Write Web Content For Customers, Not Search Engines

To a webmaster in 2012, a website’s management checklist is a heavy beast. New product copy, ongoing blogs, user comment moderating, social channel updates and interaction (which are often hourly) – the list goes on and is seemingly never ending.

Webmasters with a keen eye will also massage their strongest keywords and phrases, and keep a constant vigil on their site’s position in search engines. Add this SEO component alone to an already bursting list of tasks and suddenly this becomes a full time job; busy online stores often have a small web team to cover all bases but smaller businesses rely on one person to maintain all these things.

So if you needed to choose one job group, which would it be? Would you invest all your time in ongoing SEO campaigns, and somewhat neglect your web content and social channel responsibilities? Or would you shift your attention to content marketing instead?

I firmly believe that by concentrating on writing quality product and web page content, and publishing regular blogs – and all the while sticking to some simple writing conventions – that your so-called SEO will take care of itself.

A webmaster’s time should be spent writing emotive, quality content rather than pouring over SEO charts and keyword research spreadsheets. Forget Google, and begin pleasing the people that really matter – your customers! I don’t see the point in attracting clicks if those you attract arrive to a page that doesn’t speak to them in a language that they understand or connect with. Seriously, what’s the point of that?

So long as you follow the basic on-page copywriting principles for SEO (i.e. keyword/phrase weighting), and write quality and emotive copy that speaks to your customers rather than Google itself, your rankings will grow naturally and your conversions will follow.

Stop writing for search engines and start writing for the audience that really matters  – your customers!