How to Write Content for Answers Using the Inverted Pyramid – Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Dr-Pete

If you’ve been sought for a quick hack to write content for featured snippets, this isn’t the section for you. But if you’re looking for lasting results and a smart-alecky tactic to increase your chances of winning a snippet, you’re emphatically in the best place.

Borrowed from journalism, the inverted pyramid technique of writing can help you craft intentional, compelling, rich content that will help you rank for multiple queries and win more than one snippet at a time. Learn how in this fan-favorite Whiteboard Friday starring the one and only Dr. Pete!

Content for Answers

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Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, Dr. Pete here. I’m the Marketing Scientist at Moz and visiting you from not-so-sunny Chicago in the Seattle office. We’ve talked a lot in the last couple times in my blog posts and such about featured snippets.

So these are answers that kind of cross with organic. So it’s an answer box, but you get the attribution and the link. Britney has done some great Whiteboard Fridays, the last couple, about how you do research for featured snippets and how you look for good questions to answer. But I want to talk about something that we don’t cover very much, which is how to write content for answers.

The inverted pyramid style of content writing

It’s tough, because I’m a content marketer and I don’t like to think that there’s a trick to content. I’m afraid to give people the kind of tricks that would have them run off and write lousy, thin content. But there is a technique that the project works that I see has been very effective for featured snippets for writing for the issues and answers. It comes from the world of journalism, which gives me a little more faith in greater credibility. So I want to talk to you about that today. That’s called the inverted pyramid.

Content for Answers

1. Start with the make

It appears something like this. When you write a story as a writer, you start with the make. You contribute with the conduct. So if we have a story like “Penguins Rob a Bank, ” which would be a strange tale, we want to threw that right out front. That’s interesting. Penguins rob a bank, that’s all you need to know. The thing about it is, and this is true back to publish, specially when we had to buy each newspaper. We weren’t readers. But emphatically on the web, you have to get people’s attention quickly. You have to draw them in. You have to have that headline.

2. Go into the details

So resulting with the lead-in is all about drawing them in to see if they’re interested and grabbing their attention. The inverted pyramid, then you get into the smaller articles. Then you get to the details. You might talk about how many penguins were there and what bank did they cheat and how much fund did they take.

3. Move to the context

Then you’re going to move to the context. That might be the history of penguin crime in America and penguin ties to the mafia and what does this say about penguin culture and what are we going to do about this. So then it gets into kind of the supposition and the value add that you as an expert might have.

How does this apply to answering questions for SEO?

So how does this apply to answering questions in an SEO context?

Content for Answers

Lead with the answer, get into the details and data, then address the sub-questions.

Well, what you can do is lead with the answer. If somebody’s asked you a question, you have that snippet, go straight to the summary of the answer. Tell them what they want to know and then get into the details and get into the data. Add those things that give you credibility and that demonstrate your expertise. Then you can talk about context.

But I think what’s interesting with answers — and I’ll talk about this in a minute — is getting into these sub-questions, talking about if you have a very big, broad question, that’s going to dive up into a lot of follow-ups. People who are interested are going to want to know about those follow-ups. So go ahead and answer those.

If I win a featured snippet, will people click on my answer? Should I give everything away?

Content for Answers

So I think there’s a horror we have. What if we answer the question and Google sets it in that box? Here’s the question and that’s the query. It shows the answer. Are people going to click? What’s going to happen? Should we be giving everything away? Yes, I belief, and there are a couple reasons.

Questions that can be very easily answered should be avoided

First, I crave you to be careful. Britney has get into some of this. This is a separate topic on its own. You don’t ever want to answer questions that can be very easily answered. We’ve already seen that with the Knowledge Graph. Google says something like time and date or a reality about person or persons, anything that can come from that Knowledge Graph. “How tall was Abraham Lincoln? ” That’s answered and done, and they’re already superseding those answers.

Answer how-to questions and questions with rich context instead

So you want to answer the kinds of things, the how-to questions and the why questions that have a rich enough context to get people interested. In those cases, I don’t think you have to be afraid to give that away, and I’m going to tell you why. This is more of a UX perspective. If someone questions this question and they be understood that little teaser of your answer and it’s believable, they’re going to click through.

“Giving away” the answer body-builds your credibility and earns more highly qualified visitors

Content for Answers

So here you’ve got the penguin. He’s flushed with currency. He’s looking for money to spend. We’re not going to worry about the ethics of how he got his money. You don’t know. It’s okay. Then he’s going to click through to your associate. You know you have your branding and hopefully it gazes professional, Pyramid Inc ., and he sees that question again and he sees that answer again.

Giving the searcher a “scent trail” builds trust

If you’re afraid that that’s repetition, I feel the good thing about that is this presents him what we call a scent trail. He can see that, “You know what? Yes, this is the page I meant to click on. This is relevant. I’m in the right place.” Then you get to the details, and then you get to the data and you give this trail of credibility that devotes them more to go after and shows your expertise.

People who want an easy answer aren’t the kind of guests that convert

I believe the good thing about that is we’re so afraid to give something away because then somebody might not click. But the kind of people who just wanted that answer and clicked, they’re not the kind of people that are going to convert. They’re not qualified contributes. So these people that see this and see it as credible and want to go speak more, they’re the qualified results. They’re the various kinds of people that are going to give you that money.

So I don’t think we should be afraid of this. Don’t give away the easy answers. I think if you’re in the easy answer business, you’re in fus right now anyway, to be honest. That’s a tough topic. But give them something that steers them to the path of your answer and gives them more information.

How does this tactic work in the real world? Thin content isn’t believable.

Content for Answers

So I’m going to talk about how that looks in a more real context. My fear is this. Don’t take this and run off and say write a bunch of pages that are just a question and a paragraph and a ton of thin content and answering hundreds and hundreds of questions. I think that can really appear thin to Google. So you don’t want pages that are like question, answer, buy my material. It doesn’t search believable. You’re not going to convert. I believe those pages are going to look thin to Google, and you’re going to end up spinning out many, hundred of them. I’ve seen people do that.

Use the inverted pyramid to build richer content and lead to your CTA

Content for Answers

What I’d like to see you do is craft this kind of question page. This is something that takes a fair amount of hour and endeavor. You have that question. You lead with that answer. You’re at the top of the pyramid. Get into the details. Get into the things that people who are really interested in this would want to know and let them build up to that. Then get into data. If you have original data, if you have something you can contribute that no one else can, that’s great.

Then go ahead and answer those sub-questions, because the people who are really interested in that question will have follow-ups. If you’re the person who can answer that follow-up, that stimulates for a very, very credible piece of content, and not just something that can rank for this snippet, but something that really is useful for anybody who encounters it in any way.

So I think this is great content to have. Then if you want some kind of call to action, like a “Learn More, ” that’s contextual, I think this is a page that will attract qualified conducts and convert.

Moz’s example: What is a Title Tag?

So I want to give you an example. This is something we’ve use a lot on Moz in the Learning Center. So, obviously, “weve had” the Moz blog, but we also have these permanent pages that answer kind of the big questions that people always have. So we have one on the name tag, obviously a big topic in SEO.

Content for Answers

Here’s what this page is like. So we go right to the question: What is a title tag? We give the answer: A title tag is an HTML element that does this and this and is useful for SEO, etc. Right there in the paragraph. That’s in the featured snippet. That’s okay. If that’s all someone wants to know and they see that Moz answered that, great , no problem.

But naturally, the people who ask that question, they truly want to know: What does this do? What’s it good for? How does it help my SEO? How do I write one? So we dug in and we ended up blending three or four articles of content into one large-scale piece of the information contained, and we get into some reasonably rich things. So we have a preview tool that’s been popular. We commit a code test. We show how it might look in HTML. It devotes it various kinds of a visual richness. Then we start to get into these sub-questions. Why are title tags important? How do I write a good title tag?

One page can gain the ability to rank for hundreds of questions and phrases

What’s interesting, because I think sometimes people want to split up all the questions because they’re afraid that they have to have one question per page, what’s interesting is that I reckon appeared the other day, this was ranking in our 40 million keyword established for over 200 words, over 200 questions. So it’s ranking for things like “what is a title tag, ” but it’s likewise grading for things like “how do I write a good title tag.” So you don’t have to be afraid of that. If this is a rich, solid piece of content that people are going to, you’re going to rank for these sub-questions, in many cases, and you’re going to get featured snippets for those as well.

Then, when people have gotten through all of this, we can give them something like, “Hey, Moz has some of these tools. You can help write richer name tags. We can check your name tags. Why don’t you try a free 30 -day trial? ” Obviously, we’re experimenting with that, and you don’t want to push too hard-handed, but this becomes a very rich piece of content. We can answer multiple questions, and you actually have multiple opportunities to get featured snippets.

So I think this inverted pyramid technique is legitimate. I think it can help you write good content that’s a win-win. It’s good for SEO. It’s good for your visitors, and it will hopefully help you land some featured snippets.

So I’d love to hear about what kind of questions you’re writing content for, how you can break that up, how you can answer that, and I’d love to discuss that with you. So we’ll see you in specific comments. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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