I spend an increasing amount of time providing SEO advice to my clients. They’re usually the kind of firms you’d expect to need such advice: sole traders, SMEs, firms inexperienced in digital marketing, startups without a site. And what all those clients have in common is a strong need for sound advice coupled with an even stronger need to invest resources wisely.

Often, there will be a discussion about what I could do for them before they commit to buy. And that discussion is usually pretty wide-ranging. To illustrate the services I can provide or broker, I’ll propose many SEO tactics that would be specifically useful for them – as opposed to generic tactics that would work for anyone.

In fact, if they were taking careful notes, they’d end up with a passable SEO strategy just from the conversation. What’s more, the follow-up tasks involved are sometimes relatively mechanical (directory submissions, article marketing), allowing them to be handled in-house or overseas. The prospect could easily take what I’ve given them for free and use it to create significant value for themselves – and I’d never know. In other words, my effusive proposal could easily lead straight to being jilted at the altar.

It’s a serious issue for freelancers, and service providers generally. When does advice stop being an incentive to purchase and start being a product in itself? Where does a comprehensive proposal become a suicidal value giveaway? How much valuable knowledge should you share without payment? And just what is your advice really worth?

What you want

Let’s say you’re submitting a proposal to a client. On the face of it, your aim couldn’t be simpler: convert the prospect to a sale. But there are subtler concerns. The negotiation or proposal stage offers a valuable insight into how the working relationship might pan out. What will the client be like to work with? What if they question your advice, or refuse to act on it? How will differences of opinion be dealt with? Working through a proposal now could give you a chance to find out before any commitment is made. That gives you the option of walking away, or (more likely) quietly incorporating some ‘messing around money’ into your price.

Even if they’re not going to buy right now, you want them to remember you fondly and come back later – possibly after trying someone cheaper. And even if they’re never coming back, you should be mindful that people do talk to each other. Not just locally, but globally, through social media and other networks. Deal or no deal, you’re putting your reputation out there every time you pitch.

What you don’t want

So there are lots of reasons to submit a detailed proposal, offer useful advice and answer your prospect’s questions in some detail. But there are just as many reasons to hold back, or at least carefully consider what you want to share.

The first and most obvious reason is that you’re not being paid. The time you spend preparing and discussing your proposal must be either written off as an overhead (effectively, spreading the cost across all your clients) or charged to this particular prospect when they become a client (not explicitly, but as a tacit element of the price). For freelances, this sort of accounting is largely notional, since they rarely tot up every hour and assign it to a cost centre. But it’s still worth considering how much time you’re investing for an uncertain reward. Think of the opportunity cost – the money you could have earned elsewhere with the time you’re spending. Is this prospect actually worth that many hours?

The second reason is that you don’t want to give away valuable knowledge for free. For freelances who are paid for tangible deliverables (text, designs, websites), it can be tough to get clients to recognise the value of advice. The idea that ‘talk is cheap’ is pretty powerful. Indeed, it can be hard to recognise the value of your own consultancy, if you’re stuck in the same materialistic mindset.

Remember: if your free proposal can help someone add value to their business, in any way at all, you’re effectively giving them something for nothing. From this perspective, it’s worth thinking more like a lawyer, who charges for every conversation regardless of its content. That might be an impossible goal for most freelances, but it’s still a worthy principle: the band don’t play for free.

Thirdly, you don’t want to cede negotiating power. You want the prospect to understand what they’re buying, but not gain the ‘little knowledge’ that would allow them to misguidedly pick and choose from the service menu, or attempt to impose an alternative pricing model (for example, hourly rate instead of price-per-service). You also don’t want to give them the confidence to go back to the market for a different provider (say, one from a low-cost economy) – or, again, use the threat of doing so to secure a lower price.

Finally, and most subtly, you don’t want to seem too needy. Giving away the farm at the proposal stage suggests you’re desperate for work, which won’t instil confidence in the prospect. Remember the negotiation adage: ‘she who cares least wins’. So you need to respect yourself and do the right thing by your business – although, obviously, without striking an arrogant tone that will turn the prospect off.

What they want

It’s worth considering the client’s viewpoint too. They want to understand what they’re buying, but they’re probably making a foray into an unfamiliar market where they must buy with incomplete knowledge. They’re not going to splurge on a ‘black box’ solution where money goes in and results come out – most firms will stick with the status quo rather than take that sort of risk. (A notable recent exception is social media – in its infancy, firms were clearly spending on ‘gurus’ with little idea of what would be delivered in return for their fees.)

Most firms also appreciate that experts must have trust in order to deliver, but they don’t want to pay for snake oil. And behind the business rationale lies the deep-seated and very powerful need of human beings not to feel humiliated in front of peers by making a mistake or being taken for a ride.

Setting the boundary

In such a situation, only those in-demand suppliers with stellar reputations can set their personal ‘paywalls’ at the outer limits of their expertise. Like film stars who no longer have to audition, they don’t have to prove their worth. The rest of us need to do our little dance to make it rain.

So somehow, you have to set the boundaries on the advice you’ll give away for free. In theory, this will dictate the point in the conversation at which you will say (or imply), ‘If you want to know more, you must pay’. And it’s clearly worth deciding where this point is before you get talking, so you don’t end up putting the phone down with the sinking feeling that you’ve given away far too much.

General knowledge

One solution is to provide loads of advice, but keep it generic. You could have a ‘one size fits all’ template that you simply adapt for each new client, tweaking the content a little and changing the title page.

This can work, but most firms have already moved this type of content one stage earlier in the sales process by offering it for free in the form of web pages, blogs, white papers or free ebooks. Available to everyone online, it serves a dual purpose: building credibility before the client approach, and building SEO profile. So you might not win many client hearts by serving up this kind of content as a proposal.

Also, it’s not really about what you know, but how it’s applied. You may have testimonials, articles and past clients in abundance, but your prospect is still asking themselves whether you can do it for them.  Will you understand what they do? Will the service benefit their business? Generic content won’t deliver that kind of reassurance.

A better approach is probably to indicate the general themes of the service you’d deliver, without going into great detail on what will be involved. This can still be very valuable to a client who knows nothing, but it should be possible to leave them a lot of work to do if they want to exploit it without you.

Buying with the heart

Another perspective on the proposal dilemma is the emotional mindset of the prospect.

No-one likes buying stuff they know nothing about. And yet most of us buy far more with our hearts than with our heads. At some point in the process of appraising a product or supplier, we’ll decide (perhaps unconsciously) that we’re going to buy. This might happen, for example, when we first step over the threshold of a property, or when we see a pair of shoes on someone else’s feet. Our subsequent ‘research’ or ‘shopping around’ is actually about building up confidence and gathering data to support a decision that’s already been made – or, perhaps, so we can justify it to others. The intellect serves the emotions, not vice versa – and we may never admit how and when the true decision was made.

So you need to be attuned to the point at which your prospect clicks emotionally with your offer. If you feel they have decided to use you, you can force the free consultation phase to a close with confidence. Continued unpaid dialogue adds no value for you and could even risk unselling them. Prospects will carry on listening to free advice even though they’re ready to buy – they won’t want to look stupid or gullible by thrusting cash into your hands for something you’re willing to give away. People need a cue to act, so give them it.

I’d be fascinated to hear your own experiences on this topic, and how you decide where to set the limits on proposals you submit to clients.

In this post, copywriter Martin Williams discusses the use of the word ‘copywriter’, and whether it is coming under pressure from content mills such as Copify. He argues, passionately, that authentic, carefully developed content is the only possible basis for an effective social media campaign, which in turn drives search too. So do we need a new word to describe what ‘real’ copywriters do, as opposed to content mills?

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.

What could Alan Titchmarsh or Monty Don teach students of SEO? Quite a lot, as it turns out – great SEOaks from tiny acorns grow. Read on to learn about the parallels between cultivating plants and cultivating links.

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?

In his review of Andy Maslen’s Copywriting Sourcebook, Ben Locker approvingly notes that Andy ‘hasn’t fallen for the fashionable bullshit about online copywriting – that it has its own rules, techniques and formats that exempt it from being treated like normal sales writing’. Following up, Andy wrote this post, endorsing Ben’s appraisal and developing the theme. Later he also tweeted a link to this article, where Paul Boag casts doubt on the faith that firms put in SEO as a marketing channel.

I don’t know Paul, although his article is readable, cogent and well argued. I have huge respect for both Ben and Andy, both of whom I do know (slightly). Their copywriting experience and knowledge far exceeds mine, and they’ve both helped me out with invaluable advice and support. So this post isn’t intended as a smackdown of their opinions – it’s just a different view. And my view is that online or SEO copywriting is very different from ‘traditional’, ‘normal’ or ‘old media’ copywriting – and, furthermore, that SEO itself is a worthwhile (or at least inevitable) marketing discipline.

The user journey

Ben and Andy were right to reaffirm one of the fundamental truths of our trade. It can never be stated too often that copywriting is about communicating with people, and selling. And this is exactly the same online. Web pages should connect with people, convince them of benefits and convert interest to sales. A site built purely from an SEO perspective might be a powerful traffic magnet, but how many visitors will go on to make a purchase?

So web pages must sell. However, we have to guard against regarding them as standalone conversion tools that can be compared like-for-like with other media such as direct mail. In fact, they must do much more than just retaining and converting interest, because they form just one part of an online journey (as I’ve argued in this post). Online, the user’s voyage from search to sale extends across many sites and, potentially, multiple browsing occasions too. It’s a journey where the user is a driver rather than a passenger, and the content of web pages along the road has a direct influence on how – and whether – they play a part.

Pushes and pulls

In other media (print advertising, direct marketing) the copywriter creates messages that are then ‘pushed’ to readers through certain channels. For example, they might write a sales letter about dentists’ chairs that is then sent to every dentist on a mailing list. In this model, there is no causal relationship between content and audience; the copywriter defines the content, while the audience is determined by the distribution list or channel. Simple.

Moreover, the audience is passive; they don’t have any control over what they read, beyond the option to disregard or stop reading it. So we can use whatever terms we like, within reason, to describe what we’re selling, provided we get the message across. We can also place adverts for our dentists’ chairs in Fisherman’s World, if we want to, and be confident that at least some of the readership will see them. If we feel like it, we can mail our letter to milkmen instead of dentists; our response rate will be low, but the audience will at least have contact with the message. In short, we can push our message.

Online, the picture is completely different. It’s a ‘pull’ medium – or, to put it another way, a much more passive one for the marketer. The audience decides where to go and what to read, shaping and controlling their own experience. If they don’t click, they don’t visit – and they don’t read.

Since search engines account for the bulk of traffic to web pages, and since they prioritise those pages based on a combination of content and popularity, the content of a page has a direct, causal relationship with the type and volume of traffic that it receives. In other words, the content of a web page defines its audience.

We cannot ‘push’ a web page onto an audience that does not want it. We can’t even decide the context within which it will be viewed (it could be from the home page, directly from search results, from a bookmark, etc). In the absence of any traffic-driving backlinks or PPC activity, all we have to attract traffic – and customer interest – is the content on the page.

Keyword destiny

That ‘pull’ paradigm puts online copywriting centre stage when it comes to marketing online – not just in terms of conversion, but in terms of building a web presence with the power to get itself in front of relevant visitors and give them what they’re looking for. So while online writing certainly should include all the traditional skills of selling with words, it goes further. It has to.

The implications go far beyond achieving a particular keyword density on particular terms. Selling online is (or should be) about creating a user experience that resonates with the way customers think, how they want to find things out and how they want to buy. It touches every aspect of online marketing – domain names, site structure, navigation, internal links, content. And online copywriting and SEO are at the very heart of that.

Imposing discipline

The knock-on effects can even extend offline. I’ve had several serious discussions about changing a company’s name because the existing one, as reflected in its URL, would not click with potential customers searching online. Any startup looking to sell online would be foolhardy not to at least consider such issues.

When you can no longer ‘push’ your chosen terms on to customers, you’re obliged to use theirs; that’s how firms who aspired to provide ‘affordable HVAC solutions’ end up writing web pages optimised for ‘cheap central heating’. SEO imposes both discipline and humility; online, you must operate at the customer’s level.

But immersing yourself in your customer’s interests, priorities and thought processes is a very good idea anyway, regardless of how you’re going to reach them. Honestly appraising SEO keywords could easily be the starting point for a root-and-branch rethink of an entire value proposition. Does that often happen as the result of writing a press ad, or a mailing?

Why invest in SEO?

Moving on to Paul Boag’s post, we move beyond copywriting to the broader question of whether SEO merits the effort and investment that firms put into it.

Any search affiliate who had made their living from search for the last five years might be bemused to see that question being asked seriously. And the many search agencies who run highly profitable businesses by increasing sales and conversions for their clients through search would probably echo their sentiments. But let’s give the benefit of the doubt and presume that, behind the façade, SEO isn’t actually ‘all that’ in terms of business results, and that therefore we need to make a persuasive case for it.

Paul’s points (picking up his subheadings) are that there are no guarantees of success with SEO, that it’s about gaming the system, that it can damage the user experience, that it’s is passive (i.e. customers must seek you out) and that it lacks the weight of personal recommendation (i.e. you’re taking Google’s word on the worth of high-ranking sites).

I’d like to deal with these points in turn.

No guarantees of success

First, it’s true that there are no guarantees of success. Paul contrasts SEO with PPC and newspaper advertising, observing that both of these offer guarantees of position and therefore exposure. But this isn’t really a fair comparison.

As I’ve explained above, organic SEO is not about ‘pushing’ messages in a straightforward cash-for-exposure way, but about finding a way to figure in your customers’ thought processes, as expressed through their online activity. Google, for all its faults, has done the best job so far of building an algorithm that matches thoughts in your head with things in the world. So it follows that ranking highly with Google is the most direct way to link up with people thinking about your product.

The search experience is not perfect. It offers no guarantees, either for advertisers in terms of ROI on SEO or for searchers in terms of satisfactory search results. But it’s still clearly worthwhile for advertisers to consider it, at the very least. After all, it usually represents the most cost-effective way to link up with potential customers who are actively searching for your product. Worth a punt, surely?

A further point is that organic search activities such as link-building are investments rather than overheads. High-quality links will pass linkjuice to your site for ever. PPC adverts stop driving traffic the second you turn off the money tap.

Gaming the system

Is SEO about gaming the system? Yes, but no more so than any other form of marketing. Marketers do whatever is necessary to get exposure for their brands. If a marketer can get their message on a football shirt, or a carrier bag, or a hot-air balloon, and it makes sense to do so, they’re going to do it. PPC is mercilessly gamed through brand bidding, much to the chagrin of the brand owners affected. Everything is fair game for the gamers.

It would be nice if we could all just ‘provide high-quality content’ (as we’re endlessly advised to) and let benevolent Uncle Google sort out the nice sites from the nasty ones. I’m sure that’s what would happen if Makka Pakka set up an online shop in the Night Garden. Unfortunately, back in the real world, Google’s search algorithm is not perfect, meaning that some ‘spam’ techniques can be effective (although the line between content and spam can be fuzzy).

So as a website owner, you may be contemplating a rank of #35 with solid gold, user-oriented content, while a competitor rockets to #3 with 100 cheaply produced spam pages. Their traffic is likely to exceed yours by many, many multiples. Yes, Google will change its algorithm eventually, but will you still be in business by then?

So Google does what it can to improve the system, while marketers do what they can to game it. And, in the end, it’s only through the interplay of these two interests that the search experience evolves. The ‘game’ develops continually through the efforts of both ‘sides’, who are in opposition in one sense but also share the common goal of matching up customers with products they want.

User experience

SEO certainly can damage the user experience, but it shouldn’t. A good SEO copywriter or web developer is looking to combine the two goals of a website – to be visible online and appeal to visitors once they arrive. That may entail some compromise (on either side), but that doesn’t mean that SEO and user experience are irreconcilable, polar opposites. If they were, sites of proven worth such as Amazon and Wikipedia would not consistently rank #1 for many thousands of terms.

SEO is passive

This really comes back to the ‘no guarantees of success’ point. Yes, SEO is passive, but that’s its strength. You’re trying to link up with a motivated, proactive set of web users. Your aim is to smooth their path as much as possible.

No personal recommendation

This is perhaps the strongest of Paul’s points. When you use Google, you’re putting your trust in its algorithm. However, that algorithm determines the value of websites largely by the number of links they attract, which is at least partly determined by their popularity with humans. So Google ranking does, to some extent, reflect a kind of recommendation.

And, as I’ve argued in this post, and my guest SEO commentator argued here, Google is practically certain to integrate some sort of social-media popularity gauge into its results over the next few years. Once that’s done, user opinion will loom much larger in the search profile of every site –  and many currently effective SEO tactics will fall by the wayside.

Is it all worth it?

In his post, Andy notes that ‘You can’t spend PageRanks. You can’t invest Google top spots. You can’t bank visibility. It’s a new version of the old canard we got so used to hearing as a justification for masturbatory advertising. “It’s there to raise awareness”… Awareness is worthless.’

It’s certainly true that awareness is worthless in itself. But investing in achieving a Google top spot is a very long way from splurging millions on a brand-building campaign aimed purely at building ‘recognition’ or ‘penetration’. As I’ve argued, search visibility remains the prime way to figure in users’online journey, and therefore in their journey towards a sale.

Providing you’re targeting the right keywords, it’s by far the easiest and cheapest way to attract relevant visitors. With 80% of users clicking the first three natural results, and the vast majority never looking further than the first page, it’s hard to argue otherwise. Of course, there’s more to it than that – most notably, converting the resultant traffic to sales and delivering the promised experience. SEO certainly isn’t the whole story, but it is the first chapter.

Also, in some ways, rank is reputation. It provides reassurance. And that can certainly help a sale; it’s about something much closer to customers’ hearts than just ‘awareness’. When you conduct a search in an unfamiliar area, you’ll generally find it easy to believe that high-ranking sites are pre-eminent. But you’ll have a far harder time convincing yourself that a site you found buried on page 7 is actually the right choice. As long as search results are presented as a hierarchical ‘Top 10’, it’s human nature to adopt the mindset implied by the format, which is that rank reflects quality. Only more confident, informed or search-savvy web users go much deeper than that.

I hope I’ve succeeded in making a few points in SEO’s defence. It’s not that I particularly love it, or feel duty-bound to proselytise for it. Although I do a lot of search work, I can easily see why people dislike the search industry. But there’s no getting away from it and, for the copywriter, it does require some very special skills and thought processes – at least until Google finds a way to evaluate websites the same way people do.

• This is a guest post from Louis Venter of search marketing specialists Mediavision as part of Be My Guest month.

In my opinion, one of the key areas of concern within SEO circles is the enormous amount of SEO fodder that is being pumped into the internet to influence search rankings.

This doesn’t seem to be stopping either, with new services being launched to “rewrite” vast amounts of articles and distribute them online becoming almost mainstream.

At SES London recently the content was described as “not Pulitzer-prize winning”. I would go as far to say that a great deal of it is complete and utter crap that does nothing to build a client’s brand or reputation.

Now while I don’t believe that all of these articles currently hold the same value within Google’s algorithm, I do think their search quality team will attempt to address this problem as quickly as they can. The main question, though, is how.

My gut feeling is that they will use a social footprint to establish whether or not to count the link love to the destination website. They already have deals with Twitter and Facebook to crawl their posts in near-real time, and with these two platforms being two of the primary sources of content sharing at the moment it gives Google a fairly accurate picture.

Google will obviously have to address Twitter spam, which seems to be rife at the best of times. Given their early attempts at real-time search, they clearly don’t have a handle on how to measure social influence accurately, but these are early days after all.

Which brings me round to Buzz. Despite the obvious privacy issues, Google has placed a lot of resource into Buzz and this shows their hand a great deal in my opinion. I would not be at all surprised if Buzz was aimed at delivering a social footprint for the search quality algorithm. One obvious use for this data would be to separate the signal from the noise in online PR.

What should SEOs be doing to counter this?

Well, firstly, the rules of PR haven’t changed. Write great informative pieces of content that will attract links on their own. Make sure that these pieces of content are easily shareable and Tweetable and promote the content in the same way as you would promote your client’s site. Understand that everything you do is online PR and not just writing. The PR aspect of that is key.

If you manage to do this successfully, and Google do manage to clear out the noise, you will be sitting very pretty indeed.

When creating display advertisements for newspapers or paper directories, many firms try to cram as much content into a limited space as possible, so the reader will definitely get all the information they need. But when the ad appears on the page, it’s crammed in next to 15 or 20 similar ads, and the combined effect is chaotic. (Often, the ad that ‘wins’ these battles stands out with a spacious, simple design.)

In other words, marketing materials must be evaluated in context, not in isolation. And that’s equally true online.

As you plan your website, it’s natural to focus on the site itself. As the content is written in Word and the code developed on a test server, there’s a very definite boundary around the project. But this doesn’t reflect the way your site will eventually work. You’re creating an organism in the lab that must fend for itself in a challenging ecosystem.

Make sure you provide a suitable route for your website visitors

People sometimes plan sites as if the user magically arrives at the home page and proceeds in an orderly fashion to the ‘buy’ or ‘contact’ page. Of course, you should ensure that your site supports that ideal sequence. But in the real world, your site will slot into an online experience that encompasses multiple browsing sessions, searches, comparisons, visits and revisits. The user’s journey begins before they arrive, and continues after they leave. From search to sale could easily take months.

In this article, I’m going to look at optimising the four key stages in your customer’s online journey: finding, selecting, visiting and returning to your site.

The search

As Morpheus put it, ‘everything begins with choice’. Your user’s journey begins with your real home page – the first page of Google results for your key terms. Obviously, your site needs to appear on this page to figure in your user’s journey; unless you own a well-known brand, don’t flatter yourself that people will be making an effort to discover it on page two or lower.

First, you must identify some search terms that people use to find businesses like yours. Make sure you focus on the words your customers use (not the ones you like to use yourself). Use online tools like Wordtracker or Google’s keyword suggestion tool to take out the guesswork and home in on relevant terms you’ve got a good chance of owning. Competitor sites are another obvious place to look. (For more on choosing keywords, see this guide.)

Always remember that it’s far better to rank highly for less popular ‘niche’ terms (such as those that include place names) than it is to appear on page two or lower for high-traffic ‘generic’ terms. Research shows that almost 80% of searchers click on the first three natural results.

Pick your targets and cut your coat according to your cloth, making sure you can achieve your aims given the resources available. There’s very little point spending tons of time and money to effect a rise from, say, position 51 to position 19 – the impact on traffic will be negligible. A big, sustainable piece of a small pie is much better than a tiny, hard-to-defend slice of a huge one.

Limited resources is also the reason to focus solely on Google, which still accounts for the vast majority of search traffic (around 85%).

Even if you do appear in the first 10 natural results, you may want to grab more ‘share of voice’ (i.e. space on the screen) by placing PPC ads. It seems that some users (sole traders, in my own experience) like to click them, even with a good selection of natural results to go at. Set a tight budget and experiment!

The selection

To understand why I say Google is your real home page, consider how you go about researching a purchase in an area that’s unfamiliar to you. You’ll search, then click around a bit, unsure whether to go straight to a merchant, consult an information site or maybe browse a directory. And you’ll almost certainly backtrack to Google’s results at least once.

So your user’s first experience of your site won’t happen in a vacuum. You need to consider how your site stacks up against the other players on page one.

Ideally, you’re looking for your site to be among:

• irrelevant sites from which users will ‘bounce’ immediately
• relevant but inferior sites that won’t retain or convert ‘your’ traffic (you might even be content to rank below them, if you’re confident enough of your advantage)
• relevant but neutral sites such as Wikipedia that neither help nor hinder your chances of conversion (except insofar as they distract your customer)
• directories, comparison sites or aggregators where your site features prominently (i.e. on the first or second page reached from your search)
• articles placed by you that inform the user about your product, service or expertise and lead them back to your site (this is a big reason why people do article marketing).

Of course, you’ll rarely be able to achieve this type of line-up, except for on the nichest of niche searches. But it’s always worth considering which shops, libraries or malls are ‘next door’ to you in the online ‘high street’. If you’re up against sites that are equal or superior to yours (in your judgement), consider what you can add – a special offer, a unique product, service or bundle, etc – to bring some differentiation.

You may find that pages from your site other than your home page appear in search results, whether by accident or design. If so, make sure they can function reasonably well as ‘landing’ (arrival) pages. There’s no need to replicate ‘home page’-style text, which will be disorientating to those following an orthodox route through the site. Just ensure the page makes sense when read in isolation (i.e. without the home page to introduce it) and provides an easy way to reach the home page (one click).

The visit

Website usability is a huge topic, so I’ll restrict myself to the fundamentals.

• Bearing in mind what I’ve said about the hesitant, random nature of first-time searches, it’s clear that your home page must confirm clearly that visitors have reached the right place. Every relevant visitor who bounces from your site is a resounding fail. A dull but informative positioning statement is just the ticket; add a jazzy slogan elsewhere if you must. In general, don’t try too hard to grab attention; with an actively searching audience, you already have it.
• Remember that people won’t visit every page, and will only skim-read the pages they do visit. Working on web text in Word subtly instils the concept of ‘website as novel’, with the assumption of users reading from start to finish. Again, look to your own experience for what really happens. If there’s something people need to see (e.g. your phone number), include it on as many pages as necessary. Repeat key points as required.
• Make navigation crystal clear, ideally without rollovers. Use simple words that explain precisely what lies behind each link. Don’t try to be clever or different, the risk is too great. Group links thematically if you’ve got lots of them.
• For the main text, don’t let a designer bully you into having anything other than big, legible black letters on a white background. Ever seen a book with white text on orange pages? Well then.
• Make it easy for users to see what their next step should be. Include clear, eye-catching calls to action on every ‘business’ page. You can omit them on ‘background’ pages that just provide information.
• In general, don’t do anything to irritate, slow down or otherwise impede the user. Sounds obvious? You’d think so, but people are still building sites in Flash, which usually does all three.

The return

So far, so good. You’ve guided the user from search to conversion as well as you possibly can. But just as their journey doesn’t begin with your site, it doesn’t end there either. Many decisions to purchase are arrived at gradually, via a hermeneutic loop where the user acquires knowledge and confidence iteratively. So you need to facilitate their return to your site at a later time.

• Try to ensure your HTML page titles, so critical for SEO, also make sense (and ideally stand out) when viewed in a list of bookmarks. Choose a favicon that stands out next to those of competitor sites that users are likely to visit and bookmark alongside yours.
• Create pages aimed at different user groups, so there’s a reason for them to bookmark a ‘deep link’ once they’re within the site.
• Offer added-value content such as research or industry analysis that people will want to return to.
• Create regularly updated features such as a blog, ensuring an RSS feed is available. Resist the temptation to sell through your blog – just offer content, and they will come.

However, all these inducements are really just trimming and trappings. A well-structured, easy-to-use site is an incentive to return in itself. By contrast, a self-conscious, over-designed site may impress the user first time round, but simply irritate them during subsequent visits – the very time it should be working hardest to close the sale.

So there you have it – some useful ideas (I hope) for optimising the many steps that make up your user’s online journey.

In my recent post on Copify and content mills, I suggested that the current vogue for pumping out reams of low-grade content in order to generate backlinks and/or attract natural traffic could not last. In this post, I’d like to expand further on that point, focusing on the issues facing natural search right now and what the future might hold.

The elephant in the room

Thank heavens we fitted that laminate flooring

An ‘elephant in the room’ is an inconvenient but hugely significant truth that no one wants to acknowledge. For SEO right now, that elephant is the unsustainability of current search-marketing practices.

The truth is that the long-term viability of the whole search paradigm (site publishes, user searches, user finds) simply isn’t served by the things many search marketers do: article marketing, online PR and ‘SEO fodder’.

While the music plays, we’re still dancing

All these tactics do is soak up resources to deliver a temporary advantage that a competitor can easily reverse by pursuing exactly the same strategy (even using almost identical content). On the downside, they clog up the internet with spam, degrade the internet experience and make it ever harder for the ‘proper’ search experience to take place. It’s a classic case of the tragedy of the commons.

The parallels with the financial crisis are striking. Far from ‘sleepwalking into disaster’, many senior financiers were fully aware that their business practices would be damaging over the long term – but the short-term profits were just too attractive to ignore. ‘When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated,’ said Chuck Prince, Citibank CEO, in 2007. ‘But as long as the music is playing, you got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.’

Indefinite articles

Search marketers would certainly leave the dancefloor quick smart if Google’s search algorithm reduced the weight attached to content published at article and online PR sites.

It’s been a long time since Google respected paid links. Yet a link from Ezine Articles or another article site is effectively a paid link – but purchased with content rather than cash. You give Ezine some content, you get a backlink. It’s a transaction. For PR sites, submission fees for the sites that can deliver the most backlinks make the nature of the deal even more explicit.

Online directories with submission fees are doing a similar thing. But the nature of the relationship between client and site is much clearer – plus you can only have one backlink from each directory, not keep plugging away indefinitely.

Since Google respects article and PR links, it’s simply a case of putting in the hours to create adequate content and ‘spinning’ it across as many sites as you dare.

Yes, there are quality standards, but they’re not particularly exacting. The sanity check is ‘value for users’. Give me ten minutes and I’ll find you ten articles – on almost any subject – that add no value because they are corporate puff, embarrassingly basic or near-duplicates of other articles.

The other main way of ‘gaming’ Google is by creating banks of SEO fodder: big chunks of content that is nominally relevant but actually not that valuable to users. Since Google can’t gauge the human value of content (yet), it sees this as worthy content and often ranks it quite highly.

The cynicism of all this is well known by anyone with the slightest acquaintance with search marketing. Yet we’re still recommending it to our clients – because as long as Google works as it does, it gets results.

But that could change. We’re unlikely to see existing article links deprecated, but it seems inevitable that new links will be gradually downgraded until they’re weighted appropriately. SEO fodder represents a tougher challenge for Google.

Dark satanic mills

To sate the voracious content appetites of article, PR and SEO marketers, we’re now seeing the advent and growth of so-called ‘content mills’ or ‘word factories’, which offer a highly cost-effective way to obtain large quantities of (allegedly) optimised text. Clients pay by the word, and obtain ready-made web content that they can use for their SEO campaigns. I’ve covered the drawbacks for clients here so I won’t repeat myself.

This AdWeek article argues that content mills are one of the key growth areas in digital marketing for 2010. Maybe so, but it’s going to be a case of making hay while the sun shines. Competition will force low prices even lower, while a game-changing new Google algorithm that reduces the efficacy of content spam will result either in fewer customers (why bother?) or lower prices again (why overpay for weak links?).

Eating sawdust

As a result of all this, the internet is filling up with unreadable rubbish, damaging the searching and browsing experience for us all, as this post vividly argues. Even the AdWeek article referenced above acknowledges the point:

‘The question for 2010 is whether this automation and data-driven approach will lead to a flowering of useful information or more detritus clogging search results with low-grade, ad-heavy Web pages.’

That is indeed the question for 2010. And my money’s on the detritus, because web publishers do not presently see any value or profit in providing truly useful information – and search marketers are doing little to persuade them otherwise. 

Some observers (such as Carson Brackney in this post) argue that there’s a place for lower-quality writing, and that web users aren’t as fussy or demanding as self-regarding copywriters would like them to be. Often, a food analogy is used: sometimes you like steak, but other times a burger will do.

For me, this is disingenuous. SEO pages are created purely for search purposes, with no thought of providing any value to the reader. SEO content differs from ‘proper’ web content not by degree, but by nature: it’s not a cut-price equivalent, but a completely different animal. Again, honest search marketers will admit this.

Reading SEO spam is more like eating sawdust than munching a burger: it will fill you up, but there is literally no enjoyment or nutrition to be gained from it – because it was never intended for human consumption.

Who could argue, with a straight face, that anyone is going to get anything out of an article like this? And more to the point, do the search benefits for the firm involved really outweigh the reputational damage of having this sort of rubbish associated with their brand?

Semantic search

So the webwaves are choked with SEO flotsam and jetsam. Somehow, search has to get more sophisticated, to filter out the rubbish – or users will lose faith. And Google, though a mighty corporation, ultimately depends on users’ faith in the accuracy and usefulness of its results.

One option is a form of semantic search, where Google actually comprehends the meaning of content rather than simply analysing it with metrics such as keyword density. This could be applied to website content or backlinking pages. However, at present, it’s a long way off.

There are tools (such as this one for Twitter) that attempt to bring a basic level of semantic search to social media. However, as you’ll quickly discover if you give it a go, there’s more to analysing the emotions of a piece of writing than categorising particular trigger words into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. We have a long way to go before machines understand that ‘good riddance’ is a negative sentiment and ‘killer post’ a positive one.

Social search

Another option for improving search is some kind of link-up with social media – seemingly a ready-made source of user opinion that could be used to shape search results. All Google has to do is find a way of mining the goodwill being expressed at SM sites every day. Instead of viewing backlinks as ‘votes’ on the quality of online content, it can use SM sentiment as a measure of what people think of a site or page.

Retweets are a good example of a ‘goodwill meter’. Although they could theoretically be paid for, RTs are one of the purest online votes of confidence there is. If my article gets tweeted, a human being thinks it’s valuable. Google already uses Digg links as a measure of popularity, so this seems like a natural next step.

Efficient refinery

One way of proactively digging out better results is by refining your search criteria, narrowing your focus down to filter out some of the rubbish. At present, it’s incumbent on the user themselves to try and refine their search by adding additional keywords or trying new ones.

Google knows that it has to guide users towards finer searches one way or another, but the lack of prominence it gives to its ‘related searches’ and ‘wonder wheel’ suggests that it only half-believes in them. It might have to do more in the future to develop tools that allow rapid, intuitive refining of results, including (perhaps) one-click filters to eliminate blog, article and PR postings.

Wait and see

Whatever the future brings, it’s going to be fascinating. Google’s success depends on providing useful, unspammy search results, so we can be sure that some sort of change will come. And whatever it is, it’s surely going to change the face of search marketing completely over the next five years.

The other day I was discussing a new SEO campaign with one of my SME clients. There’s loads of potential, with great geographical terms to target and relatively modest competitor activity. I closed my proposal with the icing on the cake: the opportunity to target generic keywords that form part of a direct competitor’s name, effectively ‘brand bidding’ through natural search.

Hearing all this, my client got excited about the prospect of ‘playing the game’ of SEO, as they put it. Like all metaphors, this was both instructive and revealing.

SEO certainly does have a lot in common with a game or sport – running, for example. You choose your ‘race’ and your ‘opponents’ by selecting keywords – long-tail terms for a quick sprint, high-volume generics for a challenging marathon. You ‘train’ by optimising on-page elements and building links, then see what ‘finishing position’ you can obtain. The preparation can be rewarding; success, exhilarating.

However, metaphors have limits. They illuminate some aspects of reality while obscuring others. We should use them only insofar as they help us understand the world as it is (or as we would like it to be). And the problem with considering SEO as a game is that it misses the key objective of the whole process.

High rankings are not the point. Beating competitors is not the point. Even relevant traffic is not the point. The point is getting more business. ‘Winning’ at SEO is only worthwhile if it benefits your business; the real prizes are outside the field of play.

While you could argue for a brand-equity benefit from strong rankings, most big firms look to ROI (return on investment) and/or CPA (cost per acquisition) as the key measures of success. SMEs and even sole traders should do the same – even if they don’t have the time or capability to gauge those metrics accurately.

Of course, as with any other game, you might decide that training and competing is its own reward, regardless of winning. But this must be a conscious decision.

Personally, whenever I find myself too involved with marketing activities for their own sake, I remind myself that I work to support my family, and anything that doesn’t further that aim is a hobby.

SEO may be a game, and an enjoyable one, but it’s not about the taking part. It’s about winning.

Imagine you’re selling your car through a trade magazine. You call them to discuss options and pricing. The conversation goes like this.

You: Hello, I’d like to advertise on your front page. What will it cost?

Salesperson: Well, there are two options: the slow, cheap way and the quick, expensive way.

You: I see. And which do you recommend?

Salesperson: Both at the same time.

You: Really? I’m on a budget here. Let’s talk slow and cheap. How cheap is cheap?

Give me a break, how many good metaphors for search are there?

Salesperson: Well, it’s only cheap if you do some of the work yourself, which takes ages. Or we could do it for you, but then it’s not quite so cheap, of course.

You: So how much would I have to spend?

Salesperson: I really don’t know. It all depends.

You: I see. And ‘slow’ means…?

Salesperson: Several weeks. Months, probably.

You: But then I’ll be on the front page, won’t I?

Salesperson: You might be. I really don’t know. It all depends. You could spend hundreds and end up on page 3.

You: Riiight. Let’s talk about the quick, expensive way. How much do I have to spend to get on the front page?

Salesperson: Ah, well, it all depends on what other people are paying.

You: But if I pay enough, I can get on the front page?

Salesperson: Yes.

You: And that will sell my car?

Salesperson: Not necessarily. You see, there are still lots of other things to take into account…

It’s fair to say that, by now, you wouldn’t be giving off buying signals. Yet this isn’t that far from the typical conversation that I have when clients ask me about SEO.

It’s entirely reasonable for someone buying something new to ask ‘what will it cost?’ and ‘what am I buying?’ But with SEO, there are literally no guarantees of achieving any particular goal for any particular outlay. In fact, the outlay can go on and on, endlessly. Even getting a handle on what might be achievable takes time, which means cost.

Yet, despite all this, I still recommend SEO as by far the most cost-effective and appropriate marketing channel, online or offline, for nearly everyone who asks!

It’s no wonder people are starting to ask some searching questions about the value of SEO and the ethics of its practitioners. It’s up to the industry to justify their price – even as it rises due to ever-increasing competition. It really is the toughest sell of all.