How to write a post that ranks, from the results page backwards

Twenty minutes here saves a rewrite later. You are looking for four things, and all of them are visible without a tool.

1. 1

   Search the query in a clean window

   A private window, in the country you sell to. Your history and location change the page, so the version you normally see is not the one your buyers see.

2. 2

   Read the kinds of page, not the titles

   Ten guides means the searcher wants to learn. Ten product pages means they want to buy. A forum thread in the top five means they want an opinion from someone who has done it. Write the kind that is winning.

3. 3

   Collect the sub-questions

   The People also ask questions, and the headings inside the top three pages. These become your sections, because they are what the reader wonders next.

4. 4

   Find the gap

   Something every page skips. Usually a worked example, a table of real figures, the case where the advice does not apply, or a straight answer where everyone hedges.

A brief is one screen and it decides the page. Ours, for a fictional scheduling tool at yourproduct.com targeting “how to share a calendar link”, looked like this.

SEARCH: “how to share a calendar link”, also “send my availability”
READER: A founder who books calls with customers and does not want a
  back-and-forth about times.
WHAT RANKS: nine how-to pages from calendar tools, one forum thread.
EVERY PAGE COVERS: copying a link, setting a duration, time zones.
NO PAGE COVERS: what the other person actually sees, and what happens
  when they are in a different time zone and pick a slot at the boundary.
ANGLE: show both sides of the screen. One screenshot of the sender's
  setup, one of the recipient's view.
FACTS: our defaults (30 minutes, working hours in the account's zone),
  the two support questions we get weekly, nothing else.

The value is in the two lines about what no page covers and the angle. Everything after that is execution, and execution without those lines produces the eleventh adequate page.

The reader came for an answer and will decide in about the time it takes to read two sentences. The same two sentences are what an assistant lifts when it quotes your page.

• Before: “Sharing your availability has become an essential part of modern business communication. In this guide we will explore the various ways you can share a calendar link.”
• After: “Copy your booking link from /settings/scheduling and paste it into the email. The person you send it to sees your free slots in their own time zone, which is the part most people get wrong.”

Then keep going. Everything the reader needs to act is in the first screen; the detail, the edge cases and the worked example follow underneath for the people who want them.

Take the questions from the results page and turn each into a heading phrased the way the reader would ask it. Six to nine of them is a page; three is a note; fifteen is two pages.

The right-hand column matches what people type, reads better in a table of contents, and gives an assistant a heading it can match to a question. The left-hand column is filing-cabinet language.

This is the section that makes the page worth publishing, and it is the one that gets cut when a deadline arrives. On our scheduling page it was two screenshots side by side: what the sender configures, and what the recipient sees at 8am in another country.

• A worked example with real values, not placeholders. Real values make a page quotable.
• A screenshot of your own product doing the thing, with the part that matters marked.
• The mistake your customers actually make, which you know from support and nobody else can guess.
• A figure from your own data, if you have one you can publish: what people do with the feature, aggregated.

One of these is enough. A page with none of them is a summary of the ten pages you read this morning, which is exactly what the reader has already skipped.

Links added afterwards end up in a “related posts” box nobody reads. Links written into the sentence go where the reader's question arises.

• Link forward to the page that answers the next question, in the sentence where the question appears.
• Link back from older pages to the new one. A page with no inbound links is found by nobody, and this is the step everyone forgets.
• Use the target page's subject as the anchor text, not “click here” and not the whole sentence.
• Three to six internal links in a guide of this size is normal. Thirty is a directory, not a page.

You cannot promise what the page holds until the page exists. Written first, the title becomes an instruction to pad.

• About sixty characters, with the words people search near the front.
• A promise about what is inside, not a tease. “How to share a calendar link, and what the other side sees” beats “The ultimate guide to calendar sharing”.
• No year unless you will maintain it every year.
• Google rewrites titles it judges poor, most often when they are stuffed, boilerplate, or do not match the page. A title that describes the page accurately is the one that survives.

Then write the description in the same spirit: one sentence on what the reader gets, close to a hundred and fifty characters, no tease.

1. The query is answered in the first two sentences.
2. Every heading is a question a reader would ask.
3. There is at least one thing on the page that exists nowhere else.
4. Every figure can be sourced in ten seconds.
5. Three to six internal links are placed in sentences, and at least one older page links here.
6. The title is under about sixty characters and matches the page.
7. A person's name is on it, and the date is real.
8. Read aloud once, out loud, with the door closed.

Then leave it alone for four weeks before judging it. Search Console will tell you which queries it actually picked up, and they are rarely only the one you wrote for.