243: Best-in-Class Content - Keyword Research, Creating Value, and Authority with Ewen Finser

Foreign.

Hey.

Hi.

Hello and welcome to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm Alexa, and we are so thrilled that you're here today. We hear from a lot of bloggers who are interested in increasing their traffic. And while there is a ton of information out there about this very topic, today's podcast episode focuses on a refreshing way to understand search engines and SEO. You want to give the best possible answer to your readers and to search engines. Simple as that. And that's exactly what Ewan is here to discuss today. From organizing content in a logical way that maximizes SEO benefits, to understanding the nitty gritty of keyword research, you'll learn a lot about website structure and optimizing your content in this interview. So without any further ado, Bjork. Take it away.

Ewan. Welcome to the podcast, Bjork.

It's great to be here. Thanks so much.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about your story because I kind of know it in bits and pieces. We've been to conferences together, it's overlapped a little bit. And I know that the through line with all of it is people talk about how much they love working with you and how much they appreciate your skills and expertise, which we get to share on the podcast today. But before we get into the nitty gritty, I want to hear your story. What led you to this place where you're building and growing websites?

Yeah, so in short, desperation, I was, you know, I had kind of followed the traditional path, you know, going to college, getting your degree, and then left, you know, obviously graduated, got a day job. It's kind of a typical 9 to 5 in a corporate environment. Kind of quickly realized, like so many other people in the space have, that, you know, that wasn't for me, wasn't super happy, even though I was doing a good job at it. So it's just started to kind of look around for other opportunities and kind of back up a few steps. In college, I had dabbled with selling things online, just kind of getting a taste for buying up my roommates old textbooks and things like that, selling them on Amazon and then realizing, oh, there's other things that Amazon does and other ways you can kind of leverage that ecosystem. Which led me to the Amazon affiliate program. And so I'd kind of thrown together some really, you know, I would say really poorly designed websites, niche websites back in the day, just kind of hyper targeted, kind of a standard. You know, wouldn't call them spam because they did have quality content, but they weren't particularly broad in their focus and relatively narrow minded in terms of just focused on make the conversion. And so did that kind of call for beer money? You know, it was never more than a few hundred dollars a month. And so I didn't really treat that as like a serious endeavor, more of a side hobby. But then as I was in my day job, I was like, okay, what are the other things that I can do? And this was like the closest thing I could grasp that would lead to some independence. And so I just remember, you know, my, I was living in New Jersey at the time, driving home on the thruway, just kind of sitting in the concrete parking lot, being like, you know, what does this come to? And then actually my wife Marissa at the time, she was like, you know what, why don't you just spend the evenings at a Starbucks? You know, this was before kids, after we were married, but before kids and everything and just, you know, spend a couple hours rather than sitting in traffic every, every day and just work on this. And so that was kind of my permission slip to focus on it. And then I kind of built these sites up and at the time it was just a handful, one or two and really just honing in on what products are selling on Amazon and how can I write product reviews that can then convert our traffic that we get from Google to get the commission. Basically that was the path. And then we just did a handful of those sites and was able to build them up to a certain level where it was a few thousand dollars a month. It was enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel and be like, okay, it's not replacing my salary, but it's something, it's an exit ramp. And so I kind of took the plunge. I ended up actually being able to kind of work remotely for my day job and like work on commission. And it was kind of a great exit ramp. Most people don't have that. So I feel very fortunate that I was able to kind of ramp up the online business while I was ramping down traditional day job. So it wasn't particularly painful, although it could have been. And, and so, yeah, and so from there I would say kind of the break in my thinking was first was all about independence and lifestyle, kind of lifestyle freedom. You know, typical lifestyle entrepreneur, just trying to get away from the cubicle, control your time. And I did that right. And I built the business up to a certain point where it was nice, it was a kind of replacement salary, didn't have to answer to anyone. But then I quickly realized that there's a bigger opportunity in the space because things were growing and I felt like there was this window of digital websites, digital assets were kind of growing. Why don't we actually treat this like a serious business, like it deserves? And so we brought in some outside help in terms of project managers, editors who start to grow slowly from a handful less than 10. You know, today we have over 100 contractors in all sorts of different fields, but I'd say primarily writers and editors. And they're not all full time. They're in various part time capacities, but they're all remote. And that's kind of where we are today. We've kind of built up my main company, which is Ventureforth Media, to over 30 different websites and then in the last two years create a separate company called Owl Mountain Capital, which is basically trying to do the same thing, but with outside capital and trying to both grow sites in mass and also acquire sites where we can see some sort of opportunity or upside. And so that's kind of where we are today. We have this big investment portfolio, or relatively big relative to most of the people in the space. Sure. And then my personal company, which has continued to grow and develop.

Yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about that kind of evolution of the work that you do, because there are certain levels where people continue to build and grow. And then other times people are like, hey, I feel pretty good at this level. And that might be as the solopreneur and people really don't want to make the decision to bring on additional team members or they might get to the point where they've built their site really well and they say, hey, I want to continue to bootstrap it. I don't want to go towards outside capital and bringing people in. But you've continued to evolve that over time. When you think about kind of your end goal, if there is one, what is it or what is the drive that you have that continues to evolve to the next level?

Yeah, I think that's a very good question. I think the end goal we've always said at Al Mountain and the approach I've taken is looking at classic investors like Warren Buffett and saying, can we build the Berkshire Hathaway of digital assets? I think that is an ambition that we have in terms of where we want to be, you know, be able to have a diversified large portfolio of assets that we can kind of creates this flywheel that just continues to grow. And so that's kind of where we want to end up. And we have aspirations to, you know, to get to, you know, maybe 50 million revenue at some point. We'll see, you know, that that's further down the road and just really create another kind of side benefit would be to create a community of operators. And so one of the things that I've noticed in this space is there are a lot of people working in their own silos that aren't really connected to a larger community. They don't have support, they don't have really guidance. It's kind of Facebook groups, ad hoc. And so one thing we want to do with Al Mountain is really build a landing place for the best in class operators in whatever digital specialty they have. With the idea being that we can learn from each other, but we can also then create partnerships under the umbrella that then unlock kind of exponential value where, you know, I might be an expert with content and affiliate marketing, but what about the guy who's, or the, or the gal who is an expert at, you know, FBA fulfillment by Amazon or sourcing products from China? If we can bring those, those two people together and kind of set the right kind of conditions for success, we think that that's really where a lot of the value is going to be unlocked in the next five years.

Yep. This idea of a community element to job that traditionally would be kind of siloed. You'd be by yourself, you'd be working from coffee shops, maybe working from home. But there being value in this exchange that can happen with people who are doing different but similar things. Different maybe in the specific focus, but similar in that in some way we're all of those people are building something online. And so there's a lot of cross pollination that can happen where you can share information, can share ideas and that sort of thing.

Exactly. And also be incentivized. I think that's also their key is there are communities out there that exist that are very altruistic. But how do we also strap on like the booster of capital and incentives and aligning structures that make people not only want to share information but also be able to kind of prosper together.

Yeah, that's great. So I'm sure that people that are listening to this, it's like, wow, that's awesome. It's this huge vision. You've built it in a relatively short amount of time. But the reality is, as we said, you had to evolve along the way. And one of the things that we're going to talk about is some of the like on the ground tactical type stuff that you know and understand. But we're Also going to talk about some of that high level stuff that you've had to develop skills and expertise in. So if you, if you are to, if you were to go back and say when you were early stages in the very beginning and you were doing some of the operating and you still do some of that now, I would assume, but at a higher level when you're doing some of that on the ground, early stage web building, web business building, web, what were you doing in order to learn and what worked best in those early stages and still works today?

Yeah, so I'll, you know, speaking very personally to my narrow slice of the universe, the thing that's always kind of propelled me has been being really good at keyword research and kind of looking at what people are searching for online and kind of identifying gaps in the market when it comes to, particularly to search. And so being able to hone in on that almost to the exclusion of everything else. So I would say like the two things we built, planted our flag very firmly on are identifying these opportunities via keyword research and then creating best in class content that maybe it might not be the best in the world on day one, but eventually gets there. And we continually optimize, continuously refining our product, which is content. And so just focusing on those two things and almost to the exclusion of some other popular tactics like link building, we do some of that now, but that wasn't really what got us to where we are historically. I didn't do any link building, which in the SEO world, if you look at you like you have three heads, how is that possible? But it is. And I think a lot of times there's this kind of analysis paralysis. There's so many different things you can do to get traction online that it's like everyone, you know, you tend to go an inch deep, you know, mile wide. Whereas I said, listen, it's keywords and content and it's affiliate marketing. And those three things have got us, you know, you know, we grew to over half a million in revenue by 2017, you know, with my personal portfolio and that, you know, just by following that simple concept, nothing fancy, no adding on different business models. And so that's, I think been really key is going deep and just kind of forgetting the rest, if that makes sense.

I love that. And I think one of the things that can often happen in this space is especially if you listen to this podcast consistently, people are going to be like, yeah, that makes sense because we interview different people and they'll have this specific skill set and it'll be like, oh my gosh, I need to do that. And then it's, it's a little bit of a shift and a refocus and, and what you're saying is put your head down, get really good at one specific thing. And we see that often with somebody who's, you know, for instance, really good at YouTube, but they might not be great at Instagram or SEO or, you know, they probably don't spend a lot of time paying attention to keyword research, but they're really good at YouTube. So why, why did you land on that? What was it that brought you to this place where you're like, gosh, search and search engine optimization and specifically keyword research is the sweet spot for me.

I think some of it kind of just made sense, like this idea that you want to target people who are kind of further along in the sales funnel. And that's, I guess, another part when I want to say keyword research. We're very particular about what keywords we target. And while we do eventually cover an entire topic in depth, you know, we're as primarily review sites. That's where we started. So we're looking at keywords that have the term review and what is the best, you know, best this, best that, this versus that, versus being the operative term. You know, what are the alternatives to some popular product out there, Things that really pre qualify people. And that made a lot of sense to me, you know, beyond just, I'm going to write about something in general, like I'm going to write about Keto without having like a, an idea of where is that, where is, where are these visitors coming to me at, like, what point of the journey are they in? And so that made a lot of intuitive sense when I think where I think I picked it up just by reading blogs, you know, looking at people like Spencer Haas, you know, he was an early kind of evangelist, I think, for this approach. Also people like, you know, Pat Flynn way in the beginning, some of his examples of this is what intent phrases look like. And I just kind of took that to the extreme and said, well, I'm going to look at all of the intent phrases in this niche and we're going to prioritize those phrases above all other kind of topical concepts. So that just made sense to me. And even today we look at that as a term that might show up as being relatively insignificant in terms of the number of people searching for it. But is, but that is super refined in terms of the modifiers it has that those convert much higher than the generic head terms that everyone is competing on.

Yeah. So let's break that down a bit. So essentially what you're saying, and I think this is a really important concept for people to understand, because I think for the vast majority of people who listen to this podcast, we think about search optimization around a specific keyword monetized through ads. And what you're saying is, coming at it from the affiliate marketing standpoint, you're thinking of the buyer journey. And what you're saying is you want to make sure that those people are further along in the buying journey because there's a higher chance that they're actually going to buy. So to use a food example, it's the difference between, like, how to fix a blender. Like, that person isn't interested in buying, they're interested in fixing versus best premium blender. Like, that person is in the process of searching for something to buy. And so what you're saying is you got really into keyword research around products where people were far along in the buying journey, searching for things like best or top or kind of these keyword phrases that lead you believe they're gonna purchase in a little bit, and then creating content around that. Now, one of the things that I feel like is important to point out is you said you didn't do any link building. For those who aren't familiar with what link building is, can you talk about why that is and also why you decided not to do it?

Yeah, that's a. That's a good one. I get that frequently. So link building is basically the concept of artificially, and that's a kind of a loaded term, generating links from external sources. Because as. As some of the audience might know, Google looks at links, inbound links, links coming to your site as a signal of how authoritative you might be as a website. And so there's a whole industry and whole ecosystem around kind of gaming that system. And there's, you know, if you really go down the rabbit hole, there's different categories of SEO. One's called White hat, one's called Gray hat, one's called Black hat. And it's not entirely clear where the lines are, but basically a white hat would be, well, I'm just doing outreach. I'm just reaching out to people in my network or my niche. And I'm saying, hey, I have this nice blog. Can you link to me? Which a lot of people do naturally. And sometimes you don't even really think of it as link building. You think of it more as pr. That's kind of on the white hat side, the gray hat might be more like broken link building, where that's the whole tactic where you're reaching out to blogs where they have broken links you've identified. And so you say, hey, can you replace your link with my link? And then black cat, you know, that's, that's black hat's basically spam. But on the, on the blacker side of gray hat would be, you know, paying for links is a common one. And maybe people in the audience, your audience might actually have been approached. Yes, by other people. You know, happens to me a lot. All those spam emails you get, that's basically the SEO industry at its worst. And so the reason I didn't go down that rabbit hole was because I thought of it as a little bit like alchemy. It's this thing that works in this little ecosystem called search engine optimization that generally does not have any intrinsic value. I would say if you're doing pr, yes, pr, like being able to pitch someone for something and do cold outreach, that's a skill that's useful. But how to do broken link building or what? Anchor text is the right distribution. To me, it only makes sense in this context. So as the game changes, you're constantly on your back foot trying to adapt. And if the game changed overnight, people that are primarily SEO driven in their business model in terms of manipulating link profiles are I think at a greater risk of being negatively impacted. Whereas contrasting to where we focused on, which is identifying market gaps, identifying problems, problem statements, and matching that to quality content and structuring content that matches that search intent, you know, my bet is that, hey, regardless of where people go to search for content, quality content wants to be surfaced. And so I'd rather bet on that honing that skill set than honing what I, what I think of as more of an alchemy like endeavor.

And there's something I think to be said about thinking holistically about what a search engine is trying to do. And a search engine is the goal. We'll use Google as the kind of ultimate search engine. Its goal is to surface the best possible content. And you can kind of pick where you want to focus, right? You can pick your focus on trying to surface or trying to create the best possible content, the most helpful content, the most in depth content, or you can shave off some of that focus and then 50% of your time can be spent thinking about, you know, how do you get more links and build links to increase your rank. And for some people that will work. But I Think what I hear you saying is there's this reality that for a search engine it's always going to be evolving towards better content. And so as much as possible, if you can focus on creating that good content, then in the long run you're going to win out. Maybe not in the short run there might be some tactics that allow somebody else to show up higher than you. But if you continue to try and understand what does good content look like, then long term you're going to win out. So for sites that you're creating early stages, how do you get links? Or do you not even care? Do you just say people are going to find this and because it is helpful content they will either link to it or Google will just recognize it as quality content and therefore surface it higher?

Yeah, I think, well, both of those things. So when we launch our sites, yeah, we try to create the best answer for that term or that topic and that would be our betting. Just like you said that, you know, Google stated goal is that they want to rank quality content. And a lot of the rumors and the messaging that's coming out from Google is that, you know, you shouldn't focus on links, you shouldn't focus on these external factors. Just create, they said just create good content and rankings will follow. You have to take that, I think with a grain of salt too. But that being said, I'd rather be aligned with their mission statement than misaligned. But yeah, that's basically how we launch our ground up sites. We kind of do a spread of maybe 20 to 30 articles to begin with to kind of COVID the topical silos if you will. And we can kind of get into that more if you want. But we create this in depth content that will, that we believe will rank naturally on its own. And yeah, we don't really worry about links. Links do come naturally. At a certain point we might layer on some of this PR like the white hat outreach that I mentioned and it's. But it's, I'm very much an evidence based guy. So I look at, for each site we build, I want to see the response of our quality content and see response that Google has to our quality content and measure that alone first. Because I think a lot of another problem I've seen is that there's kind of all these different signals you're getting when you're doing 50 things at once. And so by focusing on essentialism of we're just doing quality content, we're just answering people's queries, we can then take 10 sites, let's say we launch 10 sites in a quarter. We can then kind of comparatively see which ones are actually performing better with very similar inputs before we then try to shift our strategy. Whereas a lot of people launch with you know, the kitchen sink approach, which at the end of the day might still work, but you might draw the long, the wrong conclusions about what worked and in what, what percentage, you know, what percentage really drove that progress.

Yeah. So in your case you're going through and you're saying, hey, which let's we're launching 10 sites hypothetical, we're essentially assigning the same amount of resources to those for time and energy, for content creation, which ones stick and have success and then doubling down on those. Is that right?

Exactly. And the concept I use is fire bullets and then cannonballs, which is a Jim Collins concept I borrowed. But yeah, it's essentially it. And how do we kind of boil this down to more of a science and then just kind of, yeah, listen to the feedback. Listen to what Google tells us. Not with, you know, what some, some expert has theorized about the right way to do it, but actually with what's working. And I think that also eliminates some of the niche specific issues or headwinds that exist. And it probably some of your audience knows that some of these EAT or health sites and recipe sites are probably rolled up in some of those updates that happened.

Can you talk about that for those, I'm guessing people kind of are semi familiar with that. But what is eat? And it's a very fitting acronym for food Blogging space doesn't really have anything to do with that, but maybe kind of. Can you talk about, talk about that?

Sure. So it literally stands for expertise, authority and trust. And it's, I think it's a term that I don't know if Google originated but I think they may have themselves and they said listen for certain niches. And I think that the term that I've heard is your money or your life. And so money is like financial bloggers, that's very relevant to them. Life is like health advice. So Google's basically saying, look, if there's someone that's just creating a site, some cowboy out there, it's creating a site about health. How do we know that their advice is credible? And back in the day, five or 10 years ago, the top search results were littered with examples of questionable advice that was maybe primarily geared towards pushing someone to a certain product that was question had questionable science behind it. Same thing with personal finance. So EIT I think is very closely related to that, your money or your life. Those sites, and I think recipe sites and food bloggers sometimes get wrapped up in that umbrella. And who knows how Google really categorizes it, but there's definitely a border, a borderline that kind of bleeds over, I think into anything when you're talking about nutrition and food. And if you're more health skewed, it's probably more relevant. So like more if you're more on the keto side of things or low carb or anything that's more diet focused, you're probably more into that bucket. But yeah, basically that's what it is. And I don't know if there's any other things we could talk about regarding how we optimize for it. We can go down that path, but let me know.

Yeah, but I think the important thing to point out is that, and I think what's interesting is Google will treat these a little bit differently. And so there, if you, if you are a site that focuses on a specific diet and you maybe are making health claims, like the impact that that can have when Google does the. Does an update is different than maybe somebody who is a family blogger, a mom blogger, a dad blogger. The eat update would then have an impact in a way where Google would potentially ping your site because of. Ping your site. Meaning like you could have, you could lose page views, you could lose rank. Am I summarizing that correctly?

Yeah, it's a relatively new phenomenon. Like in the past, Google didn't really segregate too much between all these different niches. But that's part of the changes we've seen in the last two years. There's so many updates from Google. And that's part of it is they're kind of honing in on, you know, what are the niches where we need to, you know, we need to have a different set of criteria, basically different rules, which is, which creates a lot of confusion, to be honest.

Yes, for sure. Do you know how Google goes about the process of figuring out, hey, is this a credible site or not? I know that's a big question and there's a lot of it depends that would go into that.

I wish I knew like the inside baseball, what are they actually thinking? There's a lot of speculation and I think some of it kind of more grounded than others. And I'll just offer my speculation is that at one level it's fairly simple. It's like when you go to a site, it's almost like when you visit a store, does it appear Legitimate. What are the indicators? And so one of the things that a lot of experts, SEOs have kind of honed in on is the About Us page. And that might be a very tactical thing that people can take away from this. Having an About Us page that is real, that says, you know, this is who I am and it's actually you. It's not some made up person or some generic kind of royal we. And just kind of this is our story. And it's maybe the About Us page links out to your LinkedIn profile and maybe somewhere else you've been published, New York Times, whatever, and kind of creates this trustworthy picture so that when you go to that site, you know who runs it, who owns it, what they're about. And if you have writers, if any of the audience has, they hire some other people to help them, you know, just highlighting their story too. And so for us that's very important because I don't do, you know, personally don't write any content anymore for any of our sites. So we have this large distributed team and in the past it would, you know, if an author asked for credit, I might be like, well, like I, you know, let's see if you stick around and then we'll give you credit. But my take now is absolutely, and if you've been published elsewhere, even if it's at a competitor, we're going to feature that in your author blurb. And so that's another, I think tactical takeaway is, you know, many people already have this, but just freshening up and making sure it's relevant and credible, you know, maybe it's an, it's an actual headshot in the little author about the author for each article. And I've even seen little tactical things like positioning rather than having at the bottom of the page positioning that like top right or at the beginning of the article so before someone starts reading, they know. And it's all kind of a shape, you know, probably there's a gradient curve of like what you know, if you do some of these things, it's probably better than doing nothing. Sure. You know, privacy policy, if you're talking about health, having like a health disclaimer in every, on every page that you talk about that I think is certainly helpful. One thing we've done, and this is very tactical is we've brought on actual medical professionals to review our content. And so we almost have a two tiered system. We have our author and they're, they're featured as the author and then we have a medical reviewer and so that's a nurse, a licensed nutrition, even a doctor, which results in a higher cost. But in certain contexts it can be worth it. And so those are just some of the things that we're doing to kind of optimize for eat.

Yeah, that's great. So one of the things that I want to talk about is it's actually two parts. One is keyword research, and you've talked about that, and I know that's an area of expertise. And then the other part is this idea of optimizing existing content so it can rank better, which maybe overlaps a little bit with keyword research, but also is a little bit of a new space. And I've heard you talk about that more and more over the past couple years and we've started to do that more and more with our own content. So let's focus first on keyword research. There's a lot of people who are interested in keyword research. They want to do it better, they want to understand it, knowing that you come from, from a history and an understanding of keyword research around product. But as much as possible, let's bend that towards, let's say, recipe or food content. How would you go about doing keyword research, including tools and the general process that you'd use for that?

Sure. So yeah, I think again, where I start is thinking big picture about the niche. And depending on where someone is starting when they're listening to this podcast, it might be a brand new site, it might be an existing site where they're looking to expand into kind of a new silo. But I like to get a once over the world view of a particular vertical or silo or niche before jumping in. And having done this for the past seven years or so, I get a sense of just looking at a data set and seeing the competition levels. And we can get into that a little bit later, you know, almost instantly, like, oh, this is a good opportunity relative to all these other opportunities that I've seen. But one way to kind of boil that down to a more of a process oriented approach would be to basically look at similar silos or similar niches side by side to kind of evaluate, well, where's the best place to put my next dollar? As opposed to, oh, I want to talk about this. So I'm just going to talk about this. A good example might be like, if you're, if you're talking about like healthy eating or healthy recipes, you know, there's obviously low carb, there's keto, there's paleo, there's a. There's a whole fodmap. There's all sorts of new trending diets out there. One interesting thing, and people could kind of follow along at home if they wanted to, is to plug into your keyword tool of choice and I'll make some recommendations here. The two I would recommend would be ahrefs1ahrefsahrefs.com and then sccockpit.com that's another keyword research tool I like. And what I like to do is kind of put in the main head term and it could be, in this case, it could be keto, could be low carb, it could be dessert. Like if you're doing dessert recipes or whatever it is, put in that key term and then kind of just return all results that have that one word in there or that one word plus an important modifier. So if it's a recipe blog, you might want to do keto and recipe. Those are your two terms. And what I like about SC Cockpit and Ahrefs is they both have functionality where you can, it's basically append, prepend and add in between words. You basically take that. Those two words have to be in the search results. And then both Ahrefs and SC Cockpit return all the possible variations. And then you can rank order them by highest search volume per month, lowest competition, and generally what you're looking for, it's kind of like an XY axis is the most volume and the least competition. Sure. And so there's different.

How do you know what those levels are? Because I think that's one of the things when you have these tools, it'll show you relative values. How do you know what a lot is or not a lot is when it comes to those?

Yeah. And it's a relatively complicated equation because you have to get back to the intent profiles I talked about. You also have to kind of go back up your funnel and say, what is the value of a visitor? To me, like, if you have a recipe blog and you have actually like a product you're selling, knowing your numbers is really helpful because that can change the whole game. If you have a unique product that you're offering or a service or a subscription. But that being said, kind of in general, if you're looking at a specific, what I call long tail keyword, which, which is just three phrase, three words or more in a phrase. So best keto recipes would be one, but it's probably fairly competitive. But like, the more the better in general. So if there's four words or five words or six words in that phrase in general, those will be both higher intent and lower competition. And so I like those because you can speak rather than speaking generally to best keto recipes, which is, well, someone could be all over the map. They could be looking at for dessert, breakfast, lunch, dinner. By having those modifiers in there, you can specifically target that person like I was talking about earlier, where they are, where they're coming to you at, rather than having to do this additional work or have to like basically have mismatched intent. When people get to your site in terms of volume, that's really, that's where I come back to looking at comparative niches. Sure. Because a good example is like look at keto versus Paleo right now. What does the term best keto recipes get versus best paleo recipes? And it's not a perfect scientific experiment, but if you just look at those two, what I call head terms, you can get a good sense of this niche, has more volume than this other niche and or has more or less competition. So the niche and that's where I get like having being able to do more apples to apples comparisons I think is super helpful because otherwise you can be so lost in your own funnel that you're kind of missing the bigger picture. You're missing this bigger trend that's happening right around you. So that's in general and some rules of thumb might be for a best modifier, best XYZ recipe, a few thousand searches per month would be attractive. That has a, you know, a competition level and this is again a loaded term because different tools use different, different metrics, but generally like under 30 in SC cockpit or under 20 SC cockpit and Ahrefs probably like under 10 on their keyword difficulty score. Those to me kind of meet my criteria. But then if you go down the long tail rabbit hole, I some is even we even publish content that only gets a hundred searches per month, but that's hyper focused and hyper relevant to our niche.

Got it. So and it's interesting, it brings up an interesting different area to focus on than I think at least for the people who listen to this podcast that do recipe content. Because usually we think about just the recipe itself. So like chocolate chip cookies as an easy example. But you're saying is there's also these identifiers that you can include within your keywords and you can have that be kind of a holistic catch all. So an example would be like you said, you know, best dessert recipes. So I think a takeaway for people listening to the podcast is don't just think about the recipe itself, but also think about the modifiers that you could include and the content that you could create around that. And it might not actually be a recipe itself. It might be some type of roundup, additional content. I think there's a ton of opportunity in our space because there's less people doing that type of content. And it's also maybe refreshing for content creators to create something that isn't another recipe. But how about for just a standard recipe? Let's say you were creating a chicken salad and you wanted to see should I be creating this versus a pasta salad recipe? Obviously, those are two really competitive keywords in the recipe niche. But what does it look like if you don't have any modifiers and you're just kind of honing in on this one? This is specific to the niche of food and recipe. But what does that look like and how do you compare and contrast those?

Yeah, well, there's two things I'd say in this example. One is kind of do the similar. Even if it's not a long tail phrase, it's just pasta recipes or chicken recipes, still pop them in the tool and see comparatively, like, how many more people are searching for chicken versus pasta. Sure, you might still do both, but you might just do that chicken one first because it gets more volume and it's lower competition. Yep. So that's. But I think then another thing I look at is when you're actually structuring your recipe content, being looking at kind of some ancillary keywords that you might be able to include. And so, you know, again, this. I'm not an expert, I'm not a food blogger.

Yep.

I might think of like, dietary restrictions, like, you know, in your, your, your pasta, your chicken recipe, chicken salad, being like, well, here's an option for, you know, meatless or something like. And maybe it's. You can, you can have that existing as a separate post, but maybe it's included. It's like, you know, here's a. Here's a. You can substitute this and thinking about it from that getting really down in that buyer's or that visitor's mindset of.

Yeah.

You know, how can we add some. What basically amounts to H2 tags for some different terms in there.

Yeah. And it's interesting. So for those who aren't familiar, H2 tags being. If you're in WordPress, you can say, is this H1, H2, H3, the type of header and H2 being usually the type of header that you'd use when you're creating a post content to kind of organize your post. But it's interesting even to think about those modifiers that you said. You know, in your world it's like best or, or top in the recipe world would be like vegan or keto or easy or like a freezer meal would be an example. So you can create these kind of longer tail keywords and focus in on a more specific subset of that broader keyword. At what point would you start to broaden that up out and say, hey, I'm actually going to go after these really big keywords versus early stages. My guess is you want to find the keywords that are a little bit longer tail. Maybe don't have as much search volume, but you can kind of focus in on a specific niche for that and maybe get a little bit earlier traction even if the numbers aren't as high.

Yeah, so back in the day I notoriously chased these long tail phrases almost to a fault where I'd end up with a site that was just like targeting obscure phrases but not talking about like the main thing like you know, best blender. We're talking about like best blender for women over 50, like trying to lose weight. And it gets to the point where like the whole site is just a bunch of these weird offshoots. And so my thinking now is that you kind of have to attack it. I attack it from both angles of we want to create a landing page with the big competitive, super hard to reach keyword and have that as maybe your in your navigation as the place, you know, click on the menu. That's where people go. And the nice thing about recipes, a really good place, a really good way to do that is to just have your roundups be that page. So your best keto recipes is just kind of a narrative, kind of introducing keto and then talking about all of the different recipes, kind of separating them out, organizing it for a reader, but then kind of taking going high and going low at the same time instead of going after those really long tail phrases, then making sure they have a link from that main roundup that's prominently featured in the header. So what ends up happening over time is that you get a lot of traffic. You kind of snipe these low hanging keywords and get, you know, you can be surprised by what traffic you actually do get. Maybe that, you know, keyword tools are notoriously inaccurate, even though they are more accurate than just kind of putting your finger to the wind. Sometimes you stumble on a really nice pocket that maybe no one else knows about. But yeah, I try to do both. I try to build these so eventually over time, you end up ranking for that big head term your site is known for. Oh, this is the keto recipe site. But I try to do that kind of this two pronged approach, going high, going low with phrases.

It's interesting. I feel like that's a shift that's taken place over the past five years and is now solidly settled into this belief that you don't actually just focus on one specific keyword. We talk about keywords, but essentially you focus on kind of a general category that you're focusing on, knowing that within that general category there's going to be lots of really specific keywords that might bring people to that post. So you had used the example before, maybe including, you know, if it's not a vegan recipe, having H2 that says like vegan options or vegan substitutes or something like that, and then, and then laying that out for this specific recipe, here's how you can make it vegan. And that that potentially might bring people who are using a long tail keyword to that post, even though it's like a, it's a section of the post versus you focusing in on that for the entire thing. Did I, did, did I recap that right? Would you, would you say that's kind of generally how you're looking at things?

Absolutely. The only thing, the one thing I would add that maybe is inferred but not explicit is interlinking. That's another huge thing, like making sure that like a lot of, a lot of, in my experience where I started with, oh, just put the related WordPress posts in and you know, that's it. And I think that does a good base layer. But I think there are so many examples that I have of sites with very low quote unquote authority. If you looked it up in a tool, it would have a very low authority. But because we're hyper focused, our silos are very tight, they're very organized and everything is interlinked. Almost like you imagine Wikipedia is linked, right? Or it is linked in this kind of web of related content that relevant when you mention an oblique reference to, you know, you know, another concept you've already discussed. Link out to that, you know, and it doesn't have to be a strict silo. I'm not very, you know, strict when it comes to cross linking. And I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole, but sure, the main takeaway is interlink your content link up to your big hub article, link down from your big hub article to your children, if you will.

Yep. And when you say silos, can you just talk about generally what you mean when you're referring to that and why it's important to think about the silos that you have on a site?

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, so silos are basically, you can think of it in different ways. My, my concept of how Google works, which has been confirmed by a few different people, it's not verbatim, but they kind of look at, they look at the map of information that exists on the web and they put it into buckets. And so what I'm trying to do when we're building sites is mirror. That's like how do we essentially, how do we organize this content in a logical way that also maximizes the SEO benefits. So like I said, having a good head term in your, in your menu structure a landing page for people to actually go to that because of where it is in the navigation, it's going to get a lot of links naturally. Having it actually be a meaningful keyword. That's one mistake I frequently see. It's, you know, it's maybe just like news or something or the latest. And it's not like why not make that landing page rather than a generic blog role that WordPress kind of pushes you in, actually make that a page that is content rich. And yeah, I think that's, I guess that's where I'd start with Asilos. Just thinking about it, terms of what's the container for this subtopic? And you know, one way, I guess the best way to do it would be to use an example of, you know, for keto or maybe even broader for recipes. You might have keto recipes, paleo recipes, low carb recipes, vegan recipes, gluten free recipes. And if you're broadly targeting recipes as a whole, that might be your separate Menus or in WordPress it pushes you to categories, which makes sense. Categories are those subtopics of your site. And I think again one of the common mistakes I've seen is just kind of willy nilly adding categories or tags whenever it suits, you know, kind of suits you in the moment. Like, oh, I'll just tag this with a million things. I'll create a, like a tag cloud. That's another thing. And in reality that's kind of spreading your authority and your relevance in not very helpful ways. You want to kind of treat where you place links and how you prioritize things in your menu. Almost with a surgeon's like, precision, so that everything is intentional and a good way actually good tool. This might be very down the weeds, but if someone wants to get a sense of what this looks like, if they're a visual person, Site Bulb is a tool that has what's called a crawl map. That's one of their features, among other things. And you kind of see it's like the spider web of hubs and wheels of content. So you have, this is your homepage, this is how many links come off of your homepage. These are the subpages, this is how many links come off of them. And what you generally want, the kind of rule of thumb is three layers deep. What you want to shoot for maybe four layers of your massive site. But if you, but a lot of sites out there are five, six, seven, eight layers deep, you have these like random recipes you might have blogged about years ago that you didn't really think about where to put them in the container. And the category structure, they're kind of just floating and maybe that's why they're not ranking. That's like one optimization strategy. But that's kind of how I think about it, as the content clusters. There's a lot of terms I'm using interchangeably, but hopefully paints the picture.

Yeah. So an example being I can, I can look at Pinch of Yum and think of ways that we could really be doing a better job of this, where we have these categories and you can go to recipes and then we have healthy breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert. Within each one of those, like healthy, we have gluten free superfoods, sugar free, vegan, lightened up. What you're saying is we could have a recipes catch all category. We could also probably have a health healthy category. And then maybe we could have a gluten free category. But if we get too far down the line, that's going to be too many. So we need to have these general catch all places and we can actually create a post on that. So we should have a way where you can go to pinchofm.com recipes gluten free, and go to a page where it's like, hey, these are all of the gluten free recipes and we should treat that as a page that we optimize and can rank for. We're not doing a great job of that. So this is self advice for us. You know, as we think about how we can structure and organize our content, it's not just the singular content that you're publishing. What I hear you saying is it's also how you organize that content. And to rewind back to the question, that's because search engines will look and say, like, what is the general category of this? You know, what is, what is the silo of content here? And you can become authoritative in a silo as well, is kind of what I hear you saying. Is that right?

That's exactly right.

Got it. So a great takeaway and a great consideration for people to think about. It's not just the individual post, it's also how are you organizing that and optimizing around it? As we're coming to the end here, there's one more question kind of area that I want to ask you a little bit about, and that is republishing older content. It's something that you are an expert at and have done really well. We, we hear people talking about that in our niche a lot. What, what advice would you give for people who want to go in and update an older piece of content in order to rank higher for that?

Yes. So the first thing I would say is that this has been a big shift in the last year and a half, two years for me and for our team. We have really prioritized looking at our existing content at the expense of even publishing new content. And I think this is like a big shift that we've had. I think it's a big shift that I think is relevant to so many people in your space around, like in any niche, treating your content as if it's living and breathing. It's not a. You publish it once and you forget about it. And you know why. And then, you know, a lot of the groups I see, like in the Mediavine group, Rad Thrive group, which I'm a part of, you see a lot of posts like, you know, my traffic is declining, like, I don't know what's happening. And sometimes I look at these sites and I see that, oh, they haven't been updated in three years or two years. A lot of their big head terms. And so you. One approach I take is I look at our. For each of our sites, we kind of have our big terms that get us maybe our top 10, you know, topics, keywords, pages. Those are updated almost monthly because think about it, those are your best sellers, those are your winners. And you kind of want to play defense, expand them, make them as useful as possible, and just continually revisit them, because that's what's paying your bills right now. And then I kind of look at a second tier of here are Some articles or keywords we're ranking for where we are within striking distance of a top position, but we're not currently there. So these would be anywhere from basically anywhere outside of position one. So position two through, you know, 14, 15, you can even go to the bottom of the second page. Basically say, look, with a little bit of elbow grease, we can probably get this topic, this page ranked higher, this recipe ranked higher. Because Google's already said, hey, you're in the, you're in the right ballpark. You're not out of the index, you're not buried on page five. So focusing efforts on there, where you have an opening, you see the light at the end of the tunnel, can in some cases be a lot higher ROI than just blasting off new content into the void. And there's a lot of math that goes into that. How we approach it, we look at what is the ROI of new content and for us, that's the visitor value and all those things. But also how quickly does our site, or does this one particular site rank new content versus, you know, versus. Versus how freak. How does it respond to content updates? And really getting a sense of what is the. How does your site behave? I think is helpful as just a starter. Maybe that's just doing a sample of. Let's drop five new articles and see. Does it take a week to rank? Does it take three days to rank? Then you can get a sense of how quickly you can get your money back. When publishing new content, if you don't have a very quick roi, I would say definitely focus on building up that existing library, optimizing your current content. And so that's been a big shift in my thinking. And in general, the cost to update a piece of content is a lot lower then to publish. Whether you're doing it on your own, I think, or paying for someone to do it, it takes a lot of time to get that new post out. It doesn't take a lot of time to update your title and add a new section that's relevant or something like that, or add some links, interlinking your content.

Yeah, that was actually going to be one of the things I was going to ask you about. So when you say elbow grease, what does elbow grease look like in the actual process of updating content?

So I would say you have your toolkit, I have my toolkit. And it's a little bit different for different people, different niches for some. Like I'm just getting into Pinterest, probably in your space. Pinterest is where most people might have started. But kind of thinking about, you know, you might have your image optimization. You put a nice Pinterest friendly, SEO friendly image that has the alt text of your target keyword. You might go in and look at the title, the title tag optimization and making sure that has a relevant call to action. You know, one thing that is working is updating dates. It's important to actually update the content. But saying, you know, these are the best keto recipes for 2020 as opposed to just best keto recipes going in. And actually so very tactically republishing content can, can actually have a lot of positive results by basically, you know why.

That is, what, what it is about republishing a content. Let's say it's a post that was written two years ago, you update it, you update the date. So then it shows up as a new post. What is it about that showing up as a new post that helps to increase the, the rank and search?

I think there's two things depending on if most people are using WordPress. I think one of the benefits is that resurfaces that post to the front of your blog role or if even if you have a category structure to the front of that category, which has some benefits, it kind of resurfaces it. The other benefit I think is that in many niches, and I think an increasing number of niches, Google has what's called like a freshness algorithm. So they want to make sure that in certain niches they're serving fresh content. You know, if you're talking about software as an extreme example, and your article was published in 2011, that's useless. So much has changed. Or if you're talking about what's the best laptop, you need to update that at a pretty frequent basis to stay ahead of where that technology is going. I think with recipes too, maybe not to the same extent. I think there's multiple benefits. Like I said, resurfacing it on your site. If you have a really good social distribution too, like integrations with like some people use co schedule and Meet Edgar and all these tools, it also can kind of blast it back out to your audience. And kind of particularly if it's an article that's done well in the past, recipe that's done well in the past, that can be a super nice evergreen kind of automation that you kind of every month, every quarter, you go back and you update that article and you push it back out to your email list. And so that gets more eyeballs and then that gets shared and there's all sorts of ancillary benefits to that. So that's I guess a long way of answering your question. But.

Yeah, and that's awesome. And it's one of the things that combination the idea of keyword research and kind of going through a process to understand what it is you're after, but then also not just new content, but thinking about that old content and how do you keep that updated were two things that I want to hit Ewan. I could talk to you for another two hours but I know that we slotted an hour and I want to be respectful of your time. I know that a lot of people will have additional follow ups. They'll have questions. The thing that is so great about interviewing you is it's kind of out of the kindness of your heart that you're doing this. You don't have a course to sell, you don't have a product, but you are out there online. People can connect with you and would love for you to share a little bit about what you're up to if people want to work with you. If that's a thing even. What does it look like to connect with you if people want to continue the conversation after this podcast?

Yeah, so I'd say there's kind of two. There's two good ways to connect with me. I'd say if you're kind of personally looking for some advice, connecting with me on LinkedIn is great. You can let me just make sure I have that. I could probably put that in show notes but yeah, we'll make sure to link to that. Yeah, relatively unique name. I think there's only one of me out there so you can find me that way. Just reach out to me and we can start a dialogue that way. If you're looking at another for Owl Mountain, an interesting kind of thing that we're doing is we do have an acquisition kind of pipeline and so we do look at occasionally picking up sites, particularly in the recipe space. We have kind of a footprint there. So if you're looking at evaluation or trying to think about selling, reach out. I can't guarantee you anything but the very least I'll offer some advice and point you in the right direction. And that's just Ewen E W E n at owlmountain Co and that's a good way to get in contact with me. If you're interested in considering selling or just to have some questions about selling, happy to connect that way.

That's awesome. Really fun to connect, hear a little bit more about your story. You and to hear some advice that you have. I know that we will be applying it as well which are oh my favorite podcast to do because we can share these with the world and also we can share it with our team and move forward on it as well. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Oh thanks so much Bjork. I love what you're doing and really appreciate it. Great questions by the way. Really felt like you pulled out the right information.

Great. Awesome. Thanks Yoon.

And that's a wrap my friend. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast this week. We hope you enjoyed this interview with Ewan and have some takeaways from his advice. I know I did, but one thing I wanted to mention here before we officially wrap up this episode is actually calling out one of the things he mentioned near the end of the interview and that was treating your content like it's living and breathing and republishing old content. It's actually perfectly timing to talk about that because we're actually publishing a brand new course on Food Blogger Pro this Thursday. All about republishing content. This course covers why you might want to update and republish your old posts, how to identify the best posts to update, what you should update in each post, and how to use popular tools to update older posts. Plus, you'll get access to a republishing checklist that you can download and use as you're working through updating your old content. Jenna, who works on the Pinch of Yum team, actually made this course for us and I feel like every time she makes any kind of content for us, she always answers every question I have about that topic. And this course is no exception. Like always, all Food Blogger Pro members will get access to this course on Thursday. And if you're not a member but you're interested in checking out this course, you can learn more about Food Blogger Pro and become a member@foodblock bloggerpro.com all right, that's all from us. Officially signing off until next time, which will be next Tuesday. But until then, my friend, make it a great week.

Sam.