One of the most annoying things about doing SEO audits for my clients is when no one ever thought to use a keyword a customer would use to find their company in the actual body copy of a web page.
So let’s say you sell property. If your opening sentence on a page is:
“We are a boutique company that offers the best services possible to our clients. We are so amazing; we have a proven track record and have won many awards in the industry. See what our clients say on our testimonials page. If you chose us, we’ll make you happy because we provide the best service. Our goal is to form long-lasting relationships with all our clients.”
I totally made that up (not a real life example), but I see this mistake all the time. Where in this short wonderful paragraph about how great you are does it say what you do or sell? Specificity will not only help your search rankings, it will also help your marketing efforts. You need to tell search engines AND humans what your site is about – what other way is there? Stuffing a keywords Meta tag with a bunch of irrelevant words like city names? I don’t think so!
So here is what some people try to do, incorrectly, to help this imaginary company rank better for the keyword “property sales in Vancouver” (I’m from Vancouver so I can use that as my example), which sounds like writing for search engines (boring, and ignores your users):
“Property sales in Vancouver – we are a boutique company that offers the best services possible to our clients. We are so amazing; we have a proven track record and have won many awards doing real estate sales in Vancouver. See what our clients say on our real estate sales testimonials page. If you chose us, we’ll make you happy because we provide the best service of any property sales company in Vancouver. Our goal is to form long-lasting relationships with all our clients who are in Vancouver, Surrey, Richmond, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Tsawwassen, Ladner, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Texas, USA and Canada.”
Totally retarded way of speaking, right? That would be writing for search engines, and that’s what people mean when they say not to write for search engines and to write for your users instead. But there is still a way to do this right, and to please both search engines and users.
Here is a perfectly good re-write of our original paragraph above. Notice below that I’m also going to use theme-related words in the paragraph, to create relevance for search engines:
“We are a boutique company specializing in property sales in Vancouver. We have a proven track record demonstrating our ability to sell yourVancouver real estate, and have won many awards in the real estate industry. Our portfolio has included such clients as Company X, Person Y and Organization Z, all of which testify of our impeccable attention to detail, our friendliness, good listening skills and our passion for finding the right buyer for their real estate investments. If you chose us, we’ll make you happy because we provide the best service while also making sure your Vancouver property sale remains our top priority. Our goal is to form long-lasting relationships with all our clients.”
There you have it. Yes, we do make an effort to include keywords, and maybe it’s not exactly how we would talk in real life, but it does the job, and it isn’t jarring, the way the ‘bad’ example above was. It also doesn’t just say “we’re the best,” it explains details ofhow the company is the best. As my journalism teachers used to constantly drill in my head: “show me, don’t tell me.” We should all be applying that principle in our writing, whether for SEO or not.
To read: “Uncommon WordPress SEO tips”
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