[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 :-)