As a copywriter at an advertising agency-turned-marketing agency, I’m generally encouraged to think outside the box. This box, as I am to understand it, represents conventional thinking, the road-oft-travelled and the general absence of creativity.
Okay, fine. That’s why I got into the advertising-turned-marketing business anyway. I’m a weirdo. A Creative. It’s trait and title. My shirt is untucked, I see social metaphors in Star Wars, and chances are good I haven’t shaved in a day or two. I may still be a nine-to-five square, but my corners are a little rounded-off.
So here I am, wandering around barefoot in the land of Outer Box, when one of the Box’s henchmen comes along to bring me back inside the city walls.
“No, no, it’s okay. I’m supposed to be out here. See? I have a pass. Just look at my business card. I’m a writer, see? Hey! Let go of me!”
As I’m thrown into the back of a truck with a bunch of other advertising creatives, one of my poor, sodden colleagues informs me that the Box is under new management. New Media is in charge and he wants us all to play by the rules.
But we were doing just fine under Traditional Media. Sure, the Box was getting bigger all the time and new ground was getting harder to find, but we were doing okay. Enter the Internet and everything changes.
Suddenly it’s not about writing, it’s about writing the right words to get people to notice you. To stick out in the sea of consolidated information that is the interwebs. And there it is. I have met my enemy, and his name is Search Engine Optimization.
SEO for short, this faceless wraith of the underworld seeks only to limit my vocabulary. To constrict my ideas. By forcing me to include certain key words, a thus-optimized piece gets a higher rank on Internet searches. Where it was once my job to cleverly coax an audience into receiving a message, I now have to make sure when somebody Googles Fort Worth Ad Agency, GCG Marketing is first on the list.
Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’ve always had rules I had to play by. Maybe, (gulp), I was never really outside the box to begin with.
I don’t get to write whatever I want. Clients always get the final say, and rightfully so, because it’s their money. I guess, then, my problem is that I was used to the old guidelines. Comfortable with the rules as they lay.
Now there’s a new set of rules and guidelines, and I can’t say I’m a fan. In the words of Wayne and Garth, “We fear change.”
But maybe SEO isn’t the devil. Maybe I can learn to create within these new parameters. It certainly feels like the devil now, but then that’s not a very progressive attitude, is it? Maybe my corners just need a little more rounding off.
And hey, how hard can it be? You may have found this very blog because of all the SEO keywords.
