Tag Archives: Content Writing

Factor in machine learning when content writing

Content writing for machine learning and AI.

The search engines are increasingly being powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, according to this interview of Fabrice Canal, Principal Program Manager at Bing, Microsoft.

So, keywords are not important?

For a few years, keywords are going to be important because to be able to ignore the keywords completely and just focus on what your message intends to deliver, the AI will need to be much smarter.

Nonetheless, even at this nascent stage, your SEO depends more on factoring in machine learning and searcher intent and less on the keywords and the search terms.

When you genuinely want to improve your search engine rankings – mostly customers come to your website and not random searchers – you need to know the intent of your average visitor.

I will give you my own example: I publish content for two reasons:

Attract people who will pay me for my content writing services.
Attract people who would like to link to my content, share it on their social media profiles, and in general, help me spread my content as far as possible.

I keep it 60:40 – 60% of my content is for spreading information and 40% is to tell people what I can do with my content writing services.

How important is searcher intent for content writing effectiveness?

The term “searcher intent” was introduced in the wake of the BERT update from Google. It stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers”. It is a deep learning algorithm related to natural language processing. It not only helps the machines to understand what the words in a sentence stand for, but also the context and the nuance.

Neil Patel on his blog gives very good “Before” and “After” examples of how the BERT update affects the search results.

The point is, the search intent of the search engine user is carefully analysed by the background AI to show appropriate results.

After all, people should be able to find information they are looking for instead of what search engines like Google and Bing think people are trying to find.

Therefore, Fabrice Canal says that the ranking algorithms at the search engines are constantly evolving and the machines learn on their own what people are searching and what search results they need.

What is search intent?

I have explained it multiple times on my website, but I will quickly recap.

Knowing the searcher intent means knowing exactly what your target audience is looking for. The search terms need to be interpreted according to their need and not according to just the words being used.

Thanks to BERT when you search for “the benefits of apple” the search engine completely ignores the Apple company which, previously, it did not. All the top results are about the benefits of eating apples.

On the other hand, if you search for “I have an apple” Google gets confused and starts showing results from various “Apple” products and reviews. It is not taking an inference from my previous search and then sticking to the fruit instead of the tech company.

Anyway, knowing the searcher intent during content writing keeps you focused and helps you write content your target customers and clients are looking for.

Again, I will come back to my own example.

Suppose someone searches for “need a content writer”.

This becomes confusing for the search engine. Is the search about the qualities that are needed in a content writer? Does it mean “I need a content writer”? Does it mean “do you need a content writer?”

Big difference. When someone looks for “I need a content writer” it is a person who needs a content writer.

When someone looks for “do you need a content writer?” question is being asked whether someone needs a content writer.

These are very subtle things, but they can have a big impact on your search engine rankings. Even if the rankings of your core content pieces don’t fluctuate much, the sort of traffic that you get may not generate you much business.

What do I do to solve this problem?

I solve this problem by writing highly targeted pages. For example, instead of trying to target something like “need a content writer” or “I need a content writer” I try to write about “content writer needed for a web design agency” or, “looking for content writer for the real estate company”.

This brings us to the discussion of using longtail keywords. These keywords or search terms may appear long, and you may think that very few people may use them, but at least these people will be clearheaded and precise.

For example, when someone searches for “looking for a content writer for email marketing” and then comes to my website, I know that the person is actually looking for someone who can write email marketing campaigns.

You will get higher conversion rate.

The topic of this post was content writing for machine learning.

Search engine engineers at Google and Bing suggest that don’t worry much about keywords. With every new update, keywords begin to matter less. What matters more is the essence of your message.

Hence, focus on quality. Focus on relevance. Focus on searcher intent.

How to be courageous when writing content for your business

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How to be courageous when writing for your business.

When you are writing for your business (or when your content writer is writing), you want to play safe for obvious reasons. As it is you want to attract clients. If you piss off even those clients who are interested in doing business with you, this is not a good content writing and content marketing strategy.

In his latest update, Brian Clark asks, Are you a courageous content creator?

By being courageous what he means is having the courage to go against the tide. It means doing your own thing whether people agree with you or not. It means not giving in to pressure and sticking to your ground provided you are sure of what you’re doing.

How do you apply this attitude when writing content for your business? How do you become “courageous”?

When you are writing for your business, don’t always try to please your customers and clients. The purpose of writing for your blog or your website is to inform and engage. Give them the right information even if it means, at least at that moment, they decide not to do business with you.

For example, there are some clients who don’t need my content writing services.

A few months ago, a client sent me a “rough draft” to improve. The draft was so well written that I thought it would be a travesty if I meddled with it. I told the client that she shouldn’t get the draft written by me as she herself had written it so beautifully. She just needed to make a few changes here and there and it was perfect to be published.

Initially the client disagreed simply because she thought that she is not a trained content writer and she mostly deals with software. A good thing was, she trusted me as a writer and when I told her that her initial draft was quite well-written, she acquiesced and decided to publish it on her website. I lost an assignment and as a result, some money, but I had the satisfaction that I had been honest with the client.

Coming back to the original topic, how to be courageous when you are writing for your business? Since I don’t mean to write a lengthy post, here are a few things you can keep in mind:

Believe in your abilities to deliver and write with that mentality – it will show through your writing.
Don’t avoid disagreeing with popular belief. For example, I don’t believe that you necessarily have to publish very lengthy blog posts for better search engine rankings. Just focus on quality and regularity and your organic search engine rankings begin to improve.
Always come up with something new, not just for the heck of it, but because you have some good ideas to share.
Be yourself.

Some good thoughts to ponder when you are writing content for your business website or business blog.

TOFU MOFU BOFU way to higher organic search engine rankings

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Improving organic search engine rankings

Image source

I know, the title seems funny, but I will come to that later.

We all want to improve our organic search engine rankings.

“Organic” means natural. Instead of having to pay Google for search engine visibility, you want your links to appear naturally in the search results.

In fact, the entire concept of SEO revolves around improving your organic search engine rankings.

Do you feel that despite publishing blog posts and webpages on your website, your search engine rankings don’t improve much?

Now and then they show some spikes but overall, your rankings and consequently, your organic search engine traffic, remains somewhat less than desired.

Why do you think this happens?

This Readwrite blog post says that it happens because you are not writing and publishing your content according to TOFU, MOFU and BOFU.

No, these are not names for three brothers living in a Mogadishu village. They stand for “Top of the Funnel”, “Middle of the Funnel” and “Bottom of the Funnel”, respectively.

These are the three stages for which you have to separately write and publish content on your website and if you’re not publishing content targeting these funnels, there is little chance that you are going to improve your organic search engine rankings.

Why simply publishing a blog doesn’t improve your organic search engine rankings much?

Blogging is great.

In fact, recently I wrote a blog post titled How does blogging help you grow your business?

The problem is not with blogging.

You need your business blog to increase awareness and to engage your visitors.

Having a business blog and maintaining it diligently is indisputable.

But what the above Readwrite blog post says is, don’t just focus on publishing blog posts.

They may give you a sense of achievement and you may think that you’re doing something important for your business, but when it comes to improving your organic search engine rankings for your SEO, your progress is quite slow.

The progresses certainly there – after all, there is a reason publishing a business blog is highly recommended – but not as good as it should be.

Blogging belongs to the TOFU part of your content marketing strategy – it raises awareness about your business. About your brand.

For example, I regularly publish my content writing blog.

Through the blog, I share lots of important information about the benefits of blogging, content writing, content marketing, email marketing and social media marketing.

I also share tips on how to write content better to improve your SEO and other aspects of writing and publishing content.

This is fine. But am I able to attract hardcore clients who would give me bigger projects?

This is where the role of other funnels comes in.

People come to your website for different reasons.

I don’t want to attract just those people who want to write better content and want to blog better or those who want to improve their SEO with quality content writing.

I want to attract people who are looking for a reliable content writing service for their business.

They want to be reassured.

They want to know if I can write high-caliber content.

For this they need case studies, white papers and other authoritative materials.

They also need an analysis of how I can actually help them improve their engagement rate and organic search engine rankings.

More importantly, how cost-effective and efficient is my content writing service?

To achieve this, I need to target all the categories of the funnel.

Hence, if you want to improve your organic search engine rankings in the sense that you can generate more business, you must write and publish content targeting different funnels.

7 ways you can use content writing for better brand awareness

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7 ways you can use content writing for better brand awareness.

Brand awareness is an important segment of your overall business strategy. It’s the extent to which your potential customers and target audience are familiar with your brand. Naturally, you want to raise your brand awareness to a higher level and ensure you’re reaching a wider audience. Content writing is one of the best tools to help you reach this goal.

Using content writing to boost brand awareness is a great strategic move you need to consider using. If you’re not sure how to do it, just keep reading. Here are the best methods for using content writing to increase brand awareness.

Let’s take a closer look together.

1. Establish a Brand Personality

Before you even start writing and go deeper into your content writing strategy, you have to think about your brand.

How do you want to represent it? What do you want from people to think about it?

It’s important that you establish a brand personality before your major content writing efforts. This will ensure uniformity across all platforms you’ll be using.

Establish a brand personality by defining:

your tone & voice
your style of writing
your identity & traits

Try to define your brand as if it was a person, and make this a foundation of your content writing strategy. Then, stay consistent in your brand personality in everything you write.

This will help your target audience understand you, embrace you, and recognize your content.

2. Use Blogging

If you know anything about content writing, you know blogging is one of the strongest tools that you have to own.

Blogging gives you a chance to reach out to your target audience and build a relationship with them.

Diana Adjadj, a marketer and writer at Best Essays Education, agrees: “Your content writing strategy should heavily rely on your blogging strategy. The two are inseparable and have to go hand in hand together.”

There are two ways you should use blogging to raise brand awareness:

In both cases, make sure that you:

write posts for your target audience
provide valuable information
serve as a credible source of data and facts
cover trending topics from your niche
write interesting, relevant content

Blogging is a great way to get organic traffic, build brand awareness, and expand your audience.

3. Rely on Storytelling

If you want more people to learn about your brand, and share it with their friends, you should rely on storytelling in your content writing.

You may also like to read: The importance of storytelling in content marketing.

Storytelling is great for building firm bonds with your target audience and deepening your relationship. It makes them feel emotionally closer to you, which is the recipe for success.

Share stories such as:

how your brand was established
people behind the brand name
fun acts
inspirational team members stories
customer stories

Give them something more personal and revealing to make your brand even more human. The further you go from your image as “just a company” or “just a brand”, the better.

4. Socialize

Social media is powerful. Today, almost every brand has a social media account on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

You may also like to read: 5 ways to make your content social media friendly.

You shouldn’t be an exception.

Social media allows you to aim your content writing directly towards your target audience. All you have to do is take the right steps:

create interesting social media posts
reply to comments and messages
get involved in discussions within your industry
communicate with other brands

Your social media presence can win you a huge number of new followers. It also creates additional space for you to show your brand personality, as we’ve discussed in point 1.

5. Team Up With an Influencer

Influencer marketing is flourishing. Brands team up with people who have a large audience and get them to promote them.

But, there’s more to influencer marketing than you think.

Here’s what you need to have in mind:

choose an influencer from your niche
make sure it’s someone your target audience likes
make sure you agree with all their public attitudes, opinions, and their ideology
choose an expert, celebrity, blogger, or anyone who could win you more audience

Neightan White, a blogger and contributing writer at Supreme Dissertations, says: “Once you choose an influencer to promote your brand, you’re linking your brand to everything that person says or does. Choose wisely and make sure you preserve your brand personality.”

6. Use Visuals

When we’re talking about content writing, we have to mention the power of visually appealing content.

Naturally, what you write is more important than what it all looks like. But, visuals have far greater power than just making your content look better.

Visuals can turn your content around and make it:

appealing
dynamic
entertaining
memorable

Images, videos, GIFs, and infographics are there to support your content and make it richer. They will make your content worth sharing and thus more popular.

Use visuals to add more appeal and value to your content. It will skyrocket your brand awareness.

7. Watch Your Competitors

Your brand needs to be unique and stand out from the rest. And the only way for you to do it is to know what everyone else is up to.

To raise brand awareness, you need to:

identify your competitors
keep an eye on their content strategy
understand their plans and goals

Once you know all this, you’ll be able to think of something new, fresh, and different. And that’s what your target audience is going to appreciate.

Final Thoughts

Raising brand awareness is a task you should constantly work on. From one level to the other, use content writing as a tool to help you improve.

Use the tips we’ve shared above and start working on your content writing strategy. Focus on raising brand awareness and give your target audience a reason to love you even more.

This is why your content marketing is not working

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Why your content marketing is not working

ReadWrite has published 6 reasons why your content marketing might not be working.

You know what? Content marketing is like any other undertaking in your life – it is replete with unpredictable outcomes. Hence, if you have been publishing blog post after blog post and have been keeping yourself busy (or one of your representatives) on social media and still haven’t experienced any significant improvement in your targeted traffic, some signs of disappointment and disenchantment are understandable.

The above post rightly says that “in the majority of the cases, it is not the content that is to be blamed. It is rather the content strategy.”

What exactly is content strategy?

It is

What content you need to publish.
Whom you should target.
Which format of content gives you the biggest leverage.
What platforms you should nurture to promote your content.

The author also says that most people wanting to use content marketing to promote their businesses do the bare minimum. They will just write 300 words because this is what Google recommends (minimum). They will use keywords to “optimize” their content writing rather than writing something meaningful and then using the keywords contextually.

Should you always publish long content? The Post says that you should write at least 1890 words. This number was discovered by Backlinko after analysing 11.8 million Google search results.

How many words you write depends on how much competition your face. About 1 ½ years ago I was working with a client who had hired an SEO company in the UK and this company was using SEMRush to figure out what must be the titles of the web pages and how many words individual web page must have according to the competition faced by that particular keyword or title.

Due to some communication gap, for many webpages I ended up writing more than required. They were upset because they thought that the time was wasted because if those many words were not needed, I shouldn’t have spent time writing them. Whereas, I was focusing on the necessity of the information rather than the word limit.

Why I’m writing this here is because I want to say that how many words you use when writing content for your web pages and blog posts depends on many, and often, weird factors.

When writing for my own blog, I don’t get bogged down by the number of words I must write. Hence, sometimes my blog posts have more than 2000 words, and sometimes they have merely 500 words. It depends on what I want to say at that time.

Bigger content marketing companies come up with surveys, statistics and numbers to aim for because they make big bucks flaunting these numbers.

Personally, what I have experienced is that it is the regularity that matters, coupled with quality and relevance.

Your audience doesn’t respond if your content is not relevant to what they are expecting. I provide content writing services. Sometimes I get obsessed with SEO-related topics but if I write too much on SEO, I will end up attracting the wrong audience because I’m not offering search engine optimization services. For me, SEO is intertwined with quality and relevant content writing.

Regularity is very important because even if you provide great content people need to come across your content on an ongoing basis. Thousands of businesses are continuously publishing content. Even if it is not great content, this content manages to occupy space in people’s minds as well as on the web. Hence you need to remain visible.

Here is my personal advice:

Don’t worry much about words and instead, focus on providing as much “useful” information as possible.
Maintain quality and relevance and give it precedence over regularity.
Be regular.

I know, explaining this to clients who want to pay according to the number of words their blog posts and web pages must have, can be difficult. Although most of them except that it is the quality that matters, they all aim for a certain number of words.

I can understand their worry. If they don’t give their content writer a “word-target” the writer may not spend much time on each topic.

Something to ponder on for me in the coming weeks.