A guide to creating SEO Content that works
Content. It is one word that means many words put together to create a feeling (in many cases, that feeling is called a brand) best used to show the various interests of your company on your business website. Sounds simple. All that you have to do is to create content that portrays your product in the best possible manner. Having worked for your company X amount of years you also have X amount of words to use in explanation. That aside, you also have marketing meetings, product explanations, and created user accounts to best explain a typical consumer of your product. With all this knowledge is sure to come well rounded content that explains your products and services to the T. This was wicked easy!
Wait. We have an issue. Your SEO (search engine optimization to those of us not in the acronym loop) guy is not happy with the explanation given to the products that you are calling “content”. No, one cannot just explain the product! What were you thinking? Just talking about the product like you would in a conversation? No, no, no, you have to have keywords! One must cram at least 3 sets of keywords per page (and one per header) and make sure to use variants! Whilst we are at it, be sure to tag excerpts with 3 more keywords! When your done with that, make it readable, because, as it were, just jamming all these words into your post has made it, well, let’s call it sloppy:
Product X is the best Product X in Denver as Product X is not only Denver Based it is also makes Issue X way easier to deal with as Product X fixes Issue X.
English. A language once considered so barbaric that was unworthy of the learned. That was until Geoffrey Chaucer came along and blessed us with the Canterbury Tales. You see, the Canterbury Tales was the SAT of the English language. It gave our language the thumbs up to be considered worthy of art (to keep the example alive, it got the English Language into college). To put it another way, the Canterbury Tales showed the rest of the world that English is not a language of the lesser. When strung together properly, English is one of (if not) the greatest language in the world that has been used by great and simple minds alike to create….
Stop! You read that SEO sentence above, did you not? Look at what we have done to the beautiful language of Shakespeare, Willa Cather, and Chuck Palahniuk. Taking your wonderful and well written content that comes from your years of experience and your care for the company then turning it into the abomination above is not only a tragedy worth of those authors mentioned, but it is a massive wast of time for those visiting and reading your website. So, you ask, where is the compromise? You want your website to show up first when someone types in Product X but you do not want to pay for it with horrible content that reads like something a robot created.
Google. The number one search engine (and website) in the world guides traffic to million of websites per second. With all that power comes the ability to dictate what shows up where on any given search. I have good news. Google controls 65 percent of the worlds searches. I have more good news. Google is the world leader is organic search algorithms (how Google finds and ranks websites). I have the best news ever! With the release of Hummingbird (the latest algorithm) Google has stopped asking that you spread keywords all over your pages like cream cheese over a day old bagel. They instead want, *gasp*, organic, naturally written, explanatory and efficient language that instead holds a conversation about you product. In other words, next time your SEO guy asks you to place more keywords, tell him to place more resumes on the internet because he is doing it wrong.
Wrap-up. This is the part where I tell you to write well and Google will reward you. Make your writing, well, yours. Give it a voice, give it order, and give it interest and life will be good. Want good content? Write good content (think back to that English Comp class you took way back when). I know, I wrote a ton of words to get you to this point, but I had to hook ya. You see next week we will be talking (I’m just kidding, only I have a voice here) about how to write so that it excites. Next week we cover adding voice to your writing and how that helps your SEO.