Stop words in copywriting can be compared to a red traffic light sign. What is a stop word? These are phrases, words, word forms that do not carry any semantic load. They can be easily replaced or dropped from the article. Stop words in copywriting make the text uninformative and insipid. Search engines ignore such material, as a result – the result of being in the top results is small. The picture looks no less sad when customers are asked to write an SEO text, and even using a large number of «keys» for a couple of thousand characters.
What does a list of unnecessary stop words look like? These include:
This also includes pronouns, interjections and other cliché phrases. Interestingly, even prepositions and numbers are referred to by some verification services as stop words. Examples of stop words include:
The main problem with stop words in the text is the absence of this very problem. But many SEOs and customers go to extremes. Writing a text without one or two of these words is not an easy task for one simple reason: the text with these words becomes «livelier» and «more human». It is necessary to take into account the rules of search robots, but do not forget: your client is not a robot, but a person!
Search engines are quite supportive of the presence of certain stop words in the text. Another issue is quantity. Any normal copywriter, whether he is a beginner or a pro, cannot do copywriting without a stop word. If they are in Russian, it means they were invented for something. The presence of stop words in the text is normal practice: without them, the material will look weak, empty and unemotional. It’s another matter when it comes to technical documents, instructions, legislative articles and acts. Otherwise, the presence of stop words will not harm the article.
After all, what is a stop word? This is a kind of balance between words that can be left, and some can be removed without breaking logic and connecting thought. A common mistake is to completely remove pronouns in the text. As a result, we get a dry, lifeless text, written as for a telegram.
When a customer or an optimizer draws up a technical task for a copywriter to write an SEO text, no one pays attention to the number of keywords required for use in the text. Those. It’s okay to add a dozen «keys» to a material of 2000 characters, but to write a couple of stop words is like death. There should be a norm in everything, in stop words too.
SEO experts believe that the text should contain no more than 30% of the total number of stop words. And to understand this, a special check for the stop word will help. But after it, you do not need to immediately delete all unnecessary phrases, otherwise there is a great risk of getting not just a compressed text, but complete nonsense.
Without adjectives, the text becomes boring and uninteresting, and without pronouns, inconsistencies appear in sentences. Stop words are both useful and harmful at the same time. But the task of the copywriter is to find a balance between the two. There is no need to reach fanaticism and delete all unwanted words, phrases, prepositions, pronouns and adverbs. If you see that you can remove the noise word from the text, delete it without regret. And if you understand that it embellishes, adds emotions – let it remain.
We hope that the article was useful and interesting, and we were able to answer the question of what a stop word is and how to deal with it.
