Volume, that seems to be the name of the game. And no that doesn't give you the right to spam out absolute crap, Google will penalise you.
However after observing multiple case studies, going through several courses and realising this myself through one of our websites, I've come to learn volume drives SEO growth
But thats what i'm here to talk to you about, there's just way too much content out there about SEO and each person best guessing the next on what matters or doesn't
Before we talk about anything SEO etc, I just want to talk in plain business terms. Whenever I see people talk about algorithms or how to gamify systems I take it back to simple terms, what does the business want. Usually its one or two things, more time spent on the app, more money made through the app, so as long as you make that happen, you're good.
In terms of google, those two metrics are hit when google tells you exactly what you're looking for
Alright so jumping into it, what exactly is SEO simplified?
This stems from the term i've been hammered with ever since trying to learn more about this space i.e "Search Intent"
And honestly you don't need an explanation, its literally what it reads as. If your content solves for what the users search intent is, you'll do well.
Someone's looking to make bread ? Find out their pain points, find content about the common issues people face when trying to make bread and make content around it
First approach is from the team at Grow and Convert, where they flip the SEO research process from high volume keyword → keyword difficulty search → content creation to a pain point SEO approach which goes like this
Pain points of users → Content ideas based on pain points → Keyword research
This takes us to the next points i've learnt, people use google in 4 main ways, and if you understand that you can work out which pocket your content fits into
Commercial
The searcher is looking for buy something and is using google to make a decision
e.g Best michelin star restaurants, manchester united jersey, Asana Vs Trello
Navigational
The searcher is a lazy/forgetful human and is using google to get to the place they want to get to
e.g twitter, dog park, facebook, bugreporting login, smartwriter blog
Informational
The searcher is looking to be educated on a certain topic and is looking for reliable information
e.g how to grow an email list, how to negotiate in an interview, how to lose weight, what is a stonk
Transactional
The searcher is warm AF and is looking to make a purchase
e.g Buy samsung s20 in JB-Hifi
When you're writing content, understand where your information sits, this will also help you understand where in the "funnel" your content is. If it is commercial or transactional you're definitely near the bottom of the funnel and if its informational you're in the top of the funnel
This takes me to the next point made around finding frameworks that help address the above issue, the team at Grow and Convert covered this really well
Their thesis and research found that whilst most content will eventually work in some form or the other, their highest performing content fell into one of these following categories
- Best of lists - Goal is to help searchers discover the best products for the category they're searching fore.g I'm sure you've seen this, "Ultimate top 10 Growth Strategies", and it works
- Alternatives to lists - People are looking for alternatives to products (your competitors), this also can somewhat fall into the category of "brand jacking", where you're leveraging someone else's popularity to rank contente.g Top 5 Alternatives to Notion
- Comparison posts - People are down to the wire and looking to pit products against each other to see which one best fits their needse.g Jira Vs Asana, Macbook vs Windows
- Product utility posts - Here you're addressing the users intent to solve their problem and displaying how your product will solve for ite.g Canva is the best example, search for anything to do with templates and canva will show you how to solve that problem but only by using Canva
After all this, question comes down to, how the hell do I solve for this. Reading through Pat Walls content, who built starterstory.com to 880k visitors per month, his mantra is extremely simple. Create a framework to pump content out fast that solves for a problem with many variables attached i.e your surface area to capture the audience is high. He speaks about it in terms of content types and topics. The content type can be dog names, and the topic can be different dogs, therefore creating an n x n combination. To quote him, "Your goal is not to write 10 blogs and brush it off, its to write 10,000".
This is counter to many people who say just write 1 content piece a month, but make it EPIC. I do agree with this, I did this and my website DA shot up 20 points and I got backlinks from everywhere. However the only issue with this is the distribution side. The best is to have a balance of pushing large volumes of content solving for specific arenas and having pillar pages and topic clusters.
Using the above dog example, your pillar page can be around dogs and the things to consider when naming a pet. To which you can have an epic list of all the dog types and potential names for them (i.e the content clusters). Pillar pages broadly cover everything in the topic and cluster content address specific targeted keywords to that topic
Again, do note, this is quickest observation I could make after deep diving into this over the past few months and spending serious $ on some of the best SEO courses on the market. If you've got opinions about what I've said, i'd love to hear, learn, understand, hear back, get a reply from you ;)
