The only real reason that online businesses pour so many resources into article marketing is to get more traffic. That’s why the best web article writing services flourish, and it’s why the top article directories do not lack fresh content.
Our syndicated article help us in this way in two potential ways. First, readers might click the links contextually embedded within our articles or within the resource box at the article’s end, and/or, alternatively, the major search engines can notice our article link and give greater important to that landing page on our site. This latter option leads to more traffic, eventually, by sending us visitors who have found our page in the search engine results.
Unfortunately those two ways of achieving our single objective are not always complimentary to each other. The pages that we want to optimize in the search engines may not be the same pages to which we would ideally send our article readers. I’ll try to explain the contradiction with a bit of elaboration.
We normally want to give our greatest SEO love to our most competitive pages. Those are often the pages that directly generate income. With those pages, we try to reach search engine users who are already in a mindset to buy.
On the other hand, the readers of our syndicated articles are, typically, at a much earlier stage in the decision making process. They are often in the very early phases of information gathering. Indeed, it is because they are gathering information that they found our article in the first place.
Let’s balance those two visitor mental frames against the way we typically sculpt a page on a business site. A basic marketing principle of good website design for a business is that each page within our site should be constructed in a way that contributes to creating only one action on the part of the prospect. Whether that action is to buy our product, sign up for our mailing list or scratch their noses, we focus all our energy on that page toward achieving that single objective. So, if we obey the marketing rule to the letter, we can’t possibly optimize the most prized pages on the site and simultaneously satisfy the human reader of our article–can we?
That is the seemingly unwinnable choice that faces us. Should we direct our article marketing strategy on search engine optimization or on providing a landing page for our readers that will give them what they actually want at this stage? Should we abide by the simple, common sense marketing rule, or should we magically try to successfully incorporate two disparate objectives within this single site of the page?
As we develop our overall article syndication strategy and the tactics of writing a single article, we must be attentive to these competing options.