When Should You De-Index Programmatic Content?
Programmatic content is content created (drumroll, please) programmatically — either by replacing certain pieces of that content according to rulesets, or through the use of generative AI.
We’re going to set aside the AI stuff for now — frankly, we’re tired of writing about it — and just focus on this Reddit thread, where a user lost a bunch of impressions after de-indexing programmatic content. They did that due to advice from…AI.
Sigh.
But that thread led to an interesting back-and-forth on LinkedIn: Should programmatic content be de-indexed?
The short answer is yes, if that content holds no unique value for human readers. We’ll explain our reasoning in a moment, but first, here’s a brief explanation of some of the terms (just in case you’re not an SEO).
But first, if you’re tackling this problem on your own, we’ve got a deal for you: Send us a message, provide as much detail as possible, and we’ll tell you whether you should de-index a certain set of pages. We’ll do this for free over email, and we won’t make a sales pitch. Easy, right?
Now, onto the boring stuff.
What is de-indexing, and how is it good for SEO?
De-indexing simple means adding a noindex tag to your content, which tells search engines not to rank that page in their results.
noindex is not a perfect tool, and Google frequently ignores it; if you really need to remove something from Google results, you’ll need to take a more dramatic approach and set an htaccess rule that blocks search engine robots (or if you’re less tech-savvy, you can just password-lock the offending content).
You don’t want to de-index content unless it’s absolutely necessary. Google and the other search engines are pretty good about deciding what should rank, so as a rule of thumb, you should let the search engines decide which pages make the rankings. That’s why Google will sometimes ignore the noindex tag.
But there are legitimate reasons to use de-index. If you’ve got an eCommerce store, you might have products with URLs that change frequently as variables change, and you’ll want to noindex everything other than the primary version of each page.
That shows Google that you understand that many of your pages are programmatic, and that you’ve designed your site to work that way — you’re not trying to game the system by bloating your page index (the total number of pages on your site).
When does programmatic content hurt SEO?
Here’s the bad news: If you’re using programmatic content for SEO, it will eventually hurt your SEO.
We’ve seen plenty of websites with large amounts of content that has been programmatically adjusted to include different keywords. For example, an auto dealership in St. Louis might have pages that are titled:
- Auto Dealership in St. Louis
- Auto Dealership in Maplewood
- Auto Dealership in St. Clair County
If all of those pages are identical other than the locations — and the dealership doesn’t have unique facilities in each of those areas — that’s a blatant attempt to bloat the site’s page index, and it won’t work in the long term.
So when should I deindex programmatic content?
If you’ve got an eCommerce site, your platform (such as Magento or WooCommerce) will probably handle all of the necessary deindexing right out of the box. You can check this by auditing your site (or have us do it, we’re not expensive).
But if you’ve created a large set of programmatic content, ask yourself:
Does this provide actual value for users? Would a human being want to find this particular page?
If so, keep it. If not, you’ll probably want to delete it entirely — not just de-index it.
Before you do that, we’d recommend checking the pages in question in Search Console and Analytics to determine whether they’re receiving traffic. Even if you’ve got low-quality pages, you might have tricked Google into sending you traffic (temporarily), and there are ways to retain that traffic. Namely, you’ll add high-quality content to the page, or you’ll make it the primary (canonical) version of its pageset.
If you’ve got a question about SEO, we’re here to help. Shoot us a message.
AIO/GEO Is Pretty Much Just SEO, But with a Few Key Differences
Artificial intelligence optimization (AIO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) are going to be very important for the foreseeable future — but they’re also not that complicated.
Or, rather, they’re not as complicated as marketers want you to think. The goal of every search engine is to deliver content that satisfies the end user’s needs; the goal of every generative text engine is to — you guessed it — deliver content that satisfies the end user’s needs.
The main difference? If possible, AI would love to keep you from clicking. Tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini will provide footnotes and external links, but their answers are structured in a way that keeps you on the page.
That’s why we’ve seen a 30% drop in organic traffic for most websites over the past two years. Note that I said “most” — we’ll come back to that shortly.
But zero-click search only goes so far.
If an end user wants something highly specific — if they’re ready to make a purchase, for example — they can’t do that entirely on ChatGPT (at least, not yet). Most people will skip past the AI when they’re at this point in the buyer journey; they’ll use traditional methods to search for exactly what they need.
But a growing number of people will ask AI for a recommendation. To get in front of those people, you really need to build a website that works well with AI.
And ideally, you want to be referenced by AI at the earlier stages of the conversation, too — AI tools are essentially taking over the top levels of the sales funnel, so you want your brand to be prominently positioned for those users.
Here’s the good news: Technical SEO tactics still work.
Technical SEO is about configuring your content so that it’s machine readable. That also helps with accessibility, by the way; if a search engine can easily read your content, so can a person who uses a screen reader (which converts text to audio) or another type of assistive technology.
That’s why the best practices of technical SEO are essentially identical to the best practices of GEO. Generative engines are, after all, machines. They want to be able to scan your content easily — bypassing JavaScript, for the most part — so that they’re able to cite it authoritatively.
If you look at any list of “GEO tips,” you’re going to find some of the same techniques that good SEO agencies have been screaming about for years:
- Use appropriate schema markup to help the AI understand the structure of your page.
- Make sure that you’re not overusing JavaScript, particularly if you’re using it to deliver your main marketing copy.
- Have an accurate site map.
- Use plenty of relevant internal and external links.
- Have appropriate alt text for images, along with transcripts and captions for videos.
While marketers are trying to pretend that this is world-shaking stuff, none of this is new.
The main difference between GEO and SEO is in the structure of the content itself.
And honestly, this is just another set of best practices that have been around since the early days of the internet.
It’s just that generative engines are more attuned to the needs and attention spans of real users than search engine spiders: They want to quickly find authoritative answers. You can’t trick them by writing walls of text with keywords thrown in randomly.
Generative engines are more semantic. They’re more capable of understanding context and presenting information than search engines (though in our opinion, they’re not that great with context, either, they’re just better than traitional search engines).
To appear in AI citations, you simply need to write authoritative content that appeals to your target audience. You need to present real facts that AI will find compelling — you need to get specific, particularly if you’re talking about your business’s accomplishments or products.
But here’s the bad news: You can’t really use AI to write for AI.
Because if you could do that, the generative engines would just…do that.
They wouldn’t take the time to consult your website; they’d just present the AI-written answer that seemed the most appropriate to the query.
With that in mind, your AI strategy should involve quite a bit of content planning. You should be delivering messages about what makes your business work, and what sets your products apart from the competition. Frame that content in a way that answers questions — ideally, a question that a real user would ask — and you’re in great shape.
We’ve seen this work; one of our clients saw a 20% increase in traffic year-over-year, despite the new “zero-click” search economy. Here’s how they did it:
- They published weekly content, focusing on success stories, case studies, and original research.
- They didn’t publish too much. Every blog and LinkedIn post had a purpose that supported their brand — they didn’t simply push out dozens of AI-written articles.
- They reached out to partners and included them in the content strategy where relevant. Success stories featured longtime clients, who then shared the posts on social media.
- They utilized the content in sales presentations. Remember, every piece of content is a potential sales tool — it’s not just for the generative engines to mulch through.
Content writers should also be aware of the minor signals that influence AI citations; it’s best to provide an answer in the first sentence, for example, and to write conversationally wherever possible.
But overall, SEO and GEO have quite a bit in common. In fact, they’re essentially the same, apart from some minor adjustments in emphasis — good content is more important than ever, it just needs to be more focused for those bottom-of-funnel conversions.
If you’re interested in setting up a content strategy, we’re here to help. Send us a message.
Writing Facebook Posts with ChatGPT: Best Practices
Note: Boy, this post exploded in popularity. If you need help building a content strategy, send me a message — consultations are free, and we’re more affordable than you’d think. Enjoy the article.
When I see a Facebook post written with ChatGPT (or any AI tool, for that matter), I have a few thoughts:
- This business thinks that they don’t have the budget for a copywriter.
- They haven’t spent any time at all thinking about their target audience.
- They don’t care about their brand.
That might be harsh, but it’s my kneejerk reaction; if you’re willing to copy-and-paste autogenerated text onto your company’s social media page and hit “post,” you must not have a great concept of why social media is important.
But to be fair, I can only make those judgments if I know that a post is AI. If someone has a genuinely unique thought and uses ChatGPT to finish that thought, I wouldn’t have the same reaction.
Unfortunately, AI-generated status updates are incredibly easy to spot. They use excessive emojis and hashtags; they make general, basic claims about the product; they invent idioms that don’t make any sense.
I asked ChatGPT to come up with a Facebook post for my bakery (which doesn’t exist), promoting our Easter Sunday special (one free muffin per customer). Here’s what it spat out:
🐣🌸 Easter Sunday Special at [Your Bakery Name]! 🌸🐣
Hop on over this Easter and treat yourself to something sweet! 🧁
We’re celebrating the season with a little extra joy — every customer gets ONE FREE MUFFIN with their visit this Sunday!Whether you’re craving blueberry, chocolate chip, or something classic, we’ve got the perfect bite waiting for you. Bring your friends, bring your family, and make it a delicious holiday tradition 💛
📅 Easter Sunday only
📍 Stop by early — muffins won’t last long!#EasterTreats #BakeryLove #FreeMuffin #SweetCelebration
As a copywriter, I hate this so much. Here are a few of the problems:
- It’s using bold for emphasis; Facebook doesn’t support that type of formatting.
- It uses title case; Facebook posts don’t usually do that, so it would look out of place on a real feed.
- There’s a tremendous amount of filler text.
- The AI decided that we offer blueberry, chocolate chip, or “something classic.” Wait, aren’t blueberry muffins classic? And what if we don’t offer chocolate chip muffins?
- The extensive use of emojis would create accessibility concerns for anyone who uses a screen reader (software that converts text to audio, frequently used by people with vision disabilities).
- The hashtags are ridiculous. Is there really much traffic for “bakerylove” or “sweetcelebration?”
But the biggest issue is that there is no representation of what makes this bakery special.
When you’re building a brand, every post has to have that brand image in mind — this is totally generic.
That’s by design, of course: Generative AI tools basically operate through at-scale plagiarism (and don’t worry, I’ll stop ripping on AI in a moment and provide some tips for using it correctly). They’re not capable of presenting anything but repetitive, grammatically correct drivel.
That’s ChatGPT, and there are other tools out there. Let’s see how Google Gemini handles the job.
🐰 Happy Easter! 🌷
We want to make your Easter Sunday a little sweeter this year, so we’re giving away one free muffin to every customer who stops by the bakery on April 19! 🧁✨
It wasn’t just a regular morning for us today—we’ve been busy prepping all your favorites. Whether you’re a fan of classic blueberry or you want to try something seasonal, come grab a treat on the house before you head to your holiday celebrations.
The Details:
- 🕒 When: This Sunday, April 19 (starting at 7 AM)
- 🧁 The Deal: One free muffin per person
- 🏃♂️ Note: We’ll be handing them out until we run out, so try to get here early!
Rather than staying in, come say hi and celebrate with us! We can’t wait to see you. 🐣☕️
The first thing you’ll notice is that this is not the correct format for a Facebook post. Also, Gemini declared blueberry muffins to be “classic,” which is quite validating for me.
But notice the odd sentence constructions, filler text, and excessive emoji use — those are hallmarks of a generative AI, and they’re also really bad copywriting.
I would never visit this bakery, even for a classic blueberry muffin.
By this point, I’ve seen hundreds of small businesses use ChatGPT for their social media posts.
All of those posts look, well, exactly the same. I would show a few examples here, but I don’t want to spend my day dunking on local mom-and-pop coffeeshops.
And here’s the thing: They’re only using AI because someone told them that it did a good job. If you don’t write for a living, you might look at either of those generated posts and think, “hey, it’s better than I could do.”
If you have problems writing, or if you have a small budget, of course you’re going to use AI. It seems like a great way to market your business to more people without spending more money.
But by copying and pasting those posts, you’re sacrificing credibility. AI text posts are obvious, and if you’re using AI to promote your Easter muffins, who’s to say that you’re posting real pictures of those muffins?
In fact, Gemini is pretty good at creating fake muffins.
As more organizations lean on AI, authenticity is going to become more and more important for consumers. That’s largely true for every business: No matter what you’re selling, you need to convince a real person to buy it.
And if your best sales pitch is “here’s what a computer spat out,” you’re not making a compelling argument.
You can still use generative AI for social media posts, but be thoughtful.
People use AI because it helps them get past the “I need an idea” stage. With AI, you don’t have to sit down with a piece of blank paper and think about strategy; you can just ask your robot buddy for a few ideas (or a complete draft).
Unfortunately, that blank piece of paper is quite important to the process. That’s the point where you actually create valuable ideas — how you want to present your brand, what will appeal to the customers you already have, how you’ll gain new business, and so on.
So my first recommendation is simple: Don’t turn to ChatGPT until you’ve got a really good idea of what you want to say. Treat it as an editor, not as a copywriter. You are the copywriter and content strategy planner (unless you’d like to hire us).
Tell your AI to write like your brand.
Secondly, have a clear, consistent brand, and tell your generative AI how to write to that brand. Maybe you’ve got a wacky bakery with weird art all over the walls; maybe you’ve got a highly professional B2B firm that only targets leads in C-suite positions. Your chat tools will need to know that.
You can build custom rulesets for any of the major AI text generators. Try adding rules, along with categorization headers (the bits before the colons below) to keep the model on track.
- Persona Anchor: Always write from the perspective of a [job title, e.g., professional baker] at [company name]. The voice should be [trait 1, e.g., authoritative] yet [trait 2, e.g., accessible], catering to an audience of [target demographic].
- Tone Guardrails: Maintain a [tone, e.g., semi-formal] tone. Do not use [style, e.g., corporate buzzwords] or [style, e.g., slang]. If the topic is [subject], ensure the response remains [attribute, e.g., grounded and empathetic].
- Emotional Resonance: When discussing [product/service], emphasize [benefit, e.g., reliability] over [alternative, e.g., speed]. Avoid being overly [negative trait, e.g., salesy or pushy].
- Filler Elimination: Never start an article or post with general filler phrases like [phrase 1, e.g., In today’s world] or [phrase 2, e.g., Our high-tech society]. Instead, begin every piece with a [hook, e.g., specific statistic or historical fact].
You can also create rules for punctuation standards, grammar, emoji use, and so on. If you’re not sure how to make a rule effectively, ask your chatbot. Chatbots are digital idiots, but they know their own rulesets and they’re quite effective at training themselves.
Train, train, train your AI.
Even after you create these rules, generative AI will not be able to represent your brand effectively — here’s what happened when I told Gemini to follow an extensive set of rules to write a post for a “wacky” bakery.
The earliest known muffin recipe dates back to the 18th century and was basically a way to turn leftover bread into a party! 🧁✨
We’re bringing that party energy to your Easter Sunday with a massive muffin-pocalypse! 🐰🌀
On April 19 we’re giving away one free muffin to every single person who walks through the doors of the bakery! 🎁🎈
The madness kicks off at 7 AM sharp! 🕒
We’ll be handing out these treats until we run out of baked goodness so get here early before the crowd devours everything! 🏃♂️💨
You don’t want to miss out on the most exciting morning of the year! 🌈🎊
We can’t wait to celebrate the holiday with some high-speed yeasty mayhem! 🐣🔥
Yes, high-speed yeasty mayhem. Gemini is a bit of a try-hard.
But look, the chatbot will always struggle if it’s working off of rules alone — it can only draw from its training data.
If, however, you provide dozens of examples of posts that you’ve already written, you can get a lot closer. We’ve written hundreds of industrial B2B articles, so I trained Gemini on those pieces of content and asked it to write another Facebook post announcing a new product for a fake B2B firm:
Unplanned downtime in manufacturing costs industrial organizations roughly $50 billion per year. We designed Fake Product to address these costly interruptions by improving equipment reliability and streamlining daily maintenance tasks.
This new addition to our lineup focuses on maximizing your facility’s throughput while maintaining strict compliance with safety regulations. It’s a practical solution for operations that need to scale without sacrificing efficiency.
That’s not perfect, but it’s quite aligned with the tone that industrial businesses use.
We also wrote extensively for a health-oriented website that targeted consumers. Here’s how Gemini handled a “free t-shirt giveaway” for that company:
We’re giving away free t-shirts to celebrate our incredible community! We want you to stay comfortable while you’re crushing your wellness goals, whether you’re hitting the gym for a heavy session or just enjoying a peaceful morning walk. These limited-edition shirts are incredibly soft and perfect for your next active adventure. Drop a comment below with your favorite self-care tip to enter the giveaway and we’ll pick the lucky winners soon! 👕✨
Chatbots tend to make up details, so we’d need to do some cleanup on this post. And it’s still quite generic — but we can fix that.
If at all possible, start with a post written by a human.
Remember when I said that chatbots are better at editing than writing?
If you can force yourself to sit down and write something, your results will be much better, regardless of how you feel about your abilities as a writer. Let’s go back to the lovely world of free muffins for a moment; I wrote this mediocre announcement post:
Free muffins! lol for real. Easter morning we’ll have free blueberry muffins until about noon or when they run out. We know you’re spending time with your family that day (we will be too) and we want to help you get started the right way. also we’re open on Monday so swing by and we got coffee now too
Here’s an edit from ChatGPT:
Free muffins. Seriously.
Easter morning we’ll have free blueberry muffins for anyone who stops by — until around noon or whenever we run out.
We know you’re spending the day with family (we will be too), just wanted to help you start it off right.
Also — we’re open Monday. Come back and see us. We’ve got coffee now too 😉
I still have a few issues with this, but it’s not too bad. For a small business, it’s perfectly acceptable. Here’s how Gemini handled that task:
Free muffins! Yes, really! 🧁✨
This Easter morning we are giving away free blueberry muffins until 12 PM or until we sell out. We know you are spending time with your family and we want to help you start the holiday the right way.
We are also open this Monday. Stop by to see us and try our new coffee while you are here! ☕️
See you there!
Again: Not perfect, but not bad.
If you can start with a draft and create clear rules, you’re ahead of the game; if you’ve got a consistent brand, you’re in great shape.
Think about the actual experience of your audience before you post.
You’re using AI, but you’re writing for real people. What do they want? What will get them excited about your business? What voice appeals to them? What drives their loyalty and keeps them coming back?
ChatGPT can’t answer those questions, but you probably already know the answers. To create great content, you’ll need to hyperfocus on your audience when publishing anything, from Facebook and Instagram posts to case studies.
If you need help crafting a content strategy, we’re here to help (and surprisingly affordable). Send us a message.
When To Use Noindex Tags (And When To Avoid Them)
Webmasters frequently make mistakes with directive tags — HTML snippets that tell search engines how to crawl (and how not to crawl) a website. We draw attention to these issues when performing SEO audits and content audits, but the simple truth is that directives aren’t complicated, and we’d rather not spend our workdays worrying about them.
If you’re reading this blog, you’re in the same boat. We’ll skip past the basics and assume that you have some confusion about noindexing pages, and you’re concerned that you’ll make a mistake that costs you ranking position. Take a deep breath; search engines are fairly adept at figuring out webmaster intent, and even if you’ve made a serious mistake, fixing it is usually a fairly simple process.
Here’s how Google defines a noindex tag. We’ll warn you, it’s a pretty simple explanation:
noindex – Prevents the page from being indexed.
That was straightforward, right? The noindex tag sends a signal to the search engines telling them that you don’t want the page to appear in search. You might use this tag on category pages, duplicated pages, PPC landing pages, or other pages that you’d rather not see in search.
The bad news: Noindex tags don’t always work.
There’s a caveat, though, and it’s a big one. Google (and the other search engines) will sometimes ignore a noindex tag, indexing the page in question and showing it in search.
Why? We have no idea, but the folks at Google (and, again, the other search engines) leave a lot of room for webmaster error. Most website owners use tags improperly or inconsistently, so the search engines use directives as suggestions, not hard-and-fast rules.
We ran into this issue several years ago with a client’s store page, which another SEO firm had outfitted with noindex tags. The store was still showing up in search, but for specific reasons, the client didn’t want that — they didn’t want the store showing up until a customer actually clicked on the requisite link.
The solution was to block search engines from accessing the store via the htaccess file (if you’re dealing with something similar and you don’t immediately know what we mean, ask your web developer or drop us a line). We then used Google Webmaster Tools to request that the page be de-indexed.
The problem was resolved, but the client was lucky; Google alone decides whether or not to send traffic to a page. Once something is indexed, getting it scrubbed from the search rankings can be really difficult.
Ignored noindex tags can be frustrating and confusing.
The entire purpose of a search directive is to direct search. With that in mind, why would Google ignore a noindex tag? We can think of a few reasons:
- The page has a large number of internal links pointing to it.
- The page is linked frequently from external websites.
- The page was well-established in search before the noindex tag was added.
- Google was feeling naughty that day.
In all of these scenarios (well, except the last one), the search engine made the determination that the page was too important for the “noindex” tag to be legitimate; it must have been a mistake.
So, here’s the moral of the story: If you really, really don’t want a page to show up on search, the noindex tag isn’t enough. You’ll need to block the search spiders from accessing the page, then add the noindex tag, then make sure that your sitemap is up to date, then monitor regularly to make sure that the page doesn’t pop up.
If you don’t want a page to appear on search, but it’s not a life-or-death situation, go ahead and use noindex tags. As a general rule, though, webmasters should avoid using the noindex tag unless they have a good reason to use it. Let the search engine decide what should rank. They’ll figure it out.
Of course, most of our clients have the opposite problem — they want pages to appear on search, but they’re unable to raise their domain authority and capture that sweet, sweet organic traffic that they know is lurking out there. The solution to this problem is to perform keyword research and create an effective content strategy, ideally while addressing technical issues along the way. We can help with that, too.
Hopefully, this blog addressed your anxiety regarding noindex tags, but if not, contact ua via email at contact@relaycontent.com or fill out our online form for a quick, no-hassle quote.
St. Louis SEO Guide: Developing A Content Strategy For A Small Business
For St. Louis businesses, SEO is often an afterthought. Search engine optimization takes time to do the right way — advertising, either through pay-per-click, social media, or traditional methods, offers much quicker results.
But SEO can offer a better return on investment overall. According to one study, organic search drives 51 percent of traffic online; that number is higher for the business-to-business sector. When you’ve got a steady stream of incoming traffic, you don’t need to pour money into advertising.
For local businesses, that’s a big selling point. We’ve been in St. Louis for several years now, and many of our clients come to us because they’re invisible to local searchers; if they could just improve their rankings, they reason, they could spend a lot less on marketing overall.
Granted, we’re writing this post for the same reason you’re reading it: We want more traffic and more business. If every single person who stumbled across our website contacted us for a quote, we’d be incredibly satisfied.
Still, we realize that some businesses have in-house resources that they’d like to utilize before contacting SEO contractors. Some business owners simply prefer to handle their content themselves. Some just don’t like us (we’d like to remind those businesses that we’ve refined our office’s personal hygiene policy).
If that sounds like you, understand this: You can create an SEO content strategy that works, and you won’t have to obsessively track keywords or pay hundreds of dollars per month for technical SEO tools. Most SEO is common sense, particularly local SEO, and if someone at your business can write competently, you can handle it. The first step is to create a content strategy.
Here’s everything you need to know to get started.
Develop a content publication schedule. Most businesses need to become publishers in order to function online. If you’re a florist, that means packing your site with up-to-date images of floral arrangements; if you’re an industrial supplier, that means providing helpful, actionable articles that will address customers’ questions about your products.
In any case, your schedule needs to be consistent. New sites should try to publish content at least twice per week. Once per day is better, but unless you write quickly, that might be feasible. Set a goal that you’ll be able to manage, and don’t get discouraged if you fall behind — just get back on it.
Running a business is difficult, and you’ll inevitably find yourself drifting behind your content schedule. When you’ve got downtime, try to get about a month ahead; in other words, you’re writing February’s blogs in January.
Start your schedule by listing the topics you want to cover for the next several months. We use simple spreadsheets (you can download a quick template here). Track word counts, keywords, expected publication dates, and anything else that seems pertinent. Tools like Trello can be helpful for keeping on track.
Use novel methods to find topics for your content. Keyword research can be time consuming, and if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll probably feel overwhelmed. I’ll write a piece on basic techniques at some point, but in the meantime, here’s the best tactic for beginners: Forget everything you know about your business.
Think about topics that your readers would ask about, assuming that they have no knowledge of how your industry works. As Brien pointed out in my favorite blog on this site (seriously, read it, it’s good), that involves a lot of sheer guesswork and listening to your customers.
Let’s say you’re selling web design services, and one of your customers asks what the difference is between Squarespace and WordPress. That’s a blog topic, right there — and probably one that you’d never think about, if you weren’t on the lookout for those types of questions.
When you’ve cleared your mind, you can come up with dozens of questions that require answers, and if you write a quick blog about every one of them, you’ll start to get traffic. Does WordPress cost anything? Where do web designers find their images? How important is font choice?
Approach your business as a newcomer, and you’ll find plenty of topics. If you can’t find a clear answer for a question with a quick Google search, you’ve probably found a spectacular topic.
Understand the basics of semantic search. If you’re website’s about auto repair, and you post a really thoughtful, well-written piece about real estate, you’re probably not going to rank for real estate. Write a piece about replacing the rear end on a Ford F150, however, and you’ll have a chance of climbing to the first page.
Why? Your domain’s semantic profile plays a role in how search engines see it. The more you write about a particular topic, the better your chances of ranking for that topic. That means that you should generally try to stay on topic — don’t use your business blog to write about events in your personal life, and don’t stray too far from your message.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t get creative. I wrote a blog about turkeys eating cigarette butts, which managed to get some traffic…but only because the real purpose of the piece was to discuss Google algorithm issues.
Likewise, understand that if you’ve got an on-topic blog that isn’t ranking, it’s still helping you — it’s adding to your semantic profile. Your domain is establishing authority. The process takes time, but every piece of content counts.
Use keywords appropriately, but sparingly. The most common mistake that business owners make is assuming that SEO works the way it did in 2004. At that time, a successful article for a plumbing website might look something like this:
St. Louis Plumbing Services From A Trusted St. Louis Plumber
If you need plumbing services in St. Louis, you’re probably wondering which STL plumber to use…
You get the idea. Now, those types of pages can still work, but only if the competition is really, really limited. Google’s algorithms can detect keyword-stuffed pages, and if you write unnaturally, you’ll end up getting penalized.
Keywords are still important, but it’s far, far, far more important to write naturally. Keep a list of relevant keywords near you as you write. Use them where appropriate, and try to use your main keyphrase in your first sentence, title, and at least one header tag. Otherwise, don’t obsess over keyword density. If your writing sounds natural — and if you’re providing useful information — the search engines will respect that.
(At this point, you might notice that we put “St. Louis SEO” into our title and added similar phrases to the first few paragraphs. Hey, keywords count for something. They’re just not a total solution.)
Watch your results. Every content strategy needs to adapt over time as more data becomes available. Make sure you’re signed up on Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Keep an eye on organic traffic, and if a particular blog is getting lots of views, try to determine what worked. If a page is sitting in the middle of the first page of results for a particular keyword, see if you can add some content to it to bump it up.
Those are the basics. Take a deep breath — You can create good SEO content, provided that you stay organized and write knowledgeably.
At Relay Online Marketing, we love our city, and we want to do our part to help new businesses get started. We offer free SEO consulting for small St. Louis businesses, with some limits (we’ll audit your website and give you advice, but if you need more than two hours of work, we’ll have to give you a quote. Unfortunately, our fancy mechanical keyboards aren’t free, although they were heavily discounted).
To speak with us, send us a note via our contact page or call 618-531-9073.
Turkeys Don’t Eat Cigarette Butts (And Why Google Isn’t Perfect Yet)
Recently, the Relay office spent an afternoon debating whether or not turkeys eat cigarette butts off the side of the road.
Don’t worry, it’s not as dumb as it sounds—it’s far dumber. Here’s the deal: Near St. Louis, you’ll often see wild turkeys walking along the side of the highway.
Around Thanksgiving, one of our partners suggested that the turkeys were looking for cigarette butts. He’d heard that turkeys get addicted to nicotine, so they frequent highways to feed their addiction.
I’d heard something similar from a friend of mine, but it didn’t seem too likely. We did a quick Google search to settle the issue, but we ran into a problem: Typing any combination of “turkey,” “nicotine,” “cigarette butts,” or “addiction” brought up hundreds of websites about quitting smoking cold turkey.
That’s useful info, but it wasn’t what we were looking for. We tried searching for scientific papers about birds and nicotine addiction, but didn’t find anything about turkeys specifically. Frustrated, we contacted the National Wild Turkey Foundation and received a quick response from biologist John Burk.
Credit: Alexas_Fotos / Pixabay
“I have been working as a Wildlife Biologist focused on wild turkeys for 30 years in 5 different states, and I can honestly say that I have never heard of this being a problem,” he wrote. “Turkeys have no sense of smell and therefore also no sense of taste.”
Burk went on to explain that turkeys have gizzards, and they walk on the side of the road to find small pieces of gravel that can help them digest their food. If a bird ate a cigarette butt by mistake, it would spit it out, since the experience wouldn’t be pleasant.
That would seem to settle the issue, but by this point, office alliances had formed, and the “turkeys are addicts” crowd wasn’t going to go down without a fight. For a second opinion, we reached out to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, which put us in touch with another biologist.
After laughing at us for several minutes, he agreed with his contemporary.
“People have been dissecting turkeys for over 30 years,” he said. “We’ve never seen a cigarette butt. While I cannot say with certainty that a turkey has never eaten a cigarette, there certainly isn’t a significant population of nicotine-addicted turkeys out there.”
There you have it: Turkeys don’t eat cigarette butts, or if they do, they don’t do it on purpose.
What Turkeys Can Teach Us About SEO And Messaging
After trying in vain to get one of our clients to run a blog about turkeys and nicotine addiction, I realized that there is a tangible SEO lesson here: Google’s semantic search isn’t there yet.
Semantic search attempts to match a searcher’s intent with the results; if you search for “dog training tips” all afternoon and suddenly search for “pet food,” for instance, the search engine will likely present dog food as one of the top results (rather than, say, cat food, or turkey food).
For the most part, it works well, and semantic search is a crucial part of our strategy. We tell clients not to focus on individual keywords, since the semantic profile of a page—the page’s tendency to use related terms and synonyms that appeal to the searcher’s intent—is more important.
But search for “turkey” and “nicotine,” and you’ll inevitably get pages about “quitting cigarettes cold turkey.” Even if you perform a long-tail search (for instance, “Do turkeys in Illinois eat cigarette butts on the side of the highway because they are addicted to nicotine”), the semantic link between “turkey,” “cigarette,” and “human smoking” is too strong.
The lesson is to be careful when branding. Think about how keywords interact. Consider whether you’re using phrases that could be misinterpreted by semantic search—and when that’s the case, be ready to change your strategy. When in doubt, create as much content geared specifically towards your audience as possible.
Another crucial lesson: Don’t spend all afternoon arguing about turkeys, or you’ll have to write a blog about it to justify the lost productivity.
SEO TIP: Don’t Just Look At Your Landing Pages
“Why aren’t my landing pages ranking for certain keywords?”
That’s probably the most common question in SEO, and it’s not always easy to answer. We usually respond by asking clients why they want to rank for a given term; are they sure that their audience is using that term? Will the people searching for that keyphrase end up making a purchase, speaking with a salesperson, or reading an article?
But for the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume that you’ve gone through all that. You know where you want to rank, you’ve chosen your keywords carefully, and you’re not getting results.
What’s wrong with your landing page? What do you need to tweak to build a successful approach to SEO?
For starters, you’re only looking at the landing pages.
That’s a problem.
Here’s why: Google looks at your entire website in order to establish its semantic profile (semantics are words similar to the keyphrase, or related to the keyphrase, but fundamentally different). The more you write about a certain topic, the more authoritative your website seems.
As an example, consider two websites with roughly equivalent landing pages. They’re shooting for the search keyword “dog food.” One site has a single page about dog food; the other has 100. Even though the landing pages are equivalent, why wouldn’t the search engine prioritize the site with more content? It offers more resources for readers; it likely has more relevant links, more related keywords (think “nutrition in dog food,” “low-calorie dog food,” “canine chow,” etc.) and a better overall experience for searchers.
You might have the perfect landing page, but if it’s the only page on your site that uses a certain keyphrase, it probably won’t rank. Why should it? A website with dozens of high-quality, relevant pages should always beat a website with a single relevant page.
Use that principle to guide your SEO plan.
Yes, your landing page needs to be perfect, but you’ll need to make sure that you’ve got other relevant pages to improve your site’s semantic profile.
Oh, and quality is crucial. You can’t just fill a bunch of pages with keywords; make them real resources that will help your audience get the information they need. Cover broad topics and niche topics. To go back to our dog food example, you might write blogs like:
- What To Know About Raw Diets for Dogs
- What Nutrition Do Dogs Need?
- Why Dogs Are Natural Omnivores
- Choosing A Food For A New Puppy
Don’t worry as much about fitting in keywords. Worry about making useful, functional articles. Ideally, you’ll write 400-600 words on each topic, but if you can get a few thousand words in without stretching, do it. As long as you’re providing quality content, you’re spending your time well.
SEO is a long process, and you’ll still have to pay plenty attention to your landing pages. Our point is simply that your landing page isn’t the only factor in your ranking for a certain keyword. Look at your entire site and consider whether you’re truly offering the best result—after all, that’s exactly what Google’s doing.
Should You Hide Blog Categories with Noindex Tags?
Recently, we had a few clients ask whether they should be putting a “noindex” or “nofollow” tag on their blog category, author, and tag pages. WordPress creates these pages to provide another avenue for site organization; they’re potentially useful to your users, and if you’re creating content on an ongoing basis, it’s usually a good idea to leave them in place.
But should those pages be crawlable? Won’t search engines see them as duplicate content, since they contain some of the same language as your blogs?
Plugins like Yoast give you an easy way to noindex these pages. In Yoast, the setting in question looks something like the image below.
Yoast giveth, and Yoast taketh away.
Simply click those “noindex” buttons, and you’ll, uh, noindex the pages. It’s not rocket science.
Of course, before you take that step, you’ll have to determine whether or not you actually want those pages to be noindexed. You certainly don’t want to nofollow them, since there’s no real benefit to doing that (and the nofollow tag shouldn’t be commonly used, anyway; that’s a subject for another blog).
Here are the questions you should ask before using the noindex tag anywhere.
Is this page useful to readers in a unique way, and does it have enough content? If so, Google will probably want the option to show it in search.
“But wait,” you say, “these pages aren’t useful, and I’m worried that they’re preventing me from achieving my keyword ranking goals.”
First of all, stop talking out loud at your computer. I’m not the NSA, and I can’t hear you through the monitor (usually). Second, you’re probably not cannibalizing your own search ranking, because that’s really hard to do.
Here’s why: If you’ve got two pages that are great responses for a given query, search engines will simply show both. They’re generally not going to interpret your tag or category page as duplicate content, since hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites use those page types for organization; Google absolutely understands why they’re there and what they do. Google is smart. Google is wise. All praise Google.
Search for FiveThirtyEight’s reportage on Jon Ossoff, for instance, and the tag page comes up first, followed by FiveThirtyEight’s articles on the Congressional challenger. Google interpreted the tag page just fine, and determined that it was the best response to my query.
And you know what? Google got it right. That page provided a better resource than any of the individual blogs.
I should note that my approach here is atypical; many SEOs insist on noindexing tag pages by default. In fairness, there are some instances in which you’d want a blog tag, category, or author page to stop showing up in search.
- If your site is new or extremely small, the blog tag pages will likely be very low quality. They may list a single blog, and if that’s the case, the blog would surely be a better query response.
- You also might not use blog tags. In this case, I’d disable the tags entirely, but noindexing the pages is still an option, I guess, if you’re lazy. Are you lazy? Don’t be lazy.
- You might have a single author, in which case the “author” pages are redundant. In that case, again, I’d just remove the actual author pages—why trust a noindex tag when you can scrub your site of redundancy?
I would noindex these types of pages in one situation: If I had a small site that was adding content slowly, and I believed that the tag/category/author pages would be useful at a later date. That situation is extremely common; if you’re just now starting a blog, for instance, this is the approach to take. In fact, we noindex our tag/category/author pages for this very reason.
Also, I don’t post as often as I should, since I’m usually busy writing stuff for clients, and our category pages are pretty bad as a result. The shoemaker’s children have no shoes.
But what about the dreaded duplicate content penalty?
Well, these organizational pages aren’t really duplicate content—they serve a unique purpose. And the whole “duplicate content penalty” might be scary, but it’s usually not a major concern if you’re not plagiarizing.
In most cases, if Google sees similar content on two pages, it’ll simply choose one of the pages to rank—it won’t ban your domain or anything like that. You’re not getting a manual penalty unless you’ve been doing some shady stuff.
The bottom line is that tag/category/author pages are absolutely fine on larger sites. On growing sites, the noindex tag is fine, but realize that it’s just a suggestion (and Google frequently ignores that suggestion if it thinks you’re mistaken). And before using any SEO directive, make sure that you’re not missing a cleaner solution.
Oh, and if you vehemently disagree with this post, we’d love to hear why. Post a comment below and I’ll respond (and call you names behind your back).