Heather Lloyd-Martin: SEO Copywriting – Episode 33

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When the field of SEO emerged in the late 1990s, Heather Lloyd-Martin was one of the first writers to focus on search engines. She’s still at it 20 years later – writing, coaching, training, and consulting on SEO copywriting.

Heather and I talked about:

• her background in SEO, dating back to before the introduction of Google
• how much she enjoys testing SEO content ideas
• the importance of addressing user intent
• the enduring importance of key phrases in SEO ranking success
• her definition of SEO copywriting: “using key phrases and content to help that content be found in search engines”
• how she trains marketing-oriented copywriters  – direct response copywriters, e.g., – to shun a pushy approach and be more conversational
• how to break down company silos to re-unite “orphaned content”
• the importance of considering how to satisfy micro-moment user intent in your editorial calendar
• how a long-tail content strategy can build brand awareness and improve conversion
• the importance of doing competitive intelligence before you go after a key phrase, and of offering a unique angle when you target a popular key phrase because Google is looking for unique content, not more “me-too” content
• the importance of understanding the context of a key phrase you’re targeting – e.g. a “blender” can be both an industrial and a home appliance
• how keyword research can improve your content ROI
• her recommendation that SEO copywriters learn analytics
• how analysis of metrics can help drive, e.g., social media decisions around your content
• how copywriters can improve the shareability and linkability of content as they create it with tools like BuzzSumo
• how content that looks like clickbait can still be effective for both SEO linkability and social shareability
• how even old-school journalists were writing clickbait-looking headlines in order to get those eyeballs to the article
• the importance of influencer marketing in link development
• how having genuine relationships is a more approach than having someone hammer you constantly
• how guest posting is still relevant, because publishers like to share different authoritative voices
• the enduring importance of SEO
• how SEO and SEO copywriting are changing, due, e.g., to the emergence of voice search and other new technologies and practices
• the importance of staying on top of emerging practices to take advantage of new opportunities coming down the pike
• how personalization doesn’t differ that much from old-fashioned knowing your reader

Heather’s Bio

Heather started her SEO career over 20 years ago – before Google, before wifi, and back when we were all using dial-up modems. In fact, Forbes even called Heather, “the pioneer of SEO copywriting.”

Today, Heather loves publishing her SEO writing newsletter and teaching people how to write top-converting content that gets great Google positions. She offers online training through her SEO Copywriting Certification training, and customized training sessions for in-house teams. Plus, in her spare time, she offers business coaching and consulting services to entrepreneurs.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to Episode Number 33 of the Content Strategy Interviews Podcast. I’m really happy to have with us my old friend Heather Lloyd Martin. Heather and I go way back to the dawn of the interwebs, and I’m super excited to have her here. We’re gonna talk today about SEO Copywriting and Heather is a true pioneer in that field. I can’t remember what the term SEO was coined, but we were right there at the start of it, and she was a guest writer for a website I worked on back in 98, called Workz, W-O-R-K-Z.com and I can’t remember if it’s coincidence but her business is called SEO, her seocopywriting.com business is called Success Works. So anyhow, I’ll let Heather tell you a little bit more about herself. So thanks so much for coming on, Heather.

Heather:
Hey, thanks. Yeah, it’s wild, so I think you were one of my very first editors back in the day when I was first writing and talking about all of this and yeah, we were in this before Google was in it. So we were in like the Altavista world. And all of that time where … So, it was so much easier then and it was so new and everyone was trying to figure it out. And since then, I’ve done a lot of different things. But right now, it’s mostly around strategy and helping companies learn how to do this, especially the newbie companies that are new to it. But I also train writers and have training stuff and do a little bit of writing on the side, just because I think it’s fun to test different things with SEO writing to see what hits and what doesn’t in today’s brave new Google world. So it’s always fun to talk about it.

Larry:
You know, I’d love to visit just a little bit. I’ve thought about this, like there’s … because I forgot that that was literally before Google launched. They launched sometime in ’98. I totally forgotten that, and so the evolution and it’s largely like 99.9% driven by Google and the way they operate, we kind of went from that era, the first thing was the page rank algorithm and the importance of links and authority and citations and all that, and then it kind of got … and that became like the thing, and that kind of led to the keyword era, I guess, in SEO where that was like, having keyword density and all that stuff doesn’t matter anymore. And then kind into the era of, the importance of, the links stayed important, but nowadays, it’s so much more about user intent and search intent and addressing that. How has that changed the practice of SEO copywriting, that evolution?

Heather:
Yeah, and it’s weird because I look back at stuff and even things that I wrote nine years ago, for the most part, are still kind of sort of valid today because it’s all boiled down to what’s the user intent? Are you answering the question? Are you authority in this? Are you writing good content, or are you writing just fluffy stuff that you’re doing for Google? And there’s still people and companies out there that will talk about, “Well, I want SEO articles or Google articles”, and they want to fill up their site with these kinds of articles when actually that’s the thing to not do. Because although Google’s kind of a reader and target reader, in a way, it’s still who is your, who is the people that pay you money? Who are the people that you want to come to your site? And write good content, authoritative content for them.

Larry:
Yeah, I think, probably when you first started as it evolved, I’m curious about this, like the evolution of ’cause you’re really writing for two audiences. You’re writing for the end user, and that’s always been important. We’ve always known that, but it used to be much more about writing for the search algorithms and addressing those needs. Nowadays, it seems to me like if you’re satisfying that user intent, the algorithm is happy, is that generally true or?

Heather:
Mostly true. So yeah, that user intent is still important, but still, I’ve worked with companies that have written really good content that does answer the question, but they’re still not using the key phrases in the right way. And so they have good articles on their site, but because that key phrase focus isn’t there, that Google focus isn’t there, they’re still not getting the traffic. So when they marry those two things together everything rocks and they’re doing a good job, but it’s kind of like you can’t really have one without the other and be successful.

Larry:
Gotcha. No, so that would be one of the core … Well, actually I want to back up just a little bit and to talk about because the term SEO copywriting, ’cause in my mind, and I know a lot of these terms of changed over the years. I think of copywriting as like marketing, and advertising copywriting with a sort of persuasive intent, but so much of copy nowadays is like content-marketing copy, where you’re putting yourself out there as an authority and it’s more like journalism or that kind of writing style. How, I guess so let me just ask you how would you define SEO copywriting?

Heather:
SEO copywriting, I talk about this a lot, is using key phrases and content to help that content be found in search engines, which in today’s world is pretty much Google.

Heather:
So we used to call it, back in the day, writing for search engines. And because we had more to write for, but today, like you said, it’s yes, we still have the persuasive copy, the true definition of copywriting that we use the key phrases in that. But there’s a lot of other content, especially the informational content, that actually focusing on that kind of informational content and those long tail key phrases are going to drive more search traffic to your site than just focusing on say, the head terms that you would use when you write a sales landing page. So it’s an incorrect use of the word copywriting, and if you look at of its truest form, but for whatever reason it stuck and it’s out there so here we are.

Larry:
No, when I think, you look at how everything, like I came out of book publishing. That’s what I was doing right before we met.

Heather:
Right, yeah.

Larry:
And everybody else comes out of journalism or agency stuff, where you’re writing ad copy or marketing copy or something like that. And now it’s all kind of converging and you just call it whatever you want.

Larry:
Yeah, but what I want to go back to what you said about so these, like you said satisfying that search intent, having that in mind. It probably depends a lot on the exact intent of your current writing initiative, like whether you’re writing like content-marketing copy to convey authority, or whether you’re writing, like you said, maybe something like a sales landing page. How, when you work with your, ’cause you’re mostly training people nowadays or something. You still do a fair amount of writing, but most of the training you’re doing. How do you, because I see a lot of people who set out to write content-marketing copy and they end up writing, it sounds like copywriting. It sounds like pitchy kind of stuff. You’re like no, no, no. You can’t do that in this context. How do you train people to be sensitive with the context they’re writing in? And does that line up, as I suspected, as satisfying that user intent?

Heather:
Yeah, it definitely does. Certainly if you want, if somebody is coming in and they want informational stuff, they want to read about how to or satisfy some sort of query, it’s okay to have some sort of sales call to action if that’s what you’re doing within your copy, but they don’t … people don’t necessarily want to read a big old pitch just to get an answer to that question.

Heather:
And so training is always really interesting now. The people that come from print and from journalism, they get that, because they want to be able to provide good information first, and even adding any kind of sales at the end call to action is a little bit uncomfortable. What can be more difficult are the copywriters, that are so used to that sell, sell, sell. Especially direct response copywriters that have the scrolling long sales pages, that are like 2500 words with lots of headlines, and sub headlines, and learn more buttons that to teach them to back off a little bit about that, and teach them to be more conversational with their writing, and it can be a little bit more than just a training. It can be some back and forth working to help. I can’t say break them of a bad habit, because it’s not a bad habit. It’s how they learned and it’s still a valuable skill set. It’s more expanding that skill set. So where they know how to write copy for the right audience when they’re looking for particular type of information.

Heather:
So it’s a very interesting and delicate balance, and dance sometimes, with folks that are very used to writing in a very particular way that has served them well in the past.

Larry:
No, that reminds me of a theme, an enduring theme, and I pretty much every one of these 33 episodes it’s come up that this is mostly about people. And so convincing people to write a different way, or to behave in a different way, and if you’re doing training, that’s what you’re doing, is you’re literally helping people do things better.

Larry:
That’s it, are there any other, so that’s one interesting thing that comes up in your training. So are there other dynamics that come up as people … because if you shift it, like you just said that you come from like a persuasive background and all of a sudden you’re writing this authoritative stuff, are there other adaptations that people have to make that you’re able to help them within your training?

Heather:
Oh, so many. A big one is how companies are so siloed, right? So you’ve got, especially if they do any kind of print publication along with online publications. So you’ve got the print folks that are doing things one way, and then you’ve got the online folks that are doing things their way, and then you have the copywriting department that’s there to sell whatever it is that that company offers, and they don’t talk and they don’t get together to figure out a strategy. So you can have this spectacular content on the site that is really fantastic for micro moments, and answering questions, and at where people are in a buy cycle, but because it doesn’t have any key phrases or even a call to action for in that content, it’s just kind of orphaned out there.

Heather:
You know, people can find it if they’re on the site. And they happen to be to land on it somehow through search or surfing around, but they don’t find it in Google. So it’s always interesting for those companies that are siloed to get everybody together in one room and say, hey, guys, you have these spectacular opportunities to do a, b, and c, but you all have to work together. And when you’re working on the editorial calendar, then yeah, a little bit of SEO in that and figuring out where people are in terms of micro moment user intent is a really positive thing. And once they do that, and once they get it, then moving forward everything rocks and rolls.

Heather:
So you know, it’s really fun to see, but there have been times that I’ll go before I go into talk to a client, I’ll give them a warning of, “and basically I’m going to blow up your entire content strategy.” I just want to give you a warning of what you think you can have and do, and the reality of how people search today are two different things. People aren’t necessarily searching on one-word terms to get to where they want to go, they’re looking at a whole bunch of other types of search terms at a different phase of their buyers journey to find the kind of content that meets their needs right then.

Larry:
Right and that’s, I think that is what you say, I had not heard this exact phrase before micro moment user intent. I love that, so that’s like at the end of any one paragraph, or piece, or whatever, have you satisfied your intent in that moment? Is that sort of the idea behind that?

Heather:
Exactly, and Google talks about it a lot and they can break down industries in terms of, for say, travel or insurance. There are these specific types of questions and thoughts that people have of like I want to go, I want to do, I want to buy, and so when you start thinking in terms of answering those questions for content, it makes fleshing out that editorial calendar a lot easier, because you’re answering the questions that people that you want to come to the site are asking every single day. And you get to be the authority in that if you learn to do everything right and answer those questions, and get up there in the top results of Google.

Larry:
So that sounds equally as important as your keyword research, is understanding that intent at every one of those junctures.

Heather:
Exactly, and the opportunity of that intent. Folks will think that I just want to position on this really narrow type of key phrase list, and there’s only 20 that are important to us and anything other than that we don’t care about. And what they don’t realize is that there’s so many more things out there, when you think about long tail key phrases, so many more opportunities where they can start attracting those users, those readers, and convert them and it might not be the first time they land on the site and read an article. It might not be the second time, but if the same sites keep popping up over and over during these random searches that we all do, then that can definitely help build up that brand awareness and eventually convert for the company.

Larry:
Yep, that makes sense. Also, I’m wondering if you have like something like a checklist or a to do box for any piece of content? Like we’ve done our keywords research, we’ve done our kind of have a sense of the micro moments that were attempting to intersect with on that customer journey map. Are there things kind of in your mind as you’re crafting any one piece of content?

Heather:
Yeah, the big thing that I stress to companies right now is do that competitive intelligence. So before you go after a key phrase and think, oh, this has awesome search volume, we should target this, start doing some searches in Google to find out who’s there. Because especially how Google is changing, and moving, and shifting that algorithm and changing the sites that they consider authoritative for particular search queries, you might find that say like best restaurants in Portland, Oregon … I’m just going to throw that out. For some companies, that might not be the best search term to target. Because the companies that are already there aren’t, don’t have any type of sales type of leaning. They’re more informational sites, and to waste your time targeting key phrases that aren’t probably going to help you in Google isn’t going to, that’s not a good ROI.

Heather:
And it’s also a good idea to find out what other people have talked about. So when you write your content about whatever, that you’re saying things that are different, and you have a different slant on it, and you’re providing more useful information. Because now getting a top 10 ranking is more than a me-too article. Where what you write is exactly the same as everybody else in the top 10. Google doesn’t care about that kind of me-too stuff. They’re looking for stuff that is different, and unique, and better, and gives the readers more information than they would have learned anywhere else. And that is like good journalism. Right? Good writing.

Larry:
That’s us.

Heather:
Nobody wants that same thing. Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah, and it’s also good content strategy. I argue, and a lot of people argue that if you’re clear on your why, and your intent, and your values and everything that drive your business and how you approach things, it’s going to be a lot easier to create that unique content.

Heather:
Yes.

Larry:
Yeah. Hey, how common is it? I remember back in the day, and I assume this is still the case, that there was always that you had both market competitors for keywords, but then you also had like keyword competitors. People who didn’t, I can’t think of an example off the top of my head, like keywords that had meaning in two different marketplaces. And at some point, you might think, oh, I can easily rank for that. But then you realize, oh, my god, there’s this whole other industry that cares about that way more than I do. Is that still an issue or are things atomized enough that you’re usually on just a market competitor level?

Heather:
If I’m understanding the question correctly, I’m thinking about maybe a key phrase that could have, say a business and a consumer intent.

Larry:
Yes. Something like that. Yeah.

Heather:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah.

Heather:
Yeah, and that’s still something to think about when you’re writing content and because I’m thinking of like the word blender. So if you are looking at the consumer intent, a blender is what I use to make my morning smoothie. So that is how we look at blender. But if we’re looking in the business to business, they’ve got these big, huge industrial blenders that cost 10s of thousands of dollars. So if you just try to optimize for the term blender without adding in that B2B focus, you may be losing on those key phrase opportunities.

Heather:
So, you know, yes, in a perfect world, Google gets it and you are still able to position even if you’re losing all, if you don’t have certain types of words on your site. But Google’s still kind of dumb, it’s getting better and better and smarter and smarter. But still, the more hints that we can give Google about here’s what the content is about, the better that it is for both readers and Google.

Larry:
Yeah. ‘Cause I think that Google would claim, and a lot of people would agree that, that they are getting better at that. That they can, because hell, they’re reading all your emails, that was other contextual information about-

Heather:
Who knows what they know about.

Larry:
Yeah, exactly. But I mean, but they do have, they also know your search history and everything else. What you’ve done up to that point. After all if you’ve been industrial sites all day, and then you do a search for blender, you’ll get a different result than if you’d been at Goog- Amazon all day, looking at home blenders. Yeah. So that’s probably … I guess that kind of gets in the whole I guess … But it’s, from what you just said, I’m inferring that Google is not as smart semantically as they would like us to believe, or do you still think there’s … That and which ended the implications of that for SEO copywriting thing, that you can still by having those keyword phrases, choosing those you can still drive the success of your copy, right?

Heather:
Exactly and it could be that Google is brilliant in all sorts of different ways that I’m not giving Google credit for, but at the end of the day, what I come from and how I look at it is, I’ve seen too many really great sites with really good content that miss out on opportunities because those words aren’t in the content, or those synonyms aren’t in the content. And so why leave it up to chance when all you have to do is do the key phrase research and find, oh here’s a tasty little long tail opportunity here that drives a good amount of traffic, and this traffic can convert and make us a lot of money. Why not do it that way? And yeah, it’s an extra step and it involves a little bit more work, but it’s the way that things are now and we all want that content to have the maximum amount of ROI.

Larry:
No, and everything you just said there reminds me of like, that’s I think the one thing that has improved a lot in the last 20 years, is the ability to measure success.

Heather:
Yes.

Larry:
Of your copy, and that and all everything you just said there makes me think of that. How do you, and how does it you know, part of this … So we talked about keyword research and then your competitive intelligence on it, I think. How much does that enter into that sort of notion of metrics and feedback? How much does that feed into your copywriting? Are you looking at like similar articles, or articles you’ve written around the same keyword phrase and comparing them over time? Or is it more just about comparing and the success of an individual piece of content?

Heather:
I always recommend that writers learn analytics, just even the very basic of analytics, because it provides such fantastic feedback about what’s working and what’s not. Even down to that, hey, this, this page is positioning top 10 but people aren’t clicking through to the landing page. And that gives us data like, do we need to change the title? Do we change the meta description? What’s wrong there? And when we’re looking at the pages themselves, yeah, that data is incredibly important because it gives us the access to information that we’ve as writers have never had before.

Heather:
I mean, people just entering the space probably take this for granted, because, hey, all of this is just a few keystrokes away. Back when we were writing, doing a lot of writing in the print days, we didn’t have that kind of feedback other than how many people responded to an ad? We hope that people read our articles, we didn’t know.

Larry:
No, that’s right. And I think about, I come out of book publishing and that book sold a whole bunch of copies, and you probably never knew exactly what the factor …

Heather:
Right, yeah.

Larry:
And now now we have a much better and more granular look at that.

Heather:
Yeah, and it helps us focus our efforts, especially for thinking about things like social. Is it worth going out to all these social platforms, and blasting everything that we can to them, if they’re not actually converting somehow and driving traffic to our site or making sales or starting conversations. And I see a lot of companies that are pulling back or changing how they work with social because they realize that yeah, it’s nice to post and be out there and they want to have a presence, but it’s not like it was where you could put something out on Facebook and suddenly it’s being out there and it’s viral, and a zillion people liked it and shared it with all of their friends. We’ve gotten, a lot more information is hitting us at any given time right now. And so that overload thing is true, and it changes how we do things.

Larry:
Yeah, and I think for anyone in business, nobody has infinite resources. So you really have to pick and choose which channels you want to be in and but also, like you said, measuring the success in each of those channels.

Larry:
Hey, that reminds me of another thing. Two of the big things that are still mattering in SEO copy and SEO success are kind of shareability and linkability. You just kind of, and I assume from the metrics that you’re just talking about, that you can measure how many social shares, like a piece of content gets, and you can go in and do an audit to see how many people are linking to you. But I’m just curious, at the copywriting level, is there stuff that you … Are their techniques, tricks, methods you’ve developed over the years, that make a piece of content more linkable or more shareable? Or do you think about that when you write? Everybody wants to know that, and I just wonder if it even makes sense to think about that at the copywriting level.

Heather:
It does, and the expert I defer to with this, all the time, is Steve Rayson from <a href=”https://buzzsumo.com/”>BuzzSumo</a>. If we’re talking about, especially best social shareability, Steve has, they have come out with this great fantastic information about how to structure a headline, and headlines to get the most amount of social shares. And the type of trigrams that you can put out on, say Twitter or Facebook, that will get the maximum amounts of exposure. So they’ve aggregated all this big data and distilled it down into this really actionable information.

Heather:
So there are some folks that when they’re writing content, they’re thinking about, okay, I want this to hit well on social because they have that kind of channel going. But I also want to make sure that this does well with SEO. So they’re sort of straddling those two worlds, making sure that key-phrase emphasis is in that title, but they also want it to be something that people respond to when they first look at it. And I use BuzzFeed as an example. And a lot of journalists, and writers, will groan when I use it because BuzzFeed to some people, that’s just the link bait stuff, but it works. We’ve all clicked on those links, trying to figure out what kind of cat we are, or whatever they’re headlines are, and it’s because they’ve worked on those types of headlines, and figured out what works, and tested everything to where they’ve got a really good formula going.

Larry:
And how do you, because I totally get that, that we’ve all learned from the link bait guys. And I think Huff Po and others are good at that too, but at the same time, you can do those same techniques with integrity and authenticity, but you’re just kind of doing it matter of factly. Like the idea of using a number in a listical headline or something like that. That just always works. And so you can … Yeah and I guess that just sounds maybe like a maturity and experience thing to balance that. Is that … or are there any things you’d say about that? How to keep it shareable, but kind of authoritative? I guess that’s the thing you, because everybody knows that, “Oh, you know, you won’t believe this”, and it’s like it’s nah, I’m gonna believe that.

Heather:
Yeah, exactly. And for business-to-business posts, it would be, I wouldn’t recommend having as a headline like, “You’ll never guess what happens next”, or “Number seven will shock you.” You could possibly do it as a tongue-in-cheek kind of thing depending on the branded tone and feel of your business. But like you said, there’s a way to keep that integrity of a headline. And this is old-school journalists with this, something that we know is we write headlines in order to get those eyeballs to the article. Otherwise, you create something that might be the best article in the world and people don’t read it, because they don’t know why they should.

Heather:
So that’s why we write good headlines, to make people open those emails because the subject line is so awesome.

Heather:
We’ve got my cat that’s coming in here.

Larry:
That’s good. That makes it an official internet video.

Heather:
There we go. Okay. I had a feeling she might make an appearance during our time.

Larry:
That’s perfect. Thank you. Yeah.

Larry:
Hey, I want to talk quickly about linkability too, because it occurs to me that at the simplest level you could just say, “Hey and if you like this article link to it.” Like you can do a little call to action in the content, somewhere down at the end, but are there other more subtle or more, apart from, I’m assuming that the main thing is like the authoritativeness, and the interestingness, and the relevance of the article. That’s the main thing that’s gonna earn links, but are there other copywriting techniques that can help you get links to the page?

Heather:
A lot of what folks are doing is that that flat out, influencer marketing type of stuff is reaching people that have similar types of publications, articles, whatever, and introducing yourself to them, and introducing your article to them. Eric from Stone Temple Consulting talks about influencer marketing and he rocks on that, and it’s always sort of a touchy balance. Because every day I get at least 10 emails from people who are like, “Hey, I love your blog. You don’t know me, but I wrote this post. Link to it.” And it’s like, dude, I don’t know you. It’s like the equivalent of walking up to a stranger saying, like, “I need a favor from you. You don’t know me, but I expect you to do it, and I’m going to keep bugging you about it, and guilting you into it until you finally say yes or I give up on you.” And it’s more than that, right? It’s building those kinds of relationships with folks where they get to know you and your stuff, so when you do write that really awesome post, that you hope everyone will read, that it makes it easier for either you to contact them, or they find you organically, because they like what you’re doing too. And they want to share that.

Heather:
And that’s the cool thing about social is that we want to share cool stuff, and cool articles that we like that will help our readers. And that is more of an organic thing than having someone hammer us constantly, and saying link to this and I’m going to send you a whole bunch of guilt ridden emails until you just start putting me on this ban list.

Larry:
Well, I think that’s part of why I asked that, is because I’ve done a lot of link development back in the day, and still talk to a lot of people who do that. It’s in every email. I get those emails all day too, and it’s like really. I don’t like any one of them, but it must be like spam. It must work one in a million times and it’s cheap enough to send them, so what the heck. But anyhow, that’s why I asked about that. I think that obviously, just like quality content and good relationships with people who are authoritative in the field and boom, there you go.

Heather:
Exactly, exactly, and it’s just like if you want to write for a website, ghost posting is not dead. It’s just we have to be more careful about what we do as publishers, and who we accept on, because we want them to have authority as well. And so it’s contacting folks like, “Hey, I love what you’re doing. I write similar stuff. Would you be interested in me writing stuff for you?” And there’s a lot of publications out there that do want that kind of content, because they want different authoritative voices posting to their site.

Heather:
Now, if you’re writing about stuff that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, but you’re just doing it to get links to your site, that is the wrong motivation for guest posting. And if you accepted as a publisher, that is definitely the wrong motivation. But it’s interesting to see how even that has flushed out throughout the years, of it used to be that everybody just threw guest posts, and it was like this regurgitation of I’m going to put my content out on every single site out there. And now I was just watching a video with SEM Rush today, and they were saying about yeah, guest posting’s not bad. But instead of thinking about it in terms of links, think about in terms of are these people part of your tribe? Could you possibly get business from this? Is this something that works to your marketing advantage and can drive ROI and if so, yeah, then it’s a good idea to do and pursue.

Larry:
Yeah, and implicit in all that, is I think consumers of this information are super-savvy now, and they immediately recognize some just meaningless guest post, as opposed to what you’re just saying, this in an authentic connection. This is somebody I work with and trust, and I’m gonna have them write on my site. That’s a way different thing.

Heather:
Yeah, exactly. And you remember pitching to publications back in the day. It wasn’t like, “Hey my name is Larry. I’m a writer, I’ll write for you.” You had to spend time trying to pitch an editor, because that person was your gatekeeper and you wanted to impress them.

Larry:
Exactly. Hey, I just noticed we’re coming up on time. I just knew this would go super-fast and I can picture another dozen conversations. But before we wrap up, I just want to give you a chance, is there anything last, anything I haven’t brought up or that it’s just on your mind about SEO copywriting or just content in general these days?

Heather:
Other than yes, it is still important to learn, there’s always that question of do you still need to know this? And I always have that my presentations with the single slide answer of yes, right afterwards. But also know that it’s something that’s always morphing and changing and moving along with the times. You know, we’re talking a lot about voice search now and writing conversational content, that even though voice search isn’t ready for prime time, right now, today, this second, we’re moving there.

Heather:
And so if this is something that a company is specializing in, and they want to make sure that they’re writing good content for their readers, or for the writers out there that are doing this as a freelancer or in house for their company, is to know that it’s not just shoving key phrases into content. There are many more opportunities coming down the pike. And the more you keep up with things, and the more you can play and test your copy, which is why I’ll always be writing, just because of that, then that’s always gonna put you ahead on the forefront of it.

Heather:
And where a lot of companies and individual writers get stuck is they focus on information that they learned five years ago. And they figure this is how it’s always going to be. And they get cut out, because eventually they learned that that’s not right anymore or it’s right, but it’s not going to help them in certain types of situations.

Heather:
So the more you know about how Google works, the more you know about the future, even if you don’t think that it’s going to affect you, then when those changes start happening, then you’re able to morph your strategy and get ahead of the game rather than playing catch up and possibly catch up with a smaller competitor. Sometimes even mom and pop, that you never would have thought would be a competitor online, but now they’re kicking your butt in the rankings and you’re in a defensive position. So the more you can learn the better off you will be.

Larry:
Gotcha. Yeah, I was just thinking of a list of things. Actually, let me ask you one last quick thing about this, about in the UX world, I think I perceived that’s where it comes from, this notion of personalization is coming along like you need … And when I think about that from a content creation perspective, oh my god, we have to write even more copy to address these personalization needs. Have you seen that come up, and are there ways of addressing that?

Heather:
I haven’t seen it as much come up with the SEO content world, but it’s certainly something that it’s going to be interesting to see how that fleshes out. If nothing else, we’ve got the personalization there, of knowing who that target reader is, and being able to get really granular to that one person. But that’s just like normal copywriting. But it’ll be very fascinating to see how things move and shift, and morph out to where that might be something that becomes a bigger thing. And we’re all starting to know how to write for that as well. So it’s exciting, a little scary, all rolled up into one and that’s what makes it fun.

Larry:
Oh, exactly. And it occurs to me that SEO may be the place where the answer comes from for that, because I haven’t stitched it together completely. I’m just thinking out loud here. But that the old long tail stuff, that we’ve been personalizing content for specific queries for a long time. Long-tail content, so maybe SEO is the place that people will come for the answer to their personalization questions.

Heather:
We’ll you shall see. Yep, exactly.

Larry:
Exactly. Alright. Well thanks so much, Heather. This is great catching up and good to see you again after all these years.

Heather:
I know, right. Good to see you.

Larry:
And we’ll have to do this more often. Yeah. Well, again, thank you and thanks so much for coming on the show.

Heather:
You are very welcome, and thanks for the opportunity.