Search Engine Optimisation. You can see why they shortened it to SEO. It sounds like a warning light on the dashboard, or something a personal trainer would scream at you at 6am. It’s the art of making your site more visible by helping the search engine understand who you are. Writing for robots, if you like. The rat race to dominate page one of the search. It sounds very Orwellian when you think of it like that.
The issue with this at face value is two-fold; firstly, from an aesthetic position it’s word salad. The second you value content strategy at the same level as high-quality, dynamic copywriting, the writing goes from concise and punchy, to a gobbledygook of buzzwords whose sole purpose is to fine-tune meta descriptions. You’re turning Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet #116’ into Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. And nobody ever finished Ulysses.
Secondly, and I hate to break this to you, but everyone is now doing it. You’re all fighting for that same 0.4% uplift in impressions using the same tired tactics of scrubbing the floors of the internet for a scrap of algorithmic attention. When everyone is taking the same route to drive traffic it becomes a traffic jam. Nobody goes anywhere quickly.
This isn’t to say that SEO doesn’t have a place. Of course it does. Basic SEO is essential for long-term marketing strategy as a sustainable and cost effective way of driving traffic. But to use it as the sole marketing approach is obscene.
The key to getting it right is to understand what is important and what is frivolous vanity projects. The website needs a clear structure, and has to feel familiar in a way that is easy to navigate. The buttons have to be clearly visible (not grey; it looks broken) and those buttons have to lead to somewhere. And please, if you are going to title a page make it purposeful. A contact page should be called that, not ‘find me’ or ‘get @ me’.
It has to target the right audience too. Well done for spending hours putting your keywords in but if the ‘best seabass in Birmingham’ searches are finding butchers ahead of your restaurant just know you have yourself to blame. Your tailored content has to resonate, it has to be high quality, it has to speak your dialect. And put simply, you aren’t doing that with a weak brand and poorly designed website.
I am Simon Carlo, a food blogger, journalist, copywriter and bonafide mild child. The above words are mine. Mostly. The gooder ones anyway.
