When writing the content of your website there are 2 prevalent schools of thought – one set of experts implore you to use Search Engine Optimization keywords and search phrases so that your website can be found by Google. Ok, that sounds smart, but the last thing you want is a home page stuffed with keywords to lure the robots, because that turns off the humans.

Another set of experts remind you that when writing content for your website, what makes it relevant is that real people want to engage with real people, so we want to see your personality and humanity throughout your site.

Uh oh – how do I strike a balance between SEO search keywords and phrases, and human emotion content on my website? It’s a struggle with 2 main goals for that page – pleasing the robots and pleasing the humans.

You can’t ignore one of those factors because both are needed to grow your business. You want your site to be found by the people who need your services, yet you also want to build the trust needed for converting prospects to customers.

It all starts with a deep understanding of your prospective best clients. What are their pain points, goals, challenges and desires? These are all items to clearly state through your website. They need to think, “I came to the right place, let me read more”.

When people are googling a way to solve their problem, they’ll often include pain points or goals as part of their search terms. Instead of only using search terms for the “thing” that you do, include content that talks about your service from the viewpoint of a person who really needs to solve this problem.

Let’s say you’re a massage therapist in Northern NJ.

Traditional SEO would have you use massage therapist Northern NJ in all your titles. It’s smart to use it as a main header or the page title, but without human content to accompany it, this makes us feel there are no humans at home.

If you study the buyer’s journey, you’ll see that the first stage is Awareness – they know they have a problem. So use that in your content as well.

Person googles what do I do about a recurring pain in my lower back.

Your website should contain verbiage that directly answers that:

Headline: Massage Therapist In Northern NJ, Experts in Recurring Lower Back Pain

Content:

As a massage therapist in Northern NJ, I treat many clients who suffer from a recurring pain in the lower back. I used to suffer from lower back pain myself, so I understand how debilitating that could be, preventing you from fully realizing an energetic lifestyle.

That’s how you marry the SEO term for what you do, plus the problem they need to solve (Awareness stage of the buyer’s journey) and the human element – telling them you understand how it’s affecting their life.

You can continue to engage by using SEO search terms that map to the other parts of the buyer’s journey – Consideration of all the ways to solve the problem; and Decision to choose your company out of all the competitors.

In this example, the Consideration phase would include mention of how your business can also help clients with stretching, specific exercises, and applying ice and heat packs, etc. within your content.

To complete the trio, make sure that you address your unique value – why would they choose your business – to answer the Decision phase of the buyers journey. Here you would mention how either you (licenses, certifications, years of experience) or your company (your team, your process, your location) are special.

Now that you understand the basics of marrying search terms and buyers’ journey and your own humanity, you’ll want to amplify that with emotional storytelling. This could be about your own journey in solving pain, or a client success story.

Another important piece of both SEO plus human content is appropriate images. Hire a professional photographer to capture images of you in action. If using real clients in your photos would create a privacy issue, get some friends or family to stand in as models in your branding photography. Real photos of real people will put you miles ahead of any stock photography that others use on their websites.

And for SEO, make sure that the filenames of those images are not something like “me and Cathy” but more like, “physical therapist in northern nj treating clients with lower back pain”. Yes, your image name can be that long. While Google cannot SEE images, it can read the file name and the alternate text of the image files you’re using.

There you have it – there are ways to marry SEO search terms + human emotion + the buyer’s journey.

If you find this is more than you’ll want to tackle yourself, I welcome a conversation to see if you’d like me to assist you. I love writing on your behalf, and marrying the practical aspects of your business with the passion you have as a business owner.