Few things in life stay constant and unchanged, least of all anything on the internet. The web has been rapidly evolving since its initial popularisation in the early 1990s, and online marketing and search engine optimisation have changed right along with it. Carried along on these waves, the practice of online copywriting has also changed and mutated, even over the past ten years. Here we take a look at five crucial ways in which online copywriting has changed since 2005.
1. Quality has become more important than quantity – Google updates like Panda and Penguin have vastly changed the internet over the past decade, in that they have made it necessary for websites to have high quality content that is actually useful to web users, rather than just content for content's sake.
2. SEO keywords have become more natural – Ten years ago, you could still (just about) get away with cramming in as many of your keywords into a piece of content as possible and then hoping that the search engines pay you some attention. Not anymore though. Today web copywriters must take care to include relevant keywords within the natural flow of the text, without spoiling the readability of a piece.
3. Content has become more social – Back in 2005, few people could have predicted the dramatic impact that social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others would soon have on the internet, society as a whole and on the world of online copywriting. Today you have to think not just in terms of 'who is going to read our content' but also 'who are they going to share it with'. From the themes of posts right down to the headlines, many pieces of web content are now geared towards sharing.
4. Substance matters – The flipside of point number one is that individual pieces of content today need to be substantially longer and meaningful than in the past. It's no good just getting your web copywriter to squeeze out 50 word-long keyword-riddled nuggets – you need to provide users with something meaty that will hook their attention and actually be useful to them. Google's Panda update and others made sure of that, by effectively reducing the search rankings of sites with lots of 'thin' content.
5. Things are much more local – As with many other aspects of web copywriting, the intended audience of many pieces has been changed by how search engines have developed over the past decade. As the search engines learned that sometimes people aren't looking for content from around the world but something closer to home, they began putting a greater emphasis on locally relevant content. This in turn has created a need for businesses who are seeking to engage with customers in specific areas or regions, to generate content on a local level.
Of course, the internet is still constantly changing, and who knows what it will be like in ten years time? But one thing is for sure – online businesses and web copywriters will have to continue to move with the times if they want to create effective content that fulfils its purpose.
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