I find myself constantly saying this to clients and colleagues, and they usually look at me with a blank stare.
“What do you mean, don’t write for Search Engines?”, they say.
“I mean, stop writing with only SEO in mind. Your goal is to get people to read it and for the content to compel them to take action on whatever you want them to take action on”.
SEO has killed good writing on the web. All we care about is inserting our keywords and writing crap that hardly makes sense, but as long as the keyword shows up in our copy three times, it’s all good. I write this with a lot of passion and authority, because I know that Google would agree with me.
In the late 90′s and early 2000′s, so many SEO “specialists” were trying to trick Google with a bunch of different tactics, and that’s why Google started changing their algorithm to reward content that was bringing value to the people that were reading it. They started building the algorithm to focus on the content that was getting passed along by other websites and other influential players on the Internet.
This article by the The Atlantic got me thinking about how much Internet copywriting sucks nowadays. You never get those catchy, witty headlines online, anymore, because everyone is so concerned about keywords and making sure headlines have all the right search terms in them.
There’s no fun in that, and it’s at the expense of the end user. So loosen up, and know that Google is smarter than you think. Just because you put a keyword in the page title, the meta description, and the content, doesn’t mean you’re going to rank highly for it. Instead write something that’s interesting, solves a problem, or inspires someone and it’ll be linked to and shared with others, and Google will notice and value that much more than old-school SEO strategies.
