Staging Your Content will play a major role in the way you create and publish online pages. It doesn’t matter if they are regular pages, blog posts or e-commerce products.
What do I mean by Staging?
By Staging, I’m talking about treating your content as actors who need to practice their play, before they show it to the audience.
It would be embarrassing for them to perform in front of a large audience, only to fail. Without testing their play first, they would go out there and they would babble out some words, without having a clear idea on what they are supposed to do or say.
The same goes for your content.
Imagine Ranking in TOP 10 – Being on the Front Page of Google.
Imagine being on the front page. Being among the first pages in the SERPs. Imagine all that exposure. The huge opportunity of getting people to see you…
Only to show them this:
Of course, you would get away with it if your brand were the Huffington Post.
Most probably, though, it’s not.
So you really need to make sure that you have a good looking description over there.
This is also to illustrate the fact that even big sites fail because they are not staging their content and they’re not paying attention to this.
Staging Your Content
In the old days, SEO people looked at the META description, which is basically that area of the Huffington Posts’s listing up there (that I have highlighted), only as a ranking factor.
The latest things that have come after the roll-out of Json-LD would indicate that it’s still useful for ranking, but nowadays this is not the thing that truly matters:
I keep saying that content should be optimized for Humans, not only for Search Bots.
This is a perfect example of an area of content marketing where you should optimize for Humans.
If finally get to rank for a couple of keywords, people will get to see the title of your page. They will not stop there. Before clicking on your listing (which is the only thing you actually want), people will try to find out if your page is worth their time or not.
A good description and a description that looks really good will make them click and enter your website.
A bad one will make them look at the other listings and choose those instead. You could be number #2 on Google and have all the search traffic go to #3 if you fail to have a good META description.
Great copywriters these days provide great text, filled with calls to action, that people will just NEED to click.
The thing is that most of the times when you are in WordPress, you only think of the text that goes into the page, but you don’t think about how your listing will look like on the Google Search Engine.
Here’s where staging your content comes in.
After you have an idea of what the content of the page will be about, you can think of a great text for the listing that your post will have.
Look again at the Huffington Post example. That’s a very bad example of a listing.
Squirrly SEO Loves you. That’s why our software always makes sure that you will NOT fail at this by having a horrible listing like the one from the example. We also make sure that you will not have an empty listing, which happens a lot more than you’d think.
Squirrly does this in ninja mode. You don’t even need to worry about it, in case you have to simply hit publish.
Here’s the great part. As I’m currently writing this piece, Squirrly SEO has generated the listing for this article, automatically in order to save me from any of the cases mentioned above.
Staging Your Content with Squirrly SEO will ensure that what you see in your WordPress “Edit Post” section is 100% exactly what people will see when they find your listing on the Google SERPs.
Most of the other WordPress SEO Plugins only pretend to do this, but we’ve engineered a few things to make sure that what YOU see here is exactly what Humans will see when they find your listing on Google.
So you have 100% control over your content and how it’s displayed.
This is super important. If you didn’t have this, all your efforts of ranking could go down the drain due to a bad looking listing.
While all of these may sound really good, it just gets better. In order to help Non-SEO experts become SEO Superstars, we went ahead and did even more:
You can customize your Google listing and view it in real time in your Edit Post section, without having to ruin your page versions and draft version by continuously clicking “Save Draft”
Just click that “Customize Meta” button to get started.
And you can now edit those text fields.
After you’re done, click “Save Changes” and you’ll automatically get an image of how it will look like on Google, without having to take any extra actions.
There you have it.
We’ve also created a few slides that show you more in-depth how to use this feature.
Alexandra Nicola
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