Marketing the products or services that your business sells is essential if you are to make profits and see your business grow. This marketing might involve placing adverts in newspapers and magazines; using radio and TV (if your business is making enough profit to afford this); press releases and editorials – and, of course, your website.
As you can imagine, freelance copywriting can be interesting and pays well – whether you are promoting your own business or working for someone else. But these days, being able to write copy for the internet is probably right at the top of the list of copywriting skills and 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 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 in Borneo. In addition to Borneo and backpacking, additional search words might be adventure, travel and gap year.
So you could include an opening paragraph, including the keywords in this way:
When I arrived in Borneo 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 hotel I’d chosen wasn’t so much somewhere to sleep as a place to stay awake….
When you read that, it sounds absolutely natural. So 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
