Writing for SEO: An Introduction

As you look around for ways to improve your business's visibility and marketing reach, you may stumble on the phrase "writing for SEO" again and again. But unless you live in the digital marketing world, your first response (and a completely valid one) is probably "What the heck does 'writing for SEO' mean?" So let's take a moment to examine that question and explore some basic ideas about creating content that helps you make a bigger online splash.

First things first: SEO stands for search engine optimization. It encompasses a whole range of techniques that content creators and web development specialists employ to help their clients score higher on online search results. The more frequently and prominently your brand pops up in response to your target audiences' online searches, the more successfully you can draw these valuable prospects to your website, at which point they've entered your sales funnel. (Keeping them there may call for other marketing measures, of course, including the placement of the right content in the right places. But that's a topic for another day.)

Effective SEO can involve everything from how your web developer structures, tags, and codes your website to the choice of URL. But it also hinges on what kind of content you write and how you write it. Fortunately, you can win half the battle here simply by writing web pages, blog articles, and other online content that genuinely matters to your target market. Google rates relevance very highly indeed, so the more relevant your content appears, and more of that content you produce, the higher you're likely to show up on those all-important search results.

Of course, you want both your audience and the major search engines to be able to understand and absorb that content easily. Consider breaking the content into easily digestible paragraphs, including bulleted or numbered lists where relevant. If you use headers, make sure to tag them with the proper hierarchy of H1, H2, H3 etc. The addition of images always helps, especially if the images contain relevant verbiage in their tags.

The presence of links can also play an important role in your content's SEO. When you include links to authoritative, respective information sources, you're demonstrating your own value and reliability as a trusted resource. If you really write high-quality content and build your reputation, other websites may even start linking to your web content, encouraging a fresh stream of incoming traffic from impressed readers who want to learn more from (and about) your organization.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned keywords yet. Yes, the use of relevant, commonly-searched keywords will help your content rank higher. However, the old days when you could just keyword-stuff a page or article and expect brilliant results are long gone. In fact, search engines now punish suspected keyword-stuffing efforts. So by all means use those keywords, but use them only as the content calls for them. Focus on creating relevant, high-quality content, and you can't help but use the right keywords in a sensible manner.

Need help creating the kind of content you need for successful SEO? Then you need the services of a skilled, experienced professional copywriter. Contact me today!

Should You Hire a Freelance Copywriter or Engage a Marketing Agency?

Not too long ago, I took a phone call from a business owner inquiring about press releases. Which is fine; I've written plenty of press releases over the years. But it soon became apparent that he didn't just need help writing the articles -- he also needed someone to provide him with high-level PR distribution and marketing strategies. So I referred him to a marketing strategist that I knew at a local print/digital agency. At around the same time, I spoke with a Florida real estate agent who needed, not just writing help, but also professional SEO assistance. I agreed to perform the writing portion of the job, but I referred the SEO tasks to a marketing agency in Dallas.

When does it make sense to hire a freelance copywriter in San Antonio, Austin, or wherever, as opposed to engaging a turnkey marketing agency that offers a full suite of marketing services? It's a worthy question, and one that benefits from a little understanding of how both freelance copywriters and marketing agencies actually work.

Money Matters

For businesses with a tight marketing budget, it obviously makes sense to buy only the services you need. If you already have access to professional-quality web design, graphic design, SEO etc., and you're firmly in control of your brand voice and marketing agenda, you might need nothing more than a writer to generate the content you already envision as part of your master plan. One nice thing about this approach is how easy it is to hire writers on an ad hoc basis. Need a single press release, or a month's worth of blog articles, or a quick update to your home page? Simply call your writer and place that order. Current copywriter not working out? Just hire a different one the next time you need some content. Need more content than one writer can handle? Keep two or three of them in your Rolodex, and engage them as needed. Since copywriters base their rates on their particular experience levels, reputations and skill sets, you can always obtain your ideal compromise between affordability and expertise.

Marketing agencies tend to require a steadier, more consistent agreement and a higher level of commitment from their clients. It's true that many of the smaller ones -- the "boutiques" -- can be amazingly flexible in the tiers and terms of service they offer. But it's a little harder to flit from one agency to another at the drop of a hat. Expect to sign on for a flat monthly rate at the very least. In short, it's a more elaborate situation to get into, and to get out of.

Range of Services 

Some copywriters dabble in other marketing services above and beyond writing; the rest of us prefer to focus on the thing we do best. If you know that you need multiple, integrated marketing services, overseen by a professional marketing strategy team, hiring a turnkey marketing agency makes all the sense in the world. But it isn't necessarily your only option.

Remember my opening anecdotes, in which I directed those prospective clients to a marketing strategist and an SEO firm respectively? I was still the designated writer on those jobs -- I simply reached out to my professional network of trusted colleagues. If your copywriter has built up such a network over many years of experience, then you've pretty much got all the pieces of a full-blown marketing agency at your command. Some of these providers may be agencies in their own right; others may be independent contractors and experts in their respective fields. You can mix and match until you have a team that suits both your budget and your marketing needs.

Here's another little insight for your consideration: Many smaller marketing agencies don't maintain their own in-house writing crew anyway. They outsource those services to -- guess who? -- freelancers like me. So you may end up working with a freelance copywriter whether you realize it or not. The big difference in this scenario is that you're not one choosing the copywriter. You may not even be communicating with the writer directly. If that's something that matters to you, you might be better off bringing your own freelance copywriter to the project.

As you can see, there's no clear-cut right or wrong way to proceed. If you're still unsure of your copywriting and marketing needs, feel free to contact me for some honest, straightforward advice!

Don't Just Create Marketing Content -- Create Your Audience!

Ever think of starting a media juggernaut that exists solely to support your business? In the past, that idea would have been dismissed as vain, over-ambitious, or just plain laughable. These days, it's considered Smart Marketing 101.

Steve Jobs famously said, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them." In other words, it's up to you to create the demand for a product or service by introducing it to your target audience within the larger context of how this product or service can enhance their lives. Proctor & Gamble demonstrated this concept by creating a whole new form of entertainment as a marketing tool. The soap company (and that's pretty much all it was, back in the 1930s) needed a way to present its products to a specific audience -- homemakers. It did so by inventing the soap opera.

Daytime drama reached into millions of households via radio and eventually television, giving the lady of the house a daily feast of "stories" accompanied by, of course, commercials for detergent products. Proctor & Gamble had become more than a product manufacturer -- it was now a media producer. If you spent your afternoon doing the laundry, chances were you were also caught up in the latest brain tumor diagnosis, adulterous affair or discovery of an evil twin. Meanwhile, you'd hear about how and why a particular detergent got the job better than Brand X, more often than not from the characters themselves. If your favorite radio or TV character is singing the praises of a new dandruff shampoo day in and day out, eventually you're going to buy some just to see what all the fuss is about.

This same approach is alive and well today. We call it content marketing -- a combined delivery of advertising and other information that a specific audience genuinely needs or enjoys. An effective modern marketing campaign might achieve this in the form of drip marketing, a series of direct-mail or email "touches" that collectively build the reader's trust in your company until the urge to buy or at least contact you for more information becomes overpowering. And just as soap opera audiences come to think of the characters they see as living, breathing people, your target market comes to rely on you as the trusted resource for your industry of field of expertise.

Blogging can prove especially valuable for building an audience that relies on your expert point of view on the subject at hand. Say you're a tax attorney trying to establish your credibility and convert prospects who need what you have to offer. By posting authoritative, genuinely helpful articles on a wide range of topics related to taxes, the people searching for that information online -- who obviously need and want such information -- come to rely on you as their own personal guru on the subject. And who better to work on their taxes than someone they already trust? That's content marketing.

Now it's your turn to create your own business's media channels. Build your own buzz through the power of content marketing. Who knows? With the aid of a skilled professional copywriter, your product or service could become the hottest show in town -- with your target market serving as the town.

Beyond Copywriting: The Key Players on Your Marketing Team

In my many years as a freelance copywriter in Austin and San Antonio, I've received plenty of requests to write for clients who didn't have all their marketing ducks in a row. They knew they needed top-quality marketing content from an experienced copywriter, but they hadn't engaged the other members of their marketing team. It's pretty hard to write content that will integrate flawlessly with an imaginary website or non-existent visual design, or without any clue what the most important keywords will be, or without knowing how the content will be implemented across multiple marketing channels. That's why I urge clients to gather their entire go-to team of marketing professionals before commissioning marketing content. Let's look at some of the key players you'll want to include in your lineup.

The Copywriter

Your copywriter serves as your written content resource. The right words make an enormous difference in persuading your target audience of your message as quickly and efficiently as possible. Since Google's algorithm has made relevant, professional-sounding content a top priority in recent years, the days of simple "keyword stuffing" are long gone -- you actually have to tell your story, and tell it well. That's a job for a professional. Your copywriter can also contribute to the conceptual stage of your marketing campaign through creative brainstorming, or make fixes to any existing content that just doesn't get the job done.

The Graphic Designer

What your copywriter is to your words, your graphic designer is to your pictures. The graphic designer is the architect of your brand's look. From creating original logos and determining your company color scheme to crafting individual marketing pieces, this artist understands how images influence potential buyers. Look for a graphic designer who feels equally at home in both print and digital media, since these two forms make their own specific visual demands.

The Web Designer/Developer

Web designers create the appearance and layout of your website and its various pages, working in collaboration with graphic designers as needed. Effective web design not only makes your website look compelling and professional; it also ensures a good user experience to improve retention and conversion. The web developer takes those designs and codes them expertly into the site, using state-of--the-art programming languages. When hiring these professionals, make sure they'll grant you some degree of user customization and administrative access to it. You don't want to be "locked out" of your own website if you ever happen to lose the people who put it together.

The SEO Expert

Search engine optimization makes the online marketing world go round. SEO strategies and tactics can take a variety of forms, from the sensible, elegant use of keywords in your written content (organic SEO) to the "under-the-hood" SEO achieved through meta-tags and other subtle website features. Some website providers include SEO among their services, while some SEO experts double as web design/development professionals.

The Social Media Coordinator

Today's marketing campaigns must embrace not only traditional print and website activities but the wide world of social media as well. Unfortunately, there are so many social media channels to choose from that you could easily spend most of your waking hours keeping track of them all. It's all too easy to neglect one important channel in favor of another, or to upload content in such a haphazard manner that your audience can't follow you easily. Your social media coordinator can focus on this activity exclusively, making sure that the right content is going onto the right channel at the right time.

The Printer

Print marketing is alive and well -- and most businesses need some form of it just as much as they need its digital equivalent. It's great to have close ties to a professional printing company that can make any kind of print marketing materials you might need, from 3D signage to event banners and vehicle wraps. A fully-equipped printer offers both traditional offset printing and advanced digital printing options. Some also have on-site graphic designers, thus filling two spots on your go-to marketing team roster while ensuring visual consistency across all your print marketing pieces.

The Marketing Strategist

The marketing strategist has the most important job of all: designing your company's marketing plan and supervising that plan's implementation. This expert is the first professional you want to talk to. Your marketing strategist can help you understand exactly who your audience is, where that audience tends to hang out, and what kinds of messaging that audience tends to respond to. A well-connected marketing strategist may even be able to find the other members of your marketing team for you, giving each of them their marching orders and coordinating their activities.

So there you have it -- the key players in your quest for brilliant marketing. Go get 'em!

4 Misconceptions About Marketing Content Creation

The quality, quantity and frequency of your marketing content creation can make all the difference in your organization's growth and success -- but it isn't always easy to know whether you're going about it the right way, especially when there are so many opportunities to mislead yourself. Here are 4 common misconceptions about marketing content creation you'll want to sidestep.

1. Your content should be about you. 

I sometimes see what I call "This Little Piggy Marketing," so named because it goes "We We We" all the way home. While it's important to provide a unique and compelling description of your organization's, history, mission and solutions, nobody's going to buy from a company that only talks about itself. The bulk of your marketing content shouldn't be about you; it should be about your audience -- the person perusing your content right this minute in search of a specific answer to a burning need.

2. Longer is better.

You may encounter so-called rules about how long a landing page or blog article should be, with longer typically portrayed as automatically being better. Take these with a few cellars of salt. Don't assume that because a web page or blog article is twice as long, it's automatically twice as good. Compact, meaningful verbiage usually carries more of a punch and makes a more memorable impression. It's true that the bigger an investment you're asking for, the more depth, detail and persuasive arguments you need to provide. But as a general rule, write only until you've made your point. Then stop.

3. SEO is everything.

I've addressed this point before, but it's all too easy to fall into the habit of writing "for SEO purposes." Yes, search engine optimization is important, and yes, regular, relevant content can help you boost yours. But keep in mind that SEO can only put your audience in front of your products and services; it can't inspire them to buy. The real power of your marketing content lies in its ability to hit your prospects and clients where they live once you've gotten their initial attention. As critical as it is to get visitors through the door, it's even more critical to convert those visitors into customers. 

4. Once you've created "enough content," you're done. 

Unfortunately, the tale told by your marketing must be a never-ending one, for the simple reason that your clientele, the business world and your own offerings are constantly changing. If you create a big pile of content and then simply stop generating more, that pile will eventually grow stale, no matter how brilliant it may be. To make matters worse, your clients may get the impression that your business has gone similarly stagnant. You must keep re-engaging your audience with fresh, relevant content that holds their attention and inspires new purchases.

Steer clear of these misconceptions, and you'll find it much easier to keep your marketing ROI on course toward your goals. Do it right -- and watch it work!

Optimal Content for Optimized Websites: SEO Doesn't Mean "Search Engines Only"

Many of my copywriting clients are very busy bees indeed -- business owners and entrepreneurs who are struggling to pump out large quantities of online content as a means of attracting business and making themselves even busier. So I understand completely when one of them contacts me for assistance with "refreshing" old content instead of creating new content from scratch. Sometimes it makes great sense to revisit an old article angle or web page and rework the text to give it a new perspective or tweak it for an evolving audience. But if you're taking articles from across the wide expanse of the Internet and simply paraphrasing them "for SEO," you could be either making problems for yourself or missing out on some key benefits of marketing content creation -- benefits that go beyond search engine optimization.

Here are a few of the issues you need to consider if you're repurposing marketing content created by other individuals for their own organizations:

Paraphrasing or Plagiarism?

Paraphrasing another entity's content isn't a shady practice as such, but participating in blatant plagiarism is. If the original author notices, you might be slapped with an order to take down the offending item -- and if Google notices, your company may sink in the search rankings. What's the difference between paraphrasing and plagiarism? It really comes down to how much of the original verbiage you use. If you must paraphrase, you must take the time and effort to completely rewrite the passage in question (by which point you might as well have created your own original content). Any word-for-word sections need to be placed in quotes or least attributed to their source.

Unique or More of the Same?

Your paraphrased piece may be as brilliantly stated as the original, or even more so -- but it won't be different in the ways that matter. If you're simply parroting what other industry experts had to say on the subject before you arrived on the scene, you won't make much impact in the sea of similar content. The right keywords might make your article or web page pop up in front of your target audience, but if the content surrounding them is nothing your prospects haven't read before elsewhere, don't expect to close any sales. Where's the original spin, the fresh approach? What's the "you factor?" Are you a thought leader -- or a thought follower?

Targeted or Generic?

A piece of marketing content originally created for one audience may hold little relevance for yours. If the piece originally referred to particular geographic areas or other details that appealed to their crowd, you'll have to take those out unless that author just happens to have the exact same target market as you. What's left is bland, generic text that doesn't clearly target anybody. Whatever the source of your material, you must always spin it so that it pertains directly to your clientele -- which usually means creating a big chunk of it entirely on your own.

As you can see, there's little to be gained by "flipping" existing materials from other organizations once you have to do all the extra work to make it yours -- especially when you could outsource your original writing tasks to a freelance marketing copywriter. True content optimization includes originality and creativity alongside the nuts and bolts of keyword placement, winning new customers as well as higher rankings. SEO stands for search engine optimization, not "search engines only!"

4 Things Your Business Website Content Should Never Include

"What's wrong with my website content?" In my many years of fielding this question and many variations of it, I've gotten pretty good at pinpointing certain traps that business owners tend to fall into when they write their own online content. Here are four errors you want to avoid.

1. The Endless Home Page

This is a mistake that I encounter from time to time when I'm asked to redo the content for a commercial website. The client is mystified because visitors are bouncing off the home page without exploring the rest of site, "even though we give them tons of great information right from the beginning." It usually turns out that those tons of information are exactly what's wrong with the home page -- because they don't belong there.

Website visitors don't want to hack their way through a jungle of words, paragraph after endless paragraph, just to figure out where they stuff they actually care about is located on the site. I had to rewrite a home page once that read like an "About the Doctor" page -- and by "about," I mean "about 5,000 words." At first I thought the physician had accidentally pasted the content from her bio page onto her home page. But no, I found a separate, even longer description of the good doctor's life story on that page!

The home page is the front entrance to your site. Dress it with content the way you might dress the front of a brick-and-mortar store: with just enough sizzle to make visitors want to explore the aisles. Nobody buys anything while standing in the doorway.

2. "We We We" All the Way Home

Another recent website writing job posed a different kind of problem. This business owner was in the health and beauty industry and wanted his web content refreshed and updated. Once I took a look at it, I realized that it needed more than that -- it needed a change of perspective. Every sentence, it seemed, was about the company's services, the owner's expertise, the staff's training, "our this" and "my that" and "we provide" the other.

I call this problem "We We We Syndrome" because it's all about the business, when of course it should be all about the visitor. It should recognize the visitor's pain points and describe the products and services in terms of what they mean for the visitor's quality of life. Let's face it, the only question most prospective customers have when they read any kind of pitch is, "What's in it for me?" Focus on that.

3. Keyword Soup

Remember the alphabet soup of your childhood? As fun as it may have been to spell words with your lunch, a some point you probably realized that the stuff was nothing more than a thin, watery broth with lots of letter-shaped noodles in it -- at which point you could be forgiven for moving on to more nutritious fare. Well, lots of website content reads like a bowl of keyword soup, featuring unsubtle, often ungrammatical piles of keyword phrases surrounded by empty words.

This practice is called keyword stuffing. Nobody likes it, least of all Google, who penalizes site owners for the obvious repetition of city names, phone numbers and other key phrases that don't have much to do with the main body of the text. I've had some serious disagreements with web developers over the use of incorrect, stupid-sounding phrases for the sake of SEO. Yes, you'll get more people viewing your content (assuming you escape Google's watchful eye). But do you really want to leave all those extra viewers with the impression that your marketing is written by morons?

4. Double Trouble

Duplicate content is generally looked on as a no-no in the world of online marketing, but I've seen countless instances of it. Some businesses think nothing of simply lifting entire pages of web content from another organization and pasting them, intact and without attribution, on their own sites. This is a dumb move, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

There are those who claim that Google will penalize your duplicate content and others who maintain that it won't hurt your search rankings. But there's another, arguably more serious problem with it. If someone is searching for what you do, chances are that he or she will browse through a pile of search results, including yours. If your content is an exact copy of someone else's, then who's the author? Who's the real expert, and who's the copycat too lazy or unqualified to post an original spin on the subject? Keep in mind, too, that as long as your content is as good as everybody else's, then it's better than nobody else's. Keep it unique!

Step away from these four potential pitfalls and you'll be a step ahead of many of your competitors. And if you want to gain leaps and bounds on them, take one more step -- hire a professional copywriter who can get that web content just right the first time!

The Past, Present and Future of Business Blogging

Twenty years ago, the word "blog" didn't exist. Think about that. In the two decades that the Web has grown from a quaint but useful academic aid to a global commercial necessity, blogging has pursued its own dynamic evolution from personal soapbox to marketing must. Where did blogging come from, why it so critical for your business right now, and where can you expect blogging to take you in years to come? Hop into your mental time machine and let's take a quick guided tour.

In the Beginning: Electronic Journalism for (and by) the Masses

The World Wide Web was still in its infancy when Justin Hall set up a personal home page called Links.net in 1994 (and yes, it's still up and running today). As the name implied, it was made of primarily of links to various categories of online content that Hall found fascinating enough to share with the public, strung together by bits and pieces of editorial content. This is pretty much what blogging was for the first couple of years of its existence -- a combination bulletin board and editorial column created by individuals who wanted to share their favorite stuff. But things took a decidedly more professional (and journalistic) turn in 1998, when the Charlotte Observer used its blog to cover Hurricane Bonnie, demonstrating the potential power of this communications medium.

The next logical step was using blog posts to promote products and services. I actually got in on the cutting edge of this trend, even though I didn't realize it at the time, when a promotional products company asked me to write a series of case study articles that they could post on their website's blog page. That was around 1999 or 2000, I think, when businesses were still laboriously hand-posting directly onto their web pages. Soon afterward came the debut of blogging programs and platforms that made it easy for any business to post regular blog entries and get their brands circulating throughout cyberspace.

The Rise of the Thought Leaders: Business Blogging Gets Real (and Social)

Today, blogging is considered an essential method for maintaining a steady stream of marketing content on the vast virtual shopping mall/newsroom/entertainment center that the modern Web has become. Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media have created a voracious hunger for engaging, enlightening blogs that genuinely fulfill needs and solve problems. The days of insipid, keyword-stuffed filler are long gone; today's search engines reward relevance, authenticity and trustworthiness of content with higher search result rankings. This is the age of "thought leadership" or "expert" articles -- meaningful editorial pieces that address specific issues while referring readers toward a specific brand or company as the place to go for the solutions. And the more you blog, the better it works; companies that boost their output from 3-5 posts per month to 6-8 posts, for example, enjoy nearly twice as many online leads.

Whither the Business Blog?

Will the humble blog get buried underneath all the other distractions created by so many online media channels, from podcasts to videos? Not likely. Instead, your blog content will see more targeted distribution than ever as online analytics engines get smarter and more powerful. Audio and video presentations can be thought of as just another form of blogging -- and even if you take full advantage of those media, you'll still want to serve the segment of your target audience that prefers reading to watching or listening. I predict that I'll be blogging for all kinds of businesses for many years to come -- and I'll be happy to add you to my client roster!

5 New Year's Marketing Resolutions

Say goodbye to 2015 and say hello to 2016! A new year brings new marketing opportunities, so this is the perfect time to make some New Year's resolutions aimed at sharpening your organization's marketing savvy. Here are 5 such resolutions you may want to put on your list.

1. "I will track my marketing success."

If you want an amazingly clear way of telling just how effective your marketing content is at specific points, you'll find that the magic is in the metrics. Resolve right now to track such important numbers as web page traffic, visitor duration, where people are viewing you site from (not just geographically, but on what type of device), first-timers versus repeat visitors, how often the repeat visitors repeat, and how many viewers respond to your call to action. The same obviously goes for the success of your per-per-click and other paid advertising tactics. If you don't track it, how will you know what works and what needs fixing?

2. "I will improve the quality of my inbound marketing content."

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Google cares about a lot more than just keywords these days; if you want high rankings on search results, you'd better bring relevant, high-quality content to the table. If you've been grinding out "okay" content mainly as a coat rack to hang keywords on (or even worse, just to fill a blank page), then pledge to make 2016 the year your content works actively to build authority and trust, not only with the search engines but with every potential customer who encounters it.

3. "I will blog regularly (and often)."

How was your 2105 from a  blogging standpoint? Did you produce a steady stream of entertaining, engaging, useful posts on topics that reinforce your own expertise, or did your company blog sort of sputter and lurch like Jack Benny's jalopy? Make a resolution to give your blog the care and attention it deserves so it can attract new visitors to your site and turn them into regulars. While there's no hard and fast rule for how frequently a particular type of organization should blog, companies that post at least 16 times a month get more than 3 times the web traffic of companies that post infrequently. Food for thought! 

4. "I will make better use of my social media channels."

How well written and logically organized are your LinkedIn and Facebook pages? How regularly do you add updates, links to blog posts and other fresh content? How much time do you spend contributing to conversations in relevant social media forums and groups? If your social media channels are just, well, there, resolve to focus your attention on the ones that do the best job of attracting your ideal audience. Then freshen the content on those channels and put your company over as a major thought leader and key influencer there.

5. "I will invest in my moneymaking machine."

Look at all the departments and initiatives in your budget, and I'll bet you see only one designed purely to make money for your organization -- and that's your marketing. So many companies make the mistake of tightening their belts in this department whenever things get tight, when in fact they should be beefing up their marketing efforts so they can get the word out, get the leads coming in and put themselves in a more profitable position. Whether you need to hire a copywriter, some new design talent, SEO specialists or an entire turnkey marketing agency, I urge you to take a big step forward to ensure a bigger 2016!

Outsourcing Your Marketing Content Creation? Watch Out for These 3 Issues

Have you been thinking about outsourcing your marketing content creation? Whether you're a small business owner or a turnkey provider of marketing solutions, strategic outsourcing can make your life a lot easier. But it's not as simple as posting an ad on an online job board and scooping up the lowest bidder. Here are three potential headaches you want to watch out for.

1. Language Barriers

The modern age of cloud collaboration and digital outsourcing has created a wealth of options for getting stuff done quickly and cheaply -- as any devotee of Timothy Ferriss's 4-Hour Work Week will tell you. But when it comes to creative, informative, well-written content, you still get what you pay for. Outsourcing's ability to turn the whole world into your marketplace can create problems in this regard. Many freelancers are willing to work for an astonishingly low price because they live in parts of the globe where a little money goes a long way -- and English is not necessarily the native lingo in these areas. No matter how fluent these writers may be in the language, their writing may contain some quaint surprises based on local usage habits.

Even where English is the dominant tongue, you need to watch out for national or cultural differences. The English language has taken on a wide range of fascinating colorations over the centuries, not only within its mother country but also in the course of its travels from one culture to another. The subtle but clear differences between American English and British English are an obvious example. Make sure your freelancer is both functionally fluent and colloquially fluent in the style of English you need for your target market. If you're catering to a UK audience, for instance, make sure your American freelancer is making proper use of British English ("jumper" for "sweater," "colour" for "color," single quotation marks instead of doubles, et cetera).

2. "Writers" Who Aren't Writers

Your outsourced writers may not be writers at all, especially if they're part of some larger online marketing package you've signed on for. Case in point: I recently had a client present me with a pile of blog articles that were almost unreadably bad -- randomly structured, repetitive, and in some cases not even relevant to the business's target audience. The client explained that he'd been getting this level of quality (?) on a regular basis, fixing the articles himself as best he could before publication. He could no longer spare all the extra hours required for editing them, so could I repair them or replace them with all-new pieces. I asked him why he hadn't simply assigned the job to me in the first place. He answered, "Well, these guys offer free blogging along with the website hosting and SEO I'm already buying from them." I pointed out that the blogging wasn't exactly "free" if he had to waste his valuable time fixing them (or hire a professional writer to make them work).

When an inbound marketing company includes content creation among its various other services, always ask about the credentials of the person doing the writing. The firm might think it just makes sense to hand the job over to the SEO guy or the web designer or whoever. But if you want articles that are not only well optimized and nicely laid out but also compelling and engaging, then you need to confirm that the company has a freelance writer -- or go find one of your own.

3. Lack of Communication

If you do bring a separate freelance copywriter into your outsourced marketing mix, then you're also dropping one more cook into the proverbial kitchen. An additional member of the marketing team means additional opportunities for communication failures and disagreements. This is particularly true if your writer has no direct access to the people managing your account. If your writer communicates only with you, and you communicate only with your marketing provider, then you're stuck in the middle as liaison, interpreter and peacekeeper. Outsourcing is supposed to free up your time, not swallow more of it.

The smart strategy here is to get your writer and your marketing company talking to each other directly. This allows these two parties to do their thing, talk to each other efficiently using marketing-industry-speak, and genuinely collaborate on a powerfully effective final result.

Outsourcing your marketing content can do fabulous things for your productivity, not to mention the quality of the content itself. Just take care to hire the right professional for the job, and then make it easy for that professional to contribute as a real part of the team.

Copywriting for SEO: Dos and Don'ts

I often hear clients say things like, "We need this marketing content for SEO purposes." But that's never completely the case. Search engine optimization can do great things for your online marketing efforts, but only if the content you use makes its own impression. Let's look at a few SEO copywriting dos and don'ts.

Do write content that naturally features your keywords. Keywords are pure representations of what matters to your audience. If you're writing a piece that directly addresses the concepts they're scouring the Web for, you can hardly help but use the words and phrases they're using in their searches. I mean, I couldn't write an article about copywriting for SEO without actually using that phrase. (I guess I could, but it would require a conscious evasive effort on my part.) This is the best kind of SEO copywriting -- the kind that laces keywords elegantly into the text to provide genuinely helpful information for those who actively seek it.

Don't indulge in keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing used to be all the rage back when the cyber-landscape resembled the Old West and you could get away with all kinds of black-hat SEO tricks. Some entities would create entire websites merely for the purpose of slapping as many high-ranking keywords into them as possible, whether they really had any relevance to the subject matter or not. Of course this caused a big spike in the offenders' search rankings, until Google finally cracked down on the practice by emphasizing relevance as the new gold standard for SEO success. But even without this new requirement, keyword stuffing would still bring you nothing but frustrated visitors in the long run. Even if your keyword is relevant, using it a hundred times per page isn't going to do wonders for the effectiveness of your writing.

Do create fresh content on a regular basis. The major search engines require proof from time to time that you're still a mover and a shaker. Google and others reward businesses whose content reaches and maintains a certain critical mass indicating that the businesses are working to provide helpful, engaging content for their clientele. The more content you upload, the larger a shadow you cast over the Internet, and this will boost your search rankings (or at least keep them from dropping in relation to your more diligent competitors). 

Don't post just for the sake of posting. Okay, so you need to update your online content periodically. That's doesn't mean, however, that anything you post will do your business good. True, sometimes the right keywords will draw traffic no matter what else you include. But if you post thin, irrelevant text, you'd better hope nobody actually notices it. No business ever profited from an enormous quantity of lousy marketing. Your content needs to deliver a meaningful experience instead of just serving as "clickbait."

Do optimize your titles. This post is entitled "Copywriting for SEO: Dos and Don'ts." Why did I choose that title? Well, that's what the article is about -- but it's also optimized for my prospective client base. Maybe you arrived at this article because you wanted learn more about copywriting for SEO, so you entered the keyword phrase "Copywriting for SEO." Or maybe you were concerned about what to do or not do when pursuing your own SEO strategies, so you searched for "SEO Dos and Don'ts." Either way, you're here reading this now, aren't you? Make sure your own web page/article titles pack the right keyword punch to draw the audience most likely to need your products or services -- don't just call it any old thing.

Don't write to a specific word count. Ask a marketing expert how many words a typical web page or blog article should be, and you'll get as many different answers as there are people to ask. In the area of blog article writing, for instance, I've heard everything from 200 words to 1,000 words suggested as the "best" length for a given piece. This is another situation where everyone is trying to guess at Google's magical word-count algorithm, as if there were such a thing. But the simple truth is that Google isn't concerned with word counts -- only with the relevance and authority of your verbiage and links. 

Does word count matter at all, then? Absolutely. Too little verbiage may skate over your subject instead of fully addressing, to the point that readers wonder why they bothered to click on you at all. Too much creates a wall of text that nobody has time to deal with. Remember, search engine optimization can bring more traffic to your site, but it can't make them want to experience it.

Think about these SEO copywriting dos and don'ts as you flesh out your marketing battle plan. If you've figured out your SEO strategy but not your copywriting solution, contact me and I'll help you put those pieces together!