Content For Your Website
This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Gordon Goodfellow
Content For Your Website
How To Discover Valid Content Themes for Your Website based on Keywords
This short guide is for website owners who are concerned about putting the right kind of content on their websites.
Website owners will be concerned that they have the right content for their sites or blogs, the kind of content that Google loves and will reward with a good ranking in the search results pages. Obviously you’ll want to have content which is relevant to the theme of your website, but how do you know how relevant or targeted that content is in Google’s eyes? How do you verify the validity or relevance of the content in the first place?
You will likely know which main keyword or keywords you are targeting for your website. But what about the secondary keywords, or the “long-tail” keywords, those less competitive keyword phrases (the low-hanging fruit, as it is sometimes described) which are so important in getting the visitors to your site? These are the keywords that also help to clarify and remove any ambiguity in your main keyword, to reinforce and provide authority to your main keyword and your site’s overall authority: but how do you find these?
Perhaps more importantly, how do you decide what Google likes, and how can you tell the content that Google actually expects to see on the most relevant sites?
Actually, the answer is staring us in the face. There are two main authority sources where the answers to these questions are hidden in plain sight. The first one is Google itself. The second is Wikipedia.
Enter a main subject or topic into the Google search box and hit the return button. At the bottom of each page of results there is a section which supplies related subjects. These could be said to consist of some “long tail” keywords which are highly relevant to the main search term.
So let’s enter as a main keyword “Spring Cleaning”.
Near the bottom of the page, below the first page of actual search results, is a section called “Searches related to spring cleaning”.
Here is the list in full. It consists of just 8 long-tail keywords:
when to start spring cleaning
spring cleaning tips and tricks
spring cleaning tips 2019
spring cleaning quotes
when is spring cleaning week 2019
spring cleaning in hotel
spring cleaning list 2019
simple spring cleaning checklist
Each is a link to its own page of search results. So you see how this works. Google understands that these are all highly relevant subsets or related topics of the main subject “Spring Cleaning”. This guide is being written in 2020 so it’s a bit surprising that last year is being cited, but it’s still only April as I write this.
Let’s take another main subject, and this time let’s take the well-worn sector of “dog training”.
Here the list is highly targeted towards long-tail (no pun intended) keywords based on place names and proximity to where I live. So we have:
dog training near me
dog training Rickmansworth
dog training tips
Bushey tails dog training
dog training classes near me
residential dog training Hertfordshire
Chorleywood dog training
In each case, Google is trying to present us with search terms which are the most relevant, or that it thinks are most relevant or most useful, in relation to my search.
You can see also that there is a certain assumption of intention here as well. Google is assuming that there is at least a partial intention that I want to discover where I can find a local source of dog training or dog training advice. This is presented as long-tail search terms which feature a place name which is near to me.
These are sometimes known as “buyer keywords” because they signify the intention that the user is at least thinking about buying a service and wants to home in on a local service provider. Certain buyer keywords, for example branded goods which specify product names, are stronger than others.
While some main search terms will have this intentional feature, others will not; it depends on the nature of the search term used. So it will depend on the subject of your website. What is your site about? Does it assume an intention that visitors to your site will be seeking information or wanting to take some course of action? This is one of the first things you need to decide when trying to figure out what keywords to base your site’s content around.
But you can’t go wrong if you let yourself be guided by Google itself!
For sites which tend to be more informational in nature then you can allow yourself to be influenced by Wikipedia. This is set up to be the encyclopedia of the Internet, so its ambitions are lofty indeed. Google ranks Wikipedia entries extremely highly in its search results, often at the very top position. So if Google trusts it to that extent then it means that it’s perfectly safe for you to do the same.
The great thing about Wikipedia is that it actually lays out the structure of its articles in its contents section near the top of each article so you have the opportunity of picking and choosing to see the sub-headings that are relevant to your own website.
If we look at Wikipedia’s own entry for Spring Cleaning then we can see this little section laid out as follows:
As you can see, there’s a huge number of sub-headings which are all relevant to the main subject and these can all be included as sections of pages in your own website or blog. The only thing I would add to this is that to make all these sub-headings true long-tail keywords you’d need to add the main keyword “dog training” to most of these (either at the beginning or the end of the sub-heading phrase) to make it super-relevant and targeted as a long-tail keyword in its own right.
So, for example, instead of having a page optimized for the keyword “before 1900” you would use the long-tail phrase “dog training before 1900”. Similarly, instead of optimizing your page for “operant conditioning” you would optimize the page for the keyword phrase “dog training operant conditioning”, and so on.
If you want more content than that, you can use these sub-headings and use the full long-tail keyword and repeat the process again. So this time you’ll put “dog training operant conditioning” into Google and look at the keyword suggestions at the bottom of the page, and so on. Do this to all the other keyword suggestions and more keywords will appear like branches on a tree. Doing this repeatedly will give you a huge number of keyword ideas with which you can populate your website with rich, relevant content.
You can see that there is no shortage of ideas for long-tail keywords which can be used for the subject matter and content for your web pages.
We know that this is all content that Google thinks is highly relevant to your main subject matter, because the suggestions come from Google itself and from Wikipedia, which is the one information source that Google holds above all others to be valid and relevant in the information it provides.
So now you have the skeleton of your website structure, based on the long-tail keywords that you’ve taken from Google and Wikipedia.
Keyword Tools, Long Tail and Short Tail Keywords
Google has its own keyword suggestion tool, and there are also some useful third party keyword tools available as well, many of which take at least some of their input from the Google tool.
Predictive keyword tools will allow you to see existing search terms which Google recognises based on the keywords that have appeared earlier on in the same search query. Effectively, this allows you to see which search terms (keyword phrases) are being used based on their alphabetical listing (rather that their monthly search volume).
This is very useful in that it will uncover the “long tail keywords” which SEO experts are so enthusiastic about. These long tails search terms are sometimes referred to as the low-hanging fruit because they are relatively easy to rank for (in other words, to beat you competition). These search terms will be very worthwhile to aim for. The reason for this is not difficult, because it would be far more difficult to rank for “dog training” than it would be to rank for “Golden retriever dog training with rewards”.
The longer search term is much more specific as well as being easier to rank for. It is true that the shorter term will have a larger search volume, but if it is impossible to rank for on a new site then it would really be a waste of time.
The long tail keywords are also much more specific so it is generally agreed that they will convert better than the shorter terms. With the shorter terms we don’t know what the user intention is. The user may not necessarily want to make a purchase, but only seek information. While with longer search terms it will be easier to see the user intention.
Predictive search term tools are based on alphabetical (or sometime alpha-numerical) order, and some can finely tune searches. So while a basic search of this nature would work on an A to Z principle, the more finely tuned tools use AA to ZZ. This means that the fine tuned version will output a greater number of keyword phrases.
While a larger set of known search terms is more useful than a more limited number, it’s also necessary to check the monthly search volume of all these search terms. You don’t want to write optimised content on a search term which isn’t being used and has a monthly search volume of 0. For search volume we have to go back to Google, and the tools which pull in Google-driven results.
It is also useful to mention in terms of search volume that Google often has difficulty with search terms which have very low search volumes. So instead of showing the number of searches per month as being between 2 and 6 (for example) Google may well attribute these keywords with a search volume of 0.
This is a problem which can be seen especially with large ecommerce site, when a lot of the relevant keywords will be product search terms with a monthly search volume of less than 10. Google will often attribute 0 searches to these. What can be done about this? Not much except to write the content anyway and see if there are searches for these terms based on what your Google Analytics tools tell you.
Be Guided by Keyword Search Volume and Competition
As always, attention should be strictly paid to the search terms or keyword phrases that people will use when searching for a product or service that you supply. Ideally you will want your product or service to be at the top of the organic Google (and other major search engine) results, above your competitors.
The content I write is always absolutely geared to these keyword phrases, and each article I write will ensure that they are properly SEO optimised for each of these search terms.
I will also check out the search volume of these search terms (how many searches are made by people for this keyword phrase, usually expressed as searches per month); if they do not have any search volume then there will probably be very little point in writing about them.
Although it has to be said that in many cases Google will show 0 search volume when there is less than 10 searches a month – this happens quite a lot with ecommerce websites, where specific product searches can be stated by Google as 0 when, in fact, there are really a few searches for this every month, but the number of these searches is very low.
The other important consideration is competition. There are ways and means to establish how competitive a keyword phrase or search term is. Some are extremely competitive while others may have no competition at all (though these are increasingly rare as the number of micro-niches having content written about them is very small in an Internet where almost everything is being written about).
Some industries or sectors are much more competitive than others. The insurance sector, for example, is extremely competitive. So an experienced SEO will know the keyword phrases and search terms to go for based on competitiveness as well as search volume. That isn’t to say that these difficult keywords are not worth trying – far from it. But it should at least be known which these keywords are as they will need extra work to get them to the first page of the search results (more or better backlinks, more careful anchor text, etc.)
Content You Can Use & Content That You Can’t
Incidentally, the information that you find on Google and Wikipedia is all in the public domain, so there is no problem with copyright issues, etc. There is no copyright (nor can there ever be any copyright) on ideas, only on the finished article or content itself. So nobody can accuse you of plagiarism if you simply take ideas (or the keywords themselves) which are already in the public domain.
But – and this is extremely important – you must not apply the same reasoning to the articles and the content itself. Because if you simply copy and paste the articles that you find on Wikipedia, or anywhere else, and use these on your own site, then you will be guilty of plagiarism, and that is a very serious matter.
Plagiarists often find themselves threatened with a lawsuit from the original writer of the content they have stolen. The matter hardly ever comes to law, and is usually settled out of court, but the price can be very steep nevertheless, both financially and in terms of sleepless nights; and it will not enhance the reputation of the plagiarist. You certainly don’t want to be caught using someone else’s material.
Then there is the issue of the much-discussed Google duplicate penalty. There’s a lot of debate about this. At one end of the argument some people say it doesn’t even exist. But at the other end you have Internet marketing experts showing you how sites with duplicate content are penalized by not appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPS) or appearing much lower down than would be the case if they did not have this duplicate content weighing on them.
Whatever your opinion on this duplicate penalty issue, it is quite clear that there are very good reasons why you should not just copy and paste someone else’s work onto your own site.
You may have heard of Copyscape. It’s the standard go-to tool for uncovering plagiarism and duplicate content and is used by all sorts of people from writers and SEOs to marketers and lawyers who specialize in intellectual copyright law. Copyscape is the top rated resource for protecting website owners against plagiarism and copyright theft, and for ensuring that a website owner’s digital property is free from unlawfully copied content.
All my written work is guaranteed to pass Copyscape, which I use as a matter of course just in case. This means that your website content will never result in claims of plagiarism or any duplicate shenanigans, and will not suffer any duplicate penalties from Google or any other search engine.
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