Skyler Reeves, CEO of Ardent Growth Shares How to Use Topic Clustering to Rank on Google
In episode 38: Skyler Reeves, CEO, and Founder of Ardent Growth Shares How to Use Topic Clustering to Rank High on Google. We talk about effective content marketing strategies for Saas, E-Commerce, and Lawyers.
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Transcript
Welcome to the mesmerizing marketing podcast, where we take a deep dive
Speaker:into the latest marketing trends, tools, and tips, and provide you with
Speaker:the top resources you need to thrive and make your marketing mesmerized.
Speaker:And now here's your host dimple.
Speaker:Dang.
Speaker:Hi there.
Speaker:Welcome back to the mesmerizing marketing podcast.
Speaker:And today I'm super excited to be here with Skyler Reeves scholar Reeves is
Speaker:a founder and CEO of ardent growth.
Speaker:He's on a mission to blend data and creativity to make the web a better place.
Speaker:Skyler holds a degree in computer science and philosophy, and
Speaker:is also an Iraq war veteran.
Speaker:Welcome Scott.
Speaker:Thanks for having me on yeah, super excited.
Speaker:So today we're going to be talking about topic clustering and how, other
Speaker:companies and corporations and you know, businesses can outrank even the bigger
Speaker:websites like HubSpot by utilizing.
Speaker:This topic, clustering method, some really intrigued by this.
Speaker:So first of all, you know, want to backtrack to when you first, had
Speaker:this idea, this conception of launching ardent growth, what was the
Speaker:problem in the marketplace that you saw that you were trying to solve?
Speaker:So when I first launched starting growth, I was working in the,
Speaker:in a complete different industry.
Speaker:I was working in the transportation industry.
Speaker:Focused on solving the algorithm problems related to routing and had
Speaker:heard about this black box of Google with SEO that no one knew how it worked.
Speaker:And that's what I've basically been working on since our time was
Speaker:trying to solve unsolvable problems.
Speaker:And it seemed interesting.
Speaker:So I figured I would give it a go.
Speaker:That's where I started the topic clustering thing though really came from
Speaker:this This frustration with never knowing what's, what's the right type of content.
Speaker:What content should I be making to get the best results as fast as possible?
Speaker:And all the recommendations out there on the web just kind of said that pick
Speaker:topics and group them together, but it was all based on gut gut feeling.
Speaker:And I didn't like that.
Speaker:So that was, that was the initial frustration.
Speaker:And why we kind of set out to solve this problem.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean, I think there's so much information out there, right?
Speaker:When you look online, there's so many things that you hear, there's
Speaker:so many different tips and some of the information is accurate
Speaker:and some of it is not accurate.
Speaker:So even on Google, it's a search engine, but just because information is listed
Speaker:on Google, it doesn't make it accurate.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:As consumers, I think, people get confused because they
Speaker:don't know where to start.
Speaker:They don't know what to believe.
Speaker:And sometimes they fall into the trap of believing methods
Speaker:and ways of doing marketing.
Speaker:That really aren't, Ethical, or they're not like the appropriate measures.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And I think by, taking those shortcuts, like companies and brands, they end
Speaker:up hurting themselves in the long run.
Speaker:So when you saw a need, you know, in the marketplace, and before
Speaker:even launching the company, what steps did you have to go through?
Speaker:Like, did you do some market research?
Speaker:What was your, you know, research process prior to launch.
Speaker:Well, there really wasn't much of one that it was my first time launching a business.
Speaker:And so I come from an engineering background.
Speaker:And so usually the only thing that's needed to require for us
Speaker:to actually go tackle a problem is that there there's a problem exists.
Speaker:It's interesting that we want to solve.
Speaker:So a lot of it's driven by curiosity.
Speaker:That's not what I would recommend.
Speaker:A lot of founders go to.
Speaker:I mean, I've learned a lot since the end of like, okay, we need to think
Speaker:about doing some market research thing about finding product market
Speaker:fit, you know, understanding kind of lean startup concepts, you know,
Speaker:but at the time it was just, there was a problem I wanted to solve it.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So wish I had a better answer than that.
Speaker:I think don't follow the exact path I fall.
Speaker:Yeah, but I think step one is, you know, finding that problem.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:I think having a business and being able to sell a product or service to someone
Speaker:is all about solving their problems.
Speaker:Because if you can't solve a problem or they don't have a problem to solve.
Speaker:You're not really going to be able to monetize and grow a business
Speaker:that way you have to be able to solve a problem that they're having.
Speaker:That's a pain point and that's, you know, in the marketplace.
Speaker:So you identified the problem.
Speaker:And what did you do after that?
Speaker:So from, from that point forward, you know, we're still iterating through it.
Speaker:I think a lot of the way other founders do, you know, we're still trying to really
Speaker:define what is product market fit here?
Speaker:We we've gotten what we think is it's pretty close.
Speaker:And so now we're kind of thinking like, all right, how do we scale this thing?
Speaker:But at the same time, we're not, you know, we're not a software
Speaker:company, we're a consultancy.
Speaker:And so we, we go back and forth with this constant identity crisis
Speaker:on whether or not we want to stay consultancy, or if we want to just
Speaker:turn this thing into a SAS company.
Speaker:But yeah, really the first thing is to say, okay, like, you've you solved?
Speaker:A problem they have to understand is like, is the market.
Speaker:That, you know, is there a demand enough there to warrant this actually
Speaker:being a sustainable business model?
Speaker:And, and can you really find product market fit where, people
Speaker:are constantly coming to, you know, exactly who you're serving.
Speaker:And from there you can pour gasoline on things and actually
Speaker:begin to scale it and go to market.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:And in terms of your ideal client avatar, like, can you give me some demographics,
Speaker:some details on, you know, who's your target audience, who's your target client?
Speaker:So we've, we've worked across a lot while, while we've been figuring this out and.
Speaker:Yeah, the technology itself is applicable to any audience, but as far as who we
Speaker:like to work with, because there's, the tech can do everything for it.
Speaker:You've got to have a human being on the other side, capable of critical thinking
Speaker:and really understanding how to put this all together into a cohesive strategy.
Speaker:So for us, it's it's B2B sale.
Speaker:And interesting lay enough is that's not even like the easiest way to
Speaker:for us to apply our technology.
Speaker:It actually applies really well to e-commerce when we've worked
Speaker:with a few e-commerce brands, it's delivered great results for all them.
Speaker:It's very clear.
Speaker:There's a lot less ambiguity there, but in terms of the actual work that's
Speaker:being done and the interest that goes into it and who we're working with B2B
Speaker:SAS tends to be Who would click much better with, on a on a more personal
Speaker:level and a collaborative level.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Thank you for sharing that.
Speaker:And Skylar, for the audience, like, I would love to know, you
Speaker:know, to you, what the definition of content marketing to you?
Speaker:What does content marketing mean?
Speaker:So content marketing to me is.
Speaker:Uh, Succinct definition would be it's, you know, it's whether it's on your
Speaker:website, whether it's on social, whether it's on video, , it's the idea that
Speaker:we're creating content out there for people to consume that directly serve.
Speaker:The overarching business strategy.
Speaker:If you're just creating things that don't serve the business strategy that aren't
Speaker:moving business objectives forward, that's not content marketing, that's just
Speaker:content creation and there's a difference.
Speaker:So in a nutshell, any sort of content, no matter what, the medium that helps
Speaker:drive business objectives forward.
Speaker:I'm a firm believer of creating content.
Speaker:And I think that, you know, every business, every even solopreneur,
Speaker:anyone who has like a business, right.
Speaker:They should be creating content on a consistent basis.
Speaker:And for some people.
Speaker:I know that that's a challenge because there's a lot of roadblocks to that
Speaker:there's time then there's, ideas.
Speaker:Some people are not good when it comes to creativity.
Speaker:And then, you know, the biggest thing I think to me, that really stands out.
Speaker:That's important that the normal average business owner and corporation
Speaker:doesn't necessarily know about is SEO is search engine optimization.
Speaker:Because if you, you can produce content day in and day out.
Speaker:But if that content is not discoverable, If people can't find it on Google, they
Speaker:can't find it on the search engines.
Speaker:You're not going to get traffic back to your website.
Speaker:You're not going to get traffic back to that blog article.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And I think the main thing is like making your content discover.
Speaker:Yeah, I think it's depending on what type of business that you're in would
Speaker:kind of dictate on what channel, right.
Speaker:That you're going to play your distribution strategy.
Speaker:So, you know, if SEO falls into the plan distribution strategy, yes.
Speaker:You've got to create content.
Speaker:That's capable of ranking.
Speaker:You've got to align it.
Speaker:We see a lot of people where they try to fight.
Speaker:You know, when you, when you search for something on Google, you can just look
Speaker:at the titles that it's ranking and get, and get a sense of what are people
Speaker:wanting when they searched for this.
Speaker:And if you try to create content.
Speaker:Is, controversial to that, or it's just a complete different format.
Speaker:Sometimes it can rank because Google does sometimes want to
Speaker:show a variety of perspectives on things, but for the most part, it's
Speaker:fighting, fighting search intent.
Speaker:That's what we call it.
Speaker:You know, the search intent is trying to fight that as it's
Speaker:fighting an uphill battle.
Speaker:So you have to do have to understand a little bit of research, therefore
Speaker:should go to create content.
Speaker:But that doesn't mean though, that SEO is all.
Speaker:The best distribution strategy.
Speaker:We focus on SEO.
Speaker:That's what we prefer, but we'll tell people right off the gate, you know, if
Speaker:we, if we began to assess the market and the way their business operates, whether
Speaker:or not we think that that's actually the strategy that they need to be pursuing,
Speaker:or if they need to pursue more of a social distribution strategy or, you
Speaker:know, email marketing or things like that
Speaker:yeah, absolutely.
Speaker:And you know, when it comes to this whole topic clustering, what is that?
Speaker:Because I haven't heard that term before, until I met you.
Speaker:And it sounds fascinating.
Speaker:in the world of computer science, it means something a little bit different
Speaker:than Whitefield plotted in marketing.
Speaker:You've probably heard of hub and spoke before how squad kind of brought that term
Speaker:up and two and 17 it's, it's very similar.
Speaker:It's a, it's another way to think about that.
Speaker:It's the idea that you're going to create content hubs around the central topic?
Speaker:I think the reason why topic clustering is sort of another way to look at it
Speaker:in terms of the verbiage though, is that it's this idea that we're actually
Speaker:creating an algorithm model around how to structure that content instead
Speaker:of just picking a topic and then.
Speaker:Ideating you know, again, using your own your own kind of gut instinct
Speaker:about what you think the topics need to be around it to connect together.
Speaker:This takes a much more algorithmic approach.
Speaker:Yeah, I bet there's a lot of research involved with that too, because how do
Speaker:you come up with all of those topics that cluster together around the main topic?
Speaker:So what is it that your company does to make this process, feasible a lot easier
Speaker:and how does it tie everything together?
Speaker:So there's, there's two general approaches to it.
Speaker:Currently.
Speaker:One of them is to use.
Speaker:A more natural language processing model, which is sort of like machine learning.
Speaker:We don't actually like doing that.
Speaker:We don't think that's as helpful because Google has its own
Speaker:natural language processing model.
Speaker:And so the way we look at it, If you just rely on what Google's telling
Speaker:you, they've already processed it.
Speaker:They've already determined the intent and determine what these words mean.
Speaker:So if you use that as an indicator to start from that's how we work.
Speaker:So what we do is we say, okay, let's take as many broad level topics as we possibly.
Speaker:And whether you're using a tool, there's SEO research tools out there like H refs
Speaker:and SEMrush and you'll pull in everything.
Speaker:You can use your search console data as well, pulling every single
Speaker:topic related to your industry.
Speaker:Effectively mapping out your Tam from a keyword research perspective.
Speaker:And then we feed into our, into our algorithm and our algorithm
Speaker:will go and pull all the search results from Google for those terms.
Speaker:And it will begin to find where things are related in terms of
Speaker:what pages are ranking for what?
Speaker:And.
Speaker:By doing that, we're able to see, okay, if Google's going to group the exact
Speaker:URLs together across these, 80 different variations of these, of these queries,
Speaker:then it's reasonable to assume that that actually all needs to go the go together.
Speaker:And so what that tells us is whether or not we need to create one page
Speaker:or two pages for particular topic.
Speaker:An example of that would be recently, we were working with
Speaker:an e-commerce brand who had a C.
Speaker:Product collection page about maternity and nursing bras.
Speaker:And we found that whenever we did our analysis, that they actually
Speaker:needed to be two separate pages.
Speaker:They were performing really well for a maternity bras, but weren't
Speaker:performing very well for nursing brows.
Speaker:They separated them out and created a separate grill collection page
Speaker:immediately shot up to the first page for that secondary query as well.
Speaker:So the way we do though, we just collect all the cases.
Speaker:Process this data from Google it can become uh, the initial problem after we
Speaker:first built this was, it was a lot of noise because you're dealing with hundreds
Speaker:hundreds of thousands, if not millions of.
Speaker:And so we built a, we built our own product priority score and relevancy score
Speaker:into this to help us kind of filter out the noise and focus in on what's actually
Speaker:going to be more relevant to the business.
Speaker:But we can do that in like a matter of weeks.
Speaker:Whereas if you do it by hand, it would take literally like half a year to do So.
Speaker:Is this providing the ideas around the topics or is it actually doing the work?
Speaker:Are you guys doing the work as well for, you know, for these
Speaker:businesses, we've done a bit of both.
Speaker:We'd like to stay more strategic when it comes to the actual, like
Speaker:telling them, okay, here, here's the pages you need to create.
Speaker:Here's the order.
Speaker:You need to create them.
Speaker:And here's how they need to connect to them.
Speaker:You know, here's your effectively, your content plan
Speaker:for the next 12 months, right?
Speaker:We've created content for people in the past.
Speaker:We sold the, for some of our current clients.
Speaker:We, we really try to get people to create their own content though.
Speaker:And I'm old coach them and train them and help them find writers if they need to.
Speaker:And the main reason is that I don't think anyone ever creates content.
Speaker:At quite the same level for, for a company or a brand than someone who internal
Speaker:would versus hiring an agency or just a a freelancer, you know, things like that.
Speaker:It's it just doesn't, it never really hits because a freelancer or an agency doesn't
Speaker:understand the unique problems that your customers face, the way that you do as a
Speaker:founder or the way that your cells your sales team or your customer success team.
Speaker:A freelancer and I seat it would take them a while to really understand that.
Speaker:And you're far better off hiring someone who is capable of doing really
Speaker:good interviews with the founder or with customer success, or with sales
Speaker:going through gonged recordings, things like that, to understand how
Speaker:the product really solves the unique problems as it fits within that topic.
Speaker:yeah, we do creation sound, but we really try to push people more
Speaker:towards building up their own team.
Speaker:If they don't already have one and we'll help them build that.
Speaker:Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker:Because when you think about, you know, a brand and their brand voice and, all of
Speaker:that, that can really just come from them.
Speaker:It's hard for someone, especially if it's being outsourced right.
Speaker:To understand a brand.
Speaker:And that's why even social media marketing is so difficult because
Speaker:when you have someone else posting on your behalf, there's limitations
Speaker:to what, you know, they can post because they don't really know.
Speaker:They really have to have a very deep understanding of your personality,
Speaker:your tone, like, do you like to be sassy in your social media posts?
Speaker:Do you like to be.
Speaker:Funny, you know, like what's the personality of that company.
Speaker:What's that brand personality.
Speaker:And I think same thing with content, you know, content can be written so many
Speaker:different ways and it can have so many different variations and connotations
Speaker:and the style, even now, when you use like some of these content writing tools, it'll
Speaker:ask you, well, what tone do you want?
Speaker:Do you want professional?
Speaker:Do you want casual?
Speaker:And, and all of those things have to be determined.
Speaker:So I think the only way to really get something, Don in a way that it's
Speaker:going to be really relevant to your organization is to have an in-house
Speaker:person are to have one person that, you know, they can be from the outside
Speaker:that they, work for you where you can have a conference call with them.
Speaker:You can jump on zoom and you can talk about it.
Speaker:It's not just via email.
Speaker:You're typing in a request.
Speaker:Oh, Content on, you know, these 10 e-commerce items that I want to sell.
Speaker:It's more like, okay, let's have a conversation.
Speaker:Let's make sure you understand.
Speaker:What we represent, what our mission is, what our values are, what are
Speaker:the problems that our customers were facing five years ago versus now?
Speaker:Because I think again, even for the organizations that are creating
Speaker:all this content, it's all about solving, a consumer's problem.
Speaker:And if they can solve that problem, They're going to make that sale are they
Speaker:can create this perception that there's a need for what they're selling, right.
Speaker:There's a need for that product, or this product is better than product a, and
Speaker:this is why you should buy this product.
Speaker:You know, I think all of those things come into play with that.
Speaker:Yeah, so, and that's why you, hit it there on the mark.
Speaker:So being able to say this is why product a is better than product B.
Speaker:That's something that outside freelancers until they've worked with you for a while,
Speaker:they don't, it's so rare for them to understand how you're uniquely positioned.
Speaker:Against the competition in a way that's going to be persuasive.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And , that's the essence of content working right.
Speaker:Is do, is to really sell for, for that content to, to be more product led
Speaker:or service led or company led, you know, depending on your model, but.
Speaker:You know, when, when you do work with external folks, like it
Speaker:can work, but it's, it's going to be a very two-way street.
Speaker:You have to make sure you hire the right people.
Speaker:That's difficult.
Speaker:But once you do hire the right ones, what you're looking for is
Speaker:you're looking for people who are inquisitive, who can push you.
Speaker:When they're interviewing you to keep asking why, you know,
Speaker:you answer a question, they dig in, they want to go deep and.
Speaker:Every answer that you give, leads them back to the product, because then
Speaker:they're able to take that and actually put that into content and your words
Speaker:that they wouldn't know how to do, because they don't have the experience
Speaker:that you have and the rich knowledge.
Speaker:And if they just write it without that insight from you as a founder, as a,
Speaker:CMO or a head of sales or anything.
Speaker:It reads as being amateur versus coming from someone who really understands
Speaker:the customer and the product.
Speaker:So, again, it goes both ways.
Speaker:On the business end has to be able to provide that feedback and coach the
Speaker:writer as well, and to, to help give them the information that they need.
Speaker:They, you know, they don't.
Speaker:Come with it automatically.
Speaker:So it's a, it's an evolutionary.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So to me, I mean, it sounds almost like a journalist, right.
Speaker:Would, do an interviewer story, is that to have that content writer, , interview,
Speaker:the person who's going to be explaining details about a particular concept or
Speaker:topic or product, and really dive deep and, you know, dive so deep into it where
Speaker:it's like, okay, they answer one question.
Speaker:And then you dive deeper into, another aspect of it so that you have a
Speaker:very thorough understanding right.
Speaker:Of, of what is that product?
Speaker:What does it do?
Speaker:What are the benefits?
Speaker:who are the competitors?
Speaker:How does it, differ from, from other products that are
Speaker:similar in the marketplace?
Speaker:Because when it comes to writing that content.
Speaker:a lot of people prefer content, especially if it comes to e-commerce.
Speaker:Or even in anything, even if someone's hiring a lawyer and a law
Speaker:firm, they're going to go online, they're going to go to Google, right?
Speaker:They're going to type in a keyword phrase.
Speaker:Let's say they type in, New York divorce attorney and they're
Speaker:going to get search results.
Speaker:And they're going to probably go to, two to four websites.
Speaker:They're going to check out the content are maybe they're going to type in a key
Speaker:word and they type in, should I have a prenup agreement, you know, be before I
Speaker:get married and then someone has a blog article that's titled exactly that title.
Speaker:So what's going to happen is a blog is going to render high on Google.
Speaker:And if it happened to render on page one, then that person's
Speaker:going to discover that attorney.
Speaker:And they're going to go to that website.
Speaker:And in the same way, I think it comes down to.
Speaker:Really knowing who the audience is for that company, for that product
Speaker:and what appeals to them, right.
Speaker:Because you really have to even speak in that tone, in that voice, that's
Speaker:going to resonate with them and that's going to get them to take action.
Speaker:And I think, you know, it's important to have the right tone.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And you know, w one quick, kind of little tip there too, whenever you're
Speaker:doing that, let's say you're working in any sort of baby, is that the way you
Speaker:write strategic content and tactical content are for two different audience.
Speaker:The tactical content, you can have a much more familiar tone of area.
Speaker:You can go a bit deeper with things, very step-by-step.
Speaker:You're talking to the people who are going to be doing the work, right.
Speaker:And that's very different from the way you're going to be talking to the CMOs
Speaker:or VP of growth or anything like that, or head of growth, where you need to
Speaker:be much more strategic in your content.
Speaker:You don't have to dive into the weeds.
Speaker:You can get frameworks, you can Use a few analogies, how this applies, right?
Speaker:Cause they don't need all the details they need framers they can work with so
Speaker:they can apply it to different things.
Speaker:And so just understanding even when you're tackling a similar keyword,
Speaker:depending on how you want to tackle it, if you tag tackle it from a
Speaker:strategic level versus a tactical level, that's how you can change your tone.
Speaker:You don't want to put them both together in one article though, but yeah, so that's
Speaker:what, that's what we've always done.
Speaker:That helps really well.
Speaker:Because if you write tactical level content for someone who's going to
Speaker:be consuming it from a strategic.
Speaker:It's just not, it's not as interesting.
Speaker:And that's usually here trying to sell to as well as is the
Speaker:more, senior lower roles.
Speaker:And do you have any, guidelines?
Speaker:Thank you like to say.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:So if someone's going to produce content based on the strategy that
Speaker:you're providing for them around topic clustering, do you say your
Speaker:content should be around this many words to this many words?
Speaker:Like, do you have a criteria or you leave that up to them?
Speaker:I'll leave it up to them for the most part.
Speaker:I mean, there's, there's certain like kind of like minimum threshold standards.
Speaker:I think we usually Tell them about Clare scope or market means are these
Speaker:tools out there that they can use to help kind of guide them along the
Speaker:way that provide recommendations.
Speaker:But, but we tell them these are just tools, right?
Speaker:Like humans, work tools, tools, don't work, humans.
Speaker:And so sometimes you can have an outlier of the way a lot of these tools
Speaker:works is there'll be one outlier out there who wrote a 10,000 word article.
Speaker:And that skews the average, right.
Speaker:Really what you want, what you want to be looking at is the.
Speaker:We tell them right.
Speaker:As much as it takes to actually cover this topic in depth thoroughly.
Speaker:And we usually like to spend more time going back through the article and
Speaker:editing more things out than anything else to make it more succinct and clear.
Speaker:It can be a bit different with tactical content because you want to make sure
Speaker:you're including plenty of images and step-by-step instructions perhaps.
Speaker:But yeah, ultimately we worked countless.
Speaker:It's not necessary.
Speaker:As long as you've provided a very robust outline about here are the things that
Speaker:need to be discussed in this article.
Speaker:Well, you can't discuss those things without writing a
Speaker:sufficient amount of content.
Speaker:You know, they wouldn't write 400 words to be able to cover it.
Speaker:Most of the time, it's a little average, a thousand to 2000.
Speaker:A lot of times just depends yeah.
Speaker:That, that does that make sense?
Speaker:And what about, SEO?
Speaker:Do you give them any best practices to follow so that when they
Speaker:are producing all this content.
Speaker:That they're doing it in a manner that's going to be SEO optimized.
Speaker:So a lot of times it depends on what kind of CMS, what kind of system that they're
Speaker:built on if they're built on WordPress?
Speaker:Let's say it's WordPress.
Speaker:That's like the most common one.
Speaker:So yeah.
Speaker:So if they're built on WordPress, we don't give them a ton of recommendations.
Speaker:Like other than like the baseline of, we give them a recommendation of,
Speaker:here's how you structure a good title.
Speaker:Here's what you need to, you know, great headings subheadings
Speaker:making sure they understand about internal linking and the, probably the most
Speaker:important is really the slug, because that's something you don't want to change.
Speaker:So what the actual hyperlink is of your article because everything else
Speaker:you can change and adapt over time, you can always change the permanent link,
Speaker:but we want to avoid it as possible, but that's a bulk of it because WordPress.
Speaker:We'll handle most of everything else for you.
Speaker:When it comes to, the basics of where does it go on the site, how,
Speaker:you know, how are things structured together in terms of your post format?
Speaker:And you know, it was the content and the body and all of that.
Speaker:So we tell people most of the time you're you're far better off just,
Speaker:follow the, the base level guidelines.
Speaker:But more importantly, if you just focus on really good content that, that solves the
Speaker:problem or answers a question for your, for your consumers, you're targeting.
Speaker:That's that's half the battle is just getting it out there.
Speaker:Not to let the perfect, become the enemy of the good so to speak.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:, it's about getting it out there, which I think is a challenge
Speaker:in itself for some people.
Speaker:But yeah, some of the pointers I give, in terms of one process,
Speaker:there's a plugin called Yoast SEO.
Speaker:So they can download that and they can, follow the best practices.
Speaker:They can make sure that all the images.
Speaker:You know, have all tags behind the scenes because that is how Google
Speaker:can tell what an image is about.
Speaker:Also images are discoverables and people can find them.
Speaker:And, it's important to, to have content behind the images because
Speaker:Google cannot read images by itself.
Speaker:Um, So those are some things I would add to that, but, you know, let's dive
Speaker:really deep into this whole topic, clustering, strategy, take us behind
Speaker:the scenes of, of your software?
Speaker:Like what does it do?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So the, these, this way to think about I'll use the example I used earlier.
Speaker:If we're looking at something like McCarney browser nursing browse, or if
Speaker:you're looking at another example would be we were doing this so we're working with.
Speaker:There's some type of clustering for QuickBooks recently where you're
Speaker:looking at expense reports and then you have like expense report software.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:So the article on the site was initially covering both of those
Speaker:topics and one single page.
Speaker:Well, the way you can start to figure out like, okay, do things
Speaker:seem to be separate is take those two pages or take those two keywords.
Speaker:If you want to do it manually pull up two Chrome browser windows side by
Speaker:side on Google, put in both keywords.
Speaker:And the first thing you want to look at are the titles and the URLs that
Speaker:are ranking for each on the first page.
Speaker:And if you see a high overlap of similarity between each URL,
Speaker:then those two keywords can go together and collapse into one.
Speaker:Now that's a very manual, painful process to do.
Speaker:Especially because Google doesn't just display the URL anymore.
Speaker:You know, they kind of, uh, you have to like right.
Speaker:Click it or hover over it to see down in the status bar, what that your old is.
Speaker:So trying to do that for, you know, if you're trying to plan 10 20
Speaker:keywords, just to see where they fall, it's not so bad might take you.
Speaker:15 to 30 minutes, but when you're trying to, let's say you're a startup and you
Speaker:know, that's you know, let's say you're, can't take Canva back to the beginning.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And Ken was like, okay, we want to heavily invest in SEO.
Speaker:What's the best way to go about doing this because they want
Speaker:to reduce opportunity costs.
Speaker:They want to get results as fast as possible.
Speaker:And they want to know that where they're investing their money is hedging the
Speaker:best way they can in their favor.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:To do that.
Speaker:You have to look at a lot more data than just 20 keywords.
Speaker:You need to really form out the entire plan.
Speaker:So we start by saying, okay, like I mentioned earlier, take
Speaker:these broad level keywords.
Speaker:Let's say it's QuickBooks, you've got things like, I'm gonna look for
Speaker:everything related to invoicing invoices.
Speaker:Expense expenses, expensing time-tracking right.
Speaker:W2, all of that taxes filing account, right?
Speaker:Found all these very singular sort of broad keywords go into
Speaker:the keyword research tools that you use, whether it's a true.
Speaker:We'd like to put them in and get all the like essentially can think of it,
Speaker:like broad match, modified keyboards.
Speaker:It's anything that has that word in it.
Speaker:And some variation doesn't matter how it's ordered just some variation
Speaker:and pull all of those keywords in.
Speaker:So oftentimes so like for QuickBooks or something, you're looking at
Speaker:four or five different keywords.
Speaker:cause they offers us such a robust set of services, especially now.
Speaker:MailChimp.
Speaker:So they imagined doing that side by side thing for, you
Speaker:know, even a hundred keywords.
Speaker:It takes forever.
Speaker:So we will now read them and do it where we can collect and process this data.
Speaker:And then basically just spit back out the results to tell you, okay, here's
Speaker:all, how all of these grouped together.
Speaker:Here's what the matching.
Speaker:We also built it in a way that we can, like I said, calculate priority score
Speaker:or relevancy score, where we can put in.
Speaker:Where, where are you ranking for these currently?
Speaker:Where are your competitors ranking for these currently?
Speaker:And then from there you can calculate, things like what's the value of this.
Speaker:You know, where does it fall on the funnel?
Speaker:We, we map all of that out, rhythmically that way.
Speaker:When it's, when it's all said and done, we've got a list of here's the exact
Speaker:pages you need to make on your website.
Speaker:Here's the order that you need to make them in.
Speaker:Here's how they need to be grouped together.
Speaker:Here's how this maps to your, to your funnel distribution, depending on what
Speaker:type of business you are, would kind of dictate whether you need more top
Speaker:of funnel or more bottom of funnel.
Speaker:And we mapped that out and give it to them and say, okay, now you're ready to go.
Speaker:Like, these are the topics you need to go create content over.
Speaker:And you could take a shot in the dark and do this, like, just kind
Speaker:of like a manual gut instinct way to, or look and model after
Speaker:competitors is what a lot of people do.
Speaker:We just didn't like doing that because we knew that there was a
Speaker:lot of opportunity out there that the competitors weren't aware of.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:If you're always trying to.
Speaker:Play catch up with them.
Speaker:You never get to become the leader.
Speaker:And so that's why we said, okay, let's, let's actually assess what the Tam is.
Speaker:Let's really understand what this company's total addressable market
Speaker:is, so that eventually people are trying to play catch up with those.
Speaker:We're able to find the opportunities before anyone else had.
Speaker:And so that's our approach.
Speaker:And the benefit of it is when you do create content in the order
Speaker:that we recommend, you were able to rank much faster, you still kind of
Speaker:have an initial period that it takes time to ramp up and get Google to
Speaker:index your site and establish what we call topical authority, right?
Speaker:To really, for Google to really trust.
Speaker:This is what your site is going to consistently publish content
Speaker:on and they can trust you.
Speaker:But we've been able to do that consistently for several brands without
Speaker:even building back links or anything.
Speaker:we took this one small niche, niche, niche e-commerce website from like
Speaker:zero to like 60 K traffic per month.
Speaker:They only saw like four products took him like seascape travel month.
Speaker:Didn't build any backlinks.
Speaker:I think they're like They have like a domain authority is what we call it.
Speaker:An SEO of I think like 14, you know, and they're less than 18 months old.
Speaker:So we've replicated that several times.
Speaker:So that's really the nice benefit too, is you're able to create content,
Speaker:focus more on content creation and the quality of the content and not have
Speaker:to spam people requesting back links.
Speaker:And, you know, trying to go through that whole side of the process too, which saves
Speaker:money whenever you don't have to do that.
Speaker:Also, I think there's many reasons.
Speaker:Let me just clarify the, I think there was some industries.
Speaker:Still sort of table stakes.
Speaker:If you're in finance, if you're, if you're trying to compete with NerdWallet, like
Speaker:you're going to have to build backlinks, you know, but again, depending on the
Speaker:business model, we'll assess it and say, okay, here's what you need to do.
Speaker:Like you can get away without building backlinks.
Speaker:We didn't try it first.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Versus if you're in something like insurance or finance, like.
Speaker:You're probably just gonna have to, Yeah.
Speaker:Anytime.
Speaker:I mean, if you don't have to do backlinks, I mean, I have been able
Speaker:to get my own sites and clients' websites to rank on page one of
Speaker:Google, multiple times for multiple keywords, you know, by using a strategy
Speaker:that is a content creation strategy.
Speaker:It's creating, you know, SEO, optimized, blog posts and.
Speaker:In a way it might even be doing topic clustering.
Speaker:I just didn't realize that's what I'm doing, but I feel like it is.
Speaker:And this was something that I was doing years ago because I just remember that.
Speaker:I have this job and I had spare time.
Speaker:So I said, okay, let me research how we can, you know, rank
Speaker:high for, for the organization.
Speaker:So they're like, sure.
Speaker:So, I built a blog just to test it out and see, and I was able to get that wog,
Speaker:you know, traffic and get it to rank.
Speaker:And then I was like, okay, I'm onto something and everything, you know,
Speaker:that I've done is it's creating content.
Speaker:But I haven't really, I've done like literally zero backlinks.
Speaker:Like if they have backlinks, that's one thing.
Speaker:And those sites have been able to rank high and like for my own web.
Speaker:You know, once I submitted it to, to Google, and built a site map, so
Speaker:they know, Hey, here's a new website, indexes and index these pages.
Speaker:It was like on page one within like four or five days of launching the website,
Speaker:which is pretty good, but it was all.
Speaker:A very strategic thing.
Speaker:It was a content marketing strategy based on picking the right domain based
Speaker:on writing content and writing blogs based on a specific keyword or topic.
Speaker:And then even the pages, the way that they were titled named the
Speaker:content, it was all very strategic.
Speaker:So, you know, when I hear you talk about the order of, what they're
Speaker:doing, the order is very important.
Speaker:I want to dive deeper into that because, How does that, how does that work in
Speaker:terms of how do you determine what order to put, you know, different
Speaker:topics and, and different ideas, because I think that's something that
Speaker:if they were doing it manually, I don't think it would be an easy task to do.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:But your technology is coming up with these, Hey, this is an order as well.
Speaker:Let's talk about the order.
Speaker:So, I'll see if I can come up with a way to explain this without like, given
Speaker:like the proprietary details, the way.
Speaker:Our initial problem, whenever we were facing ordering, like, cause we'd
Speaker:used some other like topic clustering methods, even like after we'd
Speaker:initially built ours were like, great.
Speaker:We have topic clusters.
Speaker:We know we answered the problem of what pages I need to create and
Speaker:what pages do I not need to create.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:That way we didn't have two pages competing with one another.
Speaker:Cause that was something that we ran into a lot too.
Speaker:And it was like, okay, great.
Speaker:I now know what content and maybe.
Speaker:What order do I create the center?
Speaker:There's a lot, there's a lot of different paths I can take here.
Speaker:And so that was the next problem is trying to figure out how to solve that.
Speaker:So depend on how robust the website already is, if they already have a lot
Speaker:of content, it becomes much easier.
Speaker:If they don't there's another way to, to kind of approach that to.
Speaker:The way that we were doing it prior, and that a lot of other people in content
Speaker:marketing or SEO will approach it as they'll look at things like what's called
Speaker:keyword difficulty and the various tools out there that say, this is a, this
Speaker:is not a very difficult keyword to go after you should go after the first.
Speaker:And we didn't like that.
Speaker:Primarily because of what we just talked about, all of those Katy
Speaker:metrics on difficulty are all dependent upon backlinks as, as their primary
Speaker:variable that calculates them.
Speaker:And we just, we're seeing the backlinks just through random chance
Speaker:where we get lucky a few times we sold it, the backlinks, we were
Speaker:able to rank things without it.
Speaker:So I didn't want to rely on a metric that, you know, Another variable that I didn't
Speaker:really think was as relevant as a, as a means of determining where to start.
Speaker:So the way we determined priority, let's say you have a
Speaker:site with some existing content.
Speaker:Doesn't even have to be a lot, but if you've got some things ranking or if you
Speaker:got any content out there currently, What were you look at as we look to understand
Speaker:where are you already ranking with?
Speaker:So if we build out the topic map from this cluster, some of your
Speaker:pages you already have are going to be ranking for some of these topics.
Speaker:They may not be ranking on the first page, but some of them are
Speaker:going to be ranking in the top 100.
Speaker:And so we use that based on your positioning to understand where is
Speaker:Google ranking you at for this topic?
Speaker:Because that's a gauge on how authoritative you are on this.
Speaker:And the more content that you have, the easier it makes it though, where you're
Speaker:able to say, okay, where does Google see me as being most authoritative?
Speaker:And then where does Google see me as being least authoritative?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And from that the way our, our score works, as we looked at.
Speaker:What are you ranking for currently?
Speaker:How well are you ranking for it?
Speaker:How quickly were you able to rank for it and use that to establish what is your own
Speaker:personalized you know, topical authority in this current niche, as it stands
Speaker:right now, and then we can trace a line.
Speaker:It would be hard to explain with words, but in, in graph three, we're able to
Speaker:take notes which are like topics and edges, which are connections between these
Speaker:topics, how they relate to one another.
Speaker:We can trace edges between these nodes.
Speaker:And you're able to share your screen if you want.
Speaker:I mean, you can share your screen and show that if you want the okay.
Speaker:' cause I think this whole thing about, the order of the content,
Speaker:it's fascinating because I think that people don't really think about that.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And then again, it comes down to marketing strategy and strategy on, creating
Speaker:the right content at the right time.
Speaker:Because the order that you're putting it in is going to impact the
Speaker:results it's going to impact where you rank, how you rank, if you rank.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And, and I think, you know, for me, like everything I do with
Speaker:marketing is very strategic.
Speaker:So I love.
Speaker:Hearing things that are very strategy driven.
Speaker:And to me, when you say, Hey, content, it has to be produced in the right order.
Speaker:And it has to be posted in this particular order.
Speaker:I think that's a big marketing strategy.
Speaker:There's a reason behind that.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And I, and I'll clarify and say that it doesn't have to be a, you're
Speaker:going to get better results if you, if you do it in a particular order.
Speaker:You know, we, we tell people that.
Speaker:you don't have to there's a, there's an optimal way, an optimal,
Speaker:efficient way to do things.
Speaker:And then there's, just, I mean, doing anything is often better than doing
Speaker:nothing, but if you've got, you know, if you've got the budget and especially if
Speaker:you're trying to hit certain goals, it's like, okay, like invest in something like
Speaker:this, or invest in a very well thought out strategy, at least so that you're not just
Speaker:throwing things at the wall to see what's.
Speaker:To really, you know, have a plan that you're going to tackle.
Speaker:So, there's an immaterial material on the home page.
Speaker:This is probably just the easy kind of way to sort of show it.
Speaker:But you can think of each one of these kind of circles here as a topic and all
Speaker:these lines that connect between them.
Speaker:It's kind of like how you would kind of visualize a site a visual site map.
Speaker:If you're using a e-script crawling tool that showed you site architecture.
Speaker:But it's applying it to the topic itself.
Speaker:So the close to the circles are.
Speaker:That's content that relates more closely with one another.
Speaker:So you could imagine that being something like there's this
Speaker:concept called bridge topics.
Speaker:So something like this little circle right here that kind of sits far
Speaker:away from this one kind of middle way between these two kind of, hubs here,
Speaker:the blue ones are hubs by the way what that serves as a bridge topics.
Speaker:So an example of that.
Speaker:Would be something like, let's say we were doing probiotics and prebiotics
Speaker:they're similar, but they're separate.
Speaker:You're eventually gonna have a topic like probiotics versus prebiotics.
Speaker:Can I take probiotics and prebiotics together?
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Those kinds of questions, those service bridge topics to get between the two.
Speaker:So with one company we worked with, we created a bunch of
Speaker:content around probiotics, and then they wanted to start with.
Speaker:Came up with a new product and prebiotics.
Speaker:And so it's like, okay, now we want to start ranking for this.
Speaker:So what we did is we started instead of just going in grading I mean they
Speaker:have their product and collection pages, but instead of grading content
Speaker:around prebiotics, like what's the best prebiotic best provides for women best
Speaker:pre blogs for men, things like that.
Speaker:We said, let's start because we're already ranked them well for pro.
Speaker:Let's create content about what's the difference between
Speaker:probiotics and prebiotics.
Speaker:Can you take them together?
Speaker:We started creating those articles first and they were ranking very quickly
Speaker:because we already had established topic authority about probiotics.
Speaker:And then we use that to then blend over into prebiotics.
Speaker:And that's how you can start to move between individual subject areas.
Speaker:Now, if you're a brand new site, There are other considerations to take into account.
Speaker:You, you have to assess what type of market that you're in first.
Speaker:What, what kind of vertical you're in, if you're in a volatile vertical, if
Speaker:you're in a sort of mutable changeable vertical, or if you're in a very stable
Speaker:vertical if you're in a vulnerable vertical where the top 10 ranking pages
Speaker:for a given topic are constantly changing very frequently You have to take bets
Speaker:because there's no way to actually know.
Speaker:So if you're in like crypto right now, or NFT or something like that, like you've
Speaker:got to just try things because it's, it's too early to know exactly what's going.
Speaker:If you're in a much more stable market though, say mortgages, right.
Speaker:Or home loans or anything like that.
Speaker:We'll talk about legal maybe like, because I worked on lots of lawyers,
Speaker:so let's talk about law firms.
Speaker:Is this, strategy and concept something that even law firms can apply
Speaker:and, can it be like a smaller firm or does it have to be more so a that's.
Speaker:Who is this ideal for?
Speaker:Because I know like there's a lot of even solopreneurs.
Speaker:There's like law firms that have, maybe just there have a partner or maybe
Speaker:they're under staff and 10 to 15 people.
Speaker:Is this strategy something that you would recommend for them as well?
Speaker:And if so, what are some tips for getting started?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So again, I can definitely talk about logs.
Speaker:We've worked in that space prior, and we saw some clients in it.
Speaker:They're just kind of like a local friends, but more in the perspective
Speaker:of personal injury law which tends to be the more competitive side of law.
Speaker:So, yes, it works for them.
Speaker:It works for for the people that we've worked in that.
Speaker:It's just a question of scale, right?
Speaker:How much content are you going to create?
Speaker:What does your budget look like?
Speaker:How quickly can you create that content?
Speaker:Can you find the right people to create content that's going to, adhere to your
Speaker:state's, like, you know, bar ethics guidelines with respect to advertising.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So, what we've done there in the past is we said, okay take
Speaker:all your content together.
Speaker:Let's say you're a brand new website.
Speaker:We actually did this with with an attorney.
Speaker:We've built this website from scratch.
Speaker:He didn't have anything.
Speaker:And, and did this with him.
Speaker:He's you know, I think his city that he's in has about may be 180,000 people.
Speaker:It's a pretty small city.
Speaker:He's getting a bout 10,000 traffic per month, which is good for.
Speaker:Dr.
Speaker:You know, I was his brand new website, Dr.
Speaker:Like seven website with only about 20 pieces of content.
Speaker:And that's pretty good.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So we we started you have to just kind of say, okay, like
Speaker:where do you want to start?
Speaker:Do you want to pick a more.
Speaker:If you're at, let's say your personal injury, you don't want to go after car
Speaker:accidents first, if you're just starting out with your website, feel free to market
Speaker:and advertise yourself that way on social.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:, and, advertising billboards, TV, whatever.
Speaker:But from your website standpoint, you want to start with something that's
Speaker:a little bit less competitive so that you can begin to get some traction
Speaker:and start showing Google that you have that you're developing top authority.
Speaker:So motorcycle accidents, slip, and falls, right.
Speaker:Wrongful death can be.
Speaker:It's kind of, kind of depends, but workman's comp things like that.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So going after and building out content around each of those types
Speaker:of hubs, the one that we did it with, we started with, semi-truck accidents
Speaker:still pretty competitive, but far less competitive than car accidents.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So we started with truck accidents that we did slip and fall,
Speaker:and then we do workman's comp.
Speaker:Now he had all of the service pages on his website.
Speaker:Car accidents and for you know, the broad personal injury, all of that, , we had
Speaker:all the service pages, but the actual blog content, we focused on trucks,
Speaker:slip and falls, workman's comp, and then worked our way into car accidents.
Speaker:And so here's what the impact of that's been.
Speaker:We published an article not too long ago about like chest injuries after
Speaker:a car accident and within 48 hours, he was ranking on the first page.
Speaker:So, you know, that's, that's very difficult to do in personal
Speaker:injury, even though it's tends to be more local based, it's a
Speaker:highly, highly competitive industry.
Speaker:You can find out from the UI, you can do some DUI, you can do this in divorce.
Speaker:Those are actually far less competitive.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And then be honest with you.
Speaker:If it works in BI, it's going to work in those apps.
Speaker:Yeah, but structurally you definitely want to start with all of your
Speaker:service pages first and your local pages for the cities you're in and
Speaker:the areas you want to operate in.
Speaker:That's your, that's your website content.
Speaker:Now your blog content, right?
Speaker:From your blog content.
Speaker:You want to start with the questions that people are asking, you know,
Speaker:Kennesaw kind of truck driver use their cell phone on driving, right?
Speaker:that content doesn't necessarily drive leads.
Speaker:So that's, something important that we always have to convey to people is that.
Speaker:That's up a content isn't necessarily going to drive a lead.
Speaker:What it does is we're trying to prove to Google that we are
Speaker:credible to talk about this topic.
Speaker:And as you do that, then you can start to talk about, what to do if you've
Speaker:been hit by a semi-truck, do you need to Sue the driver or the company?
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:You know, the, how to report it, how do you get in contact?
Speaker:You know, like all of that sort of things, right.
Speaker:You work your way into that.
Speaker:Now, if you start to see yourself getting traction, this is why we
Speaker:run our clusters pretty frequently.
Speaker:Usually once over 30 days to see, to reassess where they're at with things.
Speaker:If we start to see it, cause it recalculates the priority score.
Speaker:Every time we see them gaining traction in an area very, very quickly then
Speaker:we will sometimes well the prior score, we'll flip it around the topics
Speaker:that was recommending us go after.
Speaker:And we'll actually start putting more competitive terms at first, because
Speaker:once you see you're starting to get.
Speaker:Then you can definitely go after those more competitive terms immediately.
Speaker:And that's how you would approach it.
Speaker:If you're not using like our technology and having us do it
Speaker:for you, you know, you would just say, okay, let me try some things.
Speaker:Let me take some bets.
Speaker:And if I see that I'm getting a foothold, then double down and, you know, I think.
Speaker:Generally the way you'd planned to most things in life and
Speaker:you're trying things, right?
Speaker:So that's our approach.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I love that.
Speaker:I mean, so you start out, more niche and you get, rankings for those,
Speaker:you get that content out there.
Speaker:So Google recognizes that, you know, your website Is authoritative in terms
Speaker:of topics related to very specific personal injury, questions and topics.
Speaker:And once you can rank for those and it understands that then you can start slowly
Speaker:going a little bit broader and broader.
Speaker:And, and I think.
Speaker:That's really important.
Speaker:Like what you just shared because a lot of lawyers are under this
Speaker:concept of especially in personal injury right away, they want to go
Speaker:for the car accident, lawyer, Los Angeles, and those kinds of things.
Speaker:And it's very competitive, whether you're doing paid like PPC sponsored
Speaker:section or whether you're doing SEL, it's very competitive and.
Speaker:It, it can take months right.
Speaker:To, to rank.
Speaker:But in the meantime, if you can start producing content where it's
Speaker:effective to get you to rank on a more niche level, then you can expand.
Speaker:And as you expand, I think your website's going to become more powerful
Speaker:and authoritative because when you think about the websites that are,
Speaker:rotative like a HubSpot or, you know, you think of lawyers.com sites like.
Speaker:The reason why they are ranking on page one is because they have thousands and
Speaker:millions of pages of content, you know?
Speaker:And that is why a website that has 10 pages versus a website that invest
Speaker:in writing 10 pieces of content.
Speaker:And after the end of the year, they have 120, right?
Speaker:And after three years they have 360 pages of their website.
Speaker:Versus our competitor might only have 20 pages.
Speaker:Google's going to say, Hey, your website is more powerful and
Speaker:authoritative than your competition.
Speaker:As a result, we're going to reward you for that.
Speaker:And we're going to rank you higher.
Speaker:And that's the thing is it's about creating content.
Speaker:And I think one of the mistakes that I see some attorneys.
Speaker:They put all of their eggs in one basket, they will invest in paid campaigns, PPC.
Speaker:And, and I know those guys used to sell those back in the day and
Speaker:they'll put a lot of money into it.
Speaker:And for pie, it is the cost is just going higher and higher and higher.
Speaker:But then what happens is where, how are you going to build the company
Speaker:long-term growth and sustainability when.
Speaker:Yeah, you have to turn that campaign off or you don't want to pay for
Speaker:it or it's not working anymore.
Speaker:And then you don't have any organic rankings.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And that's why, to me, I'm a firm believer in content marketing.
Speaker:Cause I think content marketing is really, what's going to set
Speaker:up your business for success.
Speaker:Like if you want to sell your law firm down the road, or you want to show to
Speaker:investors, if you're a startup that.
Speaker:You have built a company that's sustainable that someone can take over
Speaker:and they can, they can run you, you have to create that digital presence online
Speaker:because everything's online nowadays.
Speaker:And I think content is how you do.
Speaker:what, I've what I've tried to explain to attorneys I've worked with in the past.
Speaker:And I'm, I'm still somewhat uniquely qualified to talk about this because
Speaker:if, if anyone anyone's ever heard of there's, what's it called?
Speaker:Rankings IO run by Chris dryer.
Speaker:He works heavily in the person who space.
Speaker:we write their content like, for them, we, we manage their content
Speaker:marketing along with Chris.
Speaker:So, we, we still kind of keep one foot in the door.
Speaker:We just don't directly work with personal injury lawyers and things
Speaker:like that ourselves anymore.
Speaker:But but again, we're still involved with it.
Speaker:So what I was trying to explain to them the past is that it's not as if, because
Speaker:this is the angle that we're taking with the content on your website with the, with
Speaker:the blog strategy that you can't, like I said, Advertise or have initiatives going
Speaker:for car accidents or the more competitive things on other marketing channels.
Speaker:This is, this is not a, like you mentioned, you don't put
Speaker:all your eggs in one basket.
Speaker:You need to take a much more omni-channel approach.
Speaker:More importantly, really what I think that attorneys need to do more
Speaker:than anything else is get really good attribution tracking going on
Speaker:and really understand how they're getting their traffic from their
Speaker:resources and, and what's converting.
Speaker:And also to understand.
Speaker:The way marketing works these days, it is not this linear path from they
Speaker:come to your website and they convert.
Speaker:That's just not the way it works.
Speaker:You have to really understand at a holistic level how your
Speaker:entire funnel fits together.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So if you're advertising, someone comes into an article about you know, their
Speaker:chest hurting after a car accident.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Well, we don't know how injured they are.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:But if they later on search for a Carson that longer, we
Speaker:now know they have our intent.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And so.
Speaker:Pixel them, you can read them, re target them with advertising because
Speaker:you can bring for the one as my chest hurt after a car accident, it's, it's
Speaker:far less competitive because all the other attorneys are more focused on
Speaker:the bottom of funnel terms, right?
Speaker:The people looking to hire one, but if you can get them to your site, then,
Speaker:then you can retarget and advertise for that car accident longer term.
Speaker:And yes, it's expensive, but you're going to be advertising to
Speaker:a particular individual who has already been exposed to your brand.
Speaker:And so you're spending far less money than what you would, if you were.
Speaker:Constantly bidding on that term.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Same thing on.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:You can retarget them on social and just kind of stay top of mind and figure
Speaker:out like, are they engaged in this?
Speaker:Do they want to learn more?
Speaker:So maybe they come to your site about my chest is my chest hurt enough?
Speaker:Christ, what do I need to do?
Speaker:Is there anything bad going on here?
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:How do I heal?
Speaker:How recover?
Speaker:That's a very interesting point.
Speaker:They're going to be Googling those things as well, because it's immediate they're
Speaker:maybe they have pain, they're suffering from the ramifications of what happened.
Speaker:It could be physical, it could also be emotional.
Speaker:It could be traumatic what happened and they can be Googling
Speaker:those types of things in.
Speaker:But what's interesting is most attorneys, they don't even think that way, right?
Speaker:Since about broadening their horizons and not the attorneys, but I mean,
Speaker:everyone, even like eCommerce startups, everyone broadening their horizons of how
Speaker:people search online is not just the main key word they're actually looking for.
Speaker:Again, solutions to their problem right there.
Speaker:They're trying to find answers to questions.
Speaker:And also when you are grading content, a lot of the times when you post your
Speaker:content in the form of most commonly asked questions that people are
Speaker:already searching for an asking for online, like that has the propensity.
Speaker:To rank high on Google and it gets, you found, it gets you discovered,
Speaker:you know, so they think that's huge.
Speaker:Is there, is there anything else you would like to share with our audience today?
Speaker:Nothing immediately comes to mind.
Speaker:Nothing.
Speaker:I think, I think I've rambled on a decent amount, about a variety of things
Speaker:if you want to learn anything about in-depth content marketing, like we have
Speaker:our own resources on learning growth.
Speaker:HRS is a really great resource to go on, learn about content marketing.
Speaker:If you're in the B2B SAS space, super path as a community built
Speaker:by Jimmy daily, that's a fantastic resource to go, to be able to kind
Speaker:of connect and network and from.
Speaker:Content marketers, if you're in the legal space there's a
Speaker:variety of great blogs out there.
Speaker:I'm a little partial to rankings IO because I, I write a lot for
Speaker:it, but but there's plenty of really great resources out there.
Speaker:More importantly, I would say like, just don't believe everything that you hear.
Speaker:I need you to test things and, think about things in a much more holistic way.
Speaker:And once you've like picked up land, like, follow it through the execution.
Speaker:Don't, don't get distracted every, every month and try to change things up.
Speaker:So, especially with SEO, because it will not work.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So have a plan and then focus on that plan until you accomplish
Speaker:what was in that plan before you just try to do too many things.
Speaker:I mean, yeah, that's great advice.
Speaker:I can totally relate to that.
Speaker:And anything exciting new that, you know, in terms of features or
Speaker:functionality that you're launching for, for Arden growth that, you know,
Speaker:you want to tell the audience about?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So we we're constantly iterating on the tool to make it better and better.
Speaker:It's.
Speaker:It's extremely, extremely fast.
Speaker:So that's always nice that we can develop these strategies very quickly.
Speaker:We're working on a way to be able to map this into the second phase of
Speaker:things of the actual creation process.
Speaker:Like we can never like create content for you.
Speaker:Like people have to make content, even with tools up there like , but
Speaker:being able to help inform the structure of that content.
Speaker:What the subheadings need to be.
Speaker:You know, those sorts of things.
Speaker:We're working on launching that here in the relatively near
Speaker:future, we already calculate things like what's the search intent?
Speaker:What where's it mapping the funnel?
Speaker:What's the value of it?
Speaker:What's the potential value?
Speaker:What's your priority?
Speaker:What's your relevancy.
Speaker:We have hubs main keyword subgroups.
Speaker:We it's a ton of data, but it's a lot of things that, unless you're in the know.
Speaker:It's overwhelming.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And so that's why we take it and distill it down into these strategy documents that
Speaker:make it very clear what you need to do.
Speaker:And we kind of remove all the noise.
Speaker:We still give it to you if you, you know, if you want to dive into it.
Speaker:But but yeah, so the next step is really trying to bridge the gap between
Speaker:now we've clustered things together.
Speaker:We've mapped out the, how the plan needs to be executed.
Speaker:Now let's take it one more step further into that sort of outlining
Speaker:and brief creation process before it gets handed off to her.
Speaker:And if someone wants to work with your organization, I mean, what's the process.
Speaker:Is there like a, you know, set pricing plans that they can pick from?
Speaker:Or is it all custom or how does that process work?
Speaker:We've been playing around with pricing.
Speaker:It, a lot of times it depends on.
Speaker:Really what you're needing.
Speaker:If, if people just want say a topic cluster built for them to understand,
Speaker:like, you know, how they need to create content if they want to go
Speaker:execute and they don't need us to make strategy documents like we'll
Speaker:make those for you go for like $5,000.
Speaker:Cause our algorithms so fast now that it's, it's, it's very easy for us to do.
Speaker:Now, if you're looking for more longterm, strategic assistance
Speaker:throughout the process, everything.
Speaker:We do the research for you.
Speaker:We cluster things together for you.
Speaker:We're helping you make briefs.
Speaker:We're guiding you along the way of the content creation process.
Speaker:We're helping you find train writers.
Speaker:That's, you know, it's a big, that's a time intensive task.
Speaker:That's when it gets a bit more custom and we have to kind of understand, like
Speaker:what's the scope of the project look like.
Speaker:But yeah Perfect.
Speaker:Love all that.
Speaker:Well, thank you so much for being on the mesmerizing marketing.
Speaker:And do you want to share any websites or social media handles where
Speaker:people can connect with you guys?
Speaker:I said art and group.com.
Speaker:That's our main website and probably the best place to connect with
Speaker:me, your name from our growth is going to be on LinkedIn.
Speaker:We're not very we're not active on Facebook.
Speaker:So there's not always the best place for that either.
Speaker:So I think LinkedIn, LinkedIn is one of the best places, just search
Speaker:for scholar Reeves on LinkedIn, and you'll be able to find us.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:We'll definitely link that in the show notes.
Speaker:Thank you so much for being a guest today.
Speaker:Thank you for listening to the mesmerizing marketing podcast.
Speaker:If you found this episode valuable, please subscribe to the show.
Speaker:So you don't ever miss an episode and also share it with your friends.
Speaker:Dimple would be so grateful.
Speaker:If you could take a minute to leave a review and visit the podcast website,
Speaker:to check out all the latest episodes.
Speaker:At www.mesmerizingmarketingpodcast.com that's www.mesmerizingmarketingpodcast.com
Speaker:and follow a dimple on clubhouse.
Speaker:Her handle is marketing expert and also join her mesmerizing marketing
Speaker:club also on clubhouse for live rooms on top marketing strategies for
Speaker:entrepreneurs and business owners who want to mesmerize their marketing.
