Freelance Copywriting, marketing and social media tips

When people think about search engine optimisation, they immediately start thinking about keywords and search engine rankings. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you spend every waking hour worrying about that, you might be missing something more concerning; something that could be happening right now.

Every website owner should use Google Analytics. This small powerhouse of stats and graphs will show  you how your website is performing. Information such as which keywords bring you the most traffic, sources of your traffic, which pages get the most hits and the geographical spread of your visitors is all at your finger tips. But one of the key stats that will show how effective your website is, is the bounce rate.

What is bounce rate?

The bounce rate is a figure that shows the percentage of visitors to your website that leave within the first 10 seconds. And that’s not good. If visitors are leaving that soon it shows that they haven’t found what they were looking for. A site with a low bounce rate (say below 30%) will be a website that is converting its visitors into customers. A site with a bounce rate of 50% and higher is one that isn’t converting – it’s failing.

If your rate is 50% and above, its time to take a look at your SEO.

Factors affecting bounce rate

Traffic to your website comes from a number of different sources:

• organic search results
• backlinks from referal sites
• repeat visitors
• social bookmarking traffic
• PPC traffic

The source with the lowest bounce rate should be your PPC traffic – if you use pay per click. If the highest rate comes from your organic traffic this would suggest that you have a mismatch with your keywords.

As a freelance copywriter it won’t come as any surprise that that is one of my keywords. So if people Google freelance copywriter they’ll find me. But what if I’d targeted something like marketing agency and they were looking for a company to deal with all their design and branding needs? When they land on my home page they’d find great information about my freelance copywriting services but no mention of design or branding. The result would be that they would click away from my site which would lead to a high bounce rate.

Therefore it is essential you ensure your keyword selection truly reflects what you do. Shed loads of traffic is useless without conversions.

But it might not be just down to your keywords. Here are other factors that may be causing people to click away from you site:

• too much advertising – this could be making your site look messy with too many messages
• videos and music – especially if they are on auto play as soon as your website is opened. The can be really annoying
• navigation choices – too many and your visitors will get confused, too few and they won’t know where to go next
• slow loading speed – peopel don’t like hanging around waiting for websites to load
• excessive corporate speak and jargon in your copy will be a huge turn off
• bad design – if you site looks unattractive it won’t encourage people to stay

So, if you are experiencing high bounce rates take a look at your site and compare it with the list above. Take another look at your keywords – are they really reflecting what your site is about?

If you can bring down your bounce rate you’ll boost your conversations.

As a freelance copywriter, I have been blogging for several years now, so what I do has become second nature. But many of you are probably coming to blogging without any experience and find the whole concept daunting. To me, it is a simple and effective method you can use to promote your business, elevate yourself to expert status within your field and get the word out about what you do.

Last week I had lunch with one of my clients who was quizzing me about various aspects of social media marketing, including blogging. As I enthusiastically launched into a speech outlining all the major benefits that blogging brings, I could see he was drowning in information overload. So I thought the easiest way to explain how to blog effectively was to blog about it.

How to be an effective blogger

The key to blogging is to do it regularly. It’s like all social media, the more you do it, the more exposure you’ll get and the more you’ll get out of it. The optimium blogging frequency will differ depending on who you talk to. Some blog daily, some even multiple times per day. But to be successful, you have to find a frequency that works for you.

Personally, I post blogs three times a week (twice a week on my other blog). This fits in with the time I have available and provides regular content for my readers. Whatever you decide, stick to it. As you gather regular readers they will grow to expect your next ‘installment’ so don’t disappoint them.

To help me stay on course, I tend to blog ahead and schedule the posts. Therefore if I have a ‘quiet’ day I can write several posts, upload them and schedule them for publication – this can save a lot of time.

As you read this, the number of times you blog probably isn’t at the forefront of your mind right now. You’re probably thinking how on earth can you constantly generate new ideas? Well, we’ll look at that next.

Ideas factory

Coming up with new material can seem daunting when you’re first starting out. So here are some tips to make sure those ideas keep flowing:

• keep a pad on  your desk so when an idea comes to you, you can jot it down
• read other industry blogs and magazines to generate ideas
• comment on current affairs especially if you can tie them into your industry
• invite your readers to comment – you may get some spin off ideas from these
• write ‘how to articles’ and ‘top tips’ relating to what you do

Before you know it, you’ll have a stack of articles  ready to go.

What’s your purpose?

As you are writing, make sure you know why you are writing. Every post must be created with a purpose. You may be looking to promote something through your writing, perhaps you want to start a discussion, you might be after more business or perhaps you want to attract links.

Whatever it is, keep this in the forefront of your mind as you write.

Every post is valuable so make sure you make it work for you.

Giving something back

Don’t forget, if you want people to take time out of their busy day to read your posts, you have to give them something in return.

The information has to be of value to them. Plus, try to remain on topic. What do I mean? Well, this blog is all about copywriting tips, marketing tips, how to use social media marketing and copywriting SEO related issues. So when a post is published you, my readers, know roughly what genre it will be about. If you bombard your readers with random posts they probably won’t come back for more.

Make your blog an encyclopedia for your area of expertise.

Write simply and with love

The layout of your blog post is very important. It has to be attractive and not too heavy.

Begin with a catchy heading. It should be interesting enough to draw in your reader so arouse their curiosity. To help your SEO, get your keyword in there – so if you are writing about copywriting, try and get that into the heading if you can.

Next comes an image. You may not see that as important, but a good image will draw readers in. Use something playful, something that will pique their curiosity.

Then comes the hard part – writing an interesting and entertaining post. Make sure the body of your post is packed with useful information. You know the audience you are targeting and therefore you’ll know what they are looking for – so give to them in spades. Break up the copy with sub headings to make it easier to read. And finally don’t let it go out with a fizzle; invite comments or add in a call to action (depending on what the aim of your post is).

So that’s how I go about blogging. What do you do? Do you have any other ideas to help out the new bloggers on the block?

Even though the World Cup seems to have taken over life as we know it, I’m sure the fact that Wimbeldon is happening hasn’t past you by. And how could it after that epic of tennis matches between Mahut and Isner.  Those incredible guys played for a mind blowing 11 hours and 5 minutes in total with Isner eventually winning 6-4 3-6 6-7 7-6 70-68! Imagine that – being on court and not being able to break your opponents serve. Hour after hour you serve and return to the best of your ability and yet still nothing. The number of games played grows to an astronomical number – the sheer will power these guys must have had is astounding.

And by now I guess you’re wondering what on earth a mammoth game of tennis has to do with SEO copywriting. Well, as being as you’re still reading, I’ll tell you. Just like Isner, if you want to win with your SEO strategy you have to be in it for the long haul.

Looking back through this blog you’ll find various posts addressing SEO and yet many people out there still think that once you’ve identified your keywords, got a SEO savvy web designer to build you a stonking site and got the best SEO Copywriter out there to create powerful, meaningful, interesting and relevant copy, you’ll hit the front page of Google just like that.

Oh if only it were that easy.

There is a simple equation that will show you what it takes to succceed with your website’s SEO:

SEO friendly website + great SEO copy + back links + determination = great rankings

If you want to achieve great organic rankings you must:

• do great keyword research
• get a professional to write your copy for you
• constantly build back links to your website (via blogs,articles etc.)
• review your analytics regularly to see your site’s performance
• regularly review your keywords

Basically it is an ongoing process that never stops – that might seem like a lot of work, but when you consider how much money you’ll save it won’t seem so bad. Great search engine results will reduce the need for other paid advertising. So what would you rather do? Spend a bit of time getting clients for nothing, or spend a shed load of cash on ineffective advertising?

The decision is yours. But I know which I would prefer.

The internet is taking over – hardly breaking news, but it is if you are a business owner. More and more people are searching for local companies through the search engines so it’s never been more important to ensure you have a strong local SEO presence on the web.

Many company websites concentrate on their products and services and omit their geographical details that will help them get found by consumers. With the advent of increased and improved mobile search, it is vital you stand out in your local area. And the best way to do that is by utilising the power of local search.

Location, location, location

If your company covers a specific geographical location, make sure those details are added to your HTML through page titles. You should also try and use these details within your copy and headings. But ensure you are sensible about it. Remember you are first and foremost writing for your reader – if you over do it, the page will look clumsy. Other areas for location information are within the footer along with your address and also within your internal hypertext linking structure. Instead of linking freelance copywriter, use a geographical reference such as Suffolk freelance copywriter.

YouTube

As well as optimising your website for local search terms, you can boost your presence by using video marketing. Upload your video to YouTube and then use very localised tags – without being spammy. The chances are (depending on the competitiveness of your keywords) you’ll be able to get these ranked and the more entries you can get on a front page local search results, the fewer your competitors can have.

Wider areas

Many buisnesses will serve multiple geographical areas. If this is the case, you should consider creating specific landing pages for each area. They should have unique content (you don’t want to fall foul of the duplicate content trap) and should be optimised for each specific area. Hypertext links within these pages can then drive your visitors to your main website.

Boost your profile

Social networking sites make it easy to spread your name and your business name to a wide audience. Set up social media profiles, again relating to your geographical region. But, as with the landing page content, make sure each description is different. You should also utilise Google Places, Yahoo local, and Bing Local to boost your local profile.

So the name of the game is local search – when creating your website always keep in mind your main business location and use it to its full potential.

Many companies are now beginning to find their feet with social media. They’re getting their heads around tweeting, Facebook. Google Wave and all the other weird and wonderful platforms out there. They are discovering which social media platform to use, they just don’t know how.

But for many, finding customers is still a big issue. Until they can qualify their time spent tweeting etc., with an increase in business they remain sceptical about its uses in the business world.

The key thing to remember is that just because you are using social media doesn’t mean customers will come flooding to your door. It doesn’t work like that. As a business you have to follow customers across the social web.

I came across a blog post the other day that will help you achieve this. Convince and Convert’s “4 Detective tricks to find your customer in social media” will help you understand how to use social media as part of your business.

Sally Ormond – freelance copywriter