Transcript
It’s been 14 years since I was first introduced to SEO. What a time to be alive that was – keyword stuffing, mass link purchases. Fortunes made overnight and obliterated the next day. Wonderful stuff.
And while the excitement has been replaced by a more mature, steady and predictable system, the search engines retain their position as the #1 route to market for the majority of B2B brands. Whether it’s top of funnel, research led engagement, or queries with a high purchase intent, it’s almost a given that somewhere along the customer journey the search engines will play a role.
Thankfully, as important as this stuff is, it continues to be a mystery to the vast majority of marketers. The reason is simple – those that most possess the power to impact SEO are terrified by its seemingly technical nature.
So here’s the reality that most SEOs don’t want you to know – technical SEO is a hygiene factor – if the site takes 3 days to load, has more security issues than a European final at Wembley and looks like ass on mobile, yeh – you’re gonna have problems.
But beyond that, the gains from technical SEO are really very marginal. The real leverage is in the brand authority and on-site content. The former is a long game, but the latter is something we can control today.
And when I say we, I mean copywriters. They’re the ones with all the power. And here’s why:
- A good copywriter is overflowing with empathy – at its core, SEO is about putting yourself in the shoes of the user and imagining the 5, 10, 15 things that person will be hoping to find when they make any given search query. Is it pricing, technical information, customer quotes, helpful insights, instructional videos? The more of these boxes your landing page ticks, the better it’s going to rank.
- They are great at research – good copywriters are obsessive about their market. Not only does this equip you with detailed product and audience intel, but it also means studying your competition. A great copywriter will look at the other results on page 1 for the target term. What content do their landing pages contain? Is there anything that’s been missed?
- And of course, they’re great at creating content – so they take everything they’ve just learnt, and use it to create killer landing pages.
There is honestly nothing more powerful than this. There is not a month that has passed in my career where I haven’t seen a website transformed by a copywriter creating really substantial landing pages, packed with rich, useful information, that represents an awesome experience for anyone that’s made the target search query.
Yes, the on-page optimisation has to be done and the internal link structure is super important, but those things aren’t technical and well within the average copywriter’s capability.
Your skills though – empathy, research and, of course, content creation itself – these are attributes a person either has or doesn’t have. And if you do, then you’re a world class SEO but you just never realised.
Well now you do., so you better update your LinkedIn profile.
See you next time,
Dan
