When you’re writing copy for the web, what do you focus on?

Do you focus on making sure yesterday’s search engines will be able to understand what you’ve written? If that answer’s yes, there’s something you should know: Search engines have changed.

When writing for the web, copywriters have worked towards “optimizing” their writing for the web. SEO Copywriting has developed many complex methods for getting search engines to push traffic to their pages. Most of these methods involve stuffing their page with keywords, even in cases where this makes it sound awkward. While this did get a jump in traffic for a long time, it was never a good idea. A better idea would have been optimizing the copy for people.

Afterall, why are you search engine optimizing your copy? The answer is probably that you want to rank well in search engines. Why do you want that? To get visitors. But what’s going to happen once they arrive on your site and read the copy? The answer was that you were usually going to lose so many of the visitors that the boost in traffic didn’t matter in the real world.

Sure, the traffic looked good to advertisers. It didn’t look good to visitors though, and the search engines want to give their users the highest value sites. If otherwise low value sites were stuffing themselves with keywords to draw attention, or were spamming or buying low quality artificial links to inflate their search engine rank the search engines needed to evolve to weed them out.

Skip to today. There have been articles claiming SEO copy writing is dead for a few years now. They make the case that because stuffing your copy with key words and phrases doesn’t work like it used to, that SEO copywriting is no more. What many of them overlook is that writing copy that’s optimized for search engines hasn’t died, it has evolved.

The search engines want to give people what they want, and they’ve been forced to adapt to a marketplace full of keyword abuse. Today’s search engines look at a lot more factors. They’re coming ever closer to human level understanding in terms of what a page is about, and how valuable it is. What’s more, they look very closely at what others have to say about the page.

If you make your copy awkward, you’re going to make PEOPLE like your site less. That’s going to translate to not just a lower retention rate when people do come to your site, but it’s going to mean people don’t link to your page, which will directly effect how search engines view your site.

Instead, you should be writing for people. When you write something great, the readers like what they’ve read. Whether it’s useful or entertaining, readers are the ones who will recognize the value of your site and share it with their friends. They’ll link your page on their pages, social media, etc.

I’m not trying to tell you not to do some keyword research and other basic whitehat SEO. Those are still good ideas. However, the evolution of SEO copywriting holds search engine considerations a distant second to  human considerations. Afterall, in the end it’s all about the readers.

Agree? Disagree? I want to hear what you think! Leave me a comment below.