Usable Words

As you can see, I have a brand new website. (Well, you can’t see it if you’re reading this via an RSS reader, so do you mind clicking through just this once?)

Rather than posting something long, I’ll give you a chance to have a look around. But I do have some people to thank, most importantly Rikki Bochow and Stuart Steel at Acorn Web who built the site for me.

I think Rikki’s done a fantastic job of designing an attractive site that’s almost all text. And Stu isn’t just generous with his employees’ time; he’s also a fount of great ideas.

One of his best ideas, in fact, was the “interactive demo” which you can get to from every non-blog page on the site. Have a look at it, it’s pretty nifty. While we’re at it, I’ve got an offer for you, loyal readers (or some of you at least). If you’ve made it all the way through the demo, you’ll see that one of the things I try to illustrate is the importance of links.

Here’s the offer

The only thing is, the bits of linked text in the demo don’t point to anything yet. Would you like one of them to point to something you’ve written? I’d be happy to do so, if you’ve written something that clearly and succinctly illustrates one of the following points:

• Most web users don’t have a lot of time and are doing several things at once
• On the web people tend to skim
• Use keywords strategically (rather than stuffing your site with them)
• Make link text useful to readers
• Tell readers what you want them to do next

So if you have anything that might be suitable, drop me a line. (If you have more than one, feel free to send me all of them, but I won’t publish more than one link per person.) No strings!

Oh, and before anyone suggests this, I’m already planning to offer a bookmark/Stumble friendly version of the demo.

Anyway, enjoy the website, and I’d love to hear your feedback. (This to Glenn at Divine Write for the very useful feedback he’s already given.)

The other day I idly typed “copywriter melbourne” into Google (as you do). Here’s what turned up:

Yep, that’s me, the third link on the page. Pretty good, huh? Here’s what’s even better: this took almost no effort on my part. I only have a stub of a website at the moment, this blog aside. (My real website is launching very soon, by the way, and just between you and me, it’s looking good.) I haven’t gone beyond the most rudimentary forms of search engine optimisation. And I’ve been in business for a shorter time than most of my competitors.

In fact, I feel a bit sheepish about placing higher on the page than experienced copywriters who’ve obviously put a great deal of effort into SEO. How did I do it?

To cut a long story short, I did two things:

1. I listed my business with Google Local.
2. I happened to have an office close to Melbourne CBD.

This listing, you see, isn’t a “normal” search result. In regular “organic” searches – the kind the SEO industry is built around – I’m pretty much where you expect me to be (nowhere, more or less).

But when searchers type in something that Google recognises as a location, Google thinks “aha, this person is looking for something in their local area”, and so the first thing it displays is a map showing businesses that have registered themselves as being located there. Those organic results that everyone works so hard for get relegated to second place.

It probably wasn’t Google’s intention, but this is particularly good for business like mine that are located close to a CBD. Even though people searching for “copywriter melbourne” are probably looking for copywriters in the greater Melbourne area, Google starts at the CBD and works outwards. Which is rotten luck for all the copywriters in Frankston.

Here’s the call to action.

If you have a business with any kind of address, even your house, you probably can’t do much to change your physical location (not at short notice, anyway!), but you can take care of getting listed right now. Go to Google Local, and list yourself. It’s easy, and free. Go on, do it now. I’ll still be here when you get back.

Done? Good. Because what I haven’t told you yet is that for some of you, it’s just become even more important to have an up-to-date Google Local listing. You see, Google has just started serving up these local results some of the time even when searchers don’t type in a location! (They do this by making a guess about where you are based on your IP address. Hope that doesn’t feel too creepy.)

Now, this change will mainly affect businesses that are genuinely local – florists, dentists, pizza shops, and so on. [Edit: for businesses that aren't clearly local, like copywriters, the situation is less clear - see the comment from Glenn Murray below.] If you’re one of those local businesses, having a Google Local listing is now more important that being listed in any other directory, online or off. It’s the easiest, cheapest SEO boost you can possibly imagine. Hopefully you don’t need any more encouragement, because you took my advice two paragraphs ago, but I’m just saying.

What’s going to be interesting over the next few months is seeing businesses start gaming the system. I can see businesses registering under fake addresses in popular locations. I can see “public-spirited” competitors reporting those fake addresses to Google. I can see new businesses springing up to provide “legitimate” virtual addresses. Isn’t it funny how, in our virtualised world, a simple change on Google’s part suddenly makes actual locations important again?

If you’ve never heard the motto “Work on your business, not in it”, then you probably haven’t spent much time hanging around business coaches, or fans of the various iterations of Michael Gerber’s E Myth.

I haven’t read Gerber myself, but from what I can gather, “Work on your business, not in it” means roughly this:

If you own a business, you shouldn’t be spending your time doing the day-to-day things that keep the business ticking over (“working in your business”). Instead, you should hire, outsource or automate these tasks, and concentrate instead on the “big picture” strategic tasks that will make your business bigger, more scalable, more efficient, more saleable down the track, and so on (“working on your business”).

Now, obviously there’s something to this idea, otherwise half the business people I know wouldn’t devote their lives to realising it. The problem is, these same people are often so enamoured of the phrase itself that they want to use it in their marketing copy. I think this is a mistake, for two reasons:

1. Some people prefer working in their business to working on it.
2. If you haven’t read the book, it’s not that easy to see the difference.

The first of these is a problem with the underlying idea of the phrase, the second a problem with the wording. But both of them lead to what I’d describe as “huh?” reactions. Something that seems totally self-evident to the person saying it seems either wrong or confusing to the person hearing it. And that’s never good marketing. read more >