Poorly formatted blogs ruling the SERPs

The other day, another fellow SEO (who shall remain nameless) sent me the following message:

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“You ever get new clients with horribly formatted blogs? Like all plain text. No headings or anything? Lol. Just got one last week. Just made an {redacted thing} to take the crap from the blogs and simply add some formatting and headings. Probably can 10x their impressions/traffic with this one thing.”

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Sure, I’ve seen my fair share of horribly-formatted blogs. 

When you learn on-page SEO, everyone teaches you to use:

• Plenty of white space

• Short paragraphs

• Bullets

Yes, from a user experience (UX) perspective, all of that is important.

However…

I don’t think it’s that important.

I mean sure, your blog should be readable – that’s obvious. 

But in the realm of eCommerce, blogs serve the primary function of helping you amass topical authority so that you can rank your money pages higher and make more money.

Yes, blog traffic is cool, but you should be mostly concerned with ranking your collection pages.

If I had to choose between ranking my money pages #1 or a fancy-looking blog post…

I’d choose money pages any day of the week.

And I think most brands would agree with me on that.

So back to my controversial take…

You can rank even with poorly formatted blog posts.

Let me give you an example:

LITERALLY ANY single medical study or scientific journal you’ve ever seen on page 1. 

Every single one of them looks the same: 

• Thousands of words, all formatted in massive walls of text

• No beautiful imagery to look at

• Zero white space

• Dozens of citations & hyperlinks that make it hard for your eyes to follow

• And plenty of long sentences with complex scientific terms 

Zero fancy shit. 

But they rank on page 1. 

Why? 

Well, that’s easy. Because they’re written by experts and published on some of the strongest domains that you can find on the internet. 

Still think backlinks don’t matter?

These medical & scientific journals don’t abide by ANY of the best practices for UX, but they consistently find themselves on page 1. 

Now… There's a difference between driving traffic from a page 1 result and converting traffic from a page 1 result.

Medical journals get tons of visits each month. But they’re not worried about converting any of those visitors – they don’t sell anything. 

But if you’re an eCommerce brand, you are only worried about conversions. Traffic is a vanity metric, you need cash. 

So let’s say someone lands on your unformatted blog. They’ll look at it for 2 seconds and go:

“Fuck that, this is way too hard to read.”

*Closes your site and moves to another site that’s easier to read*

Sure, users want content that is helpful and easy to read. But I don’t think Google has identified a surefire way to define what good & formatted content looks like.

So, my advice? 

Write & publish high-quality content. 

Wait for it to start climbing the rankings, then optimize for user experience. 

But do not wait to hit publish on a great piece of content just because you don’t have the “perfect” image or you’re waiting for that infographic to be finished. 

Hit publish and add it later. 

The same goes for the Wordpress + subdomain conversation I talked about last week. 

Posting a blog on WordPress on a subdomain just because you want it to look good doesn’t make sense at all. Plus, you have to spend more time & money on link-building. 

It’s a lose-lose. 

In fact, we don't spend a lot of time in formatting for our brands.

We always add a banner image, and depending on the length of the blog, maybe 1-2 more images to break up walls of text. 

And of course, we use bullet points & subheadings when appropriate. But when our Head of Content reviews each blog, they’re not spending hours making it look pretty. 

That’s a waste of time.

Meanwhile, I’ve posted a detailed step-by-step guide on how you rank your eCommerce store and leave your competitors in the dust. Plus, you won’t have to spend your hard-earned money with Zuck.

You can watch the detailed step-by-step guide here:

Until next time,

Kai Cromwell