Revenge of the Non-Fiction Writer

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?