I was super excited to have been a speaker at the Captivate with Content conference by CoCommercial last week.
One of the topics that comes up around search is how to tailor your content to match what people are searching for.
This came up as part of the discussion, and I shared the story of a client that Meg and I worked with this year.
She’s an extremely successful coach for women, but she knew she wasn’t taking advantage of her content marketing or organic search traffic when she came to us. When Meg and I started digging into the reasons for that, we realized that she had come up with a very clever and poetic name for what she does — that isn’t anything anybody is ever going to search for.
Specifically, one of the things she talks about is “female embodiment.” And… Let’s just say Meg realized that the other search results for that term weren’t ones our client would want to be associated with!
But we didn’t want to tell her to give up the unique language and style she has come up with around her business in favor of more searchable terms, either. From my perspective as a copywriter, her content was poetic, beautiful, unique, and compelling — and asking her to stuff it full of search optimized keywords would definitely kill the vibe she’d created for her brand.
Thankfully, we were able to come up with a solution that both preserved her brand voice and would add to her organic search traffic. We recommended she create a series of articles separate from her blog as landing pages, that would be optimized for her most important search terms.
Creating these search optimized landing pages serves two functions: First, we created the content for what people are actually searching for — even if they need to understand embodiment, they aren’t typing that into a search engine. And second, because it’s a landing page, we can optimize for the second click by removing any and all other distractions. In this case, the second click was aimed to get readers to opt-in for and download her lead magnet, which would introduce them to the concept of embodiment and give her the opportunity to continue to educate and market to them.
WIN/WIN.
According to the posts and comments in CoCommercial after the virtual conference, this really resonated with several people who consider their businesses somewhere on the “woo” spectrum. But this is useful for more than just the woo crew!
I spoke to a colleague this week, for example, who is looking to pivot his clientele away from “Internet businesses” and attract more people who are outside this internet marketing bubble we live in — people like academics, authors, consultants, and other big thinkers.
We talked about the fact that these new clients might not understand jargon we take for granted like “business model,” “content marketing,” and “scaling.” His ideal clients would not be searching for those terms! He needs to figure out what language they would use and pepper that language all over his website and his content.
Want more searchy tips? Check out my panel below with my SEO partner in crime, Meg Casebolt!
(To watch just our segment, click the arrow in the top right corner and select “Session 2.”)
Wondering if your content strategy is search-friendly? We include an SEO snapshot with every Strategy Session and offer more in-depth SEO reports, strategy, and implementation on request! Click here to fill out an application and find out if a Strategy Session is right for you.