Article Style #8: A to Z Explainer

This is the most difficult of the "post formats today", but it can also be the most rewarding to finish. The idea behind an A to Z explainer is that you cover every angle of a topic, from beginning to end, on a single post.

Of course, this means you really need to organize things well!

A table of contents with jump links, or even a TOC plugin if you plan to make multiple posts like this would be useful so people can see an overview of what's going to be covered and be able to skip to a specific section if they come back to the post for reference.

1000 words? No way. Aim for 2-3000 words or more. My highest word count for a post was 16,000 words. It took several weeks to finish, including images, links, etc formatting. Word count is not the end-all-be-all to getting ranked, but it can help a lot! If you truly know your stuff and have a comprehensive campaign to promote your content, you can definitely get ranked on page 1 for some competitive phrases.

These styles of blog posts are great to have around because you can always link back to them. If you have jump links, you can even link back to specific sections of a page using the link style [mywebsite.com/page-1/#jumplink]. Using yourself as a reference, you help boost your authority in the eyes of the reader, and with Google.

In these styles posts, don't be afraid to include multiple videos, on top of original images to help break up the content so readers don't get fatigued.

When I write large posts like this, I will absolutely use a higher competition keyword to target. I don't want to waste my time writing 10k words for a phrase that only gets a few hundred searches per month.

I also make sure to include an affiliate link somewhere, or have a clear method of monetization. You don't want to publish content just for the sake of publishing.

ProTip 1: Don't over-optimize by stuffing your keyword into every h3/h4 tag or image alt tag. Add a variety of LSI keywords, or basically, just do what's natural. It's pretty hard to perfectly optimize a huge post like this.

ProTip 2: Have an action plan in place on how you plan to promote this page. Don't just publish and leave it to "do whatever" in Google. Make sure your work was worth the time

ProTip 3: Go back and update this post from time to time with new information, then notify Google of the changes via Search Console.

ProTip 4: Good rank on these posts rarely comes quickly, unlike low-competition posts. It could take months to rank on page one. You can continue to update and promote during this time