High-quality copywriting of keyword-optimised text is an absolute fundamental for an SEO campaign. In simple terms, your copy - both on the promoted website and in link-building material - needs to contain the correct proportion of target search phrases (otherwise known as keyword density). Between two and four percent is generally considered about right. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, that statistic is where SEO copywriting begins and ends, with consequences for the success of the campaign.

Writing vs copywriting
Search engines like Google analyse the text on a webpage to determine how relevant it is for search purposes. All things being equal, more weight is given to backlinks on those pages with the correct keyword density. If the proportion of search phrases is too low then the content is deemed less relevant. If it is too high, that suggests the author has overused a phrase to try to manipulate search results - a practice known as keyword stuffing. Good SEO copywriting does neither, but successful copywriting goes far beyond maintaining keyword density.

Google is pretty smart as software algorithms go, and can detect when certain poor copywriting practices have occurred. Keyword stuffing and using duplicate text - content that has simply been lifted from another website (Wikipedia being a favourite) - are both penalised. What Google cannot yet do is rate the quality of copywriting in terms of its English. But readers can.

Bad copywriting screams out of a webpage. Where keywords - even at the correct density - have been shoehorned in at the expense of overall quality, the result is jarring. Although Google won't penalise this mistake, your readers will.

Seamless copywriting
SEO experts will recognise keyword-optimised copywriting when they see it - it's a vital tool of their trade. General readers should not. At the very least, optimised copy should not interfere in any way with the readability of the text: website content should be clear and fluent, with keywords seamlessly integrated. If a reader has to pause to make sense of a sentence because of a badly-placed keyword, the copywriter has not done their job properly. And it's not just bad English: it's bad business.

Good copywriting is about more than respecting the English language. It's ultimately about driving a marketing campaign. Readers are smarter than they're usually given credit for, and if they see bad content then they will penalise it in the same way that Google penalises keyword stuffing. Asking them to plough through poor content and then click through to your site is no way to inspire confidence in the quality of your product or service: it's insulting to their intelligence, and they will inevitably vote with their mouse. Good copywriting is informative, readable, even entertaining - it's not a chore for the reader, and it doesn't feel manipulative or disrespectful. In the same way, poor copywriting on the target website is off-putting to potential customers. If a business hasn't bothered to make the effort with its own site, will it go the extra mile for a client? That's why high-quality copywriting is critical both for gaining clickthrough traffic and conversions.

Conclusion
Too many SEO campaigns reduce their strategy to a numbers game, without considering the importance of copywriting quality. Gaining enough backlinks from pages with the right keyword density is an important first step, but on its own it's not enough. Content that sacrifices readability for keyword density is all too obvious to the reader. Bad copywriting is immediately recognisable as manipulative and disrespectful: it implies that potential customers aren't worth taking the trouble for so long as you can direct them to your site for a sale. Unsurprisingly, readers don't tend to appreciate that much.

Published at http://online-marketing.klantcrm.com