Last week I had the assignment to quickly write about 20 pages of text for a website in a *very* competitive market (travel). There was no real budget to hire copywriters and there was a tight deadline. I managed to do it in just under 8 hours.

Management summary

For those of you who do not like to read much, I used this workflow:

1. keyword research: focus keyphrase, secondary keywords, synonyms, and LSI;
2. text format: create variants for different parts of text;
3. fill in and vary the format variants (by using the different keywords, synonyms etc);
4. create unique sentences for EVERY text, as much as possible within the time you have!!!;
5. write meta-titles and descriptions (also use a format and vary);
6. check everything and make sure the right keywords are used.

Here is a screenshot of how it looked like:

Content shuffle

Content shuffling is a way to quickly produce a large quantity of texts. The idea is simple: make a bunch of standard sentences and ’shuffle’ them around. You can automate this, but that will NOT deliver good results. Both Google and Human Readers will hate you for it. It will also cost time/money to write software that does this adequately (if at all).

But that doesn’t mean you should abandon shuffling all together. By using a tight organization and formatting of your text, and even some short standard sentences, you can quickly produce texts manually. They will not be top-notch, but sometimes that is good enough.

Below is the way I did it. I’m curious about the way you do this!

Keywords

You start with keywords. Always.

First, I did a little keyword research of about 15 minutes. That’s fast, but from experience I already know which keywords I should use in this market.

The focus keyphrase I chose was relatively simple: $product $destination. There were three kinds of products (tickets, car rental, hotel, etc.) and various destinations.

The product keywords
For every type of product, there were about 5 synonyms that promised a lot of traffic and competition, and were most relevant. I chose the best one of them to use in the title-tag, H1, a subheader and throughout the text.

After the focus keyphrase, I chose the secondary keywords (the synonyms), and some combination words that convert nicely. Think about words like: ‘cheap’, ‘reliable’, etc. I also looked up some semantically related words to the products (I will write a post about LSI some day). I use these to support the overall ‘theme’ of my pages.

The destination keywords
I figured these out while I was writing the texts.

It’s not about the products you sell, it’s about what people want to do with it. In the case of a travel website, you cannot simply say: ‘hey, this is the destination, the name of the hotel is this, and the price is $567,-’.

People look for INFORMATION and ACTION. Why is this a nice city to visit? Why should I buy tickets from this website? Can I rent a car if I buy these tickets? What are the hotspots in this city? In the small amount of time I had I could not possibly answer all questions, but you’ll be amazed how much you can do in a short time frame if you have a plan :)

For every $product $destination text, I looked up synonyms of the destination name. Example: Girona in Spain is also called Gerona; Cologne is also called Köln or Keulen; Beijing is also called Peking, and so on.

Text format

I thought of a format for all texts:

1. start with 25-50 words about the product and place some call-to-actions along with it;
2. the core of the text is at least two paragraphs (100 words) with destination information;
3. conclude with more information about the company, and mention or link to related offers to this product (25-50 words). In this part there are also call-to-actions.

The call-to-actions were simply little dialogs between text and customer: ‘buy/book/order $product, because $company offers these/this POD's‘ (POD = Point of Difference)

Throughout the text, the focus keyphrase is mentioned at least 3 times (beginning, middle, end), and one time in a subheader (H2). The synonyms and semantically related words are used less frequently, but throughout the text. Also, within the texts, there are optimized links to related products and to local authority websites.

Meta texts

I also made a format for the title-tags and meta-descriptions. They were something like this:

Meta-title: Cheap $product $destination? Compare $synonym_of_product.

Meta-description: $brand_name offers cheap $product to (note: or 'in') $destination. We offer the best deals for $synonym_of_product.

I wrote a couple of variants like this and used them.

The actual writing

For the first and last part of the texts, I wrote about three global variants and made sure that all sentences were SHORT. This has to do with the way Google calculates shingles and detects duplicate content issues. I also ‘broke’ the shingles by making them as unique as possible through using variants of words, make some them plural, use synonyms, etc.

The middle part of the text is unique for every page. I simply sought and found two to three notable sightseeing locations in every city and wrote a couple of sentences about that. If possible, I would link to a local authority website.

Finishing up

I checked if the focus keyphrase was mentioned in the title, H1, a H2 and at least three times in the text. Of course I would also check if the grammar was okay and the texts made sense.

This is the method I use to quickly write up texts. If there is more time, I do not use pre-formatted variants of sentences but simply make every sentence unique.

So how do you write optimized texts? I’m also curious if you know of another way to quickly produce texts that are as unique as possible, contain the right keywords, and are still very readable by human readers.

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO