Is language a matter of class?

I love reading letters pages in the national papers. So often the writers of the shorter letters are pithy and thoughtful - but with their viewpoints all squeezed into a few cogent words.

Last week, a contributor to one letters page wrote to say he had offered his services as a proofreader to his local UK Member of Parliament after browsing the MP's web site. The MP rather surprisingly replied by suggesting that concern about grammar over content smacked of a continuation of our class war.

Now letter writers complaining about poor use of English are treated with some humour by our newspapers and the world at large, but this was, I feel, rather an extreme response. Do we still have class war in the UK? And what has that got to do with grammar?

When you are communicating by written word, it helps so much to get your message across if you write according to the agreed rules of language. Why? Because a clearly written piece is less ambiguous, and easier to understand. And also because poor use of grammar and spelling undermines your brand, whether you are an MP, a major retailer or an individual who wants to be recognised as knowledgeable in their field.If you really want to be taken seriously, it's worth taking the time to get your words right, so that the message is right.

Is your jargon someone else's nonsense?

In an effort to stop local councils from using impenetrable jargon, the UK Local Government Association has issued a list of 200 banned terms.

As the LGA chairman Margaret Eaton said: “"If a council fails to explain what it does in plain English then local people will fail to understand its relevance to them or why they should bother to turn out and vote.” It's not a hard task to edit that statement to talk about companies using jargon with their customers.

Indeed, many of the phrases on the list are commonly found in marketing and sales literature too. When I started out in marketing, I wrote a section of a proposal that seemed to me to be in perfectly clear, plain English. I was rather proud of it. The sales manager told me that it was far too clear, and he would have to rewrite it so that the customer wouldn't be able to understand it. I was never sure whether he was joking or not.

Looking at the list, there are some terms that certainly mean nothing, but a lot are simply habit. The same words are used over and over again across numerous documents, to the point of tedium. I'm not advocating that we avoid these terms altogether – if we and the customers both understand exactly what they imply, then that's fine. What perhaps we all need to consider is whether there aren't alternative, simpler, more meaningful ways of saying what we mean.

Here are few examples from the list that do crop up in sales and marketing on a regular basis:

Core message/principles/values

Dialogue

Downstream

Early win

Enabler

Enhance

Facilitate

Functionality

Going forward

Good practice (and best practice)

Governance

Holistic

Horizon scanning

Paradigm

Partnerships

Prioritization

Process driven

Procurement

Single point of contact

Stakeholder

Top-down

Utilise

Value-added

Vision

Improving search engine rankings with SEO copywriting

I am coming across a growing number of their clients who are rejecting direct mail marketing, are putting their faith almost entirely in search engine optimisation (SEO) to bring in new customers.

Take one of the reseller partners of a major software company. It's just one of many similar businesses across the country, offering much the same mix of implementation, consultancy and support. I've written copy that all of the partners can use as templates, so I know that geography may well be the only way to differentiate them.

It's in a highly competitive market, and yet this company has chosen to forgo direct mail to hook potential new customers, and is focusing instead on getting its name to the top of the search engine rankings. The theory is that if you're not on the first page of Google, you're nowhere. But if you are there, you're ahead of the competition.

How does that work?

It's all about SEO keywords. Discovering which are the words and phrases that your potential customers might use to search on, and ensuring that those words are prominent in the text of your web site. That sounds simple, but actually it's a pretty major task. Not only do you want your keywords to be popular with your target audience, but you want them to be unpopular with your competitors. So when a customer searches on “cat food”, they might be rewarded with thousands of replies. But if they search more carefully, as many of us do now, on, say, “dry food for senior cats in Surrey”, there will be fewer responses, and as a supplier of just such cat food, you could be in there on the front page.

There are two stages to this. First you find your list of keywords through diligent research. Then you insert them into your web copy as often as you can, without forgetting that the prime purpose of your site is to inform your customers and sell your products and services. That means that your web content still has to be accessible, easy to read, and intelligible. That, of course, is where an SEO copywriter can help.

Slide your keywords seamlessly into your web copy, taking every opportunity to make your headings, your tabs, your links and your text more meaningful, and you'll be able to move your site up the search engine rankings over time.

You can also help your cause by getting links to your web site out there in as many places as possible. Writing blogs on your site and contributing to others, submitting articles to industry and social publishing sites, and getting listed in directories will all help. And copywriters can help you to put the blogs and articles together, just as they would with any other marketing communications – and again aim to include your keywords of the moment.

It's an ongoing task. The people at Keytracker, which is highly recommended for researching keywords, suggest reviewing and revising your keywords monthly. Yet in a world with increasingly web-savvy customers and competitors, it has to be a worthwhile effort.

If you would like Wrightwell to help you seamlessly add your keywords to your web content, just contact kathy at wrightwell.com

Is SEO copywriting denting your credibility?

After refreshing my web site recently I've been taking time out to brush up on search engine optimisation (SEO) skills. These are the techniques you can use to push your web site up to the top of search engine rankings. Find a phrase that describes your business accurately, that is regularly used in searches, but that few competitors have on their web sites, build it into your web copy, and theoretically you’re away.

While I was researching the terms competitors use, I found a copywriting business that was way up the Google rankings. Keen to find out how they’ve achieved that, I clicked on the link, and arrived at a landing page full of nonsense. Sentence after sentence had been put together simply to include a key phrase, so I was reading stuff like:

"Get a copywriter experience freelance quote. Get a quote for copywriter experience freelance. Search engine optimization copywriter experience freelance or search engine optimisation experience freelance can be found here. If you need an inexpensive copywriter experience freelance then get in touch today."

As the page was part of the full web site, it was easy to navigate to the intelligible pages and findout what this business was really all about, and the SEO copywriting services it was offering.

I was torn. Was this immensely clever, because it had achieved a high ranking, and demonstration that this SEO copywriting business could do the same for customers? Or was it just appalling because the first contact a customer has with this firm is garbage?

Actually an approach like this might be clever, but it’s surely got to dent the credibility of the firm that’s using it. The art of SEO copywriting is to slip those keywords into the content of the home page and throughout the web site, without detracting from the site’s key purpose – to inform the customer and make the sale. So my verdict is – clever, quite amusing, but definitely a no, no.