Man, some days it’s like gouging my eyes out with a spoon. Had I known it would be this tough sometimes, I would have stayed working as a fabricator. The burns from molten metal, welding bee-bees falling in your ear, the ache of a sore back after lifting steel all day long, or the burn of welders flash in your eyes night after night seems like being in a comfort zone compared to squeezing out decent content on demand in the comfort of a chair with a cool drink at my side.
A good piece of content takes a ton of effort and sometimes even pain to create. First, you need to dig into your bag of tricks to find that one core idea which sets everything in motion. The one idea you know will pull your audience from reading to doing.
Then you do your research and bang out the first draft. It’s not too bad. The first draft won’t cause you to lose too much sleep. After all, you know in the back of your mind, it is only a first draft.
Editing starts out kind of fun, for at least the first thousand words. Then the bug-eyed dry eyes set in and you just need to take a break.
Finally, finally, the masterpiece is ready to insert onto the website page and add categories, links, and images to make the content the most appealing piece you’ve done to date.
Whoa, I can almost hear the cry from the audience. What about SEO. When do you optimize everything for SEO? SEO integration happens at every level of the process. The good news is it is not as difficult as years ago. SEO consideration is important, but the eyeballs of the human reader are much more important and often harder to figure out how to please, than the creepy website crawlers employed in search engine land. After all, it’s the human being on the other side of the page we want to take the action.
So, what are the core SEO ideas we need to get right?
Google and other search engines are getting good at figuring out what articles are about without having to keyword stuff them as everyone did in the early to mid-two-thousands. There are some basic things specialized SEO companies still recommend your site have to give yourself the best chance at ranking.
First is knowing what keyword or keyword cluster you want to target. Everyone still bangs the longtail drum and I can understand that, but Google continues to get better on figuring out what your page or blog post is about by analyzing clusters of keywords. If you write content to match what your customer wants and attach some primary keywords and similar keywords around the topic it will be very likely you will attract some long tail searches. This is exactly the reason why longer content is ranking better than short content. Google also views longer content as bettering the user experience.
Make sure the main keyword or keyword cluster you are targeting end up in the headline, the first couple lines or the first paragraph, and used comfortably throughout the article.
You need to install keyword rich alt tags and meta descriptions in all of the images within the post. Alt tags are what Search engines use to tell people what the images are about if they can’t see them. Google also uses these alt tags to give them insight into what the article or page is about. All the keywords from the headlines to the images should match.
Another on page SEO must have is having your main keyword and some of your similar keywords in the cluster present in the permalink string, page titles, and the site meta description. If your site is built on WordPress, the Yoast plugin makes altering your meta description easy. The key to modifying the meta description is getting it keyword friendly as well as fascinating enough to attract the searcher. You have a short amount of time to catch their attention. Even if you do manage to claw your way to the top of the search results, you still need them to click through and start their journey down your funnel.
The rest of the SEO stuff I usually consider off page stuff. I’m a writer, so I concentrate more on writing content people will want to interact with and want to share. If they share it on highly authoritative sites, the backlinks to provide the other end of the SEO picture will happen naturally.
What do we need to consider when writing to the reader?
Marketing companies have been creating avatars and using demographics for decades to describe the ideal customer. Now with the web, we need to begin considering the origin of the user. Two users could have seemingly the same demographics, but yet come from two different places and have to different frames of mind when they land on your site.
Search engine traffic
If you write content to be friendly to the search engine creepy crawlers and you pull interested customers in from search, they probably have no idea who you are or what your company is about. The attractive headline reeled them in and they might not even know your name and what you are selling. These people should go to your homepage or what I call your handshaking page. This is like the glossy brochure you pick up at the county fair trying to get you to buy the home gutter protectors. The homepage should tell your prospect who you are and what you sell. Then it needs to move qualifying buyers to other parts of the site to begin the hard sell. Selling too hard from the homepage may flood your sales team with calls from people who might not need or want your product. Sales time is expensive. Use the entirely cheap power of your website to best qualify the leads so all your sales team needs to do is take the check.
Social media traffic
I consider social media traffic to be very different than search traffic. These people have been interacting with you or your company on social media. The handshaking and introductions all around are done. They know who you are and what you sell. Social media acts like your home page. There’s no reason to send people from social media to your homepage. The best thing to do is to send them to a part of your site to continue the conversation. Let’s say you write some posts and start a conversation on Facebook about the installation of your product. Send these people to a page on your site which deals directly and in detail about the installation of your product.
The hybrid between social media traffic and the search traffic.
There are some articles which will be useful on both social media and search. These are your ‘problem solver’ articles. These articles are sitting on your site waiting to introduce people to you by showing them how you can solve their problems. These are the articles you want to rank well in search. These are the articles you want to send paid traffic to from different social media channels. These articles need to take care of the handshaking as well as briefly solving their problem with some useful information, but also push the further into your funnel to continue their journey to the sale.
Till next time, be safe.
Kevin