Creating Content That People Love to Read (and Google Loves to Rank)
Raelene Morey · Founder of Words By Birds
A 49-minute crash course in the actual mechanics of a good blog post, headline, intro, and body, with almost nothing on modern SEO.
What it actually covers
Raelene Morey's class is not really an SEO course despite the title's promise. After a brief nod to Google's Panda and Hummingbird updates, the SEO argument collapses into a single premise: write well and rankings follow. That premise sets up everything else, which is a fairly traditional writing-craft curriculum. The lessons move in the order a post actually gets made: generate an idea, research it, draft a headline, write an introduction, fill in the body, then find new formats for the finished piece.
The idea-generation lesson is the most process-driven part of the course. Morey describes a genuine system, tools like Feedly and BuzzSumo, a phone full of scattered notes, competitor scanning, and a return to keyword tools like keywordtool.io, but only after telling the viewer to stop worrying about keywords a lesson earlier. That contradiction is never resolved; keyword research is dismissed as an old SEO trick and then quietly reintroduced as an idea-generation tactic.
The headline and introduction lessons are the strongest stretch. The headline lesson lays out specific mechanics: a 65-character ceiling, plain language over jargon, the pull of numbers, and the difference between a bold promise and clickbait, each illustrated with a real headline from Grammarly, Refinery29, or HubSpot. The introduction lesson names five concrete openings, anecdote, question, fact, scene-setting, and the newspaper lede, and pairs each with a published example. This is the part of the course a beginner could apply immediately without translation.
Where it thins out
The main-content lesson is where the course loses its specificity. Advice to write short sentences, use bullet points, add images, and aim for roughly 2,100 words is reasonable but generic, and it is exactly the kind of content that could apply to any writing course rather than one built around Google's ranking behavior. The promised connection to search visibility mostly disappears here, replaced by general readability tips.
The repurposing lesson closes the course with a useful but shallow list, infographic, lead magnet, ebook, slide deck, podcast, video, walking through each option against a single sample post without much depth on how to actually execute any of them well.
Verdict
At under 50 minutes, this is a fast primer on writing structure rather than a serious SEO class, and the mismatch between the title and the content is worth knowing going in. Anyone hoping for keyword strategy, technical optimization, or measurable ranking tactics will find the course avoids that territory almost entirely. What remains is a competent, well-illustrated set of writing habits, strongest on headlines and openings, thinner on the body and repurposing stages, that suits a beginner who needs a starting checklist more than a marketer chasing search traffic.
The standout
The five distinct introduction techniques, each shown against a real published example, give writers an immediate way to break out of a generic opening paragraph.
What you will learn
- How to build a repeatable idea-generation habit using Feedly, BuzzSumo, keyword tools, and personal notes
- How to research a topic before writing, including sourcing original data, citing links, and reaching out for quotes
- A five-part framework for opening a post: anecdote, question, fact/stat, scene-setting, or straight news lede
- Concrete headline rules covering length, word choice, numbers, emotional language, and urgency
- How to structure a body draft around subheadings, short paragraphs, and formatting before filling in the writing
- Six ways to repurpose one article into an infographic, lead magnet, ebook, slide deck, podcast, or video
Best for: A solo blogger, freelancer, or small business owner who already has a website and needs a concrete checklist for turning a topic into a finished post.
Skip it if: Anyone wanting technical SEO instruction, such as keyword research tools, site structure, or link building, since the course explicitly sets that aside in favor of writing craft.