There are a lot of misconceptions revolving around SEO. The industry is a confusing one, with “black hat” and “white hat” strategies, endless tools, and no shortage of freelancers and agencies who all claim to have the secret sauce.
It’s no wonder most people feel overwhelmed with SEO or completely lose interest in it.
In this piece, I’m going to go against the grain and show you exactly how easy SEO can be. I’ll teach you how to rank well without stuffing your posts with keywords or throwing your money into the black hole of tools and contractors.
But before I reveal how to write SEO friendly content and rank your site, let’s look at how not to do things:
How Not To Rank On Google
I hate to say it, but if you want to look at how not to do SEO, you need only look at what the majority of people in the space are doing. People still think that stuffing your articles with the perfect number of the perfect keywords generated by the perfect keyword research tool is the key to success.
To these people, I say: “It ain’t 2005 anymore, guys.”
Maybe that stuff used to work, but Google updates their algorithm several times each year. Call me crazy, but I think after over a decade they’ve caught on to most of the cheap tricks out there.
How to Actually Do SEO & Rank on Google
Here’s the big fat secret no one wants you to know: the key to SEO is writing good, helpful content that people want to read, and posting it on a website that people enjoy being on. That’s it.
So why isn’t this what the majority of people teach?
Mostly because it’s too simple. Gurus want to sell you their silver bullet strategy or tool to slay the supposedly complicated SEO gargoyle that they themselves planted in your mind in the first place!
But before I go too far down that tangent, let’s slay the other big myth of SEO: the so-called necessity of keyword research tools.
How to Rank Without Using Any SEO Keyword Tools
You don’t need to waste money on any of the SEO keyword tools.
Just go to the source itself: Google.
Google has a vested interest in delivering relevant search results to its users. As such, it will “auto-suggest” popular queries and keyword clusters that people are searching for. These queries and clusters are the keywords you want to target.
In short: don’t overcomplicate this. Go to the search engine whose literal job it is to suggest high traffic queries and keywords!
How to Use SEO Keywords & Queries In Your Blog Posts
Now that you have your keywords, you can proceed to use them hundreds of times in your blog posts. Just kidding. Common sense tells us that a post like that wouldn’t be very enjoyable to read, right? And yet I still see keyword stuffing advocated everywhere.
The real point of the last step, wherein you got queries and keyword “clusters” from Google itself, is that these things can point you in the right direction of a topic to write about.
For example, you go to Google and start typing in “best b” and it autosuggests “best banjos,” “best banjo players,” etc. This does not mean that you stuff your post with those queries or clusters.
Instead, what this tells you is that “best banjos,” or “best banjo players,” are good topics to write about. A blog post titled something like 12 Best Banjos For Bluegrass/Country Music would probably rank pretty well, assuming the content is good. Which brings us to our next point…
The Golden Rule of SEO: Write Good Content That People Want To Read
The golden rule of SEO is to write good content that people actually want to read. Content that is informing, engaging, and helps solve a problem.
The reason this is Rule #1 is because if you stick to it, 80% of other best practices in the SEO world will follow.
This is why you don’t need to stuff your post with keywords. If you’ve found a topic using Google autosuggest as I detail above, 80% of your concern should be writing a good post about that topic, and satisfying the searcher’s intent for it. If you do that, then the keywords will work themselves out.
For example: if you write a post about the best banjos for country music, and it’s actually a good helpful post, you’re going to end up using keywords like: banjo, best banjos, country music, banjo players, budget banjos.
If you really want, you can go back in and add more uses of these words where it makes sense. But it’s unlikely to make a big difference. The real “needle mover” is writing helpful content.
The Other 20% Of SEO Factors to Consider
There are other small things that will help your content rank that aren’t directly related to the quality of the content itself. These are the other 20% of things to think about, and as such, they should really only take up 20% of the effort you want to put into SEO. The vast majority of your effort should go into writing good content.
The 20% of other things that are helpful are things like:
- UX/UI
- Good internal/external linking
- Page speed and core web vitals
- Scannability
The key thing to notice is that all these things impact the user’s experience and enjoyability of your website and its content. Each of these could get their own post, but I do want to leave you with a few words on scannability, as it’s something most people mess up that can be easily fixed to vastly improve your content and user experience.
Scannability | How to Write For The Web
Remember college and high school English classes – where you wrote long papers with huge blocky paragraphs packed with ten-dollar words to try to impress your teacher?
Well, no one wants to read stuff like that. Or at least, the vast majority of people on the web don’t.
If you want to understand scannability, just take a closer look at how this post (yes, the one you’re reading right now!) is structured:
- The paragraphs are very small.
- Boldface is used occasionally, but tastefully (if I do say so myself).
- Bulleted lists (like this one!) add further contrast, interest, and scannability.
- Subheadings guide you through the structure of the piece, keep you focused, and call your attention to specific points of interest if you wish to skim.
Simply implement these things into your own writing, and you will have content that is “scannable.”
Wondering why this helps with SEO? Essentially, people’s attention spans have atrophied and they don’t want to look at huge blocks of text that go on and on forever. Even the look of such a piece will scare people off. It’s intimidating.
So break things up. Limit yourself to a few sentences per paragraph, a few paragraphs per subheading, a few subheadings per blog post. It will help readers stay engaged with your content (which will lead to longer page and site visits, a metric Google likes for ranking purposes.)
SEO Case Study
Want to see how I actually put these things into practice? Here’s a case study on how I used all the above SEO tips to rank a blog post #1 on Google in a relatively short period of time: