Evergreen Times

From time to time, one encounters people who want content for content’s sake. If that’s all you want, adding new content to your website could be as simple as using Chat GPT or some other form of AI.

Before you think that this is a recommendation, please know that it isn’t. AI readily admits that it can’t yet write as well as a human being can and won’t be taking human writers’ jobs anytime soon.

“Content for content’s sake” means you aren’t really publishing your content strategically. You’re just showing search engines that your website has some stuff going on. You can throw in a few keywords, and it’s sort-of beneficial to your search engine rankings while still not placing you in a prime position to get noticed.

Why Choosing a Human Writer Can Benefit Your Content Strategy

A well-thought-through content strategy is meant to help people to find your business by finding your content first. It positions you as an expert in your field, and it allows you to highlight what makes you different from everyone else.

In this instance, there are definitely benefits to choosing a human writer. It allows you make novel statements, engage your readers by exercising human empathy, and it ensures a level of factual accuracy that AI can’t achieve.

So, what does a content strategy really look like? Before we dig in, please note that I’m not marketing myself as an SEO expert – I work with them, so I’ve learned a bit about this side of SEO and I know how to implement it.

Content Clusters and Pillar Content

By now, most people know that if they want to implement SEO, it helps to use key words and phrases that help algorithms to classify what they’re doing and drive traffic to their websites.

Formulating a keyword strategy takes a lot of time and research, but it’s worth doing because it looks for the foot in the door that can leverage your rankings up search engine results pages (SERPs). So, instead of competing on terms that established websites already compete fiercely for in organic search results, it finds new avenues to get you noticed.

Once you know how to go about getting search engines’ attention, it’s time to formulate a content strategy that achieves your goals. Textual SEO in individual pieces of content is only part of this. You want your content to work together to reinforce your position.

To achieve this, you will consider “big” topics (pillar content) that allow you to write very authoritative, long-form pieces covering several related subtopics. The authoritative articles that support each cluster touch on each of these subtopics, and each subtopic is worthy of, and gets, a full-length article of its own.

Implementing Your Content Strategy

Now that you have keywords that allow you to compete and a plan for using them in content clusters and pillar content, it’s time to get started. Begin with your subtopics. The reason for this approach is that your authoritative pillar content will include links to each of the topics within the cluster. This sends out powerful signals to search engines.

Typically, articles within the cluster will be 1,200 to 1,500 words long, but length is not as important as providing complete information without repetition, so they could be longer or shorter.

Once the subtopics within a cluster have all been covered, it’s time for that big, fat “authority” piece. Articles like this are invariably longer than their supporting framework of blog posts.

The usual instruction is for 2,000 to 2,500 words. I’ve also written for SEO specialists who are hoping for a 5,000-word result. If the topic is strong enough, it’s entirely possible to do this without waffling or fluff. However, I’ve also been asked to shorten articles to improve search engine visibility, so I think 5k words isn’t really the sweet spot.

Content Strategy is Only Part of SEO Strategy

Publishing articles that provide a fresh take on what you do and linking them together is a great way to improve your search engine rankings. But there’s a lot more to SEO than keywords and content. There’s on-site SEO, off site SEO, technical SEO, and a bunch of things that go into each of these areas.

Most SEO experts are not writers. Even when they’re capable of writing great articles, they don’t have time for it. That’s why they contract people like me to do the work. And, it’s worth noting, an SEO specialist worth their salt seldom recommends AI-generated articles to their clients.

There are many reasons for this, but in my opinion, the top one is that machine-generated content that has been manually tweaked to include keywords can never be wholly original. Instead, it just regurgitates info without fact-checking and without the wonderful process we call “thinking.”

Need Help Implementing Your Content Strategy?

Having an effective content strategy, and implementing it well, will improve your search engine rankings. I don’t claim expertise I don’t have, so I won’t pretend that I’m the right person to develop your content strategy.

When it comes to writing the articles that make your content strategy work, on the other hand, I’m reasonably competent. An unambitious claim? I’d rather undersell myself than subject you to the usual (questionable) marketing-speak about being the absolute best.

My clients have almost always said they’re pleased with my work. Maybe you will be too. Contact me if you’d like help in transforming your content strategy into an organic rankings-boosting reality.