Can You Repurpose Website Articles To Use As Google My Business Posts? – 86

Here is the Transcript for Episode 86

Caleb Baumgartner: Thank you for dropping by Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to help your business get found online. I am producer Caleb Baumgartner and today Bob and Jesse are once again, joined by client success specialist Sue Ginsburg, to take your Q’s and turn them into A’s. This week, we explore the value of repurposing content and how with a few tweaks, you can translate a single piece of content efficiently across multiple platforms. As always, if you have a question for us, let us know. Visit us at localseotactics.com and drop us a line. If you leave us a voicemail question, you could win an Intrycks t-shirt if we use your clip on the show. Thank you for listening and enjoy the program.

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan here with Bob Brennan and Sue Ginsburg, talking about some questions from listeners and some kind of real world stuff out there here today. Sue, let’s start off with your background there. Where are you? Slash where are you not today?

Sue Ginsburg: Today we are virtually in Houston and we are in Houston because the listeners question that we will be discussing today is from Houston.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. And just timestamp, and we’re kind of at the end of February here. Just for future archival purposes, 2021 late February after Houston had below zero temperatures and Minnesota like weather for a stretch, which is pretty nuts for all of our clients and listeners there down in Texas. We feel for you. We totally understand, being from Minnesota. But I digress though, Sue. Go ahead.

Sue Ginsburg: Okay. Before I start with the question, I’m going to start with the quote of the day, which is, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” That’s a Nelson Mandela quote and I think as we go through this question, it will become evident how that applies. Today’s question from a listener in Houston is he wrote in, “I’m wondering if you had any opinion as to the SEO value of running short, summarized versions of our articles as GMB posts to push visitor to our website from our GMB?” Really good question and the intent of this discussion is to learn whether doing this, running short summarized versions is a positive or if it’s risky and that’s important to all of us because every business owner knows that they need content but it’s generally a challenge or a struggle. Very few business owners want to sit down and write content, create content, unless they have a dedicated copywriter on staff.

The plan that we suggest to approach that and to make it a little less overwhelming, is create a content calendar ahead of time, coordinate that with either your seasonal highs for your business, as well as the everyday calendar of holidays. And the result for that is less stress for you because you have your topics strategically aligned with what’s going on in the world and less time creating content so it’s more efficient, which everybody wants, more relevant content for your website visitors and contents that is good for SEO.

I will just tell a quick story that I’ve had many, many times and also am in the middle of this conversation with a client right now. Talking to a client of ours, very sharp business owner. He happens to own a cleaning business in Seattle and we were talking about, as he has scaled his business, is he able to get out of the day to day and more run the business as a business owner should? Work on the business, not in the business. And he was telling me that he has managed to do that. He’s hired some really good people, put some good managers in place.

The one thing that he is still involved with is content creation. And it was something that he wants to get out of, like many, many business owners do. We talked about, do you want copy, video, audio, blog post, all of the above? And I was asking him this to ask him, how can we help him be efficient with his time? I will ask you two as business owners and as SEO experts, what do you think of that, of running short summarized versions of your articles to drive visitors from the GMB to your website?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. I can feel that one. At least to start off here, short answer yes. Kind of like you’re saying Sue, and just in general, you want to be efficient. First things first here is it’s almost a broader question of, can you repurpose content off your website? I think you’re talking here, you’re talking summarized versions of the articles, but really it’s can you use content off of your website even more broadly as a GMB post? And absolutely yes. There’s definitely a few caveats. You don’t want just straight copy, paste and things like that. But to your point, we really do want to be as efficient as possible in creating that content. Repurposing articles, repurposing blog posts, repurposing webpages or getting inspired by those topics, things like that, are very much something that you should do for your Google posts.

And even further, even though we’re talking about the GMB here, some of the clients in experiences like you’re talking, share this on social, shared it on your Google My Business posts. You’ve got all kinds of multimedia, YouTube videos, just anything out there for digital marketing. Into your email newsletters, repurpose that content. If you can sit down one time and generate some content with the intent of using it in multiple sources after you’ve generated it, how do you make that thing and then cut it up and use it in these different ways? It’s something that we strive with with all of our clients, because at the end of the day for marketing, like we say all the time, you’re spending time or money. And Bob, that’s something you and I have talked to people for years. That’s your budgeting your time or your money.

In this case, creating content is usually something that you have to do as the business. It’s hard to hire somebody in to create the content for you because you run your business. You are the business, you are more knowledgeable than anybody else about it so you’re charged with creating that content. And to your point with that client example, you don’t want to redo that over and over and over. If you get a good topic, good piece of content, yeah, repurpose that thing. With regards explicitly to your Google My Business posting, yes let’s repurpose it and let’s use a summarized version of that article on your GMB post. And then I would even say link it back to that article or that piece of content if you think you want to drive traffic to that. That’s one of the beautiful parts about a Google My Business post is you can create the content, put a photo with it, but then you also have the option to link it back to a webpage.

Maybe you want that traffic going to your homepage or maybe a location page. That’s fine. You can link the GMB post back to that. But if the original article itself maybe had more in depth information, maybe your GMB post was just kind of a teaser, then absolutely link it back to that article if you think that’s a spot you want it to go to. And I’m kind of extrapolating on it, given that because it’s not just yes, to repurpose it, yes, to be transparent that this was a summarized version of this article and here’s the full article if that methodology is applicable to that instance. Does that make sense? Do you think that answers the question pretty good there?

Sue Ginsburg: I does.

Bob Brennan: Jess, is there any way to overdo that in terms of penalties or duplicate content? You mentioned, it’s not really a duplicate content deal, so are you saying just again, not the full article, but just kind of a summary or highlights of that article or are there boundaries that you don’t want to cross there as it relates to duplicate content?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, perfect. You don’t want a straight copy, paste it. If you’re going to do a summarized version, to Sue’s exact question, maybe you take out a couple paragraphs and rearrange some of the words, paraphrase some of the words. I would definitely stay away from a 100% copy and pasting the content as is. Just because I don’t think there’s a huge penalty possibility there for duplicate content. But you do want Google to see that it’s original and unique because when you created that original post or article, you’ve already created that piece of content. And if you’ve done everything else for your SEO correctly, Google has seen that piece of content and digested that and has that in the archive. Now you’re creating a Google post, you don’t want to duplicate that.

It’s not from a standpoint that it might hurt you negatively, but more of, why say the same thing exactly again? Find a way to kind of maybe mix in another keyword or two or rephrase it to where you’re not generating a whole new piece of content and kind of ruining the entire concept of being efficient. But no, short answer to that, Bob, I would not worry about duplicate content unless you are explicitly copying and pasting it. Which what I’m proposing isn’t hard. You’ve already created the big piece of content, so just shifting a few sentences or words around to make it slightly unique. And duplicate means duplicate. If I have one thing and I copy it, but I change a few things, that’s no longer a duplicate. It’s a variation of it. That’s completely fine. Completely fine.

Bob Brennan: Okay, makes sense.

Sue Ginsburg: I think that for everybody who agrees with Nelson Mandela’s quote of, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” Maybe that just gave people ideas of how to make it more possible. We like that.

Jesse Dolan: And Sue, let me edify you real quick for everybody that is listening, you talked about creating a content calendar and how to repurpose some content. We are working on something kind of an incubator. We’ve been calling it the content accelerator. If anybody out there is having struggles with these things we’re talking about more broadly, drop us a line, we’ll get you in touch with Sue and she’ll help you kind of map this stuff out and really find a way to be efficient in these ways that we’re kind of alluding to.

Sue Ginsburg: Great. And again, yes, you can create it, you can hire out to have it created, you can work with us to create it. However you choose, the point is you need to create it. And that brings me to, if you remember one thing and one thing only from today’s podcast, it is you cannot ignore that content as a driving factor for SEO and it’s not one and done, it needs to be relevant, it needs to be continual and it needs to be done.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. There is nothing wrong with that statement. That is a 100% true. You got to keep putting it out there. Thanks for the question, Sue. And thanks for the listeners out there, submitting the questions. Kind of loving this format, answering questions, kind of get into some, not topics that you and Bob and myself have to come up with that we think are good talking points, things people really want to know.

All you listeners out there, if you do have a question yourself that you think you want answered, that other people might want answered and that you want us to just kind of crack open and talk about, go to localseotactics.com, go down to the bottom for submit a question and you’ll have two options. You can just send us a form submission with the question and we’ll read it just like we did here. You want to take it a step further and I actually call in and record basically via a voicemail, your question to submit it that way. We’ll play it on the show, of course we’ll answer it, but then we’ll also send you a free Intrycks t-shirt for doing that. Love to hear from you folks out there for what kind of challenges and questions you have. We can help you out.

All right, Bob, Sue, anything else you want to add? Or you think that wraps it up for this topic pretty good?

Bob Brennan: No, I think that’s great.

Jesse Dolan: Solid. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll catch you on the next episode. Take care.

Bob Brennan: Bye now.