Search Engine Optimisation all but killed good copywriting for years. Writing for the internet was all about keywords and much less about the actual content. The theory was, that even a bad site that ranked well would always outperform a good site that nobody could find. Nothing wrong with that logic!
Too many web pages read like a page of 'lorum ipsum'. You wouldn't do it on a billboard. Good copywriting is vital!
Times have changed though. Websites are more sophisticated as indeed are the people who read their content. Take you for example. You probably look at websites every day (0r nearly every day). How often were you online 10 or 15 years ago?
What if you are not in that top position on Google? You may have spent a lot of time and effort trying to get there, but have not managed it yet. You are up against thousands if not millions of competing pages for just about any keyword. How do you get more clicks.
The short answer is – write better copy! What does the title of your page say? More importantly, what does it say that will make it stand out, make somebody want to click it? Is it just your company name with a bunch of keywords strapped onto it? Would you write your page title as a headline in a printed brochure?
Lets run with that for a while. In traditional print media, the images and the copy are all important. Ask a newspaper editor how important a headline is to selling papers! Why should it be different online? Three little letters. S. E. O.
Of course SEO is important. But successful online marketing should incorporate both excellent SEO and outstanding copy writing. (by the way I just did something there… I split copy and writing, which I have not done in the rest of the text. That is aimed at SEO – catering for the different ways in which people may write their search query).
It is not just the page title that is important either. What about the meta description? This text comes up under your page title in Google results. It is a golden opportunity to sell your page. People have a tendency to use it like the now outdated and largely defunct meta keyword tag. They fill it with keywords. Lovely, but it does not appeal to me as a human being and make me want to click on your page.
Pick a keyword that you would love to be at number one in the search results for. Maybe one where you come in at position 4-6. Look at the results before you that are ahead of you. How could you write your page title to be more enticing than theirs? The first shop on a street does not necessarily make the most money. The one that can entice and then cater to its customers does.
If you can attract visitors while in a lower position, then it will actually help you to climb too. If you have good copy people will link to it. More inbound links from relevant sources = higher search engine positioning (to really simplify it).
I will be writing more on Copywriting and how to use it to get more clicks in the future, but if you take on board the small bit that is in this post it can make quite a large impact on your site traffic.
