Creating a general “writing for searchers” guide for your in-house team
Hello. Thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
Today I’m going to talk about how to give your in-house writers some general guidelines on how to optimizing their content for search discovery. Hopefully, this is a hand-off document after they’ve gone through training with you and they understand (at a high level) how content is presented in search results.
It’s essential to make sure that your in-house writers know that content is now ranking due to its ability to answer searcher’s intent and answer the question completely. SEO is no longer an exercise of writing to a keyword.
Ideally, you’d hand off specific content briefs for every topic you’d like to rank, but that requires the capacity to quickly generate those briefs to meet the demand (you don’t want to be the bottleneck).
There are few software options out there that might help generate these specific writing guides like
SEMRush’s SEO Content template
I also think there also more generic guidance that you can provide in the meantime
And my overview guides include the following steps and topics:
Step 1
Know your audience
Make sure you have a clear persona or idea of who you are writing to and how your writing will solve their problem and drive them to explore more of your site.
Step 2
Understand the searcher’s intent
I think an internal guide should provide instructions for the writers to research the intent behind their topic by doing the following:
- Use Chrome’s Incognito feature to look at the term about which they are creating content.
- Look at the results provided to see if they see any patterns amongst the results.
- Check to make sure that the results seem to be answering the same question that is the focus of writing they are working on. If it is not, they may need to find a new target topic where the results seem to “match” the answer they are providing.
Step 3
Write comprehensively and keep the searcher
How do you write comprehensively? You make sure that you’ve answered all of the additional questions the searcher might have related to the topic.
I think writers should use free tools like AlsoAsked.com, which will pull all of the “People Also Asked” questions into an easy to read interface that writers should add to their writing on that specific topic (the relevant ones anyway). The results look like this:
Pro tip:
If you want to do this at scale and love spreadsheets, I recommend the SEO minion Chrome extension, which will allow you to download the PAA results into a .csv file.
Make sure to reassure them that they can write longer pages.
Especially if it’s an information-based topic, writers should not be afraid to write longer. Most research shows that for information-based queries, the top results are 1,200 words or longer.
And finally, make sure they have a copy of the Google Human Raters Guide so that they know how Google Human Raters evaluate quality content, and what Google means by “low quality” and “high quality” content.
Step 4
Remind them about the power of formatting and labeling
Make sure your writers focus on helping the search engines and your readers understand your text by using the following:
- Natural use of the keywords in the text
- Using shorter sentences
- Making sure to write in 16 point font or higher. (this is a mobile usability requirement)
- Using bullets or numbering
- Embracing white space
- Strategic use of headings
- Using callouts and bolding or italicizing them.
- Using anchor links from a TOC to headers if relevant
- Using images and videos to support your copy (and adding alt text for those images).
Step 5
Give them tips to entice the searcher to click
- Make sure they know the character count limits for meta titles and descriptions.
- Provide examples of enticing meta description and tips for terms to use to improve theirs (checklist style)
Step 6
Remind them of the power of internal links
Especially on larger sites, internal links from higher-ranking pages to lower-ranking pages can sometimes lift the ranking of the page with less organic traffic.
Step 7
Make sure they have the resources to keep learning or look up the answer from reputable sources
I usually best industry resources to look up any of their lingering questions (but also make sure they know how to reach you with a question). The ones I usually recommend are:
And that’s your tip for today – provide an SEO overview writing guide to your internal writing staff to lighten your load as an in-house SEO.
Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
Listen to the previous tip: HTST vs 301 redirects
Related articles: SEO minion Chrome extension
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