Working as a freelance copywriter can be an interesting and lucrative business – but these days you won’t just be writing advertising copy for magazines and newspaper. A great deal of the work now revolves around writing material for the internet – articles, stories and website copy.
And if you’re writing for clients that are selling their products online, something that you really need to know about is effective keyword usage.
Keywords are the way you ensure that a site is visible to search engines. Prior to starting to write you need to think about the phrases and keywords that people might use to search for the product or service you are promoting. You then need to make a list of these and then use them in your content, title and subheadings.
It is far better to use full sentences containing keywords, rather than just the words themselves. If you overload your blog with random keywords in an attempt to improve your ranking on search engines this may work against you. The technology used by the search engines is very sophisticated and will pick up on indiscriminate usage.
Most of the time, using keywords will be easy as they should be a natural part of the topic you are writing about. However, if you do a bit of research on your subject you might find that there are terms which come up that are not a natural part of your vocabulary. If you find such words or phrases that you can fit into your writing, it’s worth going back and editing some of your copy to add them. This can really give your work a boost in search engine ranking terms.
Suppose you are writing for a travel website and your subject is backpacking. You might write the following:
When I arrived in Cairo, little did I realise that the place I’d chosen wasn’t so much somewhere to sleep as a place to stay awake. From things that scurried across the floor during the night, to insects that hovered overhead, there wasn’t any rest. A request for a mosquito net was met with incomprehension.
There’s very little in that paragraph that would show up on a search engine, apart from the word ‘Cairo’. But the site would probably be of interest to people looking for a backpacking adventure. So the search words might be adventure, backpacking, travel and gap year.
So you could re-write the paragraph, adding the keywords:
When I arrived in Cairo during my gap year, backpacking was still a great adventure, but I needed to rest before getting ready to travel onwards. Little did I realise that the hostel I’d chosen wasn’t so much somewhere to sleep as a place to stay awake….
But never ‘overdo’ the use of keywords – your writing has still to be interesting and natural or you’ll lose you reader!
And if you want some more tips about copywriting for a wide variety of media then have a look at The Complete Copywriter Course.
Author: Diana Nadin
