What does it mean to write for SEO?
Interning in the Shoreditch Red or Blue offices as a creative copywriter is not dissimilar, I imagine, to what it must be like to try and hang out in the sacred bedroom of an achingly cool hipster of an older brother and all his awesome, older-brother-like friends.
i.e. everybody uses a lot of acronyms, and has very highly-polished opinions, and focuses largely on what might be for lunch because GOD, IT’S ONLY 10 AM AND I’M STARVING. They manage to be simultaneously out-and-out technology info-maniacs and also know the latest on Justin Lee Collins.
Related: why does everybody keep talking about penguins?
I’ve spent ten days on the verge of losing my SEO virginity, drinking up the seemingly boundless knowledge of Kun, Andy, Alec, Jack and Bassmah, who have taken it in turns to explain things to me in a language I understand- and often more than once, too- and give real-life, workable examples of the role of somebody who can write well in amongst the SEO veterans who know their SERP from their CRM.
Because that’s the thing: I know I can write- that bit is easy, because Scrabble is my middle name- but what does it mean to write for SEO?
I’m still figuring out the answer proper, but it seems to me that SEO copywriting is essentially response-orientated copy, stuff that gets favourable action from the reader; it’s not passive like a magazine article on how to get that boy to fall in love with you. Ideally, you want readers to do something with your content. Like share it, or buy from it.
BUT.
This copy also serves the purpose of optimizing whatever page it is on, too, so search engines know what every webpage is about, and can do that special thing Google do where they send robots to understand who might want to read this content.
Or something.
Writing copy that ‘spoon feeds’ the search engines to crawl, index and rank pages favourably, whilst remaining engaging for people, not search engines, seems to me to be a skill as precise as balancing a spoon on the edge of your nose: in theory it’s quite simple, but try doing it for prolonged amounts of time and you end up going cross-eyed and a bit mental.
Good SEO copy is keywords on the page, and links off the page. After email, search is the biggest game in town- statistically it’s what we log onto the internet to do. Searchers are the most motivated people who hit a website, since they were actively looking for it in the first place. So copy needs to draw ‘em in, number one, but then number two: keep ‘em there long enough to do something.
The skills Red or Blue are dishing out to me like a fat mother feeding her children include navigating the tools available to figure out exactly what words and where are needed to be used to master web copy that ticks the ‘keyword’ and ‘links’ boxes.
I think my own keyword from my introduction to SEO is research. Previously, my copywriting approach has been entertainment, entertainment, entertainment. But my training here is opening up new doors of SEO enlightenment to me: using keywordeye, ubersuggest, search metrics, adwords, topsy… the list is endless; I’ve been able to get a working comprehension of the habits of searchers as people, to write copy for searchers as machines.
Or have I been learning how to understand the habits of searchers as machines, to write better copy for people?
I’d better ask my older brothers.
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