Strategical Content Optimization in an SEO Process

Hello and welcome to a new very special edition of Crawling Mondays. Today we are going to talk about strategic content, how to optimize, how to develop strategic content in SEO. And for this I invited today 2 people who I highly, highly, highly respect, who are, I consider, very well-rounded strategical SEOs who work a lot with content, right? On one hand I have John Henry Scher. He has his own consultancy that is called Role Place in the US. Hello, John Henry. How are you?

Hey, Aleyda.

How's it going?

Very good, very good. Thank you for coming. And then on the other hand, we have Suganthan Mohandasan, and Suganthan is from Snippet Digital. He's an SEO consultancy. Hello.

Hello, Suganthan. Hi, Aleyda.

To start a little bit with the conversation, right, I want to start covering those aspects that you think are misunderstood. And because they are misunderstood in SEO, we tend to make mistakes with content again and again. So for example, like it's the typical— only the term already, the SEO optimized content or the SEO content, the term SEO content for me is like, why do you call it SEO content in the first place? This is just content that is needs to be optimised to connect with the way that people search, but should be also content that at the end of the day is created strategically to be integrated within the website marketing strategy goals and is aligned with the business goals and objectives of the website at the end of the day. So which are the mistakes that you see that we do in SEO with content?

I think there's a few. I think like one of the starting mistake is popping competitors into a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs and seeing like what are the top driving pieces of traffic and how do we replicate that. And essentially going for the most broad, most general, most high-traffic pieces like interview questions or something like that. That isn't gonna drive qualified leads and isn't necessarily relevant to a business service because that's like more someone trying to do their own task and that's like the job to be done doesn't necessarily— it's going to stop at the questions. Doesn't relate to, say, like an applicant tracking tool or something like that. The other mistake I'd say is really like not like starting off and really like going for those top things in in Ahrefs or whatever that are like highly linked to high traffic, but not necessarily corresponding to the purchase journey, and just kind of like shooting from the hip and not really having a plan for the long term. I think like really the first step is mapping like the total addressable market for all like. Product and customer relevant search terms and figuring out how do we approach this, what's gonna be the most valuable things to go, and that's typically the lower traffic bottom of the funnel pieces and starting there. And the high traffic stuff, if you need a lot of links, building something that's customer and product relevant and then driving a lot of links to it, that can help fuel the lower traffic stuff. But oftentimes, versus pages or something that's deeply related to your product and you're a somewhat established brand, You can rank for that stuff pretty naturally. So I'd say going for things that directly relate to the jobs to be done that the product solves in a B2B or SaaS case, and going for comparison or shopping terms first and really proving the business model. And then also providing projections on that, Tim. I know a lot of folks, especially on the consulting side, don't love providing projections because it sets expectations for work and holds you accountable. And it's easier to say the SEO channel is a mystery and we just gotta roll the dice and see how it comes out for us and then we can optimize from there. But really, to get buy-in from executives, you need to provide projections for the entire channel. What does this look like if we publish a piece a week for a year? What can we expect? What's the return? And even if it's a bad job, what does that look like? What does a great job look like? What does a good conversion rate look like? What does a mediocre one look like? And really figuring out like end to end, like what's the spectrum that this channel could provide us? Because I just, I see a lot of people kind of, there's this like, this term brand is publisher that got thrown around a lot. And I think it's a terrible term. Like most, like unless you're Shopify or like, I guess like Amazon could do if they wanted to, but like you need to be massive to be a publisher. And like, we're not publishers. We're building like encyclopedic libraries that essentially try and help people So the idea that you're like running a media arm and you just have this backing and like don't really need to be profitable like a media company is, I think, like a trap that people that come up from like a more creative and less like business-driven side can fall into.

And like really you need to figure out the business logic straightforward.

And then oftentimes there's like product-led SEO and there's content-led SEO, and I think those need to be completely divorced. Like they should work together and like talk on like cross-link strategy and stuff, But the folks that are doing content marketing, the folks that are building a product that scales like an Airbnb-style listings that are driven through— those are 2 different business units and they need to be treated as such. And I think trying to make one person kind of accountable for both and possibly the technical stuff, sure, but content needs to have its own number and SEO that is product-driven needs to have its own number and conflating the 2 can— they also need to be budgeted separately. So conflating the 2 is, I think, just a trap that management can get into.

And then finally, just going on a more in-the-weeds note—

I'm jumping a little bit all over the place here— but I think not considering the context of the search in relation to the person's job to be done and ultimately the product. If you're talking about migrating to microservices or migrating to the cloud, that implies you either have a monolithic architecture or on-prem servers, and you need to think about who has that still, who's running that. Generally, a larger business. You're not writing to someone who just spun up an application on-prem and now is thinking about moving their small app over to the cloud. Same thing with containerization. That's not necessarily going to be done by a small business. Thinking about who would be typing in these keywords and having context to them rather than treating everything like Wikipedia and just kind of being like a general encyclopedia. I really don't like glossaries in the B2B space for SEO. Just defining the concept and letting the person bounce. How about moving it, like trying to pull the person down as far down the funnel as you can? I think like when SEO gets created in a silo and just has a traffic number and like they treat the website as some like lead catching device, that's like the worst kind of traffic you can get in because then you just start creating super top of funnel content that has no ask. And like everything should have an ask or a deeper way to get in or like, and not just exploring other content, but like how do you get into a workflow? How do you provide them with a playbook that's going to show them how to do their job? So that when they are thinking about like, what's our next phase, they've got your collateral staring them in the face, guiding them the whole way. And it's like, maybe we should consider this product. Like, these people seem to know what they're talking about.

That's what I'd say are like the major mistakes that I—

when I come into an organization that I can see going on.

Makes complete sense. I think at the end of the day, the big mistake can be summarized in what you mentioned at the end, the lack of context. It's going to a keyword research tool and looking Only for the search volume or the keywords that your competitors are already covering and you're not, without thinking if they actually align with what you're looking to sell and how that will reflect at the end of the day on the conversion or the goals that your unit, your company, your client.

I think Jon kind of covered pretty much most of the strategic part. The way I kind of look at it, most of the time I see the common mistakes is not really looking in, as you said, the context and also Things like search intent, things like for a query that you're trying to rank for, are you looking at the right intent? Are you trying to match the intent with the type of content you're going to produce? Not just that, even going to the most basics of not even looking at the search results for your query for the country. I mean, the search results change depending on personalization, whether you're logged in, whether you're not, or you're on a mobile. I mean, I've been even looking at a few places where someone mentioned that, I can't really verify this, that if they're on a mobile and when they got on a ferry, the search results changed because the connection, the speed of the connection was really low. So the search results slightly changed depending on that. So I mean, there are some really interesting use cases like that. So the way I look at it, you have to look at the search results. It's really basic. And see the type of content Google's showing you. Is there a PAA box? Is there a snippet? Is there a featured snippet? Are they showing a local map pack?

Videos, images.

Yeah, going on top of that.

Are these guides or transactional focus or product pages?

Yes, especially on images. I mean, if you've seen the ontology bit on the image search now, it's in universal search now. So for example, if you search for Tesla Model 3, in the universal search you'll see the images and you'll see ontology at the top that you can actually filter by interior, different colour options and things like that. I think you need to really look at all of these things before you start producing content. I think that's something a lot of companies miss and companies are going through a checklist as Joan, in our initial conversation, where you mentioned was going through old checklists that's kind of outdated and it doesn't fit in with every type of strategy. It doesn't fit in for every type of client.

The problem with checklists is that at the end they don't take the context into consideration and then this is how we end up with the Oh, what is the minimum text length for a blog post? Or the content that is included at the bottom of the category pages, the ecommerce pages. A lot of guides that are senseless or they don't have really a point to be included in a category, for example, in a webcam category page in an ecommerce website and then including or featuring the camera's history below the products there. It doesn't make sense. What does make sense though is that you do include some type of content that will help the user at that stage of the journey make the best decision for the best cameras of that type. On the other hand, that will have the role of a salesperson, that the salesperson will have the score, right? So how do you choose the best camera? Which are the characteristics that should I take into consideration or not? This type of thing. And And it should be common sense, I think, because it's the role that content has in that particular point. But I think since it is very difficult to productize or simplify in checklists, then it's like that how we end up having like 500 words of text below and end up having how-to guides below category pages, right? Yes.

Even Google came out saying, guys, don't add like blog post type content to product pages anymore. Don't do that. You're confusing us.

Yeah.

So even they confirmed that recently.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is our fault though. Like, I mean, because we used to work together like 7 or 8 years ago and I think like I was consulting before that at that point and the advice that we— I mean, we basically always as an industry operated like what was the absolute minimum we could do to make these pages rankable? And it was like going to text brokers and being like, write a description of this washer and dryer or whatever we were working on back then. But, you know, it was about essentially divorcing, breaking down building a site into as many different little microtasks as possible, offshoring that or outsourcing it to SEO writers, which was a whole thing that you could get on Writers Access. But everything's really evolved, and I think part of the reason why it's evolved is because Google's using more natural language processing, understanding the semantics behind words, and they're able to understand, is this well-written content? Is this expert-written content? And does it authoritatively and deeply talk about the topic? Things like that. But I think like that was sort of what the sophistication of both like the internet and the industry at that time and things have ended with Google shifting to actually understanding the semantics of content. I think now it's like, oh, we need to appeal to our users and like we have to help people accomplish their intent and like their tasks. Things are a lot more sophisticated now. It's all about like connecting with your audience and being like deeply authoritative instead of just like, Getting it on there and ranking it. So I think we ourselves haven't done a great job as an industry of communicating that the channel itself is much more complex now and it takes a deeper level of investment.

Which would you say are the most important criteria, steps to follow, like the building blocks that you have seen again and again that are always there in order to make sure that your content will be successful and will align well with both SEO best practices and goals and business best practices and goals.

I think for me, what I see is, one of the things I see doing the keyword research at the start, at the beginning of any campaign, but doing it right. I think that's the biggest thing. I always tell any clients, anyone, guys, whatever the resource, put everything into keyword research. Do it right. Don't just settle in for average work. Get it done as much as possible in a sort of more advanced, more deep analysis into your entire niche. The reason is simple, because right now it's not just search. You have to also look at Google Discover, things like Google Discover where you have to own the topic. You have to own the entire topic if you want to get surfaced in Discover because Discover is a sort of black box. Extremely difficult. There's no way to kind of know how to rank there. But Google has started showing, it's all based on personalization. There's a lot to do with personalization. But then again, if you are an authority in your space, in your topic, if you own that topic, it's likely that you will start showing up in Google Discover. And I mean, this traffic is traffic people are not even searching for, but they are being proactively shown to the users based on their previous likes and things like that. So what I would say is do the keyword research right. I mean, do it right. When I say do it right, look at the entire vertical of keywords and pull in everything. And you have to process the keywords in a way that you want to map all the intent for each keyword and you want to categorize them correctly, especially if you're on an ecommerce play. You want to make sure you categorize them correctly because otherwise you're going to have loads of problems down the line because sometimes you wouldn't know the difference between a commercial keyword and a non-commercial keyword, or it could be an informational keyword, then you get confused. But if you look at Google even search, the intent can be fragmented as well. So there's a fragmented intent. Sometimes you will see Google's ranking 5 results, they are kind of informational, 5 of them are kind of commercial for a query. You see that because Google's always trying to mix it up sometimes. So it's important to do the keyword research right, but you want to kind of also look at the seasonality of some of the terms, especially in e-com, especially things to do with like Black Friday sales. So seasonality, Google's intent shifts as well sometimes. If you look at the top 10 results, they can change when close to something like Black Friday or Halloween. The whole thing can change for 2 weeks and then it'll go back to normal. So it's really important you do the keyword research right and map everything out before you start anything. Because the worst thing that I see people do is they just start writing. They just start picking keywords randomly as John said earlier. Plug into any tools, see whatever the keywords are there and just start writing about it and then complaining why we're not converting. Why aren't we converting? We have traffic. Don't be pressured into doing 5 pieces of content, bad quality content a week. Just do 1 a month and make it the best thing you've ever done. People recognize this kind of stuff. Everyone is doing content marketing. If you look at the entire internet, if you search for any topic, you'll see millions of pieces of content written every day. So what makes your content unique? Also, you could always find a way to make it unique, make it usable, add some sort of value. I know this word has been thrown around a lot, but I'm just saying when you say value, you have to add some real value. People recognize that and it's easy to see. So that's why I would say always start with good keyword research, have a good plan, have a good blueprint, I would say.

I love when you mentioned the blueprint because I think that a few people, they will think about this like sort of a checklist. But for me, when you You talk about that with keyword research, identifying intent, mapping with your web architecture, with your organisation. For me, that is critical because doing the connection part of how each topic connects with your current web structure and organisation, how do you intend or do you really are focusing or will focus to target them? in different ways from a transactional informational perspective too, and also opening people's minds regarding, oh, this keyword is connected to this page, so I cannot cover it. I don't want to cannibalize in any other ways with another page on my website. No, you know, you have your top of the funnel, your middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. How does it play together? How do they cross-link together to make it work from a conversion perspective too? I think that that is The mapping part and the connection and integration part with your web organization structure is definitely critical for sure.

I agree with everything that you said. I think for me, this is really like what we do. I'd say companies come to us to either figure out how to create a sustainable content strategy or to put together like a go-to-market content strategy if they've never really done it before. We typically either help companies figure out search if they have a lot of authority or help companies establish authority through an initial content strategy. Content is really like you can put your state, you can really take a stand and put your POV through the entire industry and figuring out how to own your terms around there. So what we try and do is really, I already touched on this once but just worth repeating, mapping the entire total addressable market for your core keywords. Right now I'm working on feature flagging and figuring out every single way. Feature flagging is like when you expose a feature to a small subset of users and test it and roll it out shortly over time. And figuring out every single way people look for feature flags, whether they're looking for feature flag tools or feature flags for certain types of languages like Ruby or Node.js or feature flagging for AWS or for Kubernetes or for all these different environments and really figuring out what are all the different pieces of content that we would need to make to fully cover this, I think is really— and so that gives you an idea of the level of investment and you can figure out, Is this a roundup of tools that someone who's a product marketer can write, or is this something that's going to require deep expertise from a subject matter expert who knows how to code, who can talk about this very deeply? And is this like, can we have someone essentially, someone who's outsourced write this independently if it's a roundup of the best podcasts for DevOps, or if this is a tutorial for spinning up a Spinnaker stack? A developer's job. So figuring out like what's the level of investment for each piece of content and then figuring out how to connect all those pieces of content either to thought leadership concepts, product marketing, demand generation, or account creation. Like, can we ask for demos here? So like really that applies to like the jobs to be done. Like how many different ways do we need to cover this to really find out like the deeper levels of intent? Because the general stuff that appeals to a general audience. So if you just shoot your sights on like the broad keywords, Half the people Googling for that, probably a lot more, are gonna bounce once they get the definition because that's all they need. And you're not gonna suddenly turn someone who doesn't have skin in the game into an engaged buyer. A lot of those first results, that's why when you're creating content, it's really about 2 audiences. Who are the general people that are never gonna buy and how can you service that query as quickly as possible? And then how can you move beyond that and engage them into something a lot deeper in a conversation about the product or how the product can solve problems?

When you mentioned before regarding the connection with demand generation, I think that there's a fine line there because first, repurposing the content makes complete sense. Creating, for example, a much more deeper guide or white paper, webinar, etc., is fantastic because you leverage much more the information, the content out there in different formats to not only be shown in different ways in the SERPs with video, for example, or images. If it is relevant, but also to, at the end of the day, bring the user into your funnel in a much more meaningful way at the end of the day from a business perspective. However, I have to say, you need to be— again, there's a fine line. You need to be very careful because, oh my God, how many times I have seen the fantastic content, amazing content, being shared 90% of it behind a wall, or behind— not a paywall, but yeah, a wall that I can only get if I register to their email list or whatever. And then they're trying to rank with just 2 paragraphs of text, and there's no way that they are going to be able to do that, I'm afraid. And then when I access the rest of the content, It's amazing. And I am like, oh my God, if I were the SEO there, I will try to balance it out in a better way to make the most out of the content because I completely understand that they want to bring the user into the potential customer into the funnel, right?

So if you're able to make something much better that can help people do a better job, you have the ability to gate that content. And I'm sure, like, I know, like, Some people think forms are dead, or like, I know that's Drift's whole branding, but like, if I don't— I disagree. I think some people fill out forms and I think people will, especially in the enterprise, give over their email in exchange for something that will help them do their job for free because they do not have budget to go buy the stuff they want generally. That's why freemium also works. I don't wanna have essentially like large content teams producing stuff that people will never see unless they opt in. You gotta give some of that out. There is a balance there. So it's, I think like measuring the actual like business value that you drive beyond like the events that you cause to fire on the website, is super critical and just like that. And so getting folks into an ebook alone, not the most valuable thing you can do. Actually measuring how that has impact on the business with the tool, because Google Analytics really isn't instrumented for that. Using a tool like Keep is much better.

You have mentioned a couple of tools already that are very well known already in the sector to help to optimize content, right? Clearscope, MarketMuse. Are there any other tools? Which are the tools that you use, especially those that are not necessarily that well known or the typical ones that everybody's using? Which are your favourites at the moment?

There's another tool that not many people know about. It's called Neuraltext. Neuraltext is kind of similar to what Clearscope does. But I feel like Neuraltext— there's 2 tools. One is Content Harmony that came out quite recently. And the Neuraltext— what I like about Neuraltext is they do a lot of entity extraction as well. So what they will do is if you put in a query, They can bring in and say, hey, the top 10 results for this query, they use these entities. They mentioned these entities this many times and in this context. Maybe you may want to use that too in your tool, in your content. I mean, they do a really good job. And after you even write the brief, they have a section where, just like MarketMuse, where you can write the brief. And after you've done the brief, it will do a summarization automatically. It will summarize the article and say, using an NLP, they usually use the BERT BERT to do the summarization. And that you can use it for, for example, in social media or even meta description, writing meta description, stuff like that. It's all been done for you automatically. So I really like that tool. And it's not really well known. And I've been using it for a while now. And I'm really loving it. I really highly recommend everyone check that tool out. And the thing with Content Harmony, I see the only difference they have is kind of similar to what Neuralink or Neuraltext does. But What Content Harmony does, they also do the extraction on the images and the videos. So they will tell you for this query, these are some of the top ranking images. These are some of the images used by your competitors. Maybe you may want to use them. So I think that's a good tool. And one other tool that I always use is called Keyword Finder. So the thing I like about Keyword Finder is that they kind of pack everything into one tool that you don't have to go find, use a different tool for PAA or different tool for extracting related keywords or They do everything, even the autocomplete, everything is done inside. So you can just put a query, it will show you all the related keywords. You press a button, it will show you the autocomplete. So it gives you a lot more data to work with rather than having to have 5, 6 different subscriptions. And so it's quite good priced as well, really well priced. So these are some of my tools and I know some of them are well known but probably not widely used.

I'd say I do like the NLP tools like the Market Muses and Clearscopes out there because in my experience, I typically work with like in-house teams and try and augment how they write so they can write content for search. And companies get kind of biased and they get into their own jargon and that just kind of removes you from that and makes sure— and also like it's weird if you're writing an article about the history of Apple computers and you never mentioned Steve Jobs or an iPhone, that's weird. I don't know some of the topics that my clients specialize in. Like, I don't know anything about P&L for embedded services management. So it's like having— being able to like get that idea of like what makes a complete document. It just helps me as an outsider understand like, is this content high quality or not? And also, we used to talk about like quality as like this gut feeling. Being able to put a number on it is just like it abstracts the opinion out of the— it just takes the opinion out of the equation.

It makes it abstract— is the wrong word to use there.

But it takes the opinion out of the equation. And I like that because content can get emotional for certain people, especially because it's like if they are— if they think it's like, this is my viewpoint on the industry, this is how I want to represent our brand. It's like, well, it's not great. It's not a great way if you don't have like a metric or like some system to talk about how to improve it. It's just diagnosing a problem instead of providing a solution. So I very much like those tools. I'd say they're like core to our process. I personally, I don't really like tools that much. We mine autosuggest for everything. Mining autosuggest is the source of truth. Like Google promotes what people are searching for the most in autosuggest and looking at like Ahrefs isn't gonna have a live feed of that in there. They're gonna try and average a 12-month database and figure out averages 'cause that's what their customer base wants. But if you are working in like the right now and trying to get traffic right now, I think like autosuggest is absolutely the way to go. And then personally, I think as an industry we're really reliant on, at least I can say for like SaaS and B2B marketing, we're really reliant on Google Analytics to tell us like the be-all end-all. Google Analytics is highly sampled. It's not like the most accurate analytics software out there. I personally am like, I'm a big fan of Heap. I've been using it for like 3 or 4 years now and being able to see like customers that land on these types of pages churn less than customers who land on these types of pages. And typically what it relates to is like customers that land on versus pages much more qualified because they understand the industry already and they're looking for a replacement, as opposed to like a, how do I do this, or a guide to doing what the product does. Those are like first-timers who are trying to get their footing. So understanding the quality of accounts that come in based off the landing pages that you generate, that's huge. And only really tools like Heap and other product analytics tools can do that, where Google Analytics just, you can instrument it to that level of specification, But you need to be an absolute expert and if you get it wrong, you can't fix it.

I don't know if you remember all that search volume averaging, what John mentioned earlier. SEO Monitor actually, they did something really cool during the coronavirus. They did calibrate that data and they said, guys, look, we want to make sure that data, what you're looking at is the accurate reflection of the current search. So they did that. So that's one point. The other point about what he mentioned about Heap is a great tool. I know John, I've used Heap before. But the problem with Heap is it's not affordable for every company if you're looking at a smaller— That's okay. Amplitude is a great tool as well. I've used it myself. The cool thing about that is that you can do a lot of segmentation, that you can go from really narrow down your segmentation. On top of that, there's one other thing I want to mention. If you do use Google Analytics, you can create sequential conversions. For example, you can create a sequential conversion where you say, hey, I want to know all the people who landed on a blog post. And then came and bought something from our website. Now create a segmentation for that, and you can create a custom segmentation for that and use that metric as a sort of— so for example, when we do content audits, we do that all the time. That way, instead of just looking at the overall conversions, we look at, okay, for this piece of content, what are the potential number of conversions that happened? Just someone looked at it first and then came and bought it. So I think that's an easier way to do it. I mean, Heap is not something everyone can afford. For smaller companies, they can always use— there are techniques, but As you said, it requires some sort of level of expertise to do that.

I think we like relying on third-party metrics because it takes the responsibility off of us. And it's just like, well, if we get a link on this site, it's valuable. And it's like, do any of our buyers read this site? No, then it doesn't matter. Is it not gonna send us referral traffic? And it's just for that. Like, I want to basically, like the links that I want, I want to query the keywords I want to rank for. And then I want links on all the pages that are already ranking.

Like that's my link building targets.

Who can I get links from that already rank for the terms that I want to rank for that can send me purchase traffic? Like, that's what's really about— like, getting like a mention on a blog post from 7 years ago isn't going to do anything. But if you're trying to be like, we get 20 links a month, or any stupid arbitrary rule like that, like, that's not how actual marketing works. And if you're a good company, you're going to get a lot more links than that naturally. So you should focus on the links that can actually move the needle and drive traffic. Same thing with like, does our text need to be 2,000 words longer? Is it meeting business goals? Is it driving pipeline? But like I'll say, if everyone is— if everything that's ranking is 2,000 words and you are 200 and you're on page 40, like maybe that's actually not the right content. So these tools can have directional value as you mentioned earlier. And I think like instead, like I wish those tools actually had like a video walkthrough for writers to understand how to like process the information, how to augment how they write. I think these tools can be a helpful hand. Like I'd say if you're writing a a blog post about migrating to the cloud, I would want to run that through Clearscope and make sure we touch on some subtopics. But I wouldn't want that to decide my whole content strategy. I think you got to go for what your buyers are looking for and there's going to be a lot of things in autosuggest or high traffic terms that your competitors are getting that aren't going to drive value for you.

I think that you cover a very important point here. For example, in your case, Sujan, you publish a wonderful post a couple of days ago regarding web block analysis for SEO, right? And it's a huge document that should be bookmarked, right? It's a go-to resource.

He's so smart.

And it is the proof, right? And you need to be an SEO to be able to write that content first. You need to have— and one of the things that make that post actually super useful, and it is that it's very actionable. And you can tell, and you show that you have actually tested so many of these tools that you're actually talking about, right? So you are— you have validated their functionality, and you speak about their functionality. And it's a long-form post, but it's not long-form because it is the sake of making it long-form because a tool has told you that it needs to be 5,000 words in order to rank well, because the one that is already in the first position or the second position is 3,000, so you need to double it or whatever. You wouldn't have, for example, made it shorter just because of that. You wanted to make it the best resource out there, the resource that everybody will link to or refer to or use. And you want to actually even eventually establish your authority so in the future you can even bring clients because they see that this guy actually knows how to go through log files and make it actionable and get tech insights from an SEO perspective, right? So this is the way that we should actually think about it. And of course, the layer of the SEO metrics and the tools and the references will help you to make it a little bit more meaningful with the way that the people search for them, but it's not going to make it like cut it in half just because you have reached the length goal or whatever, right?

Yes.

Yeah, I think also just to top that off, the thing about that post is, like you said earlier, like you'd need to be an SEO to write that. But like, that content is like, that is true thought leadership content. Like, that is going to change how people work. That is going to change how people view log file analysis. If you're trying to do that, you can't outsource that to someone who's like not done the work and is a professional generalist writer. That just doesn't work. And like, yes, you can interview people and you can feature quotes from folks and kind of throw it together like a journalist would. But real content does very well, very quickly. So you're not out here being like, how do I get 6 links to this post? It's gonna build it all naturally for you 'cause the community's gobbling it up 'cause it's good stuff. So like, that's the kind of work that we need to be shooting for. And like, that's the kind of content I try and push clients to create. I'd say like, do we hit that mark all the time? We hope to. I'd say like, what you did though is like, that's something that only deep subject matter expert can produce. And that's what the SERPs should be filled with. That is what should be ranking first. Someone who really knows what they're talking about.

Realistically, we as SEO, like, And that is why already the copywriters, right, are also experts and specialists in each area, right? So even if, for example, if I work at an SEO agency or whatever, and for example, I have a person like you, Sugen, who are working there, and let's imagine, oh, you don't really like to write, right? But I want to show that I have the expertise in my agency to provide that service, right? Mm-hmm. I will even pair you with a copywriter who can interview you, who can even take notes of what you mentioned. You don't even need to write it yourself directly, but you can have the support of someone who transcribes your thoughts and can document the information and the wealth of information that you have. So just describing a little bit here of what you can do. Find creative ways. You work with clients. I think that we have covered tons of different aspects. So just to end a little bit, I wanted to ask you for which are these types of tips that you have, which have you found that we often forget about, that you think that is super important, or that we overlook completely, that you think is super important, that you have seen working very well in some clients or your own content out there.

One of the issues is like with SEO and publishing, we're very prone to putting things on a blog and thinking things to be like published once and done because that's like the nature of a blog is you move over through time and then you've got your most recent posts. But I think like one of the reasons why Wikipedia as a website, like obviously it has a lot of authority, but one of the reasons it ranks so well is because it's meticulously taken care of and as new things happen, like you said, they get added to the posts. And I think some of the teams that I work with that maybe aren't like super SEO focused but more like content focused, they think of like, All right, we get the content out there and then like we have the channel. And it's more about like consistent refinement and like making sure that it is, oh, like I think of thinking of content more as like an evergreen resource that needs to be continuously updated is the way to go. And I think blogs de facto make us think of like once and done publishing and moving more to like a library model or like a resources model with content is just, I think, a better way to go. And like having a date of like last updated and like not having it be published on a blog with like a date on it that says like, you know, from 2019 and next to other posts from 2018, things like that. Like, it needs to be accessible in front of the site. And I think just in the sense of like the way that WordPress works, how it's like a log-based system of like moving back, it's ordered through time, is just a bad way to frame SEO content. I think it makes people think of like once and done. So I think of thinking of content as like always in the mode of being updated or always like just continuously being ready to be changed. is the right way to think about it. And I guess it's just like it's a commitment to the channel over time and to upkeeping that and keeping up with that content over time rather than just getting it out the door and having it be out there. So that's same same but different.

I think the point I see, one of the tips I can give you is measuring the impact of your content. A lot of people, they write a piece of content and then they forget about it. And then some content works really well, some doesn't, but then they just Forget about it, move on to the next one and next one. You just completely forget about the old one. One of the tips that I can say, just go back to your old content. Give it about a month, 4 weeks. Just go back, revisit that, look at analytics, for example. Look at the sources where the traffic came from. You'd be surprised to see if people have included your content in newsletters. You'll see, especially the referral traffic, just look at who else is linking to you. Is someone linking to you? How many links that piece of content got? And then you can also think about Can I replicate the same strategy? Can I now move on from, for example, we talked about an example that I had was the log file analysis, that article. So if I'd go back in about 1 month, I'd say, hey, how many links I got? Who mentioned me? Is anyone really supporting me with their newsletters, always including me? And can I go and build a relationship with that person and help them out as well in return as a favor? So in SEO, it's all about relationship building. It's a big part of SEO, doing SEO. I think that's something a lot of people don't do. They forget about the content after it's been done. So you need to kind of go back, really see, and not just the business impact. You could measure the links, how many links you've got, what's the quality of the links, is it something I could do again? So that would be my tip for this one.

Perfect. Excellent. So thank you very much to both for the very helpful advice. I think that I see you both even tired after going through all of the topics here. Thank you, I really appreciate it. I hope that this has sparked many thoughts on people and the way that they think on content. So thank you very much. If you want to know more about this topic, I highly recommend you to follow John Henry and then Sugaan over Twitter. They are very active over there.

Thank you.

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