Writing for Humans and Robots With Maddy Osman

Madeleine

Hi everyone, welcome to the Syncast. I'm Madeleine, the host and Synup's content and community manager. Today I'm talking with Mattie Osman about how to write great content for readers and for ranking, especially as we have these new algorithm updates from Google. Maddie, why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got into the content marketing SEO space?

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Maddy

Absolutely. And just have to say I love Madeleines. That's my full name as.

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Madeleine

Well. Little bit of Madeleine supremacy here, so.

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Maddy

Umm, yeah. So whenever somebody asks me that , it always starts. Back in college I had a job at our student life marketing and design department and that's when I decided I wanted to do marketing in general because I was a business major and I just didn't know what side I was interested in. And so that kind of helped me figure that out. But interestingly enough at that job I was a website designer and basically got the opportunity to. Contribute to like our Student Life blog and like our social media channels. And I think it was that that I discovered, you know, that's I think I'm more interested in creating the content that goes on the design than the design that holds the content. So, so, yeah. So from there it really even in doing that job, I took out my first freelance gig and that kind of set me up for success. Then after I graduated, I had a couple full time jobs. They were in sales. I was always kind of hoping that that would lead to a marketing job at those companies. And then with my second full time job, they were working on a role for me. But it just wasn't happening in my ideal time period. And so I leaned into what? I was doing freelancing. I was still doing some website design, but a lot more blog content and social media content and so I quit my job. I really leaned into that. I had enough work to make that leap to freelancing full time and just kind of built it up from there. And then after doing that for a while I discovered content is really my true love. And I sort of built it. I went from being like Maddie Asmin freelance writer to building an agency. Around my writing process that really just focuses on the writing and not social and not website design, but just content writing and strategy.

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Madeleine

Right, right. So you fell in love with writing and everything else came together as it goes. I'm kind of the same way. I really like creating content. I love the process. I love writing. And yeah, excited to be learning more with you because you're clearly an expert both in content marketing and digital marketing. Which intersect more than some people would think.

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Maddy

Anonymous

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Madeleine

I'd love to hear your take on it. I know Google has been changing its algorithms. I know people have been stressed about their rankings changing. Yeah, I'd love to hear about any impact you've seen, how it's been changing how you do things or maybe not changing how you do things.

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Maddy

So I think that one thing that Google has always been very straightforward with us about as a SEOs, even though they don't tell us everything about their algorithm you know, they, they keep a lot of that kind of close to the chest. But one thing that they've always said is like content is king. You know it's trite as that sounds that has always been like their axiom and every time they you know describe what once they give us information about an algorithm update when they do choose to share details. It kind of always comes back to that idea. The idea that you're, you know, what they want to show in search is something that helps the searcher, something that is high quality, you know, something that they're willing to send somebody off to explore. And so I don't think that anything has really fundamentally changed, at least in terms of what the goal was. The execution certainly has changed a lot in recent years. And so, yeah, I mean, I would say that. Like. There's been a major leap in. 5-10 years ago where you know it was like actually using meta tags and defining keywords and synonyms and you know literally putting that into like the HTML of your article instead of weaving keywords in naturally and expecting Google to pick up on those. And so I think that a lot has changed from those days and sort of like the days where what we would now describe is like Black Hat SEO actually did work, and that's really what the algorithm was designed around. But it's kind of a crutch for Google, right? Because it's like we haven't figured out how to, sort of. Figure out something that's, you know, qualitative and turn it into something that an algorithm could measure quantitatively. I would say that something that did change majorly. Again, not the purpose, but the execution of Google's algorithm was one like the Burt algorithm update that happened, which I think was back in 2019. And so I'm sure most people who listen to this podcast would know what that was. But just to quickly define it, it was basically the ability for Google to read a sentence the way it always did, you know, from left to right or whatever, but. And also to read it backwards and to understand every word in that sentence in relation to the word that comes before or after or anywhere in that query, basically. So that, I mean that changed things majorly in terms of the execution because now Google can really understand the context of why you're using certain phrases in your search versus that old exact match ideology. So. So yeah, I mean, I think. It's interesting too, because Bert is very much. It's like a child of them playing around with more AI machine learning. That's always been a part of their algorithm, but like it's really a part of that update. But what's interesting is that while they are trying to make effective use of these machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies now, I think a lot of the recent updates, like there was the spam update and then the unhelpful content update is really an effort to sort of fight against how we're using it. AI in a way.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, I I feel like Google, Google is definitely using AI in a way where it's like they actually want to understand how our users are actually searching for things and can we make an AI that understands content the way that our users do. Whereas if you're a business kind of trying to hack the system, I'll say or, you know, like get ranked, get noticed.

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Maddy

It's perhaps.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of, it can be definitely impactful as to how you approach things. Kind of figure out how to implement SEO and keywords into my content. So yeah how was that? How Google's updates kind of changed how you approach content.

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Maddy

It hasn't fundamentally changed how we approach content and I think a lot of it comes down to when they published, when they told us about the helpful content update and they gave us their, you know, like Webmaster guidelines, different questions that we could ask ourselves about our content. It's like in answering those questions, a lot of that at least in my business, we've already sort of answered in terms of like our own style guide, like our approach to writing and and making it a great reader. Experience, because that's ultimately what it is about for us. We create content with an SEO purpose, but it's really not enough for any content creator to create something that ranks but then doesn't really convert right or that doesn't that doesn't support sort of like the sales journey or even like the post purchase process. People have questions about how to use a certain product and having a really solid piece of content might cut down on the time that. People get in touch with their customer service team and you know like having to handle it with the human versus like this already exists. And one good example of that is I worked with a client called word fence and they realized that they were answering the same customer service queries again and again and text wasn't really doing it because they have a WordPress plugin and a million things can go wrong with WordPress just interactions. You know the themes or what? So it's like you really need to have something for somebody. I could follow along with and. So this is not so much about SEO but it's more about anticipating , you know, the reader experience or the customer experience. And so I worked with them to create a bunch of videos that are just like how do you set up two factor authentication or how do you use this very specific feature for understanding what countries are accessing your website, and other security related things. And so there are different ways to do it for sure, whether it's a blog article or a video. And stuff like that. But just the idea that you're creating something, you're anticipating a need and that should be what creating content is about, is solving for those needs that you anticipate versus. Pulling an idea out of nowhere and saying well let's see where this goes.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. You can't just be creating stuff for. A ghost audience, so to speak.

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Maddy

Or an audience of, you know, the bots that are going to scan it to see if it should show up in the index, but have no tie to what actually happens after that. And I I think like another thing that's interesting to think about when we talk about love. AI generated content, you know, sort of like the spammy content the Google Quality Rater guidelines would define it as. It's just the idea that like a robot doesn't have empathy, you know? They don't really care if you buy it or not, right? Doesn't affect if they have a job or not. Or, you know, maybe it gives them a break if they're not doing a good job, but they don't. They don't really understand what it is to be a human and to be plagued by whatever problems send us to search. So it's like a fundamental piece that's missing from any AI generated content.

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Madeleine

Right, right. And I've definitely seen as the tools kind of get more advanced and yeah, they write stuff that can be kind of construed as human. I've been very interested to see people kind of testing them out and seeing oh, can Google recognize this AI generated content? And for the most part, Google usually does recognize when its content is written by not a human. But yeah, for now I've seen a lot of content. Marketers getting great like use out of AI software just to write like first drafts just to kind of get things started. But yeah, it's always kind of comforting to know that robots don't quite know.

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Maddy

Not yet. Not yet.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah. Have you, have you tested out any of the AI tools?

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Maddy

We've played around with a couple like I always look at, like appsumo, which for those who don't know is like a marketplace for entrepreneurs, sort of like a lifetime. Software deals. And so the idea is that you know, you kind of like to invest early, it's a small one time cost and then some of them are going to work out, some of them aren't. But there's a ton of AI copywriting tools that go through this marketplace and many that are like among the top now you know, like maybe they weren't when they were first there. But yeah we've definitely played around with them and I agree. I think that the main use case for us would be not starting with a blank page. It helps sort of like kickstart ideas or another one that I really like is called. I always forget. It's not right, Sonic but it's something like that. But it's basically, or maybe it does, but it's basically like a Google Docs add-on. And what happens is you basically, you know, write your sentences, whatever, and you're kind of going in and editing yourself. And what it can do is take what you've already said and you're like something about that feels off. You know I want to, I want to edit it, but you know my mind's blanking on what the edit is. And so you can just highlight the text and it gives you, like several suggestions for how you. Could rearrange it.

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Madeleine

Oh, I think I've seen that one.

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Maddy

Yeah, it might be great, Sonic. It's something like that. But I think that's such a cool use of AI because it's like, it's based on what I already came up with. It's just sort of solving for my human ineptitude of not figuring out where I wanted to go, you know?

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Madeleine

Exactly, yeah. So when you're, when you're writing content like where, where do you start? What's your process?

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Maddy

Sure. Yeah, I think in terms of what we're talking about like AI and stuff, it really does start with a little bit of topic research. And so we use tools like phrases and clear scope of different parts of the process. But they both do very similar things, which is analyzing the top SERPS for whatever primary keyword that we've determined we want to go after and giving things like phrases that do a really good job of calling out stats that like all the top. Miracles use, and so that's just a good place to start your research or, you know, kind of like terms you'd expect to see in the headings. You can start to sort of build out an outline again that follows expectations. And that's where you have to be careful because you don't want to create something that looks exactly like what's already out there. You want to add something to the void of, you know, what's already been created so that it is like.

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Madeleine

Useful and helpful.

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Maddy

That's what we're talking about. Helpful content. Um, but. But that starts with research that you would probably have done on your own anyway, analyzing what's out there and then making sure that you're adding a unique angle. Whether that's things like, you know, subject matter, expert interviews and quotes, you know, interesting visuals that really add to the text that's already out there, like infographics or, you know, statistics or something that helps to visually explain the concept, that's really hard to understand if it's text alone. Or even just like an angel, like maybe you take the contrarian view on what is all what everybody else is saying, right? And so yeah, so it starts actually with a little bit of AI tool help and then mixing in that human ingenuity. And now that I know this, this is how I'm going to make it my own. When we work with clients, you know, typically we do our keyword research process on our own after agreeing on a topic. Sometimes we'll do the keyword research to uncover the topic if the client really isn't sure. And then we go to the outline stage. Typically then, a client would have the opportunity to add in their own thoughts before it goes to draft because it's a lot easier to sort of start with the skeleton before fleshing it out. And you know that's why outlines and briefs are great in general. They just, they give us all on the same page. So from there we have editors review things that pretty much every stage it goes to draft, it goes back to an editor then it goes back to the client. A lot of sort of like the SEO tools and stuff that we're using are really in that sort of keyword research stage before doing any of the writing. And then we do use for example a clear scope kind of A to just make sure we hit everything that we wanted to hit and that it's sort of meeting our expectations in terms of what Google would want to see, to rank that content.

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Madeleine

Right, right. And how do you kind of test that this is meeting Google's? Expectations like what's the process there?

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Maddy

Sure. I mean some of it is doing rank tracking, Google Analytics tracking and just checking over time. And one thing, I can't remember exactly where I learned this tip, but something that's really interesting is, you know, making sure you have Google search console installed on your site and that's working and all that. But going in maybe, you know a month or a couple weeks after something's been published and seeing what keywords it is ranking. Word that I didn't. That I wasn't optimizing for specifically. And then if that text doesn't actually show up in your article, going back in and making changes so that it does, so that it does, it has a better chance of ranking for those keywords even higher. So, yeah, I mean I think meeting expectations is one part measurement, but it's also one part knowing what Google is looking for, right, right. And so for me, one thing that I did like a year or two ago was I did a deep dive into the quality rater guidelines and just like going through all the examples they had, going through all sort of like the reasoning and just trying to make sense of that for our own content creation process. And that's where it became really clear. To me that is like the AI generated content that spam to them like they reiterate it several times. But when it comes down to, I think for, you know, the average SEO who's trying to make sense of it without having to read, you know, almost 200 pages of examples basically, they sort of have two measurements of what they even want to rank and search. And I mean it's worth mentioning too that the quality rater guidelines, it's for a human person that goes in and does sort of an audit of sorts on different search results. But I really, I really think that it's like a, it's like a look into the brain of Google, like this. Is this how they take that qualitative? You know, way of looking at ranking content and make it quantitative, it's by doing this with millions of search results, you know, over time and anyway so, so the two things that they focus on are, you know, first of all, does a page meet the needs of the searcher and at a high level didn't answer the question that they sought out with the terms that they used and sort of analyzing the intent of of what they were looking for specifically. 

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So first of all, do it. Does it meet the needs of the search? And then the second biggest factor is, is the page quality there, which is something that anybody who does like PPC stuff should be really familiar with. Because page quality is also really important for, you know, getting the best pricing for whatever keywords that you're bidding for. They want to show something that is going to satisfy whoever clicks on that ad, for example, over somebody who. Sure is also paying them right. But like isn't really something like something that somebody you know doesn't convert on or, you know, they Google always says like, oh, we don't use Google Analytics data for rankings or whatever. I think that's a lie. But like you know, like the bounce rate, for example, is a metric. If somebody clicks on an ad and then immediately clicks back, whether they're going to admit to it or not, I think that has a factor on just, yeah, your stuff showing up and what you're, you get charged. So. So yeah, just the idea that your content not only satisfies the search, but that it's really a good reader experience when they get to that page and the information is organized well, it doesn't have to be like the prettiest design in the world. I don't think that's what it means at all. I think it just means that you can find it. What you're looking for quickly and it's easy to navigate.

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Madeleine

Right, right. Because I think definitely with the more recent updates, Google has been definitely making it clear that they're kind of focused only on the user experience. Like what do users want, what are they actually doing when they're on the site? And like making sure that they have a good experience so that they actually come back and use Google to find what they're looking for instead of. I know that there's been a few maybe a bit clickbaity articles about, oh, like Gen. Z is using TikTok. Instead of Google what? What does it mean? But, but it is, it is a good question of whether you could find what you're actually looking for when you go to Google to search. So yeah, that definitely makes sense. Like yeah, like when you kind of break it down, it does make total logical sense that yeah like good SEO just means good user experience, good article for people, which is good content. So yeah, it definitely goes hand in hand. I am on the note of TikTok. I am wondering what you think about it. There's been some rumors that are maybe unfounded, but maybe are truthful about how Google is going to introduce more diverse forms of content, especially around showing more videos, maybe indexing more social media. Yeah. What do you think about that?

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Maddy

Yeah, I mean I think that's a good prediction because they have been experimenting with all these different SERP features. I mean things like like schema markup is something that you can do on your own and implement on your site to sort of tell Google, like this is an article, this is a video, this is a recipe, you know, like it's something that you can, you can kind of help to signal to Google. And then there are certain features associated with that and there's other experiments that they do. And you know, I think SEO. Twitter is a great place to poke around and to see what those experiments are because people are catching them, you know, just as soon as they come out and speculating and wondering what it means. And I think that it is going to be interesting to see how that affects sort of like the typical organic results. You know, just articles the way that we've thought about them so far and how we optimize them. And one thing that we do at the blogs Smith is that we always look for a featured snippet. Opportunity. And it's not always like a perfect fit or like an obvious thing that's going to work. It's just like when it works, let's try to go beyond, you know, a primary or secondary or semantic keyword. It's like, let's be really purposeful about, let's say none of that works, right. We could still maybe get the featured snippet if we're, if we're thinking about that from really the point that we're outlining the content. And then I think the other thing to consider is just in terms of how these are different. Group features are like how you can repurpose content or how you sort of build different content mediums into the same article. And so like one example of that for us is I started recently a YouTube channel that's just like quick five minute content. It's called a content marketing mentor. So it's just like a dive into one very specific topic and something to think about. And So what we'll do is I'll film that and then. What we've been doing is whenever we want to hire new writers, one of our test ideas to work with them is to give them that video and be like make a teaser for this. Basically it doesn't, it shouldn't be exactly the same as the video, but it's kind of inspired by it and it's trying to get people to dig in deeper. To some extent, that's trying to also drive people towards my book, you know? And so it's just like promotional stuff based on something we've already created. So that's kind of like a content brief that we're then. Reusing this blog post that didn't yet exist and then you know another way to think about it too is on our blog. And I don't. I guess I haven't done too much testing to see how many people use this. But we have a tool, it's called Play dot HTM that translates the text and like using AI into a spoken voice. And so somebody, if you know they're busy, they're like a podcast person, they don't have time to like to sit here and read it, but maybe they have time to listen to it on their commute. Or when they're at the gym or something like that, that's another way that they can consume the content. And so I'm not sure how much that factors into surge, but I think it does factor into that reader experience that that search is trying to build a process around analyzing and matching, you know, people who have content that meets needs and that is a high page quality. So yeah, I mean I think the last thing I could say about that too is just like. Always be thinking about how visuals can contribute to that reader experience and something that could show up whether in Google image search or you know again just supporting the reader experience or things like maybe making infographics or like annotated screenshots. Again if it's like a WordPress client and I'm trying to write a how to article that you know drives them to a really specific action. So it's thinking through a really like the multimedia of an article right and. And how do you do that in an effective way that isn't going to take a million resources or a million hours for every article you write, but how can they, like, feed into each other?

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Madeleine

Right. Yeah. We've, we've been kind of taking a same approach as we kind of delve into these new mediums like obviously the podcast, but also we've been doing little videos as well and kind of, yeah, just how can you kind of give the best experience for the user while also making like great and meaningful content that people can find and appreciate, yeah, because. Obviously blogs and articles have their place and time and there's still a bunch of people who love a good article. It's nice that you can, especially if you like a well structured article. It's so nice that you can just kind of skim it and kind of get the essence of it without having to invest a lot of time. But there are a lot of people who, yeah, they love to watch videos or they prefer to get their news or their information while they're commuting. So they like podcasts. And yeah, like people, people have different styles. Of content that they prefer. So it's definitely nice to see things become kind of more accessible also.

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Maddy

Yeah, and people learn different ways too, is the other thing. Like you take yourself back to your school experience and like, you know the days where you got to do a hands-on project where maybe you got to make a poster or watch a movie and take notes. It's like all different experiences versus like a straight up lecture that may be like didn't have any notes, you know, didn't have any balls. And like how hard is it for some people to get that information down and truly understand? That versus like when you get to interact with it and your preferred way of learning.

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Madeleine

Just like I'm curious since you mentioned that you're kind of delving into video and all this other stuff like what, what kind of traction have you been seeing with your new content forms?

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Maddy

Yeah, I think the YouTube channel has been growing faster than I probably anticipated and I think and not like it in a crazy way, right, but like, but like we have I think like 120 something subscribers after starting it. Not that long ago, I haven't been super consistent with it either. So that's the other problem. But it's just like every day there's like a new subscriber. And so it's, it's incremental, but it's it's it is moving. And I think part of it too is like we are doing SEO around like the titles and being really thoughtful with like thumbnails and how, how do those bring people in and engage people and writing a good description so that I'm sort of setting our expectations for what they can expect when they hit play and I think. Expect setting expectations properly. It's just a good rule of thumb for anything with search and reader experience and content. It's like. What can somebody expect on the other end, you know, so yeah, I mean I think that. I think another thing with visuals is we used to work with a company called Design Pickle where you can kind of sort of like outsource your design stuff to them and they handle all the details. And that was really great at the beginning of making my business into more of this agency model. But now we've hired some designers that are like internal to our team. So it's easier to just. Like work directly with them and get revisions and stuff in the same day. But it has made a major difference I would say when we're talking to clients about you know like a new client for example about what we can help them with. And we'll mention almost in passing like by the way we can do custom brand images for you too. And for them typically that's like a totally different department or a person on their team who always has like a million things to do and you know their request is like the bottom of the pile. So it's like it's never going to happen. Visuals, it's just that I think that visuals absolutely transform written content from something that could be so amazing but hard to consume because it's just just text, you know, into something that really is engaging and keeps you moving and and again caters to different learning styles. Because I think I said it earlier, but for me when I look at a written statistic, especially if it's comparative like you know this. The company did this versus this company or this year versus whatever. It's really hard for me to conceptualize. I'm not a math brain, but when I can see it, it's like a pie chart or a bar chart or something, it's like, oh, OK, like, that totally makes sense. And I don't have to. I don't have to spend that much time processing it like I would if it was just written.

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Madeleine

Exactly. Yeah. I'm the same way. There's definitely certain things that are always best consumed in one certain form. Yeah. And I I think yeah. Especially going back to the YouTube point, I think it's always an interesting kind of going into a new platform. Also it kind of because obviously YouTube has its own algorithm, Twitter has its own algorithm, any platform has its own algorithm. And it's always so interesting and enlightening to me when I delve into a new platform to kind of see. Oh, these are the rules for this platform. And overall they're usually the same, like to be consistent, be great, you know? But, but it's, it's, it's always, it's always fun to see how different things perform and how different platforms have different audiences. It's always very interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And going back to different forms of content, I know you have a book, so I'd love to hear what prompted you to write that?

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Maddy

I'll flash it and throw a video here. Sometimes just put your hand in front of it so it shows up your tool background going on, but. So I wrote it's called writing for humans and robots, the new rules of content style. And I wrote it. Initially because I wanted to create a resource for the writers and I guess the editors too on my team. So we have what's called the blacksmith style guide and it's something that both of those parties already use. And what I was thinking is like it does a good job of defining rules but what it could benefit from is a little bit more of like the context of like why that's a role and also examples such as this is a good example of this rule or this is like. This is an example that wouldn't work based on this rule and just kind of like being able to comparatively see things like right versus raw or just like best practice versus not so best practice. So I wrote it over. The pandemic didn't have much else to do.

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Madeleine

So great time, a great pandemic activity.

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Maddy

As really, I was really pleased it worked out the way it did. And then, yeah, I mean, I I think the other way to sort of describe this book is it's kind of like a modern day homage to the book, the elements of style which many writers are familiar with. It's just kind of like an essential grammar guide for creating really any type of content. And even though it was written originally in 1918 / 100 years ago, now nothing about it is necessarily out of date. It's just that. It was written in a time that was so far removed from, like, the global digital world that a lot of us are writing about. A lot of things have changed. Even, you know, popular culture, politics, I mean, just the way that, like, we engage with each other. And so I think that was another important thing. It's just the idea of like when you're writing a piece, whether it's for a local audience or not, if it's on the Internet, it's for a global audience. And so you really have to think about how your words might be coming across, even if you don't intend them to come across in a bad way that they still could because you have to be thoughtful about. Language.

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Madeleine

Right, right. I feel, yeah, I feel like that's definitely been more of a discussion lately when people write content or post something silly on their personal accounts and it kind of finds the wrong audience, you know, and it's not always taken the right way. Yeah, yeah, that's a great, great resource for sure.

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Maddy

Yeah. And I mean I don't, I don't think the majority of people have bad intentions, right. It's more about I'll give an example that they give a lot, but it's, it's a really impactful one, which is saying something like clearly or obviously I had an editor many years ago. I don't really do the writing for the business now, but back when they did, I had an editor whose edit was something like. You know this person who's reading this is coming here to learn something, right?

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Madeleine

And so.

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Maddy

It's not really fair. It's like putting them in this box, even though maybe the average audience is digital, like intermediate digital marketers or whatever, but maybe this topic is a little bit more beginner or whatever. Maybe somebody stumbled across it because they want to upskill and they have no idea what this is. And so to say it almost puts them on edge by saying a word that even if it doesn't mean this comes across as like, well, you should have known this like you're dumb or you know, like why wouldn't, why wouldn't you have this knowledge? It's like. It's so unproductive that the word doesn't mean anything anyway, so just cut it so it's stuff like that.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, that's a great example. Yeah, I I always it can be easy to just kind of when you're writing content, do a little bit of writing it as if it's for you type of thing and like you already know all this stuff. But yeah, it's always important to think about your audience. Yeah, what's another kind of like most common edit that you see?

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Maddy

Another one is just adding fluff like unnecessary words so another example that I share sometimes is like simply opening the app you know if it's like a how to and it's like here's how to do this part of the step or whatever. But it would be, it would be more to the point and. And maybe even less like I don't know if saying simply is like antagonizing or not, but it might be if you have trouble with the action, right? You're like, well, it's not simple.

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Madeleine

But yeah, like.

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Maddy

You know, it's just like, Oh well, it was hard for me, am I dumb you know, but just saying like open the app, it means the same exact thing. The other thing from an inclusive point of view is like, you know, talking about for example like. Like somebody who maybe, maybe like you're writing a news journalism story and you're talking about somebody who very well, like maybe a criminal, but like in our country, you know, we believe that you're innocent until proven guilty. So we don't like to immediately talk like this criminal. It's like.

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Madeleine

This.

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Maddy

Person who was charged with a crime or something like, again, who knows, like this person might be the most guilty person, whatever, but because that's like what we believe here and that's like the process that we followed. Judiciously, judicially. You know you have to use the right identifiers instead of sort of jumping to conclusions about what they may or may not be based on current information.

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Madeleine

Right, right. That's a great point. Yeah. Especially since things can be taken out of context and then it would not be like everybody likes, like oh, this news platform or this person said, this person is a criminal and I don't want that.

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Maddy

Right. Like somebody else can be the one who makes that mistake. But yeah, you do that. And I mean that brings out the importance of things like fact checking and like not not taking a statistic and presenting it as fact without sort of investigating the original source and how they presented it, right? Because somebody could have written about it and they could have misinterpreted it, not on purpose. But you write based on that misinterpretation and then it becomes this spiral out. Whole different thing. And then again, if you're writing for clients or something, they go on, they go back to the original source and they're like, that is not at all what it meant, and then you just look bad. Matter. Meaning matters. Intent matters.

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Madeleine

Yeah. And then I guess a final question. Um yeah, if someone's looking to get into, obviously you've given a ton of great advice already. But yeah, if someone's looking into getting into writing better content, doing better SEO, like where is the 1st place they should start in terms of looking for resources and yeah, getting started.

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Maddy

Sure, I think that. It's definitely a good idea. I would say read the quality rater guidelines if you have the stomach for it.

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Madeleine

Or.

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Maddy

Read, you know, maybe some write ups of that because they think that looking sort of straight into the horse's mouth is really the most direct way that you can figure out what's right. I think you know, the other thing is really to just start experimenting and playing around. That was another big thing for me when I. Kind of went from being Maddie Osmond, freelance writer, to having a full time job. This isn't my full thing to like. Now I have a content agency. One of the catalysts for me was that I started my own blog and I was trying to come up with different promotional methods just because I knew I wanted to do marketing. I didn't know what marketing exactly I wanted to do. I know that I like digital marketing. So I started experimenting with different things, social media, giveaways, you know, whatever, email marketing. And that's really where I discovered SEO was specifically for that blog and trying to promote it. That's how I discovered one of my favorite stories is the blog used to be about living in Chicago and, you know, living like a broke post college student. And so having fun, you know, like being able to go out and do stuff without going broke. And so one of my favorite things to do in Chicago, and I used to live there, was I used to volunteer at Lollapalooza so that I could get in for free. Especially if you get the right position. So I used to work on the water team, where you just fill up people's water bottles and they're really happy to see you. So it was a good role. So I wrote a blog post about just my experience volunteering, how I found out about it, what the expectations are, volunteers, how you get invited back to the next year and all that good stuff. And so I think the keyword that I was trying to optimize around, which probably wouldn't work as well now because it would have been like. And exact intent match, but this is just me being like, you know, a little shit when I was 20.

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Madeleine

Or whatever.

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Maddy

Whatever I could to get traffic or whatever, but the keyword was like free Lollapalooza tickets, which technically that is what I was talking about, right? But it was really more about like you get that by putting in some work, but anyway, it was like the top of Google for years for that term.

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Madeleine

Oh my God, yeah. Well, I mean, if I had been Googling that, I would have seen it.

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Maddy

So that 's like that's just like it's one of those things that. In doing that and in seeing it worked, I mean that it really helped me to discover a love for SEO and to understand the power of it. And I think to some extent like also understanding that maybe I was misusing that power a little bit with like a quick baby you know heading and it, it's still important to to set expectations right. But Umm but yeah. So that was one way that, yeah. I guess.

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Madeleine

That's funny, yeah? Maybe if my blogs I met in middle school had done proper SEO, I would have gotten Internet fame that I thought I deserved. Yeah. Oh, that's so funny. OK, well, yeah. Thank you so much for talking to me today. Yeah, I hope everybody goes check out Maddie's new and improved blog that is no longer just about free Lollapalooza tickets.

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Maddy

If you want to talk about that too, I can help you out.

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Madeleine

Um, yeah, this has been the Syncast, and we'll see you all next week for another episode.

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