From my blog

In defence of SEO copywriting

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.

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Comments (13)

  2. Tom – excellent post.

    I think I need to make my point and my position a little clearer. Then I’m going to agree with some of the arguments you put forward, and ask that you reconsider some of your others.

    1) When I wrote “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”, the word you need to grab hold of is “exempt”.

    In other words, just because SEO has rules and techniques and formats, they do not – and should not – be an excuse not to create good sales copy.

    I’ll come back to that in a bit.

    2) I am keen on good SEO – and particularly appreciate good on-page SEO (i.e. the words and the code working in harmony to provide the reader with clarity).

    I made this point on Andy’s post:

    “I do take pains to do keyword research. Not so I can stuff the copy with those keywords, but so I know what potential readers/ customers are looking for.

    “It’s a bit like making sure your content is available in more retail outlets – thanks to the research you’ve done to find out which other ones exist. Why sell only in Tesco if you can get space in Sainsbury’s as well?

    “What concerns me is how many copywriters don’t work with web companies to do basic things – make sure well-written headlines go in h1 tags, crossheads in h2 and so on. It’s an easy enough print-to-web translation.”

    3) I practise SEO myself, and believe that sites that don’t use it – especially sites that should know better – are missing a huge opportunity. See this post of mine, in which I take on the sloppy SEO practices of the Caledonian Mercury. Ironically, it’s on Google’s first page for the search term “Caledonian Mercury”.

    4) Now for your arguments, Tom.

    a) Copywriting is about communicating and selling. And as you say, it’s a fundamental. Once you’ve got your audience, you’ve got to sell to it. This is the point I was making – all the SEO techniques in the world can’t efface this fact.

    b) You say that “When you can no longer ‘push’ your chosen terms on to customers, you’re obliged to use theirs”.

    I agree. But it was always so – it’s something that David Ogilvy understood long before the web even existed. You *have* to use the language of the people you’re selling to. Ogilvy did, and that’s why he was a meteoric success. To use his words:

    “I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word INEFFABLE, only to discover that I didn’t know what it meant myself”

    Keyword research is just another way of finding out how your audience uses language.

    c) When you talk about a sales letter, you say “Moreover, the audience is passive; they don’t have any control over what they read, beyond the option to disregard or stop reading it”.

    I think you’ve gone one step to far in the chain before making your analysis. First, a sales letter will always come in an envelope, and it’s well known that a good one uses text on the envelope to get the reader to open it in the first place – it’s a pull medium. When open, a good one will pull the reader to fill in a coupon, or make a call. It’s a pull medium.

    Similarly, if you place an ad in a magazine, you are competing with literally hundreds of other ads. Your headline has to grab them (good sales) and each sentence needs to make them want to read the next (good sales). It’s a pull medium.

    It’s the same way when you type in your search term into Google – it’s not necessarily going to be the most keyword-rich meta description that pulls you in, but the one that speaks to you – the one that makes the best pitch. It’s good sales. It’s a pull medium (as you rightly say).

    5) Whatever Paul Boag’s scepticism about SEO, I’m certain he has clients who use SEO specialists – and make a profit. I’d also add that those clients are likely to know the value of copy that sells.

    So, to bring it all together….

    Yes, SEO is important. Yes, it’s a vital element to consider if you want to sell on the web. But, no – a lot of the techniques aren’t in essence vastly different to what copywriters have learned before.

    The danger, as I said in my review of Andy’s book, is that SEO copywriters often feel exempted from the one thing that’s going to keep them clients – using words that sell, as well as get found.

    (A footnote… lots of advertisers, even today, feel they are exempted by “creativity” from creating adverts that sell, rather than impress other advertisers. Or amuse the public, before they don’t bother buying the product or service. SEO copywriters beware of making the same error…)
    .-= Ben Locker´s last blog ..Review: The Copywriting Sourcebook, by Andy Maslen =-.

  4. A lovely, closely argued response Tom – and can I just point out that, at 2,368 words, a rather effective torpoedoing of the notion (more fashionable bullshit) that “long copy doesn’t work on the web!

    I agree with Ben’s point c) above. Old direct mail hands like me know that you can send a letter to a list but that is a very long way from having therm read it. That’s why we spend so much time on envelope copy (or title tags if you want to translate into online terminology ;-)).

    The only other point I want to debate is the idea that search is the primary method that brings people to your site. For my corporate site, search brings roughly a third of all traffic; direct traffic accounts for another third; and inbound links bring the remaining third.

  5. Hi Ben

    Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think we’re probably in violent agreement!

    I do think that although DM and press ads have ‘pull’ elements, they’re not as ‘pully’ as SEO. My argument here would be that you can ‘push’ your DM onto someone’s doormat, so they’re going to see the envelope regardless of the content on it. A site without good SEO won’t even appear on the doormat – to stretch the analogy. But in the last analysis, maybe the push/pull semantic distinction is an unhelpful distraction from selling.

    You’re quite right about ‘creativity’ (or ‘crazitivity’ as Edward de Bono dubs it) acting as a stand-in for selling power. Promoting a creative agency as ‘award-winning’ is probably a double-edged sword when it comes to the more insightful clients. As you say, being recognised for creativity isn’t the same thing as shifting units.

    As for SEO standing in for selling, it’s clearly happening all the time. I recently created a huge bank of SEO pages (rather better written than the usual, I thought) into which calls to action were then inserted as an afterthought. Really, the concept of an ‘SEO agency’ is at the heart of the problem. Without at least some focus on customer targeting and/or conversion optimisation, isolating the SEO part of the equation can only lead to this kind of lopsided thinking.

    Thanks again for taking the time to comment.

  6. Hi Andy

    Thanks for your kind words! For ‘closely argued’ read ‘obsessively detailed’ – when I read a post that gets my thoughts going, I just have to grind it all out on the blog…

    I’m interested in the proportion of direct/search/referral traffic you get. For my part, I distrust my web stats’ assessment of direct traffic. My stats also show around 30% of visitors making a direct request, but I just can’t believe that many people are typing in my web address. It’s just not promoted offline enough for that to happen.

    I’m also impressed by the traffic you’re getting from backlinks. Most of the backlinks I’ve got – with the exception of some on blogs – drive very little traffic. But that was as expected, since they were gained more to impress Google than to actually bring people through the door.

  7. Hi Tom,

    This is a full and well considered post for which I congratulate you.

    I also commented on Andy’s post – my experience of SEO copywriting is that is has similarities and differences to ‘regular’ copywriting. It still has to be relevant, interesting and it has to sell. After all, if your SEO is driving a shed load of traffic to your site but your copy isn’t converting it, what’s the point? It’s rather like having a Ferrari in the drive with an empty fuel tank – it ain’t going no where!

    SEO copy is more about understanding keywords and where they need to be. Page titles, headings, sub headings, hyperlinks, META descriptions (yes, I know they don’t have a direct effect on your SEO but they do help attract clicks).

    For me, 90% of my business comes to me directly from the web – whether from people who’ve found me through Google searches of through a refering site (such as my blog). So SEO is very much alive and well and helping numerous businesses (including mine) with organic targeted traffic.

    I was interested to read Andy’s comment about traffic – for me, 51% of my traffic comes from search, 33% from referal sites, 13% direct and 3% other (not entirely sure what the category ‘other’ covers). So, certainly for me, it shows that organic SEO works (I don’t do PPC).

    The one thing people have to understand with SEO is that takes time and it’s an ongoing process.

    Oh look, now I’ve gone on. I’m sure this is a debate that will continue,

  8. Very interesting post Tom, and also some excellent responses.

    In my opinion there are a number of things that great copy has in common, whatever the medium, and you’ve pointed out several of them in the above.

    I find that web content does necessitate a slightly different approach from the other work I do, namely conceptual advertising and print work. Online copy should also engage, and lead on from one line to the next – but SEO does add complications like considering keyword density, and could even be said to dictate the odd headline.

    I take on board Ben Locker’s point here about keywords in some sense being the language your audience speaks. I think in one sense that’s true. But their effective order, and their exact phrasing, might also differ from a search bar to a page of content.

    This sounds like I might be positioning SEO copy as a slightly ‘less pure’ medium, but I’m not. I understand that seamlessly integrating the odd term is not only a skill in itself, but often a necessity that the medium dictates. It’s all about balance for me. Where I do have an issue, like most copywriters, is when SEO is considered but content isn’t.

    So at the end of that ramble, I’m sitting on the fence!

  9. Thanks Steve, Sally and Composed for your comments.

    Perhaps I should point out that, as I write, Sally’s is the highest ranking commercial site in the UK for the generic term ‘copywriter’. She knows whereof she speaks!

  11. I continue to miss the point where SEO is concerned. In my book, copy, if written well, automatically contains keywords aplenty. Plus, all the talk about SEO assumes that organisations do nothing but put their website up and keep the old fingers crossed. What about driving traffic to the site through other means such as advertising and marketing through banners, blogs, dare I say it press or radio etc.?

    As it stands, taken at face value to me who still doesn’t get all the furore about SEO, people in the SEO game would have us believe that unless you play by the SEO rules you are heading for a life of online misery. That the organisation that gets SEO right will prosper, even if they are not actually the best at what they do as a business. That it’s about top tens or being on the first search results page or you’re toast.

    To me though SEO is a bit like Y2K – lots of hot air from those involved in it, with the threat that if you don’t invest you are screwed. And what happened? Lots of people made lots of money in the run up to the new millenium, but the catastrophe that was set to happen at midnight on 31/12/99 if you weren’t Y2K ready didn’t actually transpire.

    In my humble opinion, if the web has one downside it is SEO and any need for it. I was writing content for a client the other day who told me that he can put a lot of the search terms underneath the surface of the site so I need not worry about trying to cram a certain word into a sentence or paragraph numerous times in order to get him up the charts. I hope that this is something that will become the norm and that us writers can focus on telling the best story rather than having sleepless nights about with poxy keywords.

    As I have said elsewhere,imagine if the greatest writers in history were inhibited by the need to get enough ‘verily’s’ or ‘thees’ in a sentence. Shakespeare would have looked a right twat!

  12. Very extensive and considered post, Tom.

    I’m on the side of SEO. But I do wish there was a less tainted description.

    I weave SEO into workshops for businesses. A lot of the time SEO turns out to be the catalyst for better copywriting all round. It forces you to be more targeted. To think about what the customer wants (and may search for). To consider what might attract a link (i.e. useful, thorough posts like this one).

    @Alconcalcia

    If your client said he could do that, he’s talking a touch of nonsense.

    Also, if it was the case (as it was in the late 90s) that you could build keywords into the code of the site…well, if you think the results are spammy now, we’d be smothered by a spamvalanche in that scenario.

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