Search Engine Optimisation is considered the gold standard in Internet Marketing. Everyone with a website wants to appear at the top of the search engines, and SEO is the way to get there.
At least, that’s what you’d think if you read online for a while.
Why Writers Don’t Need To Learn SEO
Most writing jobs will expect you to be great at SEO. There are two types of SEO: On-site, and Off-site.
For On-site SEO, you’ll be writing things that make the client’s main website better from an SEO perspective. For Off-site SEO, you’ll be doing things on other sites in order to link to the client’s main site.
You’ll be given a certain keyword, and you’ll have to make sure it appears in exactly the same form as they give it to you. It has to appear a certain amount of times per article. This is easy if your keyword is “make money writing” but really terrible if it’s “buy dolls houses cheap east midlands England.” (Really, try fitting that into a sentence without changing the word order. Report back.)
For Off-site SEO, which is where the bulk of revenue is spent, you’re tasked with writing crappy articles that get submitted to article directories and spammed on comments so that there are more links to your/your client’s pages. This in theory means that the main site will rank highly for the keyword that you’re targeting.
Here is my opinion: None of this is worth it if you are (or hire,) a good copywriter.
How did I come to this conclusion?
Every couple of years, the search engines (primarily Google,) will have a reset. Search Engines work on complex algorithms. Hundreds of factors go into giving you your search results. Over time, marketers and SEO experts work out what these factors are, and then they can “hack” the process.
Early search engines only worked based on how many times a keyword was used. This led to keyword stuffing – or, people using a keyword a ridiculous amount of times. The search engines clamped down on this.
Then there were article directories – eHow, About, and others – that were relevant because they were huge sites. Then came the clamp down.
At one point, blog comments were highly valued. So SEO experts would create hundreds and hundreds of links with their keywords as the user name. This then skewed the results. Google clamped down.
Then, guest posting was a major thing. People would create weird quasi-article directories by writing terrible articles and syndicating them to all their friend’s websites – then came the clamp down.
Essentially, however good you are at staying ahead of the curve, eventually today’s technique will be obsolete. Of course, the guys at Google aren’t any help – they simply release videos saying “Write good content and don’t cheat the system.” Like this video:
But then, a light bulb moment struck me.
What Is A Search Engine Doing, Exactly?
A search engine is essentially designed to give the end-reader the most relevant result. The reason an algorithm is so complex is because there are different reasons for searching, and different people want different results.
If you’re a copywriter, then you’ll know that there are “buying” words versus “merely curious” words. We’re complex creatures, and so a search engine is complex to mimic our quite-obscure desires.
That’s exactly what a search engine is doing – mimicking a human in order to get a relevant result.
How many human beings have ever followed one of those spam links in a blog comment to buy cheap Nike shoes? Not many.
How many people read an article that’s poorly written (my suffering readership aside)? Not many.
The reason that Google’s marketing team doesn’t say “Spam build links to as many different sites as possible” is because that isn’t what the search engine is looking for. When they say the search engine is looking for useful information, they aren’t lying.
But I Want To Rank My Site Now! What Do I Do?
Write good content as a major part of your strategy.
It’s simple, easy and cost effective. If you can’t do it yourself, it’s still cost-effective to hire a writer as opposed to hiring an SEO firm.
Writing has an advantage over SEO in the following ways:
- Natural keyword distribution.
An SEO article is going to contain a keyword at a 1-3% density. It’ll be there in unnatural terms, because keyword density is a “seeing the trees and not the forest” approach. A well written article will contain the optimum density of keywords, because otherwise it won’t make sense.
Also, an SEO expert might convince you to have “contextually similar anchor text” or some other convoluted term for related words. A writer will use those words naturally, because that’s what happens in language.
Nobody speaks like this in the real world:
If you buy my stuff, you’ll have a great time because buying my stuff is the best stuff which is why buying my stuff will make you feel happy and great.
That’s what an unnatural approach to writing and “keywords” and “density” will do to your articles. Look at this section of this article. I’ve repeatedly talked about keyword density without repeating the terms to do with it unnaturally. That’s more like what an article should look like.
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Good writing is evergreen.
I read books on writing that were written a hundred years ago. I could find them a lot more easily than I could probably find the next great SEO tactic that was written last week. Why? The general landscape of the online world moves so quickly. Half the social media networks that are big now didn’t exist five years ago. They’ll probably be replaced in five years’ time. SEO techniques are constantly adapting to the search engine treadmill.
Writing doesn’t suffer from that. Google is never going to penalise a well-written article. Sure, it might not come at the top of the search results on any given day, but it’ll hang out on the internet forever. Also, it’ll get shared by people. Real people, not robots. That brings me onto my next point.
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If you have great content, people do your SEO for you.
I could hire one hundred freelancers to pimp this article and I could get an automated program to comment on every single SEO article on the internet. I could build a million links to this article in a day.
What would happen?
Not a lot. Most webmasters would block the comments as spam. Google would know that that’s what I was doing, and de-index my site. If I spammed social media, I’d get banned. Those freelancers would post to whatever sites they could find, without regard for whether the sites were actually interested in my article. I wouldn’t get the money back that I’d spent on it.
On the other hand, if my article is well-written and interesting to people, it’ll get shared. People will comment on it. People will send it to their friends, post it on social media and share it in forums where it’s relevant.
It might even get a million links, over time. (Except, not really.)
Even if it only got ten links instead of a hundred thousand, if those shares are relevant and they go to people who are interested in the topic, that’s more valuable.
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Humans are complex.
This will conveniently take us back to the start of the article. Humans are complex creatures, and trying to gauge their intentions from words on a page is difficult. That’s why search engines are basically “human search simulators.” As a copywriter, you probably know all the hundreds of different psychological tricks to get a human to want to buy. Or subscribe. Or feel a warm, cuddly sensation as they look at the first kitten picture of the day.
SEO is in essence trying to automate and reverse engineer those complex factors. It’s an attempt to turn an organic environment into an inorganic one.
As a writer, you don’t have to create an inorganic environment. Learning the craft of writing is about learning to portray millions of different things with words. Regardless of the state of the internet now, or in ninety days or five years’ time, that skill will be more effective at building an audience than any number of SEO tactics.