SEO Blog

An SEO blog talking about ‘shelving SEO’, that’s almost like a get rich quick site talking about giving proceeds to charity surely?! Well, bear with me. SEO is still important. Rankings can lead to traffic and therefore you need to be optimised in such a way that you can maximise this potential. But when it comes to content, it isn’t your priority.

Do your keyword research. Have those terms that people are searching for in the back of your mind. That is about all your copywriter needs to concern themselves with before beginning their writing process. The remaining 99% of their focus ought to be on the audience and, more importantly, getting visitors to convert.

The vast majority of websites are created to make money. Whether through adSense adverts, products sold or services rendered, the underlying driving force is finance. That may be ugly, but the truth often is. So your content shouldn’t be just trying to get your site further up the search engine rankings (this ought to be a bi-product), it needs to sell.

Now it doesn’t matter what it is that you’re selling, you don’t want to leave visitors in any doubt that it is exactly what they want. Be explicit, be positive and be engaging. Attention spans online are notoriously short so, in reference to the last of the aforementioned engagement reference, you need to make sure that your content grabs a reader’s attention. Long drawn out soliloquies are fine for your blog, but not sales copy. Get to the point, give them what they want and relate it to your readership.

The moment that you start writing copy that is pre-conditioned to include keywords throughout, you have taken your attention away from what’s really important. That being your sales goal. What use is a high ranking, high traffic site that doesn’t convert. Impotent, keyword heavy text will leave your site with a dwindling ROI; effectively undermining its entire purpose.

Good content is good for SEO. We know that much. So why ruin your copy by caving in to inexperience or simply becoming too wrapped up in whether it is optimised or not. You don’t just want traffic or rankings (even though they are nice), you need conversions. Content can help you achieve that.

There’s no reason why you can’t optimise around the quality, unique content you’ve created. Include embedded links, use images with Alt tags even include (relevant) headers to build your page and keyword strength. Don’t get carried away though and ruin the positive element of the page – i.e. the content – just do enough to strengthen what you have.

There’s no secret in the fact that content plays a hugely important part in SEO. It anchors a page. It gives it relevance and lets the search engine crawlers know exactly what you have to offer. But it is also a positive marketing force in its own right. You can’t be entirely blinkered about SEO elements, most notably keywords, but equally, you have to focus on what you’re really trying to achieve – sales.