As Seth Godin once wrote (yes, I promise he did … I just can’t remember when!), fear is one of the two biggest killers of creativity. The other is a lack of imagination – just so I don’t keep you hanging for the rest of the post! What fear means in a copywriting and SEO context, is that you are worried about your business seeming unprofessional through your copywriting … and consequently fill your writing with a boatload of business clichés because of it.

SEo

Parental Advisory - Cliched content

Clichés annoy your site visitors – ‘Couldn’t they have thought of something original to say?’ – but it also does your SEO no favours. No searcher types ‘innovative business solutions’ into the little black box on the Google front page. Unless you’re researching for a blog post – in which case you’ll find that even with quotes around the phrase to return only exact matches, there are 57,000 web pages with that term. Hardly makes you unique … or even innovative! But this isn’t the only SEO-killing, unimaginative cliché that people use in their copywriting. Here we explore some of the most annoying!

  1. Solutions
    You might feel that your business provides solutions. Most of your customers will feel that you provide you provide a lawn-mowing service. Don’t use it!
  2. Innovative
    Your business may truly be innovative – however most customers don’t really care about this. In a way, the majority of businesses are innovative – most have a Unique Selling Proposition. So in being innovative, you’re being just like the rest…
  3. ROI
    In some cases it is necessary … just don’t overuse this one!
  4. Dynamic
    You know how much your business changes, but most of your customers don’t. Nor do they care – they only want to know what your business does at the moment they want to buy something from you.
  5. Challenge
    A watered-down version of having a ‘problem’. Of course, this one is appropriate sometimes – but again, don’t overuse it.
  6. The missing piece of the puzzle
    Well, I’ve been guilty of this one :-) . But I’m happy to cop my dues, along with everyone else!
  7. Customer centric
    This phrase tells customers that you are an out-and-out liar. If you really cared about making things easy for your customers, you would never use a phrase like customer-centric.
  8. Market-leading
    Not everyone can be a market leader … but everyone uses this phrase in their copywriting
  9. Seamless
    This means very little, apart from the fact that you’ve reviewed your product or service and found that there are no bugs or inconsistencies. Something that should come naturally, but is not a selling point.
  10. Robust and scalable
    Unless you’re in the field of IT, this won’t float any of your customer’s boats!
  11. A new breed
    You might do some things a little different to your competitors, but you aren’t an entirely new breed. I’m not aiming to denigrate your business here, just wanting to point out that when you exaggerate these things, everything else you say is less meaningful.
  12. Integrate
    Of course, there are many businesses that integrate things. Watch that you don’t make this the focal point of your sentences, though – it’s a very vague word.
  13. Results-driven company
    Ironically, all this phrase makes me think of is the fact that the business is making money off me. The result they want is obviously profit. Very clichéd … very much needs to be replaced!
  14. World-class
    Your company may very well be world-class. But there are two words that mean little to your customers, and are never going to drive clicks to your site from Google. So communicate your ‘world-classness’ another way!
  15. Core competencies
    This sort of language belongs in the office, but not on a website, where you’re speaking to real people.

Go over your website now and see if you can identify any places where you are taking up space that could be used for SEO, with meaningless copywriting clichés.

No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this post)