Sarah

I agree that an important point about your sales copy – whether you call it a brochure or not – is that it does need to call the visitor into action, and writing in a purely informative style may prevent you from converting clients. So while the tone is usually a bit more formal in your sales copy, vs a blog post, I would say it still needs to be able to connect, and not just provide info.

One additional point about a brochure :
It is often written to be able to “stand-alone”, with no additional collateral needed to make the key selling points a for a perticular product.

I would drop the keyword density argument. Density does not matter in SEO as long as the terms are on the page. Keyword proximity on the other hand, I would pay attention to.

You can also try to make brochures a bit more dynamic, which may help a bit with ranking. I would suggest allowing comments on brochures (this assumes a blog/CMS or some other mechanism to allow this). I you put in a call to action, you will get comments, questions and feedback.
–thanks
pat

I also agree with your point about having engaging content on the site, and not rely on brand recognition, as you may not actually have it

To me, the main part of the site (which you’re calling the brochure) is the absolute, most critical part of your site. Anything you do in addition to that is extra.

Like John Jones above, I also take issue to the word “brochure” as it is used here, however. I’ve spent countless seminars trying to educate marketers that their website is absolutely NOT a brochure.

To me the difference is that a brochure presumes the reader has already asked for your information and has some idea of who you are. On the web, and search engine traffic more specifically, it can be hit or miss. Those who type in your brand name obviously do know what they’re looking for, but those who type in keywords may not know you exist.

If you write your web pages like you might in a brochure, they may never get a good feel for who you are because you may not be writing descriptively enough. Online copywriting must be as descriptive as possible in order to tell your site visitors (and the search engines) exactly what the page in question is all about.

But all in all, very good article!

FYI Updated tags and categories

“… wonder where the saturation point is…”

Regardless if you call SEO art or a science, your statement I quoted above is the reason I love doing what I do. There is no absolute answer to that but instead only a handful… ok a truck load of opinions on the topic of keyword density or saturation.

I’d personally trim out, “Content on Google searches” & “Content” from your categories because one isn’t entirely relevant and the other is easily assumed by the other categories.

I’d also remove, “Brochure writing” (Do a Google search for my reasoning) from your tags.

Just opinions though; don’t shoot me or make me walk home today.