USE AND TEACHING OF SEO, VOICE AND TONE GUIEDLIENES:

Abstract

This qualitative, case-study research analyses workplace English (WE) to determine how the interplay of voice and tone guidelines and search engine optimizations (SEO) guidelines shapes the use of English in marketing content of an IT companies, as well as how much English teaching at the IT company caters to the needs of WE users in that respect. The research is based on two main resources: 1) a corpus of approximately 40 blogs and 100 website news articles which were compiled into a corpus in their draft, reviewed and post-SEO versions and 2) learning materials used in English classes for, allegedly, improving WE, including voice, style and SEO skills. The research was conducted in two phases. First, the revisions and edits in the corpus were identified and mapped to voice, tone, style and SEO guidelines, in order to see if edits do indeed target these aspects of WE use. Secondly, the teaching materials were analyzed to identify how they were crafted to address the main issues identified in the use of WE in respect of tone, voice and, in particular, SEO. This approach is based on the rules of qualitative research in public relations and marketing communication (Daymon & Holloway, 2010). The research shows that, in addition to struggling with voice and tone guidelines, employees also have trouble meeting the SEO guidelines, which may all be due to suboptimal WE teaching and learning materials which put too much emphasis on fine details of English usage, but not on the specialized requirements of IT companies in terms of voice, tone, style and SEO. The research also provides guidelines for improving WE teaching practice in terms of style, voice and, crucially, SEO requirements.