Build yourself as a Copywriting Expert

by Farhan Halim | Dec 9, 2021

When starting as a Digital Marketer, people realise that copywriting is one of the most important aspects of Digital Marketing. It is a skill that needs to constantly improve over time as it is the skill that drives people’s attention. In this article, we will talk about how we can get the best results from copywriting. These 5 copywriting tips are important for beginners in digital marketers, content creators, content writers, bloggers as well as influencers.

Table of Contents

5 Copywriting Tips for Beginners

Why is Copywriting important?

As we talked about earlier, Copywriting is an important skill of Digital Marketing. It is so important because a well organised and structured piece of writing helps the user in ease of reading.

If your content is mixed with difficult words and has long paragraphs written without proper structure, people might lose interest and leave in between. That’s why your content needs to be catching eyes, and for that, you need to have good copywriting skills.

If your content is good enough, it’ll help you generate revenue from your content. It’ll help you gain profitability, and have a good return on investment(ROI).

Even if you have your own brand, publishing content with good copywriting can help you achieve your business goals by affecting customers’ perceptions of your brand.

How can you improve Copywriting?

What makes a piece of content more interesting than others?

It’s the familiarity people get by reading your content, and to achieve that, you need to write like you talk.

Imagine that you’re living in times way before the internet and you have a friend living far away from you. Think of your content as you’re writing a letter to him talking about your experiences and thoughts that he’ll love to read.

Once you achieve this type of writing style, you’re already a good copywriter. You’ll improve and get better at it as time goes by.

See, it’s not a tough job. It’s just a skill that improves by constantly doing it, that’s it!

Factors affecting Copywriting

Although the way of writing directly affects copywriting, there are several factors that are also important to consider while doing copywriting. All these factors should be considered so that you can get the best from your content. You can have checked your copywriting and on-page SEO using the Yoast plugin for WordPress.

Readability

Readability is the way to have a check on your Copywriting. It can help you preserve interest in reading while expressing what you want to write. You might have noticed you get a hard time reading content that is too long and often find it boring or uninteresting. So having a check on readability always helps.

Steps to Improve Readability

Flesch Reading Score

Flesch Reading score is basically the measurement of the readability of your text. The higher the Flesch Score, the better is your copywriting. The average length of your sentences and the average number of syllables per word determine the readability Score.

Passive Voice

You should always try to avoid passive voice in your writing. Passive voice makes the writing more distant and formal. It also makes the reading experience bad and your message in your writing might not be clear in a Passive Tone.

Consecutive Sentences

You should also avoid using similar sentences all the time. Similar or consecutive sentences make the reader confused and also doesn’t add variety to your content. Try mixing up sentences or breaking up or adding up two sentences.

Preventing consecutive sentences is not an easy task for many and it requires much practice. But once you get a habit of not writing consecutive sentences, you’ll naturally prevent it without the use of any tools.

Paragraph Length

Paragraph length should not be too long. People generally scroll over or leave long paragraphs either to read later( which they don’t), or just abandon it. You should try breaking down long paragraphs into shorter ones.

People also write blogs in which they break paragraphs after every two sentences( like I’m doing, and you’re still reading), and they get a good amount of readers. You can also set two to three sentences as your limit for a paragraph.

Sentence Length

Just like long paragraphs, unnecessarily long sentences are also bad for you! They’re also something that drops attention. Try breaking sentences again into two or three smaller sentences. People like short sentences, they feel it’ll take less time to read. It’s all psychological.

Subheading Distribution

You should always distribute your content into different sections using subheadings. A content with subheadings every 300 words is the ideal solution for good copywriting. Try segmenting your content into various sections, so that your reader can choose what part they would like to read.

Transition Words

Transition Words brings meaning to your writing. It helps people understand your content step-by-step. Using transitional words helps you organize your content into cause and result. Transition words like ‘but’, ‘and’, ‘so’, ‘because’, etc help you in achieving that.

Your content should be of the type that the first sentence is the thing which has been caused and the second sentence is the result formed because of that.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is important for Copywriting because it determines whether your content would be visible on the search engines or not. It is as important as Readability because well-written content which doesn’t get attention is not worth giving time. After researching keywords that fit your content, getting them inside your content well so that it feels natural for crawlers and readers is a tricky job. That’s why on-page SEO needs to be taken seriously.

Steps for On-Page SEO

Keyphrase in Title

Your keyword/keyphrase should be present in your content’s title. This ensures the reader that it is the content they were searching for.

SEO Title Width

Your SEO Title Width should be adequate enough that it is visible on all the devices such as mobiles and desktops. A title that is too long will be cut and put as (…) by the search engines and the title too short might not be interesting enough to attract visitors.

Keyphrase in Slug

Slug is the part of the URL after your domain name, for example, https://blog.farhanhalim.com/top-five-marketing-tips-before-2022/ has a slug after https://blog.farhanhalim.com.

The slug should contain the keyword so that visitors can understand it is genuinely about what they are searching for. Having other keywords can make them assume that your website might be scamming them.

Keyphrase Density

The body of your content should contain at least 3 keywords per 500 words. Having more than three keywords is always good but it should only be present where it is necessary. If the total number of words exceed 1000 words, it should contain at least 5 keywords, and so on.

Keyword density shows the crawler that the content is focused on the topic of the keyword it is targetted towards.

Keyphrase in Subheading

Try to include your focus keyword at least once in your article. It can be present on H1, H2… or any of the subheadings you have.

Nowadays Google has included questions in their search results, so using keywords in subheadings increases the chances of getting featured in them too.

Meta Description Length

Meta Description is the piece of description that is below the title in search results. The description should be short and precise and should be able to grab attention towards the content.

The ideal length of the meta description is 156 characters, but it can be a little less than that too. Writing more than the set limit will add (…) after 156 characters, making them impossible to read. So meta description can’t either be too short or too long.

Outbound Links

Your content should have at least one follow/ no-follow link attached to it. Make sure to provide links that are relevant to the content itself.

You can provide links to necessary tools or other people’s article which is related to the subject so that your readers can find some value from your content. You can also provide a link to your YouTube video which is on the subject itself.

Internal Links

You should provide internal links inside your content. An internal link when put properly can help crawlers know that your blogs are related to one another and it can help you rank better in that niche.

When starting to blog, it is difficult to provide internal links but after some written content, you can edit and link it to each other. At least one link is recommended as an internal link.

Image Keyphrase

At least one image should contain the focus keyword on their alt text. Alt-text is basically providing keywords for Google image search. You should always provide alt text to all your images unless it is just for decorative purposes.

Also, after providing a focus keyword in the alt text, you should provide synonyms of the keyword in the other image’s alt text.

Images

Talking about the images, you should also have at least one image on every post. Images provide interest to the visitor as plain text just looks like notes, and nobody visits the internet for that.

Keyphrase in Introduction

Your focus keyword should be present in the first paragraph(introduction) of your content. This tells that what your content is all about, and also helps you in maintaining clarity from the beginning.

Keyphrase Length

Focussing on a short or short-tailed keyphrase also means that you’re probably competing with a lot of people and big companies focussing on the same. That’s why you should focus on longer keywords or long-tailed keywords.

Having a long-tailed keyword with informative content can ensure a higher ranking on search engines. Also, it also means that you have a specific keyword rather than a generic keyword.

Keyphrase in Meta Description

Your meta description should contain your focus keyword. It ensures the relevance of your content to that keyword when people find you on search engines.

Previously used Keyphrase

You should never use a keyword that has been previously used. Using keywords for more than one post can make it difficult for both to rank for it, and sometimes none of them ranks well even if the content is excellent.

Try providing another long-tailed keyword similar to your previous one for content that is of a similar topic to your previous one.

Text Length

The text length of your content should not be too less, otherwise, search engines would consider them as thin content. Thin contents don’t rank well on search engines, as Google and other search engines consider them as low to none value to their visitors.

The ideal text length is 500 words or more for now, but it might go soon as high as 1000 words. This is because the internet is getting filled with content on a daily basis, increasing competition for content to rank. So search engines might change their algorithms to rank content that are more than 1000 words.

If you want to be future-ready, I would suggest you write content that is 1500-2000 words at least and covers as much information as possible.

Some Extra Tips on Copywriting for Beginners

Provide Table of Contents

Providing a table of content hep the visitors navigate to the part of the content they want to read easily without scrolling through a lot of your content. This maintains a friendly interface for visitors and people will definitely like and visit your website regularly(provided that you update valuable content regularly, and thus reducing bounce rates and increasing returning user count.

These metrics play an important role in having a good rank in search engines. This is because search engines want to deliver good content that people want to read first. They would never rank a website that is not getting much people’s engagement on the first rank.

Have Social Sharing Icons on every blog post

Having social sharing icons gives people an option to share your content on various social media channels. Getting a trend of being shared on social media is also important as it signals the search engine that the content is interesting enough for people to share with others.