Using Who, What, Where, Why and When to improve SEO

This is a quick blog post which I’ll hopefully come back to, and go into more detail.

When it comes to writing content for a website home page, we’ve been finding that a back-to-basics approach works wonders for SEO.

If you are uncertain about what to write, just remember the five Ws. Who, What, Where, Why and When.

  • Who are you, who is your company?
  • What do you do?
  • Where do you provide your services?
  • Why might someone need your product or service?
  • When can your customers get it? (When are you open, can people order online, can they book an appointment)

You can go into as much or as little detail as you like, but make sure this information is clearly included on your home page. You can also use this approach on your services pages.

If you are going into lots of detail for any of the Ws then don’t forget to use paragraph headings (H2, H3, H4 tags). This in itself can help Google access and make sense of the information on your page – leading to better rankings.

Always remember google’s mission is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In general if you help them, they’ll help you.

We’ve restructured dozens of SME websites using these basic rules. Google nearly always rewards us with higher rankings in their search results.


The technique mentioned above is sometimes referred to as an Inverted Pyramid. It’s a technique used in journalism and successful blogs all the time. This technique will help you communicate the important information about a topic in the initial sentences. You can then go on to give more detail or develop your sales pitch.

Given that the average attention span of internet users is now 8 seconds you can see how important it is to not waste anyone’s time if you want to grab their attention.