I’m comprised of one part SEO; one part English graduate; and one part Steve Krug.

What’s that mean?

Steve Krug authored Don’t Make Me Think which is still one most relevant books for UX & design. I’ll give you the cliff’s notes:

People don’t read.

-Steve Krug (grossly paraphrased)

They look at sites like they’re billboards driving by at 60mph on the freeway, so sites should be designed that way.

This is where the SEO part of me comes in.

Ironically, Google bots read a lot more than real people.

We’ve all seen the “keyword planner” where people don’t use punctuation or grammar. These aren’t eloquent emails. These are word vomit, “iPhone 8 repair,” “eyes hurt eclipse,” or “child stuck doggie door help.” Alternatively, they’re stream of consciousness, “irs letter says I owe money, but can’t pay, what do I do”.

The bots are looking at the billions of queries compared to the billions of web pages and saying, “I think these’ll work.”

Google is the Jane to the users’ Tarzan.

Alright, well that tackles the SEO piece, and the Steve Krug piece, but what about the English grad?

Funnily enough, in English, I had to read numerous out-of-time texts (Shakespeare, The Iliad) and sum up some 500 cryptic pages in a 5 page paper for a modern audience. My English background doesn’t make me a stickler for grammar. It doesn’t force me to make people use “Sentence Case”. What it does is allow me to read about addiction, iCloud security services, reverse mortgages, executive finance education classes and summarize them for a layperson to understand. 

There’s a big difference in search intent from a user looking up “get DUI off record” and “expunge my record” and I excel at identifying those audiences and writing content that caters to them.