1. February 15, 2012
As promised, today we'll follow up to my last post, which talked about link farms and their <cough> writers. Today we'll
talk about how you can find an SEO copywriter who will produce rankings and conversions simultaneously.
Here's a question I get a lot:
What's the difference between link farm writers and qualified SEO copywriters?
Glad you asked. True SEO copywriters understand the user - the person searching for information, products and services
online. Users are made up of consumers, researchers, doctors, teenagers, and so on. But if to the SEO copywriter it makes
no difference because the user is almost always her client's prospect. The SEO copywriter knows how to get inside her
client's prospect's head and learn how they use the Web, how they navigate sites and search engines. She also knows how
to write compelling content that serves two masters - search engines and, you guessed it, the user.
For search engines, the content feeds robots the "food" they need to rank pages according to keyword relevancy
For the user, the content gives them exactly what they're looking for (she knows this because she did in-depth
keyword research to uncover how they're searching)
The SEO copywriter not only does this for high-level pages found in the SERPs, but she also writes for deeper pages on her
client's site. Pages that savvy searches are looking for. Achieving top search engine rankings is just one piece of the overall
SEO puzzle. Ultimately her client wants top rankings for popular non-branded keyword phrases, but they also want their
pages to perform (aka convert) to the best of their ability.
So why can't you hire a link farm to do the writing?
Sure, they're cheaper. They might even be quicker. The problem with link farms is that they "employ" thousands of so-
called writers from all four corners of the earth. They put a salesy pitch on the service, like "Our diverse selection of
talented writers can craft copy about any topic." Ya right.
Don't get me wrong, it is possible that some of them can write - I've even stumbled across one or two - but it's likely (and I
speak solely from experience) that most of them can't. Not at all. So what happens is that the link farm writer (and I use
the term writer loosely) will create a piece of content, often called linkbait, for the sole purpose of plastering it all over the
web to work in a link back to the client's site. More often than not, the piece of content falls flat for several reasons:
it's poorly written and has no value - no one's reading it let alone clicking the link
the topic isn't relevant to the client's site OR to the site it's being posted on
search engines consider the backlink useless because it's coming from a very low-quality page
Lots of things can make for a low-quality page, but that's a whole other post! Maybe next time we'll talk about how to weed
out the good from the bad.
Am I against link building as part of an overall white-hat SEO strategy? No. Do I have an issue with link farms and bad
writing? Hell yes! Don't you?
Cheers,
Aimee