It Turns Out, Google Loves It When You Write Like A Journalist

I got a B.S. in news-editorial journalism from the University of Colorado in 2007, back when newspapers were still a thing. My professional journalism experience includes bylines in the Rocky Mountain News, Sporting News, Sports Illustrated and San Antonio Express-News, among a few other places.

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When it came time to pick up digital marketing, I found it to be a pretty easy transition. Google seems to favor the writing style that many newspaper journalists use.

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That's the secret:

• Write clearly,
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• Get to the point, and
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• Add something new to the conversation that doesn't just rehash what everyone else wrote.

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With this being a portfolio website, I wanted to call out one of my favorite pieces of content writing. I wrote this guide to wire fraud for the criminal defense attorney Robert Helfend in 2019, and it spent close to 18 months as the featured snippet in Google for the broad term "wire fraud." It led to such a surge in high value cases that Mr. Helfend could get picky with the cases he took. Of course, Google squashed our fun by eventually ranking government websites and Investopedia for the term.

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How I Can Help

I provide a comprehensive suite of content services to clients, including content strategy and copywriting.

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Content Strategy

In short, this means I help you figure out what to write about. Depending on your goals, there are a number of possible approaches here, but each of them starts with the user.

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We start with conversions with customer-facing stakeholders, chats with product managers and user research. This helps us understand the important questions that your ideal customer are frequently asking and how we can use content to lead those people to your website.

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Once we've settled on an interesting set of topics for the content calendar, I use a pretty nifty next-gen toolset to validate that there's demand for these topics.

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Copywriting

Sometimes you need someone to write the content itself. As I mentioned above, effective content writing today includes novel or unique content that no one else has contributed (the SEO jargon for it is "information gain"), and as a journalist, I love uncovering that stuff.

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Copywriter? Why Can't I Just Use ChatGPT To Write Content?

You already missed the boat on using AI-generated content for SEO. Google cracked down on it in its September 2023 "Helpful Content Update," and basically wiped a number of AI-heavy websites off of the map.

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That said, generative AI is great, and you should feel free to use it to improve your creativity and write more quickly. You just can't have it do your homework for you.

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Let's Work Together!

Want to see if we're a good fit? Shoot me a quick email.

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