[tilolebo]

> The main issue was that the writers weren’t SEO specialists: they knew how to write good content, but good content is NOT always the same as SEO content.

> The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword. Then, you create content based on that intent.

Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a search engine crawler...

[PaulRobinson]

Yes, but interestingly (to me, at least), Google have modified their search engine crawler over many, many iterations so that what it values is the same as what a user would value.

When people would keyword stuff, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working.

When people would work on backlink farms, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working.

When price comparison search engines were all the rage, Google realised that if the "purchase" button led off-site, that was a marker that an intermediary was pushing the price up through affiliate schemes, so started to push those down in the rankings.

So now, the best way to create content for SEO is to think about what your ideal user would really want, because the two now align quite closely.

Opinion pieces, narratives, etc. all might make sense for regular readers but when a searcher is looking for something it's typically to get a job done, so Google ranks content that helps them get the job done.

I don't see what's sad about that.

[tyre]

Now the first eight results are articles like:

Title: How to poach an egg that's easy for everyone

Content:

Are you looking for a way to poach an egg? We have found the easiest recipes for poached eggs anywhere and compiled them for you here. Don't worry, if you want the cleanest, mess-free way to simply poach an egg, this is how to poach an egg.

## Why would you want to poach an egg?

Poaching eggs is a delicious way to prepare eggs. You can poach eggs for breakfast, you can put poached eggs on toast, or make poached eggs for eggs benedicts. There are many simple and easy recipes for poached eggs.

etc. etc. etc.

with the actual instructions/recipes at the bottom.

Garbage.

[gundmc]

This is particularly bad in the food/recipe space. I've wondered if it's for SEO or if it's to stretch the content length of a short recipe and allow more spots for ads.

[CM30]

Always heard it may have something to do with copyright. You can't copyright a recipe (in the list of instructions sense), but you can copyright original prose/content.

Adding this stuff presumably makes it trickier for other sites to scrape/copy the recipe automatically, and lets them take down those who left the 'original' content in.

Alternatively, might be because of stuff like Yoast. Those tools have a 'readability checker' which might not class a simple list of instructions as 'easily readable'.

[joshvm]

> When price comparison search engines were all the rage, Google realised that if the "purchase" button led off-site, that was a marker that an intermediary was pushing the price up through affiliate schemes, so started to push those down in the rankings.

This hasn't gone away at all. Do a search for any "best X" and you'll find a slew of review websites for the best X which are stutfed with Amazon affiliate links.

It's virtually imoossible to find reviews of household items that are trustworthy. I've resorted to appending things like "reddit" and looking on eg /r/buyitforlife.

[lhuser123]

You kind of describe the reason I can’t get rid of Google.

Many people keep saying that DuckDuckGo is good enough. But no matter how hard I try use it for everything, always end up googling a few questions. Many times, Google knows what I’m looking for better than myself.

[wolco]

This is the reason why google isn't working as well. Google tries to guess what I want in doing so hides the sites I do want.

[ncallaway]

DuckDuckGo will let you prefix any query with "!g" and redirect that query to Google.

That was the feature that let me switch everything over to DDG. DDG works great for 80-85% of my search queries. For the others, I just prefix with "!g" because I suspect Google will give me better results.

[teejmya]

I've recently learned that it does not have to be a prefix. If you put !g anywhere in the query as its own word, DDG will do the thing.

[pier25]

I agree which is why I switched to Startpage and enjoy Google results without privacy concerns:

https://www.startpage.com/

[jotm]

Yeah Google Search results have gone down in quality... but everyone else is worse still :/

[spaceman_2020]

As a content strategist, I always advise my clients to pursue a hybrid approach. Some posts have to be purely SEO focused with heavily optimized content. Some should be focused on driving social shares. And some should simply talk to people like regular human beings, not search engine crawlers.

Even with minimal backlinking, this strategy has helped grow traffic from 10k to 250k

[noelceta]

Agreed! For the most part, anyway. If you can create content that 1) can go viral or get a ton of shares, and 2) at the same time, be created with a specific keyword in mind, you'll get amazing results real fast.

Unfortunately, that's not really something you can do for a lot of industries or niches. But when it does work, it works!

[lowdose]

Could you elaborate on the specific difference?

[puranjay]

Think of these three articles:

1. How to Choose the Right Project Management Software

This is keyword focused - "project management software". Our only objective with this article is to rank for this keyword while also sharing useful advice for search users on how to go about choosing a project management tool.

2. 25 Project Management Experts Share Their Favorite PM Tips

This is (mostly) social sharing focused. If you were to ask 25 project management experts to share their tips, then tag their Twitter/Instagram/LinkedIn handles, there is a good chance a few of them at least will share it with their followers, thus driving shares.

3. How Project Management Can Help Small Startups Scale Faster

This doesn't focus on any specific keyword. Rather, it simply talks to startup founders about using project management principles.

This is a very rudimentary example but I hope you get the idea

[lowdose]

Especially number 2 gave a new insight thank you!

[at-fates-hands]

>Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a search engine crawler...

So true. I recently had a tree company contact me about their poor results in Google and the amount they were paying a marketing company who were doing videos and other monthly content for them, but nothing was moving the needle.

The amount of content on a given subject is also just as powerful with Google as the type of content you're putting on your site. I had a professional writer put together a half dozen pages on a single topic, then put those in a bullet list on the front page in a sort of blog-like structure without actually calling it a "blog" or "journal" or "news" section. Just informative articles, all on the same subject running a few paragraphs, optimized for SEO.

Within a month, traffic had spiked (doubled and then some once all the pages were indexed) and the amount of leads coming off the site increased dramatically. it was obvious Google was giving precedent to our site because we had more "relevant" material on this particular subject (tree trimming) than their competitors.

It just reinforced the idea that content is still king.

[technion]

I keep in mind when seeing these statements that the entire SEO industry is built around convincing people web developers shouldn't develop websites (it can't rank without an SEO expert), mechanics shouldn't write guides on cars (an SEO is better qualified) and so on. The fact half the SEO guides out there either contradict Google's advice, or rate most top search sites horribly should also be considered.

I'm not saying there's no truth in this do consider it critically.

[rchaud]

> I keep in mind when seeing these statements that the entire SEO industry is built around convincing people web developers shouldn't develop websites

Can you point to an example of this? SEO doesn't matter at all for devs working on web applications like Salesforce or TurboTax; they are their own walled garden. For devs that work on the CMSs of "content" sites like NYT, Buzzfeed etc, the only technical recommendation an SEO would offer would be to:

- adhere to principles of web accessibility

- HTTPS site wide

- implement caching, load assets via CDN, use srcset for images to improve site speed

- use semantic HTML (<footer>, <article>, etc, not just <div id="footer">)

- a logical URL structure (/articles/economy/us-gdp-Q4-2019) and information architecture

These are things that most devs already know they should implement.

The bulk of SEO work is organizing existing content so they perform better on search. This could mean rearranging the IA, consolidating content into a longer-form "guide" that can be backlinked on another site and evaluating if content is using the keywords that people search for.

None of those tasks require developers, as the functionality is usually available as an option in the CMS.

[technion]

I completely agree you provided a list of things Devs should know already. My point is that it's the exact same list of stuff that has shown up every single SEO sales pitch I have ever seen.

[noer]

I think you're missing the point. They're creating content to answer questions that someone is searching for. If you're creating content for "cat adoption", the likely intent of the search is to learn more about the process of adopting cats. You're not answering a question if you create content around how great it is to adopt cats. You're more likely to answer the question by writing about the process of adopting cats.

[walshemj]

Actually working in the same area (enterprise SEO for huge brands) a lot of page copy is written in shall we say a very poetic and abstract style.

Instead of actually being written for the user - which is the point here, its almost like the English grads would rather be publishing a small book of limpid poetry

[tobr]

This seems to be the opposite insight from a recently discussed article[1], which put more emphasis on consistency than keyword optimization.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22179383

[duxup]

I feel like I want to blame that for so many landing and home pages that just I can't figure out what they do.

But then again I have the same problem with most open source projects too... probabbly not just SEO at play.

[noelceta]

That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process," they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your processes," etc.

Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not going to rank because that's not actually what the user is looking for. Hope that makes sense :)

Edit: and the above is a very common writer mistake. They write interesting content, but it's just not that relevant as a search result.

[AlchemistCamp]

Some of the best content isn't searched for by anyone at all before it was written, though. In the extreme case, consider the Harry Potter series—fantastic content, but it would have been horrible SEO content when it was written.

[noelceta]

True, but in most cases, you won't write Harry Potter - you just want to drive leads from people searching for process management solutions, haha.

What you did mention IS an actual strategy though. The idea is, you coin a new term or strategy, and if you PR the content enough, the term will have a ton of searches (and you'll rank #1). More often than not, though, you have to be a big fish to really pull this off

[AlchemistCamp]

Yes... thanks to books and subsequent fan fic, all kinds of Harry Potter characters and terms are both all over the web and heavily searched!

[1123581321]

Fiction sites typically use additional descriptions (story categories, genre, etc.), words that don’t appear in the story, to help it rank. This happens independently of the creative writing process.

[Rastonbury]

What a terrible analogy. SEO content is written to market the site the best you can on search engines, obviously you want to write what people are looking to meet their needs for and its easy to do this with Google. It's very different purpose from writing a good book or writing good journalism.

[anarazel]

Imo this is one of the reasons why content on the web has become so much shallow.

[rchaud]

It's free, so what do you expect?

If you were at the mall and picked up a pamphlet about say, philosophy from someone handing them out at the food court, would you complain that it didn't have the same depth as something you'd find at a bookstore?

We've accustomed ourselves to believing that collections of words should be free if they're on the Internet, when that has almost never been true in the real world.

[eb0la]

SEO used to be about how to better use html tags on your sht to rank higher. Now is about the human factor, which is good ;-).

So this is what works now:

- What your customers want? customer not sure?: Market positioning (sale will follow later) -> Explain it and introduce your product in the explanation. -> Write content to _educate_ your customers and add a call to action later.

- What your customers are looking for right now? -> Write content to make your customers fix* their problem using your product. -> Write content to make your customers fix their problem using any product, then show how easy is to use yours.

[tilolebo]

Yep, I didn't mean to criticize the article itself, which is super informative. Thanks for the piece :-)