Rand Fishkin lays out his content visually as part of his SEO writing process.

RAND FISHKIN IS the co-founder of Moz, the industry leader in the search engine optimisation (SEO) market, which he has grown into a 8-figure company over 17 years. Today, he's working on SparkToro, a self-termed "search engine for audience intelligence", and has published his book Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.

In Moz's trademark definitive style, Fishkin lays out how bloggers, copywriters and content editors might go about approaching their SEO strategy or formula for the Google of recent times, covering how algorithms of search engines have evolved over the decades to affect how websites are ranked on the search results page.

Besides sharing this advice with their audience, you can also observe how they've also put it to use for themselves — employing the tactics and strategies mentioned to propel and amplify their content, further spreading their brand and establishing dominance in a highly valuable and competitive industry.

The Main Takeaway

Fishkin lays out Moz's recommended process for content editors looking to produce SEO-focused work, taking note of updates that Google and other search engines have made to their internal processes and algorithms.

He argues that intent matching, as opposed to other strategies like keyword targeting or link building matter more than anything else in today's SEO world (although they remain important pieces of the puzzle). Hence, that deserves the majority of our focus when it comes to writing for SEO.

Obstacles and Difficulties

Fishkin's newly proposed strategies focus more on the overall psychology of the search intent, rather than technical implementations of how a web page or blog is engineered, in order to net the best SEO results.

For those who have been in the industry for a long time, certain tactics which have worked very well in the past might begin to show signs of not being as performant, and it may be uncomfortable to try to adjust strategies, to step into a new and unfamiliar territory.

SEO marketers must be able to know how to adapt their work and businesses to best take advantage of the way Google is evolving, and refresh their tactics in order to keep up with the times.

Using an Outline

In order to be able to effectively define a page that captures the content that contains the answer to the searcher's intent, editors have to be very clear about what the intentions of the searcher are in the first place.

After drawing on the targeted keywords to define that intent, they should then use a visual content outline to help them systematically structure how their page will answer the searcher's query.

The end result should be a web page of content, written or otherwise, that fully answers all of the questions that the searcher might have had when entering the keywords into Google, which the search engine is then able to recognise and thus rank your page higher on their results page.