Get Topical with Content, But Be Unique
Topics, and Clients, and Search Engines, Oh My!
The idea of having a website for your business is to connect and engage with clients. You want to help them understand your product or service, ask questions about how your business is a solution to their problem, see the solution, and become your client or customer.
In other words, your website is there to get people to buy from you online.
Written content puts into words what you want to say to your potential clients.
You present a topic about your business that answers questions for people who are searching online.
There was a time when you could just write and search engines would find you. Now there are over a billion websites in the world, thousands in your industry, and likely hundreds in your local area.
How do you reach the right people?
How To Write for Results
After the time when you could write just about anything, there was a time when you needed to use keywords in your text so search engines could find you—so many keywords in your title, so many in the first paragraph, so many in the body of the text, so many in the final paragraph.
The language on websites became stilted and often cumbersome, making text difficult to read for the very people you wanted to reach. It worked for search engines, but not for people.
All that has turned around. Search engines like Google use sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) to “parse” what you say online—on your website, on social media, in video descriptions, even in the text you use to describe images that support your text.
Writing for results now is like talking to someone in your store or a coffee shop. You explain what your business does and how it can solve a problem for that individual. It could be unclogging a drain, providing accounting services, IT support, a cool kitchen gadget, or your sophisticated, encrypted online banking services. The nature of your business doesn’t matter.
How you “talk” about your business does matter.
Organize Your Content by Topic
Each page on your website, each blog post you write, has something to tell your client. That’s the topic of the content.
As you write about your topic, use related words to elaborate. These are the subtopics grouped under your main topic. The more your subtopics are directly related to your main topic, the better search engines understand the main theme (topic) of that page.
Don’t go off-topic.
Stick to the main topic.
Understand the basic ingredients of creating web copy. Then become the focal point of your topic.
Use Natural Language
You don’t need to fuss and fret about keywords or where to put them. Imagine you are face-to-face with a potential customer.
Now, explain how your business will work for them.
Speak to one person - the person who is visiting your website and reading your content
Stick to one topic - the one idea about your business you want to emphasize in your content
Use the inverted pyramid approach to present your information - first your main point, then back up your point with details, and finally add background information
Be sure to break up your written text into small paragraphs and group those small paragraphs under headings so your potential client can follow your ideas (topics) from start to finish.
SEO practitioner Koray Tugberk Gübür said in a recent interview about connecting content with search engines to drive traffic,
“A semantic SEO Strategy represents the sentence structures, relevance points, order of the facts, and the order of the heading structures.”
Be As Unique As Your Business
In the same way that you don’t have to struggle fitting the right keywords in the best places, you don’t need to try catching up with those keywords your competitor uses anymore.
Even search tools like SEMrush are heading away from keywords and using labels like semantically related words.
Chasing is always a no-win situation, and it’s also true with online competitors whether big or small. Google came out with a new patent that recognizes how fruitless that is. The concept is called information gain, a game-changer for content.
Yes, you want to use semantically related words—the subtopics to your main topic—to indicate to search engines what your topic is. But now, you want to include unique information over and above those semantically related words and probably using even more of them.
Say something unique about your product or service. Get to the details and explain how what you do is different from all those competitors. Google won’t dock you for being different. It will take note of that difference and serve it up to the right potential clients.
Don’t Be Shy About Your Business
The world is waiting to hear about your business. Now you have the freedom to talk to potential clients as human beings topic-by-topic. And you can add on to your topic strategy by sharing unique information that sets you apart from your competitors.
If you are new to writing about your business or just want to know more about how content writing works for your business, connect with me to discuss a consultation.
