Thursday, April 13, 2006
Highlights from Perry Marshall Google AdWords Seminar - Bob Bly
Perhaps the highlight of a highly enjoyable and informative seminar I attended last weekend was the chance I had to sit down with one of the top copywriters in the country, Robert Bly. I sat down with him in a small group session on the final day. Here's one of the tips he passed on:
"When it comes to SEO copywriting, I take a different approach from the people who call themselves SEO copywriters. They'll start out writing for the search engines and try to make it somewhat appealing to readers—but only so far as they can without affecting their keyword densities.
"On the other hand, I try to write the strongest, most persuasive copy I can. Once I have a page that really works for readers, I start testing. I replace different headlines or subheads or body text with more SEO-friendly elements and I test each change. Usually, the conversion rates go down. But I don't look only at conversion rates; I look at overall sales.
If the more SEO-friendly element I'm testing builds the traffic to the point where the lower conversion rate still pulls higher sales, I'll leave it. If not, I switch back to the original element and test something else."
Great advice and a great reminder that neither traffic nor conversion rate is the ultimate metric we should focus on. In the end, the goal is to make sales. And whatever mix of SEO and copywriting accomplishes that best is what we need to do.
Jeff
Perhaps the highlight of a highly enjoyable and informative seminar I attended last weekend was the chance I had to sit down with one of the top copywriters in the country, Robert Bly. I sat down with him in a small group session on the final day. Here's one of the tips he passed on:
"When it comes to SEO copywriting, I take a different approach from the people who call themselves SEO copywriters. They'll start out writing for the search engines and try to make it somewhat appealing to readers—but only so far as they can without affecting their keyword densities.
"On the other hand, I try to write the strongest, most persuasive copy I can. Once I have a page that really works for readers, I start testing. I replace different headlines or subheads or body text with more SEO-friendly elements and I test each change. Usually, the conversion rates go down. But I don't look only at conversion rates; I look at overall sales.
If the more SEO-friendly element I'm testing builds the traffic to the point where the lower conversion rate still pulls higher sales, I'll leave it. If not, I switch back to the original element and test something else."
Great advice and a great reminder that neither traffic nor conversion rate is the ultimate metric we should focus on. In the end, the goal is to make sales. And whatever mix of SEO and copywriting accomplishes that best is what we need to do.
Jeff
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