Google suggests there's an arena's-worth of numpties bashing this bizarre keyword into Google every month. So I asked AI to tell me why.
Like most freelance copywriters, I spend a lot of time monkeying around with keywords.
When you rank well as a "freelance copywriter", for example, you attract interest from potential copywriting clients. It's why I would give my back teeth to rank at the top of page one for "freelance copywriter".
Almost 2,000 people per month search for that term, and the number one ranker scoops up maybe 30-40% of all traffic. Nice.
To help people in any sector try to attract visitors, tools like Ubersuggest and Ahrefs suggest keywords you should use. In my own sector, one term that comes up regularly is "copywriter copywriter".
But why? What the hell is a "copywriter copywriter"?
Trying to understand the peculiarities of SEO
Most SEO tools are pretty stiff; they give it to you in black and white. But they seem pretty sure that 18,000 people per month are searching for "copywriter copywriter".
To investigate further, I checked how many times it appeared across the entire internet. The answer is 97,000 times. Which isn't a lot.
When I looked at some of the sites where it appeared, there was usually a comma between the two words. Stuff like "self-employed copywriter, copywriter London" and so on.
So "copywriter copywriter" is a thing (kind of). However, "freelance copywriter" appears almost two million times on the internet – but only gets a quarter of the monthly search traffic.
So what's going on? Is anyone really searching for "copywriter copywriter"?!
I asked Copilot (Bing's AI pal) for answers. It suggested three possibilities:
SEO Misconfiguration: Sometimes, websites accidentally create duplicate content or improper internal linking, leading to such odd search terms being indexed.
User Error: People might be mistakenly searching for "copywriter copywriter" instead of the correct term, perhaps due to a typo or autocorrect mishap.
Algorithm Quirks: Search engines sometimes pick up on unusual search patterns that don't have a clear reason behind them.
Bingo! User error seemed like a very strong candidate. Perhaps people intended to search for "copywriter copyrighter" in an attempt to work out the difference between the two.
But no. When I searched for that, it had zero monthly searches.
So the mystery remains. "Writer writer" has 50 searches a month. "Freelancer freelancer" just 10.
Maybe some answers will emerge if this blog post leaps to number one for "copywriter copywriter".
And if I suddenly get tons of emails from fans of some obscure band from Korea with that name, I'll let you know.
Written by Mike Peake, UK freelance copywriter and website content writer.
T: +44 (0)208 133 4306
