Get Efficient With Your Content To Maximize Your SEO Benefits – 182

Jesse Dolan: So you need to do more content. You need to do new content in all the fractal areas that people are engaging with you, and if you need to be there, and if you need to be doing that, well guess what? Some efficiency is going to help you out, so.

Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I'm your hosts, Jesse Dolan. Today we're going to be talking about content for your website. Everybody knows we have to have content for our website, for our pages, but I want to expand the conversation. We're talking local SEO, but I'm going to talk about social media, off website content and some other things here in this episode, but it all does tie into your SEO, your local brand, your entity, and the flywheel that is your local digital marketing. So content. We've heard, content is king, content is queen, you got to have content, content marketing, right? The last couple years there's been a gigantic push out there, I think in the digital marketing world to talk about content. And they're right. You do need to have content to get out there for marketing.

The more advanced Google gets with its algorithm, the more finicky we get as users and the less patients we have, the more we're looking for good content. I think we've all been using Google for decades now, but seeing the evolution of Google be an amazing resource, watching it get spammed and not always trusting the first link or two sometimes here and just being savvier on what's going to be good content when we find it, and thus creating good content and creating specific content is important not only for ranking but for that user experience and to make sure it's valuable and insightful information. And that is going to be just more and more important as we move forward in digital marketing and with Google into 2023 and beyond. So here I want to talk about the types of content that's important, how to apply this stuff to your website and then how to leverage it in other cross-platform channels, social media, things like that, all while talking about this from the position of being a small business owner or a marketing manager where you do not have unlimited funds or time.

So how to do this to be efficient and what's important to measure, capture and things like that. So let's start by setting the stage on a few different areas here where content can be used and applied and can benefit your marketing. Blog posts and webpages and articles on your website are kind of the natural spot for us to talk. These get ranked hopefully in Google and other search engines and get you found when people are looking for these very specific keywords and phrases that you're targeting. And if you have good content, you should be getting eyeballs on that content and then converting that into whatever your CTA is, clients, customers, opt-ins, whatever it is you're trying to do with your website. Blog posts and articles are kind of the natural spot for content. Now, within that though, people don't think about maybe using videos on webpages, right?

Or podcasts, embedded audio. Other multimedia things as well. It doesn't have to be a text-based page on your website, it can be an infographic. Again, video, things like that. So keep that in mind as well. Those items can also exist out there in their own universes. So if we're talking to video, maybe you put that on YouTube. That's going to exist within YouTube itself, not just maybe a video that you embed on your webpage for your blog post, but the actual content created and uploaded as a video to YouTube will be there to be found in YouTube and then to show up in Google search results. So for that reason, we always say, if you can create video content, that's a great multiplier for you. You can create that one piece of content, use it on YouTube, use it on your website in another ways.

Same with podcasts. Right here for us, local SEO tactics, the podcast has been something that's been great for us for content. We can do an episode, we can repurpose that audio, we can take these topics, kind of split them out into different areas and expand on them, and it's just a great way to generate content as well, and it's going to live in its own universe too. We can take chunks of this, we can put it on our webpages. You can go to localseotactics.com, check out our episode pages and see how we use it. We'll put the transcript on there, things like that, and leveraging that audio for more content and being very efficient. Also, social media and kind of very generally, right? I'm not talking TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, all these things specifically, but just broadly as social media. You can create content specific for those platforms.

And then same thing, you can repurpose those or leverage those on your website. You can do that by taking the actual concept or topic or maybe some of the creative assets that you've used for social and use them on your website. Again, if it's a video that you cut, maybe Facebook live video, right? Or something straight to Facebook. Maybe it's an image that you made, a meme, something like that. Finding ways to leverage that and use it back at your website as well or other types of marketing. Here's what I've have talked about. All right, so that's just kind of a precursor to the types of content and things we're going to explore. One area I want to start off with here though is kind of the backbone of why we love digital marketing is the measurement and the analytics and the KPIs to understand what is working.

It's one thing to just throw content out there and say, oh, content is king. We have to do it, but it's another for it to actually be effective, which as a small business owner or marketing manager, whatever your position is, maybe you're starting your own agency, you don't have infinite time or infinite money, and so we want to be smart about this and to be smart about it, we have to measure it. This is one of the great byproducts or one of the great kind of built in things for digital marketing is we can measure a lot of stuff. Some of this is going to be a little esoteric. I'm going to touch on that here, but still, we have a lot of data points that we can collect to understand what is working and what is not, so we can do more of what works and stop doing what doesn't work.

Since every piece of content requires budget of time or money, it's important to measure this stuff and then plot it out and then have also going forward some kind of a content calendar or plan that you're operating off of. If we're going to put out this content and if we're going to measure this content and try to analyze what is and isn't working, we do have to translate that back into action items for the next type of content that we create. If we want to do more of what's working, we have to decide what's working and then put something in the queue to do more of it and things like that. That's what we're talking about there. All right, let's talk about these KPIs, KPIs, goals, dashboards, stop lights, red, yellow, green. What's good, what's bad, however you want to phrase it up. Setting your goals and your expectations for your content and for your marketing is going to be important.

It doesn't mean that every piece of content has to perform perfectly and the bottom line is the bottom line, but every piece of content analysis that you can do is going to help you understand what is and isn't working. So some of the tools that we can use, it's your website. Google Analytics, you know, can set up information to know what pages are popular, what the navigation routes users are taking, right? If they land on your blog post as the entry page, where do they go next? Or if they land on your homepage, do they navigate to the blog post? There's a lot of insights and information Google Analytics can give us for the behaviors what's happening on your website. And Google Search Console is a free tool by Google that shows you what's happening before users get to your website. What pieces of your content on your website are being shown, right?

Whether or not people are clicking on it and visiting your site. Google Search Console is a great way to know what type of content is being absorbed, digested, if you will, put into the index by Google and then being served up to people. If you're creating a bunch of content on a certain topic and it's not getting any traction in Google through Google Search Console being served up or you're not getting the clicks, if it is being served up, that'd be an area you'd want to look at. Is it working? What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Could be the content itself, could be how it's being served up, right? Are you linking that within your website to get Google to crawl it? If you have it on your site map, are you set up in Google Search Console? Some things like that are definitely things that we want to be aware of, and then you're going to want to take that even further to track the events.

Are you trying to push people from your content to a certain call to action, make a phone call, fill out a contact form, whatever it is, you want to have that interaction point, that CTA measured. Again, you can use Google Analytics to set up goals, conversions, things like that. If it's phone calls that you're looking to generate, are you using a tracking system to log your number of phone calls, whether that's something sophisticated to track it back to what webpage or keyword it came from, what kind of search it came from, if it's recorded or if it's just a simple log of calls that came in and what was it about and things like that, you're going to want to find a way to track all of those conversions and see what ties in and what is working out there. And when you're evaluating the performance, the logs, the analytics try to be true to it.

You, your marketing team, the people creating this content, don't have your biases in there for what you think people are doing, what you think is working. You really do have to go off the data. What's being served up? What are people engaging with? What are they opting into? What's converting and what's not? And you want that to lead the path for you. So that's very broad overview of some of the KPIs, mainly talking about your website there within Facebook and other platforms for social media, YouTube, things like that. Other call them third party assets, not your website. When I say that is what I mean, they're all going to have their own versions of analytics, how many shares, how many likes, how many engagements, how many video plays, things like that. You're going to want to pay attention to these various dashboards and what analytics and what milestones and what KPIs do they provide to you. Start paying attention to those as well in the same way,.

Elisabeth Samuels: seospringtraining.com is the website that you can go ahead and purchase your tickets on there. You can learn a little bit more of information of what we're doing. I am absolutely available. My contact information is on there. It's elizabeth@seospringtraining.com, so you're free to email me and ask questions. I absolutely don't mind. It is April 13th is the VIP, but 14th through the 16th is the regular marketing conference. It's in Scottsdale, Arizona. We have reserved an Embassy Suites.

Jesse Dolan: And it's not an event where it's just, this isn't like trade show where it's just sponsors all over tables, people throwing stuff around and everything's brought to you by this and trying to sell you a package. It's actual people practicing SEO, doing it right that are up to date with what's happening.

Elisabeth Samuels: We bring quality value to people through our events. That's the whole purpose of it is just because when we started out, we didn't know what we didn't know, and if I can shorten the learning curve for other people, I'm absolutely happy to. Our speakers are coming from so many different areas. We've got people from social, we've got people from super tech technical, we've got people from sales, people from affiliates. It's any discipline within the SEO marketing realm.

Jesse Dolan: No, it's real. People doing stuff, sharing, helping, and not just a one off deal, not just a pitch fest to sell a bunch of stuff. You're going to come to the event, learn some stuff, get back and actually make a difference in your business.

Elisabeth Samuels: We give a lot of real world practical actionable things that as soon as you're behind the computer, you can actually utilize that information and make a difference for your clients or your business.

Jesse Dolan: Now this point I want to talk about repurposing that content. Kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier on the front side of the episode. Something to start taking into account is how can we be efficient with this content? If I'm going to create, let's say a graphic for a webpage, maybe it's an infographic. Where else can I use this? Is this going to be an image that's suitable for sharing on social media? Is this an image that is used in a video that we're going to talk over and maybe have a talking head video walking through this infographic? Wherever you spend money creating content, I would challenge you to have a test to say, can we use this on social? Can we repurpose this in a video? Do we send out newsletters and emails to our clients? Can this graphic be used in there?

Can the infographic be used in there? Do we do a blog post about this infographic and really break it down even further and showcase that graphic on the blog post, the types of content that you create, just think about how you can repurpose them. I guess another great example is like we talked earlier in the video, in the podcast type stuff that we do for our show here, Local SEO Tactics. If you go on out, check out our show page, you'll see we record this like I am right here and there will be a podcast, there will be a video, there'll be a blog post that has transcriptions and notes from this, but we're still creating one piece of content originally, right? This recording here, this episode, but then leveraging it in multiple ways. We'll also take some of the video and the content and we'll cut it out and make some little cutdowns for social media.

So the same thought process is there, sitting down to create that content, whether it's video here, taking 30, 40, 50 minutes to cut a video or if you're sitting down to write a blog post or an article that can take hours or maybe even a day. Either way, you're investing time and money into creating that content. So taking just a little bit more time to think about how can you repurpose that, how can you leverage that and get a little bit of sophistication there is going to help you. So when you sit down to then create that content, you understand where you're going to be using it, how you're going to be using it, and that should have a slate. Slight impact on the content that you create or the processes in doing it to set it up to make it efficient to use it in those multiple channels.

Now, specifically here when we're talking about images and video, something I want you to pay special attention to is the different aspect ratios and formats of these different platforms. If you're going to take a video, is it something that should be wide angle like landscape view, right, horizontal or should this be tall vertical portrait? If it's going to be reel on Instagram, maybe tall portrait view, I is best if it's going to be on YouTube wide aspect ratio 16:9, kind of horizontal depending on your marketing budget and your tools. If it's something that you're going to use in both, maybe you can frame it up. If you're watching me on video here, we use this video on YouTube, we'll also use it for social media and I have to make sure I stay right here in the middle of the frame. That way when the editors, when they're done take this and cut it down to use on social media.

If it's going to be a vertical frame, I want to be in the middle. If I'm off to the side here, right half my face get cut off, or it makes it less efficient for them to have to track and reframe the video for social media, that costs more money. So be aware of the different channels, the different outlets, the different purposes and how you're going to use this content and that should impact how you're going to create the content that's more true for, this is horrible English, I'm sorry, that's more true for the larger budget you have of time or money for that piece of content. If you're making an epic blog post or a long one hour video, that's where I would specifically challenge you even further. How can we repurpose this? The more you're spending on that single piece of content from time or money standpoint, how can you get the most bang from the buck out of it?

Put that discussion on the front side and you're going to be able to leverage that content a lot more on the back end. So there we're talking about so far here, kind of two main points. One is KPIs and measuring, and this is digital and you want to use all these different areas, but then also measure all these areas two we're talking about now that you're aware of using content in all these areas or multiple areas and having that thought process for when you're creating it and then leveraging it. That's going to take us to number three here for us for our recipe and how we do it here at Intrycks. This is the third year that's the most important to really keep this thing going, and that's your content calendar. We're going to link in the show notes to a couple different episodes we've had about creating content and content calendars here.

I'm not going to rehash the entire thing, but again, if we're understanding what is working and what is not working by our KPIs and our analysis and just understanding our content production overall, and if we're using that to guide what we are creating for content going forward in the future, then we should be having some kind of a content calendar or plan to put forth what we're going to be recording, typing, writing for future content, and this is something that can be pretty complex depending on the size and the scale of your organization, but this is something we find that when we implement it with clients is something that can be very efficient and save a lot of time and money in the creation of content and marketing. Oftentimes you're going to have people working on your social media, people working on your website, people working on maybe your physical marketing for in-store or at your location, things like that.

You've also got people creating newsletters, emails, that kind of marketing on your website. And we often see with organizations the more that those things are siloed or handled by multiple people that they're not always communicating and what's the strategy? And for us, a good model is that a company knows, let's just say next month, what is the thing we're talking about? What's our main message that we want to put out there? What's the promotion that we have? Whatever the thing is, can be educational, can be helpful, it can be salesy or promotional, but whatever it is, we would challenge the organization as a whole to understand what the main priority is and then have these different silos talk about what it is they want to create, what it is their ideas are, but then try to distill that down to something that's efficient for everybody.

If you're going to go do a photo shoot to capture one photo, is it a photo in a setting that all these different platforms within your company can leverage that same photo or do you take two or three different photos at the same time, right? Because you're already there taking photos. How can we kill two birds with one stone here, so to speak? Things like that. So having a content calendar for what are your ideas, what are your topics? Having that listed out a month or a quarter in advance allows the entire team and whoever's working on this to collaborate and be efficient. So we're putting a little bit more energy and time on the front side to be coordinated and efficient, but that's going to pay you back in droves on the back end when you are creating this content because now you can create the content a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit more coordinated, and then deploy it across all of your digital marketing areas, all your digital marketing buckets with some efficiency that wasn't there before.

And the cherry on top for all of this is if you are doing it in this way, you will kind of maximize that message or that piece of content every time. If you can envision a scenario where maybe you put out an epic blog post or a video like this episode here that I'm recording right now, if you know that you're creating that content and then if you're coordinated with all your other channels in your own internal marketing here, now you can put that same content out there at the same time in a coordinated way on social, on emails, on your website, in your printed material, things like that.

The campaign, the content itself, that message is going to get amplified and people are going to see it everywhere. If I'm your client and I get your email today announcing this thing, this piece of content, and then I'm at home tonight and I'm scrolling through socials and I see that again popping in my feed, you're reinforcing that message with me in a way that you couldn't have before if you were not as sophisticated, not as coordinated, and you're going to find that that really pumps the flywheel in a great way for you.

One of the secret kind of hidden spots for this is kind of through social media. So a lot of times companies won't invest into social media because you feel like you have to create content specifically for it, but if you're acting in an efficient way, like we're talking about here, you can just trickle out some of this content to social media without a lot of extra effort, and if you find that you're not getting a lot of likes or shares or engagements in your content through let's just say Facebook, right through their analytics, don't beat dismay. How often have you as a user of Facebook scrolled through content? Maybe it's one of your favorite brands or an influencer or something that you're following that you like and are passionate about and support. Maybe have even patronized before. But that doesn't mean you're going to like everything that that person or that brand puts out.

It doesn't mean you're going to share that stuff. So when we as marketers get too caught up in those analytics, we don't understand that some of this might just be commercials like on the radio or TV, and we view social media like that in a lot of ways. It's getting your message out there and if getting your message out there is cheap and efficient for you and you're repurposing a lot of your other content, people are going to see that in their feeds. Although you may not be able to see the stats to back it up. Things are happening. In a perfect world, if things are happening in a good way for you, what's going to happen is people are going to see that content, even though they're not engaging with it and you can't kind of get the analytics that they're seeing it, they're going to see that content and what they're going to do is they're going to go out to Google and they're going to do some searches.

Best case scenario for you is they do some kind of a brand search with a product or service that you're trying to get recognition for or ranking for. So if it was Jesse Dolan and Red Balloons, if on my social media feeds people are seeing stuff about red balloons and they're associating with me because it's my feed, they start doing Google searches for Jesse Dolan red balloons, Google is going to start to associate Jesse Dolan as an entity with red balloons as an entity, and that's great. So if nothing else, right? My point here is leverage that content, put it on multiple platforms, be sophisticated in what you're doing, pay attention to your calendar and keep putting out that content. The more you do that, you're going to pump this flywheel. Not all of it is measured, but measure the heck out of everything you can measure, but even the things that fall between the cracks, it's still going to be great for you if you're not spending energy and budget money and budget time to these silos individually.

But instead, if you're doing it coordinated, this is a much more efficient way to go about it and it's okay, right? If some of these stats don't show up for you, you don't have to be guided by them because that's really just another click or two. Maybe you were a few more minutes to put that on social, so sorry to get a little bit long-winded on the social portion of that there. But for us, if you're running this model, it becomes efficient and scalable for you to leverage content in this way across multiple platforms. Whereas before, you may have looked at them in their individual silos and then chosen what you do or don't put your time and money towards based off those priorities. Instead, if you think about putting the same content out to multiple platforms and being more coordinated, you're going to find you're able to produce more content, you're going to produce better content, and it's going to be working and much more efficient for you.

And at the end of the day, the reason all this is important is because as we move forward, helpful content, insightful content and the content that matches the intent of what people are searching for is going to rank highest in Google and is going to be the most sticky stuff that people are going to stay on, and those brands are going to be the ones that are going to win. So you need to do more content. You need a new content in all the fractal areas that people are engaging with you, and if you need to be there and if you need to be doing that, well guess what? Some efficiency is going to help you out. So there you go. Hopefully that helps. Not a direct local SEO episode here today about something that is important for your business and over the course right of time and doing this the right way.

It definitely will impact your SEO and your brand largely in all of these areas. If you like what we're doing, we'd love to get a review from you going out to local SEO tactics.com. Scroll down to the bottom, click the button for reviews. It's going to give you all the portals wherever you choose, Google, Facebook, Apple Podcast, whatever it is. If you like the show, if you like this kind of stuff, if it's helping your business out, let us know. It encourages us to keep going.

And also we like to read these reviews as we get them. Going to read one here from Warren Coopey, hope I said your last name there correctly, Warren. It's a great five star review that says, "I've listened to all the SEO podcasts I can find, and this series is my favorite by far!" Must say. "They take the most important and practical aspects for you to put to use right away and explain them in a clear, concise and entertaining way. SEO is so important to business success that it has to be something all small business owners like myself should have at least basic understanding of. Trouble is there's too many so-called experts out there that are only in it for the money and in who's own interests try to confuse and keep everything secretive."

Yes, a little aside, I would say that is true, right? So I appreciate that you get, we're breaking this down and making it simple and actionable. That is one of the cornerstones we try to do it on. So I digress though. Let me continue on with the review. This is a long review. Thank you very much. "Instead, these guys are the real deal. They genuinely want to help the rest of us by making SEO accessible and achievable to all of us, and they know their stuff. Thanks to these guys, I now have the confidence to do most of the key SEO work on my sites myself and their advice has already had a positive effect on my business. So thank you much."

Awesome review, Warren. We do appreciate that. Everybody else, if you feel like Warren or even just the smidge, we'd love to hear about it. Localseotactics.com, scroll the bottom, click the button for reviews and give us a shout out wherever you are so inclined. We would really appreciate it. Thanks for the review, Warren. Thanks to everybody for tuning in to this episode. Hope you like it. We'll catch you next one.