Writing For The Web: How Good Copy Becomes Bad Marketing

When it comes to writing websites, what is good for the search engines is often not good marketing.

Why? Because almost inevitably, when you write to please the search engines, you write about the features of your service. But you should be writing about the benefits for your customers.

This is a fundamental problem and one you have to take into account at every stage of creating the copy for your website. You have to achieve a balance between writing for people or writing for search engine robots. The balance will be subtly different for every business. You'll probably have to keep experimenting. It all depends really on how important search engine traffic will be to your organisation. First a quick recap on the basic issue of search engine copy.

Search engine optimisation (often called SEO) basically means making sure your website ranks highly with Google and other search engines. Google wants to give people the right, relevant information. It does this by reading the copy on your website.

If certain words are used frequently, Google will calculate that the site is relevant for that "keyword". When people search for that keyword, Google flags your site as one worthy of consideration.

So, when a copywriter creates his own website, he tries to use the word "copywriter" as frequently as possible.

It's no good just listing the word either. It needs to be in real sentences. What's more, it's much better to use the keyword at or near the start of a sentence. You also need the keyword in the main headline, in the first paragraph, and as often as possible thereafter.
So, you end up writing about you, the copywriter, and the copywriting that you can offer. Features of your service.

Where are your customers in all this? Any good copywriter, in fact even a complete beginner, knows that you need to turn the features of your service into benefits for the customer. It's just good marketing.

The copywriter should be explaining how he can increase sales, attract customers, save the client money, provide exceptional service and so on.

The same is likely to happen whatever business you're in. If you're a graphic designer, a client might come to you because they want you to create a professional image for their business.

But they don't search for "professional image", "design impact", or "creativity". They search for "graphic designer." So your copy has to keep mentioning "graphic designer" this, "graphic designer" that.

What's the solution? If you know an easy one, please share the secret. For most organisations and businesses, the answer is going to be a balance. You need to know how important Google searches are to you. If the answer is "not much" because visitors come from other sources – perhaps through a direct mail campaign, Internet advertising clicks, or because they are a regular customer and have you bookmarked – then your copy should weighted more towards good marketing, with less emphasis on search engine robots.

But if Google searches are everything to your organisation, then you'll have to play the game by their rules.

Carefully written copy can at least try to play both games. You can keep using keywords, but always bear in mind that you need to bring the focus back onto benefits for your customer.

It's not easy, and it can be a painstaking process. But that in essence, is what good web writing should be about: keeping one eye on the search engines and pleasing them when necessary, but always bringing it back to people, to customers, to benefits. Because that's good marketing.

Copywriting For Search Engines & Directories

To get optimal listings in search engine and directory queries, keywords and key concepts must be placed strategically throughout your web pages. To summaries, you need these words and phrases in:

1. Title tags

2. Meta-tags (keywords and descriptions)

3. Headings (if used)

4. Body text, and

Alt-attribute in the image source tags
When online marketing professionals optimize a web site for search engine and directory queries, they should not spend most of their time redesigning the layout (in HTML) or submitting the site to the search engines. Most of their time should be spent on researching, writing good copy that will index well in search engines, and writing thorough, accurate descriptions for directory submissions. Good web copy must contain well-researched and varied keywords and key concepts based on a web page's topic; accurately reflect the web pages' content; and be strategically placed throughout a web page as mentioned above.

Most sales and advertising "fluff" should be eliminated.

Here's an example (and one of our pet peeves). How many of you have seen this scam, "Put your printed brochure on the web!" Print advertising copy contains a lot of "fluff" phrases such as "service that is second to none." Search engine analysis? "Service" is a stop word in some search engines and will be ignored in a search query. "Second to none?" How many people do you know really search using that phrase? When we are looking for something on the web, we are going to type in exactly the type of product or service we are looking for, not sales and advertising "fluff."

Web copywriting should contain keywords and key concepts without all the "fluff." Web copy has to flow and be strategically placed to get your web pages ranked well in search engine and directory queries. Your potential customers will also appreciate being able to find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. That's just good customer service.

The one time that web copywriting is extremely important is your site submission to Yahoo. Although Yahoo reserves the right to change or modify the site description you send them, if you can submit a well-written description containing your most important keywords and key concepts without word stacking, Yahoo will likely keep most of your description intact.

Good copywriting is a necessary element of both online and offline marketing. If you do not have experience in writing good copy for the web, we recommend that you hire an online marketing consultant to initially write the copy for you. Then you can learn from the copy you paid for. The more practice you get at web copywriting, the better you will get at it.

Is re-centralization the new SEO and effective copy must-have for CMS?

The Issue:

The Content Management System (CMS) heralded a new age. Adding information to the web was no longer the realm of a solitary webmaster and in theory, anyone inside an organisation could update content, post press releases and evolve the company’s online presence easily. It was a revolution.

Using a CMS not only makes it so much simpler to update content and create new pages, it allows for the constant site-wide tweaks needed to coast through search engine algorithm changes. And once you have a dynamic URL rewriter, nothing should stand in the way of getting your unique compelling copy into the search engines and attracting all sorts of traffic. Content is “king” after all.

There is one major issue however. By de-centralizing the editorial process and giving multiple people the ability to add and change the website’s copy, your content may actually suffer. Diluted keyword density (effecting search engines results), poor readability (incorrect grammar and sentence structure) and uncertain intent (not sales driven enough in tone) can lead to disastrous copy. Bad writing is jarring for the user and detracts from your business acumen. Even with an Editor to oversee new content, there may be inconsistencies between writers and the process of editing and optimising content can be time consuming, bringing your “instant” CMS process to a standstill.

A Solution?

Designers of bespoke content management systems for large ecommerce websites know the many benefits of CMS and are not prepared to go back to the “dark ages”. The challenge for the designers, developers and day to day users of content management systems is to ratify the search engine and syntax issues, while continuing to empower web writers.

The answer to this challenge may come from re-centralizing the final steps of the edit process while still giving individual writers the flexibility to add content themselves. Internet savvy companies are looking at ways to standardize their copy and make the output search engine effective, by evolving their content management platforms.

The result is proactive CMS with a built-in process to standardize and optimise new content, and the dawn of a new age when it comes to adding content to your website.

How Blogging Impacts Mainstream Marketing

Because I'm a journalist and copywriter who also reads and writes blogs, people who don't use the Internet as much as I do have started to ask me some searching questions of late. Some of them sound worried.

They have heard a lot about blogging and the impact it could have on traditional marketing.

One person even asked me (perhaps a little concerned) if PR teams will be replaced with bloggers. I don't see it, I reassured them.

PR is also about managing people and that will always be important. The mainstream media isn't about to disappear, and the majority of the population probably couldn't care less about blogs. For all the hype, blogging should be seen as a potential addition to a marketing portfolio.

The place blogging may have its biggest impact is on areas of the trade press.
There is a revolution in publishing taking place, sparked by the new forms of advertising such as Google ad sense. This has made it possible for someone running a blog site, with a staff of one and overheads of almost nothing, to start earning a living from their publishing.

If the blogger can get readers, then Google places the ads (relevant to the content) – and you have a publishing business. This gives a lot of people an incentive to provide great content – so that they get more readers, and more money from ads.

It's just like the traditional press, but without the need for offices, advertising sales teams, HR departments etc.

This works best in niche areas. Soon, there may not be much need for magazines about new gadgets, or mobile phones, or ride-on-lawn mowers or whatever. Because the blogs have it covered, providing more up-to-date information and readers who are ready to buy – and can simply click on the advert.

The everyday bloggers have a new-found power and are not about to go away. Some blogs now get millions, even tens of millions of readers a day. They are rivalling the mainstream media – and if the US government can't control them, what chance does a small company or even a big enterprise have?

Companies and blogs

It's still pretty early days for companies using blogs, and the whole thing is evolving. It will probably settle down into one more piece in the jigsaw, another communication channel that companies can use.

The style used in company blogs needs to be less "written by committee" and more personal and spontaneous.

Companies that try to use too much subterfuge in the blogging world are exposing themselves to a potential backlash. There's a great emphasis on honesty in the blogging world – for example bloggers will often end a post with a "disclosure" note which mentions any conflict of interest.

At a simple level, blogging can be seen as simply another way of publishing information on the Internet. It's useful because it is so fast and it's easy to get a range of people involved quite quickly.

However, there are real skills involved to good blogging. Not only does the writing have to be engaging, colourful, funny, informative etc, but the writer also needs to take account of search engine optimisation techniques – which basically means using the right keywords to ensure the blog shows up in the search engines.

At it's most sophisticated, blogging is being used to create "viral marketing" campaigns – to create a "buzz" around a product as though this were coming from ordinary people. This is a whole new field of marketing / advertising…