Content expansion: From prompt to paragraph, to published page

We've all been there. They are the SEO for a project, and you're also the one tasked with writing great content well and quickly. And if you don't have one... Experts Great content can seem unattainable if you don't have access to it.

How can SEOs produce great content if they are not subject matter experts?
You see, search engine optimizers have this truly bizarre responsibility. We're often asked by our clients to produce content about things we have nothing to write about. As SEOs, we know exactly what kind of content will rank well for Google, but that doesn't mean we have little expertise in what our client does.

Perhaps your client is an artist, or maybe they run a restaurant. Perhaps you know nothing about it, but you have a deadline to meet to deliver high-quality content that delves into a topic outside your area of ​​expertise. Below, you'll find a few tricks you can use to get from the initial prompt to a few paragraphs and ultimately to a well-written, published page.

Caution: If an expert can create the content, they should do so.

This isn't the preferred way to produce content. If you can have an expert create the content, then by all means, have that expert create it. Then, focus on optimizing the content to make it the best it can be. That's how you should do it whenever possible.

But we know that's not the case. The truth is, most small business owners don't have the time to write lengthy articles about their services and offerings, what makes them special, and what their customers need. They have a business to run. It's not unethical to take the time to actually try and write a good piece of content for that customer.

But if you want to do it, you should really try to create something of value. Hopefully, this will help you do just that. This is called content expansion because the whole point is to start with a small call to action, then expand a little, and expand even more, until you finally arrive at something that is very thorough, useful, and valuable to the customers reading that content.

Each step is like blowing a breath into a balloon to make it a little bigger. Each step is manageable when you expand the content.

1. Start with a prompt

First, we need to start with a topic or a question. In our example, we spontaneously chose bicycle safety.

With the immediate focus on bicycle safety, we now need to consider what we want to talk about regarding bicycle safety. We know pretty much by heart that helmets, signaling, and things like that are important.

Find the questions people are asking.

But what are people actually asking? What information do they want? Well, there are a few ways we can find out, namely by searching for the exact questions they're asking. One way is to simply type "bicycle safety" into Google and look for PAAs, or People Also Ask. This is the SERP feature you'll see about halfway down the page, which often contains a few questions you can click on, and it will display a short text snippet or explanation to help you answer them.

Another option would be to use a tool like Moz Keyword Explorer lets you enter "bicycle safety" and then simply select from one of the drop-down menus. It will then show you all the questions people ask about bicycle safety. Doing this will give you a handful of questions people ask about bicycle safety.

In this case, the three questions asked by the PAA regarding the bicycle's safety were:

Is cycling safe?
How can I improve security?
Why is bicycle safety important?

This puts us in a position where we can now develop a kind of outline of the content we will build.

Create the outline for your content

We've expanded a piece about bicycle safety into a draft that includes a few questions we want to answer. Now, here's the catch. Bicycle safety, sure, we have some ideas off the top of our heads about what's important for bicycle safety. But what we're really looking for here is authoritative or valuable content.

Google will tell you what that is. If you press the button that shows you the answer to the question, Google will tell you that this is the best answer we could find on the internet to this question. I would recommend that you take the time and simply copy the answer to this PAA, to this question. Why is bicycle safety important?

If you click the button, the answer will be displayed. Then you would also write down the quote. But when you think about it, that's exactly how you would write papers at university. If you were writing a paper on bicycle safety in college, you would go to the library, select books on safety studies, and so on. Then you would go through them and probably pull out note cards.

You would find a specific page containing an important paragraph. You would write down a paraphrase and then the quote. That's exactly the same thing. I'm not telling you to copy the content. That's not what we'll end up doing. But at the same time, that's how we're taking the next step toward expanding the content. What we've done here is move from one topic to a few questions.

For each of these questions, we now have a sort of idea of ​​what the target answer is. But of course, the presented snippet isn't the whole answer. The presented snippet is only the most specific answer to the question, but not the most thorough. It doesn't cover all the basics. So, what are some of the things we can do to expand on this even further?

2. Extract and explain entities

At this point, I would like to utilize the advantages of NLP technologies, that is, natural language programming technologies, which will allow us to expand this content in a way that offers added value to the user and, in particular, explains user concepts that both you as the author in this specific case and you as the reader may not be familiar with.

My favorite is a Website It's called dandelion.eu. It's completely free for a certain number of uses. But if you produce a lot of content, I would strongly recommend signing up for their API services. What you'll be doing is extracting and explaining entities.

Imagine you have this clip here, and it's about bicycle safety. It answers the question: "Why is bicycle safety important?" It states that cyclists who wear their helmets are 50% less likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries in a crash or something similar. That's the answer in the clip you've been given.

Well, perhaps you don't know what a traumatic brain injury is, and perhaps your readers don't know what it is and why it's important to know that one thing protects you so much from the other.

Identify the terminology for your questions and expand upon it.

Extracting entities can be really important here. What dandelion.eu will do is identify this noun phrase. It will identify the phrase "traumatic brain injury" and then give you a description of exactly what that is. Now you can expand the paragraph you originally extracted from the article snippet and add a quote about the precise meaning of a traumatic brain injury.

This will happen with all questions. You will find various terms that your reader may not know, and you can then expand on them.

3. Create a new research project

The only thing I want to do in this process is not just use content that other people have written about, but try to explore something new. As you know, Google Trends is probably my favorite place for novel research, because if there's a topic in the world, someone is searching for it, and we can learn things about how people search.

Using Google Trends

In this Google TrendsRegarding the research I did, I can't recall the exact products I looked up, but they were specific bicycle safety products, such as bicycle lights, bicycle mirrors, bicycle video cameras, or bicycle cameras, etc. In fact, I'm almost certain the red one had to do with bicycle cameras because they became cheaper and more accessible to cyclists. They've become increasingly popular over time. Now, this is novel research.

Incorporate insights, graphics, and discussion points from your novel research into your writing.

If you're writing this article about bicycle safety, you can include much more than just what other people have said. Of the many ways to improve bicycle safety, the use of bicycle cameras has increased dramatically over time.

4. Pull everything together

That's good. Now that you have some of this novel research, including even graphics that you can insert into the content, we need to put it all together. We started with the call to action and then moved on to some topics or questions that we needed to answer. Then we answered those questions and then expanded on them by providing clarity and definitions for terms that people might not understand, and we also added some novel research.

Rewrite in terms of relevance

What comes next? The next step is that we need to rewrite for relevance. This is a really important part of the process. If you're writing about a topic you're not familiar with, you're unlikely to use the right language to describe what's going on. I think a good example would be if you're writing about golf and don't know what it means to accidentally hit a golf ball that goes right or left.

Find relevant words and phrases with nTopic

What is a hook and a disc? Those of you who play golf surely know off the top of your head. But you wouldn't know how to use this kind of terminology if you weren't actually a golfer. Well, if you use a tool like nTopic – it's at nTopic.org – and you write your content and place it there, and then specify bicycle safety as a keyword you want to optimize for.

In this way you can expand your content even further, not only with more formulations and definitions you are familiar with, but with the language that experts currently use when they talk about bicycle safety or whatever topic.

Check (and improve) your writing quality with the Hemingway app

Next, I would say that you should really step back and take the opportunity to look at the quality of the texts you have produced.

All along we've mainly talked about how profound and thorough the content is, how it covers many topics and areas, and how it uses the right language. But we haven't spent any time at all discussing whether it's actually well-written. There's a fantastic free app called the Hemingway App.

If you haven't heard of it yet, this will brighten your day. Every writer in the world should use a tool like this. You simply enter your content, and it will give you all sorts of recommendations, from grammar correction and word choice to sentence shortening, passive and active voice, ensuring correct verb forms, and so on. It's incredibly useful for writing high-quality content.

Two important things to remember:

Ultimately, there are two things that matter, and one of them is really, really important in my opinion, and that is worth quoting.

1. Cite your sources – even if they are competitors!

You see, when you have done all this work, you must let the world know that, firstly, this work was not only created by yourself, but secondly, that it is supported by research and information from other experts.

There's absolutely no shame in citing even competitors who have produced good content that has helped you create the content you're now putting together. So cite them. Type in citations directly. Look, Wikipedia is ranked for everything, and every other sentence is cited and linked to another website. It's crazy.

But Google doesn't really care about citing someone else in the sense that they've written about it. What they're really interested in is showing users that you've done your homework.

2. Be proud of what you have achieved!

When you are finally finished, you can publish this great piece of content that is thorough, exceptional, and uniquely valuable, well-written in the language and words it should use, properly cited, and you can be proud of the content you have produced at the end of the day, even if you were not an expert.

I hope some of these techniques will help you in the long run. I look forward to your comments, and perhaps we can ask you some questions and I can offer some further suggestions. Thanks again.