FBP Rewind: Brainstorming Content Ideas with Ranking Potential and Writing Great Blog Posts with Ashley Segura

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Hey there Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team here. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. You're currently listening to the very last episode of 2024. How crazy is that? We're wishing you all a very happy new year and we're looking forward to wrapping up the year with another Food Blogger Pro Rewind episode. This will be our second and final Food Blogger Pro Rewind episode and we're excited to feature a really great interview with Ashley Segura from Top Hat Rank and Top Hat. Ashley is a total pro when it comes to content marketing and she's sharing some of her best advice for creators in this episode. Everything from how to come up with great content ideas to what an ideal blog post structure looks like. We wanted to bring it back and make sure that everyone got a chance to listen to it. If you haven't already, or if you listened to it when it was first released, this will be a good refresher for you. If you're looking for some content creation tips before we dive in, we wanted to take a moment to thank you all for being a part of the Food Blogger Pro community. We hope the upcoming year brings you new opportunities, exciting challenges, and more reasons to celebrate. We're so excited for all of the new conversations we'll have in the year ahead. And now, without further ado, I'll let Bjork take it away for our final episode of the year.

Ashley, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, we met Super Briefly, at Tastemaker conference is one of those things where you probably met 300 people. I met 300 people. So we've met in person, which is rare for a podcast interview for me to have like an in person meeting and then to do the zoom meeting. So that's, that's fun. Uh, so good to see you again. Um, the. At Tastemaker, you were talking about all things SEO, ranking, search, and really that's your background. Ashley, I did a quick LinkedIn review before jumping on the podcast and see that you have a. A long history, not only in content background in journalism and writing, creative writing, but then also a background in search engine optimization. And it seems like where you are now, those two things have kind of come together. So how did, how did that evolve and how did that happen for you?

Yeah, that's exactly it. And it's really funny. I mean, I started in journalism right from college. I was writing for the Times Standard and absolutely loved writing stories and telling people stories. And my first gig right after college was from my insurance agent. He was like, I was having a conversation with him because about to rent another apartment so I needed to get new insurance. And he's like, hey, you just graduated college. Could you build me a website?

It's like, you're a young person. Yeah, exactly. Can you do computer things?

That's basically how that conversation went. And I, not knowing how to say no to new opportunities was like, yeah, sure, I'll figure that out. So watched. Well, actually back then it really wasn't watching, it was reading articles and learning about WordPress. Created him a site, wrote all the content for it, and then next step was social media pages, because I was doing the college of social media. So I was like, hey, you're going to need these as well. And one thing led to another and I basically got his whole insurance company online and developed an online presence. And so after I did that for him, he's like, hey, can you come and speak for the board of insurance in California and kind of explain what you did and tell them a little bit more about this whole online marketing thing? And so I did my first speaking gig. Absolutely terrified. I think there was like only 12 or 14 of these insurance agents representing the state of California, but went in, did it, and then I got clients from that. And so I started doing the same thing, writing content for them. And that's where I was able to still kind of have that journey journalism background and tell their story, but then also through doing research and a lot of what I do now try and Figure out what users actually want to know from this insurance company, not just how they got founded, what they do Monday through Friday, like outside of the fluffy. The fluffy information. And so I definitely needed to learn a lot more. And so I started working in house and became a director of marketing for an in house brand and then wanted to really grow my clientele. So I knew I was gonna need agency experience. So started working for a couple different agencies to really learn how they run their business, how they run clients and the agencies.

You mean like. Yes, let's do an agency, see how an agency works in hopes of eventually doing your own.

Exactly, exactly. So I wanted to get hands on experience. Meanwhile, I was still managing these insurance clients, then a couple other referral clients that I would get here. And so you kind of had your.

Own agency, like your side hustle agency in the insurance niche. And then we're working. Your full time gig was with an agency that was a little bit bigger and established to learn. I think it's so smart the idea of you are learning on the job for what you want to be an entrepreneur. It's like, it's like, you know, lots of different. You're a doctor or you're a dentist, like you'll do on the job training, painting, whatever it is, construction. And I think sometimes as entrepreneurs we think, hey, we're just going to go out and learn by doing, which is great, but one of the other great things you can do is, you know, learn by working underneath somebody. So it's cool to see that you were doing that along the way. What did you learn? Like what were the things that you started to the pieces that you started to pick up around what it takes to run an agency?

Well, I learned what I liked and didn't like and I loved doing social media marketing and I loved content marketing from an agency's perspective. I was writing the content still. I wasn't really doing the audits yet or the science behind the content. I was the topic ideation and creating.

The content for the agency, for your.

Design, for the agency, for the clients. And so doing that allowed me to hone in, okay, I'm not doing website development anymore, I'm not doing graphic design. I dabbled in all of it. I was like a one stop shop by myself and realized, okay, that's not sustainable. If I want to grow and have my own agency become successful, I need to just hone in. So I just honed in on social and content and that's where I really started studying and that's where I went back again and did another in house brand, doing director of marketing for another in house brand, just focusing mainly on their social and content. And then that's when I started speaking a lot more because at that point I had a lot of case studies under my belt. I had a good idea of what worked and didn't work. And that's really what brought me to where I am now, to really understanding how to optimize content, how to run paid social and actually get a return on ad spend and just amplify both of those assets.

Yeah. So right now, working with Top Hat Rank, which is an agent that we're familiar with, have worked with in the past, are you still doing some of your own, like work with your own agency or is that something that you decided to wind down? I'm always interested in somebody's entrepreneurial journey and kind of the decision points along the way. Where is that at for you now and where do you feel like you learned in that process of, of doing your own agency?

So in 2019, I officially closed my agency doors. That was around the time that I was working with Semrush. I was a speaker for Semrush and so would build out case studies and then go teach it around the world. That was a lot that was really difficult to try and do. A balance of keeping any clients and doing that. And so I closed my agency doors, connected with Arson Mid 2019 and started doing operations for Top Hat Rank. About three months into that, him and I both saw this huge opportunity. So many clients that come into Top Hat Rank and just brands in general, when they start with SEO, they generally need something else in addition to that or they're coming to SEO because they've tried content and social and it didn't work for them. They got burned or something happened. And with my social and content experience, we decided let's partner up and let's create Top Hat Content and Top Hat Social. So we actually have three brands now. And so that allows me to still have that social and content outlets and definitely do what I love and still have from an entrepreneurial aspect, still be able to handle the operations for Top Hat Rank.

Got it. So operations for Top Hat Rank and then there's kind of these sister agencies, Top Hat Content, Top Hat Social, where Top Hat Rank, if I'm understanding it correctly, would be kind of like audit related work around SEO, maybe technical SEO. Here's changes you can make your site structure opportunities where you might be able to tweak things. Top Hat Content would be a Little bit more in the world of your experience with how do you structure content, how do you ideate content, how do you figure out your content roadmap? And there's some science to that, but there's also some art to that. So there's a little bit kind of that balance. And then the social piece obviously would be kind of in the world of social media marketing, which we understand. So kind of those different categories make sense. I'm curious to know, just to talk a little bit more about your own entrepreneurial journey, what do you feel like you learned about yourself in that process? And one of the things that I think is always a good reminder and something that's important to come back to is this idea of what we are doing, what we are after is finding the thing that is the best fit for us. And that's a constant evolution. And for some people it's going to be an entrepreneur, but a solopreneur, it's just you, you're working on your own freelance contractor. For some people it's building a team and trying to scale that as much as possible. For some people, it's partnering with somebody and working together on a business. For other people it's finding a job they really love and settling into that and having a side hustle if that works. What do you feel like you learned about yourself as an entrepreneur, as a creator, as you've walked this journey of seeing inside a lot of different businesses, a lot of different agencies, and even just working with other businesses, you get to see what those businesses are like. What did you learn about yourself in that process that has allowed you to kind of continually evolve and find something that's a good fit?

I definitely learned my limits. I learned where I would max out working full time, whether I was at another agency or I was in house and still having my clients, my weeknights and my weekends was literally me on the couch with my laptop doing all my client work and implementing everything that I just learned at my full time job. And you know, after doing five years of that, that was enough and I was really scared to make that leap and go full time on my own. But it was the best thing that I did because so many doors opened after that. I also learned to limit myself in what I offer and provide and that was a really big eye opener. I started my journey with wanting to be a one stop shop and offering anything online marketing related, even branding and PR elements for a brand and then honing that in to where now today over at Top Hat Content, instead of Offering every service that a content marketing agency could possibly offer. We offer four. Well, now we have new and five services. And these are the best services that I've been able to find that actually make a difference with the brand's content. Instead of just trying to be competitive with everyone, every other agency that's in this niche and offer everything that everyone else offers, we decided, let's just hone in and offer what we know is going to get the most immediate results and actually provide a solution to what people are looking for. And that's just basic business. But you get muddled with trying to be the best and offer it all, and then time goes by and you're still doing that. And so limiting yourself has definitely been a big, big lesson and eye opener throughout the journey.

And I think sometimes I think of the parallel with content and sponsored content. I think sometimes it's when you're in the early stages, it's like the reason you do that is because you need to. It's like, I need to pay the bills. And so if you need a website designed, I'm going to figure out how to do it because I'm scrappy and I'm ambitious and I'm in the early stages. And at, at, at a certain point you, you meet your, the, the needs that you have from a business perspective and then you can start to say, like, great, you, you had kind of hinted at this. What do I actually like doing? How do I do more of that? And also, I was just talking three, four hours ago with a friend down the hall who has a video business, and he's talking about, you know, learning this new system and this different type of editing. And I said, you can see why people start to specialize like in the music business, why somebody gets really good at like mastering songs after they've been recorded, because they can do it really quick for, you know, and it's really good and they can charge an amount that makes sense because it's really good. But then they get really quick at it because they specialize in it. There's a book by a guy named John Warlow who talks about content agencies. I think the one uses a design agency in it. And I read this maybe 10 years ago or something. I don't know if it was that long ago is a long time. But he talks about how in the book he gives this analogy of this kind of chaotic design agency and how they really unlock their potential when they focus just on doing logos and they have a logo package. And you go through the process of getting a logo and it can be repeatable, then the analogy in the book is building a service business that can be acquired and that has to be one that's repeatable and has a process. But I think any acquirable business is acquirable because it's a good business to run. And so I think it applies to anybody listening here that would be service based to think about, like what is your process and what is your system and what is your specialty? And even for those who aren't in services businesses, I think it's always important for us to think what is our, what is our process, what is our specialty, what's the thing that I can do that has some element of kind of repeatability to it? So, top hat. Content. You talk a lot about content. We are in the world of content creators. That's what we talk about day in and day out. And I'm curious to know, when you are working with content creators, what are the things that you're helping them with? And then let's dive into, talk about some of the things that creators and publishers can be thinking about if they're interested in leveling up and getting smarter about their content. So, you know, you mentioned kind of four or five different areas that you specialize in, but maybe we could take a look more closely at a couple of those content ideation we had talked about and you know, topic ideation and content structure as well. But what are those buckets that you talked about before?

So content creators have content already created and, you know, you really nailed it with starting with a lot of different niches and then eventually honing in. So we'll have a lot of content creators come to us who used to maybe six, seven years ago, write about travel, family and food, and now they just want to be a vegan blogger. And so they're trying to figure out what do I do with all that old content? How can I brand myself as just a vegan blogger? There's hundreds of thousands of other vegan bloggers. Where, where can I stand out in this niche? And so usually what, where we always start with a content creator, because they have content already published, is with audits. And we'll look into a content audit which basically just dives in, collects all the data for all the content on a site and then we start to organize it and what we're really looking for, and this is something that anyone can do as long as time, resources obviously always a key factor, but we're looking for patterns within the data. And some of those older posts that either aren't ranking anymore or aren't relevant. Figuring out what to do with them is the most important part of the audit. Just mass deleting them is definitely not always a recommendation. There could be opportunities in there, and that's where you got to look at the competition and see who's currently ranking right now. How are they structuring those articles to get ideas and figure out why are they ranking over you when you technically have the authority here? You've had this piece of content published for six years. You're clearly a blogger about XYZ and have been creating content about XYZ for this long, so why are they outranking you? And it usually comes down to how a blog post is structured, how many backlinks they're getting, what the link profile entirely looks like, and what the user journey looks like. And so an audit will give all of that information and then allow us to put together a roadmap of okay, here's what to fix for your previously published, your already published content. Here's what to do with all of that. And now going forward, here's some ideas on where you should go next in terms of creating new content. Because they're content creators, they still want to create new content, maybe not at the capacity that they were doing before. And figuring out a way will usually recommend, you know, say you need to break up your time in a very number number specific way and strategy. You know, two thirds of your time should be focused on updating your existing content. A third of your time should be focused on creating new content. And that's generally a safe recommendation across the board for all content creators, whether they've been creating content for two years, a year, or 10 years. It's not always reinventing the wheel with new pieces of content.

Yeah, I think of it almost as a store and as much as possible, I think in the digital world, if we can, for myself at least, if I can come up with examples of like physical things, it helps me understand it. And I think of it as a store. Let's say it's a retail store and you're selling whatever it might be. Let's say it's a jewelry store. And I think the in my mind what, what can happen as a publisher. And I think of this even foresight like Pinch of Yam is like we just continually bring stuff into the store. We go out, we like wholesale, buy it and we bring it in and we put it on display and then we go and get another thing and we put it up and, and just do that for us. You know, for 12 years we're gathering things and putting them up. But what we're not great at and we're getting, we're getting better at this, and I think publishers in general are getting better at this. But I think there's still a huge opportunity to get good at this is to actually stop and be like, okay, we've been like gathering pieces for 12 years now. Let's stop and look. Like when somebody comes in, where are they going? Like, what are they looking at? What are they really drawn to? And this one, like gold watch we bought six years ago, like, nobody's looked at that in the past year. Is it because it's not in the right place? Is it because it's not like polished correctly? Should we try moving it, adjusting it, seeing if anybody interacts with it? They don't. Again, okay, maybe we take it out. So then when people come in, they only see things that they really like and are really appealing. And like, maybe we don't sell watches anymore, we just get rid of that. We focus on necklaces. But it's really holistic strategy around your catalog of content, the whole store, as opposed to just looking at each individual piece and being like, hey, do I like this piece? I'm going to put it in my store. But then after 12 years, you have this chaotic store that hasn't been curated and things haven't been optimized. One of the things that I heard you talk about was the potential of deleting content. You know, in this jewelry store example would be like, you know, getting rid of the gold watch. But you said that's not always the best option. Well, if somebody's interested in, you know, looking at their catalog and trying to catalog of content and trying to make a decision around, do I keep this? Do I not? Like, where do you even start for that? And then the follow up question is, can you talk about the strategy behind potentially removing it if that was a good idea?

Definitely. So trying to figure out what content is safe to delete and what should be updated where there's still an opportunity is literally looking at the traffic for the keyword. So often those older articles that you published a long time ago may have, back then had a lot of traffic, but now people just aren't searching for that. It's just not, for whatever reason, that watch is not relevant to the customers that are walking through your store anymore. And they only want to focus on necklaces or only silver watches instead of gold watches. And so if you go in and I mean, you don't have to have fancy tools for this. You can just look at the keyword traffic and if you can see that, you know, there's just not a lot of people searching for this to begin with. It's not worth your time going in and trying to recreate that post updated, do all new images, throw in a video with it, add 400 more words to it. It's not worth that effort because people aren't searching for that to begin with. So even if you make those updates and you may improve your rankings for it, those five people that are searching for it, it's not going to drastically change the wheel for you.

So in that case it would be you're targeting something that isn't high volume search. Like there's just not a lot of people searching for, let's say, you know, I'm trying to think of a example of one that would be somebody, somebody wouldn't search for. Pine cone natural pine cone tacos. I just looked out my window and I see pine cones. Right.

There we go.

Super extreme example. But maybe you're into like natural foods. Nobody's searching that. But you have that blog post on, on your site. So it doesn't make sense even to update it. Because even if it was the most optimized post ever, there's not going to be an audience there who's going to be interested in it. An example in the jewelry world would be like you have a watch, but it's like so big that nobody can wear it, so nobody's ever going to buy it because there's not a market for it.

Exactly.

So my follow up question to that would be what if there's appeal in other areas? For instance, like what if it's like a really funny post that a lot of people are sharing on Facebook? Or what if it's gone viral on Pinterest? It's less of the strategy behind it because if it is getting traffic from other places, my guess is the answer would be you leave it. It's more like curious around search engine optimization. And this is kind of a technical question, but like would you potentially no index it? So then you know, Google is crawling fewer pages on your site and you're, and you're saying like, hey, don't, don't crawl this page. Or is it more of a. It depends.

It's definitely not an it depends. This one's a pretty black and white one and one of those rare ones that it's black and white. So before for us to actually recommend, hey, you should delete this post or you should delete these 25 posts. We'll go in and look at the social metrics. So we'll use Buzzsumo, we'll pull all the social data and if there's a significant and the word significant, that means something different for every single brand. So that could be 10 shares for one brand or a thousand shares for another brand. If there's significant social engagement happening with that content, then that. Go ahead and just leave it. Let it sit there. No, index it. We also have instances where it's a blog post that was from 10 years ago and it was the family's first trip to Yellowstone, even though they don't write about travel anymore, but it means something to them. Yeah, okay, go ahead and just noindex that that's safe. The ones where you don't want to noindex them, but you're still not sure if you should delete them. The pretty much last caveat to that is the link profile. If you have one or two strong backlinks that are pointing to it, even if you're not getting a lot of traffic, but you have high authority backlinks that's helping give your blog in general a push up by saying, you know, even though this post isn't getting a lot of traffic, this big website is linking to it. So I do have a little bit of authority and do know a little bit of what I'm talking about. That's another one that we're not going to want to delete, we're not going to want to touch. You can just leave it as is.

Got it. So in the case of the travel post, like I think anybody who's been publishing for a certain number of years will have these pieces of content that are personal in nature, significant enough that you want to leave up. It's almost like a little milestone. You know, we've, I've had, we had a friend yesterday who's like, I've kind of given up on caring what it looks like for me to post on Instagram. It's just become a way for me to like remember a point in time and, and that's the value for them. And I think there's a little bit of that depending on how you run your site. Where for some people, you know, there's these markers and they use their blog or publishing to, you know, you as, as kind of a milestone. Maybe it's like a cookbook is released and not a lot of people are searching about it, but you Just remember that as a really significant thing. Or you know, to your point, you do recap of a family trip or I think of pinch of young. You know, Lindsay was like, here are 10 things we did in Charleston. It's like not a travel blog, it's very much a food blog, but. And you talk about no indexing. Can you talk about what no indexing is? Why it's important and why we would use it and also need to be.

Careful with it, certainly. So no indexing is, is allowing that piece of content, that page to still live out in the universe. But telling search engines, hey, don't worry about crawling this. I don't need you to try and rank this piece of post. I don't if someone's searching for the things to do in Charleston, I don't need this one to come up in search engines. I'm totally okay with this taking a backseat. This is just personally for me and on my site. But that also is where you need to be very careful because pieces of content that you actually want to rank and to be seen by people need to be indexed, they need to be crawled. Search engines need to be made aware of them so that they can put them in front of the right users. That's why when you go through a content audit process or say you're even auditing your own content and you're going back and forth, delete or no index are usually those two bottom of the barrel options. Because if you delete something, you're obviously not going to get traffic. It doesn't exist in the cyber world anymore. If, you know, index it, you could maybe have some people from other pages on your website stumble across that article, but you don't care if the traffic comes through. You're not really concerned about that. And the post is still live, it's still living in the cyber world, which is important to you.

Yeah. So like somebody maybe has bookmarked it and once a quarter they come back and they look at it. Or maybe would be doing an internal search on your site. So like using your site search would come across it. Or maybe it's on Pinterest somewhere, somewhere and somebody clicks on it, they can still get to it if it's no indexed, but you're telling Google or other search engines don't show this. And the word index comes from the, you know, the index of sites. Don't put this in your index, don't display it, don't put it in your database. Keep this out of search results. So the follow up question, why would you do that. What is the, what is the benefit to a publisher by saying don't include this in search results? Because it seems like you would just kind of want anything to be available at all times. So what is the benefit of saying don't include this?

Sometimes it can come down to content cannibalization. So if you have other content that say on Pinch of Yum, you have food related content in Charleston and you want Google to focus anything Charleston related on the food portion and not on this travel blog that's more of just a memory piece for you. So you want to, this is kind of an opportunity for you to map the road out for Google and for users and search engines and to tell them if you're going to do anything Charleston related with my website, show them these pieces only. So then this actually creates a proper user journey for both the search engines and for users. And it makes sense with my brand. Whereas if we go on the travel side of things, we don't want anyone to drive over into that section on the map because it just doesn't make sense for either search engines or users with our brand.

Yeah, that makes sense. One of the things that you said a couple times is user journey. What is that?

Okay, so I'm curious what the oven temperature needs to be for baking pork chops. I'm going to go to Google, type in baked pork chop oven temperature recipe. I'm going to usually my personal user experience. I'll skip over the first few results that come up because they're spammy or they're all recipes and ads. And so I'll go down to like the third or fourth. I'll click on an article, I will then see the article, I'll go through the images, I'll go down to the recipe card, I'll get the oven temperature out of it and then usually a step or two in there or an ingredient that I didn't include will catch my eye. And then now I'm on the recipe and now I really like this recipe. I didn't realize I should do sun dried tomatoes with my baked pork chop. That's going to make it taste amazing. Now I like this brand. I've now had a positive experience with not just the recipe and the content on the page, but with the brand. I now appreciate them because they just taught me something new and opened up my eye to a different way to cook this recipe. So now I'm going to go to their homepage, I'm going to see who the author is, learn a little bit more about them, I may sign up for their email newsletter. I don't know, depending upon how my user experience is on the homepage. If I kind of fall in love a little bit more with the brand, I'm going to go and see that they also have dessert recipes and I need a dessert to accompany this. So I'm going to look at their desserts and then go to their contact page because I'm a marketer and see what PR opportunities they have available. That's a user journey. That's kind of describing that user experiences what a user does with your content. Before, after. I'm sorry, before, during and after they're engaging with your content.

It's interesting. The one of the interviews we've done before is with Kingston who has a company called Slickstream. They just released a feature within Slickstream called Journeys and it shows you like, here's the journey that somebody's gone through. Obviously you know, there's comparable things you could do within a Google Analytics, but they've done it in a really user friendly way. So you can see. And they'll send an email out and they'll be like, here's an interesting journey. And sometimes we'll see like 30 people will come and they'll look at 30 different pieces of content. It's like, wow, what, what was it about that search that brought them in? Like what hooked them in? And so like starting to understand those journeys better, you can, you can see how that would be impactful for your content strategy. One other thing that I wanted to dig into a little bit that you had mentioned is this idea of backlinks. I think, you know, we talk about backlinks a lot, but can you just explain the concept of a backlink and then how can you find backlinks for your site or for a specific post?

So backlinks are when other websites link to one of the pages on your website. This is most commonly we'll stick with the baked pork chop recipe. This can be seen as say another blogger, a travel blogger, came across this baked pork chop recipe that she or he made while they were on vacation in Nantucket. Totally shooting from the hip here. And so they link baked pork chops and it links to your baked pork chop recipe. So now anyone who's reading this Nantucket post is going to naturally they're interested in baked pork chops, which generally this is what happens. They'll click on the baked pork chop recipe, they'll land on your website, they'll land on that post and they'll now have an engagement. If this is a website that gets a decent amount of traffic, it's been around for a while, has some good authority. You're looking at now having a strong backlink lots of times. Not just content creators, brands across all spectrums, small to huge brands. We'll get links from like directory websites or Wikipedia sites or forums and things like that. And those. Well, not aside from Wikipedia sites, most of them tend to be low quality backlinks. Where you see that big difference is when it provides value to a user. If you're ever questioning, you know, is this going to be a high quality backlink or a low quality backlink, ask yourself about the journey. If they're coming from this Nantucket blog post and clicking on the baked pork chop recipe, that's pretty clear that they actually want to learn more about this recipe. They want to make this recipe and give it a try. If they're going from a directory site, you're most likely not going to get a lot of clicks, you're not going to get a lot of traffic. So yes, you got one backlink from it, but you're not really getting any traffic from it. So it's not a strong backlink. It's not very helpful for you getting those links from that Nantucket blog creator. It's not easy. There's a lot of different secret sauces out there that SEOs have in order to try and get them. Some of the best have been through collaborations in the food blogger world alone. There's so many great Facebook groups out there where they're just literally collaboration groups. They find relevant niches or niches that complement each other. Like obviously a vegan niche and a barbecue niche wouldn't be great to link to each other, especially from a user journey standpoint. But there's a lot of groups out there to where they try and help each other out. Like, you give me a link, I give you a link. But they make it relevant to the user and they do it over time Instead of here's 50 new backlinks from this Nantucket person. That's pretty obvious. I mean, Google, as much as we all have lots of feelings about Google and search engines, it is pretty smart. It can tell when you're doing something fishy like that.

Right. And an important point is that one, which is like the closer you get to artificially manifesting links, the more dangerous it gets. Like, you know, I think I forget what they were called, but it was essentially like, hey, 10 publishers, we're all going to link to these 10 pieces of content in a single post. So there's this like web of connections. And into your point, like Google gets good at like understanding that it almost feels like the opportunity is like the parallel in the real world, which is like you have real genuine connections. You have a network of people and friends who are doing similar things and you naturally link to each other. I think of our connection with Melissa from the Faux Martha, who's helped out with some of the design projects we have at the office. So we link to her and her content and she links to pinch of Yum. And that happens in a really natural way over time. But it's also, you want to be strategic about it and think like, how do I do this strategically? And to your point, the importance of that. One last thing with it is there's no real metrics around low profile, high profile, quality, not quality. It's kind of up to interpretation around it. There's no rating system around links officially. It's just this general understanding, like, hey, if we get a link from Minnesota's biggest newspaper, startrebune.com that's probably going to be more valuable for us. A better backlink than to what you said, like a directory of a thousand different food sites that links to your page, is that right?

Exactly. Kind of put on your pr, your public relations hat with this. Whether you have experience in PR or not, the more popular you are, the more links that you're going to get, the more popular you are at school, the more friends you're going to have. It can apply in the real world scenario and that's a great way to think about links. That's why establishing authority is so important, and that's such a broad term. But a way to do that is to really create great content within your niche. Great content is completely different from even a year ago of what great content looked like a year ago to what it looks like today. Providing as much information as you can, Whether you're an informative type of content creator or an entertaining type of content creator, those are the two biggest. As long as you're addressing why a user would have originally come to your page better than anyone else, you're going to be popular. You're going to get links from everyone else. And to see and figure out how to do that, it really comes down to looking at what's currently ranking. Take the all recipes and take the huge corporate large brands out of the picture that show up on the first or second results. Look at the third, fourth, fifth, sixth results of who's ranking for a specific term and see what questions they're addressing. I can guarantee you there's a piece of information that you may not have yet. And when you add that to your content and dive in deeper into that, that's really helping to define the authoritative aspect that you need to really become popular and get natural backlinks without having to go out and ask everyone to be your friend.

Authoritative, almost being synonymous with knowledgeable, like helpful knowledgeable, giving people what they want, which in this world it's like success with the recipe, but also answers to questions potentially. So let's talk about all of the different. We don't have to cover like all the different pieces of it, but you know, you talked about content being different today than it was a year ago. Especially true when you look at five or like 10 years ago, we can totally. I can think back to 10 years ago and read, write a piece of content and how different that looked and felt. It was almost more like of a journal. But now you're kind of structuring content in a way to make it as helpful as possible for readers. And then also what, what Google's after or any search engines after is like trying to understand what's helpful and, and prioritizing that. So what should a, what should a blog post look like? How do you actually structure the different components and pieces? And is there, is, is there any kind of formula with it or like loose structure that you can follow?

Kind of a bit. And I'm doing my best to not say it depends throughout this entire conversation.

But it also depends.

Yeah, also, it truly does. But no really diving into the food content creators in particular. There's this one blog post and I'll look for the link and send it to you afterwards. But there's this one blog post that I always use as an example of a great piece of content structured from start to finish. So it starts out with an image of the final product that I think it was a chicken recipe. I don't even remember what the recipe was.

Yeah, but the content, what you were looking at, it was the content structure.

Yeah, the content structure was so good. It had a photo of the recipe right off the bat, had a few very short paragraphs, then right away with bullets of what you're going to get into this. Right after the bullets, it say, I think it was about 30 or 45 second video. And then it started to dive into the steps. But it didn't do it in step one, step two, and it still wasn't even the recipe card. It was more Conversational. So it still brought the user journey going all the way down. Then it had a three minute video in there and then it had more bullets, more content, and then the recipe card. So you're hitting every type of user there. The one that wants the short quick video to see how to do it. The one that actually wants to see the details and would want to watch a three minute video. The users who are just looking for the bulleted information. The knees of the world that just need that oven temperature but end up staying on longer because something caught my eye. And then you also have the ones that still appreciate the story. There are users out there who still appreciate the story not of how tomatoes were created, but of how you need to peel the skin of the tomatoes so softly after you saute them and they start to burn off. Like they still appreciate that dialogue. And so a perfect structured content to me, and what I've seen has been the most successful, is when you offer something for everyone within one piece of content. And that doesn't mean it needs to be 2,500 words to do that. In this example, they used video elements, bullets to do that and then the recipe card to get to the point, if that's what you truly wanted after watching the 30 second video.

Yeah, I think of both my parents were teachers and they often talked about different types of learners and they talk about visual learners, people who learn by listening, and then kinesthetic learners who learn by doing and actually interacting with things. And you can't do all of that with a screen. Right. But the idea is for myself, I'd rather watch a video of how something is done. But I know a lot of people, even in this podcast, and there is going to be somebody here who's going to be reading this instead of listening to it because they go to the podcast notes and even though they could listen to it, they read the transcript because that's their preference for how they consume content. And so the first piece that I hear you talking about that's important is making sure as much as possible that you are providing different ways for people to consume the content. Video, short bullet points, longer explanation. It also gets to the point where it feels like, man, that's a. That ends up being a lot. Do you feel like there's been a shift where before if you could do two pieces of content in a week, now you're probably doing one because that one piece of content takes twice as.

Long, A hundred percent it. And. And two things on that. The first being not every piece of content needs to have that much of an in depth structure for it to be successful. The ones where maybe you used to be ranking but you aren't ranking for anymore or you're just really in the middle. You're. You're on page maybe three or four and you still haven't hit page one and you don't know why. Those are the pieces of content to where it's worth doing this in depth structure to where you're providing something for everybody inside piece of content. The second part of that is really trying to figure out with your resources what makes the most sense with how much you can actually create quality content in. People are obviously consuming content faster than ever. They want the more the merrier. But it's not making a big ticket in rankings by you publishing five to ten posts a week versus your top competitor who only does one a month. But that one a month is that full structure. It's distributed across social media, it has social ads on it, it's on all the platforms. There's an email newsletter to go behind it. It's getting natural backlinks. So long gone are the days of quantity over quality. We're very much so in quality. A user is not going to abandon your brand because you're no longer publishing five posts a week. Some content creators that put out the expectation totally not food related, but maybe more in like the self help space or the educational space to where someone signed up for a subscription that is relying on that, that's a different story. But for content as a whole, it's so much more important to focus on quality at this point and focus on updating your older posts that are not quality and we're more on that quantity aspect and creating quality in the future.

Yeah, that's great. Um, so when you're dividing that up, I would imagine those kind of naturally fall into different sections. One of the things I see people occasionally do and we've experimented as well is like you're, you're. It's almost gets to the point where you can build in internal links and you can say like here's the, you know, jump to recipe card is technically an internal link, but you could also have one that goes to like the video or you could have one that goes to the story behind the recipe, whatever it is. Is that something that you've seen done and is there any strategy for that or. It depends.

No, no, no, I've definitely seen it done. In fact, that's what we do for our monthly SEO for Bloggers webinar. So I'M very pro this method because I've seen it be so successful. So we do these once a month webinars where we talk about SEO for bloggers and a week after we publish a recap blog post. Originally, the recap blog posts have we have the video, we have the transcript, we have the Q and A we have about the panelists. There's a lot of content on here. So originally we just had all the content pasted on and then about three fourths away into the first year of doing this, we added the buttons buttons right at the top above the fold where it would say watch the replay, read the transcript, go to the Q and A, learn more about the panelists. So for those just like we're going to have on on this podcast loan, for those who rather read the transcript, you click that transcript button, you're going to scroll all past that other information and it's a lot of information that you don't want. You're going to see the transcript, you're going to be able to open the transcript and digest that information. From a content creator perspective, there's all sorts of plugins that do this. The jump to buttons, having them at the top is so helpful and it's not something that you should be afraid of. We have a lot of food bloggers in particular who will come to us and be like, well, they're just going to jump to the recipe card and not read anything else. And oftentimes we find that not to be the case because they get into the recipe card and because you did internal linking properly and you have a here's what to make with this dish, here's what to make for dessert or oh, you like lemons. Here's 10 other lemon related recipes. People will start to dive into those other sections and they may not stay on that piece of content as long as you may want them, but they'll go to other pieces of content on your website and start to engage with your brand as a whole. And that's where you're satisfying everything from traffic, user experience and brand exposure.

Yeah, that's great. So we've talked about looking back at the content that you have, the jewelry store, so to speak, you know, being strategic about content updates, potentially removing content or no indexing it if it doesn't fit for the stuff that you do want to keep. And you know, revisit making sure that you're offering all the different elements for how people would want to consume that content. Updating, refreshing that. How about looking forward, let's say you, you start to realize like the niche that you should be in. You're kind of honing in on that. I think usually creators have an endless amount of ideas, but the question is like, which one of those ideas is the most important idea to be working on? So it's kind of like topic ideation and also topic selection. In regards to a piece of content. Are there any tools or recommendations that you'd have to help guide people in how to be strateg strategic about what's coming down the line in the for their content?

100%. And this is where you no longer have to guess. And we are so lucky as content creators and marketers that we have data to support this and that we can confidently create a roadmap and a topic calendar and feel like, okay, I'm going to put my resources and my time to creating this next quarter's worth of content. I can feel very confident that people are actually searching for this and it's not too competitive. So I actually have a fighting chance of ranking for it. My favorite tool is Semrush's topic research tool. You go in and you put in a keyword. If your geographic, if the location makes a big difference to you, you can put in United States or California or you can put in the location to match the keyword. It's going to populate a bunch of cards. Inside these cards are other related keywords that have medium to high search traffic volume. You can then click on the card and it'll tell you the who, what, when, where, why how questions that people are actually searching for that keyword. It will also on the other side of the card, show you the top 10, the top 10 currently ranking articles for those keywords. So you can literally see side by side. Here's what's really working well because these are the top 10 that are that this is in front of the jewelry store. This is that window display item. And also find out before people come to the jewelry store, what do they want to see when they walk inside that by understanding what questions they're asking, those questions dictate the content that you should be creating.

It's almost like you're stepping outside of the Julia store. What does somebody think before they step in? So the example in the recipe world might be, you know, chocolate chip cookies. We use this a lot. But a question that people might ask would be like, how do you make soft chocolate chip cookies? And that could be a prompt potentially that people are searching that you'd want to include in your recipe. Is that Kind of what you're getting at. Like, what are the pieces of content within your content that are most important to include?

Yes, definitely. So there's a few different things that you can get from just one card inside this tool. One of the things you're going to be able to see is when you see the top 10 articles that are ranking, look for any patterns just in the title alone before you even. Because they link them. So before you even click on them and visually look at them, see if there's any patterns going to the baked pork chop recipe. I've actually done this for baked pork chops and I discovered that 3 out of 10 of the top ranking articles about baked pork chops have the word juicy in the title as a keyword modifier. So that's a clear indicator. Okay, I need to make sure that my client includes the word juicy in their title when they're going to use baked pork chop, because something about that is working and users and bots are liking that. Another thing is, I'll go into the questions and a lot of the initial questions are going to be great opportunities for headings which will dictate what kind of pork should I get or what makes a good pork fillet. Those kinds of questions, you definitely want to make sure and make those H2s make those headings inside your content and actually spend time addressing that. But then you're also going to find some questions that are slightly different that don't go directly to just how to make a juicy baked pork chop. It could be, is it okay to add lemon when you're barbecuing a baked or when you're barbecuing a pork chop, like separate from the baked. And then that clicks. Oh. Not only are people looking for baked pork chops, but they also want to know how to barbecue baked pork chops, and they want to do it with something citrusy. Boom. That's a new piece of content that I know is getting traffic. I can create a keyword around it, do the research, make sure that there's traffic coming to their confidently knowing that there is, and then create headings. I would then take this like barbecuing pork chops, run it through the tool again, see what's ranking in the top 10, see how I can optimize my title, see what questions people are asking, make sure those are headings and I'm addressing that information. And then this kind of just repeats and you can literally create so many, like hundreds of new content ideas from just running this manual experiment that's really cool.

And that's within Semrush?

Yes. Yeah, it's their topic research tool. There's lots of other tools out there that do similar processes like answer the public and whatnot. I just really love the way they organize everything into one card so you don't have to then go inside, answer the public and then use an SEO tool to double check the traffic and everything.

Yeah. And it seems like it's a really good complement to kind of the open creative thinking that you're doing around. I'd really like to do this recipe or this recipe or this piece of content and then allowing some type of framework to help you guide decision making around which you actually pick and like what you include within that content. Because sometimes that can be difficult. It's like sometimes it's easier to make decisions with boundaries versus no boundaries. And this feels like it gives you some boundaries. Here's some general guidance of things that you could include as an outline or H2. One specific question I had with that kind of a follow up question as we round the corner here towards the end is there's an FAQ box that you can include with Yoast. Yoast is the SEO plugin for those who aren't familiar and it structures the content in a way where Google would recognize it as a question. Do you have thoughts around including questions within like FAQ structured data versus as an H2 within the content?

Here's a clear one where I will definitely say it depends. It definitely depends. You can certainly use the FAQ card. I mean, that's definitely the cut and dry way to address the information and make sure it's very obvious to both users and the search engines that hey, this is my FAQ section where we're looking at creating that great quality, that full structured content. You don't need to do that because you so naturally do that within the content and you create a user journey. The questions actually make sense from one to the next. You're not talking about or you're not addressing a question like what temperature do I need to bake the pork chops at before. Before you address the marinade of the pork chops. So as long as you can do it very naturally, I recommend doing it as headings instead of throwing it in the FAQs. But some content creators are very comfortable just throwing it all into the FAQ and it works really well for them. And so that's where the it depends comes into play. But if you haven't tried one or the other yet and you want to get started with with addressing more information with your content. I would recommend starting it into the headings first.

It almost is. That's where the art piece comes in. Like where does it make the most sense? How long is it? I imagine an FAQ area almost as being a catch all that doesn't require any kind of flow to it. Like it's could be any question in any order. Whereas.

Exactly.

If there's something that's a little bit more important, you'd probably include it. If there's a little bit more narrative around the why behind it, it might make sense to have that the actual blog post content, so.

Exactly.

Ashley, there's going to be a lot of people who have additional follow up questions who are at the point where they'd be interested in potentially working together. You talked about some of the different services that you offer, but what what's the best way for people to connect with what you're up to? And I know that you also do lots of great have lots of great free resources for people as well who are interested in continuing to learn. So just a chance for you to shout out Top Hat content and all that you guys are doing in the different venues.

Definitely. Yeah. You guys can reach me over@ashley toppatcontent.com for any content related questions. Happy to dive in and see how I can help. On Twitter I'm Shemad Hatter. But by all means, the content realm in the content world is always changing and figuring out how to optimize content is changing on a daily basis. So there's no question that is too small or too large because we're all learning on a daily basis.

Well Ashley, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast episodes. Ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you're enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it's on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you're there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much, and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance. And that's all we have for you today. So have a great week.

Sam.