Editorial seo

“Editorial doesn’t really matter for SEO, except maybe readability.”

I heard this recently in an SEO strategy meeting. About content quality and editorial. I was aghast. Shocked, I tell you.

Apparently, amongst us SEOs, we have wildly different definitions of what “good content” is.

What is good editorial?
Is editorial the same as copy, and content?
Is “good” whatever the reader likes?
Or is “good” whatever gets keywords?
Do we know what the reader likes objectively, through bounce rate and time on page and scroll depth and conversion rate?
Or is readability as important, but we can’t measure it well, so we don’t measure it very well at all?

The hardest part about editorial (how we string words and sentences together) is that evaluation is always subjective. Unless you’re a copyeditor with an English degree and experience applying AP or Chicago MLA style, it’s going to come down to whatever sounds best to you. To me. To whoever is writing the content – because we’re biased.

“Of course I’m good at writing! I’m [role function]!”

If your team has this attitude, it means your definition of “what’s good” (I call this a ‘miley’) is going to be different across the organization.

Is it possible to align on what “good content” means?

Yes, through defining a few key principles. 80% of editorial quality can be grouped into a set of guidelines that can be interpreted in different ways but almost always with an outcome that is good for the business.

Editorial principles could start here:

1. All of our content has a purpose, and we aim to do triple duty whenever possible to get impact in multiple places like: Traffic, leads, links, shares, social, newsletter, video.

2. We write true, useful, helpful, content that helps our readers make an informed decision.

3. We only write about topics that are relevant to our business’ audience.

4. We infuse our brand’s voice, tone, and context into our content.

5. We update our content on a regular basis so readers can trust that it is accurate and reliable.

6. We meet intent immediately, providing the answer to the main query at the top of the page and immediately following each section header.

7. We aim to only use active voice and avoid fluff by saying as much as possible in as few words as possible.

8. We follow AP style with the exception of the Oxford comma (use it!).

9. Our content meets intent faster and more comprehensively than our competitors.

The reality is…

Everyone has room to get better at writing

We are always mastering our craft, striving to do better for the reader, our business, and for search engines. That means committing to:

1. A culture of feedback where editorial improvements are celebrated

   1. Feedback is worked back into the system to make all future pieces better

   2. We don’t take feedback personally because content is a product of our whole team, not just whoever wrote the v1.

2. We don’t just do our job, we do our job better every day.

   1. What can we improve on a consistent basis?

   2. What do we control?

   3. How can we lift all boats?

Lifelong students practice ABL: Always Be Learning

I had a physics teacher once in high school who called himself a ‘lifelong student”.

“As a lifelong student I will always be learning,” he said. He was in his 60s and had just finished a PhD.

Little did I know, in public school, more certs means more salary, so there’s a financial incentive; but without knowing that I thought this sentiment was so pure.

“I wanna be cool like him when im old” I thought, at 16 years old already a student and having done little else in life beside be in school.

So what’s missing right now in SEO?

To be blunt, SEOs could use more training and practice in writing. Work with an editor who can explain why certain edits improve not just readability but meaning, authority, sentiment, and trust. Literally, SEOs need to play with the words and read them out loud to themselves and others.

On the other side, editorial can help define what “good” looks like by explaining what exactly they look for when they are trying to apply the editorial principles.

EG: What does “useful” mean at the sentence level?

It means we use active verbs in active voice, show-don’t-tell, make sure the sentence delivers actual information about the how and why, be clear and honest, and empathetic. There’s a training for every one of those concepts.

SEOs and editorial: Just avoid it I guess?

This Moz article looks like *the* guide to beginner SEO. Wow! over 12k KWs and growing (SEMrush):

huh. no serp features

The writer even starts with a super strong intro:

You'll get the most out of this guide if your desire to learn search engine optimization (SEO) is exceeded only by your willingness to execute and test concepts.

Dang, anonymous writer Moz neglected to name!!

I’m in. Let’s do this.

Hierarchy of SEO Needs

1. Crawl accessibility: So engines can reach and index your content.

2. Compelling content: That answers the searcher’s query.

3. Great user experience: Including a fast load speed, ease of use, and functional UI on any device.

4. Share-worthy content: That earns links, citations, and amplification.

5. Title, URL, & Description: Title tags draw high CTR in the SERPs.

6. Snippet / schema markup: To stand out in the SERPs.

If you guessed this is some early Rand, you are absolutely correct. He just knows how to distill something down to a foundational concept.

And we love it, because it puts “compelling content” as the #2 thing you need to do to get found (#1 being Uptime: Be online, of course).

So the editorial DOES matter, quite a bit!

SEOs can’t define compelling content

Right between What to Write – “how to find keywords” and How to Publish It – “how to optimize your page” – is a big fat missing chapter on how to string words together that sound decent.

There is no perspective on compelling content other than answering the reader’s query. In the one paragraph where they mention comprehensiveness, they just link to the 10x content article which we know is just a snowball method overview.

Writing and grammar is one of like.. 6 classes we must take throughout our entire childhood education experience. Where is this class for SEOs?

What does compelling content mean?

Content that solves the reader’s query and emotionally satisfies the agitation they feel in that moment. They want to feel X after doing Y.

1. Efficient delivery of information: Respecting the reader’s time by using the inverted pyramid of journalism, meeting intent immediately, avoiding sentences that say nothing, and cutting fluff and redundancies.

2. Emotional satisfaction: Reader feels relief that they have transparent, trusted information they can use to take the next step.

3. Problem satisfaction: Reader understands their problem, range of solutions, and what to do next.

4. Decision confidence: Reader has information to confidently compare solutions and make a decision that is right for them. All readers want to feel like they are making the right choice for them, this piece gives them both pros and cons, warnings, and caveats they need to know to do that.

5. Conversion: The reader does not need to leave our site to find more information in order to make an informed choice, including comparing competitors.

6. Retention: We dedicate time and space to educating readers as to what happens after the sale. Even long-term impacts and potential consequences are explained transparently.

Set principles for each

It might take time to collect the guidelines that you have generally found to be good for the reader and for SEO. Carving out that Venn diagram brings both teams onto the same page and gives them a set of tools they know when and how to use.

For example, defining what “emotional satisfaction” means in terms of editorial, requires tapping into your team’s knowledge to ask them what all readers feel in that moment. What would bring them relief? Where do you deliver that information in the piece?

I have a list of about 100 editorial principles that get weaved into all parts of our process. Some probably need to be updated, and some are yet to be defined. Much like theories, they work until they dont.

EAT as editorial principles

In SEO we love to redefine things for no reason other than we love jargon. But in reality, SEOs have long had an instinct to break down the concepts of writing and creating content into blocks and formulas, 0s and 1s, a decision tree that requires little critical thinking to ensure a likelihood of success.

How all the editors laughed in robotic-voice when BERT was released and the SEOs cried, “google wants us to write like humans!”

This is where Expertise, Authority, and Trust came from. SEOs wanted a framework for how to describe an expert journalist writing good content that deserves to rank.

But journalists already know this by heart because they’ve just been doing it forever. They just don’t have a framework built out with a free downloadable template.

So why not ask them?

Sure, a few SEO tweaks here and there can actually be the linchpin that makes the page rank, but the editorial essence – delivering a lede to the reader that they want to know – it still the most important part and it doesn’t take an SEO to figure out.

Partner with your writers and ask, what does “good” mean to us as an organization?

You will find it’s not hard to get to a succinct set of answers that are surprisingly translatable into specific content writing tactics. And if you get everyone on the same page, it will be a brand-aligned process upgrade rather than an unwelcome change.

And once you’re on the same page, you can focus on asking even better questions, like where do our venn diagrams not overlap and why? Would our reader agree with our perspective?