Category: Writing Tips

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On SEO writing (a 2021 revisit to copywriter Henneke Duistermaat)

During a recent virtual networking conversation, a great marketing consultant mentioned that many Saskatchewan start-ups, across all fields, have naively paid (and then lost) thousands of their budgets to flashy, large marketing companies. These companies promise to get start-ups on “page one of Google” search results, without knowing the marketing that local clients genuinely need and that will work to secure real sales.

I write for humans, not primarily for bots. Having my copy appear on page one of Google’s search results, whether for myself, or my clients, would not secure sales. And yet the intrusive noise over high SEO rankings persists, even in 2021. On the issue of SEO, I sometimes worry about creative integrity and always refer my clients to the UK-based copywriter, Henneke Duistermaat.

In a recent blog posting on SEO (https://www.enchantingmarketing.com/seo-writing/), Henneke reminds us that the history of SEO writing began when writing for Google was supposed to be a copywriter’s strict aim. Online writing in those days (90’s, early 2000’s) was stuffed with keywords that made copy “almost unfit for human consumption.” In the 2010s, since Google “becomes smarter every year,” overlap developed between pleasing readers and meeting Google’s demands—but the overlap was still limited.

Nowadays, Henneke asserts, pleasing our readers “makes Google (mostly) happy, too.” Google “doesn’t want [copywriters] to try to beat its algorithm. It wants you to share your expertise, to create trustworthy, authoritative, helpful content—content that delivers what visitors are looking for.” She cites marketer Andy Crestodina who says, “To write for SEO, write the best page on the internet on your topic. If you make the best page on the web for your topic, there are 2000 math PhDs at Google trying to help you rank and get more traffic. If you don’t do that but try to take shortcuts, there are 2000 math PhDs at Google trying to stop you.”

Nowadays, then, Henneke says, if your “blog strategy is clear and reader-focused, you’ll fulfill the basic requirements for SEO, too.”

She shares five steps to write for SEO in 2021:

(1) Have a clear blog purpose, aiming for a topic that “fires you up,” so that you’ll “share your expertise with more enthusiasm.” Here your creativity can shine through.

(2) Use your audience as primary keyword research tool, writing about topics that matter to your readers (their aims, questions, problems, assets they seek), not to bots or to beat algorithms.

(3) Focus on tiny topics, instead of big questions, because the latter tend to be “vague and superficial or unwieldly and boring.” Narrower topics also provide more helpful content to readers. For a blog to be “valuable,” it should mix “a couple of articles about big topics and a lot of articles about tiny topics.”

(4) Write about each topic just once, since more than one post on the same topic compete and Google can’t tell which one to send traffic to.

(5) Write to help your readers “achieve a tiny aim, solve a tiny problem, answer a tiny question, or . . . present an inspirational collection of [resources]” and “optimize (a little) for Google” (www.moz.com/explorer is a free and useful tool to search keywords). Once you’ve identified a good keyphrase, include it in your headline, opening paragraph, in the main body of the post and in its conclusion.  Also, try to add some images in which, as in your URL, you can again insert the keyphrase.

Henneke writes: “the better Google becomes, the more important it becomes to focus on your readers and to deliver what they’re looking for. So use keyword research as a complement to, not a replacement of, understanding your audience and knowing how you want to help them.”

If you fear that SEO threatens to dominate your blogging, follow your curiosity and that of your readers to address their pain points or struggles, “so you know how you can help them.” By doing so, you’ll create valuable, interesting content that “Google’s house of math PhDs” will happily rank well.

Writing here, in Saskatchewan, means your blog posting should not aim to appear on Google’s first page, but instead to be noticed by your readers. Your posting will compel them to read your content closely and to identify you as a resource they urgently need.

And that’s an engaged client (and a likely sale) for you.

And now it’s your turn: Have you lost too much money and time chasing the elusive first page of Google’s search rankings? How might a revised method of SEO, based on original, focused copywriting, work to secure clients for you and your biz?

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Wordsmiths of the world unite! . . . Grammar guffaws to make you laugh

Plenty of friends and colleagues prefer not to use Facebook. But the following posting, from friend Evelyn Mackenzie, brought some needed laughter to my day! This was written by Jill Thomas Doyle and shared by Hilary Harley and then Evelyn. If you haven’t seen this listing before, then here’s some laughter for you!

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

Continue reading “Wordsmiths of the world unite! . . . Grammar guffaws to make you laugh”

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On simplifying your elevator pitch . . . for success (with a nod to Michael Katz)

At a small, socially distant networking event recently, I encountered two entrepreneurs, with two different entrepreneurial approaches, to offering the perennial “elevator pitch.”

Both entrepreneurs knew the importance of word-of-mouth marketing and were doing their best to introduce themselves clearly.

One of them, a financial planner, kept his “elevator pitch” to one sentence. But it was a sentence with at least three clauses (i.e. naming the major services he provides and for whom). The other person, a professional coach, used a simpler, single clause description of how she works to increase her clients’ sales. Continue reading “On simplifying your elevator pitch . . . for success (with a nod to Michael Katz)”

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Want your stories to succeed? Build them on ideas that “stick,” say Chip and Dan Health

I often blog on issues pertaining to stories and storytelling. But thus far, we haven’t discussed much about what constitutes a good (or compelling) story.

Thirteen years ago, Chip Heath (a professor of organizational behaviour at Stanford University) and his brother, Dan Heath (a senior fellow in social entrepreneurship at Duke University), combined their research interests and wrote Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck (London: Penguin/Arrow, 2007).

The book, which has fascinated entrepreneurs, authors from multiple fields, researchers and academics alike, asserts one overarching tenet: Thinking, writing and other story-based endeavours that provide “sticky ideas” (i.e. ideas that succeed by becoming popular and influential in contemporary culture) all exhibit the following six principles (“SUCCES”):  Continue reading “Want your stories to succeed? Build them on ideas that “stick,” say Chip and Dan Health”