At its core, marketing is supposed to benefit customers.
Back in college, I remember learning that marketing was the act of connecting people in need with products that could help them — and today, a quick Google search still says that “marketing is the business process of creating relationships with and satisfying customers.”
I stand by those definitions.
I didn’t get into this field to swindle and deceive and feel like a shady person when I went home at night. No — I decided to be a marketer because I liked the idea of bridging a gap and helping bring a real benefit to real people.
So why are so many marketers chasing bottom-line success at the expense of their customer relationships? Why are we prioritizing “best practices” and one-off strategies that worked for some random guy doing a webinar instead of thinking about what our unique users actually want?
I see a lot of good intentions.
I honestly don’t believe that anyone I’ve met so far in the marketing world is actively trying to dismiss their customers’ needs. But I do think that a lot of us (myself included!) are getting caught up in technical metrics and forgetting about the qualitative implications that really can — and do — make a difference for our users.
Let’s use search engine optimization as an example.
Technical SEO is incredibly important.
Google’s algorithm is infamous and insanely powerful. The internet is one of the most popular ways to find products and services in 2020 — and 90% of searchers won’t scroll past the first page. That means that if you want your business to have a chance at organically snagging new leads, you need to show up within the first few results for your relevant keywords.
Old-school “black hat” SEO — keyword stuffing, cloaking, private link networks, and so on — is on its way out thanks to search engines penalizing websites that engage in these manipulative practices. But that doesn’t mean that all modern SEO is actually good for the user.
While deliberately deceitful practices are no longer supported by anyone who cares about their marketing rep, I’ve seen a rise in an obsession with specific metrics that should really be viewed as guidelines more than rules.
Technical best practices exist to make life easier for users.
And when they start to impede on the users’ experience — the actual end goal — we have a problem.
Take word count, for example. Google has said that its algorithm doesn’t directly factor word count into SEO rankings, but there is a correlation between pages with more words and higher placement on the results pages.
Many search engine optimization tools like SEMrush and Yoast for WordPress have a “word count metric” set in their software. If your webpage doesn’t meet that minimum (usually around 200-300), they’ll tell you to add more words.
Seems fine, right? It’s good to optimize for what search engines want!
Well, yes, it is good. And also no, it isn’t.
Here’s the thing: Using that word count as a general guideline to remind you to prioritize informative, meaningful content that fully explains an idea is great. Using that word count as a strict rule and sitting down at your keyboard to “pad” with a few extra sentences just so you hit an arbitrary goal is not.
Word count isn’t the only example. Keyword density is another metric people toss around frequently — but again, there is no “magic” number. What really matters is that your content makes sense for your audience.
It’s the same with putting your focus keywords at the start of your meta titles and descriptions, keeping sentences to a certain length, including your keywords in alternate text image attributes, and more.
Technical metrics are great to understand.
But we shouldn’t view them as strict, make-or-break, end-all-be-all rules.
When we focus too much on “best practices” without stopping to consider why they were deemed good strategies in the first place, we risk losing the forest for the trees — and losing our customers for over-optimization.
We should continue to analyze our work with hard data, learn from the best in the business, and try to improve our content constantly.
But we should always remember that our users come first.
At the end of the day, a shiny green Yoast SEO score or a clean SEMrush report doesn’t mean much if our customers aren’t actually getting value from the page.
