SEO or Copywriting Which is Better to Focus On When Building Your Web Site?
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
I get asked this question all the time.
Should I design my web site using persuasive copy that sells my product, or should I focus on optimizing the site for the Search Engines and in the process make it less reader friendly??
This is a great question that everyone has an opinion on. Fortunately my opinion is the right one and I know that because of my own self-important arrogance.
But really, this one’s a no-brainer. You should always build your web site like a copywritten sales letter, focusing primarily on converting a reader into a buyer.
“But what about the search engines? I thought I was supposed to use my main keywords in H1 tags and heavily throughout the copy of the page?”
H1 tags have been widely discredited in their usefulness for SEO anyway…but that’s really besides the point.
I said you should focus primarily on copywriting for a sale…but that doesn’t mean you can’t use your main keyword throughout the copy itself. And you should always stick to the tried and true SEO best practices of leading your Title Tag with your main keyword, leading your meta description tag with your main keyword, and using your main keyword in anchor text of your inbound links if at all possible.
Don’t do any SEO that will take away from your visitors experience. Obvious over optimization for the search engines can stand out like a sore thumb to someone viewing your web site. Focus on what you want them to do, which is to buy your product or service, hence focus on writing persuasive copy.
Copywriting is the most important part of any web site. The art of turning a passive web site reader into an active buyer is an art form that’s worth millions of dollars if you can do it right! Believe me! People often ask me where I learned my copywriting skills (and yes, like calculus it’s something scientific you have to actually learn – not just something you can sort of pick up).
I surprise people when I tell them I learned my copywriting skills mainly from one book (and a super cheap book at that – not some book a marketing guru wrote and now sells for $999 dollars through some home study course or something).
The book I’m talking about is the Robert Collier Letter Book at theletterbook.com and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s like $30 bucks or something silly like that. I suggest you grab a copy and study the hell out of it right now if you’re at all interested in turning your web site into a money printing press!
Now to get back on the subject, there’s always an exception to the rule, and here’s this one’s. If you’re building a web site primarily to draw in traffic from the search engines as a lead generation type thing or to build a mailing list or something, then throw all this advice out the window and simply build a web site that’s highly optimized for SEO. You’re just interested in pulling in traffic, not in converting it to sales so who cares about copywriting in that case?
But for the most part, in most cases, focus less on SEO and more on writing persuasive copy that sells.
What do you think? SEO or Copywriting? Comment Below…
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
