180: Establishing Your Expertise with Jeff Coyle

In this episode I chat about WordPress 5.0 and then Bjork interviews Jeff Coyle from Market Muse about becoming a subject matter expert for your blog. Hey, hey, hey, lovely listener. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast and we are thrilled that you're here. I'm Alexa and I'm the General Manager of Food Blogger Pro and the producer of this podcast. And I'm thrilled for you to dig into this episode because it's actually one of my favorite Food Blogger Pro Podcast episodes to date. But before we get to the episode, I want to take a quick second to thank our sponsors. WP Tasty WP Tasty is our site for food blogging plugins. We have a recipe plugin, a Pinterest plugin, and an affiliate auto linking plugin. And you can learn more over@wptasty.com and for our Tasty Tip today, that is our helpful little tip for you. Sponsored by WP Tasty. I want to chat about WordPress 5.0, aka the Gutenberg update. You've probably heard about Gutenberg, Raquel, WPTasty's wonderful product manager, was actually on the podcast to chat about it just a few months ago, and you can check out that episode by going to foodbloggerpro.com 163 Gutenberg is WordPress's new way to build content. It's a whole new editing experience and allows you to easily build flexible posts and pages. And you know, I want to focus on that word new for a second. Change is tough, it always is. But change can also be good and exciting, which is what we're anticipating with this WordPress update. It's a big change to WordPress, but it's also the most tested release ever. So I wanted to use this tasty tip to reassure you that everything will be okay. While it may take a bit for you to get comfortable with this new WordPress editor, we think it'll be a good change for WordPress sites. If you want to learn more, I encourage you to go to foodbloggerpro.com Gutenberg that link will take you to an informative blog post on the Food Blogger Pro blog All about Gutenberg. Raquel and I kind of tag teamed this post and it answers questions about what happens to your existing content with Gutenberg, what you can expect with WordPress 5.0, and what else you can do to prepare. As of last Thursday, December 6th, this WordPress update is live, so you may have already seen some of the differences in your WordPress editor. This post@foodbloggerpro.com Gutenberg should help answer some of those questions that you have. And now the episode. I totally wasn't lying when I said this is one of my favorite FPP podcast episodes. Jeff helps run Market Muse, an AI planning and optimization software. And I know that description sounds just a bit intimidating, but if we break it down a bit, it's all about optimizing your content to improve your search engine ranking potential. This episode focuses around becoming a subject matter expert on your blog. So picking a subject and becoming the utmost expert on that topic, you'll learn a lot about why subject matter expertise is valuable as a content creator, what a quality piece of content actually looks like, and how you can prove you are an expert. So, without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Jeff. Welcome to the podcast.

Oh, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you today and excited to share the conversation with the podcast listeners today, because we Rewinding the tape. There's a conference that I was at and some people were talking about Market Muse. I think maybe Market Muse even did. Maybe it was you that did a presentation. This was Rhodium. Not this year, but the year before. Was it you or somebody from Rhodium?

No, yeah, that was me. That was me. I'm a huge fan of the Rhodium community.

For sure. So Rhodium is this group. It's people that are interested in kind of buying, building, scaling websites. Some people sell websites. And there was this presentation that you did, and it opened my mind up to not only the realities of where search is going, but, like, where search was at that time. And I just had never thought about it that way. And my hope is to do that same thing for people that listen to this podcast, because not only is it something that's really interesting and really exciting and really cool, but really impactful. When you start to understand better how people are using search engines, and especially when it's people that are doing this for their business. People that listen to this podcast, that's what their business is. It's understanding search and social media and things like that, getting traffic to your site through those mediums. But before we do that, I want to hear a little bit about your story, Jeff. So if you could rewind the tape for us. I know that you haven't been doing Market Muse your whole life. Before that, you were involved with search and search engine and marketing, and that kind of led into marketmuse. So what's kind of your quick sparknote story of your career and what led you here.

Gosh, the sparknote story of that. So I've been in the search space for about 19 years since it really was in its infancy. I had an interest in search engines and usability theory while in school. I was doing that actually. Specialization of my major in computer science was in usability and how users read how people utilize information, both from a search capacity but then just in general information architecture. My first job was with a company called Knowledge Storm And Knowledge Storm we were really focused on selling leads via content marketing. But content marketing in those days was white papers and brochureware product marketing materials that you got leads for and we sold them to technology companies. And then in 2007 we sold Knowledge Storm to TechTarget and TechTarget is a great publisher of technology business to business focused content. So probably things that your listeners aren't publishing, but it would be the difference between CRM software and ERP software. I managed a large in house team there that was focused on every way to generate traffic, whether it's organic, whether it's really working with a large editorial team to generate readership as well as conversions to whether it was to a subscription of some sort or generating a lead that illustrated buying interest in a technology purchase environment. But at the same time I also managed a number of web publications including Notebook Review and many B2C publishing computer weekly. We had about 300 sites that were under our purview and we were really just trying to figure out what content strategy would work best. I did a brief stint at a private equity firm working with them on their portfolio companies and then co founded and took market muse to market. Really focused on transitioning people's thinking from only from thinking just about search engine optimization to also thinking about how that works from the standpoint of content strategy and how we should be thinking about exhibiting subject matter expertise with everything we do and how that will drive the bus for success.

Yeah, what do you mean by that? When you say exhibiting subject matter expertise when you go to a site, I'm guessing that your experience with MarketMuse and also probably some of your experience before, like leading up to it, has allowed you to have these kind of special goggles that like you see the web through and that other people don't have. So this idea of subject matter expertise, you know when you look at a site and you say hey, this looks like a site that has subject matter expertise versus one that doesn't, what are the differences between those sites?

So you know that's A great question. So what I'm typically thinking about is from the standpoint of if I'm going, why do I deserve why with this one page that I'm reading, why does this person or this entity, why did they deserve to be found for this specific article? For the things that it is about, for what it is most, the value that it's providing. So from a page level, I'm looking to say, after I read this content item, what things do I know that I didn't know before? What tasks can I complete that I couldn't read? And does this do anything to point me in the direction of next steps and next things? Next questions I might want to know to encourage whatever it is, that step that I wish to take, whether it's learning more about something, if this was informational, whether it's, if I'm considering a product purchase, is it giving me information that guides me further down that process? So from a page perspective, it's really saying, is this doing the things that were promised to me when I got to this page? Whether it's via a search query or via a reference at the site level, that's when it gets a little bit more complex where you really have to also ask yourself, why do I deserve to be the authority on this particular recipe or this type of cuisine or this type of use of a product and is saying, what are the things that somebody who would write a great recipe for Thanksgiving time for fried turkey? What are the things that somebody who is an expert on that recipe? What are the other things they likely would have also published? Would it truly be likely that they would only publish recipes? Or would they be getting into other things that relate to that topic in order to tell the story that they actually were that expert. Also, what relationships to other types of content might exist in that environment and that goes into putting your best foot forward so that future articles that you write. So the future, whether it be recipes or lifestyle type posts, will be on the back of someone who has told the story, they told the story that they actually know what they're talking about. I want to trust them. I want to kind of have a feeling that this is gonna, this recipe is gonna come out good.

And so I think those things make sense and I think it's a really good reminder. As content creators, you can't just put content out, right? A lot of times I think there's this mentality of, hey, you just have to publish on a consistent basis and three times a week and make sure that you're have new Fresh content that's coming out. But so much of it isn't necessarily the amount but the quality of it. And it's especially with content being such an easy thing to do, it's easy to press, publish on a piece of content. That means that if there's lots of supply of this then in order for you to get to the top of that, you really have to be intentional to think about those things and to make it as quality as possible. But how do you measure that? Like what does that look like in terms of understanding quality? And how do people know? And this is, this is not the intent of it. But I know that Market Muse as a tool ties into this and it's kind of some of the reason that you, that you created it. But how do people even get started with understanding what quality looks like? And, and start to, you know, wear the one to one goggles. You have the 301 version where you can really see through that. But like how do start to develop that understanding of what quality looks like?

Yeah, I think that certainly 301, 101 goggles completely understand. I think that the. But what I will say is though I had to do all this manually throughout my career. I had to build all these processes to be able to do this by hand. And some of these things you can create workflows to do this type of analysis by just laboring through. It's not something that necessarily has to involve at scale to do it with a large data processing to ensure that your hit rates are going to go up and track those things over time. That's when looking at things that would provide that level of information. But I think it really hinges on really being, you know, having a mirror in front of your, in front of yourself and your writers and saying what are the things that I know about what it is that I'm writing about that no one else does and have I exhibited those things well and what blind spots might I have? So whether that's a peer review, whether that's really just being self aware of who my writers are, how I'm, how I'm developing that content, the other. So that's where something that a lot of folks don't do and that's something that's applicable really in a lot of industries, whether it's, you know, service industry, whether you're a lawyer, whether you're focused on insurance, what do you know from having your feet on the ground in a kitchen, from doing restaurant management, from being a published writer. What are those things that people would want to know that. They wouldn't know unless they met you or somebody who had your level of expertise. And why isn't that on the page, too? That's something that I like to catch up with when I'm doing more of the strategy sessions. As far as quantifying quality, there's a lot of different processes people would go through on that. What I like to look at is to build this narrative and say, if I were a subject matter expertise and I were covering this topic comprehensively, what are the topics that I would naturally have mentioned in this page? Much like a recipe, right. You know, this is actually an analogy I use. And no matter what industry I'm speaking about, if I were to write a recipe for it, and I don't know why fried turkey's on the mind, if I were writing a recipe for fried turkey and my recipe doesn't mention the word oil, something's wrong with it, right? Because I'm most likely. Or some sort of fat, right. Something's wrong with that because I'm not, you know, I'm messing or unless I've got an air fryer dynamic, you know, as long as there's something out there that's illustrating that I actually have the ingredients that's making up the recipe. What if I don't mention the word turkey? Right? Or don't, you know, if I don't mention concepts about, you know, preparation, you know, common, common things. So that's the easiest way to think about it is to say, what are the steps that one would need to take to be successful executing this or, you know, or doing, you know, taking part in answering the questions, what are these ingredients and how am I putting them together to tell the story that I have, that I don't have blind spots, that I really know what I'm talking about, that this isn't right?

Yeah. And I think specifically of. There is this post that it was a recipe, actually, that Lindsay shared with me this weekend. She's like, this is really cool what they're doing. And it was a really small thing, but instead of a video, what they did is each step they broke down with a gif or gif, whichever side you're on, and walked people through each step. And it was this visual example of what it looks like to have success specifically with that recipe. And I thought, oh, what a great way to layer on value to something where if you were to compare that against the exact same piece of content on another site that didn't have that, there would be less. It would be less helpful. Most people would say, you know, there might be some people who are like, I just want to read it. And they had the option to actually hide those images. But I think of that as an example of like, hey, this is something that allows this person to demonstrate their expertise in a way that most pieces of content wouldn't have. So my follow up question for you would be, I think people hear that and they're like, yeah, that makes sense. I'm an expert in what it looks like to eat grain free or I'm an expert in what it looks like to create healthy, simple recipes. That's my expertise and that's what I know about or whatever. It would be vegan. But how does a search engine then know that you are the expert by the things that you say? I think that's one of the things that's always baffled me is how much of this is human and how much of this is a machine or a Google bot coming to your site and scanning through and being like you are an expert and then awarding you the expert tag. What's the difference between those? How does that work?

That's such an awesome question. And also there's a lot of different steps and what I like to always, whenever I'm kind of waxing on how the algorithms work, I also want to add some tactical ways to not just like figure that out on your own, but also things you can do to kind of speed along the process of learning. And so the best thing you can put when you put your foot forward on the quality content and there's even some things and if you want to look up, there's some things you can with. For food blogging and lifestyle blogging specifically, there are some, some technical search engine optimization steps that you can take that relate to markup. I'm going to just say become an expert in that that's kind of gets you in the door kind of situation. Make sure that your stuff is marked up appropriately.

And when you say marked up to clarify for those listening, that's like using the right. And we've talked about things like this in the podcast before. Using the right alt text description for your images and file names and using, you know, in our space it's we're able to use a recipe plugin.

Recipe plugins, yeah, exact Using those things, that's going to get you appropriately set up. And that's really an important getting you in the door type of thing. Making sure you're staying on top of that type of thing with your site. I mean you don't want to go out with something that's inferior to what might be available just so you can hint you're giving the search engines effectively hints. The important dynamic I think of what you're asking though is how that's transitioned over time from being able to just assess the words that are in pages versus what they're about. And that's the big shift. And so from 2013 on, I'd say that real innovations have been publishing into the search engine, into their core algorithms. I can get into a lot of detail there. But to stay out of the weeds, effectively trying to affect, trying to say that this is likely to be the best answer for this specific query. This is likely to be semantically related. Semantically, meaning what is it about? What is this page about? Also they've also added on a couple of years later, almost like a supercharger called RankBrain. Prior to that hummingbird, if you want to look up these references and prior to that they were really just focused on quality and coming up with ways to assess quality.

When you're naming these things, these are updates that happen to Google. So Google, just like your computer, just like Microsoft Word goes through these updates, we don't see them because we see the same Google bar, but when we do a search. But that's why for some people, they'll talk about their search rankings dropping sometimes overnight because Google pushes out an update, it changes what they view as the best piece of content and therefore some content shows up higher, other content falls off the map. And for somebody that runs a site that is primarily driven by search traffic, that's why it's so important to be aware of these things. And so you were saying with RankBrain there was a switch that happened. And can you explain a little bit about what that switch was?

Yeah. So not to get into kind of the science behind it, but the applied how it felt afterwards really was that more really complex queries were being solved by what you saw in the results. Where historically maybe the results seemed like a near miss or maybe the results were kind of catch all results, you were really getting a higher hit rate on complex queries that you might only ever see once. So great percentage of queries that go into a search engine only happen once or they happen once a year or a very small percentage of time. So if you imagine how hard of a challenge that is if you're designing search engines right, you've got to figure out how do I do that? So early attempts at doing that were doing things like query rewriting and we can get into. And that would be where? If you typed in something long, like how do I fix a broken hubcap on a 1968 Ford Pinto hatchback, which.

I have googled before. No, just kidding, I haven't. Wouldn't that be awesome though?

Yes. So how do I figure out what the intent is behind that query and then map it? Well, that's what they have done even. They're doing even better now than they ever have before and they will only get better at that.

And so this is to draw a parallel into our world. So I just typed in what I thought to be kind of a long, obscure search. How many chocolate chip cookies are in a cookie? And what I find found interesting is actually when I scroll down, I don't know what result it is. Three, six, maybe seven. There's a pinch of yam. So the food blog that we have is Pinch of Yum. And it's an article that Lindsay published called Tips for Purchase Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies. So it's interesting to see this piece of content is ranking not for the keyword that we wanted to rank for, but for this long search term. So as a publisher, how do we start to be intentional about thinking about some of these things when we're crafting our content?

Yeah, that's really exciting. That's a great question. So when I like to think about these things, is three core or four core action plans? One is that like I mentioned, that self reflection. I want to examine what I've got today. I want to examine my site and look at all of my pages, figure out what's worked in the past. What types of ways are people finding me? What types of queries are they typing in? What intent can I learn from those queries? Are they all very similar or is it all over the place? Are my hit rates for content higher when I publish a certain type of content and really trying to figure out why that is. Is it because I had one really awesome post? Is it because only one of those posts got a lot of credibility from external sources? Just trying to figure out what is assessing my inventory of content and saying where have I been strong, successful? Where do I think I have great content that underperformed? Where do I have weak content that punched above its weight? I've been trying to get kind of an assessment of what that can tell me about maybe things that I want to work on or do better, make sure that I can find maybe content that I want to update and keep up to date because 90% of my traffic is Going to one article, one recipe that I haven't updated in six years and I haven't built any new content around it. So one tactic there is really getting up to date of where you're at and then figuring out what are the topics, what are the things, what are the concepts, what are the. If it is a particular recipes, type thing or type of cuisine or type of technique, how can I start to build deliberately and strategically content that starts to, to effectively exhibit that I'm an expert. And so if I've already got a few pieces of that cloud, imagine the cloud of hubs and spokes, if I've got a few nodes throughout that that are already doing well, I'm just assembling the rest of that puzzle and I'm trying to figure out what is that cluster or what does that cloud of content look like that would fill out the puzzle where I do have gaps and fill them out. So looking at what I've got, trying to fill that out and then the third biggest piece and we can dive into any one of these is assessing the competitive landscape. So even at a query level, I can look and see who's in that space, what are they doing? Am I doing a better job than them with this individual page? Am I doing a better job with them generally with the rest of their stuff? Where do they have success, where do they have gaps? How can I put myself out there, my content out there in a better way than they are? And so when you combine that assessment of current state, the aspirational state, where do I want to be, what do I want to own, what gaps do I want to fill? And when you take that on top of competitive analysis, that's a recipe for a solid strategic process for someone who might not have the infrastructure of a 10 person contest strategy team.

Yeah, for sure. And I think it'd be worth walking through each one of those. So the first one, self reflection, kind of looking at what you have, examining that, getting a good idea of that. One of the ways that we talk about this is shining stars and finding your shining stars. What are the things on your site that really perform well. And one of the ways that we've talked about doing this is just simply going into Google Analytics and sorting by your most popular piece of content. It could be from the past year or the past month. In our niche, it's seasonal. So maybe grabbing that from the past year and saying, okay, what's been a really, what's let's say top five pieces of content and getting a good idea of what those are, you had mentioned a couple other things, like, hey, what's something that I feel like is really good that isn't performing well in regards to those types of analysis? Is that kind of a gut check? Is that just saying I'm gonna block out two hours and just spend some time thinking strategically about my content, Maybe spending some time in Google Analytics, or is that like a spreadsheet kind of thing that you would, you know, rank from one to five certain pieces of content? What does that look like in terms of like actually going through that specific process?

So I can speak to it in a couple different ways. So tactically, if you don't have a technology like markupmuse, we can evaluate the quality and comprehensiveness of any content on any topic. And that's one of the core functionality of our platform. We look at the comprehensiveness. How likely is it that this, how does this page model that which we consider a subject matter expert page on this topic? If you don't have that? Some things to be thinking about are really, I think, business indicators, right? So length, expenditure, historical peak of traffic, and maybe it's in a low. Was it doing well at one time and now it's not. And then like you said something that, you know, it's a head scratcher as to why it didn't do better. And those all tell a story. If you can also have some information about the competitive landscape as well as how comprehensive the page is, that gives you a bit of an unfair advantage because you can say, oh, in order for me to write content about chocolate chip cookies, my cookie section, I'm going to need about 400 additional articles on cookies because there isn't a competitive cohort, there isn't a competitor in this cookie recipe space that doesn't have a massive volume of stuff attacking on cookies. And I wrote four articles. Why do I think that I should be in even in the same discussion? So those are the types of things to be considering at that side.

And that was kind of number two. The thing that you talked about that I thought was interesting, you talked about starting to see where there's connections with your content. And I think the word that you used was kind of the cluster of content and I think of pinch of yam. So we focus primarily on recipes and there's some like, storytelling and lifestyle stuff that Lindsey integrates into that. Another section that she has is food photography. So she talks about and has done blog posts on, you know, how to take better food photos. Would that be an example of kind of Cluster of content. And if you were, you know, consulting with us, looking at that specifically, what do we do then to improve that? Do we do we build out the photography resources and with, with the goal being that we are kind of viewed as a subject matter expert on food photography?

Well, I think there's a couple questions in there. And yeah, that's something that you're, I think by beginning to publish on food photography, you're, you've already begun the process of having a, you know, effectively two, two large kind of content type or the content topic goals. One is in the food recipes. And then you branched out. There's a couple techniques to be looking at. Is, is that just a natural, is it natural that those two things are going to coexist? So how well was that food photography content received? How well did it do out of the gate? Or are there things that you might need to cover that are a bridge between those two topics? If you had a blog about pinjoy and then all of a sudden you started writing posts about, you know, kitty cat photos, that is going to be a much harsher bridge for you to cross. But going from food and recipes to food photography, it is a related topic. It is an adjacency. So yes, if you were building now to become an expert on food photography is a completely different set of types of content. Can you connect those two? Do you need any bridge content in order to tell that story you met? So that's what I would be looking at within food photography. It's what types of things are you bringing to the table with that content? And the way that I would be researching that would be heavily getting into. If I'm going into a new topic, I'm going into a new zone. It's going to heavy competitive cohort analysis. Competitive analysis. What do those competitive content inventories look like? Do any of them cover photography as well as recipes? What do they look like? This is a bit of a secret workflow, so this is worth the price of admission. But look at their history of posts, look at their cadence of publishing and then cross reference that against their performance on those topics. And that's a concept called competitive cohort profiling. And if I can look at the cadence of publishing, I can look at when they started publishing on that new topic, how quickly did they see success? Did I see success quicker or slower than them? So really diving deep, when I enter a new space like that that's adjacent, that's what. Those are my steps that I'm putting out there. And that allows you to Be a little bit predictive. It allows you to be. To be able to right size your budget effectively too to know how hard it's going to be to get into it. The other thing is if it's a passion and you want to write it, write it and see what happens. If it's truly. If it's a tactical thing you're looking for a return on investment, you got to be a little bit more deliberate. So those are some things to be thinking about for sure.

Yeah. And is the belief that search engines, Google whatever we'd want to say that there's an understanding around the general topic of a site and therefore like let's say you write about. We'll just use photography as an example that you for all terms your site, if it's viewed as an authority on photography then it will have this kind of built in boost. Like maybe there would be a site that has a similar amount of traffic, similar amount of links. But if they publish. But if their focus is on gadgets and then they publish a post on photography, they for the same search term they wouldn't rank as high because their site isn't viewed as a holistic photography website.

Yeah, absolutely. So that is really the as well of a description as well as I've heard of a description of authority which is a very difficult metric to quantify.

Yes.

Market means we have behind the scenes. That's really one of the core of our algorithm is one of our. Is to try to assess your authority on a topic.

Got it.

And how can that instruct what you need to do and that's really a blind spot in the market of search tools that are out there is that they're giving everyone the same metrics and advice. The competitive score for example that you get for Pinch of Yum is going to be the same as if I made a brand new blog and posted one article about the iPhone. It's going to still say that that's an 82. What do I do with that information?

Right.

And so what people who are actively pursuing strategies like you mentioned. Yes. All boats. It goes in both directions too by the way. All boats rise. If you do something that really puts yourself into an authoritative state. Thought leadership material that does really well. A lot of your other content that's related will start to potentially improve as well. So if you have success, consistent success will breed more and more consistent success. That's why for example, like you mentioned, if not to name any. But that's why somebody who started a new blog tomorrow and wrote an iPhone post versus if the Verge writes the same post, who do you think is going to have a better chance, no matter how great? And in some cases, that authority can be overwhelming to a market and give a dramatic unfair advantage for that top publisher. That's what you need to be watching out for to ensure that you don't waste money on certain zones. If you're just, you'd be so out of luck. And I'll give you a I have to take the brand out of it. But I'll give you a customer example. We for a customer, they were focused on two core markets and we gave them our estimation of the content they would need to remediate and put them as the leader in both of those core topics. One of them was 120 content items in 2018. The other one was about 650 that they needed. And here were the topics that we're on. The business basically said, gosh, that might be something we're going to do after Our revenue is 3x what it is. But let's focus on this other thing that we know we can take on at the cadence of content. We know we can create and crush that, build up enough revenue on that topic and then pivot. So that's something I always like to say. What was once search engine optimization strategy and is adapting into content strategy is truly now business strategy.

Yeah, it's what, what focus do we want to have? What, what, what is our area of expertise? What is the thing almost like what is branding for our business? What is the brand going to be?

Yeah, exactly, right. And the other piece on competitive analysis is look. And if you have access to any, even a free keyword tool, even Google AdWords, Keyword Planner or a free keyword tool, really any topic that dive into all those keyword variants and try to figure out what story they tell about what people are thinking about when they're thinking about this topic. Because let's say that there's, we call it the nerd word for this is intent fracture. It's very fractured intent. There's a lot of different ways someone thinks about it. But the way to think about this is to say if 90% of the people who were thinking about chocolate chip cookies are thinking about eating them and the best ways to stack or the best ways to stack them on top of one another. Right. And you're going out there with recipes, well, is that really going to get you what you need? And so it's really important to see how wide it is that people are thinking about this, how specific how can you build the best experience for people only going after your intent, what you want your readers to learn? And is that something that is going to drive the bus with what your business goals are? If you're getting those things right, really being self aware, identifying with that aspirational, that perfect view would be, you can start to plan and say, hey, this month I'm going to approach filling the gaps in some of my thinner recipes by updating them. Next month I'm going to write a really long form article about the different, you know, what a weird thing to say about recipes, the different variants of chocolate chip cookies and all the different types of chips.

But you never know. People could be curious about it.

But yeah, those are ways that you can. And you know, nothing goes better for writers too than hearing about it in this manner. You're not bits and bites ing them. You're not dropping a keyword on their head and saying do this. This is the outline of what we need to fill, get creative. But cross all these T's, cross all these T's and we're going to have success and high five. And that's what editorial teams love to hear. And that's why we've been successful.

And by cross all these T's, you mean hit all of these areas within this specific focus that we're focusing on?

Exactly this topic, this post, you know, making sure that every, every recipe you have, you know, maybe talks about regional variants in the region that you're targeting the market or maybe talks about what cuisine it belongs to, how it fits into a meal in this particular ethnic, ethnic target of mine, you know, the getting, really getting into. Like if you truly were the trusted advisor, what are the things, what are the things that would be in your page outline or that rubric that you want to consistently bring to the table in that recipe experience or that blog post, you know, whether it's a style experience, I know that you know, it's not just, not just recipe, not just recipe sites in the food space. We work with a lot of publishers who are crossing that chasm between lifestyle, expertise, hobbies. But it isn't to say that you can't have a sight about a lot of things. I like to toss that myth. You certainly can. It's just starting from scratch and doing that is more difficult now than it's ever been because it's about things and concepts and expertise, not just about words. And that's where it is. A little bit harder can be done. A lot of people do it really well. It's a lot easier when you've got some existing power and history to work with. To start from scratch, though, I always, I'm a huge advocate of competitive cohort profiling and if any of your readers want to know more about that, have them, you know, look me up. I'm very transparent with our strategies.

Yeah. And we'll be sure if you have any articles or anything like that we can link to that. That was actually going to be the, you know, as we're coming to the end here, one of the questions that I was going to ask was for people that are listening to this, I would imagine one of the takeaways that they have is, okay, I need to really own a certain area, and that area should probably be an area that I'm an expert in. And we can't decide what people are experts in, but we can help people decide how narrow they should get in their expertise. Like the, in the world of food and recipes, as well as many other niches, you could get get really small, right? You could, you could be an expert on cell phones, or you could be an expert on Apple cell phones, or you could be an expert on the, you know, iPhone, Xs, and that would be really, really small. That'd be really niche. So as people think about, okay, what is the thing that I want to be an expert on? How small should they go in their expertise? How. How narrow should they focus? And then what does that look like to then add on other areas of expertise as they kind of land and expand, to use a common phrase?

No, that's a great question. I think it certainly goes. The depends answer is terrible, but it's one where it really goes with what your business goals are. Is it something where you are doing your research about this and you feel it's a profitable niche? Or do you already have some profitable niches in mind that you're not as much already of an expert and you're trying to get into them by using this foundation of stuff that, you know, you're the, you're dominant. So it's about setting proper expectations based on the scope and then just trying to figure out how I can get into the things that I do want to publish more from an enterprising perspective or entrepreneurial perspective. And it's, it's not something where it needs to be an either or. But I think that how niche it is, it really depends on those business schools. If, you know, you want to get into something that's a larger than you are going to likely have to do it in Pieces versus just boiling the whole ocean launching. Who can afford to just go out and source 300 pages and then dump them into a market. Will that even have the intent that you desire? So I think that how do I right size my scope is by budget and business goals and then also competitive landscape. Those are the three things what I would shy and this is a great piece of advice, shy away from long tail hunting. Only going out, you know, going out and finding some really, really long tail weird queries and writing posts for each of them. Because that tactic is it really leaves a lot to desire. You may get lucky. Your hit rate is going to be a mixed bag. And that tactic was very popular about six or seven years ago. Easy to do. It's a lot harder to be successful now. You're always going to have to go and build out these pillar content items that represent the fact that you're a success. You know what you're talking about. So what I would be thinking about, if I do find those niches, even if they don't generate immediate traffic for you today, build out that thought leadership material. Build out that pillar of content that tells the story. You're an expert, really put the investment in there. And then over time, as you do grow and become more of a, of a resource for that, it's already going to be there and it likely will have contributed to your success, whether direct or indirect.

Yeah, that's great, Jeff. I know a lot of the reason that you know this stuff is because of Market Muse. You've been able to run, you know, this analysis of so many sites. You kind of get this, this chance to do a little bit of an X ray into successful websites and help websites that aren't having success kind of grow through the use of the Market Muse tool. And so I want to take some time for those. You know, we've kind of referenced it a couple times. Can you talk about what Market Muse is? And I know that you recently just relaunched kind of this big new overhaul called the Market Muse Suite, kind of the 2.0. And if you'd talk about that as well, that'd be great.

Yeah, sure. So, you know, just one. Yeah, I'd love to catch up on those things. One thing I did want to note was that when we're helping sites, they can be in any state. Someone who's just starting out or a very established one of the largest food publishing websites is a customer of ours. Just for reference, before we get into what it is, there's a lot of range. It's really about how much investment in content, what's your culture of content and what do you want to put out? Fantastic things. Our goal as a business isn't to provide recommendations that cut corners. And I like to be very upfront with businesses when we're working with them. So Market Muse is an AI platform really, that lets marketing teams build high quality content at scale. And you mentioned we help thousands of sites. So by analyzing massive amounts of of web data, we build content briefs or content blueprints, or in this condition, recipes that show exactly how to write to comprehensively cover a topic. So MarketMuse Suite, it's a SaaS platform that analyzes your entire website, even up to millions of pages, and identifies content gaps, high quality, low quality content opportunities throughout your sites. And so we work with hundreds of brands really focused on thought leadership, boosting engagement, and the fun result of having 2-6x improvements in their search traffic even as quickly as the first year they worked with us. MarketMuse is really, the MarketMuse suite is focused on tactically identifying those opportunities, whether it's creating new content or updating existing content and building out content briefs that you can hand right to your writer and they'd be able to execute on that content item with a shared agreement of what you expect as a strategist or a business owner.

That's great. And also a great resource for additional content like Market Muse produces content as well. And as I was preparing for the podcast, was reading through some of the blog posts that you've published and there's been some great webinars that you guys have and everything from kind of the basics to 201301 type conversations around SEO, which is always good for me to get outside of my box a little bit to tie it back to how we started. When, you know, when I heard the presentation that you gave, it was like, oh man, there are some people who are thinking about this stuff at a really high level and you guys are doing that. So appreciate you coming on the podcast, Jeff, sharing your insights, sharing a little bit about Market Muse. If people want to learn more about that, if they want to get in touch with you, if they think they might be a good fit for it. You talked a little bit about who the, who the right market would be for those people. So can you, can you kind of reiterate that the best fit for people and then if they want to learn more, what that process looks like to reach out with you and have that conversation?

Sure. Typically, what we'll see is a team that has more than two dedicated resources, whether freelance or in house. Developing content. They have a culture of content. Their goal is to generate, you know, high quality traffic and engagement. That's typically going to be a great starting point that you're fit in any particular space we work in, whether you're a publisher, local B2B technology or pharma, life sciences. Anything under the sun from a topics perspective on our site on the top right, there's actually an experience where you can grade one of your pages if you'd like to check it out on our site. And then also on the top right on MarketMuse.com, you can fill out a contact form, leave us a little bit of detail about the sites that you manage, a little bit about your role, optionally, if you want to get into that level of detail, and we'll set up a customized demonstration of what we can provide. And I think that if you're putting this much energy into making it to the end of this podcast, I think that, yeah, it's something that would be a great filter as well. I think that really getting into the details about what makes your sites tick, if that is something that drives you being able to have a control center for all of your content gives you an extremely unfair competitive advantage. I always write this online. If anyone's read anything, we give you an unfair competitive advantage. And that's the spirit of which I run the product department.

That's awesome, Jeff. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, for sharing your insights, your knowledge, and I know that it'll help people move along and achieve their goals and continue building and growing. So really appreciate it.

Thank you again for having me on the podcast. It's really excellent. And if any of your readers have some stories about some things that they published or updated as a result of this discussion and they send them in, please send them along. I'd love to hear about that.

Oh, awesome. Yeah, we'll make sure that that happens if we hear of any of that.

Wonderful. Thanks again.

Wasn't that such a great episode? So many great takeaways. Thanks again, Jeff, for being on the show. And be sure to check out MarketMuse.com for more information about optimizing your content. And now it's time for one of my favorite parts of the episode, the reviewer of the week portion of this episode. And this week's reviewer of the week is Rebecca from nobigbites.com where she's cooking up healthy seasonal food for families. I love that her review says this podcast has so much awesome information for food bloggers. I found the interviews about branding and marketing particularly helpful. Thank you Bjork for bringing so much transparency and insight into some of the more murky and mysterious parts of success in the food blogging industry. Thanks so much for your review, Rebecca. We love to share reviews from our listeners, so if you'd like to be featured on an upcoming episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, just leave us a review on itunes. Thanks for tuning in this week. We appreciate you sharing your time with us and from all of us here at fbphq, make it a great week.

Sam.