SEO website copy

What SEO website copy is

SEO website copy is the rewriting of the ordinary pages on your site — services, products, about, home, the awkward ones in the middle — so that each page reads like a person wrote it for another person, and a search engine can still tell exactly what it is for and who should be sent to it. Both at once. Neither at the expense of the other.

It is not a page rewrite in the ordinary sense, though it includes one. A page rewrite starts with what the page is for and ends when the page does its job; being found is not part of the brief. This service adds that requirement, which changes the opening, the headings, the vocabulary and sometimes the number of pages.

It is also not an SEO landing page, which is a new page built for one commercial search. This work is for pages that already exist and already have a purpose in your navigation.

When you need it

The common case is a site that reads well and cannot be found. Somebody wrote it carefully, in the company's own vocabulary, describing what the business calls its services. Nobody outside the business uses those words, so nothing matches what people type.

The opposite case is just as common and worse: a site written for search by someone who did not care about the reader. The same phrase repeated in every heading, a paragraph of towns at the bottom, four hundred words saying nothing. It gets found and then loses the person who found it. Rewriting that is usually the cheapest improvement available to a business.

You do not need this if you do not yet know which pages are worth the money. Run an SEO content audit first; it will often find that four pages matter and eleven should be deleted. And if a page was performing well until a year ago and has simply aged, a refresh is the narrower and cheaper job.

What changes on the page

The page is rewritten from the reader outwards, and then checked against the search it is meant to answer. In practice, five things move.

• The opening. The first two sentences say what the thing is and who it is for, in the words a buyer would use. A page whose opening is a paragraph about your values is a page nobody scrolls, and it gives a machine nothing to match.
• The vocabulary. Your internal names for things are kept where they matter and paired with what customers actually call them. Nobody searches for a product line code.
• The headings. Each one describes what is under it, so that someone scanning the page gets the argument from the headings alone. That is also, not coincidentally, how a machine reads it.
• The missing answers. Price or the way price is set, what is included, how long it takes, what area you cover, what happens after they get in touch. These are the things people search for and the things pages leave out.
• The number of pages. Sometimes one page is doing the work of three and has to be split, because three searches are being aimed at one paragraph. Sometimes three pages are competing for one search and have to become one.

What does not happen is keyword stuffing. There is no density target, no requirement to repeat an exact phrase, no word count to hit. A page ranks because a reader who arrived got what they came for and did not go back to the results. Writing for that reader is the mechanism, not a nice thing to do alongside it.

What you get

The rewritten pages. As an editable document per page, with headings marked, in whatever format your site takes. Ready to paste, or entered into your CMS if you would rather not.

The title and description for each. The line that appears in a results list and the two lines under it, written per page rather than generated from the heading.

A note on what changed. One page across the whole set: what was cut, what was added, which pages were split or merged and why. This matters when somebody in the business asks why their paragraph is gone.

The internal links. Which of the rewritten pages should link to which others, in what words, so the set works as a group rather than as separate documents.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Winnipeg insurance brokerage has 14 pages. Its services are named after the internal desks that sell them: “Commercial Lines”, “Specialty Risk”, “Personal Solutions”. No page says the words contractor, restaurant, landlord or trailer, which is what people type.

Nine pages are rewritten. “Commercial Lines” is split into three: one for contractors, one for restaurants and one for landlords, each opening with what the policy covers and what a typical premium depends on. “Specialty Risk” keeps its name in the navigation but the page now opens by naming the four situations it exists for. Two thin pages about the firm history are merged into the about page. Every page gains a plain statement of what happens after the form is sent, because the brokerage answers that question by phone eleven times a week. The internal desks are unchanged; only the words facing the public are.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which pages, what each one is supposed to do, and who you are trying to reach with it. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Priced per page, agreed before anything starts, with the list of pages named in the quote.
3. Access and material. Read-only access to your search data, plus whatever keyword or intent research exists. Where none exists, the quote says whether it is needed first.
4. The writing. Three to five working days per page for the first few, faster after that as the voice settles. A set of ten pages is usually four to six weeks.
5. One round of revisions. You mark up the drafts, we talk, and the corrections go in. Factual corrections are not counted as revisions.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because a set of five short service pages and a rebuild of thirty is not the same job. The pricing page shows the four ways of working here and the published bands, so you can see roughly where a project of your size lands. The number is fixed in writing before the first draft.

What happens next

Most people do one of three things afterwards. They build the pages the rewrite showed were missing, usually pages aimed at one commercial search each. They put the on-page work in order across the rest of the site with internal linking, now that the good pages are worth pointing at. Or they hand the rewritten set to whoever writes next, with a style guide so the voice holds. The rewrite is finished work on its own: the pages you named are done, and nothing further is assumed.