In Article Syndication Think About Your Readership
Quite simply, we put a lot of effort into article marketing in hopes of achieving one simple objective: Get more traffic!
Our syndicated article help us in this way in two potential ways. On the one hand, we can receive visitors directly from those articles when the readers click a link in our resource (or author’s) box, 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. Let me explain this problem in a little more detail.
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 (or perform whatever our desired, money-making action happens to be).
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.
Now, hang onto those two competing states of mind for a moment, while we consider how we construct pages on a business website. 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 end. So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, we can’t possibly optimize the most prized pages on the site and simultaneously satisfy the reader–can we?
That is the seemingly unwinnable choice that faces us. Should we focus our article marketing efforts on search engine optimization or on providing a landing page for our readers that will give them what they truly desire at their current stage of decision making? 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.