If you’re a regular member of our site, you know how important catering to search engines can be. However, there is one thing most marketers don’t keep in mind. It’s not really about the search engines. In the end, your customer’s are people, and that’s who you should be writing for.
Now don’t get me wrong, search engines are THE tool for promoting yourself and your business. Without search engine marketing your website and online presence could go unnoticed forever. However, we want to assert this writing philosophy, this writing for people, also called search engine marketing writing.
Far too often, marketers get very wrapped up in all the cool things that search engine marketing has to offer. Once you start learning, there’s a tendency to go overboard and attempt to optimize every little thing. We become so wrapped up in analyzing and overanalyzing rankings and re-tuning our sites for search engine appeal that we miss the bigger picture.
Are we in the business of improving our search rankings? Do we directly profit or generate revenue from this constant tweaking? Our search rankings are merely a means to an end. Our business is to serve our customers and continually evolve and improve our ability to do that. Your ultimate goal is to convert website visitors and build relationships.
If you fail to write with people in mind, it will show in your content. If you write on poorly thought out ideas, with bad grammar and spelling, people aren’t going to care what you have to say, and will take no interest in your site. Meaning your search rankings will be all for naught.
When you optimize your content, really optimize it with people in mind rather than just trying to cram as many keywords as possible into your writing. When you do this, it results in stilted unreadable copy that nobody will bother to read, much less be persuaded to convert.
Instead, write strong, interesting, action-oriented copy that helps your visitors accomplish their goals. That way even if you lose the battle of search rankings, you’ll still win the war of conversions thanks to your original, quality content.
