10 Ways To Recognize Great Content From SEO Copywriting Services

There are many copywriters and SEO copywriting services online willing to create web content for you. Unfortunately, however, not every writer or writing service can provide you with great content. While subpar content might still offer some basic benefits of making your brand appear relevant or engaged to some level, it won’t help you distinguish yourself from your competition in any meaningful way.

In order to really succeed in your digital marketing strategy, you need great content. Great content can be defined as copy that helps you increase search rankings, generates leads and connects with customers on a personal level; all at the same time.

Many business owners do not have the time nor the resources to consistently put out great content. They often decide to use an SEO copywriting agency to help them. It is said of copywriting services that you get what you pay for. That is true … up to a certain point. However, there are SEO writing agencies out there that may charge you top dollar and then produce only good content, not great content.

What is an SEO Copywriting Service?

In a nutshell, an SEO copywriting service is a company that finds, vets and contracts with high-quality copywriters that they can then connect with clients that need writing help. Some SEO copywriting services are simply a platform/broker for writers and clients, while others take on a more managed approach.

Managed copywriting services usually provide a project lead to help organize and maintain a team of copywriters and editors to finish a writing project within an agreed-upon turn time and at a certain quality level. Because SEO copywriting services have done all of the work of finding and managing quality copywriters, they are a perfect fit for companies needing to scale their content marketing without having to take on additional staff, payroll, hiring and training duties and managing the process themselves.

How Can You Gauge the Quality of SEO Copywriting Services?

Before hiring an SEO copywriting service, first ask to see samples of the work it produces. The copywriting agency should offer you one of two options:

1. Allow you to peruse a portfolio of the work the agency has produced in the past
2. Or, you can make a small custom writing order on a trial basis.

A trial order is extremely helpful to preview what kind of content you can expect to receive from the writing service, and the writing agency can maintain any privacy agreements it has with other clients. However, that content may not be of much use to you if you do not know what you are looking for.

10 Qualities of Great SEO Copywriting

You may think that recognizing great content is intuitive: You’ll know it when you see it. That may be true to some degree, but what resonates with you may not resonate with your customers (or with search engines).  With so much riding on your digital marketing strategy, you need to balance your intuition with intellect and objectively consider what distinguishes great content written by SEO copywriting services from that which is merely good. Here are ten qualities you can always look for.

1. Strong Headlines

Many readers will decide whether or not to read your content based on the headline alone. Therefore, it is crucially important to have a strong headline in your copywriting. But what makes a headline strong?

• Connecting with your audience by addressing their concerns
• Using language to create a sense of urgency to entice the reader to learn more
• Incorporating keywords for search engine optimization
• Balancing emotion with information.

Strong headlines help you stand out from the competition by using an engaging format but do not alienate portions of your audience by trying to be too clever or by sounding too desperate.

The flip side of the headline in content writing is the call to action. This is where you make your final pitch to the reader to encourage him or her to place an order or find out more information. A call to action is not strictly required, but if you choose to include it, it should use the same techniques as the headline to evoke a response from your audience. Writing effective headlines and calls to action is an acquired skill. SEO copywriting services are typically well-practiced at it.

2. Achievable Goals

Before you order content from SEO copywriting services, you should have a specific idea of what you want that content to accomplish for your business. As the following graph illustrates, different types of content are likely to help you accomplish different objectives:

Knowing ahead of time what you want the content to accomplish helps you to decide which type you need. Once you’ve decided on the inherent goals, you can craft content that has the best chance to resonate.

For instance, if website traffic and customer education are high on your list, you may decide to invest more in long-form, comprehensive content that covers all aspect of a subject. This can be a great educational guide for readers, but also will be filled with keywords and queries that search engines would find valuable which could lead to higher search engine rankings for that article. Higher search engine rankings ultimately will lead to more traffic to your site.

Going into content creation with a plan can help drive the process and while there will always be a creative aspect to style, flow, feel and formatting, applying more strategy early on can improve your chances of hitting your long-term online marketing goals.

3. Originality

If you want your SEO content writing to improve your search rankings and attract customers’ attention, you must be able to offer something unique. This may mean new information that is not yet out there, or it may involve presenting existing information from a different angle or perspective.

Plagiarism is copying and reusing content, either from your competitors or from other pages on your own website. Not only do search engine algorithms take a dim view of duplicate content, but customers are unwilling to waste their time lingering on pages that don’t offer them anything new. High-quality SEO copywriting services perform checks for originality on every piece they create to avoid plagiarism, whether accidental or intentional.

However, it is not always necessary to completely reinvent the wheel. Copywriting services can refresh existing content, e.g., geo pages, for originality. This involves taking the existing information and presenting it in a new way. This helps satisfy Google’s algorithms and hold readers’ interest.

4. Answers to Questions

People perform web searches because they are seeking information. This is true regardless of whether the searcher phrases the query in the form of a question. Your SEO content can rank better in search results and connect with more readers by answering more questions with a single article. This helps to establish you as a trusted and reliable source of information.

Performing a quick Google search of your keyword generates a box of questions labeled “People also ask.” This gives you an idea of what other information people are seeking about your topic. You can provide your SEO copywriting agency with one or more questions that you would like the content to answer.

5. Accuracy

It is not enough to answer questions; you must also answer them correctly. An error of fact can undermine the credibility that you are trying to establish with your readers. SEO copywriting services train content writers to conduct internet research efficiently and present the information accurately. Not only that, but your copywriting agency may also be able to provide quality control in the form of editing.

Editing becomes one of your most valuable tools when trying to create and maintain an authoritative, professional brand image. Spelling and grammatical errors in your SEO content can quickly sour a reader’s trust in your brand’s ability to provide quality services. No matter how great of a copywriter or SEO copywriting service you employ, a second set of eyes should always look over content before publishing.

Whether that second set of eyes is someone on your team or someone from your copywriting agency is up to your budget, bandwidth, and services offered/available at the writing company you’re using.

6. Balance of Data and Creativity

Great content is proven effective through research. The keyword query described above is an example of a simple research method used in SEO copywriting services. However, with the help of search analytics and other data-collecting tools, you can delve much more deeply into your research to gain a more exact picture of what your audience is looking for.

If your approach is entirely data driven, your SEO content is going to come across as coldly calculated and manipulative. Yes, you have to provide your audience with what the data tells you they want, but you also need creative content that will capture their imaginations. Working with SEO copywriting services may be the key to achieving the correct balance: You supply the data, and the copywriters draw upon their skills to interpret it creatively.

7. Relevance

Since your perspective is different from that of your customers, it can be difficult for you to determine what is relevant to their lives. This includes not only the SEO content itself but also the approach to the content. Your readers are looking for the benefits of purchasing from you. However, when you create your own content, the tendency is often for you to emphasize the features of your product, which is less relevant to your readers.

Professional SEO copywriters have the ability to approach the topic from different points of view, including that of your customers. Writing professionals may be better able to ascertain what your readers want to know and present the information in a way that is relevant to them.

8. Authority

One of the main objectives of content marketing is to establish you as an authority in your field. Publishing relevant, accurate, intentional content that engages readers and answers their questions with substance communicates that you are knowledgeable, helpful and trustworthy. When it comes to establishing your authority, the quality of the writing itself can either help or hurt you.

Copywriting that is peppered with grammatical, punctuation, or spelling errors can give readers the impression that you do not know what you are talking about. This is true even when the information itself is factual and research-based. Working with SEO copywriting services allows you to benefit from the writers’ experience and expertise in creating content that is accurate and error-free.

9. Authenticity

While it is important to keep your audience in mind and to publish SEO content that is useful and relevant, it is also important to publish content that reflects your own beliefs and values. Inauthentic content that seeks to tell your readers what they want to hear at all costs is unlikely to impress potential customers.

Part of authenticity is presenting a consistent brand voice. Managed services from an SEO copywriting agency allow you to provide brand voice guidelines to a dedicated team of writers so that they can create content consistent with your company’s ethos.

10. Multimedia

Text continues to be a cornerstone of an effective content marketing strategy. However, because people process information in different ways, a multimedia presentation is more likely to connect with an audience. This means incorporating photographs, infographics and video into your content writing.

As of now, most SEO copywriting services offer photos to accompany your content as an add-on. This means that you pay an extra fee, and the copywriting agency will select an appropriate photo to post with your content. Because video is content presented in another form, following the current trend does not mean that you will no longer need copywriting services. It just means that there may be a shift in the type of content that you order, e.g., video scripts and transcriptions.

Discover the Benefits of SEO Copywriting Services

In addition to producing great content, the best SEO copywriting services offer additional benefits, such as flexible purchasing options and dedicated account managers. Check out the writing services we offer and contact us today to see if we can help with your copywriting needs!