WHAT I LEARNED FROM WRITING SEO COPY

The first red cent I ever earned from my writing didn’t come from the sale of an O’Henry-winning story to a glossy magazine, it didn’t come as the prize money from a short story competition, it didn’t come as a gratifying semi-pro payment from a small-but-noble press dedicated to paying their writers; no, it came as payment from a ghost-written blog post about green roofs. It paid $30, and it would ultimately go on to become one of the most crucible moments of my writing career.   

I was three years out of grad school, having completed the first draft of Eisenstein’s Monster, the author of seven short stories published in the US and UK...and flat broke. I had worked a handful of “band aid” jobs—small gigs painting, staining, landscaping, installing and patching dry wall, doing some small carpentry—before working the front desk at a gym that paid less than I’d made in my high school retail job, writing sections of my second novel on the backs of indoor rock climbing waivers and learning the sacred art of towel folding.

Each of those jobs had their own lessons to offer, but it was not satisfying, or consistent, work, and certainly not enough to move out of the proverbial basement. After enduring the last in a long line of degrading straws, I quit the gym, moved into a friend’s spare bedroom in the city, and began looking for a new job. Which is when a friend of mine asked if I’d ever considered SEO copywriting.

“Um, what?”

“Blog content designed to optimize a website’s search engine ranking. It’s huge right now.”

“I’m listening…”

He went on to explain the field of Search Engine Optimization, the kind of content that produces said optimization, and how I could go about getting paid to write that kind of content—which I found most optimal of all.

I spent the next year and a half as a freelance SEO copywriter, writing everything from DIY home projects to green pest-control remedies, from top motorcycle travel destinations for ex-pats to smoothie recipes in HTML5. I learned more about age-related macular degeneration than should reasonably be expected of a 25-year old. I learned a great many things, useful and not, while providing a little scratch to compose the first draft of my 900-page second novel.

I took on gigs writing metadata. Do you know what you learn after you’ve written 250 unique metadata tags for boom, scissor, and fork lifts? A lot! For instance, the reach and weight capacities of 250 different lifts. And while the merits of that knowledge are certainly self-evident (in the event that I go on a lift-exclusive episode of Jeopardy!), the real lesson learned was that I was capable of writing the same information in 250 non-plagiaristic ways, and in 160-characters or less.  

In short, what I learned, not just from the metadata copy but all the SEO copywriting, was this:

“YOUR WRITING IS NOT THE ORACULAR!”

Not everything that drips from your pen is glistening with the ore of pure, creative, black gold. And, more importantly, not everything has to. Some of your writing will suck. Some of it should suck. That’s okay. It’s all part of the process. The point is to realize the various stages of the writing process and how to effectively manage your time, learning when to walk away and when—and how—to best dig into your revisions.  After all, if I could write the same blog post twenty different ways, if I could find 250 different combinations of language on industrial tools, like a linguistic Rubik’s Cube, how could I not find at least five different ways to write a sentence, paragraph, or story of my own?  

TAPPING THE VEIN

I tend to think of writing—once you’ve gotten through the idea phase, the false starts, once you’ve started on the right path and the stones are laying themselves out in anticipation of your steps—as tapping into a deeper vein of hidden treasures: a gold deposit; an oil well whose riches are expelled by your pen or fingers working as perfunctory and automatically as the pumps; the ecstasy of harnessing another dimension and bringing it into the light of the visible world…

Whatever that treasure trove may be, it tends to fill the writer up with an unquenchable zeal. You become stricken, greedy, punch drunk on prose. This is why you write; this is why I write. This is our bug, our burden, our calling.

But, one of the dangers of writing—especially for new writers—is that you tend to believe the vein you’re tapping into is infallible, unadulturable, that you’ve used your pen as a vessel for the uncut word of God. (Let’s be clear, it is not!) Meaning, your beloved stories and lines can become precious, pushing the idea of revision into the vile territory of blasphemy. And that is far and away the worst thing you could do for your writing and yourself as a writer. Artistry, like anything else, is about growth, improvement, and adaptation; and almost all of those are predicated upon self-realization.

In many ways, writing SEO copy was one of the greatest things to happen to my fiction writing, principally because it helped kill my writerly ego—or at the very least somewhat deflated it. When you’ve written your 20th article on Green & Humane Home Pest Removal Hacks, your 12th entry on server software for quick and easy data discovery, or The Top 10 Cars from the Chicago Auto Show, you realize pretty quickly not everything you put down is in the lineage of Joyce and Woolf. You also learn that not everything has to be.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t put some care and craftsmanship into all of your work. I’m simply saying you need to develop:

PRIORITY & PERSPECTIVE

Weeks should not be spent drafting the perfect Tweet, nor months on the perfect Facebook status. Years should not be spent drafting a blog entry. For one thing, it would be a maddeningly tedious dedication for very, very little payout—while taking away time that would surely be better spent on other projects. For another, it would most certainly lose whatever topicality you’d been hoping for—which is sometimes the most important element in nonfiction platform building.

Gone are the days of compiling into a museum every stroke of the keyboard, every scrap of paper, every post-it a writer has ever besmirched with words into one all-encompassing tribute to stand at the end of the artist's life like their own personal pyramid. Partially because in today’s age it would also have to include every Tweet, text, or comment and it would simply be too much: terabytes of information that would take an entire lifetime to read, burning yours in the process. It would also be largely, grotesquely inane.

Don’t worry yourself too much about the legacy of your oeuvre to the point of dysfunction. Because your legacy will only matter if you’ve released enough meritorious work to warrant a legacy; and you’ll only create those works once you’ve gotten to the point where you can take an objective stance and toss your Precious into the flames of Mordor, so to speak.

No, that doesn’t mean you should just slop it out there. Do the best you can relative to the importance of the medium; but keep in mind no one is going to be compiling an anthology of your ghost-written blogs or looking to publish a collection of your best Tweets and Facebook updates. (Anyone that would should be banished from the publishing world for just so many reasons.)

What I’m speaking to is developing a hierarchy of the writing process, opening new paradigms, new styles, time management, and the simple fact that being a writer in today’s world means putting out a lot of content that is not dear to you. A LOT. Essentially, it’s about learning to let go and to breathe from time to time.

What writing SEO helped me do was be able to put some distance between my writing so I could view it as objectively as possible, so I could breathe. It helped develop in me different styles and attitudes for “business” writing as opposed to fiction writing, which has helped me draft pitches, queries, marketing content, the aforementioned social media posts, and, most obviously, this blog entry you’re reading now.

But how can you apply those concepts to your own work?

Of course, the best thing you could do would be to put yourself in a position where you’re producing a similarly abundant amount of content. But that is not always possible or practical in every writer’s life, and the goal of this post isn’t to push you into an SEO copywriting career. And further, what would be the point of me writing this entry if I couldn’t in some way pass on what I’d learned in a practical application? So I’ll try to do just that by providing a couple, hopefully worthwhile, exercises.

Exercise 1:

Write your best possible sentence—or take the best sentence you feel you’ve written—then step back and try to think of all the ways it could possibly, just maybe, be better. Ask yourself, How might someone else write that sentence? How might your favorite writer(s) compose that sentence?  

Instead of talking about it, do it.

Choose five writers whose styles are fairly differentiated from each other and rewrite your sentence as if each of those five writers had written it.  What do you see? What did you find out? 

Exercise 1A: BONUS ROUND

Now, if you really want to push yourself, choose five writers whose prose is stylistically very similar to each other and replicate the exercise. It’ll be a hard exercise; it will force you to look at the minutiae of each writer, scrutinizing the word choices and syntax that make up the literary genome of each writer. For example, you could try isolating the DNA of Pynchon, Wallace, or DeLillo; John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, or Ornette Coleman. (The exercise can be used for more than just writing.)

And of course, you can then reverse engineer your own writing to try and find your own genome, the raw essence of your voice. 

Exercise 2:

This is a similar exercise but with a twist.

Select a small paragraph; you’ll see the best results if you choose one that you’re really proud of. Now, instead of looking at how different writers might right that selection, see how you yourself can modify the paragraph by changing up some of the details.

• Change the POV of the paragraph.
• Change the tense of the selection.
• Change up your punctuation: if you’re using a colon try an m-dash; if you’re using a semi-colon, try a period; etc.
• Change the syntax of the selection.
• Change the sentence ordering of your paragraph.
• Find the lynchpin variable in your paragraph and change it (if the character does x, make him do y)

Hopefully you’ll find gems you never would have discovered, or an entirely new direction your story could take. But who knows, you might find that your original paragraph is best after all. At least you’ve tested it, explored new routes and variables, and seen the various incarnations of what your writing could look like. And, most importantly, hopefully you were able to take a few steps back and look at your writing more objectively.

THE TAKEAWAY

If you take away nothing else from this post let it be this: You are capable of more than you think. You are capable of viewing your work through the objective eyes of an editor or peer, and making the precipitant changes. You are capable of opening new portals and dimensions into your work with the mystical aptitude of Dr. Strange. You have the power, most of all, to be your own impetus of growth.  

And, of course, that the weight capacities of fork, scissor, and boom lifts are myriad. 

--A.V. Bach is a writer and musician living in Chicago, IL. He holds a BA in English from Syracuse University and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins. His fiction has been published in the US and UK in such literary journals as Gone Lawn, Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, and Gargoyle. You can purchase his debut novel, Eisenstein’s Monster, here, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or can be ordered by your local bookstore or library.