There are few professions that can compete with the air of mystery that surrounds SEO. In fact, David Copperfield could learn a thing or two about misdirection and creating mystique from a chat with an SEO consultant.

But things are changing.

Google’s algorithm is getting ever more sophisticated, and the attempts to game it ever more antiquated. Pretty soon, it will be what other people say about your website that decides its ranking, rather than the tactics you can deploy yourself.

But for now, here’s a basic rundown of how SEO works:

On page optimisation

Title tag <title> – Placed in the header section, this helps Google identify your page’s subject, and defines the description that appears at the top of the browser window

URL – Having keywords in your domain name and page name also helps

Heading tag <H1> – Tells Google what the title of your page or article is

Body content – Keyword stuffing is more likely to get you blacklisted then patted on the head. But it’s wise to aim for a keyword density of 2-4% to keep the SE spiders well fed.

Popping your website address into SEOBugz.com will tell you whether you’ve ticked off all of the above.

Off page optimisation

It’s all about the backlinks baby. So how do you get them? Here are some common tactics:

1. Blanket email/spam website owners offering a link exchange.
2. Beg relevant websites with a high Page Rank for a backlink
3. Manually create mini websites for posting backlinks
4. Post articles to directories with linked keywords and phrases
5. Post links in social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit)
6. Post relevant comments in blogs

These tactics are all well and good. But they can be very time consuming and there’s no guarantee Google won’t flick a switch (e.g. Panda) and reduce their impact.

There are 100s of other SEO tricks you can try, but they could all stop working tomorrow.

Instead, there’s a better approach to SEO that combines marketing, PR and sales into one juicy cocktail. What am I talking about? Yep, you guessed it – customer focused SEO copywriting.

SEO copywriting should focus on answering your customers’ questions

The aim of a forward thinking SEO campaign should be to attract links naturally.

To do this, you need to create content that people want to link to. So rather than produce keyword stuffed articles that scrape, copy and mash together content already available, SEO copywriting should focus on being valuable, interesting and original.

For topic ideas, consider what questions your customers might ask before buying your product or what queries they’re typing into Google. Answering these questions through your content will:

1. Attract ‘long tail’ traffic from search queries
2. Build trust in your expertise
3. Pull customers into your sales funnel if they subscribe to your blog
4. Attract links from people sharing your articles with friends and colleagues in social media
5. Attract links from other bloggers in your field (posting helpful comments on their blogs is a good way of attracting their attention)

To get these benefits, your articles will need to deploy the persuasive and psychological techniques used by generations of copywriters. These are skills not easily found in article writing sweatshops, which continue to pour their bilge onto the web.

As word spreads on the new long term approach to SEO, expect to see more businesses investing in high quality SEO copywriting in 2012 – which provides useful information with a sales pitch weaved between the words.

It’s one SEO tactic that’s destined to always generate results.

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Ah, the long form sales letter. Such a bone of contention among copywriters. Many will deride their length, saying nobody has the patience to read pages of copy these days, whilst direct marketing copywriters, who test avidly, will tell you otherwise.

When discussing long form copy, many people will picture those get rich quick schemes covered in bold red headlines, where you can earn millions with only ten minutes work a day while drinking pina colada’s on your beachfront balcony.

With this sort of reputation, you’d think a long form sales letter has no place being on a serious corporate website.

After all, business folks are busy people. They’ve got a mountain of emails to plough through, meetings to attend and conference calls they’re already late for. They don’t have time to wade through pages of copy, or will be fooled by your copywriting mind tricks.

But is this correct?

Perhaps it’s time to take a scientific approach. To stop basing the length of B2B copy on intuition and to find out what actually pulls in the numbers.

Long form copywriting gives you space to answer objections

Long form sales pages have the potential to dramatically improve conversion rates on B2B websites.

This was the argument put forward in a recent Internet Marketing Podcast interview with Dr Karl Blanks, the co-founder of Conversion Rate Experts. With a client list that includes Google, Apple and Sony, when he speaks you tend to listen.

One example he gave was how the changes they made to the landing page for SEOMoz increased revenue $1 million/year. Their approach included all the classic traits of a long form sales letter. These tactics would be equally effective on a B2B landing page.

After all, whether you’re selling sparkplugs or software, your website still needs to convey the same information as you would selling face to face. And you wouldn’t tell your sales people to stop talking after three minutes, now, would you?

Write for the customer, not for yourself

Too often, corporate home pages focus on trying to make the company sound important and impressive. They’ll use longwinded clichéd gobbledegook rather than tell the customer what they actually want to know.

A landing page should be focused on the customer. It should answer all their questions, counter their objections, remove risk and give proof that you can deliver what you promise. This is a lot to cram into 300 words.

Ultimately, landing pages should be as long as they need to be to win a sale or to trigger an enquiry. Maybe long copy isn’t always the answer.

But (as the SEOMoz case study shows) it’s certainly worth considering and testing.

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Upon visiting my website I discovered nasty looking warning signs plastered all over the home page and in my WordPress’ admin screen. Thinking it was probably a plugin playing up, I logged into my WordPress theme’s support forum to get some answers.

Unfortunately, the issue wasn’t so innocent or simple to solve.

In super quick time, I got a response from my theme’s creator, Andon, with the words every website owner dreads – ‘Matt, I think your website has been hacked’. Not exactly the best news to receive last thing on a Friday.

Thankfully, Andon also gave me some salient advice on something every WordPress owner needs to know, and how to protect against it: In  July and early August there was a security vulnerability discovered with TimThumb script used in some WordPress themes and plugins.

So if you haven’t updated your theme in a while, you could be at risk, and should follow these steps to lockdown your WordPress website:

• Take a deep breath and try not to panic. Rushing through these steps could create an even bigger mess if you get them wrong
• Backup all your WordPress files and database (you can download your database with this plugin)
• Update your WordPress installation and theme to the latest versions. If you have a premium theme they should have put out a security update. If it’s a theme you’ve created yourself, it might be worth getting it checked over by a WordPress expert (feel free to post your details in the comments, if you are one)
• Check to see whether any new users you don’t recognise have been added (as I discovered to my horror) and delete them post-haste
• Change your passwords if you haven’t done so in a while
• Even after changing your passwords hackers can still login if you haven’t cleared their cookies. You can do this by uploading WordPress security keys to your wp-config.php file
• Install WordPress Firewall 2 and AntiVirus plugins for an extra line of defence

Thankfully, the hackers didn’t do much damage (as far as I can tell), and I was still able to login and rescue it from their clutches.

There’s still some ugly warning messages all over my admin panel and for some reason three portfolio posts were sent to subscribers yesterday(?). But other than that, I think I got away lightly.

Otherwise I might not be writing to you now.

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Getting people to trust you has always been a cornerstone of effective copywriting. It’s a simple principle: if people believe what you say, they’re more likely to buy.

A key factor in building trust, that’s often ignored, is the channel you use. An advertorial, for example, in a well respected broadsheet is likely to have a higher response rate than if you were to email the same advert.

A YouGov survey (reported upon in Marketing Week) to assess levels of trust in different types of media (in response to the phone hacking scandal) found the following:

• radio  - 52% think it’s very or fairly trustworthy
• TV – 47%
• newspapers – 28%
• magazines from brands – 25%
• online magazines and mag apps – 23%
• paid-for printed magazines – 22%
• websites – 21%
• email – 11%
• direct marketing – 8%
• celebrity tweets – 1%
• YouTube and website videos – less than 1%

(Breakdown courtesy of Help in the City blog)

Combining channels can increase trust levels (and sales)

Another interesting stat is that the same percentage (31%) trust ‘comments/reviews written by other users and customers’ as editorial written by professional journalists. This highlights the power of ‘word of mouth’ in the social media age, and that people are actively looking for feedback from other customers before committing to a purchase.

With this in mind, it’s worth considering how you can incorporate customer feedback alongside your own content for maximum trust building impact. Perhaps by extending your promotions into Facebook and Twitter, therein lies the answer?

Another takeaway is the fact that people now trust free branded magazines (e.g. those of supermarkets) more than paid-for magazines. After endlessly banging my drum about content marketing a few years back, it looks as though people are finally getting used to the idea of brands being producers of quality content, and not merely shallow advertising.

Customers are a cynical bunch

So what else can you apply from these findings to your marketing?

Well firstly, the overall low levels of trust show that you can’t afford to treat your customers like idiots. People are already cynical of marketing. Filling your copywriting with exaggerated claims and hype won’t win you many friends.

Secondly, try to involve customer input, with reviews, case studies and comments, to build the authenticity they’re looking for in this (supposed) era of transparency.

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Do you own a smartphone? I bet, being the sophisticated reader that you are, you do. You only need to do a quick scan of people on trains, in supermarket queues and around the office to know that smartphones are absorbing more and more of people’s attention. And there are plenty of stats to prove it.

Recent figures (compiled by Google and the British Retail Consortium) show that mobile search is growing over 200% year-on-year. 27% of the UK population now owns a smartphone (and shockingly, for cash strapped parents, 57% of teenagers).

So should we start worrying about the implications for us copywriters of the shift to a shrunken version of the internet? Maybe. But for now, what’s important is to be offering valuable advice to our clients, many of whom will be wondering how they can convert their website for the mobile web.

If you’d like to know how your website looks on people’s smartphones, you can do a quick check by entering a website’s address into skweezer.com. If it looks as though it’s been squeezed through a letterbox, you’re not alone.

Thankfully, creating a mobile version of your website doesn’t have to be the technical minefield it sounds:

1) Create an app style version

With services like mobisiteGalore or Zinadoo, you can create a stripped down version of your website without any coding wizardry or having to worry about different screen sizes and formats.

The drawback is that the customization options are fairly limited, along with the type of websites you can create. But it can be a quick, easy way of enabling people to get core information about your company on their mobiles.

2) Create a stripped down version

Mobify is a service used by The New Yorker, Threadless and Wired to create mobile versions of their websites. To use it, you simply select which elements you wish to port over and Mobify will do the rest.

I haven’t tried it myself, and it appears to be aimed more at ecommerce and publishing sites, but it’s certainly worth a look if you don’t want to get tangled up in code.

3) Plan for the future, with ‘responsive web design’

If you’d prefer to keep all your website’s elements intact, you could modify your website with ‘responsive design’. This involves setting the sizes of all your elements as a proportion of the screen size (this post covers it in more depth).

With tablet PCs also growing in popularity, responsive design enables you to create a website that will expand or reduce to make the best use of the available space, and to ensure people can enjoy a smooth experience whatever device they’re using.

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Sooo, the new website is up and running, after a few minor technical hitches.

On the home page you’ll see I’ve followed through with the idea/threat of switching to promoting myself as an agency. Along with the elevated sense of self importance, I’m hoping it will push me up higher into the big leagues as a serious outfit, one that’s ready to take on all the business world’s copywriting projects, both big and small.

But with transparency and being honest with clients high on the agenda, I’ve made it clear that it’s still me behind the curtain pulling the levers. Otherwise, I’ll be on thin ice when clients start wondering why it’s only me that ever picks up the phone.

My USP – Cliché free B2B copywriting

Google’s search results are a crowded place.

So to try and stand out I thought I’d give myself the USP of offering corporate BS free copywriting. You won’t find any ‘bleeding edges’ or ‘best of breeds’ being poured out from this melting pot.

But I’m starting to have second thoughts.

Am I at risk of scaring off the entire B2B crowd with my high mindedness? Are endless superlatives and grandiose claims how they expect copywriting to sound?

If so, will they pay my invoice?

So to help me decide, I thought I’d put clichéd copywriting on trial.

First up, the defence for the ‘blue sky thinking’ style of copywriting that’s sat (looking rather smug in a pinstriped suit, might I add) in the dock…

The Defence – Clichés build rapport and familiarity

Buzzwords might make us copywriters wince. But customers are different. They don’t spend all day reading through marketing material like we do.

Words and phrases that sound like clichés to us are common expressions that help people get your point. They immediately know what you mean.

After all, isn’t it our job to communicate as clearly and concisely as possible? Creative wordplay should be left for novelists. Otherwise, for the sake of sounding unique and clever, you risk writing long winded phrases that are inaccessible to readers.

And terms like ‘synergy’ and ‘one stop shop’ sound professional. It’s the way business people talk. If you’re a serious company with a serious product, you don’t want to sound like someone flogging watches in a bar or how you’d chat to a neighbour over the fence.

Keep your ‘conversational’ copy for those that want to hear it – teenagers and bloggers.

Well, after that ballsy defence, clichéd copywriting is looking more pleased with itself than ever, even giving the court typist a sly wink.

Will the prosecution be able to knock it off its perch? Let’s find out…

The Prosecution – Clichés are lazy, meaningless and send customers to sleep

When you read copywriting packed with clichés it can sound as though the copywriter has been writing on autopilot – hammering out one hackneyed superlative after another, with one eye on Game of Thrones.

Clichés are so overused that they’ve become vacuous phrases without any real meaning.

Everybody is so far outside the box we don’t even know what the box is anymore. And can anybody remember a world where everything wasn’t already ‘turnkey’ and ‘off the shelf’? Supposedly, we all had to assemble everything ourselves, like an Airfix model without any glue.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not as though there’s a shortage of words to choose from for expressing an idea or concept.

And customers don’t want to listen to a business droning on about how it’s the fastest/cheapest/market leading/ etc. They want real information they can use.

Focus on what the customer wants

Copywrting should be focused on them – on their problems, hopes and desires. It should show empathy for their predicament, and explain how your product can solve it in real tangible benefits. Not with sugar coated features.

And beneath the power suit and reassuringly thick business cards, a B2B customer is still a living, breathing human being. You’re not writing to a fax machine.

Writing that’s more conversational, and mirrors how people talk, comes across as more trustworthy. And as any salesman will tell you, trust is invaluable when trying to sell something.

So rather than use lazy, meaningless clichés, copywriting should be fresh, tight and brimming with personality. It should arouse a customer’s curiosity, keep them reading until the last full stop and then send them rushing to place an order.

Copywriting won’t achieve this if it’s reeling off the same old tired sales patter customers have read a million times before.

The verdict – Guilty!

And with that, as the writer and self appointed judge, I’ve decided that clichéd copywriting needs to be locked away – permanently.

 Guards!

Not looking so smug now, are you?

But I fear clichéd copywriting will only serve a minimal sentence. I’ll be forced to release it soon. It’s far too entrenched in the B2B world’s vernacular to be removed from polluting the marketing world forever.

After all, I’ve got bills to pay and clients to keep happy. But at least I’ve made a small stand for fresh, cliché free copywriters everywhere.

Now, time to rewrite my home page…

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Dear Readers,

Sorry for the flood of promotional sounding posts in your inboxes and RSS feeds this weekend. As I hope you’ve guessed, these weren’t supposed to have been sent out (I’d never use my blog for such blatant self promotion).

I’m currently updating my website with a new theme, which unfortunately seems to have placed all the portfolio pages in my blog feed. So please just delete everything you’ve received in the last two days, and sorry again for the intrusion.

Matt

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Why do people buy things? Sounds a simple question. In the copywriting world, you’re taught to use a combination of aspiration, emotion and logic to secure a purchase. But there can also be subconscious irrational reasons at play.

Over the last decade ‘behavioural economics’ has grown in popularity as a way of identifying the irrational reasons behind buying decisions. These are reasons that fly in the face of commonsense or logic, and aren’t recognised in classic economic theory.

After identifying what these irrational triggers are, behavioural economics aims to use them as a way of influencing how people behave and ‘nudge’ them towards taking action.

A popular book on the concept, ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness’, is believed to be required reading in UK government circles, and Obama is believed to use its principles to guide his reforms.

So maybe there’s something in it for us copywriters…

4 key principles of behavioural economics you can weave into your copywriting

1. Price context/framing

People will gauge the value of something based on the other options available.

Restaurants will stock an exceptionally expensive bottle of wine because it increases the sales of the next bottle down by making it will feel as though you’re splashing out without going overboard. Similarly, the second cheapest can be a top seller because it feels like you’re saving money without being like a cheapskate.

Another great example of price framing is the supermarket chain M&S’s ‘Dine in for 2 for £10’. This positions the range as an alternative to eating out in a restaurant, thus subconsciously raising its value.

2. Fewer choices makes it easier to buy

In an experiment, one shop sold 24 types of jam whilst another sold 6. The shop selling 6 jams outsold the other shop by 5 times. Why? Because if you give people too many options it makes it harder for them to make a decision. It simply increases the variables in play and the potential objections to each choice.

3. Power of the default option

When you give people an automatic default option it gives them a sense of ownership. It feels like something they already have. The sense of loss people feel from giving up that option is stronger than the sense of gain. So if there’s a particular option you want to direct people towards buying, set it as a default.

4. Make the cost less painful with delayed payment

This is a trick retailers of high price products, like sofas and high end TVs, have used for decades. Offering delayed payment reduces the pain people feel at the point of purchase. They don’t feel the sense of loss of money being sucked from their bank account at that moment. Delaying payment softens the sting and makes it easier for people to say ‘yes’.

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SEO has always been a game of cat and mouse. As soon as an effective tactic is uncovered everyone rushes to exploit it before Google finds out and slams the door, often maiming a few fingers in the process.

For years now, article marketing has been a core SEO strategy. Inevitably, this tactic became overused/abused, leading to article directories becoming flooded with cheap, poor quality content, and annoying Google in the process.

Following Google’s ‘Panda’ update, article marketing as a cheap link building strategy appears to have died a death.

So what’s to be done?

You could either:

a)      Realise that, maybe, being on page 1 of Google is no guarantee of success, and that you might be better off using older, yet still effective, tactics of generating sales, like picking up the phone, advertising locally or sending direct mail

b)      Adopt a more Google friendly link building strategy

Article marketing still has a future as a link building strategy. Only now the focus is on creating quality content, and being more selective about where you publish.

Here’s a rundown on some tried and tested tactics which don’t (yet) risk upsetting Google into slamming more doors:

1)      Guest post on relevant blogs – Clued up search marketers have known for years that effective link building is about quality, rather than quantity. Approach fellow bloggers in your industry with a high page rank to see if they accept guest posts. Just remember to write something fresh, informative and useful that they’ll be happy to share with their readers.

2)      Relevant niche industry sites – Look around to see if there are any industry news websites accepting submissions. Often this is in the form of press releases. But you might also find news websites happy to publish commentary or ‘how to’ articles that will be of interest to their niche.

3)      Link exchanges with relevant bloggers – Getting listed on a ‘Blogroll’ (list of blogs people read) has always been link juice gold. Rather than sit around hoping a fellow blogger notices you and gives you this nod of approval, why not consider offering a blogroll link exchange? It’s wise to approach bloggers with a similar page rank to yours so it’s a fair trade.

4)       Link bait with videos, eBooks and quality content people want to share – Offering quality content, that’s not easily available elsewhere, has always been a lock when it comes to SEO. Producing videos, eBooks and a high quality series of blog posts does take a lot of elbow grease though – but nobody can say you’re not committed.

5)      Press releases – Ideally, press releases should be newsworthy to attract a journalist’s interest. But in the world of SEO you’ll find companies announcing the opening of a window if it means they can generate some backlinks. In my experience, PRWeb is great for a US audience whereas Daryl Willcox is better for the UK. There are plenty of free directories you can try as well, but there are no guarantees your press release will be read or generate any useful backlinks (but if you do know of any effective free PR services, feel free to share in the comments).

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When one door closes, another door opens.

Long time readers will know that I’m not a fan of the $10 (or less) per keyword article copywriting gigs you find on freelance bidding websites, like Elance and Guru. I pity the copywriters that feel forced into these jobs, where they’re paid sweat shop wages to hammer out 10-20 articles a day just so they don’t have to live in a box.

Hopefully, these low paid writing jobs might be on their way out.

Following Google’s recent ‘Panda’ update the rankings of many ‘low quality’ article directories have been slashed. This means the tactic of flooding directories with keyword articles to boost a website’s ranking might no longer be effective, slamming the door on the market for hastily written (or copy and pasted) content.

But before all you article writers out there start to panic, there might be a bright new dawn on the horizon.

Other changes are taking place which suggest there could soon be a growing market for a more profitable and ethical market for copywriters, one in which quality content is rewarded with increased website traffic – and higher wages.

Article directory marketing is dead. Long live Facebook marketing

There are two key reasons why Facebook’s growth is good news for copywriters.

Firstly, there are already hints coming from Google’s labs that social media will have a bigger influence on SEO in the near future. The world’s most popular search engine has already started including links to videos and news stories at the top of its search results. Higher rankings for websites featuring popular articles being shared in social media could soon follow.

Secondly, Facebook has given its ‘Like’ button a revamp. Following the update, whenever you click on ‘Like’ you’ll now share a full story in your Facebook newsfeed, with a headline, blurb and photo. This extra information will make ‘Likes’ a potent tool for spreading content, generating backlinks and boosting website traffic.

The key is now quality, not quantity – which deserves to be paid a higher rate

People aren’t going to ‘Like’ any of your posts unless they find it valuable (whether it’s informative or entertaining) and think it deserves to be shared amongst their friends.

Quality content can’t be churned out on a conveyer belt, where copywriters are rushing to get as many done as they can. Creating quality content takes research, effort and time. And writers should be reimbursed for it accordingly.

Blogs have always been an engine room when it comes to driving traffic to a website. Now their importance is even greater, along with the need to consistently write quality posts people will ‘Like’ and share with their friends.

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