Dear Jill,

I thoroughly enjoy your clear and straightforward treatment of SEO application. Yours is a refreshing voice in a hyped-up field.

In cases where a client is smarter than you are about SEO, insists on saturating his keyword pages (10 per 200-word page) at 5% (which includes the keyword phrase in two header lines), and currently (without keyword saturation) consistently hits in the top 20 on his Google searches.

Is there any tactful way a copywriter can tell this kind of client that he may be destroying his currently high ranking when he implements these new "search friendly" pages?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Mark

Jill's Response

Hi Mark,

I assume you're being sarcastic when you say that the client is smarter than you about SEO? Because obviously, if the client is stuffing keywords all over his pages, he's definitely not smart.

If it were me, I'd take this opportunity to educate the client about good web writing. Perhaps you can ask him what he would think if he landed on a page that was stuffed full of keywords. Would that page make him want to buy the products or services? Would it enhance the image of the company and the brand, or make them look pretty silly?

You should also ask why they would hire you as a copywriter only to ruin your well-written, professional prose this way. You may want to also direct him to Karon's copywriting articles at her Marketing Words site here.

As you know, SEO copywriting has absolutely nothing to do with keyword stuffing, but this is often lost on people who just don't know better. For some reason, people think that the search engines will like poorly written, keyword-stuffed copy, when they actually want the same thing the human readers want, i.e., good copy that provides them with information that explains what's in it for them.

Hope this helps!

Jill

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