“We keep writing all of these big, long blogs, but nothing seems to really help our SEO. What are we doing wrong here?” The Danny Star team gets asked some version of this often. Intuitively, that makes sense.
So many of us are ingrained with the idea that “hard work is rewarded.” You work hard to write a long blog, you should be rewarded with better SEO.
However, that’s not the case.
To really get the most out of your content marketing and blog writing, you may want to redefine the phrase hard work.
“Hard Work” in Writing
“I wrote a one thousand word blog. Why isn’t it doing better on SEO?”
For one, word count is not a ranking factor at Google. You don’t have to take our word for it, listen to Google. That entire quote is worth reproducing: “word count is not indicative of quality. Some pages have a lot of words that say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important and relevant to queries.”
It is much harder to write something concise that’s meaningful and relevant than it is to write a lot of words.
That’s harder work.
It may not always feel that way, because you may spend much of that time doing hard work not “looking like” or “feeling like” you’re doing hard work. Perhaps you’re pacing. Maybe you’re jotting ideas down on paper or in a Google doc and constantly paring them down. Perhaps you’re just staring at your screen, going through several different ideas in your mind, trying to find that perfect, shorter way to get your message out.
All of that is hard work. Much harder work, in fact, than just banging out 1000 words.
“Hard Work” in Podcasting
So often, when we reach out to someone about being on our podcast, they ask if we should “write it out.” That could mean writing out the questions, the responses, meeting ahead of time to go over it, etc.
There’s any number of reasons for this, but one of them is definitely that this feels like what “hard work” should be.
However, that almost never leads to a better podcast.
What makes a great podcast, we’ve found, is truly listening to what the other person is saying and then coming up with the next response from there.
Again, this may not “seem” like hard work, because it doesn’t include hours bent over a computer.
But, (and this is key) it is hard work. Specifically, it’s hard work that leads to a better overall product.
By redefining what “hard work” means to you, you can improve your content marketing and so much else.
To grow your business in a variety of ways, schedule a consultation with Danny Star at (213) 457-3250.
