Tag Archives: SEO
Web content writing – Are you over-reliant on PPC?
Fact – Your website needs increased traffic to raise sales
Fact – Search engines remain the number one way for people to discover your website
Fact – Paid search results can get you to the top of Google rankings (ish) So obviously you should be concentrating your online marketing budget on PPC right?
Increase your website traffic, increase your profits
Wrong! Consider the following stats:
- 85% of search engine traffic comes via organic links
- Only 11% of advertisers report achieving a higher ROI through a Pay Per Click Advertising Program than an Organic Search Engine Optimization program
- 4 out of 5 (80%) of search engine users never click on PPC results
- 86% of search engine users report they feel organic listings are more relevant than paid listings (Source: Zero One Zero)
And what about the following quote from Marc Resnick’s seminal work, “An Empirical Study Of Paid Listings In Product Search And Purchase“: “For paid listings to yield the financial results that are anticipated by the business community, it is critical that consumers perceive paid listings and their descriptions as relevant to their transactional tasks. The results of this study support previous findings that this may not be the case, but also provide some guidance for the development of paid listings. Participants in the study showed a bias against paid listings in several ways. They reported an explicit suspicion about paid listings in their verbal protocols. They rated the relevance of the paid listings as lower than the organic listings despite the content of the descriptions being controlled across listing type”
Does this mean you should drop PPC completely? No, but it should serve as a warning that paid search complements organic SEO. It does not (and cannot) replace quality web content as a driver for your website. Organic search engine results are driven by carefully crafted, compelling website copy which is relevant, entertaining and informative for real people.
Google have stated the importance of creating content that people actually want to read time and again. Truly great websites recognised this long ago, and are inevitably crammed with fantastic content. Unfortunately there is no shortcut to success.
Organic SEO provides a long term boost to your website traffic, PPC traffic lasts only as long as your budget. Paid search can kick start traffic to your website, but ultimately it will be quality content which keeps traffic and customers flowing to your site.
One more thing! SEO and top notch copywriting is not about creating website traffic. Your focus must always be on creating sales. All the website visitors in the world will not be of use if you convert them into customers too.
Need help creating quality SEO web content for your own site? Get in touch with us today to learn more about our professional copywriting services.
Where’s the beef? Is your website text full of horsemeat?
Did you know that just like a frozen ready meal, your website text could be full of nasty surprises? Unlike “beef” burgers however, the hidden surprise is not horse meat, but duplicate content.
Your website text may look the part, but is it really just horsemeat inside?
The hidden dangers of duplicate website text
Up until recently, the internet was pretty forgiving about content being duplicated across websites. That was until the legendary Google upgrade nicknamed “Panda”. One of Panda’s many intended goals was to identify website text that was duplicated across multiple sites and adjust the search engine rankings for for these websites accordingly.
Almost overnight previously successful websites found that they were not appearing in the top Google search results any more. All because their website text could also be found on other websites. And lower search engine rankings meant less website visitors, eventually leading to less leads and less sales.
How did this happen?
Some less scrupulous websites were simply stealing content from other sites operating in their niche. After all, why write your own website text when someone else has already done the hard work? For these sites, the Panda update was a timely lesson in honesty.
100% unique website text is like 100% beef – tasty!
The Panda update therefore caught many of these smaller companies by surprise. They figured that because they were paying someone else to oversee operations, everything was hunky dory. Many were often paying quite a lot out on website content management every month, believing that more money equated to a better service.
What to do?
The only way to avoid being penalised by Panda is to ensure that web content is unique and of good quality. For some businesses this may mean rewriting significant sections of text to replace content that has been duplicated elsewhere. For others it simply means committing to writing great webpages and blog posts from here onwards.
Businesses must also ensure that companies offering professional copywriting services only ever use completely unique content on their website. As most experienced SEO copywriters are now familiar with Google Panda and its effects, this should be a given, but you must check before committing to an ongoing writing partnership.
Here at Tech Write, every copywriting project we undertake is (and always has been) 100% unique, with content created and shaped specifically to each client’s needs. Drop us a line to see some examples of our previous work or to find out how we can create steak-standard website text and stop your site being condemned as horsemeat.
Keywords at the cost of quality?
When starting a copywriting project for our clients, we are often provided with keywords and phrases which the client would like us to use for SEO purposes. Sometimes these words and phrases are relatively simple to weave into a quality blog post or article, but other times the phrase is not so amenable. Worse, often the chosen 
phrases make no grammatical sense whatsoever leading to clunky, unfriendly sentences which spoil the article in general.
As a service provider, Tech Write is duty bound to fulfill the wishes of our clients, but we do also offer advice when we suspect there may be a problem. Here are three things we suggest will help ensure your website is stocked with tip-top content, rather than something which reads as though it has come straight out of a content mill:
1. Quality often trumps keywords
Keywords may help attract the attention of search engines, but the same is not necessarily true of website visitors. Focus on delivering quality content and readers are much more likely to pass your links on to their contacts, helping to raise your profile and reputation in the process. Search engines rankings are not as convincing or persuasive to real people as a well written article.
2. Limit the number of keywords
We recognise the importance of keywords but advise clients that keywords are best used sparingly to ensure copy reads well. Choose a key phrase or two and stick to that. If you want to cover more keywords, then save them for another web page or blog post (we can write as many as you like after all!). Approaching keywords in this way helps your copy remain more reader-friendly and feels less like a sales pitch at Google.
3. Choose the right keywords
It might sound obvious, but rather than creating an article into which are crammed loads of different keywords try choosing the most pertinent phrases and sticking with then. Pick the phrases which best relate to your product and services and we can then optimise content around these. Your content will then be more focused and meaningful for your readers.
Our key piece of advice is think of your reader. Search engines may help increase websites clicks, but compelling, readable copy is what actually equates to sales. So if you would like a hand creating content people actually want to read and pass on, why not avail yourself of our SEO copywriting services?
You can get hold of us using our nifty contact form.
