I have done copy and search my whole adult life, and I work with an SEO/GEO agency. An agency can ship ninety articles a month for one client. My own property site got four articles in its first month, all on other platforms, and no bought links.
The site went live on 3 September. As of 23 October, Google Search Console shows 4 clicks and 151 impressions over 28 days, and 42 pages in the index. All four clicks went to one listing. Small numbers in an almost empty niche, so they prove nothing about a crowded topic. But they came from a site where the order of work was strict, and I want to talk about that order.
Put plainly: SEO is the more technical job. Copywriting is technical too, but it is more literary. They are different trades, and the market keeps mixing them up. Clients often expect two more on top: SMM and marketing.
Yes, I do SEO and copy. But when I explain that to a client, it is simpler to say "I promote websites". In Russian that is one word, and it covers everything from SEO to ads. And right there the client's brain short-circuits: so you do marketing too, funnels and all?
First the frame, then the words
In the first week the site had no articles at all. It had titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph, a canonical URL and hreflang for every language, clean addresses and a generator that builds every page's head from one data file. I wrote about that generator here.
The first article went up on 14 September, when the frame was already there. The site was a listing from day one, so there was always some text. But it already had structure: headings, body, footer, schema. The copy went into a ready frame, not the other way round.
The first listing is the clearest case. I drew it as blocks before there was much to put in them: key facts, location, what's nearby, why it's good value, finish, the developer. Each block answers a question a buyer asks, in the order they ask it. Lists where people check facts, prose where something has to be argued. Later listings were built from that one. As the site grew, the template started to drift: one listing moved the value block to the top, another dropped it.
Once the technical work is done, you can play with the copy. That is the order I believe in. And then I broke it myself.
The day the order broke
On 24 October I wanted short answers to the questions people ask about North Cyprus first: visa, time zone, currency, airports, Kyrenia or Girne. I didn't phrase the task precisely enough. I meant a separate article. My AI assistant understood "a block of answers" and put it on the hub page that lists my articles — and there is the result: two rounds of fixes.
The copywriting part of that day was real work, and none of it was SEO:
- Topics came from demand, wording did not. Google Trends gave the questions. But the heading "Kyrenia or Girne: what's the difference?" has almost no search volume as a question. People search the pair of names. We kept the question, because it is how a reader thinks.
- Every fact was checked. Distances to the airports we checked in Google Maps. For visas we only had secondary sources, so the note sends readers to the current rules on the ministry's website instead of listing exceptions.
- We cut more than we wrote. Residence permits, the 90/180 rule, cost of living and a few more topics did not go in. One note went from six sentences to four after I said I was confused by it myself.
- Words for the reader, not for the dictionary. On one listing in Turkish, "ensuite" became "ebeveyn banyosu". I was against it at first. Then we counted 20 listings on a big local property site: "ebeveyn" seven times, "ensuite" zero.
The block went live. Then I asked one question: what goes into the title and the description of this page now?
The answer: they still described the list of articles. Ten answers about visas and time zones were invisible in search. So the SEO had to be done as a separate pass the same evening: new title, new h1, new description, then a push to IndexNow.
Next day I said the block was impossible to find. The only way in was through "All articles". So the answers moved to their own page, and the title and description moved with them — by hand. The hub got its old title back.
What we had skipped on the first day was not "the SEO". It was one technical decision, the very first one — a separate address, or a block on somebody else's page. Everything else had to be bent around that decision twice.
Where the two jobs touch
There is one place where the line gets blurry, and it is headings.
The page title "North Cyprus: visa, time, currency and other short answers" is made of words, so it looks like copy. But we chose those words by what people search. "Ebeveyn banyosu" goes the other way: we picked it by counting, which is a technical method, and it works for the reader.
So the jobs meet at the headings. Below them, they split. Trends chose the questions, not the answers. The title was fitted to queries, the text of the notes was not.
Copy and marketing touch too, once. In that first listing, the "why it's good value" block compares the price per square metre with Spain's Costa Blanca. The block itself is copy: a selling argument in the text. Choosing Spain was a marketing decision. It says who the buyer is: someone weighing a flat by the sea in Spain. I made that decision once, when I drew the frame. On this site I gave myself carte blanche, so I could make that call myself. For a client it would be somebody else's job, and somebody else's invoice. No funnels, no ads, no quizzes, no landing pages.
So the trades overlap and lie in the same plane. But they are clearly not the same thing.
The generator does not decide
All of this happened on a site with a working SEO generator. It keeps titles, descriptions, hreflang and markup consistent across five languages. After the block went live, it built the page faithfully, with the old description, because nobody had changed the data file.
The generator takes away the routine. It does not take away the decision about what this page is for in search. A person still makes that one. And in my data file titles belong to addresses, not to texts. When the text moves, the SEO does not follow it on its own.
The client wants four jobs in one
Back to that short circuit. Building funnels is another profession, and it is paid separately. What clients often want is four jobs for the price of one. That is normal: any business wants to spend less and get more. So I do believe that we professionals should act as a business as well, and not take on extra work for the same money. Which means I have to know where my own line is, and say it before the work starts.
I can combine SEO and copy. I am no marketer, and I am not an SMM person at all. Some of the agency's clients even ask about Threads. Social media is not in the contract. But contracts are rarely read to the end, and to the client, if you do the website, you surely set up their social accounts too. Figuratively speaking: where exactly would I put JSON-LD in an Instagram post?
This October a network of clinics, one of the agency's clients, ordered five opinion columns for a national business outlet. The outlet has hard rules. A headline is a full sentence with a verb, 73 characters at most. The format is expert opinion, not instructions: an earlier batch of columns was rejected for exactly that. No products, no prices, no calls to action.
The topics came from the client's head of SMM. I cut the headlines to the limit and turned them into opinions, mostly "Why…" sentences. The client accepted the first one and sent back their own versions of the other four. One of them, in English: "Boosting clinic profits through a personal brand on social media. A step-by-step plan." 78 characters in the original, and a step-by-step plan is the one thing this format does not take.
We found a compromise. We took their wording, fixed the grammar and cut the "step-by-step plan". The columns were then written to those headlines. I told the client up front that the outlet has its own limits and moderation, so the final version may still change. So far, silence.
Two weeks earlier, the same side had asked for more clickbait headlines on a blogging platform, because the articles felt "too standard, too educational". That is feed logic, and in a feed it may well work. A feed pays for the click. Search and a business outlet pay for the match between the headline and the text. That is why I need a good text, and a clickbait headline works against me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but an expert, almost academic tone and a clickbait headline are a bit at odds.
To the client a headline is a headline. But a headline for Instagram and a headline for a business outlet are written for different places, and this one went through the person who works for the feed. The absurdity is in the setup, not in the person.
What the client should know
SEO is not done once for the whole site. Every new section needs its own pass: title, h1, description, links, a request to recrawl. So does every move. If that pass is not in the plan and in the budget, the new text goes into search under an old description.
When I say two jobs, I don't mean two people. That day it was me and an AI assistant in one session. I mean two pieces of work, each with its own scope and its own price. Ordering a text does not include SEO. And the other way round.
Even on my own site, with carte blanche, I knew where my line was. I can make things look good and neat. But I am no marketer and no SMM person, and I have no wish to sit in Instagram or Facebook, whatever tools they offer. I genuinely respect good SMM people, like the teams behind Aviasales and Vizit (a Russian flight-search service and a Russian condom brand, both known for their social media). I can't name a third. I just can't picture myself racking my brain over posts, let alone answering comments there. The numbers in Search Console and an article now and then on a platform like this one are enough for me.
The page from this story: girne-apartment-sale.com/north-cyprus-first-questions
The standalone, genericized version of the generator, if you want the code rather than the description: github.com/sergei-swh/seo-generator
Top comments (0)