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Hi Sandra! I'm so glad you liked my story and found it to be insightful!

For me, writing long form articles like I'm writing to a friend (I have an actual person in my head that I write to - I have a clear vision of how old she is, how much money she makes, how many children she has, what she likes to do on weekends etc) and that is working so well for me and is helping me reach the right people.

I write for a few other sites on a freelance basis and, while I can't speak for all, but many I do write for don't get as many eyes on them as I do - and they send me lists and lists of keywords that must be included and have all these fancy apps that measure rankings or SEO appeal etc.

Subheadings and writing naturally seem to be bringing out the keywords naturally for me and, if people are asking for answers to questions often, then at least I know that there is already a demand so it makes it easier to know what to write about.

So I believe you CAN write about anything. Of course you can. Why not just try a few articles in this way - and see what happens? Write what you would tell a friend - go into great detail and make the answer extremely helpful and valuable (more valuable than anyone else seems to be putting effort into creating right now.) Forget keywords and rankings - see what happens. I honestly believe that it's different now and google and other search engines are wanting to see. REAL answers with REAL value from REAL humans.

I love this! Thank you for sharing. Reading this felt truly insightful. I've been wanting to shift my blog toward a more personal approach like this but my fear is that writing based on what is being requested from readers like mentioned in this article, and basically anything other than specific keyword driven articles, may not be picked up by Google. I've been using SurferSEO for keyword research and I've also used RankIQ but I feel like that just makes it hard to write because it based on that, any keyword that is used from high ranking sites won't give me the time of day. This article made it sound like that's not necessary which makes me feel like I can write about anything. But then my question is, how do you find non-competitive keywords on answering questions (turned into blog posts) while at the same time being acknowledged by Google? That's my biggest challenge.

Thank you so much! Glad you liked it — really appreciate the kind words 🙌

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