We’ve talked about the importance of finding the right keywords, why editing is imperative if you’re using AI to draft brand content, and more, but yes — there’s still something else.
And this is very important. In fact, I’d say it’s becoming even more important than keywords themselves (though don’t get me wrong, those are still vital).
It’s how you structure your content around those target keywords.
Why does content structure matter?
Content structure matters for SEO in three ways:
- Content structure influences how a search engine (traditional Google search or AI) gathers, categorizes, and ranks the information on a page.
- Certain types of content—identifiable in part thanks to how the structure looks on a page—address search intent and need more effectively. (We’ll talk more about what this means next week.)
- Good content structure improves readability, which makes your pages easier for humans to read and understand. As people stay on and engage with your page, it creates signals that convey value to search engines.
But content structure matters in one more way for you, the person creating or publishing the text:
A good, defined outline structure for your content makes writing a blog post much faster and easier.
Why content productivity involves structure, not just output speed
A lot of people expect, in part because it’s told to us repeatedly, that using an AI tool to produce words on a page faster is the key to…blogging more. Better. Something like that.
But the majority of AI tools apply a generic structure to content outputs. The tool crunches numbers to make a prediction about what structure you might want (based on your chats with the AI) and related content in its training data. Sometimes this goes awry.
As an example, I opened a regular Claude chat and asked it to write a blog post about coffee. I then sat at my table for five minutes while it coded an entire landing page and wrote some content about the topic.
I didn’t want an HTML file, which is what I got.
I could now either spend an hour getting the portions of the text I want out of this conversation … or I could be halfway done with my own blog post about coffee that’s written from scratch.
If you take the time to develop your SEO content structure in an outline—or use a content outline template that someone else created—you can truly write posts from scratch in less time than it would take you to coax the right thing out of an AI.
For what it’s worth, I did get slightly better results when I prompted Claude to write a text only blog post, but the end result is still missing some key elements of strong SEO content … and it also totally skipped any kind of semantic keyword research. (That’s the process of identifying secondary keywords, questions, subtopics, and phrases that relate back to your main topic.)
Three key structure elements for SEO content
Quality content needs to have a few different elements, no matter what the purpose of that page may be. While there are some variations to be made based on the type of content you’re writing (such as a how-to blog post vs. a case study), we’ll go into those specifics more in a future post. For now, the three steps below are what you’ll want to focus on the next time you sit down to draft content on your own or with AI.
Clearly defined answers directly after subheads
Every piece of content should have a title and subheads that speak to the target audience’s needs and wants. You want to make it clear what information you’re about to provide beneath each header—and then immediately provide that answer or informational tidbit.
This doesn’t mean you need to make all of your headings into FAQs. But clear statements and explanations are important.
Bullet points, lists, or tables
Bullet points, numbered lists, and even tables are important for:
- Easy human readability
- Quick TL;DR summarizing
- Giving search engines and AI tools quick sections of content to pick up and display in results
Links to other resources
SEO-friendly content must have both internal links (to pages on your own site) and external links (on other websites).
If you were to put the content generated by Claude (in our example above) without editing—which 42% of people skip—you’d be hard-pressed to generate rank and traffic quickly. This is because each internal and external link acts like a door that helps search engines find your content from other pages on line.
Publishing the content with no links is like building a room without windows and doors. It’s much harder for search engines to find your content online, no matter how high-quality it may be.
EEAT: The acronym that improves your SEO writing
If you haven’t heard of it before, E-E-A-T is a roadmap for reinforcing the value you provide through your content. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness and it’s a series of signals (bits of information) that search engines like Google look for when figuring out which content is the best to include in search results.
I have a free workbook you can download and fill out to figure out how you can better communicate:
- What your experience is
- What your area of expertise is
- Why you’re an authority on the topic
- Why you’re trustworthy
Grab it at the link below; it’ll help you implement everything you’ve been learning through this week’s emails!
E-E-A-T your way to better SEO
A workbook for content writers and business owners of all skill and experience levels.