Put the most important information at the top. You’ll make your audience happy.

In many of the articles out there—even recently published ones—you need to read through a couple paragraphs before you find an answer to your question.

10+ years ago, the common belief was that you wanted readers to stay on your site as long as possible. Which was true. Google favored it. More time on page = better SEO.

However, the world has been trending toward the quick and the fast. Short TikTok videos. Tweets. Everyone wants answers to the problems quickly—including myself.

So what better way to provide a good user experience than giving your readers what they want?

Say someone searches for “how many continents are there?” and in the first sentence they find the answer. You’ve satisfied their need, and you’ve maintained their attention, so they might just keep reading what else you have to say. Near the middle of the article they read that Antarctica is a desert, so they keep reading, and click through to another article on your blog.

Bad (pyramid):

Put the fluff at the top and the key point near the bottom.

Good (inverted pyramid):

Put the answer at the top and more color and context in the rest of the article.

To improve your content marketing and SEO efforts, answer you readers’ search query at the top of the page. Use the inverted pyramid technique.