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In my two-plus decades of digital marketing, I've met and worked with SEOs of all stripes. Good ones, bad ones, and a few who mailed it in to collect a lazy paycheck. By this, I mean they dispensed the standard SEO advice. Don't get me wrong — there's value in SEO...
Content developers are creative people. Even information copy reads better when written with imagination and pace.
Technical SEO is mainly a left-brained pursuit, a world of crawl data, code analysis, and Excel spreadsheets. Few writers have the patience or desire for that.
Bulleted lists are the lifeblood of PowerPoint, and they break up monolithic blocks of copy on a web page.
But they don’t stand on their own as information.
Customers need more. Search engines may not index a page with bullets and nothing else, let alone rank it.
“All content starts with keyword research!” That’s the standard SEO advice. And while I endorse keyword research for any content initiative, it’s less useful for established content. You see, in the Search Console, Google already tells me what the keywords are.
For years, Google has told us that the meta description tag has no SEO value. Stop stuffing it with keywords!
It should offer a one or two-sentence summary of the page the user is about to see or maybe a brief marketing message. But more often than not, Google will override your carefully crafted meta description with its own in the search results. And Google’s description is usually more relevant for the search term entered.
Digital marketing yields faster, better, and cheaper results than traditional marketing. If it didn’t, companies would still invest heavily in TV and print ads instead of websites and social media campaigns.
Amazon.com is possible only because of digital marketing.
But some digital marketing terms and acronyms have no simple substitute: SEO, CRO, and PPC, for instance. And they’re not always easy to explain.
Sometimes the language confuses even digital marketers. An SEO specialist may not understand automation. An email marketer may not know the difference between local SEO and plain old SEO.
Customers don’t read web copy like essays or magazine articles. They scan a page for information and hop to the sections that interest them most.
City pages are essentially landing pages targeting a specific geographic area. You might link to them from your service area page, where you list all (or most) of the cities you serve.
If you wanted to target the city of Simi Valley, you’d create a page with content and keywords specific to that city. Your heading might read “Plumbing Services in Simi Valley, CA.” Below, you’d write about your plumbing services, neatly organized with h2s and bulleted lists.
In 2000, two university psychologists published the findings of their experiment. They had set up a table for jam sales in a food market. On day 1, they featured 24 flavors of jam. On day 2, they offered only 6.
Faced with too many choices, shoppers bought less, not more, and they bought less by a wide margin.
