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Web Podcast - Episode 40: Writing Valuable Content for SEO

In this episode Matt talks about how you can write good quality copy for your website. Content is KING, writing copy is one thing, but writing in a way that people engage and interact with is another. Find out how.

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Hey guys and girls it's Matt from the RAZOR Web Design Wire Podcast, Episode 40 Today and we're talking about SEO. In this episode though I'm only focusing on one specific point.

Now, people say to me all the time "Umm, do I need to put my website on 50 different directories?" or "Do I need to put my keywords in there 500 times in my writing?" and the answer to that is NO YOU DON'T. Diffidently, it's good to have your site positioned and linked on other websites. For example, Google My Business, Facebook, LinkedIn - stuff like that; it's good to have those backlinks setup. However, content is just as important. There's alot of SEO companies out there that don't touch the content on the website but they sit there making backlinks all day for a site that 's got one page, it just doesn't really work that way - Hey, you know it can work but you want a sort of an effective way to get your website performing better, I diffidently believe that content is much more highly weighted than alot of other factors. So when I speak about content I'm not talking about keyword cramming - getting your website crammed with keywords, we don't want you to say what you do 500 times in a 600 word page but what I want you to do is think about 'writing valued content', good quality content that explains what you do. Now, there's only so much you can really write about your business obviously and there is and as I said in previous episodes - there is so much we want to show people directly, we don't want to cram a page up with writing because people are just gonna get overwhelmed and leave. So, we want to follow that content structure of a pyramid where we have it sort of alighted to the point up to and as we get down we build on it more so that the people do want to read more are gonna look for more and they can get more. So it's the 80-20 Rule, 80% of people just want the real basic details and the bullet points, then they wanna give you a call or send you an email and the other 20% generally want to read more so we want to cater to both sides of the spectrum.

But what I'm talking about here is more blogs, more articles, more valued content you can give away for free. Now, people always get freaked out about giving content away for free but look at it more from a point of being an expert in your field, look at it how more you can help answer people's questions, you might not be telling people exactly what you do on your website - in the way of your processing, your secrets but what I'm more talking about - writing content that helps answer common questions that they ask about. So, if I can give you an example guys, what I want you to do is I want you to go to a website called 'answerthepublic.com', and I got this website from a course I went to a few weeks ago with a guy called Dale Beaumont who's in Australian entrepreneur - very good seminar, but he told us about this website and what's cool about it is you can put a topic into it and push search and it basically gives you a list of questions that people commonly search relating to that topic, so I'm on it right now as I do this podcast, if I type in 'cleaning' as a topic (the website guys: answerthepublic.com), If I put cleaning in and I wait for the results to come up - so what you've got is some sort of like a mind map of all the different questions that people are gonna ask. So one of the question's here - there's 100 of them but one of them's "Why is cleaning necessary?", let's find another one here, "Will cleaning vinegar remove rust?". Some of them are obviously not relevant, there's probably a good quarter of or a 5th of them that aren't really relevant or abit funny but there's actually good questions, for example "Where should cleaning products be stored?".

So what I'm getting at here is if you're a cleaner which you probably aren't but if you're a cleaner you need to setup on your website a sort of directory of commonly asked questions and explain the answer to each question in as much detail as you can. Now some of them are gonna be hard to explain in more than a few paragraphs but some of them you can probably get quite deep into and what I want you to do is basically answer that question and write the page title of the name of the page in the format that that question's asked because when we Google and you can probably relate to this, when we Google something we put "How can I do this? or "Will this happen if I do this? or "Where can I find this?" or "What should I do with this?", we don't name the page for example, something generic like 'Vinegar Rust Affects'. We would be better to write it how a human would search it or say in which would be "Will Cleaning With Vinegar Fix Rust?" or whatever I said before - if you get what I'm meaning? So we want to write it in the sense that how someone would search it on the internet and then we want to answer the question and give the page the title of that question so as soon as someone lands on the page, bang! - That question that they've searched for is most likely what your page is relating to so they can go "Cool, I'm on the right page!" and they can start reading.

Again we want to follow that structure, we want bullet points, it could even be a summary of this article, then you can go into detail and talk about it more. Now most people aren't really gonna read the article or they're gonna really skim through it but the more important part about it is when they've sort of found the answer they go "Great" but subconsciously your company, your brand's in the background there giving them that information and if it's a topic that they're quite interested in finding out more about, they might go and look at your other articles or they might even go and look at your pricing page or your services page and they might go "Heck, I can't be bothered doing this, I'm gonna get these guys to do it, they've given me the answer to what I need, cool." "I'll flick them an email and I'll tell them I've got a rusty car and I need it cleaned with vinegar." I don't know if that works or not but you know what I mean. So that's what we're wanting to achieve here, we're wanting to give people valuable information and Google likes sites that give valuable information. They don't like websites that just have list of certain services and a contact page and that's it, you need to give up as much information as you can. Anyway guys that is 'answerthepublic.com', I strongly suggest - just check it out quickly, then if you sort of loving what I'm talking about here, set a weekly task on your phone, a weekly reminder that pops up and nut out a question each week even. After a year that's 52 articles you have written and that will diffidently have benefit to your website's ranking - I would be quite sure of.

Anyway guys that's Matt from the RAZOR Web Design Wire Podcast and join us again next time, Thank you.