Contradictory Objectives in Article Syndication
The only real reason that online businesses pour so many resources into article marketing is to get more traffic. That’s why the best web article writing services never lack business, and it’s why the top article directories do not go begging for content.
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.
Trying to maximize our results from those two methods causes a problem. 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. We are optimizing, in those cases, for searchers who are in a buying state of mind–or at worst in the state of mind in which they just need a little shove to make that final decision.
On the other hand, the readers of our syndicated articles are, typically, at a much earlier stage in the decision making process. They are usually at a stage of beginning information gathering. That’s why they came to our article rather than going directly to a store or service provider.
Now, hang onto those two competing states of mind for a moment, while we consider how we construct pages on a business website. One fundamental rule of marketing that applies to a good website design for a business is that any given page should be directed toward moving the visitor to one and only one action. That action might be buying or it might be signing up to receive additional information. So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, it is logically impossible to both optimize our most important pages and satisfy the human reader–can we?
That is the seemingly unwinnable choice that faces us. Should we direct our article marketing strategy on SEO or on providing a landing page for our readers that will offer them what they actually want at this stage? 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.