SEOs can at times garner somewhat of a negative reputation for, well, “SEO-ing” content.
As a result, many of us fighting the organic growth fight will inevitably come across that voice in the room, perhaps an overprotective brand manager or a member of the marketing team with a passion for a particular strain of creative writing, that stands in the way of tweaking or optimising core on-page elements or content as a whole that hinders its chances of performing well in search.
That’s not to throw shade at brand managers, marketing managers, PRs, or anyone at all. I speak as a writer by trade who has every passion for the written word, and staunchly believe in a strong tone of voice, originality and creativity. Supposedly, Google do as well.
In fact, I’m broadly of the opinion that SEOs need to be better at framing their arguments when they have a seat at the content optimisation table.
Suggestions such as “feature keyword A in this header” or “add more content that goes further into that semantically related concept here” are all well and good, but there does need to be a balance.
SEO Forays Into the World of Music Writing
I want to use an example around a recent client I looked at who are very protective and proud of their writing style, tone of voice and how the brand is represented in their content.
Historically, they’d balked at SEO approaches to their articles as they feared any SEO-driven optimisation, be it on the content itself or technically within their page structures, would compromise what they had built from a branding perspective.
Quite rightly, perhaps, too: they are a well-respected independent culture blog with a loyal audience. They are very particular about the music, art and film content they feature on their site, and they aim to be as unique and informative as they can: uncompromising in their approach almost to a fault. I believe that these types of websites are a dying breed and must be protected at all costs.
Yet despite their historic reluctance, they were aware that their SEO performance needed looking at in order to drive more subscribers and were still open to suggestions.
Here, I’d like to delve into some of the tactics I used that made a difference without “selling their soul”, so to speak. I’ll give a brief explainer as to what they are, why they work for this particular case study and what the SEO payoff is for each.
Hopefully, what I’m sharing here will be useful to those who are often in the position of getting push back on their SEO ventures in similar contexts, too.
Tactic 1: Collection Pages for Artists, Genres
Collection or hub pages can be a great and relatively scalable way to catch additional traffic from topic or category-based search terms that are generally more broad in nature. Furthermore, they also serve as great mechanisms for entity consolidation and for improved internal linking.
Let’s take cult shoegazing band Slowdive, for example (yes dear reader, a favourite of mine). The site had written countless articles on the band, tracking their genesis in the late 80s, their break-up in the mid-90s and reformation in the mid 2010s. There were 30th anniversary album write-ups. Interviews with individual band members on adjacent music projects. New album reviews. Gig reviews. Long-form think pieces on the cultural reverberations (that one’s for you, shoegaze fans) of the genre in general in the run up to the Britpop explosion and why the genre was mocked at the time in amongst general trends of “lad rock”.
The missing piece? Hub pages for the artist that aggregated all this content together and funnelled users out to where they wanted to browse. The goal here wasn’t to rank on exact match artist terms, more to consolidate authority as a publication on the artists themselves that had been covered so much across the site over the course of its history.
We are also looking to take this further into genre hub pages too. Think of the potential that well-put together collection pages on “post punk”, “krautrock”, “ambient” or “indie film” could do for the site and its overall entity consolidation and user journeys.
Such pages can be easily pulled together through tagging and taxonomy mechanisms that create familiar “archive” type pages, the likes of which WordPress and others are known for. The concept here is similar, albeit with a slightly more deliberate approach in curating the artists/genres at hand with a bit of succinct intro text around the topic of the hub pages in general.
Tactic 2: The Artist/Genre/Film + “Influence” Approach. And Yes, Reddit Helped.
When I was running some initial keyword research for this site on how it was performing for some broad searches around artists, genres or films, a lot of what was creeping up was phrases such as “Gang of Four influence”, “Life Without Buildings style”, and “David Bowie legacy”.
The thinking from this discovery wasn’t to start simple building call and response articles such as “what is post-punk” or “why were Life Without Buildings different” or even “Why is David Bowie revered”. Instead, the thinking was to consider opinion-led essays and articles that naturally answered the intent of these questions.
As we’ve seen so often in recent years, Reddit was a useful source for some of this. However, I’m not talking about scraping a long, in-depth reddit thread on the David Bowie subreddit on his far-reaching influence and then regurgitating this into the format of a long-form article that suited the tone of voice of the site in question.
The concept was more an opportunity: lots of search queries around “artist/album/film/artwork + positive word” simply returned Reddit threads in the top results. There was a clear opportunity for a credible, authoritative and trusted site like this to come and write something proper that could compete with Reddit in the search results.
Tactic 3: AI Search Optimisation-specific components
Yeah, I know, it took me this far to start talking about AI search optimisation. As much as many of us in the industry like to repeat the maxim that AEO/GEO/AERO/SPEAROW (acronyms on a postcard) is just SEO, this I’m afraid, is not what many businesses are thinking; rightly or wrongly.
Indeed, the opportunity for me to engage with this brand was derived from them wanting to get a sense of how they performed in “AI Search” and how they could be doing better, without, of course, compromising their tone of voice or familiar page templates and article structures.
For the benefit of brevity, and to not go into too much theory and analysis (of which there was a lot) I’m simply going to list out some examples of content components that the site were happy enough to deploy, and that I know, from work across other clients with similar stringent template and branding jurisdictions, made an impact in AI search visibility.
- Proper structured data including author, review, FAQ, breadcrumb markup where relevant across all article content
- Intro summary paragraphs at the top of articles that blended well with the existing journalistic “hooks” that the site employed in this text location
- More definitive demarcation of content blocks (I’m going to avoid using the word “chunking” here) per concept addressed in the article
- FAQ components very selectively and very deliberately, at the bottom of the articles only if they actually added something to the piece in question or could be used as a tangible signpost to another relevant topic or page on the site “Are Slowdive playing shows in Europe this year?”
The point here is that none of this was framed as “writing for AI search”. All care was taken not to muddy the writing style or visual style of the articles that the brand had so painstakingly become known for over so many years.
These were merely subtle embellishments with one key objective framed to the client: enhance the user experience and readability. Anything AI search-related was a bonus. Second fiddle.
But the payoff came and yet again, seeing SEO through the lens of improving the user experience as a primary focus won overall.
A Few More Subtle, Search Friendly Content Embellishments
Outside of these slightly bigger ticket and conceptual tactics, there were a series of other content enhancements that were greenlit as part of the publishing and article formatting BAU.
These will be familiar concepts for many of us that work in an SEO capacity across almost any brand that puts out long form articles or blogs, though they were elements that this particularly protective client were ok with implementing.
- Clean semantic HTML markup across headings (yes, this was an oversight on the site previously. I’d be amazed if this wasn’t uncommon elsewhere across similar sites)
- Automated internal linking logic that deployed a maximum of one internal link per entity/band name/genre name/artwork name per article to the aforementioned collection pages
- Unintrusive inclusions of anchor link components on articles (think small and in the top left hand corner, in a way that didn’t detract from the high quality writing that makes the site what it is).
We’ve All Experienced “That” Client
The above subheading isn’t meant to sound snarky in lieu of this particular case study. They were a joy to work with, and as a massive music geek myself I thoroughly enjoyed the privilege.
The goal of this article is that hopefully, for those reading who have been in a similar position where they’ve worked with brands small or large (though more often, large) that are particularly protective over their brand voice or indeed the very essence of the templates they deploy, I’ve given a few avenues to explore.
I believe it’s critical that as SEO consultants, we first arrive at an understanding as to why editorial teams push back on anything coming from, well, SEO.
Rightly or wrongly, there are historical connotations in the publishing space of SEO making a hash of editorial quality. In fact, I won’t beat around the bush here: there are countless examples of this in the wild.
In this context, and in many others, SEO works best when it becomes a supporting arm of editorial intent and the overall user experience.
But you know this. And enough with the lofty platitudes. Go out there and do some good and get those treasured independent sites the visibility in search they deserve.
