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If you’d like to raise your site’s position in the search engine rankings, you need to get your on-page copywriting right. The issue is that you do not know what ‘right ‘ is. Clearly the keyword phrase you have chosen needs to be in there, but how often? So you scramble around and look at the information from all the SEO gurus and what do you find? All of them say something different. One might say to make your keyword phrase 1.5% of your copy and another might say 3.5%. Who’s right? The answer varies from ‘no one truly knows except the individual who locked Google’s algorithm in the vault ‘ to ‘it depends.’

So what do you do? It’s easy. You review the your competitor’s websites. Type your keyword phrase into Google (or whichever search website you want your website to appear on prominently) to discover which sites come up on the first page. Now, you need to recognize there are numerous ingredients that go into the recipe that goes into awarding them the top spots in the search engine rankings. Only one of them is their SEO copywriting. So if you would like to get more sophisticated, you must also check out other considerations like directory listings, back links, and whether the keyword is in the URL, title and web page description.

So check out these web pages because they are clearly getting something right. Take the pages that are in the top positions in the search results, and copy it into Word. Look at the word count for the copy. Then use the ‘find ‘ button to hunt for your keyword phrase. If you’re using a phrase such as ‘copywriting for SEO ‘ you need to add up how often that phrase is employed, and then work out that as a proportion of the total words on the page. You also need to count how often ‘copywriting ‘ and ‘SEO ‘ are used outside of that keyword phrase. Again work out the use of each of these keywords as a percentage of the total words. That tells you the share of times you need to use each keyword in your own copy.

You also have to focus on the way the keywords phrase ‘copywriting for SEO ‘ and the keywords ‘copywriting ‘ and ‘SEO ‘ are employed in the headings and sub heads. You want to model your page after this too. Also, ensure you add your header tags so that Google knows what’s important on that page.

So there it is. Stop wondering what you need to do and use the competition as a guide. You can do it yourself or if you’re strapped for time, find a website copywriter to help.

Written by Carolyn Frith of Carolyn Frith Marketing, LLC, a marketing advisor who focuses on website copywriting, copywriting for SEO and content marketing.