Don’t Bore the Humans (While Feeding the Bots)!
Tell me which of the following two sentences interests you the most:
Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs — a fortified breakfast cereal.
Or…
Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs are “tasty, lip-smacking, crunchy-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside, and they don’t have a single natural ingredient or essential vitamin to get in the way of that rich, fudgy taste.”
That’s Bill Watterson’s comic character Calvin, of course, waxing eloquent about his favorite cereal.
(Hobbes, Calvin’s lovable tiger companion, wryly comments, “This is like eating a bowl of Milk Duds.”)
But the fact is that the first sentence reads like a marketer might write it, if he were going to optimize for the keywords “breakfast cereal” and “fortified.” The second is Calvin’s exuberant keyword-stuffed proclamation of eternal allegiance.
Which brings me to my point: never forget that when you write about your product, you want to engage the humans as well as feed the bots.
I’m not saying that you want to position your hyper-sugary cereal as… well, a hyper-sugary cereal, but I am saying that you want to write for your human readers. Don’t bore us!
It isn’t necessary to choose between writing for one (humans) or the other (bots) — let people be your primary audience, and SEO can follow.
It’s the difference between “Disney: A great place for a family vacation,” and “Our family had the most incredible vacation ever this year at Disney!”
Optimizing for search is critical in positioning your business products and services, but it’s more important to speak to humans in a way that makes them smile, chuckle, raise their eyebrows, or otherwise gets them interested.
What interests humans? Story does. Narrative. An inventive telling of human experience. We naturally want to hear about the experiences of other people, rather than a dry recitation of facts. Put the facts and the keywords in there, but don’t make us yawn.
Critics are quick to point out that there’s no point in having a beautiful, optimized-for-humans website if no one can ever find it.
There’s truth to that critique, but there are also ways to have your Sugar Bombs and eat them too.
Meta titles are one way to bridge the divide. There are plenty of SEO plugins for WordPress that will allow you to create one title for SEO purposes (for bots to read) while keeping a more human-centric title on your article.
Be mindful of content arrangement as well. Make sure your “hook” or call to action is above the fold, and write for the reading habits of online readers.
Finally, track your analytics. Do you have pages that draw heavy traffic but also have a high bounce rate? What’s driving people away?
If you are truly dedicated to building a site that engages your target market in a way that generates revenue, you absolutely must find a way to keep the balance between feeding the bots and engaging the humans.
Need a little help? Contact Calvert Creative today! We help businesses build content that drives revenue. Call us toll-free at 877-495-6851.
