How To Create a Winning SEO Keyword Strategy For Your Business

Google and search engines are always on the look out to optimise their results for the end user. It’s why they so frequently change their algorithms. In 2018 they “improved” their PageRank and ranking signals algorithm over 3,000 times; in the age where AI is taking over more and more, it could be refining itself in ways we don’t even see.

If your business site has been reigning supreme over Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for years, you could find yourself in the unenviable position of being on the wrong side of an algorithm update, losing hard-won rankings and positions.

Having a strong keyword strategy that keeps up with Google and new trends can help your business navigate the wild world of SEO without having to start from square one.

WHAT IS A SEO KEYWORD STRATEGY?

Though it can be confused with keyword research, a keyword strategy goes a step further than mere keyword research. Intuitively, we know what keywords we want to target in searches. If we own a plumbing business, we would type in “plumbers near me” or “gas plumber Melbourne” to Google and grab the first few autocomplete results, incorporating this into our on-page SEO copy.

A keyword strategy goes deeper. Instead of a scattergun approach, an SEO Keyword Strategist would identify the cost/benefit ratio for chasing certain keywords or keyphrases, see what keywords could drive relevant traffic to your site, identify new opportunities, and help structure your content into topic clusters. A strategic approach can also temper expectations around rankings and growth. Highly competitive keywords may be out of reach for many small businesses.

However a laser-focused strategy that also includes less competitive or high-intent keywords could drive more qualified leads to your site. This often means a higher return on investment than looking for raw volume. Many users who end up at your site may be “tyre kicking” and bouncing off without any conversion or interaction. The strategy also needs to consider this aspect of user behaviour.

Benchmarking Performance

At the very least, you should have some kind of analytics set up to gauge what incoming search terms your site is ranking for at any given moment. You should be using Google Analytics or Google Search Console at the minimum.

Signing up for free versions of Ahrefs or SEMRush can give you general overviews of how your site is ranking in terms of keyword authority and positioning among competitors. At the very least, you need to set a baseline from which to work with.

Set SMART Goals

With any strategy, be it crossing the Ardennes or carving out 10% greater market share, it needs an identifiable goal. These should be SMART:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Actionable

• Relevant

• Timely

The specific goal a business could set are improving rankings for a certain topic or keyword cluster to the first page within six months. To use our plumber, this may be “blocked sinks/drains/grease traps” to the first page in that time period. These could be refined into key performance indicators for Top 3 rankings or Top 4-10 rankings, for example. For a list of SEO KPIs every business should track, SEMRush has a great guide here.

Topics - The New SEO Keyword?

As you may be aware, Google uses the E-E-A-T ranking signal to sort relevant pages and display them in Search Engine results. This stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This rings especially true for businesses that trade in “money or your life” sectors such as financial advice or medical treatment. Instead of focusing on individual keywords or phrases, a good SEO keyword strategy will incorporate content and backlinking efforts on becoming trusted expert authorities on topics.

Our plumber may want to target keywords around plumbing, but what other topics are relevant to would-be searchers? How to unclog drains can also relate to general home maintenance; the latter of which could be a topic cluster. The high-level topic then informs what other secondary keywords you could be targeting underneath to support your strategy.

Creating topic pages also feeds into any good SEO content strategy, which also comprises how you lay out your pages and sitemap. Certain pillar pages may contain basic information on a given topic (plumbing maintenance) and supporting pages with their own topics (how to stop drains from running slowly) which you can then link to.

Remember: this topical content need not be written: it could be video content, podcasts, interactives, and social media content.

Keyword Difficulty vs. Payoff

Every keyword has metrics that you need to look at such as search volume and keyword difficulty. Search volume shows how often a search is run (usually a rough estimate) and keyword difficulty is the probability of entering the “race” for ranking high and actually pulling it off.

Sites or pages with high domain authority, referring domains, and page authority are harder to knock off the perch than lower-hanging fruit. The higher the difficulty, the better or more relevant your content has to become, which can take a lot of time and effort (and even then, it may not pay off.)

You will have to evaluate how much effort you wish to funnel into certain keywords or perhaps look for “easy target” keywords that you can target for quick and easy wins. (which Backlinko goes into detail with here.) How you prioritise high difficulty vs. low difficulty keywords or topics is a matter for your business - but the strategy itself should give you insights into what will work best to achieve your ultimate goal.

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SEO KEYWORD STRATEGY IS ALSO Content Strategy

Your topics and keywords will be centered around content - but your keywords for content shouldn’t be placed “just anywhere.” They too should be laid out in a strategic way.

A strategic approach must include direction for topics, blog or page posting frequency, and where a potential customer could potentially enter your sales funnel when searching for that keyword or phrase.

The top-of-the-funnel often sends larger traffic levels with a lower intent to purchase or convert, whereas the bottom-of-the-funnel typically sends lower traffic volumes with a higher intent. Though you may have less traffic coming through at the bottom-of-the-funnel, the payoff is much higher than if you simply ignored that keyword completely.

Tracking and Refinement

It’s vital that you conduct regular tracking and reporting on progress towards your goals.

Plans can change and the methods you employ to can and might shift halfway through. That's normal, and it's frequently what distinguishes a good plan from a great strategy. 

Checking in on your KPIs at least monthly ensures that you are constantly aware of how near you are to meeting your objectives, that you can communicate updates with other stakeholders and that you have confidence that things are heading in the right direction and that your SEO Keyword Strategy is set up for success.

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Should You Cut Back On Marketing During a Recession?

Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and General Motors. Huge companies that have been around for a long time - in the case of GM, over 120 years - but what do they have in common?

They all sprung into life during a recession or depression. They were so successful, the chances of you using at least one of the products those companies make while reading this is almost even money.

With inflation still rampant, interest rates rising, and electricity bills set to soar by at least 25% after the 1st of July, Australia is staring down the barrel of a recession - the standard definition being two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. So what does that mean for us as business owners?

Our first impulse is to cut costs across the board. Where the axe lands, that’s for the almighty to know.

However, planning to cut back needs to be a surgical strike on certain wasteful expenses, not an all out war on your profit and loss statement. Many businesses think that cutting their marketing - usually an outsourced “expense” - is a good idea during a recession. Is it, though?

With SEO copywriting being a vital plank of digital marketing, can we copywriters not only survive, but thrive in unfavourable business cycles thanks to keeping our marketing up too?

Cutting Back on Expenses During a Recession

40% of American businesses surveyed here said they would cut back on their expenses during a recession.

This makes sense from a household budget perspective - but a household is not a business. If you cut a Netflix subscription, it means no more binge watching Stranger Things. If a business excises its Zapier subscription, it means previously automated tasks need someone to complete them manually.

Value in a business isn’t always measured in profit and loss statements to begin with - but it will come back to haunt you eventually in terms of slower cash flow, which can often lead to a death spiral where more cash goes out than comes in. According to ASIC, about 20% of businesses that went insolvent during 2018-2019 was down to poor cash flow management or high cash use.

Though many companies see marketing and communication as a third prosthetic limb they can take on and off at will, it’s essential to maintain that “third arm” for keeping your current customers on side and potentially reaching new clients. According to WordStream, repeat customers are a 65% chance of conversion, while new customers are a 13% chance.

Besides, how cool would it be to have a third arm?

Case Studies in Recession Marketing

Almost every study conducted into marketing during a recession shows one outcome - businesses that maintained or increased their marketing usually did way better than their counterparts who cut back.

Buchen Advertising discovered that companies that cut advertising during the 1949, 1954, 1958 and 1961 recessions fared poorly compared to businesses that did the opposite.

The International Journal of Research in Marketing paper ‘Turning adversity into advantage: Does proactive marketing during a recession pay off?’ noted that “firms that have a proactive marketing response in a recession achieve superior business performance even during the recession.” Companies can shore up their position with some strategic, entrepreneurial marketing.

For example, during the 1990–1991 recession to improve their position, microprocessor giant Intel launched its “Intel Inside” brand-building program, aggressively promoting the brand when there was little advertising competition.

During the 2008 financial crisis, analysis by Kantar Millward Brown found that 60% of the brands that stopped all TV ad spend for six months saw their brand use decrease 24%, and brand image decrease 28%.

McGraw-Hill’s oft-cited study into the marketing habits of 600 B2B companies during the early 1980s recession showed that brands who invested in better marketing and advertising grew 275% more than those that didn’t.

The most recent example is home short-stay rental’s darling AirBnB and how they fared during the pandemic. They cut almost all their ad spend during the COVID-19 pandemic, where many jurisdictions were locked down by their governments in response. Competitor VRBO outspent AirBnB ten to one during that initial 2020 global lockdown period and saw their bookings recover by 61%, while AirBnB’s slumped by 15%.

Though we may want to tighten the belt during a recession, we really ought to be grabbing a megaphone.

Why keeping professional marketing and copywriting is important

If you use an amateur you’ll get an amateur result. Keeping on your professional digital marketing or copywriting specialists means a consistent tone of voice, branding, and audience engagement.

As information analysts and resources, they can help you identify strategies that will return on your investment more than simply “pouring more money” into PPC or social media ads. They’ll be at the forefront of new channels, techniques, and messages that cut through to people during a recession. They can explore new keywords to target or niches to penetrate. Their creativity is a value-add that you can leverage at almost every level of your business.

Outsourcing your marketing - or bookkeeping, or administration - means concentrating more on your core business and delivering more value to your customers, whether you’re a B2B or B2C business. Everyone needs their dollar to stretch further. Figuring out how to do that with what you have is a big boon for business once the recession passes.

Further, copywriters and marketers are natural networkers. They have their ear to the ground when it comes to new trends, grants, and other opportunities that could come your way.

working with your marketing or copywriting team

Though you may be fretting that dreaded phone call to tell your faithful marketing or copywriting firm “your services are no longer required” it’s better you work with us rather than cutting us off altogether.

Though you may have ordered a blog post every week, it’s unwise to just “stop.” Tapering that back to once a fortnight or month means your SEO won’t stand still compared with the competition who is still investing in their digital marketing - if you stop, they can and will overtake you.

You may want to invest in content at scale using AI while your copywriter edits it using their skills in Artificial Intelligence Optimisation. Even if copywriters become “obsolete”, there are still some opportunities left out there for us!

If you stop advertising or content marketing until you “ride out the storm,” playing catch up may end up costing far more.

Oh, and you know we’re a GST deduction, right?

So, should you cut back on marketing during a recession? I think the evidence speaks for itself.

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The State of Digital Marketing in 2023

AI, TikTok…what’s next? Digital marketing seems to be so evolved it barely resembles this time last year. In a new report by Hubspot has taken a snapshot of the state of digital marketing in 2023. We all know about the advent of artificial intelligence - but is it all its cracked up to be? Is short-form video still effective? Will budgets increase or decrease in 2023 and 2024?

Drawing on other trends and sources on digital marketing, let’s have a deep dive into the State of Digital Marketing in 2023.

Artificial Intelligence and Automation

According to Hubspot’s report, the average marketer works on five campaigns at a time, and a total of seven campaigns per quarter. Using AI to automate certain processes makes business sense to gain more productivity with less time spent on admin and busywork. Tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E are proving to be useful in generating ideas, creating templates, and churning out content at scale. However, the time savings may be offset by the limitations of GPTs which are prone to repetition, “hallucination”, and limited in scope.

First Party Data

Notice how “big data” died suddenly and without warning? With Apple and Google both tackling the problem of terrible user privacy with new features that restrict the tracking of data from third-parties via cookies - and users taking matters into their own hands with AdBlockers and the like - gathering first-party data will be the boon for marketers wishing to personalise and target content to their audiences. 86% of marketers told Hubspot that that data privacy changes have impacted their overall marketing strategy over 2022. Giving users control over their data by opting in to newsletters, shopping accounts, and other data capture methods such as surveys, yields a sense of trust and an opportunity to create value in the often hidden transaction of harvesting user data.

The Rise of the Short Video

Instagram Reels is just YouTube Shorts for people who don’t like TikTok. Whatever the platform may be, short form videos are reigning supreme for marketing in 2023. (Especially the tarted up AliExpress tat hawked by people in sweatpants - but that’s a discussion for another time.) 21% of marketers are going to be investing in short form video, and ad revenue from the format is set to surpass $10 billion (USD) according to Woosuite. Research by Wyzowl shows that 91% of businesses are using video and 73% of consumers prefer to watch a short-form video to learn about a potential purchase. 90% of those businesses that are using video has helped them generate leads.

Mobile Friendly Design

According to SimilarWeb, 57.36% of Australian web traffic is consumed on mobile; the present and the future of the web will be mobile optimised. That means optimised designs, user experiences, and even instant apps will be in-demand among users - and businesses. Though desktop designs may look great, the chances are your customers are scrolling with their thumb, not their index finger.

Sliding into DMs

“Sliding into DMs” or direct messages over social media was once describing a slick romantic gesture - and businesses want the romance between customers to blossom as they use social media to directly interact with customers by answering questions, handling complaints, and general interaction. Hubspot says 30% of younger (Gen Y and Z) have bought products on social media over the past three months, thanks in part to direct message customer service. Using AI chatbots and other automation can help start the conversation with humans taking over when things get too complicated for the machine to handle.

Authentic, Organic SEO

When downturns occur, people look for authentic, organic content. Not paid advertorial but something they can connect with and feel good about reading. Hubspot says that 7% of businesses will cut their ad spend during recessions and bottom-out business cycles - but that doesn’t mean you should skimp on your organic content that improves your SEO. Though marketers may do this as a business-building exercise, B2B and B2C companies should be thinking of investing in SEO content that isn’t engineered to hard sell, but connect with customers while taking home the added benefit of improved Search Engine Results Pages. That means providing real value for their reader - not so much top of mind, but strong of heart.

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Ready to leverage the top marketing methods that will keep your business thriving during 2023? Want the best marketing copy to fuel your videos or SEO? Contact me!

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How Often Should You Blog for SEO?

Blogging: once the province of teenagers with too much time on their hands (hello, LiveJournal) is now the backbone of corporate and business marketing and communication.

Blogging, or adding authoritative and trustworthy content to your website is a time-honoured and proven strategy for increasing your Search Engine Optimisation. Blogs that target keywords can help increase your ranking and drive traffic to your site, theoretically increasing conversions and revenue.

With all that in mind, how often should you blog for SEO purposes?

The advantages of determining your appropriate posting frequency are considerable.

Why Blog for SEO?

Blog entries, first and foremost, help you rank for natural keywords. For your website to receive organic traffic, you need these.

A blog that is regularly updated also raises brand recognition. Your target audience becomes more aware of your web presence, your products, and your services as you post more about your sector.

Your company can gain the community's trust by blogging. Regularly updating and posting pertinent articles about your sector can help you establish credibility with your audience. In contrast to a rival that rarely refreshes their content or publishes blogs, they are more likely to convert on your website.

How often should you blog FOR SEO?

You need to establish a blog post frequency first and foremost. How often can you afford to blog, in terms of time and resources? An ad hoc approach of “when I’m not busy” will lead to exactly zero blogs being written.

A blog post frequency lets you set a baseline for yourself or your content writing staff for more pragmatic reasons. Without a schedule in mind, you can neglect other tasks in favour of creating blog entries all the time. This also applies to teams that are close to one another, such as social media and design, who would significantly benefit from a set frequency so they could order their tasks.

You have an upper and lower limit for blog post frequency, allowing you to concentrate more time and resources on other areas of your company.

Newer websites or start-ups should blog at least once or twice a week to play “catch-up” with their competitors. For established businesses, blogging bi-weekly or monthly may be key. The important factor is to keep adding to your pool of content, as the SEO benefits will emerge over time.

Even a solo writer like me can’t compete with enterprise level communications firms or dedicated blogs that churn out content several times a day – so you have to keep your expectations reasonable and sustainable. Burning yourself out writing blogs all day as an accountant will likely upset your clients due to a lack of attention!

When too many blogs steal your keywords: keyword cannibalisation

With many things in marketing and communication, too much of a good thing can often lead to diminishing returns. Having too many blogs – especially blog posts of equal quality and authority – on the same topic or search term can lead to keyword cannibalisation.

Keyword cannibalisation means that a site has too many pages that are competing against one another, potentially driving away traffic from more important pages, especially ones that are geared towards conversion (e.g., a sales page.)

You should be targeting key phrases and keywords related to your business – just don’t choose the same ones too often!

You can compliment evergreen topics or blogs with new information and timely resources. Just remember to keep on top of new developments to share on your website – because old and outdated information can work against you the staler it gets.

Skyscrapers – the long read blog

Blogs don’t have to be any particular length – though more words are better to convey as much information as possible – but experimenting with the “Skyscraper” or “Hero” blogs once a month can lead to greater SEO dividends than peppering your site with smaller blogs more often.

One client of mine uses this strategy, producing timely and keyword rich skyscrapers of over 1,500 words every month. It not only increases traffic for their chosen keywords, but it also garners considerable media attention and the all-important backlinks from other authoritative sources.

This of course takes time, research, and editing to make it all flow and read well.

The final word on blogging for SEO

The trick is to examine other blogs in your field and assess how frequently they post in relation to their organic keyword distribution. For a hint as to how many posts per month are optimal for your site, search for a strong organic keyword profile that has the largest percentage of industry-relevant page one keywords.

That way, you’ll see significant upticks in your Search Engine Page Results over time!

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How to Choose an Effective SEO Copywriter

Of course, this could be the shortest blog post in the history of this site - Choose me! I’m awesome! End of story.

However, not all SEO Copywriters are the same. Some have particular niches; others are generalists (such as myself.) One may emphasise on-page techniques over off-page optimisation. I am more creative - others are more technical. Learn about the differences between types of copywriters here.

Identifying a suitable SEO content creator or copywriter for your organisation is vital to the success of your digital marketing and content strategy.  It’s important to consider various factors when selecting the ideal SEO copywriter for your business.

Research Their Portfolio

It’s important to research a potential copywriter’s portfolio before hiring them. Check out their past work and see if it aligns with what you need done. You want someone who can provide quality content that will help boost your website’s visibility and attract more customers.

Gaining an insight into their methodology is key when searching for the right SEO copywriter. To make sure you’re on the same wavelength, ask questions about how they approach a project, what kind of results can be expected, if they’ve worked on projects within your industry, and any other important details like turnaround times or keyword optimisation techniques.

Gleaning information from reviews and testimonials can provide insight into the efficacy of a copywriter, allowing you to make an informed decision. Seeing what others have said about them can give insight into how reliable and effective they may be when it comes to producing content for your business needs.

Tailored or Specific Writing Styles

When selecting an SEO copywriter, make sure to read through some samples of their work so that you understand their writing style and determine if it fits with yours or the brand identity that you want portrayed online. A great writer should be able to produce content tailored specifically towards meeting all of your objectives while also staying true to the tone desired by both parties involved in the project (you included).

I Sell Words, for instance, always produces “test pages” to ensure the tone and style of your content suits your brand’s personality and your target market’s expectations.

An experienced SEO copywriter should be able to offer valuable insight into how best to optimise content based on industry trends, keywords used by competitors in similar markets, etc. What's more, it is essential that they understand exactly what success looks like from your perspective; meaning having a clear grasp of both short-term and long-term objectives associated with each piece of content written/produced for the best results across multiple channels (e.g social media platforms).

By following these steps when selecting an copywriter, businesses can ensure they find someone who meets all expectations set forth prior to engagement, ultimately leading up towards successful digital marketing campaigns.

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What is Artificial Intelligence Optimisation (AIO) Writing?

There’s a new buzzword/acronym floating around the writing space at the moment, and it’s the “AIO writer” - the Artificial Intelligence Optimisation writer.

Some sites are saying that the advent of the AIO marks the death of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) writer - and at this stage, there is merit to the argument.

What is AIO writing, and will it really kill the SEO writer?

What is AIO Writing?

AIO writing is a bit of a misnomer. AIO writing is more like AI editing - taking the output from an AI text generator and editing it up to make it seem as if a human wrote the piece itself.

The business model is to have an AI write a blog or webpage in mere minutes, have a human AIO specialist massage the content so it bypasses any potential AI-detection algorithm (the kind that can scuttle your hard won SEO) and appears as if a human wrote the entire thing itself.

HOW AIO WORKS, IN THEORY

If you are an SEO content writer, the usual process is to write an article that caters to a certain search term, keyword, or keyphrase.

The aim of this is to provide expert-level, authoritative and trustworthy content so it ranks higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a user query. The higher the ranking, the more likely it will be clicked on, resulting in more traffic for the site. For business or commercial sites, this forms a crucial part of their digital marketing.

Instead of an SEO writer writing the content from scratch, the initial ‘draft’ would be generated by an AI algorithm. This can take minutes instead of the hours in which a human would usually complete a draft.

As discussed in a previous blog, “ripping and posting” AI content can potentially harm your SEO efforts. An AIO writer (or editor) would “massage” the AI content so it has the superficial appearance of “experience” - the Google PageRank metric that AI struggles to replicate in its writing.

The AIO writer could also edit the work so it has a consistent tone of voice, is free of glaring copy errors, and/or factual inaccuracies.

However, it could be argued, that any veteran SEO writer would not need to edit their own work to a significant degree. In the three hours an AIO writer shapes a 2,500 word AI-generated article so it’s worthy of PageRank and human eyes, a deft writer could have written the article itself with the editing process resembling proofreading (fixing grammatical or spelling mistakes) instead of substantive copyediting (making stylistic or editorial changes to the piece, e.g., removing entire sections.)

A human writer could also have made critical decisions when it comes to linking to other authoritative sources, instead of shoehorning them in after the fact.

The POTENTIAL Limitations of AIO

It would seem that my job is caught up in a “rapidly developing, uncontrollable technological system” as the thinker Jacques Ellul would say.

However, the fact I just (rather shamelessly) name-dropped an obscure technological thinker from the late 20th Century also shows the limitation of AIO writers. If they are mere editors, over a long-enough timeline, all AIO writing will sound, feel, and read the same.

AIO writing as a bonafide “profession” may also be a flash in the pan. Google and other closed-source detection algorithms may become so sophisticated they will ferret out AIO content from the “real thing” and end up penalising “cheaters” who take the easy way out.

Ellul said “every problem generates a technological solution; computers breed ever larger, more fragile, and vulnerable systems. But the solutions raise more and greater problems than they solve.” His disciple, the incomparable media ecologist Neil Postman went further: “like all important technologies of the past, they are Faustian bargains, giving and taking away, sometimes in equal measure, sometimes more in one way than the other.”

Like the smartphone revolution in 2007, it “solved” many problems by combining many different technologies into one device. It also had unintended consequences. Mental health problems, addiction, and cyberbullying are now rampant problems caused (at least to a significant degree) by smartphones and “always-on” social media.

The academic Evegeny Morozov in his landmark To Save Everything, Click Here, argues that technology can often be an improvement, and is not necessarily revolutionary in and of itself. Even the once “revolutionary” streaming service Netflix has lost more than one million subscribers.

There is a tendency to view any mass-adopted technology as truly game-changing. I even wrote in a journal article (2011) that businesses don’t use computers because they’re handy; you literally cannot run a business without one and a connection to the World Wide Web. Is AIO in the same category? Would this level of introspection even be possible for AI? Or is that not what we want?

I mean, you can travel by horseback these days, but why would you?

That said, I still wear mechanical watches when many of my friends wear Apple Watches. What does that make me?

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Will Artificial Intelligence Change SEO Copywriting?

If you haven’t taken the AI natural-language dialogue engine ChatGPT for a spin, you definitely should.

It’s astounding how it can take a normal query and reply in a structured, easy-to-understand, and if you didn’t know any better, thoughtful way.

Friends and colleagues have been sending me links to ChatGPT, fearing that this will kill off my livelihood. As an SEO copywriter, at least on the surface, it can produce articles in minutes for cents while it takes me hours and hundreds of dollars of investment later.

With that scary thought in mind, should I learn how to code these machines instead of competing against them?

The written word by a scribe’s hand has been around for tens of thousands of years; we aren’t extinct just yet.

The Limitations of AI-written copy

The irony of logging into ChatGPT is the reCAPTCHA asking if you aren’t a robot. AI cannot access itself, it would seem.

I asked it “How do I optimise my content for Google?” - and it returned a pretty decent list of best-practice SEO techniques. Use H1, H2, etc. headings, use internal and external links, upload sitemaps, conduct keyword research. Couldn’t fault it there.

Then I asked it something more subjective - something that required real-world experience to answer.

“Who's the better Starfleet captain, Picard or Sisko?” If you don’t speak nerd, this is the eternal debate as to whether who is the better fictional starship commander - Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise-D or Captain Sisko of Deep Space Nine and the Defiant in the iconic Star Trek spinoffs.

Here’s where things got interesting; or from my perspective, quite boring.

Its opening line was this:

It's difficult to say definitively who the better Starfleet captain is between Jean-Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko, as it ultimately comes down to personal preference.

That’s not what I asked, ChatGPT. I asked who is better.

It rattled off, in natural-language, how Picard was a level-headed, intellectually curious, and stoic diplomat; Sisko by contrast was an impulsive yet decisive warrior who let his emotions guide him more often than not.

That’s all fantastic; but AI will never ever give you a “straight” answer. So who’s better, HAL? I am unable to tell you that, Dave.

If it was attempting to persuade me one way or the other - the essence of sales - it was doing a pretty poor job.

Fortunately for us mere mortal copywriters, Google has seen the inherent flaw in AI copywriting and adjusted its PageRank algorithm, the fundamental programming behind its search engine, to accommodate.

Preempting the rise of AI - Google’s E-E-A-T

Prior to 2018, Google’s quality index rated pages in terms of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). If a page could demonstrate more of these attributes compared to others, it would rank higher in Search Engine Page Results (SERPs).

In August of 2018, Google added another metric to the ranking system: Experience. (E-E-A-T.)

Google is essentially asking if the writer behind the content has accumulated actual, real-world experience on their chosen topic. Have they actually made Gramma’s Sausage Gravy & Biscuits? Have they actually stood underneath and witnessed the grandeur of the Sistine Chapel? Have they binge watched Star Trek: The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine to truly evaluate whether Picard or Sisko is the better captain?

An AI could have high levels of Expertise (they have the entire internet at their disposal), and in turn Authoritativeness or Trustworthiness owing to prior social proof, high traffic, or user ratings on a particular site.

However, if this high E-A-T site begins churning content written by a machine lacking Experience, their ranking will be soon be diminished in comparison to a site that has a real human that has actually done all the things it’s writing about.

Expertise is also a subjective measure - just because I changed my oil on my car, does that make me a motor mechanic? Hardly. How do I stack up against Star Trek nerds who saw the first television run in 1966 and stuck with it ever since? At the end of the day, it’s for the reading public to decide.

Training and formal education can go a long way to establish credibility as a subject matter expert or influencer - but I can’t sit here and say that I learned everything there is to know about copywriting by attending university. That took independent research, trial and error, informal learning, and practice.

AI copywriting is cheap and fast, but never good

If you’re a business and you’re thinking that SEO copywriting “costs too much” we now have something that can do it for free. But should you use it?

Remember the triangle of value: good, cheap, and fast - you only ever get to pick two.

AI copywriting seems to pick “cheap and fast” each time, every time. That doesn’t bode well if you have high search engine ranking aspirations in the short-term or long-term. AI will always be one step behind human minds doing real and original research.

The Hungarian scholar and author Arthur Koestler once remarked, “true creativity often starts where language ends.” For AI, there is no end to language. It can only regurgitate or synthesise what we feed it.

For now, pioneers will always be flesh and blood; and machines will be playing second fiddle.

SPOILER (RED) ALERT

To me, Sisko is clearly the better captain.

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Get your own human-written and award-winning copywriting for your business right here at I Sell Words!

How Professional Copywriters Can Boost Your Finance Business

I’m a wordsmith but somehow, I fell into finance and economics copywriting. One of my nearest and dearest clients is Savvy, one of Australia’s leading finance brokers. It’s been great to learn finance from experts such as the CEO Bill Tsouvalas, and gain insights into PR and SEO from Satwik and Adrian over the last decade.

With all that in mind, I’ve also learned how to leverage copywriting to enhance a finance business. I’ve written for many different finance businesses: brokers, lenders, financial advisers, debt negotiators, financial educators, investment firms, and companies working in financial technology (fintech.)

So how does professional copywriting boost your finance business?

Copywriting establishes credibility

Finance is complicated. Extremely complicated. For instance, all types of consumer (not business!) lending is overseen by ASIC under the National Consumer Credit Protection Act. Finance is a bit of a taboo subject in the West - people don’t readily tell you how much they make; nor will they volunteer whether that shiny new Beemer is under finance, either. People want to feel reassured that the people that will handle their money will treat it with kid gloves - and do right by them. Not just because they have to, because that’s part of their mission and core business principles. Professional copywriters can craft that narrative, so it’s baked into all financial communications.

Copywriters are “financial interpreters”

Full disclosure: I haven’t touched a mathematics textbook since I was in Year 11. Finance is all about numbers - and some of the trickier calculations can often go over my head. However, interpreting dense and often confusing concepts such as chattel mortgages so laypeople can understand it is half the marketing battle. Technical explanations of chattel mortgages can often throw people for a loop; but explaining products or loans in simple terms make them easier to sell. A chattel mortgage is a loan for business to buy equipment or vehicles that gives them tax advantages and allows them to borrow more than the value of the item being purchased. A few of you reading may be thinking, “That’s just what I need!” See? Simple.

Copywriters help with financial education

There is no advantage to “tricking” people into your financial product. ASIC will eventually find out and you’ll lose your credit licence. Simple as that.

Financial education in Australia is lacking to say the least. A Savvy survey in 2020 showed that about 35% of Australian adults have a “fair” grasp on financial literacy which corresponds to a primary school equivalent of knowledge. For a society that runs on finance, that’s pretty woeful.

An educated audience is an empowered audience and an empowered audience makes better financial decisions. Copywriting can be tailored to introducing new technology in finance (fintech) and helping people help themselves when it comes to finance and economics. This all feeds into trust and credibility for your financial business.

Copywriters Broaden Your Niche Content

As someone working in finance, you may think there’s only so much you can write about. A copywriter can broaden your appeal by writing for several different niches at the same time. Just writing about highly abstract “car loans” can be drilled down into:

• How to save money on car loans for single mums on a budget

• Bad credit car loans

• How to get a great deal on car loans as a pensioner

• What scams to avoid when applying for car loans

• How your business can save money on car loans

• What is the difference between a car loan and an unsecured personal loan?

Those are all free ideas (that I’ve already written about - sorry!) which your financial business can leverage to expand on your content base and improve your SEO for niche keywords. Professional copywriters are also lean, mean ideas machines - use them! They also make for great newsletters, social posts, and blogs.

With an expanded content library you cement your thought leadership - and trust in your brand. Which can go a long way into developing an ongoing audience; you’ll never know when the family you got a car loan inquiry for may turn to you for their mortgage broking!

Copywriters Save Time (and Money)

Writing out everything yourself can be exhausting if you aren’t a writer. If you’re doing the writing and marketing as well as all the broking or advising, it can be a struggle. Copywriters are much more efficient at writing and researching than doing it all yourself. Just like outsourcing your plumbing to a plumber, outsourcing your writing to a writer makes financial sense. For a modest investment, you’ll make a good ROI over months and years with good content.

Using high conversion content for transactional emails are even better investments; and there are so many points of losing a prospect in a financial sales funnel, too. Qualifying leads, supplying estimates, getting documents submitted, consenting to credit checks, conditional approval, unconditional approval, settlement, post-settlement follow-up - that’s almost 2,000 words of copy if you wanted to send nurture emails to your prospect at each step. For someone like me, it’s a breeze. But that figure may send some finance people dizzy - and rightly so!

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If you want to get the best financial copywriting in Melbourne, contact me! I’m always happy to get stuck into financial copywriting and help take your business to new heights.

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How To Write Evergreen Content For Your Business

Living in a fast paced world where news goes in one ear and out the other in a matter of minutes, having solid evergreen content for your business will feel like herding cats - cats who may or may not exist depending if you look at them or not. (Schrödinger’s content, perhaps?)

With some businesses, some truths remain self evident. Good narrative writing, no matter what language you speak, will always need a beginning, middle, and an end. In Accounting, showing people how to balance their books will always be a valuable skill to impart.

So what is evergreen content, and how do you write it for your business?

What Evergreen Content Looks Like - And What It Doesn’t Look Like

Evergreen content is content that will be relevant now, tomorrow, and (hopefully) five years from now. Evergreen topics are ones that people will always be interested in and will search for consistently.

Topics based on:

• Recent news or current events - X did Y at Z time

• Temporary trends and fads

• Pop culture

• Statistics or reports

Are not evergreen, as the map they are trying to create will not correspond to the real-world territory for very long. There’s nothing more disheartening finding out-of-date statistics when conducting a research project.

Evergreen topics may look like:

• How to come up with ideas for your blog

• How to write a mission statement

• Steps for creating and sticking to a budget

• Choosing complimentary colours for your logo

Usually, evergreen topics are highly abstract in nature - they don’t focus on a specific application that may not exist in a year or two - and conversely they don’t try to predict the next best thing. It remains as relevant now as it will five or even ten years down the track.

Researching and Writing Evergreen Content

Evergreen content needs to be thoroughly researched - even if you feel that the topic is “played out,” you can conduct research by looking up already popular articles on the topic. You know you have researched the topic to its limit when you are finding new articles or websites that contain almost the exact same information.

Now that you have your research, it’s time to write the content. Evergreen content is rarely “novel” - but there’s nothing preventing you from putting your own spin on things. Coming up with new ideas for blogs is a broad topic - though you could drill down into a niche such as Finance or Automotive to appeal to a select audience. You may want to produce smaller pieces, or create long-form ‘skyscraper’ content that touches on almost everything there is to know about the topic.

Evergreen content should be aimed at laypeople or beginners. It shouldn’t contain jargon; unless it’s vital to the topic. At any rate, you need to explain what it means and how it fits into the broader subject.

Evergreen Content and SEO

Evergreen content should form part of your comprehensive SEO and content strategy. That means choosing the right keywords, optimising the meta descriptions, having relevant headings, adding links and having good backlinks. It should be authoritative and valuable to others - not a cynical play at boosting your Search Engine Results.

Repurposing Evergreen Content

You may be thinking - once I’ve written my evergreen content, that’s it - I’ve painted myself into a corner. I can’t say the same thing on the same topic twice! That may be true, but you can refresh evergreen content by:

• Turning it into a video or podcast.

• Reminding your audience of the content via social media.

• Looking at the “state of” or “trends in” the topic as a follow-up (which unfortunately is not evergreen, but may be useful for others in their research.)

• Create case studies based on others who have followed your advice.

• Turn your information into an infographic.

• Use it as the basis for an email onboarding campaign.

• Tailor it for other websites or niches.

I’ve worked with businesses where I’ve written evergreen content on subjects so many times I’ve seen them in my dreams. The information is relevant but tailored for certain audiences. “How to get a car loan with bad credit,” with a little creativity and research can also become “Tips for single dads to get a car with impaired credit” which speaks directly to certain demographics.

What’s Next

That’s up to you - pick something you’re knowledgeable in, something other people will find useful, and start writing!

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Looking to get your own evergreen content up and running, written by a copywriter who’s worked with some of Australia’s top ASX 200 companies? Contact me to get started!

How To Write Landing Pages To Improve Your Local SEO

As a business that’s vying for prime position in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), you’re using every Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) trick in the book - but are you focused on local SEO?

Local SEO is becoming vital, especially when searches for “X near me” have surged 500% over the last few years, according to WebFX.

Couple that to 78% of local mobile searches convert into offline sales; and you’re probably wondering why you haven’t amped up your local SEO already!

So what is Local SEO and what do you need to consider when writing landing pages to take advantage of local SEO?

What is Local SEO?

Local Search Engine Optimisation or Local SEO is an SEO technique focused on catering to searches within a discrete geographic area, instead of just generic keywords. For example, “hairdressers near me” or “Plumbers in Ultimo” are search engine queries that businesses that have good local SEO will rank highly for. Businesses with multiple locations or are Service Area Businesses (SABs) benefit most from local SEO. A leading technique that chases these queries is having a area-specific or local landing page.

Getting Your Data Ready for Local Landing Pages

You may learn more about your existing visitors' origins and online behaviour by using Google Analytics, Google Trends, or SEO software such as Ahrefs. Make a list of potential local search terms for these people using this information. Leverage your position as a local businessperson to your advantage by asking clients about their search habits and the phrases they use to describe the services or goods you provide.

Thinking About Site Structure

You will either have a single local landing page or an overview page with multiple pages beneath, depending on the number of locations. It makes sense to include these pages in your navigation in order to guarantee that they will be found. Is there room on your menu to put "locations" as an item? Or do you want to include your overview page or a few significant landing pages in your site's footer?

Consider where in the navigation of your site your visitors would want or expect to discover your places. Link internally to your landing pages from other website pages or blog posts wherever it is possible to do so naturally.

Elements of a Good Local Landing Page

Elements of a good landing page are universal - that means having the right keywords in your meta and title tags; having clean URLs; internal linking; a definite call to action; social proof such as testimonials, preferably from someone in the area; a contact form; and your name, phone number, and email address so people can contact you directly.

A good local landing page should also include an interactive map of your location or service area; special local offers if applicable; and local schema markup too. This all enhances your local SEO.

Remembering Landing Page Localisation

Repeating the same information over and over can get tedious to write; and it also means duplicate content that search engines will penalise. The object of the landing page is for people to find your business when running a local search. It should be obvious that you are located or service that area. That means you’ll also have to be mindful of localisms and other peculiarities of language. If you’re a fast food wholesaler, a “potato cake” in Melbourne is a “potato scallop” in Sydney. Let’s not forget the eternal barney over what constitutes a “pint” in Australia.

Writing authentic and authoritative content needs a local flavour - and if you don’t know what that is, do your research by visiting the area (if possible) or making a list of consistencies in language among other local sites to use in your own landing pages.

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Looking to supercharge your local SEO with specialised local landing pages? Get started with award-winning SEO copywriting from I Sell Words.