It’s an old saying that the customer is always right. That’s not true in this case. Of course, it’s equally untrue that an SEO or business consultant has all the answers. The client and the consultant need to work together to find them.
Gorell’s article includes a list of dangerous assumptions, and I’ll get to them in a minute, but he doesn’t even put the most dangerous one he identifies on his list. The client assumes that their customers “already know what kind of equipment they’re looking for.” Well, of course they do. If the client’s site consists entirely of images and technical descriptions, then the only customers who will find the site in the first place are those who already know what they’re looking for!
Gorell thinks the most dangerous assumption made by the SEO copy writer is that the client’s assumptions are true. Admittedly, that’s also very dangerous, because it prevents the copy writer from thinking outside the box. If you can’t see past your client’s assumptions, you’ll have trouble making their site perform better.
So what are the client’s assumptions? Here’s the list, modified slightly to make it more generally applicable:
There’s not much to say about the product or service.
Pictures are more important than words.
The problem with doing SEO on this site is that “there’s so little to say.”
The site’s visitors all fall into a particularly narrow niche (in this case, they’re all from construction companies).
The site’s visitors already know exactly what they want.
In the client’s field, selling goods or services comes down to a matter of price competition.
The products for sale on the site do not need to be described with text.
Pictures can tell most of the story.
Page rank and content are independent variables.
For the last point, I think Gorell means one’s position in the search engine results pages (SERPs), and not PageRank, which is something else. In any case, if we take the first assumption that I identified – that all of the client’s customers know what they’re looking for – and assume it’s mistaken, what happens? All of a sudden, practically none of the items on the bulleted list above are certain!
Gorell notes a false premise that the client makes, which brings that last bullet point into sharp focus – “We’ll pay you to help us rank higher, buy you shouldn’t have to do much writing to accomplish that.” Even if our intrepid copy writer could make this client rank higher without doing too much writing, it seems unlikely that the client’s sales would increase much. One assumes that increasing sales is the real reason this client wants to rank higher. But sales won’t increase unless the site gets the kind of page copy that attracts customers. Or as Gorell put it, “has a search engine ever bought an oscillator at auction?”
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