When clients ask me how Sterling Content is able to produce weekly articles that keep readers engaged and coming back for more each month, I always have the same answer:
It just takes a bit of TLC, which in terms of content, stands for tone, length, and clickability.
Tone
Tone means approachability and readability. Once a user has discovered your article via Google’s search engine, will they stay to read what you’re writing?
Google privileges writing at a certain reading level, which automatically makes it easier to understand. Have you ever good to Google link only to be lead to an article that is nearly unreadable, or filled was laughable errors? This content was likely outsourced from overseas on a dime. If junk content makes you click away, the same can be said for your potential clients, so just remember that good, readable content brings eyes to the page, generating solid leads.
Your tone is an introduction to your brand. If your articles are warm, engaging and informative, your readers will feel the same about your company.
The biggest mistake anyone can make when building a blog is to create filler articles. Because every article is targeted with keywords (more on that in the clickability section), you never know which article a user will find on the Google SERP (search engine results page) — so every post needs to be a banger.
Show your readers something about your company they should know. Answer a burning question they have. Or inform them about your industry so that they feel more comfortable because now they know they’re dealing with an expert.
The best articles will have something to say — they’ll have a mission statement (what academics call a thesis). And they’ll break down each point that gets them to that final central statement.
You are reading this article because each section is giving you information you didn’t have before in an attractive tone. We can do the same for your site. And you know you can trust our content because of our incredible portfolio of satisfied clients from Scotiabank to Audible.
Length
Longer blog posts, usually articles between 750-1500 words, have been proven to rank better on Google because a longer article is more likely to provide useful information and is likely to provide secondary sources of information such as graphs or videos. Of course, longer articles still need to be readable, which is why good SEO content breaks up paragraphs every 2 to 3 sentences.
Length isn’t only how many words an article contains. It’s also about dwell time, a fancy term that measures how long a user stays on the article’s web page. Google privileges web pages that people actually take the time to explore.
A longer article with secondary assets such as embedded videos or readable images will not only reduce the bounce rate, keeping readers from leaving, but will also improve their overall experience by giving them more than just a wall of text.
Clickability
For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and captivate your audience seem mutually exclusive, but I totally disagree.
An expert writer will be able to infuse your blog’s articles with keywords that will have Google’s algorithm eager to bring visitors your way — without sacrificing readability.
Of course, you need the right keywords positioned strategically throughout your articles, but over-using keywords severely hampers the readability of your text. In fact, an overly-high keyphrase density can be a signal to Google that you might be stuffing keywords in your text, and that can negatively affect your rankings.
This is why Search Engine Optimization is truly a science: it takes careful research and experience to know which phrases to include in an article, where to position them, and how often they can be used in any one article, or even in any one month.
The key takeaway here is that a great article must be both SEO-friendly and pleasing to read. These two goals make up the twin pillars of the Sterling Content style guide.
Researching Keywords = Better Content
If you’re trying to bring more people to your website, there’s no point in having a blog unless it is optimized for search engines. In this means keyword research. If you want to dominate the search engine results page when people enter terms or phrases adjacent to your industry, you need an expert to conduct the research that identifies exactly which buzzwords people are using. The right search engine optimized content writing company keeps up with Google’s algorithm and knows how it actually works.
The actual goal of Google is to organize all the information on the Internet. Every day hundreds of thousands of blog posts are published online, and Google needs to determine what these articles are about and to rank them depending on search terms users enter. In order to curate their user journey. But Google also acts as a database of content, which means that it groups relevant articles about the same topics together, strengthening them as a whole — based on Google relevance.
This is why a proper content curation strategy takes a few months before delivering real results. You need to publish in the articles on your website for Google to determine that you are a regular, contributing source of expertise in your industry. After several months of writing informative, intelligent, topical articles, Google privileges your website as part of its database, and naturally leads users to you.
This blog posts ranked immediately after publication, Google would be too volatile a place to reliably find the information you’re looking for. The algorithm privileges multiple informative articles written over time.
Knowing How Google Works Pays Off
Google actually puts content on hold for a period, only tagging it as relevant once it begins to appear as part of a pattern.
This holding period is often referred to as the “sandbox effect.” There’s no exact mention of this sandbox existing from Google, but it can be seen with new websites. You can’t just create a brand-new website, create SEO optimized content on it, and expect it to rank quickly. This is why you need to create content consistently, for months, until you are no longer in this sandbox and your articles start getting crawled and index quickly.
This holding period is sometimes called the sandbox effect, and you can really see how this works with brand-new websites. Making a new site and then plugging it with as much search engine optimized content as possible, expecting that site to rank quickly, is a pipe dream.
Solid content needs to come out regularly for Google to recognize it. Once it sees that your site is real, producing relevant content that people actually want to read, your articles begin to get crawled and then indexed. After six months of regular informed article writing, Google will index your articles quickly and immediately submit them into the algorithm.
This is why companies that publish on their blog only once every few months never rank.
But once Google determines that a company’s blog is producing regular, relevant content, it will begin to tag and collate your blog articles as necessary to the user journey.
At the end of the day, Google wants its users to find the right answers to their questions right away. This means that any content you create for your website needs to have the user journey in mind. This is how you use Google’s algorithm to your advantage, and drive more interest and traffic to your site.
What Google wants for its users is for them to find the right answers to their questions as soon as possible. This means you need to create content with the goal to end the search journey.
If you’d like to upgrade your blog so that Google is working for, rather than against you, get in touch with a reputable blog writing company like Sterling Content today. Together we can launch your blog into the SEO stratosphere.
