Someone pass the smelling salts

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Someone pass the smelling salts

Cause the intro to this Backlinko article has left me swooning.

Not only is it a crash course in today’s SEO and UX best practices

It also includes something I’ve literally never seen in the nine years I’ve been working in content marketing…

Lemme show you what I mean in a deep dive into the intro of Information Gain: How Top Content Leaders Win at SEO by Michael Ofei...

Let’s go 👇

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👋 Hey Google! This article is about ____

The intro to this article is 220 words long.

The target keyword is in there four separate times:

So, once every like 50 words 🤯

Now that’s what I call on-page SEO, baby!

👌 ‘What is [target keyword]’ perfected

Dread it.

Run from it.

The ‘What is [target keyword]’ section arrives all the same.

You’ve gotta gun for those featured snippets after all 🤷

Michael handles it real nice here by just straight up plopping the definition of information gain in a little block quote four sentences in:

It ticks the SEO box. It gives readers the info they need.

And he didn’t stretch it out to 300 words under a H2 FoR sEo.

🤯 I’ve literally never seen this before

I’ve been working in content marketing for nine years.

And I’ve literally never seen what Michael does in this intro next before.

He just… tells you to go read his competitor’s articles on the topic he’s about to cover.

Like, he links to them and everything:

The unspoken rule of content marketing has always been “pretend no one else has ever written about this topic before”, right?

Michael throws that out the window and straight up tells you to go read his competitors’ articles to learn the theory.

Then he’s gonna turn things up a notch (BAM! 💥) by diving into some case studies.

🧾 They’ve got the receipts

“Yo, Animalz, I'm really happy for you, I'mma let you finish, but Backinko has one of the best information gain articles of all time” is obvs hell of a claim.

So Michael follows it up with super simple – but super effective – way of showing he has the receipts to back it up:

This lil’ table shows the creds of the SMEs he’s quoted in the article (with a cheeky product CTA to boot 👀)

🐷 But that’s not all, folks…

The article on the whole is a greatest hits of today’s SEO and UX best practices:

✅ The title tag starts with the target keyword

✅ The “Last updated” date under the title

✅ The author’s headshot and a link to their author bio is included

✅ The table of contents and social share buttons follow you as you scroll down the page

And y’know how Andy Crestodina says today's most successful content looks like a social feed?

Have a scroll of this article 😙👌

👉️ Check out Michael’s article on information gain here

Give it a read to see the best intro you’ll come across this week (or your time back!)