Sawdust tastes terrible
- Inventory, Organize, and Supercharge Your Marketing - May 12, 2023
- Customer Data Tags: 4 simple ways to engage your customers - May 12, 2023
- 3 Tips for Creating Your Knockout Value Statement - May 12, 2023
Every time the temptation to write a boring, self-involved and uninteresting brochure, sales sheet, or website copy, pull up a seat and eat some sawdust. If you can’t swallow it, neither will your audience. Maybe someone in management knows just enough about SEO (from 4 years ago) and they push for the crawler cred. “More content will get us found.” This may have been true once, but no longer.
Google algorithms dictate content is no longer a generic box to check. It’s not enough to search engines that you slap a huge quantity of dreck up on the web. Lots of keywords? So what. Google passes out credibility gold stars to sites with content people actively read, share, cite and talk about. The more of these signals the Google machine records, the more perceived value there is, and therefore the more worthy your site is to climb the ranks organically.
Let’s come back to the sawdust. If you genuinely believe people will do any of those things with your content, then you get a “c” passing grade. But let’s be honest. Dreck is a boldly embarrassing display of outright laziness. Tap into your 4th grade English teacher, who would have marked in angry red on the margins of your essay: “WHY IS THIS INTERESTING? WHY SHOULD THE AUDIENCE CARE? WHAT IS THIS STORY ABOUT?”
Step off the hamster wheel of churning out content for its own God-awful sake, and see the story. See the characters. Breathe life into it, and leave the sawdust for the hamster cage.
