2016·06·29 · 22:47
Marieke van de Rakt & Joost de Valk: Beyond SEO – Copywriting for professionals
Marieke and I make the case that good content and good SEO are not in conflict, but that focusing too narrowly on SEO copywriting is its own trap. I explain why Google’s mission, to organize all the world’s information and make it accessible, tells you exactly what you need to do: create content that is genuinely useful and clear. Marieke covers the writing side in depth, and together we walk through what it looks like to produce something that ranks well and that readers actually want to read.
0:21 well thank you all for postponing your beer and sitting down for us very happy to have you here well this is us but we've talked about that um we have slides there's quite a bit of content on some of them if you want to follow along dare dare if you want to get them later that's fine too I want to talk about a bit about what we're doing here you've seen the purple shirts and dresses there's 14 of us around here there's now
0:54 45 people working i do switch frightens dirt out of me because well it only five years ago was just me luckily my wife was always with me and so I'm very happy to present be presenting alongside er I've taken some pictures you've seen the EOS Lego things if you haven't you should and then there's this slide oh yes usually doesn't do this but I'm stuff when I have the opportunity to
1:26 talk in front of an audience of the thousands people I'm going to show off the thing I'm most proud of so these are our children and their fans host the SEO plugin was a great achievement but I think these are your best achievement yet so today I could fill up the whole talk talking about my children but I think you're not here to to hear me
1:57 talking about them so we're going to talk about SEO copywriting so Yost's main focus and expertise always has been on SEO and mine was on writing and about two and a half years ago I joined the company and well we started getting going on the importance of writing for SEO and I think what we are presenting today's actually been the result of two and a half years of work so yours is first going to explain why SEO copywriting or copy writing in general
2:30 is important for SEO well let's start with Google of course SEO focuses on all the search engines in the world and there are seem to be more search engines than Google but especially in Europe I think we can say that search is google and google has a mission that is quite daunting but also tells us a lot about what they want to do their mission is to organize the world's information make it universally accessible and useful which is quite a
3:01 bit it's not just all the information on the web it's all the world's information which is why you see them doing all these other things scanning entire libraries you see them work on things like Google Maps where if you have a phone number on a wall somewhere and the Google Maps car comes by and scans that thing a few days later you'll actually be able to search for that phone number in google maps and it will show you where it is on the wall google is
3:34 getting frightening any good at indexing everything now what we try to do is we try to improve a website's position in the 3or organic results those are the results that you see be healed below those free or for ads and it's actually shocking sometimes how far down the organic results are now these days but for quite a few terms you can still get an enormous amount of traffic by
4:06 optimizing for SEO and we've always been one of the companies telling you to do SEO in a way that we don't promote what we call scorched earth tactics we won't be telling you to buy links we won't be telling you to optimize your site in ridiculous ways that are not useful for the user why not well because we prefer sustainable SEO we prefer to build up your site in such a way that it will still be there and will still be ranking in two or three years from now and not
4:38 be gone entirely we've seen a lot of people do it the other way around we actually help people every once in a while that come to us for review because they've burnt themselves hard and it's usually quite a bit work to get them back and not always even really possible to get them back if they've done really stupid things so we try to do SEO in a way that's sustainable and works in the long run we try to do that by focusing not just on some technical things but focusing on
5:09 all the aspects of website optimization we believe that you have to be the best result in order to be number one this means that you have to think about a concept that we call holistic SEO holistic meaning all encompassing everything is SEO or SEO isn't everything else so small things like technical excellence which is of course fairly easy of you're using WordPress we with the occo tries to do the remaining things that WordPress doesn't do well
5:41 enough we try to do in yo socio so do we take all the technical stuff away from you because it's not thing something that a normal user should be thinking about we need you to have flawless security and that means a tiny bit more than just installing a security plugin but at the same time it's also something that we are very aware of that it's not our main focus so do talk to the guys that Sue curry or someone else that is really good at work for us security and make sure that your site is secure because everything we talked about today
6:13 doesn't really help you if you just start gets hacked we need to have good UX and UI who if you were in here for a maths session and who have you heard Miley from google ask a question that was actually very shocking to me saying we said we still see twenty eight percent of new sites coming online and not being mobile friendly I seriously can't understand how in 2016 that still
6:44 happens if you have sites or you're building sites and they're not mobile friendly they're not working on any device then you're doing it wrong you need to have awesome PR and social which means that you have to tell people about what you're doing because you could be building the most awesome thing in the world but if you're not telling people about that awesome thing they will never get there if you build it they will come is something that in the valley people have been shouting for
7:15 quite a bit and now all of these people are hiring growth marketers which is just a glorified term for hiring good SEO s if you look at all the growth hackers in the world that are famous now and you look at their background almost all of them are SEOs by background there's a reason to that you need to talk about these things marketing and PR are very important but I hear you're thinking we were going to talk about copywriting right well we will because with all of these things they all work
7:48 in in tandem but if your content is shitty then they're also absolutely no use so we need quality content now there are more reasons why you need quality content now we're not there yet you have to tell them something else what do I have to tell you have to tell them why quality condoms is important for SEO so you've talked about holistic SEO yes befall don't know that ok so this happens all the time yeah it's my wife telling me that I'm doing things wrong
8:20 which is probably why we have a plug-in and a company that actually works because I just go off and talk and then I forget what I so quality content isn't like it quality content is important for SEO for one simple reason if Google can understand all that then quality content means that Google can understand your site and it really goes to the extent of
8:53 what does Google do with text what does why doesn't this work anymore I was too quick wasn't I you know a screen I sorry so I'm in the past who here is done keyword stuffing at some point who is maintained a site and stuffed keywords into pages come on there's more of you I we all know this used to work and we all know that this doesn't work anymore why is that well it's fairly simple Google has gotten better at actually
9:27 understanding your text a year ago they released hummingbird I think it's about two years ago actually they released hummingbird in which they said hey we can understand your queries better they can understand if you search for the world's best SEO plugin they'll actually search for best SEO plugin and they know they have to ignore the word world because that is not really that important to that query so they truly
9:59 understand your text if they can do that to your queries they can do that to your content too so they can understand what you're talking about a lot better than most people are used to and they're not thinking purely about keywords anymore they're thinking about content and about topics in a far more overarching way than most people realize and now we get your white quality content is also important that's true so yes already told why it's important for SEO but quality content has always been
10:31 important just because of another bunch of reasons and the first one is that people will understand your message so every article or piece of text you rides and put on your site has a message something you want people to remember or to do after they read your article so it could be that you're just explaining your shipping process and the explanation is the message you want to let them come through if an article is really poorly written then this message won't come through so people won't understand what you're talking about if
11:03 you don't write a nice text very important most important things second one and this actually has a lot to do with SEO is that high quality content will rule will result in a lower bounce rate so people come in from your to your sides from google and then they look at a piece of text and when this crappy day will go away and when it's good today we'll stay at your sides and read your article may be by your stuff if they go away instantly this will be shot in the lower bounce rate and eventually your ranking will go
11:36 down so very Empire bounce rate oh sorry no I get always nice to ever hear yes okay third reason is that high quality content leads to more trust if your articles are well-written you will come across as more legit and professional than when you have lots of typos and lots of mistakes in your grammar and its really poorly everything so very important to have more trust if your article is of better quality and the
12:08 last reason why high quality content is important is that it will gain more attention on social media so for me to post something on my facebook timeline then i have to like and understand the message and i should like it enough to send it to all of my friends right and if if an article is really poorly written I don't do that and you won't do that either so it's very important and more attention in social media eventually leads to higher ranking as
12:40 well so we knew all this and then we thought what I do you think no we thought okay so how do you write quality content what is quality content what is well readable content this is where we started to do research this is also where I get to put a colleague who's sitting in front here instead Irene who we hire to do a lot of research into this Irene is a linguist and we together with marika she did a lot of research into okay so what makes a text readable
13:14 and what are things in readable text that we can actually in a programmatic way do to help you write better text there's a whole story to that but we've actually brought a magazine with you and we will tell you to read that because otherwise we will never get to our desert Jocelyn there too up yeah I come grab it at our brief it's free and if you'll like it enough we might even make it a quarterly which I have been told it's only funny for those of us in the WordPress community long
13:47 enough I don't get that good but there's a lot to know their it what is really important to know is that we've done quite intensive research and it take okay what is it that really makes a text readable I'll leave it up to Marika to tell that because I can actually write breedable tax are you can now yeah so we have four things that you should be focusing on if you want to write readable nice free text and the first one is to focus on your structure so before you start writing I would advise you to think about what it is you want
14:19 to tell your audience and to think about what are you going to tell them and in what order so make kind of sort of a skeleton of your texts that structure is really important for people to grasp the message of your text and probably also important for Google to grasp the message of your text and to think about how they are going to do those rankings so really important is clear paragraph a paragraph should have one idea not to
14:51 one and I think that for that you should start each paragraph with one core sentence the sentence that really covers the topic that you're addressing in death paragraph and why is that well if people are scanning a text and they will come across a wide space they will read the first sentence after the white space if that sentence is really the most important centers of your paragraph people easily grasp the structure of your text and you would want that because it's hard reading from screen so
15:23 one core centers are not a few sentences to elaborate on your point right don't write paragraphs that are too long but don't add random white space just because it looks nice we had a colleague I won't mention his name q But and it just was like yeah everything like four or five sentences and I need a white space yeah don't either you are making your paragraph too long because two ideas and then you
15:54 shoot a separate Fergus for them or you should do something else but not randomly you should think about that he never does it anymore so a noose transition words which well it's something that my son was I don't know what's what the equivalent of hoop says in Holland for euro gorgeous but he's 10 and he's learning about these words in Dutch and he says well if I come across such a word I know what is coming yes readers know what is coming if you use these words so if you are enumerated use
16:25 words to help people understand oh there's something coming something else so first of all also another will help people to grasp the structure of your text movie so use these kinds of words use clear headings that these are important for SEO as well so you should put your the worse you want to be found on in these headings because these words are probably also the topic of your text or you're doing is wrong and then make sure that the paragraph that comes after
16:57 a heading is well is summarized in that heading headings are also the thing that that readers need to grasp the structure of your text make sure your text is easy to read you could have a blog for PhDs only and then you can write like really difficult texts or really you could do that but most of us will have a general audience well perhaps most of you will have a development audience but that's another story but if you have a general
17:30 audience use short sentences and simple words so make your sentences about 20 words per sentence that's about the amount of words people can can keep in there in the short term memory and getting lots of sentences longer than 20 words makes it's really hard use simple words that means words with less than three syllables keep your audience in mind the fella like under less than four what less than four student the syllables that you've made it very hard for yourself with that
18:03 equal or less then I don't understand I cannot pronounce the word syllables either it's hard so make sure it's easy to read and make sure your Texas nice to read that's a hard one because style is something that some people have and others well just lack but oh you could do some things avoid passive voice passive voice is when the object of an answer no sorry the subject of your sentence isn't in the sentence so this
18:34 product can be bought in our webshop it's not clear who or what is doing anything and that's results in very distant writing so it doesn't appeal to 2d to your audience becomes very distant and weird a better alternative would be to say customers can buy this product in our webshop so avoid passive voice and mix it up use synonyms yes no keyword stuffing Google understands the cinnamons as well so use them in your set in your in your text mix sentence
19:06 length so longer and shorter sentences shorter and somewhat longer paragraphs and make variation in word order and if you do all these things you will be great but it's very hard so well it it in if you do all these things yeah you'll not need yo sessio 3.3 or not the new readability analysis that we put in there we call this content analysis at first and then we told everyone that their content was bad apparently some of
19:38 you didn't really like that so now we call it readability and we say needs improve math we got it while we're a touch just translation of course it was bad then I got it that what let's just say we're Dutch and we're harsh and so we didn't mean to we took a bit of UK style and I made it readability needs improvement yeah I think it's it's good today we take things from the Brits and learn things from them right especially on a day like
20:14 today it's in our free plug-in so don't worry this is not me talking to you about buying our stuff even though I do want you to buy our stuff because that pays for all of us but this is here for everyone what we try to do is we try to make all these things that Luke and just talked about into rules and these are rules that actually tell you like hey you've got over 20 25 percent of your sentences is longer than 20 words maybe your taxes to our to read we already had the flesh reading East hecht test in yo
20:48 se Co for quite a while we now move to to the readability tab and the funny thing is that of all these things the flash reading each test is probably the least actionable test in there because it creates a score but it does that by doing it by doing a calculation of the amounts of hardboard to use the amounts of long sentences use etc so it's actually pretty hard to action that all the other ones are very actionable so we say fourteen percent of your sentences contains passive voice and you'll go
21:21 like okay so what it uses it to me when you say fourteen percent of your censuses uses passive voice well it's very useful because there's this mark here this nice look button I was very happy to see Adam Matthias presentation on his first slide actually and if you press that button then we'll actually highlight the sentences in your editor showing you which sentences are in passive voice and which sentences are too long etc as you start typing the highlighting will go away immediately
21:54 because the editor is a enormous are in to integrate with I once we're on stage or not too much at least this is absolutely work in progress so we're doing more and more of these things will actually probably be releasing in the next month or so two or so more of the six that we have now at only three work in non-english because a lot of these things need work lists and other methods of actually seeing whether it's passive
22:25 voice or transition words etc so we're working actively on getting these two more languages but bear with us and in fact we will probably be asking for help at some point for several languages do