An SEO Discussion: Are you writing for humans or bots?

And SEO writing discussion…

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) is hailed as the holy grail of digital marketing, and for good reason. After all, how can people buy from you if they don’t find you?

But worrying only about using an SEO writing strategy is detrimental to your business. You can get hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site each month but your business will fail if none of them convert to leads and, ultimately, customers.

Although optimizing content for search engines is important, you must also remember the end gain – A human being reading it, enjoying it and taking a strategic call to action. This CTA can be to consent to more communications or it can be a purchase, Either way, if your content is not engaging this will not happen. You’ll be crushing SEO writing and losing money.

Renowned copywriter Dan Kennedy says “The cardinal marketing sin is to be boring.” And there is no easier way to be boring than loading up your content with SEO driven buzzwords at the expense of readability and engagement.

It is better to write a really compelling post that only 1,000 people read if 75 of them sign-on as customers. than it is to cram buzzword after buzzword into a post that reaches 10,000 but only 5 convert because your content is written for bots.

Remember: You are a marketing expert. You read marketing blogs and eBooks and white papers every day. Your prospective customers do not. So avoid jargon and buzzwords.

Here is an exercise you can try right now that will let you know if you’re making this critical marketing mistake: Print out 10-15 of your blog posts and give them to friends of yours who don’t work in the marketing industry. Ask them if they understand them. If they don’t, your content isn’t effective. It may feed your ego to write fancy posts, but it won’t move the needle. If prospective clients don’t understand what you’re saying, they’re not be engaged. And if they’re not engaged they won’t take the next step.
As a marketer, you know: If they don’t take the next step they won’t become customers.