How to make solid SEO content (and overcome that writer’s block)

👋Hello, Jack here from PDS. Since “many” people have asked about starting their own content, here are the biggest takeaways from my +8-year content and SEO career.

Most importantly, this isn’t an ultimate guide. The internet is full of marketing and SEO help. This is the bootstrap guide, full of things you probably won’t hear elsewhere, designed to help you as much as possible with no gatekeeping.

Who are you talking to?

One of the most important things authors need to determine is who their target audience is. Since your audience will be very specific to your industry, I won’t be too prescriptive.

Generally speaking, your blog posts will speak to one of two target audiences:

Ideal buyers

For a company like Statsig, this is data scientists, engineers, product managers, and other experimenters under whichever job title they occupy.

For you, as a marketer, you’ll need to develop your own list of personas. Remember to go deeper than just job titles. A good persona includes:

• What problems do they solve?
• What tools do they use?
• What frustrates them?
• What type of content/resources do they prefer?
• Etc

They say the key to making a sale is to appear as a “trusted advisor” to prospective buyers. Remember, your salespeople will do the selling. Your content program is to gain visibility, spread the word, solve problems, and foster trust. 💪

“The growth audience”

The cynical takeaway is that search engines are an audience. That’s not true, despite marketers always saying things like “oh I wrote this post for Google.”

The growth audience is comprised of people at the top of the marketing funnel. They haven’t heard of your company, but you want them to find you through search engines, referral links, etc.

Even if they’re not a potential buyer, they might know one or become one someday. And their traffic helps your site perform better.

Growth content titles include things like “Top 3 rookie mistakes on feature flags,” or “The quick guide to calculating sample size.” They’re written to be scannable, entertaining, informative, and send solid on-page SEO signals to search engines. They’re also fun for human beings to read! 👽

The knowledge spectrum

< No familiarity with your product — ///////////// — Active users of a product like yours >

Your blog should have content for everyone on the knowledge spectrum, but individual blog posts don’t. This means each post should have a target demographic somewhere along the spectrum. Pick one, and write the post for them.

Also, beware of making too many “Ultimate Guide” Posts. Instead of one colossal blog post, you can make a handful with different target audiences possessing different levels of expertise, frustrations, needs, etc.

A handful of blog posts around a topic is almost always a better option than one giant blog post, because it sends better SEO signals, as well as providing different users an option tailored to them.

Formatting

You’ll need to have a style guide that you adhere to. Even if there isn’t one officially documented, you should be aware that every blog post should have:

• A title
• A cover (or “hero”) image
• A “hook sentence” (H4)
• Cascading headings (H2 covers broad sections, H3 is for granular sections that are relevant to the H2)
• At least 500 words (optimal is 1000+)
• A handful of external and internal links

Pro tip: The link anchor (the hyperlinked text itself) should be (close to) the keyword of the page you’re linking to

Overcoming writer’s block

The skeleton method 💀🦴💀🦴💀🦴

This is a simple process that works for me, and is worth considering if you find yourself stuck. It’s also great for structured SEO posts. I call it the skeleton method. ☠️

• Don’t start writing right away. Write down all your talking points as bullet points. Just make one big list.
• Put your list of talking points into an order that makes narrative sense.
• Add headings where necessary. Think of it as “grouping” your talking points together. (FYI this also helps blog post skimmers)
• One by one, delete and rewrite your talking points as complete sentences. As you type, you’ll find that more information emerges too.
• If your skeleton was created in a notetaking app, you’ll need to c/p it into a word processor for this final step.

^ An example blog post skeleton (in notepad) for a post about Hubspot being expensive

Activating your storytelling brain

Another tactic to overcome writer’s block is to just talk to someone about your topic.

You don’t even have to inform them that you’re writing a blog post. Conversationally discussing complicated ideas helps jumpstart your storytelling brain into processing the information.

Ideas and concepts are not words. They don’t naturally exist inside our brains as verbally conveyable information. Sometimes the transformation happens naturally during the writing process, but not always — and this is a common place to get stuck. A good discussion almost always fixes this.

Basic writing style

There is a rule of thumb for writing by which most skilled content writers abide. Aside from SEO signals, the readability of blog posts is a valid benchmark that all writers should be shooting for. Google claims that they don’t use time-on-page as a metric to determine a piece of content’s ranking, which is probably true, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not an important metric. In fact, click-through rates, shares, backlinks, etc., are valid enough indicators that algorithms don’t necessarily have to index users’ time-on-page in order to effectively estimate how good and engaging content is. Furthermore, Google recently launched a “quality content” upgrade that is meant to further incentivize sites against keyword-stuffing and other writing tactics that appeal to search engines over readers.

☝️ I know you skipped this. Your readers would too. Here’s the rule:

Counterintuitively to the writing styles taught in college, readers skip paragraphs that occupy more than three lines on the page. See below:

This is the first line of paragraph text.
This is the second line.
This is the third line.
And this is the line that causes people to skip the entire thing.

You don’t have to always adhere to this rule. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Just don’t overestimate the attention of your reader. Even if they’re your biggest fan, human attention just doesn’t work like that.

• Avoid using topic sentences and summary sentences in each paragraph.
• Think about using headings to isolate themes, so you don’t feel pressure to cram information into paragraphs. Give yourself space!
• “Write how you speak!” Meaning that it’s okay to string together miniature paragraphs that build upon one another and follow a narrative, rather than having each paragraph encompass an isolated narrative.
• When it doubt, just insert an arbitrary paragraph break. Seriously, you will find that this helps your story flow. Literally just break your paragraphs up!

Compelling titles

Your page title should concisely reflect the content of the post. If there is a disparity, it sends bad vibes to Google.

Furthermore, your title should pique the reader’s curiosity, or otherwise make it clear why they should click and read your post. Pro tips in picking a title:

• Leverage the information gap (it’s not clickbait if you’re not spammy about it)
• Keep the keyword close to the beginning of the title. This helps SEO as well as humans. (“[Release management] best practices” is better than “Best practices for [release management]”)
• Avoid cliches like “ultimate guide” unless the article is like 5000 words.
• Try to be a little bit novel. Your post title may appear among other search engine results.

Finding your voice

The best advice for creating good content> Use your own voice, be yourself, and write as if you’re speaking to another human being.

Don’t try to be a thought leader, don’t try to use words outside your vocabulary, etc. Just express yourself. That’s what your readers want!

As a brand, you should take pride in being able to explain without using jargon. Speak plainly about somewhat complicated ideas, just like your audience might.

Instead of saying “leveraged and utilized supplemental resources,” we’d say “used a tool,” and so on.

Furthermore, using jargon of any kind (especially corporate jargon) is like gatekeeping — it shakes off the weakest connected readers/listeners. You should be using inclusive and simple (yet accurate) language to keep the barrier of engagement low.

“This works by using pre-experiment data to ‘explain’ some of the observed variance.”

• Craig Sexauer describing CUPED simply and concisely

Keyword strategy, headings, and SEO stuff

You shouldn’t overly focus on this when you’re writing your content. But here’s a summary:

• Every article should have 1 keyword (sometimes called a “focus keyword/keyphrase”).
• The keyword should appear about once per 200 words, and be distributed evenly across the blog post. This satisfies an algorithmic criteria called “keyword density.”
• Your writing, if on-topic, will naturally cover what search engines consider to be “related keywords” in the paragraph text, so don’t worry too much about them. Just check the text once you’ve finished writing
• The keyword should be in the title, as close to the beginning as possible.
• The H3s should try to include keywords related to the H2s. Aim for ~66–75% again.
• 66–75% of H2s should include permutations of the keyword or related keywords.

Example: Focus keyword (Belgian waffle), permutations (belgian waffle recipes, quick belgian waffles, belgian waffles vs regular waffles), related keywords (waffle iron, waffle ingredients, are waffles cheap?, what makes a waffle belgian?)

Example SEO headings following keyword cascading best practices.

Topic research

Writing a solid piece of content—on any topic — will require a bit of research. Here are some tips:

• Start with a keyword that is adjacent to something you have content for, or rank for.
• Search the keyword and variations in Google. Record ranking results and their heading keywords.
• Type as a question in Google and record related questions.
• Enter the recorded variations, heading keywords, and question queries into a keyword research tool (we use SEMrush).
• Measure SEMrush’s estimated volume and competition for each keyword.
• Use the results to craft your blog skeleton.

Note: A good skeleton doesn’t require keyword stuffing, and is the right mix between high volume and low competition (can do high comp when our domain authority is higher)

“In conclusion”

Just kidding! Generative AI almost always includes a summary sentence or heading that says “overall,” “in conclusion,” or “to summarize.” Make sure you delete that from your final draft.

That’s it, hope this article is helpful for people looking to start creating their own content. If you have questions, comments, or could use some help, don’t hesitate to reach out!