You can write for people and search engines, too.
Recently I wanted to test my instincts and show the client how well I was writing copy for search-friendliness.
Writers have a natural tendency to make up terms like the one I just used. But when writing online, you need to think quite literally: keeping the intelligence level of your search engine robots…not not to mention the 6th-grade level literacy of your readers… in mind. That doesn’t mean you have to publish the same copy over and over again (in fact, duplicate content on different pages will confuse the search engines) or dumb everything down. But you do need to think what is the person looking for and what would they type into the search engine. In this case, I was appealing to high-level managers to attend a marketing course.
Since this course costs more for 4 days than I make in the month, I figured I’d appeal to a 10th grade reading level. Then I tried to instill some emotion into the writing, as I usally do. What I tested (using google search) and found, was that a colloquial terms outranked the business terminology. See below (in bold) how the marketing term “customer-centric” performed compared to “give the customer what they want”, outranking it by about 500 to 1.
Here’s how some of the terms used stacked up.
- customer-centric marketing 1,360,000
- customer engagement
marketing 5,530 M - customer engagement
7,610,000 results - customer centered marketing
2,130,000 - customer experience
82,400,000 results - marketing innovation 102,000
M - what the customer wants
196,000,000 results - giving the customer what
they want 106,000,000 - give
the customer what they want
521,000,000 results