The importance of copywriting for your website

In an age where content drives the visibility of your website, understanding the tricks behind making content successful is key to curating a great, Google-friendly site. This comes down to optimizing the tools available to help Google prioritize what it deems useful content. Our goal here is to offer ways to get your content noticed. Copywriting that is structured, SEO-proficient, and well-linked will boost the visibility of your site to potential customers.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the development and distribution of relevant content through blogs, newsletters, social media posts, or emails to name a few. The consistent use of content marketing establishes and nurtures relationships with prospective and existing customers.

Why is copywriting important for content marketing?

Copywriting, when done well, can be a powerful tool for content marketing. However, a number of aspects need to be considered to create effective copywriting. Not only is it important that the work is relevant, it also needs to read well, and have a good internal linking structure.

But what do we mean by an internal linking structure? These are any links from one page on your website to another page on the same site. Both users and search engines use links to find content on your website.

Despite websites having sitemaps that list the URL of pages on your site, search engines may take a while to reach these pages. By adding internal links to your newly published pages, you provide search engines with more ways to reach your content.

One aspect in particular that will help achieve successful copywriting is through the incorporation of search engine optimization (SEO). This will enable Google to understand the content, and provide answers or relevant information for search queries. Furthermore, it offers readers engaging enough content, and helps the work become organized in a way that viewers and search engines can both easily read. Finally, SEO targets keywords and phrases that users are searching for on Google.

With a solid internal linking strategy, rich SEO and easy readability, you can show which content is related and which of your articles are most informative and valuable. This will help both Google and your users understand your site better, which will, in turn, increase your chance of ranking well.

Is AI taking over copywriting?

One neat piece of tech that is quickly taking over the copywriting world is AI, which has the capability to jot up an article on any given topic in seconds, making copywriting as easy as typing a simple instruction into Chat-GPT’s search bar. However, recent headlines have raised concerns regarding AI’s potential and how that might impact the world of content creation.

At the end of March 2023, an open letter signed by hundreds of prominent artificial intelligence experts, tech entrepreneurs and scientists called for a pause on the development and testing of AI technologies that expand beyond GPT-4.

According to a story covered in The Wire, the letter is a response to the fast developments and competitive nature regarding research taking place among AI systems. For example, GPT-4 was only announced around two weeks ago (at the time of writing), yet its capabilities have stirred a fair amount of concern. Although the language model, which is available via ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular chatbot, scores highly on many academic tests, the system also makes plenty of mistakes, is prone to betraying ingrained societal biases and can be prompted to say hateful or potentially harmful things.

Part of the concern expressed by the signatories of the letter is that OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google have begun a profit-driven race to develop and release new AI models as quickly as possible. At such a pace, the letter argues, developments are happening faster than society and regulators can come to terms with, which means that this could impact how content creation is managed.

Until policymakers can lay firm boundaries on AI’s usage, we’d do well to heed using our p’s and q’s when Alexa’s around.

SEO copywriting tips to help your rankings

In the meantime, creating engaging content is still within your control. So, with the topic we’ve covered here, these are some nifty tricks to better improve your website copywriting:

1. Match search intent

This will involve researching how people are looking for their required topic online, and the type of keywords they are looking for.

2. Look at ‘People Also Ask’ boxes in Google

Another useful way to investigate how a topic is being researched is through the ‘People Also Ask’ box, which will provide other perspectives on your topic.

3. Make reading easy with the ASMR formula

This involves annotations, short sentences, multimedia usage, and reading your copy out loud – basically, how can your content be more engaging.

4. Use the inverted pyramid method

Here, we advise that you place the need-to-know information at the top, and the nice-to-know information at the bottom of the article

5. Establish proof and credibility

As Scott Adams once said: “Persuasion is strongest when the messenger is credible.”

Hopefully, this has provided you with enough information to be inspired by the possibilities effective copywriting can afford you, and remember: increasing reader engagement is what will help drive traffic to your website, which is why good copywriting is crucial.

Written by Danielle Rachel Champ.