Copywriting in today’s digital marketplace goes so far beyond the written word – you’re no longer just selling your writing skills, you’re selling results, and the marketplace competition is rapidly revolving around this mindset, requiring content creators to work organic SEO into their deliverables.

Are you just delivering copy, or are you delivering copy that’s designed to help your client reach their goals?

It’s impossible to truly predict how well your content is going to bring in traffic, and what kind of impact it will have on a site’s traffic, but there are a few tried and true methods that can only help you reach a broader audience, without stuffing your copy with keywords and setting off Google’s alarms, and those practices lie in organic SEO.

Identify a Target Audience Before a Target Keyword

There’s a saying that’s making its rounds all over the web, and for good reason – write content for people, not search engines. Don’t decide a target keyword is where you’re starting.

Instead, begin by identifying who your target audience is – who stands to gain the most from what you’re writing. In some cases, this is inversely related to keyword research, but more often than not, people let the keywords get in the way of what their audience actually needs to read, and it’s selling their readers short.

Find your people, and give them what they want.

Keyword Research is About People

Remember when starting keyword research why you’re doing it in the first place – you need to know what problems your target audience is most interested in solving. Your aim shouldn’t be to dominate a topic with the biggest and baddest rankings of them all, but to provide easily accessible content to the people that are looking for answers to the questions that you’re answering.

Identify those needs, put together a list of target keywords, and build those keyword lists with semantically related keywords with an SEO tool, like Text Tools, to make your content as relevant and visible to your target audience as possible.

The key to organic SEO is that it comes naturally with the topics you’re covering, but tools make it easier to identify how well what you’ve already written is going to perform, so you can just tweak it slightly for the best results.

Long Live the Content King

You can optimize your copy until your eyes are bloodshot and your brain is fried, but ultimately it all comes full circle to the information that’s actually in that copy – if your copy is weak or poorly written, you’re not going to rank, and it’s just as simple as that.

Before you even begin to get your brain around advanced SEO techniques, get your writing up to par, and format articles that are engaging, easy to read, and create natural interest in the rest of your site for your readers. Give them content that is written in the voice they need to hear, with proper grammar and punctuation, and information they want – most SEO really is as simple as that.

From there, traffic spikes come naturally. If you give the people what they want, the rankings will come, so get to know your audience, and get to know them well.

Keep Content Fresh

Regularly posting to blogs and updating the copy on a site to optimize it for the user-experience is always a smart move for your site’s traffic. Test and track changes made to site copy, and keep blogs up to date with articles that are current, relevant, and compelling to your readers.

It used to be the recommendation for blogging frequency to be as often as possible – once a day if you could swing it. These days, digital marketers are realizing the importance of quality over quantity, and advocating that indeed you post as often as possible, but only when you have new information to share.

No puff pieces, no fillers – just authentic, unique content that’s information-rich and relevant.

Build Your Network

Aside from the rabbit hole that is backlink building, networking with other creatives in your niche is a great way to spread awareness about your latest work, and reach a broader audience that’s interested in what you’re writing about.

Keep open dialogues with industry professionals in your niche, before you decide to send them a link, and make the relationships mutually beneficial with information that’s relevant to them. If they like it enough, they may just decide to share it, with little to no poking or prodding on your part.

Pretty soon, you’ll start noticing that more people are aware of your work, and are simply sharing your links on their sites because they know and trust you, and feel you’re an authoritative resource in the industry.

Know Your Niche

Getting to know your competitors and their content is about more than outranking them – it’s about seeing what they’re delivering to their readers that you’re not. Sure, it might be a competition, but ultimately if they’re ranking higher than you, chances are it’s because they’re offering something you’re not.

Don’t let it get you down – take a stroll through their content, and determine what they have that you don’t. Begin with a basic approach, reading through their topics, article format, writing style, social media engagement, etc., and from there, work into the link metrics, evaluating their backlink profile and DA alongside each other to get the full picture of what’s working for them.

As a wise man once said, watch and learn. Then blow them out of the water.

Don’t Narrow Your Organic SEO Strategy Down Too Much

There’s isn’t a one size fits all approach to SEO that is going to skyrocket your pages to the top of the SERPs – a healthy combination of them all coupled with authentic, relevant content is what is going to ultimately boost your rankings and send more traffic your way.

Employ a healthy combination of everything when you create content for clients and yourself, and you’ll see the results you and your clients want. Don’t over-optimize, and always focus first on what you’re writing, and let organic SEO be the cherry on top of what you’re delivering to sweeten the deal.

Expand the reach of your content based on what your readers are actually interested in – get semantically related keywords to optimize your content with Text Tools.