All About Content

So, you can see these are really diametrically opposed goals, but you cannot ignore either one of those masters because on the one hand, if you optimize only for the machine, you’re going to have a huge page of text with lots of keywords. And that’s great for the machine, but no human’s going to read that, which means no customers.

On the other hand, if you’ve got a wonderful page full of beautiful images and very compelling texts that a human loves, but the machine doesn’t have enough to go by, they’re not going to rank it well, in which case no humans are going to find it, and that again means no customers. So, you have to serve both.

Now, there’s a lot of myths out there about how to do some of this: specifically things like shoving stacks of keywords into the page where they don’t really necessarily fit, or listing piles of zip codes or cities in the footer, trying to target those locations. Or, maybe even in the extreme case, putting white text on a white background, thinking that the machines will read it and the humans won’t see it.

These are all really bad ideas. Some of them maybe used to work, but don’t now — but they’re all just bad. At this point, they can only hurt you, not help, so don’t do any of those. It’s important to remember that these days when it comes to keywords and content, you’re looking for the Goldilocks approach. You don’t want to have too much. You don’t want to have too little. It’s gotta be right in that sweet spot— just right.

So, another mistake we see all the time is when people list, say, the 10 services they provide in a bulleted list on their homepage and think that’s enough to convey what it is that they do. Unfortunately, that violates a core principle of one thought per page. So that would have been if it’s 10 services on the homepage, that’s 10 thoughts on that one page, not one thought.

So, to give you an idea of how this works, let’s take an example that brings it to sort of an extreme. Let’s say you have an exteriors company that has roofing, siding, and windows; and you service the areas of Dallas and Fort Worth. Well, that means you need a page for roofing installation in Dallas, roofing installation in Fort Worth, siding installation in Dallas, siding installation in Fort Worth, window installation in Dallas, window installation in Fort Worth. That’s six pages, so it’s kind of a lot of work.

Now let’s take it even further and say, “Well, you actually need to double that,” because you need to target both spoken voice searches and the way those are phrased versus the way you phrase text searches that are typed in. So now you’ve got to double that to 12 pages, and then let’s think of this even more: You now need to, say, offer repairs because you don’t just do installations. You’ve got to double that again to 24 pages because you have to combine all the areas with the services.

Clearly, that’s a pretty daunting task. You can see how this gets out of hand quickly.

Now, again, anything from this that deviates from this plan is suboptimal, though being realistic, almost no one takes it to this extreme and almost no one really needs to. It’s just an example to give you an idea of how far this can go, and also to illustrate the point that it’s wildly different from just dropping a bulleted list on your homepage. That just won’t cut it.

So, I hope this information was helpful, and if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. We’re always happy to talk to you and help answer any questions you have. Thanks for watching the video and we’ll see you next time.