You don’t need SEO or Usability - You need a writer!

OK you do need SEO and usability. But find out why you really need to invest in a good writer.

Chris and I were chatting and he threw me this comment today:

Nobody reads anything from usability experts. Especially programmers. Some day our field will be taken more seriously. For now, it’s an after-thought.

On the contrary, I think usability and beautiful design have gained momentum recently, and web firms are taking these things much more seriously than they were five or six years ago. What we really need to shift our focus to is content. No, I don’t mean Information Architecture. Leave that in the SEO & Usability camp, too. I’m talking about writing. Usability adoption and understanding still has a long way to go, but now we need to go adopt its orphaned cousin, content writing, and bring it along for the ride.

The fact of the matter is: If your content is good enough, people will take the time to learn how to use your shitty site to read more of it.

Example: www.sheldonbrown.com is the most popular web site for bicycle information among bicycle enthusiasts worldwide. Look at the web site. It has terrible design, a poor structure and inconsistent navigation menus. It truly lacks all the essentials to what we in the web industry would judge as esthetically pleasing design and architecture.

The late Sheldon Brown didn’t buy Adwords campaigns. He didn’t have PPC (pay-per-click) accounts. He didn’t know a damn thing about Search Engine Optimization. He never hired a web designer, an SEO consultant or a marketing agency.

Sheldon Brown knew about bikes, which makes his web site the best resource for cyclists at any difficultly level.

Don’t buy into the tricks and promises of SEO work alone. You can fool Google and Yahoo into listing you at the top, but you’ll never fool people. Machines recognize patterns and play along to the rules of an algorithm (which, remember, is written and rewritten daily to emulate human behavior). But people are emotional, irrational and impulsive. People have short attention spans. Humans still need an interesting headline. They don’t care about your keyword density.

If you can’t write something people actually want to read, all your SEO, usability studies, information architecture and beautiful design flies right out the window.

Start with a good headline. What was true in print design on newspapers hundreds of years ago is still true today. You have to grab the reader in the first sentence. Regardless of how well you did on Google, people still have to be intrigued by your title.

Write with conversational tone. Business2Business, Business2Customer. It doesn’t matter. Write with a natural voice in human language that common people understand. Don’t overdo it with technical words and exceptional vocabulary. Send your content around the office. If most people get stuck on the words, make them simpler, smaller and use less of them.

Poke a little fun at yourself. Don’t be afraid to inject some humor and playfulness into your writing. It makes your content easier to digest and can get people feeling good about contacting you for business.

Invest in the community, not just campaigns and charts. Google analytics and PPC charts and graphs can never teach you what your customers can. Start a conversation with them, find out what they think about this or that, find ways for them to get involved and show you what you’ve missed.

Write about things you care about because they matter to you, too. Don’t pick topics that are trendy, cool, or because you can “monetize” them (worst new word in the web industry, by the way). If you stay engaged in the things that are important to you, what you have passion for, you will attract more people like you. You will get more customers who are like you.

Business doesn’t have to be just about money. Of course, revenue and profit are important. But business can revolve around things you genuinely care about, too. Think about how you can have fun and do what you love now, rather than putting it off until retirement. Thanks to the age of the internet, there’s all sorts of ways that you can turn what you love into a profitable business and have some great conversations with people.

There is no easy over-night answer. You can’t flip a switch and magically get countless people visiting your site over and over again. You have to participate, engage and inspire others in your community. You’ll have to make comments on other blogs and forums, appear at public events, speaking engagements and conferences. But this means you’ll attract others who are like you and care about your business, too.

This is in contrast to haplessly attracting mindless internet searchers who will take the first decent result they see. Of course, you want to get them, too. And you will, but this time with much better content that keeps them coming back for more.

Write for humans and hire a good HTML developer who can code for machines.