As a professional freelance writer, I get a lot of questions about what is SEO writing (I know this isn’t the best grammar, but it is the best match to the google search for ‘what is seo writing’) and whether I do professional SEO writing. The second answer is easy, yes, I do freelance SEO writing for clients. The first question is a little trickier. Depending upon the length, and where the SEO publication will go, SEO writing is easy for some uses, and much more complicated for others. I want to write up a whole professional freelance SEO writing article, but Christmas is coming and I’m already using all my unbooked time to write ahead for paying client deliverables. However, I keep finding SEO writing examples that are either too good, too funny, or low-value SEO writing. I figured I would crank out the ol’ placeholder article so I have a place to put those.
Is This Good SEO Writing?
The Multiple Keyword Intro
There is an old SEO joke that goes: “An SEO goes into a bar, tavern, pub, brewhouse, saloon, beer garden, alehouse, watering hole, and orders a drink.”
Google has long claimed to be able to handle synonyms, and it does well. However, there are lots of things that aren’t solid synonyms despite mostly meaning the same thing, especially in context. For example, bar and tavern are decent synonyms, but so are tavern, brewhouse, and restaurant in some cases.
Enter the multiple keyword intro, where you figure out how to use all the keywords you want to target in an intro paragraph before you get started writing. This not only ensures that those keywords exist to be matched, but that they also occur early in your content, which some SEO analysts consider a ranking factor.
Saw this example of the multiple keyword intro this morning:
Are you looking to make money with print on demand? In this article, we’ll go over how to make money with a print on demand store. We’ll also cover how much you can make with print on demand and how to run a successful print on demand business.
In addition to understanding synonyms, Google claims to have super-advanced, artificial intelligence, semantic, search text processing so that it always knows what the searcher wants. The author of the above article obviously doesn’t believe the Google PR machine. The solution is the multiple, long-tail, keyword intro.
Obviously, this SEO writer wants to rank articles about making money with print on demand, but there are many ways a searcher might try and find that information. The paragraph above is grammatically correct and “written for the reader” more or less, but it is also very clearly written for Google, or more generically, written for search engines. Maybe Google would rank this article number one based on any of these searches, but there are a lot of other search engines out there like Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and others.
You can probably see the different searches the SEO author is looking to hit, but for clarity’s sake, here they are:
- make money with print on demand
- make money with a print on demand store
- how much you can make with print on demand
- how to run a successful print on demand business
You’ll notice that not matching all these queries isn’t necessarily Google’s fault. Technically, these are different things, making money with print on demand, versus specifically using a store, versus inquiring about how much money you can make, and finally a query about a print on demand business. They are not the same, no matter how great Google’s matching is, so if this author wants to rank for all these terms, then they need to spell each one out. Furthermore, if they believe that including the keyword phrase early in the text is important, this is the best way to get them all up there in the beginning.
The multiple keyword introduction is more necessary in longer posts. The author may cover each of these topics in-depth in a 2,500-word article. By the time they get around to writing about running a successful print on demand business, the beginning of the publication will be long gone. This type of intro is substantially less worthwhile in shorter articles, where all three topics receive a sentence or two over 300-words.
Sketchy Grammar SEO Writing
Write for the reader, not the search engines. This is good advice, but sometimes you can do both, even if you are leaning one way over the other.
That first sentence above will make Grammarly throw hands. It is more correct to say, “I get a lot of questions about what SEO writing is…,” but, when someone searches it is far more likely they will type in ‘what is SEO writing’ than they will type in ‘what SEO writing is’. As a professional writer it bothers me a little bit too, but I ain’t in this for your revolution, and I’m not in it for you, Grammar. I expect to be well paid. I’m in it for the money. (Me, paraphrasing Han Solo, because this is my own writing blog and I do what I want.)
More To Come
Later when I see it, or I have more available time.
For Now, Buy Stuff 😁