My Boss tells me personal narrative content isn't read online and bad for SEO, anyone else disagree? b/c I do!
-
I am in a constant debate that content 1st person or 3rd person doesn't make a difference in terms of SEO and what people on the web want to read. What do you all think? Does it make a difference?
-
I couldn't agree more! I believe the only reason that they didn't want personal narrative is because of some bad information about that style being bad for SEO; but as I have expressed to them, it's not!
Appreciate your response!
-
Gonna be blunt... a travel writing contest that doesn't allow first-person stories is simply ridiculous. (Disclosure: I work predominantly in tourism/travel too)
Travel is an incredibly personal experience. A travel guide that lists attractions of a city is one thing, but an inspiring, exciting, or moving storing of how one person experienced that city is far more likely to actually inspire others to start thinking about visiting there as well. It's the personal stories that allow a reader to start to visualize themselves doing and enjoying the things the writer is talking about.
Travel is aspirational and emotional - people don't do it because they have to but because something inspires them to do it. That inspiration doesn't come from a logic-based laundry list of places and events (facts), but the ability of the visitor to imagine themselves in and enjoying the destination (emotions). And that comes in large part from reading others' experiences. Even most travel fiction is based on first-person narrative for that reason.
Sure, once you've captured their attention in the dreaming phase, you need solid guidebook-like info for followup. But even then, people are looking for personal connections to assess the validity of the guidebook recommendations. One need only to look at the explosion of TripAdvisor over the last couple of years to see that even guidebook info is more effective when accompanied by personal stories (reviews).
The writing contest is a great idea for generating interesting real content. Don't neuter it by removing the emotional connection to the stories.
There's more than my $.02
Paul
-
Hi Kane,
You are spot on, there is room for both types of content! We are in a panic mode to get as much content up as we previously lacked pretty much any type of content being a directory!
I like your suggestions with museums, I think that is a good strategy!
-
Dear Jonathan,
Moosa and Kane have given nice insights. Here are my two cents. No matter what, an original piece of content which is unique, fresh, relevant and link worthy, always gets great traction online and goes viral with little to no help. So all that we need is try and come up with such content. All the SEO goodies will follow it after...
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hi Jonathon,
This won't cause any problems. The only argument one could make to support this theory is if one type of content tended to earn more links. An example would be authoritative content like Wikipedia. I don't believe this to be the case. 1st person voice can be just as link-worthy and perhaps more likely to get shared socially.
Honestly, there's room for both types of content on your site: a resource page written in 3rd person tone about a subject, and a blog article in 1st person with a personal recount about the area. Use the 3rd person content to target a keyword phrase like "Museums in Rome" and the 1st person content for a phrase like "Best Museums in Rome".
Hope that helps.
-
Yup, I mean personal experiences, specifically to a travel experience, as we are a travel website. We are creating a writing contest and they are wanting to restrict 1st person experiences, doesn't make sense to me!
But I agree the more personal and a piece of content that hits the user emotionally will be the most impactful!
As you said, content that is straight 500 words with links, is dead content these days!
Thanks for the feedback! I am mostly hoping for responses so I can prove my point! As with all SEO'er it is easier to convince with data!
-
From personal Narration if you mean a story about something that happened to you and how you feel about it. Then in that case i am with you... The world is moving towards personalization... even in the SEO world people love to hear personal experiments, tests instead f theory articles!
Technically speaking content that have a touch of personalization tend to go more viral as compare to the one that only talks about boring theory...
I think if you boss want straight 500 words of article and a link at the end to get SEO benefits.... so the time is over for that... today if you are not creating valuable and engaging content you are almost wasting your time as far as SEO is concern!
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate Ttile and Duplicate Content
I'm a beginner of SEO. I have a few questions need to ask people to help. The MozPro's Crawl Diagnostics show I have a lot of duplicate titles and duplicate content. However, most duplicate titles are related to Pagination. What should I do? Also, for my duplicate content. B/c we are selling similar products,everything all most the same, only product's item number different. How can I avoid it?
Content Development | | alexsu09100 -
Anyone good at ranking on Yahoo?
I don't get Yahoo or Bing these days! I wrote a story "Did David Wineland and Serge Haroche Steal Idea For The Nobel Physics Prize?" It is a unique story, sourced from a prince. It is referenced on many other sites. It has had about 115,000 pageviews so far. most of those people read 2 or 3 pages. Do Yahoo or Bing list my story? No. They list all the referencing sites, they even list unrelated stories on my site that show that headline in the "top ten stories of the day" widget, but not the story itself. It has about 1250 shares. What am I doing wrong? http://buff.ly/WXso4P Is it page structure?
Content Development | | loopyal0 -
Prevent average users from copying content and pasting into their websites
Please do not respond with a "you can't stop them" comment, I understand this. Most of our pages have content that is duplicated across multiple domains. The recent Google algorithm update focused on penalizing pages that have duplicate content, and it could be one of the reasons that we have been seeing traffic loss. I'm looking for some type of javascsript/php code that will help minimize this issue.If could be code that does not allow you to copy and paste the code without turning of javascript or a dialog box pops up and says "this content is copyright protected, anyone copying this content is subject to legal action" I've found one script that might work http://www.ioncube.com/html_encoder.php My questions are still the same: 1 What is the best method to achieve my objective? 2 Will this additional code affect how the webbots see our site and or affect rankings? I know that anyone can figure out how to get the code, I am trying to mitigate by providing a warning about copyright infringement and making it more challenging to copy our content. Please do not respond with a "you can't stop them" comment, etc, I understand this. Thank you for your comments!
Content Development | | 4RealLocal0 -
What's the best RSS Feed Pluggin for Wordpress?
I need to add an RSS feed for my Wordpress blog. Which one is the best to use? How can I maximize my RSS feed once I have it ? I'm thinking Technorati but what other places should I place it?
Content Development | | bronxpad0 -
Forum Site: Content Value Post Panda
I run a forum website built on Wordpress. We're about two years old. The theme of the site is a directory of attorneys, with each directory listing having its own blog account on our site. Through this platform, we receive 75-80 blog posts now every month of varying quality from our users. QUESTION: A good number of the blogs published on our site are also published on the attorney's law firm site as well (they're syndicating on our site). Will this hurt our site in light of Panda? A lot of the syndicated content is very well written and insightful. By contrast, Will non-syndicated but average to below average posts hurt our site? The authors almost always link back to their firm site. Would love some feedback on whether we should be happy about the syndicated content or whether we should potentially ban it?
Content Development | | JSOC0 -
How to fight the Panda/Farmer update?
I have been suffering majorly from the Google algo change, as I lost more than 50% of my traffic of my largest site. Since then I have been focusing on rewriting pages, and adding new ones. New pages are all of high quality up to 2,000 words each, and the improved pages used to be thin content pages, rewritten to about 1,000 words. All content is 100% unique. I have noticed Google still has the old pages cached, dated to more than a month back, despite new pages (linking to some of the old) being indexed. Anyway, I am pretty much desperate by now, and coul really use some advice how to fight this. FYI, I got some budget available and a writer stand-by. Thanks, Giorgio
Content Development | | VisualSense0 -
For a consumer facing blog, how often do you recommend updating content to develop good rankings? I understand that it's really dependent upon the niche/competition, but what are some best practices? Content is expensive. Thanks
For a consumer facing blog, how often do you recommend updating content to develop good rankings? I understand that it's really dependent upon the niche/competition, but what are some best practices? Content is expensive. Thanks
Content Development | | CSOD19990