Copywriting Mistakes That Ruin Your SEO

Copywriting mistakes can damage your SEO strategy, so why don't we help you correct them before repeating them again?

While it's true that video is the preferred format for consumers all over the internet, copywriting keeps showing how important it is to broadcast your brand's message. Audiovisuals themselves need some copywriting to, you guessed, be appealing to search engines.

Copywriting can take many forms within your. It is in the form of a blog - like the one you are reading - it is in your ads Call To Action to convince users to take the next step. Most of all, it's there for search engines to identify what your content is about and, so, redirect users to your website whenever they query.

But with so many rules, search rankings and those keywords you can't stop studying, there is a high chance you might make the same mistakes repeatedly since you know how to please search engines and, most importantly, your users.

To help you avoid these mistakes, we will cover them in this article, so keep looking at what we are writing and find the knowledge to create a successful copywriting SEO strategy.

Keep reading!

CodeDesign is the leading digital marketing agency in Lisbon Portugal.

Why is Copywriting Important for SEO?

The copywriter's task is to create content in all your formats so that people know what your company is about, what makes it unique, and, of course, to persuade all these people to choose you over the competition.

How do they do this?

SEO Copywriters are always in charge of researching the keywords of their clients to develop different content around them that attract users' attention.

A content strategy is vital for any brand within the internet environment since it is a sample of the brand "for free" that makes people interested in your brand and, thus, continue to take steps throughout the sales funnel to become a customer ultimately.

The good thing about SEO is that it is an entirely free and organic strategy and is essential for your success. For this to work optimally, you must manage good copywriting and be outside of all the quality demands that search servers demand and, even more importantly, your audience.

With the help of an SEO copywriter, you can:

• Increase web traffic 
• Make people connect with the content you create to generate leads
• You create a brand voice for your company.
• You become an authority within your niche.

Google itself only gives importance to these websites that are authorities within each niche. Those who manage to respond more effectively to user queries receive a courtesy pass to the search engine results page or SERP for connoisseurs. This first page is usually the limit to which 99.9% of users typically search for all their results beyond Google's second page, and nobody knows what is there.

Knowing this, now is the time to see what things you must correct so that your content is scalable by search engines and that readers enjoy it similarly.

Copywriting Mistakes To Avoid.

From using the keywords repetitively and indiscriminately to copying the article format of other pages with more authority, there are fundamental errors that, if you have some experience in writing, you will know beforehand. Even so, let's investigate further what practices you should avoid.

Use A Lot of Jargon.

Even the word jargon is jargon if you don't understand it.

For those who do not understand, we give you a small definition:

Special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.

Oxford Languages

It is at the end of this definition that we want to emphasize.

As a digital agency, we know that the people who will read us may know what digital marketing is. However, if we want them to understand our recommendations, and above all, if we want them to know why our services are essential, we can't talk on an academic level to them. First, we can sound pedantic; beyond sounding pedantic, they will not understand anything we say. 

Read this complete guide on digital marketing funnel and then choose the right digital marketing channel for your business.

Digital marketing is full of jargon: SEO, SEM, PPC, CRM and many others.

If you know about digital marketing, you understand all these acronyms, but if you are a beginner and want to learn more, there you have only seen a lot of meaningless letters.

While you should show that you are an expert, you should also teach it in a way that both a beginner and an expert in your subject know what you are talking about so that you can reach a wider audience.

The idea is to make consumption easy, not bore them with many theories.

Ignoring Keyword Research.

Sometimes you have a fantastic idea to write, we make a whole article about it, and then, you watch the article go unnoticed through the content offer.

Although we cannot always predict which content will generate high engagement or even go viral, with a good keyword study, we can be sure that we will target the terms our audience is looking for the most.

Now, when you get these keywords, you don't have to put them over and over again for Google to notice them, this practice is called keyword stuffing, and search engine optimization connoisseurs claim that it can even be a black hat practice - translating jargon, practices that do a lot of damage to your SEO.

So that you better understand what keywords are about and how you can use them, we are going to a basic concept of SEO, and for that, we will describe the types of search intent that our users usually have:

• Navigational: These searches point to a specific brand (Nike, Apple, Netflix)
• Informational: To find answers to questions such as what, where, how and so on.
• Transactional: Searches to buy products in e-commerce or Amazon.
• Commercial: Comparisons or reviews about products to evaluate which one to buy in the future.

Now, there are ways to study these keywords; the first and cheapest is to search it directly through Google and see how many people are looking for it and what people are talking about it.

However, software and AI make the study of keywords much more effective, so we recommend some of the best for your keyword research:

• Semrush
• 
  Ahrefs
• Ubersuggest

Forgetting About Title Tag Optimization.

Title Tags are the first data that Google analyzes to redirect its users to different content.

When you write blogs or web page headers, you know that the most important title is the H1. This "H1" is nothing more than an information code that shows Google what the central topic of the page is. Therefore it must be clear and concise.

For this, keyword research will be your first guide. Once you complete it, you will see what type of content there is around this and what titles competitors use.

The idea is to give an original "twist" to this title that may be similar to those that appear in the SERP but still have specific differences to increase your chances of appearing on this first page.

Now, what about the length of the title? Does this influence?

Several blogs talk at length about stating that short Meta Titles are the ones that generate the most click-through rate. An Etsy study showed promising results after shortening several titles, thus increasing traffic to these pages.

Perhaps the main reason behind this is that, as the title is more concise, it looks complete in the SERPs, which can be more eye-catching for users and even something that Google specialists prefer.

However, according to "What should the title tag length be in 2023?" from the Search Engine Land blog, the title should not be an impediment as long as your title accurately explains what your content is about.

A study in the article shows that title tags of between 60-40 characters are the most displayed in the SERPs.

When correcting this, we recommend creating concise titles and extending them only in exceptional cases if the article requires it.

If you want to know how your title tags, meta descriptions and URLs will look, we recommend using the Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool.

Always Compete for High Volume Keywords.

This wave of self-help and self-improvement may sell you the idea that you should always aim for the stars, go higher and achieve more. But, if you know anything about the Greek Myth of Icarus, you will know that flying to the sun will not bring you any good results.

You see, these highly searched keywords are almost closed to any business that wants to break through in their niche, and competing for them will take you beyond the second page of Google into territory even more unknown than the dark side of the moon.

In digital marketing, sometimes you must have the humility to understand which league you belong. You shouldn't compete in the Champions League if you are still a local team.

Now, don't let that discourage you; a comparison with soccer is not a reason to throw in the towel; rather, it can be the starting point towards success.

As any football player does, you start first by dominating the local leagues to reach that championship or world cup you want.

Forgetting about soccer and going back to the keywords, the idea is to look for opportunities in those keywords of a medium volume to a little low so that you can start ranking for those.

On the internet, users often get bored of the same "reliable source" and venture a little further to get other opinions that expand their knowledge.

For this, they can do the query another way and match the title tag you managed to stand out or take the courage to go beyond the first SERP and get jewels in the afterlife.

Whatever the case, the important thing is to take opportunities on keywords that suit your level of popularity and reach.

Check these Amazon FBA tips to grow your business and see how optimising your Amazon listing could help you grow.

Not Optimizing Your Images for SEO.

The images are a visual break between all the text.

The bulk of a copywriter's job is to create paragraphs of valuable content, but when users only see a long text without an image or video that adorns the visual, rest assured that they will go to another, more appealing website.

But the images are not just about decorating, and that's it. They can help you with SEO too.

And you will wonder, Codedesign, how do images help SEO?

Well, we present to you the "Alt Text."

How does the search engine locate that the image is of a dog?

Search engines do not have eyes, although we want to believe they are spying on us all day. However, the words are the eyes of the search engine.

When you click on the image of the dog, among the options, you will see "Alt Text," and this will indicate what the image is about, that is, "a dog."

This tactic is another valid way to use your keywords effectively, and a curious fact is that even this helps people who are blind to understand your blog better, so that is a great plus.

If you want to learn more about this topic, we recommend you read about visual search.

Use Too Much Passive Voice.

Copywriters are not helped by the passive voice. 

Wow, that doesn't sound good, even a little confusing. This is a passive voice sentence, and it's a tense that experts don't recommend you use. 

In the passive voice, the subject is affected by the verb, and it is not the subject who does it. 

If we look at it from a more "metaphorical" perspective, the passive voice does not encourage consumers to take action; instead, they are taken by it. 

Even writing software like Grammarly always highlights the passive voice as an error: 

The passive voice is usually more helpful for newspaper headlines, but if your idea is to sell or explain something to your audience, always put the subject first and then the verb. Read this guide on E-commerce supply chain and voice search optimization.

Not Updating Old-content

A blog is a long-term investment, so you can't get it dusty. You should clean and fix it occasionally.

Let's take this article for example. The validity of our advice in this article may be relevant for what remains of this year, but what happens if we discover more things to correct next year?

The idea is not to delete this article and write a new one, but rather to take everything that is still valid and spice it up with the new one to give the content fresh air.

When you do this, you make sure that your pages do not lose relevance for the updated requests of your audience, and therefore you do not have outdated pages on your website. An excellent example of this is our guide on voice search updated.

Something similar is what you do with repurpose, in which you take written content, and you can recreate it in other formats such as video or podcast.

Final Thoughts.

In this article, we saw that words are, in a way, the eyes of search engines, so we must polish our copywriting skills to achieve better results in our click-through rate and web traffic.

Beyond all these tips, the most important thing is to offer your users high-quality and high-value content since this will get people hooked on your content.

If you got hooked on ours, keep up to date with all our updates at Codedesign, experts in digital marketing. For further advice, contact us.

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