SEO for DevRels 101

Speaker 1: What's up? Well, thank you for that amazing intro, and hello to people of devrelcom. We are so excited to be here with you. Today, we're gonna be talking about SEO, that is search engine optimization for DevRel one zero one, hitting all the basics here. We're gonna be talking about how to write for both Google and the reader.

So first question right off the bat, Megan, like, why do we even care? I mean, like she was just saying, can't you just write a blog, hit publish, and be done with it?

Speaker 2: You could, but you wanna look at it like this. Of course, the numbers will vary depending on who you talk to, but we know that anywhere from 4,400,000 to 7,500,000 new blogs are published every single day. So if you want your content to be seen, then you need to care about writing for both Google and the reader.

Speaker 1: Makes sense. Alright. So before we go any further, we're just gonna briefly introduce ourselves. My name is Lauren Schafer, and my background is in software engineering. I currently work as a developer advocate at MongoDB where I've been learning so much from Megan about SEO.

And I would love to connect with all of you on social media. I am on Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Yes. I'm one of those crazy DevRel's on TikTok. I really enjoy making silly videos about life as a developer.

And, Megan, over to you. Do you wanna introduce yourself?

Speaker 2: Thank you. And I love your talks. So my name is Megan Grant. I'm the owner of Spark Content Agency, and this is Peanut Grant below me. I have been writing and editing professionally for about twelve years now, and I am also on all of the social media channels, LinkedIn, TikTok, not as good as Lauren at it, but, I'd love to connect with you, so feel free to reach out and say hello.

Cool.

Speaker 1: Alright. So today, I'm gonna be asking Megan a lot of questions about writing for both Google and the reader. So the big question right off the bat, what is SEO?

Speaker 2: That's a good question. So let's start there. When we talk about SEO, we are basically talking about two main things. The first thing is writing for the search engine. And for the sake of this talk, we're just gonna focus on Google.

Now Google is trying to understand how to rank your content, so you wanna give it hints. And the hints that you give it are going to impart determine whether you end up on page one or page 10.

Speaker 1: Does it really matter if you're on page one or page 10?

Speaker 2: It matters a lot. According to Moz, that's where I got these numbers. The first page of Google gets about 71% of all search traffic clicks. Some people say that number is as high as 92. Now on the flip side, once you get to page two, that number drops to 6%.

So basically, if you wanna be seen, you have to be on page one. But like I said, we're talking about two things here. And the second piece of it is writing for the reader. The reader doesn't really care about these hints. They just want you to give them the information that they're looking for.

So that's why you need to write for Google and the reader if you wanna rank, and that's what we're gonna cover today.

Speaker 1: So the first thing we need to do when we're preparing to write is pick a topic. So, Megan, what do you think? Do you have some tips for us on how to pick a topic?

Speaker 2: Yes. Definitely. Because we wanna be writing about things that people care about and are actively searching for in Google. Now the writer might think it's a brilliant idea, but if you don't research it ahead of time, you can't really confirm if people are even searching for it in Google. Now, fortunately, there are a couple of really simple ways that you could come up with topics.

The first is to use the it's called the people also ask feature in Google. Now let's say that you know very broadly that you wanna write about something that has to do with data lakes, but what? So what you can do is you can go into Google and you can type data lakes. And Google will show you on page one this little box that says people also ask. These are related questions that people have actually searched in Google so you know that this is stuff they care about.

Another way to come up with topic ideas is to use the related searches feature in Google search results, and you can find this if you scroll to the very bottom of page one. So again, I searched data lakes and this is what Google returned. So similar to the people also ask section, these are searches that people have actually conducted in Google. So those are just two very quick, simple, free ways to come up with relevant topics. But after you have a topic, we're gonna take this one step further and we're gonna start talking about your keyword.

And there are two things you wanna look for with a keyword. It has to be high traffic and ideally low competition.

Speaker 1: So what do you mean by high traffic?

Speaker 2: High traffic means that there are a lot of people searching for it in Google.

Speaker 1: Okay. Yep. That seems important. And what's the other thing you said we need?

Speaker 2: The second part is low competition, which means that a lot of websites not a lot of websites are blogging around that keyword, so it's going to be easier to rank for it and easier to be seen for it. So we want a keyword that's high traffic and low competition. There are a lot of tools that can help you with this. One is SEMRush or SEMRush. This is the one we're gonna focus on for the remainder of this talk.

You can sign up and use it for free with some limitations. A few other tools are Ahrefs, Moz, Keywords Everywhere, and Ubersuggest all are great in their own ways. Now when we were researching topics a moment ago, we saw a few ideas around the phrase examples of data lakes. So we're gonna look this up in SEMRush. I went into SEMRush and I typed in example of data lake, and this is what it tells me.

This search term gets about 20 searches a month, which is pretty low and the competition is 46%, which is getting up there, especially for a search term with so little traffic. So we can do better than this. What we're gonna do is we're actually gonna take a step back and simply search data lake. So we're gonna go broader. And here's what we're working with.

The volume is much higher, more than 18,000 searches per month, which is great. But then the competition is also a lot higher. It's up to 75%. I would say that we're on the right track, but we need to keep refining this, so let's keep going. Now one of the things I love about SEMRush is that it'll suggest related keyword ideas.

So if we scroll down on that same results page, this is what we see. Data lake versus data warehouse, which I put the big red square around, that one jumped out at me because the volume is still great, but the competition is a little bit lower. So this was something that's, you know, worth exploring. And you could continue going through this whole process as long as you wanted, and you would eventually strike gold. You would find, you know, a keyword that's high volume and low competition, meaning that if you wrote a really awesome blog around it, you'd be in a good position to rank and a lot of people would find you in Google.

So let's roll with data lake versus data warehouse as our keyword just, you know, for the sake of this example. And we're actually gonna come back to this in a moment. We have one last step before we can keep going and that is determine user intent. Now this is a matter of your blog being completely off topic versus giving the reader everything they wanna know about. So user intent, which is also sometimes called search intent, is what people are trying to learn when they search for something in Google.

And sometimes the user intent is really obvious. Other times, that's not the case. As an example, data lake as a search term is super broad and it can mean a lot of different things. But data lake versus data warehouse is much more specific.

Speaker 1: So why do we care about user intent?

Speaker 2: That's a good question. The reason you have to care about it is that you can write a blog around an amazing keyword. It can be perfectly optimized. But if you don't ultimately give the reader what they want, none of it's gonna matter. So that's why we have to keep in mind we're writing for Google and the reader.

Fortunately, determining user intent is pretty simple. All you have to do is search your keyword in Google, and, incognito is best. And what you're going to do is you're gonna start looking through what's ranking on page one and especially what's ranking in the top three positions. And you're gonna start going through these pages, and you wanna ask yourself questions like, what subtopics are they covering? How exactly are they covering them?

Are there images, videos, code blocks? You can look at the approximate word count. And essentially, you're trying to determine why readers love these specific pages so much. And you're gonna use this as inspiration. You're not gonna copy it, but you're gonna use this to create your own content that is ideally much better.

Speaker 1: Alright. So I know we've got people here like me who love to get in and write the code and I can take a guess what they're thinking. Okay. We've done a lot of research at this point, but when do I get to start writing my code?

Speaker 2: That is the fun part. So now that you have your topic and your keyword, now it's time to start writing your code. Now if you're writing a series of blogs, we do recommend building all of the code you'll need for the entire series. There is nothing more frustrating than getting to the last article in a series and then realizing that you should have tweaked your example slightly to make it work throughout. And if something is fuzzy as you're building your code, don't gloss over it.

Dig into the details. You know, find the answer and make a note of it in your article. Going deeper into your topic might take a little bit of extra time, but your readers are going to notice it and appreciate it. And honestly, they probably have the same questions as you do. As you're looking at your code and you're figuring out how to break it up into multiple articles, you wanna consider the keyword that each article is going to target.

Now each post in the series should focus on its own keyword or the post might end up competing against each other in the Google rankings.

Speaker 1: That actually happened to me. I created an article series about getting started with MongoDB. And so I broke up the series so each of the CRUD, that's create, read, update, and delete operations, were their own individual posts. And it turned out nobody was actually searching for those individually. So they were searching for the CRUD operations as a whole.

So when I combined those four separate articles into this one mega article, the post really took off in popularity.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's a perfect example, and I'd be willing to bet money that that article will just keep gathering traffic.

Speaker 1: Alright. So I've picked a topic. I've written my code. Can I start writing now?

Speaker 2: No. There's one more thing we wanna do that's going to save us major headaches down the road, and that is outline your blog. Now I know this is a step that a lot of us tend to skip, but if you spend even just a little bit of time here, it's going to speed up the writing process and make it easier on anyone who is reviewing or editing your content. So first, if you're writing your blog as part of a series, you wanna outline every part to make sure that it's gonna be cohesive to start from start to finish. Or if it's just one standalone blog, you outline it, just that one and you can move on.

We can keep this simple. You wanna look at it like this. You start with your title, which is the main overarching theme of the whole blog. And within that main theme, you have main topics. You might have two or three or maybe four.

And then within those topics, you have subtopics. Okay? So all we're doing here is kind of breaking down the main theme into smaller bite sized pieces and outlining what we're going to cover. And remember your user intent here. Whatever you outline should be the beginning of satisfying user intent.

Speaker 1: Alright. So now do we get to start writing?

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Alright. Great. So then how am I actually gonna write for both Google and the reader?

Speaker 2: Let's start with Google. By this point, you've got your topic, your keyword, your user intent, and your outline. So you're ready to get going with the first draft. You wanna make sure you take your keyword, and you're going to include it in the title of the blog, the URL, the first paragraph, at least one header, ideally an h two, and sprinkled throughout the blog where it feels natural. These are very basic SEO best practices.

Remember earlier, we talked about giving Google hints. These are the hints and it's going to help the search engine determine how to rank you. And remember this, I wanna swing back and talk about headers for a minute. Whatever you wrote down in your outline as your main topics and subtopics and so on, Those will very likely become your headers. So you already did that work.

It's done. And you really wanna put some thought into your headers because these are really important for two specific reasons. First, Google pays extra special attention to them, which is why you wanna include your keyword if possible. And secondly, readers use them to skim. A lot of your readers aren't reading word for word.

They're skimming. So headers allow them to still grasp the main points of your blog so that they walk away getting the information that they need.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm totally guilty of just skimming articles and looking for the pieces that interest me. So I always appreciate when authors use headers appropriately.

Speaker 2: Yeah. They're a huge help for both the writer and the reader. This is a little it's not top off topic, kind a side note, super important. There's something called the featured snippet in Google search results. And Google shows a featured snippet when it determines that a web page has very concisely, very perfectly answered a user's query.

Now there's no way to control the featured snippet and, like, you can't force yourself to get it, but you can increase the odds. So what you wanna do when you're writing is ask yourself, someplace in this blog, how can I very quickly answer the user's query? And you wanna make it as concise as possible. So here's an example. I googled how do you rank in Google, and this is the featured snippet.

Okay. So Google saw this article from backlinko.com, and they said, this is the perfect answer to that query. So they gave it the featured snippet snippet, which is at the top of page one, and it's really good real estate.

Speaker 1: Alright. So, Megan, you've given us so much helpful information. Can you summarize all this for us? What does this all mean?

Speaker 2: The simplest way to look at it is like this. SEO matters, and you're going to do this largely for Google, but never forget Google's number one priority, which is making the user happy. Did your blog do that? Did you also follow SEO best practices like we've talked about during these slides? If you did, then you're on the right track.

You're in good shape. And if you want your content to spread like wildfire, just remember, write for Google and the reader.