What Google’s latest update really means
Recently Google announced its Helpful Content update. And as per usual, the interwebs got their knickers in a twist.
SEO agencies sending emails to copywriters telling them to stop using keywords.
Business brands frantically worrying that they were going to get a penalty after stuffing their sites with useless space-filling guff in their blogs.
But I tend not to freak out about these things.
I like to wait and see.
And today we’ll be chatting through what Google really wants to see when it talks about Helpful Content.
The dos.
The do nots.
And the do not panics.
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About James Welch
James has been in the industry since 2000. Like most SEO’s, he got into it by mistake, and fell in love with the competitive nature of SEO and online marketing.
James has held several leading positions at agencies that he started, and established agencies.
He has spent the past 15 years educating employees and clients about the virtues of producing leading and voluminous content.
Fun fact: James has been making a computer game since 1995 and it is STILL not finished!
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Transcript
Kate Toon:
Recently Google announced its Helpful Content update, and as per usual, the internet got their knickers in a twist. SEO agencies sending emails to copywriters, telling them to stop using keywords, google doesn’t care anymore. Business brands frantically worrying that they were going to get a penalty after stuffing their sites with useless space-filling guff in their blogs. But I tend not to freak out about these things. I like to wait and see. And today we’ll be chatting through what Google really wants to see when it talks about helpful content. The do’s, the do not’s, and the do not panic’s. Hello, my name is Kate Toon, and I’m the Head Chef at The Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. Today I’m talking with James Welch. Hello, James.
James Welch:
Hello.
Kate Toon:
And we’re actually joined by a friend of James’ today. When you listen to this episode, make sure you go and check out the show notes to see the famous celebrity who is also in James’ episode. I’m not going to give it away, James. I feel like people need to discover that for themselves in their own little Con Air way. But while we are waiting for the celebrity to contribute their opinion on Google’s helpful friendly content doodah, I’m going to introduce James. James has been in the industry since 2000, and like most SEOs, he got into it by mistake and fell in love with the competitive nature of SEO and online marketing. James has held several leading positions at agencies that he started and established agencies. He spent the past 15 years educating employees and clients about the virtues of producing leading and voluminous content. Fun fact, James has been making a computer game since 1995, and it’s still not finished. What is this computer game about?
James Welch:
It’s a soccer management game that I had the idea of in 1995. And unlike most SEOs, I’m a terrible programmer. So I’ve started and completed over and over and over. I’ve got the furthest I’ve ever got at the moment, but still nowhere near completion.
Kate Toon:
See, James, I think you’re a bit younger than me, because I remember back in the day, when you would get magazines from the shops, and you would get your ZX Spectrum out, and you would type out the code for Snake, or similar coding games, and then you would play them on your own computer. You’re the next generation, I think, aren’t you?
James Welch:
No, no. I did exactly that.
Kate Toon:
That’s you too?
James Welch:
That’s how I got typing, from the magazines, absolutely, yeah, on my Commodore-
Kate Toon:
Yeah. It wouldn’t work, and me and my brother would fight. And then we would have to read out the code on the screen, and I’d be reading it in the magazine with a pen to see one character that we’d missed. Do you know what I mean? It was great fun. People talk about kids watching TikTok too much today. Like we were doing anything better, to be honest. But anyway, well, I hope you get it finished one day. One thing that has been finished pretty much now is Google’s Helpful Content update. Did you see how smoothly I segued to that?
James Welch:
Very smooth.
Kate Toon:
Very professional. So look, let’s start with the facts. I’ll just do a little intro for anybody who hasn’t heard about this update. It began rolling out on August 25th, and it looks at content that was created to rank well in search engines, over helping humans. Google hasn’t mentioned penalties, but of course, if you get de-ranked, it might feel like one. So the Google-friendly content update is all about focus on people first, humans first, Google second, which most of us have always done. But anyway, rather than creating content just to please the Google gods, now we have to think about humans and be helpful. But really James, has anything changed? Most of us were doing this anyway, right?
James Welch:
Yeah, exactly. Nothing’s changed for the vast majority of people. It’s those 15% of SEOs that are on the bleeding edge of things, and testing the naughty things out. So I think this update was aimed at the kind of sites where if you, like me, are checking to see if Kate Beckinsale is still single or married, in that last remaining hope that she is still single, and she likes a fat guy from the North West of England. It’s those sites, and sites similar to that, that are the ones that are being handed out.
Kate Toon:
Just Kate Beckinsale related sites? So this is a Kate Beckinsale-
James Welch:
Well, in my search history, yes, it’s just Kate Beckinsale. But it’s those kind of sites that are quite perfunctory, and they’ll basically turn one word, yes or no, whether she’s married, into a whole web page full of random content. It’s got those alerts that tries to… Can we keep annoying you? That kind of thing. It’s just that perfunctory kind of content. That’s Google’s main aim in this update, I think.
Kate Toon:
I think that’s interesting. I don’t Google Kate Beckinsale. She’s not single, by the way, James. I’m sorry to break it to you. She actually used to go out with a friend of mine. So there you go. A long time ago. I know. I was Googling the other day… You know when you have a dream? And I wanted to know what it meant, not in a portent of doom way. This means that you’re going to get killed by a pigeon. But more like, if you dream about your teeth falling out, does it mean that you’ve got anxiety or whatever?
Kate Toon:
And I went to several different posts that were ranking number one, you know, one, two, three, and they all kind of made sense, but they kind of didn’t. Like they were the right words, but they weren’t in the right order. And they’d used adjectives and prepositions, but essentially it was all gobbledygook. And like you said, it was the same paragraph, just wiggled around and wiggled around and wiggled around again and again. So I think we all know what… And there was ads flashing, and I was obviously being pixeled up the bagooga while this was all happening. It’s that kind of content.
Kate Toon:
But you mentioned there that 15% of SEOs are on the bleeding edge. Is it really the bleeding edge or is it the bleeding lazy? Because I have many copywriters in my community who still get briefs from SEOs that say things like, “We want you to write 30 blogs about cheese and the keywords you need to use are cheese, cheese, cheese, and cheese.” And they’re like, “Really?” And they’re like, “Yep. And you can’t use any prepositions. You have to say cheese, Sydney, not cheese in Sydney, just cheese Sydney.” And it’s like, “Wow.” So I’m not sure it’s bleeding edge. I think it’s just rubbish people.
James Welch:
Yeah. Yeah. Bleeding edge doesn’t necessarily mean good. It most oftentimes means the opposite of good.
Kate Toon:
Right.
James Welch:
It’s pushing Google and testing Google to its limits in terms of what it’s not understanding fully, I suppose. So, yeah, I certainly don’t admire these people at all.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, yeah. I see what you’re saying.
James Welch:
Yeah. It’s just pushing Google to its limits and getting away with as much as they can. Essentially they just want eyes on the page, so the ads, so they get money from ad revenue that, as we know…
Kate Toon:
So it’s kind of getting as many eyes on the page with the least effort as possible.
James Welch:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
A lot of people have said it’s attacking AI content, but I don’t think it’s necessarily AI. It’s just lazy content, bad content, content that feels like it’s ticking Google’s boxes, but that’s all it’s doing, yeah, like you said. Yeah.
James Welch:
On the AI thing, this is why, I think, people are getting their knickers in a twist. So is Google specifically trying to punish AI content? No, but there’s a healthy amount of people that use AI content with all the lazy traits as well. So if you are using AI content in the correct way, and you’re writing valuable stuff, the usual stuff we know about, valuable stuff that’s useful to humans and things, that’s fine, but it’s easy for Google to say, right, this is AI content. What else is it doing that could determine whether this is lazy or not? And the classic case is lazy SEOs. And they’ve done it for years and years. It’s where you get… let’s use cheese in Sydney as a thing. By the way, cheese is my go-to search word as well.
Kate Toon:
Is it? Mine’s usually piglet jumpers. Piglet jumpers, because it’s a little bit more obscure. You can borrow that one if you want to.
James Welch:
Right. Okay. So let’s do piglet jumpers then. So it’s where they put underneath some kind of normal web content or an inquiry form or whatever, they’ve got piglet jumpers. Two sentences, piglet jumpers, X, two sentences, piglet jumpers in Melbourne, two sentences. It’s that horrible content where there was… Internally we at my company, we look for a high number of headings per sentences, and we determine that as bad content. So that’s just one thing that could be determined as bad content. But if you add AI to that, so if Google thinks right, there might be some AI going on here, and there’s terrible content, as we’ve talked about, the Kate Beckinsale or the dream sites, and another flag, which is a high number of headings per text, those are the kind of things together that make it very easy for Google to determine whether this piece is trash or not.
James Welch:
Another one, the biggest red flag, and this is what upsets me about most SEOs today. The easiest thing in the world for Google to detect is a blog post with just one link in it. It’s the most easy thing, and still it gets done. There’s probably tens of thousands of those pages being written today. So if you mix… Again, like we said before, if Google check… It’s trying to determine if this is AI content. If there’s a high number of headings per text, if there’s just one link in this blog post, and it’s obvious it’s a link out to gain [inaudible 00:10:19]. It’s those things. That’s where this update’s… Where I think people are getting mixed up in their own minds. The update is Google saying, right, we’ve probably got five or six factors here that if you’re tripping one or two or three or four of these things, it’s very easy for us to determine that your content’s not made for…
Kate Toon:
Humans. Yeah.
James Welch:
Yeah. And it’s-
Kate Toon:
I get that. I like that. So we talked about a few things we shouldn’t be doing there. As you said, a high propensity of headings to copy. AI generated content just for the sake of it. Single links. Lots of ads as well. I think if there’s a heavy amount of ads being served and there’s only 300 words of copy, I think that’s a bit of a flag. But let’s talk about some of the things we should be doing because I think some people are, as we said, are panicking. You and me have been doing this for a long time. Most of these algorithm updates aren’t aimed at the likes of your average small business, because you’re not, not to be rude, you’re not clever enough to be pushing Google to its boundaries, so it’s not trying to impact us.
Kate Toon:
But I’d still say that even by accident, a lot of small businesses write really bad content. They think, oh, we’ve been told that we need to rank for printers in Melbourne. So, “Bob, Bob, write an article about printers in Melbourne. Can you write… It only needs to be 300 words because Google only needs 300 words.” I read that in a someone’s blog once. “And put a picture in it, and then we’ll be done, and we need to publish a blog every week because Google wants that, right. Right?” We all know this is all nonsense, but I think people are doing it by accident.
Kate Toon:
So let’s talk about some of the things that you should be doing. Now, I’m going to go first and then I want a tip from you and then we’ll go tip, tip, tip like this. I’m using my arms like… So one of the things I think’s really important is to stay on subject. So if you’re not bothered about SEO and it’s your personal blog and you want to write about your cat, and the next week you want to write about some great pancakes you ate, and then the next week, like James, you want to write a poem to Kate Beckinsale, that’s fine. But if you’re a small business owner who always has written about squirrel food, and then all of a sudden you start writing blogs about Rick Astley, Google’s going to be a bit confused by that. So I think it’s quite important to stay on topic. Think about your pillars and your clusters and trying to keep your content in the same ballpark. Do you agree with that, James?
James Welch:
Absolutely, 100%. If you get to the next stage of your website’s life, which is probably once you’ve written a thousand articles, then you can start to deviate and talk about Rick Astley. Absolutely. My next tip, which I think is the number one thing that I would recommend anybody doing is, if you are writing… Let’s say you can only write 300 words, even though I would heavily recommend against that. If you’re only writing 300 words, stick four or five links in there, links to useful things across your site. The number one thing, it really frustrates me, is that people don’t use links within their own copy to other pages in the site, and external links. That’s another subject matter, but it’s so frustrating.
James Welch:
Every single day, a million pages are probably created that are 300 words with no links in there. Google sees these things all the time, so why is it going to suddenly say, “Oh, this is so amazing.” But Google, if it sees four or five links in there and they’re relevant links to other pages in your site, that gives it 10 times, a 100 times more…. I can’t think of the right word. More justification to take it in, take that piece of content in better. It’s just a simple change, but people just are so lazy that they don’t do it. And maybe it’s not laziness. Maybe they’re just not thinking about that at the time. But essentially, just adding those four or five links in is the world of difference.
James Welch:
And you do that, I call it birdsnesting, is my own phrase. Think of every page in your site like a twig in a bird’s nest. The more you add them, the more the bird’s nest becomes stronger, which is essentially how birds build their nest. And every link that you put in to your own content is like another twig. So again, and essentially you’re… I’m doing this with my hands on the screen. Obviously people can’t see this. But essentially you are making this very tight, compact bird’s nest that’s very, very strong and the stronger the bird’s nest, the more durable it becomes, and exactly the same with websites. The stronger you make your bird’s nest, the website, the more durable it becomes, the more rankings you’ll get and the more impervious it is to any kind of Google update in the future.
Kate Toon:
I love that. And I mean, I think as well, a lot of us are writing blog posts to try and satisfy that informational intent, but at the end of the day, we want the sale. So linking internally to your key products and your best services and things just makes sense, to give them that boost. And sometimes I’ve had blogs on my site that have just gone off and then I’ve afterwards, because I’ve forgotten to put links in, because you do. You’re so busy writing beautiful, beautiful words. You’ve gone back in afterwards and dropped some links in to key services to give them a bit of a lift as well. So, very important.
Kate Toon:
All right. My next tip is going to be about thinking about the user experience. So we know we’ve got Core Web Vitals, which is looking at how your page is loaded, but if you’re writing content, the worst thing I see, and I see this so often, is just great, fat, fully justified lumps of copy. Just, that’s it. Lump, lump, lump, call to action. And so think about adding in headers, sub-headers, not every sentence, but at least every paragraph, to just break it up and to signpost what you’re talking about in the next paragraph. Adding in some quotes, maybe some interesting statistics and insights, some videos, some demos, some pictures.
Kate Toon:
I love me a Giphy. God, I love me a Giphy. Just to lighten the mood. Bit of white space, get a bit of wiggle in the copy, so you’ve got long paragraphs, short paragraphs, and just think about the pleasure of reading that both on a mobile, on a laptop, on a desktop. So just mix it up. No just big chunks of copy. Because I think again, that shows that rich media is what Google’s really after, a really immersive experience that tick a lot of different boxes. So that’s my next tip. What’s your next tip?
James Welch:
100% agree with that, by the way. And again, that’s very similar to the links thing. It’s essentially what’s different than the absolute norm. There’s a game, obviously you are over in Australia, and there’s a game that people play at fairgrounds all around the world, which is count how many marbles are in the jar. I’m sure people do it in offices, where you count how many candles are on the cake. So I have a little magic trick when it comes to these things. And actually, luckily, I had the opportunity to do it in a company once, where I’d said to the people, right, I’ll count the… I promise this is going somewhere with it.
James Welch:
I said, “Right, I’ll give my answer once everyone’s given their answer, and I will be the correct answer,” very cockily. So basically I waited till everyone had given their answers, about 100 people, and I counted how many people there were, counted their total guesses. So some people would guess 300, some people guessed 12, that kind of thing. Added all those up and then divided them by the number of people that had… Let’s say the average number was 58. I guessed 58. And I knew mathematically that I would be less than 5% out, and I was, and I think it was 59. And everyone thought I was some kind of magician, but what I did, it’s the wisdom of crowds. And essentially, by calculating everybody’s answer and dividing by the number, I worked out the average answer for people, and we are fantastic… Human beings are fantastic at working out something as a crowd rather than individually.
James Welch:
So why am I talking about this? Because that’s exactly how Google rates your page. If your page is exactly like the middle answer of marbles in the jar, if your pages are 59, as in, you’ve just written one heading in 300 words with no links and no quotes and no Giphys in, you’ve just done the same thing that millions of other people do, Google yawns with the biggest yawn you can imagine. What Google’s after is those wild answers from the… Let’s talk about the cake. The wild answer from the woman who works in the accounts department who likes to think she’s edgy and she said 512. That’s what Google wants. It wants the different kind of things. And again, that’s how Google… A lot of its algorithms, I believe, are that kind of wisdom of crowd. And it wants to see what’s not the plain obvious thing all the time. Again, we’re talking about content, but by those companies that sell links to SEO companies, what they do is produce one blog, one blog post with one link again, and like we’ve talked before, there’s no quotes in it, there’s no gifs, there’s nothing. And essentially those are boring. Google sees tens of thousands of those a day. It wants the difference. It wants those…
Kate Toon:
I know what it wants. It wants you to be Carol in accounts. That’s what we’re saying pretty much, isn’t it? Be more Carol. I love this. We’ve had bird nest, we’ve had marbles, we’ve had cakes, we’ve had Carol, and we’ve had Kate Beckinsale. I’m going to give another tip because you explain my tip in a much better analogous way. So I’m taking another tip now. You’ve lost your tip chance, but you can have another after this. My next tip is… We talked about user experience.
Kate Toon:
I think a really important thing with blog post is to share your experience, to show you have skin in the game. So if you’re writing about the best pancakes in Ipswich, talk about the fact that you used to make pancakes as a kid and what it felt like to go into the restaurant and what coat you were wearing and what the cook was called and what was on the table. Don’t just regurgitate content that other people have generated and try and amalgamate it into a blog. Talk about real life experience. What can you offer that’s firsthand, a bit of insight, a bit of quotes, and a bit of experience. So that’s my next tip. What’s your next tip?
James Welch:
I think, by the way, what you just said, that’s where inquiries come from.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
James Welch:
People might see the same kind of content on different pages. As you’re saying, they do lots of regurgitation. But that’s where inquiries come from, because they trust the person, the personality comes out the page and that –
Kate Toon:
It’s a bit of a story, isn’t it?
James Welch:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
I mean, there’s a classic thing with copywriters that every copywriter starts off writing a post about colons, how to use a colon. It’s the second post I ever put on my site. I mean, I’m talking about the punctuation mark, not your bowel. And obviously when I first wrote that, it’s years and years ago, and I was just really basically trying to explain what a colon is. It’s not remotely interesting. It’s the story. You don’t need to take it as far as these horrible recipe posts where there’s literally 72,000 words before you actually get to the three ingredients and the methodology, but you do need to kind of tell us a story, give us some adjectives, a bit of warmth, I think. Okay, cool. Experience and experience. I’ve done two experience ones. What’s your next tip?
James Welch:
Using that experience, write twice as much as the competitor that really haunts you.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
James Welch:
It’s very simple, but volume is still very important. And my company did… Well, it was basically me and one other guy. We did the world’s largest study of word counts that’s ever been done. We counted the word counts of 24,000 keywords, like the top 10 for those keywords. And the number of keywords to rank in Google has increased over the last 10 years, significantly. So volume is still a massively important factor, but volume’s no good if we don’t do everything we’ve talked about so far, including personality. If you haven’t got personality, volume’s pointless. And if you haven’t done the other things, volume’s pointless. So volume is my big thing, but on top of everything we’ve discussed.
Kate Toon:
So forget some nonsense word count, but at the end of the day, longer posts do tend to perform better, get more links, more likes, more engagements, more shares, right?
James Welch:
That’s absolutely factual. The data is factual. It’s not theory. It’s absolute fact.
Kate Toon:
Right. Maybe I’ll ask you to share a link to that research that you did. The way I like to describe it, and I did steal this from JRR Tolkien, is, don’t make your content like too little butter spread over too much bread. If the bread starts to get dry, it shouldn’t, you need moist content. That’s not my next tip. I just wanted to say moist as many times as possible. My next tip is, I guess, not to be trendy. There’s a lot of people who are out there using Google Trends and a lot of tools and going, “Oh look, loads of people are writing about this at the moment.” Or they’re using this analogy of Miley Cyrus, how Miley Cyrus buys printers in Ipswich.
Kate Toon:
And it’s like, really think about it. Would you have written about this content anyway, or are you only writing about it because it’s trendy? Because the thing is, by the time you’ve discovered it’s a trend, the trend is already over. It’s like my son when I start talking about reels on Instagram, and he’s like, “Mum, that was a trend on TikTok about eight months ago.” So you’re not going to be the cutting edge person who breaks this story, or even the second or the third person. You’re the 59,000 person who’s tried to jump on this bandwagon, and it doesn’t sit with the rest of your content. So don’t try and be trendy, is my next tip. Anyway.
James Welch:
Everything we’ve said, we’d have made a beautiful SEO marriage, I think, everything we’ve said so far.
Kate Toon:
Are we going to disagree on any, I wonder? I wonder what your next one’s going to be.
James Welch:
I can’t think of anything that we disagree on. That sounds really cheesy, doesn’t it?
Kate Toon:
Where do you stand… Because I know that one of the things that you mentioned in the great article that you wrote that I will link to, it is kind of about being an expert. At the end of the day, we had the whole Google Medic update and the whole idea that Google’s looking for people who are writing on topics that actually have expertise and authority and that we can trust. If you’re going to be writing about someone’s rash in their groin, better your doctor of rashes at Melbourne university than just Bob. We appreciate Bob, and if Bob actually has a rash in his groin and he is talking about real life experience, maybe we’ll still give him some credence, but if we are actually dispensing advice and knowledge, you’re better off being the doctor. So where do you stand on experience, and how do businesses who aren’t experts make their content more expert-y?
James Welch:
Okay. When you said about the doctor, again, not to try and agree with you, but the phrase internally that our business use is, we are the doctor. That’s exactly the phrase we use. Especially when we take new people on, that’s our phrase in terms of dealing with SEO in general. They’re coming to us for a reason, so we need to act like the doctor. But in terms of how do you act more like the doctor, so I’m not sure whether I’m allowed to mention pieces of software. It’s not my software.
Kate Toon:
Of course you are. Yeah, yeah.
James Welch:
Okay. The best piece of software I’ve ever come across from the perspective of SEO is a software called Frase, created by this genius guy in Canada who’s got too many ideas for his own head, but a long story short, he created this software and we were like the fourth customer of it. I’ve got no skin in the game with this company. I wish I had, because it’s grown really fast. But the long story short is, Frase allows you to write as though you are the expert. Essentially, if we wrote a piece about cheese or piglets… What was the piglets?
Kate Toon:
Piglets jumpers?
James Welch:
If we wrote the document about piglets jumpers with the research that Frase allows us to do… It’s a really cheap piece of software by the way. I recommend it to everybody listening, anyone beginning in SEO, anyone new to it. If we write a piece about piglet jumpers, we have all of the armour to be able to write that as though a professor of piglet jumpers was writing it. And in our own company, that’s one of our unique selling points, is that we have a research facility that we literally press a button, it creates a content brief, and it’s got everything you ever needed to write about that. So in containing entities, and I know entities is a word that some people think’s a bit pontificating, but if your document can contain as many entities about a particular subject as possible, Google is forced to think that you are a real expert about the subject matter. And the wider you grow that circle of entities… Let’s say-
Kate Toon:
I’m going to stop you there, James, just because we’re going to keep this as a noob episode. Not a newbie. So when you’re talking about entities, what do you mean by the word entities?
James Welch:
Okay. So piglet, for example. An entity around piglet is a pigsty or straw or food or the sun, because the sun shines on a piglet in a piglet sty, in a pig sty, the pig’s mum, I don’t know. An entity is an object in a conversation around a piglet. And in very simple terms, a newbie writing content about piglets would probably naturally use 10 entities that were related to piglet that Google understood. A professor of piglet jumpers or professor on piglets in the same piece of 500 words of content would probably use 58 words that are entities around piglets. And essentially, with Google improving its… Something called a knowledge graph, basically its understanding of a subject matter. Google’s knowledge graph is growing all the time. The more entities you contain in your content, the more that Google thinks you really do know the subject. So if you mix what I’ve just said with your personality stuff as well, that’s where you pull in-
Kate Toon:
A beautiful combination, isn’t it?
James Welch:
Yeah, absolutely.
Kate Toon:
And then I think another little slight cheat, if you haven’t… I mean, I’m going to ask James to drop the link to that fantastic Frase software into the show notes to check them out. But a lot of writers here use HARO software. Over here in Australia we have something called SourceBottle where if you can write a fairly confident article about this topic, but you would love some expert input, you can go out there and say, “Hey, are there any experts on piglet jumpers or groin rashes?” And then you do get a quote from Dr. Bob of Melbourne University talking about groin rashes in a more complex way that you can drop into your content and give it that gravitas, and maybe a few extra entities as well. I love that, James. Look, we’ve talked about a lot of positive things.
Kate Toon:
There’s a few more things we could mention in terms of good content, but I hope people are getting the gist, that it’s… We’re here to solve a problem. And the one I like to come to at the end is, did I make the world a better place with this piece of content, or did I just add to the noise? And also can somebody completely answer the question that they had in their mind when they search for this content and click through, or do they then need to go and do more and more? Do they need to read another six blog posts? Is it holistic? Does it do the job?
Kate Toon:
And obviously not every post is going to do that, but then I’d question why post the post. The world does not need another 300 word article on how to use a colon. It just doesn’t. So if you cannot think of 2000 words worth of content, maybe that’s not the blog post you should be writing. And this brings me to my next question, which I think you’re going to love answering, because you’re going to say, “Well, we don’t do this.” What mistakes do you still see agencies making with content, when they are both producing it themselves, and also, from my perspective, when they’re briefing it out to copywriters? Copywriters get the worst briefs from SEO agencies. What mistakes do you see them making?
James Welch:
The number one mistake that agencies make, and it fascinates me to this day, is that they will have an SEO team of six and a content person who works part-time after she’s finished her job at Starbucks, or it’s outsourced to a single mum in some suburb somewhere, and it’s a complete afterthought. It literally fascinates me.
Kate Toon:
Or a single dad. Let’s not, you know…
James Welch:
Or a single dad. Where, my agency, we have as many, and we always have done, it’s not a trend thing, we have as many content writers as we do SEOs. And I’ll explain what’s good about that is, whenever anything happens, like the Google Helpful Content update, everybody in my country, I suppose, or people around our business, know that we are content focused. So we always win in these kind of situations when Google has any kind of update, because they go, oh, that’s what they’ve been doing all the time. So yeah. So number one thing is content as an afterthought or it’s outsourced to a third party agency. And then, as you say, the next problem, the next thing that they do, is then give a content brief of five words, which again, fascinating. And the client will be paying X dollars for this, and the SEO company will be making 80% of that, and then passing it to a third party with a five word brief, which is, if you think about it, it’s bordering on the inept, but it’s also scandalous as well. And this is common practise. This isn’t rare.
Kate Toon:
Oh, I hear you. Every day in my… Because a lot of my copywriters have done SEOs and my background is content as well. And they’ll put in the group, they’ll be like, “Got this brief from an SEO agency, but it’s like, it’s the SEO agency. I don’t want to argue with them, I don’t want to push back, but this doesn’t seem right.” And I’m always like, “Well, it’s not right.” You push back once and you say, “This doesn’t seem right.” How can I write a whole article, and why would you write a 300-word article, and why is the keyword cheese? You push back once, but then if they push back on you, you’re not their mum. It’s not your job. You produce the work. Maybe you don’t put it in your portfolio, but that’s not your job. But it’s just, why are they still doing that? Because clearly it doesn’t work. Or does it work in the short term? Why is it still happening?
James Welch:
It works. It works on black and white spreadsheets that management understand. That’s why. We get X dollars for a piece, we send it out to these people and we pay X minus 20%.
Kate Toon:
The job’s done, tick, but the result… Yeah, exactly.
James Welch:
Yeah. In black and white terms, it works. And the scarier or the more hard a management team is, the more that pervades in companies, without any kind of thought of the client. The antidote to that, by the way, and again, I have no skin in this game, but Frase, the reason when I saw it, it was literally like angels singing, honestly-
Kate Toon:
(singing). That noise.
James Welch:
It literally was. The reason is, there’s a thing there where you put in a particular keyword and press a button and it gives you a content brief. A content brief that’s better than the vast majority…. Well, it’s better than any SEO company would ever produce. And it’s probably two or three pages long with everything you need to contain. Statistics, quotes, everything. And so the reason why the angel sang is because I realised that that content brief is the equivalent of me having to hire a research person. So essentially I would say our content team is 25%… We don’t need 25% more employees, because we have this software and anybody who’s writing content on this, or any SEO, I’d recommend it entirely. It’s very cheap.
Kate Toon:
I hope after this, that they actually send you a live piglet or something, because you’ve given them the biggest plug, and I can’t wait to check it out. I’ve never heard of it. So apart from going immediately and getting Frase, what would your two final content creation tips be for our audience, assuming that the majority of our audience really do struggle pumping out content? They don’t have a lovely team of 25 writers. It’s them, they’ve got Friday afternoon, they’d like to produce something. What would your top two tips for that kind of person be?
James Welch:
So, number one tip would be, set yourself a target. So let’s for argument’s sake say your competitor that you want to beat has written X number of words across three pages, for argument’s sake, about a particular subject matter. It’s to write double the amount of those, still containing all of the entities that we’ve talked about, but write about it in tunnel vision, without even thinking about deviating until you’ve completed it. Human beings are terrible at thinking, going through the valley of despair, “Am I writing the right thing? Have I done this right? Have I taken the right approach?” Just set yourself a goal, tunnel vision, write it. And there’s a brilliant cathartic feeling knowing that you’ve gone through it and you’ve now got double the amount of content for that particular subject matter.
James Welch:
And as we know, beautiful things start to sprout from that. Your keyword reach increases greatly. And by the time you’ve seen the green shoots of that, then you get the enthusiasm to do the same thing again for your next subject matter or a deviation of that subject matter. So it’s courage of your convictions, I suppose the big thing is, and that’s where SEO’s content writers, people in general, are useless at. They write this one page thinking, “Should I change? Should I change?” No, no. Do it all and then lift your head from the page, and then beautiful things happen, in my opinion.
Kate Toon:
I love that. Do you want to know my little tip for doing that? Because I think one of the things that most people do is, they edit as they go or they stop and they reread the paragraph they just wrote. Don’t do that. And it’s really hard not to do that. So my little tip is to write in white font on a white page. So change your font from black to white, and then you cannot read what you’ve written and yes, it will come out a bit stream of consciousness, but you can’t edit a blank page. And as soon as you then finish and you turn it back to black, great, now you start sculpting and tidying up and improving the grammar and going, “Oh, we could do with a couple more statistics,” or, “Great, this is the point where I add my Giphy.” That’s me, I love my Giphys. That really helps sometimes. And I’m the same as you, I just plough on. I just write everything out and then I go back and tidy it up and polish it up. And generally it’s pretty good. You’re 70% there. So I love that.
James Welch:
And that goes because people are terrible at trusting their gut instincts. Especially if you’re used to writing, like you say, your stream of flow, your gut instinct will be right so much more than you think, but we always question it too often, the writing, and why it’s a really good way of doing that, actually.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. And I think it does get easier with time. From that first colon post I wrote back in, I think, 2008, to now, I can bang out a 2000 word article in about an hour, because I just go with the first thought. Generally, your first thought is pretty right. It’s not the second, third, fourth or fifth thought where you’ve second-guessed yourself. Your first thought was pretty much on the mark. I so agree with that. I love that. And it’s permission to just let it all flop out. And also, as we know, yes, sometimes one piece of content can set the world on fire and go viral, whatever. But generally it’s the flow of content, it’s piece after piece after piece, that builds that trust and authority, not just with Google, but with the human audience too. They read one post. They love it. But then they’re looking to see what the next one’s going to be to come back again and again. And so don’t put too much pressure on yourself to write the perfect piece of content.
James Welch:
And to add to that, there’s a massive thing that I think most people miss with… When you’ve written content like that, and you’ve done it maybe two, three, four times with different subject matters, there’s a thing that, and I’ve barely heard anyone ever talk about it, but the confidence of people that have got great content on a site is significantly better than the confidence of people that don’t have it. And what I mean by that is, the confidence of the person who’s written it, the confidence of the SEO that the site’s going to be successful, the confidence of the sales people that work for the company that have got the best content on their site, is immeasurable. I’ve seen sales teams transform because they’ve gone from having a commercial focus website and it’s been essentially designed by corporate, so it’s got none of the stuff we’ve talked about, to suddenly then having a site where they’re extremely proud, gives a whole confidence and proudness to everybody in the company. And it’s a thing that virtually no one talks about, but the confidence of anybody surrounding a site that’s got this great content on, doing the things we’ve talked about, is something that’s unmeasured.
Kate Toon:
I love that. That’s very profound. What a great mic drop to end on. I love that. So I think we have agreed a lot. That’s a good thing. I didn’t want to have a fight with you, but maybe next time, we’ll talk about something else. Talk about what we think of Nicholas Cage or something like that. But thank you so much for sparing some time tonight to talk about this. I think we’ve pretty much wrapped it up and said, Google’s not out to get us. It’s not just about AI. It’s about writing content that’s rich and useful in all the ways that we’ve discussed today. So James, thank you so much. Where can we find out a bit more about you and your fabulous company?
James Welch:
So, company’s called Embryo and the domain is EmbryoDigital.co.uk. I am on LinkedIn. That’s my only social media these days, because I’m old.
Kate Toon:
You big weirdo. Well, look, I will link to Embryo and to LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is where I discovered James. There is still good things happening on LinkedIn. I know you don’t want to believe it, but sometimes you find some diamonds in the rough. So thank you very much again, James, for coming on the pod.
James Welch:
Thank you very much.
Kate Toon:
So that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have questions about Google’s Helpful Content update, head to my I Love SEO group on Facebook, and good news, if you’re listening to this episode the day it comes out, The Recipe for SEO Success course is open and taking new students. This is your last chance in 2022 to take SEO into your own hands, learn all my tried and tested tactics, and take on the Google beast. So if you’re listening to our chat, put a fire in your belly to optimise your site, then head to therecipeforSEOsuccess.com or look it up on Google. Sign-ups close on Friday, the 30th of September, 2022 at five PM, eight EST, and spots are limited, so get in quick.
Kate Toon:
Now, you know I like to end the show with a shout-out to one of my lovely listeners, and today it’s Tim and Sebastian’s from Australia. “Great news, great for newbies and more experienced e-commerce business owners, well chosen guests and easy to follow discussions, pitched nicely to stretch newbies, but also offer a lot to more to experienced players.” Thank you very much for the great review and thanks to you for listening. If you like the show, please don’t forget to leave a review. We have actually run out, so we’ll have no more reviews at the end of the show. If you have time, I’d super appreciate it. And as I mentioned, there are some great links and tools there mentioned by James. I have put them all in the show notes, along with a transcript of the show. So if you have any difficulty understanding our northern accents, you can go and have a read through that and perhaps leave a comment. So that’s it for this week. Until next time, happy SEO-ing.
