Write Drunk. Edit Sober.

Today I’m talking about writing drunk and editing sober.

Famous author Ernest Hemingway is quoted as saying the following:

While I’m not here to condone (or correct) drinking and writing, I do want to provide some commentary about this quote for the age of the internet.

While the internet as a whole isn’t all that forgiving, search engines are actually quite forgiving.

Meaning that it is sometimes okay to write and publish content that is a little sloppy or “drunk” and then just come back to it and edit it later.

In fact, if you are writing to primarily attract people from search engines to your website, it is often an extremely effective strategy.

A Quick Case Study on Editing Your Way to Better Visibility

The image above is from Google Search Console, which provides you with organic visibility insights, among other things.

In the last 16 months, this site has gone from around 150 clicks per day to 750, and here’s how:

• Consistency in writing (and publishing)
  Write and add new pages of content that fulfill search intent, even though they weren’t amazing out of the gate.
• Consistency in analyzing
  Review search console to see how individual pages/URLs are performing. Are they getting impressions and clicks? If not, why not?
• Consistency in editing
  Edit the content. Both the pages that are starting to perform and those that aren’t. Refine those that are performing and redo, merge, or dump those that aren’t.

If you are trying to dominate a large topic in the search results, a “write drunk, edit sober” strategy just might pay off.

“Publish over perfection” is something we often say at Avalanche!

In this week’s website teardown, I audit REI’s website. Specifically, I ask – “what does it take to dominate the ‘hiking’ topic in search results?”

Watch to learn how to audit what it might take to dominate any topic in search results.