During a hangout, one SEO professional asked John Mueller about writing content for their audience.
Their question was: for semantic search and voice search, is it better to use proper grammar or write how people actually speak?
For example, it is grammatically correct to write “more than X years,” but people actually say “over X years.” Or, write a list beginning with “ such as X, Y, and Z,” but people actually say “like X, Y, and Z.”.
John explained that you can write however you want, but this is a simple answer. There’s nothing holding you back from just writing naturally.
And essentially, Google’s systems try to work with the natural content that they have found on their (the SEO pro’s) pages. If Google can crawl and index those pages with the SEO pro’s content, they will try to work with that.
And there is nothing special that they really have to do here.
The one thing that John would watch out for, regarding how you write your content, is just to make sure that you’re writing for your audience.
For example, if you have very technical content, but you want to reach people who are non-technical, then you want to write in the non-technical language.
You would not want to write in a way that is only understandable to people who are really deep into that technique, or technical information. So it’s a situation where John would suggest going by the traditional marketing approach: write for your audience.
This happens at approximately the 08:40 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Question)
Okay, next up with semantic and voice search, is it better to use proper grammar or write how people actually speak? For example, it’s grammatically correct to write “more than X years,” but people actually say “over X years,” or write a list beginning with “such as X, Y and Z,” but people actually say, “like X, Y, and Z.”
John (Answer)
Good question. So the simple answer is you can write however you want. There’s nothing holding you back from just writing naturally. And essentially, our systems try to work with the natural content that we have found on your pages. So if we can crawl and index those pages with your content, we’ll try to work with that.
And there’s nothing special that you really need to do there. The one thing I would watch out for with regards to how you write your content, is just to make sure that you’re writing for your audience. So for example, if you have some very technical content, but you want to reach people who are like non-technical, then write in the non-technical language and not in a way that only is understandable to people who are really deep into that kind of technique, technical information.
So kind of like the, I would guess, the traditional marketing approach of ‘write for your audience.’ So, and our systems usually are able to deal with that perfectly fine.
