The Goldilocks Question: Too Much Content, Too Little, or Just Right?

The tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears has endured in various forms since the 1830s. It's pervaded popular culture to the extent that astronomers talk about "Goldilocks planets," planets that are neither too close nor too far from their sun to support life. (They're not too hot; they're not too cold -- they're just right.) When you're creating marketing content for your business, you may find yourself wondering where that Goldilocks zone lies for your purposes. What counts as too many words, or too few, or just the right number for the particular marketing channel you're working on? It's a question worth asking, so let's look at some answers.

Web Page Content

While the maximum word count on an effective web page can vary widely, there's little doubt over the minimum. Google has made it known that it considers 250 to 300 words the least you want to put on each page. Why? It's an SEO thing. There has to be enough written content for the search engine's bots to crawl and index the page properly. The content should contain an even, sensible, relevant scattering of keywords that you want Google (and its users) to associate with your business.

Beyond that minimum word count, the general rule is to include as much information as you need to convert the visitor -- and not a word more. The more complex or pricey your product or service, the more verbiage you'll probably need to apply toward persuading your prospective buyer. But keep in mind that people have better things to do than read long, densely-packed web pages. Give them the least they need to know to get excited enough to take action.

Article Content

How many words should your article contain? That depends on what sort of article it is. Many of my clients are happy with 300-word blog posts which deliver concise, digestible, entertaining content to their clientele. For press releases, I generally get requests for about 450 to 500 words. (Remember, space is limited in printed news formats.) Feature articles can run longer, but you have to know in advance what word count your intended publisher wants from you. On the other end of the scale, a detailed report or white paper may run thousands of words, not including the list of sources.

Print Marketing Content

Print pieces can be some of the most challenging things to write simply because you have so little free space. These pieces tend to be dominated by their visual elements, and rightly so. It's your job to find just the right words, and as few of them as possible so you don't overcrowd the design. Don't fall into the trap of writing substantial content for the small panels of a typical trifold brochure -- unless you're ready to shrink the text down to an unreadable size.

Direct mail pieces can be among the most challenging of all. You only have space for a few words, so make them count. Focus on grabby headlines and a few high-level points that maximize the excitement factor while conveying only the most critical information.

The most important step in creating any kind of marketing content is making sure that it delivers the necessarily results, whatever word count that may entail. If you need compelling writing that falls comfortably into the Goldilocks zone, contact me so I can help you get those words just right!

This Is Your (Target Audience's) Brain on Copywriting

Do you recall the old TV ad that showed a frying egg with a voiceover proclaiming, "This is your brain on drugs?" As dumb as the analogy may seem, that ad was remembered, quoted and even parodied for years. Why? Because it used certain psychological hooks for engraving itself on the minds of viewers. Let's face it, marketing is largely the art of psychological manipulation. So let's look at how your marketing content can employ specific techniques to place your target audience "under the influence."

The Bizarreness Effect

The Bizarreness Effect holds that creating bizarre images out of otherwise-mundane ones can help lodge those images in the memory. Let's go back to our opening example -- an image of an egg in a frying pan, paired to the idea of a brain on drugs. These two incompatible, less-than-memorable notions form an unforgettable metaphor when you put them together.

Appealing to Both Sides of the Brain

You probably know that the left side of the brain is considered the more rational of the two hemispheres. It's one that responds to facts, reasons and logic -- but it's not the one that makes your target customer buy. That impulse comes from the right side of the brain, which is commonly associated with creativity, emotion and intuitive thought. Ideally, your marketing content appeals to both hemispheres. Your feature statements pile on fact after fact in support of your products or services, while your benefit statements hit readers where they live emotionally by helping them envision how their lives will be improved by those products or services.

Repetition, Rhythm and Rhyme

Just as the major search engines take notice of repeated, relevant keywords in your marketing content, the brains of your target audience will respond to repetition. The more you repeat a statement, the more convincing it becomes--simply because it's being constantly reinforced in the brain. Rhythm and rhyme can then make that statement more memorable, just as they tend to make song lyrics stick in your head. Think about all the great catchphrases you've heard over the years. Still thinking about them? Exactly.

Reticular Activation

If familiarity breeds recognition, then specificity breeds familiarity. If you try to appeal to everybody in the world, in every possible scenario, your message is probably so generic that it has no strong psychological effect on any individual. But if you paint a specific "How many times has this happened to you?" kind of picture, your ideal customer may think, "Wow, I'm having that exact problem right now. These people are talking to me!" That reaction is coming from a bundle of neural fibers called the reticular network, which acts as a kind of high-level "lookout" that waits for stimuli it recognizes as something we need to pay attention to right now, as opposed to the mass of more generic information the brain doesn't have time to bother with. Target your message as precisely as possible, and you'll be targeting that reticular network.

Persuasive copywriting is as much about psychology as it is about sheer writing skill. An experienced marketing copywriter can help you apply both for maximum effect. Contact me today and let's talk about how we can influence your target market!

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!

Want More Timely Marketing Content? Think Seasonally!

I'm writing this post about a week after Martin Luther King Day, and about three weeks after New Year's Day. Did these holidays offer particular opportunities for your business? Did they at least align themselves nicely with your organization's brand identity, mission, values or goals -- and if so, did your marketing content reflect or comment on them?

Of course you want to populate your blog, social media channels and other inbound marketing platforms with timeless or "evergreen" content that will always matter to your target audience (and always help you rank higher in search results). But national, state or local observances of all kinds make an impact on our daily lives. The seasons themselves can play a huge role in how consumers behave, what they search for and what they buy. Take Valentine's Day, which is coming up in just under three weeks. If you're a candy maker, a confectionary retailer, an upscale restaurant or a florist, does this holiday matter to you? Of course it does, so you'll advertise special discounts, storewide sales or other promotions accordingly. It would also make good sense to blog on the topic, if only to jog your potential customers' memories on the subject and push them into action.

But seasonal behaviors are often much less obvious than that -- which is where online analytic tools and savvy can come in handy. For example, if you have a particular product you want to promote, try running that keyword through Google Keyword Planner or Google Trends to see how the numbers for that product spike or drop at specific times of year. You may find that the search timing appears disconnected to the relevant time of year; people planning a June wedding, for instance, aren't going to wait until June to engage all the necessary services. Analytics help you understand when and how fast the "gears" of the consumer decision-making process actually turn -- and this enables you to time your marketing content to reach them at just the right moment.

Get imaginative with your seasonal approach to content marketing. Yes, Mardi Gras, Valentine's Day and President's Day tend to grab all the media attention in February, but what about Groundhog Day? Doesn't this goofy minor holiday have something to say about the advent of warmer springtime weather -- and might those weather changes (for better or worse) influence your audience's buying behaviors? If you're in the health and wellness industry, what about all the national health awareness days that occur in February, such as American Heart Month, National Children's Dental Health Month and African Heritage & Health Week? Or what about state and local holidays such as Texas Independence Day or Maryland Day? 

All of the observances mentioned above -- and many, many others -- represent golden opportunities for touching your target market with especially timely and relevant information. So get ahold of a skilled, experienced marketing copywriter and start seasoning your marketing calendar with seasonal content!

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!

The Numbers Game: How Metrics Can (and Should) Influence Your Business Marketing Content

Like so many other right-brained individuals, I was never any good at math. Even today, I feel much more comfortable working with words than navigating numbers. I’m sure many businesspeople feel the opposite way. But when you’re tasked with creating marketing content for your business (with or without the aid of a freelance marketing copywriter), you should know that there’s one area where words and numbers can enter into a powerful partnership -- and that’s in the relationship between your marketing content and your marketing metrics.

Metrics, or key performance indicators or whatever you want to call them, are the numbers that tell you how well your current efforts are working for you. The king of all marketing metrics, of course, is the revenue generated by your marketing. But that grand total won’t tell you which bits of your marketing content are actually helping to boost it and which one are doing no good at all. To obtain that level of detail, you need to examine the performance of each piece of marketing content -- every web page, every contact form, every blog post, every video, every step along the buyer’s journey. Here are a few ways your metrics can enlighten you:

Web traffic and referral sources - How many visitors does your website receive in a given period of time, an even more importantly, where are they coming from? If you’re getting the lion’s share of them from ads or blog posts, which of these items are scoring highest -- and which keywords seem to be at the center of this success? If, for example, the phrase “alligator shoes in Austin, Texas” is pushing thousands of new friends onto your custom shoe retail site, then you’ll know you need to pump out more ads and articles mentioning this hot property. On the other end of the success scale, if your B2B services company is getting surprisingly few click-throughs from your LinkedIn page, then maybe the LinkedIn page's content could use some polishing.

Drop-off points - Are there specific spots in your online marketing content that seem to be sabotaging your lead generation efforts? If so, the right metrics can point those places out.  For instance, if your red-hot lead suddenly grows cold when faced with a call to action or a request for personal data, then he will likely drop off of your site at that point -- possibly never to return. If lots of people seem to be exiting your site at that specific point, then maybe you’ve introduced the hard sell a little too early in the process. You might need to create additional content, or improve the content you have, on the pages leading up to this one so the viewer is better primed to sign up for that newsletter or click that “Order Now” button.

A/B Test Results - This method of testing your marketing content’s effectiveness works equally well for both online and print content. Say you want to entice a specific target market into trying your products by offering a free gift, but you’re not quite sure what kind of offer will make the biggest impact. With A/B testing, you might simply create two different marketing postcards, each one offering a different freebie, and mail them out to a sliver of your audience. The gift that gets the biggest response is clearly the more effective choice, so now you can switch all your efforts toward distributing that postcard. You can do the same thing with a landing page by subtly varying the page layout, offer, call to action, or some other aspect and then showing one of two versions to each half of your incoming traffic. Whichever one scores the highest number of responses is the one with the Right Stuff. 

Don’t keep using the same old marketing content just because it sounds good and looks good. Measure the effects of that content on your audience, and then refine it accordingly until the results it gets are good, too. Let your numbers help shape your content, and you’ll find that your content starts to pull in some nicer numbers!

Different Content for Different Applications: Blogs vs. Email Marketing vs. Direct Mail

If you've been involved with marketing for any length of time, you're well aware of the need to put fresh, relevant content in front of your target audience on a regular basis. You may also understand the need to approach different kinds of audiences with variations in content, style and tone. What how does your choice of medium impact what you say and how you say it? Let's look at three popular content marketing channels -- blogs, email drip campaigns and direct mail -- to see how these different media use written content.

Content for Blogs

Your organization's blog can serve a multitude of purposes as a powerful inbound marketing tool. It's your website's dedicated news channel, announcing important advances, product or service rollouts, changes in key personnel and other exciting tidings. It's a thought leadership resource, feeding your readers valuable information that they can use in their own lives. It can even act as a straight-up billboard to promote that big upcoming sale. For the most part, however, these tidbits are presented in the form of articles -- articles meant to pop up in search results when your prospect seeks the online solution to a pressing problem or question. So you want to create genuinely helpful, interesting, engaging articles on a wide range of "evergreen" topics that relate directly to what you do. Some of them might be bound to a specific time of year or situation, while others are presented more as introductions to basic concepts -- not sales pitches. A critical feature of blog articles is the judicious use of keywords in your titles, headers and body text -- with them, you can expect your wisdom to go unread.

Content for Email Drip Campaigns

On the surface, email articles for drip marketing campaigns may not appear too different from blog articles, offering a few hundred words of useful information in an entertaining, readable manner. But there's one big difference -- these articles are written as responses to specific actions taken (or not taken) by the readers. For example, prospects who expressed initial interest in a product but failed to buy it might receive an article about how to select the ideal (whatever the product is) for their needs, prompting them to take a second look at the item they passed up. Email offers can be triggered in the same way. Customers who haven't purchased anything in, say, six months might receive a special "thank you" offer such as 10 percent off their next total purchase price. When you prepare these pieces, you first need to lay out a decision tree of directives: "If they do X, send them email Y," "If they don't do X, send them email Z," and so forth. You then create the individual content to suit each "if/then" trigger point in your plan.

Content for Direct Mail

Direct mail print marketing campaigns can take lots of different forms, from "personal" letters to colorful postcards, and they may use the same automated triggering strategy as an email drip campaign. But they also tend to have a broader, more general reach because the initial round of mail is sent out to everyone in a particular set of zip codes, not just those who have had previous dealings with the brand. The content you create for these pieces must therefore make a bigger, louder, more sales-y splash than either blog content or targeted email content. You might include a few lines of information or education text in there somewhere, but let's face it -- most people are conditioned to receive their serious information online, especially in this age of mobile marketing via smart devices. So save your brassiest, most blatant promotions, sales, announcements, and calls to action for the printed word, and let the other media do the heavy lifting.

All three types of marketing can be highly effective in helping you increase sales and grow your business. Just make sure you're using each medium to its best advantage by providing the right content for the right job. And if you find it all a bit overwhelming, don't hesitate to contact a professional copywriter for help!

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!