In my work with not-for-profit organisations, I come across a set of bad habits that drain the life out of their posts.
The usual challenge is to get writers and producers to accept that audiences have to be won and that algorithms of one kind or another drive the majority of their traffic. Every production decision has to bear that in mind. In particular, t’s not good enough to leave ‘promotion’ until the end of the process when exhaustion, boredom or sheer time constraints starve this crucial aspect of the creative input it requires.
The good news is that, deep down, we’re all experts in navigating networks; we need to use that expertise. Winners adopt a network mindset, which recognises that it’s not enough to produce a piece of content; it needs to be shaped at every stage with the needs of social networks and search engines in mind.
The following guidelines aim to embed in your workflow thinking about how this piece is going to make its presence felt. Observing this checklist will fix about 80% of the problems.
- Spend quality time on ‘framing’ your idea to make it helpful with a familiar format likely to appeal
- Write a catchy headline that would grab the attention of your best friend
- Craft a killer first paragraph that sells your story
- Get a feel for the search queries to which your piece is the answer
- Use subheadings to help those who scan (including Google) get the gist of your story
- Make sure you answer all the obvious questions
- Adopt a friendly writing style
- Think creatively about the visuals – stock photos aren’t going to be enough
- Link intelligently to other content
1. Frame your post effectively
Framing is more than choosing an angle, it’s about putting yourself into the shoes of an audience member and thinking about what kind of emotional trigger is most likely to cut through their general indifference to the content within the streams that they scroll through.
Studies suggest that anger, surprise and positivity are particularly powerful. What you need to do is to stress-test your content idea for emotional appeal. That’s probably best done within a small group.
One of the traps that organisations fall into is failing to frame their ideas with an audience in mind. The organisation’s structure is hierarchical – it’s hard to introduce experimentation and the workshopping of ideas. So a brief comes down from the top, and there’s no chance to suggest a smart way of framing the idea so that it will appeal to an audience.
The evolution of digital content has given us a wide range of formats. The ones that have attracted the most attention are:
- Listicles
- Explainers
- How to posts
- Curated posts that summarise a range of things
- Graphics-led posts
Many successful posts combine two or more of these qualities. This one, for example is part listicle, part ‘how to’.
One of the features of online life is the wasted time that comes from being sent to pages that are not what you are looking for or are poorly produced. Nearly everyone has an inbuilt concern about time-wasting. As a result, they are looking for signals that their time will not be wasted. Post types that generate titles that point to a tight structure do particularly well. As do those that look like they are straightforward answers to frequently asked questions.
2. Write a headline that would encourage your best friend to read
Headlines are the most important words you write. They must act like a hook to pull readers in. That means avoiding abstract, jargon-laden titles and instead finding something relatable that will fire a browser’s interest.
Many drafts have headlines that would look better as the titles of academic papers.
Headlines are so important that some authors don’t start writing their posts until they can find a sufficiently attractive title.
A good way to get ideas for better headlines is to use the following prompt in ChatGPT or Bard:
“Give me suggestions for headlines that would maximise the chances of Google ranking it highly for the following text…”
It is unlikely the results will be good enough for you to use, but they will give you a very good start.
3. Give your opening paragraph plenty of TLC
Your opening paragraph needs to ‘sell’ the story promised in the headline. You are constantly fighting to hold people’s attention, and this is the second most important thing you will write.
Think about how you would talk to your friends about your story. What are the one or two most interesting things about it? Use these as your opener, as you would if you were discussing your story with them in a restaurant or bar.
One tactic used by digital native publishers is to provide a bullet-pointed summary of the story before the opening paragraph. This is useful to readers and Google alike.
4. Think like Google by researching words and phrases to emphasise
Think of Google as a massive database of the language that real people actually use rather than as a complicated, algorithmic thing, which gets in the way of drafting.
In general, this means using simple rather than technical terms.
Google looks at your headline, your subheadings, and then your text. So focus your attention in these areas and make sure that you mention all the obvious words.
In my experience, Search tends to be an afterthought and even a topic left to technical experts. But it’s almost certainly the biggest driver of traffic to your website and, as such, deserves to be at the front of all your decision-making.
The surprising thing here is that nearly all of us use Search all the time and far more than the superficially more attractive social networks. In a way, everyone is now a search expert, and you need to channel this expertise into content decisions.
A few examples:
- Think about the search queries you would hope would take people to your blog post
- Use some of those queries to structure your post, including sub-headings
- Explore what sort of questions are being asked about your topic area
Use ChatGPT or Bard to get going. I use this prompt:
“Please give me a list of the words and phrases in the following text that would be most important to highlight for Google Search Engine Optimisation…”
If you’re unsure about which of several competing terms would be best to use, then use the ‘Explore’ tab on Google Trends to compare them.
5. Use subheadings as a way of structuring a post that flows
Many drafts I get have zero structure – just a title and a long series of paragraphs. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by this. And that’s how readers will also feel.
The aim of the exercise is to get readers to the end of your piece. In order to do this, you need to think hard about your narrative structure, how to sequence your main points, and how to get the post to flow.
This is best done before you start drafting, and it can make writing the piece much more straightforward. The technique I recommend is to structure your piece around the headline and subheadings.
Subheadings are the digital writer’s best friend – they break up the text for mobile users, they give Google huge clues as to what you are writing about, and they help those who scan text before they read it (pretty much everyone) an easy-to-parse guide to your story.
Play around with your subheadings until you’re happy that there’s a natural flow. Always be thinking, ‘Am I giving readers what they need?’ (See point 5 below for more details.)
6. Make sure you answer all the obvious questions
It’s often clear after a first read-through that draft posts are missing key areas. I think this is down to a very widespread digital media myth about article length, which holds that users are too busy or easily distracted to read anything other than very short pieces.
The truth is that the top results on Google searches are in the region of 1500-2000 words. The reason for this is that Google uses article length as a signal of quality and regards very short pieces as potential spam.
1500-2000 words is usually enough space to answer all the obvious questions. And a good way of reassuring yourself that you have covered the most important ones is to use the free version of AnswerThePublic.
7. Adopt a friendly writing style
There’s a tendency for writers in organisations to play it safe and write in a formal and sometimes academic style. Paragraphs and sentences tend to be long, and the result is an intimidating mass of text that looks overwhelming on mobile.
Try to write simply and avoid repetition. Readers are busy and want clear, concise text. If they find themselves getting lost in a long paragraph, or that they are reading the same thing again, the risk is that they will click away.
Always read your post out loud. If you stumble, go back and redraft.
To get a fix on how difficult your piece is to read, use the free version of WebFX.
To fix grammar and wordiness, run your pieces through the free version of Grammarly.
8. Give your post some visual appeal
Most drafts I get have no visual elements at all, yet there are several reasons why visuals are critical:
- Images are another signal of quality used by Google
- Graphics, pictures or videos can reinforce and clarify the main points you are making and, potentially save on text
- Anything visual will break up the text – particularly important for mobile users
- We’re a visual species and readers like them
One powerful tactic is to present data in graph or chart form, which is easier to digest than written text. Infographics are very popular but hard to create. Instead, think about creating simple graphics in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Readers are surprisingly forgiving about production values, provided the information is presented clearly.
A second tactic is to look for ‘bullet point opportunities’ – long descriptions about programmes or features can be stripped down to an elegant list, which is another way of saving readers time and making your piece look good.
A third is to embed videos within your post, even if they are not from your organisation, to provide relevant context.
We’re a visual species, and posts with strong visuals outperform those without. In tests at the World Economic Forum, posts with a graphic outperformed those with a stock photo by four to one. Visuals tend to be introduced at the end of the production process. But they are so important that they need to be brought to the front of the decision queue.
9. Observe linking etiquette
I still see drafts that include academic-style footnotes. The convention for digital media is to embed web links, which is most helpful to readers.
Good digital etiquette is to link to anything that you reference in your story. Google views external links as a quality signal.
You should also consider linking to other posts on the site you are writing for. This can help you to avoid lengthy explanations, and it helps to boost the overall ranking of the site.
Linking intelligently is partly about making life easier for readers. If you mention something interesting, then save users the trouble of having to Google this themselves and just put the link in. But this is mostly to do with Search. If you link to authoritative third parties, the evidence is that Google will see this as enhancing your own usefulness. But don’t do it too much. Likewise, the more internal links you have to a page, the higher the ranking of that page in the eyes of Google.
Google is looking for the most authoritative source on a topic. It partly does that by judging the content itself and partly by seeing how it fits into the wider network of content. It’s looking for how well-connected the piece is:
- Does it link to high-ranking sites?
- Do high-ranking sites link to it?
- Do links within its own site suggest this is an important page?
Decisions, decisions
Historically, writers have taken commissions, often in the form of a brief and target length, and produced to order. The piece has then been edited, possibly illustrations added, and then it has been published. It’s a relatively simple linear process that has stood the test of time in a world of channels.
Crucially, the number of decisions to be taken was pretty limited. But life is more complicated in a world of digital networks. Content has to be optimised to work effectively. And that introduces a whole new range of things that need to be done, and it disrupts the linear model from start to finish. In short, producers need to have good answers to a much wider range of questions than ever before.