Links referenced in video:
https://www.nearmedia.co/google-people-first-content-apple-pays-75-e-commerce-enjoyment-declines/
Hey guys, Joe Burnich. In this video, we’re going to talk about Google’s new update. This is extremely important for people that own a service business or are a contractor. This stuff can help you rank at the top of Google search engine, or help you from sinking down once this update goes into effect. It’s called the People First update. I want you guys to be ready. I’m going to show you step by step how to prepare for this starting today. So let’s get started right now.
Okay, so, this article came out last week, August 19th, 2022, and so what I want to do now that I’ve kind of studied it and I’ve seen what’s going on, I’ve seen some of the effects it’s had on our SEO clients, I want to share this with you, make sure you guys are in the know and that you’re fully prepared for what’s coming.
So this is all about the content on your website. The words, the text, that you put on your website. There’s a ton of websites out there. In fact, most small business websites out there have very thin content, meaning there’s hardly anything for Google to read and understand what your page is about. And in the past, that was okay. You could get away with it. But over the past year at Big West Marketing, we saw something like this coming. The SEO community was buzzing about better content, more personalized, unique, content written for people, not the search engines.
So we still need to pay attention to headlines and keywords and all this stuff, but we don’t want our content written just for Google, we want this written for people, and with Google’s new AI and how smart they’ve gotten and the criticism that Google’s gotten for having just low quality search results recently, they’ve decided to take action. And this is going to only help you if you pay attention to what I’m saying today.
So if you’ve got a website with just 100, 200 words on the homepage, and you’re trying to rank for some competitive search term, good luck. So what we did over the last year is we got some tools, we paid for some tools, which I’m going to explain to you, show you, and show you how to use them. With these tools, we were able to analyze the content on our SEO client’s websites and all the new websites that we’ve developed over the past six months to a year, and what we’ve done is found a new group of writers with more skill and more SEO knowledge.
Now, that costs us a lot more, that’s why the prices of our websites have gone up over the last year. That’s one of the many reasons, but the main reason is because the content that we now provide on our websites are much better than they were six months, a year ago. So we saw this coming and we are excited when we saw Google actually announced that the update is going into effect. And what this means is the content that is written for people, for people, and not just for Google, tricky little things that these SEO gurus like to do to make your website rank higher, faster, all that stuff is great, but if you don’t have content or words that speak to the person, you’re going to be in trouble.
You can even see here in this article by Near Media, very respected media source for this kind of stuff, Google is going to punish SEO first content and reward people first content. You can even see, Google is preparing to demote SEO first content. And if you want to read this straight from Google, I’m going to put a link down below and I’ll give you this link over here. And this is out, this is from Google’s blog here, and this is basically tech speak on exactly what this means. And if you want to read through this, if you want to geek out over this stuff, that’s absolutely fine. We’ve done it so you don’t have to. But basically you need to start getting better content on your website if you want to compete moving forward.
So exactly how do we do this? Let me show you how we do it at Big West. There’s lots of different ways to do it. There’s lots of different tools and programs and writers that you can hire, but I want to show you exactly how we do it, and you can take this information and do what you want, or you can hire us to do it, or you can hire somebody else to do it, whatever you want. I just want you guys to have the information, the tools, and the power to take control of your website and make sure you are affected positively, not negatively, by the peoples first content update.
So there’s a program called frase.io. It is a paid program, this is not free, but if you decide to use this, it’s going to really take your website to the next level. Let me show you how we use it. So here’s a bunch of examples of real life pages that we are writing for clients currently. And so we’ve got electrician, Irving, Texas, basement, waterproofing, Columbia County, New York, pressure washing Kasson, Minnesota, and then down here, we’ve got like HVAC, Kerrville, Texas. These are actual keyword research projects that we have going on to write content for clients in real life here.
So let’s check the first one out, electrician, Irving, Texas. Now, what you’ll see this program is doing right now is it’s analyzing the top 20 websites that are ranking when somebody types this in, and it gives us a lot of cool information here. So one big thing is word count. People are always like, how many words do I need, Joe? Well, it depends on how competitive your area is. The average word count of the top 25 in this area for Irving, Texas for electricians is 705 words. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to hire a writer to write at least 800 words. We want to beat the average, and we want to make sure that we have more targeted keywords, and we want to make sure that content is written better than our competitors, so when Google’s AI crawls our website, or our client’s website, they’re going to be like, “Oh, this is the real deal. This is written for people, not for little tricky search engine tactics, but for people. We’re going to rank them higher.”
And the people that don’t have good people first content, are going to start sinking down. They’re going to be demoted. This is what it’s all about. You want to climb to the top? This is one of the most powerful things you can do starting this week.
What else do we use this for? Okay, so we got the word count there, now we also click over here to optimize, and then here’s all the keywords that are used most often for this search term. These are the keywords that we want to have the writers work into the people first content. So as they’re writing a sentence, they’re writing a paragraph, we want them to start working in a lot of these terms. And so we’ll take the top 20 here and we’ll give it to a writer and say, “We need 800 words, and these are all the keywords that we want to have included in that page.”
Then what we do is we jump over to this program called writeraccess.com. There’s lots of different programs out there to find good, high quality writers, this is the one we’ve been using for the last year. They are not cheap. They have high quality writers and we always choose five star writers, because we want people that really know their stuff. And we have tried many writers over the last year, we found a handful of writers that we really like that know the industries that we work in, the contractor and home service industries, and those are the ones that we hire to write the content for our clients’ websites.
So let’s take a look real quick. Let’s look at some of the completed orders here. Carpet repairs and restructuring. We’ve got EV charging installation, electrical panels, and metering closures. And you go down here, we got a homepage for somebody, an about us page for somebody, and you can see the homepage here, this is actually an electrician, and it is 765 words. So we determined how many words we want the writers to create content for, like I said, based on this program called frase.io, spelled with an F. And as you scroll down here, you can see we have created hundreds and hundreds of pages using WriterAccess, using these specific writers that we like. We got David, we got Carrie, we got William, we got Jessica. These are all experienced writers in these industries that understand SEO, that also understand people first, writing for people first.
So that’s why we use this program, but you can find writers anywhere. Maybe you know somebody that’s a good writer. Maybe your spouse is a good writer. Maybe you have a child that can write really well. Make sure that they write for people first, not for search engines, and that they use these keywords and work it in in a natural language manner, so that Google looks at it and says, “This is written for people, but we also know exactly what it’s about and we know which phrases to start ranking this for.”
So now, once you get your content and you’ve approved it and you’re ready to put it on the website, make sure you have your web designer. Hopefully you have a good web designer that knows how to make things look visually appealing. Here’s a recent one that we’re working on for an HVAC company, but you can see we took all this here and we had our web designer put it in a nice format, created bullet points if needed, put it in next to some pictures so that not only is it appealing to read, but it’s also appealing to look at. If it’s just a page with a bunch of text, it’s probably not going to get read, or it’s not even going to get skimmed over, but you have it separated out in this nice visual format, so we’ve got different places people can go and read the stuff that they really want to read.
But all that content that we had written over here at WriterAccess, now we have the web designer, the artist, the visual person, put it into a form that is nice to look at. That’s how we do it at Big West Marketing.
So I just wanted to give you guys a rundown of what’s going on, what you need to do, how we do it, so you can take action and either have your web designer do it yourself, you do it yourself, or, if you want to hire us to do it, please reach out. If you are a service based business, or if you are a contractor, that’s who we work with. If you want us to do this for you, we can.
