Copywriting (SEO) Tips For Online Advertising

Online copywriting works much harder than it’s printed counterpart. It has to not only provide information, but has to engage with visitors, persuade them, and successfully convey the brand personality. It also has to convey context and relevance to search engines. Because of the volume of information on the internet, writing for digital is inherently different than writing for traditional media. Content is king here. Writing for digital includes not only the content on your website, but also emails and everything in between. If it’s being read on a screen, it’s online copy. Just because a tree didn’t die for it though, doesn’t mean we abandon the traditional rules of writing. Like many traditional and digital marketing principles the foundations remain the same.

Writing For Your Online Audience

As in any marketing communications, it’s important to understand your audiences. This will guide you in developing your content strategy, figuring out what topics your audience is interested in, and will help you organize the information you provide in a way that’s easy for them to navigate. Of course you need to research your audiences in order to be able to successfully understand who they are.

You also need to think about what action you want them to take consuming the information. This will help you to rate to the actions as well. And you can then determine what information you need to provide, so that they feel confident in taking this action. This is according to Holly Bucannon of Future copywriting career. When you are researching your audience, it help’s to think about the audience of one and personas.

Audience One 

The audience of one is a digital concept. We are no longer dealing with vague audiences that are very broad, but many niche audience being spoken to as individuals.

Personas

Personas, however, are profiles that a copywriter creates to embody the characteristics of the target audience for whom they are copywriting. It important when thinking about audiences, to think about their demographics, things like age, gender, geography, their psycho-graphics, how they think, how they feel, and their behaviors, how they make purchases decisions, for example. All of these things help you understand your audience more effectively to communicate with them well.

Types Of Online Web Copywriting

Lets take a look at web copy specifically. Copywriting for online web need to be clear and concise, easy to read, well written, and well structured. It could be argued the copy for any medium should be all of those things.

• Clear and concise 
• Easy to read 
• Well written 
• Well structured

Short Copying

Of-course, not all copy on the web is the same. When we think about short copy, we’re thinking about things like a call to action, titles and subject lines, social media copywriting, and search ads.

• Call to action 
• Titles/Subjects lines 
• Social media 
• Search advertisements

On the web we sometimes have very little space to convey our message. Much like headline, taglines, categories and other short copy in traditional media, short web copy has to engage and clearly communicate the user quickly in order to get them to act.

Long Copying

The Web also provides us opportunity to provide more information in the form of long copy. A major advantage of long copy is that it provides an opportunity to convey more and more specific information to the audience. Often we have to get our user to the long copy with short copy, so they have to work together. Long copy is still not as long as it would be in traditional media. Online readers behave differently then offline readers. Long copywriting should be easily navigable and scannable. Let’s look at a few examples of long copy. 

News Releases 

As the internet has grown, so as the overlap between digital marketing and PR. The new release has long been a staple in the public relation field, but it is now used by marketers as well. New releases can be published directly on the brand websites, so don’t necessarily have to go through journalists anymore.

Articles For Syndication

These are different than new releases as they don’t contain a reference to your brand. That’s sometimes difficult for marketers to wrap their heads around. They provide useful and/or entertaining information for the readers and are intended to be shared.

Emails

This is fairly self-explanatory, but emails need to be somewhat brief so that the user isn’t expected to scroll. You generally have one  screen of information to convey your message and make an impact.

Blog Posts

Blogs can be very successful marketing tools. These posts can also be shared via social media channels, and therefore drive users back to your site.

Website Copy

There are some principles in writing that need to be addressed here. Your website copies should be easily scannable, which often times means meaningful headings and subheads. You should also consider bolding and highlighting key phrases. Bulleted list are helpful in web copy, and again, make it more scannable. As what any writing, limit each paragraph to one main idea is key.  When we’re talking about long copywriting, we still have to keep things brief on the web, which means cutting the fluff and getting to the key ideas quickly. Remove redundancies. And finally, include multimedia like images, videos, infographics, anything like that draws the eye wherever you can.

Online SEO Copywriting 

A good online copywriter has to understand SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, and how this can be integrated into their copywriting. One of the most important things to think about advertising your copy, is that you’re not just writing for your audience, but for search engines or algorithms.

Optimizing For Humans And Machines 

Your target audience is likely to use a search engine to get to your site or to specific information or places on your site. Blending keywords into your copy, therefore, is a necessity. A keyword is a single word used in a search, but a key phrase is more than a one word, also used in a search. Key phrase research is an important element in digital copywriting.

Key Phrase

You can incorporate these phrases into your copy, to draw them to your content. And always remember, content is key specially in digital copywriting.

Best Practices For Online SEO Copywriting 

We’ve looked at short and long copy, so let’s think about best practices for writing across both. Here are several things that you need to consider while copying.

• Does your copy convey a creative idea? 
• Does the layout of your copy make it easy to read? 
• Is your meaning clear and direct? 
• Structured in a logical manner? 
• Does the copy convey the features and benefits necessary to make your point? 
• Will your readers clearly understand the content of your copy? 
• Try to emphasis features and befits, ways to ensure meeting your best practices, active voice, avoid buzz words and jargon. Is the content of your message structured in a logical manner?