The ‘long tail’ is a much talked-about concept in internet search circles, but one that is generally poorly understood – especially amongst clients, who most need to grasp its importance before they sign off on your marketing strategy for their site.

In fact, the term ‘long tail’ itself isn’t that useful, since it refers to a graph depicting a particular quirk of probability distribution. This is hardly the most useful illustration, unless your audience is well versed in statistics.

Going fishing

The graph itself represents the reality that a ‘population’ (or market, in this case) is composed roughly equally of a small number of large players and a large number of small players (the graph’s ‘long tail’). In practice, there are better ways of explaining the concept than with a graph.

Let’s say you’re a fisherman with a small boat, making a living by selling fish by the pound to local restaurants. You could go about this two ways. You could pour all of your time and effort into catching one of the rare but huge fish out there, fulfilling your month’s quota in one major coup. The problem with that is that there are other, bigger players around who are far better equipped to hunt the big fish, and they’re likely to get there first every single time.

The atún's tasty, but merluza are easier to catch

The alternative is to cast your net wide, looking to catch the small fish that the other hunters tend to ignore. OK, so they won’t make you rich overnight. But the thing to remember is that they are an easy win. Competition for these fish is low – sometimes even non-existent. Because they’re so plentiful and easy to catch, they soon start to add up: as the old Scots saying goes, many a mickle makes a muckle. It’s far quicker, cheaper and easier to catch your quota of fish this way than it is to stake everything on snaring that one prized leviathan of the deep. It’s a strategy that works for the humpback whale, which effortlessly filters tons of minuscule plankton out of the sea water rather than going for the occasional big prey, like a killer whale.

Online fish

The same principle goes for the long tail of internet search. It’s hard work – not to mention prohibitively expensive and time-consuming – to target a broad keyword, even if it does get millions of searches a month.

Try to rank for ‘shoes’, for example, and you stand no chance. But collect some of the smaller, more specific and relevant searches that have comparatively little competition – ‘sports shoes London’, ‘tennis shoes London’, ‘London sports shops’ – and you can quickly aggregate more hits than you ever would by aiming for the impossibly ambitious keyword.

The same goes for products. Bookstore owners know they will make good money out of a small number of disproportionately popular titles – the Harry Potter series and Dan Brown’s books, for example. But they also know that most of their income isn’t going to come from those books. It’s going to come from the hundreds or thousands of books they sell in small numbers: the odd copy here and there that all adds up.

Long tail = higher conversion rate

Lack of competition isn’t the only factor, though. Because these terms are very specific, the conversion rate is vastly superior. If you somehow manage to rank for one of the broad terms, you are going to be inundated with masses of irrelevant hits. Your traffic will rise, but few of these hits will lead to a sale.

For example, if you market commercial property in London but simply aim to rank for ‘property’, the majority of your site’s visitors won’t be interested. They will include people looking for residential property, people outside of London and outside the UK, and so on.

But the long tail keywords indicate that the visitor is looking for something quite specific, and is far more likely to buy it when they find it on your site. Experience suggests that perhaps only 1-3 percent of high-traffic but broad keywords actually convert. For specific queries in the long tail, that rises to around 50 percent. Look at it this way. If you own a store that sells left-handed golf clubs, who would you rather walks through your doors in a day: 1,000 golfers, or 1,000 left-handed golfers?

In addition, the reported figures for the number of broad keyword searches are often inaccurate. The reason for this is that they are artificially inflated by site owners misguidedly chasing the big fish, and then continually entering their own search terms to check where they rank! These ‘fake’ searches can account for around a third of the total in some cases – further decreasing your conversion rate if you target those terms.

Find your niches

If you’re in any doubt about the effectiveness of understanding and applying the long tail theory, it might help to know that enormously successful online stores like Amazon and eBay operate along just such lines – selling a few products in bulk and many more in smaller numbers.

At the other end of the scale there is the phenomenon of niche websites. These are sites designed to capture traffic for very specific terms – keywords with perhaps only a couple of thousand searches a month, but very little competition. Monetised with AdSense or affiliates, these sites might only make a few pounds a day. But there are lots of people who use portfolios of such sites (often totally unrelated to each other) to bring in a very respectable income.

Conclusion

In summary, then, there are three good reasons why you should target the long tail.

• Firstly, competition for these terms is low – sometimes even zero – because no one else has bothered to do the work to identify and target them.
• Secondly, they add up to bring in more traffic than the few ‘head’ terms. Check the analytics from any successful and well-optimised site and you’ll see that as well as the small number of search terms that deliver big traffic, there are dozens or hundreds that each deliver a relative handful of hits. Moreover, you’ll probably see that the totals of each are roughly equal. Ignoring the long tail means you could be cutting your potential traffic in half.
• And thirdly, the conversion rate for long-tail terms is an order of magnitude higher than the broad searches because they are so specific, indicating that the visitor to your site knows exactly what they want and will buy it when they find it.

These lead to one very obvious bottom line: long tail terms are far more lucrative. Target the long tail and you will see a far higher ROI than if you spend unnecessary time and money going after the prestigious ‘big’ terms.

• Kes Phelps (@kesphelps) is an SEO consultant specialising in link building and director at LinkJuice.co.uk. Kes focuses on gaining high quality links to increase traffic and rankings, using tactics that safeguard the client’s brand values.

The Chinese word bin, meaning 'guest'

Choosing a blog for your guest post

Initiatives such as Be My Guest provide an ideal platform for bloggers to approach each other. But you can also find suitable venues independently – just find a blog you like and submit a polite email to its owner, asking if you can guest on their blog.

The blog you choose needs to be relevant to your own site, and the more directly relevant the better. If you sell computer equipment, you won’t get much benefit from blogging at an angling site. The audience won’t be interested in your content, and the backlink (see below) will give you very little SEO benefit.

The ideal host blog is probably at a competitor site, since the domain is likely to be relevant to the same keywords as yours and their readership is likely to be similar to yours. But getting a guest slot with a competitor can be difficult if you don’t already know them somehow, for obvious reasons. (Build up a relationship through social media first, then ask.) So you might find it easier to target related sites that aren’t direct competitors, but still have busy and popular blogs. Look up and down the ‘food chain’, and side to side for linked niches. For example, a graphic designer could post at the blog of a web developer; a pie-maker could guest for an outlet that stocks their wares.

The approach

When you make your guest posting approach, it’s important to bear in mind the underlying transaction of guest blogging, which isn’t what it might seem at first glance.

On one level, offering to guest on someone’s blog is doing them a favour. You’re offering them free content that they would otherwise have to create themselves. You may also be offering fact, opinion or style that is different from the host’s, bringing welcome variety to their blog. If you have a high profile, or can promote your post in lots of channels, your guest post might attract more traffic than your host normally gets.

However, it’s not all one-way traffic. On another level, guesting on someone’s blog is actually an opportunity to promote yourself, enhance your profile and link back to your site. If you are a smaller fish than your host – that is, the blog you’re guesting on is very high-profile (or has a higher average PageRank than your site), then it’s actually the host who is doing you a favour by allowing you to blog.

So it’s a good idea suggest a mutual guest posting arrangement, and give your host as much flexibility as you can in terms of what you’re going to blog about, how much you’ll write and so on.

The get-out

To avoid embarrassment, it’s polite to give your host the opportunity to decline your offer of a guest post if they want to – not implicitly, but by saying so out loud. They might not want your style of writing or subject area on their blog, or they might not want anyone else guesting on their blog. At the end of the day, it’s their blog.

By the same token, it adds reassurance if you give them ‘final cut’ – the option to amend your guest post, ask for it to be amended or just reject it, with no hard feelings. Even with hundreds of solid gold posts on your own blog, your host can’t be sure what you’re going to give them.

To add weight to your initial approach, you might want to send your proposed guest post (or an example of one) along at the same time – with the option to request a replacement, or course.

Guest posting and SEO

The significance of guest posting for SEO can hardly be overstated. Most hosts will let you include a link back to your site in your guest post, perhaps in the brief author biography that accompanies your post. You can control the anchor text of that link, which is crucial. Your post title will almost certainly form all or part of the URL’s HTML page title, which is also key for SEO. And finally, you control the content of the page, since you’re writing it.

All that adds up to a brilliant way to gain a keyword-text backlink from a keyword-relevant and keyword-dense page, perhaps on a keyword-relevant domain such as a competitor’s site. In other words, the holy grail of SEO. Blogs are seriously rated by search engines because they are human-edited, content-rich, niche-specific online resources where links carry a lot of authority.

Also, blog posts get comments. Commenters do your SEO work for you, extending the content of your guest post along relevant lines and bigging up the popularity of the guest post in Google’s eyes – which, in turn, boosts the value of the backlink it contains.

Blogs that are integrated with social media through plugins like ShareThis and TweetMeme carry their own ready-made gauge of relevance and authority – which Google almost certainly uses to get another handle on how strong the page content is. If your guest post is popular in social media, that increases the link juice passed to your site by the backlink in your guest post.

Finally, your guest post might also attract backlinks itself, which also increases the value of the backlink it contains to your site – the phenomenon known as ‘link boosting’ in SEO circles. You could even build links to your guest post yourself, but keep it strictly white hat or you’ll nobble your host’s rankings – the blogging equivalent of leaving stains on the guest towel, and counterproductive for you too.

To sum up, guest blogging offers killer backlinks for modest effort, which most SEOs are desperate for. In fact, it’s practically the only way to gain such powerful links through your own proactive efforts – rather than being passively granted them, as when someone lists you in their blogroll.

The key points for SEOing your guest posts are:

• Include keywords in the title. You can’t control the HTML page title of your guest post, but it’s almost certain to mirror or contain the title of the post. Put keywords near the start if you can (e.g. ‘Snowboarding essentials’ rather than ‘The essentials of snowboarding’).
• Include keywords two or three times in the opening paragraph, and at least once in each subsequent paragraph – if you can. Don’t insult your host by trying to stick ridiculous keyword spam on their blog. They’d be entirely justified in rejecting it.
• Include synonyms and variations of your keywords too. Too much repetition looks unnatural.
• Use relevant keywords (rather than the name of your site) in the backlink to your site, if you can. Author bios often provide a good opportunity. For example: ‘Tom Albrighton is a copywriter…’
• Don’t push it with the backlinks. One link towards the end of the guest post is acceptable. Linking off the first paragraph looks spammy; more than one link looks greedy.

What about the SEO implications of reciprocal guest posting? If you’re getting a backlink from your host, aren’t they also getting one from you? Well, yes they are, but this isn’t such a big problem. Reciprocal links between relevant sites won’t harm your standing in Google; it’s only the spammy reciprocals that get you into trouble.

Exchanging guest posts with a direct competitor can often be beneficial: you’ll both get an SEO boost relative to the competition, and just because your rival has gained doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost out. If they are at #15 in Google, you’re at #11 and you each rise three spots as a result of the reciprocal link, you’ll be on page one and they’ll be a step nearer to it.

If you’re worried, you could exchange guest posts with a similar player who speaks the same language but is too far away in geographical terms to compete with you.

Content of guest posts

So far, I’ve taken it for granted that your guest post will be good enough to be accepted, read and commented. But to actually achieve that, you’ll need to create some first-rate content.

You might approach guest blogging with the idea of palming off some second-rate or hastily produced content on your host. Forget it. While you can get away with ‘potboiler’ posts at your own blog – brief comments on news stories, whimsical reflections, half-formed analyses, reposting YouTube videos – it’s really not on to offer this kind of thing for publication elsewhere. Instead, you should work hard to write the best post you can for the host blog: something at least as good as the content you post yourself.

Partly, this is out of courtesy to your host, but it’s also based in enlightened self-interest. Remember, you want them to create some quality content for you in return, and/or invite you back to guest post again. But also, as I’ve explained, the SEO power of your guest post is directly related to its quality, which governs the inbound links and social-media votes it will attract.

With your own blog, you can hit and miss – blogging away weekly or even daily until you discover by trial and error what your audience will take a shine to. With guest posts, however, you’ve got just one opportunity to post some killer content at a new domain that will attract links, comments and social-media mentions. So give yourself the best chance of success.

It can feel a bit sad to ‘give away’ content you’re particularly proud of. If so, remind yourself that your premium content will probably bring you more benefit at someone else’s blog than it would at your own. That should help you get over the heartache…

My guest posts

• Is copywriting evil? for Ben Locker
• Copywriting for conversions for MediaVision
• If you don’t know, say so for JargonWriter
• Five things your home page can do without for Emily Cagle
• Take your time for The Right Writer
• The top five freelance fears, and how to face them for Diary of a Mad Freelancer
• When clients attack for Freelance Folder
• Google’s Farmer update and the squeezed middle for Econsultancy

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving the position of your website page in ‘natural’ search results. ‘Natural’ means the unpaid listings that appear centrally on Google’s results pages (as opposed to the ads that appear to the right or on top, with a coloured background).

In this article, I refer to ‘Google’ throughout, because it accounts for most searches. However, the same principles apply to all the search engines.

SEO breaks down into three key phases: choosing keywords, optimising your site and building links.

Choosing keywords

The first step is to choose the words or phrases that you’d like your site to appear for when they’re typed into Google. These are called search terms, key phrases or keywords.

There are three main things to consider when choosing keywords:

• How relevant the keyword is to your business and your target audience. Note that the words you use to describe your business may not be the ones people search for.
• How many people search for the keyword (sometimes called ‘search volume’). The more people search for it, the more traffic it’s likely to bring to your site.
• How competitive the keyword is (that is, how many other people are targeting it). The more competitive a term is, the more time, effort and money it will take to achieve a high ranking for it.

All these factors influence each other. Simple or ‘generic’ keywords (like ‘holidays’) are relevant to many businesses and attract huge search volumes, but are intensely competitive. Longer, niche keywords, sometimes called ‘long tail’ keywords (like ‘holiday cottages in Southwold’) are relevant to far fewer businesses, attract fewer searches and are less competitive.

You’re looking for the right balance between relevance, volume and competition, which will vary depending on your subject area, your audience and your budget. In some industries, it’s still feasible for small firms to target generic keywords; in others, long-tail is the only way to go.

Around 85% of searchers click on the first three results on page 1. Very few reach page 2. So a high ranking for a niche keyword may be much more valuable than a mediocre ranking for a generic one. Don’t be drawn off course by the lure of big traffic on generic terms – even if you get it, very little of it will convert to sales. Pick your targets and focus on keywords that will bring you the hottest leads for the least investment.

One very good way to narrow the field is by adding ‘geographic modifiers’ (place names), as in ‘holiday cottages in Southwold’ or ‘plumbers in Chiswick’. For many businesses, it makes a lot of sense to focus on nearby searchers.

Keyword tools such as Wordtracker, or Google’s own keyword tool, provide data on search volumes and competitiveness, as well as suggestions for related keywords. However, not all good keywords are intuitive or obvious – it can take a while to find the best ones.

Optimising your site

Having selected keywords, you need to make sure your site signals its relevance for those keywords to Google, by taking these steps:

• Assign keywords to pages. Your home page should target your most important keywords; use other pages to target other keywords. Consider creating special pages to target keywords that are important to your audience – products, services, places or queries.
• Include keywords consistently. Make sure the relevant keywords appear in the HTML page title, META description, headings and text of each page on your site. Write naturally, but favour the keyword rather than using synonyms, so it appears a few times, and always in the first paragraph. Include variants (‘design’, ‘designs’, ‘designer’, ‘designing’), since Google recognises these as relevant.
• Use headings appropriately. Include one <h1> heading near the top of the page, including the keywords for that page. If you use lower heading levels too, make sure they follow in logical order and don’t appear above the main heading.
• Include enough content. Include at least 250–300 words of text on each page. Don’t put text in images or Flash movies.
• Optimise internal links. When you link between pages on your site, in navigation menus and particularly in text, include the keywords relevant to the linked (destination) page in the text of the link. For example, if you link to a page on potato guns, make the link read ‘More on potato guns’ rather than ‘Read more’.
• Ensure usability. Create a user sitemap (list of pages with links) and a privacy page. Include your full address at the bottom of each page. Make sure all text contrasts with background colours (black on white is safest).

Building links

Google uses links from other sites (sometimes called ‘backlinks’) to assess the value of your site. Each link is viewed as a ‘vote’ – but not all links are equal; those from very popular or authoritative sites carry more weight. Link building is simply the process of creating and cultivating backlinks.

The key types of link are:

• Directory listings. Well-established, human-edited directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo! are particularly important, as are directories relevant to your niche. Sometimes, you have to pay to be considered for inclusion.
• Articles and PR. You can write, publish and distribute content relevant to your site at sites like Ezine Articles and PRWeb, with a link to your website. However, article links are likely to become much less valuable following Google’s recent Farmer/Panda update.
• Relevant sites. A link from any relevant site demonstrates relevance to a topic. In business, relevant sites are likely to be competitors, making blog links (below) the most likely means of gaining links. Links from public-sector sites (government departments, universities) carry huge authority, but are very difficult to obtain for commercial sites.
• Blog links. Since blogs are human-edited, rarely for profit, Google views links from relevant blogs highly. Cultivate links by writing guest posts for relevant blogs and (to a lesser extent) commenting on them.
• Social links. ‘Likes’ at Facebook and links from Twitter show Google that real people value your content.

Ideally, you should gain high-quality links steadily over time (a constant ‘link velocity’), demonstrating to Google that your site has sustained, consistent value.

Over the long term, it becomes more and more difficult to build additional links to a static, unchanging brochure site. This is one of the main reasons for having a blog – to create interesting, valuable content that people will want to link to.

For me, the key criterion was quality of output – not speed, website design or even cost. In this post, I’d like to revisit the concept of quality copywriting and explain why the whole scope of the Nublue test was so misguided – and what it tells us about the way people see blogging and online content generally.

True value

The key problem with the Nublue survey was that it only reflected the perspective of the client, not the target audience.

So, you think your new blog post is a cracker. It was easy to order, it arrived quickly and it was cheap. That’s great! I’m really happy for you. But the true test of quality is how your content fares out there on the web, and what benefit it brings you as a result. Only when it’s realised business benefit can you truly say it was quality content. Otherwise, your assessment of quality is just a personal judgement.

It may be going cheap, but will it ever bring you golden eggs?

The quality of a blog post has three dimensions.

• Commercial. What value will your post offer to customers? Will it help them make or research a purchase? Can it function as a landing page, guiding first-time visitors to the ‘business end’ of your site? And, whether they buy or not, will they form a positive impression?
• Reputation. Is this post truly unique? Is it going to build up your authority, credibility or standing in your niche? Does it differentiate you from competitors? Is it something you’d want prospective employees, partners or investors to read – and judge you on?
• Search and social. Is the post going to be commented, liked, tweeted and linked to? Is it going to be something you can push to social networks again and again, perhaps for many months? Is it going to get links and responses on other, reputable blogs?

If your posts aren’t valuable in these ways, why are you putting time, effort and cash into something that won’t bring you any benefit? Even if the content itself only costs a tenner, you still have to plan it, commission it, publish it, host it. Is it really worth it?

What’s the point?

‘Write me a post about IE9.’

‘Write me ten web pages about Irish whiskey.’

‘Rework this competitor’s content and make it unique so I can use it on my site.’

I get a lot of requests along these lines, and I always want to ask the same question: ‘Why?’

If it’s a blog post, what benefit will you really get from hastily written, internet-scraped, inaccurate or downright boring content? As noted above, no one will link to it, or like it, or comment on it, or (in all probability) even read it. It will just sit there, unloved and disregarded, making your blog look like a digital backwater. What’s more, there are hundreds of sites out there doing much the same thing; you’re aligning yourself with your competitors rather than differentiating. So what’s the point?

For SEO, the logic of cheap content is dubious at best. Even supposing you can get a ranking with your blatant spam (which gets harder by the day anyway), why should visitors stay on a site with average content? What impression will they form? How can such a site hope to convert traffic into sales?

For corporate web pages, the whole philosophy of ‘filling up’ the site with content as quickly or cheaply as possible is utterly misguided. As when buying a suit, a car or a meal, it’s about spending as much as you can afford to get the best possible result – scrimping and saving is just selling yourself short. And when you start thinking about hard performance factors like conversion rate, the idea of ‘cheap and cheerful’ makes even less sense.

The time factor is important too. While you spend months building a pointlessly derivative blog, or spamming the article sites with uninformative rubbish, your competitors are taking the quality route – building up such an advantage in terms of content, backlinks and SEO profile that you’ll simply never be able to overtake them. When success takes time, it’s best to start doing the right things right now.

Aim above adequacy

The depressing pursuit of ‘adequate content at best cost’, perfectly encapsulated by the Nublue exercise, misses the whole point of blogging – and online content creation in general.

Your aim should not be to create ‘me too’ content that achieves a passable standard of quality, but to make an exceptional and lasting mark on the internet with something that brings genuine, new value to the table.

But how do you get this wonderful stuff?

Choose better titles

Well, the first step is to stop posting dull, sheepishly topical briefs like ‘Review Internet Explorer 9’ to content mills and expecting anything good to come of it. A blog post can only be as good as the idea behind it.

Instead, try striking up a relationship with a copywriter who can come up with ideas that thousands of other people haven’t already covered. (Do I need to add that such a relationship can’t really be conducted via the web interface of a content mill?)

When you work with a professional writer regularly, they come to know your business very well. That puts them in the ideal position to consider how the expertise, knowledge and opinion you already have within your organisation could be turned into killer blog content.

What’s more, as you work together, you’ll become more alert and attuned to the blog ideas floating across your desk every day. Believe me, they’re there – but you won’t perceive them until you break free of the ‘get it done, get it cheap’ mindset.

Get better content

Having got a nice title together, make sure you honour it with some decent writing. Again, I don’t recommend going to a content mill, since you’ve got no control over who takes on your assignment, nor can you enter into a dialogue with them, nor is there any real mechanism for having your content revised or improved – which is the only path to quality.

Moreover, since they’re paid by the word, content-mill writers have zero incentive to add something extra in terms of research, snappy phrasing, humour, original opinion, different perspectives or anything else that might lift your post above the sea of mediocrity. So even the best writer, should you be lucky enough to get one, has no motivation to do the very things you want done.

It’s a crucial point, and one that content mills would rather their clients didn’t think about too deeply about. But there’s no way round it. The more time and effort goes into your post, the more likely it is to deliver lasting value to your business. There are no short cuts, no discounts, no quick and easy way. However, it does get easier the more you do it – provided you do it the right way in the first place.

Put quality over quantity

Finally, learn to put quality over quantity. Carefully considered content beats cheapo spam every time.

Some content mills crow over the fact that the typical freelance copywriter costs ‘ten times as much’ as their service, while glossing over the quality implications. For me, it’s very simple: while your cost per word is higher with a ‘real’ copywriter, your content is going to deliver far more benefit, however you measure it (backlinks, reputation, readership). Proper copywriters deliver far more bang for your buck.

Do they deliver ten times as much benefit, to justify their price? Well, as I’ve argued above, derivative and low-quality blog posts deliver little or no benefit at all, when you take all the factors into account. So a good blog post could be infinitely superior to a poor one.

To put it in the language of accounting, working with a copywriter makes content into an asset that delivers a return, rather than an overhead to be resented and minimised. Seen in this light, it’s easy to see why investing in it is worthwhile.

Start making sense

‘Best price’ offers, like the poor, will always be with us. In every sector, in every professional discipline, there will always be suppliers who opt for a value proposition based on the lowest price. And there will always be customers for them, too – people who see price as the overriding factor in every purchase, as well as those who lack the time or insight to analyse costs and benefits in a more balanced, reasoned way.

But when it comes to copywriting, there’s no getting away from it – the benefits from content-mill writing are small, and shrinking fast. That cheap content you’re buying could turn out to be very expensive indeed.

Craig, who trades as Straygoat Copywriting, was named in the first version of the article. At his request, it was edited to remove his name, but he ‘outed’ himself anyway by referring to the post on Twitter.

Conflict of interest

Several comments on the blog note the existing relationship between Nublue and content mill Copify, which comes top in the test.

The facts are as follows.

• Copify was co-founded by a former Nublue employee
• Copify operates from the same building as Nublue, and staff from the two firms know each other personally (confirmed in comments on the post)
• Copify is a supplier to Nublue
• Copify was nominated by Nublue for a Mashable award.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this constitutes a conflict of interest for Nublue, and whether the content delivered by Copify for the test was likely to be representative of its usual standard. (Craig was made aware that his copy was being used for a test, so it’s reasonable to assume that Copify also knew.)

The challenge

Shortly after the Nublue article appeared, I noted the points above on Twitter and received this reply from Copify:

As a rebuttal of the bias charge, it seemed rather thin; as a challenge, it seemed irrelevant. The real question is not whether I’m better than Copify’s writers, but whether Craig Wright is – despite what the Nublue test says. And that’s the focus of this article.

Scope of the test

Nublue asked for a 300-word blog post reviewing the beta version of Internet Explorer 9.

It rated the content providers in five areas, awarding scores out of ten in each category to arrive at a total score out of 50:

• cost
• ease of placing order
• speed of service
• usability of website
• quality of the finished article.

Copify and Text Broker came first and second with 49/50 and 46/50 respectively, with Craig in third place on 31/50. The other two content mills scored 9/50 and 4/50 because of problems with their service that don’t concern us here.

Category selection

Nublue’s assessment method, while perhaps even-handed prima facie, is actually highly questionable – because the choice of categories is arbitrary, and the weightings given to them are unbalanced.

For a content mill, ‘usability of website’ is key; for a freelance copywriter, it’s marginally relevant at best. A freelancer’s site is a portfolio with an email address attached; it has no real functionality.

Similar observations could be made on ‘ease of placing order’ and ‘speed of service’. A freelancer is unlikely to offer instant online ordering, because they’d want to discuss the brief before submitting a price. Similarly, an in-demand freelancer might not be able to turn a commission round in 24 hours, but their clients are willing to wait in order to get the writer they want.

Including these three categories inevitably biases the results towards content mills; in effect, the categories imply a preference for a Copify-style content service before we even get to the scoring. A fairer test would also reflect the strengths that freelance copywriters offer: listening, developing the brief, making helpful suggestions, responding to feedback, developing an understanding of the client’s business and so on.

Category weightings

Even if we give Nublue’s choice of categories the benefit of the doubt, there’s still a major problem with the weightings they’ve been given. Each category is evenly weighted (ten points), but four of the five categories focus on process rather than product, making the weighting given to quality far too low.

For example, are ‘usability of website’ and ‘ease of placing order’ really just as important as ‘quality of the finished article’? And is the way copy is ordered and delivered really three times as important as the actual quality of that copy, as the combined weighting of ‘usability of website’, ‘ease of placing order’ and ‘speed of service’ (30 points) implies?

In this model, a content provider could potentially deliver completely unusable content but still score 40/50 because they did it quickly, cheaply and efficiently. This seems like a case of ‘the operation was successful, but the patient died’.

Alternative assessment method

We could use a scoring method that gives equal weight to cost, quality and service. While this is also arbitrary, it does reflect the methods used elsewhere, for example at FreeIndex (customers score providers out of five for value for money, service and quality).

However, I would argue that, in copywriting specifically, quality is far more important than service and price. I’ll develop my argument more fully in a future post, but for now I will simply observe that the commercial and economic value delivered by (for example) a blog post depends on its power to generate social-media interest, attract backlinks and build authorial reputation – all of which are directly related to its quality.

Therefore, I propose a higher weighting of 30 points for quality, with cost and service together accounting for a further 20 points, to give this model:

• Cost: Score out of 10, as now.
• Service: Score out of 10, based on 3.3 points each for ease of placing order, speed of service and usability of website and calculated by adding Nublue’s scores in each area together and dividing by 3.
• Quality: Score out of 30 (calculated by multiplying Nublue’s score by 3)

As before, this gives a total score out of 50.

The table below shows how the three medal-winners would score under this new system, using Nublue’s own scores.

Assessment of quality

When I caught up with Craig, I found him understandably ‘angry’ at the results of the test. While he’s realistic about the way his costs and service stack up against the content mills, he takes issue with the evaluation of the end product.

‘I don’t care about being seen as expensive or slower,’ he said. ‘But what I don’t agree with is that the end result is of the same quality. As I stated in my comments on the blog, there is no way that Copify article can be seen as an objective review. It may as well have been written by Microsoft’s PR department.’

The Nublue brief is very clear: it asks for a review of IE9, not just coverage. The text of the brief includes these words (my italics):

This article will be aimed at Internet professionals and webmasters that may already be using IE9 or thinking about trying it.

The article should review Internet Explorer 9 with a focus on its performance and functionality for web users and developers. The article should make comparisons with other browsers that are available such as Firefox that are currently seen to have stronger developer ecosystems and stands [sic] compliant features.

While the Copify piece uncritically lists the features of IE9, press-release style, Craig’s expertly probes the areas where IE9 needs to prove itself to the web-developer community. Is it really fair to give both articles the same score?

‘It would have been good if some developers looked at the articles and commented, because I know which one they would have disliked the most – the pro-IE9 [Copify] one!’ laughs Craig. ‘Considering that developers were part of the target market, you’d expect something in the Copify article to provide them with a bit of info about how it is going to affect them. Would an IT expert/web developer have considered the Copify article was well researched and thorough? I doubt it!’

A commenter on the Nublue blog echoes these sentiments:

I did find it interesting that the Copify article and the freelance writer were ranked equally. I’m not even sure that the Copify article responded to the prompt. No evaluation of performance and functionality for web developers, no substantive comparison to other browsers, especially in the context of compatibility and developer ecosystems and no real consensus on whether IE9 is a competitor (“a step in the right direction”). Moreover, it’s technically inaccurate where there is substantive analysis.

To get an impartial developer’s perspective, I asked Gareth Thompson of Codepotato for his views on the three articles, as well as his score out of 30 for each. The texts were sent in a Word document with no accompanying details, and I didn’t outline the scope and intention of this post. As far as possible, it was a ‘blind’ assessment – a copywriting ‘Pepsi challenge’.

Gareth rated the Copify article 15/30, Text Broker 19.5/30 and Craig’s piece 25.5/30. ‘I think that article B [Craig] is a better article from the technology or “capabilities” point of view, as it explains the improvements that most web developers will want to know about,” he said. ‘Article C [Text Broker] just seems to miss the mark a little. Personally, out of the three articles I would have been more inclined to bookmark/recommend article B [Craig].’

When we plug Gareth’s scores into the more balanced scoring system, here’s what we find:

So there you have it – a much more balanced outcome. But I’m giving the final honours to Craig, for three reasons. Firstly, because Nublue marked him down on speed of service just because he was on holiday when they approached him. Secondly, because his article has the all-important social-media appeal that would have delivered true long-term value to the client – as Gareth confirmed in a blind test. And finally because he came top, convincingly, on quality – which should surely be the ultimate deciding factor.

Conclusion

I’ll leave the last word to Craig himself. ‘For an in-depth and considered view that gives your readership the answers they are looking for and adds value to your site, you’re better off with a freelance copywriter,’ he says. ‘One who takes the time to look past the press releases and investigate the real issues, concerns etc. – a process that takes more than an hour, and so costs more than £15!’

In a future post, I’ll expand on this point, explaining exactly why quality of content is so important – and why you ignore it at your peril.

I won’t explain Instant again, since Andrew’s done such a good job of it. For those who don’t know, long-tail searches are highly specific searches that lead to a smaller number of results. For example, a broad search term such as ‘ice cream’ leads to 111bn results, while ‘organic ice cream’ leads to 5,450,000 and ‘organic dairy free ice cream’ leads to 244,000. So ‘ice cream’ is a generic term, while ‘organic dairy free ice cream’ is a long-tail term. Long-tail terms are generally less competitive, but they attract less traffic; generic terms are more competitive and attract more traffic.

Andrew’s view is that Google Instant will encourage more long-tail searches, with the instant feedback encouraging people to type additional words to see how they modify the search results. I’m sure this is true. They’ll probably try chopping and changing their search modifiers too, as well as deleting them if they feel the resulting set of results is too small.

However, the order of words in long-tail terms will be crucial in determining the impact of Google Instant. Specifically, if the search modifiers come after the main keyword, I think there’s more likelihood of diversion before the search is completed.

Let me work through an example that’s close to my heart. Someone in Norwich needs a copywriter. So they go to Google and type in ‘norwich copywriter’. Until they type the second word, Google will have no idea what they’re searching for. With just ‘norwich’ typed in, they’ll probably be looking at a load of tourism sites. Then, once they go on to add ‘copywriter’, Google will give them the results they’re looking for.

But what if they type ‘copywriter norwich’? With Instant active, they’d see the (UK-wide) results for ‘copywriter’ before they typed ‘norwich’. At that point, they could easily think, ‘you know what? I don’t really need my copywriter to be in Norwich. Let me have a look at some of these ones.’ And if they click away from the search, they might never return.

Let’s suppose they do stay with the search. Two keystrokes later, at ‘copywriter no’, they might see the results for ‘copywriter nottingham’. They’re perhaps less likely to click a result at this point, but experience shows that we should never underestimate the laziness, inattention or sheer obtuseness of the average web user. Not everyone is hyper-search-literate, fine-tuning the Google machine to chime with their carefully considered intentions. People just don’t care that much what they click on. (You could argue that the whole PPC advertising phenomenon depends on that fact.) And even a mistaken click to a rockin’ site might be enough to divert them from their original intent.

Note that none of this could happen with the ice cream example discussed above. Since the adjectives precede the noun, Google has to wait until the end of the phrase to know what ‘thing’ the searcher wants to be organic and dairy free.

In other languages, where adjectives usually follow nouns (such as French), it would have a much better chance of showing some diverting results before the searcher got as far as entering all their modifiers.

To sum up, I think Instant will result in some ‘leakage’ back to generic terms from long-tail terms that previously locked in their traffic, particularly if the modifiers (adjectives, locations) in the search phrase follow on from the main subject (noun).

Also, although it’s less likely, a long-tail term including a string that will return a list of potentially relevant results (as with the nottingham example above) carries a smaller but still potentially damaging risk of leakage.

These changes could make some difference to the long-tail terms that are worth targeting: terms with differing word order that were previously equivalent might turn out to be less attractive, as might those including sub-strings that return potentially diverting results.

Brand bidding is the practice of bidding on the brand terms of a third party, so your ads appear when their brand is entered as a search term. For example, an insurance company X might bid on the brand term ‘Aviva’.

The idea is to grab traffic on the brand term and redirect it to your own site. The brand bidder’s reasoning is that if they can write a sufficiently eye-catching, memorable ad, the web user will click on it, arrive at their site and choose their product instead of those of the brand owner they originally searched for. The aim is diversion, in both the psychological and user-journey senses of the word.

Affiliate brand bidding

Affiliate sites sometimes bid on advertisers’ brands without authorisation, diverting traffic that rightfully ‘belongs’ to the advertiser to their own sites before directing it back to them, generating a commission from the advertiser in the process (while also inflating the bid cost for the advertiser). For example, a hotel booking site might bid on ‘Hotel Hilton’ (or whatever), perhaps promising reduced rates, to grab people who would probably have found the Hilton anyway.

One way to fight against this is for the brand owner to authorise a handful of affiliates (a ‘closed group’ in network terminology) to bid on its brand, with the traffic directed to approved landing pages or microsites devoted to the advertiser’s products. If done effectively, this technique allows advertisers to harvest a significant proportion of the traffic from page-one results while blocking out rogue bidders.

How brand bidding works

To illustrate how brand bidding works in practice, let’s work through an example. Fountain Partnership, the ethical copywriting agency based (like me) in Norwich, have recently begun bidding for my brand term, ‘abc copywriting’. The image below shows their ad appearing for the relevant search.

At the time of writing, Fountain’s ad appears for ‘abc copywriting’ and ‘copywriting abc’, but not ‘abc copywriting norwich’. This suggests that it has been set up to appear on an exact match for those two phrases. (You can read more about AdWords keywords matching options here.)

But couldn’t the ad also be targeting a broad match on ‘copywriting’ – as the ad for Copy Unlimited (on the right) presumably is? I don’t think so, because a search for ‘copywriting’ reveals that ad still appearing on page one, while Fountain’s doesn’t appear on the first ten pages. So we can deduce that Fountain are almost certainly targeting the brand term with their ad.

The legal position on brand bidding

In May 2008, Google announced that it was allowing brand bidding for the first time. From then on, advertisers could use third-party trademarks as target keywords, provided those trademarks don’t appear in the text of the ad. (It’s easy to see how using the brand in the actual ad could constitute ‘passing off’ – pretending to be someone else for commercial gain.)

This change proved controversial and was challenged in the courts in several countries, but to no avail – the outcome was that advertisers can bid on trademarks as long as the trademark terms aren’t included in the ad creative.

As a result, advertisers who depend on digital marketing have to be extremely vigilant about who is bidding on their brand, often using ad-monitoring technology to help them. (Read Google’s full policy on trademarks in PPC ads here.)

Assessing the threat of brand bidding

How much of a threat is brand bidding?

The search for a specific brand signals a strong interest in researching, or purchasing, a specific brand. Users are generally not in browsing or comparison mode when they search for brands.

Some brand owners use this argument to ignore brand bidding, whether by competitors or affiliates. ‘If someone’s searching for my brand,’ they reason, ‘they’re not going to click on an ad for a rival domain. And even if they do, they’ll realise their mistake immediately and click through to my site instead.’ This argument is given more weight if the brand owner appears at #1 in the natural results for their brand – as nearly every brand (including mine) does.

It sounds comforting, but it’s almost certainly not true in every case. Research shows that a significant proportion of search engine users (around 20%, from memory) click on the ads that appear above searches (as Fountain’s does).

It’s only natural, since they occupy the screen position where high-ranking natural results would appear in the absence of ads. People are accustomed to finding strong, relevant results there.

However, the raw stats are too crude. Many factors affect what people click on – most obviously, how relevant the content of an ad or search result is to their own search term. For a brand search, 20% is almost certainly wildly optimistic for an ad that doesn’t include the brand term in its text. But it could still get some traffic. And remember that it’s a risk-free deal for the brand bidder – they only pay when people click. And with little or no PPC competition for the brand term, they could pick up some very cheap visitors who are definitely interested in their offering on a general level.

Another factor is where the ad takes the visitor. Fountain Partnership’s ad simply leads to their home page, funnelling the web user down their standard sales channel. Arriving at this point, a user looking for my site might well backtrack, finding no message tailored to their search. But the ad could easily lead to a page featuring, say, a point-by-point comparison of ABC’s service against Fountain’s. Such a tactic might make visitors more likely to remain at their site.

See this post for an account of how Mazda ran ads targeting a term used by Pontiac as the basis for their online campaign, successfully diverting a huge wedge of valuable traffic to a page that compared their cars favourably to Pontiac’s.

Responding to brand bidding

Like any brand owner faced with brand bidding, I now have to decide what to do. A fair few people search on my brand: 43 visitors reached this site from that search during August 2010, which is more than one a day. What’s more, that traffic is very valuable to me, because it represents pre-qualified visitors – people who’ve heard of ABC and are motivated enough to search for the brand. For a B2B company, one visitor like that a day is worth having, and therefore possibly worth paying for.

The most common (and easiest) way to respond to brand bidding is to bid on your own brand, outbidding the brand bidder for the top AdWords slot. This was my chosen response and the image below shows the search results with my ad appearing.

Since I can use my own brand in the ad text with impunity, I benefit from having the matching words emboldened, which always helps to draw people’s eyes to an ad. (Moral: always include the search terms in PPC creative if you can.) Of course, the Fountain Partnership ad still appears, below my own. But I now control more of the screen ‘real estate’ for my brand, including the #1 PPC position and positions #1 and #2 for natural search (Google usually grants me a second position for this blog). Short of hiring affiliates, that’s as good as it’s going to get.

Is it worth bidding on your own brand?

Some marketers advocate bidding on your own brand regardless of who else is targeting it, for a number of reasons. As explained, it gives you more ‘real estate’ on the all-important page one. It gives insurance against temporary blips in your natural search position. It allows you to vary the marketing messages you present to searchers before they click. And, in the absence of competing ads, it’s cheap. (More details on this here.)

However, if you’re bidding against rivals, you’re effectively being forced to pay for traffic that, if not for the brand bidders, would almost certainly have reached your site anyway – which is galling as well as costly. In this situation, rival bidders are like trees in a forest, trying to grow taller than each other to reach the sun in a sort of search-marketing ‘arms race’. Ultimately, the endeavour absorbs resource and marketing effort for all concerned, but leaves the relative positions of the players pretty much as they were before.

What is content spinning?

Content spinning means creating variants of the same content that will appear different to search engines. Typically, the underlying meaning is exactly the same – so human readers won’t get any benefit from reading the new version.

The holy grail of SEO is unique content. Content spinning is a way to get more ‘juice’ from the same content ‘fruit’, so you can submit the same content to multiple sites, publish it in more than one place, and generally use it more effectively as an asset. Wherever your spun content goes, it gets better SEO results (whether in terms of building or attracting links) if Google regards it as unique.

Many article sites stipulate that all content they publish should be unique. In practice, their checks are minimal (or non-existent) and you can in fact get away with the same article at four or five sites. But if you want to steer clear of duplicate content penalties (see below), it’s worth spinning multiple submissions – particularly if the content is strong and you feel it’s got a good chance of republication.

Does content spinning work?

I expect some SEOs might jump on this article, saying the content spinning is an outdated technique. Well, I’m still being asked to do it by reputable search agencies who get results for their clients. SEO isn’t like social media – it’s all about what works, not the next big thing. And right now, content spinning still works, within its own limitations.

Is content spinning a ‘black hat’ SEO practice?

Tricky. If you use a software package to do it, I’d say yes. But creating alternative versions of articles is something every writer has done, or might want to do. After all, there’s no substantive distinction between content spinning and ‘editing’, ‘updating’ or ‘improving’ your own work. You’re not asking humans to read all the different versions – only Googlebot has to do that, and it doesn’t get bored. So if you accept that posting a low-quality, unoriginal or hastily written article purely in order to get a backlink is ethical, I think you have to accept that reposting variants of the same article to get links is also ethical.

Duplicate content penalties

A word about duplicate content penalties. Reading some sites, you’d think that posting duplicate content will bring the massed armies of Satan down on your site, laying it to waste. In fact, the web is full of duplicate content. Indeed, if you’re posting to an ezine or online PR site, that’s kind of the point – your submission is propagated across multiple syndicates or publishers, hopefully generating a new link to your site every time. All Google does is downgrade or disregard the duplicates – in other words, five links from republished ezine articles might only be worth one from a unique page on a reputable and relevant blog.

Is your spinning top?

The takeaway is that you don’t have to sweat content spinning: you should do as little as you can to get the result you want. The worst that can happen is that your content is seen as duplicated and your links don’t do much good. That’s a waste of effort, but it’s not going to see your site crash and burn. It’s silly to spend ages carefully spinning out content when the time could be spent writing something that’s really new.

With that in mind, here are some tried and tested content-spinning techniques. Use the ones that work, and don’t use any more than you have to.

Consider a wholesale rewrite

When you spin content, it can sometimes be quicker and easier to rewrite the text completely rather than laboriously editing the original word by word. Print out the original and keep it by your monitor as you rewrite it. If you’re going to reorder paragraphs (see below), do this once you’ve finished rewriting.

Alternatively, rewrite each paragraph in turn by typing a new version under the original in the document, then deleting the original.

Change the title and description/summary

Obvious maybe, but your first step should be to choose a completely different title. For example:

Perennial weeds: ten ways to keep them out of your garden

might become

Perennial weeds: ten top tips to get rid of them for good

Note that any key phrases, such as ‘perennial weeds’ in this example, should be retained – near the start of the title if possible.

The summary should also be rewritten, again retaining keywords.

Find synonyms

Synonyms are words that mean the same, or nearly the same, as other words. Swapping individual words for synonyms is one of the easiest ways to vary your body content. Microsoft Word even has a synonym finder that will suggest them for you – just select the word, command-click it (control-click on Mac) and find a list of synonyms. For example:

Destroying those persistent perennial weeds is all about choosing the right tool for the job

might become

Annihilating those relentless perennial weeds is all about selecting the correct approach

The first three changes are all single-word changes of the type that Word might suggest. The fourth one is a more human change, involving switching one idiom for another. You’ll have to engage your brain to find these.

It follows that if you’re writing with content spinning in mind, write adjective-heavy text that gives you lots of opportunity to swap synonyms around.

Take care if spinning content several times – it’s easy to end up putting the original word back. Although as long as you’re making lots of other changes too, you’re unlikely to end up recreating the original version verbatim.

Swap clauses

With a minimal edit, you can swap the clauses in a sentence to make it completely different. Let’s return to the previous example:

Destroying those persistent perennial weeds is all about choosing the right tool for the job

This can be switched around to read:

Choosing the right tool for the job is the secret to destroying those persistent perennial weeds

OK, you had to type a few words – but you’ve ended up with a completely different sentence.

Add sentences

For a quick and easy substantive change, simply insert a new sentence that duplicates the meaning of the one before it. For example:

Perennial weeds can be a serious problem.

might become

Perennial weeds can be a serious problem. They are a real headache for gardeners.

This adds extra content without requiring you to do any research, or indeed think very hard.

Reorder lists

A frequently used writers’ device is the comma-separated list (usually of three items). These can be reordered to make the content different without affecting meaning in the slightest. For example:

Perennial weeds spread themselves through three main methods: running roots, layering and self-seeding.

It’s a quick and easy job to change this to:

Perennial weeds spread themselves through three main methods: self-seeding, layering and running roots.

Bullet-point lists are even easier to spin – just shuffle those bullets around until the order is completely different.

As before, it makes sense to include lots of these lists if you’re planning to spin your content.

Reorder paragraphs

It’s surprising how often you can reorder the paragraphs in a piece of text without substantively altering the meaning. You just have to take care that you don’t introduce any nonsense – for example, using a word repeatedly and then carefully explaining what it means, or saying ‘see below’ in the last line of an article. (Although, if we’re being brutal, neither of those will bother Google.)

Reordering paragraphs in conjunction with one or two other techniques is a quick, easy way to get big changes in your text for minimal time outlay. More than any other technique listed here, it’s worth tailoring your text for – in other words, writing your paragraphs in such a way that they can be reordered. That usually means breaking your content into clearly delineated ‘meaning modules’ and making sure your paragraphs follow that structure. Use headings to help you. For example, the tips in this article could easily be presented in any order without changing the meaning.

Mix and match

The best way to get results with these technique is to mix it up. You’ll have to discover through trial and error what works for you, and what you find easiest and quickest to achieve. For example, you might go for a process like this:

• Change title and summary/description
• Rewrite first two paragraphs completely
• Swap synonyms where possible
• Rewrite last two sentences

That will almost certainly create enough difference for your new version to be regarded as unique.

A final check

When done, you can use Word’s ‘compare documents’ feature to highlight all the differences between the new version and the original, in a similar way to tracking changes. There’s no particular percentage of changed content to aim for (as with keyword density), so this is really just a quick visual confirmation that you’ve got a good level of difference throughout the document.

This post presents my responses to Martin’s post (and will make more sense if you read his post first).

What’s in a name?

What really got everyone’s goat about Copify was their hijacking of the term ‘copywriting’, for instance in their tagline ‘changing the way people think about copywriting’. If they’d set up as ‘content generation services’, or whatever, far fewer copywriters would have been bothered. Equating 2p-a-word content creation with the careful, considered approach of an experienced marketing, publishing or digital professional is ludicrous, and Copify were duly called out on it.

What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet

For my money, ‘copywriter’ still denotes the high end of the market – right up to highly experienced creatives who can charge hundreds for a single advert or slogan. There are many different types of writer under the umbrella of ‘copywriting’, but the sense of a consultancy/service rather than a by-the-yard word factory is pretty well understood – with the possible exception of ‘SEO copywriting’, which does have some connotations of cranking out the copy I think. (But that’s not to say that all SEO copywriters are content-crankers, Andrew!)

Come for the writing, stay for the thinking

It’s this consultancy/service aspect that distinguishes a ‘proper’ copywriter from a content creator. Or to put it another way, clients pay for the thinking, not just the writing. Working with a copywriter who takes the time to engage with you, your values and your character as a business is what makes the difference between getting content and being content. And it’s dispiriting to trade under a name that implies you simply churn out the words without paying much mind to the purpose of the exercise.

J’accuse!

However, when I look at my own website, or those of other copywriters, it always strikes me that we do tend to sell ourselves short in this regard. There’s a general emphasis on ‘words’, ‘writing’, ‘content’ and so on, although the incidence of pen imagery seems to be on the decline. This rather prosaic positioning is sometimes leavened with some promise to drive sales or build brands.

We tend to push the craft of copywriting rather than its business benefits. And when we do try to force our way into the boardroom, it isn’t always convincing – perhaps because we don’t quite believe we should be in there ourselves (but that’s another story).

Let me reiterate, I include myself in this criticism. My own tagline, ‘We’ll choose your words carefully’, is typical. Why should a client care about that? What does it do for them?

Where’s the value?

If I were advising a client who was a copywriter, I’d probably exhort them to emphasise the value being added rather than the service being delivered. As with tool manufacturers who are in the business of selling holes rather than drills, it’s the ultimate benefits that sell a service, not the nuts and bolts of its delivery. Positioning as a seller of words weakens the offer and invites like-for-like comparison with low-cost providers.

Could we therefore rebrand as ‘content consultants’ or similar, just as designers might describe themselves as, say, ‘creative directors’ or ‘senior creatives’? My feeling is we could, but there might not be such a benefit to it.

First, ironically, we’d lose out on people searching the web for ‘copywriter’. Online, you can’t get away from the need to use the language your client uses, and people start from a perception that they need content, so they search for the word most closely associated with their need. (Many firms developing their websites don’t even get that far, so we should be grateful.)

Secondly, we’d lose the very important emphasis on language as the tool for marketing communication, and the positioning of ourselves as the people who can take the client all the way from concept or value proposition through to words on a page. In my experience, being the person who ‘gets’ a company and can express its values in writing is a pretty good position to be in. I wouldn’t want a title that made me sound like an expensive luxury.

So, in summary, while it’s probably worth talking about the high-end stuff we can do, I think we need to keep our feet on the ground.

What the future holds

I personally think that the market will sort itself out. ‘Content’ and ‘copy’, for want of better words, will diverge more and more as clients become more literate, and there will actually be less need to differentiate, not more.

Those who just want content will get it. Those who want something better, and try to get it from a Copify, will change their approach. Those who think they just need something written will soon realise, from working with a professional, that they’re not just delegating an admin-level task that they could just as easily handle in-house. And those who appreciate the value of a true copywriter won’t be going anywhere.

Sow good seed

Quality plants come from quality stock, or quality seed. If you want to avoid failure, choose your raw materials wisely. Otherwise you’ll be waiting another year to establish that plant you’ve always wanted in your garden.

So it is with SEO. Domains that include keywords; sites that are optimised well; keywords that are chosen wisely; articles that are valuable enough to be republished – getting all these elements in place from the earliest possible stage will generate the best results.

Time takes time

‘The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.’
Zen saying

If you’re planting a slow grower like Japanese Maple (Acer Japonicum), you have to accept that it’s probably going to be another gardener who enjoys its full maturity – after you’ve moved on (or passed on). But what can you do? If you want a tree, all you can do is plant it and wait.

It’s kind of hard to accept in the instantaneous world of Web 2.0, but when it comes to SEO, these things take time. To get to the top of the stairs, you step on the lowest one first. Domains must age to be reputable; links take time to accrue; blogs take time to build readership and reputation.

Do it once, do it right

Some gardeners attempt to ‘renew’ or ‘redesign’ a garden by ripping out gnarled old shrubs and shady trees, only to discover they’ve ripped out all the character too. Others insist on recreating a ludicrous six-inch-high array of dwarf annuals year after year, sacrificing dignity for tidiness. But the best gardeners take sure, steady steps, putting the right plants in the right place and letting them mature as they wish.

It’s the same with SEO. Choose a domain and stick with it. Establish URLs and don’t change them. Then choose an SEO strategy and stick with that, too. Don’t change your on-page content for the sake of it, or try to fix what isn’t broken. In general, be wary of changes of direction that could put you right back at square one.

Don't be like Teddy. Plant your SEO seeds and give them plenty of chance to grow

Mix it up

Trees. Shrubs. Herbaceous perennials. Annuals. Herbs. Ferns. Unless you’re a one-trick plantsman who goes nuts only for spurge (or whatever), you’re going to want a mix of plants in your garden. It’s the only way to get a nice balance of colours, views and seasonal changes.

In the world of SEO, it’s all about a blend of tactics. Because you never quite know what works (see ‘plural causality’ below), you have to advance on a number of fronts at the same time. Google likes a balanced link profile, so you need to attract links from a range of sources if you want to rank.

Plural causality

Or, to put it another way, things grow (or don’t grow) for lots of different reasons. Christopher Lloyd attributed the profuse flowering of his ceanothus to his habit of throwing his nail-clippings at the base of the plant. (Ceanothus need calcium, so there is some reason behind this.) The truth is that gardeners never really know which of their tactics has, quite literally, borne fruit. Yes, you used seaweed fertiliser on that hebe this year, but it was a sunny spring too – and you took out a nearby tree. Which factor, or combination of factors, actually did the business?

SEO is just the same. Typically, you’ll be trying a range of different tactics simultaneously: on-page optimisation, directory subs, article marketing, PR, blogging. But since results are so one-dimensional (basically a number from 1 to whatever), there’s precious little feedback on which have worked. This can be enormously frustrating and probably also contributes to a lack of faith in search marketing as a discipline. Clients never know which search tactic actually brought them their ranking, leaving them pretty much in the dark about how to optimise ROI by cutting out the less effective approaches.

Little and often

Horticultural atrocities such as decking bear witness to many gardeners’ yearnings for a ‘low maintenance garden’. Sorry, but if you want a lawn, a flowerbed or a hedge (and if you don’t, why didn’t you buy a flat?) you’re going to have to buckle down to regular mowing, weeding or trimming. And no, it isn’t possible to give the hedge one monumentally brutal cut in May and hope it will see you through. It doesn’t work that way.

SEO is similar. Google’s looking for a steadily increasing number of inbound links to your site (a constant ‘link velocity’, to use the industry term). And that means getting out there to post articles, submit PR, update your blog and comment on other blogs on a regular basis. Maybe you could do it while you’re resting after mowing the lawn?