Shakespeare was Wrong - But, Then, He Wasn’t Writing for SEO

Juliet had her own agenda for saying: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet….”

In the world of writing for SEO, however, names rule. Selection of the terms you use for your web content (known as “keywords”) will, to a large extent, dictate how sweet the smell of success - read, sales leads leading to profit.

We fail to research and select the right keywords at our peril.

Seek out the SEO stinkers and leave them out of your copy

To use Juliet’s example, a rose could actually stink if, for example, you called it a rosebush:

• More than 273,000 people each month are searching the Internet using the word “rose”.
• Only about 600 people are searching for “rosebush.”

Art or science?

I spend a lot of time researching keywords/phrases, and folding them into SEO copywriting, for my clients. I think it’s both an art and a science:

Art: Fine-tuning a marketing campaign until the pitch sounds just right; then, writing eloquently and elegantly with these keywords.

Science: Building a significant database of keywords and mapping them strategically to each web page of content.

Investing in deep and imaginative keyword research, conducted by SEO experts, is some of the best money you’ll spend on your website. Don’t even think about beginning the (re)writing process until you’ve got a list of optimum keywords - and all their variations - as long as your arm.

Waxing poetic over real people buying real products

Of course, you don’t want to write just for the ‘Google-bots’ that crawl your site looking for content-rich, relevant sources of information. You want to write for humans - and specific types of humans, depending on your market. But you better know how those humans are searching.

So, poetically, a rose by any other name might smell as sweet - but if you don’t call something by the label most people use, who’s going to come ’round and smell it?