I'll never forget my first freelance writing assignment...
One day I was searching for writing jobs on Elance. And I saw a job listing that stood out:
"Freelance Writer Wanted for 50 Short Health Articles"
This sounded perfect. So I submitted a bid.
And the client accepted my proposal! I was PUMPED.
That is, until I saw the project details...
As it turns out, these "health" articles were on the topic of: "how to get rid of man boobs".
(Yes, you read that right)
The client told me that each of the 50 articles should be optimized around a keyword.
So I'd write one article optimized around "get rid of man boobs" and another optimized around "removing man boobs".
You get the idea.
Looking back on this experience, two things stand out:
1. I actually wrote 50 articles about man boobs
2. SEO and content marketing has changed a lot since then
(Especially what defines "great content").
How have things changed, exactly?
First, there was Google Panda.
This update penalized sites that pumped out lots of mediocre content.
Before Panda, success with SEO was as simple as creating lots and lots of pages...
...And optimizing each page around a long tail keyword.
(That's what Mr Man Boob was doing when he hired me).
Then, there was Hummingbird.
If Panda was the jab, Google's Hummingbird update was the hard left hook.
In fact, Hummingbird knocked mediocre content on the mat...never to recover.
Why?
Before Hummingbird, Google would treat two similar keywords as completely different terms.
For example, they'd consider: "knitting tips for beginners" and "beginner knitting advice" as two unique keywords.
(Even though the intent behind that search is exactly the same).
Today, thanks to Hummingbird, the search results for both of those keywords are very similar.
But Google's Hummingbird algorithm goes even deeper than that...
Today Google can take a keyword...and boil it down to what the searcher really wants.
For example, let's say you search for "where can I get a haircut in Boston?".
Google knows that you really want to see a list of barber shops and salons. And that's what they'll show you.
The question is:
How does this apply to your SEO efforts?
It's actually pretty simple:
Publish content that deserves to rank for several different keywords.
In fact, this is the approach I use at Backlinko. And it works GREAT.
For example, Backlinko generates over 180k unique visitors per month.
And I've only published 36 total posts on the site.
How is this possible?
After reading what I just outlined, this shouldn't come as a big surprise.
Publishing 1000 articles optimized around 1000 different keywords doesn't work anymore.
What does? Publishing AMAZING content.
That way, Google will rank your content for your target keyword...and hundreds of long tails.
For example:
One of the first pieces of content I published at Backlinko was called: "Google's 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List".
Let me tell you, this content was HARD to write. In fact, the first draft alone took me over 25 hours.
So, how did the content do?
Today, that single piece of content ranks for 2.9 thousand different keywords (according to SEMRush).
What's going on here?
Google considers my page an amazing piece of content. So they rank my page for as many different keywords as they can.
It's that simple.
The way I see it, you have two options when it comes to your SEO and content marketing:
Option #1: Publish less content. But make every piece of content insanely amazing.
Option #2: Take the man boob approach
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