The Battle For Interesting Content by Paul Grimsley
People get lost in the technical aspects of a thing — in the mechanics of a thing. It’s easy to get bogged down in the must-dos and the must-haves of SEO and to lose sight of the fact that you have to put some meat on the bones of the writing; you actually have to have writing there which is interesting. The best barometer for how well you are doing is to survey someone who knows nothing about SEO.
Sit down an amateur or a total novice in front of a screen and ask them to wade through something that has been “optimized” but has only really been stuffed full of keywords and it won’t take them long to turn up their nose at it — why? because it is tedious to read. It isn’t worth investing time in. Writing like this may give you an initial boost, but in the long term it isn’t going to count for much.
Great — so the search engine has found you, you are on the first page of the Google Listings. What happens then? What’s your bounce rate? How many people actually convert into customers? How much of a quality experience does your site provide for the viewer? Because here’s the thing, sure Google is judging page quality by certain criteria (certain things included), but in a naturally well written article a lot of those points are covered already. It’s a guide — a way to assess your writing; it isn’t suggesting you pare the content down just to satisfy a bare minimum.
As a person looking to get good marketing you should be on the look out for people that are trying to cut corners. Anyone trying to push the notion that the marketing of your site can be pulled off with the panache of a one night stand is someone you should avoid; in the same way that sales has always been about building relationships, the online iteration of marketing is the same.
Once you have got someone to buy a service from you, or a product, you want to keep them, you want that relationship — a website is this in microcosm, and any marketing should retain that ethos. You want to start your relationship with your customer on the right footing, and you want to carry that forward.
In the same way that people want to short cut the initial part of the relationship building, they often want to short-change the relationship later on as well. Not everything can be left to run on automatic, and if it is your client will soon pick up on it. It is not dissimilar to those situations where one partner in a relationship puts in no effort, and then someone outside sees the value in the person and starts to go after them (starts to out in an effort), pretty soon they are going to end up getting wooed away. It can all be avoided quite simply by working at, by investing time — this is all good content writing is about … taking the time and care to make something that satisfies the search engines but which displays care for the viewpoint of the audience reading.
