People nowadays are uninterested in cold and business-like pieces of content.They want something authentic. They want conversations with people. That’s partly why Reddit is grabbing top spots in the search results because people know they’ll be reading something authentic. Hence why it’s smart to create more conversational content. But how do you do that? Read this blog to find out!
What is conversational content?
Plain and simple, it’s writing like you’re talking with someone. Not to someone. You’re not lecturing. You’re having a conversation with your audience. Though I’d suggest that you leave out the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and multiple uses of ‘like’ or other filler words, because those can be a bit, uh, distracting or annoying in a text.
For language purists: That also means letting go of some of the more formal writing conventions, like never starting sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but’.
Why conversational content?
As mentioned in the intro, people don’t want to read cold and dry texts. You probably don’t want to read some textbook answer that goes: ‘Conversational content is the art of writing in the way one might talk to other humans’. You, and many others, want to feel like you’re reading something written by another person. And one way to achieve this feeling is to create conversational content.
Because when you write like you’re holding a conversation, chances are that your audience will want to talk back. Or in beautiful marketing terms: engagewith your content.
How to start?
You now know the what and the why. Let’s look at how to start writing conversational content. Easiest way? Write a new blog post. Pick a topic that you’re interested in and that fits with your company or content strategy, then write like you’re talking with your audience! I know, I know, it’s not as easy as that. So here are some tips.
I’m writing this post…
Let’s get a quick tip out of the way: write in the first person. So, use I-sentences, like I’ve been doing so far.
Speaking generally might come across as more professional, sure, but that’s not what you want. If you want to sound authentic, like a human, then you should let go of the generalized statements. No more “Our Product is Great and A Life Saver”. Instead, you can write: “I’ve used Our Product for my own small business, and this is how it’s helped me”.
… And you’re reading it
Don’t forget to address the other side of the conversation. You. The reader. Address them like you would if you were having a conversation with someone. Don’t say “people” as much. Try to use “you” instead.
For example, instead of writing “People want more connection”, write “You probably want more connection”. See? Way more personal when you’re getting addressed.
Ask questions
Do you like it when people ask you questions? Probably, right? As with any good conversation, it’s nice to ask questions. They make the other person feel heard and addressed. So use that in your content writing. Ask people questions, and you’ll see that they’ll feel more engaged already.
Don’t use difficult words
Unless! Ha, there’s always an unless. If you know your audience really well, and you’re sure they’ll understand this or that difficult word, then go ahead. Generally speaking, however, even experts like content that’s easy to understand.
So, no difficult words. You will only equivocate your readers! Worse, some might see it as a diatribe, and accuse you of being dilatory (see how annoying it is when you don’t know half the words? If you do know them, kudos to you!). The short of it: if people lose focus or interest in your content, or simply don’t understand, there’s no way they’re going to engage with it.
Keep it short, okay?
Think about it: if you talk with someone, are you using sentences that are three paragraphs long? Probably not. Which means that as you write, you should keep your sentences short too. Plus, this will make your content easier to read, which is great for readability!
Pssht, if you have the Yoast SEO plugin, it will check if your sentences are too long. If they are, the plugin highlights them for you. This makes it easier to rewrite them!
Emphasize your words
With italics! It sounds almost like a slogan. But yes, it can help with making your writing sound more natural. Why? Because you emphasize words when you speak too. Sometimes it can even change the meaning of your sentence.
For example (a very Dutch example, because if you live in the Netherlands, your bike will get stolen one day. It’s the circle of life): “I didn’t say he had stolen my bike,” means you really didn’t say that. But if you say, “I didn’t say he had stolen my bike,” you want to emphasize that it wasn’t him, but someone else.
Do not write ‘do not’
I’m a big fan of contractions. Grammar contractions, that is. They make a text sound so much more natural. Because let’s be honest, do you say “I do not want another coffee” or do you say “I don’t want another coffee?” Probably the second one, right?
Using don’t and I’m and you’re etc. will sound so much more natural to readers. Which means your content will sound more like a conversation too.
You’re a person, so write like one
Does that sound threatening? I do mean this in the nicest way possible! In order to write good conversational content, you have to ‘let go’ a little. The professional in you needs to take a step back and make space for your personality to shine through. Because if you can make your writing sound like you, it’ll sound so much more natural.
It all comes back to the “people don’t want impersonal and business-like content anymore”. They want to read content made by people. So let your own personality shine through. Make a little joke. Heck, use silly words like ‘delulu’ instead of delusional every once in a while (just make sure your text is still readable to everyone). Just be you.
Add examples and anecdotes
Another great way that will help you write like a person is to add examples. Personal examples, to be exact. It doesn’t have to be long. You don’t have to let us know every detail about your life, but sharing about your personal experiences can help make a piece of writing feel more personal.
Keep the conversation going
Okay, you’ve written a post or piece of conversational content. People are engaging, maybe even commenting! Don’t let the conversation end there. Reply to them. Use their point of view, their insights and questions, and perhaps create another piece of content. Build on the conversation. Keep it going!
What kind of content works for conversational content?
Finally, before you pour your heart and soul (and personality) into your content, let’s look at what kind of content works.
An easy one is opinionated pieces. Has something interesting happened in your area of expertise? Write content about it, and give your opinion. Add to the conversation with your voice.
But really, any piece of content can become conversational if you write it like that—if you use your own voice and personality, and make it yours. Look at this post! Technically, it’s a how-to. Those can be very dry. You’re just giving information, after all. But I’ve used the conversational content tips to make it, well, interesting. I hope I did a good job.
Let me know if I did 🙂 And good luck with writing!
Cindy is a content manager at Yoast. She writes and optimizes blog posts, and enjoys writing content that will help people create better content for their site and users.
What could be the matter if your perfectly optimized post isn’t ranking? Is the problem that your site is not on Google, or is something else going wrong? What is keeping your content from reaching that coveted #1 position? In this post, we’ll discuss many possible reasons why your page is not ranking, even though it’s optimized.
We’ve divided the possible issues you might be having into four sections:
Pro tip
Quick question: how’s your internal linking? If your content is optimized but not ranking, or Google is ranking the wrong pages from your site, it could be because you need to improve your site structure or fix your orphaned content. We’ve made some really neat SEO workouts to help you check and remedy these kinds of issues — check them out and fix those issues now!
Indexing and crawl issues
The first few points on the list all deal with indexing and crawl issues. Put simply, you can’t rank if your page or site is not on Google in the first place. If you find these topics confusing, you might want to read up on how Google works and how to start with SEO.
1. Your site/page is not on Google
If you need help determining whether your site is on Google, you can use the site: search operator in Google. Type site:yoast.com, and you’ll see a list of pages for that domain. If you type in the full URL of a specific article, you should see only one search result return. If you see your pages, this means that Google knows about your site and has put — at least some of it — in its index. Once you discover that your page is in the index, but you think it is not performing well, you might want to dig deeper.
The site: search operator helps you find your site in Google’s index
How to fix it
Check your WordPress Reading Settings. For the Search Visibility option, if you’ve ticked the box ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’, that’s the most likely reason your site is not on Google. If that’s the case, uncheck that box and click to save your changes. If the problem is that only some specific pages aren’t showing up on Google, then you might want to review your Search Appearance settings in Yoast SEO. Go to the ‘Content Types’ tab and ensure your settings are correct.
2. Your site/page is still too new
If your site or page is new, it might simply be a matter of chilling out and checking back in a little while. There are many moving parts in getting your content crawled, indexed and ranked. Sometimes, it takes days or maybe even weeks for Google to finish its discovery process.
How to fix it
If you check and find your site is not on Google yet, you can install Yoast SEO and submit the generated XML sitemap to Google Search Console to help Google discover your website. You can also use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to determine how specific pages are doing. It tells you exactly how Google crawls and views your site.
3. Your content is noindexed
One of the most common reasons Google does not index your site or a specific page is that it has been noindexed inadvertently. Adding noindex meta robot tags to a page tells Googlebot that it can crawl the page but that the results can’t be added to the index.
How can you check if your page is noindexed? That’s easy; simply open the page and view the source code. You’ll find the code below somewhere at the top of the page. This tells search engine crawlers that the page’s content shouldn’t be added to the index, thus keeping it from ranking.
4. Your site/page is blocking Google with robots.txt
You might have told Google not to index your content, but it’s also possible you’ve told Google not to crawl your site at all! Blocking crawlers in a so-called robots.txt file is a surefire way never to get any traffic. Blocking robots is easier than you might think. For instance, WordPress has a Search Engine Visibility setting that does its best to keep crawlers out once set to Discourage search engines from indexing this site. Uncheck this to make your site available again.
See that this option isn’t inadvertently checked
WordPress uses the noindex approach described above to handle the indexing of sites via the Search Engine Visibility setting. It does have a warning that it’s up to search engines to honor the request.
Besides telling WordPress to block search engines, it might be that other technical issues generate crawl errors, preventing Google from crawling your site properly. Your site’s web server could be acting up and presenting server errors, or buggy bits of JavaScript in your code trip up the crawler. Make sure Google can crawl your site easily.
How to fix it
If your robots.txt file is blocking Google from crawling your website (or parts of it) and you want to change that, then you’ll need to edit the file. You can follow this guide to edit your robots.txt file.
5. You must enhance your index coverage
Ensuring that Google indexes your web pages is essential to succeed. Index coverage refers to the number of your site’s URLs included in Google’s search index. Even the most optimized content may not appear in search results without comprehensive index coverage.
To identify the issue, you must examine the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console. This tool categorizes your pages into various categories and explains why pages are not indexed. If you notice many pages falling under “Error” or “Excluded,” it’s time to investigate further. One of the most common errors is ‘Crawled – currently not indexed’ in Search Console.
How to fix it
Ensure your XML sitemap is current and accurately represents your site structure. Please submit it to Google Search Console to help Google find your pages. Review and resolve any crawl errors such as 404s, server errors, or redirect issues. These errors can prevent pages from being indexed. Pages with low-quality or duplicate content might be excluded from the index. Focus on creating unique, valuable content that provides genuine user engagement. Use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for crucial pages not yet indexed. This tool also provides insights into how Google perceives your page.
Google Search Console helps you understand why pages are not indexed
Technical issues affecting ranking
Is your page/website indexed but not ranking? Then, technical problems need to be checked.
6. You’re not ranking because your site has technical issues
Your website needs to meet certain technical benchmarks if you’re going to rank on Google! Loading speed, or how quickly your pages load, is important. Security and hosting quality are important too, and that’s not all. You can read about all the essentials in our article: things everyone should know about technical SEO.
If your post doesn’t appear in the search engines, technical issues could prevent it from appearing in the search results completely. You could have conflicting plugins causing problems, and we’ve also seen some themes that prevent Google from indexing your site. And, while Yoast SEO takes care of many technical issues under the hood, it should be set correctly to do that properly.
How to fix it
The fix you need will depend on the technical issues your website is having, and we can’t cover everything here. You might want to check the following points:
Check your plugins and/or theme aren’t causing problems.
If your technical SEO looks good and your site is indexed, you must dig deeper to discover the problem. Keep reading!
7. You’re being penalized for breaking SEO rules
If Google catches you using shady SEO techniques that it doesn’t allow — e.g., sneaky tactics like buying links or stuffing keywords into hidden text — your page or site can be penalized. When you’re already putting in the effort to make a good website and quality content, it’s counterproductive to try. Even when everything else on your page is perfect, if you’re doing something that Google doesn’t allow, you will have problems ranking (or appearing in the Google search results).
Most of these things are common sense, so you probably don’t need to worry if you’re not trying to trick Google or spam people. However, a few things used to be common SEO practices that can now lead to issues — check out our article about SEO myths for more examples of bad SEO practices to avoid.
How to fix it
You can check whether Google has flagged your page for these problems in the Manual Actions tab in Google Search Console (GSC). If you’re still new to using GSC, you might want to check out our introductory article. If you find an issue under the Manual Actions tab, read this help article to learn more about what it means and how to fix it.
Linking issues that affect ranking
A good internal linking structure and quality backlinks are important if you want to rank high. Google crawls the web, following each link it finds, so if your links are lacking, it can cause problems with ranking.
8. Your site doesn’t have a proper internal linking structure
Another reason your content doesn’t appear in the search results is that a crucial part of your SEO strategy is not in order. Don’t underestimate the importance of site structure – the internal linking structure – for your SEO strategy. Having a clear site structure leads to a better understanding of your site by Google. If your internal linking structure is poor, chances to rank high are lower – even when your content is well-optimized and awesome.
How to fix it
Start adding those links! Make sure that your important posts and pages have the most internal links to them. But don’t randomly add links: make sure you add relevant, related links that add value for your users.
You can use the Yoast SEO orphaned content filter to find posts without incoming internal links. Yoast SEO Premium will help you even more by offering helpful linking suggestions as you write. In addition, if you use Yoast SEO Premium, you get various other AI features, like Yoast AI Optimize, that help you do the hard work. And if you really want to improve your site structure, check out our site structure training — which is also included in Premium!
Pro tip: Take care of your orphaned content and internal linking the easy way with our SEO workouts, available in Yoast SEO Premium.
If you just started with your website, your content won’t instantly rank. Not even if you have optimized everything perfectly and every bullet in Yoast SEO is green. To rank, you’ll need some links from other websites. After all, Google has to know your website exists.
How to fix it
Creating incredible content is a good way to get links to your pages. High-quality content attracts clicks from readers who might share the content far and wide via social media. All this helps to get those links. Of course, you can do more to get links in a natural, non-spammy way: here are fifteen ways of getting high-quality backlinks.
To get (more) backlinks, you can reach out to other websites. You’ll need to do some PR or link building. Ask them to mention your site or talk about your product and link to your site. You can also use social media to get the word out! Learn all about link-building strategies in our All-Around SEO training!
Content and keyword issues affecting ranking
If everything else is as it should be SEO-wise, then your page or site is not ranking might be related to your content or keywords.
10. Your page is great, but there’s too much competition
Usually, a page doesn’t rank because there’s simply too much competition. If you optimize your content for competitive keywords and keyphrases, such as [cat behavior], [robot vacuum cleaner], or [real estate agent], chances are high that you won’t rank for that term.
Check the results pages for your keyword to determine if this is the problem. Do high authority sites like Wikipedia or Amazon dominate the first page? Do you see many sites already firmly established themselves in this niche? Probably, your site doesn’t have the authority that these other sites have (yet). So you can optimize all you want, but unfortunately, that’s not enough to rank high in the search results if your niche is too competitive.
How to fix it
If you want to rank for highly competitive terms, try a long-tail keyword strategy. Write content that targets related long-tail keywords and phrases before tackling the competitive keywords. If these long-tail articles start ranking, you can also rank for more competitive terms. Such a strategy requires long-term efforts, but in the end, it will pay off.
Another reason your content isn’t ranking is that it doesn’t match the intent of people searching for your keyword. Search intent is important for search engines: do people want to buy something, go to a specific website, or seek information? Even if you’re targeting a more long-tail keyphrase, if your content doesn’t match the dominant intent of searchers, search engines won’t show it in the results because it won’t be what people are looking for.
Let’s look at a few examples. Say you’re a dog trainer who wants to rank for puppy training services, so you optimize for [training your puppy], with transactional intent in mind. But if you look at the search results, you’ll see that there are informational videos, and all the results explain how to train a puppy yourself. So, searchers have informational intent. This can work the other way around, too. If you’ve written a step-by-step guide for your blog on making garden decorations, aiming to rank for [flower garland garden decoration], you may have trouble ranking for that term if people just want to buy that, not make it themselves.
Remember that not every search term has one dominant type of intent. Also, it isn’t impossible to rank with content for differing intent. Still, it can be worthwhile to look into this if your optimized content doesn’t rank in the search engines.
How to fix it
Unfortunately, you don’t have the power to change the intent of search engine users. But you can adapt your content strategy. If your optimized content isn’t ranking, look at the search results (use private mode) and analyze what you see. Is one specific type of result dominant? Are there images or videos? Which related queries are shown? This is where your opportunities are. If you find primarily informational intent for a query, you can write content to get people to your site, establish your brand as a reliable source of information, and stay top of mind when people want to buy something. If you find a lot of images in the search results, you may need to focus more on image SEO. Consider what you see on the results pages when determining your SEO strategy.
12. Your content lacks uniqueness
Even well-written and optimized content might struggle to rank if it doesn’t stand out. Search engines prioritize content that offers a unique perspective or provides additional value compared to existing articles on the same topic.
Check the search results for your target keywords and examine the top-ranking pages. Does your content offer something different or more insightful? If your page presents similar information in a comparable format, you may find it difficult to climb the rankings. With the advent of generative AI, we’ll see a wave of mediocre sameness appear in the search results. If you publish the same stuff, search engines won’t bother with it.
Generative AI can help create content but needs help maintaining quality and relevance. While AI can quickly produce large volumes of content, we should prioritize quality over quantity. You should make sure that the material is original and valuable to your audience. AI-generated content might be repetitive or lack diverse perspectives. It’s essential to refine it with your unique insights or expert opinions.
Additionally, the content should always align with your audience’s needs and search intent, as AI may not fully capture human nuances. Always comply with search engine guidelines regarding AI-generated content to avoid potential penalties or indexing issues. You can enhance your content strategy while preserving its integrity by using AI as a supportive tool rather than a standalone solution.
How to fix it
Quit simply; add unique insights and views. Add your own voice and incorporate original research, case studies, or expert opinions to set your content apart. Keep your content fresh with the latest information, trends, or data to maintain relevance and uniqueness. Encourage comments and discussions to build a community around your content, making it more dynamic and engaging.
Is your optimized content still not ranking?
Multiple reasons could prevent a post from ranking. Have you optimized your post correctly with Yoast SEO? Then, the most common cause is likely to be that the competition in a niche is too fierce. Unfortunately, SEO is a long-term strategy. You need to work hard and be patient. In the meantime, you can tackle many other aspects of your SEO (site structure, link building). Try to focus on all website optimization aspects and be the best result. It will pay off eventually!
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
The summer has just ended. Should you already start preparing for Black Friday and the holiday season? Yes! They’re the biggest sales of the year, and ranking in Google is something you take time to do. It’s never too early to start getting your deals ready. So, if you have an online shop or an ecommerce store, let’s start working on your holiday season and Black Friday SEO immediately!
Don’t forget that Black Friday (November 29, 2024) and Cyber Monday (December 2, 2024) are kicking off this year’s holiday shopping season. You can set up a lot of content for all occasions. In this post, we’ll review some things you can do to prepare!
Table of contents
Today, people are used to shopping online. It’s easy and convenient. You don’t have to travel only to find something out of stock. Plus, online stores often offer payment plans. Shopping online is so popular that online sales in the USA during the holiday season hit a record of $221 billion last year! And the numbers will only continue to rise. That’s why it’s safe to assume that people will buy many (if not most) holiday gifts online this year.
Staying on top of trends to prepare for the holiday season is good. E-commerce is still growing, and consumers expect more every year. Here are some actionable tips for the upcoming Black Friday and holiday season to improve your SEO:
Discount deals and alternative payment options (Buy now, pay later) should be part of your ecommerce strategy
Brands should provide a consistent purchasing experience across digital/online and physical stores
To minimize returns, brands should make their product pages as comprehensive as possible
Holiday season marketing campaigns should be tailored to each platform to ensure maximum effectiveness
Online is where it’s at
Of course, in-store or curbside pick-up will still prove popular. However, most people research their ecommerce purchases online – sometimes weeks in advance! So don’t be surprised when the holiday shopping season starts well before Black Friday and continues for weeks.
Extending Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday season online deals for a few days or weeks can be a good idea. This is especially true if you want to prevent huge crowds from gathering at your store on a specific day. That won’t be a good shopping experience for anyone involved, so spreading these deals over an extended time is probably better.
Start preparing in time
Dive into the data you amassed during previous Black Friday and Cyber Monday events, and see if you can come up with improvements for your holiday season SEO. Bear in mind that it takes a while for content to rank. So, to keep up with the competition, try to get your content in gear at least 45 days ahead. That’s often recommended. Of course, you can always start preparing earlier if that works better for you. Your schedule could look something like this:
45 Days in advance: Post your promotion to your website calendar and post a save-the-date post on social media and in your email newsletter).
7 Days in advance: Post upcoming events/promotions on social media and via email. Try to encourage other (small) businesses to share it with their followers.
1 Day in advance: Post an event reminder post on social media.
It’s a good rule to remember these steps and time frames. However, you can do much more than set up new pages and renew old ones. Let’s look at a few practical tips.
1. Do holiday season keyword research
Keyword research is important all year, but especially during the season when your online store starts having big sales. You have probably worked on this research previously, but now is the time to dive in again. There are always things to learn, like developments in your industry, changes in consumer behavior, or new trends and topics to discuss.
Start early with your research to give yourself enough time to produce high-quality, helpful content that helps reach those new audiences. While using generative AI tools to generate Black Friday SEO content for your ecommerce is enticing, please refrain from doing so. Generative AI can help you do your job but can’t replace your valuable insights and opinions.
2. Set up holiday season gift pages
First, we must consider what category or particular landing pages make sense for the upcoming holidays. You can always set up pages like ‘Best gifts for parents/millennials/teens’, ‘Newest deals for your 6/10/12-year-old’, and ‘Best friend/grandparents/coworker discounts’. You could also think of ‘Top 10 gifts for outdoor/skiing/parasailing enthusiasts’ and ‘Top 3 deals for stay-at-home parents’, etcetera.
To increase the chances of your gift pages ranking, boost their internal linking structure. You can also link the previous all-year holiday season pages, such as specific Christmas landing pages (‘Top 7/10/25 gifts for under the Christmas tree’) to boost these when the time has come. That could be around the 45-day mark, but we would be okay with stretching that to 60 days. You’ll need to give Google and other search engines enough time to follow your links and find your specific holiday season SEO landing pages with deals.
Social media like X and Pinterest — though this is technically a visual search engine — can play a massive role in the success of your (online) holiday season sale. Take Pinterest, for instance. Raise your hand if you or your spouse has a Pinterest Christmas wish list. Many people do. If you get your products on people’s wish lists, that can positively impact your sales.
While you’re at it, don’t forget to share your holiday season gift pages on Facebook and Instagram. In the previous section, we’ve mentioned the top 10 lists. We all know these still work pretty well on social media. Yoast SEO can help you optimize your social media posts before you share them.
Email marketing
Last but not least, remember your email marketing! For many companies, newsletters provide a steady stream of income. Be sure to plan a good campaign for your newsletters.
For example, we recommend setting up holiday gift guides and sharing these. You can create an excellent overview of many gifts that many people will enjoy. ELLE and Target have pages like that, and so do more companies.
4. Introduce new products
The holiday season is an excellent time to pitch new products. If you know of potential bestsellers for the upcoming holiday season, start writing content about these products now. You can compare it to tech sites writing about concept iPhones, features that Apple might add, etc.
The more you write about new products upfront, the more likely the sales pages for these products will rank when it matters. You should link all pages you made in advance to that one main page you’ll set up when the product is released and available to buy. Treat that page like cornerstone content.
5. Add structured data to your product pages
When adding or changing your product pages to fit the holiday season, don’t forget to optimize them. Check, for instance, whether you’ve added structured data to your product pages. Rich results that show ratings and prices can give you an edge over your competitors. Our WooCommerce SEO plugin, Local SEO plugin, or Yoast SEO for Shopify app can help you do this to improve your holiday season!
Example of a product appearing in the search results if you use structured data.
Don’t forget to optimize your product feeds for Black Friday SEO. This maximizes visibility and sales during this high-traffic online shopping period. Start by ensuring all product information, such as titles, descriptions, prices, and availability, is accurate and up-to-date. Check if the products that need them have relevant Black Friday keywords to enhance discoverability. Use high-quality, clear images to showcase your product.
Use the promotions feature in Google Merchant Center to prominently display special deals and discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This way, you’ll make your offers more attractive to potential buyers. Please update your feed regularly to reflect real-time inventory changes and fix errors to maintain product visibility.
7. Reuse content
There’s no shame in serving old wine in a new bottle. If you have a Black Friday or a Christmas gift guide for 2023, feel free to reuse it in 2024. Update the year and details like popular brands and products for that year. If the slug of your URL is /black-friday-guide-2023/, change it to /black-friday-guide-2024/ around August next year, and redirect the old URL to the new one. No need to create a new page. It would be a waste of nice inbound links not to reuse that old URL. Of course, this is even easier if you don’t include the year in the URL, so /black-friday-guide/ is also an excellent slug.
In the months before the holiday season, you could even simply repost popular posts from last year (a bit adjusted or updated if needed) on social media. Valentine’s Day might even become Secret Santa. Cyber Monday might match your child’s favorite gifts for Ramadan. These are probably small adjustments; perhaps just adding ‘this Ramadan’ to a meta description or title will do.
It’s a good idea to check and optimize your website for speed and mobile use. Trust us; you’ll get these recommendations from an SEO blog or consultant daily. And with good reason! Mobile, site speed, and user experience are essential to get people to spend money on your ecommerce business this Black Friday. When preparing your online store for the holiday sale season, this is as good a time as any to check your mobile website and site speed, and update or improve them if possible.
Investing in local SEO for Black Friday and Christmas shopping is essential for local businesses aiming to attract more customers. Begin by optimizing your Google Business Profile with accurate business information, including address, phone number, business hours, and any special Black Friday/Cyber Monday hours or promotions. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews. Use local keywords in your content, focusing on terms your community will likely search for, such as “Black Friday deals in [Your City].” Additionally, engage with your local community on social media by promoting special deals to drive more foot traffic to your store.
10. Create a measurement plan
All set? Remember to make a measurement plan to analyze your success. Write down all your plans, then think about how to track all your actions. This is key to knowing what to focus on next year. For detailed instructions on analyzing your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Cinco de Mayo shopping, read our post with five tips to measure your holiday sales success.
What should you do when the holiday season is over?
How do you handle the product pages of holiday gift sets after the holidays? Even if the gift set or product was a great success, and you want to offer it again next year, it’ll take a while for the page to be relevant again. What is the best way to deal with these pages in the meantime?
Our advice: Keep the pages up. However, you don’t necessarily want them visible to people browsing your site. So, have the page up without linking, then link to it again during the holiday season. This is better than deleting it and starting again.
Conclusion on holiday season SEO
In short, now’s the time to buckle down and start writing holiday gift pages and content for new products. Remember to plan your social media promotion and analytics. After all, you can never start too early when your online business depends on the holiday season. Be prepared; begin now with your SEO. Good luck with your holiday season sale!
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
Another way to market your product or service? Really? Yes, we’re really looking into something new today. But don’t worry. It’s not groundbreaking. If you look at how the internet and your audience’s interests have changed, you’ll understand why conversational content might be worth investing in.
Does this interest you?
That’s the big question you want to ask your audience. Because you want to write content that interests them, and yet… Something’s not going right. With Reddit moving up in the search results, instead of actual blog posts, there’s a trend happening that people can’t seem to make sense of.
Except it does make sense. People want to read what interests them, and lately, they haven’t been interested in the cold and business-like approach that most websites and blogs have adopted. And let’s be real with ourselves, what’s more appealing?
The latest shift has indicated that audiences engage more frequently with content that’s written in a semi-casual or even fully casual style, with syntax one might use while talking.
Or: I’ve noticed that my blogs get more engagement when I talk about personal preferences and experiences. Here’s what I did.
Yep. It’s the latter, isn’t it?
Why the shift towards conversational content?
Listen, we don’t want to blame AI again, but… It’s not helping. It makes every blog post sound the same; worse, it’s not even right half the time. That’s why we don’t want to read a fully-generated blog post either. And yes, we can tell it’s generated. A lot of people can nowadays.
Conclusion: people can tell when content is generated, and they don’t want it. They want authenticity. Which is why they go to… Reddit. Because there, humans give advice to and talk about their problems with other humans.
Example of Reddit appearing high in the search results
What about influencers?
Good question (I once read a blogger complain about the use of questions in headings, because it’s not an interview, they said, but it reads more like a conversation this way, doesn’t it?). Influencer marketing doesn’t work as well as it used to, mostly because people aren’t clueless. They can see through the beautiful photos/videos/words. They know the influencer is being paid to say positive things, making it less appealing and ineffective.
Don’t entirely give up on influencers
What does seem to work is working with micro or nano influencers. People with a small following usually have a better connection with their audience. Their brand deals are also less common, because they’re not well-known, so they’re not throwing commercial after commercial at their followers. Plus, the brands who sponsor/work with them might be smaller too, and more fitted with the micro/nano influencer’s own brand.
Example of a micro influencer
Though the reasons might be varied, they all boil down to the same thing: the content of micro and nano influencers is more authentic.
A shift in the audience’s needs
You’ve probably heard the phrase “Write for your users”. Yes, we’ve used it too, because the underlying message isn’t wrong. You should write content that interests your users. The problem is that people don’t want to read cold and factual content anymore. They want to have a conversation with you.
So what should you do?
Take a look at your own content. Try to see how you can make it more authentic, more genuine, and how you can add value to your audience. And no, we’re not talking about how your product adds value. We’re talking about your content. Your brand.
Brand marketing is where it’s at
Yes, it sounds like a no-brainer, but hear us out. Let’s say you’ve been seeing posts and content from a brand that really inspires you. It makes you laugh, it makes you think, it makes you feel connected to the brand. When you eventually visit their website and see their product, which aligns with their brand, you’ll probably feel more inclined to buy/subscribe.
Why? Because you’ve not been beaten to death with commercials or ads or buy ourfastest, bestest, newest solution that will change your entire life. You will look back at your life Before Our Product and think: Wow. How could I have ever lived without Our Product?
That kind of marketing becomes exhausting. Plus, it doesn’t mean anything. Everyone’s the fastest, and everyone’s product is the best. We don’t believe it anymore, and you probably don’t either.
Be genuine with your brand marketing
People are looking for authentic web experiences. They don’t want to walk into a sales pitch, even though that’s exactly what half (if not more) of the web is nowadays. Visiting a website is like opening your front door to someone selling vacuum cleaners. It’s exhausting.
You have to establish a real connection first. So foster your brand’s identity. Show concern for your users and their lives. Talk with them like a real person would. Have a dialogue with them. And please don’t ask people to open their wallets and fork over money without even saying hi, how are you? first.
Cindy is a content manager at Yoast. She writes and optimizes blog posts, and enjoys writing content that will help people create better content for their site and users.
AI-powered search tools like SearchGPT have sparked both excitement and concern among SEOs. Recently, industry prognosticators have expressed fears about AI-driven tools undermining traditional traffic sources. They worry that widespread adoption of these tools will divert so much traffic away from previously profitable websites that the decline in visibility will “unalive” those sites completely.
Table of contents
It’s normal to feel nervous about new technologies, especially when they seem to change not only the core of how you understand search works, but also change searcher behavior in general. Thankfully, anxiety fades when facts are clear. Let’s break down why AI-powered search is not built on theft and how it fits into the broader SEO ecosystem.
Understanding how AI-powered search works
Before addressing the claims of content theft, we must first understand how tools like SearchGPT function. At its core, these AI tools are large language models (LLM) trained on vast amounts of publicly available text data. This training process involves learning patterns in language to generate human-like text responses. Unlike traditional data analysis or fact-learning, the “training” focuses on understanding and predicting language rather than memorizing specific facts. This, then, begs the question: “Does it really, truly answer questions, or does it just create accurate-sounding guesses?”
Data gathering and synthesis
When a user submits a query, SearchGPT (specifically, but this is probably true of similar tools) processes the input by analyzing and interpreting the request using its trained language patterns. This means the way the search for facts is constructed is more accurate than relying solely on the terms inputted by the user. Then, instead of merely searching for and retrieving existing content, it looks at all the content from multiple top sources. It synthesizes that information (meaning it reads and evaluates all the retrieved content) to construct a coherent and comprehensive response.
The “synthesizing” process involves:
identifying relevant data points
understanding the context of the query
evaluating the expertise and likelihood of accuracy
and integrating information in a way that aligns with the user’s intent
Generating original content
SearchGPT doesn’t copy and paste text from websites. Instead, it generates new content based on the patterns it has learned during training. This process is similar to how human writers use their knowledge and experience to create original articles. By leveraging sophisticated algorithms, SearchGPT (and other tools) ensures that the generated text is both unique and informative, providing valuable answers without replicating existing content verbatim.
Ensuring accuracy and relevance
To maintain high standards of accuracy and relevance, AI-powered search has processes in the background to evaluate the reliability of the information it synthesizes. It prioritizes data from authoritative sources, cross-references information to minimize errors, and continually adapts to new information to provide up-to-date answers. This dynamic capability ensures that users receive responses that are not only accurate but also reflect the latest knowledge and trends.
The dynamic nature of AI responses
This is where the general understanding of how AI creates search responses and content goes astray. When tools like ChatGPT or AI-powered search tools write new content or provide answers, they are not relying solely on data points and facts that they have been *previously* trained on; the data set is not “old.” The AI’s ability to search for and adopt new information allows it to refine its responses over time, ensuring that the answers remain relevant, valuable, and accurate. This continuous learning process means that AI-powered tools can adjust responses to better meet users’ needs as user behavior and information evolve, providing a more personalized and effective search experience.
To sum up, tools like SearchGPT function by gathering and synthesizing information from a wide array of sources (that they find on the web) to generate original, accurate, and relevant responses to user queries. This process ensures that while the AI provides quick and concise answers, it does so by leveraging a deep understanding of language and context rather than stealing or copying content.
The role of attribution and source linking
The biggest concern among SEOs is the traffic loss if AI-powered search provides direct answers without driving clicks to the source website. This fear is completely understandable but overlooks an important aspect: the role of attribution.
Many AI-powered search engines, including those integrating models like SearchGPT, prioritize providing users with accurate, high-quality information. In doing so, they include links back to the original sources. This attribution ensures that websites receive credit and traffic for their content. Rather than stealing clicks, AI serves as a conduit, directing engaged users to the source of the information for more in-depth exploration.
However, this also means that the core concern, that some sites might lose traffic because they are not chosen as the cited source for the information, is a reasonable concern. The way to combat this loss isn’t to fight against adopting new technology (because that is probably futile at this point). The best way to fight is to ensure the cited source is YOUR source. This will become the new focus of SEO.
AI as a complement, not a competitor
The notion that AI-powered search will “kill” websites is rooted in a misunderstanding of how these tools are intended to function. AI doesn’t replace the need for high-quality, authoritative content; it amplifies it. Search engines and AI tools rely on the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT) of websites to deliver relevant and credible information to users.
Websites that invest in EEAT will continue to thrive, as AI tools will naturally prioritize their content in response to user queries. In this sense, AI becomes a partner in the SEO journey, helping to surface the best content and ensure it reaches the right audience.
Websites that are “killed” by AI-powered search won’t be innocent victims of a new technology run amok; rather, they’re more likely to have been removed from the knowledge pool by digital Darwinism — “survival of the fittest“ and all that.
The future of SEO in an AI-driven world
As with any technological advancement, AI-powered search tools will require SEOs to adapt and evolve their strategies. However, this evolution doesn’t mean the end of traditional SEO practices. Instead, it highlights the importance of optimizing for both AI and human users — which is not all that different from the old guidance to “optimize for both robots and human users.” See? What’s old is new again!
By creating valuable, authoritative (read: unique!) content that meets users’ needs, websites can continue to grow their visibility and influence in an AI-driven world. SEO professionals who embrace these changes and integrate AI into their strategies will be better positioned to succeed.
Dispelling the myth of theft
The idea that AI-powered search is built on theft is misleading and overlooks the potential benefits these tools bring. Rather than fearing AI, SEOs should leverage it to enhance their strategies, drive more meaningful engagement, and ensure their content remains at the forefront of search results.
AI isn’t here to steal; it’s here to drive evolution. It’s not the biggest or loudest that thrive on the web, but those who adapt. Just as in nature, survival belongs to the fittest—those who innovate, evolve, and embrace the future.
Carolyn Shelby is an expert in SEO and AI, specializing in enterprise and technical SEO and optimizing web architectures. She views SEO and AI as powerful tools to narrate a brand’s journey, aligning content with core values to engage and convert audiences. Her approach is both data-driven and distinctly human, using straightforward, innovative methods to achieve real results.
Staying on top of things and beating your competitors means staying on top of trends and consumer behavior. Over the years, Google quietly developed a tool that has become a staple in many SEO toolkits: Google Trends. This tool provides invaluable insights into what people are searching for. The latest update of Google Trends brings an updated Trending Now section that promises even more data on what is happening right now.
What is Google Trends?
Google Trends is a tool that analyzes the popularity of search queries over time while showing data on trending topics globally and locally. It helps marketers, researchers, and content creators understand the interest in certain topics. Many use it to make strategic decisions based on searcher interest.
The Trending Now section in Google Trends shows real-time trends. Here, you’ll find topics that are gaining significance at this moment in time. Google updates this section constantly, so you’ll always see the latest search trends come in as they happen. Creators and researchers use this data to create timely content or to gauge interest in current events.
Google Trends is an essential tool for SEO
Exploring the Google Trends update
Launched in August 2024, the latest update to Google Trends brings many enhancements that make it faster, smarter, and customizable. The updated Trending Now section promises deeper insights into current search behavior. Thanks to these new insights, you get even more options to fine-tune and expand your SEO strategy.
Enhanced real-time data processing
First, the update improves real-time data processing in the Trending Now section of Google Trends. Now, the tool gives you even quicker access to search trends. These insights allow you to better inform your content strategy with the latest trends and topics. This gives you the tools to ensure your content is timely and engaging.
According to Google, “It detects ten times as many emerging trends as before and refreshes every ten minutes on average, so you see the latest upward Search swings right as they take off.”
What does that mean in practice? For example, if you operate in the VR gaming space and there is a sudden increase in searches for a new term related to “virtual reality gaming,” you can use that to write timely content that tackles the latest games, technologies, and industry news. As a result, you might become top-of-mind with that audience.
The updated Trending Now section in Google Trends
Smarter trend analysis tools
Google Trends gives you a ton of data for free, but you need to put in the effort to make it work for you. The new update introduces smarter analytical tools that make it easier to interpret data. With these tools, you can get more detailed breakdowns of trends, which, in turn, helps you understand search behavior across different regions and demographics.
Let’s say you work in the automotive industry. With these enhanced tools, you can dissect electric vehicle trends by various options. This way, you can tailor your strategies to specific market segments. Then, you can collaborate with local dealerships and keep monitoring trends to optimize engagement and sales in key markets.
Increased customization options
There are more buttons to push and options to select. The latest Google Trends update is focused on customization, which gives you more flexibility in viewing and analyzing the data. You can tailor the data and trends to fit your needs, whatever they might be. You can focus on timeframes, geographical areas, particular industries, or more.
Improved user interface
Google Trends has improved dramatically over the years, and this time, it’s the Trending Now section to get a much more usable interface. The section is now far more intuitive to navigate and, not unimportant, easier on the eyes. This new interface makes it easier to access and interpret the trending data. As a result, it should reduce the time needed to get those insights.
The clean layout includes an improved trend graphic, which makes it much more helpful overall. Now, you can quickly spot trends and patterns that inform your content and marketing efforts, ensuring you remain agile and informed.
Using the Google Trends update for SEO
The updated Google Trends tool makes it easier to make data-driven decisions about your SEO strategies. You can tailor the tool to your needs using faster data processing, real-time insights, smarter analysis options, and various other options. You can use the resulting findings to steer your SEO and content strategies.
Using real-time insights for content creation
Google Trends has always been the go-to tool for finding out what people are searching for right now, but the update makes this even more so. The tool has even better access to real-time data and makes this available to anyone in an easy-to-understand interface.
Combined, these are things that can give you an edge over your competitors. Google Trends gives you everything you need to quickly respond to emerging trends. This helps you stay relevant with your content. It also helps you stay at the forefront of developments in your industry.
These real-time insights can also help you improve existing content. You can regularly check your content to see if there are new, timely trends, keywords, and terms that you can incorporate into your articles.
Better geographical targeting for local SEO optimization
Google Trends has always had great insights into how people worldwide search, but the latest update greatly improves that. It now gives deep insights into regional search behavior, which you can use to tailor your local SEO strategies. Google says, “This tool is now available in 125 countries, and in 40 of those, you can not only see what’s trending in the country as a whole but also dive deeper in specific regions.”
For local SEO, it’s crucial to understand how people search in those specific regional markets. You’ll also need to see the differences between various locations. If you want to succeed in your local content strategy, you need data about that.
The enhanced local features give you more options to dive deeper into local SEO data
Building a long-term content strategy
Google Trends is for more than just timely content. Of course, you can use the insights to build a robust long-term strategy. Find persisting search patterns in the data, including all relevant topics and search queries. Use these to create high-quality, helpful, evergreen content. Make sure that this stands the test of time and outperforms the competition.
This kind of long-term data helps you position your brand. It helps you establish a market position and develop a message that people will align with. This is essential if you want to beat your competitors and build a brand for the future.
Diagnosing and responding to traffic anomalies
It’s hard to analyze unexpected changes in site traffic. Google Trends can give you a little bit of insight, though. Compare your traffic data with the broader search trends to see if the fluctuations happen more broadly. The changes might happen because of external factors, like global events, seasonal shifts, or other issues.
A great example of the seasonality of a topic
Don’t forget to use Google Trends
Google Trends has been around for a long time and is now better than ever. It’s a very helpful tool that gives you tons of data on how people search on Google — even showing trending stuff that happens when it happens.
Use Google Trends to inform your SEO strategies, as it provides a data-driven foundation for making decisions. Also, remember to tap into the regional search data, which can give you ideas of what your target audience searches in specific locales.
Even if you’re a new or experienced business owner, you can’t ignore the impact of social media on your business. It’s great for marketing, brand awareness, and SEO. But it’s quite a hassle to keep track of your social media accounts, website, blog, and your product(s). To save you time and money, we’ll be looking at what benefits your SEO the most: an organic social media strategy or using social media ads?
First, what is an organic social media strategy? Well, it’s the opposite of using social media ads—something you have to pay for. An organic strategy means you use free/unpaid methods of creating and sharing content on social media platforms to build an engaged audience.
In other words, you regularly post high-quality content on your social media accounts. Plus, another important part of an organic strategy is engaging with your audience through, for example, comments.
Long-term benefits
There are a lot of long-term benefits from having an organic strategy. If you post consistently for a long time, you’ll usually get sustained engagement and traffic from your posts. Which, in turn, can lead to higher search engine rankings.
Authenticity and engagement
Another benefit is the authenticity of your content—which is becoming increasingly more important nowadays. People want to know if they can trust your brand. By regularly posting authentic content and engaging with your audience, you’ll be able to boost your brand reputation and indirectly boost your SEO.
So how does engagement boost your SEO? Well, likes, shares, and comments can influence your SEO by signaling that your content is relevant and popular. Plus, now that Google shows social media content in their search results more often, it can only be a good thing to have great engagement metrics.
The disadvantages of organic social media
It takes some time
To see the benefits of an organic social media strategy, you have to post consistently over a long period of time. This can also be a disadvantage, however. Sometimes you want to launch a new brand or product, and you don’t want to post about it for months before you catch people’s attention.
Even though you do get results with an organic strategy, it can take months to see significant results. So you need to have patience!
Consistency is important
It’s a key component, in fact. For an effective organic strategy, you need to continuously and consistently put in the effort to maintain your brand’s visibility and engagement. This means you need to stay on top of your feed and regularly brainstorm what might be interesting content for your audience. Which does take time and effort.
What are social media ads?
Social media ads are pretty straightforward. They’re paid advertisements that you can run on social media platforms like Meta (which includes Facebook and Instagram), X and YouTube. It’s also good to know that there are various advertisement types, such as display ads, video ads, sponsored posts, etc. Depending on your goal and audience, you choose one of these.
Example of display ad
As we just mentioned, social media ads are paid advertisements. The costs, however, can vary, depending on your audience, the type of ad, and the duration of your campaign. That’s why some campaigns might be more expensive than others!
Example of sponsored post
The SEO advantages of paid social media
Quick results
As opposed to an organic strategy, ads can generate immediate traffic and engagement to your site. This could indirectly improve your SEO because your engagement metrics will increase.
Plus, if you’re promoting high-quality content, then people are more likely to share it, like it, and link to it. Which is all very valuable for your SEO.
Reach your target audience
Ads also make it relatively easy to reach your target audience. When you set up an ad, you can fill in precise information that will allow you to reach people from a certain demographic, with certain interests and behaviors.
If those people like the content you’ve boosted, they might even follow your account. That would be the ideal situation, since they will now also see your organic posts.
The disadvantages of paid social media
Costs
This is a no-brainer since it’s in the name, but it’s still worth mentioning. Paying for ads can get quite expensive. Especially if this is your social media strategy, and you don’t have an organic strategy.
If that’s the case, you’ll have to continuously invest in social media ads to maintain your brand’s visibility.
Short-term impact
Ads only run for a limited time. If your campaign is over and your ad isn’t promoted anymore, then your traffic and engagement from that ad will drop. In other words, there are no lasting SEO benefits from paid ads.
Ad fatigue
Yep, it’s a thing! Seeing an ad too often can desensitize people. In other words: people get bored from seeing the same ad and they stop paying attention. Which means your ad will become less effective. Have you ever seen a TV ad so many times that you get tired of it? It’s the same thing. Ad fatigue.
Overall impact on SEO: organic versus paid
We’ve talked about the SEO advantages to both strategies, but let’s briefly summarize.
Having an organic social media strategy means you regularly post high-quality content, which can lead to more backlinks and improved brand visibility. It might even improve your engagement metrics!
Using paid ads will not directly influence your SEO ranking. However, ads can drive significant traffic to your site, which in turn can improve metrics like pages per session.
Which strategy is better?
As always, the answer fully depends on your goals and how much you’re willing to invest into your social media strategy, be it time or money or both. To maximize the impact of your social media on your SEO however, we would recommend using both strategies.
Why? Because you can use ads to boost new or high-value content to reach your target audience. Once the initial buzz of an ad has died down, you can keep people interested with your organic posts.
Tip: utilize analytics
Most social media platforms offer you insight into the performance of your organic and paid posts. Use this to check which posts are resonating with your audience and which aren’t. If you combine this data with your website’s analytics, you’ll be able to easily adjust your strategy, so you can focus on what works best.
Conclusion
Both organic and paid strategies have their advantages. An organic social media strategy will result in slow and steady growth with lasting benefits for your business. However, this will take a lot of time before you see any results. On the other hand, using paid ads will give you quick results and allows you to target the exact audience that you want to reach. But paid ads can get expensive, so they might be more useful for immediate traffic boosts or announcing a new product or service to your audience.
That’s why it might be in your best interest to combine both, so you’ll have the benefits of building a connection with your audience while also boosting your growth with paid ads.
Sabrina is the Social Media Specialist at Yoast. She’s responsible for creating and curating engaging content to enhance Yoasts’ brand presence across various social platforms.
At Yoast, we talk a lot about writing and readability. We consider it an essential part of SEO. Your text needs to be easy to follow and it needs to satisfy your users’ needs. This focus on your user will help your rankings. However, we rarely talk about how search engines like Google read and understand these texts. In this post, we’ll explore what we know about how Google analyzes your online content.
Are we sure Google understands text?
We know that Google understands text to some degree. Just think about it. One of the most important things Google has to do is match what someone types into the search bar to a suitable search result. User signals (like click-through and bounce rates) alone won’t help Google to do this properly. Moreover, we know that it’s possible to rank for a keyword that you don’t use in your text (although it’s still good practice to identify and use one or more specific keywords). So clearly, Google does something to actually read and assess your text in some way or another.
How Google understands text
Back to our initial question: How does Google understand text? To be honest, we don’t know this in detail. Unfortunately, that information isn’t freely available. And we also know, that Google is continuously evolving their ability to understand text online. But there are some clues that we can draw conclusions from. We know that Google has taken big steps when it comes to understanding context. We also know that the search engine tries to determine how words and concepts are related to each other. How do we know this? By keeping an eye on any news surrounding Google’s algorithm and considering how the actual search results pages have changed.
Word embeddings
One interesting technique Google has filed patents for and worked on is called word embedding. The goal is to find out what words are closely related to other words. A computer program is fed a certain amount of text. It then analyzes the words in that text and determines what words tend to appear together. Then, it translates every word into a series of numbers. This allows the words to be represented as a point in space in a diagram, like a scatter plot. This diagram shows what words are related in what ways. More accurately, it shows the distance between words, sort of like a galaxy made up of words. So for example, a word like “keywords” would be much closer to “copywriting” than it would be to say “kitchen utensils”.
Interestingly, this can also be done for phrases, sentences and paragraphs. The bigger the dataset you feed the program, the better it will be able to categorize and understand words and work out how they’re used and what they mean. And, what do you know, Google has a database of the entire internet. With a dataset like that, it’s possible to create very reliable models that predict and assess the value of text and context.
From word embeddings, it’s only a small step to the concept of related entities. Let’s take a look at the search results to illustrate what related entities are. If you type in “types of pasta”, this is what you’ll see right at the top of the SERP: a heading called “pasta varieties”, with a number of rich results that include a ton of different types of pasta. These pasta varieties are even subcategorized into “ribbon pasta”, “tubular pasta”, and other subtypes of pasta. And there are lots of similar SERPs that reflect how words and concepts are related to each other.
After typing [types of pasta] Google now shows this entity-based rich result
The related entities patent that Google has filed actually mentions the related entities index database. This is a database that stores concepts or entities, like pasta. These entities also have characteristics. Lasagna, for example, is a pasta. It’s also made of dough. And it’s food. Now, by analyzing the characteristics of entities, they can be grouped and categorized in all kinds of different ways. This allows Google to understand how words are related, and, therefore, to understand context.
Google has heavily invested in NLP
Natural language processing is the understanding of language by machines. It is one of the hardest parts of computer science and one where the most advances are being made. Today, with a world increasingly powered by systems run by AI, proper language understanding is key. Google understands this and invests a ton in the development of NLP models. One key system was BERT, a model that could understand the text coming after the content words and before those words. This way, the system has the full context of a sentence to make proper sense of its meaning. What BERT did is awesome, but Google is doing more. Meet MUM.
MUM: Google’s language model
In 2021, Google introduced a new language model that can multitask: MUM. This means that this model can read text, understand its meaning, form a deeper knowledge about the subject, use other media to enrich that knowledge, get insights from more than 75 languages and translate everything into content that answers complex search queries. All at the same time.
A visual representation of how Google MUM works (image from Google’s blog)
Does the rise of AI change all of this?
Over the past year, we’ve seen a lot of developments in the area of AI. Naturally, Google could not stay behind and introduced their own set of tools including the well-known AI model Gemini. Most recently, they introduced AI overviews in their search engine. And you might have already guessed it, but natural language processing models come in handy when you’re developing AI features. So Google’s ongoing research into NLP and machine learning is not slowing down anytime soon.
Practical conclusions
So, how does Google understand text exactly? What we know leads us to two very important points:
1. Context is key
If Google understands context, it’s likely to assess and judge context as well. The better your copy matches Google’s notion of the context, the better its chances of ranking well. So thin copy with a limited scope is going to be at a disadvantage. You need to cover your topics properly and in enough detail. And on a larger scale, covering related concepts and presenting a full body of work on your site will reinforce your authority on the topic you write about and specialize in.
2. Write for your reader
Texts that are easy to read and reflect relationships between concepts don’t just benefit your readers, they help Google as well. Difficult, inconsistent and poorly structured writing is more difficult to understand for both humans and machines. You can help the search engine understand your texts by focusing on:
Readability: making your text as easy to read as possible without compromising your message.
Good content: adding clear explanations that show how what you’re saying relates to what’s already known about a topic.
The better you do, the easier your users and Google will understand your text and what it tries to achieve. Which also helps you rank with the right pages when a user types in a certain search query. Especially because Google is basically creating a model that mimics the way humans process language and information.
Google wants to be a reader
In the end, it boils down to this: Google is becoming more and more like an actual reader. By writing rich content that is well-structured and easy to read and embedded into the context of the topic at hand, you’ll improve your chances of doing well in the search results.
As Google rolls out its new AI Overviews, SEO professionals and website owners must adapt to these changes to maintain and improve their search rankings. Google’s AI Overview, powered by the advanced Gemini model, integrates generative AI into the SERP. It provides users with summarized answers to complex queries at the top — well above the organic results. Google intends to improve user experience by offering quick, comprehensive answers; however, it also introduces new dynamics in interacting and preparing for these AI Overviews.
Understanding Google’s AI Overviews
Google’s AI Overviews are designed to summarize information from multiple web pages to answer user queries more efficiently. These overviews appear at the top of search results. They include links to the source websites, potentially driving more traffic to diverse sites. According to reports, users tend to click on links within AI Overviews more frequently than traditional search listings. This suggests an opportunity for increased visibility for well-optimized content. AI Overviews are widely available in the US and will gradually roll out worldwide.
Steps to prepare for Google’s AI Overview rollout
Enhance content quality:
Focus on creating high-quality, comprehensive content that addresses user queries in depth. Google’s AI will pull from various sources, so ensure your content is detailed and authoritative. Your ability to influence or to be cited in the summary will be directly related to your existing authority on the subject.
Use structured data to help Google understand and categorize your content accurately.
Optimize for user intent:
Identify and target the specific user intents behind searches. Use tools to determine your audience’s questions and tailor your content to provide clear, concise answers.
Incorporate FAQs and summaries that Google’s AI can easily extract for overviews.
Leverage Yoast SEO features:
Content analysis: Use Yoast SEO’s readability and SEO analysis tools to ensure your articles are well-optimized with relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and readability scores.
Schema markup: Implement structured data with Yoast SEO’s schema markup feature. This makes your content more accessible and understandable to search engines.
Internal linking: Improve your site’s internal linking structure to guide users and search engines to your most important content.
Monitor performance:
Keep an eye on your Google Search Console for changes in traffic and visibility. Google plans to include AI Overview impressions and clicks in Search Console reports. Unfortunately, these won’t be distinguished from traditional search results (SiliconANGLE) (Search Engine Land).
Use this data to adjust your strategies and optimize underperforming content.
Stay informed and adaptive:
Update your SEO knowledge regularly and stay informed about changes in Google’s algorithms and AI capabilities.
Participate in SEO communities and forums to share insights and strategies with peers.
How Yoast SEO can help
Yoast SEO can help you navigate the upcoming AI upheaval. Here’s how:
Content optimization: Yoast SEO’s analysis tools help you create content that meets high-quality standards. Quality is crucial if you want to feature in AI Overviews.
Readability checks: Ensure your content is easy to read and understand. This increases the chance of AI summarizing your content effectively.
Keyword optimization: Yoast helps you target the right keywords and phrases that align with user intent. As a result, you improve your chances of getting into AI-driven summaries.
Structured data implementation: Use Yoast SEO to add structured data to your pages. With structured data, you make it easier for Google to extract and present your content in AI Overviews.
Use Yoast SEO and be proactive
Use Yoast SEO and stay proactive with your SEO strategies. This way, you prepare for and thrive in today’s world of AI-driven search results. Stay adaptable and focus on high-quality content. Use the powerful tools at your disposal to maintain your visibility and traffic in this new era of search.
Carolyn Shelby
Carolyn Shelby is a seasoned SEO expert with a knack for making complex digital strategies accessible to everyone. She specializes in technical SEO, she excels at optimizing web architectures and crafting strategies that enhance visibility and drive growth. Carolyn views SEO as a powerful tool to narrate a brand’s journey, aligning content with core values to engage and convert audiences. Her approach is data-driven yet distinctly human. She uses straightforward, innovative methods to engage audiences and see real results.
Having awesome products is why people would shop in your Shopify store. But there are many options to get people to notice those amazing products. One of those is content marketing, and then specifically blogging. This article will give practical tips on improving your Shopify store’s blog posts.
Table of contents
Main reasons to publish blog posts on Shopify
If we break everything down, your content is what ranks in search engines. Of course, your products can appear in the various shopping sections in Google, but your content helps you attract an audience, build a brand, and get noticed.
Simply put, blogging can improve the SEO of your store or online business. It makes your store more visible to Google as regularly updated blog content encourages search engines to crawl and index your site more frequently. By writing about relevant topics, you automatically expand the range of keywords and phrases for which your Shopify business will rank.
In addition, as you fill your site with highly relevant content, you’re improving the overall quality of it. This provides a platform to engage customers, share valuable information, and respond to their comments and questions. As a result, you’re building a community around your brand, which will help to improve customer loyalty. Blogging on an online store can also increase your reach. People might be more inclined to share your blog content on social media or other outlets where your potential customers are.
Well-written, unique, high-quality, informative articles establish your brand as an industry authority. Blog posts are an amazing outlet to showcase your expertise and share insights on your Shopify site. All of this helps to improve your brand’s reputation.
Blogs improve customer experience
Of course, blogs are excellent for promoting new products, sales, and events. Content marketing through blogging is cost-effective compared to traditional advertising. But it’s not only about sales; it’s about educating users to get them ready to buy.
Blogs can educate customers about your products and industry. Educational content can reduce customer service inquiries by providing answers to common questions. Quality content can subtly influence purchasing decisions by highlighting the benefits and applications of your products. In the end, all of this helps potential customers make informed purchasing decisions.
Blogs give you a lot of options to inform your customers and improve their experience
Shopify blog posts have a long shelf life
If done well, your Shopify blog posts can continue attracting traffic well into the future. Blog posts generate leads long after publication, offering long-term ROI on your online marketing. Ensuring your content is evergreen helps you remain relevant and continues to draw in visitors over time.
Lastly, a well-maintained blog can set your ecommerce site apart from competitors. It can become a competitive advantage if your competitors lack a decent content marketing strategy. Unique and engaging content can be a key differentiator for your brand. Blogging can be a powerful component of your Shopify store’s online marketing strategy.
Well-written blog posts can keep bringing in traffic for quite some time
Pitfalls to avoid when starting a Shopify blog
We’ve seen that adding a blog to your online store can significantly enhance your brand’s visibility, customer engagement, and SEO performance. However, some pitfalls can undermine its success. One challenge is keeping a consistent posting schedule. You need it to keep your audience engaged and your SEO in check, but people frequently overlook this.
Another common pitfall is producing irrelevant or low-quality content that doesn’t provide value to your audience. In the end, this could hurt your online business. Additionally, neglecting ecommerce SEO can limit your blog’s visibility and effectiveness.
Tips for writing blog posts that strike a chord
We’ve established that adding a blog to your Shopify store can bring great benefits, but only if you do it well. One of the most important points to consider is content quality. Content quality is what you say and how well you say it. Your writing talent can make or break your Shopify blog posts. These days, it’s enticing to open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask it to write a post for you, but that’s not actual writing.
Know your audience
Understanding your audience is crucial for effective writing. By knowing who you’re writing for, you can tailor your content to their needs, interests, and preferences, making your blogging more engaging and relevant. This involves using language and examples that resonate with them, fostering a deeper connection, and encouraging interactions like comments and shares. Conducting keyword research for your Shopify store is also essential, as it helps address your audience’s specific concerns and challenges, making your writing clearer and more direct.
Eliminating unnecessary jargon and focusing on clarity ensures your message is communicated efficiently. This increases the likelihood of persuading your audience to take action, whether making a purchase or engaging with your brand. Ultimately, this will boost conversions and build loyalty.
Keep your writing clean and to the point
For effective blog content, you should use simplicity, clarity, and brevity as your main guiding principles. Start by clearly understanding the primary message you want to convey. This understanding will guide your writing, helping you stay focused and avoid unnecessary digressions.
Then, plan out what you want to write before you start writing. Outline the main points you want to cover. A structured approach helps organize thoughts and ensures that each paragraph contributes directly to your overall message. Making a mindmap can help you structure your thoughts and make new connections between thinking. Planning makes the writing part so much easier.
An example of a mindmap explaining the topic of Google BERT for a blog post
Keep it simple
Avoid jargon and complex vocabulary that might confuse your readers. When possible, use everyday language to ensure clarity. Opt for simpler alternatives that make your message clear. As a result, your writings will be accessible to a broad audience.
Be direct and concise by using short sentences and paragraphs. Get to the point quickly by eliminating filler words and redundant phrases that don’t add value to your message.
Don’t forget to write in the active voice instead of the passive voice. Write in the active voice as much as possible. It’s more direct, lively, and clear than the passive voice, making your writing easier to understand.
Make it human and make it your own
As a beginning writer, you’re always searching for your voice. This takes a while to develop. For instance, you might want to infuse your writing with a sense of humanity and uniqueness. Try adopting a conversational tone as if you’re talking to a friend. If it makes sense, don’t shy away from sharing personal anecdotes and experiences that illuminate your points.
Expressing your opinions thoughtfully can add depth to your blogging. You can make your stories more vivid by using descriptive language that taps into the senses. This can make your content more emotionally resonant. Importantly, let your personality and unique voice shine through. Ultimately, this is the authenticity that makes your writing distinctive and relatable.
Develop a tone of voice that fits your brand
Developing a distinct tone of voice for your writing begins with deeply understanding your audience. You’ll also need a clear definition of your brand’s personality and an analytical review of your existing content.
If you want your content to resonate with your readers, you must delve into who they are. You need to identify their interests, values, and the language that speaks to them. This forms your brand’s personality — whether authoritative, playful, inspiring, or something else. Describing your brand in human characteristics helps craft a personal and engaging tone.
Simultaneously, examine your current content to see what performed well. This can provide valuable insights. If you want to find aspects of your tone that resonate with your audience, you should check articles that got much engagement or positive feedback in the past.
Writing is rewriting
Embrace the concept that “writing is rewriting.” Begin by taking a break after your initial draft to gain a fresh perspective, then read your work aloud to catch any awkward phrasing or inconsistencies.
Initially, focus on the overall structure to ensure ideas flow logically. Be prepared to ruthlessly cut anything that doesn’t directly contribute to your main points. Simplify difficult sentences and get feedback from trusted sources for fresh insights.
Revising and refining your work enhances its clarity and impact, but you must know when to stop. But remember that truly great writing comes from a willingness to revisit and improve your initial ideas.
Yoast SEO for Shopify improves your blog posts
Yoast SEO for Shopify has tools to significantly enhance your content’s quality and visibility. This Shopify SEO app aims to help you make your content SEO-friendly and engaging for your customers.
Yoast SEO provides detailed analysis and actionable recommendations for optimizing your content, including product descriptions, blog posts, and web pages. It guides you on where to place your target keywords, how to structure your content for better readability, and what you might be missing regarding SEO best practices.
The readability analysis feature evaluates your content to ensure it’s clear and accessible to your target audience. It checks for sentence length, passive voice usage, and paragraph structure, offering suggestions to make your content easier to read. This improves user experience and increases engagement rates, as readers are likelier to stay on straightforward and engaging pages.
Yoast SEO for Shopify helps you optimize your blog post for readability and SEO
Examples of great blogs on Shopify
Exploring successful blogs on Shopify stores can provide valuable insights and inspiration for your content strategy. Here are some examples that have harnessed the power of blogging to engage their audience, enhance brand awareness, and drive traffic to their stores.
Partake Foods
Overview: Partake Foods stands out not just for its allergy-friendly food products but also for its engaging and informative blog. The blog is a resourceful hub where readers can find many recipes, food allergy guides, parenting tips for managing allergies, and insights into an allergy-aware lifestyle. It caters to the needs of parents looking for safe, delicious options for their children with food allergies, but it goes beyond just food.
Why it works: The success of the Partake Foods blog lies in its ability to directly address and alleviate the concerns of its core audience—parents navigating the complex world of food allergies. By providing valuable, practical content, Partake Foods positions itself as more than just a food brand; it becomes a trusted ally to families.
Briogeo has a great blog with loads of useful content
Overview: Briogeo, a natural hair care brand, enriches its Shopify store with a blog that serves as a cornerstone for educating and engaging its audience. This blog doesn’t just sell products; it delves into various topics relevant to natural hair care, including detailed guides on hair types, the benefits of specific ingredients, and tutorials on tackling common hair concerns.
Why it works: The effectiveness of Briogeo’s blog lies in its educational approach, addressing its audience’s specific needs and questions with information and practical advice. By focusing on the intricacies of natural hair care and the science behind their product formulations, Briogeo establishes itself as an authority in the space.
An example of a blog post on the Death Wish Coffee Shopify blog
Overview: Known as producing the world’s strongest coffee, Death Wish Coffee’s blog is a treasure trove of coffee culture, brewing tips, and company news. It effectively engages coffee enthusiasts with content ranging from the science behind caffeine to stories of people living life to the fullest, embodying the brand’s adventurous and bold spirit.
Why it works: The blog perfectly captures the brand’s essence — intense, passionate about coffee, and a bit rebellious. By sharing content that appeals directly to their target audience’s interests, they promote their products and build a strong community of coffee lovers. The blog serves as a platform to educate readers about their unique value proposition while entertaining and informing them about coffee.
The BeardBrand blog is all about growing and improving beards and mustaches
Overview: BeardBrand takes the concept of beard care and elevates it to a lifestyle, which is vividly reflected in their blog. Their content ranges from grooming tips and style advice to deeper dives into the culture of beard-keeping. BeardBrand’s blog is a comprehensive guide for anyone looking to embrace their facial hair, offering insights into grooming techniques, product recommendations, and the philosophy behind growing a beard. It’s not just about selling beard oil or grooming kits; it’s about fostering a community and identity among beard enthusiasts.
Why it works: The BeardBrand blog excels because it taps into the lifestyle and ethos of its audience rather than merely focusing on product usage. By addressing the broader culture of beard-keeping and the lifestyle that comes with it, the blog connects on a deeper level with readers who see their beards as an expression of their identity. This connection is further solidified by the blog’s clear, confident, and engaging tone of voice, which mirrors the brand’s ethos of self-care and community.
An example of a blog post on the Veloforte Shopify store
Overview: VELOFORTE, recognized for its range of natural, performance-enhancing nutrition products, extends its commitment to athlete support through its engaging and informative blog. The blog stands out as a valuable resource for athletes of all levels, offering nutritional advice, endurance training tips, and insights into optimizing performance through natural means.
Why it works: The success of VELOFORTE’s blog lies in its precision targeting and expertly crafted content that speaks directly to the needs and interests of endurance athletes. By providing scientifically backed nutrition and training advice, the blog positions VELOFORTE as a thought leader in sports nutrition and deepens trust with its audience. This trust is crucial for a brand whose products are designed to support peak athletic performance.
An example of an article on the Made In Cookware Shopify blog
Overview: Made In Cookware distinguishes itself through its high-quality kitchen tools and richly informative blog. This platform serves as a culinary hub, offering everything from cooking tips and detailed recipes to chef interviews and insights into the manufacturing processes of their cookware. The blog aims to educate home cooks and culinary enthusiasts, providing information that spans basic cooking techniques and advanced culinary concepts.
Why it works: The effectiveness of Made In Cookware’s blog lies in its ability to demystify the cooking process, making gourmet cooking accessible to a broader audience by sharing professional chefs’ secrets and offering guidance on using their products to achieve the best culinary results, Made In positions itself as an ally in the kitchen. This educational approach builds trust with the audience and illustrates the value of investing in quality cookware.
These examples illustrate how diverse Shopify stores use blogging to connect with their audience. These blogs effectively enhance their brand’s online presence and customer engagement through educational content, behind-the-scenes stories, or practical advice. These examples serve as a blueprint for success for anyone looking to boost their Shopify store’s content strategy. Consider integrating similar approaches tailored to your brand’s unique voice and audience needs.
Write awesome, helpful content that builds your brand
Blogging is great as it can help your Shopify store to stand out from the crowd. While adding a blog is easy, writing your content is harder. Make sure to write high-quality content about the topics you know your customers are interested in. Use easy-to-understand language and other writing tips to make your content come alive.
