Abhirupa Purkayastha – Simplifying Life

The answer to the question I asked in the title is NO. But what it has done is made life easier for serious website content creators.  I’ve dealt with quite a number of website owners and SEO guys in the past 8 years. And based on my experience they fall in either of 2 categories –

1)      Think content as an asset not as a liability. Spend considerable amount of time in getting the correct requirement + information on which the content would be based. Mapping the structure of the content, content testing, and ensuring that the team is following the correct writing style. Last but not the least – value serious content creators.

Or

2)      Think website content as a dispensable and not requiring much thought thing. The only thing writer needs to do is insert the keyword and check its density. No focus on getting the information, writing style, grammar or content structure correct. I remember one of my friends whining about writing for a client who provided ac installation services but the requirement sent to her also had the keyword floor heating services. The reason was search for the particular keyword was high and it didn’t matter whether the client provided floor heating services or not. Her SEO manager wanted increase in website traffic!

Now, how hummingbird update affects you? If you’re in category 1 then don’t copy what guys at category 2 are doing. Continue focusing on good content and help the writing team come up with meaningful, relevant and unique web copies.

If you fall in category 2 then you’re in for some ‘thrilling’ time.  The signals were already there but sadly you didn’t notice – the Penguin, Panda updates hinted Google’s intention of becoming human! Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words. So, if you were just focusing on keywords in the article and not focusing on content then it’s high time you changed your website content creation strategy.

Now the question comes – how to develop an effective website content strategy? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this. In this post I’ll give an insight into how website content strategies are designed at TechShu. 

Quality website content is a mix of –

• Relevant and right information
• Right SEO
• Right grammar and
• Right structure.

Which is why at TechShu, content writing doesn’t work as a silo department.

• We’ve a team of  topic experts ( who do R&D and help the content engineers gather factually correct, updated and relevant information).
• So, what do content engineers do? They transform the information into a coherent, gramatically correct,  and informative copy. Depending on the business/ product, the copies can be conversational  ( you and me), imaginative ( imagining a situation and then talking about how the product/service can help the readers )  or plain ( it directly talks about the business, provides facts and data).  Our copies are creative but written in plain English.  Note – We love reading Lawrence and Virginia Woolf though!!
• The web copy then goes to the marketing experts. Let’s face it search engines still depend on some content parameters like SEO structure, proper interlinking of pages etc. Note – we’ve consciously avoided training our engineers on SEO  nitty-gritty.
• The copy then goes to the content editors. At Techshu we call them structure experts. Apart from checking punctuation, spelling, grammar, and usage, they ensure that the copy is beautifully structured , honest and user-friendly one.

Share  your views on creating good web copies.