We don't have time for ambiguous answers.
Can you imagine if the answers we were given today were like those given by Jedi Master Yoda?
Hey Google, how do I do a good online competitor study? “You will do a competitor study. Yes, I can help you. Mastering the force is not the way, you must know the secrets of SEMrush.”
Well, that's it.
We can't take away the truth from our italy phone number Yoda's answer, but who expects an answer like that?
Who has time to enter the world of strength “little by little”?
We want and expect concrete steps.
We need the answer to be: “do this, then do this, now do this action, and finally do this.” Period. X steps to achieve. Recipes.
This is what we all expect from a “How to” type article and it is what Google expects, so always approach the writing as a recipe.
Make the steps of the process recognizable
We all hope so, and so does Google.
Furthermore, following the standard truth that “ on the Internet we don't read but scan ”, we need the answer to be presented to us in the most easily localizable way possible.
What a strange phrase. Aww.
It's all very well for you to give me a sequence of steps, but if you do it all in a long paragraph that's hard to read, you're going to make me work a lot. Okay?
We love recipes and Google expects it.
Expect a sequence of steps and expect to recognize it easily.
That's our mission, to make it easy for Google.
We must use numbers that identify the specific step and, above all, use H2 or H3 for the steps.
Using numbered lists could also work, but after studying a good number of results, I have seen that those whose steps are in an H2 or H3 sequence prevail.
Furthermore, the steps must be concrete actions.
Use verbs in your steps so Google sees actions.
See how we're presenting it in this article?
Use it as a template!
3. Improve CTR by including steps or time in the title
Of course, the more visits our article receives, the more clicks in the search results, the more relevance or degree of usefulness Google will give it.
So, we have to work hard to increase the CTR, to make it attractive within the SERPs to get more clicks.
One of the key points to achieve this, apart from a good description, is to include a promise of X steps or X time in the title.