> The main issue was that the writers weren’t SEO specialists: they knew how to write good content, but good content is NOT always the same as SEO content.
> The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword. Then, you create content based on that intent.
Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a search engine crawler...
Yes, but interestingly (to me, at least), Google have modified their search engine crawler over many, many iterations so that what it values is the same as what a user would value.
When people would keyword stuff, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working.
When people would work on backlink farms, Google developed techniques to spot that and stop it from working.
When price comparison search engines were all the rage, Google realised that if the "purchase" button led off-site, that was a marker that an intermediary was pushing the price up through affiliate schemes, so started to push those down in the rankings.
So now, the best way to create content for SEO is to think about what your ideal user would really want, because the two now align quite closely.
Opinion pieces, narratives, etc. all might make sense for regular readers but when a searcher is looking for something it's typically to get a job done, so Google ranks content that helps them get the job done.
Title: How to poach an egg that's easy for everyone
Content:
Are you looking for a way to poach an egg? We have found the easiest recipes for poached eggs anywhere and compiled them for you here. Don't worry, if you want the cleanest, mess-free way to simply poach an egg, this is how to poach an egg.
## Why would you want to poach an egg?
Poaching eggs is a delicious way to prepare eggs. You can poach eggs for breakfast, you can put poached eggs on toast, or make poached eggs for eggs benedicts. There are many simple and easy recipes for poached eggs.
etc. etc. etc.
with the actual instructions/recipes at the bottom.
This is particularly bad in the food/recipe space. I've wondered if it's for SEO or if it's to stretch the content length of a short recipe and allow more spots for ads.
Always heard it may have something to do with copyright. You can't copyright a recipe (in the list of instructions sense), but you can copyright original prose/content.
Adding this stuff presumably makes it trickier for other sites to scrape/copy the recipe automatically, and lets them take down those who left the 'original' content in.
Alternatively, might be because of stuff like Yoast. Those tools have a 'readability checker' which might not class a simple list of instructions as 'easily readable'.
> When price comparison search engines were all the rage, Google realised that if the "purchase" button led off-site, that was a marker that an intermediary was pushing the price up through affiliate schemes, so started to push those down in the rankings.
This hasn't gone away at all. Do a search for any "best X" and you'll find a slew of review websites for the best X which are stutfed with Amazon affiliate links.
It's virtually imoossible to find reviews of household items that are trustworthy. I've resorted to appending things like "reddit" and looking on eg /r/buyitforlife.
You kind of describe the reason I can’t get rid of Google.
Many people keep saying that DuckDuckGo is good enough. But no matter how hard I try use it for everything, always end up googling a few questions. Many times, Google knows what I’m looking for better than myself.
DuckDuckGo will let you prefix any query with "!g" and redirect that query to Google.
That was the feature that let me switch everything over to DDG. DDG works great for 80-85% of my search queries. For the others, I just prefix with "!g" because I suspect Google will give me better results.
As a content strategist, I always advise my clients to pursue a hybrid approach. Some posts have to be purely SEO focused with heavily optimized content. Some should be focused on driving social shares. And some should simply talk to people like regular human beings, not search engine crawlers.
Even with minimal backlinking, this strategy has helped grow traffic from 10k to 250k
Agreed! For the most part, anyway. If you can create content that 1) can go viral or get a ton of shares, and 2) at the same time, be created with a specific keyword in mind, you'll get amazing results real fast.
Unfortunately, that's not really something you can do for a lot of industries or niches. But when it does work, it works!
1. How to Choose the Right Project Management Software
This is keyword focused - "project management software". Our only objective with this article is to rank for this keyword while also sharing useful advice for search users on how to go about choosing a project management tool.
2. 25 Project Management Experts Share Their Favorite PM Tips
This is (mostly) social sharing focused. If you were to ask 25 project management experts to share their tips, then tag their Twitter/Instagram/LinkedIn handles, there is a good chance a few of them at least will share it with their followers, thus driving shares.
3. How Project Management Can Help Small Startups Scale Faster
This doesn't focus on any specific keyword. Rather, it simply talks to startup founders about using project management principles.
This is a very rudimentary example but I hope you get the idea
>Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a search engine crawler...
So true. I recently had a tree company contact me about their poor results in Google and the amount they were paying a marketing company who were doing videos and other monthly content for them, but nothing was moving the needle.
The amount of content on a given subject is also just as powerful with Google as the type of content you're putting on your site. I had a professional writer put together a half dozen pages on a single topic, then put those in a bullet list on the front page in a sort of blog-like structure without actually calling it a "blog" or "journal" or "news" section. Just informative articles, all on the same subject running a few paragraphs, optimized for SEO.
Within a month, traffic had spiked (doubled and then some once all the pages were indexed) and the amount of leads coming off the site increased dramatically. it was obvious Google was giving precedent to our site because we had more "relevant" material on this particular subject (tree trimming) than their competitors.
It just reinforced the idea that content is still king.
I keep in mind when seeing these statements that the entire SEO industry is built around convincing people web developers shouldn't develop websites (it can't rank without an SEO expert), mechanics shouldn't write guides on cars (an SEO is better qualified) and so on. The fact half the SEO guides out there either contradict Google's advice, or rate most top search sites horribly should also be considered.
I'm not saying there's no truth in this do consider it critically.
> I keep in mind when seeing these statements that the entire SEO industry is built around convincing people web developers shouldn't develop websites
Can you point to an example of this? SEO doesn't matter at all for devs working on web applications like Salesforce or TurboTax; they are their own walled garden. For devs that work on the CMSs of "content" sites like NYT, Buzzfeed etc, the only technical recommendation an SEO would offer would be to:
- adhere to principles of web accessibility
- HTTPS site wide
- implement caching, load assets via CDN, use srcset for images to improve site speed
- use semantic HTML (<footer>, <article>, etc, not just <div id="footer">)
- a logical URL structure (/articles/economy/us-gdp-Q4-2019) and information architecture
These are things that most devs already know they should implement.
The bulk of SEO work is organizing existing content so they perform better on search. This could mean rearranging the IA, consolidating content into a longer-form "guide" that can be backlinked on another site and evaluating if content is using the keywords that people search for.
None of those tasks require developers, as the functionality is usually available as an option in the CMS.
I completely agree you provided a list of things Devs should know already. My point is that it's the exact same list of stuff that has shown up every single SEO sales pitch I have ever seen.
I think you're missing the point. They're creating content to answer questions that someone is searching for. If you're creating content for "cat adoption", the likely intent of the search is to learn more about the process of adopting cats. You're not answering a question if you create content around how great it is to adopt cats. You're more likely to answer the question by writing about the process of adopting cats.
Actually working in the same area (enterprise SEO for huge brands) a lot of page copy is written in shall we say a very poetic and abstract style.
Instead of actually being written for the user - which is the point here, its almost like the English grads would rather be publishing a small book of limpid poetry
That's not the case, actually. Your content should be based on the intent of the search. For example, if someone's Googling "how to improve a process," they're looking for practical advice on improving processes. They're NOT looking for "benefits of process improvement," "why you should improve your processes," etc.
Sure, you can write the BEST article on one of these topics, but it's not going to rank because that's not actually what the user is looking for. Hope that makes sense :)
Edit: and the above is a very common writer mistake. They write interesting content, but it's just not that relevant as a search result.
Some of the best content isn't searched for by anyone at all before it was written, though. In the extreme case, consider the Harry Potter series—fantastic content, but it would have been horrible SEO content when it was written.
True, but in most cases, you won't write Harry Potter - you just want to drive leads from people searching for process management solutions, haha.
What you did mention IS an actual strategy though. The idea is, you coin a new term or strategy, and if you PR the content enough, the term will have a ton of searches (and you'll rank #1). More often than not, though, you have to be a big fish to really pull this off
Fiction sites typically use additional descriptions (story categories, genre, etc.), words that don’t appear in the story, to help it rank. This happens independently of the creative writing process.
What a terrible analogy. SEO content is written to market the site the best you can on search engines, obviously you want to write what people are looking to meet their needs for and its easy to do this with Google. It's very different purpose from writing a good book or writing good journalism.
If you were at the mall and picked up a pamphlet about say, philosophy from someone handing them out at the food court, would you complain that it didn't have the same depth as something you'd find at a bookstore?
We've accustomed ourselves to believing that collections of words should be free if they're on the Internet, when that has almost never been true in the real world.
SEO used to be about how to better use html tags on your sht to rank higher.
Now is about the human factor, which is good ;-).
So this is what works now:
- What your customers want? customer not sure?: Market positioning (sale will follow later)
-> Explain it and introduce your product in the explanation.
-> Write content to _educate_ your customers and add a call to action later.
- What your customers are looking for right now?
-> Write content to make your customers fix* their problem using your product.
-> Write content to make your customers fix their problem using any product, then show how easy is to use yours.
For the short sentences and paragraphs thing, I think it's about readability more than anything. People tend to scan content when they read online, not go through word by word, and it's probably easier to do that with short sentences and paragraphs.
It's also likely in part down to them optimising for readability tests. Stuff like Yoast grades your content based on the results of a Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which marks it as easier to read if there are less words and syllables per sentence, with the recommended score being roughly equivalent to a grade 8 reading level. Hence these SEO writers are basically writing for 13-14 year olds.
I think it's called direct response copywriting and mimics a more conversational style.
I know, you wanted to make a negative example and yes, this writing style gets old pretty fast. However, for a moment it works surprisingly well. And in a way the value you provide with that style is that the point you want to get across sticks better somehow.
Keep in mind that this is posted on the site of an organization that provides SEO services.
In my experience, the SEO game is a waste of time if you are looking for long-term traffic. Not that it doesn't work in the short-term - it does. And there are good practices in how to structure your pages, and making sure they perform well on multiple devices.
But all of my personal and work-related sites have gotten their long-term traffic by delivering a good product, and having our customers speak well of us. Then people search for us, and when they find and go to our page, our rankings go up. You end up in a positive feedback loop due to the quality of your content and your product.
Your last paragraph doesn't negate the value of SEO. IMO you still need good product / good content / some reason for people to visit your site for long-term success, but if 10 others have an offering (of any quality) in the same category & they all make at least some attempt to optimise their websites, how is anyone going to find your site at the top of page 2?
Yep, a good product / service and happy customers can take you a looooong way. If your product sucks, no traffic in the world is going to make it work.
But that doesn't mean that SEO is useless. We might be biased, but there are a ton of benefits - traffic, leads, brand awareness, etc.
there is a minimum basket of SEO optimizations that are worth keeping track of and are 'natural', like proper site hierarchy, meta tagging, linking out to connected social accounts, the rest of the time is better spent on what the site is actually about.
Ironically, I'm based in St. Louis, looking for business automation software for my company based in St. Louis and the only reason I know Tallyfy exists is because of this HN article.
Small nitpick but title says 0 to 200k, and 3 paragrafs down from the headline it says ~8.000 to 200.000:
> which is why we created this guide - a complete step-by-step SEO case study on how we took Tallyfy, a SaaS process management software, from ~8,000 monthly traffic to about 200,000 in less than 2 years.
I imagine there is a big difference between starting from 0 and from an already established baseline.
From the little experience I have of this domain for me SEO still was all mostly about building backlinks, not your shitty $5 links but making something to which people want to link to naturally.
One of my sites was mentioned on Techcrunch which led to lot of other blogs linking to it and within 2 or 3 months we were dominating the first page of Google (happened around 2010 so a lot must have changed too). So yeah getting big sites to link to you is the 80% part. The rest of the SEO stuff like tags, etc is probably the 20%.
I do SEO work for a large (DJIA component) tech company, so I'm pretty far removed from startup-land, but I'll still share the number one piece of advice I give out internally:
Write high-quality content about topics that people are searching for.
Simple? Yes. But it still seems so hard to get people to do it. Everyone would rather talk about page load time and HTML markup and structure and meta tags and exactly how many characters their headline or URL should be. Yes, you should make common-sense decisions about those things. But no amount of technical optimization is going to make people start Googling something that they couldn't care less about to begin with. Find out where demand exists for answering questions, and give the user a good experience as you answer those questions, and the search traffic will follow.
Absolutely. SEO is content & links. Good (valuable to the searcher) content earns links (over time), low quality content needs various tactics of increasing dodginess to gain links.
Writing good content is hard. If a writer could do it, they are rarely going to be writing it to sell. So gaming the system and writing average content (much easier to produce) and gaming the system is the best way to go.
Here are some notes I made when I worked for a company that did very well in SEO. This was a few years ago now, so this might be horribly out of date now.
Hygiene factors
- Never expose an error page to Google.
- Never expose an empty page.
- Make sure all content is visible on first page load (e.g. not behind pop ups).
- Show the same content to Google as to users.
- Make sure all relevant content is in the HTML (not loaded dynamically).
- Make sure page load times are good.
Keywords
- Research keywords you need to match.
- Build database of search terms you wish to match, grow and improve this database over time.
- Carefully curate pages, their URLs and metatags to match these keywords.
- Use this database to choose which pages to expose to Google and make sure that all links and pages have the correct follow/nofollow attribute.
- Steadily grow the content you expose to Google over time, keeping the quantity and quality of content on pages exposed to Google high.
Site structure and internal links
- Organise your site in a shallow tree structure. Top level pages should have many links to lower level pages.
- All levels of the tree should have keyword rich content which is useful to users.
- Not every level of the tree needs to be visible in the Google search results, it is mostly to make things easy for the crawler.
External links
- Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site.
- Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter.
- Do not generate fake backlinks, if Google thinks you are doing this they will give you a severe penalty.
Submit your sitemap
- Submit your sitemap in Google webmaster tools and make sure it is kept up to date at least weekly.
Bounce rate
- Carefully monitor your bounce rate and time on site for users coming from Google as these are key factors in Google rankings.
Click through rate
- Use descriptive and relevant titles and metatags to improve the click through rate from the Google search results to your site.
- PR, social media, advertising and other channels can improve brand awareness that in turn improves click through rate.
- Regularly check a selection of searches that you rank on to assess the quality of your Google search listings.
Most of these are still current SEO practice, however:
> Use PR and social media to generate good backlinks for your site. - Use social media like reddit, pinterest and others as well as facebook and twitter. -
FB, Twitter and Reddit may not mark external links as "nofollow" explictly (which would kill their backlink value), but searc engines are smart enough to reduce the power of these links as these are "user-generated content" links and are less valuable as they're not authored by the "site owner" in the way a blog post or web page would be.
The impact of these links on social isn't zero, but it's not great either. You're better off trying to get qualified, organic traffic to your site (say from a backlink on a related site or from an email newsletter) as those clicks will likely have a lower bounce rate, which is good for SEO.
Yep, the impact of social links is pretty low on their own. You do, however, get these 2 benefits:
- If your content gets a ton of views, people will start Googling for it and clicking your result, specifically. This will increase your CTR, which is a known ranking factor.
- People who LOVE your content on Reddit or wherever will link to your website from their blog (hence, more backlinks).
I'll never forget the SEO consultant who, when I told him I wanted to focus on CTR, told me it was not a factor in ranking. This was many years ago, but it was obvious Google would use it, and it should have been obvious to him too.
From personal experience: Yes, correct markup and h1 tags etc (“On-Page SEO“) all matter. Set everything up correctly, that should take your frontend dev a couple days at most for a small to medium site. But that will do almost nothing unless it’s coupled with loads of backlinks. Get a tool like ahrefs or semrush (they’re expensive because they’re good, but a one-week trial is enough to take a look around in the beginning). There you can then see how many backlinks your competitors have and track your own rankings. Concentrate on 1-2 keywords in the beginning and fill your site with well-written content for those keywords, interlink everything on your own site, and then go get backlinks. Yes, you can buy backlinks on Fiver, but those are terrible and will probably do more harm than good. Make something good and get people to write about it.
Complete speculation: They make their money by assessing back-links. So they crawl as many websites as possible, as often as possible, to establish some kind of view of who is linking to what. From that, they extrapolate some kind of popularity score, which they can probably correlate with keywords and types of users and searches.
That is what they sell back to users, presumably. I am actually quite interested to see how clear their data / recommendations would be, but haven't had the time to do so yet.
> I am actually quite interested to see how clear their data / recommendations would be, but haven't had the time to do so yet.
I have tried both, and while ahrefs probably has a better dataset, semrush does very specific recommendations when it comes to link building for example. They will suggest what sites to contact to ask for backlinks (something I have not yet tried, because other people email me all the time asking for backlinks or guest posts so I know how annoying it is).
Basically what the other commenters said, they scan the entire web to find out who links to whom and how many backlinks each site has.
One thing you can do is stop them from scanning your site with robots.txt – some SEO people recommend this to prevent your competitors from finding out where you got your backlinks from, but I haven’t tried it.
There's an arms race in the SEO tools market, to have the largest / most frequently updated / most accurate backlinks database. Ahrefs have used the claim that their bot is the most active (apart from Googlebot) in their marketing.
Create content relevant to what your startup does. Answer relevant questions that real people search for. You can do some keyword research and use tools such as Autocomplete and People Also Ask to get some questions to start with.
Answer these questions the best you can. In-depth, clear, easy to understand. Make it informative, make it educational, make it look nice. The focus is on providing the best value possible to the person who is asking the question.
Review the posts that currently rank on the first page of Google for these searches. What topics do they talk about? What issues do they solve? And then try to create something that's better, more practical, easier to understand, presented in a better way... than what you've found on the first page.
It will take some time and effort of regularly posting quality articles before you start seeing the results but this is a more trusted and more self-sustainable way of driving traffic and leads to your startup.
It's not free even if you put in just your time. In a startup, everything competes for your time. You could spend it on your product or other growth channels.
Forget an overarching strategy. You don't have the bandwidth for it as a small startup.
As a start, just find 3-5 core keywords that aren't insanely competitive. Write the best possible content you can on these keywords. Promote them like hell - guest posts, forums, heck even HN. Don't just look for links; get actual people to read your content.
This alone can move the needle for small startups. A trickle of high quality leads can give you the confidence to invest more in content and SEO
You can only control your own content while following Google guidelines, so state-of-the-art, world class content will however & pretty always be your best shot?
Felt very meta reading this article about SEO while the article itself was employing all the SEO strategies - backlinks, infoboxes, etc :P
It was great that the company had already started its SEO pipeline, but what about for companies with no strategy at all? Are there any good tools to help decide which keywords to focus on?
yeah, haha. It's super meta - we're trying to get this article to rank on "SEO case study." It will probably take a while since the domain is pretty new, but we'll get there.
As for which keywords to focus on, our rule of thumb is, find one of your competitors that's winning with their SEO, and borrow their ideas. In most industries, if you combine the keywords from your top 3-5 competitors, your keyword strategy is gonna be pretty comprehensive. As for the "how," just run your competitor's website through SEMrush or Ahrefs, and voila!
SEO is not only content there are other factors such as performance, accessibility and structure. Looking at a lighthouse audit on the landing page (https://tallyfy.com/) it looks like there can be a lot of improvement there.
Worth noting also that "ApolloDigital" cofounder and writer of the article is also the Head of Content & SEO for "Tallyfy". So not sure that constitutes as a client, nor take full ownership of this growth. Not saying they couldn't do it, but seems misleading.
Nice post! I would add "per month" to the original headline as "200k per month" sounds much more impressive than "200k in 2 years" which the current headline says.
Would be great to see how this translates into actual $ for the business. Is this mentioned somewhere else? The high CPCs indicate that there IS some value. But in general some people/businesses can make a living with an audience of 100 and others not with an audience of 100k.
That's super situational and really depends on the keyword you rank on. Can't give you the numbers, but yeah, the high CPC keywords are usually the bread-winners.
Are they really trying to say that SEO was the sole reason that the organic traffic grew so much? That is ludicrous. It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the service itself grew in popularity, or relevancy, or reputation, etc.?
I'm convinced SEO is modern-day snake oil. If you have a useful website/service with well-written content then the traffic will come to you. The idea of trying to "SEO" a useless/poorly-built website is like an obese person taking herbal pills because the bottle says they help weight loss.
Most of the organic traffic is content SEO, yes. Around ~2k of monthly searches is branded search (people looking for the company). And, well, it IS pretty reasonable - the company IS ranking for most BPM / workflow keywords.
I do get why you'd think SEO is snake oil. Yeah, useful website, service + good content is the way to go. You can't just "SEO" a mediocre website and expect anything to happen.
It's very easy to know how people came to your site. If they came from a Google search, you can track that and use that data to validate if SEO is working or not.
I hate any SEO case study and companies that want to make it happen for you.
Just write content that help people and solve people problem.
Have you seen how Digital Ocean has lots of useful tutorials and articles, they get tons of visits and lost of customers and exposures, they solve people problem.
How about StackOverflow ? is the content written with SEO in mind ? No, they solve people problem, problem that people seek an answer for;
You are using 2 examples that couldn't be more different.
Digital Ocean's tutorials are often written by third party contributors, not DO staff. Those third parties are doing their own SEO by linking to their own websites, if you haven't noticed. It's a win-win for both DO and the writers.
Having set up a few DO droplets, I'll say that the documentation around their own services is less than great, and I often find myself Googling how to do this or that in DO and finding help on third party sites.
StackOverflow is like Facebook or Reddit; it's all user-generated content. SO staff don't contribute besides moderating the discussions. SO does well on SEO because it's been around for a long time, and the content is set up in a question and answer form, which is tailor made for search engines.
Traffic is of course nice but in the end not the goal, just a tool. Traffic by itself even increases costs.
In the end, you usually want to have customers, not traffic.
To be even more precise, you want HAPPY customers, because then they will remain customers and also bring new ones.
That means you still need good content and a good product more than a lot of traffic.
Does anyone know why the screenshot of a keyword spreadsheet is all about prescription drugs? It doesn't seem to match the business described. Could they have uploaded the wrong image?
> The main difference between SEO content and generic content is that the first is written with user search intent in mind. You need to keep in mind what the Googler is looking for when they search for any given keyword. Then, you create content based on that intent.
Isn't it sad that nowadays you don't create content for the users but for a search engine crawler...