Bad news. There’s a chance that a lot of the SEO copywriting tips you’re following are from 2008 or earlier. Don’t beat yourself up—it’s not your fault. A lot of the major marketing blogs are giving bad advice right now.
Good news. Rand Fishkin is swooping in to solve this problem right here, right now. If you don’t know Rand, you should. He knows everything about modern SEO.
Before we get to writing for SEO in 2018, let’s travel back in time and debunk some myths.
- In 2001, keyword stuffing was a tactic that worked well. If you do it now, Google will see this as spam and drop your rankings.
- In 2008, exact match keywords were really popular. Basically, you’d write two different blog posts. One for “blue watch” and another for “blue watches.” Don’t do this now.
Rand debunks a few other things, but we’ll move on for now. Here’s what he has to say about writing for SEO in 2018:
- Solving the searcher’s query matters most. Essentially, the content that accurately and succinctly helps the searcher solve their task will be ranked the highest.
- Only a few tags are still absolutely crucial to doing SEO correctly. You should prioritize having your keywords in two place—the page title and the body of your text. H1 tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and image alt-tags just aren’t very important anymore.
- Using related keywords and phrases can provide a significant boost. Google understands how things relate to each other. If you’re writing about coffee beans, but don’t mention the roasting process, Google will view this as incomplete. That’s kind of why 10x content is so valuable.
- User experience matters more than ever. We mentioned before that Google RankBrain understands if someone has a bad experience on your website. If they do, you need to fix this problem.
Plenty more here. And hey—there’s a video that goes along with this blog post so you can read or watch. Whatever suits you.
