030: How To Write Blog Posts That Show Up In Google Search Results

Title: How To Write Blog Posts That Show Up In Google Search Results

Guest: Paul Lee

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. I’m with Paul Lee today.

Peter: He’s our SEO expert, and he is really adept at blog writing for SEO. He sat down and put together a blog writing guide for SEO search engine optimization. So I’d like to, kinda cover the highlights of that with Paul today. Paul, how are you doing today?

Paul: I’m doing fantastic, Peter. It’s so good to be here talking to you.

Peter: So where do we begin? Blog writing guide for SEO. I’m writing a blog post. So let’s just kinda back it up a little bit here. A blog post I’m not gonna let you answer your question.

I’m gonna lead the witness here. So blog post, that is a piece of content that you are gonna put on your website, maybe put it on social media about some topic in order to rank on the search results of Google, hopefully, or help your website rank

Paul: well in

Peter: the search results. So yeah. So so what are the what are the elements that we wanna talk about today?

Paul: Well, the first thing I think would would be to decide what kind of blog or what length, I guess, is first place you want to talk about. I sort of classify into three of those different lengths, what I call a quick hitter, which is 300 to 500 words. Maybe you can write one of those once a week or something or even more often than that if you have the ability. It’s a shorter post. It should never be shorter than 300 words.

Any blog post, Google considers that what they call thin content, and that content is basically worthless to them. It’s not going to rank. Anything that quick hitters 300 to 500 words, you could have maybe more expanded posts, which is like 700 to 1,000 words. You get to unpack the topic. You’re able to discuss it more in full more detail.

Then you have what some people really go for, which are these things I call deep dives We have 2,000, 3,000, maybe up to 10,000 words that aim to be this one complete resource on one particular topic. Are going to unpack. You are talking about software, you’re going to unpack everything about this particular program and you’re going to lay it all out in one huge long blog. Those take obviously a lot more time, but all the principles that we’re going discuss today still apply to those as well. The only thing I would say is if you’re going to do those deep dives, you can only do one per topic because if you try to do a second one, it’ll compete within Google for the rankings for that, and you don’t want that.

Peter: Give us an example of a deep dive topic that you’ve seen done.

Paul: You often see this in comparison things. So, you know, comparing the top five dog toys that they found. So they want to look at look at the pros and the cons. The dog was the dog interested in, is it not? Break it all down.

From an SEO standpoint, if I’m researching more about SEO, I want to know if somebody has got some resource, software or something that’s out there, all the positives and all the negatives about this particular experience that we’ve gotten. If you’re a guitarist, if you want to see all the information that you could possibly glean about Eric Clapton’s guitar rigs from the last fifty years of him playing guitar, There are posts out there that detail what amps he used in the sixties and what amps he used in the seventies and in the eighties and brings it all down. And so it comes to that’s one, one gigantic resource on Eric Clapton’s guitar tone that is out there. For businesses, most of the time I discourage the deep dive because a) because it’s so big that it becomes this thing that’s unwieldy to write. And it takes a long time and a lot of research and most people are not good for your local chiropractor.

You don’t need a deep dive. You need a bunch of quick hitters that answer. A bunch of the questions that people have about chiropractic. Is it going to hurt? Can I do it to myself?

You know, why does it make that popping noise? I mean, all the, just the different questions you can break those down into smaller chunks and produce more on a more consistent basis. I think that’s more valuable generally than The deep dive. The other possibility is if you write the deep dive and it doesn’t rank, you’ve just wasted a whole bunch of resources. Not so good.

Peter: So what’s next?

Paul: Well, the next thing is to talk about, and then you kind of figure out this topic that you want to write about. You’ve got to break it up into structure. You got to structure it. Google. Expect and the reason, by the way, we say Google expects these things.

Google expects them not because they’re like some sort of dictatorship that wants things that are unreasonable. It expects these things because it thinks this is what makes articles more readable and more usable and more valuable to customers. They expect that articles, good articles, have structure. They have a title, obviously. They have an intro paragraph, closing paragraph, all the stuff that your English teacher taught you to do back in high school.

But you also need to break up the paragraphs with headings and subheadings. The most important things should be in the headings and then the slightly less important Smaller things should be in the subheadings. All that stuff needs to be kind of broken up so that there’s not this pile of paragraphs. There’s not these super long 15 sentence paragraphs. Need to break it up, put it into some structure.

Bite chunks. Yeah. Bite sized chunks. Exactly. Because you don’t want to If you look at a page that’s just dense with text, you’re not going to read it.

Most people don’t. No. Want to see it a little bit more bullet pointed. You know, don’t get to the point where every paragraph is one sentence. Use that as sort of a literary device if you want to, but most of the time you’re going to be two, three, four sentences, and then it’s time to make another paragraph.

Right. Keep it structured, keep it structured.

Peter: And have, like you said, have subheadings. And if you use the correct, HTML for those

Paul: Yes. Absolutely. You know, if we were to to get nerdy for a second, you know, that the title is the h one tag. That is the heading one. Google expects hierarchical structure to the articles.

If you don’t have that, then that’s probably an indication that you need to go back to the editing process. And say, this, you know, how, how does this work? Is this, is this actually a workable article? Because if, if, if you don’t, aren’t able to break it up a little bit like that, and you’re expecting people to read this huge treatise, you know, they’re just not going to do it.

Peter: Right. So it looks like the next thing you’ve got here is using the key phrase. So tell me about that.

Paul: Obviously, you’re not writing this for the fun of it. You’re writing this to rank. You’re writing this to inform your customers but also, in that process, to recruit new customers who are having the same question.

Peter: Give us an example.

Paul: So, okay. So say you’re a dentist and you want to promote your business that you’re doing in cosmetic dentistry. So you’re wanting to write an article. That in a blog article that that will address maybe some of the questions that people have. A lot of people come with the same questions, so now you can kind of pile that into your article.

Maybe we’ll call it three questions you might have about cosmetic dentistry. That includes that phrase, cosmetic dentistry. That’s what you’re trying to rank for. You want to include that same phrase in at least one of the subheadings. Say you’ve got kind of three questions.

Well, one of them needs to actually say cosmetic dentistry in that subheading. You should include the same phrase in the first paragraph and in the last paragraph. If you count it, that’s three times in the actual article. If the piece is only 300 or 500 words, that’s enough. Don’t go more than that.

Then it starts to sound silly and Google hates it. We all know it when people are stuffing keywords into an article. Google does too. The AI is smart enough now to know when people are being unnatural. If the paragraph says, We don’t want answer all the questions you have about cosmetic dentistry.

Cosmetic dentistry is a specialty at the cosmetic dentistry site of Seattle. We know that many people have cosmetic dentistry. That’s just silly. You can’t do that. Google will penalize you for that.

Everything that you’ve done, all the work that you’ve done trying to put this article together will be of no value. Be natural about it. First paragraph, last paragraph, one subheading. If you’re doing a longer piece, 700 words or 500 words or more, you can start putting it in places that are natural. Again, it shouldn’t look forced in there ever.

You also want the same phrase to be in the title tag that’s used by HTML, so that’s the thing that shows up in the little tab of your browser. If you bookmarked it, that’s where it would show the name of the page. You want to put it in the URL, the address of the page. If you are localdentist.com three questions about cosmetic dentistry, also want to put it in the description of the page. You want to keep using that.

You can also use slight variations, so you don’t have to say cosmetic dentistry. You can say you’re looking for a cosmetic dentist. Google is smart enough to know plurals and things like that, swapping phrases around slightly. As long as the things are in close proximity, they have to be reasonable. Google will be able to understand that, so you need to use that phrase.

Use it, but don’t abuse it.

Peter: Mhmm. Got it. We’ve also got here a couple other points. It looks like you’ve got locality. Obviously, I’d say 90% of our folks that we work with are local businesses, and so they wanna show up locally in the search ranking.

How does that factor in?

Paul: When you’re talking about locality, one element you can’t really control is the address of your business, the actual location. Google does know that and Google uses that as part of their understanding of your location. But besides canceling your lease and moving to another building, you don’t have a lot of options there. It is where you are. But inside your content, you can also draw connections between yourself and that address.

Say you’re a business in Mill Creek, you can obviously mention Mill Creek. We are the plumber in Mill Creek, Washington. But you can also do it by mentioning things like that you’re at the intersection of this street and that street. Google knows where those places are. You can mention events or things that are happening in the calendar, local news.

Google knows that that stuff is happening, so it just draws more connections. You want to use those kinds of local references, but again, not abuse them. You want them to, again, sound natural, but you want Google to know that you’re connected and that you’re relevant to the geographical area that reinforces the locality of your search because that’s ultimately what you want to do is you want to appeal to people who are close by to you, the people that are searching for things in your neighborhood or in your city. Doing that by saying, We’re the Pacific Northwest cosmetic dentists or We are a cosmetic dentistry in the Seattle area. That gives Google that connection.

It also gives your customers that connection. If you start abusing it, it’ll sound ridiculous and your customers will also think these people sound ridiculous, so don’t abuse it.

Peter: Lastly here, we’ve got arguably one of the more important pieces of the whole equation is your writing style. So what can you tell us about that?

Paul: Yeah. This is the part that gets into a little bit more of the nuts and bolts of actually, you know, for the English majors out there or, the people that wrote lots of papers, you know, back in high school and college. It gets to the way that you write and analyzing that a little bit, which sometimes we’re reluctant to do. We write it and there it is. It’s about going back and editing and making sure and tightening things up because Google rewards a particular style of writing.

They want zippy, active, and very easy to read text. They value readability really over anything else. I joke around that Ernest Hemingway would be the best SEO copywriter of all time. There’s never a wasted word. The dude had it as far as exactly how to boil down to the essence of what he was talking about.

Now, that makes it sound like you can’t have your own personality a little bit. You have to write to Google. You do to a certain extent, but you can have your personality, but you just have to have it within this kind of structure. To get into some of the nuts and bolts of it, using the active voice is very important. In English, you can have passive voice and you can have active voice.

Passive voice would be to say something like passive voice was used. It just happened. Active voice is he used passive voice, so he did something. That’s active writing. As you look at paragraphs or articles that have too much passive voice, it just feels very limp.

It feels like stuff is just happening but nobody is actually doing it. One good guideline is that you shouldn’t have any more than 10% of your sentences be in the passive voice. Another one is to keep the sentences short. Ideally, 25% of your sentences should be longer than 20 words. That’s a difficult one for me.

My particular writing style, I love the run on sentence. I’m a big fan. Left to my own devices, I would probably create too much, much, much too long sentences, but I have to go that.

Peter: Let me stop you there and put a period there.

Paul: Hang on. Exactly. Exactly. Because I write how I speak, which is one long sentence. Keeping your sentences short, boiling down and disconnecting these long semicolon slash colon slash land, you know, em dash and all that stuff.

Just bring it down, break it down, put it into bullet points, maybe even if you have to make them shorter. And then connected with that, we talked about subheadings and structure. You shouldn’t have more than 300 words between any two particular subheadings. So if you have 300 words, you basically created another art article going on in there. And so you need to break those things up.

One of the ones that I love is using transition words. You need to be using transition words to connect the one sentence to the other. It helps the reader to understand, said this. Now because of that, this thing happens. Now when I say because or however or as a result or moreover or in other words or therefore, all that stuff, it makes the reader connect this next sentence to the ones that have come before it.

And then you realize that actually really helps comprehension. It really helps people understand, you know, how all of these elements of this article that I’ve just read are connected to each other. And that’s what Google is after

Peter: Right.

Paul: Is understanding. The last one is related to that. Would say use simple short words. Some people love to huge vocabularies and love to show it off. Google is not interested.

You’re not flexing on Google to be like, look at me. I know seven syllable words.

Peter: I would put one tiny copy out there. If your particular audience expects that language, you know, if you’re talking to college professors, you could probably get away with it.

Paul: Yeah. Absolutely. Or if your or if your business relies on words like that. Yeah. For instance, doing SEO for a company that does clinical trials for new pharmaceutical drugs, they’re going to have long words.

Peter: Yes.

Paul: They’re just going to. And so, you know, some of that can be, all these things are to quote Pirates of the Caribbean. They’re all guidelines. They’re not rules, but they help us kind of put the guardrails on so that we don’t just go crashing off a cliff with our writing. We need to have this writing that is zippy, active, very readable.

I know as a writer, to me, it sounds a little bit like I’m being asked to write sort of blunt, simplistic, maybe even dumb stuff. But the fact of the matter is what I really want is to be understood. I say it’s not literature. It’s SEO. If you want to write your fiction, you know, your interpretive poetry, go for it.

Fantastic. I would love to read it. But for SEO, as far as what we’re talking about for blog articles, these things need to be understood and so write for understanding.

Peter: Great point. Well, one of the things that we’d like to offer you all who are listening is a copy of Paul’s blog writing guide for SEO. We’ve, turned that into a PDF, and it’s available as a download. And it’s, if you go to our resources page on our website, you’ll see there’s a link at the top of our menu on our website that’s called resources. And, one of the items there is, blog writing guide.

So if you’ll click on that page, you will be able to download Paul’s definitive guide to writing for SEO. Paul, is there anything else you wanna add, before we wrap up?

Paul: No. Other than other than to say I encourage everybody to be writing for this stuff. And if you do have struggles, you know, you you don’t this is all for you to write. But if you need help with writing, if you need help with somebody creating your content for you, even for specialized businesses, that is possible. Contact us.

We are able to create content for you that matches all these criteria that focuses on the keywords that you want to rank for. It’s important to you and to your customers. There is help for this. If this is beyond like something you, you know, this is not what I want to do. I don’t want to write these myself.

I want somebody to write them for me. That can be done.

Peter: Good to know. Well, thanks, Paul. Thanks for

Paul: Thank you, Peter.

Peter: Today, and, look forward to chatting with you again real soon.

Paul: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.