Gary and I are pretty psyched about the work we just tag-teamed for our client AutoSport. The job consisted of two parts: an SEO analysis performed by Gary, followed by SEO copywriting performed by yours truly. For the copywriting, my mission was to take AutoSport’s 25 most popular pages and implement 50 keywords from Gary’s SEO analysis.

I went into the project with a couple of objectives: 1) to keep the original text in tact, changing the copy only to leverage keywords, 2) to maximize the keywords without making the text seem forced or unnatural, and—probably most challenging—3) to keep the original form of the keywords. (Meaning that if a keyword was “rear view mirrors,” not only would I have to find a way to use the plural form, but I’d have to take every existing instance of the singular and find a way to make it plural.)

Here’s the process I used:

• I first took screenshots of the 25 pages I was to enhance.
• I then typed the text into a Word document so I could use Word’s “Track Changes” feature to show my changes.
• Next, before I really even dove into the text, I considered all of the keywords from the list of 50 that could possibly fit with every page. So, for example, if a page contained product descriptions of floor mats, I made note of all the keywords having to do with floor mats (12 in all).
• I then started to look for ways to make those related keywords fit – again, without forcing or losing the flow of the copy.

Here’s an example of a sentence before and after SEO copywriting (keywords highlighted in yellow, new text in red):

BEFORE

AFTER

In this one sentence alone we were able to bump up the keyword count from 0 to 3!

At the end of the project I went back through and counted up the keywords. I found 135 occurrences of the keywords in the original copy on those 25 pages, but ultimately we were able to bump that number up to 286. Not too shabby!

Posted by Jessica Swope, web editor for Business Bullpen. You can follow Jessica on Tumblr.