Competing Objectives In Article Distribution
The only real reason that online businesses pour so many resources into article marketing is to get more traffic. That’s why the better Internet writing services never lack business, and it’s why the top article directories do not lack fresh content.
Our articles accomplish this in one (or both) of two ways. First, readers might click the links contextually embedded within our articles or within the resource box at the article’s end, 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 on our site to which we might want to send the article readers may not be our most desired pages for maximizing our search optimization resources. I’ll try to explain the contradiction with a bit of elaboration.
Often we pay the most SEO attention to pages that generate revenue directly. 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 often in the very early phases of information gathering. That’s why they came to our article rather than going directly to a store or service provider.
Let’s balance those two visitor mental frames against the way we typically sculpt a page on a business site. One fundamental rule of marketing that applies to a 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. That action might be buying or it might be signing up for our mailing list in order to receive additional information (that we may hope, in turn, to use to move them closer to deciding upon our product or service). So, if we obey the marketing rule to the letter, it is logically impossible to both optimize the most prized pages on the site and simultaneously satisfy the human reader of our article–can we?
That is the dilemma we face. Should we direct our article marketing strategy on search engine optimization 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.
