Author: Guest Post / Source: Duct Tape Marketing In the movie Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella played by Kevin Costner constantly hears the
In the movie Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella played by Kevin Costner constantly hears the saying “If you build it, they will come.” Spoiler alert, if you have not watched the movie, the prophecy did come true and people showed up to play or watch baseball on the field that Ray created.
Unfortunately for small business owners, like myself, I do not have the huge budget to promote my product or service like Universal Pictures can, or have not mastered the versatility as Kevin Costner. However, we as small business owners are talented in the work we do and have built a great product or service but have not received the traffic as we expected.
The disconnect lies in the fact that we may struggle to communicate the value of our products or services in ways that compel people to buy it. We constantly fall into the traditional marketing trap of thinking we must pressure our customers to buy now, buy now, don’t miss out, don’t miss out – it is all about me, me, me, me – you can only get this from me.
We have to realize that it is a global marketplace where our customers can shop around not just in our city, state or country, but anywhere in the world. How about instead of pressuring our customers, we try working on nurturing and gaining trust from our customers until they are ready to buy from us.
A 2016 Content Preferences Survey Report stated that 47 percent of respondents (B2B) indicated they viewed three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. In today’s consumer market, it is clearly better and not a waste of your sales reps’ time to provide the needed content to answer your consumers’ questions and guide them along the buyer’s journey. And when they are ready to buy, they would purchase from you because you gained their trust with the expertise and credibility you provided in your content.
To get to this end goal, let us look at the five tips you must understand and work on.
1) What is SEO Copywriting
As we know, SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of growing visibility and gaining traffic for web pages through “organic” (free) search engine results. And copywriting is the process of writing engaging advertising materials. Put them together you have this definition from Copyblogger:
SEO copywriting is all about crafting content so compelling that other people want to promote it by linking to it or sharing it, which increases your trust and authority and helps pages you want to rank well for certain keywords.
This definition shows us that SEO copywriting has two main functions:
- Engaging readers to build trust and authority.
- Using keywords to help search engines understand what the content is about.
To make this work for your business, SEO copywriting must contain quality content. PERIOD!
2) Keyword research using long-tail keywords
When we use Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine, what do we do? We type words into the search box to find an answer to our question. Some are short and some are long but search engines can decipher the keywords to find authoritative content that answers our questions.
It takes time and investment for small businesses to compete with larger companies that have plenty of traffic and higher trust and authority from search engines on short keywords.
e.g. What do you think would be a better keyword for Linnaeus University to target potential exchange students to learn Swedish there?
The short keyword phrase ‘swedish language course’, where the university is competing with online courses, municipalities, community colleges, etc. for high rankings.
Or the long-tail keyword phrase ‘swedish language course for international students’, where the university has less competition with only other universities.
We highly recommend that you focus on using specific long-tail keywords to gain trust and authority to differentiate yourself and attract better-qualified leads who are more interested in buying your product or service. Using a tool such as Google Keyword Planner, you will be able to find the long-tail keywords that interest your buyer personas and see the competition level and other relevant keywords to use.
If you look at our title ‘5 Simple SEO Copywriting Tips For Small Businesses’, can you figure out what is the long-tail keyword that we are using?
Search result is taken from semrush.com
If you stated ‘simple SEO tips’ then give yourself a pat on the back.
You may say that I am only getting around 40 searches per month with the keywords, but to our small marketing agency those are the quality leads we are aiming for.
To go more in-depth, you can use more user-friendly tools that will provide you a better recommendation for specific website keywords or tools that provide you research on your competitors’ keywords. Use the information to get started and compete with them, while finding relevant keywords not being used by your competition to stand out.
3) Key Elements of SEO Copywriting
Title
The rule of thumb to remember is to make sure your title provides a clear description and your keywords are contained in it. The keywords are an important factor for search…
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