I know we've all been told that readers have the attention
span of pancakes. We've been told we only have .0003 nanoseconds to get the
reader's attention before they will just go elsewhere. We've been told that
we'll never get seen if we don't find a way to optimize our SEO to show up on
the first Google search results page. And yada yada yada.
My contention: we writers may be making things worse.
By focusing on competing with other writers for the
increasingly impatient eyeballs amid an ever-growing sea of writings, we might
be doing ourselves a disservice: if they only stick around for brief moments
then we try and grab them faster, it just drops that bar lower and lower.
If we all required them to stick around longer they would
start sticking around longer. But we can't afford to take that chance now, can
we?
At some point this will self-correct, but I know a few
things which are not shown in the "expert studies":
* Many folks I personally know who want to research
something will probably not look up the information efficiently to begin with.
I can't tell you how many times I've been told - even at work - that no one
could find anything about the topic they wanted to find, and I get a hundred
hits with my first try, all because searched efficiently.
* If most folks actually want to know about cystic fibrosis,
they aren't going to just take the first Google return and run. They will spend
a good minute just looking over the page of returns, taking a moment to try and
take in the information in front of them. Not everyone researching a topic is a
skilled SEO-savvy net ranger. In fact, most people aren’t.
* Here’s another thing about writing an informational post:
it’s never good to dawdle when getting your information started, but it’s a
mistake to think that no one will give your article a chance if you don’t have
the instant gratification hook. Maybe busy publishers and agents need that
hook, simply because they have a pile of things they have to read as part of
their job and can’t afford to waste their time. But the poor young lady looking
for information about thresh isn’t going to abandon an article just because it
takes a minute to really get started. She has the time; otherwise she wouldn’t
have sat down to look the information up to begin with. She’s going to head for
the article that promises to tell her what thresh is and she’s going to at
least scan down through a page or two before she moves on. We aren’t all on the
clock for this kind of stuff.
* When a person wants to know about a subject, there’s a
chance they’ll just do lightning searches and scan the information. Us real
people tend to give writers the benefit of the doubt. If it was all about the
first paragraph, everyone would only write in single-paragraph articles. Most
readers want more information, and we honestly will spend the time combing down
through articles looking for satisfaction. Even after repeated experiences of
reading halfway through a worthless article returned by a search engine folks
will not generally stop giving any time to the next article. If anything, they’ll
probably take more time choosing the next article to try.
I personally have a policy for certain searches: I will
Google the topic, and then scoot past the first 7 or 8 pages of results to
offset the SEO bandits. This is especially true if the returns on the first
page look like first cousins of each other. If there’s too much inbreeding of
the information returned on the first Google page, then I’m only going to get
that slant and the results will be too biased for my tastes.
If I don’t want to read about cucumbers, I really don’t care
how awesome your article on cucumbers is, or how optimized it is for search
engines, or how many awards you got for it. Harsh but true – if my time is ever
considered precious, I’m not going to spend it reading stuff I don’t want to
read about. And if I do want to read about it, I’m still going to wait until I
have enough spare time to do so. If I have only exactly 38 seconds, I’m not
going to spend it looking up definitive articles on cucumbers.
When I am ready to read about bipolar disorder, I will give
articles a few paragraphs to get their feet underneath them. If I’m on the
market to read about this topic, I’m going to spend a minute. The writers of the
first thirty articles probably understood the same thing and so page after page
has the same basic Google summary. At that point I will take a moment to decide
if I want to read one rather than the other, and I’ll probably spend at least a
few minutes in several.
Right now the bandwagon everyone is jumping on is finding
ways to compete for attention. That’s cool, that’s been true for writers for
just ever. For folks who are getting paid per page view, or who are trying to
write content for huge-content arenas, they gotta do whatever they gotta do.
For the rest of us who are writing content for the sake of the
content and the reader, there are better ways to market our words. Yes, we
still need to do things that get our words in front of the most pairs of eyes
possible until our brands are built.
But seriously? Despite what market realities are highlighted
by the latest user and browser studies, writers aren’t necessarily doing themselves
a favor by assuming the average person out there is a hyperactive two-year-old.
There must be a balance, and an audience will be able to tell the difference.
For my part, I don’t SQUIRREL!
What was I saying?
