SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the discipline of constructing your content in a way that artificial intelligence, search engines, and software algorithms of all types can easily identify both the content and the quality of what you create. They have been tasked to scour the internet and return relevant content. Our job is to make it easy for them to do that. Today I will talk about approaching SEO for content creators.

This is Bill Strand and you are listening to the Niche Content Creator Podcast.

No matter what platform we are creating content for, there is always a search algorithm analyzing what we have created and trying to figure out who needs to see it. SEO is top of the mind for anyone creating a blog or website, but I think some of that has been lost as social media has taken the spotlight. And for some creators, they never went through the blog stage. Social media is all they have known! But, even then, there is the constant reference to a shadowy “algorithm”. Just tap into the creator community on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube and you will find an avalanche of posts talking about how to beat the algorithm.

So, how do we beat the algorithm? How do we game the system? Well, there are always the short terms hacks and short cuts that everyone loves to jump on. Like, remember on Instagram when we found out, or at least thought we found out, that the algorithm valued how many times a post was viewed? And the trick was to create a very short reel with a wall of text so the viewer would have to repeat view to read it all? That is a hack. And it works until the Instagram engineers catch on and fix the loophole. And the hack gurus are well on their way to find the next loophole. This is an exhausting way to live. And, although I understand the excitement of discovering a trick and this constant oneupmanship with the engineers at Instagram homebase, I have to point out that the more time you spend playing this chess game with a software program the less time you are spending concentrated on your followers.

The long term approach is to realize that the algorithm is looking for something. Generally, it is looking to provide the best content to the people it is serving. And those would be your current and potential followers it is serving. So, instead of trying to trick the algorithm into promoting your content, you could always work with the algorithm and make its job easier to know what your content is about.

Now, I do have to acknowledge that we do need to know what the algorithm is looking for. The Google Search algorithm, TikTok’s For You Page, and Instagram’s selection algorithm do have different priorities. And, although we should always have our followers’ best interests at heart, it pays to give the algorithm what it is looking for. What is that? Well, it is quite simple. Figure out how the platform makes money and that will lead right to what the algorithm is looking for. So, before we go into specifics of what we can do with our content, let’s get a lay of the land with regard to our algorithm overlords.

The Google search algorithm is an amazing program which can, with genius and, I am convinced, a little black magic, shift through 2 billion websites and return high quality search results in seconds. How does Google make money? Google has sponsored results that show up first. These are the ones at the top which have the :”sponsored” tag. And how do they make this valuable advertising real estate? They bring hordes of eyes of potential customers to their search page. And how do they keep those hordes of eyes coming by? They produce high quality search results for whatever we, the customers, type intro their search bar. So, what do the managers at Google want their algorithm to look for? And the answer is top quality content that will answer the question that was typed in the search bar. So, your job, as a creator, is to create content that is top quality and done so in a way that the search algorithm can easily tell what it is. And that seems like an obvious purpose for a search algorithm. That should apply across all platforms, right? Yeah, no…Let’s take a look at some of the other platforms.

TikTok is almost the opposite. Although there is a search function you can use that will try and give you decent results, the main use of TikTok is not to search for anything. You may start there to get your feed going in the right direction, but TikTok is optimized to provide results to you that you didn’t search for, but the algorithm thinks you will like. The TikTok algorithm is highly tuned to judge our behavior and predict what will entertain us. TikTok found that if you are just given what you think you like you won’t stay scrolling as long as if TikTok serves up surprises. We all know that we get bored with the same thing after a little while. So TikTok has gotten amazingly good at continually giving us something different. How does TikTok make money? The longer we stay scrolling away on the app the more money they make. So TikTok is looking for short videos that will produce quick dopamine hits. It is the immediate entertainment value that TikTok is looking for.

So, we have Google that wants to provide exactly what we are looking for and TikTok that wants to provide what we are looking for just enough to bridge us to an entire new world that we will then spend until 3AM exploring.

YouTube is a combination of the two. If you are searching for a how-to you have the full power of the Google algorithm finding the right video answer. But you will also see a arm full of related suggestions to try and get you to click through more videos. How does YouTube make money? By people clicking on videos and viewing the ads before, during, and after. So, YouTube is looking for videos that people will want to watch. Yes, a view counts after 30 seconds and the viewers have already seen an ad at the beginning, but the ads in Midrolll are much more lucrative so finding videos that keep attention for 5 to 10 minutes is a priority.’

Instagram is a different thing and keeps trying to change what it is. A few years ago it would show you posts based on what you liked. Then it tired to be an entertainment app with short form video like TikTok and values the scroll. So, Instagram is now looking at how people react to the video and whether they like it enough to stay scrolling on the app. That tracks with how Instagram makes its money – which is keeping people scrolling the platform.

So, with these four examples, how would you attract the algorithm’s attention? If you have a blog you would want to give as quality of an answer to a question or as good of a presentation of a concept as possible so that people who search for what ever it is that you do, will love the result. With Google your job is to figure out what you are offering and do an outstanding job doing it.

With YouTube you want to create a video that captures attention and keeps people engaged with what you are presenting.

With TikTok and Instagram you want to be creating something that gives a quick emotional response.

The reason why I like the Google algorithm is that it is constantly updated with new ways of determining quality of content. So it’s goals are 100% aligned with your goals of providing a quality service to your community. There is no reason to try and trick the algorithm because it wants exactly what your readers want. So we can focus on providing excellent value to our community and we will be found by Google soon enough. Google will be monitoring how our viewers behave and if Google decides the viewers are happy then our ranking will increase.

Instagram and TikTok are a little more tricky as entertainment as the content doesn’t have to be quality. It just has to be entertaining. Me tripping while carrying 12 food trays has zero educational value and would get a low ranking by both the community and by Google if it were on my webpage. But, on TikTok or Instagram, it might go viral because of the entertainment aspect. So Google is aligned with our purpose. Instagram and TikTok require that we serve two masters. We need to provide value to our community, but we must also do it in a way that has our customer entertained.

Now, you’ll notice that this episode on SEO is halfway through and I haven’t yet touched on specific techniques. That is coming. I will do a simple overview. But what I am trying to communicate is that, although we do have to understand the algorithm’s motives, our top priority is to feed our community.  The one thing all algorithms cannot ignore is popularity. If your content is good enough that people stay to watch or read and like it, save or share, then it will push you to the top of the stack.

My audience with this podcast is people who are building a community as opposed to people who are targeting a community. What is the difference? The person who is building a community is part of that community, loves and lives the topic, and wants it to grow. The person targeting the community has determined that the community is big enough and the keywords are attainable enough that they can produce a website with carefully curated posts to bring enough eyes by to make some good money with ads and affiliate links. One will have a shopping list on their site with the best products and there may be some that allow affiliate links. The other will have a shopping list that only has products that will provide affiliate links. You see how one is building community and the other is being a parasite of the community?

I recognize that the builders need to use the same techniques as the parasites. And, unfortunately, the parasites are often better at making money because they are not worried about true quality. They only need to put on the facade of quality enough to fool the search engine. How do you do this? Well, you create content that looks authoritative to the unsophisticated audience. That would be the new people to the community that are in the most need of good information. The builder is burdened with making sure the information is solid. So, to the builders, I would like to give some tricks that the parasites use so you can give them a run for their money and take the search engine attention.

Talk the right talk.

But, first, some SEO basics. The top priority for you as a community builder is to get into the mind of the level of person you want to attract. The reason is that you want to know what they ask and how they talk. That is what they will type into a search bar and that is the kind of content they will be telling, by their behavior, the Instagram and TikTok algorithms they like. And this comes down to keywords. Keywords are words typed into search bars. Consider the search terms “pet lizards”, “chameleon”, Jackson’s Chameleon, and Trioceros Jacksonii xantholophus. This is my favorite example because my niche is chameleons. If I use the words pet and lizards I will be telling the search algorithm to send me to the type of person that would ask about pet lizards. This would be people so new to having a pet lizard that they don’t even know the different types of lizards. They are looking for suggestions. This type of person will be interested in the kind of reptile pets you find at large chain pet stores.

The person typing in Chameleon is savvy enough to know what they are looking for and is probably at the level of wondering how to take care of a chameleon and if a chameleon is right for them. Someone typing in Jackson’s Chameleon has done a little bit of research and so is on their way to be experienced. Anyone typing in Trioceros jacksonii xantholophus, which is the scientific name down to the subspecies designation, is a sophisticated reader.’ So, what words I use to describe the subject of my content will dictate which level person a search engine will attach to my content. And since the search engine is looking for the best results, you will want to select the right term and then make it a point to use that term often. In fact, the trick is to use it as often as you can. Pick a keyword that you want to show up for and use it generously. But, do not overuse it. Keyword stuffing was a common tactic where people would stuff the keywords in so much that it was uncomfortable for humans to read. Google has gotten very wise to this and now your “readability score” is part of your ranking. If you are found to be keyword stuffing your ranking tanks.

I remember I went to interview with a company back in my corporate Product Marketing days. I noticed that their website had a pretty active blog. Although it wasn’t posting regularly, it had a good bit of posts already up. I like to read the blogs of companies I go to interview with because it tells me how clever their marketing out reach is. And this was a complete disaster. They literally had a computer write the blog. I knew this because every sentence was grammatically correct, but, to a human, it was a hellscape of jargon.

You could read any sentence and even though it was structured as an English sentence should have been, it conveyed no useful information. This company had hired someone to create automated posts that were written for the search engine, not the humans. So I knew this company was led by people who had no passion for what they were doing. Nobody cared enough to connect with their potential customers. Someone read a book on how to game the system and that was what they did. Of course, it was probably an old book or one thrown together by a get rich quick internet guy because they neglected to take into account that Google now does that readability check on the webpage to make sure it is useful for humans and they check bounce rate so they know how useful it is to anyone going to that page. So I am sure this was wasted money because their readability score would be in the sewer, no one would link to this jargon disaster so there would be no websites linking to it, and the bounce rate (which is how many people saw the page and left quickly) would be off the charts. So this blog that was meant to game the system was actually an anchor around their neck dragging them down. So, yes, trying to game the system is a fast way to have the opposite effect. Google knows what you are trying to do. As far as social media, it is even worse to game the system because if the first 50 people that are shown your post don’t like it, you are dead in the water.

So, the winning formula is to select one keyword per webpage or post and use that enough times that the search engine is clear what you are talking about and who to serve up your post. Make the content as valuable as possible so other websites want to link to it. Sounds like a reasonable couple of steps for a blog. How about if what we are creating is an instagram post or a YouTube video or a podcast? How does that translate over?

Once again, you use what is available. You have a title and a description that you can select proper keywords and then, if the content is good, it will get shared. For it to be shared it needs to be relevant and useful. So, how do we figure out what is relevant and useful? We need to figure out what our target audience cares about.

What are your people talking about?

If you are part of the community then you should know what the community pain points are. But you may be so deep in your community you are not sure how you can help the beginners and what questions they are asking. Well, if you want to speak to beginners you need to go where the beginners are. For this, you have two tools easily available to you. The first is Google. If you know your keyword is chameleons you can type “chameleon” in the search bar and Google has this wonderful feature where they suggest questions to you based on the word or phrase you typed in. So, try it. I typed in Delorean because I have always loved that car. And if I had a site about Deloreans or wanted to create posts for people curious about Deloreans I would want to know what other people were searching for. So I can share that Google searched for the following questions

How much does a Delorean cost now

Are Deloreans still made

How many Deloreans exist

Who currently owns Delorean?

And you can click on those questions and Google will generate more questions it searched for. So, by this simple exercise, you have the exact titles and topics of as many blog posts as you want to start working on.

For social media posts you can still use these ideas to guide what types of things you will post about because you already have been told that people were wondering about this.

And then take yourself to the forum style social media. Top platforms are Facebook and Reddit. Go to beginner forums and hang out there for a while and watch what questions continually come up. Those are pain points being provided to you in real time. Be the solutions to those problems. I have created entire courses around pain points that continually come up on social media.

The Google search shows you beginners that are so new they are not part of a community yet while social media shows you the thoughts of beginners who are far enough along to be part of a community.

If I want to speak to community members further along in their development then I need to put myself where those people are. If I want to speak to enthusiasts then I may take a weekend to go to a car show and listen to the conversations around me. I know the thought of doing something in real life will have many of us hyperventilating, but this is part of living the life. Once again, if you are wanting to build community you are part of that community and your greatest skills will be in listening to the people around you.

The Google question method works on volume so you will be getting questions from beginners from that method. And if you want volume of traffic that is your approach. If you are wanting to make posts and a site for a more sophisticated segment of the community then you need to be where they are. If it is specialty forums or in person meet-ups, that is where you have to go. Of course, that is probably no problem because, if you are community building, you are already there. The reason the parasites are always at the beginner level is because that is where they find enough volume to run by their ads and they can find topics using the simple methods I laid out.

In my podcast on chameleons, half the topics come from community pain points that come up over and over and the other half come from my desire for personal growth and what I am interested in. That makes my show of interest to both beginners and to advanced keepers. This is a difficult balance and would confuse the search engines, but I produce so much content that I can afford to have two separate demographics that I am serving. But, when you are starting and training the algorithms, so to speak, it is best to stick with one target audience, lock that down, and then expand later.

Conclusion

So, to boil this down, the absolute best SEO is to have a focused audience you are writing for and create a piece of content that effectively solves their pain point. The resulting response from your community will tell the search algorithms all they need to know. Constantly adhering to this template will build your digital reputation and the traffic will follow.

The way to make this easy on the search engines is to select the proper terminology that your target audience would use and use that generously in your writing. This is true whether you have an entire blog’s worth of paragraphs to write in or even if you have just a title, short description, a Twitter’s length of characters, an Instagram bio’s worth of space, and even down to the alt-text on images. Consistent use of the same keyword across all those spaces will generate even more momentum as people from that segment of the community gather around.

SEO is simple when community building. Focus on specific segments of the community, constantly and generously use the terminology that they would use, and solve their pain points.

Basically, serve your community the best you can and aggressively search out how you can serve them better. Algorithms will not be able to ignore you.

You can dive deeply into SEO practices. Keywords can be an entire study of their own and you can develop a strategy of high volume, high competition words, called short-tail keywords, and low volume, low competition words called long-tail keywords. There are software services that will search for and provide to you collections of these keywords. And it can get to the point where you are feeling like you need to learn more and more about these strategies to compete. And I tell you, yes and no. It is always good to know the tools and be an expert at the tools. That is how you excel. But I also want you to know that what you have as a dedicated community member living the life is valuable beyond what those tools can offer.

The first step for you as a content creator is not to dig deep into tearing apart search engines. The first step for you is to realize there are vast teams of engineers working day and night trying to teach these search algorithms to extract from the internet what you instinctively know your community needs. So dig deep into yourself and your community for direction and focus. Combine that with the simple keyword strategy I laid out here and you will have the bulk of the important parts of SEO for Google, Instagram, YouTube, or whatever algorithm you are working with. Once you have that down and you are making keyword content on a regular basis you can dive more deeply into the art of SEO. It is a fascinating area and I enjoy playing with strategies.

I want to make it clear that getting to the level where you are familiar with terminology like short and long tail keywords and are becoming adept at advanced SEO strategies is a great place to go and will only benefit you and your outreach.

But the message I hope I have successfully communicated is that if you are living the life of your niche and are deeply involved in the community already that you have a unique insight that is much more valuable then the advanced techniques. Wrapping those insights with basic keyword techniques will get you very far. Once again, search algorithms aren’t mysterious beings. They want to provide their users with top quality content. I encourage you to put more time into consistently creating top quality content rather than staying on top of the latest loophole hacks

Thank you for joining me here for an introduction into SEO for content creators. I am slowly building the Instagram outreach and if your would like to be on the ground floor and watch as that takes shape I invite you to find me at @nichecontentcreator, all one word, on Instagram.

Have a great day exploring this digital jungle we love so much and I will see you next time.