SEO content and copy

Add SEO expertise to your website content writing

SEO is not just for sales pages

Search engine optimisation techniques can help connect clients with your content at the right stage in their decision-making.

The key is using SEO principles to refine the writing and serve readers’ needs. Not writing to some kind of formula. Or stuffing keywords into sentences that no human could ever bring themselves to read.

I admit that before I learned what effective SEO can look like, I had seen a lot of sites where the SEO seemed to consist of cramming ‘legal services Sydney’ three times in every sentence. And I could never see how readers could find that informative or engaging. Or how it could persuade a client that the writer could help them.

I was delighted to discover (thanks to The Recipe for SEO Success) that search engines love much the same thing as human readers: clear, well-structured copy that answers readers’ questions and keeps them engaged.

Be found and recommended for your expertise

In the age of AI search and LLMs, SEO is just as important as ever.

Your clients probably tell you they are looking for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Google calls that your  E-E-A-T, and that’s also what will help your site to appear in search results. 

Relevant and high-quality content that demonstrates your E-E-A-T might just be the single biggest contributor to successful business-to-business marketing.

Well-crafted and insightful content will also set you apart from an ever-expanding sea of indistinguishable content-slop. It seems bots and LLMs find that as unhelpful as humans do.

The good news for professionals is that the way to stand out is to share the things that make you an expert. Show your deep subject-knowledge, specific examples, applied experience, and understanding of how the issue will affect clients. That’s what will help readers trust there’s a human expert behind the writing. And help get your content noticed.

Keyword research to understand your clients’ questions

Again, there’s a lot more to keyword research than picking the most frequently used term.

There’s an art to thinking about your relationship with prospective clients.

What are they searching for when they wake at 3.00 am?

What questions they might have about your services or products?

And where are they up to in their search for answers—just trying to understand the issue, comparing different solutions, or ready to choose a provider?

Once you understand that, you can craft content to meet them where they are.

Build a body of authority

Authority also comes from having a suite of content.

There will certainly be one-off or emerging issues you need to talk about. But just touching on an issue once and moving on to the next shiny thing isn’t going to establish your expertise.

Ideally you want to approach your core topics from different angles and use a variety of formats.

A writer who understands SEO and keyword research can use that expertise to help you build a content strategy to align with audience needs, showcase your expertise, and demonstrate your experience.

Meaningful content matters

I’m obviously not impartial here, but I think my job as a writer is to take all that information and use it to connect you with existing and potential clients. Basically the opposite of keyword stuffing.

The principles for making content accessible for human readers are the same ones that make it easier for search engines to digest.

But human readers also want to be engaged. Writers also need to bring out all the things that will help capture and hold your readers’ interest. Emotion, storytelling, pacing, structure and flow. 

Once you can combine SEO content writing skills with expertise and client insight—you’ll be perfectly placed to design and build content to give clients and search engines the information they’ve been looking for.