Solving The Content Conundrum (A Clever Way To Succeed at SEO)

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Today, I'm talking with Erik Newton about how to solve the

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content conundrum, a clever way of succeeding with SEO. Eric is

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the Vice President of Marketing at Milestone Inc, a digital

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marketing software and services company, where he manages

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acquisition content and product marketing. So let's dive in.

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Eric, it's so good to have you on the show. Glad to be here,

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darling. I'm really excited to get into today's topic where

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we're going to talk about the content conundrum more content

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or more visibility, and audience. Tell us a little bit

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more about what that means to you and your skill set. Yeah, the

The Content Conundrum

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content conundrum is defined by a key piece of data that was

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developed in a large study by H refs, where they observed, like

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a billion a billion impressions and millions of URLs and

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keywords. And what they saw was that 91% of content had no

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audience from Google. And what that means is that over time,

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after you launch and release your blog, and do the initial

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social promotion for something, its long term viability is

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mostly driven by search engines. And if you're not in the first

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15 or 18 positions, you have virtually no audience coming

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from Google. So that begins the content conundrum, which is a

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cool phrase developed by a guy named Andy bats. And it's it's

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it's good alliterative phrase, and what it's basically saying,

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and the question it's, you have to ask yourself, is, do I make

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more content? Or do I bring more audience to the content that I

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already have. And if it doesn't take you long to think about it,

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that you'd write, if you could do it, you'd rather do the

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second because creating new content is a lot of work. I

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mean, it's fun to doing what we're doing right now. And I see

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your publishing about, you know, a couple of months. And you

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know, sometimes, you know, once a week, that it's good to make

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new content, but you do want to take care and nurture the

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content that already exists in your portfolio, and get it more

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audience. So this is all a very clever and fun way of talking

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about SEO, SEO is really the business of getting audience to

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content. And since Google is providing between, I don't know,

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60 70% of traffic, if you take out direct Google or search

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engines is a huge channel. So how do you do SEO? And how do

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you how do you get your content, right? Is the the question of

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how you get more leverage out of the content you made last week

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or last month. You know, this isn't necessarily the case for

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10 or 20 year old content, which you know, depending on what kind

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of company you're in, you might have some of that doesn't need

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to be like five years or less. So let's talk about solving the

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content conundrum by getting more audience to, to the content

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we have. Let's break it up into four buckets, accelerate, amend,

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extend, and append, make it pretty make it make a little bit

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easier for people to follow if they're taking notes. Or if the

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if we you know, we can put out some notes with the with the

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podcast later. So accelerate means customer experience, it

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means page load speed, Google's put an emphasis they gave us the

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warning, they gave us the one year warning that page load

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speed is going to be a big deal content stability. And this is

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called this is called the core vitals. So if your core vitals

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are good, and your content sits on top of your website, that and

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you're quick to get your core vitals, right, you're

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accelerating, and Google will reward you for that you'll

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typically see on a really good acceleration, you'll see a

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pickup of maybe 10 or 20 positions. So if you got stuff

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on page three, and four, if you got if you went from four second

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page load to 1.1 second page load, you'd see that stuff move

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up into lower, you know, upper upper second page lower lower

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first page. Now, in this accelerate category, let's talk

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about amp, which is accelerated mobile pages, which is a markup

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format that Google defined 567 years ago. That was sort of a

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boomy thing at one point and then people started saying, you

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know, amp is dead. AMP is definitely not dead. It's not

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being used that much. It's being used by maybe five or 6% of

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websites. What amp does is it gives you a recipe for speed. It

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simplifies the page and a declutters page and it makes

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this lightweight version, that lightweight version is mobile,

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Google sees it. And Google gives you credit for it. It's it's a

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good, it's a good means to an end of getting a fast page and

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good page experience. So that's the first one that's accelerate.

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Yeah. Yeah, you know, this is so good. I mean, I would love to

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get into the other steps in just a minute. One thing I love to

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break down to is first off, for those tuning in, definitely take

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note on what Eric's breaking down. Because far too many

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people I feel like have lean so much on, say, just exclusively

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one form of traffic, maybe it's just social media traffic, or

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maybe it is, like affiliate or other leveraged traffic like

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that. But to me, and what has more of the longevity with the

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internet being around is what you're talking about Eric, and

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SEO and organic, and putting the upfront work in and getting all

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of those pieces optimized, will serve you a lot more longer term

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than say, all of the often wasted marketing budget into

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solely just paid ads bed.

Long Term Equity

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Yeah, one of the ways I like to say that his long term equity,

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you know, it is it is a hassle to get things to, you know, be

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in good condition for SEO. But once you do it the long tail of

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benefit of this media of this channel, I've got stuff that I

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optimized and got into first position five, six years ago, we

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can look it up right now it's going to be in first place still

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is in first or second, still getting traffic for companies,

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you know, companies I don't even work for anymore. That's long

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term equity, that's a long term benefit. When you use media, you

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get an immediate benefit, you get a lot of satisfaction, you

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get a lot of control, I can control the ad, I can I can test

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on ads, but I'm paying 235 15 bucks a click in paid search and

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you know be paying, I can control my message and display.

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But this is getting me long term equity to for for free. And you

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know, I've have you even on a b2b basis, if you get something

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that does 1020 30 per day, well, you know, 30 per day is 10,000

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per year. That's on one topic. That's really good. Alright, so

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that was the first bucket accelerate, make the pages fast.

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Consider using ample while your competitors aren't using amp, I

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can guarantee every time I look at research, it's not I just

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don't see that many people using it. The next one is amend. So

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you amend your existing content. So you usually write something

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and it's the writing and the idea is the most fun like you

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and I coming up with which topic we were going to cover today.

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That's the fun part. And then kind of like, are we going to

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expand it? Are we going to you know, do we have to you know,

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we're getting to a certain amount of coverage of topic or

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depth or length. But some of the simple things you can do to

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content that already exists, is amend the body of the content

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with good subtitles. And traditionally, in SEO, we would

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say use h2 markup, I don't think it matters as much anymore. But

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just for simplicity. h1 is is a ranking factor, Google

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understands that it's visible H twos or H threes, or sub r sub

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heads. And I think what Google likes about it is it it helps

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organize the page. And that's a good user experience. That's a

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good reader experience, it makes it more skimmable. So that's

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pretty easy. Add, add add subtitles every two or three

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paragraphs. And you know, make them look probably you know,

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your stylesheet that you're using, and whatever you're

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publishing your blog, or your site on, will probably

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automatically do some formatting to make it look like that. But

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using an h2 tag is a good idea. Now the other thing you can do

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on the amend step here, is that you can add questions. Alright,

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just adding questions, think of the four or five questions that

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go with this topic. And, you know, if you if you study, if

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you research questions against topics, what you see is like you

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get a lot of what is people like definitions? How do you How much

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does it cost? How difficult is it? How do I get started? Those

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are the natural things you might ask. And those are the things

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that the audience is asking. So those even just understanding

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those five or six question types, will enable you to kind

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of efficiently go over 10 or 20 or 30 pieces of existing content

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and amend it with an FAQ. Now an FAQ has two parts has a

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question, and it has an answer. And I'm going to I'm going to

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revisit this when we get to when we get to a pending What do you

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append with to make it even stronger? Thoughts on that dawn?

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Yeah, you know, it's, it's getting into the weeds more than

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what people actually do say on podcast like I just want to say

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that in general terms in and that's I love like I'm taking

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notes for myself too. That's really good. That's really good.

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And it's something that majority people are not even considering

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When it comes to marketing, let alone marketing for your website

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and PageRank. And so I would love for you to just keep going,

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you know, breaking down this framework, because based on what

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you shared it just some simple references to case studies. I

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can see that it works. And so I think this is a lot of value. So

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yeah, good. Yeah. Like now the streamer. Yeah, I

The Framework

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like to I like to provide, try this at home stuff to people.

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When I do webinars, I do a lot of hours, a lot of office hours

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and number of podcasts. Alright, let's go back to our framework.

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So we're solving the content conundrum with accelerate,

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amend, extend, and append. So we covered the first two topics,

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let's touch on the third. The third is extending the media

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type. So if you come up with an idea, typically you come up with

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a bigger piece, like a podcast like a webinar. And then the

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real work begins. The sort of the fun part is the recording

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and having a great conversation like we're having now. Then you

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got to make a one pager, then you got to do a transcript. And

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then you break out the FAQs. If people ask questions during an

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event, you want to attach that a video, a short video, a longer

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format video, great images. So these are these are different.

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These are different media asset types that you want to create

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against each topic. And as you do that, Google says, Oh, this

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is more robust. This is this is more fulsome, a resource for the

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people I might refer here. So those are, those are the things

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you can extend. And the way you know this is working is when you

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look at the Google SERPs the search engine results pages that

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you can see sometimes they have videos, and you know, you've got

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a video and they've got a little a little place marker to get the

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exact, you know topic that you're looking for within a

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video on YouTube or another hosting site. You can see you

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know, recipe information, you can see reviews, you can see

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images, you can see the FAQs are popping up in a couple of

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different ways. When you use FAQs, you'll see them at the

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very top at the rich snippet, which is called position zero by

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some it makes a little more clear what we're talking about.

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It's above the normal results. And typically, when you have

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that position zero, you don't have ads. So it's a very

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prominent, you're going to get like 17 to 25%, click through

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even if you answered the question really well, in the in

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the rich snippet, and Google, it looks like Google's taking your

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content. But Google is leveraging your content, but you

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still there's a lot of traffic to go around. Then below that,

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typically, there's something called people also ask. And

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people also ask is one of the more mysterious layouts? So this

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is that little accordion of questions where you ask a

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question and you click on it, it opens it gives you an answer,

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and it pops out some more questions and answers. It's

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pretty convenient. And it often it often provides you that

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answer. What I've been able to figure out about people also ask

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is that those are top in the top two or three? The answers listed

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below this question the question and answers Listed below are top

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ranking. In other there the top ranking for these related

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questions. So Google sees the world in a knowledge base or

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think about like a plotted graph and little little connected

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diagrams. Those are the related topics to that question. But

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they're the top ranking answer. So this goes back to having

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really crisp definition of questions and answers. And those

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don't have to be standalone content, like a traditional FAQ

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on an on a single page. Those can be embedded. And now that

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we're going to move to the fourth section, append, I'm

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going to give your audience a another technique that they can

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use to what we call create entity definition. So the topic

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is an entity. And the question and answer are entities. And if

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you mark them up very cleanly makes it easy for Google to drop

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it into the knowledge base and present it and these FAQs, even

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though they're embedded in your page, and your media can break

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out as the zero the position zero answer or they can be

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broken out into questions that appear below one of the natural

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listings. Have you seen this, this listing for over like,

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somebody, everybody looks the same. But one, one section has

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this little like pa it has another little set of questions

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to questions below it. That's giving you twice as much space,

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you're going to get more click through, you get a little bit

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more branding. So what are we talking about? So schema markup

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is, there's 800 and different different types of schemas that

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you can use to explain things to Google that you put in the

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metadata that you don't have to put on the page. So it doesn't

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clutter up the page with a whole bunch of busy, you know,

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details, but it helps clarify. Are we talking about? Jaguar,

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the cat Jaguar, the car, Jaguar, the sports team, you know, which

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one is it? That that kind of? It's called disambiguation. So

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it's a markup language the same way. HTML metadata is a markup

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language that we use to build web pages. Now they're creating

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this. It's essentially 1000s of more attributes that you can add

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when you append this information. So let's let's wrap

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up the model again and say this, these are our four buckets with

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about one or two steps in each to solve the content, conundrum,

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accelerate, amend, extend, and append.

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And that will get you a lot of progress. You know, if you think

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about, you know, if 90% of your content is not getting traffic,

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what if, what if 20% of your content that's essentially

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double? That's 100% More traffic on a long term basis? For free

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with, or at least for no media cost? I mean, there's obviously

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a labor cost and getting some of this stuff done.

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Right on it. Yeah, yeah. First off, I just wanna say, thank you

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for sharing this amazing framework. And second off, you

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know, a bay aspect of this, too, is really taking a look at what

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are you currently doing in these efforts? And what can you clean

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up? That's kind of what I internalized around this

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conundrum, is the fact that we can feel like we need to

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literally put out a machine supply of content. I mean, my

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my, my main business is literally called Content supply.

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So it's like, you're unloading all this content, when at the

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end of the day, more content doesn't necessarily mean more

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business, more clients,

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it depends on if there's a breadth point you want to get to

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you want to be as broad you want to be topically covering and

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touching on things to a couple of pieces of depth, but not not

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endlessly. Because then it starts, it's the content might

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start to go to compete with itself. Well, and it's

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also the the approach, I would say is contextual to your

16:44

industry, right or your audience, like you think of a

16:46

news publication, they're putting on multiple pieces of

16:49

content a day, on their site alone, or you have like, more of

16:54

a blogger type, you know, who may be putting out a good deal

16:59

of site content, but not at the same frequency. And you're also

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not catering to current trends the same way, maybe there's more

17:07

evergreen posts. And so yeah, I mean, obviously, this framework

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applies to all those industries. But as far as the breadth or the

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the depth of, of that content, what I see is definitely knowing

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your industry, knowing your content, but also reading into

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the analytics, right, like you want to understand how Google is

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treating your website, and whether what you're currently

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doing with your content is actually working.

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Absolutely. Well said. Yeah. Well, Eric,

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this has been so so valuable. Could you give us just a little

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bit of a snapshot, we won't dig it as deep into it. But I know

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one thing we want to get into as well beyond the conundrum, is

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your Omni channel marketing strategy approach. What does

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what does that look like? And how can people learn more about

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that?

Omnichannel Strategy

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Yeah, I guess if I would break it up into a good subhead on

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what what to do with your Omni channel strategy is look at your

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big six or seven channels, and then really focus on breaking

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them up into 14 or 18 channels. So adding, adding segmentation

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within your channels, like let's say referrals, referrals are

18:22

typically the best performing of your traffic, but it's usually

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not the highest volume of that usually converts the best. Well

18:30

make sure you're understanding like if you can bucket your so

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you mentioned affiliates before, maybe you have PR like this is a

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you know, traditional press, maybe this is influencer, use

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your UTM codes, and take those UTM codes and go into your

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analytics and redefine your channels and sub channels so

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that they break up cleanly. And you can really see where your

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efforts are going to get this podcast, you know, more

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distribution, you know, is it your referral? Is that your

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audience that's referring you? Is it other websites? Do you

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have an industry vertical website that's doing really well

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for you? So that's the first I mean, obviously, using UTM

19:06

parameters, you should be doing that anywhere where you have

19:10

control over the URL. So that's that's the first one that the

19:13

big channel as we mentioned before is SEO and SEO is

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typically going to be 50 to 70% of traffic if you kind of leave

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direct out of it. Leave direct out of the calculation because

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directs not really a channel direct is derivative of other

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channels like other channels are causing word of mouth and people

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to know the website and come visit. So the big one you need

19:36

to break out if your location based business is local. So take

19:40

local SEO, go into GMB. Add a UTM parameter. Then go back into

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your analytics and at your top level at your top level channel

19:49

categories. Separate local from SEO and you'll see a really big

19:52

difference in performance. You know you've read the research

19:55

that local local traffic has super high intent and you'll see

19:59

a conversion At like 30 40%, higher than organic and like two

20:04

or three times, other channels. So that that's, that's a couple

20:08

of the mechanisms. You know, the other reason to break out

20:11

referral is because your PR is embedded there appears really

20:16

expensive and difficult, but it's powerful. And this is one

20:19

way you can capture part of what it's doing for you. Social is

20:26

interesting. You mentioned social earlier that like maybe

20:28

you're focused on social, I think the reason we like social

20:31

is because we could control it, we are the publisher, we hit the

20:33

button and boom that goes out. It is the you know, it is a

20:36

great owned media. But typically proportionally, it's below 3%.

20:40

For most of the sites, I'm looking, I have access to five

20:43

600 different websites to kind of study and understand. And so

20:52

social isn't going to contribute that much traffic, but it does

20:55

give you control. And one of the things I think is good to break

20:58

out in social is also a lot of channels together. Like it's

21:01

going to be LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. And

21:04

you're going to want to add this one more social. That's not as

21:08

not as closely regarded as social, which is GMB posts.

21:12

Google, my business allows you to publish a feed and those and

21:16

you can tag them and you can put your url on them and you can put

21:19

the UTM parameter. So make sure your social breaks down and you

21:23

can understand social within social again, that's

21:26

segmentation. Another one that's a lot less obvious that if

21:30

you're a b2b business that your SDRs like, you know, typically

21:33

the SDR departments bigger than the marketing department in

21:36

terms of number of people. And they do a lot of email outreach,

21:38

they do a lot of marketing, a lot of hand built marketing on

21:42

their outreach, make sure the UTM parameter goes into their

21:45

messages. And then you can have a channel called SDR outreach.

21:49

And what you'll see with this channel is there's good spiky

21:51

volume when they're campaigning. And the bounce rate is

21:55

unbelievably high. So they're able to get people to like check

21:58

out a link or something. But people are, you know, less

22:01

qualified, they're so far up funnel there. But that's it.

22:04

That's an interesting one, when you're thinking about being a

22:06

good omni channel omnivore of like, looking at sales and

22:11

marketing together, and like, Hey, we're gonna we're gonna, we

22:14

want to separate you out. So we want to know what kind of

22:17

traffic's coming from the traditional channels. But hey,

22:19

good job, you guys on driving that that in?

22:23

Well, you know, and that's, that's powerful, too. I mean,

22:26

just from the omni channel approach and breaking that down.

22:28

And, and definitely based on the size of your business, not

22:31

overwhelming yourself with trying to do all of the things

22:34

right and rolling it out, I think of a previous employer, I

22:37

had used to work for the cruise lines at their headquarters. And

22:40

with the marketing communications team, you know,

22:42

they are they've got a global audience. And with that, they

22:47

have a variety different different audience types, right.

22:51

And, you know, whether it's direct mail or email or you

22:56

know, there's there's all these channels that they have to

22:59

really reach out to, and sometimes it's less targeted at

23:04

that point, right, because you're trying to get to the

23:06

masses versus say targeted.

23:08

Sure. And in a b2c business like that, and travel with that high

23:12

value in the high value conversion, you know, you've

23:15

got, you might have a 50 100 million dollar budget at a big

23:17

cruise line, and you've got, you know, 10, probably 2030 People

23:22

in marketing and all the departments together, and you do

23:24

want to know, like, what's working? And, you know, if we

23:27

had if we had some more resources, where should we put

23:29

them? Alright, one more comment on omni channel is what do you

23:33

do with direct, and I say you try to reallocate direct through

23:38

attribution. And there's free attribution tools within Google

23:41

Analytics, if you kind of dig in on the lower left side of the

23:45

the Google Analytics menu, you'll find your attribution

23:47

models. And what you want to do is like, like, look at a model

23:52

like channel attribution, excluding last click being

23:57

direct. So what you're doing is you're when it comes in direct,

23:59

if there's any other channel, it's aware of on that cookie, or

24:02

however, it's, however it can see it, that it moves it to that

24:06

one. So if you have typically 33% is going to be direct. But

24:11

if you could get that down to maybe half that, like 17, and

24:16

you reallocate 17 points, you're really getting a better

24:19

understanding of the performance and the contribution of these

24:22

other channels that are doing a lot of upstream work. And direct

24:25

is direct, essentially just a bit of a parasite that collects

24:29

up the hard work of the under channels. So think about

24:32

attribution and how you can reallocate, direct from from

24:37

direct into any other channel, especially channels you can

24:40

control.

24:41

Yeah, definitely. Well, hey, this has been so good. And one

24:47

thing that I would love for people tuning in to do is to go

24:50

explore more of Eric's knowledge, and your company's

24:54

services. And I know that you have recently written a book

24:57

right? Tell us Thinking about it? Yeah.

25:01

Yeah. So my books called Hack the corporate fast track, you

25:04

can find it on Amazon. And what it does is it gives people a

25:07

good playbook for getting promoted within a corporation.

25:11

It's not an entrepreneur's book. It's a like, hey, most of us

25:14

work for somebody else. And like, how do you do that? Right?

25:16

It took me a while to figure it out, maybe 20 years. And so I

25:19

took some of my secrets that I was sharing with my with my

25:22

staff, and I encoded it into a book that you know, people find

25:26

pretty helpful. Now, if you're interested in milestone where

25:29

you can find us at Milestone internet.com and some of the

25:33

things I've been talking about some of the research you can

25:35

find in the resources section drill down into research reports

25:39

and ebooks. And you know if we can help you out you can, you

25:42

can contact me at Eric dot n at Milestone internet.com. Love to

25:46

hear from you. If you reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm at slash

25:50

Eric Newton and mentioned mentioned the podcast that you

25:53

you heard me on and and then I'll be sure to connect with

25:57

you.

25:58

Perfect. Well, hey, Eric. It's been a pleasure. And definitely

26:01

we'll include those links down below for the show notes. Thanks

26:04

for tuning in and everyone we'll talk soon