3 SEO Copywriting “Don’ts”

Many a well-meaning copywriter winds up writing some truly awful content in the spirit of getting rankings. While writing for the web is definitely different than other mediums, there’s no need to butcher the message in the process.

Here’s a short but crucial list of things you don’t need to do to make your content search engine friendly.

1. DON’T use awkward sentences or phrasing for the sake of exactly matching your target keywords.

If you’ve ever read bad content like the following, an “seo copywriter” is to blame:

“Looking for a Calgary Plumber? Our Calgary Plumbing services can help you solve all kinds of plumbing problems in Calgary. If you need Calgary plumbing solutions..” 

Yikes, that’s ugly! You might get people to your pages but you aren’t selling them on your services.

People search with phrases like “Calgary plumbing services”, but they definitely don’t use them in every day speech.Thankfully, Latent semantic indexing and Google places for business have made cheesy content like this unnecessary.

2. DON’T write excessive content just to capture rankings.

Some SEO’s will recommend writing enormous chunks of content to boost rankings. This is a product of the mistaken notion that more content = better content. That’s not true – while you never want thin content, you don’t need volumes.

When searchers arrive on your website you’ve got seconds – not minutes – to give them what they were looking for. While there are times that lengthy content is acceptable, you’ll usually do your conversion numbers a favor by getting straight to the point.

3. DON’T worry about “keyword density”.

Keyword density doesn’t matter; Google themselves have come out and said so. There is no need to keep repeating the same phrases ad nausea to hit an ideal percentage or “density”.

In fact, there are cases where a page will rank well for a keyword phrase despite never containing that phrase in the content (thanks to other ranking factors)! In my opinion, some content is always better than none – but don’t get hung up on any mythical keyword “ratio”.

Your Content Is Your Message – Make Sure It SELLS.

Your content shouldn’t just help people find your site, it should keep them there and drive conversions. You should never need to sacrifice readability or usability to get rankings if you’re writing your content the right way.

Take a quick peek at your content. Do you break any of these copywriting don’ts?