Writing Good SEO Content: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Writing Good SEO Content
Writing Good SEO Content: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly!

OK, so today, we’re going to talk about how we do good SEO content writing. But instead of me boring you with a long list, I thought we’d make it a bit of fun and go with a classic: the good, the bad and the ugly.

And look, if you’ve been writing for any length of time, you’ve probably done some of the bad – maybe even some of the ugly. The point is that you’re not doing it anymore and instead trying to be a saintly do-gooder, who only abides by white hat SEO practices. 😇

I’m going to break it up into two categories: link building and content writing. Let’s get into it!

SEO Link Building

The Good: for on-page links, you have considered information and article hierarchy. You have adopted the Hub and Spoke model, with your long, pillar posts getting the lion’s share of the internal links on your page. You have articles that link contextually amongst your content, but also call outs and other user-friendly sections that encourage users to keep reading.

The Bad: you’re definitely linking between articles, but it’s more of a loose mess than anything. There’s no structure, more of an incidental afterthought. The anchor text isn’t good either. It’s random, long sentences that sort of make sense to people, but don’t make sense to search engines.

The Ugly: oh you build links alright. On-page is OK, but lift the bonnet and you’re proud of your work off-page… which happens to be bought links from link farms, or other questionable locations. “Look at my boost in rankings!” I hear you say. You show me Google Search Console or Google Analytics and point to the increase in traffic. Little do you know that a slap is just around the corner…

SEO Content Writing

The Good: you’re a reader of this blog, so you’re already way ahead in this realm. 😉 You show up everyday, post every week and are robotic like in your consistency. Your content reads naturally to people and your content takes on a problem solving tone. Bounce rate is low, as is time spent on page. Google has rewarded you with impressions and clicks are steadily rising, even if you don’t actively link build.

The Bad: you write content when you feel like it. It tends to more so be random blogs, thoughts, musings, ramblings, stuff that’s on your mind, rather than stuff that solves your readers’ problems. Speaking of your readers, you’re not really sure who they are. As a result, Google is confused about who to show your content to. It doesn’t really rank. Certainly doesn’t help that the keywords are showing up in meta tags, nor as headers.

The Ugly: your idea of a good strategy is to completely outsource this to ChatGPT or another article spinner. “Look at these fools,” you scoff, staring down your nose at the plebs. “Still writing content like it’s the dark ages!”

I mean yeah, this strategy might work for a while, it might also work longish term, but it’s an evolving arms race. You know that you ultimately like reading content written by people. AI content is still pretty obvious. There are people creating “anti-ChatGPTs” who can find content created by AI.

So there it is: the good, the bad and the ugly of SEO link building and content creation. Does it sound about right?

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