Creating Glossaries

A good starter project

I wanted to include a section on creating glossaries for SEO purposes, as this is a project type that I've worked on many times over as a consultant. It's simple, effective, and encapsulates a lot of principles that differentiate traditional SEO from AI-first SEO.

Why Glossaries?

There are a few reasons why glossaries are a good first step into the world of AI-first SEO:

AI vs Traditional SEO

While a lot of brands already have them, they're typically very thin and easy to out rank. A typical brand which has a glossary will have one page (example.com/glossary), with a big list of terms, and a few sentences' description underneath each.

The fact that these glossaries are so thin is a result of the economics of human-written content. It's generally not possible to have humans write in-depth articles on hundreds of terms (at least not without sizeable budgets), and so brands resort to a matter of sentences.

AI changes the equation however, and makes it significantly more economical to produce in-depth articles on each term in a glossary, providing an easy opportunity to outcompete established brands that haven't adopted AI methods.

1-Dimensional

If you read the earlier page on N-Dimensional SEO, you'll recognise that glossaries are a great example of a 1-dimensional syntax (what is {term}?).

This makes it very easy to compile a large list of terms, and to produce content that scales well, without having to pore over keyword reports. It also means you can enforce a consistent and replicable title structure in Byword, as covered below.

Creating Glossaries in Byword

The other reason I like to talk about glossaries is that they provide a prime example of how and when to use Title Mode in Byword.

Let's say we have a big of terms that we want to cover in our glossary, and they're all on the topic of finance. We can use a syntax like the following to create our titles:

{term}: Finance Explained

In Google Sheets, or Excel, or some other tool, we can pass in each of our terms and generate a large list of titles. These will all look like CapEx: Finance Explained, Interest Rates: Finance Explained, and so on.

We can then pass these titles into Byword, perhaps into the Batch Generator, and have Byword produce the content for each. Crucially, by using titles like CapEx: Finance Explained, we're making it very clear to Byword that we're looking to produce explanatory/glossary-style articles.

By prompting Byword with a carefully chosen title structure, we're able to get it to produce higher quality output, with better consistency.

Admittedly, we could do this for any collection of randomly chosen keywords. This would require the manual work to come up with the right title for each one however. The beauty of N-Dimensional SEO however is that we just have to think of one title structure or syntax, and then just pass in our lists of items (or terms, in the case of a glossary).