Writing Web Articles for Content Development
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Writing Web Articles for Content Development
Many of my clients need more traffic on their websites. Understand that traffic does not necessarily equal search engine optimization. For more on that, see The Problem with Chasing Google and understand that the difference here is that we're looking to be of real use to real people, not to actually boost our rankings on Google or any other search engine.
So the main purpose here is to have articles on our website, to email/facebook/tweet our fans, friends and family, and hope that they're so interesting, educational, useful and usable that people can't help but share them. If they're shared, Google will notice, and the ranks will rise.
Why articles?
Short & sweet articles are great -- and come in many flavors: dos & don'ts, # Ways To..., anecdotes/stories/humor, general beginner articles, defining terms, etc. If you can make it actionable in the headline, you're more likely to get a click through. I'll give some examples below.
The things is when people are searching on the web, they may not be ready to buy. We mainly use search as a method of investigating. We may eventually buy something, but we usually want to know more about it first. If you give honest information without being preachy, you may be the lucky person who gets the sale. Also, the more clicks, the higher your whole website will be regarded by the search engines, as long as it fits the topic in question.
What to write about
As an example, I'll use my http://LiberatedLifeCoaching.com website and my stress-coaching business. I go to the Google keyword analysis tool (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner). I know I just said pretty much ignore search engines, but we can tap into the data of "what are people really searching on?" to hone word choices in our articles, especially our title. We don't need to "keyword load" by repeating these words over and over throughout the page -- but it helps to be able to peek into our potential customer's heads and see what language they are using.
Search on "Stress"
I know that the right word is "distress" but who would search on "distress"? So I want to see what people think about "Stress" -- what sends them to the search engines?
Stress (as of today) has "Low" competition, 9 MILLION global monthly searches, 3 MILLION local monthly searches. That's a lot, but way too much to give me the information I need. A check on the search engines: 398 MILLION results. Toooooo much. Move on:
Also too much competition on: "how to de stress", "what is stress". The lowest term that comes up is in the 2 million/month category. I have to get more specific. Try to stay as broad as possible, when possible.
Search on "Stress women"
My target market is usually women. Let's see if this helps. Low competition, 27K global, 14K local. It's still a lot to compete with, but much more manageable than 9 million. 298 Million articles though, and NO ads (if I wanted to pay for ads on the category).
But when I scroll through suggested terms, there are many more useful terms coming up: Ones that may suggest articles. They're in the 200K global/90-100K local rankings -- still a lot of articles to climb over to get on the first page, but easier than "Stress". Here are some suggested results that suggest articles:
- what is stress relief
- relief from stress
- relief for stress
- how to relief from stress
- how can we relieve stress
- how can I relieve stress
- how to relieve stress
Obviously "stress relief" and "relieve stress" are hot terms. I should use those in articles, maybe even directly using the above search terms to help write an article.
Good article titles
The article titles that will get the most attention will have titles that are direct to the point -- nothing cute -- and promise learning/tools: i.e. 10 Ways to Improve X. How to Y. 3 Steps to Z.
Here are articles I could write next:
- 10 Ways to get Relief From Stress
- Relief for Stress is a Breath Away
- 3 Steps to Relieve Stress
I'd have to tweak these titles so that they're not redundant -- and of course spend more time with the search engine tool digging up possible article titles and topics.
Easy-to-Edit™ customers should also see the examples for how to add a pagelist to your website for how to create an article index and add their article index to their website.
If you need help with this, please don't hesitate to contact us.
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