When NOT to worry about SEO

When writing copy for your website, you’d ideally like search engines such as Google to be able to understand your content as well. If Google like what they see, they’ll rank your website higher up; and with higher rankings should come more traffic.

That much we all understand.

But how much should we be concerned as to how this process happens?

Well, for one thing I would advise you not to write explicitly for Google; write for the humans who are actually going to read your website copy. The copy needs to resonate with them; it needs to engage them, and enthuse them to take appropriate action.

So I can ignore ‘keywords’?

Well, yes and no.

For starters, the word ‘keywords‘ is slightly misleading. What we tend to mean are ‘key phrases‘ e.g. perhaps I want my website to be found when people search for ‘web design South Wales‘. See, that’s a collection of words, it’s a phrase.

As it is, I’m not too bothered about my company turning up for that search phrase so, whilst the Glass Mountains website does pop up there (I think it’s the 5th), that is by accident. It’s by accident because Google have automatically decided that my company’s website is to do with ‘web design‘, and is based in ‘South Wales‘. And that makes perfect sense. But note; I’ve not really had to do any magic to make this happen.

How does new work come to you?

I say I’m ‘not too bothered’ about appearing for this search phrase as the vast % of new work arrives because of word of mouth referrals. People will have been let down by a website company and are looking around for a more experienced, more professional outfit to take over. And they won’t Google for that; they’ll turn to trusted peers for recommendations first. As we’ve been running for over 15 years, we’ve got a solid base to attract word of mouth referrals from. Such referrals are much more likely to search for us using our brand terms such ‘Glass Mountains‘ (#1).

So a key point here is this: if you write clear, concise website copy (and do other various bits and bobs which’ll keep Google happy, I’ll save that for another post), SEO can be a happy accident. It will take care of itself. If you don’t expect to get much work from random web searches, then fair enough – Google will do its best to understand your site anyway, and it’ll rank you accordingly. In such a situation, perhaps focus on ranking for your company name and brand terms instead.

So SEO is rubbish?

No, no. That’s not to say that you can’t take SEO to the next level.. If you really want to, you can focus your page on whatever search phrases you like. We’ll take a look more into that in the next post.

 

 

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