As you can see, the SERP for the keyword "blog services for startups" doesn't clearly match our buyer intent. Of the ten organic results (not ads) that are shown on this SERP, only one search result was related to the services we offer, and two results were about why it's important for startups to blog. The rest of the results were along the lines of "startup blogs that you should read." Even the ads didn't match the buyer intent that we were looking to market for, only two of the seven ads matched our buyer intent.
You can look at our example in two different lights. The first one is that because there's little competition for what we do on this keyword, we should try to rank for it. A second way of looking at it, though, is that the SERP itself has so many different intentions (reading startup blogs, fundraising, etc.) that the buyer might search for something else instead. When you don't see what you're looking for right away, your temptation of clicking "x" on that tab is evermore.
Attention span is something to keep in mind when choosing which keywords to rank for. We've all been in situations where we "x" out a tab or search for a brand new keyword in the same tab because we didn't immediately see what we're looking for on the search engine.
The best SEO copywriting services are those that do this keyword research in advance. Equally important, the best SEO copywriting services are those that do the grueling work of a SERP analysis for every keyword you're trying to rank for. It's a waste of time to rank for keywords that don't match your buyer's intent, so this process is just as important as doing the actual blogging work.
Another practice that the best SEO copywriting services do is
having original content.
If you've ever read any SEO blogs, such as Neil Patel's or HubSpot, you'll find a lot of the same, though good, advice is rehashed:
have high-quality content.
While this is important, you want to be sure that your content isn't repetitive. Do we really need another article on how to do something when that article has been written by several blogs,
all spewing the same advice?
Having original content is genuinely difficult to make, but it's worth the effort.
Do you have something to say that other blogs haven't addressed yet? Or at least the blogs that rank high on keywords you're trying to rank for?
We found that in the keywords we're trying to rank for, the insight of buyer intent in keyword research hasn't been addressed enough in an actionable insightful manner. The term "buyer intent in SEO" is thrown out there a lot, but there wasn't much strategical input from the bloggers we read on analyzing whether or not it's worth it to rank for a certain keyword. That's why we spent the effort analyzing the example we did on "blog services for startups."
Another best practice of the best SEO copywriting companies is that their proactive with technical search engine optimization. Technical SEO tells search engines what to look out for when you publish your article on its webpage.
The best SEO copywriting companies will not only
write original content that is optimized for keywords, they will also tell you where to put header tags and why you should put those specific ones. Header tags are commands in HTML that indicate on a webpage the organization of content. It's a way to communicate to search engines like Google and Bing the titles of your blog articles and their sections.
Header tags are intuitive in terms of their organization: H1 is the title of your article webpage, H2s are usually the titles of sections in your article, etc.
An example from one of our customers is this article, with
“How to Brand a Restaurant 101” as the H1 of their webpage. Another example comes from another customer, with
“What Is Outsourced Sales Development?” as one of their H2s. The wording of those headers was for a reason: both writers were trying to get that article to rank for a keyword mentioned in that header.
Header tags can either be written in HTML itself or in your website builder if you are using a company such as
Tilda or Wix.
Some search engine optimization copywriting services will write the header tags for you in HTML or your website builder, if you give them access to it. Either way, they should at minimum tell you which header tags to use.
In addition to header tags, the best search engine optimization copywriting services will tell you what to put for your article webpage's meta description. A meta description is the description of your article that appears in search engine result listings.
This is what you normally see to the right of the link to an article (such as this one) when you send it to Google or Bing.