Who’s your site for, Robby the Robot or Ronald the Restaurant Owner?
---------->>> What a weird question!! I get PMs every week from people asking about which phrases to target when writing website content. Questions like “shall I call my log post ‘how to get more customers to my restaurant’ or ‘restaurant how to get more customers’ or ‘how to get customers restaurant’” …and so on.Guys, you gotta stop taking what the keyword tools say too literally. I mean, don’t you ever find it weird when you search for a phase you’re pretty sure must get a good number of hits, and then your heart sinks when you see less than 10 per month. How many times have you seen that and then ditched that keyword.
You will also often see keywords like I’ve shown above and think “hmm, that’s a weird way of writing a sentence’…..exactly!!!
Ok, the short answer to this is to use your brain, and put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. Imagine for example that you are a restaurant owner, and wanted to find ways of getting new customers, what would you type!! Now go to Google and physically do that. If this is what you would type, then I bet there are a ton of others who would do the same.
Here’s the cool thing, if that phrase shows that there are less than 10 people searching for it, it is likely that most other marketers will pass by that keyword. Low hanging fruit. Now, granted, the search term for that individual phrase could be pretty low, but if it is highly targeted, then you don’t actually need a ton of hits. Then what you do it find another phrase and repeat the process.
10 highly targeted phrases, each getting 10 hits a day is often better than 1 broad phrase giving you 100 hits a day. For example, if each of these phrases got 10 hits to your site, which one do you think is more likely to lead to a sale 1)baseball caps 2) boston red sox baseball caps. I hope you picked 2; it is clearly more targeted right?
Now, I DO use keyword tools, but mostly to get an INDICATION as to what people are wanting to find information about. So, let’s say I’m thinking of either writing a blog post about how to help electricians get more business or how to help plumbers get more business. If the phrases for plumbers are being searched 10 times more than the ones for electricians, then I’ll start with the one about plumbers. The thing is, rather than stressing about, I’ll probably just do both. The amount of time some people spending agonising over which one to write, they could have bloody written it in the same amount of time!
Ok, back to the original point of my topic heading. The MOST important thing when you are writing content for your site, is you are writing it for humans, not for Google robots. Do you think a robot is going to find your site ‘interesting’ and then want to share it with all its friends on Facebook???
I get lots of questions about SEO. Here’s the funny thing, if you look at a lot of the sites that are on page one for their phrases, a lot of these website owners haven’t got a clue about SEO, in fact many of them don’t even know what a key word is, let alone a keyword tool. So how the hell do they get to page one of Google????? They concentrate on writing good content that will either help people, or entertain them.
So, the next time you write a blog post about weight loss (for example), don’t call it “green tea weight loss”, call it “how my cousin lost 5 lbs in a week just by drinking green tea”. Ok, I just pulled that out my ass, but you see what I mean. Which of those would likely get a click from google if you saw it in the search listing?
Well, gonna stop there. Comment and questions welcome below.
Beers
Phil
Recent Comments
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Very well written. I keep telling people the same thing myself. I think people get caught up in SEO sometimes and forget that they are writing for people not bots. If a keyword does not connect with people and your writing dose not connect with people then basically you're not connecting with people.
Straight from Google, they flat out tell you that the best SEO is to forget about SEO. Of course you need keywords to connect with your audience but don't get to hung up on how many searches or competition a word has, if you like the word use it! If you think the word or phrase is retarded then don't!
Totally agree. While we still need to promote our site to get it out there, it will be pointless if the content is not great in the first place.
Exactly. It all comes down to a person sitting at home reading what you wrote and finding it helpful. That's the basis for everything IM
hmmm, that might be interesting to test out:
write two articles one obviously optimized for a keyword and the other one written naturally like your example "how my cousin lost 5 lbs in a week just by drinking green tea". Then post both of them two streetarticles and see which one ranks better and/or gets more views.
I looked up green tea weight loss in Jaaxy and it didn't seem too appealing, way too competitive. However, I did find "green tea weight loss drink" which might be a suitable substitute. Monthly searches 493, QSR 218.
Any takers for this experiment?
Ok, let me put it a different way. If you were writing for a real magazine, you would need to put a meanigful, interesting and inspiring title rather than just a keyword phrase right? Forget about which gets the most clicks, it's about what will inspire the reader more and make them want to return for more.
Very true. However, google is always saying write for the reader and not for the search engine. Which kind of makes me wonder how well does that actually work? I know with low competition phrases you can base an article around a keyword(title, once in the first paragraph, the rest naturally) and you can rank it.
If you just wrote for the reader, would it still rank for the keyword you wanted? I have a hard time believing you automatically get ranking for that specific keyword, but google might give you rankings for other keywords. Then it all becomes hard to tell if your article is going to be ranked.
What's the use of the article if it's not going to get in front of anyone? You could have the most awesome article in the world, but if it's in a crappy, unknown magazine very few people will be able to find it and enjoy it.
Last year, I started a weight loss site, did no back linking at all. Wrote a post every week day for two months and was then getting 200-300 hits a day.
The posts were based around phrases being searched for from a keyword list. The important thing is I use the keyword tool to get an indication of what topics people are interested in reading about, not to use the exact keyword phrase. Don't forget that when you write an article or post, if it is long and interesting, you will rank for tons of other keywords you wasn't even trying to target. Google now also takes 'click through rate' from the search results into consideration, if you need to make the title of the post enticing, rather than just the keyword. Hope that helps. - Thanks, Phil.
Yeah that helps out a lot. I was actually just thinking about doing longer blog posts the other day. I had been doing 500 word blog posts each day for the past 30 days. I then realize a lot of the blog posts that I read online and enjoy are a lot longer than 500 words. It's just kind of hard to cover any topic in depth at 500 words.
I was thinking about dropping how often I post to once a week and make the posts longer. That would also give me a lot more ways to link to the blog post. To me it seems kind of weird to link a 500 word article to a 500 word blog post both on a narrowly focused subject even if they are completely different articles.
Yeah, once a week is fine is it is consistently once a week. The thing with doing longer posts is you'll find other websites will be much more likely to link to you. Then, because you are getting natural links from other sites, this will do wonders for your SEO. Have you tried using something like DragonSpeaking? I bet if you rambled into that for a while, you'd be amazed how quickly you could knock up a 1000 word post, then just edit it by hand to polish it off.
No I haven't tried the Dragon software yet. I might look into it in the future. For this particular website I was outsourcing the content writing, so it won't be too big of a deal to make the articles longer.
LOL, no worries then. Mate, outsourcing is awesome, it's the only true way to up-scale. p.s I just posted this under Ty's response....technology eh!!?? ;-)
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Very informative, very honest and to the point, with a touch of humor. I really enjoyed reading the article.