I went to see the movie Hidden Figures about three women mathematicians at NASA – a superb movie I highly recommend. Something Dorothy – a computering person – did emphasized the importance of looking ahead that I want to share with you. As a computer person, these women worked complex math calculations by hand. Later when NASA moved towards adding an IBM (the mainframe computers that would takeover performing these calculations at approximately 24,000 per second) Dorothy looked ahead to recognize both she and the other women in her department wouldn’t be needed unless they could provide value in another way. Dorothy realized programmers to program these IBM computers would be needed. She studied and learned the programming language then taught it to the others. This desire to serve their country, and save their jobs, provided value to NASA.
Part of being successful in business means providing value to your customers. It’s necessary to continually look ahead and keep abreast of what’s currently happening as well as what’s coming that will impact your customers and how they will want to work in their business serving their customers. Your customers look to your business a trusted authority and respect your guidance.
Recently, I’ve been doing an increase in copywriting services and search engine optimization (SEO) projects. These two very much go hand-in-hand. Copywriting covers anything from blog posts to web page content, from social media posts to newsletter content, from one sheets to bios, and all of these can (and should) be optimized. With the ever-changing algorithms of search engines what was working a year ago, may no longer bring identical results today. But, one thing that is constant and continues to drive good optimization is well-written high quality content. Yes, content is still king. It doesn’t matter that Google has moved through the algorithms of Panda to Penguin to Hummingbird or that algorithms now factor in such things as brain rank, knowledge base, and page layout.
If you are copywriting material that has some depth – thin blog posts are harmful to your SEO – to the information you’re sharing as well as some decent word count – aim for longer word counts, not under 500 words – than your content will be found worthy of ranking higher and being indexed well (and accurately). When someone searches for answers via a Google search it’s vital that what they find gives them the information they crave not a watered down, brief mention. In your own experiences, think about the search results you want to find when you’re searching for something. You want the answer in whole, never a light mention; even if that answer means buying a service or product or scheduling a consultation. Your time is precious and not meant to be spent searching multiple links for information.
In my own business, I recognize my value to my customers is in understanding and knowing how to apply search engine optimization to what I copywrite. I am sought out for this. As the search engine algorithms change, the content is still strong and holding its own because the content is of higher quality.
Like Dorothy at NASA, make it your priority in knowing what’s happening in your industry/in your niche specialty, what’s trending, and what is coming next. Share this information with your customers and your business becomes valuable for the services or products you provide.
Think ahead. Understand that there may not be a formula…yet, for what is coming. You can pave the way to the next frontier.