To SEO or Not to SEO, That is the Question.

A contact in the business of copywriting asked me today what I would recommend she do when writing copy for her client, but her client doesn’t have the money to invest in keyword research and SEO work. Should she still deliver elements of SEO within the copywriting service despite not having evidence about keywords being used? What should she do with Meta Descriptions, Titles and H1, H2 etc within the page structure? These are quite tricky to address as we want to deliver a great job, no matter what the client can afford, but to what extent does copywriting cross into SEO and can you even write great copy without having done the research on keywords?

Here’s my answer:

I recommend ignoring client’s thoughts on keywords and simply write relevant copy. All to often I have clients telling me they want to rank for XYZ but when researched, the phrase either occurs too seldom to be worthwhile, or sometimes not at all. I also have clients asking to get rank for what I would call “vanity keywords”, like “expert plumber” or “best Auckland fish shop”. Vanity keywords usually have appeal to the business owner, but seldom ever searched means nearly worthless as a keyword phrase to optimise for.

My advice on writing good sopy without the research is that topical and relevant copy will almost always contain the appropriate keywords. The thing is, human nature says we try to communicate in a way others can understand – so writing in such a manner also implies you would use words others can easily connect with the topic and would naturally use themselves for search. If you try to get fancy, using structure to make the text ‘fluffy’ or ‘outside the square’ then you might miss the appropriate keywords altogether.

But what about the H1 and H2 tags? And what do I advise about title and description tags?

Well, Meta Descriptions are problematic, because a lot of the time they don’t even render, and they don’t count towards pagerank either. They are there for Click-Through-Rate (CTR), but if they don’t render, they are worthless. I’d suggest writing one that ‘will do’ for now that includes either (or both) a Call To Action (CTA) or Benefit, and then set the site live while watching over coming months what words actually trigger impressions. You can then reverse engineer your Meta Description to increase likelihood of render for a commercially viable search phrase that the page is getting impressions for at or near page 1. Evolving your Description like this will increase its chance of rendering, and have little if any effect on rank. And it will improve the effect on CTR. Bearing in mind that any decent CTR is unlikely unless you have a page 1 impression.

For <H1> and <H2>, <em>, <strong> <a href=…> etc, follow common sense. Use H for the right reasons, (not styling). If you want to use an H sized font for “design” purposes, create a class instead if you want to style an otherwise standard element like <p>. Also, use anchors naturally. I tend to mix mine up between commercial keyword anchors but also the odd “click here” wont hurt either. Just anchor logically and if the anchor is commercial, make sure the page it goes to is highly relevant. Another thing you can do with anchors is ensure you have good keywords in immediate surrounding text. Evidence I have seen lately suggested that Google passed relevance from context to a page through a non-commercial and non-relevant link anchor.

At the end of the day though, you have to ask ‘why do all this work’? – it’s like doing SEO for free as part of your copywriting, when really you should wait until the client has the budget (or finds the budget) and then pays for it properly. Doing a great job is admirable, but your client really needs to understand that SEO costs money. Great SEO costs a lot of money. But it’s an excellent medium term investment and shouldn’t be given away just because the client can’t afford it.