Section 6

SEO copywriting

There are only very few of us who can write the Great American Novel.
Writing a well-structured blog post however, can be learned by
(almost) everyone. In this section, we will give you some practical
tips about writing, rewriting and structuring your articles. And who
knows? After some practice, your blog posts will read just as smoothly
as the Great American Novel did.

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 Dutchmommies ~ In this section a blog for moms is central:
Dutchmommies. A team of five moms writes about proper food for
children, education and upbringing, arts and crafts, pregnancy
and children’s parties. They try to write stories about their every-
day lives and offer tips on how to handle being a mother.

Introduction

We will first explain why quality content is important. After that, we

will discuss the process of writing. Chapters 23 and 24 give practical
tips about the structure and the style of your blogs. Chapter 25 can
be read as a manual to write posts with the Yoast SEO Plugin and
chapter 26 focuses on maintaining a blog with multiple authors.
Finally, chapter 27 is about illustrations to accompany your blog
posts.

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 Chapter 21

Why is quality content important?

This chapter

Content writing requires some of your creative writing skills. And let’s
be honest, many blogs are hardly readable and not at all informative,
entertaining or inspiring.

Now, we don’t all have to be Hemingway, but you should make an

effort to write well. Why? Here are four reasons why the content on
your website should be well written and nicely structured:

1 People will understand your message better

Whether the aim of your post is to entertain, to inform or to persuade

people, in texts that are poorly written the aim is lost. People simply
will not understand your message.

Every blog post has some kind of a message. This message is the
purpose of that piece of writing - what do you want to say? A message
can be very small. An article on your website could for instance
inform people about the features of your product, or explain the
shipping process.

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In poorly written pieces, chances are much larger that people will not
understand your message correctly. If your blog post is well thought-
out, nicely structured and free of misspellings and typos, chances are
much higher that people understand the message of your texts.

2 Lower bounce rate

If your content is well-written and nicely structured, chances are

much higher that readers will actually stay on your site to read your
post. That will result in lower bounce rates and will eventually
improve your ranking in the search engines.

3 More trust

Well-written pieces will lead to more trust from your readers. If

your content reads well and is free of typos, it will look much more
professional and legit, making it easier for people to trust you and
your blog.

If people trust your blog, they will be much more inclined return to
your website to read your next blog, or buy your product.

4 More (social media) attention

Well-written blog posts will have much higher chances to be shared
on social media or talked about among friends. For a post to be
shared on social media, you first have to convince someone to read

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the piece themselves. And more importantly, someone has to think
your post is awesome enough to give it their personal stamp of
approval by sharing it on their timeline on Facebook or Twitter (or
any other social media). Poorly written blog posts will never get
shared much because people will have stopped reading halfway. The
message is lost.

Two examples of blog posts: Which one would you share on your
timeline?

Dutchmommies ~ Blog 1: The end of my mommy perfectionism

Being a mother of four children has taught me to be more relaxed.

I am very perfectionistic myself and I know I tend to transmit my
perfectionism to my children. Luckily for my kids, I have four
sweethearts, so my perfectionism has to be shared by all four. And
let’s face it, you cannot be a real perfectionist raising four
children.

Trying to be the perfect mom is not in the best interest of your child.
When I first became a mother, I was so determined to do everything
‘right’, it became an obsession. I was a loving and devoted mother
and played with my son, read to him, puzzled with him and talked
with him whenever I could. He had to be dressed spotlessly, drink
from a cup (not from a bottle!) and eat the proper food. Before my
oldest son was 2 years old, he talked in full sentences and knew all
colors, numbers, letters and barn animals... but he was unable to
play by himself. He was a very sweet and intelligent child, but he
did have a hard time doing things on his own.

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 Dutchmommies ~ Blog 2: The end of my mommy perfectionism

I have four children and I am very perfectionistic. I know I have

high standards for my children as well. As I have a lot of children,
I cannot be as perfectionistic as I used to be.

With my first child, I wanted to do everything right. I played with

my son all the time. I made sure he was dressed properly and I
gave him the proper food. I wanted to be the best mom. My son
was a very quick talker and knew a lot of things. My son could not
play alone.

Conclusion: higher ranking and higher conversions

Writing awesome blog posts will not instantly improve your ranking.
But: in the long run it will definitely have a positive effect on your
SEO! Attractive texts have lower bounce rates and higher chances to
receive social media attention.

Attractive texts will also result in higher conversions on your website.

If your message is properly understood by your audience, chances are
much larger for them to return to your website to read your next blog.

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 Chapter 22

The process of good writing

This chapter

In this chapter, we will take you through the process of writing. It is

important to realize, however, that proper writing takes some time.
In order to write a good, readable blog post, you will have to follow
three steps:

Figure 41: the three steps in writing

Step 1: Preparing

Writing begins with preparation. In the first step of your writing

process you will have to answer a number of questions. The answers
will form the core of your blog post:

1 What will be the main message of your post?

Which is the central question you want to answer?
Why are you writing? What do you want to achieve?
2 Who are your readers?
3 What information do you need to write your post?
4 In what order will you present your information?
What will be the structure of your post?

We will elaborate on these questions in the following paragraphs.

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1 What is the message?

Before you start to write, take some time to think about what you
want your readers to know (or do) after they have read your text. We
refer to this as the message of your text.

In order to come up with your message you could try to phrase that
knowledge in a question. We refer to such a question as the central
question of a text. The text you write will be the answer to your central
question.

Dutchmommies ~ Dutchmommies writes posts about raising

children. One of their posts is about how to handle stubborn
toddlers. The central question of this post is: How should a parent
deal with a stubborn toddler? And so the post offers advice for
people who struggle with this question in their own lives.

Make sure that your central question is clear. Try to come up with a
summarized answer to your central question in one or two sentences.
I refer to this answer as the message of your article. Perhaps you will
not be able to phrase the message of your article until you have done
some research. You should then tend to your research first (see
question 3!).

We usually communicate the message of our posts in its introductory

paragraph (telling people what the post will be about) as well as in
the conclusion of the piece. Making your message really explicit is
especially important in web texts. It helps your readers instantly
grasp the message of your article and will increases the likelihood

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that people will keep on reading. This is actually a big difference
between printed texts, in which one usually starts with a teaser and
builds up to a reveal in the end, and web texts, in which the purpose
should be clear from the start.

Dutchmommies ~ The message of the post about stubborn

toddlers could be: You need a lot of patience handling stubborn
toddlers. Parents should try to stay relaxed and positive: toddlers
will all grow out of their stubborn phase eventually.

2 Who are your readers?

Before writing your text, you should take some time to think about
the people who are going to read your text. Make sure you adapt your
text to their level. You should adjust the difficulty of the information
in your piece as well as the difficulty of your style (use of jargon, long
sentences etc) to your audience.

In many cases it can be really hard to know who your readers are.
And, if your audience is a very heterogeneous group, it can be quite
hard to decide the level of difficulty for your topic and your text. It
could therefore be very helpful to do some research concerning your
audience on a regular basis. Read chapter 28 of section Marketing if
you would like to know more about getting to know your audience.

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 Dutchmommies ~ For Dutchmommies, the audience might seem
obvious: (Dutch) moms with young children. And this is true,
though ‘moms with young children’ is still quite a heterogeneous
group. It wouldn’t hurt to think about things like level of educa-
tion and the age of the mothers. Focusing on stay-at-home moms
or working moms could for instance call for a different approach.

3 Which information do you need?

In some cases all the information you need to write your text is already
in your head. If Joost de Valk writes an introductory piece about SEO,
he doesn’t need to open any books. In many other cases, you will need
some sources (the internet, books, newspapers) to provide the infor-
mation you need for your text. You should take the central question of
your piece and come up with a number of subquestions.

Dutchmommies ~ For the central question: How should a parent

deal with a stubborn toddler? one could pose the following
subquestions:
• Why are toddlers stubborn?
• What should parents do when their toddler is in specific
situations (e.g. toddler lying on the floor, screaming “i hate you!”)?
• What is the most important advice for parents?

Find answers to all your subquestions in your sources (books, inter-

net, scientific articles etc.). You can write these answers down. You
will then already have the foundation of your post or article.

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After this phase, the (central) message of your article should be
entirely clear. Take some time to phrase or to rephrase your message
(the summarized answer to your central question) in one or two
sentences.

4 What will be the structure?

The final step in the preparation process is the most important one.
You have to give some kind of structure to the information you want
to transfer to your readers. In chapter 23, we will give practical tips to
create structure.

Step 2: Actual writing

After the initial preparation you can start the actual writing
process. This will take about 20 % of the entire time you spend on
your blog post.

Just do it!

The most important tip for this phase is: just write. People often
have trouble coming up with the first sentence (or the first para-
graph for that matter). You can skip writing that first paragraph all
together. Just put down a couple of words referring to the content
that first paragraph should have and start writing the second para-
graph. Beginnings and endings are easier to write once you’ve
fleshed out the body of your post.

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If a sentence isn’t grammatically correct or sounds awkward, just
keep going and don’t worry about it just yet. You can rewrite these
things in the next phase, which is editing. In the writing phase, it is
important to stay in the flow of writing.

Guard the structure of your text

While writing, use the structure you established in your preparation

phase as an outline (we will help you set up your structure in chapter
23 of this section). Try to write the paragraphs according to that plan.

Yoast tip

The order in which you write the paragraphs does not have to be the
same order as you will present them in your final text. It can be very
helpful to write ‘easy’ or ‘fun’ paragraphs first, just to get you started.

Take a break every now and then!

Writing can be an intense process. If you write for long periods of

time, you will discover that concentrating will become harder. The
exact timespan will of course be different for every individual, but be
mindful of when your attention starts to wander, that’ll be the time
to take a break.

Marieke for instance isn’t able to write for more than 20 minutes (but
to be honest, her attention span is quite sad). At that point she gets
up to take a walk, look at her Facebook timeline or make a cup of tea.
Even a minute-long break can be enough to return to your writing
with a fresh and renewed level of concentration and creativity.

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Step 3: Editing

After step 2 of your writing process you will have a first draft of your
blog. In most cases, you have now done about 60 % of all the hard
work. The final step will still take much of your time…

This final step is the part in which you should ‘kill your darlings’. You
should read and re-read and re-re-read your post and correct your
awkward formulations, unclear phrasing and jumbled paragraph
structure.

Re-reading

You can start this phase by reading your piece slowly (and maybe even
out loud, this can really help). Each sentence should be grammatically
correct and the spelling must be flawless. You should be very critical
of your own work.

If all sentences in one paragraph are approved, look at the structure

within a paragraph. And if the structure within paragraphs is okay,
focus on the structure of the entire piece. Is it structured the way you
planned in advance? And is that still the most logical structure, or do
you need to make some adjustments? Perhaps you have come up with
some extra arguments supporting your opinion. This could lead to a
change in your structure. And finally, when the structure is finalized,
you can come up with definite headings and subheadings for each
section.

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Chapters 23 (about structure) and 24 (about style) should give you
plenty of practical tips to use in the correcting phase of your writing
process.

Ask for feedback

After editing your text, you should ask people for feedback. At Yoast
all the posts we write are read by at least two or our colleagues before
we publish them online. Feedback allows for the perspective of
someone other than the writer(s) and almost always leads to large
improvements in the post.

It will be really useful to let someone from your audience proofread

your post to test whether or not the message is communicated
properly. Also, feedback from someone with proper writing and
grammar skills will help you improve your blog post even further.

Yoast tip

WordPress offers the possibility to pre-publish your content as

drafts-for-friends. It’s a great way to share your post it with the
people from whom you want to receive feedback before publishing.

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 Chapter 23

Structure

This chapter

In this chapter we will give practical tips to help you set up a nice and
clear structure for your blog posts. The structure is the skeleton of
your text: it will help the reader grasp the main idea of your post.

In this chapter, we will help you setup your structure while preparing
your post, guard your structure while writing, and improve your
structure in pieces already written.

Set up your structure

Before you begin setting up your structure, you should have a clear
formulation of the central question you would like to answer in your
post. I would advise you to put this answer (the message of your text)
in the first paragraph of your blog post. One way or another, you
should introduce the message of your text within the first few
sentences. This will make it much easier for your reader to quickly
understand your text, and that is very important for web texts.

Next to having a clear formulation of your main message, you should

also have a clear idea about which information you want to include in
your text (and which information will not be included).

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Setting up a structure of your text can be done following these three
steps:

Step 1: Create a list

If you have gathered all the information you want to use, you can
start structuring it. You can for instance write down a list of all the
topics you plan to discuss (or phrase subquestions/ short sentences).
Whatever works to make some kind of list of everything your text
should cover.

Dutchmommies ~ Before writing a post about signals of early

pregnancy, the bloggers of Dutchmommies came up with the
following list of talking points in a brainstorm:
• weird cravings
• dislike of coffee
• crying
• sensitive breasts
• morning sickness
• stomach ache
• acne
• tired
• getting in arguments
• easily upset

Step 2: Bundling topics together

If you have a clear overview of all the topics you want to discuss in
your article, you can start bundling topics. Topics which are similar
should of course be grouped together.

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 Dutchmommies ~ In the post about early pregnancy signs, one
could for instance bundle the purely physical signs (sensitive
breast, acne, stomach ache, tired), the food signs (weird cravings,
dislike of coffee, morning sickness) and the emotional signs
(crying, getting in arguments, easily upset).

Step 3: Ordering topics

If you are done bundling, you should decide the order in which you
want to present the topics in your article. In most cases you can
decide to order thematically. For instance, if you want to discuss
various aspects or angles of a certain topic in order to answer your
central question. You should then present every aspect in a new
paragraph.

Dutchmommies ~ In the post about signs of early pregnancy,

one could make three main paragraphs: one about physical signs,
one about food-related signs and one about emotional signs.
Starting with an introduction paragraph and closing with a
concluding paragraph makes the structure of the blog.

Next to ordering according to theme, you could also order chrono-

logically or discuss your topics in a didactic order. Especially when
you try to explain complicated material, a didactic order, in which
you explain easy stuff first and difficult aspects later could be a very
good idea.

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 Type of ordening

thematic ordered by theme, aspect, topic

chronological old to new

didactic easy to hard

problem-solving introduce problem first and then describe possible

solutions

Figure 42: types of ordening

After you have ordered the topics you want to address in your article,
you should make a new list. This list is actually kind of a summary of
the article you are about to write. You could write a short sentence or
a few words for every paragraph you plan to write. This list is the
skeleton of your article and you should keep it in mind during the
remainder of the writing process.

Guarding your structure

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After you have set up your structure, you start phase 2 of the writing
process, in which you start the actual writing. Use the following tips
in order to guard your structure while writing.

Writing the first paragraph

In your first paragraph you should make clear what your readers can
expect in the text. Readers on websites are easily distracted. Take
them by the hand. The final sentence of my first paragraph usually is:
“In this post I will explain…”

Creating paragraphs

In the structure you have set up, you have bundled topics together.
You can then start to write paragraphs around those topics. But what
makes a good paragraph? A paragraph can be defined by three things.
Remember these things while writing!

1 the paragraph should form a thematic unit

2 the paragraph contains one core sentence and an elaboration
of this core sentence
3 the paragraph should be visually identifiable (by whitespaces)

Lots of people make mistakes while creating paragraphs. Writers just

put some white spaces in their text on random places for esthetic
purposes, but don’t really think about the coherence and structure of
the text. We also see a lot of paragraphs containing only one sentence.
In many cases, the coherence within paragraphs and between para-
graphs is unclear. These kinds of mistakes can really mess up the
structure of your articles.

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Paragraphs can be short or long, it really depends on the amount of
information you want to communicate. It could be two sentences,
or it could be fifteen sentences, whatever seems right to you. For
writing on websites, we would advise to create short paragraphs
(stick to about five or six sentences). The attention span of people
reading from a screen is very short. Short paragraphs helps people
to easily grasp the essence of your text.

We would advise you to always start your paragraph with the most
important sentence. This is your core sentence, it is what you want
to state in that specific paragraph. Then explain or elaborate on
that sentence. A reader will be able to grasp the most important
content from your article by just reading the first sentences of each
paragraph. And that’s the way lots of people will scroll through
your post, deciding whether or not to read your post entirely.

Dutchmommies ~ Example of a paragraph starting with the

most important sentence:

Trying to be the perfect mom, is not in the best interest of your

child. When I first became a mother, I was so determined to do
everything ‘right’, it became an obsession. I was a loving and
devoted mother and played with my son, read to him, puzzled with
him and talked with him whenever I could. He had to be dressed
spotlessly, drink from a cup (not from a bottle!) and eat the proper
food. Before my oldest son was 2 years old, he talked in full sentences
and new all colors, numbers, letters and barn animals... but he was
unable to play by himself. He was a very sweet and intelligent child,
but he did have a hard time doing things on his own.

141
 Yoast tip

If you want to elaborate on or explain a topic which does not entirely

fit the central question of your article, you could use an aside. This
is a little textbox to communicate that this specific part of text is
relevant to your post, but isn’t part of the message you are trying to
get across. This could for instance be an explanation of a jargon
term, or an example to illustrate a point.

Figure 43: example of an aside

Use of signal words

In order to guide your reader, you can use signal words. These words
reveal the structure of your text, and give readers information about
what they can expect:

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 Type of relation Examples of signal words

and, first of all, also, another, furthermore, finally,

enumeration
in addition

cause and effect because, so, due to, while, since, therefore, thus

same, less, rather, while, yet, opposite, much as,

comparison/contrast
either, or

as a result, hence, consequently, therefore,

conclusion
in conclusion, to summarize

fuzzy signals seems like, might, probably, almost, kind of, I guess

most of all, above all, most noteworthy, especially,

emphasis
definitely

Figure 44: examples of signal words

Readers will be able to understand your content much better if you

make proper use of these kinds of words.

Taking the reader by the hand

Grasping the structure of a long articles is hard. You should make

sure your readers do not get lost. You can do that by putting sentences
in your article that guide your readers. If you have three examples to
explain your point of view, tell your readers exactly that: “I would
like to present three examples to you.” Subsequently, you will present
your three examples using signal words: The first example, the
second example, my last example. Structuring your text in such a
way (especially when your content is quite difficult) will make read-
ing it that much easier.

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Headings

Headings are important for SEO purposes. Google uses your head-
ings to determine the topic of the content on your website. Your
headings should thus be used to optimize your posts. However,
headings are of great importance for your readers as well. Headings
allow your readers to quickly scan through your text and to decide
whether or not they would like to read your article (or which parts).
Therefore headings should be attractive and should clearly state the
content of the paragraph below it.

We would advise you to put a header above every long paragraph (or
above a group of paragraphs which are thematically similar).

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 Chapter 24

Style

This chapter

Some of us are natural writers. They are able to write an attractive,

fun, readable text in a matter of minutes. Others lack that skill.
Attractive writing is a matter of talent, but practice sure can help! In
this chapter we will give some tips about how you can upgrade the
style of your writing and set up an attractive text.

Read a lot

If you want to develop a nice style, you should read a lot; novels, blogs,
magazines, whatever. Reading will inspire you to write your own
awesome articles. You will learn how other people form their
sentences and how they built their paragraphs. Finally, lots of read-
ing allows you to develop a gut feeling about what makes a nicely
readable text.

Play with word order and sentence length

Variations on the level of sentences are easily made by varying their

length or the way they are constructed. Try practicing this by taking
a long sentence and see in how many ways you can reformulate it
using the same words.

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 Dutchmommies ~ A sentence like:

Our most important tip in trying to get your baby to sleep through
the night is having some patience.

could also be written as:

Having some patience is our most important tip in trying to get
your baby through sleep to the night.

or:
If you are trying to get your baby to sleep through the night, our
most important tip is to have some patience.

If you vary the way you construct your sentences, your text will be
much more attractive to read.

Mix it up!

For a text to be attractive to a reader, it should be varied - so try to

mix it up a little! Look up synonyms if you tend to use a specific word
very often. Use an aside to elaborate on an example, or include an
image to give readers a breather. Throw in a semicolon or a dash
sometimes to connect two sentences; these techniques could make a
text much more interesting to read.

Dutchmommies ~ By simply mixing sequences of words, you

can transform this:

Having some patience is our most important tip in trying to get

your baby through sleep to the night. Having some patience is

146
very important because eventually all babies will sleep through
the night. Having some patience is harder for some people than
for others, though.

Into this:
Our most important tip in trying to get your baby to sleep through
the night is: have some patience. This is harder for some people
than it is for others, but it is very important, because eventually
all babies will sleep through the night.

Yoast tip

You probably would like to use your focus keyword (the keyword on
which you want your post to rank) a great number of times. This could
make your text very unattractive. And more importantly, using your
focus keyword too often could also lead to over-optimization (eventu-
ally resulting in a penalty from Google). If you want good synonyms
for your focus keyword you should Google your focus keyword.

For instance: if you Google ‘Baby cot’ and look in the results, you will
see that Google also bolds the term ‘Infant Cot’. This means that you
can use Infant Cot as a proper synonym. Read chapter 25 about our
Yoast SEO plugin for more info.

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Do not write too abstract

If you are writing a blog post, you should try to use clear terms. You
should try to use words that have meaning to people, words people
can visualize. Writing about your ‘employees’ is fairly abstract, while
writing about your secretary and the handyman has more meaning to
people. Of course, at some point you will need some abstract terms
and words in your post, but make sure to explain these terms by using
concrete examples as well, in an aside for instance.

Choose a formal or informal style

The (level of) formality of your writing style is a matter of personal

taste, and the taste of your audience. There aren’t really any rights or
wrongs in this matter. Most blogs are not very formal.

At yoast.com, we try to write in an informal and enthusiastic

manner. Our company is young and dynamic and we very much like
what we are doing, so we feel an enthusiastic style fits us and our
audience. We directly address our readers and often ask for their
opinion or feedback.

Use metaphors and expressions

A picture can say more than a thousand words. And using metaphors
is the next best thing. Using metaphors can be a great way to spice up
your text. A metaphor describes a phenomenon with a description

148
that has a different literal meaning. If we say someone is cold as ice,
we all know we do not literally mean the person is made of ice. Using
metaphors or expressions can make your text more concrete and
more fun to read. Do not go overboard though: writing a blog post
with twenty metaphors is too much.

Avoid passive voice

Use of the passive voice results in very distant writing. In sentences

with passive voice it remains unclear who or what is acting. Texts
using a lot of passive voice tend to be hard and unattractive to read.
Avoid using (as much as you can) the passive voice altogether, espe-
cially in call-to-actions.

Passive voice Better alternative

This product can be bought in our

A security employee checks the bags.
webshop.

The employees are informed about The manager informs his employees
their financial contribution. about their financial contribution.

All our posts are checked by a

A colleague checks all our posts.
colleague.

Figure 45: use of passive voice

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Use a writing / grammar tool

We discovered a really awesome tool to help with your writing. You

can put (a piece of) your text in the Hemmingway app (free online
version) and it analyses your text immediately for a number of things,
like whether or not your sentences are too long or too difficult, or if
you’re using a passive voice. At Yoast, we are planning to add more
style-checks in our content analysis tool soon too.

Another way to make sure your blog is any good it to ask your neigh-
bor, friend or a colleague to read it before you post it online. If
someone gives you fair feedback you will be able to make large
improvements in your writing skills.

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 Chapter 25

Writing with the Yoast SEO plugin

This chapter

So now you have composed a blog almost as

beautifully written as Salinger’s The Catcher in
the Rye. You now want to make sure your post
ranks in search engines. In this chapter, we
will guide you through the Content Analysis
tool in the Yoast SEO Plugin.

The Content Analysis Tool:

most important features

The Content Analysis Tool in the Yoast SEO plugin measures many
aspects of the text you are writing. It helps you to make your text
SEO-friendly. We’ll first describe the most important features of the
Content Analysis Tool, and how to use and interpret these features.

1 The plugin allows you to formulate a meta description. This

description has to be a short text which indicates the main topic of
the page. If the meta description contains the search term people
use, the exact text will often be shown by Google below your URL in
the search results.

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2 The plugin analyzes the text you write. It calculates a Flesch
reading-ease score, which indicates the readability of your article.
The Flesch reading-ease score takes the length of sentences and
words into account. In the future, we will add more checks on
readability, making it easy to check SEO and readability of your
text simultaneously.

3 The plugin does numerous content checks. It checks whether or

not you used your keyword in the article heading, the title of the
page, the URL of the page, the content of the article or the meta
description. The plugin also checks the presence of links in your
article and the presence of images in the article. It calculates the
number of words and the density of usage of the focus keyword in
the article. And, the plugin also checks whether or not other pages
on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from
competing with yourself.

If you write a text which is relatively SEO-friendly (based on the

aspects mentioned before) the plugin will indicate this with a green
bullet. Writing pages that are awarded green bullets will help you
improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

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Two warnings before you start!

While optimizing your post for a certain keyword, you should keep
two things in mind:

The first thing is that in this phase (the final, optimizing phase) you
should not change any major things in your article. You have put
effort into writing an attractive, structured and readable text, and the
optimization process should in no way jeopardize that.

The second thing is that you should not change your keyword strat-
egy in this phase. If you have done your keyword research properly
and you have written your post or your article with a focus keyword
in mind, don’t go changing your focus keyword now! Read The
temptation of the green bullet article for more in-depth information
about that.

We will now describe the optimization process in 7 simple steps:

Step 1: Put your text in the WordPress backend

You have written your article or your blog post. You can write directly
in the backend of WordPress or write in any kind of text editor and
copy your text into the WordPress backend; do whatever you like!

If you choose to copy your text in the WordPress backend, choose to

copy without the layout and adapt your layout in the WordPress
back- end, otherwise you might run into some layout problems.

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Make sure to set subheadings into heading 2, sub sub headings to
heading 3 and so on. Then put the title of your post in the title box.

Yoast tip

WordPress has a distraction-free writing mode that enables you to

write in the WordPress backend without being distracted by the
menu, the toolbar, the categories box, etc.

Figure 46: WordPress backend

Step 2: Enter your focus keyword

Scroll down to the Content Analysis Tool in the WordPress backend
and enter your focus keyword in the appropriate box. As explained
before, your focus keyword is the keyword you would like your post to
rank on. Ideally, this should be a keyword which emerged from your
keyword research and which you have kept in mind during the entire
writing process.

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Figure 47: Yoast SEO plugin, Content Analysis Tool

Yoast SEO premium offers the possibility to optimize one article for
more than one focus keyword. Optimizing your post for more than one
search term allows you to rank on more keywords and to retrieve
traffic to your site through more keywords. You can use this for
multiple related terms and for synonyms.

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Step 3: Write a meta description

Enter the meta description of your post. Make sure you use the exact
phrasing of your focus keyword in the meta description and give a
clear description of what your post or article is about. The meta
description will be shown by Google below the URL if people search
for your focus keyword.

Figure 48: Meta Description

It’s important that the focus keyword is contained in your meta

description. Not because it will improve your rankings, but because
otherwise Google won’t show your meta description. Google will try
to match the search query with the description, so if people search
for your focus keyword and the focus keyword is not contained in the
meta description, it’ll just grab a random piece of content from your
page containing the keyword.

The meta description shouldn’t be too long. On the other hand,

there’s no ‘penalty’ either, for having it be too long. So what you
should really optimize for is that logical bits of it are of the right
length and that when it’s cut in half, it still makes sense and still
entices people to click.

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Step 4: Fine-tune your headings
Look critically at your title, the headings and subheadings or your
article. Do these contain your focus keyword? Can you alter them
(without changing the structure or content of your article) in such a
way that they will contain your focus keyword? Do not put your focus
keyword in all of your headings! That is too much! Using your focus
keyword in one heading and in your title should be enough. You can
read more about headings in one of Michiel’s posts.

Step 5: Fine-tune your body text

You should also mention your focus keyword in the text a couple of
times. Make sure to mention it in the first paragraph. Throughout
the text, you should mention it again. As a general rule of thumb: try
to use your search terms in about 1 to 1.5 percent of your text. Say
your article has 300 words, that means you should mention your
search terms 3 to 5 times. 300 words isn’t an exact number, nor is the
amount of keyword mentions, but 300 is a decent minimum number
of words for an article that needs to show authority.

Step 6: Check your bullets!

Clicking on the Content Analysis tab will allow you to see which
aspects of the search engine optimization process were successful.
The green bullets show which aspects are good, while orange and
red bullets indicate where you can improve your SEO strategy. You
don’t have to keep on optimizing until all of your bullets are green.

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 In posts on yoast.com, we
often have a few orange
bullets and sometimes even
one or two red bullets left.
The important thing is that
the overall bullet (the one
on the upper right in the
backend of your post) should
be green. The overall traffic
light will become green if
the majority of your SEO
aspects are covered.
Figure 49: the overall traffic light

Figure 50: the (green) bullets in the Content Analysis Tab

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Step 7: Fill out the Social data
The final step to take in the Yoast SEO meta box is filling the Social
data. If you fill out a description or title for a social network on this
tab, it’s shown in the metadata for the page. This means this
description, title or image will be shown when sharing the page on
this social network. These descriptions basically have the same
requirement as the meta description (which is what they fall back
to), but can usually be longer. They should tell people what to expect,
why they should click.

Figure 51: Content Analysis Tool, Social section

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 Chapter 26

Writing with multiple authors

This chapter

On many blogs, a team of authors work together. For a company blog

this will often be the case. Authors all write blog posts by themselves,
but they still have to work together. Otherwise, a blog post with the
exact same topic could appear twice. Or, authors could use a totally
different style and tone of voice. In this chapter, we will give advice
on how to maintain a blog with more than one author.

Learn from each other

Blogging with more than one author is (in most cases at least) a
really great thing. So before we give any advice on how to work
together, we really want to emphasize the positive side of working
with multiple authors. It means that you can blog more frequently
than when you are alone. You can learn from each other and give
feedback on each other’s writing, making your post that much better.
Everyone has their own expertise, making the scope of topics you
can blog about larger.

Style guide

Composing a style guide for your blog is a great way to make sure
everyone writes and spells in the same way. In a style guide you can
agree to write words in a certain way. Of course, we all should write

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proper English, but use of capitals and brand names could differ. You
could also discuss what proper English is: American English, British
English? As all authors write for the same blog, it will create more
unity if everyone spells the important words in the same way.

In the style guide you could also agree on the length of posts, the use
of paragraphs and headings, and the use of images. It should be a
document in which you write down all the things you want the blogs
to be similar in. If you work with an occasional guest blogger, a style
guide could be a great document to help them write a post that fits
the style of your blog as well.

Dutchmommies ~ At Dutchmommies a total of five authors work

on blog posts. They tend to have their own writing style and
decided amongst each other that having different styles is just
fine. In their opinion, each author should have their own distinct
tone of voice, appealing to a certain audience. Combined, the five
authors would appeal to an even larger audience.

However, the five bloggers did make a list of words and agreed
upon the spelling of this words. For instance, Dutchmommies will
always be written as Dutchmommies with a capital D. They also
made agreements on other words that were used very often. And,
they decided to not use the real names of their children in the
blogs, but refer to them with their initials.

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Editorial calendar

An editorial calendar is really necessary if you are working with

multiple authors on a regularly-updating blog. You could make an
excel sheet, or write down the posts in your own calendar, but you
definitely should make some sort of planning. Decide amongst each
other who writes which posts. These decisions are most easily made
in some sort of meeting in which all authors sit down together. Decide
what topics you want to address and who will write about them.

Dutchmommies ~ The authors of Dutchmommies agreed to read

and give feedback on all of each other’s post. In order to have that
time, the authors make sure that their blog posts are written a
few days before they actually post them on their blog.

Conclusion

Working with multiple authors will most definitely be a good thing

for a blog. It is important though to come to agreement about style,
the topics to write about, and the number of blog posts to write. As
long as authors keep on working and talking together a blog with
multiple authors will be a great success!

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 Chapter 27

Images for your posts

This chapter

From a SEO perspective, the text on your blog is most important.

However, images are really important in getting your audience to
read your post. A post with a nice photo or illustration will receive
lots more attention on social media. In this chapter, we will expound
on the importance of photos and illustrations and give practical tips
to find and optimize images on your own.

Choose images that fit your blog post

If you choose a photo or an illustration for your post, make sure that
the image actually fits the topic of your blog. A picture should make
people want to read your blog or explain something you have written
about in your blog. Text and picture should be about the same topic,
should reinforce one and other.

Tips on how to find images

You cannot just use any picture or photo you find on the internet.
Illustrations have copyright (just like text, software or any other
creation of someone) and should not be used without consent of the
creator. No worries, though, because there are plenty of databases
containing pictures you can either buy or use freely.

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Photos

Take your own pictures

If you really want original pictures that fit your post, you should make
your own photos. Taking your own photos ensures you to have an
original picture, one that can never be found on another blog. Also,
you could shoot a photo that really fits the content of your post. If
you are blogging about your day-to-day life, taking your own pictures
is definitely the way to go. That also goes for food blogs. For a company
blog or a technical blog, or for yoast.com for that matter, it is much
harder to take pictures that actually fit the content of the posts you
are writing.

Dutchmommies ~ At Dutchmommies all pictures are unique.

The authors post photos of their own children (usually not facing
the camera though), of arts and crafts project they are making
and of the food they are preparing. Sometimes Dutchmommies
also use photos of shops or brands they are reviewing. If an author
is writing a post about a certain type of children’s shoes, market-
ing photos of this specific brand are used. In most cases, they also
try to add some photos of their own child wearing the specific
shoes. Dutchmommies feels that using their own photo material
makes the blog more authentic.

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Use photos from platforms

If the content of your blog is somewhat abstract, taking your own

pictures just isn’t doable. You could then buy or download pictures
from a platform. You could use many platforms to download free or
paid images. Yay Images, Shutterstock, LibreStock, Adobe Stock,
123RF, Getty Images, iStock, nature in stock, Pixabay, Unsplash. As
mentioned before, make sure your stock image isn’t a photo that is
used by everyone though.

Figure 52: Facebook page Ariane - The Overexposed Stock Image Model

Illustrations

Hire an illustrator

If you have specific ideas about what illustrations for your blog
should look like, but you are not able to create or buy them yourself,
you could also work with a professional illustrator (as we do at Yoast).
We would like to emphasize that you really need a budget for that, but
that it could pay off. Working with a professional illustrator will get
you original and on-topic content. Above that, if you work with the

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same illustrator for multiple blogs, you will also get come continuity
between posts and within your blog. People will recognize your posts
just by looking at the illustration.

Figure 53: images specially created for posts on yoast.com

If you see illustrations you like (e.g. on Facebook), make sure to check
out who the artist is. Googling the name will probably lead you to
their portfolio (if they did their SEO well!). Lots of illustrators and
artist work freelance. On Facebook you can also find collectives of
artist offering their services. Again, these professionals need to be
paid. You should also be aware that the copyright of the illustration
stays with the artist, make sure to make clear arrangements about
the use of illustrations on your blog.

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 Yoast tip

While lots of illustrators work freelance, ours don’t.  At Yoast we

have a team of illustrators in-house that make appropriate illustra-
tions for our blog posts. We used to use stock photography, but
we’ve written so many posts now that we kept using the same sort of
images, so we decided to make our own, and it really adds to the
appearance of our blog.

Optimizing images

What are alt tags?

In order to optimize your blog more and make it accessible for blind
and visually-impaired people, you should make use of alt tags. The
alt tag describes what’s on the image and the function of the image
on the page. So if you have an image that’s used as a button to buy
product X, the alt tag would say: “button to buy product X”.

Why are alt tags important for SEO?

Google places a relatively high value on alt tags to determine what is

on the image and to determine the topic of the surrounding text.
This is why, in our Yoast SEO content analysis, we have a check
specifically to see whether you have at least one image with an alt
tag that contains your focus keyword.

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How to set up alt tags

When you upload an image in WordPress, you can set an alt attribute.
By default it uses the image filename in the title attribute, which, if
you have no alt attribute, it copies to the alt attribute. It’s better than
nothing, but it’s still rather bad, because ‘DCIM_0054’ doesn’t really
tell you anything about the image. You really should take the time to
craft a proper alt text for every image you add to a post. The interface
makes it easy: click an image, hit the edit button, and find the alt
attribute field.

Figure 54: Image Details interface

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 Section 7

Marketing

If you have a website, you want an audience. Nobody wants to perform

in an empty room. Ranking high in search engines by doing your SEO
flawlessly will of course help. But you can do more! In this section,
we will give you lots of practical marketing tips to make sure your
audience will grow and will keep on growing! Mind you, growth does
not equal more money. Your audience can grow, but the revenue of
your site might not. In the next section we will explicitly talk about
monetizing your site.

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Yoast.com ~ In this section our very own blog yoast.com will be
our central example. Yoast.com started as an SEO blog. In the
beginning, Yoast (which was only Joost de Valk at that time)
wrote posts about SEO and WordPress. Also, Yoast offered a
number of free SEO plugins, which were eventually merged into
what is currently known as Yoast SEO. As Yoast started growing
an audience and Joost de Valk was speaking at conventions and
doing more and more SEO consultancy, the site started to change
a bit. The SEO blog still is a huge part of the website, but the site
also has the character of a webshop as we offer eBooks, SEO
courses, premium plugins and site reviews.

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Marketing and mission

Marketing has to do with getting more people getting to know and

like your company, your products, your brand. But in order to do
successful marketing, you should always choose marketing strategies
that fit the mission of your website (see chapter 1 of section 1). Your
mission, the thing that makes your company or your website so
unique, should always be reflected in the content of your marketing.

Marketing should also fit your brand.

Branding is the way you want to present
your company to the world, visually or in
the way you communicate. It could even
be in the way you make your products.
Perhaps you want your brand to be hip
and young, or you’d rather come across as
traditional and solid. Branding is a matter
of personal taste, and most importantly,
branding should reflect your mission.

Yoast.com ~ The mission of Yoast is (in short) to help people

optimize their website. Yoast offers free and premium products in
order to fulfill that mission. In our Facebook and blog posts (our
main marketing channels) we always keep in mind our mission.
The type of posts should fit our mission and our brand. That does
not mean that every post we write is about optimizing websites.
Especially on Facebook, we also share posts about our office life.

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We make sure that these posts fit our brand; We like to come across
as enthusiastic, young, hardworking and fun. We post pictures of
the Yoast team doing sports, having lunch or building LEGOs
together.

We feel that these pictures fit the brand of Yoast. We would never
place drunken party-photos, or promiscuous photos of Yoast team
members, as we feel these would not fit the Yoast brand.

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 Chapter 28

Getting to know your current audience

The first step in marketing is to find out what your audience looks
like right now. Who are your visitors? Where are they from? Who do
I currently engage with my blog posts? In order to answer these
questions, there are different kinds of research you can do.

Conducting a survey

Google Analytics gives some information about the visitors to your

site. But besides that, you’re pretty much left in the dark about your
audience. The only way to really get an idea of your audience, their
characteristics and their intentions, is to directly ask your audience
questions, through surveys or polls. Knowing your audience better
allows you to adjust your marketing strategies on your audiences,
making them more effective.

At yoast.com we regularly research our audience. As our website is

growing rapidly, it’s important to keep track of how our audience
changes. When Joost started yoast.com it was only a blog about SEO
and WordPress and most of his post were rather technical. Nowa-
days, Yoast offers plugins, eBooks and online consultancy, being
much more than a blog. And posts aren’t just technical anymore. So
we have to wonder: who is our audience nowadays? Do we still
appeal to a technical (nerdy) group of people? Are our customers
mainly developers? Or is our audience not that technically skilled?

173
And what consequences would that have for the marketing of our
products? Perhaps a technically skilled developer is more easily
convinced of the use of one of our plugins than someone without
the ability to read code. These kinds of questions were the starting
point of our research.

Which questions to ask?

The questions you ask your audience depend on the things you want to
know from them of course. Asking some simple background questions
(gender, age, level of education, profession) is always a good idea. This
background characteristics allow for a nice profile of your audience.
Also make sure to ask your audience about their preferences in social
media and ask them whether or not they read your newsletter. This
information can be really useful in planning your marketing and
growth strategy.

Setting up a questionnaire

It seems so easy. You just put some questions in a survey and present
them to your audience. They’ll choose between some answers you
made up. Creating survey questions however, is complicated.

If your questions aren’t well formulated you could be measuring the

wrong thing. In that case, your results will be absolutely useless.
Questions should be valid, meaning that they have to measure what
you want them to measure. And they shouldn’t suggest that one of

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the answers is better than the rest. Also questions should be reliable,
meaning that they should be answered in the same way by the same
people, regardless of other factors (read more about validity and
reliability in this post).

Open questions or multiple choice

You should think about the type of questions you want to formulate.
The type of questions you choose largely depend on the number of
people you’ll reach. Open questions (in which you will allow people
to type their answers) will give much more information, but the
information can become overwhelming if you have many respon-
dents. Imagine yourself having to analyze hundreds of open answers.
If your survey contains more than 30-40 persons, we would advise
multiple choice questions.

Formulating survey questions

Here are some guidelines you should bear in mind if you’re formu-
lating questions for a survey:

1 Make sure your question isn’t too vague. For instance, don’t ask
“have you ever visited my website?” but “how often did you visit my
website in the last year?”.

2 Make sure your question is easily understood - try to avoid com­­

plicated terms and long sentences.

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3 Make sure you ask only one thing in your question. For example,
don’t ask people whether they like your products and your service.
It could well be that they like your products but they don’t like your
service, which makes the question impossible to answer.

4 Make sure your question it not suggestive. Formulations like:

“don’t you also think that...” or “isn’t it true that...”, should be avoided.
Keep things neutral.

5 Make sure that your question is applicable. You should only ask
people what they thought of your products if these people have
actually used your products. So you’d have to ask whether they’ve
ever bought one of your products before asking such a question.

6 Think about which answers you let people choose from. Try to
present them with all the possible answering possibilities. This
isn’t easy, but try to look at all the angles. Be aware that answering
possibilities give context to your respondents.

7 Think about the order in which you ask your questions. You want
people to fill out the entire questionnaire. Give everybody the
same clear introduction. Begin with easy and non-threatening
questions. Asking for income at the beginning of a survey is not
wise. Make sure the questions follow a logical order. Pay attention
to context! If you ask people about their opinion of your products
after you asked them about your service, you could have influenced
people with your previous questions.

8 Always make sure you test your questionnaire on a few individuals

who could be part of your audience.

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9 Make sure your questionnaire is not too long, as this could scare
people off. Test how long it takes to complete the survey (and
inform people about this). If you have to delete some questions to
make your questionnaire shorter, you’d want to keep the questions
of which the answers will definitely help you to improve your blog/
marketing activities.

Yoast tip

Don’t let people think the questionnaire will never end. Inform them
about the number of questions they can expect.

1 2 3 4 5

Are you satisfied with our service?

satisfied no opinion dissatisfied

Figure 55: indications of the number of questions

So how do you collect the data?

After you conscientiously formulated your questionnaire, you can set

up your online survey. There are numerous free (and premium)
services that allow for an online questionnaire, like Polldaddy or
SurveyMonkey for example, but other packages could work fine as
well. At Yoast we usually work with Polldaddy because of the beautiful
integration with WordPress.

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Think about where you want to deploy your questionnaire. You could
set it to pop up when people enter a certain page on your website, or
you could send a link to it in your newsletter. Whichever works best
for you and your audience.

Analyzing your data

Once people fill out your questionnaire you will have a lot of data
stored in the online application of your choice. Now comes the time
to analyze it. Some services allow you to export the results to an Excel
file, and you can subsequently do analyses in any statistical package
of your choosing. Excel works fine, but we would recommend using
SPSS or R. If you are not such a statistics nerd, most services offer a
built-in way to visualize the results too.

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 Chapter 29

Growth towards new audiences

As we’ve just seen, you can analyze the audience your website
currently has. You can put them into hard numbers. The audience to
which you want to grow is not measurable, however. Nevertheless, it
is really important to have a clear picture in mind of the audience you
would like to reach with your blog. In this chapter, we will give tips
on how to formulate this goal and how to adapt your growth strategy
to that desired audience.

Current versus desired audience

It could well be that your current audience consists of exactly the

kind of people you want to have visiting your website. Your growth
question will then be: where do I find more of these people?

It could also be that your current audience and your desired audience
are somewhat different. Your growth question will then be: where do
I find my new audience?

Yoast.com ~ At yoast.com, our initial audience mainly consisted

of 30-year-old males who were able to write code. But, we were
actually aspiring to reach a new group of people: both male and
female, both young and old, and those less skilled in (web)devel-
opment. Our goal was to get a bigger audience of more generic
WordPress users.

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Defining a desired audience

An important step in your marketing and growth strategy is defining

the audience you aim to grow to. Who are the people you would like
to welcome at your website? It is hard to give tips on how to decide to
which audience you’d like to grow. It all depends on your mission
(section 1 of this eBook) and the content of your site. For your growth
strategy, though, it is of great importance to write down a clear defi-
nition of the audience you want to ‘attack’ with your marketing and
growth strategy. A clear definition will help you through the process
of making all the (big and small) marketing decisions.

In order to define your desired audience you should ask yourself the
following questions:
• what does my audience look like in terms of gender, education, age
and income?
• what kind of websites (other than yours) would your desired audi-
ence frequent?
• what kind of activities does your desired audience partake in online
(do they read blog posts, watch videos, play online games)?
• what kind of social media does your desired audience use?

These questions could be a starting point for a brainstorm about a

‘new’ audience you would like to appeal to.

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Adapt your choices!

Having a clear vision of the people you want to reach is important for
every choice you will make concerning marketing. Trying to reach a
30+ audience via Snapchat is simply not a good marketing strategy.
Both the content of your blog posts as well as the channel you choose
should be adapted to the audience you are aiming to reach.

Yoast.com ~ At yoast.com, we focus on a large audience. In

essence, all people who are interested in SEO are people who
could be our visitors. Most of our current audience is 30+. These
people are on Facebook and Twitter. In order to reach a younger
demographic, we started using Instagram as well. But Instagram
is especially suited for sharing pictures and illustrations, whereas
we tend to write a lot of content. In order to do well on Instagram
and to perform even better on Facebook, we decided to make very
awesome illustrations for every post. Hopefully, our new content
(illustrations) and use of new social media will add more young
people to our current audience.

Figure 56: Yoast on Instagram

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Commenting on other blogs!

A very good way to get exposure for your site is by reacting and
commenting on other blogs. Make sure to adapt the choices of the
blogs you comment on to the audience you would like to address. If
you read something interesting on such a blog, something you may
have written about yourself as well, you should comment. In the
comment you should share your view on the matter. You could also
place a link to one of your own blogs. Make sure your comments are
always nice and polite and make sure you only comment if your own
blogs genuinely applies to the piece you are reading. You don’t want
to end up in the spam filter.

Yoast.com ~ When Joost de Valk started blogging about SEO back

in 2006, he commented a lot on other SEO blogs, sharing his view
and discussing it with other blog authors. He really built a name in
the SEO community by being an active commenter. He usually
didn’t even link to his own blog, just shared his view on the topic at
hand. But showing his expertise on different matters concerning
SEO still gave lots of exposure to Joost’s own blog.

Advertising

If you have a budget, you could also decide to place ads on for instance
Facebook or Google to promote your site. Facebook also has the
possibility to boost your post, making sure it’ll get more exposure.

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Figure 57: boost your post in Facebook

Facebook actually allows you to really focus on the demographic you

would like to reach with settings for age group, location and interests,
making it quite easy to target your desired audience.

Figure 58: Facebook insights

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 Chapter 30

Social media

Social media are a necessity for the growth and marketing of your
site. It depends on your (desired) audience and on your content which
social media are best suited for your site. In this chapter, we will
explain the importance of social media, describe the minimum for
every blog and give practical tips. For more information, you should
definitely check our posts about social media on yoast.com.

Yoast.com ~ If we release an article on yoast.com, the first thing we

do after releasing it is use social media to push that article into the
public’s attention. We have a number of followers on Twitter that
automatically share our content with their followers, which creates
a snowball effect: more and more people will know we have published
that article and the new and return traffic to our website increases.

Social media are important for SEO

Social media are a necessary part of any marketing strategy, but they
should also be a part of your SEO strategy. As social media become
more popular, Google and other search engines can’t ignore them
any longer.

This means that your site’s popularity on social media is getting

more and more important for your SEO. The reason for this is simple:
if people talk about you, online or offline, you are relevant to the
topic at hand, and you’ll want to know about these conversations.

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Social media is the new marketplace, where people share questions
and reviews about products and events, and you’d better make sure
those are your products and events, right? Partaking in these conver-
sations can be great for your brand and could lead to growth.

Tweets and Facebook posts don’t get the highest rankings in Google,
but Facebook pages and profiles for sure do. See what happens when
you do a search for Yoast:

Figure 59: Google search results

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Which social media suits your business?

The first step in determining a social media strategy is whether or not

that social medium is one that you’d want to be found on. In other
words, does this social medium suit the message and branding of your
company? And on top of that: does this social medium offer the
options and reach you’re looking for?

Social media like Facebook and Twitter offer a lot of ways to advertise
and make your brand and company known beyond the scope of your
followers. With other social media, this will be a bit more difficult.
Make sure to think about what presence on the considered social
media would mean for your company. Make sure that this aligns with
how you want your business to be branded.

Yoast tip

Showing the number of followers on social media gives your visitors

‘social proof’, it makes them think: “everyone follows them, I should too”.

Figure 60: social media stats

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Which social media does your (desired) audience
use?

Different kinds of people use different kinds of social media. So you

have to know what social media your audience uses. For instance, if
your company mainly works in the business-to-business area, you
should definitely be active on LinkedIn. And if you have a young audi-
ence, your business is best off using social media such as Snapchat,
Vine, Tumblr and Instagram:

Snapchat 45% 26% 13% 10% 6% 1

Vine 28% 23% 17% 15% 10% 7% 

Tumblr 28% 25% 18% 13% 11% 6% 

Instagram 23% 26% 19% 15% 12% 4% 

Twitter 19% 22% 21% 18% 13% 7% 

Google+ 16% 25% 22% 18% 13% 7% 

Facebook 16% 22% 19% 18% 15% 10% 

Pinterest 15% 26% 21% 17% 15% 7% 

LinkedIn 14% 21% 22% 18% 16% 9% 

18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65+

% of users in each age group – US data – users aged 18 and over – December 2014
Source: comScore, image source: Business Insider, BI Intelligence

Figure 61: age distribution at the top social networks

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Social media you can’t ignore

At the moment there’s basically only one social medium you really
can’t ignore and that’s Facebook. Why? Let us show you:

Facebook (FB) 1,550

WhatsApp 900
QQ 860
FB Messenger 800
QZone 653
WeChat 650
Tumblr 555
Instagram 400
Twitter 320
Baidu Tieba 300
Skype 300
Viber 249
Sina Weibo 222
LINE 212
Snapchat 200
YY 122
VKontakte 100
Pinterest 100
BBM 100
LinkedIn 100

Image source: Statista, © Statista 2016

Figure 62: number of active users in millions

Facebook currently has over 1.5 billion active users every month.
That’s over 20% of the entire world population being on Facebook at
least once a month. So you can see why this is one bandwagon you’ll
want to get on.

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A blog should thus definitely have its own Facebook page. And your
posts should all be shared on Facebook. That way, all the people who
follow your page see new posts in their timeline. WordPress can do
this automatically for you when you publish an article. Some people
will like, share or comment on the Facebook posts, giving them even
more exposure.

How to use social media

Below are some tips you can use in order to set up or to improve your
social media strategy.

1 keep your account alive

The most important advice in the use of social media is that you
need to keep your account ‘alive’. Make sure you post on a regular
basis. Sharing your new blog posts is a good start, but also let
people know what you’re working on or what interests you. If you
go on vacation, schedule posts for the time you are away, or at
least let people know when you will be back. And after a while you
could do a repost to draw people to your website with old(er)
content.

2 write captivating excerpts

If you decide to share your blog post on social media, make sure to
select/write a short and appealing excerpt in order to draw people
in. You could for instance choose the most important sentence or
the main point of your post. Or you could simply choose to share

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 the introduction of the blog post if you feel that is captivating
enough. You want it to get people to click on the link and read the
whole post. And do make sure that people can easily navigate to
other pages on your website once they are there.

Figure 63: a captivating excerpt to draw people in

3 diversify
Make sure you write different types of posts on your social media
account. As mentioned in point 1, you could share your blog posts,
but you could also share short news items, videos or simply some
(behind-the-scenes) pictures.

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 Yoast.com ~ At Yoast we really think about the types of posts we
make on Facebook and Twitter. The main focus of our social
media posts should be on information about SEO. We share new
posts, and repost older content from yoast.com when it is relevant
or gets updated. Next to that, we share pictures about what we do
at our office. These pictures show that we are working on a new
plugin, brainstorming about new products or simply that we are
having fun together. These personal posts should make our brand
more ‘fun’. And they receive a lot of likes!

In order to decide which posts do well on social media, you should

really analyze the number of views, shares and likes. Types of posts
that receive a lot of views and likes should be shared more often.

4 Handle comments
If you share your posts on social media, you could also receive
comments. You should handle these comments swiftly. Read
chapter 12 of section What to write about? for more tips on this.

5 Use awesome illustrations

For some social media (Pinterest and Instagram) it is all about the
illustrations. But also on Facebook visual content is really import-
ant. They make your post stand out from all of the other posts in
someone’s timeline. Read chapter 27 of section SEO copywriting for
more info on this.

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6 Be part of the community
If you are active in a certain community or niche, you will soon
discover other important people in that area that your audience
follows. Follow them too and interact with them, this could help
your and their audiences grow.

7 Add metadata
Smart use of (hash)tags can also help your growth immensely. For
instance if you are at an event, include the hashtag for that event
in your post, so everyone searching for that term will come across
it. There are also hashtags for certain interests or technology.
Some people might even retweet everything that is posted in a
certain hashtag, which is a great way to boost your post. But don’t
go overboard! Nobody likes a post that is filled with all kinds of
random hashtags.

If you think about it, social media and blogging are very similar in
many aspects!

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 Chapter 31

Email marketing

Email marketing can be a really good marketing strategy to bind

your audience to your site. It is relatively easy to set up an email
newsletter and send it to your audience. In this chapter, we will
explain why email marketing can be an important element of your
growth and marketing strategy, and will give practical tips in how to
set up a newsletter.

Importance of email marketing

People who sign up for a newsletter expect and want to receive your
information. So this part of your audience is very committed. And it
really pays off too. As the costs of email marketing are very low, email
marketing has a relatively high return-on-investment.

Email is a great way to increase your customers’ retention. What this

means is that it’ll increase the amount of customers that purchase
repeatedly, instead of just once. So this would help make your clients
recurring clients. By emailing your customers on a regular basis, your
brand will stay top of mind and they’ll return more quickly to buy
something again. Of course your emails would have to be interesting,
enticing and engaging for this to really work.

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A newsletter is relatively easy to set up through a service like
MailChimp or TinyLetter. It is also easy to target specific subgroups
within your entire audience with a newsletter. It is a great way to
inform your readers that you have written new blogs and that they
should come and visit your blog.

Pitfalls of email marketing

Filling a newsletter can be a lot of extra work. Work on top of writing

those posts for your site. And if you want to send out a newsletter on
a regular basis, you will have to fill it with content that is actually
useful to your audience. That can be a challenge.

People will not open your email or will unsubscribe from your news-
letter if they do not like your content. It is very important not to
annoy people with content they do not want, or have already seen.

Yoast.com ~ At Yoast we send out a newsletter every Thursday.

We plan the content of this newsletter in advance. In order to keep
people interested, we usually make sure that at least one of our
topic is new and informational. We always refer to the blog post
that appeared on yoast.com that week, and we also mention a
sale or promote one of our premium products. We try to find a
mixture between sales and information. Our newsletter really
pays off. It keeps our audience involved and informed, but also
creates a lot of direct sales.

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How to set up a newsletter?

1 Start with something important

Most people will not read your entire newsletter. That’s why it is
important to start with the thing you really want people to know
about. You could also choose something that people would like to
read, something that will draw their attention and make them read
the rest of your newsletter.

2 Make sure to choose a good subject line

Whether or not people actually open your newsletter depends on
the subject you have given your newsletter. MailChimp makes it
really easy to test open rates of newsletters with different subject
lines and it really pays of to think about and test which subject
lines work for you.

3 Clarity and focus

Make sure the layout of your newsletter is good and looks appeal-
ing, and that people are able to read your newsletter on a mobile
devices. Make sure you have clear calls-to-action, things you want
people to do after they read (part of) your newsletter. Give them
enough opportunities to click through to your website (and buy
your stuff or read your posts).

4 Tone of voice
The people who have signed up to receive your newsletter actually
like your products, your blog or your company. So your tone of voice
should be friendly and enthusiastic, not too aggressive or sales-y.

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 Your newsletter should make your audience even more fond of you
and your products. You are telling them something other people
will not hear. Make them feel special.

5 Make it visual
If a newsletter is just a wall of text it could become a bit boring.
Illustrations and pictures can make the newsletter look much more
attractive and pleasing to read.

Tips on making your newsletter that much

more awesome!

1 MailChimp
There are a number of helpful tools that make sending out emails
that much easier. At Yoast, we love MailChimp. MailChimp allows
you to send out emails to 2000 subscribers for free, and has a great
interface to write content and manage your subscribers.

2 Test!
You should test which topics converts best into sales or new read-
ers. Simply follow the signups of your newsletter, the shares of
your posts on social media etc. as you post new content. It’s
harder to evaluate this for old content, but you could still track
the referring page for signups. To do this you have to make sure
that when people sign up for your newsletter, the thank-you page
is hosted on your own site and has your Google Analytics code,
otherwise tracking the signup is going to be hard.

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 You should also look into the time and day of the week you are
sending your newsletter. For some blogs, the weekend could be a
time to draw people to your blog, while for other (more company
related or professional blogs) a weekday and an office hour would
be most profitable.

3 Getting people to subscribe

In order to send people your newsletter, you first have to convince
them to subscribe to this newsletter. Make sure you offer a subscribe
field beneath your posts and on visible places on your website. You
can also use a pop-up to invite people to subscribe. At Yoast, we
use optinmonster for this.

Yoast.com ~ In order to get more people to subscribe to our

newsletter at yoast.com we use a pop-up that appears if people
are about to leave our site. Such a pop-up can be really annoying,
so we made sure that people can close it and will not see it for a
few weeks after doing so. And in order to make subscribing to our
newsletter even more appealing, we offer a free eBook that people
will receive once they subscribe.

Figure 64: the pop-up at yoast.com to convince people to subscribe

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4 Make sure your newsletter is mobile friendly
Mobile is also really growing in the email market (see chapter 7 in
the section about technical SEO). You should really make sure your
newsletter is as mobile friendly as possible. A lot of the mailing
services offer default templates that are mobile friendly and will
scale down nicely. If you don’t want to spend too much time or
money on your newsletter, this is a good option.

Another thing to take into account with mobile emails, is your

subject line. Since mobile screens are obviously not as wide as
desktop screens, your subject lines might not actually fit the
screen. This might not be a problem at all, but it’s a good one to
keep in mind. It could be a good idea to test this.

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 Chapter 32

Link building

Links from other sites (or backlinks) are a really important ranking
factor. But link building done the wrong way can easily backfire. It
can result in lower rankings instead of higher rankings in Google.
Link building just isn’t that easy. That doesn’t mean it’s rocket
science, it means it takes a lot of work. In this chapter, we will discuss
the importance of link building and explain how link building should
be conducted in both a holistic SEO strategy as well as a growth
strategy.

How does a link help the ranking of your site?

A link to your site can help you get higher rankings in four ways:
• It adds value to the receiving page, allowing it to improve its
visibility in the search engines.
• It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page
on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.
• The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the
topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.
• People click on links, resulting in so called direct traffic.

The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the
topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same
topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a
page about an entirely different topic. On top of that, a link from

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within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a
footer. Furthermore, the more links there are on a page, the less
each individual link is worth.

Bad Reputation
In recent years, link building has gotten a somewhat nasty reputation.
Once people noticed that links from other sites resulted in higher
rankings, they began to abuse this. They got links from sites that did
not have any relevance to their own site. In other cases, people bought
links from other sites. Buying links polluted the search engine. That
way, not the best information but the people who bought most links
ranked highly in Google. That is why Google started giving penalties
to companies who buy links or (mis)use links from non-related
companies. If you get a penalty from Google, your site will disappear
from the search results. The bad reputation of link building (and our
hesitation to write about link building) comes from companies who
were a bit too enthusiastic in link building and got penalties from
Google. Does this mean that you shouldn’t do any link building at all?
Of course not!

Link building should be part of your

growth strategy
Links are important for your SEO. And link building should there-
fore definitely be a part of your holistic SEO strategy. But more
importantly, link building should be part of your growth strategy.
Links can help generate traffic for your site directly. The reason

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links were invented was to send you to other pages you might also
enjoy. And that is exactly the way you should handle your link building
strategy. Place links on sites that will actually generate traffic to your
own site because they are about related subjects.

How to start link building?

If you have a clear picture of your present and desired audience in

mind (as discussed in chapters 28 and 29 of this section), you can
make a list of websites that could possibly help you in reaching your
new audience. Links from these websites could help you to reach your
new audience.

Every time you write an awesome blog post, you should dive into this
list of websites. Choose sites from it that might link to the article you
have written. If you have a long tail keyword approach (chapter 9,
section 3) the number of websites which will be fit to link to your blog
post will be small. Make an effort to find those websites that really fit
the specific topic of your blog post or article. These websites will
probably be very willing to link, as your blog post really fits their
content. More importantly, the traffic that will come to your website
via that link will really fit the topic of your article (making chances of
conversion and recurring visits much higher).

If you really have put an effort in both the writing of your content as
well as in finding websites that fit the content of your article, you
should contact the website you would like a link from. Tell them
about your content or your product and ask them to write about it and

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link to it. You can use email, but in many cases Twitter or even the
telephone is a great way to contact people as well. Make sure to reach
out in a personal way, never send out automated emails.

Yoast.com ~ At yoast.com, we do not have an active link building

strategy. That is, we do not contact other people or other websites
only to score links from these sites. However, we definitely contact
people asking them to pay attention to our products and blogs. We
ask people for tweets or to write about our eBooks. We also send
our eBooks for free to influential bloggers if we think they’ll like it
and write about it. Our goal in link building is always to attract
new audiences. Yoast.com isn’t that big in Germany for example.
We would definitely like to grow a larger audience there. We
contact our German friends and colleagues on a regular basis
hoping their audience will also discover our SEO products.

What not to do!

In the old days, link building meant putting links on as much external
pages as possible, often by buying or trading links. Since Google
Penguin came out these tactics have become a risky SEO strategy. If
your link building tactics include spamming, your site risks a Google
Penalty and could be banned from Google’s results completely.
Placing a lot of links will probably help the ranking of your site for a
short while, but probably not in the long run. I suspect most of you
will know quite some of the link building tactics you should definitely
avoid, so I’ll sum up the most obvious link building don’ts and will
then discuss some less well known – but equally important don’ts.

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Obvious link building don’ts

You should:
• not buy large amounts of links,
• not exchange links,
• not use any automated programs to get links,
• not partake in guest blogging with very thin and off-topic content,
• not comment on blogs or forums if your only purpose is to leave a
link in the comment,
• not over optimize your anchor text.
• not have links that are unrelated to the topic of your website,
• not have links from sites that have no real content,
• not have links from spammy sites whose only purpose is to adver-
tise for gambling, viagra and porn (unless your website is about
gambling, viagra and porn).

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Don’t link everything to the homepage

You should make sure to get links to different pages on your website
and not solely to your homepage. If you only – or mainly – receive
links to your homepage, your link building will look spammy. Of
course, if someone is writing about your brand, a link to your home-
page is appropriate. But if a website writes about products or about
news of your company, they usually link to your product, news or
blog pages. That is just the natural way people link to other pages.
You should make sure your link building strategy resembles the
natural way people link to websites. Extra benefit: linking to a more
specific page will probably lead to a better conversion on your website!
So you should work on getting links for important product pages, or
for your cornerstone content pages. Get links to those pages where
the deal is closed! It will get your website a trustworthy link profile
and will increase the conversion at the same time!

Pay for specific links? We say: don’t!

Another link building don’t is buying links. You probably all know
that buying links in large bulks from companies claiming to get you
ranked fast is not something we would promote at Yoast. But what
about a link from an individual company? From a high quality website
right in your niche? Is it wrong to buy one link from such a company?
How will Google ever find out about that?

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Google won’t know about one link you buy from one company. Still,
we would recommend not to do so. If this company has sold one link
to you, they could sell more links to more people. And although one
link will not alarm Google, as the amount of questionable links on a
website rises, the risk of getting hit by Penguin or a manual penalty
rises as well.

Don’t recycle your content on different sites

A way to get links is to write articles about your company or about

your products and try to get these articles published on other sites.
Beware to not publish the same content on different sites though!
An article in which sentences and paragraphs are switched and a
few words are altered still remains duplicate content to the original
article. Especially if you repeat this trick several times. Spinning
content is not creating new content. It is a link building trick and it
could backfire. Write the articles for the audience of the website
you’re sending your piece to. Yes, that is a lot of work. No one said
link building is easy…

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 Section 8

Monetizing your site

Just writing a blog post every day does not pay the bills. For some
website owners, the ultimate goal is to be able to live off the earnings
of just their website. Making money with your site appears to be a
dream for many. In what ways could one make money with a site? In
this section we will give some tips on how to make money with your
site (chapter 33). We will also give a short introduction in how to
change your site in a shop (chapter 34). Finally, we will teach you the
basics of doing conversion optimization (chapter 35).

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Hiking Time ~ Hiking Time is a blog on which a group of friends
write about their hiking trips, tips to spend a weekend hiking, and
good hiking gear. Hiking Time started out as a hobby for the
authors, the blog was intended for friends and family. But along
the way, Hiking Time got quite an audience, with over 1.200
unique visitors each day. So the bloggers of Hiking Time started
thinking about making some money with their hobby project.

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 Chapter 33

How to make money with your site

In this chapter, we will talk you through the different ways you can
make money with your site. We will give some practical tips and
discuss the upsides and downsides of these different ways of mone-
tizing your site. In our opinion, there are five ways to make money
with your site:

1 Advertising

You can set up an area on your site’s homepage (or another page)
dedicated to running advertisements. You will get paid based on the
number of clicks on the banner, or on the number of times the ad is
shown to your audience. Google Adsense has a relatively easy pay-
per-click model you can set up in just a few steps. Google Adsense
will then decide which ads are shown on your webpage.

Advertising is simple to set up, but it won’t make you rich unless you
have a lot of visitors. Also, ads can make your site much slower and it
can potentially annoy your readers if you place too many. And more
importantly, ad blocking has become more and more prevalent.
A growing group of people uses software that will hide all advertise-
ments. This trend is making advertising with Google Adsense more
difficult. It is hard to predict how ad blocking will develop from here.

Of course, if you have a site with a large audience, perhaps there are
companies who want to put an ad on your website directly. You will

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have to do some reaching out and communication in that case. The
major advantage of communicating directly with the companies that
place ads on your website, is that you will have complete control over
the types of advertisements that are shown on your website. There-
fore you can make sure that the ads fit your blog and that you agree
with the content of the ads. Advertising in such a way will not make
your site much slower as running Adsense does and ad blockers will
not as easily hide these advertisements from your audience, as they
are not generated by a specific program like Google Adsense.

Yoast tip

In the early days of Yoast, we had a great experience using BuySellAds,

they will sell ad space on your site but you can approve each ad indi-
vidually. Especially when you have advertisers in your space you’d
rather not have show up on your site, this is a very good idea. These
ads can also be paid by the time period they’re showing on your site,
irrespective of the number of page views.

2 Promoted Posts

If your site has a large (and loyal) audience, companies may be inter-
ested in reaching your audience, telling them about their products or
services. They could ask you to write about these things. And they
could pay you to do so. Lots of bloggers receive free products to
review, but some companies also pay bloggers to write about their
products. Writing posts in which you promote a product can be a nice
way to make money with your site.

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Writing promoted posts also has a downside. Your objectivity as a
blogger could become the object of speculation. It could be wise to
make clear to your readers when you are being paid for your opinion
(in writing, or by making it clear in the design). It all depends on your
blogging style and subjects.

Hiking Time ~ At Hiking Time, one of the authors received a pair

of very expensive hiking boots. The company which produced the
boots only asked the author to try the boots and did not ask
anything in return. They simply hoped that he would write about
the boots if he liked them. The author tried the new boots during
a hiking trip and was really enthusiastic about them, and wrote a
very positive review of the boots in his next blog.

He then got some critical remarks about this review. Some of his
readers wondered why he was reviewing these boots and not
other types of boots. Other readers were surprised that the author
was recommending such expensive boots, while his other posts
were mainly about cheap hiking trips. People got a bit suspicious
about the author’s objectivity.

The author was really surprised by the reactions of his audience,

but understood the commotion. He wrote a second post in which
he was more upfront, admitting that he got the boots for free
from a company who loved his blog. It was an opportunity for
him to try out these really expensive boots - something he
normally wouldn’t buy – and because he instantly loved the boots
he wrote the positive review.

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 Yoast tip

When you’re selling promoted posts, receiving products for free or

are adding affiliate links to your site, make sure to disclose this to
your readers. Not only is this the morally right thing to do, you’re also
required to disclose this by law in many countries.

3 Affiliate products or services

Another way to make money with your site is via affiliate products.
An affiliate product is a product that you recommend or write about
in a blog post, or for which you place a banner or an ad on your
website. If someone clicks on the link on your website they will go to
the webshop of the company which product you are promoting. If
people actually buy that product, you will receive a percentage of the
amount they are paying. You will not receive money just by showing
the ad to your audience, but only in case your audience actually buys
something after they’ve clicked on the banner on your site.

A lot of retailers offer an affiliate program. You will receive a track-

able link that you include in one of your blog posts (or in an ad), and
you will get a commission if someone clicks on the link via your blog
and buys the product. How much commission you get varies greatly
on the type of product; It could be only 1 or 2% for physical products,
but for digital products it could really be a lot more.

There are a number of affiliate networks you could join, large ones
like CJ and Shareasale, but there are also company-specific networks,

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like Amazon’s affiliate network and the eBay partner network. Which
one fits your blog the best really depends on your niche and what
type of product you could sell to that niche.

Affiliation can be a really good way to make money with your site. As
with promoted post, the risk with affiliation could be that the objec-
tivity of the author could become object of speculation. In our view,
you should make sure that the products you promote are products
you really like. Products you would recommend to your friends and
family. That way, you will make sure that you are not promoting
things to your beloved audience that do not fit you or your website.

Yoast tip

Make sure to add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to each affiliate link

and to all links in promoted posts so they don’t count for Google and
other search engines. You need to do this to make sure you’re not
getting penalized as Google might think you are selling links.

4 Selling your own products

Of course, you could also make money with your site by selling your
own products. The moment you start selling your own products, your
site will also become a shop. In the next chapter of this section, we
will discuss just how to turn a site into a shop. Selling products does
not necessarily mean selling physical products. You could also sell
digital products such as eBooks or apps.

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 Hiking Time ~ One of the authors of Hiking Time makes digital
hiking maps. He designed a special app for mobile phones that
allows people to find their way through the rough outdoors.
This app is something that can be bought through the Hiking
Time shop.

Another author combined his blogs from Hiking Time into an

eBook. He rewrote his material, turning the different blogs into one
coherent story, and he offers it as a paid download from the blog.

5 Indirect sales through a blog

For lots of (larger) companies, the blog is a prominent section on

their website and is mostly used as a marketing tool. The blog helps
to get your ideas out there. If your ideas are worthy, people will get
to know you and your company. And this will help you to get sales in
the end.

A company blog could be a really powerful tool to get some indirect

sales. If you blog regularly, you show your audience your expertise
and involvement. Also for people who do consulting, or give work-
shops for instance, a blog can be the way to present yourself to the
world. The exposure to your blog will eventually result in more sales
for your company (more consulting, more workshops).

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 Chapter 34

Creating a shop (in WordPress)

A WordPress site can easily be transformed in a webshop. There are

numerous plugins that add the functionality you need to make your
website a webshop. We would recommend to use either WooCom-
merce or Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) to create your shop. If you
want to learn more about the creation of shops and the SEO of shops
(and you have a little patience), we are planning to release an eBook
on shop SEO in the fall of 2016.

WooCommerce

If you want to start a webshop selling physical products, WooCom-

merce is definitely the way to go. This plugin instantly converts your
WordPress-based website to a shop and is fairly easy to use. This free
plugin makes it easy to display your products, adds the functionality
you need to let your customers pay for their stuff, and helps you to
manage your inventory.

Yoast tip

Easily combine your WooCommerce webshop and

our Yoast SEO plugin with our Yoast WooCommerce
SEO plugin, making sure your webshop ranks in the
search engines.

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Easy Digital Downloads

If you’re selling digital products, we would recommend Easy Digital

Downloads. This plugin might not look as pretty, but it offers a
boatload of add-ons that make sure you can alter everything you
want. We’re actually using Easy Digital Downloads ourselves on
yoast.com.

The goal of your webshop

Before you can start selling anything on your website, you’ll have to
have a very clear picture of what it is you want to do with your
website. Before you do anything, you should write down your mission
(remember section 1?).

What do you sell? Why should people buy it from you? What makes
your product unique? Make sure your mission is clear in your mind as
well as on your website. What will you be offering exactly?

Hiking Time ~ At Hiking Time, the authors had a hard time

starting to sell stuff. They started blogging purely because they
were so passionate about their trips and their hiking journeys.
But as their audience was growing, they saw the opportunity to
really make money with their blog. And making money would
allow them to reach an even larger audience of hiking fanatics.

They decided to only make products they themselves would want

to buy. Their mission was to make hiking easier and accessible for
a larger group of people. They wanted to make more people

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 enthusiastic. The development of an app with hiking maps and
tips on the routes was something they all agreed upon really
corroborated with everything they and Hiking Time stood for.

Payments

Make sure a visitor feels safe enough to submit personal details like
their address on your website. That doesn’t mean your online shop
should just contain a lot of security signs. Yes, these should be added,
but a secure feeling is also enhanced by other things, such as testi-
monials and contact details. That large telephone number in your
header makes sure I know I can contact someone if things go wrong.
That address in the footer tells me you have an actual location I can
go to with my complaint or damaged goods. It sometimes seems as
though some online shop owners just want to sell and prefer not to
be contacted afterwards at all.

Figure 65: add security signs to increase trust

When you’re considering taking credit card payments, use a service

like PayPal or Stripe so you don’t have to process the transactions
yourself. This saves you from having to comply with the very strict
security regulations that come with this type of data.

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Also be clear about refund policies and Money Back Guarantees. Most
of the times these are required by your local law, so why not display
these clearly on your website? Sometimes having a more lenient
Money Back Guarantee can really help persuade people. Especially
for digital products, the cost of refunds is usually only the labor
involved in doing the refund, so why not be lenient? A lot of your
customers don’t realize they are protected in this way and have very
little to worry about when purchasing something from your shop.
Listing these policies and guarantees near checkout buttons is a great
way to take away that last bit of doubt.

Yoast tip

Now that we’re talking about legal stuff: as soon as you start selling
stuff, you should really compose a Terms Of Service. It’s probably
smart to have a lawyer draft this for you based on some ideas. One
of the things that’s usually a part of this is explicitly choosing a
jurisdiction in which you reside. For instance, Yoast is a Dutch
company. If, god forbid, you bought something from us and want
to sue us, that would have to happen in the Netherlands, because
that’s what you agreed to when you agreed to our terms of service.
If you don’t define this, people might sue you in their country,
which could become a big problem very quickly.

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 Chapter 35

Conversion rate optimization

If you have a webshop, you want people to buy your products. You
want to guide your visitors towards a desired end point (the check-
out): that’s what we call funneling. You are aiming to convert your
visitors to a sale.

In the field of sales, people often talk about conversions or conver-

sion rates. Conversion means that you turn a visitor into a paying
customer or a returning visitor. A high conversion rate for a webshop
usually means that many visitors actually buy a product. But a high
conversion on a blog could mean that people return to your website,
or subscribe to your newsletter. Conversion rate optimization thus
is something that is important for shops, but could also be very
useful for blogs to enlarge their loyal audience. Conversion rates are
usually very low (often lower than 1 percent). Trying to increase your
conversion is known as conversion rate optimization.

Figure 66: funneling

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In this chapter we will give you some tips how to optimize your
conversion. If you would like to learn more about conversion rate
optimization, you can buy our eBook on UX & Conversion.

Call-to-action

The most important thing when trying to funnel your visitors is that
you have focus on your website. Focus means that new visitors should
be able to see what your website is about within 5 seconds. This can be
achieved using so called call-to-actions. A call-to-action is an element
on your website – usually a button – which shows your desired result
for the visit immediately (see section 5 about UX, chapter 18).

If you have a webshop, the call-to-action would link directly to your

shop. The text on the call-to-action would then say something like
Shop Now. Such a button would instantly make clear to visitors what
kind of website it is.

You’ll have to make sure that these calls-to-action actually stand out
in the design of your website. The buttons have to be eye-catching. A
button that doesn’t stand out is at risk of visitors completely missing
it. And if people miss it, it obviously won’t call anyone to action.
Make your call-to-action stand out by giving it a bright color you
haven’t used in your website yet.




Figure 67: make sure your call-to-action stands out

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Product pages

Visitors should become more and more informed about your product
when they’re moving towards your product page. If you’re selling
physical products, you should try to make it as much as the ‘real
thing’ as you can. What are the odds you’d buy a product in a physi-
cal shop based on a piece of paper with a small picture and sloppy
description? You should attempt to mimic the experience of viewing
a product in a store. Offer high resolution images, from all angles,
which people can zoom in on. Possibly even videos or 3D images that
people can turn around themselves, mimicking the experience of
inspecting a product in a store.

Figure 68: Death Star™ video and (360°) images on shop.lego.com

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Social proof

Online marketing is not that different than other types of marketing

in many aspects. In trying to convince people to buy your stuff, you
can use the insights from social psychology and marketing. What
influences people? We know that other people are a very important
factor in convincing people to buy or try something. People trust a
product a lot more when other people, preferably friends or people
who are similar to themselves, have told them it’s good. This principle
is called social proof. If you sell products or services on your website,
you can easily use social proof to your advantage.

Yoast tip

Try to create an ambience through your textual and visual content

that evoke the same type of response from your visitors as in the real
store. Such an ambience through text can be achieved by, for instance,
not just describing the product, but describing your own reaction to
it. Approaching your descriptive content this way will give it a lot more
depth and value.

Testimonials

Have people leave testimonials or reviews on your website and your

products. This will work even if your visitors don’t know the people
that left the review. You need legitimate testimonials. Make sure
your testimonials look legit. So post as much information with the
testimonials as you can (name, job, picture, etc.).

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Having decent testimonials and reviews will definitely convince
people to click on your call-to-action.

Figure 69: testimonials on Hiking Time

Conversion research

If you want to optimize your conversion even further, you could do

your own conversion research. In most cases the conversion of your
site will improve if you improve your UX (see section 5 about UX).
However, things that work on one website, could well be a bit differ-
ent for the conversion rate on another website. Your website is
unique and your audience is unique. In order to further improve your
conversion rate you should do A/B testing. If you want to read more
about A/B testing, you can read our UX & Conversion eBook.

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Epilogue
You have reached the end of this eBook. In it, we tried to teach you
about all aspects of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress sites.
If you are reading this, you will now have all the knowledge you need
to really make the audience of your blog grow. We have presented all
the information from a holistic SEO perspective, focusing on all
aspects of optimizing your site, from UX to marketing, from content
writing to technical SEO.

If you want to read more about optimizing your site, you could check
out our eBook about UX & Conversion or you could read our eBook
about Content SEO. If you want to make sure all angles of your SEO
and user experience are covered, you should definitely check our
website reviews as well. Also, we have a really amazing online train-
ing about SEO which will give you very many tips about optimizing
your website for search engines.

While writing this eBook, we had a lot of help and feedback from
many of our colleagues of the Yoast-family! A special thanks to
Michiel Heijmans for his great input, Tim Hengeveld for the amazing
illustrations and to Mijke Peters for the design of this eBook and for
her ability to critically review and edit all of our texts.

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About the authors
Joost de Valk

Joost (1982) is a web developer, SEO and online marketer. He started

his career in IT working at several companies, ranging from enter-
prise hosting to online marketing agencies, allowing him to work
with several large businesses around the world.

In May of 2010 Joost founded Yoast, which focuses on software

development (currently mainly WordPress plugins) and consulting
in SEO, WordPress optimization and online marketing/content
strategy. Current clients include Student.com, eBay, Disney Inter-
active and the European Patent Office. Yoast sells multiple
WordPress plugins, Website Reviews and eBooks and is expanding
quickly.

Marieke van de Rakt

Marieke (1981) studied Sociology and Communication Sciences at

the Radboud University in Nijmegen. She obtained her PhD in Social
Sciences in January 2011. Since then, she has worked as a researcher
and as a teacher at different companies and universities. As of
September 2013, she focused her attention solely on her activities
at Yoast.

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Marieke focuses on marketing and
product management. Besides that,
she loves to write texts and posts for
yoast.com. Together with Joost and
Michiel Heijmans, she runs Yoast.

Marieke van de Rakt and Joost de

Valk are happily married and live in
Wijchen, the Netherlands. They have
three sons (Tycho, Ravi and Borre)
and one daughter (Wende) together.

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