And the winner is… SEO Copywriter by a landslide!

Wow, is it Wednesday again!? Geez, where’d the week go?

As promised, today we’ll follow up to my last post, which talked about link farms and their <cough> writers. Today we’ll talk about how you can find an SEO copywriter who will produce rankings and conversions simultaneously.

Here’s a question I get a lot:

What’s the difference between link farm writers and qualified SEO copywriters?

Glad you asked. True SEO copywriters understand the user – the person searching for information, products and services online. Users are made up of consumers, researchers, doctors, teenagers, and so on. But if to the SEO copywriter it makes no difference because the user is almost always her client’s prospect. The SEO copywriter knows how to get inside her client’s prospect’s head and learn how they use the Web, how they navigate sites and search engines. She also knows how to write compelling content that serves two masters – search engines and, you guessed it, the user.

• For search engines, the content feeds robots the “food” they need to rank pages according to keyword relevancy
• For the user, the content gives them exactly what they’re looking for (she knows this because she did in-depth keyword research to uncover how they’re searching)

The SEO copywriter not only does this for high-level pages found in the SERPs, but she also writes for deeper pages on her client’s site. Pages that savvy searches are looking for. Achieving top search engine rankings is just one piece of the overall SEO puzzle. Ultimately her client wants top rankings for popular non-branded keyword phrases, but they also want their pages to perform (aka convert) to the best of their ability.

So why can’t you hire a link farm to do the writing?

Sure, they’re cheaper. They might even be quicker. The problem with link farms is that they “employ” thousands of so-called writers from all four corners of the earth. They put a salesy pitch on the service, like “Our diverse selection of talented writers can craft copy about any topic.” Ya right.

Don’t get me wrong, it is possible that some of them can write – I’ve even stumbled across one or two – but it’s likely (and I speak solely from experience) that most of them can’t. Not at all. So what happens is that the link farm writer (and I use the term writer loosely) will create a piece of content, often called linkbait, for the sole purpose of plastering it all over the web to work in a link back to the client’s site. More often than not, the piece of content falls flat for several reasons:

• it’s poorly written and has no value – no one’s reading it let alone clicking the link
• the topic isn’t relevant to the client’s site OR to the site it’s being posted on
• search engines consider the backlink useless because it’s coming from a very low-quality page

Lots of things can make for a low-quality page, but that’s a whole other post! Maybe next time we’ll talk about how to weed out the good from the bad.

Am I against link building as part of an overall white-hat SEO strategy? No. Do I have an issue with link farms and bad writing?

Hell yes! Don’t you?

Cheers,

Aimee

Quality SEO Copywriter or Link Farm? You Choose.

Happy hump day!

So, it happened again this morning. I’m sitting on the train, commuting to the city and reading my email. I plugin my internet stick and prepare to reply to an email I feel very strongly about, and the next thing I know I’ve got a full blown blog post — not the response to the email I had originally intended.

So, the email I read started out something like this …

“We’ve been talking with this guy, he has a social media background is great with analytics. We really think he’d be an asset. Do you think we should hire him?”

So I open up the link in the email to find a link farm. Seriously? A link farm? Paid links, affiliate MLM options, really? This is “the guy” with this social media and analytics expertise I’m supposed to embrace? <Sigh…>

Here’s the thing. Buying links is never a technique I recommend to clients who want long-term results. {I can hear the clickity-clack of keyboards as angry link-builders crafting their strongly worded emails to me!} Save yourself the time and blood pressure spike, I’m not saying all links are evil. I’m saying that all links are not created equal.

In my opinion, paid links is a band-aid approach to low search engine rankings. If you have crappy rankings, you have bigger problems than a lack of crappy links. Paying for links has been known to give certain sites a quick boost their rankings. The problem is that those rankings are short-lived.

My second opinion is that paid links are a thing of the past, a pre-panda tactic. Search engines are getting smarter and they’re demanding better quality from sites overall.

The issue that I have with using paid links as an SEO technique is that even if (and that’s only IF)  a site gets to the top of the rankings, odds are it won’t convert/get the click-thru. That’s because there was never a strategy put in place to cover, which is really the most important part. What do I always say? “What good is a #1 ranking for 100 keywords if none of your pages are converting?”

Link farms build links — that’s it. They don’t create quality, relevant, useful content (c’mon, stop the clickity-clacking again). Quality SEO copywriters are NOT a dime a dozen. Finding one sort of reminds me of American Idol in that everyone thinks they can sing write. But the ones who win get results are the ones who have a healthy combination of raw talent and years of industry-specific training.

How do you find an SEO copywriter who will help you rank well and convert? I’ll explain in my next post … I’m about 3 minutes from Union Station and I need to pack up my gear and hike up the office!

Cheers,

Aimee

DX3 Canada Content Takeaways

I spent all day yesterday at the DX3 conference. It was great to see some familiar faces and I also had the pleasure of chatting with some great new minds of the digital world. Best of all, I picked up lots of tips and tricks of the SEO copywriting and content marketing trade.

Content was a hot topic buzzing around the showroom floor. Some of the CMS and Iaas/Saas software was new to me, as were some of the thoughts shared by speakers and audience members alike. It was also rejuvinating to hear – or should I say re-hear (new word of the day, we’ll call it an Aimeeism) – familiar information. Do you ever notice that when someone new says something you already know, it still sounds fresh. That’s because they bring a new perspective, a slightly different angle, a new approach. I love that!

Here are some bits ‘n bites I feverishly jotted down on my iPhone yesterday – I think you’ll find them valuable, too. If nothing else, I’ll give you my “new” perspective on something you already know

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. If you need content ideas, look around to see what others are doing, then do it better.
• We live in a world of social media overload. There are only so many hours in a day and there’s a ton of info to absorb. Keep your content short and to the point. Cut through the BS.
• Be unique. Be controversial. You’ll get others’ attention and spark some great conversations when you evoke emotion.
• Keep your content simple. Your audience is (probably) filled with busy everyday folks just like you and me. Don’t go all corporate and fancy on their ass–they get enough of that at the office.
• Consider video content (you don’t need to be a model or an idol). When you want to learn how to bake a pie or change a tire or build a treehouse, you go to YouTube to watch someone show you how to do it. Share your expertise in video format – people like it.
• Use lots of whitespace, avoid the clutter.
• Keep it simple visually as well as contextually. Studies have proven that animated ads annoy the hell out of people, so don’t litter your pages with them.
• Use short sentences. Use short paragraphs. Use bullet lists. All of these are easy on the eyes.
• Use headlines. People don’t read every word on every page – they scan. A friend and former colleague of mine, Ian Everdell, shared his eye-tracking studies yesterday, and guess what? People scan and stop at headlines. Go figure.

That’s it for me – at least that’s all that was on my little iPhone notepad. I know I’ll remember a lot more as my brain defrags over the next day or two, so I’ll be sure to share more. Remember, short ‘n sweet!

Cheers,
Aimee