I’m happy to publish a nice guest post from copywriter Glenn Murray
who has a bunch to say about copy and he is well versed in this area so I hope that you join in the conversation and add your 2 from whichever currency.
Over to Glenn…
There’s a lot of talk around the traps, at the moment, about LSI, ‘the Semantic Web’, ‘Web 3.0’ phrase-based this, probabilistic that… I’ve been paying close attention to all this talk, but I’ve been a little… shall we say… suspicious of it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not questioning whether search engines actually use Semantic Analysis Methods. Today’s search engines are definitely smart enough to take context and ‘hidden’ meaning into consideration when learning what a page is all about.
What I’m suggesting is that the search engines are smart enough that we don’t have to optimize our copy any more. Helpful, informative copy naturally contains the elements the search engines look for when assessing relevance. And now that the search engines are smart enough to find those elements, we copywriters can forget about optimization.
Assuming someone’s doing keyword analysis to choose the most appropriate keyword phrases to target, and then planning clusters of pages around those phrases, all we copywriters need worry about is writing helpful, informative, engaging, compelling copy.
Don’t believe me? I suspected you wouldn’t. So I’ve dug up some NON-SEO copy I’ve written over the past year or two, and analyzed it to see if it naturally contains the things that SEO copywriters would normally focus on.
What do SEO copywriters normally focus on?
Let’s say your page is about cooking. An SEO copywriter would consider the following:
- Keyword density / phrase ratio – Have I used “cooking” 15 times on this page?
- Keyword prominence – Have I used “cooking” in my headings, bulleted lists, bolded bits, etc.?
- Subparts / stems – Have I used “cook” and “cooks” often enough?
- Related terms – Have I used “chef”, “ingredient”, “recipe”, “gourmet”, “cuisine”, “taste”, “aroma”, “oven” and so on?
- Synonyms – Have I used “baking” and “barbequing”
- Modifiers – Have I used “pastry cook” and “short order cook”, just for good measure?
(Hold on, don’t shoot! I know there’s more to semantic indexing than that)
I’m gonna stop you there for a sec. I’m not saying this is all Google uses to learn meaning. Far from it! I haven’t even mentioned construction grammar, generative grammar and the other transformational grammars. (Mostly because I don’t know what they are!)
Nor am I saying that Google thinks precisely in these terms. For instance, it doesn’t use keyword density, as we think of it, at all.
4 examples of copy that contain these elements WITHOUT optimization:
Below are 4 pieces of non-SEO copy I’ve written over the last year or two. When I wrote them, I wasn’t targeting any particular keyword, I was just writing on a supplied topic. (And I swear, I didn’t optimize them at all during this exercise. I performed this analysis as much for my own understanding as for this post.)
- Piece 1 – Formit brochure copy .DOC file (topic: Rainwater tanks)
- Piece 2 – Divine Pearls web copy .DOC file (topic: Freshwater jewellery)
- Piece 3 – Evolve Pictures web copy .DOC file (topic: Concept art)
- Piece 4 – Perring Group web copy .DOC file (topic:Executive search)
For the sake of this exercise, let’s use those topics as our target keyword phrases.
Visualizing natural optimization with yellow highlighting
In each sample piece of copy linked to above, I’ve highlighted in yellow:
- The most likely target keywords
- Prominent keywords
- Subparts / stems
- Related terms
- Synonyms
- Modifiers
As you can see, every page in every sample is heavy with instances from the list above. Maybe not every item on every page, but, it’s important to remember that Google isn’t looking for specific statistics, nor is it checking things off a list as I’m doing here. It’s looking at the entire page, and the neighboring pages (and a whole lot of other things), and making judgments based on the whole.
Bearing that in mind, it’s hard to imagine Google needing more from these samples. I’m confident it could tell that the Formit copy is relevant to searches for “rainwater tanks”, the Divine Pearls copy is relevant to searches for “freshwater pearl jewellery”, and so on.
Visualizing natural optimization with word clouds
It took me a long time to go through and highlight everything in those documents. It’s certainly not the sort of thing I’d like to have to do for every job.
A different (and much more replicable) approach is to generate a tag cloud – or word cloud – from your copy. If the words from your target phrase, related terms, synonyms, etc., are very prominent in the cloud, that’s a pretty good indication that your subject matter will be considered relevant to searches for your target keyword phrase.
Word cloud for Formit brochure copy
Here’s the word cloud from my Formit brochure copy. Topic: Rainwater tanks. (I use Wordle for my tag clouds)
Figure 1: Word cloud illustrating natural optimization of brochure copy for Formit rainwater tanks.
As you can see, without any optimization, my brochure copy looks fine. “Rainwater” and “tanks” appear to tie for the 2nd most prominent position. Interestingly, “water”, a subpart of “rainwater”, is 1st, and “tank”, a subpart of “tanks” is 4th. What’s more, most of the other prominent terms are related to the business of manufacturing and selling rainwater tanks.
Word cloud for Divine Pearls web copy
Here’s the word cloud from my Divine Pearls straight web copy. Topic: Freshwater pearl jewellery.
Figure 2: Word cloud illustrating natural optimization of non-SEO web copy for Divine Pearls freshwater pearl jewellery.
Without any optimization, “freshwater” seems to be about the 5th most prominent term, and “pearl” is the 4th. (And “Pearls” is clearly the most prominent.) “Jewellery” isn’t as prominent as I would have had liked, had I been optimizing the copy, but when you consider the whole – including the fact that most of the other prominent terms are somehow related – I’d suggest it’s fine as is.
Word cloud Evolve Pictures web copy
Here’s the word cloud from my Evolve Pictures straight web copy. Topic: Concept art.
Figure 3: Word cloud illustrating natural optimization of non-SEO web copy for Evolve Pictures concept art.
Once again, without any optimization, “concept” seems to be no.1, and “art” looks like no.3. Note also that the other prominent terms are nearly all somehow related to concept art.
Word cloud for Perring Group web copy
Here’s the word cloud from my Perring Group straight web copy. Topic: Executive search.
Figure 4: Word cloud illustrating natural optimization of non-SEO web copy for Perring Group executive search.
Without any optimization, “executive” is the 4th most prominent word in the copy, and “search” is the 2nd most prominent. And once again, you’ll note that many of the other prominent words are related to the executive search domain.
Conclusion
Although I’ve chosen only 4 samples of my copy, I chose them because I knew they were definitely NOT optimized. So I’m confident I’d find the same results if I analyzed more. And I don’t think it’s just me. I suspect if you analyzed any decent copywriter’s work, you’d come up with similar results.
Helpful, informative copy doesn’t require optimization. It’s the topic selection and site structure that require SEO thought. Someone needs to:
- Do some keyword analysis to identify what customers are searching for;
- Plan a cluster of pages around each target keyword phrase;
- Supply the copywriter with a list of topics to write about (preferably one topic per page).
All we copywriters need to do is write helpful, informative copy on the topics supplied. Exactly as I did in the 4 samples discussed above.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Also bear in mind that the samples I’ve analyzed here are high level pages. Home, About Us, that sort of thing. More often than not, these pages would be supported by a great deal of very focused blog content, which would naturally contain even more keywords, related terms, synonyms, etc.
Please comment to let me know your thoughts
What do you think? Agree or disagree? Is SEO copywriting dead? I’d love to hear your comments…
PS. A big thanks to CJ Jenkins (my gracious host here at Science for SEO), David Harry from Reliable SEO and Ben McKay from Just Me and My Search Marketing for your help on this post. You may not agree with everything I’ve written here, but I appreciate your assistance!
And back to me…
Cheers Genn for a really well researched and interesting post, I agree to some extent but not fully so I’ll kick this off with a few bullets 
- When you’re used to writing for SEO you do it all the time, it becomes a normal things after 5-10 years of doing it. I think we SEO’s tend to forget how hard it was to pick up in the beginning and how much though it took back then. Glenn’s example site is very good, but I think that not everyone will write as freely and as well as that.
- See for example this which shows at page 8 in Google for “Holiday Bali” – The site is here
- This one is the same for “Borneo trekking” – where is the “trekking”? Site here.
- What about Rotschild wine?
- Density is a dud measure if you look at the percentages and try and get a ratio and so on. That’s not how it should be used. Use it to see at a high level which words stick out, that’s all.
- If you are a n00b to SEO and that you have written your copy off the top of your head, chances are it will need some tweaking to be effective.
I do agree that there is far far more to SEO than just copy but well formed copy goes a long way. This doesn’t mean copy that has been written by ticking those seo check boxes. This requires more of an artistic streak but at the same time making the copy meanfingul equates to making it useful for search engine optimisation.
Ooh ah! Nice post Glenn.
I’m also going to say that I think if you’ve been copywriting for SEO for a while you will naturally optimise your copy.
I know myself that I can’t design or develop a site without considering SEO because it’s just how I do things now.
I think it also goes without saying that helpful, useful content is inherently optimised for search engines also – because what the user wants – the search engine wants too.
Seems to me you just proved that good copywriting is SEO copywriting, exactly what Google wanted in the first place. My understanding of Google led me to this conclusion years ago. The whole idea is to make things easier for Google to do the right thing and it comes as no surprise to me that good copywriting practice in general does exactly that.
I’ve urged my students for years to just write in plain honest language and trust Google to index them correctly and been proved correct time and time again. SEO copywriting will soon enough be generally equated with plain honest copywriting. No more secret ‘hat’ tricks, just back to 6th grade composition rules.
Great article, and an interesting twist on something I’ve been telling my clients for years.
Well-written web copy which answers your customers questions and addresses the things they likely want to know about you will *always* rank well.
That presumes of course you have a good web developer too!
First, I think you (and Jay Greathouse) are exactly right. If you write copy that is about the keyword theme of the page, search engines will understand it. This is because text analysis based on linguistic theories of grammar and discourse analysis are based on real language. If you really wrote about rainwater tanks, they’ll get it. However, for some reason marketing copywriters don’t seem to want to write copy that is about the intended theme of a page. They think they have to “trick” us into being interested in what they have to say. Also, copywriting is a skill that a lot of people don’t seem to have so while I think that copywriting for “SEO” as distinct from good copywriting is really a myth (other than knowing what keyword is being targeted and making sure it shows up on the page now and then), I think that SEO copywriters will still be needed for some time to come.
Nice article and you are right, in your cases you got a nice semantic cloud in a natural way. But your using long texts from 1800 to 6200 words. In these cases you’ll rollback words and phrases more often to attach parts of the text to the topic. If you’ll have to create shorter texts (e.g. ~300 words) you’ll have to work more accurate to reach the same thematical weight. In my opinion the LSI is a good way to make yourself aware to related terms and diversified phrases, which is definitely an important part to cover more searchphrases and get more relevant users.
This is certainly a well put together article, and provides a bit of an eye opener. As a copywriter (now dropping any reference to SEO in my title) personally speaking, SEO has always been an organic process. Over reliance on keywords has always been a little black hat in my books; if the body copy doesn’t read well, it isn’t doing its job.
Copywriting for the Internet though is very different to the published media. Whether we like it or not, SEO copywriters tend to have that gnawing feeling in the back of their mind that they need to include certain terms. It’s almost a subconscious reaction, and that’s probably how it should remain. Quality copy should always come first over SEO. Great article.
@ImpactCopy
I agree “SEO copywriting” has long been dead. The art of sprinkling in keywords as many as it could make sense… well doesn’t make sense.
Glenn, great idea to visualize the texts with word clouds. I totally agree that if the word cloud looks “right” there is no need to think about keyword frequency or to check if all possible synonyms are used.
However, in my experience, it often happens that writers use marketing terms or technical terms that don’t match the searchers behaviour. For example using “item” or “product” instead of “mp3 player” or “mobile phone” or whatever product you are talking about.
Having said that, of course, if the keywords used in the copy closer match to what the user expects, it’s also better copy from a user’s point of view.
So in the end I agree with all said above, if copy is written really well, matching the subject and the language the target audience uses, the copy will also be good for SEO.
Good point Lisa!
Great article, as with others I’ll cautiously agree, with some reservations.
At times I blog with no thought to SEO while writing, and only pass an eye over the content to pull out some keywords for meta-data. Surprisingly, I have had the opposite to what you describe, with a few occasions where I have had NO relevant keywords in my copy at all. This being due to my writing style being based on analogies and (hopefully) thought provoking examples.
However, in the case of high level pages, I think your theory holds true.
Thanks for this article!
I am happy if all the above is indeed the case. It will make writing in the future easier. Not that I have been thinking SEO constantly, but now I certainly know that it is -and should be- only about content.
Good article, and I agree wholeheartedly that quality copywriting is naturally “optimized”. However, relying on instinct will not always get the job done. That’s why you frequently see poorly written copy high on Google SERPs and brilliantly written pages buried on page 20.
It’ not a bad idea to do a little actual research before deciding what keyword phrases are important. Beyond that, content optimization includes the composition of meta information, URL structure, anchor text, and internal/external linkbuilding. If you’ve done everything right on your visible text but bungled all of this, I would argue that achieving high search ranking is more luck than skill.
@Clare & @Stephen, I’ve definitely been writing SEO copy for years, but I don’t really think that means I do it without thinking about it. Until quite recently, ‘SEO copy’ was simply another name for ‘high keyword density’. And for me, that was always a conscious effort. I know this ‘cos it always took me a LONG time to ‘optimise’ (aka increase the keyword density) after the client signed off on the copy. (I always did the SEO as a dedicated last step.)
@Marjory, I’m not really sure what you mean when you say “marketing copywriters don’t seem to want to write copy that is about the intended theme of a page. They think they have to “trick” us into being interested in what they have to say”. Can you give me an example? Thanks.
@Jan, yes, the total wordcount of my pieces was quite high, but overall, the word count of each page was pretty low. I haven’t done the sums, but I’d say they average well below 300 words per page.
@Lisa, yes, I agree that many sites/copywriters don’t use the same words their readers use. And keyword analysis is definitely a great way to understand your audience. But that’s at the topic selection / page theming level, not at the nuts-n-bolts copywriting level. At the copy level, yes, it’s imperative that copywriters use familiar language, but that’s general copywriting best practice, independent of SEO. Furthermore, by focussing too much on optimising for the words readers use, you may actually eliminate a lot of the jargon, and this isn’t always a good idea. Jargon, used appropriately, can convey authority and credibility, and it can also provide the related terms, synonyms, etc., that Google wants to see.
@Alistair, good point. However, I’d be interested to see a similar analysis for a selection of your copy pieces. Assuming they’re on topic, I suspect your analogies would contain a whole lot of synonyms, related terms, etc., even if they’re not all rich in target keyword phrases?
@Brad, I agree that many high ranking pages have crap copy, and many low ranking pages have great copy. But in most cases, that’s not a causal relationship. It’s far more likely that there are other factors at play (e.g. the crap copy sites have heaps of quality backlinks or domain authority, or the great copy sites are poorly coded).
Thanks everyone for your great comments. I appreciate the time you’ve taken!
Cheers.
Glenn
Over the top post, and as most have already stated, it goes to having the ability to write. If you do have the talent to write, the SEO part can be worked in with a natural flow. However, from what I have seen, and of course everyone else has too, there are a lot of really good writers, but there are more really poor writers. They will write just enough to get buy, or have someone else write for them that is also just enough to get buy. You see poorly written articles all over the Web that are optimized, and nothing is more aggravating to me than to come across some of this crap in high standing when doing a Google search for information. Yes, the search engines have gotten much better at finding the well written, informative pieces of work, but they are still far from perfect. If they were, this garbage wouldn’t make it to the first page, regardless of how many backlinks they were able to acquire. Hopefully, in the near future, the search bots will gain a higher degree of artificial intelligence and will be able to sort out the difference.
Just my 2 cents.
Marie-Claire,
thanks for providing this insightful article. It helps me a lot in understanding what my SEO guy is talking about. Now have to go on and read as much as I can of the other posts on you blog.
Thanks again and have a good time.
I think there is a distinction to be made between copy used in an article and copy used on product or introduction page. The semantic and keyword cloud come into their element on article based pages, however, many sites in the e-commerce world need to be less wordy , so SEO copy has to be a more considered activity in such cases.
Hi June. Thanks for your comment. I agree that there are a lot of high ranking sites with poor, but highly optimized, copy. But that doesn’t mean they rank well BECAUSE of the poor copy. Similarly, low ranking sites with great un-optimized copy don’t necessarily rank badly BECAUSE of the copy. There are a lot of other factors at play.
Also, I did say that dedicated SEO of copy is not necessary *if your copy is helpful, informative and on-topic*.
Cheers.
Glad you like the site” Glenn wrote this though
“SEO Copywriting” cannot be dead because it was never there.
I think there is nothing like “SEO Copywriting” if an article is well written, it will automatically cover the main subject and topics related to it. It is all about good copy writing.
Adding “SEO” to copy writing just gives a psychological advantage that the piece of literature is now search engine friendly.