The challenge for a digital marketer is to please two very different audiences.
- Website content must be addressed to and strike a chord with visitors to the site. It must generate an emotional response in the reader.
- It must communicate the right things in the right way to Google so it awards the page with high rankings for the desired search terms.
The challenges are first of all, that each of these is difficult requiring a high skill in its own right. Even then, you have a problem: These two goals aren’t necessarily compatible.
Of course Google insists that if you write good quality content for the site user, you don’t need to worry further about search rankings. If only that were true. I tell myself Google can’t seriously believe that but it leaves me wondering why they aren’t being honest about it. I believe it is part of the long-running (more than 20 years) battle between Google and scammers who, after all, spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to trick Google. The less that is known about how their algorithms work, the harder it is to fool Google.
Regardless of history and who says what, every experienced digital marketer knows you have to make compromises to try to please both Google and the website visitor. It may take content never expected to be read by a human being to get the desired results with Google.
Once upon a time marketers would do things like put such text in the same color as the page background, so it would be invisible. These days that can get your site banned by Google.
So we have no choice but to do our honest best to deliver content that works for Google and works for the visitors.
For it is true: We serve two masters.
