It IS possible to write with your audience and search engines in mind. Learn how to find your voice within the limitations of SEO here.
In SEO and inbound marketing, the big buzzword of late has been ‘content.’ Everybody is concerned with developing and marketing great content. But the word itself, content, doesn’t mean anything more than something that fills something else. Content, on its own, can be quite an ugly word. But if we’re interested in breaking away from the vapidity of the word, we’re going to have to do something about it. (Fellow content strategists, I’m looking at you.)
W.B Yeats, in his poem “The Fascination of What’s Difficult” – written, actually, about writer’s block – describes the feeling of being emptied of the “natural content of [his] heart.” While ‘natural content,’ in this context, maybe a rather cold expression, it is also strange. What is natural content? It surely must mean something to marketers, to whom everything means something.
And, by extension, what is unnatural content?
Natural content is, naturally, what we feel. So unnatural content must be what we say, mainly what we write. We, as inbound marketers, are ever concerned with the production of content, busy primarily with the unnatural variety – especially because we create for the web, arguably the most affected and demanding platform ever made available to publishers. And yet: We must feed the beast.
Content marketing – Finding naturalism in the domain of the unnatural.
Ever the binarist, Yeats also wrote, quite famously, that “the intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.” Those of you reading this on the glow of your office computer at 9 pm can likely confirm his thesis.
Coincidentally, Yeats was quite fond of working by the steady glow of late-night candlelight. Unnatural content, it must be said, always overwhelms us when we let it. Sometimes it can be hard to look past the keywords in metadata, and examine our copy as actual user-driven content.
The key for inbound marketers is to re-establish the connection between the work – unnatural content, our shaping of the external world; and the life – natural content, our own internal world. A disconnect between these two concepts results, generally, in lackluster content, which causes marketers to fall into the habits that have made ‘SEO’ a troubling bit of nomenclature.
So as inbound marketers, we must – if we’re interested in the intellectual legitimacy of our industry – must reconnect our content with legitimate passion. We need to make our content great while always keeping the needs of the client or brand we represent front and center. This is our challenge.
Ever the binarist, Yeats also wrote, quite famously, that “the intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it takes the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.” Those reading this on the glow of your office computer at 9 pm can likely confirm his thesis.
Coincidentally, Yeats was quite fond of working by the steady glow of late-night candlelight. Unnatural content, it must be said, always overwhelms us when we let it. Sometimes it can be hard to look past the keywords in metadata and examine our copy as actual user-driven content.
Inbound marketers are key in re-establish the connection between the work’s unnatural content, shaping the external world, and life’s natural range, our inner world. A disconnect between these two concepts results, generally, in lackluster content, which causes marketers to fall into the habits that have made ‘SEO’ a troubling bit of terminology.
So as inbound marketers, we must reconnect our content with legitimate passion if we’re interested in the intellectual legitimacy of our industry. We need to make our content great while always keeping the client’s needs or brand we represent front and center. This is our challenge.
Why we want natural content
Search engines love natural content, probably because users love genuine content. As latent semantic indexing becomes more and more complex, search engines reward a diversity of language – rather than a repetition of keywords.
Inbound marketing agencies are becoming more and more prominent in the branding space as our services continue to expand outward from SEO. If we can create content from a place of honesty – and for marketing, this boils down to genuine interest in the product or brand we’re marketing – we can potentially pull ourselves up to the heights of commercial artistry generally reserved for our cousins in the ad agencies.
And because the limitations of commercial content are, even in the digital space, rooted mainly in the subject (i.e., what we can get away with writing about), innovations are generally found in the vertical axis of style. Therefore natural content is not what we say but how we say it.
And how we say it is (or at least should be) how the user is searching for it. How we are saying it, if we’ve done our market research, should be a reflection of the very people we’re trying to reach. But we certainly won’t contact them by boring them to death. It’s not a coincidence that the golden age of advertising coincided with the rise of post-modern art – the art of style over substance. Or rather, style as substance.
That is the conceit we’re working with. The search limitations do not bind us, but rather the fact informs our creative obstacles. The challenges of creating content within a narrow framework encourage ingenuity – or, if we’re lazy, replication. It inspires us to imagine new ways to circumvent the rigidity of the medium – or it allows us an excuse to produce derivative content. The choice is ours, but overcoming obstacles should always make us better at what we do.
Finding voice within limitation: the natural poetry of SEO
Once you start talking about the voice, you have to make some distinctions. First, you have to understand the difference between voice and tone. Your writing voice is like your singing voice: it may get better with practice, but it will not change. If you’re a baritone, you’re a baritone. Your agency or clients gave you a job because (presumably) you have a beautiful voice. Stop worrying about that. The challenge is to apply your naturally good voice to work within a given brand’s tone, which comes down to a willingness to wrestle with yourself.
The Shakespearean sonnet is by no means an easy thing to write – if any poem is easy to write. But poetry is undoubtedly one of the hardest. Though its rigid structure, while somewhat restrictive in the drafting phase, is ultimately an empowering form. So, I posit, is SEO.
It’s a matter, one, of distillation. The nature of solid SEO copy disallows irrelevancy. You have to stay on point. You must employ natural language in a way that feels slightly unfamiliar to readers – just enough to make them curious. It is just enough to drive their response, generally in the form of a click. That’s what we’re hired to do, though that may not be the language we use when describing our services to clients.
Secondly, the very nature of overcoming challenges to get your point across will make your point sharper. No kernel of an idea grows into anything worthwhile from not being challenged.
Our dedication to SEO, or Inbound Marketing, deserves more than copy that hits keywords. We need copy that hits keywords and then transcends them.
SEO is a demanding structure, but I argue that it is ultimately one that can make us stronger. It is the self-correcting diagnosis of the web. It is the organization of our content. SEO is, ultimately, a reminder to write well.
I say utilize it.
Creating Passionate SEO Content
The meta description tag is Google’s gift to the copywriter. When Google kicked meta descriptions out of the community of factors influencing their search engine rankings, copywriters were given a free pass to write whatever they wanted. The focus could finally be on users, not keywords. It was like the old days of ad copywriting.
For a good example, let’s look at how the folks at Old Spice did it. Now, Old Spice always has excellent content and bold social media campaigns, and they generally tend to sit right at the forefront of their game. Take a look at how they use rhetoric from their past ad campaign in a unique twist for their meta description tag, which contains only one primary keyword:
Awesome, right? Deodorant is not an easy subject to write about. Seriously. But this copy covers four significant points:
1. It hits the target keyword once, so it pops.
2. Integrates the feel of their ad campaign down to the metadata (a substantial part of the new SEO process).
3. It creates a call to action that is charming and inviting and undoubtedly drives conversion.
4. Most importantly, (as I said in the previous section) disarming and then intriguing the user with unfamiliar, poetical language: man smells. That word sounds like it could have leaped right off the pages of Joyce’s Ulysses.
In the wrong hands, the promotional copy can read a bit like the meta description from this Speed Stick landing page:
Typo aside, this uninspiring copy does almost nothing for the user. It’s a passionless, 2003-era blurb – a relic from the time that keywords mattered in metadata. And it’s not like Speed Stick doesn’t have a pretty strong advertising campaign to pull from. They do, kind of. They just haven’t given their digital properties that much thought.
It’s no wonder that Old Spice continues to be a leader in the brand space – and not just in their vertical. Their efforts (along with those of their ad agency Wieden+Kennedy) were putting creativity, absurdity, and irony (the good kind) back in the advertising forefront – particularly in their unique campaigns like featuring a man and his wolves, which aired (only in Alaska: wolf country) during Super Bowl.
The Responsibility of Inbound Marketers
As creators of online content aimed at mass appeal, our responsibility is to do everything we can to make the content we produce great, artistic, and poetic. We will often fail, especially if greatness is our objective. But since, quite frankly, people interact with sponsored content significantly more often than they read books of poetry and high literature, we owe it to our audience and our art to at least make an effort.
what are your ideas to add more art to our industry? How important is creativity to you and your clients?