Adam Gent says: “I believe that writing is a great way to communicate with developers and product managers to get things done.”

Do you want to touch on other aspects of the importance of writing as an SEO?

“I think not only does it help you communicate better to those technical teams, but it’s also a great tool to improve your communication skills and thinking skills to solve problems, become smarter, persuade others, and translate technical. Sometimes jargon from Google speaks for business stakeholders who must understand what is happening. It's a great way to brief your technical stakeholders like your developers, product managers, and content writers. It's a great way to have a structured brief and tell them what it is you're thinking of wanting to build the guardrails, why we're doing it, and what problem it's solving. It also can help to get ahead of problems because you can do what is called a pre-mortem on projects where you can talk about these big risks. Let’s write it down. It's a boring way to do it, but you're trying to stop high-risk problems and assumptions across the team from effectively killing a project or slowing a project down once it's released. Writing is a way to capture those thoughts and structure them in a way that can be clearly understood, and then action straightaway.”

For a moment, I thought that writing was becoming less important because of AI, and we could just let AI do everything for us, but that's not the case is it?

“No, I get asked this often when talking about it in writing. Remember, writing is thinking, right? When you write, you're crystallizing and refining your thoughts to communicate them to someone else: an email, a report, a Slack message. The problem with AI is it's thinking for you. It's writing out the thoughts and ideas, but you're copying it from another part of the internet, and then putting it into an email or a report. Maybe it can help you improve your writing, or write in a different style, but it's certainly not a replacement for what you should be doing, which is thinking through problems and trying to identify those recommendations or those insights that you've taken out of data.”

How does an SEO get better at writing? Is there any particular style of writing that an SEO should try to get better at?

“There is a way you can get better at it, and it's something called copywork. Copywork is an old practice used by copywriters to help people get better at writing. A copywork is very simple. You take a piece of writing that's good. There could be this piece of business writing that you think communicates well, or you see it done well with stakeholders and copy it. The theory behind it is similar to learning to play a musical instrument because most people learn by playing other people's songs and learn the patterns of these things. The same happens with copywork when you learn to write others’ work. You're not trying to copy straight from it and start using their work. What you're doing is you're learning how a good piece of writing works, and you're looking at the pattern. The problem is that we learn to write at school, and you do essays, and you get to write a university dissertation. But if you write for the web, like I do, like my newsletter, The SEO Sprint, where you write for business writing, people don't have time to read chunks and chunks of paragraphs. You have to structure and thin out your work to make it easier to read and get to the point. If you want to learn how to do business writing, you can read books, but the best way is to write. And to do that, you can do copywork. I'd highly recommend booking in what I call ‘copy hour’ to just book some time on your calendar, find some writing and write it. The best way to do it is by hand, but I sometimes do a Google Doc where I start writing out other people's good work I've seen.

If you would like to, you can do Tom Critchlow's SEO MBA. He’s pretty good at writing. There are also Amazon quarterly updates where they've written these things down, or you can look at really good emails internally that you work on, or if you’ve seen really good emails or other newsletters or pieces of work that you have that you like and has either persuaded somebody or you felt it's really good, then you can use that to copy that out. I'd also recommend using Hemingway, which is a writing tool which is really good and free. When you put in and paste your work, it tells you the reading grade level of it. So many times I put my work in and it's technical, it's like it's postgraduate level, and I feel like I need to tune this down. Ideally you want between grade six and grade eight. So when I'm writing for my newsletters I have roughly a grade six to grade eight kind of target because I know that people like it. The reason why is because you're trying to make it easier for that person to read that information, digest it, understand it, and you're trying to get to the point.”

Is that generally a good rule of thumb for stakeholders as well? Because you mentioned stakeholders earlier on. So if you're writing for stakeholders, should you aim for grade six to eight still?

“Everybody. Developers, product people, everyone. Everybody's time is already booked. When you write to somebody, you want them to do something like write an email. There’s probably an action list or next steps, and you want to put that at the top to get to the point. And this is true for newsletters and business writing too. Everybody in every business at every level needs to get to the point because nobody wants to read many paragraphs of text around technical things they don't care about. So, it's just all around getting to the point.”

Is there any formula you would use to structure the content of your writing for developers or stakeholders? For instance, I've produced a content production or content marketing course. And part of that was looking at sales content. And I was looking at a formula for creating sales content. And I like Simon Sinek's way of looking at great businesses, starting with ‘why’ and then moving to ‘how’ and then ‘what’. And that's a formula that can also be applied to sales content. So, you start with the ‘why’, then move on to the ‘how’ and then the ‘what’ of what the business does, and ask for the sales afterward. And too many people start with the ‘what’ to begin with by mistake. So, is there a similar type of formula that you would apply to internal writing?

“So I'm going to say there's a bit of a difference between sales copy, sales letters, content writing, and internal writing. You can still use some of these formulas, but the reason it's different is that a lot of the time when I'm communicating with another stakeholder, I am trying to summarize a piece of insights that I found in this recommendation or this piece of analysis. I use MECE principles, which are Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. Imagine a shopping list, but it's just one big list, and everything's not grouped. You’d have to go across the shop, backwards and forwards, many times. I don't know about you. But I go down and jump across the shop based on the list’s order. However, the MECE principle is very simple. It sounds complicated, but it's not. It's grouping information that's relevant. So going back to the shopping list, you’d put all the frozen stuff in the frozen section, all the bakery stuff in the bakery section, and you want the meat in the meat section. So, you are grouping all of that list into those collective groups.

It's kind of the same with your writing. You want to group information to help them understand the problem. Let's say the recent algorithm update hits you, because who hasn't been hit at some point? So you need to provide action and then the next steps. We're seeing a drop in these rankings, and we've done all this analysis to guarantee that business owners don't want to read reams of content. So, what you need to be doing is defining the problem and then the action, and beneath that, here are three key initiatives. So, you will do three key initiatives to help overcome that problem, and that's going to help action that top level. We need to improve content and to do it, here are the reasons why. You can read the in-depth stuff if you want, but straight to the point, this is what we're doing. And that is the MECE and what is called the pyramid principle.

These are like business consultancy, McKinsey-level frameworks that have been used for years. So the first part of the pyramid principle is you're using the MECE and what you're doing is writing to get to a piece of friction. You have your problem, recommendation and your three pieces of information. And then the second part of the pyramid principle, as you go down, is getting to the point when you're communicating with your stakeholders, anybody in high management or leadership, quite a lot of people, so you want to get to the point. So, you get to the point, and then you go into details if needed. You can use writing to improve your slides, so what I do a lot is write and then put stuff in slides rather than try and mix it up in slides. Slides are great for communicating and presenting ideas, but they're not great for thinking through problems. Digging into your analysis is a great way to connect both of those things.”

Should every SEO build the skill set of great writing? Or maybe Technical SEO isn't necessary to become a good writer as well?

“I am a Technical SEO and I didn't realize the power this had over persuading people, as well as helping me become smarter as well, by just helping me identify and think through problems better, because as you are writing it down, you're thinking it through. If some questions haven’t been answered, then I need to go off and get these questions answered. I think you're not trying to be like an amazing author, but you are. It is all about just improving your thinking and then improving your communication. And even if they work on it a little bit, it just helps them get across what they want people to do, because SEO is all about persuading others to do things that need to be done.”

You've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. Now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. So what's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“I will go against what I've said in today's episode. So, what these people love to do is try and automate workflows and try to cut out speaking to others, especially in SEO. Crawlers alert you to a problem, and you will email the development team. I'm using writing to write this great, short, quick email, explain everything, and go fire out. People should avoid trying to make a process where you don't talk to people. You have to go and sit and discuss things and have conversations over documentation. You can write things down as much as you want clearly. But my own experience tells me that people aren't always going to read it. Just because they read it does not necessarily mean they understand. You can write the best email, but that doesn't necessarily mean they even remember it. They'll read it, and then they'll forget it. This is something that a lot of SEOs will take just recommendations over and run away. So, it seems it's quick and easy to do. I will crawl and send it to developers, and I am not usually the one who handles it anymore. You have to own it and catch up on that conversation. So, I think people should try to be proactive and have these conversations with developers, product people, and business stakeholders. I know it's tough to have these conversations, but I think it's a more productive type of conversation than it is to rely on a system or a process that nobody necessarily even understands.”

Adam Gent is an independent SEO product manager at The SEO Sprint, and you can find them over theseosprint.com.