The Best SEO – A Basic Content Strategy

I tooted about this and thought it’d be worth a post too because I have opinions.

The best SEO is stating what you offer and your beliefs about what you offer without being overly clever or precious about it.
Start by writing out pages for the following in straightforward language your customers can understand (read: avoid jargon that your customers don’t already know):

  • What goods and/or services do you offer? List them all with a short description. Use the words that your potential customers will use to ask for it.
  • Why is your offering better than every other company offering something similar? No need to name names, this is about you, not them.
  • Why do you offer what you do? What drives you to do your thing? Be as personal as you feel comfortable about this.
  • How can a customer contact you? Phone, email, text, snail mail, walking in the door, facebook messenger? If someone contacts you they better get a response. If you can’t do this you need to solve that problem ASAP.
  • How can a customer pay for your goods or services? If they can do it online, have a link where they can do it. If they need to call mention it, etc.

None of the above needs to be a novel. Say what you need to say and don’t overcomplicate it by being cute or coy! People have no attention spans to figure out why you named “Contact Us” to “All the ways you can get in touch”.

Once this is done have a friend who knows nothing about your business read it and answer the questions above. If they can’t answer them or tell you the exact page to get this information…rewrite it.

Advanced Mode:

Until you’ve written those pages don’t bother with the below because writing the above will help you write these:

  • What are the questions you get all the time? Write pages for each of them, or add the information to existing pages. A question you get more than a few times is an indicator that something about your business isn’t as obvious as you might think it is.
  • More information on each of your offerings. For products: describe it, why you made it (or why you’re selling it), and who it’s for. For services: what is it, what’s your approach, and why are you good at it. Remember that you are the expert and your audience might know nothing other than that they need something like what you offer.
  • Reviews, testimonials, and results. When people say nice things about you ask them to do so publicly a site where other people like them spend time. Google is a good default, your niche might have different places. Then start a page on your site where you collect the best of those nice things.

Putting it on a website

If you can manage to patiently write the above before you design your site you’ll find that the site design will come much more easily. Take a shot at setting up wordpress or squarespace yourself. Pick a simple template that makes it very easy to read the text that you’ve written.

Hiring Someone to Help

If any of the above seems daunting then you should hire someone to help you! If you hire them and they immediately jump to a strategy other than “let’s make sure it’s clear what it is you do and why” you should be wary. Especially if it involves spending money on ads, but not on content for those ads to point to.