Scottsdale SEO Expert Dishes on the Effects of Curse Words in Content Marketing

Zack Greenfield • September 23, 2016

For the most part, SEO is serious business — but it is important that you inject personality to it as well so you can better connect to your target audience. Studies even show that sporadically sprinkling curse words over content rarely has negative effects; on the contrary, it can actually make content more impactful.

A Scottsdale SEO expert concurs; however, he claims that using foul language in content marketing still needs to be properly calculated. You do not want to diminish the value of your message by cursing excessively or making your brand appear too angry or crass. You also do not want to prevent people from sharing your good message out there in fear of offending recipients. So make sure you are doing it right,because when done strategically, cuss words in content can yield the following benefits:

  • Make your message fresh because it’s not in the mold of traditional marketing. Most folks are very casual and they get intimidated when something is so polished.
  • Give a more confident image to your brand because curse words demonstrate the courage to break a few rules (just a few), which is actually a very “human” thing to do.
  • Appeal more powerfully to folks who actually curse a lot. It is the kind of content they can understand completely.
  • Make your message more authentic because most people cuss (perhaps not as much as sailors and truckers do, though) and they do so when they’ are being completely real.
  • Demonstrate passion. Curse words come out when emotions are high.
  • They provide a very real voice to the content. People see that it’s not just some desperate spiel to sell or promote some

These are effects that you want for online marketing, the objective of which is to create connections. Cursing is all right. It wouldn’t hurt to let it rip sometimes (not all the time, just sometimes — propriety will remain to be highly regarded in the SEO world).

In conclusion, cursing can be very effective for content marketing, but it is all about doing it right. Use a cuss word to stress a point, but if it somehow breaks the “character” of the content yet it has to be done, take care of it by apologizing before the utterance or asking to be “excused for your French.” Also, no need to spell them out completely — get creative with those symbols to replace a few letters and people will still catch what you are saying.

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