Diving Into The Value of Your SEO Reporting

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SEO reporting plays a critical role in developing a strong digital marketing strategy. Collecting the right data and knowing how to sort and understand the information can let marketers know what efforts bring customers and what areas need improvements to provide a quality ROI for the company.

Despite the obvious need for SEO reporting, 74 percent of marketers say that they do not adequately track their results. Similarly, only 22% of marketers say they have data-driven strategies that drive strong strategies.

What makes SEO reporting and analytics so critical?

Brands that do their SEO reporting house in order tend to have a far better idea of what their customers like and respond well to and what they do not. They can clearly see which topics and types of content attract more engaged customers and lead to a higher number of conversions.

As brands develop a greater understanding of what customers like and do not like, they will be able to better allocate their limited marketing resources. They can focus more time and energy creating content that has a higher chance of properly engaging the target audience and bringing the brand revenue.

Brands with strong reporting will also find it easier to detect trends in consumer needs. You might see higher engagement with certain topics or types of content at particular times of the year. This will provide greater insight into what people likely look for during different seasons. Armed with this insight, organizations will find it easier to anticipate new needs for customers moving forward.

SEO reporting metrics to understand funnel success

To set up your SEO reporting, you will want to track how well your digital marketing efforts bring in leads and how well those leads convert into customers. This requires a keen understanding of your sales funnel and the metrics that determine your success at each stage.

SEO reporting requires examining closely how well your outreach efforts encourages people to enter and engage with your site. You then need to track how those leads move through the funnel until you get new customers.

There are a range of metrics you can use to better understand your sales funnel. At the top of the funnel, you want to gauge how well your content and SEO efforts bring in leads. Metrics here include:

  • Traffic
  • Content ranking
  • Shares/likes on social media

As prospects move through the funnel, you want to see how well your content encourages people to progress close to a conversion. For this stage you want to measure:

  • Engagement rates
  • Return users
  • Followers on social media

You also want to see how well your traffic turns into official leads, so look at:

  • Non-purchase conversions
  • Email open rates

Finally you want to see how well your leads turn into paying customers and how much money you make per customer. So monitor:

  • Your purchase conversion rate
  • Your average purchase size per customer

You can then take this information and determine the financial value of your leads working backwards. Your conversion rate will let you know how many leads you need to secure per customer, on average. Then, calculate the value of each lead. Using the value of the lead, you can start to generate numbers that will tell you the value of your various SEO efforts. These concrete estimates can then be used to determine SEO ROI and your more profitable executions.

seo reporting example of a clicks and conversions report

While these core metrics will give you a far better idea of how your SEO and your content throughout the funnel performs, you can also track other metrics that will provide valuable insight into the standing of your content. For example, many BrightEdge customers find it helpful to also track their rate of backlink acquisition. Backlinks provide Google spiders with important information about how your content is regarded by readers– reputable content will regularly be linked to. You can track the number of backlinks on your content through helpful features on the BrightEdge platform.

How long does it take to see the impact of SEO initiatives?

As you implement changes to your SEO strategy, you will want to closely track performance before and after to gauge impact. While you work on your optimization strategies, you should mark important dates in your BrightEdge account with the Page Events capability. Marking the day within the system allows you to track when changes were made, simplifying your ability to see ranking changes before and after.

If you make major changes to your site, it can be worth asking Google to recrawl your site, particularly if your domain is smaller and less popular. Otherwise, it might not get recrawled for a few weeks. Google tends to crawl larger domains that receive huge amounts of regular traffic on a regular basis, so this would not be as important for them. Google does have a quota to the number of times you can ask for a recrawl, so generally save this strategy for when you make large changes that you would like to see reflected in your rankings immediately. Regardless of whether you request a recrawl or if you allow Google to get to the page naturally, you can watch the progress through your Google Index Status Report.

seo reporting example of reindex tool in google search console

The rate at which you see progress in your SEO analytics report will depend upon a few factors, including against whom you complete and the authority of your domain as a whole. Generally, SEO updates and changes should start to create some positive changes within a few weeks of making updates. You might not immediately jump to page one, but you may start to see an uptick in rankings and traffic within a week or two.

If you do not see any changes in performance within a few weeks after making updates, you should look carefully at your site to see if anything else is holding you back, for example the robots.txt file which provides crawling instructions to the the search crawlers. Keep in mind also that the authority of your domain as a whole impacts the ranking of individual pages. Look for ways to boost your site, such as internal links, your site map and see if that helps to lift your optimized pages as well.

What should I do if my analytics reports show drops?

Not only will monitoring your SEO report and your analytics report help you see the success of your digital marketing strategy, but it can also alert you to problems. You can never afford to neglect pieces on your website, especially not those that have secured your top rankings.

If you see your rankings start to drop, you should always inspect your page and its competition. Look to see who replaced you in the rankings and what optimization strategies they use. BrightEdge can allow you to dive into the recommendations for a single page, helping you pinpoint what will help recover your position.

If you notice a dramatic drop in your rankings on multiple page, you will need to inspect your site with your Google search console and check popular SEO sites to see if any algorithm updates may have hit your site. Examine your site for potential problems, such as duplicate content.

Presenting SEO reports to others in the organization

Now that you have a solid SEO report, you will want to present your digital marketing findings and your analytics report to others in the organization. Providing such a report can help you convince others in your organization about the value of your SEO efforts, which can make it easier to secure assistance on particular projects–such as the UX team or subject-matter experts within the company who you would like to collaborate with on content. Marketing heads and others in the C-suite want to see reports as well.

Begin compiling your report by identifying key areas that this particular position wants to see. For example, the c-suite will want to see revenue related to SEO, someone in sales or product marketing may want to see information on leads earned. Consider the statistics that matter the most and pull out the numbers that present the positive, strongest picture.

On the BrightEdge platform, the StoryBuilder feature makes it simple to create eye-catching, clear reports that will emphasizes your chosen statistics. The data can be easily compiled into your relevant report.

When it comes to succeeding in digital marketing, understanding the value of the SEO report and how to compile a thorough analytics report remains critical. This type of data will not only make every step of your job more efficient, but it can also impact your budget and collaboration with the rest of the organization. Consider these tips as you build your own strategy and analytics reports.

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SEO World Rankings 2019

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Another post released by Searchmetrics SEO Blog . Undoubtedly one of the best suppliers of free information online.

Every year, Google makes changes to its ranking algorithm and introduces new features to its search engine results pages. These affect the search experience for users around the world and cause websites to either rise up or fall down the rankings. To keep tabs on developments, Searchmetrics publishes its SEO World Rankings each year, which summarize the leading domains and biggest winners in 10 Google indexes from different countries. Analyzing this data lets us see which domains have become permanent fixtures at the top of the rankings, which are making ground and which are on the wane.

SEO World Rankings: The Methodology

All the information within Searchmetrics’ SEO World Rankings is based around our primary metric for measuring the performance of websites in organic search: SEO Visibility. This is compiled from a range of search factors, and expresses in a single number how visible a website is in a search engine’s organic results. This metric has been developed by Searchmetrics to provide a universal index for measuring and comparing the online performance of different domains.

Recap: Who are the reigning champions?

This is the third edition of Searchmetrics SEO World Rankings. For consistency and to make it possible to compare developments year-on-year, we have maintained the methodology, the data and the ten countries we have analyzed. You can find the infographics from the previous years here:

SEO World Rankings 2019: The Infographic

The infographic includes the following information:

  • Global Champions: Top 5 domains worldwide
  • National Champions: Top 10 domains in 10 different countries
  • Big Winners: Top 5 most-improved domains in 10 different countries
  • Category analysis: Breakdown of winning domains by industry.

Additionally, the data is supplemented by selected facts and figures relating to some of the biggest global domains.

Searchmetrics SEO World Rankings 2019

If you want to know how your domain is performing, check it out for free here. Just enter your domain and look at the “SEO rank” to see where it ranks amongst your country’s top domains:

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Content Marketing For Small Business: Thriving when big domains dominate the SERP

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With more than a billion sites online, competition is fierce across nearly every sector. Brands try to get their voices heard above the noise. In a number of industries, however, there are sites that dominate the search engine results pages and seem nearly impossible to overtake.

Take for example the medical industry and websites like WebMD, Healthline, or Cleveland Clinic. In the film and entertainment industry, IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes can be found at the top of the SERP. Wikipedia also presents a considerable indirect competitor for many brands to try and outrank.

Search query reveals dominance of certain websites for medical queries, presenting challenges for content marketing for small businesses

For brands that have sites closely tied to keywords that these major sites rank well for, it can seem futile to try and figure out how rank highly when competing against these major sites. That does not mean, however, that SEO and content marketing overall cannot be used.

Understanding how to create content that performs well in these situations, and how brands can bolster performance, is important for realizing the full potential of content. Here’s what you need to know about content marketing for small business.

Create content that is location specific

Many smaller brands focus on location-specific audiences. For example, a local medical provider or practitioner might treat patients within a specific geographic location or a local events organizer might focus more on local entertainment.

Adding location keywords helps with content marketing for small businesses

These brands should look for opportunities to create content geared towards their local audience. The targeted audience might be smaller, but the use of local keywords will help them appear in local searches for people in their area.

Think carefully about what people in the immediate area might be looking for when developing content. Consider places, landmarks, local names, or other factors that might show up as terms in people’s searches in the area. You can even incorporate factors, like weather or local events that might encourage people to make related searches that wouldn’t occur to larger brands trying to appeal to people across a wide variety of locations.

Target less-popular keywords for content marketing for small businesses

In every industry there tend to be less-popular keywords brand websites often ignore. They opt instead to optimize for the most popular keywords that have the greatest potential for traffic. In a situation where you are trying to compete with large brands with excellent reputations, however, sometimes these less popular keywords can be an important part of optimization.

By creating content for less-popular keywords you create opportunities for your brand to start building your brand reputation. You will be able to brand yourself as an expert in your industry and your site will rank for important keywords, even if they aren’t the most common searches. As you build your domain reputation, that bedrock foundation will help your brand build rankings across all of your pages.

Take keywords in slightly different direction

You can also create content that takes a slightly different look at some of your most common keywords. You can focus on slightly different areas of concern for users. For example, say you are a medical practice. You know that trying to compete with WebMD and Mayo Clinic on general articles pertaining to different diseases and conditions would be a big challenge.

You can, however, focus on creating content related to treatment, what to expect during treatment, how your office treats this particular condition, or optimize for treatment related to this condition within your area.

To consider the type of content that will provide the most value for your organization, think about the types of questions and concerns that customers or prospects often approach your organization with. This will provide you with valuable insight into the issues and concepts that matter the most to them, helping you find the topics that will most likely appeal to other prospective customers.

Incorporate paid search strategies

For your high-value keywords where the first page of search results remains dominated by major brand names in your field, the best way to get your brand recognized will be to use a paid search strategy. PPC will get your content featured at the top of the SERP, putting you directly in front of prospective customers.

Developing a strong PPC strategy requires understanding what people generally want to see when they land on a particular SERP. Research what the SERP looks like currently to get a better understanding of the typical user intent of users. Both your ad and your landing page will need to reflect these desires.

You ad will need to closely reflect what other search results look like. Examine how the results are formatted and how descriptions are worded. Your ad should take this information into account and also reflect what sets your organization apart.

Your landing page will also contain what users want to see. It should provide high quality information that reflects what visitors would see on any of your competitor’s sites .

Monitor your success with PPC closely. Since you have to invest more monetarily, you will want to make sure you derive maximum value. Look at your click through rate as well as the number of conversions and revenue you secure with each lead. This will allow you to calculate the value of your efforts with PPC, setting you up for the optimum conversion rate.

Focus on your social media presence

Social media can also provide organizations with a powerful means of getting out from under the umbrella of larger companies. The modern consumer spends a lot of time on social media–an estimated 77% of Americans have at least one profile, and Nielsen reports that Americans over the age of 18 spend an average of 45 minutes on social media every day. This makes social a great way for people to interact with potential customers.

When it comes to building a strong profile, you do not have to worry about outranking your competitors. The most important aspect will be creating a profile that engages users in your target demographic. Interacting with people, encouraging them to post on your page– which means that their engagement with your profile shows up in the feeds of all their connections, and otherwise using social media as a means of building a personal connection with users all create an excellent opportunity to stand out from the others in your industry. Customers greatly appreciate this personal connection with brands they consider doing business with.

Given the immense size of some brands that dominate the SERPs, creating a more personal, intimate connection with followers might not be as feasible. This makes it a fantastic place for smaller organizations to shine. Consider how you can take advantage of your smaller size to bring a more individual touch to your social followers.

Fighting for space on the SERPs is something that brands of all sizes must do. Sometimes, however, it can feel like a David vs. Goliath fight, and the smaller companies know that keyword research alone will not be enough for them to overtake the large, reputable, and well-cited content that dominates the top slots for their industry keywords. Understanding how to build a successful marketing strategy despite this obstacle, however, can help brands of all size see success in content marketing.

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2019 Content Industry Trends

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Episode Overview

We’re thrilled to be hosting Robert Rose, the Content Marketing Institute’s Chief Strategist and one of the Content Marketing Industry’s leading thinkers. In this episode, Ben and Robert discuss the growing fragmentation of content, driven by omni-channel marketing strategies as well as the growth and evolution of the industry as a whole. Tune in to understand what’s next and how to leverage cutting edge trends to improve your content marketing efforts.

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Episode Transcript

Ben:                 Welcome back to content month on the Voices of Search Podcast. I’m your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we’re going to continue our month-long deep dive into the words behind the numbers and discuss what SEOs need to know about content creation, publishing, and optimization. Joining us today is a very special guest, Robert Rose, who is according to his LinkedIn profile bother the chief strategist and chief troublemaker at the Content Marketing Institute which is a resource that helps marketers maximize their content marketing efforts by teaching them how to attract and retain customers through compelling, multichannel story telling. Today Robert is going to talk to us about the current landscape of the content marketing industry.

Ben:                 But before we get started, I want to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by the marketing team at Searchmetrics. We are an SEO and content marketing platform that helps enterprise scale businesses monitor their online presence and make data driven decisions. To support you, our loyal podcast listeners, we’re offering a complimentary digital diagnostic. A member of our digital strategies group will provide you with a consultation that reviews how your website, content, and SEO strategies can be optimized. To schedule your free digital diagnostic go to Searchmetrics.com/diagnostic.

Ben:                 Okay. Here is our conversation with the one and only Robert Rose, chief troublemaker and chief strategist at the Content Marketing Institute.

Ben:                 Robert, welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast.

Robert:             Well thanks so much for having me. It’s awesome to be here. I’ve been a listener of the show for some time and it’s awesome to be on it actually.

Ben:                 We’re thrilled to have you here, I’m thrilled to have you here, and I’m also excited to talk to a fellow chief troublemaker.

Robert:             Well, you know, as I usually introduce myself it’s I’m generally overhead. If I’m not throwing a bomb into the middle of the conference room table I’m generally pretty useless.

Ben:                 When I first met Jordan Koene, the CEO of Searchmetrics and one of the hosts of this show, his official business card at E-bay said that he was the CIO, chief infographics officer.

Robert:             That’s a good one. I have one of mine where someone asked me my title one time and I said, “The bringer of gravitas”.

Ben:                 Love it. Very presidential of you.

Robert:             There you go.

Ben:                 Well we’re really excited to have you here and really excited to wrap up our content marketing month by talking to you about which way the content marketing industry is headed. Let’s start off by doing a quick review. Tell us a little bit about how you got into the content marketing industry and how has it changed since you started?

Robert:             Sure. Well, and it’s changed a lot. I’ve been in marketing now, I’m coming up on my, and I have the gray hair to show it, I’m coming up on 30 years of working as a marketer. And what happened was I was a CMO of a software company in the early 2000s, as I like to say, way before cloud was cool. And it was overall pretty much a struggle and pushing a rock up a hill and all of that. We were trying to introduce new terms and new ideas into a very classically built infrastructure of install software and as a CMO I was trying to figure out how to become a little more innovative with marketing and one of the things that I decided was when they put those millions of dollars on my desk and said, yeah go do that thing called marketing, is that I would do something a little different.

Robert:             I would, instead of trying to compete with IBM and HP and Microsoft at the time, and Oracle, and all of these huge software companies that would always beat us in SEO and definitely beat us in any kind of spend that we would do, I was just going to be deeper. We were going to be the expert in our space. And so I didn’t hire marketing people, I hired content creators and designers and communicators and I turned this into a little bit of a media company. And the reason for that was quite simply because I wanted us to be a mile deep so when we did get to the table, we got a better shot of actually winning the customer because we would be seen as the thought leaders in the space. And my hunch and my hypothesis was, I can teach them how to be marketers, I can teach them how to do an A/B test, I can teach them how to a call to action, but I can’t teach them how to be great writers and great media producers. And it worked. And so over the course of eight years the company grew and we did a nice little thing and basically became the thought leader in the space.

Robert:             And then I was out telling my story in 2008, 2009 timeframe and I met this guy, Joe Pulizzi, and he was basically giving the same presentation I was. I had read his book, of course, Get Content Get Customers, and he and I had dinner and became just fast friends immediately. We both saw things from the same perspective and him from a little bit of a difference in that he was a publisher and came from a publishing point of view and I came from more of a marketing practitioner point of view. He was just starting this thing and he said, “Hey, listen, if you ever decide to be done with the software company we should do something together, I’m starting this thing called The Content Marketing Institute and we’re gonna evangelize this thing called content marketing”. And I said, “Well, it just so happens” dot, dot, dot, and the rest, as they say, is history. I sort of latched onto this idea of helping businesses figure out how to operationalize this thing just like I had in my company and figure out the right people and functions and strategy to really operationalize content as a strategic function. And I’ve been doing that since 2009.

Ben:                 I want to talk a little bit about your experience at the software company and try to relate it back to SEO terms where you were competing against install base software companies with a larger chip stack, more money to spend, and your strategy was to create a high volume of content that was, I think you called it almost a publication.

Robert:             That’s right.

Ben:                 To me that is you creating the long tail, right? Trying to relate this back to SEO by having a high volume of content that covers a wide breadth of very detailed subjects. Do you refer back to what your strategy was back then, can you relate it to SEO terms? Were you specifically trying to create content that wasn’t being touched or was it about volume, timeliness, and velocity?

Robert:             The strategy at the time was sort of two pronged. One of the things that I did specifically in SEO, one of the challenges that I even saw in the early days of SEO was I would hire, because I was certainly not an expert, so I would hire SEO, quote unquote, consultants to come in and teach me and my team on how to do this, and the thing that they kept saying that just never made any sense to me was you need to pick your keywords, make a list, and then we’re going to go spend the next nine months or twelve months ranking for those key words.

Robert:             And the thing that never made any sense to me was we were going to spend nine to twelve months ranking for these key words and quite frankly in twelve months they may be gone, they may be out of style, they may be not what everybody is searching for, especially in the business that I was in which was quite frankly a very evolving and fluid industry. This was software as a service, cloud computing, we used to call them ASPs and MSPs and trying to distinguish ASP which was active service provider, versus ASP in programming language. We had a number of keyword challenges and people weren’t really searching for it yet but they were searching for things that they were seeing and so what we did with that was a little different was we started making bets on keywords and keyword lists that didn’t rank today but that we could own in nine to twelve months. In other words, building a content and media strategy that would be hopefully, and we were wrong as often as we were right, that would actually be what people were searching for a year from now or nine months from now.

Robert:             So we took a very forward leaning approach with our SEO strategy and then buffeted it with this idea that quite frankly what we were trying to create was truly evergreen content, best practices, thought leadership, leading thought, so that because the business we were in was all about a moment of change and that moment of change can sometimes come for an enterprise software buyer not for six months. In other words they may have a moment to build a budget for this and then it gets canceled or they may build a budget and then something else comes up and it gets delayed. And so it wasn’t about trying to find buyers in any one moment, it was building a platform that would find buyers and keep them engaged so that when that moment then arose we would have them engaged and ready to have a discussion. It was truly nurturing a market so that we would be ready for them when they were ready for us.

Ben:                 I think that’s an interesting takeaway for the SEO community is that as you are developing your SEO strategies thinking about the landscape and trying to build a keyword list that’s going to be valuable when you actually have the opportunity to rank for it. And if you think it’s going to take six to nine months to rank for a keyword then you should try to pick something that’s future looking as opposed to something that you need now. I like how you position the time value of your SEO work.

Ben:                 Talk to me a little bit about The Content Marketing Institute, the asset that you’ve developed with Joe Pulizzi and what does that do?

Robert:             Well Content Marketing Institute was started by Joe as a media company. And when he started it it was all about evangelizing the practice of content marketing as an approach, as a methodology for marketing, and it’s still that to this day. And when I joined my sort of influence if you will was to sort of bring the more practitioner side of it. Joe had come from the publishing side as I’ve mentioned and basically brought a lot of the best practices. I still learn things from Joe today about how media businesses operate, how publishers operate, they’re so applicable to what we do in marketing today.

Robert:             But the thing that I could bring is what was really happening in big companies when it came to the practitioner’s point of view or the point of view of content in an enterprise, the politics, and the silos, and the technology, and all of the things that sort of rear their head. And together we really started CMI as sort of a resource that would be available for all of these marketers in typically larger businesses. How to sort out what all of the issues would be in making content marketing a more successful practice. And that’s when we launched the business that I run which is of course the education and consulting piece of it and that’s mostly what I do. And then the media operation which was the event primarily, The Content Marketing World which happens in September each year, and of course our blog if you want to call it that but it’s really more than a blog at this point, our website which is really just a resource and a daily news source of content marketing goodness.

Ben:                 So it’s a multichannel business where you’re creating content yourself as educational content, you’re doing consulting, and you have an event, I imagine that you work with a lot of content creators mostly on the consulting side. Tell me a little bit about how the content marketing industry has been changing and what are some of the big factors that are influencing marketers, and maybe even if you can talk specifically about what are some of the factors that might be effecting SEOs.

Robert:             I think the biggest evolution that I have seen is, as Joe used to like to say, we are in the early innings of this as a strategy in the business. And I think that’ still true today. What we’ve seen over the last, call it six or seven years, and the SEOs in your audience will appreciate this, they typically do when I talk about this where the important of content, original, value delivering content, and I don’t necessarily just mean ad copy, and web copy, and email copy, and stuff like that, I mean stuff that is supposed to deliver value in and of itself, content that is-

Ben:                 Articles.

Robert:             Yeah, exactly the increasing importance of that has become unquestioned. There is now really no argument that a business shouldn’t do this to some extent. You can argue about how much and quantity versus quality and there are certainly lots and lots of debates that happen around that but the idea that it should exist somewhere in the business has sort of been put to bed. Now the question is, and this is the challenge that quite frankly I most often saw and where we sort of sit today, is that what has evolved is personal skill sets or what I call random acts or ad hoc content pockets within the business. So the demand generation team has a strategy, the PR team has a strategy, the brand team has a strategy, the web team has a strategy, everybody, I call it the Oprah effect of content. Everybody gets a content marketing strategy. And as such we’ve launched a million blogs, we’ve launched websites, we’ve got 900 landing pages out there, we’ve got all of these elements of content that quite frankly are a mess and aren’t very focused and don’t have a lot of purpose around them.

Robert:             Sadly, in many cases the SEO professionals are left trying to optimize all of that and continually saying in meetings, we should cut down on the piece of content here because we need to focus here and we’re not optimizing here or we should be optimizing there, and its big ball of untangled twine right now. And so what we see is that businesses are finally starting to realize that and the landscape today that we see out there are, especially in larger enterprises, finally making the discovery that content as an enterprise strategic and at some level central function to the business is as important as product development. And so getting our arms around the creation, management, optimization, and measurement of content is a critical thing. And that’s the real challenge these days is who should it, what does the team look like, how does it play out, where is the strategy, what’s the channels that we’re going to be on, and getting out of this sort of mentality of, yay everybody needs content so let’s just produce as much as we can of it, throw it up against the wall and see what sticks, and rather getting much more media operation like, figuring out what is the direct purpose and focus of the experiences we’re trying to create for customers at various parts of their journey and be really good at delivering.

Ben:                 So, Robert, I guess one of the things that I have a question about is, what’s really driving the increase in importance of content? People have been writing blog posts since the dawn of the internet era and now it seems like there is a shift sort of away from a focus on paid advertising for a lot of brands, and more focus on these sort of experiential advertising campaigns and that affects content. What’s driving the increased importance of content as a marketing channel?

Robert:             Well I think you see a couple of things, right, which is at a tectonic scale we see fragmentation. We see fragmentation across, the term du jour is omni channel. So we see social media, television, print, online, your Apple watch, the screen in front of you in a car, all of this fragmentation of audiences and where they’re spending their screen time and how they’re consuming content, and thus you see a real … I mean, look, we’re spending as much money as we did on paid advertising before but the purpose and the platform of it is evolving significantly.

Ben:                 The overall impression levels have gone up.

Robert:             Of course. Of course. And we’re spending a lot to get there. And we can have a wonderful discussion around the efficacy of that and bots and fraud and NGPR and where all of that is going, but the ultimate net result of it is an increased importance on creating content that delivers value and quite frankly starts to deliver trust earlier in the relationship. And so differentiating whether you’re Nike and you’re going to create a Colin Kaepernick ad and all of the content around that, and you’re going to pay for some placement of that, some of that content you’re going to pay for placement for, but the goal of it is to differentiate you in a way that develops trust in the brand going forward instead of saying buy now, buy now, buy now, buy now. And the same goes for the website, the same goes for email, the same goes for social media, especially as it becomes a more paid oriented platform. The importance of good content rises in importance as the need to pull trust forward with consumers has become such an important thing with the fragmentation of audiences and the lack of attention and really any kind of brand loyalty that might exist.

Ben:                 What I’m hearing is that we’re being advertised to more often, in more different places because we have our smartphones and just putting a performance-based banner ad in front of somebody and saying buy something doesn’t do the trick like it used to because people are always being advertised to and we’re desensitized to that. So the way to reach consumers is to build trust and build relationships with them and that’s where content is a better vehicle than sort of the traditional format of advertising.

Robert:             Yeah. I mean a great example of this is you look at Edelman’s trust barometer and you look at just trust generally in the mainstream media. And so if you look at that and you compare numbers and I’ll get these numbers slightly wrong but let’s say they’re in the high 30s, low 40s where trust in mainstream media and the facts and information that we’re being given is generally where consumers are these days and that’s an extraordinarily low number, and you can feel it, we don’t have to have research to tell us that we don’t have a ton of trust in mainstream media these days but that goes across the board. That’s not just one or two networks or one or two content platforms. That’s across the board of media, broadly speaking, consumers are being advertised and sold to not only in paid advertising but of course in the content itself in many ways and the distrust has grown highly because of it.

Robert:             Let’s not forget that in the sixties and the seventies, let’s remember we’re talking Watergate era, trust in mainstream media was in the high 70s and low 80%. So it has come down markedly. And while that says not so wonderful things about where we are culturally right now, it is an extraordinarily big opportunity for us as brand marketers and marketers to create that trust. It’s a low bar right now and so starting to create trust earlier in the process and differentiation in what we deliver and our point of view on the world and what we stand for is the opportunity to be the trusted source of interesting things is to become Amazon, it is to become Netflix, it is to become Disney, it is to become Starbucks, USA Today, and then translate it out to [inaudible 00:20:45], IBM, and all of the companies that are creating value through their content programs that are ultimately pulling trust forward and building an audience that believes in what they stand for.

Ben:                 Yeah, it’s interesting, what I’m inferring from what you’re saying is that the process used to be sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, once somebody is your customer build the relationship with them. And now it has to be build the relationship, sell, cultivate the relationship.

Robert:             That’s exactly it. Because that’s where we have the opportunity. I’ve talked about this before but this idea it used to be about attention and as marketers we have been classically trained at university to conflate attention and trust. In other words, time spent on site or we look at how much attention we’ve gotten in a television rating or a TV commercial and in many ways that attention could be at least correlated to some success measure. That’s no longer true with trust as low as it is. Attention is not the same as trust. And I can be loud, and I can be noisy, and I can get somebody’s attention, and it can be for very, very, very bad things and that will not affect in a good way my marketing results. And so that’s the opportunity.

Ben:                 Talk to me about best practices for content marketing and specifically when you talk about how marketers and SEOs build that trust to make their content effective.

Robert:             Honestly it starts with good content and I know that’s a circular argument. It’s like, hey how do you create content that people trust, create trustworthy content. But I think beyond that what we have to do is figure out a way, because what happens in business so often I find is that we get into this content, it’s just like we were talking about at the top of the show, which is we get into this mentality in business of, hey content works, this stuff works. And so what happens is without a purpose and focus, a strategic purpose and focus behind content as a function people look at content as an alternative to a piece of collateral material or a catalog or an advertisement and start measuring it as such and that’s the wrong way to measure it. If we start measuring it like that we will ultimately fail because content, good content, quality content, trustworthy content, is harder to create than an ad or a piece of collateral or a catalog.

Robert:             And so it has to start with this, what experience are we trying to build for a customer at whatever part of the journey we’re looking to build this experience, and what would that mean if we could pull trust forward here, like if going out of this experience they trust us a little more deeply, if they give us a little more information because they want to give us more information, if they convert in a little higher preponderance because they really start to become more deeply involved or invested in our point of view, what does that look like and how do we do that in a concerted way where we don’t have to pay attention to the noise of sales going, hey make the logo pop more, or we go, hey we’ve got to put a call to action in here, or, hey there aren’t enough mentions of the product in this. How do we get to a point where our focus becomes audience centric and developing trust. And if we can’t start there we’ll never get there because the pressure then to create persuasive ad copy, marketing product heavy content is just too great.

Ben:                 I hear what you’re saying in the sense of how building trust is important and I guess the thing that sticks out to me is that authenticity is an increasingly important thing where you build trust by getting across the point that you are someone that is knowledgeable and that there is no ulterior motive or no hidden motive to you creating the piece of content that you’re creating. Who is doing a good job building content, what are some of the examples that you point to of somebody that’s doing a nice job building trust? And if you can think of, maybe tie in what their SEO strategies might be or how they’re implementing it that would be wonderful.

Robert:             Well let me give you a couple. And I’ll tie at least one of them into SEO because one I actually know what they’re doing on SEO and the other one I don’t. Of course the quintessential example of the trust, and I love this case study, is what Red Bull does. And we often talk about Red Bull. I mean you can’t go to a content marketing conference and not hear Red Bull mentioned. But the thing that I love about what Red Bull does is first of all it’s not only a focused strategy for them, it’s an entire division. It’s a company. It makes money. They add money to the bottom line. They sell advertising, they sell sponsorships. Red Bull media house is the main marketing arm of Red Bull but more importantly, it’s a focused business strategy for them. Now here’s the thing about the trust, they have done the research into what their audience that shows. So first of all we’re going to both have to agree that Red Bull tastes like crap, I mean it’s just a horrible, horrible tasting drink and we need to agree on that.

Ben:                 For the sake of the podcast, sure. I don’t think it tastes terrible. It’ll just kill you.

Robert:             It’s really bad.

Ben:                 Okay.

Robert:             And so. It’s Jägermeister bad.

Ben:                 Well no, that’s the Jägermeister that you’re tasting, it’s not the Red Bull.

Robert:             Fair enough. Fair enough. The other thing is that it’s the most expensive soft drink in the soft drink aisle typically. And so what they’ve done the research to show is that people who have either tried Red Bull and don’t like it or people who have never tried Red Bull will actually recommend Red Bull to their friends because of the value that they’ve gotten out of the content that they’ve received from Red Bull. Now that’s not an SEO story, that is a trust being delivered at the very top of the funnel with an audience that either doesn’t know you or knows you and tried you and didn’t like you. Imagine getting recommended for your product from a customer who has either never tried your product or quite frankly has tried it and was dissatisfied with it but they get so much value out of the content that you’ve created a trust, a level of trust that, you know what, I didn’t like it but somebody, my friend, might so I’m going to recommend it to them. That’s a powerful story.

Robert:             Now, on the SEO side, I would point to a lot of what the company Indium is doing. Indium is a solder supply company selling soldering and soldering equipment. And they’re not a big company, they’re a mid-sized company. They have 23 different blogs, each one fronted with an engineer in front of it, and they have a complete SEO strategy for all of the different flavors of soldering and soldering equipment and that’s why they have 23 separate blogs for each flavor of soldering, each fronted by a particular engineer. And they call it there from one engineer to another. And they ostensibly just answer every single question a soldering engineer is going to have about an experiment they want to run but don’t have time to run it. Now, they answer every single question, they don’t publish the answer to every single question but they publish most of it. And all of those blogs, by the way, are now translated into six different languages.

Robert:             So, if you said to me, who’s the biggest media company in soldering, I would tell you it’s not a media company, it’s Indium. And the wonderful thing about that is it not only works from a search and from just a general ranking perspective, but it works from a trust perspective as well as these are engineers who come to trust the answers and information they get from Indium whether or not it has anything to do with their product and many times the content quite frankly doesn’t.

Ben:                 The last question I have for you is, you’ve been a marketer for 30 years, you’ve been at The Content Marketing Institute for, I won’t say it too loudly but, a decade.

Robert:             Highlight my age why don’t you.

Ben:                 Well you look great for being 35. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Robert:             You’re very, very sweet.

Ben:                 You’ve seen changes in the value of content as a marketing channel, if you can read the tea leaves and look into the crystal ball, what do you see being the future of content marketing? What direction are we heading next?

Robert:             I think there’s a couple of different directions. I think one, I think the interesting thing I find in the SEO space is broadening out because honestly the last, and search engine professionals quite frankly are way more out ahead of this than I am, but what I’ve noticed is  that in many cases what SEO became for a lot of companies was they just should call it GEO, so it was Google optimization. And it is so much more than that. I know companies in manufacturing that have entire SEO practices that are focused on Amazon and that are focused on Target, and Walmart. And I know other SEOs that are really focused in on social and how to optimize against YouTube. And that I think the growth of that has been really inspiring to me and I think it’s such an important piece as the web evolves itself and turns into voice search activated and other sort of big channels that we would normally think of as the web itself, IE Facebook or Amazon, et cetera, how search is really such an important component of building access to us as a brand. That I think will continue to expand and become a much more interesting expansion. Quite frankly I find that much more interesting than I find sort of the buzz around artificial intelligence and all that crap.

Robert:             But on the same side I see this idea of as we build out these experiences, whether we call them publications or blogs or websites or email newsletters or thought leadership hubs or whatever they are, getting more focus around the value and the sort of platform like integration into the business is where I see the next sort of step for most businesses as they take them. It’s sort of what I was talking about at the top of the show, sort of evolving out of that siloed mentality of content and getting much more into a how do we make content flow through our business like blood, like water, so that we can control how much better it can be used, and control the costs around it. Those are all short term things that I see businesses really focused on.

Robert:             Longer term down the road, yes, artificial intelligence, machine learning, content creation at scale, all that stuff is going to become I think fairly interesting but right now it’s just a mosquito noise around everybody’s head and sadly I think marketers have too much attention on it right now.

Ben:                 It’s the new shiny thing in front of us.

Robert:             Of course. Of course. And there will be a lot of over purchase of software as a result of it. But I think one of those things, I can’t remember who it was, I want to say it was, it might have been Andy Hall or somebody like that who, it was a great quote so I’m misattributing it for sure. But it basically said, before we go buy the new thing we should probably get good at the old thing.

Ben:                 Yeah. Definitely true. I do think that it’s interesting that you find the verticalization of search beyond just Google into video content and ecommerce, YouTube, and Amazon, more interesting than AI. Any other last upcoming, future trends that you think are interesting or that SEOs should be aware of.

Robert:             Well you bring up video and I think that’s an incredibly important one. The web is becoming much more video based and along with that comes not only the text but the audio and even the search around imagery. I used to have a really good friend of mine and they in fact worked at the software company that I told you about who was just an amazing computer scientist and had all kinds of sort of [inaudible 00:33:20] for searching against imagery and using that for robotics and I think that’s another part of search that’s truly interesting is having search recognize images and how do you start optimizing image creation to be better found on search. And that includes video as well.

Ben:                 It’s something that we’ve actually focused on a fair amount at Searchmetrics where we are an SEO and content marketing platform but a big part of our marketing strategy is producing audio content, this podcast, and we’re using that and transcribing it and basically repurposing different mediums of content to produce valuable trustworthy ways to reach out with our consumers across multiple mediums and I do think that there is something to be said about video becomes audio, audio becomes text, text becomes searchable.

Robert:             Yes. Exactly right.

Ben:                 Okay. Well Robert it’s an honor and a privilege to have you on the podcast, thank you so much for making the time. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you and I hope that everybody that’s listening appreciates that Robert is absolutely an influencer in the content marketing industry and, like I said, we’re very excited to have you on the show.

Robert:             Thank you so much. What a fun discussion this was.

Ben:                 Great. Well glad to have you on and that wraps up this episode of the Voices of Search Podcast. Thank you for listening to my conversation with Robert Rose, the chief content strategist and chief troublemaker at The Content Marketing Institute. We’d love to continue this conversation with you so if you’re interested in contacting Robert you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, you can send him a tweet where his handle is @Robert_Rose, or you can visit his company’s website which is contentadvisory.net. If you have general marketing questions or if you’d like to talk about this podcast you can find my contact information in our show notes or you can send me a tweet @benjshap. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use search data to boost your organic traffic, online visibility, or to gain competitive insights head over to searchmetrics.com/diagnostic for your complimentary advisory session with our digital strategies team. And if you like this podcast or you want a regular stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we’ll be back in your feed next week. Lastly if you’ve enjoyed this podcast and you’re feeling generous we’d love for you to leave us a review in the Apple iTunes store or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Ben:                 Okay, that’s it for today. Thanks again to Robert Rose for joining us. And until next time remember the answers are always in the data.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

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5 Ways of Turning Content into Revenue

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Publishers, journalists and media – they all ask the same question: How do I turn my online content into revenue? Print media, besides the money made from product sales, usually relies on advertising revenue. However, display advertising, as we know it from the past, has died out. It is now time to think and act digitally. In this article, we will show you how digital content can be used specifically as an advertising medium and thus be used to directly generate revenue.

The Searchmetrics Digital Strategies Group specializes in supporting the digital transformation of companies. Let our experts show you where your business is on the road to digitization:

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Video: Online sales for publishers

The topic of this article was also covered by one of our recent webinars. This video is part of the trilogy “From Dinosaur to Unicorn”, where experts give advice on different aspects of digital transformation. Björn Beth, Director of the Searchmetrics Digital Strategies Group, and Svetlana Stankovic, Team Lead SEO Consulting at the Digital Strategies Group, discuss content marketing strategies for publishers and showcase examples of industry leaders.

The Print Business Model – Offline Content that pays

In the past, publishing houses literally had a licence to print money, with a profit margin of 30-40% and millions of dollars in turnover. Sales were only a secondary source of revenue for the newspapers. Indeed, ads from third-party providers were the real source of income. By cooperating with publishers, they hoped to reach the largest possible audience.

However, it wasn’t only companies advertising their products and services, small ads from private individuals were also printed. Up to several hundred euros had to be paid by the average consumer to take out a 5×5 cm space in the newspaper for their content. Thus, newspapers have transformed from an information medium to an advertising driver, with a constant increase of advertising revenues until the year 2000.

At a certain point, newspapers turned mostly digital, and posters and brochures became banners and pop-ups. Display marketing was born! Nowadays, the German publishing giant, Axel Springer, still drives revenue with advertising, but not with display ads. The publisher generates profit through online companies, such as the comparison portal Idealo. The digital transformation of content has been a driving force for a long time –classic print media, on the other hand, started running out of gas some time ago.

The Print Business Model 2.0 – Online Content that doesn’t pay

Publishers understood that the old business model had served its purpose. However, instead of creating a new strategy, publishing houses simply kept on going with the same concept, applying the  the Print Business Model 2.0 to the digital working world 2.0.

But why doesn’t this work?

The three sources of income of the traditional business model are classified ads, sales, and display advertising. Since digital structures have been established in the advertising industry, revenues from all three sources have dropped significantly. Today’s customers use free platforms like Craigslist or eBay for their classified ads, instead of investing in offline and online media.

Subsequently, publishers had to cope with natural losses of up to 44% in sales and subscriptions. Nowadays, these lost advertising revenues go somewhere else. Generations X and Y mainly use Google and social media like Facebook or Twitter to share information. In total, 90% of all revenue goes to Google, newspapers share the remaining 10%.

Another big problem is display marketing. About 25% of Germans use adblockers, which automatically filter online advertising. However, the other 75% are difficult to reach. The average click-through rate (CTR) of banners is around 0.05%.

What does this mean in practice?

The German magazine, Focus, provided a sample calculation of the CTR in display advertising. The starting point here is 1,000 people seeing an ad with a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of 45 EUR. This means that, with a CTR of 0.05%, it will generate approximately half a click. The resulting cost will be 90 EUR for 2,000 impressions, and one click that have not even necessarily been converted.

The technology platform Atlantic.com notes, “You’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad.” Consequently, it is overpriced and inefficient to invest in display ads.

5 alternative ways of turning your content into revenue

With advertising no longer proving as profitable, new methods are needed to generate revenue from online content.

1. Content Commerce

Content Commerce is a concept which combines content marketing with e-commerce, resulting in visible success.

As an example, we can look at the American comparison portal Gizmodo. Gizmodo generates 25% of its revenue with content, with a conversion rate of 16% per product.

How does this work?

Since Gizmodo is a comparison portal, you immediately spot content for specific product groups. Once you arrive at the welcome page, you see an article which presents a product, defined as a “top deal”. Clicking on the link takes you to a domain called Kinja Deals, where you can read the complete product article. This content was written independently by an external editorial team and can be classified as a digital ad format. What we see here is a classic affiliate system. In the content itself you will find links to the Gizmodo provider, which will be billed according to the PPC method. These two pages are based on a referral strategy and generate almost twice as much traffic due to clever link building.

Another magic formula here is content optimization. While a lot of publishers focus on conversion-rates and apply a “publish-and-forget” approach to their content, Gizmodo’s main concern is content revenue. “We’ve basically been writing stories optimized against yesterday’s sales data every day for the last five years.”

Recently, a partner platform of Gizmodo, called theinventory.com, has been launched. Gizmodo gets around 76.4 million page visits per month, and directs many visitors from their page to The Inventory, where those clicks ideally convert. Overall, 45% of 9.9 million visits  at The Inventory are generated through this referral strategy (users of Gizmodo are directed to The Inventory).

This method is only possible due to excellent product content, which is key for any e-Commerce business who wants to generate revenue from online content.

2. Sponsored content

Sponsored ads are part of display marketing and remain, as mentioned earlier, largely ignored by users. However, things are different with “sponsored content”.

The newspaper “Welt” from Axel Springer has taken up this approach and successfully implemented it in their strategy. If you have a look at their page, you might see an article that leads directly to a conversion page. This doesn’t feel like a regular ad banner, although it is basically a display ad. Nevertheless, the content you’ll find will be valuable for readers and also fits thematically to the landing page of the referring domain.

3. The platform strategy

External sponsored content generates advertising revenue, but not necessarily traffic. That’s why Axel Springer Verlag has also launched its own platform strategy.

The TECHBOOK platform is part of the Axel Springer publishing house and releases articles on the latest technical market events. The content is sponsored by the landing page of the newspaper “Bild Zeitung”, which also falls under the umbrella of the Axel Springer Publishing Group. In this way, TECHBOOK can reach the entire readership of the Bild newspaper, one of the most successful tabloids in Europe.

Since both formats are part of the same publishing group, no advertising revenue is generated. Hence, some of TECHBOOK’s articles also contain an externally sponsored product link as a call-to-action (CTA) that matches the content.

4. Podcast

The Reuters Institute for Journalism states in the Digital News Report 2018, that 75% of publishers believe in the success of podcasts for the future. In fact, audio is indeed a great opportunity.

A current example from the industry is the sports magazine The Ringer. Their in-house podcast, “The Bill Simmons Podcast”, is presented by advertising partners, with ad sales of 15 million dollars and a download rate of 35 million in 2018.

Another successful example is the podcast of the platform Online Marketing Rockstars (OMR). The media company hosts 20 different podcast formats with a variety of presenters, starting from ad partners such as Youtube, where insights from online marketing are discussed, to influencers from the online marketing scene. In Germany alone, the podcast has reached an advertisement revenue of 700,000 euros, and rising.

Podcasts have great potential for marketing journalism and the resulting content. Particularly interesting in this context is the development of smart speakers. Amazon’s “Alexa” assistant is already on the rise and is becoming part of the everyday life of many people. It can be assumed that content will, at some point, only be successful if it works in audio format. It is expected that marketing strategies will have to be adapted accordingly in the future.

5. Videos as an advertising format

It’s not only audio content that generates revenue. The tabloid “Blick” from Switzerland trusts in visual advertising and integrates videos from advertising partners into their content. An example is its cooperation with the e-commerce platform, Weinclub.ch. By incorporating videos with a winemaker, they can simultaneously promote the Blick article and the Wein Club brand. Again, we’re seeing a successful affiliate strategy that helps you to get the most out of your content revenue.

Would you like to find out more about how you can turn your content into revenue? Get in touch with one of our experts! 

Make an appointment!

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

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Voices of Search Podcast: SEO tips for relationship building with your content teams

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The following was indeed created courtesy of Searchmetrics SEO Blog . They will always deliver subject material of the highest quality and therefore are among my own must-watch blogs. I think you will get something out of it.

Episode Overview

We continue content marketing month with an overview of how to build strong working relationships with your content marketing organization. Joining Ben for this episode is Taylor Robinson, Senior Manager of SEO for Conde Nast. Join Ben and Taylor to understand how to blend proactive, change agent approaches to filling online performance gaps with while providing excellent, reactive SEO support.

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Episode Transcript

Ben:                 Welcome back to Content Month on the Voices of Search Podcast. I’m your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we’re going to continue our month long deep dive into the words behind the numbers and discuss what SEOs need to know about content creation, publishing, and optimization.

Ben:                 Joining us today is Taylor Robinson who is a Senior Manager of SEO at Condé Nast, which is a media company that attracts more than 100 million consumers across its industry leading print, digital, and video brands, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, GQ, Architectural Digest, and the New Yorker. And today Taylor’s going to talk us through her teams working relationship with the content production teams at Condé Nast.

Ben:                 But before we get started, I want to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by the marketing team at Searchmetrics. We are an SEO and content marketing platform that helps enterprise scale businesses, monitor their online presence, and make data-driven decisions. To support you, our loyal podcast listeners, we’re offering a complimentary digital diagnostic where member of our digital strategies group will provide you with a consultation that reviews how your website, content, and SEO strategies can be optimized. To schedule your free digital diagnostic, go to searchmetrics.com/diagnostic.

Ben:                 Here’s on conversation with Taylor Robinson, Senior Manger of SEO at Condé Nast.

Ben:                 Taylor, welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast.

Taylor:             Hi, Ben. Super happy to be here.

Ben:                 It’s great to have you here, and I’m excited that we have fulfilled your boss John Shehata’s promise to get you on the podcast. He basically signed you up when we talked to him over the holidays.

Taylor:             He did. I would listen to it. He didn’t even tell me he was doing this really, and then he posted the link on Twitter. I gave it a listen, and then all of a sudden he’s name dropping me.

Ben:                 Well, it’s great to have you here, and thank you to John. Is there anything you want to sign him up for while we are on the podcast together?

Taylor:             I think we want to do a ping pong competition. He’s very good at ping pong. So I’m signing him up as a competitor.

Ben:                 Great. So, John, Taylor wants a raise and a promotion. That said, we’re here today to talk to you about how you work with your content team. Tell us a little bit before we get started about the relationship between SEO and content, tell us about Condé Nast and what your role is.

Taylor:             Sure. So I lead the SEO team at Condé Nast. I know John has mentioned this in previous podcasts before, but we are a small in relation to maybe some other companies. Small but mighty SEO team. So I report into John Shehata who’s our VP of SEO, search, and email. I oversee the SEO team, obviously. We have three SEO managers who work directly day to day with each of our 18 brands in our portfolio. We also have an SEO analyst who kind of weaves in and out as we see fit and wherever we need him. Then we also have an SEO engineer who focused on some of the tools that we want to build in house as well as kind of being the liaison between the engineering team.

Ben:                 So multiple brands. You mentioned 18 different properties. And you’re basically responsible for managing the projects that span across all of those brands, but then each specific brand has their own SEO optimization needs.

Taylor:             Yes. So each brand has a dedicated SEO manager, but the SEO manager has seven or eight brands. So they are very busy.

Ben:                 I could imagine. Talk to me a little bit about the structure of the editorial team at Condé Nast. How big is that team in comparison to the SEO team?

Taylor:             Sure. So it really depends per brand, but some of our larger brands may have 20 to 50 editors. Some brands are smaller, maybe like a 10 editor team. But, again, it really depends on the volume, the traffic to the site, not just search but overall traffic, as well as maybe the newsiness or evergreen of the site.

Ben:                 Okay. So essentially you’re working with roughly 100 different content creators.

Taylor:             Yeah.

Ben:                 I’m imaging that you’re not directly interfacing, or your team isn’t directly interfacing with each editor. Talk to me about the leadership structure of the editorial team and a little bit about what their process is like. How do they create their content?

Taylor:             Sure. So we have obviously Anna Winter, everyone knows her. She oversees all of the editor in chiefs of each title, but essentially from our end, we work really closely with two groups of people at the brand. The first is a main editorial contact. So this could be like your executive digital editor, and the second group of people are the dedicated development, audience development leads. So these are people who sit on the brand floors, are deeply integrated with the brand itself, so they know the brand voice. They know the brand DNA. The know what they would or wouldn’t write about. So these team members are vital to our success as an SEO team because we’re able to basically champion our strategies and recommendations at the brand. So we work really closely with audience development to get what we want slated into the editorial queue.

Ben:                 So there is a … You said there is an editor and an audience development resources. Was the first person editor? Sorry. I didn’t catch it.

Taylor:             Yes, it’s like the main editorial contact. So that could be per vertical or it could be just one person.

Ben:                 Okay. So you have a main editorial contact and then an audience development. Let’s just go into a little detail about the difference between editorial and audience development.

Taylor:             So the audience development team is basically tasked with developing the audience of the site. So bringing in as many users onto the site as possible. Whether that’s through search, social, email, or partnerships. The editorial group is tasked with pitching editorial pieces of content that they may be interested in writing, or they may have a bigger strategy. Like let’s say they really want to focus on hair this year. So we’ll work with them to kind of slate that or work with recommendations to get that to them.

Ben:                 I’m imagining the editorial team of the New Yorker is not the team that’s focused on hair this year.

Taylor:             You would be correct.

Ben:                 Okay. Good. Good. All right. I have a good understanding of the brands, and what I’m hearing is that you have no only an editorial contact that’s really responsible for content development but also an audience development team, which is really more focused on, let’s call it user acquisition and activation.

Taylor:             Yes. And they’re the ones that really champion our recommendations at the brand. At the end of the day, we’re just SEOs. We’re not writers. We’re not social people, etc.

Ben:                 SEOs can be social creatures, maybe not by nature, but it’s a learned skill.

Taylor:             Yeah, I haven’t met one yet.

Ben:                 Okay. Well, they’re out there somewhere. Okay. So I have an understanding of how your team is structured. You’re working with a large editorial team. You have a couple people that are basically project managing each individual brand. Talk to me about what those working relationships are like and how do you interface with both your editorial and audience development teams?

Taylor:             Sure. So the recommendations kind of go twofold. The first is this is more of our proactive strategy, and I don’t really like using the term proactive in this case. But we’ll go with it. This is where we as SEOs determine the things the brands need to cover. So this is through our own analyses using various tools, finding white space opportunities, taking a look at competitors. And then on the flip side, it’s actually the brand is driving … Maybe they have an idea that they do want to cover hair. So how can we best support their needs in terms of SEO? So it works in both directions.

Ben:                 So you basically have a proactive and reactive strategy where sometimes the SEO team is looking at the landscape of SEO and creating suggestions for an individual brand in terms of … Well, why don’t you tell me. What are the type of suggestions that you’re reaching out and trying to push? Are they related to types of content they should cover? Are they related to formats of content? Text versus video versus imagery?

Taylor:             We focus are recommendations in four different areas I would say. Content gaps, so this is identifying just white space opportunities around certain topics. Do a lot of refreshing on the brand. So taking a look at our existing content. I remember when I first started working on one of our wedding brands, they had 40 galleries on branded wedding hairstyles, and of course only one of them was performing. So a lot of this has to do also with content consolidation strategy, redirecting, that type of thing. And then the last two are kind of closely related, but we do a lot of seasonal or temporal related recommendations. So Vogue Met Gala is really big. It’s happening in May. We want to make sure we’re working a couple of months out of that event to give them the best recommendations as possible. Just constant meetings with them, making sure they understand the recommendations, maybe what performed well last year, what didn’t perform well last year.

Ben:                 So essentially you’re looking at the editorial output and trying to understand what has been successful, where there is an opportunity to create more content, and then also helping manage the editorial calendar in the sense of helping the team understand what has been successful in the past and what’s coming up. You mentioned the Met Gala as the seasonal example.

Taylor:             I will say though last thing we’re trying to do more of. I mean, Condé Nast isn’t traditionally thought of as a news organization, but we do try and help the brands capitalize on trending stories. So I would say that’s the fourth area that we focus on.

Ben:                 Okay. So you’re also working on not just evergreen content but also trying to help the team understand what’s likely to have a near term effect or something that’s more topical.

Taylor:             Right. I mean, a brand like Vanity Fair, for instance, is probably more naturally newsy versus evergreen. It’s good to have a little bit of a ratio. So maybe 70% news, 30% evergreen, and on some of the evergreen brands, it’s actually flipped. So it would be 70% evergreen versus 30% news.

Ben:                 Okay. Talk to me a little bit about the reactive work that you’re doing when it comes to interfacing with your content teams. How are they coming to you and asking for your help?

Taylor:             So each of the brands has … Like, for instance, I just met today with one of the brands where we’re talking about their editorial calendar for the rest of the year. So each month, what are some of the big initiatives content-wise that they need us to support because at the end of the day, we’re trying to get whatever they have in mind surfaced in search. So a good example of this would be like Bon Appetit City Guide Projects. They want to write about the best restaurants in New York City. How can we help them get there?

Ben:                 So what’s the process from basically being available to manage some of the inbound requests from your team? When you’re reactive and you’re audience development and editorial team are coming to you, do you set a weekly, daily, monthly cadence to try to understand what’s going on with them?

Taylor:             So we meet with the brand on a monthly basis, and by the brand who’s in the room, it could be our digital director, which also I think our audience development team obviously works heavily with. In that room may also be a product person so they can enter any technical things. And then we have our main editorial contact and audience development. And that meeting is meant to be very pie in the sky, overarching, SEO strategy. It’s just our normal SEO monthly, but on the more nitty gritty, day to day type optimization, we meet biweekly with our audience development leads to make sure we’re staying in constant contact, making sure we’re constantly up to date.

Ben:                 Okay. You mentioned that the conversation is for the monthly is more of a pie in the sky SEO, talk to me what you mean by that.

Taylor:             Yeah. I guess that was a weird phrase to use.

Ben:                 No, no, no.

Taylor:             It’s more not too in the weeds. I think we have a lot of stakeholders in that room. So once you start getting into like, I don’t know, someone’s talking about canonical tags, you start losing the room a little bit. So we keep it very like, “Hey, what’s coming in February from an editorial standpoint?” Or this is the time they want to all of a sudden bring up that they’re changing their navigation. So that’s something that we would talk about in that meeting.

Ben:                 Okay. And you mentioned that there is a second meeting that you’re having. Was that more of a short term meeting?

Taylor:             Yeah. So the second meeting is typically with our dedicated audience development person, an analyst for the brand. So in that meeting, it’s more in the weeds. Why did this story not perform well? Why did this story perform well? Talking about temporal or new strategies. So it’s more in the weeds.

Ben:                 Okay. So if I had to summarize sort of the way that you’re interfacing with the content production teams, you have a broad monthly meeting where you’re talking about your high level topics and picking your strategic direction. And then you really have a more frequent meeting that is tactical with your audience development team where you’re working on specific tactical projects.

Taylor:             Yes. Couldn’t have summed it up better.

Ben:                 Glad to hear it. That’s the job as the podcast host. Talk to me a little bit about how you build relationships between your editorial team, and by that I mean your editor and your audience development teams. I’ll preface it with there’s a balance in SEO and it just in content production between art and science.

Taylor:             Yes.

Ben:                 And editorial teams are generally writers, they’re artists, right? And SEOs are more scientists. They are tacticians and they’re thinking about data and more of the technical aspects. How do you communicate and manage that relationship?

Taylor:             So I think this really comes down to why the audience development team is so critical because they’re sitting on the brand floor with the editorial contacts. Essentially they’re taking our recommendations and disseminating it across the brand floor. But they’re also communicating it in a way that makes the edit team excited to write about the topic. So for instance, we have two food brands in the building where all of the editors have some type of culinary background. They’re legit. They’re legit editors. And if me as an SEO told them to write about how to roast a chicken, that probably does not sound exciting at all to write about. But the audience development person knows how to come in and position it to them as something exciting. Maybe they’re saying, “Okay. You’re going to write the best guide on how to roast a chicken that the internet has ever seen.”

Taylor:             So, I think having them as that liaison really helps get our recommendations across and kind of taking the here’s just a keyword with search volume.

Ben:                 It seems like you basically have an interpreter on your team.

Taylor:             Yeah.

Ben:                 Between here’s the SEO language, here’s how we optimize clicks and conversions and traffic and reach and everything wonderful about SEO.

Taylor:             Yeah.

Ben:                 You have an audience developer, a marketing manager who understands growth and then can communicate that to the editorial team.

Taylor:             Yeah. Because, like you said, really at the end of the day we are SEOs. We can inform topics and terms, but personally I don’t have the editorial expertise to craft a full headline. I’m not writer. So lead it back to the experts on the editorial team.

Ben:                 So what advice do you have for SEOs who maybe don’t have the luxury of having the audience development, that sort of interstitial marketer in your process. What recommendations do you have for working with content production teams and how do you communicate?

Taylor:             I think it’s always really important to share results as much as you can. So we do a lot of post analysis on the things that we’re recommending, and we’ll sit with them and talk about opportunities or missed opportunities for the specific content. Because at the end of the day, they’re writing all of this content, but if no one is seeing it, that kind of puts a damper on their editorial day to day. So we try as best as we can to communicate wins to the team and get them really excited about it.

Ben:                 Let’s talk a little bit more about the working relationship. I’m curious to know how you think about the balance between the editorial and the SEO teams in the sense of who is the end stakeholder and who is responsible for performance. Is it the SEOs are responsible for driving their metrics and they can dictate what the editorial team should be creating, or is it the editorial team is responsible for creating their art and the SEO team is there as a service provider to help them get it out there?

Taylor:             Sure. So I think it does go both ways and is a little bit 50/50. So we do determine areas of opportunity for each of the brands per vertical, provide that the main editorial contacts saying, “We should be winning here. Here’s what you need to do to get there.” They’re either onboard or they have a little bit of feedback, and then on the flip side, we’re sitting down with the editorial team themselves and they’re telling us, “Okay. We have this big content plan around X. How can you support us?” So it does go both ways.

Ben:                 It sounds like it’s a marriage. It’s split 50/50, and both parties are responsible for the overall success of the relationship.

Taylor:             Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben:                 What advice do you have for SEOs that are maybe struggling to communicate with their editorial team or just having trouble building that relationship?

Taylor:             I think it’s just continuous education over time. It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. We still do brand refreshers with the editorial teams SEO 101s even quarterly. So I’ve been here almost four years, and we do this every quarter. We have done it every quarter. So we’re kind of always in the face of the editorial team talking about why it’s important, why they should care, but they want eyeballs on their pieces of content. So they’re pretty receptive to what we have to say.

Ben:                 So what’s some of the content that you cover when you give your SEO 101s to the editorial team?

Taylor:             So we pretty much start from the basics, what is SEO, maybe the three pillars of SEO. So your onsite, offsite, and technical. But where we’re really delving into the education piece is obviously the onsite. So thankfully this is everything they can control as editors from the URL to the headline, SEO title, body content, and then basic keyword research.

Ben:                 Okay. So the thing that occurs to me is that Condé Nast is a large, very successful, content centric business, right? Your content and your editorial team’s output is really your product. How do you think that the relationship between SEOs are different when the organization isn’t really centered around content production?

Taylor:             So the way we think about metrics from our standpoint on the content side, we’re really starting to care about from a business standpoint, our engagement metrics like time onsite. So of course this is twofold where you have to have a great template that keeps users on the page, but the other side of things is also having really great, engaging content. So we’re really trying to do away with the 100 to 200 word pieces of content. I think a lot of publishing companies struggle with that. Like how do you come in and change the mentality to have them thinking quality versus quantity. On the other side of things, we’re also starting to think about search as it relates to user search loyalty. So we typically think a search user is a one and done visit, and right now we’re essentially trying to debunk that myth. It maybe true for some brands, but we’re trying to determine what loyalty means from the search user.

Ben:                 Yeah. It’s interesting that you talk about your KPIs and your time onsite and search loyalty are really interesting metrics. And going back to my question about how other brands that are not centered, their product is not their content, to me I think that there is likely a contrast between those KPIs. And for people that are in SAS business, it’s lead generations. For people that are in eCommerce, you’re looking at driving conversions. And my assumption is that no matter how big your team is, having a shared understanding and communicating what your KPIs are and driving toward a common goal helps the artists and the scientists speak on the same language because they’re all talking about the same numbers.

Taylor:             Right. And I think we’re really moving away from the term scale. Like how do we get more users to the site because we aren’t starting out as like maybe a startup or an eCommerce site with conversions. So we’re trying to think about search holistically and that what is a search user really mean. For instance, if I’m a searching for a recipe, most likely I’m a one and done type visit. I go to the website and I probably bounce back to Google and look at like a few other recipes. So that search loyalty is different than someone maybe searching for wedding hairstyles. Maybe they’re more engaged or spending more time on site. Maybe they are prone to viewing another page after that. So we’re trying to determine what search loyalty means maybe based on a topical category.

Ben:                 Yeah. So you’re saying essentially that you’re developing more advanced KPIs to understand the value and loyalty of driving someone through search and what the customer profile is for that, and that’s kind of a shared KPI between you and the editorial team.

Taylor:             Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben:                 Okay. So, Taylor, let me ask you one last question before we let you go. Let’s just sort of summarize and talk about some of your big tips for how SEO teams should work and interface with their content team. What’s the way to build a healthy relationship?

Taylor:             So I think the primary here is just constant communication and knowing exactly what the brands plans are, whether it’s for the year or even more short term. So another one could also be education. So we are constantly educating our editors on an ongoing basis. We even educate new hires as they come in. On the education piece as well, we actually have an SEO scorecard within the CMS and their workflow. So they’re able to constantly see kind of SEO in their face at all times. So it kind of gamifies it for them, which has been really interesting and successful for us. But in general, just setting up shared KPIs in those meetings and talking about the goals that they have or we have and seeing how we can support each other.

Ben:                 Yeah, I think that you bring up some interesting points, and just to summarize, it’s a relationship. Working with your content team whether they are, like I said before, whether they are artists and you’re a scientist.

Taylor:             Yeah.

Ben:                 You are working to achieve a common goal. So understanding what those shared KPIs are, having regular communication, making sure that they understand what SEO is, all very, very relevant points. So good advice, Taylor. Appreciate you sharing the knowledge with us, and that wraps up this episode of the Voices of Search Podcast.

Ben:                 Thanks for listening with my conversation with Taylor Robinson, the Senior Manager of SEO and Content at Condé Nast. We’d love to continue this conversation with you. So if you’re interested in contacting Taylor, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact her on Twitter where her handle is @Taylor_SEO. If you have general marketing questions or if you want to talk about this podcast, you can find my contact information in our show or you can send me a tweet @BenJShap. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use search data to boost your organic traffic, online visibility, or to gain competitive insights, head over to Searchmetrics.com/diagnostic for your complimentary advisory session with our digital strategies team.

Ben:                 If you liked this podcast and you want a regular stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we’ll be back in your feed next week.

Ben:                 Lastly, if you’ve enjoyed this show and you’re feeling generous, we’d love for you to leave us a review in the iTunes store or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ben:                 Okay. That’s it for today. Thanks again to Taylor Robinson for joining us, and until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.

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Voices of Search Podcast: Using Data to Optimize Content for Each Stage of the Funnel

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Episode Overview

Welcome to the fifth and final episode of Content Optimization Week on the Voices of Search Podcast. In this episode we’ll be reviewing the topics we discussed earlier in the week while diving into the data and tools that you can use to optimize your entire content marketing strategy. Join Ben and our special guest, Marlon Glover, Content Services Team Lead at Searchmetrics as they dive into the gathering and utilization of data to optimize your content funnel.

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Episode Transcript

Ben:                 Welcome back to Content Optimization Week on the Voices of Search podcast. I’m your host Benjamin Shapiro, and this week we’re going to publish an episode every day talking about what you need to know to optimize every stage of your content marketing funnel. Joining us for content optimization week is Marlon Glover, who is the content services team lead here at Searchmetrics. Marlin is responsible for shepherding Searchmetrics’s largest, and most strategic clients to content marketing success. Today we’re going to wrap up content optimization week by reviewing some of the topics that we’ve discussed, and talking about the data and tools that you can use to optimize your entire content marketing strategy.

Ben:                 But before we get started, I want to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by the marketing team at Searchmetrics. We’re an SEO and content marketing platform that helps enterprise scale businesses monitor their online presence and make data-driven decisions. To support you, our loyal podcast listeners, we’re offering a complimentary digital diagnostic. A member of our digital strategies group will provide you with a consultation that reviews how your website content and SEO strategies can all be optimized. To schedule your free digital diagnostic, go to searchmetrics.com/diagnostic. Okay, here is the last installment of content optimization week with Marlon Glover, Searchmetrics’s content services team lead.

Ben:                 Marlon, happy Friday and welcome back to content optimization week on the Voices of Search podcasts.

Marlon:            Happy Friday, Ben.

Ben:                 It’s great to connect, and it’s time for us to recap and land the plane. As we think back on this stages that we’ve discussed in terms of content marketing, what are the overarching themes that you can think of that helped SEOs understand how to optimize content across building awareness, across building consideration, and across driving people through the purchase funnel, and then retaining those customers?

Marlon:            Sure. When we look at the data to understand the performance of our content and our potential clients content, we’re looking at a few things to determine. What are the symptoms, causes, and solutions for helping them steal those content gaps. The first thing that we’re looking for is, you can look at it at a micro level for each individual piece, or you can look at each segment, but we’re looking to understand, one, is that continent visible in search, right? Does it have low to no ranking for non-branded keywords in the earliest stages of the funnel. If it’s experiencing some of those issues, there’s likely some problems that we need to solve before we even talk about content strategy. That’s when I pull my SEO friends over into the conversation and have them really try to diagnose what could be some underlying problems for their content’s lack of performance. It could also be just a general lack of good content targeting or SEO keyword targeting for those pieces.

Marlon:            Those are some of the things that we’re looking for before we move over into the next stage of assessing some potential gaps in content strategy. The other thing that we’re looking for is, let’s say a piece of content or a category of content is visible in search, but is not producing the amount of traffic that it should be based off of the search volume that then the keywords that that content is targeting. Then we’re looking at some commonalities, common causes of that. Things like poor title tags, or from a content strategy standpoint, maybe there’s a little to no understanding of customer goals, pains, tasks, maybe the content doesn’t match the user intent, and that could be impacting the click rate from that content appearing in search.

Marlon:            From there, if everything is going well there, then we’re looking at engagement metrics, right? Low engagement metrics can mean maybe their slow page loading time. Again, I’m pulling my friends over in SEO to kind of help diagnose some of the potential issues there. Maybe the content just isn’t engaging. Maybe it’s poorly written. Sometimes that’s a real fact that we have to address. We could be working with other agencies that may be let the ball drop, maybe if there’s poor UI and overall UX. Those are kind of three potential causes that could be producing low engagement metrics.

Marlon:            Then lastly, for each individual piece of content, if the intent of the content is to drive more conversions, a conversion could mean an email newsletter sign up, or click through to a specific product page on the site, whatever that conversion is, we need to understand kind of what could be driving success, but also failure of that conversion rate. Typically low conversion rates can mean their CTAs aren’t relevant or there’s not enough related content if we’re talking about some of this topic or we’re in this type of content.

Marlon:            Those are some of the things that we’re looking for a when we look at the performance of content and what could drive effective constant your energy.

Ben:                 A couple things stick out to me. One, there’s a deep relationship between the content marketing team and the SEO team, or the vast majority of people that are listening to this show are likely SEOs. I think that hearing you as a content marketer think about your process, hopefully is educational for them, but also it helps our listeners understand how the content marketers think about their relationship with SEO. There are shared metrics between the two. As we about the relationship between the content marketing team, that’s sort of where you live, and our audience, the SEOs, what are some of the shared KPIs that you think about it? And how do SEOs and content marketers hold themselves accountable? Because there’s so much overlap between, is the content good and is the SEO strategy actually working?

Marlon:            Yeah. For us, content marketers were oftentimes trying to identify evergreen content opportunities. Content that is going to address questions that will stand the test of time or we’ll ask the significant amount of time, right? Those things that we’re answering at the consideration stage and the purchase stage, typically the awareness content is again, is less evergreen. In terms of shared KPIs, I know that evergreen content, for me as a content marketer is near and dear to my heart. One, because typically is addressing those teaching moments that we’ve identified that our customers truly care about when they’re looking to make a purchase and particularly looking to make a purchase with me as a supplier. The shared KPIs there are pretty obvious, right? We’re looking at some of our organic metrics, but we are also looking at some of the engagement metrics.

Marlon:            I don’t know if the SEOs particularly care too much about the engagement metrics, but for me as a content marketer is incredibly important, and from my understanding, from an SEO standpoint, is that when content is engaging, when folks are staying on that page, and they’re not bouncing off the site in a relatively short amount of time, that sends signals to Google that this content is of quality. I would say those quality metrics are something that we share. But also from a content side, when I’m attached to an organic strategy, it typically aligns with the content that is going to be evergreen in nature.

Ben:                 What else do you think SEOs need to understand about life as a content marketer? What are some of the things that you’ve seen where the content creation process doesn’t necessarily translate into how SEOs think?

Marlon:            Yeah, sure. Oftentimes, I’m playing translator for SEOs to content teams. As a content marketer, I care about the human element. I’m really thinking about what’s going to be engagement for my core audience. I tend to cringe at times when I hear keywords, the term, literally the term keyword, or when I hear search volume, and some of the kind of other terms that SEOs use when we were talking about optimizing your site for search. I tend to translate a term keyword to … It’s a mouthful, but the questions that our buyers are asking, right? What does the demand/search volume for the questions our buyers are asking/keywords. There’s some subtle changes and differences in messaging that I think could go a long way for SEOs when they’re looking to communicate with content marketers.

Marlon:            The other thing is, and this kind of goes back to that is, how do you effectively provide insights to a content marketer when you were doing, whether the keyword research to identify what content should be created. It needs to be pretty tangible for a writer and editor to understand. What I mean by that is, instead of just giving me a list of keywords, help me understand, one, at an aggregate level, what is the core topic that those keywords are looking to address? Can you, and the great thing about constant experience Searchmetrics tool is that content experience allows us to kind of take a keyword and too derive a core topic that is going to be content friendly for us.

Marlon:            But I would say that first and foremost it needs to be digestible. Don’t give me a list of keywords that we need to include in the content. Give me the top three to five search terms that we should be looking to rank for, and then I want to go out and do my due diligence to understand what other types of content is ranking for those keywords. One of the top 20 or so pieces of content that’s ranking for those keywords that I can use to start my writing process. Then on the backend of that writing process, then I want to leverage technology, or my SEO team to make sure that content is optimized the last 10 to 15% of my content creation process is the optimization of that content for search.

Ben:                 At the end of the day, we’re all marketers and there’s an obvious handshake between the content team, and the technical side of Search Engine Optimization. But to me going through the different stages of content, thinking about awareness, about consideration, about purchase, about post-purchase follow up, really goes back to understanding who you’re trying to reach. It goes back to understanding what is the right type of content for the specific experience you’re trying to create. That goes into how do you optimize that piece of content to have the maximum impact, and it has to be the right words on the page, and it has to be the right technical solution.

Ben:                 Marlon, let me just stop and say, thank you for giving the insights into the way that content marketers think about building the content marketing funnel and sharing that with our SEO communities. I appreciate you taking so much time and walking us through not only your process, but answering our questions about how to optimize each stage of the marketing funnel.

Marlon:            Yeah. Thank you Ben, and I appreciate you inviting me to this podcast. Yes, SEO teams tap in to your inner consumer is the best way … is the best piece of advice is I can leave you with.

Ben:                 I think you could still use the word keyword. It’s cool, everybody. Okay. That wraps up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast, and that wraps up content optimization. Thanks for listening to my conversations with Marlon Glover, Searchmetrics’s content services team lead. We’d love to continue this conversation with you, so if you’re interested in contacting Marlon, you can find the link to his bio in our show notes. Well, you can contact him on Twitter where his handle is @Marlon_Glover.

Ben:                 If you have general marketing questions, or if you want to talk about this podcast, you can find my contact information in our show notes, or you can tweet me @BenJShap. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use certain data to boost your organic traffic online visibility, or to gain competitive insights, head over to searchmetrics.com/diagnostic for your complimentary advisory session with our digital strategies team. If you like this podcast and want a regular stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we’ll be back in your feed next week.

Ben:                 Lastly, if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, and if you’ve enjoyed content optimization week, and you’re feeling generous, we’d love for you to leave us a review in the iTunes store or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, that’s it for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.

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Voices of Search Podcast: Using content to retain post-purchase customers

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Episode 41 Overview

Welcome back to Content Optimization Week. In our 4th episode, Marlon and Ben discuss how content can be used to create a virtuous cycle of customer retention, satisfaction and up-sell. Marlon also speaks to the similarities between content developed to educate and engage in pre-purchase phases and how it can be optimized for your customer’s needs. Join us to better understand how to be there for your customers with the content they need and the rewards that can be enjoyed with secondary and tertiary purchases, post-sale.

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Episode Transcript

Ben:                 Welcome back to Content Optimization Week on the Voices of Search Podcast. I’m your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and this week we’re going to publish an episode every day, covering what you need to know to optimize every stage of your content marketing funnel. Joining us for Content Optimization Week is Marlon Glover, who is the Content Services Team Lead here at Searchmetrics. Marlon is responsible for shepherding Searchmetrics’ largest and most strategic clients to content marketing success.

Ben:                 Today we’re going to discuss optimizing your post-sale customer retention content. But before we get started, I want to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by the marketing team at Searchmetrics. We’re an SEO and content marketing platform that helps enterprise scale businesses, monitor their online presence and make data-driven decisions. To support you, our loyal podcast listeners, we’re offering a complementary digital diagnostic. A member of our digital strategies group will provide you with a consultation that reviews how your website content and SEO strategies can all be optimized. To schedule your free digital diagnostic, go to Searchmetrics.com/diagnostic.

Ben:                 Here’s the fourth installment of Content Optimization Week, with Marlon Glover, Searchmetrics’ Content Services Team Lead. Marlon, welcome back to Content Optimization Week on the Voices of Search Podcast.

Marlon:            Hey man, good to talk to you again.

Ben:                 It’s great to hear from you. I feel like this is the part of the race where, it feels like we’re past the finish line. We talked about building awareness. We talked about building credibility. We talked about getting past the hurdle of the sale. We’re done, right? We don’t have anything else to talk about. Let’s just make it up.

Marlon:            Finish lines, hurdles, man, I’m ready to do an extra lap.

Ben:                 Well, what happens after you’ve finish the sale? We still want to keep the relationship going with our customers. Right? Doesn’t matter-

Marlon:            Follow them.

Ben:                 … ecommerce or any sort of business. You want to keep the romance alive.

Marlon:            Oh man, after the sale, that’s when the fun begins. That’s when the client is really experiencing our product.

Ben:                 Talk to me about, how you build a relationship and what you need to be building for your customers, on the content side.

Marlon:            Yeah, sure. This is when you start getting into their customer life cycle journey. If you’re a SaaS company, which we are, we’re thinking about onboarding. We’re thinking about making sure that first impression … You can argue that first impressions happened at the awareness stage, but we’re thinking that first impression with that product, and how they take it out of the box, figuratively speaking in some cases, what that experience looks like. We want to make sure that they have a clear understanding of how to get the most value out of what they’ve just purchased.

Marlon:            I would say that’s the first step in continuing our content strategy, post-purchase, is making sure that they have the information available to them to really solve the problem. I’m starting to think about some of these how-to videos or how-to pieces of content, the step-by-step guides, comprehensive guides that you see some of the more progressive organizations creating, post-sale.

Ben:                 To me, this is about documentation. Right? This is, okay great, you’ve decided to purchase a product or service. We’ve documented ways that you can get the most out of it, so you’re not going to have as many touches as you might if we just left you alone, that end up in customer services lap, that end up back in sales, that end up on your CEO’s desk with an angry customer not understanding how to use your product.

Marlon:            Yeah, that’s right. There’s some documentation. There’s the traditional user guides, and as I mentioned before, comprehensive guides, these robust pieces that may even come to play in some cases, earlier in the funnel. Sometimes you have very technical or detail-oriented folks that have pretty significant information around what they’re looking to solve for. They’re looking for specific details about your solution and how to use it earlier on in that process. As I mentioned before, that journey isn’t necessarily linear. Maybe you have individuals that have prior experiences with other solutions and products that they’re looking to these types of guides to help answer for them and uncover potential challenges that we have. But, then there’s other types of content too, that play a role in the retention in post-sales.

Ben:                 Help me understand first off, how do you figure out what content to create to keep a healthy relationship with your existing customers?

Marlon:            I think it’s still important for us to do some of those things we did earlier on. Right? I mentioned in our first conversation earlier this week, that that keyword research is still pretty important. Right? I mentioned before that it was important in the consideration stage that we separate the branded contend from the non-branded content. At this stage we’re looking at the question modifiers that I mentioned before, the who, what, where, why, when. When should I consider doing X with this product, for example?

Marlon:            We start taking those branded terms that are related to our company or our solutions, and products, and we start identifying the questions that are searched the most for that. I would start there, to give me some guidance in terms of the content and the questions that have the most demand for our customer base. That’s where I would start. Again, I mentioned in our second conversation, is that we should also be thinking about leveraging our internal teams, the folks that are having conversations with our customers, our clients, the customer success reps that are getting these questions. They don’t necessarily need to pick up the phone and have those questions answered. They’re able to have a very easy access to the information that they may be seeking when they purchased our product, the solution.

Ben:                 The interesting thing to me about this type of content is, not only how do you understand what to write, but how are you harvesting your organization for some of the pain points customers have had so you can help answer those questions in advance, but also where does it live and what’s the experience? This is where you get into, how are you building and monitoring communities? Do you have special onboarding section? You’ve got to get a little creative in terms of how you’re getting this content to your customers, so they don’t end up in, like I mentioned, your customer service, your sales, or your CEO’s lap. Talk to me a little bit about the format of content that use see being useful when you’re going through your retention type content.

Marlon:            Yeah, sure. The way I typically think about it is, there is public-facing content, so again, if we find that there is significant demand and questions being asked that are related to our brand and products, I believe that content should be open to the public. It should be indexed by Google and searchable. You bring up a good point around these community forums. What we’ve seen with some organizations, and one particular technology company comes to mind. They have great community forums that are behind, within a client portal. It allows individuals to be able to speak a little bit more openly about some of the problems that they are having and challenges they could be facing, not necessarily with our product, but just in the task that they’re looking to accomplish.

Marlon:            When I think about this, I’m thinking about it applies to both B2B and B2C, but folks that are superusers of a technology, or our folks that are key users of a product, and fall within this specific lifestyle, so path runners that may have a benefit from leveraging insights from their community. I believe through that community engagement, if it lives within your site, then you become the moderator for that. You become sort of the ambassador for that community as well.

Ben:                 I think building a community is an interesting idea here. Not only does it solve multiple places, it gives your customers a place where they can interact with your customers in a place that they’re creating valuable content, allows you to continue to build their experience, but it also allows them to answer other leads questions. When we talk about community and building the relationships with your customers, this reminds me of something that we talked about yesterday. In our last episode where we were talking about getting reviews, and building those relationships and getting your customer’s feedback. Talk to me a little bit about just some of the ways that you’ve advised people that are interested in developing more content, to get the most out of their customer relationships.

Marlon:            Sure. We mentioned harvesting information from our internal teams is still very important, whether it’s through our communities, if we have the resources to build that up, or whether it’s through individual touchpoints to really surface insights from our customers. That’s one of the places I go to is, if we have the benefit of having a community forum, it allows us to touch our customers, to get information to them and to receive information from them based off of what they’re discussing in those forums, and then to have a more one-to-one relationship with those individuals, to cultivate new content.

Marlon:            The other thing I’d say is that, there was a point in time, I believe about eight years ago when a lot of marketers wanted to gravitate away from direct marketing and email marketing. Well, I still very much believe that this is still a very relevant channel. When we talk about really identifying some of those challenges, whether it be through our search data, to determine what questions folks are asking related to our products and brand, or whether it be through our community forums, or our internal teams that have direct relationships with customers and answering those customers, we need to be aggregating that information and distributing it out to our existing client base. Email and newsletters is another great channel for us to distribute that information to our existing customers because if we are identifying the common pains, then we can be pretty sure that the rest of our customers could benefit from hearing how they could be addressing challenges that they may be having, or they may be facing in the future.

Ben:                 I think you’re talking about a distribution lever for sending your content out, which is-

Marlon:            Absolutely.

Ben:                 … something that’s applicable across the entire funnel. To me, when we’re thinking about what the content SEOs need to create to maximize the value of the post-purchase relationship, the onboarding process, making sure that people are happy, making sure that you’re building good customer relationships, showing people that you’re going to take care of them after they’ve made the purchase, is something that’s going to help you with your pre purchase conversions. Building a community, cultivating user-generated content, harvesting your existing customer relationships to get your testimonials, all things that feed back into the front end of your marketing funnel.

Ben:                 Then, using email, as you mentioned, as a distribution lever to get that content out there, to make sure that it’s well-trafficked. Mostly like driving engagement to your forums by emailing people links and questions, that’s going to get them to create more content, to give you more testimonials. There’s a lot of value there.

Ben:                 We talked about creating forums. We talked about your onboarding content. What are some of the other formats or topics of content that you recommend SEOs and content marketers produce to make sure they build healthy customer relationships?

Marlon:            You brought up a good point before, and we typically think about this funnel as sort of this, one way in, one way out approach. But, if we look at this type of content as a cycle, this retention type of content can cycle back towards the front end of that process. I think it’s important that we don’t lose sight of that. I don’t think that this type of content should be significantly different than the type of content that we’re looking to create in the earlier stages of the funnel, because if we’re effectively onboarding, we’re engaging, we’re helping them use our product technology, and we’re showing that we’re there for them, at some point they’re going to be looking to make another purchase.

Marlon:            Now, whether that’s a cross-sale, or whether that’s, this product has reached its expiration date and they’re looking to make another purchase, we should be effectively teaching them in a similar fashion as we have before. When I’m thinking about different types and topics, the types aren’t significantly different, because again, we’re talking about the same buyers. We’re talking about some of the same solutions. But, we should think about the type of content that we create, or at least the topics that align with individuals that have used our product. We need to understand in some form or capacity, the experience that they may have had in using that product and how they can enhance that experience the second go-around.

Ben:                 What I’m hearing is, you should always be selling. Right? You have a customer. You’re more likely to get a repeat buyer, or a higher value of a customer if they already have a relationship with you. Even though somebody is post-purchase, keep your foot on the gas, so that you can continue to upsell, offer more value, create more content that’s going to have them deepen their relationship. That provides more value to the organization, so building-out the product pages for people that are already your customers. Special experiences, replicating some of the things that are already on your website, but under the guise that it is for a specific person that is of high value, also has value to you.

Marlon:            Yeah, that’s right. Always be selling. Always be closing. The Glengarry Glen Ross approach to content marketing.

Ben:                 Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers.

Marlon:            That’s right.

Ben:                 Okay, on that note, I think we’ve covered enough about how to use your post-purchase content to both drive people back into your marketing funnel, how to cultivate your existing customer relationships to create more value, to build more credibility with your leads, and also to continue to sell and make those relationships more valuable. On that note, that wraps up this episode of the Voices of Search Podcast.

Ben:                 Thanks for listening to my conversation with Marlon Glover, Searchmetrics’ Content Services Team Lead. We’d love to continue the conversation with you, so if you’re interested in contacting Marlon, you can find a link to his bio in our show notes, or you can contact him on Twitter, where his handle is @Marlon_Glover.

Ben:                 If you have general marketing questions or if you want to talk about this podcast, you can find my contact information in our show notes, or you can tweet me @BenJShap. If you’re interested in learning more about how use search data to boost your organic traffic, online visibility or to gain competitive insights, head over to Searchmetrics.com/diagnostic for your complimentary advisory session with our digital strategist team. If you liked this podcast and you want to regular stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app, and we’ll be back in your feed tomorrow to discuss optimizing your brand building and navigational content.

Ben:                 Lastly, if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, and you’re feeling generous, we’d love for you leave us a review in the iTunes store or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay. That’s it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.

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How Google, Visual Search & Smart Speakers are Changing the Travel Industry

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Online search demand from users researching and planning their travel has risen over the last few years. At the same time, classic SEO for travel sites is currently undergoing huge changes: Google is integrating an increasing number of its own travel services into its search results, which is turning what was once a search engine into an answer engine. This is also providing the technical requirements for personal assistants and smart speakers that only return one result. Visual search and virtual reality are two other exciting trends that are particularly exciting for SEOs and online marketers in the travel industry.

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How people search online for travel information

They say every journey starts with a single step, but nowadays almost every journey starts with an online search on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Search engines have become an important tool for researching travel topics and planning trips. According to Google Trends, for example, user interest in the generic search terms, “hotel booking”, “holiday booking” and “book flights”, has been on the rise since 2011.

google-trends-generic-terms

This data obviously refers to Google search, and Google is way out in front as market leader. A recently published analysis by Rand Fishkin showed that, between January and September 2018, 96.1% of all web searches in the EU were carried out on Google services.

69% of all searches were done using Google web search, 22% on Google image search, 4% on YouTube and under 1% on Google Maps. Die other 4% of searches were mainly conducted using Bing, Yahoo and Facebook, with a few others. In the US, Google is only slightly less dominant, with its properties combining for a total 93.4% of searches.

search-market-share-eu-vs-us

Search engines generate reach

For travel sites, search engines are extremely important from an economic point of you because they generate reach – reach that results in transactions and revenue. If you look at the online sources of the travel agent TUI, which you can do using SimilarWeb, then you see that 60% of the users on tui.co.uk come from search engines, followed by 33% direct traffic.

But before a user books a trip online, they visit several websites and use several web serivces. On average, a user encounters 700 digital touchpoints. This includes conducting 52 Google searches, looking at five different airlines and closely considering eight accommodation options. These figures are taken from a Google trend study.

The travel websites and services visited are distributed as follows:

In this context, Google talks about “Micro Moments”, for which Google clusters together search queries that share a user intent and creates a customer journey that the user takes online. It starts with the first thought about travelling and goes through all the steps leading up to booking and then planning the details of the trip.

For travel, Google has defined the following four micro moments:

  • I-want-to-get-away-moments: At this stage, the user doesn’t have a concrete plan and is looking for inspiration about possible destinations. This includes search terms like “cheap holiday” or “Thailand holiday”.
  • Time-to-make-a-plan-moments: Here, the user knows where they want to go and they are looking for suitable flights, accommodation and things to do. This includes searches like “best time to visit Thailand” or “rainy season Thailand”.
  • Let’s-book-it-moments: Now the user has finished their research and they start booking e.g. hotels and plane tickets. This includes search queries like “flight Phuket” or “hotels in Phuket”.
  • Can’t-wait-to-explore-moments: In this phase, users are already on their holiday and might be looking for things to do locally. This includes search terms like “best restaurants in Phuket”.

If you provide holidays to Thailand, it is essential that your website offers content that will appeal to users at all stages of the customer journey. This means creating content that satisfies the different user intents. A look at the search volume for queries that belong to micro moments at different stages of the sales funnel shows how important this is:

Most companies that provide products or services tend to concentrate on the “transaction” stage of the funnel. But if we look at the search volume, we see that the vast majority of all queries take place in the first two stages (awareness and consideration) – and only a fraction of queries in the purchasing stages (transaction and retention). Neglecting the upper stages of the funnel means missing out on potential reach, customer relationships and revenue.

Online search is changing

Since Google went live in 1997, the way we search has changed dramatically – from one-word searches to complete sentence and question searches; from just web search to video, map and image search. Google hasn’t just created new, independent verticals like Google Maps, Google Video and Google Images, it has also adjusted its algorithm to better serve changing search habits. This is most evident in the switch to Mobile-First Indexing.

As users, we have changed our search habits according to the technology available to us. In the past, we mainly used desktop keyboards to type search terms into Google. This has changed to virtual smartphone keywords and, since 2014, we are now at a point where we can communicate with Google through speech and we can enjoy the support of smart assistants like the Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa by having a Google Home or Amazon Echo in our home. Voice search is currently one of the most relevant trends for the future of online marketing.

Search using a visual input (e.g. a photo) is also an upcoming trend, albeit one that is still at an earlier stage of its life cycle.

Websites are losing relevance for users

Today, if a travel agency creates and optimizes content for its own website, then it does this because it wants to bring users directly to its website, it wants to inform them and, ideally, it wants to convince them to make a booking. In the future, this travel agency will have to structure and prepare its content more for those platforms where its users are active – this primarily means social media platforms (Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat), smart assistants (Google Home, Amazon Echo etc), chatbots, virtual reality devices and Google itself.

Google’s transformation to an answer engine

Thinking about the trend towards voice search, we can see – particularly when we look at mobile search results – that Google is undergoing a transformation from search engine to answer engine. This transformation presents a threat to travel sites and their reach.

When a user searches for flights, Google displays offers from different providers, including a price comparison:

For a search for hotels in a particular city, Google shows different accommodation options, and again includes price information:

A search for things to do or in a given city, or even just as search for the city name, will return Google’s own travel guide, including sights and suggested activities.

edinburgh-travel-guideGoogle shows these results in a structured, highly prominent layout on its search results page. Google pulls the content for these results from various websites and uses this structured form to provide the basis for answers to voice search queries.

Get-to-know-Google-Home

If you ask your Google Home Assistant for a flight to New York, then you get exactly the same result, including all the details on prices and flight durations, that you get when conducting a normal desktop or mobile search.

Content published by travel agents or other travel sites is scraped by Google and then presented to the user so that they don’t have to leave the search results page to access the most important information.

Smart Speakers & Personal Assistants

A forecast published by the website gminsights.com predicts enormous growth in the voice assistant market, with global shipments estimated to reach over 500 million units by 2024.

Devices that, today, are mainly used by early adopters, are expected to be integrated into many objects and devices we use in our daily lives, like cars, fridges and TVs. The car manufacturer, Kia, has already equipped its “UVO” with a Google Assistant. And Nissan has installed its “Nissan Connect” service in several of its models. This service makes it possible to connect the car to Amazon Alexa. There are also fridges made by LG that include Cortana and Alexa integration.

We can already use everyday objects to reserve a table in a restaurant, book a flight or order some milk. This is another example of the available technology changing the way we search.

Voice assistants, like chatbots, are playing a key role in the digitization of the travel industry. In the summer of 2018, Marriot announced a cooperation agreement with Amazon that saw a specially developed voice assistant, “Alexa Hospitality”, installed in all hotel rooms. This lets hotel guests perform tasks like making a spa appointment, calling room service, controlling light, music and temperature within the room, or accessing information about cultural events and nightlife in the city.

Social Media & Visual Search

Social media platforms like Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat have long become more than a tool for connecting people across the globe. For E-Commerce in particular, social media platforms have become extremely important. A ViSenze study published on Business Wire found that 60% of Generation Z consumers now use social media for shopping. On Snapchat you can already take a photo of a friend’s shoe and be given the opportunity to purchase it directly from Amazon.

Source: Business Insider

With Instagram Shopping, Instagram has also made it possible to shop within a user’s feed or within a story. With these offerings, the platforms are responding to what Business Wire’s study found to be the technology Gen Z and Millenial consumers want more than any other: visual search capabilites.

The same study also found that 40% of millenial travelers valued how Instagrammable their holiday appeared to family and friends as the most important factor in choosing a destination. The airline, easyJet, has responded to this demand with its Look & Book App. Users can load photos of places from Instagram into the app, which then recognizes the destination and provides relevant flight options.

Virtual Reality

Another visual search trend for the tourism industry could come from virtual reality. With virtual reality technologies, it is possible to send a user to their destination before they even book their trip. This can make it easier for the user to make their purchase decision. Thomas Cook introduced “Try Before You Fly” in 2015. With a virtual reality headset, users could be submerged in a 360-degree video that let them inspect a hotel or take a virtual walk across Times Square.

It is also possible to make direct bookings using VR, as demonstrated by the booking system developed by the Spanish software company, Amadeus. By wearing a VR headset, a user can enter the booking system itself and book a flight, including the selection of times and dates, via a virtual interface. The new form of “visual” search engine also includes the opportunity to reserve a seat and book additional services like car rental. selecting all desired options and conducting the entire transaction process all the way through to making the payment.

For the leisure and travel industries, Virtual Reality is incredibly useful for turning interested prospects into converting customers. In the future, I see VR becoming a potential content marketing measure for all leisure and holiday operators.

Conclusions

  • Technological advances will continue to develop at a great speed – likely even more quickly than we are used to. Automated systems and improving artificial intelligence will take the systems we work with to a whole new level. Users and software providers alike will find that new technologies become available with an ever-increasing frequency, which will continually impact user behavior and the way people search online.
  • With these developments, the tourism industry, like other traditional industries, faces an enormous challenge. The key to success will be how well companies and employees can adapt to new processes, new technologies and the new expectations that users have regarding the content they consume and the platforms they visit.
  • We can already see a few visitors migrating from company websites to smart assistants, and many more to social media platforms or to Google, where users can access required information – or even make a booking – without leaving the platform.
  • It will take courage to take up this challenge and experiment with new platforms and technologies. This means changing old structures, (re-)training existing staff and hiring tech-savvy employees.
  • If machines and platforms are to be able to interpret content correctly, then technical understanding and know-how are required to prepare and structure the information in a machine-readable way.

These may not be the easiest times for those of us working in search engine optimization, but they are certainly exciting! So … are you ready for tomorrow’s challenges?

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Voices of Search Podcast: Driving Conversions with Bottom of Funnel Content

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Episode 40 Overview

In this episode, Ben Shapiro and Marlin Glover, the Searchmetrics Content Services Team Lead dig into the importance of building out the early stages of the content funnel before leaping into the bottom of the funnel.  Marketers that ignore the information and educational stages will find their bottom of funnel efforts to be less effective. If you aren’t teaching, informing and guiding them, someone else will be.

Listen in to understand how to craft content that meets the unique needs of buyers for every product line, rather than applying a one size fits all approach to the buying stages of the funnel. Marlon also digs into how hard consumers work to avoid engaging with sales organizations and how you can customize your content to address the detailed questions consumers have as they work to avoid your sales and customer support organizations.

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Episode Transcript

Ben:                 Welcome back to Content Optimization Week of the Voices of Search Podcast. I’m your host Benjamin Shapiro, and this week we’re going to publish an episode every day, covering what you need to know to optimize every stage of your content marketing funnel.

Ben:                 Joining us for Content Optimization Week is Marlon Glover who is the Content Services Team Lead here at Searchmetrics. He is responsible for shepherding Searchmetrics’ largest and most strategic clients to content marketing success, and today we’re going to hear Marlon’s tip for optimizing the bottom of funnel conversion related content.

Ben:                 But before we get started, I want to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by the marketing team at Searchmetrics. We are an SEO and content marketing platform that helps enterprise scale businesses, monitor their online presence and make data driven decisions. To support you, our loyal podcast listeners, we’re offering a complimentary digital diagnostic. A member of our digital services group will provide you with a consultation that reviews how your website content and SEO strategies can be optimized. To schedule your free digital diagnostic, go to searchmetrics.com/diagnostic.

Ben:                 Okay. Here is the third installment of Content Optimization Week with Marlon Glover, Searchmetrics’ Content Services Team Lead.

Ben:                 Marlon, we’re halfway there. We’re at the bottom of the funnel. Welcome back to the Voices of Search Podcast.

Marlon:            Thanks for having me again, Ben.

Ben:                 So, let’s talk about what most marketers would consider getting people across the finish line. We’ve talked about building awareness, getting in front of people that are in our personas, talked about helping them build credibility and get educated on our class of products or services. But now this week we want to talk about the bottom funnel. How do we get people to buy something, whether it be a product or a service? Talk to me a little bit about the strategies behind building your product content.

Marlon:            Yeah. Well, this is actually a really fun topic because for me I can quickly point out to a client the value and the importance of building content at other stages. Because if you haven’t effectively taught clients earlier in that process, then it’s going to be very difficult for them to make the decision that you as a supplier or someone that can solve their problem and fulfill their need. So first and foremost, that is critical. I mean, I know we see in the car buying process there’s typically 900 or so digital interactions, this source from another study from Google. There’s 900 interactions, and it’s important …

Ben:                 800 are emails that you didn’t subscribe to. But go on.

Marlon:            It’s true. But I think that just kind of helps us validate this point, and that point is if you aren’t present throughout many of those interactions, if you weren’t present when they’re looking to learn online, then you have less credibility when they’re looking to determine if your solution is right for them. So that’s the importance of some of that earlier content. If you’re not teaching them, then someone else is, and they’re likely leading them to their solutions. So that’s first and foremost.

Ben:                 There’s a dating metaphor here, and I’m going to try to say this without being crass, vulgar, or rude. But I will turn it back into a product conversation. If you’re trying to get across the finish line and you haven’t put in the leg work over a series of dates and you haven’t sort of shown, in our case, that you’re a gentleman, it’s a tall ask and likely something that’s going to be turned away and aggressively turned away. If you go directly to the sale, people are going to think that you’re being pushy or aggressive. So, I totally understand what you’re talking about building the relationship, building that credibility, starting the customer journey earlier through awareness and education. But once you’re building the relationship the right way, what are some of the tips in terms of types of content that you need to have on those product pages to make sure that they’re visible, showing up, and that they’re converting?

Marlon:            So first then, I’m impressed that you managed to keep that analogy PG. Great job there.

Ben:                 Podcast isn’t done. It could go sideways at any point.

Marlon:            So, let me say this, I think we spend a lot of time talking about eCommerce, and I do want to talk about some traditional eCommerce approaches and types of content that align with this kind of purchase and buying stage. But a large part of my background is in the B2B space, and in the B2B space, there’s typically multiple stakeholders involved in the buying process. Certain individuals get involved earlier on, other individuals may get involved throughout the middle stages, and then you may have some unknown stakeholders that tend to come into the mix in the later stages. And so what we found in the B2B side is that there’s some very unique and specific types of content that may be needed for, let’s say, a CFO that hasn’t been involved in the earlier stages, the process, that may not care about the solution per se that you’re solving for the head of marketing, right?

Marlon:            In those instances, we’re looking to create pieces of content that uniquely address the questions that they’re asking later on in that process. So maybe that’s a calculator to show the value of the ROI in your solution. Maybe it’s some other type of downloadable content that your internal champions can leave on the desk of a CFO as a lead behind to help solve the value of that within an organization.

Marlon:            So, on the B2B side, that’s what that looks like, and I only bring that up because I think that there is some parallel in the B2C side as well. So for customers that are looking to make a purchase at the later stages, they’re looking to answer this question of which solution is right for me, right? So I’ve learned all of these things earlier in the consideration stage. You address all of my questions. You’ve even helped me uncover things that I wasn’t considering, and now I’m looking to determine if you, as a provider, are actually helping me solve for those things. Are you actually providing those needs that you helped me identify?

Marlon:            And so I think based off of those specific needs, those solutions, we should really take some careful consideration around the type of content that we create to help answer those later stage questions. Sometimes that content can come in the form of videos. So I’ve told you, and I think we’ve used this example in the past, that the blender example, right? I’ve told you the things that you should be thinking about when you’re choosing the right blender. So let me show you the blenders that we have and the unique features and specs that we offer that aligns to the things that I told you before that you should be considering, right? So that type of content may be in the form of a video where we show you how that blender blends and how this type of blade performs when you’re cutting up this type of vegetable that you taught you earlier on in this recipe content.

Marlon:            So at this stage, we’re looking to understand, to answer the question of which solution is right for me, and that should be unique to every product that you offer. It should directly link to the unique problems that you addressed earlier on in that consideration content.

Ben:                 You’re talking specifically about the feature set, which is very important. You need to be detailed about what your product or service does to make sure that your customer, when they’re in the point of making a purchase decision, understands the value you’re going to provide. I think that there’s a second component here in terms of credibility and belief, right? Hopefully throughout your process you’ve built that credibility. You’ve gone on your multiple dates, and you’ve shown that you’re a gentleman and someone willing to commit to. But as you get farther in the purchase process, people are going to want to check your references, and to me there’s the notion of having testimonials, reviews, and even questions and answer content. I’m actually just thinking about what is on Amazon’s product pages. You mentioned videos, detailed descriptions, product features, even comparisons to some of your competitors is another thing you could do. But really it’s like great, you’re saying you can do all of these things. How do I know that I can believe you?

Ben:                 Talk to me about some of the tricks and hacks or ways that you can build credibility to add to the funnel to get somebody over the finish line.

Marlon:            Well, first let me say, using that analogy, thank goodness that there isn’t a platform that allows our exes to write reviews about us. I probably wouldn’t be married. No, I think the point that you made, Ben, is pretty accurate. We all know that Amazon is a nightmare for a lot of these retailers out here. So it is a good rule of thumb to go to an Amazon product page to understand what are the elements and components on that page that we should be thinking about. Also, using to build some credibility of our product at these later stages. So you’re exactly right. I think reviews, user generated content are things that are slightly outside of our control but have the ability to create significant credibility. It allows us to, as a product provider, as a solution provider, it allows us to be able to show that everything that we’ve said that you should be considering, everything that we’ve said in terms of our product being able to deliver on those promises, that type of content allows a potential buyer to see that I actually believe them, right?

Marlon:            No, that type of content is significantly important.

Ben:                 I think moving beyond just focusing on eCommerce, I think we used Amazon as an example of somebody that’s obviously done a great job building out a ton of valuable product pages. But the reviews and the testimonials, you can use that methodology or that sort of idea of credibility building in your B2B SAS pages or whatever your website is for, and it could be something as simple as our services are used by these clients, right? And you’re putting the logos of other companies that are there. This is less about SEO optimization, more about how to build credibility, right? You can always put more content on the page, and sometimes that’s not always the answer. More content is great, but a lot of the times it depends who’s writing it and who’s tone and point of view you’re sharing as well.

Marlon:            Yeah. I mean, we mentioned in our last podcast that one of the sources of information are some of our other teams within the organization. So folks that directly interact with clients. So at this stage, we’re looking to answer some of those questions for our sales team. Folks don’t want to get on the phone and talk to a salesperson anymore. They don’t want to go to the car dealership. They want all the information available to them, and they have that information available to them whether you’re answering it or not. So that’s exactly right. They want to know who else you’re working with. They want to understand case studies, testimonials, all of that content, all of the things that we’ve traditionally known to be right at later stages of the buying process, and that sales teams are being asked before a customer makes a purchase is still very relevant. So the question is how do we bring that to life in the digital marketplace?

Ben:                 So how do you do that? How do you go and build that credibility? Let’s talk about specifically if you’re early on, you’re starting out, you don’t have a lot of that content created, what suggestions do you have for building that credibility, getting other people to talk about your products, getting your reviews?

Marlon:            Yeah. Sure. I think that we can’t lose touch and a close connection with the folks that are using our products and are getting value out of our solutions. So the first place I look is to go to some of our ideal customers. We need to understand where they’re truly receiving the value in our product and solutions, what their experience looks like, and at best, they feel that they’re connected to our brand. They feel like they’re connected to our growth through this connection, this relationship that we’ve built for them. Then in most cases, they’re going to be willing to speak on our behalf. And so I would say just as a general business model, we should be thinking about close we are staying to the customers that are ideal to us, that we want to continue to replicate. How close we’re staying to them and how we’re differing customer success models and really getting value out of interacting and leveraging them to speak on our behalf. And then there are other influencers in the marketplace that we should be tapping into. Folks that have broad reach to our customer base.

Marlon:            So we want to tap into those individual. We want to find ways that we can make offers to them in terms of using our products so that they can, in turn, see the real actualized value of our solution and really provide value to their followers. So the folks that they’re teaching on a daily basis, right? So we want to find a way to integrate into their lifestyle and their world and how they might be solving problems themselves. If they see a real value in our offer, then they’re going to communicate that to their folks as well because they’re looking to produce content on an ongoing basis.

Ben:                 Yeah. Absolutely. I think that when I think about this format of content, when I think about getting someone over the finish line, you have to start building the relationship early, and that was the reasons why we had two days of podcast before talking about building awareness, building credibility. Doing your product descriptions and making sure that you’re writing detailed descriptions and understanding who your customers are and what features you have that are going to solve their problems is table sticks, right? You have to nail that. You have to knock it out of the park.

Ben:                 But the incremental things that you can do to make sure that you’re optimizing not only for visibility and reach of your product pages is adding more content that’s going to be around building credibility throughout the sales process, and that gets into your testimonials, your reviews, your frequently asked questions, the other content that you can put on the product page. We’re specifically talking about eCommerce. If you’re in services-based business, it’s putting other customer referrals and putting the other brands that you’re working with on your conversion pages, right? Putting as much content that show that you are a credible, reliable product or service. And whether it’s building relationships in the community with influencers or whether it’s harvesting relationships with your existing customers, either way you’re going to be building relationships and asking people to create that content for you and publishing it in your … really in the pages where the rubber meets the road.

Marlon:            Yeah. I agree, and I think it’s critical that we look to every piece of content that we create, particularly if we’re optimizing for a core topic or a set of keywords that we look to the top 20, 30 highest ranking pages to understand how we can build the most comprehensive piece of content we can within every stage of the buying process. But yeah, absolutely that becomes significantly more important as you move down that buying journey.

Ben:                 Yeah, the last thing I’ll say is we bring this back to the … specifically to the SEO communities. Some of these tactics are not things that the SEOs listening, if you’re a technical SEO, I’m going to use air quotes here that you can’t see that this is not your problem. Right? Harvesting reviews and getting that content is not your content, but it does dramatically affect how your pages are going to rank and how your conversion rates are. So building relationships with your cross functional partners and getting them to build in the feedback loop so you can cultivate the positive experiences and use that content on your product pages is something that you should have a vested interest in because it’s going to make the pages that you’re trying to optimize that much stronger.

Ben:                 So, while we have talked a lot about how to create content and maybe the SEOs aren’t going to build relationships with influencers, you can put that agenda and try to harvest that content from the rest of your marketing team.

Marlon:            Yeah, Ben, and that’s actually a great point. Shameless plug here, right? So we actually do this for a lot of our clients. We offer workshops for SEO teams, content teams, particularly to help bridge that gap between the SEO and the content teams sometimes inability or it can be challenging to work together, to speak the same language. But we actually help a lot of our clients do is to develop that relationship, whether it’s understanding the correct process from SEO insights to content strategy and execution or helping evangelize the value of the SEO within the organization and all of the elements that are involved in doing that. So shameless plug again, but I wanted to make sure that I mentioned that.

Ben:                 SEO and content marketing team therapy. And on that note, that wraps up this episode of the Voices of Search Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Marlon Glover, Searchmetrics’ Content Services Team Lead.

Ben:                 We’d love to continue this conversation with you. So, if you’re interested in contacting Marlon, you can find the link to his bio in our show notes or you can contact him on Twitter where his handle is @marlon_glover.

Ben:                 If you have any general marketing questions or if you want to talk about this podcast, you can find a link to my contact information in our show notes, or you can send me a tweet @benjshap.

Ben:                 If you’re interested in learning more about how to use search data to boost your organic traffic volume, online visibility, or to gain competitive insights, head over searchmetrics.com/diagnostic for your complimentary advisory session with our digital strategies.

Ben:                 If you like this podcast and you want a regular stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and move back in your feed tomorrow morning to discuss optimizing your post sale customer retention content. Lastly, if you’ve enjoyed this podcast and you’re feeling generous, we’d love for you to leave us a review in the Apple iTunes store or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ben:                 Okay. That’s it for today but until next time, remember answers are always in the data.

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