Writing SEO-Friendly Copy: Don't Forget About Your Customers!

When you’re writing your website copy with your SEO strategy at the forefront of your mind, it’s important to take a step back and make sure that you’re still writing with your customers’ needs and wants at heart. When it comes to writing SEO-friendly website copy, you need to make sure you know the difference between well-written optimized copy, and keyword-stuffed garbage. Sometimes it’s important to remember that while you want your website to do well in search engines you should ultimately be writing your copy for your customers, not (search engine) spiders.

Sure, stuffing your content with copious instances of your target keywords may help you rank high in search engine results quickly, but have you thought about what you’re doing to your chance at getting lasting, loyal subscribers? It doesn’t matter if your page ranks well if the visitors that arrive there instantly click away in disgust from your keyword-ridden un-engaging copy.

Sadly, there are still many marketers out there who think that optimizing their site in this manner is a good tactic. Unfortunately, those people seem to have forgotten the fact that getting quality links to this kind of content is virtually impossible (who wants to link to that?) and getting repeat visitors is highly unlikely.
Optimizing your website (or blog) in this manner is a short-term option with few (if any) long-term successes. Remember, if your content doesn’t provide some kind of inherent value to your website visitors then they will have no reason to return in the future, and, having lost a subscriber’s good opinion once, it is extremely difficult to gain it back.

Building a strong SEO strategy that gets results is a long-term, ongoing process. There are no (successful) quick fixes to get your website the rankings you want. The best thing you can do is to ensure that your strategy is built on a strong foundation and this begins with excellent, informative, fresh content. If you write for your visitors (and we’re not talking about the crawling kind) then you start to build a loyal following, which become subscribers and encourage linking, and, hopefully, word of mouth marketing for your brand. 

How can you write copy with your customers in mind?

1. Be careful about overusing your keywords. Like we said above, keyword stuffing is the enemy of the compelling, customer-centric copy. It takes away from the flow and tone of your copy, and makes your optimization efforts look desperate at best.
2. Focus on their pain points. Your copy shouldn’t be all about you. Your website visitors have most likely arrived at your website because they are looking for a solution to a problem. By addressing their difficulties from the get-go you can position your products or services as the best solution. 
3. Write conversationally. People aren’t looking for complicated web copy filled with industry-specific jargon. Your visitors want to feel like you’re speaking to them, in the language and tone they understand. 
4. Keep it short, and to the point. People want to find one their looking for quickly and easily. Every company has enormous amounts of information they CAN share with their audience, but that’s not what their visitors are really looking for. Keeping your copy minimal, skimmable and easy to navigate usually makes for a much better customer experience.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at October 21, 2010 8:00 AM

Comments

Internet Marketing

I was very pleased to find this site. I wanted to thank you for this great read!! This is a very informative post, it helps me more.