Imagine your business is at the top of search engine result pages for critical keywords in your city. You don’t have to pay Google a dime for this great listing. But what if once your prospect gets to your website, the content writing is lousy? Or the navigation is confusing? What will happen?
If that happened while you were shopping online, you know what you would do; you would click away and look for a better website. You would look for one where the web content writing is simple, clear, and compelling. Where you could navigate easily and not get lost. You wouldn’t even care if the second site was more expensive. At least it’s not giving you a headache!
Now if you had paid an SEO firm to get that top-ranked listing, and if they delivered without using black-hat techniques—which might get you banished from Google later on—that’s great. But if they neglected the content writing and usability of your site, those high rankings may have been all for nothing.
But wait! The SEO firm told you they had staff copywriters who would help you with your content. Well, let me tell you a little story.
A well-established SEO copywriting colleague of mine was approached by one of the top SEO companies in the nation. And I mean top! They wanted her to assist their clients by writing web content. My friend was excited about the opportunity; she envisioned steady work with quality products.
Then she was informed that the top amount they would pay for any page was $20!
No writer worth the price of her keyboard would work for that amount. That’s like hiring an interior decorator to do a room for $20.
Internet marketing companies commoditize and systematize everything. That may be okay for some aspects, but it’s certainly not acceptable for the words that will go on your website. Web content writing needs to do a lot of heavy work, like …
Grab attention
Understand your prospect’s motive for searching
Present a concept or solution
Show why you are the best solution
Present proof of the above
Move the reader to a next action
Be professionally written in a non-stuffy manner
Incorporate keywords in a natural manner
Incorporate keywords in a NATURAL manner SEVERAL times (very difficult)
Have a title tag artfully crafted to get rankings and attention
Have a description tag artfully crafted to get click-throughs
You, as an owner, should pause when an SEO company says, “We’ll handle it all including the web content writing.” After all, do you really want to entrust the marketing of your business—your livelihood—to a $20 (or less) copywriter?
What kind of content do you think you’ll get? I’ll tell you. It’ll be the same blah, blah, blah as every other website in your industry.
To cover the points above and get words that truly “connect” with your visitor takes hard work. It takes deep research, thinking, writing, and rewriting to bring out what’s unique about your store and why customers should shop with you and not the guy down the street.
Even if you have a pre-stocked storefront or franchise website with canned copy, most systems allow you to do some customization. But incredibly few owners take advantage of that. That’s an opportunity for you that your competitor is probably too lazy or too ignorant to take.
