I've answered on the aspect of seo because the title of this thread is "Copywriting - and SEO" and because the OP asks "Or do they not need to concern themselves with anything other than the impact to a site visitor?" and that'll be why Earl's done the same.
Fair enough, and I'm not disputing the use of keywords on a page, although, as a copywriter I tend to just think of them as 'words'. If a webpage is about honey then I wouldn't include the word 'honey' on the page because it's a keyword, I'd include it because that's what the page was about.
And there's more to SEO than keywords - if you focus on creating the best user experience for the visitor then you're more likely to get the page linked to, or shared.
Well the figure often seen is that 93% of internet traffic initiates from search engine's
And that's an impressive number, until you consider that 20% of that is people typing
www.facebook.com into google rather than navigating straight there.
Ok, I'm exaggerating a little there, but not all traffic is created equal - and studies have shown that about 1/3 of all search traffic is navigational, and most of that is repeat traffic to a site the visitor has already been to.
For instance, I just did a search on something like 'nielsen seo copywriting readability' (I can't remember the exact phrase), because I was pretty sure that I'd read something by Jakob Nielsen in the past about the subject, and wanted to find the reference. I figured that it was probably quicker to do a google search than to try to remember what the site address was and navigate from the homepage.
And I was right, the search brought up an internal link to the article on the site I was looking for*.
Interestingly enough, it wasn't the top result on the page, I think it was pretty low on page 1 or maybe even on page 2, but that didn't matter, because I wasn't asking google for just any article about 'nielsen seo copywriting readability', I was looking for a specific article on a specific site.
Add to that the fact that search queries tend to follow the usual short head/long tail distribution and it means that the bulk of that traffic will be coming from a minority of searches - most of which will probably be totally unrelated to your website or business.
It's not important whether 93% of internet traffic originates from search, what matters is where the traffic that you want on your website comes from. If (hypothetically) 93% of the traffic on my site is coming from search but the 7% that brings in money is coming from an email newsletter, I'm going to be more interested in catering for the 7% than for the 93%.
*Btw
this was the article I was looking for, in case anyone is interested. It wasn't quite as I remembered it, but it does contain this useful insight...
"Vocabulary choice can also present conflicts: the keywords that are entered most often in queries can sometimes be more difficult to understand — particularly for low-literacy users — than simpler terms."
In other words, if you just incorporate the keywords that people use in their search queries, rather than answering the answering the question implied by the query in the simplest possible way, you're making it much harder for your visitors to get what they want from the page.
This is probably more relevant than ever as the proportion of 'long string' searches increases. Just because I searched for 'neilsen seo copywriting readability' doesn't mean I wanted to find a page with those 4 words in that specific order, because even though it's a useful search query, it's not a phrase that lends itself easily to clear, elegant English sentence construction.
