SEO expert Steve Wiideman joins today’s Lunch with Norm to discuss why businesses should care about having optimized content on their site and the benefits of SEO. In this episode we discuss what’s the optimized layout of content for an eComm site, steps to follow to improve your SEO, and tools for beginners. Steve specialized in strategic planning for multi-location and franchise brands. He considers himself an e-commerce SEO scientist. He is the author of SEO Strategy & Skills, a college textbook through Stukent. He has personally helped the SEO success of brands on the likes of Disney, Linksys, Belkin, Public Storage, Honda and many more.
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Episode: 219
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Steve Wiideman, Strategic planning expert.
Subtitle: “SEO Tips and Tricks for Success in 2022”
Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0APeKaTxZ4
On today’s episode SEO expert Steve Wiideman joins today’s show to talk about why businesses should care about having optimized content on their site. We discuss what’s the optimized layout of content for an eComm site, and steps to follow to improve your SEO. Steve considers himself a scientist and practitioner of SEO for eCommerce brands. specialized in strategic planning for multi-location and franchise brands he has personally helped the SEO success of many big brands and companies.
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Norman Farrar 0:01
Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm the FBA and ecommerce podcast.
Norman Farra 0:21
Okay, like I mentioned on Monday’s episode we have a great show today, we’re going to be talking about how to improve your website and content with SEO. This is important for Uber. Our guest today has personally played a role in the success of brands like Disney, Honda Skechers, and some of my favorites. Appleby and I hope to do anything food related. Okay, he’s also the practitioner of local and ecommerce search engine optimization and paid search advertising, returning guests, Steve Wiideman and can’t wait to talk to him. But before we do that, just a quick shout out to cellar eyes. solarize is a comprehensive solution for your everyday business needs. It’s everything you need to grow and scale your Amazon business and it’s just a click away. For more information, please visit solarize. Calm that’s salaries within one hour. All right. Where the boy wonders squire Kelsey?
Kelsey 1:17
Hello, Happy Monday. Welcome to the show. I’m doing fantastic. How are you?
Norman Farrar 1:23
Good. Did you behave over the last two days?
Kelsey 1:26
I did. I’m here at my new place. And we didn’t have a coach for the last week or so. So that finally came in so I can actually get comfy at my place feels a little more like.
Norman Farrar 1:38
I was just wondering why you weren’t returning any of my messages that we’re sending you on the weekend?
Kelsey 1:45
But yeah, well, you know.
Norman Farrar 1:49
All right, already. Yeah. All right. Sorry. What am I going?
Kelsey 1:54
Alright, so first of all, I want to welcome to the show Andy Simon Duska rabbit, aka Rosalyn from Florida, Marcia, and we have rad. It’s great to see everyone. How’s everyone doing? Did you do anything fun this weekend, you have anything planned for q4? Let us know in the comment sections. Also, if you’re listening to this on a replay, just go ahead and skip all this and go right to the action if you wanted to start the interview off and smash those like buttons. Let’s get this thing going. Also subscribe to this YouTube channel too. If you’re watching from YouTube. It’s the big red button down below. And also don’t forget to hit the three dots. If you’re watching from Facebook, click those push notifications so you get those notifications rate when we go live. And I think that’s about it. We can just jump into the good stuff. welcome Sarah Chu, I believe that’s Jose actually, Marina. It’s good to see everyone and thank you rad I’m growing the mustache. Yes, this is for Movember. It’s 15 days old and it’s still lots of time to time to grow.
Norman Farrar 3:02
I still have the breadcrumbs in there from the last time we talked. Just saying just
Kelsey 3:10
save them for later.
Norman Farrar 3:11
Okay. Okay. All right. So if you have any questions, just throw them or comments, throw them over into the comment section. And we’re going to be talking about SEO. We’ve got one of the top guys in the business. Make sure please ask questions as we go along. We will get to them at the end of the podcast. Okay, so sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy the episode. Welcome, Steve.
Steve Wiideman 3:38
Hey, thanks for having me back. Again, norm. It’s funny, you mentioned all the food brands I’ve worked with. And I realized like, well, that’s how I gained all the weight I kept looking at all day long. I must have gained like 40 pounds in the last decade. And thankfully I met up with a gentleman named Mike Warren runs this program called ditch the dad bod yoga last year, I’ve been able to drop like 35 of those 40 pounds, and I feel much better. But I think you’re right, I think you need to look at more non food industries is something to get into because I feel like maybe there’s something subconsciously this makes me want to eat more. I don’t know.
Norman Farrar 4:12
I’m right there with you. I’ve got although I don’t have any grandchildren, I’ve got the granddad bod. So
Steve Wiideman 4:19
ever. Grab me back. I’m excited to talk about you know, web page optimization for for conversion rates and see how we can talk about different elements of a landing page and just kind of nerd out about you know, page level SEO. Yeah, you
Norman Farrar 4:36
know, it’s so important. A lot of a lot of people have no idea how important and it’s funny because I’m going to be on you probably you might not know Kevin but Kevin King is one of the top guys top trainers, moderators, like just guys in the Amazon business and I’m going to be talking about building out a brand Not just an Amazon listing, but building out a brand. And it’s important because, you know, people right now, you know, it’s funny, I went to a show recently called the Amazon powwow in in Miami. And it was talking to a couple of aggregators. And a year ago or two years ago, Amazon brands would sell like, people were concentrating on sales. And they were trying to, you know, aggregators were just buying up left, right and center two and a half times multiples, but it ended up expanding now 24567 and a half times multiples on earnings. And now it’s changing over, people are starting to spend lots of money on building their brand. And they’re taking a longer time to establish it or throwing more money into it, which is going to reflect a completely different model, which is going to be you know, one times revenue, or x times revenue. And this is all about that this is trying to build that this is something that a lot of Amazon sellers have never had to think about. And now it’s time it really is time, you know, you’ve dealt with it forever, you know, but every like even these micro brands, they have to do it. So here’s the question long way around it. Why is that so important?
Steve Wiideman 6:17
It’s incredibly important. When you look at this scheme of things. I remember watching Bob’s watches go from non existent to hey, let’s purchase an old domain that’s been alive for a while with a website to Let’s now turn it into a brand now, it’s probably one of the top three, you know consignment sites in Rolex and pre owned Rolex. And that was such an important part for Valtteri, the owner was wasn’t just hey, let’s, let’s dominate every keyword in Google, it’s let’s build a brand. So that people start to recognize us remember us as being the you know, the first place that you could buy and sell on online for your Rolex and, and let’s let’s make our names and brands that we get higher click rates and search results, because people recognize us. Let’s build relationships with the top industry sites that talk about our products and services and do some advertising put some dollars behind it so that people start to recognize us, and then they see us in search results, and they’re more likely to click on us. And hopefully, if we provided a good result and affordable price, and they have trust, you know, all those EA T signals, we always talk about the expertise that already trust signals, then, you know, they’ll stay they’ll purchase, and Google will infer that we were helpful result, again, moving us up in search. So I think I think brand is such an important part, even with Skechers. I remember when working with Skechers, they kept telling us we want it to be a brand driven SEO strategy. Like what about all the non branded keywords like kids shoes, you’ve got girls shoes and boy shoes, but there’s no kids shoes page and lots of people are searching fat. And they said yeah, but if you look at the click through rates, and at the time, we can even see some of the keywords before Google hid them behind the not provided. It didn’t convert as well. It was a it was a brand awareness search term because people weren’t, they didn’t know which shoes they wanted specifically yet. They were just window shopping. But when they search for kids size seven blue tennis shoes, they know what they want. But when they type in kids shoes, they don’t. So so a lot of the energy was and you’ll see this in paid search everyday majority of your budget for these larger brands, Applebee’s and Skechers. All these other companies, you mentioned, at least 90 95% of their paid search budget is going toward brand to own their brand and all the different permutations. So it’s, it’s critical, so they don’t get flanked by the competition and lose out on that business. It’s affordable because Google gives really high relevancy scores to, you know, to branded terms because people know that that’s the company. So it’s, it’s kind of a win win. And you know what we’re doing this right now with one of our restaurant chains, we we did some keyword research, just using their name as a required part of the the search term. And we found like over 1000 different ways that people were searching, history and company information. They’re looking at events that had happened previous commercials. And we started searching for that for that content. And the site had nothing on there. And it was all just third party sites, news sites, press releases, like wow, you’re missing out on a lot of your own branded traffic, you could drive them into your loyalty programs, you can cookie them and remarket to them. You could do so much with that branded traffic where they have a specific interest in you, if you just take a look at the ways that they’re searching for you and create content so that you have and Google’s always going to rank your website first. As long as you’ve got a page of content that matches the query, they’re going to give you that credit. So I think brand is is instrumental, maybe even maybe even foundational when you’re thinking about a search strategy.
Norman Farrar 9:48
You know, I I’ve dealt with, I’ve dealt with a lot of different companies. I see really good content, and I’ve seen horrible content and when we’re talking about content We’re not talking about the content that you get 250 words or 500 words from somebody who you’ve picked up for $2 in the Philippines, who doesn’t really have a good grasp of English? Sure. The better the quality. And I think Neil Patel talks about this. He talks about if you don’t publish the best quality blog, don’t publish it at all. Would you agree with
Steve Wiideman 10:24
it? I’ve said that many times. Even even our friends over at Bom swatches, and one point where we’re convinced that every day they had to post content every day, I have to post content, like, Yeah, but if you look at the traffic and the links, and the sharing that that content has, has earned you, you’re gonna find out that it’s, it’s not that great. And, you know, one out of five posts, you know, gets reasonable attention. So let’s, let’s focus on quality, not quantity. And let’s, in fact, let’s redirect a lot of that content that didn’t get much visibility that wasn’t really shared or picked up on that, that thin sort of low quality Google Panda style content. And now that the cadence is completely different. Now, it’s a focus on what search terms are we trying to emphasize? What other content are we trying to promote through internal links? And who can we collaborate with to get them to share this so that every page gets at least, at least two or three other websites, sharing, curating and linking to that content so that Google starts to see all that being helpful? Whereas if it sits, sits out there for months, shows up in the search results a few times doesn’t get clicked on? Or does and people bounce back and choose different results? It’s like, how is that helpful? Right. So I think, I think you’re right, I think it’s it’s all about the quality and not the quantity for sure.
Norman Farrar 11:40
What about mixing up the content? So there’s a lot of sites that I’ll go to, and it’ll be the exact same thing. Three reasons why five tips? How, and there’s, there’s, it’s the exact same, it’s the exact same title, you know, it’s just you can switch around the words, is it like SEO, where you should switch around the style of content? It just mix it up a bit?
Steve Wiideman 12:07
I think it depends on who your user is, and what what mode of the buyers journey it is. But I can tell you, when you talk about mixing up content, and like norm, the 90s called they want your SEO program back. It’s like we don’t we don’t spin or mix, you know, article content. And we don’t use
Norman Ferrar 12:24
Oh, it’s not what I’m talking about. By the way. That’s not what I’m talking about. Like in in social media, we’ll talk about polls, questions, curated content, posting from your blog article, what I’m talking about, is maybe not using those hooks, although hooks are very, very popular, but talking about different types of ways to promote your content, or the way that you write the titles?
Steve Wiideman 12:54
Sure, well, I think I think testing is always a good idea. I think the first thing you could do is perform a search for the term that you’re trying to appear for and see what types of content Google’s displaying, maybe even run a survey and saying, Hey, we’re gonna, you know, maybe ask your customers, we’re gonna run a blog post, which of these three titles do you like the best, right, and if you if you participate in the poll, you can win a $20 gift card. So get your your clients feedback, those are the ones that that are going to be you know, the demographic that you’re going after? That’s your target audience. So why not, you know, get them involved in the process might not have a focus group, routine, vitamins system, R O T I N E does this. I’m in a discord group, a Slack group. And on email threads, similar web does the same thing. They have their similar web, all stars, they’ve got a Slack group, they’ve got a Facebook group, right? And they’re getting their customers involved in what they’re doing in marketing. Hey, guys, what do you think of this and, you know, just just really getting with they’re the folks that really believe in the brand and the products and getting them involved in that process. So I think that’s, that’s where I would start. And, of course, there’s tons of generators, you could use, like title generators, out there, hub spots, got a few and there’s a few different things you can play with to draw inspiration, for sure. But the end of the day, it’s really going to be about, you know, looking at the search results, seeing the types of content that rank well, that searchers tend to gravitate toward. But standing out and being unique, do something different test emojis on long form content and titles right? Sometimes having an emoji in there, make your listing stand out, start with symbols or Asterix is to make your title stand out a little bit more and be clickable, all sorts of tests that you could run, maybe, maybe run depending on how much traffic you’re getting to your site, maybe run one a week or one a month, to see what that click through rate differences when you look at search console and, and filter into just that URL and just, you know those queries that that you’re testing against, see, see what people respond to. And you can test this with Google ads, too. You can actually start with doing your Google ads with similar titles. See what that click through rates are click, but the click through rate is before you move it over to SEO.
Norman Farrar 15:05
Okay, now, okay, so I’m gonna back up. And I’m just going to ask because you You said he’s talked about spinning articles, but there is a lot of, I get hit up all the time now with these new AI spinning tools. And, you know, they come out and they say, okay, find an article, spin it. And we have this, you know, proprietary, you see it all the time we have this proprietary AI algorithm that will. Okay, what’s that all about? And can you use them?
Steve Wiideman 15:38
Sure. So it’s two different things, right? There’s, there’s the 90s article spinning, then you we both agreed, we just don’t do we don’t, we don’t punch, you know, you know, an article into a spinner and then go through all the different derivatives so that it swaps them out, use the word, put a pipe, and then two different variations, and then let it spin it. We just, we don’t do that anymore. We used to do that when we were, you know, in the early 2000s. Before all the you know, but when we’re thinking about how do we make an article unique without just dedicating time and research and, and referencing books and college and educational and government websites for actual fact data that we can source, if you’re saying hey, let’s just put a few keywords in and let the AI do its thing. I’ve seen mixed results, I’ve seen some that just doesn’t make any sense. I’ve seen others with Jarvis, you know, version, formerly conversion AI. And with that phrase, and, and I’ve seen, I’ve seen some of the titles and descriptions actually look pretty decent. And they’re not really spinning them, I think they’re actually using, you know, the I don’t even know if it’s AI, I think it’s more logic and business rules and AI honestly, but, but some of them make sense, especially if it’s product, you know, a lot of cases that the user isn’t interested in the sales copy in the title they’re more interested in, in the details of the products that they’re interested in. So in some cases, it seems to spit out some reasonable suggestions. But all are worth testing. And I don’t feel like any of its really spinning it, or at least at least the ones that do a good job of it, like, like Jarvis. But But I do think it’s worth testing the potential depending on your industry, test it, see if it saves you a little bit of time, in terms of running long form content, no, don’t have a idea that that’s, that’s casual content should have the voice of the brand. But if you’re talking about product descriptions, and you’re talking about something that that isn’t meant to be sort of conversational text, it’s supposed to be informational, then you test it, see if it could save you some time. And I mentioned a couple different tools that you can play around with. But for long form, I would say really take the time decide what your structure is going to be get those right keywords into titles, headings, subheadings, don’t be repetitive, don’t stuff keywords, make sure you break up your content with lists and you know, all the great, you know, attributes I’m sure we’re going to dig into in a few minutes. But yeah, um, you know, really take the time and make make that long form content, the most helpful, useful and easy to navigate and have a really good page flow. And normally honestly, that’s that’s the one thing I see is the biggest challenge and has been for years is that you as an SEO specialist and or even just an SEO writer, you’ve got all the right elements on the page, right all the right keywords in the right places. But the page doesn’t look right. It doesn’t flow correctly. It just looks like repetitive, you know, information. And yeah, and you’ve got all the right keywords in this video, and there’s an image and stuff but it just doesn’t look right. It doesn’t flow. So having having the rights UI, the right usability expert to help you to design that page or to do mock ups. Our guy Brian over here, he’s just literally a genius are so lucky to have him because he can whip together a mock up that takes a site that’s got all the right elements and makes it actually read really well. And and flow. Incredibly right space, the right esthetics, the right margins, the right padding, all of those things make such a difference to the user experience. Even if you have all the right SEO elements. If the user feels subconsciously it’s something’s off, they’re gonna bounce choose a competitor and you’re just going to get demoted in the rankings.
Norman Farrar 19:16
Right. Okay, so one of the things I want to talk about, just point out to anybody listening. We’ve we’ve had Bill Fraser on from phrase and one of the things I love about it, it’s sort of like answer the public on steroids. And so if you can go in and if you’re looking for content, phrase will help you go through this. I don’t know what it’s called. I call it a mind map. But it’ll be like answer the public. It’ll show you all the topics, the different questions, and it gives you the number one ranked article for that question. So it’s, it’s something very inexpensive that you can use, and there’s tons of different things that you can do with it, but This is one thing that you can do just to get ideas if you’re lazy, and you don’t want to do it yourself, but this is one way to very quickly do it. Steve, before I forget, we’re already you know, 1230, you have a great, really great giveaway. Today, it’s probably one of the biggest giveaways we’ve given away. You want to just tell everybody about what that is?
Steve Wiideman 20:21
Sure. Well, one of the things that that we’ve been evolving over the years is our technical SEO checkup, right? It’s about 72 different items that we’ll look at everything from those 80 signals, we were just talking about to security, accessibility, privacy, core web, vitals, and all these things that the search engines are throwing at us every day. So we thought we found a to give one of those away, we sell these for size, 3500 bucks. So kind of a cool value if if your audience finds it interesting, and hopefully, you know, we can give you something that you can give to your web developer to really kick your technical SEO up a notch might not solve your content and off page issues. But you’re sure it’ll it’ll give you everything you need prioritized for your technical SEO.
Norman Farrar 21:06
Fantastic. So that’s a 72 point check for your SEO and that’s has a value of up to 3500 bucks. So if you’re interested hashtag we’ll have Kelsey if you want to get an extra entry, tag to people and get them to comment. Alright, let’s see. Let’s move on. Let’s talk about, yeah, the anatomy of a well written SEO article.
Steve Wiideman 21:34
So we’re talking about upper funnel now, right? The long form not the lower funnel, customer attracting content that’s about articles. And we’re looking at the goal of that article to attract new potential customers down the road to attract people who have an interest or affinity in our products or service, but aren’t specifically searching for our product or service. This is the first my favorite type of content, honestly, because because you can have fun with it, you can be goofy, you can make it you know, 3000 words, if you’ve got enough information or insights that you can share about it, the call to action is going to be different, right, you’re not going to have fill out this form, you’re not going to have you know, contact us now, if you’ve done it correctly, and you’ve segmented your upper funnel content, not have any sales cues, so that it’s more likely that somebody would want to share it. So they don’t feel like they’re sending somebody to a sales page, your call to actions change to you know, download, you know, Hey, you want to get this guide and audio download the audio here, you want to get our checklist, it’s mentioned on this page, download it, you know, and then they opt in to your newsletter. So I think I think the the call to action on that content should should be towards downloads or sign up for, you know, some fun event, make it make it something where they want to, hey, Was this helpful? Do you want more of this? Well, I have it sent straight to your inbox via via Feedburner. And, well, Feedburner is gone now. But But via whatever you happen to be using for your RSS, and and basically every time you do content, now they’re going to get an email saying, Here’s the latest and greatest. But that page structure itself is going to be a little bit different than our sales page, we’re not going to have, you know, the couple check marks of value proposition and a call to action button and, you know, an image at the top instead, you know, we’re gonna focus in on on what the user really was looking for. And usually right at the top, that’s a headline, and a short summary. And I know I know, people who’ve been in publishing for a long time I hate this because they want people to read the whole article before they get the summary. Right? That’s that’s how they get you to click and stay and get all the crazy ads and accidentally click on ads. So they make money. But the reality is most consumers if you’re looking for to answer a question or solve a problem, they want that short answer right away. And if you’re a savvy SEO, you’re going to have that 375 character or less summary with a nice little Copy to Clipboard button. So that it makes it really easy for anybody who wants to share it or curate it. So that when Google does find that short summary across the web, it starts to think that maybe that’s a good answer. And they’ll show it as the featured answer at the top of the search results. And that coveted position zero that we all want. So I would say the first thing you’re going to see, especially because most users are going to be on these mobile devices now. That’s that it should be a headline. And it should be that short summary, then maybe you’ll have like a background image in the background and make sure you’re using the, the newer formats Don’t you know, stop using JPEGs and, and PNG start using web P and you know, some of them other faster loading and more, you know, future ready image formats. So that when the user sees something that’s that’s visual that’s compelling, they see the short summary and maybe just at the bottom of that, below that short summary they’re gonna see a very short table of contents. If you want an example Have that, look at any health line? Article, if you go to, if you go to Google and you search for health fine, keto, right, you’ll see this one of their keto articles, it’s one of my favorites to reference because it has all the right elements. It’s got, you know, a quick little breadcrumb, it’s got the, the main h1 title, it’s got that short summary at the top. And then it’s also got the very short and explicit Table of Contents, which could culminate into having jumped to links in the search results, it means that page has supportive content, and isn’t just in some cases, and just one page, maybe it’s a couple sub pages as well. But it’s a really great way to organize that page before the user even starts reading, hey, I got that first thing I needed headline resonated with me, the summary was, was the, you know, the first thing I needed right away. And in fact, this is what I needed to share with somebody. So I’m gonna copy it and put it on my website. And then here’s a list of links for the different areas of this page. And if they want to drill in, they want to look at the charts and the graphs and the info and the, you know, the graphics, they will. But if they just wanted that short summary, let them get what they need. And they’re not going to go back to Google, right? That’s the worry that a lot of publishers have that. Well, if I give them the answer right away, they’re just gonna go back to Google. And I want that to happen. No, they got the answer. They’re done. They’re not going back to Google, they’re gonna close the tab. Right? They’re done. So it’s okay, let them have that short summary, or, or short checklist, maybe, you know, eight to 10 items and a little list, very short list. So it doesn’t, you know, wrap around or, or word wrap in the featured answer area. If you do one of one of those two things, that short paragraph or that shortlist, you have a higher probability of getting that featured answer. So I think that’s, that’s above the fold. Want to chat about Delvin? word you want me to kind of draw?
Norman Farrar 26:50
Well, so I’m just thinking about that summary. I’ve never heard that before with the copy all. So that’s kind of cool. Kelsey, you’ll have to get on that by doing it.
Norman Farrar 26:59
No one’s doing it. It’s but if you do that,
Norman Farrar 27:03
and I don’t know if this would be considered taboo or not. But could you take those summaries and put it on, I guess you could, you could put it on your, you know, on your main blog page, just showing the summaries with you know, an image. And then when they click read more, now, that’s not the same thing. But if they click read more than it would come over, I’m just trying to find a way where you can just highlight all the summaries, and they don’t even get to the article, they just click on the summary, and copy the copy the information that they want
Steve Wiideman 27:38
something fun to test for sure. I love that I remember we don’t use Read More anymore. Google wants us to be more descriptive in our links. So we want to make sure it’s read about and whatever the topic happens to be, or find out or get the tips or you know, just just make sure because in some cases, we’ll look at a page and it’ll be six different read more links, you know, and that’s not very descriptive. That’s wrong accessibility or for Google. So but but yeah, I love I love where you’re going with that.
Norman Farrar 28:05
Um, you know, I, and the other thing I was thinking about is in your table of contents, would you write the table of contents as a question, rather than the actual content?
Steve Wiideman 28:20
You know, it might look strange on mobile devices, I think I would test it Look, look again at Healthline and how they’ve kind of summarize their questions into just very short phrases. And then when you actually jump to that section, they are written as questions in many cases. So I don’t I don’t know that you need the explicit anchor text anymore for the jump to link, but I would do it in the subheading itself, for sure, because that’s, that’s, you know, what’s gonna get you into that people also asked section, right, but, you know, now that now that Google is using passages and not just the whole page to rank you, now they’re using sections of your page, I think that’s going to help you a lot, especially with those featured answers. Because there’s not really a lot of I rarely see it for lower funnel content, we don’t usually see a featured answer. It’s normally for this informational how to where to why two questions, you know, you mentioned phrase, and there’s another one, answer the public as one of my favorites, and it’ll give you all of those different questions. It doesn’t give you as much on and you might have to use a tool like conductor, or or maybe sem rush to get this but you want to get some that are also ideas, strategies, tips, not just keywords that start with what, when, how, where, why? Because there’s a lot of people who are asking, or looking for answers to questions where they don’t start out with one of the hosts. So I think I think there’s a lot more to explore and play with, but I would keep those those jump two links, short and really easy to see on a mobile device, so that it doesn’t feel overwhelming to the user.
Norman Farrar 29:57
You mentioned sem rush and Some of if you’re not familiar with sem rush, it’s a great tool. H refs is great. I mean, there’s Moz is great. One thing I like about sem rush, and I’m not sure about the others if they do this, but they have an area when you type in a keyword, or gives you questions and ideas, which is really cool.
Steve Wiideman 30:18
Just a little button to toggle button. Yeah, you word magic tool, you punch in lunch, right? And it comes up with any questions button and it comes up with all the questions that have lunch in it really neat.
Norman Farrar 30:31
Yeah, so I’m not sure if there’s anything further and I’m sure there is that we can dive into on a long form blog. One of the things I was wondering about how often should you come back and update it?
Steve Wiideman 30:44
I think it depends on the topic. Some some topics are evergreen, like the history of something isn’t going to change. It might it might evolve into recent history. But if you’re looking at you know, and you’re telling a story about the company, or about a product that no longer exists, there’s no reason to really change that. But But I saw, I saw AWS med conferences in Australia, go back through all of the historical posts that were big traffic generators forum and do a refresh, they refresh the the titles, the descriptions, the headings, they use their Google Search Console to find what words were really generating high click through rates, and then applied some of those search terms same thing on any sort of paid search that they were doing, where they were driving people, you know, to two upper funnel content, which is rare, but it happens. And they were using the search term data from their ads to help to to modify or enhance the page based on, you know, what really drove the the highest engagement. So I think I think there’s always an opportunity to improve content, maybe maybe set something up, I mentioned surveys, maybe set something up where, you know, once a week, you’re shooting off a survey saying, what would you improve on this page? Or what would you change and if you’re number one, for a broader search term, and you start to notice that you’re losing ranking, and that’s a keyword that’s driving 20 30,000 visits a month, you might set up an alerts like visual ping, which is a browser extension, I think it’s free up to five searches, it’s called Visual P ing, and get an alert every time those competing pages make a change, what are the other nine listings doing so that we get an alert? Oh, they’ve they’ve modified their heading, oh, they’ve used this new keyword or they added a graphic? It’s good to know that because when when it does change, you can go back to that change log and see what what it was that they did that move them up over us. And so yeah, I think there’s there’s a lot of opportunity to improve and modify, especially if it’s dated content, right? I mean, I’ve got a lot of that. And I look back on like, whoa, search results don’t look like this anymore. There’s a seven pack listings in here, what’s going on, let me refresh this local SEO article so that it reflects today’s, you know, ecosystem. Yeah.
Norman Farrar 32:53
So I’ve got a product, an older product that I’m bringing back to market, I’ve stopped using it now that this is a it’s a beauty product, and most of the content is from 2014 15, maybe some 16. So I can go back there and just basically spritz it up a bit better header. I mean, and the rules back then, are different than the rules nowadays, right? But just give the just give it a complete overhaul, and I should be able to get it reindexed and everything will be fine. Again,
Steve Wiideman 33:27
if there’s if there’s an interest still, right, if you’re looking at the Google Keyword Planner, and you see a spike in interest, and long, as long as that page hasn’t been redirected or 301. Right. I would do a search for six or seven words, from that page in quotes to see what type of results come up. We should be number one if that’s our content. But if we discover that we’re not that we’ve kind of lost track of this page and some other page on the internet is getting credit for that content, because it’s become more linked to and more helpful than Google decides that that’s a better page, even though it was our originating content, it might be time for a content refresh. But if we find that we’re still ranking really well, then yeah, look at the historical, last 16 months of search term data from Search Console. If you have any historical data and analytics around keywords, look at that, you know, and then make your your tweaks based on you know, the click through rates, and you know, the engagement rates and analytics.
Norman Farrar 34:22
So we started talking about the header going over to a summary and then going over the table of contents, then high quality, well written paragraphs. And it could be a 1500 word article. It could be a 750 word article, it could be a 3000 word article. Let’s talk about linking. Okay, so just the ability to find a lot of the times you know, people are linking, they’re there. They have the anchor text, they like there is a direct, exact keyword match with I think we talked about it last time. And that’s kind of taboo nowadays, isn’t it?
Steve Wiideman 35:04
Depending on the content, for sure. I think it’s so cliche right for any SEO to say it depends, but but I really like how helpline does it helpline uses explicit anchor text to other internal content. And Google is okay with that, because we’re, we’re basically defining what, what the page is going to be when they go there, right. And, and we’re not, we’re not doing that with inbound links, right. We don’t focus on anchor texts anymore for inbound links, that’s just going to get you in trouble. But, but we do want our internal links to have anchor text. And we don’t want to, we don’t want to link to two different pages using the same anchor text, because it’s like, it’s confusing the search engines about which page is the most relevant for this particular phrase. So we want to make sure that we’re only linking to one page, if we’re using that exact anchor anchor text for outbound links. On the other hand, I like how helpline does it they actually use superscripts and a number, sort of like a, like a footnote. So you see the number and you know, it’s right after the thing, and then it clicks away. Now, if it’s, if it’s to an educational website, or a government website, they don’t put a nofollow on it. But if it’s to some other, other smaller website are one that might not be as trustworthy, then they add the nofollow attribute to it. But if it is, if it is, as you know.edu or.gov site that they’re linking to, you know, they want to get that credit for for the EA T, and they do trust those domains, they want Google to crawl to them. But if it’s if it’s one that could get compromised, or a WordPress website somewhere, they might add a rel equals nofollow just to tell the search engines, you know, hey, I don’t necessarily trust this page. But this is where I’m this is where I’m citing my reference to something that I said in the article. Yeah. And then you mentioned, you know, there’s there’s different ways there’s the the UGC, so if you have a comment section, make sure all the links that are going out, if you’re allowing links to have that REL equals UGC, the REL is the, you know, the attributes. And the UGC is the variable as in user generated content, if someone’s paying because they want to be sponsored. And you have this as a this is a sponsored article on a website, which is totally fine. It’s native advertising, I would do that. Just make sure that the, you know, the, the rel attribute has a sponsored variable, so that Google knows, hey, this article is a sponsored article, they’re not gonna weigh it the same. And if you just want to use the traditional nofollow, that works great, too, but I do love I do love the fact that Healthline uses explicit anchor text to promote their own content, and then numbered footnote looking superscript outbound links for External links. I love that I think they did a great job. Really very smart thinking, I
Norman Farrar 37:41
think. So Cal Oh, I noticed he put it in there is this going to save make sure you get that URL in there? And the the other thing about the the blog articles, so let’s say I’m selling so and I’ve got these articles in just these articles, I’m not linking to the product page Am I Am I like if I if I’ve got a link about lavender soap, which by the way is fabulous. I’ve got if I’ve got a link to my lavender soap page. Should I not do that?
Steve Wiideman 38:16
I think this should be no problem with me. Don’t overthink your article. But I mean, if you’re they know people who are reading this know that you put time and money and, and so forth into creating helpful content for them. You, you deserve to give yourself some attribution, just just avoid a lot of sales copying it don’t say try our lavender soap. But instead, it’s like, some soaps that people might find interesting include lavender. And you know, I don’t know, basil or something. Right? I think it’s perfectly acceptable to internal link to that. In fact, in many cases, when you’re looking at your Google Search Console at your internal links, you’re trying to understand you know that the pages that are linked to the most and what texts that you’re using, and if you’re trying to amplify the ranking of a certain page, the first place I would start is where am I mentioning the keywords I’m focusing on this page throughout the rest of the website, so that I can activate those links and, and boost how many internal links I have to a page to tell the search engines that this page is important and relevant to this keyword and, you know, maybe five or six, you know, derivatives.
Norman Farrar 39:19
Okay. All right. So I just wanted to mention again, we’ve got a giveaway today. And Steve’s giving away a 72 point audit on your for your SEO, if you want to be involved with that as hashtag we’ll have Kelsey a tag two people, get them to comment and you’ll get a second come, you’ll get a second entry. Alright, so let’s talk about that. Let’s go over to any further optimization of your website. So you’re putting out to you’re putting out the blog article. Is there anything else that you can do to help promote that article or anything you can do on your website, too? To get better SEO? That’s a pretty loaded question.
Steve Wiideman 40:02
Let’s wrap up, let’s wrap up upper funnel first, I think I do think as you’re, as you’re navigating that page, a common thing I see happening that that almost becomes annoying is like text, throw up it just paragraph after paragraph, maybe a couple of subheadings thrown in. But it’s just a lot of paragraph content. I think if you’re going to create a really good page, take some time to create your own images for that page, get a camera out or hire a photographer, put some images in there. And and if you’re backing up some of the statements that you have, create some charts and graphs, right? There’s can’t remember the name of the website now I think it’s vintage, that IO or visit and what? That’s it. Yep, that’s it. And so you go to that, and you can actually create some charts and graphs around the information that you found. So so put some research behind your articles so that you can create some graphics, because people really like to link to and share and curate data. They just love that. They’re like, Oh, I can, they’re always trying to prove I’m right, right. There’s a lot of people in the room like I’m right, and let me show you and they’ll, they’ll pull graphs and charts and they’ll put them in your presentations and whatever. So So I would say break up your paragraphs as much as you can maybe, maybe even in some cases, put something where since you know you’re, again, not trying to sell but maybe somewhere in between you put a little block, you see Neil Patel do this where it says, you know, something like, Hey, if you’re interested in this topic, we have a guide, you know, it’s a nice little gray box, or whatever that says, Click here. And then we’re so So break up your content with visual elements that that don’t make the user just see paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. Neil Patel and Healthline are both good examples. If you want a point of reference, I found that that pages that have more unique media on them perform better than pages that don’t media being custom images, because you can use caption and title text and alt text and, and metadata and those images video, just be careful with video with all the new PageSpeed requirements, we probably want to have that video a little bit lower on the page than we used to, we select that have that video right up there and be prominent. But for, you know, Google’s new core web titles, it seems like putting it lower on the page is preferred. So having a custom video, having maybe some audio on the page, if you’ve got an audio download, and of course any any images that you could use that you created that other people might share, stay away from the stock images, people recognize those and like this, they’re just trying to write an article to get free traffic. But when you come up with something custom and unique, like oh, this is pretty cool, this is helpful this is they put time into this, and I gotta share this, this is really cool, they took the time to create something really helpful. And you know, I want to share it with everybody. So I think that’s those are sort of the elements that long form page and think about your college days, we had the the MLA, you know, writing standards, you know, we tell them what we’re going to tell them, you know, then we tell them that we tell them what we told them. So you know, really, really break it down in that that first paragraph below the table of contents, sort of like a thesis, here are the three four things that we’re going to talk about, and you know, this article, and then talk about them and use subheadings to, to break them up and then have a summary at the end. And if you can, if you can put some actionable goals at the end, what to do next, a checklist to download a template that’s going to really stand out from what the competition is doing. There’s a lot of really interesting content out there. But nothing was specific actionable that you can take away to say, Okay, this is exactly what I need to do. Now, this is the template I should use. And this is an example of a page that our page needs to look like, if you can do that, then you’re setting yourself way apart. There’s just so much just chitchat in articles that it’s almost annoying, give, give them something actual, they can take away and you’ve got yourself, you know, amazing, long form upper funnel page to build brand awareness to use for remarketing, you know, and hopefully get some feature answers.
Norman Farrar 43:50
So you could put at the end something like For more information, download our checklist, or you could have a PDF file about the topic. Could you also with
Steve Wiideman 43:59
ever page called SEO manager job description. And it actually has, you know, a downloadable PDF that has the bullet points of the responsibilities and requirements, you know, so they really can just kind of copy and paste. But it’s, you know, that’s the one thing I always got the most compliments for is the fact that we actually created exactly what they should be using instead of just giving ideas we said, here use this and like like you just gave me everything. Yeah, enjoy. Like, you guys are really helpful. Thank you.
Norman Farrar 44:29
Perfect. So do you also at the end, kind of lead people to the next topic? I’ve got lavender soap, I’m writing about the benefits of lavender. And then say maybe Dead Sea. So at the very end would you say for more information or to learn more about our soap products click boom, it would bring up the next blog article.
Steve Wiideman 44:51
You could test I like seeing the related articles right? Yeah, everything tagged correctly and you can set everything up right in your your WordPress. having, you know, two or three options of here’s some of the things you might be interested in. I’ve even seen that done in context. So as they’re reading something like this is really helpful, oh, but this is what I was really looking for. And so click that, right, as they’re reading the article and go to the page that they want, it breaks up the content, but it also gives them an option to go to another page, and just like, just like YouTube’s goal, right? They want to keep you on there as long as possible. So if you’re doing the same thing, and it’s somebody who’s, you know, in that, that, you know, what do you call it higher phase of the buyers journey, you know, they’re, they’re not yet ready to make a purchase, keep them on the site, keep them navigating, see what their interests are. And if you’re, if you’re tracking things correctly, and you’re using event tracking, and your Google Tag Manager, and you’re paying attention to what they’re doing and where they’re going, then you can tailor the remarketing experience for them based on what you know about them. You can put them in a custom lists in your CRM, and and tailor the messaging that you have, when you do paid social and paid search around what you know, their interests are based on where they went on your website, and where they where they ended up leaving.
Norman Farrar 46:04
Quotes. So a lot of blog articles will use quotes in their formatting. Is that cool?
Steve Wiideman 46:12
Yeah, I know, a lot of a lot of SEO is get really hung up on duplicate content, there’s no penalty for duplicate content and quoting and curating other contents, find that that particular section isn’t going to benefit the SEO, but it’s not going to take away from it, especially if it’s helpful. And the user, you know, uses that as a social signal, you know, or social proof signal. And they’re like, Hey, this is really cool. I’m I trust, since I see this quote in here that that this page is, is legit. They’re, they’re sending facts and sharing other information for other websites. I think it’s great. I think, if I were to try to come up with a percentage of what should be unique, and what should be curated, I’d try to shoot for like, 75% unique, you know, or greater. But I, I think it’s great sharing content from other websites, I’ve never had problems ranking pages, by doing so.
Norman Farrar 47:03
Back when I was writing those, or when I had the other site up back 14 1516. One of the things and I think it’s, I think it’s probably a taboo now. But I would take curated content, take a small portion, and I’d have like 10 articles, all the summaries of the curated content on the page, which would lead back to the actual article. Is that still okay.
Steve Wiideman 47:31
I don’t know that I’ve seen that. That’s interesting, I think I’d have to see an example of of what it’s doing and, and look at the performance of the page. I think a lot of it’s just testing, right, you look at, you know, trying trying some new content strategy, trying some new link strategy, you know, you put an annotation analytics, the date that you start the test and watch and see what it does. Look at your search console around those URLs, look at your discover section and console, if it’s upper funnel to see if it, it adds benefit. I think everything’s always worth testing, as long as everything that you’re doing is for the benefit of your customer, and not just, you know, specifically to try to game search results.
Norman Farrar 48:12
Now, for publishing this on social media, you don’t have to just publish it once. You can publish it for us, like, I always tell Kelsey, try to publish it three or four or five times put it back in the queue, because people might miss it. Sure, or just not all at the same time on the same search platforms, but just spread it out different times. Do you have any thoughts on that? Like how many times an article should be published?
Steve Wiideman 48:43
I think there’s there’s another cliche it depends moment, because all my social networks a little bit different than Twitter, for example, like you said, the Twitter stream is a waterfall. So yeah, sure. reshare. Share again, the neat thing about social media, if you’ve done it right, in your article, you’ll use some of the difference fields that are available on the back end, for Facebook, use that Open Graph, tag and customize the experience. So that you’re talking specifically to your Facebook audience, you’ll have your Twitter card fields. So you can say hey, tweeps, here’s our latest study on such and such, you can talk to them, the Twitter audience specifically using those tags when anyone shares not just you sharing your own content, but when anyone shares that content and they they drop that URL into Facebook or Twitter, they’ll automatically pick up those those specific tags, the Twitter card and Open Graph tags, so that you can tailor the message toward those audiences. I would do I would do the syndication of that short answer and the syndication of your images and media that you have on the page as much as possible for image search and video search. And you know, so that’s that you’re, you’re working toward getting those those beautiful little Featured Snippet images that you see at the top sometimes so part of that syndication process for upper funnel Let’s, let’s blast out all the media and our short summaries to every social network that we have, how often I would post I think would vary based on what my marketing calendar looks like, and, and what our themes are, maybe this month, we’re talking about technical SEO. So a lot of our content, you know, is going to be divvied up by, you know, I don’t know, 100, different technical SEO things that maybe, maybe instead we don’t have a calendar this month, maybe we’re just kind of like, you know, let’s just get something out there and share it. What I would do is when I reshare it, I would, I would ask different questions, like, hey, when you read this, what did you think about this was this particular thing that we said? Or, hey, when, when you got this graphic, you know, did you how did it resonate with you maybe run a poll or a survey, just just various, so you’re not just repeating the same thing? I know, we like to use buffer and Sprout Social and, and and, you know, blast it out there and schedule it and reschedule it. But I think it’s worth the time to go in and modify it just slightly to see which ones are getting the most engagement, and which questions which types of, of things that we’re saying, garner the most engagement, otherwise, you won’t know if you send the same message over and over all you’re going to get from it is what time of day is best to post. Just still helpful. But I think varying the share the text and the share as much as you can, and maybe tagging certain influencers and certain people in the industry to ask for their opinion and using, you know, a hashtag generator to see, you know, what hashtags seem to get us in front of the bigger audiences. Each time you you post, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to to vary, what you’re pushing out while still pushing just that that URL.
Norman Farrar 51:45
Am I going to kill my audience by putting a pop up on a blog?
Steve Wiideman 51:52
So lightbox is aren’t that big of a deal? If you’ve got a light box that comes up? And it says, you know, hey, we would you be interested in something that’s, that’s related to the content? Right? Like, Hey, before you read this content, there’s also an audio, or we have an event coming up on this topic, if you’re interested. I think that’s great. I don’t think I would hit it with them right away, I think I’d let them read the content for a few seconds. And as they start scrolling the content, have that little light box come up very passively at the bottom where they can, it doesn’t really annoy them because you can still see the content on the top. And they can say you know what? No thanks. And they’ll just close it if they’re not interested. I think that’s a that’s a polite way to have a passive lightbox, as opposed to using an interstitial that that’s distracting. I don’t know about you. But I get really frustrated when I get to a page and I don’t even read what’s on there. I just want to read this. I saw it in the search. And I don’t even look at whatever it is I immediately close it. So I would I would do the opposite. Now. You might test the you know, the the popup on exit, you know, before you exit, you might want to do such and such, so a little bit annoying, but they’re going to leave anyway. So I think I think it’s worth testing, you know, a pop up for an exit. If they’re leaving the website, they’re going to another page on the website. No, but if they’re leaving the website, Hey, before you leave, give it a shot.
Norman Farrar 53:11
Okay. Now I just had a brain fart content, was that lower funnel? Of course, that’s where we’re going. But I did have something else I was going to talk to you about. But okay, let’s go over to Lower, lower funnel content. Let’s talk about that.
Steve Wiideman 53:27
Sure. It’s one of my favorite things, because that drives customers, right? We always say what type of content is this and your informational versus transactional. I call it customer driving versus link attracting.
Steve Wiideman 53:41
That’s the way I look at it one’s going to hopefully get us links to our site by creating amazing stuff that people like, and one’s going to hopefully attract customers. And that customer content is going to have a different voice a different tone. You know, our title is going to say five things to do such and such. It’s going to say buy purchase order download sign up, it’s going to include our main keyword that we want to optimize for, it’s going to include a selling proposition, right? What is it that we know our customers really need right now all the airlines are charging more for baggage. So maybe our title says something like no baggage fees? Right? Free shipping is always an obvious it’s up to default. It’s almost numbing at this point, because most brands have tried that as part of their title to get better click through rates. I think having a strong meta description as well even though the meta description keywords aren’t used in ranking, they’re still bolded and highlighted and, and something that’s that users will see and respond to. But more importantly, I think in affecting that user behavior, that user search behavior signal is exploring some of the different rich results that we can have for that page. I would go to Google and search for rich results gallery and look at all the different things that that we could optimize for so that we get a pretty thumbnail in a mobile search result from our image or FAQs right below our listing or star ratings, because we want people To see what our customers think of our products or our service, there’s, there’s a number of new things that are coming out all the time. And that structured, you know, rich, rich results gallery, so many cool things that you can test and try and experiment with. There’s even fact now it’s so funny. And then there’s, there’s so many different ways that you can explore to make our listing standout. Now, once they get to the page, because we’ve, we’ve convinced them to click on us by by being more visual by standing out in the search results. Now we got to keep them there. I think to keep them there for a sales page, we want to make sure they don’t have to do a lot of scrolling, they get what they need right away above the fold. We got a fun email from Jeff at, at eye hop last year, when we help them to load up a start Order button during the pandemic, on the location pages, or location pages getting to 30% of all the traffic to a restaurant site, right, the actual restaurant location pages. And people weren’t clicking on directions during the pandemic, right? So we added a button that said start order and then Monday we get an email saying, holy crap, what just happened? What do you guys do? Can you send us some data and like we just added a button. Millions of dollars of online orders later, you know, could be because we made it simple. And that button was a floating button at the footer of the website, you could see it now if you do go to any any I hop or Applebee’s location pages, you’ll see those floating buttons, the conversion rates, and many cases are as high as 300% of an increase versus not having those floating buttons. We started experimenting with that with California clauses in 2014. You know, by schedule a consultation, we ended up putting it above in the floating header instead of the footer. But if you can get it in thumbs reach because that’s our goal. From a mobile user experience. We want them the user to be able to with one hand, get through an experience. And if we’re if we’re good enough with just their thumb. So they’re holding their device. And they’re going to flip through with just their thumb interested, interested, maybe one little flick to look at some details. Purchase, Oh cool. There’s purchase integrations, I could use shop pay, I could use Amazon pay, I could use Facebook, pay whatever, click a button, and boom, I’ve checked out and I’m done. Wow, that was easy. click click click Checkout finished Apple pay Google Pay, right, whatever. So I think I think that’s our end goal. And a lot of businesses still have old school business owners that want more information, I want to collect more data, I want to put more stuff away. Great. Get that later. Let’s get the purchase first. Right. So I think I think from a sales page standpoint, let’s make sure they get everything they need, as much as they can without scrolling, that we’ve got a floating call to action button in the footer within thumbs distance, maybe one is buy or purchase or add to cart, and one is chat, so that you can interact with the customer service department, if you have questions. Always have a phone number, a phone numbers a trust signal, and it lets the customer know that if I’m not happy, I know how to get ahold of you. I can call and I can actually speak to a human being. So I trust you more now. But if I can’t, then I’m gonna have to go through crazy emails and go on Facebook saying Does anyone have a customer service number? You know, and so I think having that phone number is important. And I get it as a business. You don’t want people phoning in orders, you want to track your digital marketing data, exclusively online, I understand that. But you got to let some of that go for the sake of of the value you get. And the traffic you’re going to get is going to outweigh the number of visits, you know, significantly. If you just add that one little phone number one other thing I might do to above the fold, is have a search. And because we’re talking to mobile users now more than anything, unless you’re b2b, or b2c. And you’re you know, trying to get customers to your site, have a search box with a microphone in it, not a magnifying glass, use the Google Voice recognition API, and allow users to be able to voice in their query similar to how you might in Google. So you click that microphone, it’ll come up with a prompt that says talk now and you say, iPad cover and then it searches and it finds all the iPad covers for you. Now you can use voice on your mobile device without even having to use your keyboard or click around it just a smart thing to start evolving to as you’re getting your pays for this. There’s some above the folds focal points that I would do for mobile experience, have that search box, or at least the microphone prominent have a Call icon at the top. Put your buy now button in thumbs distance and a chat button next to it or just the Buy Now button if you just want to focus on that. And then make sure all the product information they need is right there above the fold as much as possible. below the fold, we might put some other attributes more details. One of my favorites was the Bowflex. I don’t know if they’ve changed their site over the years but Bowflex used to have all of these different tabs. Watch a video about this product. See customer reviews about this product, frequently asked question About this product, and then the FAQ stuffs always important for that rich results anyway, but Bowflex, always had some really good product detail pages. And you know, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, Amazon does a great job, so does eBay, with how they’ve structured their pages. And they’re getting better every day. Even when I was in college, you know, in the 2000s. At one o’clock in the morning, it was always exciting watching Amazon changing button positions and button colors doing their midnight testing, you know, because they they live and breathe in, in the SEO world, because that’s, that’s the bread and butter. They don’t have a lot of Amazon stores yet. Right? So it’s, it’s all online. But yeah, so the product details, the product attributes, and it can be tough sometimes if you’re, if you’re selling other people’s products, if you temptation to copy and paste for the manufacturer website, not really going to help your rankings as much. So I would, I would really dedicate a small team of people or use phrase are some of these other tools you mentioned, or Jarvis to help you to generate the content for those product descriptions at scale, if you can. I’ve also seen people use Mechanical Turk, and use the Masters in Mechanical Turk, to help them to create content at scale. You upload a Mechanical Turk. Yeah, Amazon Mechanical Turk is this anonymous platform of anonymous workers all around the country, or any country, you choose the country you choose, you know how many ratings or reviews or product projects they’ve worked on the column hits HTTPS. And at scale, you can have your content written by people all over the states, and then you stopped as somebody edit moderate, but you can five cents to $50, right? However much you’re willing to invest, those anonymous workers will look at the task and get and go, Yeah, I could do this. They’ll submit your review, and you’ll either approve it, or you’ll decline it. And you know, it’ll go back to them or or to another worker, but it’s all anonymous. And you could you could probably knock out 1000 product descriptions in about an hour. Oh, yeah. It’s pretty cool. But but the moderation piece, you know, does take a lot of effort. You don’t always get great writers. So yeah, I would I would, I would test look at phrase look at look at Jarvis look at Amazon Turk, do some experimenting, see what works best for you see, we get the best results. And, you know, but but don’t don’t just copy from the manufacturers website. I don’t think there’s a lot of value in doing that. And, you know, manufacturer is going to come up for that content anyway. So I think it’s, it’s better when you can take the time to create your own, that user generated content is the best if you can get your your customers to leave reviews. That’s work for Amazon for years, right? So why why not? Why not. And they’ve got moderation on a lot of the stuff. So you know, create your review and allow users to review section let users submit their information. But but give them clues about what you want them to say. So that you’re getting more keyword use, like, tell us about why you wanted this product, tell us about what you were going to use this product for. Because then the words that they’re going to use are words that other searchers are going to be using to find and solve problems. And they’re going to come up with that that page, because somebody said on that page, you know the answer that they were looking for. So I think I think that UGC, that user generated content is a real easy way to create unique content on each of your product pages, or even your service pages if you wanted to.
Norman Farrar 1:03:24
Have you ever heard of a KTM?
Steve Wiideman 1:03:28
What’s a KTM?
Norman Farrar 1:03:29
A KTM is
Steve Wiideman 1:03:30
bad guy from what was it the last dragon? No, it might
Norman Farrar 1:03:35
be I will say it is? No, I don’t remember. But a KTM is a an incredible site for interns. Okay, and you can go all over the world you can go like I was looking at one lady for copy, who was just graduated from Yale, okay, you could get any, there’s everybody from all different walks, usually higher university educated, that are just looking for 10 hours of week of work. It is dirt, cheap, and high quality work. So I think it’s a, I think it’s around $300 And you have a three month term, at 10 hours a week with this person, and it’s for social media or for it’s for anything, anything to do that you can help somebody along with their experience, you’re mentoring them.
Steve Wiideman 1:04:42
So any task that requires a little bit of critical thinking anything that’s that’s pushed button or just, you know, placement type work or data entry. You know, I would still probably think about you know, Philippines or India but if it’s something where it’s not just follow some steps and be done where You want them to think into research. I love that. I think that’s fantastic. And that’s very affordable for for most businesses, I think. Yeah.
Norman Farrar 1:05:07
And they just started a freelance program. So now you can go in and you know, find somebody and get them started. But anyways, that’s I think Kelsey put it in there, Steve, but
Steve Wiideman 1:05:19
I’m at Arcadia now from last dragon help. Easy to remember.
Norman Farrar 1:05:23
There you go. Okay. But we can send you that link
Steve Wiideman 1:05:27
80s Pop Culture nerd over here.
Norman Farrar 1:05:31
I think we’re about 115. Kelsey, do we have I know, Steve has got to get off the call shortly. Do we have any questions that we can answer?
Kelsey 1:05:44
We do have a couple questions. I’m guessing they’re gonna take up a little time though. But we can see see how it goes. Okay. Okay, from Jessica Rabbit. When you have a product and want to determine keywords? Do you start with Google putting it in what you think a searcher would use? If not, how do you determine most searched for and relevant?
Steve Wiideman 1:06:06
I think it depends on if it’s an existing URL, or a new URL, a new product. If it’s an existing product, I’d start with Google Search Console, I’d look at my ad group search term reports from Google ads and Bing Ads to see what actually converted for me, I don’t care as much about the traffic as I do about trying to get sales. So I might look at the search term, query data in both Search Console and ads first, and then I’d use competitive insights I’d take you know, might start with just something broad. Look at what search results come up, take those top 10 pages, drop them into say sem rush or a traffic or whatever keyword tool you’re using. And you might find that that initial seed keyword is the third or fourth most searched and not the highest when you actually run that pivot table, looking at the 10 results that appear. So you get those 10 results. And then it starts to starts to draw inspiration to potentially give you another seed keyword that you would then use, then you do your research from that seed keyword, start to organize it into groups and clusters, those groups become sections of the page or even sub pages, depending on how much content you can create about them. And then you’ve kind of set yourself up for a silo of really helpful content that’s driven from search volume insights that you got from competitors. If you’re working with a new URL, that’s how I would do it. Okay.
Kelsey 1:07:28
Okay. From Simon, the creation of content and its distribution is extremely time consuming. On top of the 1000 other tasks we do every day, what is the most cost effective and efficient way to build out content?
Steve Wiideman 1:07:41
And well, it’s, it’s a tough one, especially for newer brands, because like you said, it is a lot of work. So if you can get an intern like norm, I’d recommend recommended. And I’ve even gotten a few from the classes that I teach at UC San Diego and Cal State Fullerton, even folgen Community College. So if there’s someone that you want to connect to who’s learning digital marketing, still, that might be a great place to start to help you to scale. Give them lots of examples and references. The helpline, for example, is a great place to start. If you’re doing commerce and focusing on trying to sell on your website, give them the Bob’s watches example and say, I need you to try to emulate one or one or two of these websites, and then shoot it over to this consultant for his opinions so that you know, you’re, you know that you’re going down the right path. So I would start there, if you’re looking to scale, we also give some ideas on how you could use crowdsourcing like Amazon Mechanical Turk. There’s also crowdsourcing content sites like writer access writers access. And it’s it’s got a you know, just a pool of writers that specialize in certain industries. So if you’re in automotive, you know, there’s probably 50 different writers that are that have an automotive background, there’s probably 100 writers with that are where paralegals and looking for extra writing work, you know, as in the legal sector. So writer access is a great place to find industry specific content writers that can help you to scale but you’re right, it’s expensive. It takes a lot of budget, especially with coming up with some of the media that you need, then the unique images and the vintage charts and graphs. It’s it’s a lot of work. So if you create a calendar with with Meineke car care, they they were releasing content every Tuesday. And then they would work Wednesday through Monday on creating the next piece of content. And then they’d launch it on Tuesday. They do some outreach after the fact to try to get some people to share. But they did one a week and in a year and a half they generated nearly 500,000 visits to their their content section of their website by creating all these how to where to why to with pictures, images and sometimes videos. It’s worth the effort. It drove brand awareness and you know, because most people need oil change within 90 days they were able to use remarketing and pull them into a 1499 oil change coupon Alright,
Kelsey 1:10:01
Alright, and then this is our last question from Simon. If we have a new website with new URLs and have a lot of content that has old backlinks, is there a simple way to amend all those links?
Steve Wiideman 1:10:15
That’s a tough one. So you have a new website. So it’s interesting, you have a new website, but you have old backlinks. I’m not sure I suppose if the topics the same, what I would do is, and this is how we did Bob’s watches back in 2010, is we took the original website that was on that domain, and we kept the old pages up. And then we built on top of it, and we created our own content. But we left those pages up for several months, so that Google wouldn’t think that it’s a new website, but instead it evolved website. So we didn’t lose the history, or the you know, the authority that those those pages that helped to, you know, to give Google some sort of a signal of holistic relevancy, that made a big difference. And then three months, four months down the road, we started to redirect those older pages. And it’s sustained, we’re actually able to have a really profitable first year and, and rank very quickly, because we’d use that older site, to update links that are coming in inbound links, you could do a little bit of outreach, find the ones that are the most important that are driving traffic using your referral traffic report in Google Analytics, and go to those folks and have them updated. If you’re not getting a lot of referral traffic from it, I wouldn’t worry about it as much. Instead, I will just use redirects, go into your Google Analytics, drill into content, sort by title, and filter, anything that has not found in it, that will give you basically a list of all the pages that are getting hits from other websites that are pointing in, and maybe some from internal, but, but then you take that list, and based on how many people are hitting those pages, figure out where you want to redirect that traffic to. So that way, you don’t really lose much when you do a 301 redirect in terms of PageRank value. Instead, you can focus your energy on on attracting new links. But that way you don’t lose the links that you’ve already earned. And if there’s something there that aren’t trustworthy in the report, you run in SEMrush, or Ahrefs, or Link Research Tools, which is also an amazingly tool. They’ll give you a disavow list, take that disavow list filter, make sure you’re not throwing the baby out with the bathwater and submit it to Google and the disavow tool and make sure you keep it up to date once a month. And you don’t have to worry about any kind of penalties happening, especially after the latest spam update. I’ve noticed that, that they’re just ignoring a lot of those links a lot more than they are penalizes them. Okay.
Norman Farrar 1:12:35
And that was it. Kelce?
Kelsey 1:12:38
Yeah, we had a quick one. Do you recommend Textbroker? No.
Norman Farrar 1:12:45
Okay, short and sweet.
Steve Wiideman 1:12:49
This is a lot of love, content and nerding out on on, on SEO, thank you so much for the opportunity to hang out with you and listeners think thank you for giving me a chance to you know that to be a geek and talk about search stuff. If you enjoyed this, you know, we we’ve mentioned this on the last time, but we do have a little course called Academy of search. You should all have that promo code, just SEO Steve, if you want to save, you know, get it for free, feel free to use SEO, Steve, check it out. And we’re gonna keep it up to date. Beginning next month, we’re updating our SEO course. So if you want to see something similar to what I teach at Cal State Fullerton in terms of SEO strategy and get all our templates, I’ll ask that you give me some feedback. Let me know what you think. Oh, you’re
Norman Farrar 1:13:31
just you’re a giver. I mean, that that course I think is four or 567 $100 600 bucks. So that’s free, guys. So go in there, check it out. We signed up. It is a it’s a great course. Thank you. And you know, I just got to appreciate like really appreciate you coming on and you know, just always just giving us a ton of information.
Steve Wiideman 1:13:55
My pleasure. Before you
Norman Farrar 1:13:57
Kelsey 1:14:04
Alright, here we go the wheel of Kelsey. Key Point, checkup audit. If you’re the winner, please email me Kate at lunch with Nora calm. And here we go. All right. The winner today is Tony, Tony. All right, Tony. Tony. All right.
Steve Wiideman 1:14:48
Tony, do you want to use that for a client side or or give it to a friend? You’re more than welcome to so
Norman Farrar 1:14:54
yeah, Tony’s got a great product. So I think he’s gonna love love this 72.0 So, Steve, how do people get ahold of you or your company if they want to get started?
Steve Wiideman 1:15:05
Well, I’m Seo Steve everywhere SEO STV on all the socials. And then the team here if you want to pick their brains for questions on ecommerce, SEO, or local or multi location, we’re just Wedeman wi D mn. Pretty easy to find everywhere. So check us out.
Norman Farrar 1:15:23
Steve, you’re awesome. Thank you for joining us say.
Steve Wiideman 1:15:26
Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.
Norman Farrar 1:15:28
Alright, we will see you later. Okay, everybody. Well, I hope you got a ton of information. Steve always drops a ton of nuggets on us whenever he’s here. Kelsey, who do we have coming on Wednesday.
Kelsey 1:15:44
We have Rob Brock. And he’s going to be talking about financial KPIs and accounting and how it can help grow your business.
Norman Farrar 1:15:53
Okay, very good. Before we go any further, I just wanted to give a big shout out to global wire advisors. They’re a leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, please contact Christopher Ling and his team over at global wired advisors.com. Alright, right. Today is Monday. If you have not subscribed to our new newsletter, and you want some interesting content, exactly what we’re talking about today, sign up, the newsletter doesn’t suck. It’s just content. That’s all it is. Kelsey, is there anything else more than like and smash those like buttons or whatever you say?
Kelsey 1:16:37
Not really, but you know, it never hurts to smash those like button. There we go. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And share this episode out to anyone who you believe needs some help with SEO, or website contents, anything like that. So if you’re new to the show, we do these q&a sessions at the end of every show, where we get the experts to answer your questions. So yeah, next episode, we’re going to do the same thing. Have a weird Kelsey giveaway. So tune in on Monday, Wednesday, Fridays at 12pm. Eastern Time. And yeah, learn a little more. And I stole norms lines again.
Norman Farrar 1:17:20
Okay, thank you for doing that. Kelsey. I only have two lines at the end. But you know, that’s okay. I’ll just say it again. So tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at Eastern at noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you guys for joining us today. Thanks for being part of our community and enjoy the rest of your day. Entrepreneur
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
