I’ve gone over some of the standard website SEO strategies on this blog before, but if you want something a little more comprehensive, feel free to go right to the source: Google. That’s right — Google has published it’s own official SEO Starter Guide. It’s actually been out for a while. Here you go:

• Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Why am I just giving this information away on my website? Won’t my clients be tempted to just read the document and stop using my services? I doubt it.

First of all, Google has already shared this information on search engine optimization with millions of people. And SEO wonks like me have been helping give this information away for free in a more curated form for years. I’ve been giving it away and I’ll keep giving it away.

Second, there’s a difference between knowing the rules and being able to actually do the work. SEO is akin to the game of Chess, in that the basic rules can be learned in a single session: expertise takes years.

The advantage in sharing this information with my clients and colleagues is that they understand the value that an SEO website copywriter provides to them. The more they know about the process, the more they’ll appreciate the work that’s being done — and the better they’ll be able to strategize their website presence for their business.

Need help with your website? Contact us today to learn more about our SEO website copywriting services

1. We write well. Sure, SEO for website copywriting is important. But the content has to be readable first. Great copy gets results.
2. We give good advice. Sometimes, clients don’t quite know how to proceed with their communications strategy. We help them see where they need to go and assist them in adapting their communication strategy as their companies grow.
3. We understand social media, online marketing and traditional marketing. It’s not enough to have great messaging. We help our clients understand how to get those calls to action out there in blogs, newsletters, press releases and more.
4. Convenience. For big companies, we’re a handy add-on for their existing communications department, able to take on projects big or small on the fly. For smaller companies, we are the communications department.
5. We’re easy to work with. Customer satisfaction is important to us because a lot of our business comes from referrals. So when you’re happy, we’re happy.

I contacted my friend, Kathryn Haley the owner of the recently-launched Vancouver-based business Home for Her to ask her about her experiences in setting up and maintaining the content for her online presence. Kathy’s business serves independent women homeowners by providing guidance and creating confidence in all areas related to owning a home. Because of the nature of her specialized business, she needs to communicate very clearly what she has to offer her target market.

Here’s what she wrote when she had put the finishing touches on the website:

This site is finally ready to go live and I am filled with excitement, exhaustion and hope.

I am excited because this process has taken me far out of my comfort zone and I have discovered I thrive on that feeling. I must…I seem to put myself there a lot these days.

I am exhausted because setting up websites is not my strength, and it has taken a lot of tweaking, screaming and several bottles of wine. It is a work in progress so please give any feedback or comments to help improve your experience.

There you have it. Putting the website together in the first place is not an easy thing. Frankly, this early step in developing a business can be so intimidating that some people realize that perhaps they weren’t ready to become entrepreneurs after all and quit the project entirely. (That’s awfully sad, but if you can’t do it yourself and you don’t have the budget or willingness to out-task the web copywriting, there aren’t a lot of alternatives — unless you’ve got one of those businesses that can thrive just fine without the web. Selling crack, for instance…). But those who do launch often find themselves re-energized and full of purpose as soon as their business goes “live”.

How do you maintain the website content? Well, you’ve got a few options. First, write the stuff yourself. Again, if you haven’t got the time or talent, the next option is to hire a copywriter, such as… me.

A third option which I often make use of myself to supplement my own efforts and maximize content freshness, is to cross-post content with strategic partners. Of course, it also helps build links which help gather Google juice to turn a lonely website into a well-trafficked, SEO-friendly site.

Whichever method you choose has benefits but can also pose challenges, as Kathryn notes:

The written content for the site comes from myself and from guest writers. I have posted a couple of articles that I have written myself. The content comes from conversations I have with design clients or friends and simply thinking about some of the biggest problems I have had to deal with over the 13+ years of being in the renovation industry.

Once I determine a topic and actually start writing it usually only takes about 1 hour to finish it. My challenge is getting into the head space to write… I find myself second guessing whether readers will think the posts are silly.

What kind of content seems to work best for Kathryn? It’s important to mix it up:

I believe it is the variation of writing styles, topics and experts that provides the best experience for the reader. It creates a ‘something for everyone’ site that has mass appeal. The variation of topics also allows me to use SEO on a wide range of keywords, maximizing exposure to Google and other search engines.

The site also benefits from the cross promotion that each writer brings.

Are you having difficulty launching your website? Or are you finding it difficult to ensure the content on your website is fresh and Google-friendly? If you would like a free consultation about your website content strategy or need a copywriter to get your articles written, go ahead and contact me

If you have other tips about creating and managing website content or just want to reply to this post, please leave a comment!

Is This Content Still “Fresh”?

Why is fresh important? Google loves new content on your website. Old content gets downgraded in search engines. Pages with fresh content gets crawled more often and also have a higher chance of getting noticed by customers, colleagues or Internet surfers who may just turn out to be unexpected but welcome evangelists for your organization.

Bottom line? Keeping your content fresh is an important part of your overall web marketing strategy.

Putting aside the design side of things, does this describe your company’s website?

1. Hasn’t been updated with fresh website content in months or years.
2. No SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work done at all. Obvious keywords are not prominent anywhere.
3. There is no blog, or if there is one, it hasn’t been updated since the week it was set up.
4. Long pages of content that force readers to scroll down and down and down.
5. Page titles don’t refer to anything specific about your business. Instead, you’ve got generic statements like “Call now!” or “Learn more about why we’re the best!”
6. Calls to action are not prominent or compelling.
7. You can read a page down to the fold and still not know for certain what the company sells.

Does this describe your website? If so, isn’t it time that you got the help of an SEO website content copywriter?

Here’s how the program works:

1. You’ve got a colleague who wants their business website content updated and search-engine optimized. Or maybe they’re just starting out and need website content written from scratch. Either way, this is someone you could refer to us.
2. The client contacts us and lets us know that you referred them, passing along your contact info.
3. After a consultation to lay out the scope of the SEO website copywriting project, if the client decides to proceed, the contract is signed.
4. The client sends us a deposit (typically 50 per cent of the value of the contract) up front. As soon as their payment clears, you get a referral fee via a check in the mail.

The first-time referral fee is $100. A second referral and all subsequent referrals earn you $200. Easy money, right? Aw yeah.

Clients Referring Clients

Are you already a WRITEIMAGE client? If so, you start off at the $200 referral fee. Cha-ching!

SEO Website Copywriting That Works For Your Business

If you’re not familiar with WRITEIMAGE, we don’t expect you to point your friends in our direction without doing a little due diligence first.

• Learn more about our SEO website copywriting services process
• Read our case studies of successful copywriting projects
• Have a look at our copywriting portfolio and see our full range of services
• Check out our Clients and Testimonials

The WRITEIMAGE Affiliate Marketing Rewards Program In Action

Bob is a mover and shaker living in Vancouver. He’s got plenty of friends running all kinds of businesses; software, hardware, B2B consulting, construction, financial services, you name it. He’s what you call “connected”.

Bob got new SEO-friendly content written for his website by WRITEIMAGE a little while back and he was pleased with the results. But he’s noticed that his friends’ business websites suck. The content is boring and unreadable. Even worse, they’re not SEO-optimized, so they’re not ranking first in Google searches for their kinds of businesses. They’re all complaining to Bob.

Being a good friend, Bob recommends that they contact WRITEIMAGE and get them to do their professional SEO website content copywriting. Sally, George and Fred decide to take action based on Bob’s recommendation and get in touch with WRITEIMAGE. They all get a free consultation to look at the scope of the project and decide what sort of content they need.

Sally and George decide to move ahead with their projects. They sign contracts with WRITEIMAGE and know that very soon, they will have some awesome content for their websites. Fred decides to hold off for a bit because, well, that’s the kind of guy Fred is. Instead of updating his website content, he decides what he really needs is a vacation in Guadalajara.

Over the next month or so, Sally gets new SEO-friendly content for her website that is going to help drive her software company forward. George gets similarly great results for his landscaping business website.

(Fred never did get his website content updated, but he’s got bigger problems to deal with because he’s been kidnapped by a drug cartel. Perhaps he’ll get his website SEO-optimized as well after the police rescue him in six months.)

As for Bob, after Sally and George paid their deposits, he got a check for $400. He used half to take out his wife for a fancy steak dinner. He donated the rest to his favorite charity, for which he received a bronze plaque and the eternal gratitude of a small village in Malaysia.

YOU COULD BE BOB. Start referring your friends and colleagues to us for SEO-website copywriting services. They’ll be grateful. You’ll get paid. It’s win-win!

What is cross-posting? It’s copying an entire article, probably including hyperlinks and titles; maybe even tags. Then you publish it on another website.

This is distinct from just quoting from a website and linking to it, which is a good thing. Quoting and hyperlinking is social. When you don’t have time to write a complete article on your own, it helps keep your site fresh. It’s totally cool.

It’s also distinct from exchanging blog posts. For example, a marketing expert I know sends me an original article that links back to her website and I publish it here. In exchange, she publishes an original article from me linking back to my site. That’s all good.

But cross-posting, copying someone else’s article wholesale, doesn’t have a lot to recommend it.

Assuming it’s not violating copyright, it certainly is violating best practices for search engine optimization. Google won’t like it. They’ll downgrade the search ranking of both the original site and the duplicate site. That means fewer people will read the content. That’s the opposite of what you want.

The only exceptions I make for cross-posting is if someone is launching an urgent appeal for a charity or humanitarian cause. In that case, it’s more important that the content gets copied to a bunch of sites as fast as possible. But even in those cases, it’s not a terrible idea to at least change up the title and maybe the intro paragraph, if you can.

Long story short about cross-posting? Don’t do it.

When you create a page on your website, a URL is generated. A good content management system will automatically create a URL from the title, where you’ve likely already added important keywords. That’s great.

But particularly with blog posts, you may want to create cute titles that aren’t necessarily keyword heavy. For instance, if I wrote a blog post titled “Verbs Trump Nouns”, about the importance of using “action words”, my auto-generated URL might be http://writeimage.ca/verbs-trump-nouns

Unfortunately, “verbs”, “trump” and “nouns” are not keywords for me. So I would want to adapt the URL. Your content management system should allow you to change the URL to whatever you want. In this case, I might change it to http://writeimage.ca/copywriting-tip-verbs-trump-nouns

(Note the hyphens between words. Don’t forget them. Otherwise, Google won’t recognize the individual words).

You can do the same with any URL on your site. Ideally, once you set a URL, you don’t change it. Otherwise, all links to the original URL will be broken.

Yes, this is all very geeky. But when you’re writing content for websites, geeky makes Google happy.

If your company needs some SEO copywriting for your website, contact us and get help today

If you’d prefer to take a crack at improving the SEO on your own, fill your boots. Here’s a link to 55 Quick SEO Tips. I’ve posted some of them below:

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

Unless you’re one of the subscribers to this website’s RSS feed, that was the phrase you typed into Google to find us.

Our website is search engine optimized for the type of business we do. Is yours?