The 2 Golden Rules For Writing SEO Friendly Blog Content
Writing good quality content for SEO purposes can be a real pain. What should you write about? What will bring the most value to your website? What keywords should you target? Should you cram the post with these keywords so Google understands what you’re talking about? The answer to that last question is an unequivocal no, and I’ll explain why below, but before that I’ll explore how Google has grown over the past few years, why Google does what it does, and how you can set yourself up to write content Google will rank well now, and into the future.
The way Google ranks your website in its search results is always changing, and as a result of this, the SEO strategies used to maintain or improve rankings need to constantly adapt or die. Building backlinks used to be a successful method of improving rankings, and some SEOs abused this – creating spammy, poor quality links in order to game the system. So Google released the Penguin update – which gave the algorithm the ability to see the difference between a good, naturally built link and spam – and a lot of the sites using these strategies were penalised for it.
When the old tried and true method of backlinking became a lot harder to pull off, the new SEO “gold mine” became content. “Content Is King” became the mantra for many, and poor quality backlinks began to be replaced with poor quality content. Content simply written because there was a topic a website wanted to rank for. You’ve probably seen this out in the wild, a wall of text plastered on a page with unnatural looking phrases sprinkled throughout, with sentences like “are you looking for carpet cleaners Melbourne? We do the best Carpet Cleaning in Melbourne”. This content would then be repeated throughout the website, with the location substituted for whatever suburb or city the company would want to rank in. So along came the Google Panda update, penalising duplicate and low quality (keyword stuffed) content, and again pushing many sites abusing these methods further down.
The reason these updates are released by Google is to improve the user experience for people using the search engine. If the quality of the search results is significantly low, and people are finding nothing but spam and poorly worded articles, Google will get less use, it’s advertising revenue will decrease and it’ll lose it’s monopoly on search. Google clearly has a vested interest in ensuring that what they serve up to the user is what the user wants, and these rolling updates to the algorithm help keep them on track.
One of the newer updates, that’s arguably had the largest impact on search since PageRank, goes by the name of RankBrain, and you can read an in-depth analysis of what is known about it here, but the gist of it is that Google no longer needs you to type out keywords in order to rank for them. Through machine-learning, Google is beginning to understand the context of searches, and finely tune the results to best suit the user. You can see this in action, simply ask Google a question.
Google knows what I’m looking for, it’s found the answer to the question I’m asking, and it’s serving it up to me straight away. The first regular result returned, Wikipedia, doesn’t have the phrase I asked in the title, in the URL or anywhere within the content on page. Because it doesn’t need it. Thanks to machine-learning, Google knows the context of the search, it understands the intent of the user, and is able to return exactly what they are after.
The Golden Rules
So, how do we use all this information to write good quality content that will rank for the keywords you want it to?
Write like a person, for a person
For a long time, websites needed to include the exact words and phrases within their content that they wanted to rank for, otherwise they’d be left far behind. Adding to this problem, Google wasn’t as robust it is now, and in order to get what you were searching for, your searches would need to be dumbed down – using an example from before, you’d search “carpet cleaners melbourne” for a carpet cleaner nearby, rather than “where can I find a carpet cleaner near me?”. This lead to a lot of content being written with these low quality types of searches in mind, filled to the brim with repeated phrases and sentences that don’t make sense.
Instead, if you want to rank well now, and maintain those rankings, write what the reader wants to read. Write useful, quality content. Make it interesting and nicely structured. If someone is searching for something, they likely have a problem – solve that problem. Don’t write content for the sake of having content on your site. While this method may still work now, it’s certainly not future proof. Writing content that people want to read will not only keep you safe from any future Google update, but it will also encourage readers to share it, building your social media presence and increasing the links to your site.
Don’t forget keywords, just don’t force them
For this post, I wanted to have a crack at ranking for “content writing”. Not an easy task, but I felt it would serve as a good experiment. The only post we have ranking for the phrase at the moment is this one and calling it “ranking” is a stretch, with it currently sitting around position 350. But even though I’m targeting that phrase, that’s the first time I’ve mentioned it in this post, and even then it’s only being brought up to show you the point I’m making – you don’t need to mention the keywords. Of course, if this post doesn’t end up ranking for it, I’ll look like a fool and will livestream the eating of my hat on our Facebook group, but I’m fairly confident my hat will live to see another day.
Instead of keyword stuffing, for this post I took the phrase I wanted to rank for, and expanded on themes for it. What do people want to know when they search for something along those lines? They’d be looking for tips, they might be looking for a certain niche of the subject, such as SEO, or maybe they’re from a demographic and want results tailored to them, bloggers for example, rather than ideas for corporate website content. I tried to consolidate these ideas into a single title, and then based the content I’ve written around those themes. By taking this approach, you can build high value content for the topic you want to rank for, rank for that topic, as well as establish yourself as an authority on the subject which will help with ranking for long tail phrases. There’s no checking for keyword density, I’m not attempting to write out questions or terms people would be searching for, I’m just writing with the hope that the information I give will be useful to anyone who stumbles upon it.
Additional Tips
- Internal linking – helps improve retention, keeping users on your site and increasing the likeliness of a conversion, read more here
- Content structure – writing great content is all well and good, but if you don’t structure it properly, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice, read more about it here
- Featured answers – with RankBrain came featured answers, or “position zero”, a new ranking elevated above all others. Find out how to optimise your content to get that spot here
That’s it for now folks, let me know if you’ve got any questions in the comment section below, or if you’re a member of the BloggersSEO group, chuck something up on the wall and either myself or Jim will get round to you.
Boasting over a decade in the digital marketing landscape, this seasoned consultant excels, not just in technical SEO, but in providing comprehensive digital marketing solutions. With a solid foundation in growing organic search traffic and supervising website migrations, he has broadened his expertise to cover all aspects of digital marketing. Combining his knack for balancing SEO needs with design and user expectations, his skills extend to enhancing sales pitches and delivering expert training. He’s your go-to strategist for a well-rounded digital marketing approach without compromising on user experience.
