I don’t know how many times I’ve said it. So many, I’ve lost count. SEO copywriting is not solely about the search engines. While the engines can drive traffic to your site, they will not whip out a credit card and purchase anything. That’s why your focus must be primarily on your human customers with a secondary concentration on the engines.
This very topic came up again just the other day. I was talking with a new client who wanted me to write three SEO pages for her website. She emailed me her keyword research along with the phrases that were recommended by the SEO firm she used. The first thing that struck me as odd was the keyword choices for the Home page.
She was selling three entirely different products, but the SEO firm recommended three keyphrases that all focused on one, single product. The firm’s rationale: it gave better focus to the page so the search engines could recognize how to index it better. While it may have given a tight focus, the engines wouldn’t have had an accurate view of the page because the copy would have been slanted toward one product.
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On an ecommerce-type site (as this was) shorter Home page copy is very common and typically works best.It would be virtually impossible to fit in three keyphrases about one product into short copy without the text sounding extremely repetitive.Also, that strategy would leave little room to discuss the other two products in any detail at all. This means the visitors essentially would only receive information about one of the three products.
A better solution in this particular case?Use one keyphrase for each of the three products. Google is now recognizing synonyms in copy and, since each of this client’s keyphrases dealt with weddings, having a range of keyphrases would not only benefit the site visitor, but would also assist Google with evaluating and ranking the page.
Always remember… there are dozens of ways to drive traffic to a website. There is only one means for earning revenue (customers). Never sacrifice the latter for the former.
