TIL I was writing blog posts for search engines instead of humans for 2 years

A client called me out during a monthly review. She said 'your article on email automation reads like a robot wrote it for other robots.' She was right. I had been stuffing keywords and focusing on word count targets. After that I rewrote everything to sound like a normal conversation. Traffic actually went up 30% in 3 months. Anybody else get called out by a client for something embarrassing?

3 comments

3 Comments

miller.rowan21d ago

A buddy of mine who runs a small landscaping company got a similar wakeup call last year. One of his clients straight up told him his quotes sounded like they were translated from another language before being fed through a spam filter. He was so focused on making sure every service had the right industry keywords that he forgot to write like a human being. After that he started jotting down notes like he was talking to his neighbor over the fence instead of writing a legal document. His closing rate went up about 25% after he made the switch and people actually started asking questions about the work instead of just nodding along. It's wild how much better things go when you just talk normal instead of trying to sound like a brochure.

elizabethmason21d ago

Read an article about how people actually scan text in a certain pattern before they decide to read it. Sounds like your buddy figured that out without needing a study. His closing rate jump makes perfect sense when you think about how much easier it is to trust someone who writes the way they talk. Makes you wonder why so many businesses fight so hard against being natural.

rowan_thomas8421d ago

Exactly. Being fake is a lot more work anyway.