7 Deadly Sins of SEO Copywriting

Happy (belated) Leap Day!

Why the 7 deadly sins reference this morning? Is there some deep, dark meaning behind today’s post? Umm, no, I just saw the movie SE7EN on TV the other day, and it did get me thinking about how the seven sins can relate to just about everything in our lives — including our work.

Don’t believe me? Check it out:

Greed

Keywords, keywords, more keywords! I want more keywords in my copy, I want more rankings for more keywords, I want to be #1 for the single most competitive term I can think of — and I want it all yesterday. Wanting generates the feeling of lack. And when you put out that feeling, that’s exactly what you get back. Lack. Instead of focusing on what you don’t have, what you wish you could have, what everyone else has, focus on your accomplishments and ask yourself better questions. Instead of asking, “Why can’t I get to #1 in Google?” ask “How can I get to #1 in Google?” Small changes in the questions you ask can have a major impact the answers.

Envy

Covet thy competitor! Frankly, I recommend envy as long as it’s in a healthy way. How else would you know how to write cleaner, tighter, and more efficiently if you don’t admire those around you? That’s not to say that you should spend all your time wishing you were someone else, or feeling badly about your own writing skills. But I do believe it’s important to look up to those you admire. A little competition and envy can encourage an SEO copywriter to work a little harder and push a little farther. And that’s what keeps us on our toes so we don’t fall victim to the next deadly sin…

Sloth

Are you getting lazy with your writing. It can happen to the best of us, but your readers deserve more than a half-assed attempt at content.  When your inbox is overflowing, your boss is breathing down your neck for yesterday’s deadlines, and on top of it all, you’re late with your blog post. Believe me, I get it. You want to throw your hands up in the air and surrender. And when that’s not an option, you crank out a little something that loosely resembles SEO copy. It’s not good content, but it’s content. At the very least, if you have little to no time to write a long, meaningful piece, write a super short meaningful piece. Personally, I’d rather read 75 words that hit hard, than 500 words of regurgitated fluff.

Lust

A-hem … it’s not that kind of blog post

Wrath

Turn criticism and bad reviews into a solid marketing opportunity. When someone criticizes our hard work, our defenses kick into full gear. But beware the wrath. Instead, when you see a review that is less than stellar, or someone lashes their serpent’s tongue, first take a deep breath. Then calmly craft a response that does not argue, but rather rectifies the situation. An unsatisfied customer can be a wonderful opportunity to redeem yourself . No problem is too large that it can’t be fixed … publicly. Show off your superior customer service skills!

Pride

Ahh, the deadliest of all. Admit it, you think you run your business better than anyone else has ever run a business in the history of mankind. OK, maybe it’s not that dramatic, but you still feel like the way you do things is the way things should be done – or else why would you continue to do things that way? It’s so important to put your pride aside and accept the advice of those who have proven success in your industry. And above all else, never be too proud to ask for help when you need it, and to ask questions when you have them. That’s the only way to continue growing and moving your business forward.

Gluttony

For me, this one is easy to fall into when you try to please everyone all the time. Your target audience is what you should be focused on – no more, no less. When copywriters don’t know who their target market is, the writing suffers. It ends up being vague and ambiguous at best. “But I want to reach the most people and appeal to everyone,” is something I hear a fair bit.  Don’t do it! Know your audience and speak directly to them. Only then will you convert.

I can’t help but think there must be more than seven sins we could talk about here… what’s your biggest SEO copywriting sin?

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