Content marketing just got a whole lot harder

Creating cool online content isn’t worth a thing if no one’s reading your business blog.

Enter Scribe – the new WordPress plugin from Brian Clark and his team.

What is Scribe?

Geared to WordPress users who run themes like Thesis, Headway and Hybrid or the indispensable All in One SEO plugin, Scribe sits in your dashboard and tells you how to improve your writing for search engines.

As Brian Clark puts it “it’s like having an SEO expert as an editorial assistant.”

The idea is that now you can write your daily blog posts with an online buddy there to whisper SEO tips as you write.

Neat, huh?

So what do you get?

After struggling with some silly sign-up issues (I’m based in Stockholm, Sweden, after all), I managed to get hold of a copy today and my first impression is that this is a game-changer.

Once you’ve signed up you get a plugin that you upload to your Plugin directory in your installation of WordPress.

After that’s done you activate the plugin and enter the API Key you received when your subscription was confirmed.

Then all you have to do fire up a new post and you’ll immediately notice a new field on the right of the WordPress composition window geared to SEO.

Tweaking a post

To test things out, I analysed yesterday’s post: 5 Reasons Your Business Blog is Failing.

My initial SEO score was a measly 72%, even though I’m pretty adept at writing SEO copy if Google SERPs are anything to go on.

Anyway, my pride intact and my interest high, I glanced through Scribe’s summary.

It was interesting to see that the Title tag I’d written hadn’t contained any Primary Keywords at the beginning.

I’d gone with the “5 Reasons…” and not bothered to put a different title in the custom title field that Thesis gives you.

Scribe pointed out that my keywords business blogging needed to be at the beginning of the title code.

I duly tweaked this to “Business Blog Failing? Here’s Why”.

On the page and in your RSS newsreader you still see the original (and more reader-friendly) title, but the code for the page (eagerly read by Google, I hope!) puts the keywords first.

Scribe also encourage me to tweak…

My tags.

I don’t really tag very much. Well, just one or two each post. But Scribe suggested a stack of tags taken from my content so I updated that. We’ll see if that has any effect.

I then included 2 more links in the copy as Scribe suggested this was below the minimum of 1 every 120 words – something totally new for me!

Finally, I also tweaked the post description reducing it from 218 to 165 characters. I must admit I was a bit miffed to have to do this because I liked my original; however, Scribe forced me to be more economical in my word choice and perhaps the end result makes for snappier reading.

Original: Did you drink the business blog Kool-Aid and wake up wondering what’s gone wrong? Ever find yourself fretting: “Why’s my business blog not getting enough traffic? Jon Buscall has the answer why.

New version: Business blog not getting traffic? Communications consultant Jon Buscall might just have the answer why.

I actually like the new version more, although I had to kill my favourite phrase there; the “Did you drink the business blog Kool-Aid”.

Remember: this phrase together with the title tag is what shows up in Google. It’s really a “call-to-action” striving to get the reader to click.

Whether or not my new version works or not, the proof is in the pudding.

But for now, what’s currently:

Should soon be updated to the new version.

What Scribe said

I ran Scribe’s analysis for a third time after all my tweaks and low and behold my score had gone up to 95%.

As I’ve only got 300 queries a month on my subscription plan I decided that would do and hit republish.

What All This Means?

For me, I want to know if this will improve my SEO and yield real results in terms of SERPs. I’ll be using Scribe on this site and two client blogs, so expect me to report back at some point.

For Brian Clark and team this may well be a licence to print money. Having already amassed a massive online following for his excellent copywriting tips and work with Teaching Sells, lots of users trust the Brian Clark copywriting / copyblogger brand already. I expect them to purchase this en masse.

If Scribe remains bug free (it was down for a while this morning and caused a couple of WordPress error as I was running it, but maybe that’s because I’d upgraded to the newest version of WP out today) and deliver’s results across the board (other blogging platforms are expected to be added soon) it will also prosper.

The big issue for me, though, – and here’s why I think it’s a game changer – is that if it really does deliver better SEO copywriting, a lot of people will get on board. And that will make blogging and content marketing even harder.

Has Scribe pushed the bar even higher for businesses to achieve success with their blogs and content marketing?

Be honest? Did you start thinking “I’ve gotta get that?” as you skimmed this post?

Or is it just marketing SEO fluff that won’t change the way you blog? I really want to know!

PS: When I checked my score having written this post with Scribe’s previous recommendations in mind I got a 100%.