So much happens in the blink of an eye. How you use that time, in the context of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), can be the difference between a successful online marketing strategy and not…
I assume you’re reading this either because you want to know what good SEM copywriting involves so you can do it yourself, or because you’re looking to hire a skilled SEM copywriter for your business.
In highly competitive search markets, PPC (pay-per-click) search engine ads are an effective way to jump the (SEO) queue and reach potential customers, but ad budget is not enough in itself to generate new business. Most advertisers need profitable ads, usually a return on ad spend of 2-3x or even 10x, depending on project margins and sector. Part of getting there is with excellent copywriting – so that your ad stands out and entices relevant readers to click, and discourages irrelevant clicks . If your ad copy is weak, confusing or ambiguous expect adverts to perform worse and to pay more for each customer. In turn your acquisition metrics will be off and you will not know if your campaigns are as profitable as they ought to be.
(And, to be top of the class, if combined with website copy and SEO copywriting, your website and ad copy can work together effectively in bringing in new visitors and converting them to paying customers…)
For that reason it’s worth investing proper time and money into finding and hiring a skilled SEM copywriter who can achieve all the objectives at once.
But the internet is flooded with low quality, superficial, unskilled writers who rush off content without honing it into its best form, leading to poor results and wasted marketing budget. They also often lack the context of how PPC auctions work.
This guide walks you through what good SEM copywriting looks like so you understand what you’re doing (or paying for), then looks at how to find the perfect copywriter without breaking the bank, then giving tips on filtering out the best copywriters.
First I’ll explore all the different elements of a good Google ad. (I’ll use ‘Google’ synonymously with search engines because it’s by far the most used, but the same logic applies to other search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc).
[It’s worth stating here that you also need a relevant website landing page that matches the person’s expectations given what they have seen in your ad, so that anyone who clicks on your ad is kept in a ‘funnel’ that performs.
Then, I’ll talk through strategies for finding good SEM copywriters, pricing and how to filter the very best in the business.
What makes a great SEM ad?
In this article we are only discussing copywriting for ads – rather than the other components that come into an ad – e.g. the keyword targeting and the landing page. Before we go through writing copy, keep in mind even with the best ad copy in the world, if your keyword targeting is off, or your landing page does not convert, having nicely written adverts will not help you.
An ad is made up of the following elements:
- Your website URL
- The headline of the ad
- The description under the headline
- Extra information through ad extensions and callouts
An ad served in response to ‘learn guitar’
Within these elements, several things make your ad effective:
- It is specifically written in response to a specific need (target keyword/s)
- It has a strong call-to-action – what to do. The ad above doesn’t explicitly offer one.
- It is well formatted (so the customer can scan the most important info quickly/clearly)
I’ll walk through all of these elements in a logical order
Tailor your ad to existing search demand through keywords
As I explore in another piece in relation to SEO copywriting, good SEM writing starts by exploring what people are currently searching for and tailoring ads to those search terms.
To find out what people are searching for you can use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner, or a paid service if you want more detail and flexibility (I love Semrush).
Let’s say you’re a graphic designer specialising in branding for small businesses, and you want to see what people are looking for in relation to ‘graphic design’. On your keyword tool, you find that people are searching for this:
There are three questions that determine whether you should bid for / include a particular keyword.
- How many people are searching for that keyword?
For this you look at the search volume column (“Avg. monthly searches”) in your data, which tells you (for the territory you’ve chosen; in our example it’s the UK) on average how many searches there are every month. Keep in mind this is not the true picture; Google’s Keyword Planner, unintuitively, does not show you the full monthly search market in this metric, but rather shows you what you are eligible for based on your account’s current spend profile.
Obviously the more search traffic for a particular term, the more scalable a campaign can be. If you can find relevant, profitable purchasers but there are only 10 of these customer profiles searching a month, this is not particularly interesting, if you want to grow your business in most contexts.
Looking at a particular keyword, what is the searcher’s intent?
Here, you need to do some common sense thinking about what people are actually looking for with the different keywords. It’s not enough simply to get someone reading your ad; you want them to come to it with some intent to click through and purchase your service or make an enquiry.
Keywords roughly fall into three categories:
- Transactional
- Commercial
- Informational
Transactional keywords are less common or frequent, but most valuable in that the searcher’s aim is clearly to spend money immediately in exchange for something. For example “hire graphic designer” - the word “hire” suggests that they intend to spend money on this service now.
Informational keywords show that the searcher is merely looking to educate themselves on a topic. For example “What?” - this suggests they don’t know much about the topic of something and are simply looking to learn. These searchers might, with more education, be useful customers down the line, but not today. This is why many websites trade content for email addresses – to educate and sell later on.
To justify the spend of running an ad, you should target searches that suggest as strong a transactional element as possible - there is less work to do in converting a potential customer.
(That said, a really efficient and well executed marketing funnel (e.g. using an email sales funnel) could combine very lucratively with Google ads aimed towards merely informational keywords. (And if this is something you want to explore - you can contact Self Studio).
How competitive is that keyword?
In the SEM context, competitiveness is a measure of how many people are already paying to show their ad when someone searches for that term – in other words, people who are participating in the auction to buy that search traffic / attention.
As you can see in our screenshot above, the Google Keyword Planner tool has a column for ‘Competition’ that categorises each keyword as “low”, “medium” or “high”. You can also see typical ‘cost per click’ costs, which vary according to the auction. For lawyers and insurance companies, each click can cost hundreds of dollars, and for low-margin products clicks generally start at $0.20/30.
Keep in mind, increasingly Google appears unwilling to shift ‘cheap’ inventory and would rather not sell cheap clicks at all; this means it is becoming harder to run profitable ad campaigns for ‘low margin’ products (think of something selling for $10-20, where you can only afford to spend a few dollars on getting the sale) unless you are running your campaigns on a LTV (lifetime value) basis when assessing profitability.
Creating an eye-catching ad that maximises the number of clicks
Now we’ve chosen a search term that shows strong intent to purchase, that is within your budget.
Your aim is now to create an ad that as many relevant searchers click on as possible and discourage irrelevant clicks. This is where we get into the detail of what makes good SEM copywriting.
Headline
Your headline should make the searcher immediately aware that you are responding to whatever they are looking for. You do this by ensuring the search keyword is included within the headline, whilst making the headline itself persuasive and attention-grabbing.
Let’s assess a few example headlines for our “Hire graphic designer” search term, assuming that the campaign is focusing on searchers based in London.
ABC Creative – Get The Best Design For Your App (not good, no mention of graphic design – apps can be ‘designed’ in many ways beyond graphic design)
ABC Creative – Graphic Designers For Websites and Apps (ok)
Hire an Trusted Graphic Designer | ABC Creative London (better, includes a geographic component which is a common feature of service-based enquiries)
Description
While you don’t have a lot of word/character count to play with in your headline, your description can go into more detail on how, by clicking through to your website, the searcher will fulfil their need/objective.
This involves a few things:
- Understanding what the customer needs in detail
- Concise writing (saying a lot with few words)
- Putting your information in a strategic order, so that they take the most essential details first
Remember that your searcher is taking in all this information in the blink of an eye. You have to win them over against all the other competition with something that they’re largely reading semi-consciously or even unconsciously.
This is where good formatting can help:
- Break up info using punctuation
- You can use capital letters for extra emphasis on certain words, e.g. your call to action
- Keep sentences short where possible. Keep in mind it will be skimmed.
Call to Action
Your description and maybe your headline should also include a call to action, so that the searcher knows immediately what they need to do to fulfil their need/objective. Will they need to book a call? Order a sample? Sign up for a week-long trial?
This is your way of streamlining the process so that, when they click through to your website, they know why and what they’re going to do next…
And to make your call to action extra effective, you can leverage the power of FOMO (fear of missing out) through time limits or limited offers - if the searcher thinks that your offer only lasts for a short time or the spaces/products will run out soon, they will be more likely to click now. This is why, e.g., airlines and train companies put little warnings saying “Only 3 left at this price” so that you think you need to book now to take advantage of the cheaper price! The same logic works with SEM copywriting.
Ad Extensions
For your ad to occupy extra space – which is powerful where you’re competing against other ads and only have peoples’ limited attention – you can use ad extensions to include further details about your service/product/offering. Remember that, as with the description, this involves understanding what your customer needs and showing them that you can provide it.
Very important point: all of this needs to be closely tied together!
It’s important to make sure your target keywords are chosen, and from here your ad copy AND landing page copy is tied directly to this. These three components are all coupled together. Finding target keywords come before writing ad copy or making the landing page. Many teams write the landing page first and then try to shoehorn keywords into the landing page. Wrong approach.
This is to make sure you’re not wasting your ad budget on people clicking onto your site who want different things to what you’re offering.
As an example: you sell men’s running shoes and create an ad and landing page all tailored towards selling them. Here your keyword ought to be “men’s running shoes” (avoiding broad match types in most cases - see below) and the advert copy / headline / description should be about men’s running shoes – and your homepage better lead to something about men’s running shoes!
If your landing page is actually about men’s shoes of any sort, you will find you’re paying for useless clicks.
Similarly, if you have a specified a ‘broad’ keyword match style, you will likely be serving your ad to people who are not looking for running shoes – but say ‘men’s formal shoes’ or ‘mens‘cycling shoes’. Frustrating, but Google’s ad engine encourages this broad match type by default, presumably because it's more money for them and advertisers do not know better. If people click on your ad because it comes up at the top of their search results, you’ve paid for their (useless) click, as they have no intention to buy your product (running shoes) because they wanted cycling/formal/dress shoes, and so on.
Aligning keywords / ad copy and landing pages at scale is one of the challenges of PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. A large part of it is about using negative keywords to filter out irrelevant clicks. We will discuss this separately in another piece later on.
How to find skilled SEM Copywriters and filter out the best
Now you understand all the skills and research that go into effective SEM copywriting, you understand the value in hiring someone who’ll deliver you the best ad for your money.
Once you’ve found potential candidates, you want to ask them these questions:
- How do they understand, in detail, what searchers are actually looking for?
- How do they balance this with the need for concise, FOMO-driven writing?
- How do they price their work, with reference to the value it brings your business?
But how do you find good SEM copywriters in the first place?
Here are some channels for finding them, and questions you can ask to filter out the best copywriters.
Find SEM copywriters by asking other businesses you trust “who writes for you”?
If there are other businesses you already know and interact with, ask them if they use PPC Google ads and, if they do, ask them how good their return on investment was. If you like how it sounds, perhaps you want to hire the same.
Look on marketplace sites
You can use Upwork or Fiverr or more specialist marketplaces for writers like Scripted or Strategically. However, this takes more energy as you need to filter out the many unskilled writers. Also these platforms sometimes rely on AI-generated content which is very often low quality and a waste of money.
Work with Self
If you've found our guides useful and well written (as I hope you are!), you can get in touch with us about our SEM copywriter services.
