Do you have an amazing offer or an incredible message but the fish just aren’t biting in the big black fishing hole of The Internet?
Confused or intimidated by tech talk?
Or bravely using SEO but it’s not moving the needle on your bottom line?
When it comes to crafting an SEO strategy, it’s not just about feeding the algorithms and getting Google to look, because all the traffic in the world doesn’t matter without that conversion piece in place.
Crafting SEO copy that converts is all about serving people really, really well. Just as you would with a brick and mortar business.
It’s about both funneling people to your site and creating a happy client experience.
It’s about getting the right site visitors at the right moment for them.
It’s about metrics WITH heart.
Just because we’re leveraging data and playing numbers games to help your audience find you doesn’t mean you’re leaving behind your mission to facilitate transformation for your people.
SEO should not be in lieu of being a good entrepreneur. It is in service of it.
And rest assured that whether you’ve been avoiding SEO or engaging with it, it’s completely normal to feel like SEO is either over your head or a moving target that adds a constant, stressful addition to your business to-do list that just isn’t worth it.
But I promise it doesn’t have to be.
I want to help you understand that if you’re not seeing the conversion numbers you crave, it’s not that your message is wrong or that it isn’t the best one to serve folks. It’s that your message is not finding the right people at the right time.
SEO can change that for you.
If you want to use SEO to your greatest advantage, you have to learn how to craft SEO copy that converts.
And you can do it without a lot of technical expertise.
Here’s how:
- Do your keyword research
- Focus on both user experience AND feeding Google
- Give your customers what they need NOW (either the product or a place in your ecosystem for more info)
- Just post - don’t wait for it to be “perfect”
- Know how to react to search algorithms that change in the future
The natural byproduct of being super helpful on the internet is that you will make money. And if you do it well, you'll make more money.
Powerful SEO that converts is all about that.
It’s a virtuous cycle where the more you help, the more there is in it for you.
As an SEO consultant and organic marketing strategist (and long-time entrepreneur), I love SEO and what it can do for entrepreneurs.
That’s why I host a regular, live entrepreneur workshops so together we can learn and connect with other successful entrepreneurs, cultivating our growth mindsets and making sure no one misses out on the best opportunities.
You can watch the replay of my entrepreneur workshop on ”How To Craft SEO That Converts” or keep reading for more information.
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Getting Started With Keyword Research
The first step is becoming really familiar and focused on your ideal customer.
For any SEO play to work, you have to meet people where they are and meet them with the known.
“Throwing spaghetti at the walls” marketing where you're just chucking stuff out there, hoping it lands, is not the best way to go about having a profitable business.
Instead, having an idea of what people are actually looking for, and where it overlaps with what you offer, can lay the foundation for more easily welcoming people through your digital doors and converting them to paying and long-term customers.
This step requires a keyword generator. There are lots of good ones, but I primarily use Ahrefs' free keyword generator.
You go in there, type in any query word or phrase and it’ll tell you how hard it is to rank well for it in a search engine listing, based on how many people are looking for that (search volume) and how many competitors are vying for that word or phrase (keyword difficulty).
Some basic tips when playing around with keyword research:
- Be clear with the language you're using
- Simplify concepts and phrases
- Don’t hide what you are and what you’re doing; how you do it is the special secret sauce
- Don’t use insider speak. Use what a newbie would say. (You can teach them your specific, niche lingo, but you have to reach them first!)
Writing SEO Copy That's Compelling For The Human Reader
Oftentimes copy lands awkwardly because it focuses on what's in it for the entrepreneur rather than what's in it for the person who just arrived through Google to your site and doesn't know you from Adam.
Don’t be that person.
Create a warm space.
Invite your reader in with honesty and empathy.
Let them know you (even if your business isn’t about you), so they know who they’re talking to and why they should trust you, but don’t focus on yourself.
When crafting SEO copy, here’s what you need to focus on from the human side of things in order to increase conversion:
- Have a readable, logical layout.
- Remember this isn’t a literature class. Write for the internet.
- Fulfill the promise of your titles and headers (google will notice if people click away quickly and frequently, that's what click bait is – it doesn't mean you can’t have something catchy, it just means you have to deliver)
- Include client success stories and testimonials to increase trust.
Here’s the truth: People know when looking at your website whether they like you or not. Whether they trust you and want to work with you or not.
If they don’t, they go back to Google and signal that they need another search result.
So it’s not about making everyone like you, it’s about making sure that your copy reflects who you most want to serve so that when those people find you, they stay on your site and signal to Google that you’re who they were looking for.
That's the kind of clarity that we really want.
We want to resonate with folks on that visceral level and SEO is a fantastic tool to allow you to do it.
It's all about figuring out…
- What the data says,
- What I know as a practitioner in this space, and then
- With all of that information, this is how I choose to meet my target audience.
- The language I use endears me to somebody if they are my right fit or repels the wrong fit immediately without me having to have a discovery call.
You can use all of the tried and tested marketing techniques with SEO. They are designed to play well together.
Writing SEO Copy That Pleases Google's Bots
This is where SEO often gets overly technical and scares people off because it feels like you have to choose one or the other. The humans or the bots.
And that is actually not true!
What you really need to do is choose both the humans AND the bots.
You need to reach out with both hands and weave these two threads together at the same time. When you marry the two, that is where the real magic happens.
And it doesn’t have to be perfect.
On my very first website, higherscorestestprep.com, I thought the headings in my blog posts were about the font that had been programmed, not about helping the Google bots skim and understand your material.
But I was still getting 16,000 hits of organic traffic a month!
So don’t wait until you think you know everything or you get a degree in computer programming.
You don’t have to be an SEO expert or do it all right immediately in order to be successful with SEO.
Don’t be scared.
I’m here to help you.
Starting with all the things, ideally, you need to do technically:
- Have a well structured site with a clean, organized hierarchy (this is your URL structure) that would be clear to an outside searcher
- Know what Google is seeing when it looks at your site so you know where to keep improving and can keep an eye on the data
- Make sure your site loads very quickly
- Make sure your site is mobile friendly
- Have regular posts with keyword optimized titles
- Maintain a quality interlinking strategy throughout your site
- Utilize different types of media to keep people engaged and on your site longer
- Make sure your images are correctly titled to reflect the keywords you’re targeting
Want to learn more or don’t know where to start?
If, right now, you are unsure of how your website is doing, through the lens of how Google looks at it, I offer a free website SEO audit mini course to help with exactly that.
In this complementary, three-video mini course, I’ll show you more about the things that are most important to Google and teach you how best to apply that to your own business.
Leveraging SEO Copywriting For Conversion
You’ve appealed to the humans and the robots, targeting the words and phrases that strangers might use to find you, now you need to provide a solution that alleviates the pain, discomfort or need that brought the potential client to your digital door.
You can do this in two ways:
- Leveraging an immediate purchase
- Leveraging a future possible purchase through opt-in
Either way, you are helping others.
If a person is on the Internet searching for something, they are saying “I have a problem or question I need help with.”
That problem is either that they need more information or they need to buy something to solve their problem.
Through your business, you should be able to address both of these pathways.
For scenario #1, the transactional immediate purchase:
- Have a clear, well-structured sales page.
- Make it easy to buy your product.
(This also means having “buy” buttons spaced at the beginning, middle, and end of your page so people don’t have to scroll to find it.)
For scenario #2, the informational scenario (they’re not ready to press buy, or as a business owner you’re targeting a longer play):
- Facilitate a clear journey to make each step convenient through your informational content to set up a possible future purchase.
- Have an opt-in that is really aligned with what those folks are looking for and will help them take the next right step.
- Make it easy to connect with your content.
(Even if all you’re asking for is an email, remember that in today’s digital world, getting someone’s email is incredibly valuable currency and it’s important to treat that with respect.)
But remember that pivoting someone from an informational query to a purchase requires time and nurturing.
That's where the term “nurture sequence" comes from.
Where patience and a lighter hand are required.
You are meeting people and welcoming them in a warm and fuzzy kind of way. You are meeting them with different SEO copy and a different tone in your offer than the situation where the person is an immediate yes or no to a purchase.
Smooth the path for your audience, stay honest and respectful, and above all, prioritize clarity. In this age of so much digital noise, the clearer you are, the more you’ll stand out from your competition.
So if you feel like you’re getting traffic but not converting, you’re probably making the wrong offer.
Separate out these two types of copy, transactional vs. informational, and get clearer on who you’re meeting with each query and what kind of content they are asking for.
Avoiding Perfectionism & Attaining The Organic Freedom Tipping Point
Do you want the opportunity to say yes to only marketing that you want to do?
Marketing that can even be yours at the affordable price of free?
The Organic Freedom Tipping Point gives you that.
It is the calculated point at which Google is sending you so much traffic that you'll always be able to make your monthly revenue based on organic traffic alone.
You have to embrace the data and then you have to take action.
Because the best time to implement SEO is yesterday.
If you’ve hit the major marks, go ahead and publish. You can return and refine later if you need to.
Serve your audience in the best way possible based on what you know right now, which means getting your message out there asap.
Then keep taking action, even if it’s imperfect.
When you have a solid strategy that works, it's easier to say yes to the action that makes it actually come to fruition. If you keep pivoting, you keep changing and waste all your energy.
The good news? Google is really smart.
It can see and connect adjacent ideas and terms, so you can rank for related terms too, even if your keywords aren’t spot on right out the gate.
Again, you won’t know everything until you start putting your strategy into action and continue gathering data, once you know how to.
Use that data.
Meet people with empathy.
Find the opportunities to really support your clients and say “I see you, I care about what you need and want.”
That’s how strangers on the Internet feel honored and start reflecting to Google and their neighbors that your business is the real deal.
Then you’ll see your numbers grow.
Then you can keep checking in on the relationship between your site traffic and your conversion numbers to see if there are places you can improve or adjust.
Based on the monthly revenue you’d like to make and your average rate of conversion, you can calculate the number of eyeballs you need on your site to make your dream numbers happen.
That is the Organic Freedom Tipping Point.
The Future & Search Engine Optimization
If you choose to not play the algorithm game, there's a higher cost for you and it can impact your bottom line.
It’s not that I don’t believe in or do social or other forms of marketing, it’s that as a business strategy, leveraging SEO through copy that converts is going to feed my business for far longer than any social media gambits.
And so if I have to choose where to spend that time, I always put it into the SEO bucket first.
Here’s why:
Every algorithm change in Google so far is always done in an effort to elevate better content.
Every algorithm change will feature more highly the content that ranks high in the expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, content that is well organized, content that delivers quality information.
So if your SEO strategy has included those priorities from the beginning (which it should have if you were focusing on delivering optimized content for the human reader), you might see a shift in your numbers but it usually won’t affect your bottom line.
AKA you don’t need to stress enormously about algorithm changes as a moving target!
Technology will definitely evolve going forward, but so will you and so will your business. This is not a reason to avoid having a solid SEO strategy and leveraging Google to send you more business.
I mentioned before that I got 16,000 hits of organic traffic a month, (that’s new users, new inbound leads) to Higher Scores Test Prep when I was there.
That lasted for two years, even after I stopped creating new content because I had a baby.
Seriously.
It took care of me.
And yes, I still had to do other things like email my list and support them and make sure that they were seeing content that I had posted in the past.
But it was absolutely amazing to me that what I had built in the past could live on with a shelf life that was longer than a day of doom scrolling.
If you want to find the right people who want to say yes to your products…
If you want to pour your energy into something that does not require daily maintenance, that allows you to post once a week, once a month, once every two
weeks, whatever cadence works for you in a very clear trajectory…
If you want the research-based strategy most likely to get you to the outcome you want...
That is leveraging SEO.
That is what I help people do.
If you want to learn exactly how to do that (and more), the Organic Marketing Ecosystem Course is your next right step.
Let’s keep building together!