How to make your copy more efficient to write, edit, read and optimize

How to make your copy to write, edit, read and optimize from Rusty Cawley

6 simple things you can do today to make your B2B content easier for Google to find and to rank

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Making it easy for Google and other search engines to find and rank your company’s business-to-business web pages used to be all about what we now call “black hat” techniques: stuffing, stacking, misdirecting, cloaking, swapping, baiting-and-switching, and all sorts of other nefarious tactics.

Google has gone a long way toward changing that in the last two years. Three significant updates – known as Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird – to Google’s search algorithm are eliminating these tactics, and punishing them. If you use these techniques, Google may sentence your web site to its version of the Phantom Zone.
When Google users enter their search terms, they want Google to point to the pages that best meet their needs. Google’s updates are making it easier for Google to do just that, by finding and ranking web pages based on how well they meet the needs of the Google user.
There are six simple things anyone can do to help Google find our B2B web pages and treat them fairly.  Keep in mind, Google sees only text. It is blind to everything else. So we’ve got to create text that Google’s web-bots can easily recognize, quickly analyze and accurate rank.

Identify your keywords

We need to decide exactly what our web page is about.  What is the subject of the page? Do we want to answer a question, solve a problem, or just to provide information our customers are likely to seek for online? (For example, this post is designed to answer the question:  “What can I do to get Google to pay attention to my B2B web content?”)
Once that is settled, we have another question to ask: If prospects or customers are looking for a page like ours, what are the search terms they are most likely to use? What you need is what we call a “keyword,” which can be a single word like “widgets” or a short phrase like “widgets for oil producers” or “how to use a widget.”
You can start by brainstorming with your marketing, sales and PR teams. If you need help, there are plenty of online tools, like Google’s Keyword Tool. If you want to get serious, put together a focus group of prospects and customers to do their own brainstorming, or take an online poll, or (if you have a strong Facebook or Twitter following) try crowdsourcing.
Do your best to narrow down your choices to just a primary keyword (or key phrase). If you have runner-ups, you can always work them into your post’s body text. But it is important to agree upon a primary keyword as the foundation for creating a web page that Google will love.  For the purposes of this page, I’ve narrowed my keywords down to this phrase: “SEO for B2B.”
According to my research using Google’s Keyword Tool, Google users rarely enter this search phrase. So why use it? Because anyone who does use that search phrase is likely to be someone who is really interested in this information. Also, there’s very little competition for that phrase, so I have a better chance of ranking high on a search results page.

Include your keyword in your page’s web address

Also known as the URL, the web address is the page’s unique identifier. For example, the URL for this page is  http://rustycawley.typepad.com/realityincopywriting/2013/11/seo-for-b2b.html.  Note that I included my key phrase for this page as a suffix to my site’s main URL. This will encourage Google to point users to my page if they enter “SEO for B2B” as a search term.
To add your keyword to your page’s URL in a content management system like Wordpress or Typepad, just use the keywords as your post title before you save the post for the first time. Once you have save the page and created the URL, you can enter the actual title of your post and save it without altering the URL. If you have questions, check with your webmaster.

Include your keyword in your post title

A copywriter has two jobs when it comes to a post title. First, work in the keyword to get Google’s attention. Second, write an eye-catching title that piques the interest of prospects and customers, and causes them to click on the Google link.  Remember the 3-30-3 Rule. We have three seconds to get attention; if we can get the web readers’ attention, we earn about 30 seconds of their time; if we can keep their interest for 30 seconds, we can earn another three minutes or more. This process starts with working the keyword into the title, and encouraging Google to flag it for the client’s prospects to find. Google is more than just a search engine; it is a form of social proof. When a web page appears at or near the top of a search, Google is essentially recommending the page to the user. It’s a form of “word of mouth,” and that makes it a powerful tool for marketing and sales.
You may notice that my headline uses “Google” instead of the keywords “SEO” or “search engine optimization.”  That’s because in general my customers and prospects are not familiar with those keywords. But they know Google, and I’m counting on Google to recognize that went I say “Google” in this context, I mean “SEO.” It’s a small risk, but there’s little point in attracting Google’s attention but missing the audience’s attention.  I will keep an eye on my Google Analytics. If I see Google is bypassing this page, I’ll change the title to one that Google likes better.

Work your keyword into your post's text

But do it judiciously and logically. If you use the keyword too many times, Google will think you are stuffing your text, and will downgrade your page. A good rule of thumb is to include your keyword in the first paragraph, and again in the second or third paragraph. After that, use your exact keyword sparingly, about once every 200 words or so. Feel free to use synonyms, or phrase variations, or even some of the runner-up keywords that came out of your research. Once you get past the title and the first couple of paragraphs, focus your efforts on creating a useful, informative, entertaining web page that your customers will enjoy and share. That’s the kind of page that Google is looking to recommend.

Include your keyword in your page’s meta description

Of the six simple things we can do, this is the one that requires a little understanding about how web pages are built.  The content management systems that create web pages – like Wordpress and Typepad – are designed to include a brief, 160-word description of each page. This is essentially an executive summary designed for Google’s benefit. It is one more way that Google finds and ranks pages.
This is usually an easy process. You may be able to take the first two or three paragraphs of your text, and boil them down to 160 words or fewer.  Assuming your are in Wordpress, go to your dashboard, then go to “posts,” then go to the post you are writing.  Scroll down to the metadata form, and drop in your summary, and save it. If you can’t find the metadata form, ask your webmaster to add the form to your dashboard. If you are using another system, talk to your webmaster about establishing a process for adding a description to every future post.
Here is the meta description I added to this post:

Are Google and other search engines ignoring your online business-to-business content? Here are six simple things you can do right now to improve the SEO – search engine optimization – for your B2B web pages.  Anyone can do this. You don’t need to be a web geek.

Add your keyword and your runner-ups as your page’s meta tags

In the metadata form, you will find a form for adding individual keywords as “tags” to help Google and other search engines find your page. Just create a list, separating each keyword or phrase with a comma, copy it, and paste it into the form, then save it. You can add, subtract or alter this list as needed. Don’t get carried away. Focus on the keywords that are most important.
Here are my tags for this page: SEO for B2B, SEO copywriting for B2B companies, B2B, business to business, SEO, search engine optimization, B2B SEO, B2B copywriting, SEO copywriting, B2B-SEO copywriting, B2B copy, SEO copy, B2B content

Bonus tip

If you really want to improve your page’s SEO, ask your really good customers or friends to create links to your page. They can do this via their hub sites, or on Facebook, or through re-tweets, or by recommending your page on Reddit, or by adding links to any other online medium.
Ask your webmaster to include sharing tools to every post on your B2B web site. Sharing tools allow readers to easily create links to your post via social media. The easier it is to share your post, the more likely readers are to do it.
All of this is very, very important to improve your SEO for your B2B content. For Google, a link is a vote. It tells Google that others consider your page to be an authoritative source of valuable information about a specific subject.
Links make it easier for Google to rank your page highly.

Which reminds me

If you found this page useful, please share it with your friends or peers. You can use the sharing tools on this page, or you can add a link to your home page.
Many thanks for your consideration.

Why longer articles will rank better on Google than short articles in 2014

From Jayson DeMers at the Search Engine Journal:

Not long ago, you could publish a couple 500-word blog posts per week and gain measurable traffic and authority with Google. While short articles do still have value, there’s definitely a trend within Google toward favoring longer content. 

In the future, I expect that articles will need to be a minimum of 1,000 words in length to rank well in Google, and better yet if they’re over 2,000 words. Google’s new in-depth article section is a good indicator of where things are going. According to Google, “Users often turn to Google to answer a quick question, but research suggests that up to 10% of users’ daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic.”

The power of Like: Is a blog post popular just because it's popular?

To help answer that question, researchers led by MIT came up with an experiment to manipulate reader comments, The New York Times reports:

“The experiment performed a subtle, random change on the ratings of comments submitted on the site over five months: right after each comment was made, it was given an arbitrary up or down vote, or — for a control group — left alone. 

“The first person reading the comment was 32 percent more likely to give it an up vote if it had been already given a fake positive score. There was no change in the likelihood of subsequent negative votes. Over time, the comments with the artificial initial up vote ended with scores 25 percent higher than those in the control group.” 

One researcher said the test shows how "very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding.”  

You can read the entire story here.

Stop writing for Google and start writing for people

Arnie Kuenn at the Content Marketing Institute blogs:

First and foremost, your website content should always be written to provide value for your audience. If you’re still writing for search engines, you may be making the following errors:

• Focusing on high-volume keywords: If you’re a little fish in the sea of your industry, it doesn’t make sense to compete against the big sharks. Small businesses have a much harder time gaining traction with high-volume keywords, as the competition is so fierce. To overcome this, focus on long-tail keywords (keyword phrases with three or more words) that still have a respectable search volume.

• Elevating your keyword density: When it comes to keywords, less can be more. Stuffing keywords into every other sentence may have worked in the past, but now, it’s definitely frowned upon. Add keywords where it makes sense, but don’t focus on achieving a certain density percentage.

• Creating content in “production mode:” Many businesses say that producing enough content is one of their top challenges but, again, “less” can sometimes offer more when it comes to creating content. Churning out content left and right isn’t sustainable and will most likely result in mediocre content, at best. Instead, focus on creating fewer content pieces that are of higher quality, and build that evergreen content for more durable reach and engagement.

Why you should optimize your site for both search engines and mobile devices

Matthew Young writes on the Bruce Clay Inc blog:

A recent study on mobile search activity showed that 1 in 3 mobile queries are local, and after looking up local business on a smartphone, 61 percent of users called a business and 59 percent actually visited a business. 

Other telling statistics from the report include:

• 79 percent of smartphone users use their smartphones to help with shopping.
• 71 percent of smartphone users that see TV, press or online ad, do a mobile search for more information, but 79 percent of large online advertisers still do not have a mobile optimized site.

There is marketing power in these statistics and even Google is getting on board mobile SEO in a big way. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to know that if Google is an advocate, then we should be too.

3 things to do when your SEO isn't working

Happy Brooke says on the Moz Blog

1. Talk to your clients. Keep the relationship strong. Share your resilience with them. In no-rank land, they'll need it, too. Let their enthusiasm for and expertise in their field revitalize you.
2. Try new things. Be adventurous. Experiment with new content or approaches. Sometimes failure propels us out of the box we were stuck in when nothing else can.
3. Give yourself a break. Don't make yourself miserable by wallowing in continual blame and guilt. Everybody fails! But dwelling on it for too long will prevent you from moving forward.

Want to attract Google? Write 'epic content'

From Jayson DeMers at  Search Engine Journal: 

The days when you could publish 500-word pieces on your blog a couple times a week and achieve authority status are fading away. While high quality, shorter pieces still have value, I predict we’ll see a migration toward “super articles.” Longer pieces that are a minimum of 1,000 words and more likely upwards of 2,000 will become increasingly valuable. 

It’s what Neil Patel has called “epic content.” There’s several ways to approach this. If the best articles in your niche offer 50 ideas, your round-ups could offer 100. You could get access to experts, develop detailed tutorials, or supplement your content with high quality videos or images. The key is going to be to follow an approach that sets you apart from the most basic content in your space, and grabs people’s interest for the long-term. The focus is on depth, quality, and ultimate value to the reader.

Do stock photos hurt your SEO? Do original photos help?

Even Google seems unsure. The answer is: Stock photos probably don't hurt your search engine optimization and original photos probably don't help. But now that Google's has been asked, you can expect the next update to tilt the SEO bias toward original photos. For details, watch this Google Webmaster video with Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts:

Is 'predictive search' about to make SEO obsolete?

Rachel Pasqua blogs at Search Engine Watch: 

Call it what you like – predictive, unified, aggregated – Google Now is a glimpse at the seamlessly personalized, contextually complex, nascent future of search. 

Picture a business traveler in a foreign city for work with Google Now installed on her smartphone – or, even more likely, her Google Glasses. 

The viewfinder of her glasses with built-in Now functionality will guide her seamlessly throughout her day in a unfamiliar locale, presenting visual maps and directions to her calendared meetings, flashing safety alerts, translating price tags into more familiar currency and presenting her with real-time tips on local business etiquette – all without her having to do more than blink. 

She'll be able to text, email, and post to Google simply by speaking and gazing at her surroundings as she goes about her day, more efficiently than if she had a real human assistant in tow. 

This is a blue skies vision of what's likely to come but it's fair to say that Now is truly the first virtual personal assistant worthy of the title.

Your keywords should serve your readers, not your agenda

SEO blogger Chelsea Adams says: 

When you start looking at keyword suggestions it can be easy to fall into a high-volume drunken haze and forget that relevance means directly descriptive of your content or product — not loosely related to the idea of the content or the general needs of the target demographic. 

Don’t approach your keyword like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.  If you identify a keyword phrase that doesn’t describe the topic on your landing page, but is related to your topic, or of related interest to your target demographic, create a new landing page with new content to work in that keyword phrase. Don’t try to fool humans or Google spiders by using phrases that do not exactly describe your content — use keyword research to inform content strategy! 

Think to yourself: When the user searches this query, what are they looking for? What do they want? If they find my site, will their needs be met?

She offers a useful six-point checklist for conducting keyword research. 

Is Google being unfair to sponsored content?

Sam Slaughter at Digiday, on Google's announcement that it plans to weed out sponsored content from its Google News feed:

I’ve always felt it’s better for brands to err on the side of DIY — and Google’s announcement pushes the needle even further in that direction, especially in the long term. Sponsored stories are a great way to reach an audience, but they’re a little bit like a sugar rush; tons of eyeballs and great short-term results, but then the story’s gone, and it’s taken the audience with it. No Google means no long-tail traffic; that audience you rented went and moved on up to the East Side.

SEO for the brand journalist: Make it easier for Google to find your content

Mastering the art and science of SEO copywriting is essential for the brand journalist.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” This is the strategy we use to attract the attention of Google and other search engines.

The easier we make it for our target customers to find our web articles, the happier we make our clients.

You may have heard about also sorts of secret formulas for improving SEO. Many folks think SEO is a job for the information technology gurus. That may have been true, but Google ended that with its most recent updates to its algorithm.

Google wants to put SEO in the hands of copywriters. That’s good news for every brand journalist. Today, SEO is primarily a function of how we write our stories, not how they are coded.

The first step is to identify the keywords you want to use in your SEO copy. These are the words that help customers find your story with an online search.

Generally, the keywords are a phrase that you will use frequently in your article.

For example, I recently wrote a brand journalism article about diagnostic testing for the West Nile virus. Using Google’s keyword search tool, I figured out that about there are about 310,000 searches each month for the words “West Nile virus” and about 110,000 for “symptoms of West Nile virus.” So I made sure to use those keywords often in the story.

How often? You don’t want to “stuff” your story with keywords. Google will penalize you for doing that.

Aim instead to use the keywords throughout the text as a rate of between 2 percent and 5 percent. That’s about once every 100 words. That level of keyword density appears to be the Google’s sweet spot for SEO copy.

To get the most out of your keywords, you will want to include them in:

• The title of your article: Keep it really simple. Write a real headline with a subject and a predicate. Put the keywords up front, if you can. For example: “How to diagnose the West Nile virus in horses” or “West Nile virus: How to diagnose the disease in horses.”
• Sub-titles: To make your brand journalism more easy to read, try inserting a sub-title every few paragraphs in each story. In addition to breaking up long blocks of text, sub-titles give you yet another opportunity to work your keywords into your SEO copy without a penalty. Google loves sub-titles, especially when they help it define what you article is about. Readers love them, too.
• The suffix of the page’s URL: What you don’t want is a long, irrelevant page URL, like this one: example.domain.com/news/article/0,,30200-1303092,00.html. Instead, aim to create a URL like this: example.domain.com/news/article/WestNileVirus. You can do this easily by typing the key words into your title and hitting “save” before you put in your actual headline. Some programs also allow you to edit your page URL later in the process. In some cases, you may need your client’s webmaster to help you out.
• Anchor text: This is just another phrase for the words we use to create links from one page to another page. Avoid using a link like “click here.” Instead, create a link using your keywords.
• Images: Google reads only text. It can’t see images. But it can see text that is embedded in the image’s menu. When you upload an image, go to the image’s menu and enter your keywords into the space marked “alt tags.” Now Google can recognize your image and will know how to identify it for searchers.
• Navigation menu: If your keywords apply to your entire site, consider adding them to the navigation links. That will also boost your client’s SEO by giving even more emphasis to the pages to which they lead.

Two other tips, both of which may require you to work with your client’s webmaster:

1. Create a site map for your client’s entire site.
2. Enter specific keywords into the metadata for every page, not just the home page.

SEO: Getting found vs getting read

From Patsi Krakoff at The Blog Squad: 

Here’s the thing: when you follow the basic common sense rules for getting your article found online, it’s also good structure for making sense to the readers. Here’s why, reviewing three basics of search engine optimization and how it applies for both getting found and getting read: 

• Opening paragraph needs to alert the search engines about the topic being discussed. What’s this article about? You use your keywords upfront and hyperlink them if you can. Although you want to be compelling so readers want to read your article, you want to be clear about the subject matter through obvious use of keywords and hyperlinking. 

• Your title needs to place keywords prominently so the search engines and the readers know what the subject is, and are curious to read more. 

• You need to repeat the keywords throughout your piece, so readers don’t get off track and can take away some key learning about your topic. You probably need to remind them of your point in your concluding paragraph to do this. (I don’t mean you should go over board and use the keyword ad nauseum).

Keywords: How to zag when your competitors zig

Instead of competing for the keywords that everyone in your market is using, Timothy Martell at Wikimotive says you should avoid the big head and discover keywords in the long tail:

The main benefit of long tail keywords is that they’re so specific. This means that even though you get less searches per term, the searches you DO get will be more targeted, and thus more readily convertible. Additionally, because these long tail keywords aren’t as commonly seen on analytics tools, they are generally less competitive for both organic and paid search marketing.

Click through to read a neat infographic that puts all this into perspective.

Are you ready to play by the new rules of search?

We just hit the two-year anniversary of Google's Panda update. Many sites are still trying to cover, and some owners are asking: Are we better off adapting our current site to the new reality of search, or shutting our site down and starting over?

 Eric Ward at Search Engine Lane answers: 

After two years of trying (and not succeeding) to get back to where you once were, does it make sense to shut down your site and start over? 

I know people are still asking this question because I’m being asked this question by many people who for years made fun of the content driven approach. Why go the the trouble and expense of being awesome when it’s easier to just fake awesome, especially since so many of the sites that rank high are awful? 

It would be nice if there was a standard test you could take where you answered a series of questions about your site, and at the end of the test you were given a simple Start Over/Don’t Start Over answer. 

But, the answer to that question begs another question: Are you going to do things differently with the new site than you did with the old site? 

If not, then it really doesn’t matter anyway.

How you can use blog comments to improve your rankings on search engines

Guest writer Jonathan Solis at ProBlogger offers these five tips:

1. Provide a call to action: Ask a question. Invite your readers to comment on your post.
2. Reply to all comments on time: Give a prompt response.
3. Know your target keywords before writing your comment: Do your research.
4. Use complete sentences in your comments: This gives you more opportunity to use your keywords again. It also keeps the search engines from seeing your responses as spam.
5. Reply to comments with another question: Keep the conversation going.

4 ways to create URLs that attract Google to your online content

If you want Google to find your content, it helps to create a URL that is easy for the search engine to recognize and catalogue.

That means you should:

1. Use words in the URL that tell the search engine about the content.
2. Keep your URLs brief and to the point; trim any extraneous information.
3. Avoid including generic information like page numbers or session IDs.
4. Avoid using too much keyword information in the URL; one keyword or phrase is probably enough.

Think of it this way: If you can recite the URL from memory a day after you created it, then it's a cinch for Google to find it. If you can't, then you are making it too hard for Google to find your content.