Search Marketing Insights (Search Done Smarter)
Writing for Readers, Not Just Buyers or Cynics
By: Bryce Walat, Content Development Specialist
In the SEO Book.com article Writing for Buyers vs. Writing for Cynics, one of the comments stated that:
“It’s easy to say that you should write about what you love or you’ll get bored, but the big money is always in things that no one loves, like mortgages and loans, etc…”
What do you do when you have to write about something you don’t love, or don’t know that much about, and have to write it for SEO?
Reframing SEO Writing
At its most basic, search is about questions and answers, and problems and solutions. When searchers search, they’re ultimately looking for answers to questions or solutions to problems. They’re looking for a way to compare mortgages and pick the best option, or get help with payment problems, for example.
With that in mind, SEO writing is more about answering a question or solving a problem than writing content to promote a product or service. Therefore, when writing for SEO, it’s a good idea to reframe the task from writing to promote a product or service to writing to answer a question or solve a problem.
As far as writing about what you love is concerned, that part comes from the satisfaction that you get whenever you help someone answer a question or solve a problem.
Write for the Right Audience
Good SEO content does more than increase your search rank; it also brings more visitors to your site, especially visitors who are most likely to convert. Your site may rank higher organically after you’ve written or optimized your site’s content, but may still fail to attract more traffic and more qualified traffic.
For example, if you want to purchase a digital camera online and enter the phrase “purchase digital camera” into Google, the first organic result is for pcworld.com and the second organic result is for learnthat.com. These sites rank high organically, and they provide well-written, informative content about how to purchase a digital camera, but they aren’t sites where you can actually buy a digital camera. Although these sites have ads for digital cameras in the content pages, you may not click on any of the ads, much less buy a digital camera from seeing those ads.
Write for the Readers First
Writing for SEO means that you not only have to write for the human readers, but also the non-human readers, namely the search engines. So, which of these audiences should take precedence?
Although the search engines are important, your first priority should be your human readers. Your content may be keyword-rich, but if it’s grammatically incorrect, factually incorrect, or just plain boring and irrelevant, your readers will be turned off.
Believe it or not, it helps to forget that you’re writing for SEO, at least when you’re in that initial draft stage. In other words, the best time to do the SEO part is after you’ve written the content. A good rule is to make the keywords fit into the content, not the content fit into the keywords. That way, your content won’t sound like you’re trying to force keywords.
