Why SEO is an important part of your copywriting remit

Many people who study creative writing go on to work for Advertising and Marketing agencies. These types of careers bring a lot of variety and collaboration across brands and people which is why they’re so popular. Yet, for the last couple of decades, Search Engine Optimisation keeps popping up into conversation.

SEO, in short, means a website is optimised to perform as best as it can for search engines such as Google. Engines send ‘crawlers’ or ‘bots’ through the internet, scanning websites, including your company or client. For your website to rank well on a search engine’s listing, you need to make it easy for these ‘bots’ to crawl.

The easier it is to access information and more obvious it is to read it; the higher your rankings will be, generating a higher traffic volume.

It all sounds very technical, and a lot of it is; however, copywriters play a crucial role in optimising sites because they write the content for them. From news and information pages or even blogs, all of the information a bot can crawl will be stored to rank your page accordingly.

So how can this be done successfully? Make sure you have sourced relevant keywords and content topics. You can use sites such as SEMrush to discover the right keywords to target, as well as content topics that you should write about.

It would be easy to stuff your written information full of keywords, but search engines are too smart for that. Google’s crawler, in particular, is highly advanced, it can tell when you’re spamming it with keywords to achieve higher rankings, and for this, your website will be penalised.

The best way to optimise the copy on your site is to think about your customer. What is a user searching for in Google that could land them on your website? Once you have discovered the multiple keywords that people use to find your site, enter them naturally into your site.

Of course, there is plenty more to learn about when it comes to SEO, but these basics are important to consider if you’re looking for a career in copywriting.