Copywriting Tips from the Best Keyword Research Guide

I read Keyword Research and Selection: The Definitive Guide to Gathering, Sorting and Organizing Your Keywords into a High-Performance SEO Campaign and all I can say it’s great. The guide provides an abundance of information for anyone in the SEO business.

That includes the copywriters. Here are the tips I found to be helpful as a copywriter:

1. “Never use misspellings. I don’t like to mix spellings on a page. We’d make an exception for the spellings of ‘duffelbag’ and ‘dufflebag” because of the low search volume each one produces, but ‘duffel bag’ produces enough results that we felt it best not to try and mix them in.”

2. “It is usually difficult to write good, user-friendly copy if you keep changing your spellings. This inconsistency can look unprofessional to your users. Again, an exception was made for the two low-volume keyword phrases, but ultimately these two produce such few searches that they are pretty far down the list of important terms to optimize for. We’ll be better off spending our time going after more important and higher traffic phrases.”

3. “Don’t get locked into using the keyword phrase precisely as its most often searched, even if the stemmed variations show little search volume. When writing, use all variations as they would naturally be used within the context of what you have to say.”

4. “If appropriate include plural word forms, but do not group plural and singular forms of the same phrase into a single page unless they can naturally be worked into the writing.”

5. “When researching competition it is good to type 2 or 3 keywords at a time into the search field as this will furnish a list of competitors that are specifically targeting a similar audience.”

6. “Use overlapping keywords with similar conceptual strengths.”

7. “Proper synonyms should not be used together on the same page. This is because proper synonyms rarely occur together, yet often occur in similar contexts. Rearrange groupings to ensure this does not occur.”

8. “Don’t try to force groups together that won’t be a good fit on a single page. It’s important here that when constructing the page’s content that a natural flow in writing will be achieved. Grouping words together that don’t fit will only make your content awkward and cause you to lose your visitor’s attention. Regardless of how many terms you think you can get on a single page, don’t try to force them all in when it comes to the writing of the page’s content. Look for creative ways to work them in naturally but if a keyword doesn’t fit then try it again on another page.”

9. “If your keyword research is well considered and well organized from the very beginning you’ll be giving yourself a much greater chance for success. You’ll be presenting less clutter and a more streamlined page designed to achieve the results you expect from the marketing campaign you are investing your time and money into in the first place.”