The most common SEO content mistake

Hi Penfriends!

We’re working with several Done-For-You clients now with more discovery calls booked over the coming weeks.

What’s interesting are the common questions (or even assumptions) between many of the people we’re talking to.

The assumption that sets so many people back is the same thing that sets businesses back.

I’ll explain what I mean with cartoons because really, I’m still a ten year old boy at heart.

This image from Henrik Kniberg succinctly describes the idea of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a popular way to test a product and build a company.

An MVP does the job you need it to do (viable), and not much more (minimum). So in the case of Henrik’s cartoons, the job is to get from A to B.

That is possible with a skateboard

Not perfect perhaps, but possible.

A scooter is easier to handle than a skateboard. A bicycle is easier still and much faster. A motorbike will get you further faster and a car, well a car is safer, faster, and way more fun because you can shout your favourite tunes on those long drives 😝🎶

But if you’re trying to go from A to B and you start with a perfect wheel, you’ll have a perfect wheel and stay at A forever. It takes 4 frustrating steps for the car, the viable product, to emerge. And honestly, the whole idea of going from A to B probably ends before the car is ever made.

This is why so many businesses fail. They try to ship perfect products, too late.

And, it’s why blogs fail

People try to write perfect wheels.

Actually, they think they have to.

They think, if it’s not perfect Google will punish me 🥹

So they spend weeks, perhaps months, polishing the perfect article. They spend days writing it themselves, or $1,200 getting a freelancer to do it for them.

And when it’s finally done, exhausted, they lay it to rest next to the other 3 perrrrrfect articles on the blog.

They lay it to rest because that blog is dead.

No results. No traffic. No conversion.

4 perfect articles can’t get you from A to B, where B is the-topical-authority-for-your-niche.

The irony is you can still rank without perfect articles.

Write skateboards instead

In content terms a skateboard is MVC.

Minimum Viable Content.

Content that does the job (viable) and not much more (minimum).

Two caveats with that sentence.

1. Viable is a pretty high bar

By viable I mean they have to answer search intent thoroughly. They have to be helpful. They need to be well structured and readable.

2. Minimum at first

When I say minimum, it doesn’t mean the article doesn’t improve over time. All articles need maintaining.

We’ve designed Penfriend to generate viable content:

• It answers search intent

• It writes well (using Claude)

• It cites sources (using Perplexity)

• It structures a thorough article (using 70+ ChatGPT prompts)

You can publish straight from Penfriend.

We do.

Hundreds at a time

✅ = 400 hundred at once
❌ = 15,000 at once (yes, people try this)

And then this happens

Our record time for ranking an article straight from Penfriend is 11 hours.

We haven’t touched it since then and it’s steadily climbed the rankings.

It currently sits in position 2 of the organic listings.

I generated it.
I published it.
Google ranked it.

Google is more forgiving than you know.

So what should you do?

This is what we’re doing for our Done-For-You clients and probably what you should do too.

Write 150 MVC articles making sure they:

• target the right keywords

• answer search intent thoroughly

• are helpful

• are well structured

• are no less than 2,000 words

• are readable (white space, font size, table of contents etc)

Then publish them all.

Then give it 3 months.

Now you need to see which ones get picked up in 11 hours, and which ones need a little more love.

THIS is the point you can start to work towards perfection. It’s where you can start turning skateboards into scooters, then bicycles, then one day, cars!

And if you want us to do it all for you…

Here’s the full Done-For-You service:

1. Advanced keyword research

2. Priority score the keywords

3. Cluster the keywords

4. Existing content review

5. Market research on your business's industry and positioning

6. 150 articles, generated by us

7. Have a human review each article for LLM hallucinations

8. A content optimisation plan with editing principles and guidelines

9. A content maintenance plan so you know what to do next

10. A training session with your internal team

11. A Coda workflow board to store and manage your articles

If you’re interested to find out more, just reply to this email to start a conversation.

Best wishes,

John, Tim, and Inge