SEO? SEM? PPC? I need an LOA.-Holland Webb

Nothing freezes your brain faster than a series of meetings on the minutiae of government grant management. Trust me. In 2009, I had to attend a lengthy conference in Uganda where they taught us exactly what snacks and beverages could be funded with federal dollars and how to apply U.S. government accounting standards for hotel stays in parts of the world that don’t have hotels.

The unkindest cut of all, though, was the acronyms.

Hundreds of acronyms were tossed at us by serious, gray-suited government bureaucrats with the power to take away the funds they had just generously awarded us.

Finally, one woman, far braver than I, raised her hand. “All these acronyms are hard to keep track of.”

“Oh, we know they are,” the speaker replied. “That’s why we created an LOA.”

“An LOA?”

The speaker laughed. “It’s an acronym that stands for List of Acronyms.”

Trust the government to create an acronym for an acronym. I’ll admit, though, that the LOA was a big HELP.

Starting out in copywriting, especially writing for the web, you may feel the same way. Job descriptions toss around a bunch of acronyms like SEO, SEM, PPC and more. They’re hard to keep track of, so here’s a brief LOA for new copywriters.

• SEO – Search Engine Optimization
  SEO draws the right traffic to your site. Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing have bots that crawl through a site, reading it in order to index it properly. Once the bot knows what your site is about, the search engine can pull up your site when a web user types in a related string of keywords.Let’s say your site gives advice to aspiring writers. Someone at home types, “advice for new writers” into a search engine. SEO makes it easy for the search engine bots to know that your site is about that very same thing and to rank it highly in its returns.What does SEO mean for you as the writer? Before you write for a website, do some keyword research. Find what keywords people are using to search for your topic. Be specific. Long keywords rank better than short ones, and they are more likely to get you in front of people who are interested in what you have to say, sell, or do.

  You can try searching some different keywords yourself to see what ranks best, and you can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Moz to identify high-ranking keywords.

  Once you have pinpointed some helpful keywords, use them strategically throughout your text. Try to fit them in the title, your metadescription, your images’ alt tags, and the body of your text. Old SEO models required keywords to appear a minimum number of times in exactly the same order. Today’s search engine bots are sophisticated, thank goodness, so we don’t have to stuff our text with keywords to get it to rank. Write naturally, focusing on the message.

  Voice search is increasingly popular. At least 20% of Google’s mobile searches are voice searches. That means people are asking questions of search engines instead of typing strings of words. Why don’t you ask those same questions in your text? The bots will recognize the match and put your page near the top of the search results.

  So how does a copywriter use SEO to write great content? Simple. Imagine you’re a robot charged with reading and indexing web sites. Ask yourself what searchable terms and phrases would get your site indexed accurately. Use those terms in prominent places in your text while still sounding like a human being.

• SEM – Search Engine Marketing
  SEM is the whole bunch of bananas – SEO, paid search, social media marketing, you name it.
  • Paid search is when a company pays a search engine to rank their site.
    Have you done a Google search and noticed the top ranked sites have a box with the word Ad in it next to them? These sites have paid Google to rank them near the top.
  • PPC (Pay Per Click) is how those sites pay Google for ranking them at the top or bottom of page one.
  • SMM stands for Social Media Marketing. SMM uses Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites to market products and services.

Why do copywriters care about SEM? Because it affects how you write.

Companies test their keywords and calls to action using PPC. You may have to write several of these for a company to test before they discover what works best. Social media marketing may have you writing Tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram messages that match your web site, blog post, eblast content, and the video script you wrote for the new YouTube video.

• CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization
  Now that SEO and SEM have helped prospective buyers or donors find your site, CRO is what encourages them make a purchase or donation while they’re there. Copywriting, as we discussed in my article last month, is all about conversion. We don’t just want readers; we want buyers. CRO increases the percentage of web site viewers who take action.Why does CRO matter to copywriters? Because if our CRO numbers are not good, we’ll get fired. The company that hired you to write for them exists to sell a product or service. Keep CRO in mind as you craft your prose, and you’ll be in business for a long time.

So there you have it, folks, a brief LOA for newbie copywriters. Let me know your adventures in copywriting acronyms in the comment section below.

Holland Webb: I love telling the stories that people put down so they go take action. I’m an advertising copywriter by day, an aspiring novelist by night, a parent, a dog-lover, a prison volunteer and a follower of Jesus.