Does SEO ever feel like the Wild Wild West? It can feel like things are changing DAILY, and the things we were told to do six months ago can be obsolete today.
It’s freaking madness!
But, the one concept that has endured through the past five years is this: You need to create awesome content for searchers. Period.
And most of the traffic you drive to the site is going to come from creating great content. It’s not going to be your tech-heavy SEO stuff from the days of old.
And that tends to break peoples’ brains because they assume SEO is super technical and black box-ey.
But here’s the thing: It’s still pretty technical and sophisticated, but those technical elements have been redirected into the right brain side of things: language and communication.
That said, “technical stuff” can cross the bridge into seemingly subjective stuff like “content quality” and “depth of topic coverage” fairly easily now.
So let’s explain how Google is turning something subjective, like “content quality” into a technical/mechanical thing.
Step 1: Choosing a keyword to create content for
The easiest way to waste all the hard work you put into keyword research is to use a “keyword target” approach in which you use a keyword you want to rank for throughout the site.
Or, to try to get a piece of content to rank for more than one keyword.
So what we’re going to do instead is choose a keyword and create one AWESOME piece of content for that keyword.
After all, Google ranks pages for keywords, not websites!
Open up this keyword research template and add your keywords and data. Choose a keyword that has a solid combination of low keyword difficulty and a substantial amount of monthly searches.
Next, we are going to need to figure out WHY people are searching for that particular keyword, then decide what kind of content to create.
Step 2: Audit the SERP for intent
Arguably, the most important and oft-overlooked aspect of creating content is understanding why someone is searching for your keyword target and how to satisfy that intent.
Remembering that we are going to create an entire page for each keyword we select, we will first need to determine which type of content to create. We will do this by investigating SERPs for the keyword we choose.
When I Google “golf rival tips”, I see the following results:
Three videos dominate the first scroll. As we move down the page we see the following:
All told, we have 3 video results, 5 blogs and a link to a social page. If we were to summarize what people are looking for when they search this keyword, it would most certainly be: An informative blog/guide and possibly video content that explains how to play the game “Golf Rivals.”
So I’m going to plan on creating a guide-style blog post for this keyword.
The next thing we need to figure out is the type of media (video, graphics, imagery, tools) people are expecting to find when they search this keyword.
The easiest way to do this is by briefly clicking through all the results on page one and observing the types of media people are using.
The results were the following:
- 30% video content
- 20% use screenshots of the game
- 50% are text only
So we could technically get away with writing a text-only blog, but we would likely get a bonus by creating a video and/or adding some screenshots.
I want to create something better than any of my competitors, so I’m going to do both.
The last thing we need to figure out is what to title the content. This is SUPER important because it will dramatically influence your click-through rate, and indirectly, your rankings via RankBrain data.
I’ll do this by auditing the titles we find on page one. Here’s what we’ve got:
Here’s a summary of what I’m seeing:
- “Golf rival” is generally used at the beginning of the title tag.
- I should probably either use “tips” or “guide” somewhere in the title tag.
- It seem that people want to “become a pro”, so I’ll include that somewhere.
I’m going to use the title tag: “Golf rival tips to become a pro player.”
This incorporates everything people seem to be clicking on the most.
Finally, we are ready to write content.
Step 3: Write the content
This is the part of SEO where Google is mashing your left brain and right brain things together.
While “content quality” might seem like a subjective concept, Google actually has a mechanical method for determining this.
For starters, it’s evaluating your EAT (Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness). In other words, it’s evaluating whether or not you’re an authority in the space, and whether or not you’ve written authoritative content on the topic.
This is why you should specialize in specific topic clusters on your website. If most of your content is about how to use medicinal herbs, you’re not going to have much “EAT” in the area of golf video games.
Google is also looking at how well you cover the topic you are writing about for your blog.
In other words, it’s trying to answer the question, “Does this piece of content do a good job of discussing all the topics someone would be wondering about when searching for this keyword?”
To figure out which sub-topics to talk about in your blog, you could theoretically read through every blog in the top ten results and make a note of every sub-topic that’s discussed.
If I were to try to rank for “baseball”, the results could look something like this:
With this information, I now have a blueprint for everything I could possibly talk about, and how to prioritize the topics.
Fortunately, there are tools out there like Clearscope, MarketMuse, and Surfer who will do this for you automatically.
Here’s what the output for “golf rival tips” looks like when I put it into MarketMuse:
On the upper left you can see the “content score” I need to hit in order to be competitive. My content score is determined by how well I cover all the sub-topics you see on the right.
The more sub-topics I cover, the more “thorough” it will be seen in the eyes of Google. I want to be as thorough as possible.
After writing my content I will add the text into the tool and see how well I’ve covered all my recommended sub-topics.
This is exactly how Google has turned something seemingly subjective into something quantitative and mechanical. It knows how well you have covered your topic cluster relative to your competitors, and it will seed your content in search results accordingly.
Step 4: Keep an eye on performance and re-optimize often
After doing a yearlong study, I found that it takes new content about 100-150 days to fully mature.
So be patient! And if your content isn’t performing after about five months, you’ll probably need to reevaluate what went wrong in steps 1-3.
Conclusion
Everything we just talked about is the “hack” to generating SEO results. Only nowadays “hack” isn’t the right word. Rather we should think of it as “creating the best content on the planet that gives searchers zero reason to click on a competitor’s link.”
Using just these four steps resulted in Brafton 20x’ing its organic traffic.
Sure, it’s a lot of work, and can feel tedious, but the payoff is incredible.