SEO performance speaks everything
“They say there are two sides to everything. But there is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.”
Jesse Livermore – Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
I always remember this famous quote of Jesse Livermore,1 an American speculator in early 20th century. He never argued which idea was correct, because the result was everything in the stock market. It is also the same in SEO copywriting, we only care about the rank and the rank tells us everything.
Once before, a friend asked me, “I feel my website good and fast, but its score is so poor in Google PageSpeed. Should I change the testing tool?” I patted his shoulder and said, “Pal, you are doing SEO on Google, so just listen to Google.”
Let me share with you a successful case of SEO copywriting:
Successful Story:”Government Funding Consultant”
In order to boost the competitiveness of SMEs, Hong Kong government has established multiple subsidy funding such as the TVP Fund and the BUD Fund. A tech company assisted its clients to apply occasionally, and found that it was a potential market. So this company set up a website for promotion (this is a Chinese SEO project). I found those critical keywords were similar, “TVP consultant” (“科技券顧問”), “BUD consultant” (“BUD顧問”) and so on. Keywords and phrases were important for sure, but the ultimate goal was to find out the search intention. Therefore I built the search persona to dig out what information they needed. Only by doing this, we could understand why people search these keywords.
Once we get people’s “Big Why”, give them what they need. This is the task of both Google and SEO copywriters.
Around half year later, the SEO copywriting gave observable influence. Our pages ranked well for a lot of important keyword searches. On the first page, listed No.1, or even selected as “Featured Snippet”.2 The website owner told me that both quantity and quality of the inquiries from SEO were good. He proposed an idea daring me: build multiple similar websites to dominate the first page! This was an interesting and challenging proposal, because I couldn’t just copy articles site to site. Plagiarism would result serious search engine penalties. Also, the articles couldn’t show identical tone. Imagine that both the Sun and the Daily Telegraph were written by the same person. LOL
10 on the first page, 5 by me
Among these websites, some was professional, technical and academic, while some was in spoken words as a daily life blog ULifestyle. Every website had its own tone and manner with the same goal: to improve the SEO for inbound marketing. This time, it spent not half a year but only 4 months to reach the target. Every website was on the first page for particular keywords, and we occupied 5 returns out of 10 in some crucial keyword search. I saw that the same person called different phones of our company for many times.
Certainly, there are 3 essential factors of SEO: content, technology and authority. It relies on the entire team effort to achieve in an SEO campaign. Copywriting is the main dish of content, as well as illustration, infographic, video and so on.
The successful story of “Government Funding Consultant” SEO copywriting campaign is my most unforgettable experience. I dare that the SEO effect will continue for years even we stop the copywriting works, unless there is an even more competitive site.
- Source: https://quotefancy.com/quote/1639546
- (2017) Ann Smarty, “How to Optimize for Google’s Featured Snippets to Build More Traffic”, Moz, https://moz.com/blog/optimize-featured-snippets