In the beginning, there was the internet.
One upon a time, to find a site you hit up Google. Whether it was an actual site you were looking for or a topic, Google was your go-to.
This is no longer that time. We are no longer those people.
These days, people find sites, products and info online in a million different ways. (Ok, maybe not a million, but an awful lot!)
We get news headlines on Facebook and click through to learn more.
We find out about products through influencers on Instagram.
We browse YouTube for the latest how-tos.
And sometimes we hit up Google, just like we used to.
We go to different places for different things. Google is no longer our one-stop-shop.
So when a client says they need to optimise for search (SEO), I always ask them to take a step back and look at what’s going on.
How are they getting their site traffic now?
How do people find info on their topic? (Tools like SEMrush can help.)
Are people sharing about it, or is it a topic they like to keep to themselves?
Without data and insight, you could be wasting your time and your client’s money trying to optimise for a selection of keywords.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t believe a copywriter should ever be just a writer. We should be marketers, thinking beyond the words on the page to the user experience from end-to-end, and steer our clients to better projects and outcomes as a result.
And sometimes that means SEO. And sometimes it doesn’t.
PS. If you want to learn more about what copywriting really is, sign up for my 5-day Copywriting Course. It’s a quick and easy intro to copywriting with learnings you can put into practice right away.
