Turtl Docs can be crawled and indexed by all major search engines and form a complementary part of your content strategy. While they are discoverable and play a role in maximizing reader engagement, they shouldn’t take the place of traditional content types. As with all content, there are a few additional steps, beyond discoverability, you can take to ensure your content delivers an SEO benefit for your brand.
It's worth noting that when a search engine comes across a Turtl Doc that has been set for Public access, it will automatically try to index it. If you don't want this to happen, read our SEO and Indexing guide to learn how to turn off indexing on Docs.
1. Optimize your Turtl Doc
Here are some SEO tips worth bearing in mind when you're getting ready to publish a Doc:
a. Built-in features
H1, H2, and H3 tags are on every Turtl Doc page. The top H1 tag is the title you give to the Doc, and the H2 tag is the description. The other H2 and H3 tags are the Surf page heading and the subheading of each section.
b. Make sure your Doc title is descriptive and contains important keywords
The title you give will be indexed by search engines and used in search results, so make sure it's as relevant as possible:
Tip: We suggest making your title no longer than 60 characters.
c. Add a description to your Doc
Turtl lets you specify a description for each piece of content you create. These become the meta descriptions, which are used by search engines when your content is displayed.
Here are some key points:
They should always be written for human consumption, and not be keyword heavy.
These descriptions are chosen by Google approximately 30% of the time to serve on the search result page, and while they are not direct ranking factors, as they could impact your click through rate - they are still an important element to consider.
Meta descriptions don't have a set length, but as Google truncates around 155 characters, general guidance is to keep them between 50 - 160 characters.
Make your description clear about what your content contains, try to give a reason for the user to click and include reference to your keyword/phrase.
Examples:
"Learn how to cook eggs with this complete guide in 1 hour or less. We cover all the methods, including: over-easy, sunny side up, boiled, and poached."
"A compelling brand is built on 4 pillars: category, consumer, company, culture. But one of these is more important than the rest."
"Sales enablement is about providing agents and customer-facing teams with the knowledge and tech to sell effectively. Here's how to do it right."
Your description will also be used by social media channels to provide more information about your content, so it's well worth providing one.
You can learn how to share Turtl Docs on social media here.
d. Customize your Doc URL
A URL plays an important role in making sure both search engines and readers know what to expect on the Turtl Doc. To help with search rankings and indexing, keep your URLs descriptive but concise, relevant to your content and ensure they contain the main topic/keyword of the content it is directed to.
https://team.turtl.co/story/the-psychology-of-proposals
https://turtl.co/blog/5-best-b2b-content-marketing-examples
You can specify a custom URL for your Doc by following the steps here.
2. Optimize your Turtl Doc domain name
By default, your Docs will be served from a domain name that looks something like mycompany.turtl.co . This is ok, but your brand's domain will not accrue any SEO benefit from the content you create.
To address this, we recommend:
Setting up a CNAME with Turtl
This will mean that your content can be served from a subdomain of your main domain name (e.g. content.mybrand.com) providing a signal to the search engines that there is a relationship between your Turtl Docs and website, improving the likelihood that any SEO benefit will be associated with your brand's domain.
You can find instructions on how to do this here.
For even more SEO tips and tricks, check out our SEO Best Practices Doc:
