Small Business SEO Explained: What is SEO copywriting?

Small business SEO topic - this week, it's SEO copywriting. What's the difference between copywriting and SEO copywriting, and is one more important to your business than the other? How do you know what to focus on when you're creating content to make sure that it's able to be found by the right people when they're searching online - that, my friend, is at the heart of SEO copywriting. Listen in today and learn. 

Other episodes mentioned in this week's episode: What are Title Tags and do they matter to your small business, and how to create a content calendar? 

 https://www.etchedmarketing.com/blog/what-is-a-title-tag
 https://www.etchedmarketing.com/blog/how-to-create-a-content-calendar

Transcript

0:26

Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm so glad you're here today. So today, we're talking a little more about small business SEO, and I'm kind of explaining a little bit of the basics to help you really understand what you need and what all the different things mean, because I know you hear me or other people use these terms, and then you're kind of like, "Well, what is that?" Or, "What does it matter?" Or, "Does it make a difference for my small business? Do I need to focus on this?" So that's what we're talking about right now, and today it's SEO copywriting. So you've probably heard people talk about SEO and content or maybe all together SEO content, and you're like, "How does that differ from just writing or just doing SEO?" Like, why is it all pulled together? So let's talk about it, because the way I look at it, SEO and copy or SEO and content, honestly, my friend, they go together like PB&J. And I know it sounds silly to say that, but it's summer break, and my kid is at home with me, and I'm making a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. And there's a reason that things just go together: peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, pizza and kids, chicken nuggets and kids. Anyway, back to our topic at hand. SEO and content go together because SEO is really what should be the foundation of the copy that you're creating. I know sometimes you hear about SEO, and people say, "Oh, it's something you do at the end." No, it's not. So what I want you to understand is that SEO copywriting is just copy that has strategy behind it. Your SEO is your foundation, and it's like, what is it that somebody cares about? What questions does your ideal customer ask? What information do they need? Rather than just developing topics willy-nilly or be- waiting to be inspired or being like, "It's Tuesday, I think I wanna write about XYZ," we want to go into this with a more strategic approach, and we want to really understand who our ideal customer is, what questions do they have, what do they need help with, how do we help them? Because when we create content that serves a purpose, then we are creating content that can help our business grow. But that content that serves a purpose, that purpose is to be found by the right people online and to be helpful to them. That's really the biggest key, and that's the difference between copywriting and SEO copywriting. SEO copywriting is strategic copywriting. It is blog posts or website pages that are designed to be found by the right person because we've gone a step further. We haven't just brainstormed. Now we've looked to see, are there keywords that I could rank for? Are there questions that I should be answering in this copy for the answer engines, for ChatGPT and Perplexity and Gemini, et cetera? Are there phrases I should be using? Do people even care about this topic? Like, is there search demand? Are people interested in this topic? Because when we create content that we know our audience is interested in and we go that step further to optimize it so that whether it's ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, Yahoo, Bing, it doesn't matter where they're searching, so that the search engines understand what we're creating, then we're creating SEO copy that can help grow our business. So we really want to think about our ideal customer. Who are they? What questions they, do they have? We talked in a recent episode about creating a content calendar, and I walked you through how to brainstorm not only the questions you get asked, but also the questions that they should be asking. If you didn't listen to that episode, go back and listen to it now. I'll link it in the show notes. I'll give you the, um, episode number. I believe it was actually just last week's episode. So go back and listen to that because that will help you to start to understand how to do this. So you plan out what you're gonna create, then you write it, and you write it with SEO in mind. So you start- Not just by writing. What I do when I'm creating content that is designed to convert, I go through and I come up with my brainstorm ideas, I look for my opportunities, I decide if there's something that's helpful to my audience that I have a good chance of ranking for on Google. Then I go in and I look for keyword research, and I try to identify what keywords could I use in this post, and I make a list of them. Then I go in and I verify whether or not these are good keywords for my website. So I go in and I look and I see, yes, I can probably rank for these, maybe not that one, this one's a bit of a stretch. And then I title my, my piece based on the keyword that I wanna try to target. From there, now I know I have a good chance of being found through traditional search. That's all that we did for many years. Now, with the answer engines, I take it a step further, and I go in and I use other tools to look and find out what are the questions that are related to this query or this keyword that people might be asking, and I make sure I answer those questions, so I jot those down as well. I use a lot of those as my outline so that I know what to write about in that post. So now I've done my background, so I understand what question somebody is asking. I know that my website has a pretty good chance of ranking. I know that it is really relevant and applicable to what I'm doing. Now I'm gonna go in, I've chosen my keywords, and I've figured out what answers I need to ask. Answer. What questions I need to ask and answer. Now I go through and I start writing my post. Then once you've got that content, you have a really strong strategic foundation because now you know somebody is interested in this, and that somebody is your ideal customer. You know that you've chosen a keyword you have a good chance of ranking for on Google, and you know that you have answered the questions that your ideal customer is asking when they're searching, whether they're searching traditional search or AI-based search Then you've written a post that anticipates those questions and answers them and provides value and is helpful. That's when we go in and then we optimize. So now we go back and we make sure we write a title tag and a meta description. If you don't know what a title tag is, I covered that recently also in our Small Business SEO Explained series. So you can go back and check out that. It was earlier in June, so that'll walk you through what a title tag is. I also talk a little bit about a meta description in there. If you're new, you're trying to learn what all these things are, be sure and get my beginner's guides to traditional SEO and AI-based SEO. Those are both available on my website, etchedmarketing.com/freebies. Just go to the Freebies tab. They're all there. You also can get signed up for the free training. We're gonna do that again in just a few weeks. We've got a five-day training series, a couple of webinars on top of it, bonus lessons each day. That's gonna then give you your invitation to join me in Simple SEO Content, where I will walk you through exactly how to do all of this and teach you and show you. So now you're creating your optimization elements, and you're publishing your content so that you can start to get it out into the world. Now, one thing that I like to do, and this was something we did at the agency, but I don't know that a lot of people think about it, is to go and look and see your baseline keyword ranking score for that new content piece when you first set it out into the world. Because it's interesting to know where you started versus where you got to. So I do this with any keyword that I'm going after. I go and I look and I put it into my keyword research tool to start tracking. So I know generally, in the beginning when you've not done it, you don't exist. You're page 100. You're, you know, you're position 100. You're page 10. You don't generally exist for most keywords unless you've created content for them. But then you can start to track it and watch it, because what you're going to want to do is to see over time, does this keyword move up? Meaning, does the number, the position ranking, get smaller? Do you go from 100 to 35 to 25 to 12 to 10 to eight? Like, that's what we're looking for is that trajectory. We want our number to get smaller and smaller and smaller. Because the smaller the number gets, the closer we are to the top of Google. We also then want to watch and just kind of see, am I getting traffic? Are the right people finding me? So we wanna go in and look and see, you know, uh, is this ranking? Is it getting traffic? Is it being found in AI-based search now? Like, there's so much that we can do with our content to really see how it's working to grow your business. So if you're excited about this, you're like, "Oh, okay. I didn't realize that SEO copywriting is truly just-" Copywriting with some strategy applied to it, that makes sense. I wanna do this. Then join me in Simple SEO Content. Let me walk you through this. Or if you're like some of my one-on-one clients, and you wanna learn how to do this but you just hate a group, it's okay, my friend. I get it. I know that sometimes we'd rather work one-on-one, and I do have that available. It is understandably more expensive to work one-on-one, but it gives you that opportunity to work with me, ask questions, and not have to be part of a group. So I do have both options available. I would love to help you with this. If you just would love somebody to tell you exactly what to write, you don't really care about learning all of it, I do also offer a consulting, um, program where all I do is do the research for you and tell you exactly what to write in your niche and hand you a list of keywords and content ideas to get you started based on your niche and based on your website's ranking opportunities. So that's something that we could talk about as well if you're interested in that. Let me know. Price point-wise, it's about the same as working together one-on-one because it is me handing you your strategy. So it's, um, it's a little more expensive, but it works really well. It's something that we used to do in the agency world that I have been working on bringing to you at, uh, not the $25,000 that we charged agency clients for it. It is significantly less than that. It is catered to a small business owner budget to make it work for you. All right, that's it for today. I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.