Facing the Contradiction in Article Marketing

Putting it in the most direct way possible, we put a lot of effort into article marketing in hopes of achieving one simple objective: Get more traffic!

Our syndicated article help us in this way in two potential ways.  First, readers might click the links contextually embedded within our articles or within the resource box at the article’s end, and/or, alternatively, the major search engines can notice our article link and give greater important to that landing page on our site.  This latter option leads to more traffic, eventually, by sending us visitors who have found our page in the search engine results. 

Trying to maximize our results from those two methods causes a problem.  The pages that we want to optimize in the search engines may not be the same pages to which we would ideally send our article readers.  Let me explain this problem in a little more detail.

Often we pay the most SEO attention to pages that generate revenue directly.  With those pages, we try to reach search engine users who are already in a mindset to buy. 

Our distributed article readers are not yet in they buying frame; instead they are usually at a stage of beginning information gathering.  That’s why they came to our article rather than going directly to a store or service provider.

Now, hang onto those two competing states of mind for a moment, while we consider how we construct pages on a business website.  A basic marketing principle of good website design for a business is that any given page should be directed toward moving the visitor to one and only one action.  That action might be buying or signing up to receive additional information.  So, if we obey the marketing rule to the letter, we can’t possibly optimize the most prized pages on the site and simultaneously satisfy the human reader–can we?

That is the seemingly unwinnable choice that faces us.  Should we direct our article marketing strategy on SEO or on sending our readers to a page that will give them what they actually want at this stage?  Should we abide by the simple, common sense marketing rule, or should we magically try to successfully incorporate two disparate objectives within this single site of the page?

We must consider these options carefully in both our article syndication decisions and our copywriting decisions within the website itself.