What SEOs Can Learn from Brand Marketers — Michelle Robbins // Aimclear

Quotes

• “Copywriting and the importance of a great copy is something that will always be relevant. I think that SEOs have always understood that content is king but when it comes down to actually writing a copy, sometimes there is a bit of disconnect.” -Michelle

• “The disconnect in copywriting is getting much better especially as Google rolled out the BERT algorithm. It helped in re-focusing everyone on the importance of copy and context more so than the importance of architecture and structure of content.” -Michelle

• “I think what SEOs can learn from brand marketers is how to write more naturally compelling copy and content.” -Michelle

• “An example I would use is the billboard. Most of it is visually driven with a short copy to capture attention immediately and convey a narrative. You would never keyword stuff a billboard. It bears worth considering with SEO.” -Michelle

• “If you do a search for, Why does my TV look weird?, the results that pull up have everything to do with what we call the soap opera effectand Google doesnt return results with the phrase, why does my TV look weird in any of the top results, it returns results for soap opera effect Google knows that what you are looking for is information about soap opera effect not about weird TVs.” -Michelle

• “You wouldnt keyword stuff a billboard because Google isnt looking at a billboard to decide whether it is going to show that billboard driving by based on the copy. To me, the devil is in the details but tricks for SEOs is that there is a rite of passage that SEOs are trying to meet to actually get visibility and in other channels, that problem doesnt exist.” -Ben

• “It is a compensation question of whether their ad is going to be served as opposed to the type of criterion content that they are producing.” -Ben

• “So an ad being served against a particular topic is different. That is something you can 100% control. You can tell Google, When someone searches for this, show our ad. I am talking about organic ranking and organic disability and that is typically the domain of SEOs.” -Michelle

• “My point about the soap opera effect is that you no longer need to keyword stuff because Google does understand what you are looking for without you explicitly telling it.” -Michelle

• “Google is getting better and better and more sophisticated at natural language processing. They are able to understand intent not necessarily on the page level but now down to paragraph and sentence level.” -Michelle

• “Going back to the billboard, they dont typically say explicitly what they are trying to convey. They show a car and have an emotional copy to try and drive you towards developing brand affinity without forcing their end goal on you.” -Michelle

• “A lot of copy that is written for SEO purposes tends to be unnatural. We have all done it but does it tell a story? You are more constrained with storytelling if you have to be sure to populate certain words within that story because then youre trying to develop a story within a word instead of developing a story.” -Michelle

• “I dont think it is binary. It depends on the vertical that you are in, the channel that their content is geared towards and what you are trying to convey.” -Michelle

• “This also goes back to what SEOs can learn from brand marketers and thats the importance of having a multi-channel, not relying on one source of traffic and channel for all of your visibility and figuring out how to tie all those channels together.” -Michelle