A well-established copywriting colleague of mine was approached by one of the top SEO companies in the nation. They wanted her to assist their clients by writing web pages.
Web pages need to …
- Grab attention
- Understand the reader’s desire or pain
- Present a concept or solution
- Move the reader to a next action
- Be professionally written in a non-stuffy manner
- Incorporate keywords in a natural manner
- Incorporate keywords in a NATURAL manner SEVERAL times (very difficult)
- Have a title tag artfully crafted to get rankings and attention
- Have a description tag artfully crafted to get click-throughs
My copywriter friend was excited about the opportunity. She envisioned steady work with quality products.
Then she was informed that the top amount they would pay for a page was $20!
No writer worth the price of her keyboard would work for that amount.
Internet companies try to commoditize and systematize everything. That may be okay for some aspects, but it’s certainly not acceptable for the words that will go on your website.
Never under estimate the power of words.
So you, as a business owner, should pause when an SEO company says, “We’ll handle it all including the copywriting.”
Do you really want to entrust the marketing of your store to a bottom-of-the-barrel copywriter?
What kind of content do you think you’ll get? I’ll tell you. It’ll be the same blah, blah, blah as every other website in your industry.
To get words that truly “connect” with your visitor takes hard work. It takes deep research, thinking, writing, and rewriting to bring out what’s unique about your store and why customers should shop with you and not the guy down the street.
Even if you have a pre-stocked franchise-style website with canned copy, most systems allow you to do some customization. But few franchisees take advantage of that. And that’s an opportunity for you that your competitor is too lazy to take.
Be very careful of SEO companies handling the content of your web pages. You might get stuck with very poor pages!
