Good at SEO. Bad at marketing.
We had a client once insist on making the headline of his new web page four sentences long and jammed with keywords. Then he made us repeat that same copy in the very first paragraph of body text, which sat directly below the headline. He had done this on the company’s previous website and believed it directly resulted in his number-one ranking on Google for a particular keyword phrase.
And he’s probably right. He likely figured out how to catch the attention of the web spiders by putting certain phrases high on his page.
But this isn’t a great marketing strategy for someone in professional services. Sure, if you’re selling an umbrella stand and the text surrounding that item isn’t as important as its photograph and price, then cramming the top of the page with keywords might be a good strategy. But if I were someone looking for a financial advisor — doing a cold Internet search, no less — and got to his page with the crazy headline and repetitive text below it, I would not give him a call. He succeeded in getting me to his website, out of all the thousands of competitor sites, but he failed to win my confidence.
Clunky web content might have flown in 1999 or even 2009. But as web audiences become increasingly more sophisticated, websites sleeker, copy cleaner, and competition fiercer, this SEO trickery isn’t a viable strategy. This is especially true for professions in which trust is a crucial ingredient in winning business: lawyers, accountants, therapists, financial advisors, etc. Sloppy or confusing content on a professional services site sends the message that the professional, or even the entire organization, doesn’t have her act together. (“If she can’t recognize that her webpage is a mess, how is she going to manage my money/clean my teeth/handle my trial?”)
And at some point, the spiders will feel this way too. Not that long ago, meta tags were the SEO silver bullet, and now they have very little impact on rankings. Since the release of Google Panda in 2011, search results are increasingly correlated with rich content and high quality design. It’s only a matter of time until the algorithms are so savvy that they will evaluate a website exactly like a human does, and poorly written, four-sentence headlines will hurt, not help.