 Hello everyone thank you for joining me for this last session of the day. I'm sure you're all pretty tired and brain fried at this point so I'll try to keep it interesting for you. So we're going to talk about how to write content for both humans and search engines. It's certainly a delicate balancing act so I'm going to give you a what I think is a formula for success so that you can achieve success at doing this all pretty much all the time in all of your content. If you'd like to download the slides they're available here at that link stealthsearch.com slash slides. I'll leave that up there for a moment and I'll show it again at the end. All right so few tidbits about me who am I I am may have always been a nerd and I am also an experienced SEO owner of two agencies Pam and marketing and stealth search and analytics and fun fact I am a not-so-closet metalhead so I've been challenged at times to include slayer references in my slides so you'll see just a few hints of that there. Anyway this is what we're gonna not learn how to do and what you should not ever do. I don't really think it needs much more explanation than just no. That is an example of getting the balancing act wrong and going too heavy in the direction of writing for SEO and alienating humans but that's what a lot of people think of when they think of writing for SEO that it's got to be stuffed with all these keywords and sound unnatural and it does not have to be that way. So I'm going to give you the formula for success that shows you how to successfully balance those two. I know that's pretty small we're going to go through it piece by piece so that you can see it better. A little bit of intro first your website has two audiences essentially I mean you can get more granular than that but categorically you are talking obviously to humans but also to search engines so what do humans want out of your content they want high quality advice natural sounding language and short digestible snippets of information. Now what do search engines want they want you to give high quality advice natural sounding language so the same so far and here's where it differs though they search engines value long length lots and lots of words. The average result on page one of Google varies between 2400 and 2000 words top to bottom so the 24 average position one is 2400 words in most cases and the average position 10 the bottom of the first page is about 2000 words that's a lot of words so we got to figure out how to compromise between what the search engines want which is basically a term paper and what humans want which is short digestible snippets of information so you can do this by picking a specific number of points that you want to make in your content very clear points and write about each one thoroughly so that your word count your total word count is high but break down each point with subheadings to make it easily digestible and easily skimmable and include a lot of visual assets peppered in throughout the content so that it doesn't look like a term paper it's okay to have a lot of information and it can still be easily skimmable and not look like a term paper but to have the same number of words in the end so when writing for humans to go into this in depth a little bit more and then go into search engines too for humans want like we said high-quality advice in natural sounding language that's not too difficult breaking down each key point with subtitles like I said can help with that but also here's something kind of unique to the humans is they like catchy titles and how do you make your titles catchy one very well proven method is to use numbers the number of points in the title so the number of points you're making quantity as a number goes in the title like top five marketing strategies for success that is very effective you can also make your titles catchy by adding a sense of exclusivity or urgency like there are only three ways to increase online sales well now I'm curious I guide there's only three I gotta I gotta know what they are this is this is too easy I just got to know those three so that works identifying your audience also works like essential marketing tips for contractors if I was a contractor and I saw that be oh I'm a contractor that's me I identify with the title and therefore I'm interested and you can include the result of your advice in the title the with them what's in it for me that's very effective to that's in that example about increasing online sales you know what's the outcome that I'm going to get after reading this and it's to increase online sales so including the outcome of what you're talking about that is mean something to the human helps as well and last but not least using powerful words in the title attracts humans as well and here's some example examples of powerful words like inspire most important amazing some of these are a little click baby like shocking if that's not your brand voice or tone you may not want to use those but there's plenty here and and you can look up long long lists online of power words that are you know not as click baby in nature yet still very effective so that's how to make your content attractive to humans now when writing for search engines as we said you want to give thorough advice so that your word count is high naturally incorporating right-sized keywords that people actually search for here's where we get into the search engine specific stuff and what do I mean by right size keywords I will explain right size keywords basically means using a keyword research tool to pick keywords that have an average monthly search volume that is at or below your monthly organic traffic number the rationale behind this is that if search engines were willing to rank your content for a keyword that gets 90,000 searches a month your traffic would be probably around 90,000 hits a month that's not exact science or exact math but that the idea the concept is just to be in the same realm sort of of the keywords that you're picking the number of searches per month that they get and the number of hits your website gets from search engines per month because there's kind of a correlation between the keywords keyword volume and how much traffic you are getting so you want to just keep them in the same realm it doesn't have to be exact but if you're if you're getting 50 hits a month on your website and you're trying to rank for a keyword that's 50,000 searches a month that is searched that many times that's probably not going to be attainable for you so the idea in this right sizing is to pick keywords that are more attainable more possible more likely for you to rank for because the search engines are willing to rank your site for keywords in that realm does that make sense okay great why wouldn't you pick the higher one why why not aim high it's a valid question you want to work your way up gradually so you do in the end want to aim high but jumping from point a to point you know from a 50 to a 550,000 is you know that's a big leap and kind of impossible to achieve without working your way up first you have to make the search engines willing to rank you for those two-digit volume keywords enough of those you're going to have a three-digit volume traffic then they're going to be willing to rank you for a three-digit key volume keywords and so on so yes you want to aim high you just have to take steps to get there so how do you find your monthly organic search traffic number you can go and Google analytics to the acquisition section click on all traffic and then channels and then set your date range to the last 30 days and look at your organic search number result there so in this case it is 583 in this example so that's what you can find out your monthly or your last 30 days worth of organic search traffic that you got to your site to use for that right sizing then you go to a keyword research tool and there are a lot of keyword research tools out there I'm going to highlight my favorite not affiliated with them in any way but it's just our favorite it's called keyword tool pretty simple name it's found at keyword tool dot IO and I just think this does a great job at showing not just the keyword that you put in and the stats for that for how many times per month that keyword a search but related keywords this is where this tool really excels is giving a lot of ideas for other very similar keywords and it pulls the data from AdWords keyword planner so AdWords keyword planner used to be available for free use to anyone to look up keyword search volume and competition and whatnot now they only let paying advertisers use it so this is the same data and this is a paid tool also but it's very inexpensive even their highest plan that we use as an agency is $88 a month so super affordable and they have some other lower plans too so it does a great job and it pulls the data straight from the source straight from Google I use AdWords a lot are used to in the past and like you said you can go in there and use the keyword tool are you saying like now I haven't been in my account a while but you're saying like even just if I have an AdWords account I can't go in there and use the keyword tool yeah even if you had an account got some money in my account or something yeah even if you had an account before and you were using it for free you have to be an active advertiser to use it currently yeah but this is the same data there are other good tools out there too SEMrush and SERPstat there's a lot of them but they use their own a lot of the others use their own proprietary databases for the average number of searches a month in competition and whatnot and I'm always wondering like where do they get that from I like to get it straight from the source from Google I like I trust that data more so if you are an active advertiser you can use Google keyword planner but I find that their related keywords aren't always so related and there's not that many of them compared to this tool so I like this tool a lot so you go into the keyword research tool now that you know your monthly organic traffic number and for whatever piece of content you want to write look up the topic and pick a primary keyword that has a monthly search volume within that same realm ish of your monthly organic traffic number it is not an exact science it is okay to go below the idea is just not to overshoot by a lot if it's over by a little bit fine you know if this had said when we had saw 583 for the monthly traffic number if this had said 600 or even 700 fine it's just you know stay within the realm don't overshoot by a lot so if I wanted to write an article about AC compressor failure for an HVAC company and in the HVAC company had 583 organic search hits to their website a month then this keyword would be just fine it's 90 it's it's definitely under I'm not overshooting by a lot so that could be my primary keyword next you also want to pick a couple of secondary or supporting keywords Google has indicated in the patents that it's applying for that it wants to become more of a topical match engine using AI artificial intelligence and machine knowledge to fully understand topics and match searches with a website that fully covers that topic as opposed to simple keyword matching like they did in the past so you want to pick for each piece of content that you write a few secondary supporting keywords so that you can represent you're talking about this topic holistically and so you can use the keyword research tool to get a couple of ideas for what those secondary supporting keywords might be and you can also use Google search suggest where you just start typing in a phrase and it finishes it for you that's a perfectly good place to get ideas for secondary keywords as well so you pick the primary keyword and a few secondaries one final double check you want to do before you start writing is to check for context like I said Google's trying to use AI and machine knowledge to understand a topic and so it thinks that a certain word is associated with a certain topic and it's usually pretty spot on but sometimes you'd be surprised I was doing something where I was I was searching for a word it was a term about marketing I forget exactly what it was but I punched it into Google just to double check and look at the results and a bunch of stuff about farming came up like that I'm not talking about farming here so you just want to do that quick double check and make sure that the Google search results look on topic with what you're talking about before you finalize your keyword selection so now they've got your keywords primary and secondary picked out it's time to start writing and here's where we're going to go through step-by-step the formula for success and it starts with the title and the opening paragraph and this is you know with word the goal here is to incorporate these keywords and have it sound natural but use them enough so that Google understands the topic of the article so easy enough put it in the title that's a very powerful place to put it and put it in your opening paragraph where you're stating the intention of the article you've got your your two uses already of your keyword easy and natural next this is good for humans to provide a quick overview of the key points that you're going to make give them the kind of the with them what's in it for them what are they going to get out of this article and quick bulleted format at the top before you go into each one in depth and it's an easy place to simply use your primary keyword again in that quick roundup then you can go into breaking down each point more in depth and this is where you can use not only your primary keywords but also your secondary supporting keywords just naturally write them in as you're talking about each point and breaking it down and then you can use them two more times use your primary keyword two more times in your conclusion easy enough you just put a subhead as we talked about subheads are good for that visual skimmable skimmability of the content and so put it in your conclusion subhead and in your conclusion paragraph it's so easy to simply summarize what you just talked about and use your primary keyword again sounding supernatural so you've got it in there a bunch of times but you do want to double check that you didn't do it too much because it's very important not to overdo it and start sounding like that bad example that we saw in the beginning or get a red flag from Google for overuse and keyword stuffing so the way to double check that is to count up your total words and count up the number of times you use the primary keyword and just make sure that you're not exceeding two times per 100 words and kind of aim for about one time per 100 words not exact more important again not to go over then under under is okay just don't go over so you don't have more than two times per 100 words so for example in a thousand word article you would aim for a rough minimum of 10 fine if it's under but don't go over 20 that's where you're getting into the danger zone of looking alienating humans looking like keyword stuffing and you know potentially rate raising a red flag in search engine algorithms as well so that's how you can double check that a quick frequently asked question about questions and sometimes your primary keyword will actually be a question that is very very difficult to repeat even in the simple way that I described in the formula it's very very difficult to repeat a question in question format over and over and over again and have it sound natural so here's what you can do you can state it as in question format a few times the title easy enough again in the opening paragraph so what can affect ovulation easy enough sounds natural but after that you can rephrase the question as an answer it's okay to do that Google will kind of understand that you're just answering the question so in this example of what can affect ovulation you can restate it as an answer x can affect ovulation y can affect ovulation z can affect ovulation etc that's actually kind of likely to get you into that answer box at the top of Google you know when it answers a question for you a lot of people ask how to optimize for that one one of the ways is to very clearly simply rephrase the question as an answer using a similar word structure as you can so the questions what can affect ovulation x can affect ovulation y can affect ovulation that helps Google understand that you're answering the question so that's how you can not overuse it in question format too much but you can actually at the end in your call to action which every piece of content should have a call to action it's amazing how specific you have to be with users to get them to go do the next step that you want to do no matter how intuitive you think it is it's an analytic study show it is so the users are so much more likely to click and do whatever it is you want them to do next if you very specifically tell them what to do next so that's always a good thing to include at the end of every piece of content and in in the case of question phrases it's an easy place to restate it as a full question one more time so one last time to go through the formula for success step by step and then we can do questions keyword and topic selection is first for humans you want to determine a few clear key points you're going to make so that you can break your content down and for search engines you want to choose your right-sized keyword based on your monthly organic search results and a few secondary supporting keywords for context so that you represent the whole topic holistically next up is title for humans you want to do a catchy title either with a quantity of key points in the title a sense of exclusivity or urgency or audience identification and also use power words and for search engines simply include your primary keyword in the title next up in your opening paragraph for humans summarize the intent of the article so they know what they're getting out of it and for search engines just naturally use the primary keyword and then do your quick overview of key points in bullet format for humans they'll they'll get the with them the what's in it for me when I'm going to read this article what am I going to get out of it and for search engines it's an opportunity to very naturally use your primary keyword one more time in the subheading of that quick overview and then you break down each key point thoroughly with good useful information you know content is king in SEO it is important to be giving high quality genuinely useful information so go thoroughly into each point and use your primary and secondary supporting keywords very naturally as you thoroughly describe each point and then in your conclusion subheading for your human users you can repeat the intent of the article in summary format just kind of drive drive home your point and for search engines you can use your primary keyword naturally one more time and then in the conclusion paragraph summarize your key points reiterate your most important takeaways for your humans and again natural place to use the primary keyword one more time and like we said call the action highly recommended humans need to be told what to do next very specifically so put that call the action in there for them and link to a related article or lead magnet or product or service page or contact page something semantically related that's actually good for search engines the intro linking of content that's highly related to each other when you do that and you link different content pieces of the same topic together you're kind of creating like a hub and spoke type of a thing or basically representing to Google that you have a whole chapter in your book about this topic and that helps with that topic optimization that I was talking about before representing a whole topic you want to do that within each article but also throughout your whole site by intro linking similar pieces of content to each other so that's an SEO thing as well so that's it for the formal walk through of the formula for success I'm happy to take any questions so I've got I do stuff that I teach that's very technical and I'm seeing more and more of the TLDR to a long and read this is actually really useful because it breaks it down so I I can write 5,000 words I find I'm always coming in could I actually for the search engine put something down below what I'm starting to do the TLDR so that someone wants to dig in it's down there and the search engine I know will get it is that good or is that bad okay so to summarize the question of people can hear it was about the concept of TLDR which is the abbreviation for too long didn't read and whether or not that's good or bad to kind of do that in your content at the end or anywhere in a sense that's kind of what I was recommending with that open opening section of the bullets of what you're going to go over and then by restating in the conclusion paragraph what you just went over but you could certainly kind of put the TLDR heading on those sections and make sure that is clear to humans I don't think search engines are looking at looking for TLDR specifically but but the content and especially if it's a question phrase like we were talking about with rephrasing it as an answer I think that's the TLDR section is a great opportunity to give that super succinct answer so that you have a shot at getting in that answer box for the question phrase thank you no problem yes do you think that there's any plugins that adequately help with SEO for instance Yoast SEO danger if you write above the level of an eighth grader and sure so the question was about plugins for writing for SEO like Yoast and if you know I recommend any or whatnot Yoast is good but I think it throws some people too far off track so the intentions behind the Yoast plugin when they ask you to put in a focus keyword and then kind of grade you on how you're doing with green lights and red lights the intentions there are good and it's good advice except it doesn't take into account certain things I mean the free version doesn't take into account secondary supporting keywords the premium version allows for that but it doesn't take into account things like stop words which are okay to include if you have to put a small like a and the in in the phrase that's fine and it doesn't count that and the question phrase thing if you rephrased it it doesn't understand that so I think the guidance is is there's good intention in there but people get a little too focused on getting all the green lights and not taking into account some more extraneous things that are valid factors so I don't know if I mean that's the the main tool that people use for writing for SEO I don't really know of any others that come close to it I think it's good if I had to choose one it would be that one but I caution people not to go to nuts exactly you don't have to take it as the law is as literal as they are telling you whoever's question over there about it being too long so these days you know I write a lot of content for a lot of different clients and so you know on the first pages you're sort of teasing things up okay and then you're taking them to the other page which is longer and lengthier so you didn't really speak to that right that's almost like taking what you just said but you're chunking it up and you're doing it on different pages and is it all still count and yes I think I know where you're going with that so the question was about the length of the content and how in certain places you might be summarizing things very succinctly because that's the appropriate place to do that and then linking through to longer content to another page where you can read more and that that's totally fine and natural and the way it should be when I was talking about the length of the content that ranks high being between two thousand and twenty four hundred words that's on average there are definitely cases especially like any commerce with product descriptions it's not appropriate to have a two thousand word product description and it's not necessary because product pages will rank without that so I think Google understands that there's like a different appropriate place for short content versus long content and as long as you have both and everything's in the appropriate places you should be okay landing page on nutrition landing page on nutrition you know when you have five pages and the landing page on nutrition are you counting the words for the entire page so you might have five buckets and you're saying all of those count all of those words and then each of those pages goes to another page which has more words right so in the example of a landing page like you described where you have kind of chunks of information in small paragraphs based out does all those do all those words count even though they're kind of chunked up yes Google doesn't really look at how much it's chunked up that's for the humans but they do see the total word count and then if you interlink those small chunks to longer pages even better than Google can see that that's not the only information you have in that little snippet that you also have all this other information think I saw a question on this side you had mentioned primary keywords and secondary keywords create a more holistic approach to make the search engine happy is that all within one post or are you suggesting right about AC compressors in your first post then right about the secondary and I mean a few other secondary posts to follow that up in coming weeks or months or whatever the schedule is right so the question was about secondary supporting keywords and if I meant to do that within one piece of content or kind of across the site by writing individual pieces of content for each secondary supporting keyword both you definitely want to do both within an article you want to show that you're representing the topic of that article holistically with secondary contextual keywords and also across your site with very smart intro linking of content you want to show that you also went in depth on the other secondary supporting concept any other questions you were talking about making sure to look up your keywords I know I did something for a client that was doing video games and there's a video game called Street Fighter and they have these fights with powers and so one of the characters a couple of the characters have this thing they call the flaming punch where they punch somebody and your piss is a fire I was gonna optimize for that I looked up flaming punch and came up with alcohol yes that's a great example if you don't mind I might use that in future talks about what do you really think you know what the topic means but you type it into Google just to double-check and look at what the results are about sometimes you'd be surprised that flaming punch is not only a video game move it is an alcoholic version of Kool-Aid which sounds awesome but that's not what you that's a great example thank you so my question is should that affect your keyword right like you can't control somebody's search off of so should you maybe still put that you know in there as a for the people that may search off I think it you know flaming yeah so should you still use it because it does have that other meaning that's kind of case-by-case so if I see that the entirety of the Google search results are about the other topic that I'm not talking about I'll try to find a slightly different version or an additional word like flaming punch move game move or something to clarify so that when I type that in the primary keyword that I'm gonna use then the results are more on point or at least mixed with some about this and some about that because if you if you want people to find your article and you used a term where the entirety of the front page is about something else they're not going to find your article with that term they could have been searching for alcohol yes so you want to make sure you're getting the right users and that's a big part of keyword research is making sure you're going after the right target audience you don't want to some people say well I don't care if it's the right person or not I want the traffic that's not good because if you attract the wrong type of traffic for the searcher had a different intent and they bounce off of your site back to Google that's a very specific type of bounce called Pogo sticking and so because you can bounce off of a website in a lot of different ways you can just close the browser window whatnot but if you if the user bounces back to Google it's called Pogo sticking and Google can see that and it's the signal that your website did not satisfy that searcher's request and that's not good for SEO optimization you want Google to see that people are staying so it's really important on a mixed intent keyword like that that has multiple meanings to refine it and tweak it a little bit to make sure you're getting the right people so that you don't get all the alcoholic Kool-Aid searchers bouncing off your site and then you have a high bounce rate or just include the recipe for great questions comments thank you any other questions yes so the question was will this approach work with voice assisted search and the answer is yes and the questions section is usually where that's applicable because people speak in full sentence questions with voice search so rephrasing the question as closely as possible to the structure of the question is a good way to optimize for voice search any other questions everyone's really tired sure so asking about who what our services are and who we do them for and what not we do work with a lot of established nationwide companies that want to take their SEO strategies to the next level so as far as when we're engaging on services it's typically with a client like that but for smaller business and solopreneurs and entrepreneurs we do coaching and training because we understand that it's important for them to learn how to do these things themselves and so we can do private one-on-one coaching and training we're developing video courses that are kind of self-serve also we do web free webinars blog has advice and so we work with smaller companies on an education basis excellent reminder reminder reminder to get your parking ticket validated before you leave favorite slayer album oh my god I'm blanking the one with the disciple on it season to the best thank you I was an SEO brain mode I didn't have slayer mind thank you everyone