7 Essential SEO Skills For Copywriting in 2021

Google continues to reign supreme as the top search engine, handling over 90% of all worldwide search queries. Ranking high in the Google search results is an SEO professional’s top priority.

Changing algorithms provide constant challenges to SEO copywriters. However, the basic rules of SEO skills for copywriting remain the same.

Here are 7 essential SEO skills for copywriting to help you rank on the first page of Google in 2021.

By strategically matching keyword intent, you will rank higher on the Google SERPs. If you mismatch your keywords/keyphrases. by targeting something like “managing remote workers” with a product page about “home office furniture”, you’re likely not going to perform well in organic search results.

Matching keyword intent is one of the essential SEO skills for copywriting. Keyword intent is the reason someone is searching for the keyword you want to target. Are they looking for information on a topic, looking to make a purchase, or searching for a specific web page? You need to know this before you can optimize your content for SEO.

The goal of an SEO copywriter is to engage the reader by getting to the point and creating relevant content. You must prove to the Google algorithm that your content is on the money by targeting your top keyword early on.

Increasing the keyword density at the beginning of your blog post will help to bump you up in the Google rankings.

While you should include sufficient keywords in your writing, there comes a point when it’s just too much. When you read an article that has been keyword-stuffed, it’s obvious. The text does not flow naturally. Google does not like keyword stuffing.

If the Google algorithm detects keyword stuffing you can risk being penalized. Use a keyword research tool to help spread your keyword net as far as possible without overusing any single term. There are plenty of secondary and related keywords that align with your primary keyword. You just need to put the time in to do the research.

Here’s where keyword research tools come into play. Of course, there’s Google’s keyword planner, but there are also other useful tools out there. Tools such as SEMrush, AHREFs, and Keyword Planner.

Be sure to check the bottom of the search results page after you’ve searched for a term or phrase. You’ll find a host of queries relevant to your main keyword that people have searched for, so it would be beneficial to you to add those into your content.

Check out the following screenshot from a search I did on “SEO content writing”. These are related searches that people have put into Google.

Without a good headline, no one is going to click through to your site. Whenever possible make yourself stand out as a subject matter expert in your headline. Invoking emotion or curiosity, promising to fix a problem, using numbers, and of course, including your primary keyword will help in search and click-through rates.

Whatever title you come up with, make sure it’s consistent with your content and keyword research. The same rule applies when writing a promotional email. If email tracking tells you someone has opened a message or if they click a link, don’t disappoint them with irrelevant content.

Google will truncate your headline (title tag) if it’s over 60 characters in length. So, as well as being creative, you have to be clear and concise. While the headline is crucial you also need to optimize other meta tags, such as the title tag and meta description.

The title tag and meta description are what people are going to see first in the search results, so make it engaging enough that they want to click on it to read more.

Images and video can draw a reader’s eye to key points and takeaways, as well as keeping them interested and engaged for longer periods of time. By breaking up the blocks of text with photos and video, you’ll increase a reader’s time on each page which will, in turn, bump up your Google rankings.

Stock photos are generally free and work well, but Google prefers more interesting pictures like screenshots, graphs, and charts, or infographics. The more value the media provides the better it will perform.

We all know that Google likes to tweak its algorithms on a regular basis in order to provide a better user experience. And it’s fair to say that this provides a fair amount of anxiety and frustration for SEO copywriters.

With the algorithm constantly changing, it’s challenging to implement a winning content strategy. However, there are many SEO skills for copywriting that will work for you no matter what business or industry you’re in.

From understanding how your target audience is searching for your products or services to optimizing your headlines and using high-quality images, all these things count towards better rankings on Google and other search engines on the internet.