How to create better SEO content that people actually want to read. Small business SEO tips.

Are you creating content for SEO? Do you find yourself wondering how to create great content for your readers and make sure it's SEO-friendly so that people can find it wherever they search? If so, you're not alone! Let's talk about how to create great content that's both SEO-friendly and something your audience wants to read. I think there's a big misunderstanding sometimes when it comes to SEO content development. Let's talk about what matters most to your business. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. I am Rachel, and today we are going to talk about how to create better content. For both your search engine, so Google and our AI based search, like chat, GPT, Claude Perplexity, the overviews and your customer. So how do we merge this together and how do we create great content that people actually want to read and the search engines actually want to share? Because that's a really big part of the equation right now is making sure that we are creating. Great content that's helpful, that provides value that people are interested in. So there are some things that you can do to improve the quality of your content. They're not really complicated, they're not super difficult. I wanna walk, walk through a few of them today so that you can understand. What makes a difference and what can help you? So before you start writing, this is one of the biggest things. Before you start writing, I want you to really focus in on who is your customer? Who are you writing this particular piece for? And I want you to really think about them. What information do they need? What do they know now? What maybe is stopping them from doing what they need to do in order to get results or to be ready to buy from you or be ready to partner with you, or hire you as a coach, or use you as their realtor? Like really, really, really think about that. What I see is very often people will tell me, oh, I know my niche. I know my ideal customer. But then when we really start trying to think about what key words to choose and what type content to create, they very quickly realize they have kind of a high level I. Idea as to who they want to attract or help, but they don't know them very well, and that impacts their ability to make better content, to really connect with the person who is reading or listening. So that's the first thing before you even start, really make sure you have honed in on. Who is your customer and what questions do they have? What information do they need to know? What is keeping them from making a decision or what is keeping them stuck? How do you help them? So that's. The first thing, the second thing I want you to think of before you really get started with creating content, because you're doing this for your business, you're probably not creating content just for the heck of it. You're probably like me. You're creating content. Because you want to nurture your audience. You want to answer their questions, provide value, help them, hopefully get them to the point that they're ready to work with you. They want to partner with you. So you really wanna think then about what type content are you creating. We don't want to take a willy-nilly approach to content creation. We want to be strategic. So we want to think about. Our products and our services, and make sure that there is a direct line between the content piece that we're creating and a product or a service. So for example, if you're a life coach. Let's say that you coach women who are in midlife who are kind of having their own version of a midlife crisis. And so let's say that your offer is one-on-one coaching and you are creating content. Now you want to think about her. What is she struggling with? What questions does she have? What might she be searching on Google or traditional search engine? What might she be asking? An AI based search engine? Because we want to make sure that the time and effort we're putting into content creation. We'll attract the right people to our world and bring the right people into our world. So for our life coach who works with middle midlife, women who are transitioning or they're feeling less fulfilled, that midlife woman. Likely is a new empty nester, or she's beginning to look at becoming an empty nester. Maybe her youngest child is going to middle school or high school, maybe they're a little older than that, and they've already gone off to college, and so she's home alone now, and she's feeling less fulfilled because it's like, wait a minute. I've spent the last 20 years raising children and now what am I supposed to do? So those are the type things that she's thinking. So then from a content perspective, that life coach might want to have a post about. What do you do when you send your baby off to college, like. Why does your house feel so empty in August and then you realize it's the first time you haven't been getting a kid ready to go back to school. You're not racing people to sports practice and ballet lessons and scouts. And so what you've kept yourself busy with for a decade or two decades has changed and now it's like, oh my gosh. How do I fill my days? How do I fill my time? And that's where they start to struggle. Or the ano. Another example that I've shared several times is the life coach who focuses on helping people recover from binge eating. She had a new client who found her through. Chat, GPT, who was searching for ways to explain binge eating to her partner. That is the type content, because that's helpful to the person right now. It answers their questions. I create a ton of content on how to know if your SEO is working or how companies get leads from Google, or how you show up in the AI overviews or how you show up. On chat, GPT as a resource because there are things that you want to know as an entrepreneur, but they also tie back to my offers, my program where I teach you how to do this and help you and guide you or my one-on-one work. Either way, they help bring the right people into my world. You want to think about the same thing. You really want to think about how do I bring the right people into my world? By creating the content that they're searching for, that they need, and then you just optimize that content for them. Now, the other things we can do. Sometimes, especially depending on the subject matter, you might wanna inf, you might wanna partner with an influencer, you might wanna interview someone, you might wanna talk to a doctor, or you talk to another expert. Sometimes bringing another voice into your content can be really helpful because now not only are you. Teaching. You're the expert. You're bringing people into your world, but now you are also bringing someone new in who can help explain something that is in interesting to your audience as well. We see a lot more of this today with like podcast guesting than we do with guest blog posting, but this is something that. Is a good way to help bring another perspective into that piece of content, which can increase the value, the overall value, or the perceived value that your customer has or your reader has. Because now it's like, oh, I'm not just hearing from you. I'm hearing from somebody else who is an expert on this, who has some insights as well. So that's another way you can make your content better. Another thing that you can do is make sure that you are using insights and stories and anecdotes, things that really paint a picture and bring your content to life, because if you're really boring, you only share stats. You only share, you know, stats and figures and interviews and stuff like that. You're going to have a hard time engaging people. People really want to be able to see themselves in what they're learning about. They want to also be able to see how it can help them, how it's applicable to them. So sharing those stories and those anecdotes can make. What you're talking about or writing about come to life and make a little more sense for your audience. The last one is after you've written your content, and that is to make sure that it is optimized the right way for both AI and traditional SEO. So making sure that. You chose a keyword in the beginning, before you started writing back. When you were thinking about what should you write about? What did your customer need to know and how did it tie to your business? You also in that step would've chosen a keyword. Now you work on making sure that you've used that keyword in your copy. You've used it naturally and now you do. You create your title tag in your meta description. You make sure you use that keyword in your image file names and in your header tags and all of that as you optimize that new piece so that Google or the AI search engine can understand it. You also then want to consider using. AI based search phrases or making sure you're answering the questions that people are asking. In AI search, there are some new tools available now that will actually give us insights into what people are searching for, whether it's Gemini, perplexity, claw Chat, GPT. There's. Information available in different tools today that helps us to understand how to optimize for AI based search. Also, if you're in simple SEO content, if you have questions about any of that, just ask me. We've talked quite a bit about how we do all of this, what we do for ai. There's. Always new tools coming out. It's kind of a fascinating time 'cause there is a lot going on with that. The other thing you can do to really expand your reach to make that piece of content, not only better but make it work better, is to repurpose it, to use it across different channels. So this podcast episode is actually based upon a blog post that I wrote, and I'm gonna be honest, I wrote the blog post back in 2017. I've gone through multiple times over the years and I've edited it and updated it and made it work better. And this last revision, it was like, wow, this was written by corporate Rachel. Like I was out of corporate. I was an entrepreneur. But reading through it, it was definitely for a corporate audience. And I had updated it several times over the years, but this last time I sat down and I really kind of. Tore out everything that felt corporate to make it feel more approachable for an entrepreneur, adjusted it more to this particular market, adjusted my targeting a bit from an SEO standpoint, and then used it for the email that you received. If you're on my email list, you received an email with a little bit of insights about this, and then I used it as the outline for this podcast episode. Now, if I were super active on social media, I would probably also record a reel, maybe make a carousel post, maybe post this podcast episode on YouTube. I keep thinking I may go back to YouTube and do the. Video version, especially now that Apple Podcast is doing video podcasting for Apple. I'll be honest, I just really don't want to like, it's just an internal fight right now. I don't wanna do it, so I probably will because I know it's better for the business. But if you've ever had one of those situations where you're like, yeah, I know I need to do this, I probably should do this and I don't wanna do this. I want you to know you're not alone. We all struggle with that once in a while. Alright, that's it for today. There's some tips for you to create better content that people actually want to read and search engines actually want to share with those people. That's it for today. I'll see you back here next week. Bye for now.