Andrea Durrheim

From time to time, one encounters people who want content for content’s sake. It’s a mistake every website owner should avoid.

“Content for content’s sake” means you aren’t really publishing your content strategically. You’re just telling search engines that your website has some content. You can throw in a few keywords, and it’s sort of beneficial to your search engine rankings while still not placing you in a prime position to get noticed.

Why Choosing a Human Writer Can Benefit Your Content Strategy

A well-thought-through content strategy is meant to help people to find your business by finding your content first. It positions you as an expert in your field, and it allows you to highlight what makes you different from everyone else.

In this instance, there are definitely benefits to choosing a human writer. It allows you to make novel statements, engage your readers by exercising human empathy, and it often results in a level of factual accuracy that AI can’t achieve.

So, what does a content strategy really look like? Before we dig in, please note that I’m not marketing myself as an SEO expert – I work with them, so I’ve learned a bit about this side of SEO and I know how to implement it.

Content Clusters and Pillar Content

By now, most people know that if they want to implement SEO, it helps to use key words and phrases that help algorithms to classify what they’re doing and drive traffic to their websites.

Formulating a keyword strategy takes a lot of time and research, but it’s worth doing because it looks for the foot in the door that can leverage your rankings up search engine results pages (SERPs). So, instead of competing on terms that established websites already compete fiercely for in organic search results, it finds new avenues to get you noticed.

Once you know how to go about getting search engines’ attention, it’s time to formulate a content strategy that achieves your goals. Textual SEO in individual pieces of content is only part of this. You want your content to work together to reinforce your position.

To achieve this, you will consider “big” topics (pillar content) that allow you to write very authoritative, long-form pieces covering several related subtopics. The authoritative articles or pillars that support each cluster touch on each subtopic, and each subtopic is worthy of, and gets, a full-length article of its own.

Implementing Your Content Strategy

Now that you have keywords that allow you to compete and a plan for using them in content clusters and pillar content, it’s time to get started. Begin with your subtopics. The reason for this approach is that your authoritative pillar content will include links to each of the topics within the cluster. This sends out powerful signals to search engines.

Typically, articles within the cluster will be 1,200 to 1,500 words long, but length is not as important as providing complete information without repetition, so they could be longer or shorter.

Once the subtopics within a cluster have all been covered, it’s time for that big, fat “authority” piece. Articles like this are invariably longer than their supporting framework of blog posts.

The usual instruction is for 2,000 to 2,500 words. I’ve also written for SEO specialists who are hoping for a 5,000-word result. If the topic is strong enough, it’s entirely possible to do this without waffling or fluff. However, I’ve also been asked to shorten articles to improve search engine visibility, so I think 5k words isn’t really the sweet spot. Save that for an e-book.

Content Strategy is Only Part of SEO Strategy

Publishing articles that provide a fresh take on what you do and linking them together is a great way to improve your search engine rankings. But there’s a lot more to SEO than keywords and content. There’s on-site SEO, off site SEO, technical SEO, and a bunch of things that go into each of these areas.

Most SEO experts are not writers. Even when they’re capable of writing great articles, they don’t have time for it. That’s why they contract people like me to do the work. And, it’s worth noting, an SEO specialist worth their salt seldom recommends AI-generated articles to their clients.

There are many reasons for this, but in my opinion, the top one is that machine-generated content that has been manually tweaked to include keywords doesn’t differentiate the content. It just ends up looking like everyone else’s article on the same topic.

Need Help Implementing Your Content Strategy?

Having an effective content strategy and implementing it well will improve your search engine rankings. I don’t claim expertise I don’t have, so I won’t pretend that I’m the right person to develop your content strategy. Theoretically, there are tools I could use to do it, but you’d be paying for them and my learning curve.

When it comes to writing the articles that make your content strategy work, on the other hand, I’m reasonably competent. An unambitious claim? I’d rather undersell myself than subject you to the usual (questionable) marketing-speak about being the absolute best.

My clients have almost always said they’re pleased with my work. Understanding what they’re trying to achieve definitely helps. Contact me if you’d like help in transforming your content strategy into an organic rankings-boosting reality.