SEO Killed the Analog Star

Someone spouted this thought in the billion-voice echo chamber that is Twitter the other day: “Too many people are writing content for Google and not their readers.”

The dude nailed it.

Of course, five minutes later he Tweeted: “5 affordable ways to see Paris like a local”…which, of course, is something that’s been covered more times than Angelina Jolie’s baby-mama and symbolic-tattoo crusade.

If you’re a writer who cares about readers, you can’t help but notice that your copy has been impacted by what I call the Great Extortionist known as SEO. 

The Great Extortionist—yes, picture Joe Pesci in “Goodfellas”—aided by a new breed of media professionals with titles and gigs that didn’t even exist five years ago, tells us we must produce content the Google spiders like…or we will be mercilessly maimed online—and no one will like you in the church of right now.

Invariably, these threats beget bite-size content chunks. Which beget bite-size headlines. Which beget, allegedly, more eyeballs to your website.

I get it. And I’m getting used to it, grudgingly.

(The Great Extortionist has even impacted my thinking at home. I say all manner of ridiculous things to my kids: “Quick, name the top 3 things you did at lunch today.” At which point the three of them deadpan, “We ate our baloney sandwiches.”)

While SEO has even impacted the way I plan stories—fewer narratives, chunkier pieces—I maintain that, no matter what the medium, great content will take you to the Promised Land with readers.

But what constitutes great content these days, and can the Great Extortionist be used to your advantage? Get a little creative:

Get Naked. Strip away the SEO scaffolding that often props up your stories—the incessant lists, the quote-free paragraphs, the bland headlines—and assign and write pieces that were created to spark discovery or additional learning.

Get Naked Consistently. Great content isn’t about one-hit wonders and the single killer story that delivered 20,000 unique visitors to your website in one day but never returned. It’s about consistency, readership trust and literary brand building. SEO can’t do that. Nor can spider-food headlines.

OK, put your clothes back on.

The Great Extortionist isn’t going away. He’s on every corner of the web, and he has many frightening cousins and, soon, potentially frightening baby cousins.

But the man can be tamed and used to your advantage. Do not strip away your editorial integrity, but instead merge it with the new normal, and that normal is SEO.

To be sure, you’ll need to be creative.

Here’s what our Twitter friend could have written: “How I fell in love with Paris cafes, midnight rooftops and a poet on the same night and didn’t break the bank.”

Yeah, I’d read that.

Remember, great content lives forever. And the rest? It’s gone, baby, gone, stomped out like a spent Camel beneath Joe Pesci’s disagreeable little boot heel.

[image: davedehetre]