As the saying goes, the Cobbler’s kids have no shoes. It’s often the case you’ll see a web designer who is brilliantly gifted and their website is still stuck on the modern day equivalent of geocities or worse, wix. I started to look around and realized that although I’m doing work that I’m proud of for my clients, my own site and businesses are not looking so hot. After a month and a half of writing with over 60,000 words worth of posts, articles, cornerstone content etc I’ve learned a ton! It really opened my eyes to what it takes to be successful in SEO but also business. There’s a reason the top sites stay at the top. So here’s 5 reasons why every digital marketer should write seo content.
1. It Creates Clarity and Focus
If you’re responsible for the content it forces you to have a purpose. Before every post for my clients I look up keywords and google suggestions, trying to see what readers actually want. This is much bigger than just good SEO writing, it’s about writing to the reader – it’s the digital marketer’s version of the platinum rule. “Treat others how THEY want to be treated.”
I have several clients that have pages that they hired SEOs or VAs to create and while having more content is good, having a bunch of bad content isn’t. Luckily most bad content can be re-purposed for something good and this blog post is living proof of that.
2. You Learn Alot
It may sound like I’m speaking in generalities here, but seriously if you are writing a 2,000+ word semantic search engine article you have to do your research. It’s hard enough to spit out a few hundred words but you can do that off the cuff if you want, but 2,000 words, you have to know your stuff. Even if you were simply scraping wikipedia and spinning it, you still end up learning a ton about the subject matter that you wouldn’t otherwise. I don’t recommend doing your content that way however.
Think about the customer, their questions, etc and then find the answers if you don’t have them. For me I’ve learned a ton about local SEO by learning about my client’s businesses.
3. Helps With Hiring
If you’re a senior SEO or in the marketing department the idea of SEO content writing probably scares you. I highly, highly recommend it! By writing that much and for that long focused on one thing I know…
- The level of quality I need from a freelancer or in-house writer
- The length of the article
- to ask them to research images too
- to ask them to link to relevant sources
- to give them a keyword topic (not just keyword)
- to give them creative freedom to create great content
Basically because I’ve done it, I have a very clear picture of what I want from others.
4. It Gives You Vision
When you’re writing a ton, you have to have a clear vision of how things are laid out. So this last, “ah ha!” is basically a culmination of the other reasons why you’d want your team to all be writing seo content. After several thousand words for a client I have a general sense of direction and while I wouldn’t go as far to say you create a template for the future you do have a framework.
5. It Keeps You Out of the Pigeon Hole
In addition to the above, it keeps you from over optimizing the page. If you get good at writing content the keywords just flow but if all you focus on is the extremely technical aspects of seo then your content tends to suffer. I’ve helped many clients that had all the technical keyword optimization on the planet done but they couldn’t figure out why they weren’t ranking. The bounce rate was through the roof and no one wants to be on the page. Over onpage optimization is the 2017 version of keyword stuffing.
Bottom line: Writing even if it’s not your full time gig is great to keep you relevant and up to date and keeps the juices flowing enough to get you out of tunnel vision.
