Dear Gerry McGovern

A few days ago, I read your book Killer Web Content. It was quite frustrating to read the book. No, hang on please! I only mean that it’s frustrating to know that I need to do further research. I need to find out my customers’ care words and I need to do testing regarding headings and summaries. You gave me a lot of work, my friend…

What’s wrong with SEO?

There’s just one thing that was really frustrating. In the chapter about search, you state the following:

A big focus in the search marketing industry is “search engine optimization”, but I think this is the wrong long-term focus. Such an approach can result in tactics that try to trick the search engines by creating content that ranks well with them; it will, however, be a big turn-off for the reader because it has no style or flow.

I do understand what you mean. And there really are people out there who have just one KPI: the number of visitors. But I think you are a bit too negative here. I myself, as an SEO, have no interest in the number of visitors on my customers sites. I’m heading for conversion, not for traffic.

As an SEO, I am a consultant. A consultant is an advisor. If everything is okay, a consultant doesn’t have his own goals, because he’s busy trying to reach the clients goals. Most clients don’t want traffic, they want conversion. Indeed, some sites don’t have that good goals and maybe traffic combined with the bounce rate is the best KPI for them. But most clients sell something, have a news letter, have some information that can be downloaded, etc. That’s the KPI for them and for their SEO.

This being said…

… I must conclude that I really liked your book. You have something to say. I do believe that content will make the difference more and more, not only for the performance of your website, but also for the rankings of your site. Thanks for writing the book.

Kind regards,

Erik-Jan Bulthuis

PS Dutch translation: Gerry, zin om een biertje te pakken?

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