Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed the problem of how to approach content for achieving business goals, the wisdom of setting expectations, and observed that it may not matter whether a site is optimized if the content is already achieving its intended results.
Getting The Content Right
Anyone can write, but it’s hard to communicate in a way that meets the audience’s needs. One thing SEOs often get wrong is content, which remains the most important ranking factor in modern search engines.
A common mistake is publishing entire sentences that waste time. I think that happens when writers are trying to meet an arbitrary word count and providing context for the high volume keywords they want to rank for.
Martin Splitt started the discussion by asking how to go about writing content and shared his own experience writing content and getting it wrong because he was writing for himself and not for what the audience needs to read.
Splitt shared:
“…how would I know how to go about content? Because now I know who I want to address and probably also roughly what I want to do. But, I mean, that’s a whole different skillset, right? That’s like copywriting and probably some researching and maybe some lettering and editing, and wow. That’s a lot. I love to write. I love to write.
…But I love having a technical writer on the team. Lizzi is a tremendous help with anything that is writing. I honestly thought I’m a good, reasonably good writer. And then Lizzi came and asked three questions on a piece of documentation that I thought was almost perfect.
I basically started questioning the foundations of the universe because I was like, “Okay, no, this document doesn’t even make sense. I haven’t answered the fundamental questions that I need to answer before I can even start writing. I’ve written like three pages.
Holy moly, that is a skill that is an amazingly tricky skill to acquire, I think. How do I start writing? Just write what I think I should be writing, I guess.”
Writing is easy to do, but difficult to do well. I’ve seen many sites that have the SEO fundamentals in place, but are undermined by the content. Splitt’s experience highlights the value in getting a second opinion on content.
Site Visitors Are Your Inspiration
Mueller and Splitt next move on to the topic of what publishers and SEOs should write about it and their answer is to focus on what users want, encouraging to do something as simple as asking their readers or customers.
Mueller observed:
“I think, if you have absolutely no inspiration, one approach could be to ask your existing customers and just ask them like:
- How did you find me?
- What were you looking for?
- Where were you looking?
- Were you just looking on a map? What is it that brought you here?
This is something that you can ask anyone, especially if you have a physical business.
..It’s pretty easy to just ask this randomly without scaring people away. That’s kind of one aspect I would do and try to build up this collection of ‘these are different searches that people have done in different places, maybe on different systems, and I want to make sure I’m kind of visible there.'”
Set Reasonable Expectations
John Mueller and Martin Splitt next provide a reality check on the keyword phrases that publishers and SEOs choose to optimize for. It’s not always about the difficulty of the phrases; it’s also about how relevant they are to the website.
Mueller commented about what to do with the keyword phrases that are chosen for targeting:
“And then I would take those and just try them out and see what comes up, and think about how reasonable it would be for one of your pages, perhaps to show up there and how reasonable it can be, I think is something where you have to be brutally honest with yourself, because it’s sometimes tempting to say, “Well, I would like to appear first for the search bookstore on the internet.” Probably that’s not going to happen. I mean, who knows? But there’s a lot of competition for some of these terms.
But, if you’re talking about someone searching for bookstores or bookstores in Zurich or bookstores on Maps or something like that, then that’s a lot more well defined and a lot easier for you to look at and see, what are other people doing there? Maybe my pages are already there. And, based on that, you can try to build out, what is it that I need to at least mention on my pages.”
Mueller followed up by downplaying whether a site is search optimized or not, saying that what’s important is if the site is performing as well as intended. Whether or not it’s properly optimized doesn’t matter if it’s already doing well as it is. Some may argue that the site could be doing better, but that’s outside of the context of what Mueller was commenting on. Mueller’s context was a business owner who was satisfied with the performance of the site.
Mueller observed:
“I mean, it all depends on how serious you take your goal, right? If you’re like a small local business you’re saying, ‘Well, I have a website and I hear I should make it SEO, but I don’t really care.’ Then it’s like do whatever you want kind of thing. If you have enough business and you’re happy. There’s no one to judge you to say, “Your website is not SEO optimized.”
Listen to Episode 95 of the Search Off The Record at about the ten minute mark:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
