The Misfit’s Guide to Content Writing
*Throughout This Misfit’s Guide to SEO, clickable text takes you to more helpful content*
Here’s what we’re covering:
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Sounds complicated (boring AF), but SEO make websites discoverable on the internet. Discoverable to whom? Search traffic, AKA organic traffic (folks searching on Google).
SEO is the drabbest name for a thing you’ve ever heard. The word ‘optimisation’ makes your eyes glaze over. No one is thinking, wow, what an interesting subject, tell me more! (That is, until they come here: The Misfit’s Guide to SEO.)
Confession time: SEO can be hella tedious, so when I explain it, I like to lube up the learning nut with some laughs. This (totally off-beat) guide to SEO is fun—not forced fun—proper fun. You will learn and you will lol. (Here’s hoping you share my sense of humour.)
Trust me, you’ll understand everything I reveal because I wrote it for you, business owner who doesn’t have a damn clue about the subject. Fear not, this isn’t going to hurt me a bit.
What’s a search engine?
Traditional search engines (like Google) are information retrieval systems. They are powerful online libraries. Keywords we feed them match with relevant indexed content.
Google is the Big Daddy of search engines, but there are others (Bing/DuckDuckGo). Tailoring your website to the whims of these algorithmic info vaults is how to attract search (organic) traffic.
IMPORTANT INFO: LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemmini, Perplexity, and Claude aren’t search engines in the traditional sense because they don’t crawl and rank websites. LLMs scrape information provided by search engines (along with any publicly available source). So if you want LLM visibility, keep SEOing.
What’s organic traffic?
Organic traffic is web traffic you attract when you optimise content for search engines. Organic traffic is from users googling keywords that match your website content. Individual organic search results show beneath the AI Overviews and sponsored ads.
All websites need SEO.
Believe it or not, a business can run perfectly well without a website. In the olden days, people sold without the internet. Depending on your business (and your market), a website isn’t a must-have. But if you do have one, it’s pretty useless without SEO.
Full disclosure: SEO is forever. It’s the New York City of online marketing—it never sleeps. And like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, it must constantly be fed.
SEO isn’t just one thing.
Na-ah, it includes loads of stuff. Sorry, but there’s no ‘Enable SEO’ button on your website. Depending on the size and complexity of a website, businesses might hire an agency to help with these subsets:
- Technical
- Content
- Analytics
- Mobile
- Local
- eCommerce
“To the uninitiated, anyone with ‘SEO’ in their job title performs all things SEO. Yes, there’s often a crossover of skills, but what one SEOer does, another might not, so it isn’t always straightforward.”
When SEOing, broadly speaking, it will sit in one of two categories: off-page SEO or on-page SEO. You’ll either be working on your website or away from it. Content will be produced on your site, but promotion happens outside of your site, on the socials and the like.
SEO is a giant pork pie.
There are different (meaty) slices. One slice might be technical SEO, another, local SEO, and one might be content SEO. To give you the very best (tasty) chance of smashing traffic goals, you need all the slices.
User Experience (UX).
If I believed in a god, it would be UX. This is hands down the most important thing when SEOing because if your website is a hot mess, your potential customers will avoid it. Insights into how users interact with websites should inform how you build yours.
Search engines want you to think about your audience first. When you lure people to your online space, make their visit easy, FFS. Navigating your pages should be a piece of cake (or pork pie).
“Search engines adore easy-to-use websites. Remember, your customers are lazy; they don’t want to expend their limited energy rooting through yours, trying to locate what they need, so if your homepage is similar to a hoarder’s front room, with years of tat clogging every inch of space, users—especially lazy users won’t stick around. No one enjoys sorting through out-of-date bean cans and cat shit, metaphorically speaking.”
Website traffic.
SEO increases digital footfall. SEOs bang on about organic clicks, but all traffic is welcome.
Here’s the other traffic I’m talking about:
- Direct (website link has been typed into Google)
- Referred (website link has been found on another site)
- Email (website link found in a newsletter)
- Social (website link found on social media)
In my mind, I think of web traffic being from TWO main sources:
- Organic (users finding you from search)
- Traffic from everywhere else (paid ads not included)
Once upon a time, the top spot on Google was where sites wanted to be. And that’s still the case, generally speaking, but things have seriously changed in search and there isnt just one ‘top spot’.
“In reality, garden-variety website links vie for space with other SERP features. Those cosy, easy-chair SEO days are long gone. Google is in earnest, throwing every option at users in a vain attempt to provide a diverse search experience. One could argue that such an attempt has resulted in busy—not always accurate—SERPs.”
Search traffic should be qualified.
We all want to attract search traffic, that’s why we’re here, right? Yes, that’s true, but it’s also not true. Loads of random hits to your digital yard are not what you want.
“You qualify web traffic as you’d qualify real-life clients. (If you don’t have a qualifying process, now’s the time to sort that out.) Flesh-and-blood prospects are guided through a client triage. A set of steps that determines how suitable (or unsuitable) they are. You qualify web traffic in much the same way. With inbound enquiries, you don’t convert them all. That’s why homepages target broad keywords to pull as much traffic in as possible.”
Organic traffic isn’t the full SEO story.
When you build an expert reputation (the one you’ve worked your arse off for) and demonstrate it online, you’re SEOing. Your audience is getting to know you and they’re beginning to trust you. You stand out as the go-to person in your field. This plays into E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
“When we create content, we ask ourselves this: can we offer examples of firsthand experience? Are we providing insights that demonstrate our knowledge and expertise? If we can do those things, we will garner authority in our field and build trust.”
Everything you do to market your business online is linked to SEO. It’s building a picture of who you are. Quality information found on your site (and shared off your site) will be a major player in how much traffic you get.
Having integrity as a business is also in your best SEO interest.
“Google hates a bullshitter. It assesses how your content impacts your audience. So if you’re selling products and the claims aren’t credible, that’s a surefire way to balls up your ranking.”
Traffic that doesn’t need SEO.
You’ve seen the sponsored ads on the search results pages. Well, businesses pay to get there, so unlike organic traffic, PPC (pay-per-click) is about forking out cash for site visits.
“SEO should be something you do for your overall site health. You cannot hope to build long-term traffic without it. The many clicks you gain from targeted ads will eventually dry up.”
>>SEO vs. PPC makes men angry<<
Website building.
Maybe you’re thinking fiddling with your website is a good idea. Before you tinker, there are a lot of things to consider.
“First-timers are often attracted to website building because it seems easy, but, most importantly, saves cash. And let’s be honest, the likes of Wix, GoDaddy and Squarespace all tell us how simple setting up a CMS website will be, and rather naively, we believe them. Sadly for the novice, it can be a steep learning curve (a bloody nightmare). And one that requires more time than there are days in the week.”
“Website building platforms often promise ‘SEO already built-in’, which implies you don’t need to do anything to be found on Google. That’s a crock. And if you’re in the dark about SEO, I suggest you start with content SEO. Technical SEO is a must, but it might push you over the edge. I’d recommend you hire a technical SEO specialist to help improve your DIY website.”
— Improve your DIY website with 5 SEO truisms.
If your business is new and you’re thinking about buying a domain, think about how to optimise the name for search.
“Newbie business owners can SEO a business name from the get-go. (And if they’re really sensible, they’ll make sure no one else is using it or has registered it before purchasing the domain.) But if you’ve been in business a while, and you’ve had your name since the dawn of time, you can’t change it. And why would you want to? That’s part of your brand identity coz it often means something. The good news: you don’t have to stuff industry terms into your trade name to make page one.”
Content SEO.
Content holds the keys to a website’s traffic potential. Content is so important that it has its own SEO category. Anything you add to your website is content. Blogs, infographics, podcasts, videos—that’s all content. Back in the dark ages of the internet, you had to do very little to rank on the first page. Competition was low, which meant so too was the quality. Cramming the living shit out of keywords was regarded as a successful SEO strategy—because it worked. The emphasis was on bot pleasing (which sounds oddly sexual).
These days, that stuff won’t wash.
Remember, UX reigns supreme.
SEO isn’t just for search engines. Yes, you optimise content for the algorithm, but content created for humans to read is the number one concern. Search engines have grown exponentially sophisticated; they didn’t suddenly jump from their early incarnation to their present one.
Google’s Helpful Content update.
In 2022, the most popular search engine made a further tweak to its algo in favour of “people first” content:
“Google Search is always working to better connect people to helpful information. To this end, we’re launching what we’re calling the “helpful content update” that’s part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.”
Google search central blog
You can read all about the Helpful Content Update here.
See “Written by people, for people” for search engines. Allow me to caveat this with a warning: Google updates are newly referred to as Google fuckupdates (by me anyway). What Google says and what it actually does isn’t always the same thing. Even so, I will continue to view pleasing the algorithm and my audience as the same thing.
Full disclosure: many websites realised the Helpful Content Update wasn’t all that helpful. Sites doing the right things (according to Google) saw their traffic tank. I still stand by SEO best practices coz it’s ultimately the best thing for your audience too, and Google, at some point, will get its shit together (👀).
SEO content writing.
Content writing is a big deal for SEO because words are all over your website. You can’t have an SEO strategy without a content strategy—and a content strategy without a content writing strategy is bollocks.
“SEO content writing is, first and foremost, content that pulls visits to your website. When devising content strategies, search traffic (organic traffic) is usually what we have in mind. For example, your blog post, How To Commit The Perfect Crime, gets found by a potential murderer, googling the ins and outs of, well, murder.”
Many businesses spend cash making their websites look pretty. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the same businesses write their content. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up with a site that’s all style and no substance.
Page snippets.
Page snippets, AKA meta title tags/AKA title tags, are the page previews you see land on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Think of them as your shop window. Folks, peering through the glass, wondering if they want to step inside (hit the link).
“When an SEO tells you to stick to a fixed character limit, act like a teenager—ignore them. Yes, long title tags are ugly, but their impact on ranking is significant.”
Full disclosure: snippets aren’t a ranking factor, but they help click-through rates. In reality, Google pulls whatever it pleases from each web page, regardless of whether you’ve customised your snippets. My opinion? Test both and see what happens.
Blogging is ALIVE!
You thought blogging was dead. You hear it all the time on LinkedIn. Ignore anyone who says it, it’s bullshit.
“Allow me to captivate you with a tale of SEO misconception. A few years back, I read an uninformed opinion by a pesky copywriter bloke. He made the mistake of saying that keyword stuffing might mean you rank well on search engines, but it will read like utter tripe (yes, he used the word tripe, the guy must be older than me). The truth is, I wholeheartedly agree. No one in their right mind should be keyword-stuffing. Not only does it read like shit, but it doesn’t work. That method is as outdated as that Bullworker™️ your dad keeps behind the wardrobe. (And if you know what one of those is, you also might be older than I am.) Brilliant writing is already SEOing like a muthafucker, but wonderful words require a few other things to help them along the way.”
To blog is to communicate a message to your audience. Your blog is where you have conversations with potential clients.
“The entire purpose of a blog is to curate useful, valuable information for your audience/ideal client. The next hurdle is to get them to read it. When you publish your blog (and anything on your website), ask yourself, is this user-friendly? For example, is it easy to understand? Can visitors scan through the content? Can they choose to skip to different sections? Does the blog use a table of contents? Are the heading structures correct, and do they correlate to the paragraphs beneath? Well, do they?!?!”
Organised content.
There you are, beavering away, producing content for your website, but is that content like segments in a Terry’s Chocolate Orange? Let me explain: the orange is the main topic on your site (your pillar content). The segments are the sub-categories (your cluster content) and they have a direct relation to the main topic (do you like Topics™️? I don’t).
A-ha!
“Pillar content increases the chance of people finding your stuff. Content arranged logically will make visits to your website a joy. Pillar content also has Google saying, hello, what’s all this then—more great info about [INSERT TOPIC TITLE HERE]?? How wonderful!”
You can have as many pieces of pillar content as you need. Before you know it, your website will be chock-full of helpful knowledge.
(FYI: you’re reading pillar content right now.)
Keywords.
Keywords are the words and phrases we want our websites to be found for.
“Keywords still matter to SEO coz they remain a ranking factor. The broad keyword assigned to your homepage is your website’s entry to organic traffic. As is any keyword attached to any web page. If you’ve properly researched keywords for stuff like search intent, keyword difficulty, and search volume, they’re absolutely a thing, and a thing you need to do if you want to kickstart search engine visibility.”
Broad keywords.
Broad keywords, AKA competitive keywords or head keywords, are the keyword big hitters because they attract huge amounts of organic traffic. Think about those all-encompassing industry terms. For example: ‘quantity surveyor’, ‘photographer’ or ‘chief fluffer’. (You might need to pop to the Urban Dictionary for that last one.)
Long-tail keywords.
“You know what it’s like, you’ve decided to spend some money, so you google a detailed phrase. For example, ‘brown leather bomber jacket’ or ‘black rubber inflatable gimp suit’. Those search terms would be regarded as long-tail keywords. Now this doesn’t mean you should shun broad keywords altogether—hell, no! It just means you should diversify your keyword portfolio (or something similar).
>>Find long-tail keywords and unlock your traffic potential<<
Keywords with intent.
“Keywords have been getting heat from the generative AI crowd. You know the people I’m talking about: AEOs who insist we optimise for LLMs as a standalone practice. Optimising for information retrieval systems, AKA ‘old-fashioned’ search engines, is “not enough”. The same crowd tell us keywords no longer matter. In which case, search intent (customer/user intent) no longer matters. Search intent is arguably more important than it ever was, and keywords are how we understand it.”
Wanna read more like this? Check out >>The Misfit’s Guide to Content Writing<<
Sarah Wilson-Blackwell
I’m a freelance SEO consultant and owner of The Sarky Type®. I help businesses with their search potential. Wanna know what your SEO is doing, for free?