Jan 11 2011

When Did a Search Engine Last Buy One of Your Products?

I’m one of those people who like to do the right thing on the Internet, I don’t use Black Hat techniques and I always try to follow an ethical path when it comes to my Internet Marketing.

One of my new years resolutions for 2011 is to be more interactive with my peers, so I’ve started blog hopping again (can’t remember why I stopped really) and it’s been great, catching up with old friends, meeting new friends and visiting sites that I liked in the past and seeing how they’ve progressed. It’s been a real tonic.

But there’s one thing I have noticed on my travels that surprised me and that is a marked change in the writing style of quite a few bloggers.

Some of the posts I have read have been clearly written for the search engines rather than the human reader that pay our blogs a visit. If you know what to look for it stands out a mile.

But let me ask you a question:

  • When was the last time a Search Engine whipped out its credit card and bought one of your products?
  • So why continually write for them?

Yes, I know the obvious answer is so that you can get ranked in the search engines and get lots of lovely free organic traffic. But how much work is that?…and not to mention just how painfully slow it can be too.

I think we as Bloggers have got it a bit wrong at the moment. Surely by writing excellent content for our Human Readers, who may also become our friends as well as our customers, we’ll find ourselves in a much better place in terms of the traffic that comes to our site.

And who knows, one of our ‘Human Readers’ may like what we have to say enough to be compelled to get their credit card out and buy one of our products.

Now I’m not saying don’t optimise your blog posts, but do it in a way that’s friendly to a person too or you may just find that the only visitor you get is a BOT, which will never improve your bank balance.

Let’s all keep things interesting for our real readers and forget about the search engines, because in reality they don’t even leave us a blog comment let alone buy something.

Happy Marketing

Steve
www.steveking.biz

7 Responses to “When Did a Search Engine Last Buy One of Your Products?”

  1. Judith says:
    January 11, 2011 at 9:32 pm

    Amen, Steve! If you write about what you know and what you are passionate about — you are in essence automatically SEOing! So don’t sweat it so much — write for your target market.

    *Way* too much focus is being put on optimizing blocks of words instead of creating great stuff you believe in that has your unique voice — that you then tweak with a bit of SEO.

    Keep up the good fight! ;-)

  2. Rob Corrigan says:
    January 11, 2011 at 9:45 pm

    Hi Steve, I know that a lot of people go to a lot of trouble to make sure that the please the Search Engines, but as you say they don’t buy the products people do. So by writing good content and reviewing products acuratly, dont we automaticlly include keywords that the Serach Engines will find anyway? I would be interetsed in your opinion on that one, or indeed anyone elses.
    Rob

  3. Robin says:
    January 12, 2011 at 4:04 am

    Ah, Steve, this was like a breath of fresh air. Thank you for reminding us of what we should already know!

  4. All-the-Info-in-the-World says:
    January 12, 2011 at 8:30 am

    I came across Daily SEO Tip a week ago or so and have left it open as a tab in a Firefox window so I can easily come back and peruse it. Just refreshed the page after a couple of days of not visiting and found these interesting remarks, interesting to me in that I was actually taking some time to respond to folks who have left comments on one of my blogs that I have posted frequently to of late and decided to drop by here while taking a bit of a break from that.

    I wholeheartedly concur, write to peeps, not bots. And methinx it might serve as a sort of exercise in thinking to maybe even do both at the same time, that is, while writing so that a human being’s interest might be held, throwing in a few keyword terms here and there.

  5. become a dj says:
    January 16, 2011 at 4:23 am

    Great article Steve, the trick (or challenge) is to find the right balance – obviously without the organic traffic you’ll have no-one coming to your site to even read your articles let alone make a purchase so optimizing is important BUT no point putting in the hard work to get visitors to your site if they bounce because the way we have written the article isn’t making sense or is distorted for the bots.

    Like I said though this article is all well and good but the trick if finding the right balance – maybe a couple of good and bad examples would help the simpletons like myself??

  6. buket says:
    February 9, 2011 at 12:54 pm

    I’m one of those people who like to do the right thing on the Internet, I don’t use Black Hat techniques and I always try to follow an ethical path when it comes to my Internet Marketing. One of my new years resolutions for 2011 is to be more interactive with my peers, so I’ve started blog hopping again (can’t remember why I stopped really) and it’s been great, catching up with old friends, meeting new…

  7. buket says:
    February 9, 2011 at 12:54 pm

    I’m one of those people who like to do the right thing on the Internet, I don’t use Black Hat techniques and I always try to follow an ethical path when it comes to my Internet Marketing.