A review of "Practical SEO Copywriting"

On the weekend I was lucky enough to score a review copy of “Practical SEO Copywriting” from Glenn Murray. Sixty-five pages of advice for individuals and companies looking to understand how to rank well on Google.

It’s a topic we wrestle with here at Eventarc, as like most companies we would love to rank well in the search engines. Not just rank well for our company name, but rank for our key phrases such as “sell tickets online” and “online event registration“. So how well does this book assist us in achieving our SEO ambitions, and is it a good buy for you?

Overall the book is an incredibly useful entry point into the world of writing content for both your users and for Google. It is very accessible, and doesn’t assume any advanced prior knowledge of SEO. The general argument made is that anyone can rank well in Google if they are willing to put in the effort and follow a few basic guidelines, and Glenn does an excellent job of laying out the groundwork.

The biggest take away you should get from the book is that you cannot avoid the need for writing copy. If real estate is all about “position, position, position”, then SEO these days is all about “content, content, content”. If you are a small business owner looking to understand the basics of writing for Google and for your users, then I highly recommend grabbing a copy of “Practical SEO Copywriting”.

One great tip that I have already started using from the book is to use word clouds to visually represent your keyword frequency. What a great idea! Here is a word cloud generated from one of our landing pages:

The page targets the key phrase of “Online Registration“, and the word cloud shows that we are doing a decent job of highlighting that phrase within the content.

The other quick fix I made to our site after reading this book was to change the title tag on the homepage. We had fallen for the trap of trying to inject all our keywords into one big title, so it ended up looking ridiculous. Immediately after reading the advice from Glenn, I jumped into our CMS and updated the title to:

“Sell event tickets online with self service event registration | Eventarc”

Better? I think so.

So do we now rank number one for all our phrases on Google? Not likely! SEO (as I am sure Glenn will agree) is very much a long term strategy. It requires constant vigilance over a number of months, and is therefore not likely to give you any quick wins. The benefits though are enormous, so if you are in business for the long haul (like we are) then it is worth the effort.

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