Is Using a Question, Answer Format Appropriate for a Blog? Is a 300 Word Micro Blog An SEO Plus?
-
My PR agency has suggested a question answer format be incorporated in my blog. They suggest a microblog with a single sentence question and an answer of about 300 words.
My blog currently has about 35 posts. I would like to ramp up blog entries to about one or two per week of these "mini blog" posts.
The format of the new blog begins as a question with the responses being paragraphs that do not use headings. My concerns are as follows:
1. No headings in an answer of 300 words will fail to provide Google with context regarding the content's meaning. Everything I have read about SEO suggests text be broken up in short sections and that it be divided by headings (preferably H2s).
I very much like my agency's concept for a question answer format blog. It provides very practical info for visitors. How can I use it in a manner that supports SEO best practices?
2. According to a reputable SEO firm that has been assisting me, Google does not consider a blog post of less than 600 words to be superior quality. They told me that blog posts of 300 words, from an SEO purpose will not be a great helpful, that the content will not be rich enough to generate incoming links.
Is this really the case? What if this abbreviated content is very well written and engaging? If so, is 300 words sufficient? From the visitor's perspective I am not sure they would have the patience to read 600 words when 300 words is more than than enough to answer these basic questions. From a PR perspective I think the shorter content in a question answer format is superior at least for my line of business (commercial real estate brokerage).
3. If 500-600 words is the minimum word count, and headings are necessary, what is the best way to execute a question and answer blog format?
The purpose of this blog is to provide very useful info to my visitors while generating incoming links to that will boast my rankings.
Thanks in advance for your feedback!!!
Alan
-
There used to be a platform for this called Sponge, but their site is down so I assume it's gone now.
Q&A can be very useful, but you will need to focus attention less on length and more on the capability to search the questions. More importantly if your market wants this and if it's not available elsewhere. If this is something that has been identified as necessary and useful, go for it. Don't worry too much about the headings and length. Just don't make this a factory of questions and 300 word answers. Allow the people writing the answers to answer well, no matter how long.
Hope that helps!
-
Heading over to Quora, Yahoo Answers and related site types is a great way to seed your FAQ type posts.
Try to answer these questions with as much detail as possible as it will gain return readership, especially if their pain was relieved.
You can worry about the finer details if you would like but providing relevant help answers to industry questions is always going to be a plus.
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
-
Use of "/" and using fractions in titles
We are a company that sells pipe and fittings. An example of a part that someone will search for is : 3/4" PVC Socket I am not sure how best to represent the fraction in the title of the page that has such a product. I am concerned that if I use the forward slash it will be misinterpreted by search engines (although it will be interpreted properly by users). A lot of folk search for the product by the fraction size and so it would be good to be able to represent it in the title, but I don't want to get "punished" by confusing search engines. I could replace the forward slash with a hyphen or pipe symbol, but then may look a bit weird to our users... Any recommendations? Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobBawden11 -
If there any SEO downside in using Google+ brand page for news curation?
We are thinking about using our Google+ brand page to curate relevant news from different sources and organize them in Collections. We are confident that we can generate backlinks, followers, and engagement with this strategy. My fear is to suffer some penalty due to the fact that will not be sharing our own content. We will be redirecting the clicks to the website of the owner of the content; using Start a Fire tracking links (https://startafire.com/). Since I am not aware of any Google+ brand page that executed this curated news strategy with success, I decided to post this question. Our goal is to get high ranks for our Google+ brand page for searches to our brand name and for the name of the Collections. BTW, our curated news posts will be automated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grinseo0 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Blog content and panda?
If we want to create a blog to keep in front of our customers (via email and posting on social) and the posts will be around 300 - 1000 words like this site http://www.solopress.com/blog/ are we going to be asking for a panda slap as the issue would be the very little shares and traction after the first day or two. Also would panda only affect the blogs that are crap if we mix in a couple of really good posts or would it affect theses as well and possibly even the site? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Where do we focus from an SEO perspective?
I run a digital business development consulting company. Our core has always been centered around consulting with client to develop strategy and then working with a set of vendors in a variety of different services types to implement the strategy. I'm struggling right now to determine the best approach for our own SEO. Our website is http://phase2solutions.net. What suggestions would you have on the approach here? Feel free to share your service as well as the tactical end is something we are looking to outsource. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phase2solutions0 -
Parked Domain question
Hi, If a domain has been parked for more than 12 years, and has never been used for a project so far, does this has an impact on SEO or its like having a fresh new domain? Sebi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheHecksler0 -
SEO Checklist for eCommerce?
Over the past week or so, my eCommerce site has experienced a large drop in organic traffic from Google.I have used analytics to determine that the pages that have seen the biggest losses in traffic are product pages. I know there are so many seo checklists/site audit checklists out there recommending different things, but does anyone have a good checklist (or link to a good checklist) that would fit our situation best? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Using both dofollow & nofollow links within the same blog site (but different post).
Hi all, I have been actively pursuing bloggers for my site in order to build page rank. My website sells women undergarments that are more on the exotic end. I noticed a large amount of prospective bloggers demand product samples. As already confirm, bloggers that are given "free" samples should use a rel=no follow attribute in their links. Unfortunately this does not build my page rank or transfer links juice. My question is this: is it advisable for them to also blog additional posts and include dofollow links? The idea is for the blogger to use a nofollow when posting about the sample and a regular link for a secondary post at a later time. What are you thoughts concerning this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 90miLLA0