How to Edit Your Content For SEO – Content Marketing Part 2 – SEO Unlocked
– [Instructor] Hey
everyone it's Neil Patel. And today is another day of SEO Unlocked. Today we're going to be covering editing. I want to first start off with
this quote from Steve Martin, he's a actor, many of you guys
have seen him on television. I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. In other words, if you wrote something, you're not happy with
it, don't worry about it.
There's a whole editing process. And it starts with going and
finding the right keywords. Because if you're writing
content that never ranks, it's going to be harder
for you to get traffic. So head on over to Ubersuggest
and type in the keywords that you'll like to rank for. Whatever that keyword is or
whatever you want to write on, put it on there and
Ubersuggest will tell you how popular that term is,
as well as show you ideas. Now I want you to look at
a few boxes on this report. The search volume, the higher
the number, the better. SEO difficulty, typically when
the number is 40 or lower, it's easier to rank for
and that's the keywords that you ideally want to go
after if you're a new website, or you haven't done much at SEO. If you've been around for a long time and you have bigger SEO budgets, you can go after more and
more competitive terms. Then you also want to look
at the pay difficulty. Typically, the higher that number, it means the more likely
that keyword is to convert. And of course you want to look for the cost per click as well.
This is how much money would cost if you would buy this keyword. The higher the number
typically that also means the more lucrative that
keyword is as well. Now that you have idea if
the keyword is good or bad, I want you to go to the
left hand navigation of Ubersuggest and click on keyword ideas. That'll bring you to a
report that gives you more related keywords to
the one you just typed in. Look for other terms that are related. And it'll show you if they're good, if they have a high SEO difficulty, a low SEO difficulty,
if they're expensive, because the more expensive they are, even though you're not paying for them, it means the more likely
they are to convert into customers, right? Those visitors who find
you from those terms. Then I want you to go to
the content ideas report, in the left hand navigation,
click on Content Ideas, and they'll show you all the other posts that are popular related to that term. It'll give you an idea of what is working based on social share count.
The higher the social shares,
the more people liked it. You also want to look
at the estimated visits in the backlink's column as well. The estimated visits doesn't tell you how many visits that
article gets in total, it tells you how many visits that article is getting on a monthly basis
from Google specifically. So the higher the number
there, the better. And of course for the backlink's number, the higher the better
because it means people are willing to link to it. I also want you to create
an outline for your content. We discussed how to create an outline in the previous lesson, if
you don't know how go back, we give you the steps on doing that, and follow that to
create your own outline. And as you're creating your
own outline and filling it in, and you're generating your content, in essence you're writing. And as you're writing, finish it, and then start editing after
but keep those keywords in mind while you're writing.
So it's really important before you write, you go to Ubersuggest and do your research every time before you write a article. Remember, you can edit
throughout the whole process. You don't have to produce a masterpiece from the first time that you're
done writing that article, because in the previous lessons, we talked about that you
also want your article to sit for at least 24 hours
before you do anything with it.
That gives you time to edit
to really think through, did I do a good job? Did I do a poor job? How can I improve it? Most people also write
and edit their content in Google Docs, it's free. You should consider it, I
love using Microsoft Word, but Google Docs is the free version. And now that you have your
content up and running in Google Docs, let's
go over the main steps that you need to follow in order to create a masterpiece through editing.
So I call it STEPS. As long as you follow each
of them, you'll do well. The first one is you want
to strive for brevity. A lot of people like adding
in fluff, they're like, Neil, my competition has 2500 words, I'm going to write 3000 words. And that's great if you feel that you can expand upon it and have 3000, even five or even 10,000 words. And if you feel that it
provides value to the reader by all means do it. But if you're just adding in fluff and wasting people's time, then
they're not going to like you. So try to remove those filler words that aren't needed like
just, really, perhaps, literally, stuff, things,
very, better, always. They don't really provide much value. And funny enough, I just
said the word really, but think about it and if you can take these vague words out of
there, you'll be better off.
You'll also want to
delete redundant words, by deleting redundant words, it'll get the point across
quicker and people like that. Make sure you also check for
spelling and grammar errors. People don't like that. And if you're terrible
at spelling and grammar, don't worry about it, I am as well. I use a Chrome extension called Grammarly, and it makes my life really easy because it corrects my spelling and grammar, better than Google does or even better than Microsoft Word does. It's amazing and it's free. Here's an example of a grammar
issue that could be fixed. It might rain tomorrow. You don't want to start
a sentence with it. And when you get more specific, people love your content much more. Example of cleaning it up is, the forecast calls for rain tomorrow. It's more decisive.
It's telling them hey, this is what's going to
happen tomorrow based on data. The data is the forecast
right, the weather report. The second step in STEPS
is technical jargon. Who doesn't want to sound smart? The thing that I hate the most and this is a big pet peeve of mine. I meet a lot of people from
these Ivy League colleges, and there's nothing wrong with that. Some of my best friends
graduated for them. But they love using this technical jargon, throughout their content. And they feel it makes them sound smart and they're writing for their friend who also went to the Ivy League college that went with them to Harvard. But that's not the average
person who's reading your text. So make your text easy to understand. Avoid using technical jargon. Avoid using complex vocabulary
that most people don't know. And it's not because it
means people are dumb if they don't understand
the technical jargon, remember, those people may
know stuff that you don't know or those people may be
international audience and businesses these days
are global businesses.
So you need to make sure that you're avoid using lingo that could mean something else in another language, or
that may not translate well. Another thing I love doing is
using the app Hemingway app. It's a free website app, it'll
tell you your overall score. And your overall goal is to just make your article super readable and easy to understand for anyone. Next thing you want to
ensure your writing flows. If it doesn't flow, who's going
to want to read your content? You want your content flow seamless. That way people like, oh,
this amazing experience. If you ever watch a TV show, and it's all choppy
and hard to understand, what do you think you're going to do? You're going to skip and
go to the next TV show or the next movie. The same with your writing,
if it's hard to understand, people are going to be like, all right, I'm going back and I'm going to go read some other article around the web. So the easiest way to ensure
that your article flows, is to check to make sure
that you're using subheadings throughout your article,
and I love doing this throughout my body, as well
as all map out my conclusion, and I'll label it conclusion.
So my conclusion summarizes
everything in my article, but also use a sub heading
up conclusion right above it so that way people know,
hey, this is the conclusion. This is also why I push
you to create outlines. Because if you create an outline, you can quickly tell before
you write your content, if things are flowing. If you spend all the time writing first and you don't do the outline, you could end up with the
piece that doesn't flow and then you're going to have
to spend a lot more time editing and rewriting and you
don't want to do that.
The next step in STEPS is pain points. Think about the person reading it. Can you match your
persona story pain points? If you can, you can relate more to them, and really hook them in. Does a content supply examples
and themes or stories? People relate more to stories than they do just reading sentences. Stories really get the imagination going, and storytelling is an
age old marketing tactic that's been used for thousands
and thousands of years. You also don't want to abuse pain points. You don't want to push it really hard. You need to respect your readers time, and not just being like,
ah, you suck because you have these issues
like be nice and kind when you're covering
the pain points as well.
The final section is SEO. If your article is not
optimized for Google, how are people going to find it? Did you include the
keywords that you found through the Ubersuggest
tool in a natural way? Did you include them in
the title of the article? Within the body, within the conclusion, within your meta description? And even though you may have
a list of 50 or 100 keywords, you don't want to just keep
stuffing in those keywords. Is it natural? You don't have to mention
a keyword 50 times. You'll naturally mention it if that's what the article is about. And you also want to run the page against your on page checklist
which we've provided or you can find that
neilpatel.com/training if you don't have it. Another aspect of SEO that
most people don't talk about, is user experience. Are people actually reading your content? Why are the readers dropping off? How can you improve that experience? Through CrazyEgg, you
can create a heat map, which will show you how people are interacting with your web page. And here's an example.
This is a live heat map
people could be scrolling, they're reading ad as they're
reading and scrolling, then what from there, I can show, hey, this is what people are reading, here's what they're not reading, here are the pages that
need to be improved. So now what I want you to do is go to neilpatel.comm/training or beneath this video
if you're already there, I want you to download
your editing checklist.
I want you to edit your draft
article with the checklist. And then I want you to set
up a heat map with CrazyEgg, so that way when you publish your content, you can see how people are reading and engaging with your content, because it'll show you
where the drop off is, so you can continually improve
and tweak your content. I look forward to helping
you grow your traffic through SEO and content marketing..
