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You’re an SEO. You’ve found an incredible keyword gap for your client that their competitors aren’t ranking for.
Thrilled, you develop title tag and on-page copy recommendations for your client and are sure that your advice will propel their organic traffic forward.
Copywriting tools? For on-page recommendations and a title-tag? Your writing is fine as is. Or so you think.
See, you didn’t use copywriting tools to make sure your language was actionable, invoked emotion and had perfect spelling and grammar. Users didn’t click on your client’s result because they felt indifferent and unmotivated while reading your title.
But here at Distilled <> Brainlabs, we can help you with that.
In case you missed it, we’ve merged!
While an SEO’s job can include mapping keywords or making content recommendations, these actions won’t matter if we can’t attract users to click on and read our results. The perfect keyword can exist, but if we can’t position it and attract a user to it, we could be left wondering where we went wrong.
Because of this, I’ll share with you five important copywriting tools that ensure your title tags, headers, and on-page copy stand out from the crowd and attract your target audience.
1. Avoid any costly spelling mistakes – Grammarly
When writing, we can think of the most enticing and encouraging language to get users to click on our results. This is a goal that we should strive for, except when our titles or copy have egregious misspellings or hard-to-ignore grammatical errors.
A persuasive title with a spelling error is pretty much user-repellant.
Users are looking for results that display:
Misspellings and grammatical errors scream the opposite of authority. We need to make sure our content is cleaned up.
Want to know how we can do this?
Using Grammarly, a free digital writing tool that uses artificial intelligence and natural processing language to check grammar and spelling.
It would be really disappointing if the first tool we recommended to you is a glorified spell-checker.
Luckily, Grammarly is more than that. It also makes recommendations based on vocabulary, clarity, brevity, and tone. You can insert Grammarly into your optimization arsenal as a first line of defense, whether you prefer editing as you write or towards the end of your work.
Grammarly has an online editor on their website and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Having Grammarly installed will also improve your writing anywhere on the web quickly and seamlessly, without ever having to open another tab.
Grammarly’s algorithms help raise issues that may be present in your writing, and give the reasoning behind any potential correction, which help you make informed and thoughtful decisions while editing your work.
Grammarly also offers functionality in Microsoft Office on Windows and a Grammarly Keyboard for IOS or Android. They also offer a Gmail plug-in, so when you’re communicating with your client or colleague, you can draft up that 4:55 pm email knowing you’re in good hands.
We want our writing to be error-free and grammatically correct. But sometimes we need that extra push to make our writing more concise. Many writers find themselves constructing difficult and hard to read sentences. This can lead to writing at a comprehension level higher than your target audience.
Enter the Hemingway editor.
Hemingway Editor is a free writing tool that helps make your writing clear and bold. It can help with improving the style of your writing and letting the reader focus more on your message.
Think about being a reader yourself. Do you want to spend time having to re-read a sentence to understand its meaning?
You can enter your copy directly into the Hemingway Editor and watch as it dissects your text for adverb usage, use of active voice, and hard to read sentences.
For SEO professionals, another valuable aspect of Hemingway is its built-in readability score. After you enter text or copy into Hemingway, it uses the Automated Readability Index, which basically informs you what “grade level” your writing is at.
We want to consider who we’re writing for, as SEO professionals, content writers, and writers in general.
Writing to capture traffic for a direct-to-consumer electronic company should look and read differently than a B2B cloud migration company.
Studies have shown that the average american reads at an 8th-10th grade level. So if your copy starts to creep up to 12th or 13th grade level, consider whether this level of reading comprehension makes sense for the users you’re trying to cater to.
The next time your client asks you to review a blog post, or you’re constructing title tags and meta descriptions, you can rest assured that your recommendations will include robust and readable copy.
Hemingway is available for your browser. They also offer a paid version–the Hemingway Editor 3 for Mac and PC. This version works without an internet connection and lets you publish directly to WordPress or export directly to HTML or Microsoft Word.
We now have two free tools to make sure our writing is grammatically correct, bold, and easy to read.
Think about how much value you can now provide your clients with:
Their content will be punctual and powerful, and they’ll have you to thank drawing all of this new organic traffic to their website and resulting in a 15% increase in conversions.
Except you can’t keep users on the page.
Your blog post is boring her. She’s now headed to your competitor’s site.
Now: how can we draw the reader in?
Using a classic copywriting technique called Bucket Brigades.
As SEO’s, we know that average time on page can directly affect a result’s ranking potential. And while bounce rate doesn’t necessarily indicate a decrease in ranking potential, wouldn’t users be more likely to convert if they were drawn in by and attracted to our content?
Think about it: we want to keep users on our client’s pages. We can’t do that if they stay on the page for less than 15 seconds.
A bucket brigade is traditionally defined as a human chain, used to transport items from one person to the next (think firefighters passing a bucket of water).
Thankfully, we’ve invented fire trucks.
In writing, a bucket brigade is a phrase that motivates a user to continue reading. Of course, writers being the creatives we are, had to steal this concept and make it about ourselves.
It does make sense though. As writers, we want our reader’s attention to easily “pass” from one sentence to the next, and bucket brigades help accomplish this.
As an SEO, whether you’re reviewing a blog post for a client or trying to create attention-grabbing headers, including bucket brigades is a simple and free way to improve users’ time on-page and improve a client’s conversion rate.
Whether you’re working in-house or for an agency, one idea to keep in mind is your client’s brand voice and to ensure the language you recommend ties in accordingly. If they employ a more conversational approach to content, using bucket brigades would be a welcome addition to their strategy.
If your client’s content exudes a more formal tone of voice, bucket brigades are still an acceptable strategy, but it may be beneficial to limit your usage to avoid coming across as too informal.
Some classic Bucket Brigades include:
You could use some of these examples or get creative and develop attention-grabbing bucket brigades yourself.
This is incredible. You now know how to write powerful, error-free, and captivating copy.
But how can we ensure users will even click on your result in search engines?
Any SEO professional will tell you that a title tag can make or break a piece of content. How can you improve a client’s organic traffic if you can’t even get users to click on your result in the search engine?
Luckily, Distilled’s own Dominic Woodman recently discussed how to write an incredible title tag where he goes into defining a title tag, what your goals should be when constructing one, and how to write different kinds of title tags and expectations one should have.
When constructing headers or title tags, many copywriters like to brainstorm and write down as many as they can, and this is something SEO professionals can benefit from by implementing into their title tag creation process. It can help get the creative juices flowing and explore different title or header structures one might not have thought of at first.
What should we do when we decide on two to three that we love?
We can use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.
After briefly filling out a call-to-action, you can use this free tool to help you write headlines that will drive traffic, shares and search results.
The Headline Analyzer has a couple of useful features.
It measures a header’s “word balance”, which includes how many common, uncommon, emotional and powerful words are used in great headlines. They recommend a strong header has the following balance:
While I wouldn’t be too alarmed if you aren’t hitting every single target here (writing title tags and headers is hard!) this part of the tool is helpful to consider your usage of powerful and emotional words.
In addition, CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer includes a length analysis feature that measures if your headline is the proper length and uses an ideal amount of words.
All in all, this tool can assist in giving thoughtful insights for titles and headers that you may not have previously considered. Feel free to use this during any part of your title tag or header ideation process!
Last but not least, we’d like to introduce you to AlsoAsked.com, a new SEO research tool that focuses on informing users on how questions are topically grouped. It isn’t necessarily a copywriting tool, but provides us with valuable insights into what we should actually be writing about.
This free tool takes your search term and displays related questions from other users. It uses “People Also Ask” data, rather than Google’s Autosuggest, which is a main reason why we use this tool to create relevant headers and write copy that helps our readers.
We know what questions users are searching for and what language they’re using. Why not use it to our advantage?
To use the tool, you simply plug in a keyword you’re targeting, select the language you’d like results for, and choose the region you’re trying to target.
Let’s say we want to know what questions users have about meta descriptions.
We just plug “meta description” into the search bar, choose the language and region of our choice, and let AlsoAsked do the rest.
You can see below that we’ve now been given an overview of different types of questions users have, and how those questions can lead to even more specific searches.
With these findings, we now know what answers users are looking for, and can create content that satisfies them.
For example, if you’re writing a blog post about meta descriptions, some topics we may want focus on include:
All in all, AlsoAsked is a useful tool that can help inform your content strategy and give you new ideas to write about or recommend!
At Distilled <> Brainlabs, we’re constantly testing out new and old tools alike, seeing what helps us deliver valuable client work and grow and improve our clients’ visibility. We hope you find some of these tools and tips helpful in your future content goals.
What are some of your favorite engaging words or phrases to use? What’s the most captivating title you’ve ever written?
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