Wix | SEO Webinar: Outranking the Biggest Brands with Blogging

We are joined today by Jeremy Moser. Jeremy, I don't know if you want to say hello and introduce yourself quickly.

Yeah. Hey, everyone, how's it going? Appreciate you having me here. And yeah, excited to jump into some of the topics today. Is anyone, anyone in the chat from the Tennessee area? I'm in Nashville, so. All right, fellow Tennesseans out there.

Okay, shout out Dolly Parton.

Thanks.

There we go. Tennessee.

There we go. And also, let's get. And we've got Elizabeth Irvine here with us today as well. Elizabeth, you'd like to say hello and introduce yourself quickly.

Yes.

Hi, everyone. I'm Elizabeth Irvine, the VP of marketing for Market Muse, and I'm coming to you from Arlington, Virginia today.

Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us. And again, I'm Crystal Carter. I'm the head of SEO Communications. I'm joined today by Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Branding. We, we are both from the team here at wix and we are going to get started just now. So just to let you know, and if anyone else asks in the chat, please let them know because people join late sometimes. But yes, this webinar is being recorded. It will be shared on YouTube and you will get a link with the recording in an email sent to you your inbox after the webinar. We also have a Q and a panel right next to the chat box on the webinar page and you can see that and you can ask questions there. We have a team of people answering questions there who know lots about blogging and, and who know lots about wix and can help give you answers there. You can also go to the WIX SEO Learning Hub to find out lots more about our webinars and you'd find lots more other information, including our WIX SEO newsletter, the Searchlight newsletter, which Mordy always reminds me to remind everyone that we have. So I've nailed that today. And in terms of agenda, we've done our introductions. Very soon we're going to hear from Elizabeth Irvine and she's going to talk about some amazing things that she knows about blogging and she knows a lot. You're also going to get some insights from Jeremy Moser and then I'm going to share a few just five quick WIX blog resources that can help you to grow your blog and help you to get more traffic and things like that. And then we're going to have a Q and A hosted by the one and only Morty Overstein. So we are going to jump into it if we're ready, Elizabeth. And I'm going to stop sharing this screen.

All right, let me make sure. Oh, it's disabled for me. Would you mind giving me the power?

Power. Just a second.

I think I got it. Okay, try it now.

Yes, Wonderful.

So I'm going to start by talking about high quality content and low quality content because both impact your ability to establish topical authority and influence decisions around content optimization. So let's dig in. High quality means your content delivers value. You're offering something authentic and unique. You're telling search engines and your reader that you know what you're talking about. Rewritten. Go through some of these. Rewritten, aggregated, rephrased content doesn't really offer anything new. It could be considered copycat content. Thin content, of course, doesn't cover enough. It's surface level. I'll use that in an example in a minute. Overly optimized content is risky because it's trying to do too much on one page. It's overcompensating. If you're overdoing it with certain keywords and kind of repeating yourself in order to hit a word count target, then you risk over optimization. Or if you're trying to show what the problems are, why you need to solve it, how to solve it, tools to help you solve it. Search engines won't know when to serve that page because it's unclear what it's about. No information gain if you're not offering something new and different, not offering your experience and expertise. Why would search engines favor your article? Poor promotional use and topic misalignment really comes down to the story you're telling and journey you want your audience to go on. Does everything on the page in question help move your reader to the next step of their journey? Or would it take them on a completely different path altogether? Think about what makes you read an article for something you're trying to solve. This happened to me the other day. I landed on. I landed on something that was like three ways to do X, Y, Z and had additional content that was like kind of related, but not really a bunch of promos and pop ups. And that's not. It's a frustrating experience. It's not giving me what I really needed. So then when AI comes into the mix, it's exciting because you can save time and resources in your production. But if you're not producing high quality content every time you publish now and you figure out a way to scale your process with AI, you may see slight increases in the beginning because of volume, but you risk long term pain because of the lack of quality, which is what search engines prioritize, Creating a high quality article is a long process. You have to decide where you want to save time. And I'll briefly go through these steps and note this is pre Generative AI research is diving into competitor topic and keyword research. How are they covering it? What are the gaps that you could fill? What are the must haves? Planning? You drill down a little bit more into targeted topics that will better attract your audience based on authority and long tail keywords that position your content in a more niche area where you can thrive. Briefing Putting together a detailed outline of titles, subheaders, topics, questions to address, and links to include for your writer to focus around writing. Putting it all together in a story. Editing pertains to proofreading. Copy editing is it telling the story you want, publishing and distributing to your audience and optimizing afterwards for continuous improvement and changes in the market, which I'll also get to in a minute. It's easy to look at this and think, well, why wouldn't I want to shorten that writing bar with generative AI? Or maybe I can cut most of the research out and simplify that. But what are you sacrificing? It could be a lot depending on your existing process and implementation of AI. Say your current process is to give a writer a brief for a topic that's been on your list for a long time. They write it, you edit, and then you post it. Now you want to shorten that process with AI, so you create a brief based on the topic and it looks good. Seems like it's covering everything you would expect. What you risk missing out on here is targeted personalized research. What if that topic wasn't the right target topic to pursue to begin with? What if coverage is so good and vast for that topic you're facing a huge uphill battle to rank for it? If you then use generative AI to help with copy providing light editing because again, everything sounds fine, that piece isn't going to help you build authority. Knowing how hard it will be for you to rank and not just anybody to rank is important, and your authority is a huge factor in determining that. So if you're using AI to identify a topic to create a brief to write your content, where does your expertise fit into that story? Prioritize authority and helpfulness in your content, then volume. So let's go into an example. Here we're going to use the term how to groom a dog. This is an example of a piece of thin content ranking for this term, but this is all the article was. There was an intro paragraph in the beginning with related links at the bottom. Not much detail. Low meaning they left a lot of stuff out. There's also an intent mismatch. This seems more like it's trying to sell these scissors, these three in one scissors. But they're not really giving instructions on how to groom a dog. Let's look at a high quality page. So I can't put the whole page on here obviously, but it's just this section alone has much more detail. It could be formatted a lot better, but the information is valuable. They had other sections on what not to do and details on brushing eye and ear cleaning. It actually talks about how to groom a dog. Clearly there's experience that went into creating this. It has a high content score meaning it covered a lot of relevant topics. If you were looking for details how to steps on grooming a dog, you're going to stay on this page and not the other one. You'll also be more likely to buy grooming tools from them or follow their recommendations because they earned your trust with how to do it when you're likely to buy from them instead of the other. Every page on your site should have a purpose. Really think about what your page is about. Do the keywords you're going after reflect that? Does the intent match? Are you trying to sell something on a page that's really meant to be informational? On this slide? These are some of the questions that Google provided on how they define helpful content. Goes back to experience. Have you actually done this? Or getting help from someone who has who can weigh in on the narrative and provide details that you may have overlooked? Because if a writer or generative AI is helping you build it out, it looks fine, it looks good, it reads well. But it's not necessarily sticking to the topic and has that experience and expertise to make it really authentic. The first page that I showed recommended the reader to actually go to a groomer in a couple of those paragraphs, which is really confusing because the article was about how to trim your dog's hair. It's easy to find out. It's easy to think about it from a personal point of view. How often have you gone to a site, like I said before, looking for an answer to a question? You get frustrated and you go back to search. You haven't learned enough from that page. So when visitors reach your page, will they have learned enough? Low quality content has a compounding effect. Outdated content can also hurt you here. If you have an article talking about ways to cook a turkey, for example, and you don't mention air fryers. That's going to hurt if people don't stay in your page because they didn't get any value. You may see traffic, but that's feels good to create new content and increase your footprint. But content is not Set it and forget it. All of your content together tells a story to search engines about what you know and how well you know it. So don't automate for the sake of it. Identify the safest place to automate, or bring AI in and test it first and then scale. There's a lot of really great prompt recommendations and templates, but they're meant to give you a starting point. You need to make it your own and personalize the inputs before executing or you risk creating okay content or similar content to what's already out there. And remember to prioritize authority and helpfulness in your content, then volume so let's talk about how to build authority with content optimization. We will do that with the example I showed before. But content optimization is not just about the page you're working on today or going back to old posts. Of course you want to prune looking for posts with dates, names, stats that may need to be updated. But it's also good to do for good performing post good performing posts to help them continue to improve and do even better. But content optimization is more than optimizing a single page. As I said, you want to tell search engines that you are an expert on the whole topic, which is the makings of a cluster. So let's go back to that example that was underperforming and talk about how we could quickly improve it. First, this page is not talking about how to groom a dog. It's really talking about the tools you need and honestly recommending that you go to a groomer. So this could be rewritten and a new page could be created that goes into more detail on all the gear that you need to groom a dog, including scissors, nail trimmers, shampoo, all of that stuff. So make sure you're really clear on what the page is about. Going back to the purpose of the article. You don't want to cover too much and cause confusion for the search engines. It will confuse intents and the search engines won't know what your page is about. Read your article as if you know nothing on the topic. I actually do this quite a lot. Or write it for your parents who adopt a dog for the first time and you want to clearly explain what to do something like that. I think sometimes we get so close to our content and our topics that we kind of forget what our readers don't know and how to fill in those gaps and help create that context for them. Look at your topic model. Some of that early research that you did to identify what you should write about in the first place. In this case, trimming nails, skin, health, dog's ears and eyes were key to showing search engines what was needed to build an authoritative piece, but they weren't included in this page anywhere. The site also ranks for how to groom curly coats, which also points to a somewhat surface level page. But this paragraph could be updated about why the coats are complex. What type of breeds does that pertain to? It could turn into two or three paragraphs, probably removing the groomer mention, but that's really all that would be needed to tell search engines that there's more information here. But we don't. We want to be really careful not to tell search engines that this page is about grooming curly coats because that's not the title, that's not what you're trying to rank for. But since we don't want to change the focus of that page, but there's enough content and expertise for a full article, that's when you can create a new page for how to groom a dog with curly coats and also medium to long coats and wire coats. And with those pages created linked to from that original how to page without too much work, the site could pretty quickly increase its authority on dog grooming. To take it a step further, when you go back to your topic model, look at those related topics. We covered the gear thinning shears, that bottom of funnel Content specific breeds. Are there really certain breeds that are incredibly challenging? Dig more into those. Explain why paw pads must be particularly challenging with grooming because it was quite high up for semantic relevancy. I know that personally because we get charged extra from the groomer because my dog hates having his paws clipped. So I don't think that's fair because it's also a crazy amount to get your dog groomed. But that's beside the point. Once those pages are created, they can all be linked together along with strategic non competitive external links because you don't want to give more juice to sites that have crazy authority anyway, like Wikipedia. And there you have yourself a beautiful cluster. Topic authority matters. Use good data to help you make decisions, including finding gaps. We go back to the topic model on that previous page. We say that nobody was covering dry skin in a comprehensive Way they could create additional content on that and take advantage of that gap would give them an additional edge. Keep the language simple and clear. One tip I got a long time ago was to read the content out loud. It's amazing what errors you'll uncover and you'll find. If you're reading it to yourself over and over, trying to understand what it's saying, then it won't be clear to your audience either. And that's part of optimization. You want them to be able to absorb the information and don't forget intent. Make sure your page has a purpose.

And there we go.

That was amazing. But I just want to like really hard for the audience on, on the point of experience that you brought up. If you're competing with a big brand on the SERP and they have an entire content team and a content team on top of the content team working on top of the content team, one of the gaps that they'll generally have a color vulnerability is a lack of experience. They're a content machine. Whereas you're, let's say a niche site, you have experience or you're in contact with people who have that experience. You can really write deep, nuanced, very specific content. You can really build up the authority, the topical authority around that topic. Multiple posts covering the topic from different angles, from different, for different audiences in different ways, all built on real firsthand experience. And that's really a way as, as we just saw is a way that you can really differentiate yourself from the big brands. I know someone in the chat asked, well, how do I outrank a big brand? That's really how it's use your strength. Your strength as an SME or as an SMB is that you aren't a content machine. And it's actually a great thing these days if you see. It's one of the things I've been jumping on a lot lately. You see this trend where people are looking for real experience. They're hoping they're hopping over to social media, to TikTok or whatever it is to get information because we're craving that personal experience. I don't want to, I don't believe a random webpage. I believe a person. If you're a niche site, you can really create that feeling of you're getting information from a person when you write in a really experience based way and you're really covering a topic in a really holistic way in a really thorough way that really aligns to that wider marketing trend of people looking for insurgents really looking for great information built on personal experience. I just really wanted to reinforce that point because it's something that I think is so powerful in blogging today that you really have the power to do. I'm off my soapbox now.

It was a great presentation. We really appreciate it. Elizabeth, thank you so much for taking the time. We're going to move on to Jeremy's so that we can get through some more, more fantastic insights now. Jeremy, if you are ready to share your screen, that would be great.

Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. We can. Let me make sure I'm on the first slide here. But yeah, Elizabeth did a really good presentation. I think Morty kind of hit the nail on the head too with focusing on your strengths there. And something we'll talk about too in this presentation is, you know, the difference between velocity and specificity and how you can use those to your advantage sort of based on the situation that you're in. So yeah, let's just dive right in. I'm Jeremy Moser, I'm co founder and CEO of Usurp and also part owner and operator in Codeless and we do stuff for a wide variety of brands from like, you know, SaaS to E commerce to even service based companies as well as worked with some cool brands like Monday.com, freshworks, Robinhood, Hotjar, ActiveCampaign, things like that. And just here to share a little bit about some of the frameworks that we use in relation to sort of this main prompt here of like how do we use blogging to outrank the competition? What does it actually look like in practice? How do we prioritize things? And so the presentation today, just going to cover a little bit of that and if there's any questions we can kind of go from there. So on the agenda there's kind of like three main things I wanted to address today, revolving mostly around you know, content velocity versus specificity. So what are those two entities? When do you use them or pick them based on sort of the scenario that you're in currently? Number two being topic prioritization. So when you look at a mix of topics within these sort of frameworks, how do you decide what's prioritized and why? What does that sort of payback period look like for you and how do you map that within a given strategy? And then number three, once you've got some of that content output going, how do you then distribute that content and how do you do link building at scale to where you can start to outrank competition? I think it's a really key factor within Just kind of that blogging sphere as a whole, right. Of good content is good and it's a great start. But we also need to figure out how do we promote that content and how do we get good quality websites to link back to it so that we can outrank and we can last a long time on the search results without competitors coming in. So those are like the three main points that we'll hit home on today. We'll just dive right into the velocity versus specificity. And so velocity from a content standpoint is really just how many pieces are you publishing on a given, you know, daily, weekly, monthly basis? Whatever it is, whatever sort of time frame you're looking at there, Velocity is most often used like, you know, you'll hear it all the time of just publish more content, right? Like get more content on your site, publish more, add more articles. It's all about that quantity game where specificity is sort of what Morty was hitting on a little bit there too, around how do you find what niche you're in and how deep can you go within that niche? And I think both have their merits. It just depends entirely on where you're at as a company in terms of are you already substantially within SEO in the sense that you've been here for a couple years, you've been publishing for a while, or are you a brand new site? Those will all sort of impact your, your ability to use one of these frameworks here. So Velocity, we tend to think of it from our experience here. Velocity tends to be really good for new sites to test out what works and what doesn't work. We'll typically find that if you're a brand new site and you're, you know, you just getting your blog up, you're just starting to publish things, if you throw sort of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, it tends to be a little bit better than actually going for something that's super, super specific there. If you're spending a lot of time in the early stages, let's say this is your first couple pieces, you're putting those out, you're spending, you know, maybe weeks or even a month to get that piece out the door. You're really delaying your time to seeing any sort of baseline analytics that you can iterate from. And that's really the key that we find for brand new sites, is that sometimes if you have, let's say, three or four different ideal customer profiles that you target and you want to create content for all of those, sometimes it's going to be really Hard to tell if you're going slow, which one of those niches is going to be the most profitable for you from an SEO perspective. And the way you can get around that is just kind of sheer velocity in the early stages to see what picks up, what doesn't, what's hitting home in the eyes of Google and what's not, then you can really use that to your advantage to essentially harp on that specificity later on. And so essentially, as a new site, it can be really hard to find specificity without velocity first. So you can end up spinning your wheels a ton if you're going too specific, if you're saying, hey, we need to publish this one guide, this other guide, those ones just might not hit as well as if you're doing a bunch in a wide variety of spaces there and seeing what works and then doubling down on there. So really, velocity, we find, is very, very good for new sites, but it can also be combined with specificity, which we'll kind of dive into in a little bit here. So some of the main findings I'll just summarize super quick before we actually get into kind of like the nitty gritty and the actual frameworks and how do you apply it? But some of the main things we've noticed over time with, you know, after working with a couple hundred brands that big brands should often prioritize velocity in a specific measure and not land grabs or volume metrics. And so what we mean by that is, what we mean by specific velocity is, is really dialing in on what are those current ICPs. So what are your ideal customer profiles within the search framework? You know, which one of those are doing well currently? Which ones do you already have existing topical authority in that you can kind of go deeper in? So, for example, let's say you have a couple different customers from like, you know, construction firms to law firms, whatever it is, if you find that one currently has a really strong foothold from a search perspective, those are generally speaking, ones where you want to prioritize specific velocity. So how do we go deeper within that one very specific niche now? And how do we publish a lot of content across the board there versus staying? We're looking at all these in, you know, semrush, hreps, whatever it is, and we're seeing a ton of volume metrics here that look great. Let's just go for everything. It's usually not a great strategy as you just spread your efforts too thin when you can really dial it down when you focus on one or two niches there. When you're a little bit larger of a brand and you already know that you have good traction in those spaces. Small brands, generally speaking, should start with velocity to identify some of those winning niches, to understand which ones are working and which ones aren't for them. But then they should focus on specific velocity once they reach those, those analytics there, and they can kind of see what's working, what's not. And then small brands should not focus on velocity long term. And we'll kind of dive into some of the downsides of velocity here that we've just seen over time. And so we'll just jump right into essentially a framework that we've used on our end, which we kind of deem the velocity specific specificity cycle. It's kind of a mouthful, but essentially stage one here what we're looking at is typically a newer site or a new to a topical niche. So this can apply if you're, like I mentioned, a brand new site, you're just getting your, your foothold in the SEO space, or if you are sort of a larger entity, you've been around for a bit, but you're entering sort of a new topical niche. So let's say you just haven't covered this subset of content before or this topic before, this still applies to you. Even if you're a bit larger of a brand, you have more experience, et cetera. And so you know, newer site, new to topical niche. What you want to do here is really prioritize the velocity of those topical niches in your space. And so if you're a newer site, and let's say you have three ICPs, or you offer multiple different product variations, like, you know, Your product has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, bunch of different features there, there's a lot of good unique content you can create around those features around their use cases. A lot of what you want to do there is really prioritize velocity. And so that's stage two where we're talking about how do we publish content clusters across three to five verticals at a time. And then we sit back for a little bit, we analyze some of the data, and we understand which which content clusters within that publishing framework are actually performing best. And so it's a really key stage that we find that a lot of newer sites or folks that even have larger sites and they say, cool, we have a huge site, we have a big domain rating authority, whatever it is, we can kind of capture any topic we want. We find that you're creating a little bit more Work for yourself doing it that way. Whereas going a little more specific and seeing, hey, these are what you know, these topics, these verticals, they're performing well. Let's go a little deeper here until we've got a really good foothold and then you can kind of expand out from there. And so stage three is what we're talking about there. Just analyzing the data after a few months, Right. Depending on your competition, your difficulty analyzing the data could be as quick as a couple of weeks, it could be as long as a couple months depending on how aggressive you're being as well as obviously competition. Right. If you're going up against larger competitors, you want to take a little bit more time to analyze that data. You're not going to see movements quite as fast. So take that into account based on your sort of existing site authority as well as competitors in your space and how difficult realistically it's going to be in stage four. Here what we like to look at is essentially finding those winning niches that align with your business goals and intent. So instead of looking at things from just like a purely volume standpoint of like, hey, this one says it's low key or difficulty, it says it's high volume, it's sort of related maybe in some senses, let's just go after it because it sounds nice. Those are usually ones that you want to avoid because you're probably not going to rank for it. Long term, it might feel like a good short term win. But again, if it's not aligning with your business goals and intent, a lot of the cost that you're creating in that sense is sort of just useless. Right. And so what we want to do here within that velocity specificity cycle is again, find those winning niches based on a little bit of velocity at the starts and then go a little bit deeper with the specific niches that we're finding are doing well. And when you're looking at metrics within Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, whatever sort of keyword tool you're using, a lot of those volume metrics are just plain wrong anyways. So for example, we've seen this across our own brands as well as hundreds of sites we've worked with. And that's we'll usually see. You know, I'd say if there's a keyword that says a couple thousand, Maybe it's probably 2 to 3x that amount of search volume, if it says it's somewhere in that like you know, 10 to 50amonth, we'd assume it's probably three, four times that amount just based on the actual experience in there. So if you're seeing things that are super low volume, even if they're registering within a keyword tool, that's generally speaking a really good sign that that actually has more volume than it says. So it's just something to take into account here that we want to avoid some of those shiny objects when we're talking about stage two to four here of finding those content clusters across a few verticals and then finding sort of that within niche where one is just outperforming another. This is usually what you'll find across these stages that when you do publish across a few different verticals, you'll find maybe one or two are going to perform better than another. And it's usually due to things like different competition or maybe you just have more experience in that space or Google perceives you to have a little more topical authority at the moment there. And those are the ways that you kind of double down in stage five here. Essentially what we're looking at is the specificity production. And so that's how we go deep essentially in a winning niche now. And so those are ones you should have identified from sort of that multiple month period of analyzing data. You'll now have a pretty good understanding of what are those niches that actually do perform well for us, not only from just a pure SEO standpoint of like actually ranked well for it. We got traffic, but it did it actually result in some sort of, you know, movement towards your goals. Right. Whether that's directly for leads or sales conversions, whatever sort of business model you run, making sure that those winning niches are categorized correctly in the sense that they're forwarding or getting you closer to your goals. So that's when you start to amp the production up within that specific niche and you really dial in on that without sort of getting that shiny object syndrome across different spaces. So stage six there is basically increase velocity only within those spaces and put a major focus on content rejuvenation cycles. What the heck does that mean? What is constant rejuvenation? How do we framework that within net new content production where we're doing a lot of this at scale? One of the key things that you'll notice over time is that too much velocity often means a lot of content decay, even for large brands. So this is something you want to be aware of at almost all times. And Elizabeth hit on this, Morty hit on this a little bit as well, where essentially if we're seeing low quality content on a given site. Google has said this time and time again. We've also just seen it in practice that low quality, outdated, inaccurate sort of content brings your entire site down. And so it's something to be really cautious of when we're looking at content velocity and we're looking at that too much in a silo of saying, you know, we hear it all the time, right? I've just published more content. Just create more content and you'll start to see traffic. A lot of that is it's, it can be good advice in some cases, but it also sets you up for failure if you don't have the processes in place. From a content rejuvenation perspective of now that I've created all this content, how do I go back and make sure that it's updated over time, that I'm not just creating a piece and kind of setting and forgetting? Because we've just seen time and time again that brands that do set and forget there, that's an opening for another company to come in. Right. And it's another way that you can actually rank against larger brands doing sort of a basic level search like this, you can do this on pretty much any keyword tool you've got, but essentially just take a look and plug in a domain, see what sort of content they are ranking for in different positions. You can even then compare that over time. It'll give you a really good understanding of like what are all these keywords that they're not even ranking well for, which ones have declined in the past 30, 60, 90 days or even longer gives you a really cool insight into sort of what topics are these brands deprioritizing or simply just not focusing as much on. Those are really your kind of ends in a competitive space. Good example two of stage, sort of number two here, publishing content across three to five verticals. So I'll give you a little bit of a breakdown of how you do that, how you identify that, what's the next step there? So this is a direct example of what we did for Monday.com so we looked at essentially all the different sort of niches that they serve and their different ideal customer profiles. And we just mapped those out to start. So they cover a whole host of different customer profiles. Your business might cover only one or two, and that's totally fine. We can chat too about ways to adapt based on that. But if you cover multiple ideal customer profiles here, what we want to look at is essentially spreading those out and seeing what terms, what keywords, what sort of content can we create specifically for those teams and then sort of expand upon that? And so what we realized was, okay, cool. Monday.com, it's a pretty broad product around project management. They serve a bunch of different company styles, types, what, what have you. And so what we looked at there was, you know, they're covering marketing, CRM and sales, project management in general, creative teams, software dev teams, nonprofits, construction firms, finance and accounting. Right. There's all these different topics that they can cover. And so what we want to do here is pick a few of these at the start that are sort of the bread and butter ones that historically, if you have that data over time, which ones have converted best for you or have resulted in the highest return on investment or lifetime value, whatever sort of metrics you're measuring there, and then create content for those specific niches. So the cool thing about Mondays, it might not directly apply to you, is that a lot of that is really scalable in the sense that you're talking about one sort of specific product here, right? A project management tool. And you can expand that based on the use cases of each individual team. So you can really scale the amount of content velocity there within a specific niche. But that whole sort of stage two to stage four applies directly in here of find those three to five verticals. Let's just say here it's marketing, CRM, sales, project management, and really focus on velocity at the start. Within those, maybe we identify that, hey, marketing and creative teams, these ones are ranking really well. Let's put a little bit of the other stuff on the back burner and let's double down on that specificity and see that we've already got some of that topical authority there. So that's kind of what it looks like in practice. Hopefully that makes some sense. If I'm going a little quick, we'll, we'll send some of these slides to everyone after, I'm sure, so you can kind of dive in and see anything else up close there. Cool. So that was a lot for the, the first framework there. But the second section here is a little bit on how do we prioritize some of those topics. So now that you've actually done some of the research, you're saying, cool, I've got some of these ICPs. I know what I want to target here. How do we go from the typical phrase that, you know, I've uttered, We're all guilty of it, right? Of I need to rank for xyz and it's one specific sort of money keyword. Or a batch of those, how do we go from that to I know I can rank for a given keyword in x amount of time frame, resulting in a given roi. And so we really like to get a little bit more granular on topic prioritization and really look at some of the metrics there and our realistic ability to rank for that over time. So what we're going to cover in this section here is topic prioritization, which goes into a few things like the payback period. So how long will it take you to actually recoup some of the investment there from targeting these specific pages? What are your time frames to goals ratio, what are your KPIs? And then what does success actually look like to you? So this is a framework that we use quite often across Codeless and you serve for our companies. And it's a content framework here called Planning Predictor. And what we like to start here is at the base of harvesting demand. And so what we're talking about there is looking to see what already exists from a search engine perspective. There's a few ways that you can create demand via SEO, but a lot of the times, 99% of the time you're looking to harvest existing demand, right? Folks are already searching for this. How do we show up and build a brand in this space? How do we capture some of that attention? There are subtle ways to create demand, but again, a lot of what we want to focus on here is how do we harvest it? Because creating it is really, really hard to measure over time. And if we're talking about trying to get a really good ROI and a reasonable time frame, a lot of it is going to be based on harvesting existing searches. And so what we want to do here is really perform both the top down and bottom up analysis to build out a lot of that initial keyword list for things like relevancy to your business, from a direct relevancy to something that's a little more broad, from volume metrics to again, take those with a grain of salt, just based on your industry and space, and then things like keyword difficulty and even cost per click. So I'll just breeze through some of the stuff on this framework as a whole and then we're going to dive into each one in specific. So just feel free to listen, no need to take any notes or anything on on this section just yet. We'll dive into each one there. But the second stage here essentially is sort of competitiveness. So how difficulty or how difficult is the corresponding SERP that you're Looking within, can you realistically compete based on, you know, average Dr. DA scores that give you sort of a good proxy, but also looking at like, how long have they been ranking there, what's their content quality, referring domains? All these sort of things will give you an idea of like, what is your actual, you know, reasonable timeline for ranking for some of that. The third stage here is topical authority. So are you already seen as a topical expert in these spaces or are you building it up from the bottom? Are you already ranking for similar queries? Again, that's sort of what we were touching on earlier there. If you're in that specificity stage, you might have a lot of topical authority. Already gives you a little bit more room, needs to kind of explain, expand and see results faster. The organic CTR stage here of the framework is can you realistically rank within, let's just say the top three for that given keyword, which is going to net probably somewhere between 70%, maybe even higher of the clicks. And you're also assuming kind of baking in that organic CTR has just been decreasing over time with various SERP features. Whatever it is, you know, you really need to be ranking within that topic 3, 4, 5 to really see any sort of payback from a keyword these days. So it's something to keep in mind when you're doing that initial research. And then last but not least is the fun parts, right, the money part. So the payback period, what's your ideal payback period in risk tolerance plays a huge, huge factor in how you build a content strategy from the ground up. So your tolerance here could be, you know, I need to get leads in two to three months. Or it could be, hey, we've got funding here, we've got a 24 month timeline, let's hit the ground running and see what we can rank for in that time frame. Your strategies are going to look completely different. So those are really key factors that we take into account before ever even looking at a piece of content and deciding whether or not to publish for it. Cool. So we'll dive straight into all of these now. Hopefully won't take up too much more of your time. I'll try to be concise on some of them, but essentially the harvest demand stage is where we're plugging in a bunch of different initial keyword ideas and looking at essentially all the long tail variations, weighing up their respective relevance, volume, keyword difficulty, cost per click. Pardon me. These metrics here are really good at understanding what's the intent of these, what sort of Length do I need to put into it? What's that cost going to be? So a metric like cpc, some of you know this, some of you might not, but, you know, while it's a obviously an advertising metric, can really help you indicate what people are willing to spend on something, right? And usually if someone's willing to spend a pretty significant amount of money for a single click, it generally speaking means they're getting really good quality leads and traffic to their sites. And so you'll often see if it's like if you're in a law firm niche, you see, you know, if they're searching for a law office near XYZ City, that's going to probably be maybe even upwards of 100, $200 per click. And that, generally speaking means the folks that are bidding on that are seeing a pretty good return. They're seeing good quality leads come through the door. So it's something to keep in mind in your space. Obviously depends on the space you're in, how expensive the things you sell are, but you can weigh those up on different keywords and essentially get some really good data on structuring intent. So this is just another example of what we did for Monday of looking at basically a keyword framework that you can plug in, which is that customer segment vertical, and then a problem or a pain point that they face. It can be as literal as this one here, where it's, you know, construction project management, literally taking their ICP and then taking their exact software that they do here. This one's a little bit more middle to the bottom of the funnel, but you can also get a little bit more broad with these and you'll come up with a lot of really good quality terms here. So the harvesting demand is really just building a lot of different keyword lists at scale that you can then compare side by side and understand which ones you can go after that you're going to see results from in a given time frame. So it's a really good starting point of just building a lot of lists in a lot of different areas, so you can have a lot of that data offhand from a SERP competitiveness standpoint. What we want to look at here are a few different things. And so what you'll tend to see in given keyword tools are things like a, you know, keyword difficulty metric or a score. These are basically useless these days, in my opinion. I think they're a good, they can be a good starting point, but when you really dig into the actual fundamentals or how they're ranking some of that or scoring it rather, they're just not great indicators of what you'll actually see work. So for example, if you're looking at this one here, this keyword of contractors planner says a keyword difficulty of six. And when you look at some of the stuff in here, it's a bit misleading, right? Like there's a few brands in here that are super high doctor Millions of links pointing to them. But when you actually look at how that metric is scored, it's really just looking off the domains pointing to that individual page. So it's looking at things at a page level more than it's looking at things at a domain level. And we need to be taking into account both factors because obviously they matter heavily in that, you know, if Forbes comes in on this topic and they have zero links pointing to that specific page, their brand is just so large that they're probably going to be able to garner some topical authority and rank there really quickly. So we don't want to base things off of just the amount of domains to a specific page. We want to look at things from a domain level. And so the good news is that when you actually do that, you'll start to see things a little bit more clearly. You know, maybe this one shows an app store ranking, etc. This one shows Amazon ranking Monday.com, this might not be a term that you really want to go after for the short term as you're just probably not going to rank for it based on competition, despite the keyword tool saying it's an 8, which for a brand new site might be relatively easy. So what we look at here too, from a SERP competitiveness standpoint is especially as it relates to how do we create content at scale, how do we do this, how do we create a piece that's actually going to rank from here? Using blogging to outrank the competition. What we want to look at here is modeling things that work from brands that are at your size or potentially even smaller. And so when you look at the first few things that are ranking here, you'll see pretty large companies, big domains, big brands. We often are told in various different circles that, hey, we should look at the number one ranking thing here. We should basically try to make that a little bit better and then we'll hopefully at some point rank better than them. But it's just really not how it works in practice. We find that there is often sort of, you know, lower size brands, smaller, they're just getting things going on. The SEO side that actually penetrate in a lot of these SERPs. And so that's something we want to really hone in on and understand how are they doing this? And a lot of it comes down to that specificity within a given topical area. So whereas a brand like Reich or whatever is ranking here, they can rank for a lot of these things just based on they, you know, built a brand over the past decade, they've got a bunch of different ICPs, they have content going in a whole host of spaces that might not be you. Right? And that's okay. And you can identify there's other folks out there that are succeeding doing this. And so you want to model after them and not model after some of the big hitters you see on SERPs. Because a lot of folks can rank for some content, unfortunately, just by the size of their brand and the quality. You might read it, you might say, you know, it's not the best content I've ever read, this one's a little better. And so that's one you want to model after. Generally speaking, when you're looking at SERP competitiveness is is there anyone that's a little bit closer to your brand size, lower than your brand size or smaller rather? And then using that as an indication of whether or not it's realistic to rank for these terms. And oftentimes you will find that even if something is hyper competitive, like an international marketing strategy, whatever it is, you'll find that there are doors that are open there depending on your own brand, you know, how does it fit with your company, your ICPs, things like that, from a topical authority standpoint. And so Elizabeth hit on this a lot as well. So I'll just expand a tiny bit on that. But essentially what we look at here is organizing topics around specific customer industries and then using basically a parent child hierarchy to help reinforce some of that topical authority. So creating pretty dense clusters. Again, going back to that specificity velocity framework of identifying the specific clusters and niches and then really going deep within those. So you can see some of that too, just on their sites as well as sort of that URL structure that we tend to use here is essentially just sending positive signals around those various different topics, topic areas that we want to focus on, making sure we've got a lot of good quality content that's condensed into this area. And so we're building a lot of that topical authority, we're adding in expertise over time, et cetera. We want to obviously focus on a lot of the topics where we can add some of that uniqueness to it. So that could be, you know, your company does things a certain way. Let's touch on how we actually utilize that in practice within the content and add some sort of unique value there. So that's what we mean by the topical authority standpoint. Some of the practical application here is really going back to specificity, right? So if you're ranking well for similar terms, you probably have some topical authority there's. And you can go deeper and then use that Velocity framework within specificity. So really take a look. If you're already an established company or you've been doing SEO for a while, you've been blogging for a while, just go take a look and run a quick analysis and check and see what are sort of those generalized themes or areas that we rank well within. Which ones? Maybe not so much. That'll give you a really clear idea of your expansion opportunity there, or even your pruning opportunity to say, you know, hey, this content's been in this niche for the past 12 months. It's not ranking for anything. Let's potentially prune that or redirect it or remove it. Whatever sort of decision you make there based on your current standing and then really focusing on areas where you do have that topical authority, you're going to see content rank far faster. So that's a really good practical application there. And, you know, not. Not sponsored by Market Muse. And it's just a coincidence that, you know, they're involved in the webinar, but we like to use them for this specific purpose, actually. So using tools like their inventory feature, where we can analyze things like a more personalized difficulty score, we prefer that over sort of just looking at them generically in other tools because it can help predict, just based on your own sort of topical authority in the given space, how much content do you have there? What are you currently ranking versus relying on generalized numbers that they tend to be really vague. Again, like we saw in the example up here, it tends to not be a really clear indicator of if you're actually going to rank well or not. If you see an 8 out of 100 keyword difficulty score, the last thing I would expect to see is Amazon ranking number one, because you're just not gonna outrank Amazon for the most part. So just something to keep in mind there. Cool. Back to the organic ctr. So we're moving again. I'll jump back here as well as you can get another bit of an overview here. So we covered the Harvest Demand section, SERP competitiveness, topical Authority. Now we're into the CTR and then the final one, Payback period. And WIX team, feel free to stop me if I'm going way too over on time.

We kind of are. I don't know what to say.

No, you're good. I figured it might have been a little too in depth, so I'm happy to skip ahead too on anything if we have like another minute or two. Sure.

Cool.

Cool. No worries. So the payback period, essentially you'll have these slides after so you can kind of run through it. But there's a few kind of questions you can ask yourself based on where you're currently ranking all those sorts of things to kind of determine how do you make sense of like velocity, specificity, roi, things like that to be able to dive into some of that. The distribution side too. There's a lot of practical applications in here, it'll take too long to go through. But essentially what we're looking at here is we see that from a link building perspective it plays just as much in the content as anything else. In that content quality isn't just on page. So here's like kind of a direct line from Google's own How Search Works documentation basically saying, you know, one of the several factors they use to determine quality content is if other prominent websites link to you. And so what we want to see, link building ads, is not really this like kind of mystical thing, but more as an extension to the content quality. So how do we get really good quality sites to link back to that content you've created actually bolsters that content and makes it better quality. And so that's what we want to do in this section here. I won't dive into all of it just now, but there's a few different things you can test around in here, a few different ways to go about link building at scale. And there's a couple of different frameworks in there that you can dive into at another time. But I won't, won't draw on drone on too long because I think I already went too far.

It was a lot of information. So we really appreciate you sharing, sharing everything. I'm just going to sign host everyone quickly so we can get to some of our, so that we can get to our things here. Just a second. So we want to make sure that we are getting to our. We're getting to your questions but so on the place where you registered for the webinar with all of this information, we have added lots of the notes here from, from Jeremy and from Elizabeth. And we've also added a lot of the. The signposting, lots of different tools that you can use on wix to optimize your blog for distribution, for using video maker, for using different content. Different content, using analytics to understand some additional opportunities, verifying your site for rich results, which can also give you different opportunities and things like that. So we'll link to that in the email that you get and I'm going to pass it over to Morty so that we can get to some questions before we wrap up.

Hi there. Okay, I'm going to quickly just pull up my list here, by the way. Thank you, Jeremy. That was absolutely amazing. I just want to kind of sum up what you're talking about in, in one distinct sentence. So I know because there's a bunch of questions around this. You kind of just want it. You, if you see that you're ranking or you're getting some traction around a particular topic. So if you sell a few, you fix cars and you, you talk about brakes on your blog post, you talk about the engine on your blog post, you talk about spark plugs. I just got mine changed. And you see that the, the content about the engine is not working. It's not ranking, but the content about the brakes is ranking. And you're starting to get some traction on that. Go de breaking or breaks. You really just want to build on the momentum that you have. Your whole podcast episode of the SERPS up podcast on the WIX SEO hub about momentum and its role in SEO. So check out that episode for more on that.

Okay.

Wow. Let's go. Andy Jarvis.

Great.

Andy Jarvis had a question. He wrote, how do you know if you should update, optimize a piece of content or write a new piece, save something? Updates from spring to summer 2023. What factors would be driving updating the piece versus writing a new one? Oh, yeah.

Do you want me to.

Oh, yeah. Folks, floor is yours, Jeremy.

Cool.

Yeah.

So in terms of sort of deciding, you know, whether to update or create a new one, is that sort of the. The basis of the question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think a little bit of it depends and kind of goes back to some of the stuff we were just chatting about around how much content you've already got published there versus creating new ones. I think a lot of the difficulty we run into with a sort of content velocity as just like a blanket prescription for most folks is that you do run into the fact that you just have so much decay going on. And so it'll depend a little bit on the evergreen nature of a given topic that you have. And so you can do a little bit of a clear test there by just looking at what content is already ranking there when you search that term. So if you go to Google, don't even need an SEO tool for this. Just plug in that keyword and see what time frame was the content published in that's currently ranking. Like, did anyone update it recently or is it still showing stuff from two, three years ago? That gives you a pretty clear idea actually, in two senses. Number one being that that content, if it's outdated still a little bit, that's an opportunity for you to create a little bit better content if you're not already ranking number one. Or it's potentially your opportunity to just bolster that number one ranking by updating it anyway with new or fresh information. And if you see that a lot of the content there is updated more frequently and you have been losing rankings, I'd for sure prioritize rejuvenation or updating of that content than I would net new because again, you're then if you're playing into that net new cycle, right, you're creating a bunch of new content that's also going to decay at some point. You're creating yourself a really big backlog there. So I tend to be a much bigger fan of working with what you've already got if there's still opportunity in that space and you're seeing results from it.

And that's something Elizabeth touched on as well, about making sure that it's not a set it and forget it sort of. Sort of approach.

Yeah, I think it's going to be very rare to hurt yourself by updating your content. That's. You can only improve your content that way, especially if there's a change in the market, change in information. When it comes to updating or creating new, it goes back to thinking about what is this page actually about. If you're adding too much information, that's changing the subject of that page, that's when you should create something new and go really deep into it.

So Elizabeth, you spoke a lot about content clusters and a bunch of folks were asking if you maybe could define what is a content cluster and maybe give an example. One would sort of look like how you go about creating one.

Yeah, yeah, it's a lot. We can provide some additional content on clusters too. In the simplest term though, it's. It's a way. It's a group of content that fully covers a topic. And I like to think about it across the Buyer's journey. So if you're talking about, and that's kind of what I was talking about earlier too, if you're talking about tools in a how to article, that's, that's clashing. That's the intent, mismatch, the intent of someone searching how to do something if they're served with products that's now answering their query. So when you're creating a content cluster, you want to think about the related topics to your core topic and create content that covers the why, the how, the what. Jeremy talked about different verticals. So how, how can you expand, go into more detail on the topics within that, the related terms, what's semantically related to that initial, that initial topic and go deep into all of those. It's kind of the mix of science and art and really thinking about what's going to provide value to your audience. That's really what you're trying to do with your content and answer their questions. If you need to create 10 pieces of content to do that, to answer all of those questions, do it. If you need to do 20, then that's fine too. It's not necessarily you need five pieces for this cluster and you move on. It's really how are you going to show that you know this topic really well and can provide a comprehensive answer for them?

And I think it's sort of being a sort of one stop shop. So like if somebody's got, if somebody has a question about like a houseplant or something that they, they know that you know how to grow it, where to which, where to put it, whether to put it in dark light or bright light or like, you know, what kind of food it needs or what kind of pot it might go in or like all of that, that sort of stuff. So it's got all of the different ways that people might be interested in that topic and really showing a depth of knowledge.

Yeah, basically if someone were to say, hey, are you an expert on plants? You would show them your blood. So yeah, here's all the things I talk about. Clearly I am an expert on plants. One question that kind of came up and really touched on the core of what this, what this webinar is about. Let's say, for example, I'm starting to write content and I'm raking. I know position number 15. So page two of Google and I just can't seem to get above page two. What do I do now

other than the first thing I. Yeah, now the first thing I typically would look at there would be sort of A one to one stacking of like, is the content quality good at like a baseline perspective from a subjective level, just looking at the, the depth that you're going into in comparison to competitors, what sort of varying other related topics can you add to that constant. If not, if you've checked all those boxes you created as good, if not better of a piece of quality content, a lot of the difference maker there, from what we see, tends to be the link building side. Do you have enough authority in that space? Are other good quality brands pointing to that piece of content or your company as a whole and saying, hey, they're the experts in the space on this. Listen to them around this. Generally speaking, that is what we see pushes folks from, let's just say the bottom of the first page, top of the second page into a position where you can actually compete. And then from there it tends to be a little more around, like how much do you update that content, et cetera. Generally speaking, that's what we find to work. But there's multiple ways to do it, of course.

So one last thing. I know we're really short on time, but I've seen Bernard multiple times throughout the Q and A. Is this idea of authority and what do I mean by authority? What are we trying to do here? And I'll say this really quickly before I hand it over to our guest. You know, the Google is sort of like a courtship. You need to show Google that you're trustworthy, that you're relevant, that you know, they can, they could feel comfortable showing your website on the result pages for whatever keywords that you're trying to rank for. And that's a long process of really creating content. And I think in terms of outranking bigger websites, it's really a place where you have some advantages because again, as I mentioned before, you can really go into the nitty gritty details of a topic to build up that authority in ways that maybe a bigger website can't. But again, it's a one. We're talking about authority. Elizabeth. Jeremy, what comes to mind, what's really important in terms of building authority and what does that actually mean for a SME or an SMB, smaller kind of website?

Elizabeth, it'd be great to hear. I know you talked about this a little bit on yours.

Yeah, and it starts with, it starts with expertise and experience and displaying that in your content. So I talked about dog grooming. If everything on my site is about dog grooming, going into it, talk about specific breeds, I talk about things, if I start talking about cats and have no other content about cats on my blog. I'm not going to have any authority on cats because Google's like her blog is about dogs. Why am I going to give her rankings for something about cats? I need to build out a whole infrastructure with all the basics and go into the same details of what I did for dogs for cats. And at the basic level, that's how we perceive authority.

And with that, I think I'll hand it back over to Crystal. Just one quick plug for the Surf's up podcast. And I think two weeks in August, I'm going to say eighth, we're releasing episode number 50 of the podcast. So check out episode 50. It's got a heap of cuts from our previous episodes. So if you're looking to get into SEO, learn more about SEO. You cover a whole gamut of topics

in just one episode, so it's.

That's the perfect one to get started with.

And now I hand it back to Crystal.

Yes. And I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for joining us here. Thank you, Elizabeth, for your fantastic insights. Thank you, Jeremy, for joining us today with your amazing insights. We're going to be sharing this video on YouTube. We're going to be sharing it on the web, the website that you joined this webinar via. And thank you all so much for coming. I hope you guys have a great, great rest of the week and see you again for the next webinar.

Bye.

Thank you.