#92: Content Strategy, B2B SEO in 2023, and Category Creation Content with Mitch Briggs (SEO Success Manager at Demandwell)

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My guest today is Mitch Briggs. He works at Demand. Well, he's an expert in SEO. I don't care. Don't say. Don't say anything bashful. Don't say anything after. That's how I'm framing this. And I wanted to do a little something different. Maybe we'll do more of these where we bring on a subject matter expert and talk about, do a deeper dive into a. Into a topic, which is something we've been getting a lot of feedback on. So before we get into this, Mitch, give us your quick background. Who are you? How'd you get into SEO? What do you do for work?

Yeah, great question. My name is Mitch Priggs. I'm calling in today from Indianapolis. I am an SEO expert. Yes. How I got into that. I have a journalism background, a degree in journalism, had my first job in corporate communications and pr. Was able to see what some of the digital team was doing at the time and found that to be way more interesting. And that person actually left that role. And I kind of raised my hand and said, I'd like to do that, and was able to do that in house for about six years. Digital marketing at a software company, then left there to do consulting for an SEO agency. So grew a lot in the agency world. You get a lot more exposure that way. You get to see what works, what doesn't, across multiple different applications, and then kind of gone back and forth between in house and agency and consulting across different aspects of digital marketing. So been doing that about 15 years now. So I'm currently at Demand. Well, and really focusing on the SEO side and content marketing.

So what's been the biggest change or how do you articulate? There's been many, many changes. That's a bad question. But how would you articulate about what's different about SEO then versus now? And I think a lot of people will be familiar with, like, you know, maybe 15 years ago, it was a much more of a land grab. Like you could simply rank for things by existing and the fact that you were a company that was, you know, on the bleeding edge of digital and you had a Website and you had a blog could be a way you could bring in a lot of traffic. Fast forward to today. Blogging and digital media is like, or not even blogging specifically, but digital channels.

Are table stakes for a company.

How do you think about and talk about the role of SEO today?

Yeah, it's gone through a lot of change and I think a lot of people think of those past updates and Google making the big changes and the big shifts and kind of where we're at today. I think the coolest thing to, as I look back on that is that there's been a lot of these changes, but fundamentally at its base, very much the same. And a lot of the changes that Google has made are really reactions to people that were either spamming or abusing or gaming the system in some way and trying to make it more fair and more appropriate kind of over time. So things like in the beginning, where if you had a lot of people that linked back to you, backlinks were huge, really valuable pieces that you could easily kind of spin up and spam and that would be enough to kind of trick the algorithm to get what I would say, low expertise content, low quality sites to rank really quickly and really high without doing much of the legwork in terms of researching keywords, understanding great content, good site structure, some of those kind of fundamentals that Google has always wanted to reward but always struggled to because it's a tough job, right, to analyze the Internet on a daily, hourly basis and when someone types in a word, decide who wins that top piece of real estate. So Google has always tried to keep turning those knobs and people have always tried to react to what they're saying and how those things might change. But that fundamental has always been there, which is your audience, users, people are going to Google and typing things in. If that person behind the keyboard is someone you want to reach as a marketer, you can be trying to create that piece of content that aligns as best as possible with that query and with that intent. And then it's a quality game and a volume game. So I think that's what's changed the most, I think over time is you can't really just have a blog or one or two pages or like the amount of content it takes to win to not only prove to users that you're an authority, but you have a lot of in depth, great content across all the topics they care about, really providing that user experience that the user wants. And Google rewards that as well. So I think that's the biggest thing that's happened over the long term. You know, spam tactics changing aside. Right. I think the infrastructure stuff and the metadata and things like that have mattered more in the past. But as those become easier and as CMSs have evolved, as Google has become smarter about how to actually categorize content and figure out what is good, it relies less on those signals and more just on like the expertise, the breadth and depth. Are you being overly marketing with your content or are you being straightforward and addressing a user? Are you being helpful? All of those types of things I think is kind of that spectrum. Looking back this, it requires more breadth and depth, long form content than in the past.

Is that why so much of the first page content is so often like Reddit answers or Quora answers? It's like, because those are genuinely, like, if I go into Google and I type like best half marathon training program, I'm often going to get something that's not selling me anything. And it's like that's. And that could be a Reddit, that could be a community on Reddit. I kind of answer that question. But I think where this breaks down inside of a company though is I think a lot of people that I talk to, like, we believe in this. We're like, yeah, we got to create great content that our customers would want. But then where this breaks down is like, okay, well we wrote five articles and how do we measure those? And like, do we write an article that drives to a demo? And like, the measurement side of this kind of gets tricky and it's like, well, this is where this whole thing breaks down because you're also not going to write an article. And then because in the article you link like, get a demo to our software today, like, hey, six people signed up for a demo. There's just, you have to take such a longer term lens. You know what I'm trying to articulate with that?

Yeah. And I think that when you think about the intent of each individual search, you know, don't ask the person to get married on the first date. Right. This might be the first time coming. And they might even be typing in something like, what is customer relationship management? You need to answer that question and you need to answer it well. And you need to answer it in a somewhat unbiased way and maybe even a boring way, you know, not a marketing way. Right. Give that answer, help that person understand. And then maybe there's some other step to take. You know, learn more. Here's additional content for you to explore. It's not get a demo Right away. But then think about on the other end of that spectrum. If people are typing in CRM software providers, how can you be helpful there? Well, you might have to list other providers other than yourself, which is why the G2s and the Capterras of the world can win those types of searches because they are providing providers. But if you were to go after that on your site, you need to list providers and maybe then it is appropriate to ask for a demo. But thinking through that whole spectrum of someone doing an educational type search versus more a solutioning search, like how to improve sales productivity, that maybe is like, all right, we'll tell them about CRM there. Because that's a way to improve sales productivity versus someone saying CRM software provider. They've educated themselves to the point where they're looking for vendors. So even just think about those three buckets, you know, an educational versus kind of solutioning. I'm trying to solve a problem here. I need help. And then more transactional commercial intent, which is, you know, I'm looking to buy, I'm looking, I'm putting a list together. Why you over these others? Tell me about your features, show me a demo. You know, kind of adjusting those content types for the to match up those levels of intent.

Is it better to start with like, okay, I want to talk specifically for let's say startups. People have been saying, Dave, we need more advice for we're not an established 50 million plus revenue company. Maybe we have no revenue or maybe we have, you know, 500k or a couple million or we need help with SEO. And I've been in this situation and so like you're an up and coming CRM. You're the new CRM provider, right? You created this new CRM because you think that Salesforce and HubSpot and whoever else, you know, you created the AI CRM of the future. What's going to be hard is it's going to be very tough for you to go and compete and to go and write that like what is CRM article? I understand why you would do that, but I also feel like that could be a waste of time for an early stage company where, you know, you might want to go and pick off more bottom of the funnel and higher intent opportunities. However, then you also have the CEO in your ear that cares about the company perception and it's like, well why are we not in the like what is CRM conversation, right? How would you play this game? And also granted like you don't have a big budget, you don't have 10 writers, you have one marketing person who's trying to already already doing five other things. Like where does the SEO, where does the content strategy start?

Yeah, I like to try to find those types of terms that might be in between somewhere. Like the straight up CRM software, which you would argue, hey, that's great intent. Someone's looking for CRM software, I need to be there. But that's going to, you know, to think you can just spin up a page and start ranking is not going to happen. And then same with what is. You know, there's been people educating the market on CRM for the last 20 years and they're got great content and they have the advantage of the history of their domain and all the authority they have. It's just not going to happen for you there either. But something like, you know, artificial intelligence and CRM or modern CRM or easy to use or you know, what are those other modifiers? Maybe it's a specific industry you're going after that you can start to really just hone in on when you lay out that universe of terms, looking for those nuggets of it could even be 10, 20 searches a month. Yeah, really honing in on something you can win early and get them in and then start building out over time into those more competitive markets and competitive terms.

So it's almost like a litmus test for your marketing. Right. Which is like it's going to force you to be more specific. And so like, well, we're not selling, we can't sell this thing to 10 different Personas right now. Who is the one Persona and what's the one specific use case? And you kind of start there, write content for that one Persona and all of your marketing. And this is where a lot of companies make mistakes is they the founder, the CEO, whoever they want to be everything to everyone because they have this game changing product and like you do need to start and build content for a specific Persona and build this out. Right?

Yeah. It is kind of a cool way to think about audience research and market research through the lens of what are people searching for and what do we think we can attack first in the market? It'd be like similarly to if you had all the contacts and like who do we call first? You know, who do I prospect first, you know, finding that, you know, that icp, but also attaching that more to would that person be typing in and it could even be non CRM things. It could be problem or solution based. It could be something like I can't understand how to use Salesforce in this certain capacity and you're educating them like, yeah, that does suck. It doesn't integrate with that and it doesn't load well, but we do.

I love that. This is where like I think a lot of SEO is missed.

Right.

It's not just about like finding some keyword, writing some generic content. Like what you just broke down is like showing that you have a deep understanding of who is this person that you're trying to sell to and how can you basically reverse engineer your way to that person. I think a classic example of this is like, is Gong, for example, where they were selling, let's call it, you know, my friends at Gong, don't be mad at me for dumbing it down to this, but let's call it call recording software. Right. They weren't writing like in depth guides to call recording software. They were obsessed about creating interesting content for the person who would use that, who would be sales managers. And so what they did is they published these like monthly reports about here are the top terms salespeople sell for deals that close or something like that. Or like they'd come up with these benchmarks or interesting data. And so what they would do is that might not necessarily be like related to their product, but now they're creating these like media articles that are going to rank for terms about like, you know, helping reps hit their quota.

Right, right.

And there's probably also some like social signals of like the shareability and how much activity is happening on that page that tells Google like, hey, this is content that people like and so you can go and create more things. And so in a lot of examples it's like, yeah, should you go create that? Like what is CRM as your first thing? Probably not, but can you reverse engineer back what you said in the beginning? Like, what is this person searching for? And they're not always going to be searching for like they're not always going to be ready to buy and search for that thing. Now in some ways that's the easy stuff to do. Yeah. When someone's ready to buy, like, okay, they're going to type in demand, well SEO tool or whatever.

Right. But yeah, I think and staying in that Gong example, you know, I use Gong to record consulting calls and I kind of was googling the other day, like I wish there was a way I wanted to like easily send follow up emails to customers with like, here's what we talked about, here's the high level bullet points and the action items that we talked about and I was googling things like that, right? Like how to take a video from Gong and like put it into AI and like have it generate like an email that I could send.

Yeah, that's the best SEO play to me because you're not kind of doing this fluffy, like what is CRM like? And I've done this play before. Like that's where you get a lot of traffic and low conversions and you're like, well, well, no kidding, this isn't going convert, right? We've talked a lot about on this podcast about Zapier and what they've done with content. I think that's another good example is like by the nature of their product, they have something that integrates with thousands of other tools. And so like they can create all this content about like, you know, three ways. You can use Trello and integrate it to HubSpot to do X, Y and Z. Those are very specific searches that are going to convert really high. And so like, I think, you know, anybody that's listening to this as an exercise should be like, forget about the top of the funnel stuff for now. But like leave this podcast today and like come up with. And maybe you have a framework for this, Mitch. But like come up with, you know, 10 to 15 just examples. You don't even have to write the content yet. But like what are 15 examples like you know, Mitch and Dave are talking about that you can go and create for your business that somebody might be searching for.

Right. And I think the advantage of being in a software company is you usually have a large set of features, right? There's the category of if you took all those features together and put into a solution, that's the CRM category, right? Or marketing automation category. But think about every little tiny feature that you have and how it solves a very unique problem within that large set. And who's going to be searching for something like send batch email to list or something like that? Probably a bad example. But what are all those little tiny features that you think aren't a whole, you know, oh, that's not our product. We do much more than that. Sure, you should say that on your homepage, right? When you talk about your messaging and you have your sales decks, you could talk about the entirety of your solution. But if you don't have a page that talks about these individual seemingly tiny features or cost benefit things that you're doing, I think there's some real gold in those niches. And same if you're creating a content or category, if you're creating a category. If that said commercial intent doesn't exist, you have to start thinking differently as well. And you know, what is it that that person that will eventually buy me is looking forward to do now? Take better notes of sales calls. Well, let me introduce you to call recording software. You know, before people start searching call recording software, they might have been searching for sales call, note taking software or something like that.

I have a thing that I want to go to next, but since you mentioned I was going to ask you about category creation, how should you think about. There are a lot of people listening to this that are at startups and they want to create a category and the challenge is that category is new and so there has no, there is no search volume yet. I'm going to tell you what I think my answer would be and I'm curious to hear if it's right, wrong or whatever. It seems to me that the value in creating SEO content for that category is because ideally it would be easy for you to own and rank for those keywords now. So then you can be the one. But as an actual like demand capture or whatever strategy, like, don't expect to generate a lot of business from that. How do you think about that? What's your response?

Yeah, I think especially if you're like, I don't want to say making up a word, but oh, that's what we do.

That's what we do here in marketing. Don't be shy.

Yeah, introducing a new category to the market. That would be the professional way of, maybe you're calling it performance AI or something like that is not necessarily an official Forrester Gartner software category, but you're trying to tell the market, hey, this is this new thing that we've come up with and you're going to want it if people do start to eventually Google that. If you're going to spend time and energy going on to podcasts or doing PR and talking about this new thing, people are going to start Googling that and you better be there. Right. So I would definitely start with like let's create our page on what this is and why it matters and how it's different than other categories. Like put that stake out there for Google to index and you should be able to start ranking for that fairly quickly because no one's really searching for it. So I would definitely start there and make sure you at least have that base covered. But like you said, don't anticipate that to bear any fruit until you've sufficiently educated the market on what this term is and why you need to Google it. Kind of like ABM back in the day, you know, account based marketing was something that not many people googled and now do.

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Go check them out forecast and metrics from your ad networks like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn. And better yet, it integrates natively with Salesforce to gather all your results and help you track ROI so you can prove and improve the value of your marketing efforts. Get the platform your CFO will love and help them speak the language of marketing so they can understand the value of all of your activities. Go to planful.com marketing to learn more. Or better yet, go book a demo right now and tell them Dave and the Exit 5 podcast sent you. I do like it as an exercise because I think it's, I think it can be a forcing function where like I like it when a startup, let's say they create a new category. I like it when they then kind of create that definitive. Like let's say I'll use Drift just because I worked there and I can speak to that as an example. Like we created this category of conversational marketing. What was the forcing function was we wanted to have the definitive guide and overview to this new thing, right? And so we needed to create Drift.com conversational marketing. And that page got better over time. But it was like this is what conversational marketing is. This is why it's important. This is why now. This is how to think about it and So I think like search volume or not, if you're going after a category, you need to do that. That forcing function of like writing, you're kind of like how you see the world. I think HubSpot still has a really good example of this where like they kind of have like this like why inbound marketing page.

Yeah, inbound marketing was what they invented essentially.

Right. Or, you know, this could be gainsight and customer success or whoever in ABM or whatever the thing is that you're doing. And so it's like it's a forcing function to like write that definitive page and then also you then create that pillar page that then when you go create all your other content, you're constantly like sending links back to and driving.

As your core asset 100%. It's a great starting spot. Not only just from an SEO standpoint, probably from a business alignment standpoint as well.

Yeah. When you have to sit and write down and say like so. And I do feel like a lot of start. This is not even SEO thing, but I feel like this is where a lot of startups struggle is. We're like, we're going to create this category. Here's what we're going to call it. But we don't actually. We can't even write a 500. We can't even write 500 words of copy on the landing page.

Right.

And I think where this works best is when you have a clear philosophy and a strong opinions on that. So you gotta go and create that. What else? Anything else on the topic of like SEO and category creation before I take us somewhere else?

Yeah. I think again, it's kind of thinking just two, three tangents away or being a little bit more removed from the terms themselves and the category. And again, rethinking of audience. I have a cool example of a company I worked with that without giving away the industry, the tool itself was new. Right. Nobody knew that there was a tool out there that served this particular audience in this particular way. But what we noticed is that audience was constantly trying to educate themselves. It's kind of a regulated industry, so they're constantly trying to educate themselves on like law changes and updates to guidelines. And it was state by state. And so there was all this information people were looking for and we realized nobody had that all in one nice place of like. And it was weird terms and like numbers and like, you know, what's the policy for this, this, this in the state of Nebraska. Right. All of these different things that were always kind of changing and people were Looking up. So then the content strategy became, well, let's build, you know, a collection of all of these rules and information that would be a helpful guide for that audience and then educate them on how you can help them navigate this stuff with a piece of software that they didn't know existed because no one searched for that plus the word software. So it's like focusing on those type of problem things that you solve even if you don't actually solve that problem. But it's the right audience that you could educate, you become a helpful resource, a neutral party, but still have basically the at bat in the form of a visit to say this is who we are and what we do and see if there you can convert off of that.

I just wanted to put this on the, on the audio so we have it. But you and Chantal shared this great deck. And I'm not going to share the deck with everybody, but I'm going to talk through what's in it. So there's a chart that basically shows balancing search volume and intent. And I just want to read these different categories. So you have at the top of the chart, at the top of this graph that you have here, you have lots of searches and then you have likelihood to buy on the bottom access here.

Right.

And so lots of searches would be something like education. And so what is X definition of meaning? Book importance. Right. That's going to get a lot of searches, but it has a low likelihood of somebody searching for that who's going to be ready to buy versus on the bottom end of this spectrum you have somebody in the decision making stage. So this is searches around, pricing around best X verse, Y reviews alternative, which, the best alternative example I've ever seen was, I don't know if it still exists, but it used to be Zendesk Alternative. Do you know this one?

I haven't seen that.

Okay, so Zendesk, let me type it in right now.

Is it a competitor?

I guess Zendesk Alternative. Okay, so if you googled Zendesk Alternative you wouldn't just get a. So this would be somebody who's using Zendesk and they're looking for a different tool or maybe they are evaluating and they want to see what else is out there. They created a fake like grunge emo rock band called Zendesk Alternative. And the page is actually like their Seattle's alternative rock band. And it's completely fake, but it's an amazing little like Easter egg slash SEO hack that I think everybody should go and check out.

That's amazing.

So you have education. Then the second step would be how tos. And this is where I think there's a lot of gold from a content marketing standpoint, which is templates, checklists, calendars, how to plans, samples, calculators. I think HubSpot is probably the best ever to do this type of content. But even something like, like actually we're running ads right now on the podcast for demand. Well that are demand for demand wells like SEO, feasibility assessment. Right. I think things like that are great where like you have a need, like your customer's gonna be searching for something. How can we build a free tool? At drift, we had this lead response grader, so we would check how fast people are responding to leads. How TOS can be really powerful. What do you say to that, Mitch?

Yeah, for sure. I think another word that stands out that we've seen a lot of success is just the word examples people wanna see. Content marketing plan, example, email automation, workflow, exam. I just want to see what one of these looks like so that I can build it in house or mimic something out there.

Or like think about every, you know everybody's talking about AI tools right now, right? Like if I was at an AI company, I would be product marketing the heck out of, you know, 15 AI generated copywriting examples for B2B marketers. Right? 10 ways you can use AI to help create your next presentation. That's not selling your product, but that's like ways you're showing how your product can help somebody achieve their goal. They're going to read that article, get an answer, get some benefit from that and say, oh, by the way, this happens to be created with our product, which you can go sign up for right here.

Right? If you are a venture studio or a venture capital firm, like you should be showing good pitch deck examples. That's going to get the eye of an entrepreneur that might eventually want to work with you or something like that. It's like thinking a little twist away. It's like, yeah, we want to rank for venture capital firm, but we also might want to rank for pitch deck examples, stuff like that.

What should I have for SEO? I mean, what should I have for Exit 5?

Oh man. So yeah, I mean that's the thing. When you're serving a huge audience like B2B marketers, there's so many probably how tos that you could be helping with in terms of I think like high level templates, checklists on like strategy. I think that's always the biggest thing people struggle with. Like what does A strategy take the form of, is it just a deck? Is it a spreadsheet? What is a really good marketing strategy or marketing budget or marketing plan? I think that's where none of us, like, learn that in school. I love that tagline of yours. Like, I was in journalism. I learned like how to code a website in like actual HTML, right? Like, there wasn't. There wasn't like, I think WordPress was barely like a tool that you could use. So it's like, I think it was like, what is it? Dreamweaver? Was that the one that.

Yeah.

So, you know, we never had to like, what does it look like to develop a real content strategy and plan and tactics and budgets and like, what should that look like? I think so many people default to spreadsheets and spreadsheets are great. I love a good spreadsheet. But like, especially early on in my career would have, like, really loved. Prime example of like, what these things should look like.

Well, that's a perfect example of what you talked about earlier. We're like matching who's searching for that? So it's not related to the community, but I would like. We went and we created a bunch of great content about like, here's how to present to the board or here's how to create a marketing plan. The people who are going to be searching for that. Then I could have, in the article, like, I could create this killer article about how to do it. Then it's like, by the way, if you enjoyed this article, you might get value from our community where you can ask people questions and get questions answered. And I think, I think that's like a perfect example. And I'm, I'm not looking for free SEO advice, but just to show people how you can bridge the gap in your company and then like, make the sale. I think that's a good example. Okay, so we have education how to's solutions, decisions. We talked about decisions. How do you define, like, the intent of solutions?

Yeah, solutions I think can be anywhere from, like, I'm looking for a tool or an app. Like, they've kind of identified that path that they're looking to buy a piece of software or technology or service. They're kind of identifying themselves more B2B in that way. So that's particularly something to pay attention to for B2B is are they looking for a service or solution? Are they looking for, you know, something else? But also I think in that category is all those, like, problem and answer type things.

Got it.

You could get really granular there. Of Whether it's integrations or it's kind of a how to it gets, it's like lives in the middle there. But it is kind of like that pain point search.

It comes back to like stages of awareness. Like does this person know they have this problem? And so do they know? Like if they know they need a CRM, that's where solutions they know they need live chat. Right. But that's going to be different if they don't know they need that. Okay, this chart is great. So I'm saying this again so you can write these down, but there's four buckets. Education, how to's, solutions, decisions. This is kind of just broad based advice to like what, how would you say it, Mitch? Like give a wrapper to your content strategy. Like, we haven't talked about technical SEO on this podcast today, nor will we. I think this is like, I think a lot of companies make the mistake of not having a clearly defined content strategy. I've made this mistake a ton of times where it's easy to just have a good idea for an article and you want the team to go and create it and next thing you know you've created 20 articles. But I think you gotta be operating with some type of framework, right?

Yeah, we always use the analogy of like the keyword universe. That's like everything your audience might be looking for. But then these galaxies start to form within that universe and you start to bucket like, okay, here's the solutions. And they can be specific to one or two things. Like what does that little cluster of keywords look like around email marketing? And this is marketing automation and this is CRM. And this is you start to like put them into their buckets then kind of based on your priorities, whether you rank well or not. Today you could kind of use data to kind of assign all that out to existing content. It should be clear after you do that where there's good low hanging fruit gaps that you can start producing content and targeting. So that kind of takes a lot of planning and I think, you know, don't skimp on that part. The execution. There's a lot of tools and a lot of great ways out there to execute on strategies now more than ever in terms of using AI to help you write, doing keyword research, those types of things. But the strategy has to be correct or else you'll be six, eight months later even getting traffic ranking for good terms. But you don't see any business result at the end. It doesn't matter. Right. So you really have to think that you're just like any marketing program that you're going after the right audience and the right intent.

Let's wrap up with this. What is the right cadence for somebody to start with? So they listen to this today they want to take SEO and content strategy a little bit more seriously. They're going to go and they're going to start to build their mini keyword universe and they're going to start to map some of these topics and pain points. Then it's overwhelming because we just created a list of 50 articles we could create. Like, how do we know where to start? How much should we create? How good does it have to be? Let's wrap up with some of that, like, actual production advice.

Yeah, I think a workflow is really important when it comes to SEO. It's always easy to push it to the back burner because there's always something that might be more time sensitive, like we have a webinar coming up or an event, or I've got to get this email out to launch our feature. And if you don't have kind of the people and processes laid out of how you're going to attack that plan. So it's one thing to map it out, say, wow, here's the 50 pages I want to make. I would like schedule those out for your entire year or six months of how, who's going to do that and when, and really think about the templates you're going to use on your website. Like, really get all of that stuff set up so that it becomes a really easy workflow for you to say, I'm going to do two of these a week or one of these a week. I'm also going to do these two things a week in terms of SEO, which is like, look at these reports, make sure I'm still going in the right direction, really think through the execution of it, and be really, you know, diligent about doing at least one or two of these per week. Or else it will always be something that gets kind of pushed to the back burner of like, oh, I don't really need to put that blog post out today because we have this thing coming up and I can't get to it.

How do you balance that with, like, you know, how sometimes there's just like. Or at least there's a perception of there's just like, content that needs to be created. Like, oh, we have this announcement with a partner, or we have this thing or this article. Article. Are those outside of the SEO bubble? Are they outside of the content strategy? Bubble. Could they be better if you put them in? How do you think about those type of requests?

Yeah, I think the cool thing about once you have your kind of workflow and SEO engine and that content starting to develop a foundation of traffic and impressions and people visiting those pages, then they also become a really great form of promotion for those what we'll call like premium content or downloads, or like new webinar or new announcement, new feature, something like that. So let's say you had, you created those 50 pages and you start getting traffic to those pages and you know, it's a good audience. The next thing, you create that great ebook. In addition to pushing it out on social and sending out the email and, you know, contacting partners and kind of the other marketing activities, now you can kind of sprinkle it throughout those pages that are live today as a CTA that where it's appropriate. And now you have kind of consistent lead flow coming from those pages and you're able to maximize that type of content on your owned area of the site versus relying on other people to promote it or paid promotion or things like that. So that's one of the coolest things that I've seen with SEO as not just, okay, the pages themselves can bring in traffic and awareness, but as you start to develop, you know, hey, our CEO was featured on this podcast. Let's get the video and put it on all 50 of those pages because it's appropriate and something the audience is going to want. You get to enhance those pages over time with those types of pieces of content, New messaging, new things like that get to now be magnified because you have an actual steady stream of people checking those pages out on a daily basis.

Okay, my final question is, do you think that we've obviously talked mostly about Google. Is there a new world where, like, is SEO gonna change given how much content is being created on all of these other platforms now? Right. Like TikTok or YouTube or Twitter or LinkedIn or from social to video. Like, there are going to be more sites that not everyone's going to just go to Google to find your website. Is there a world where SEO changes? And I know that a lot of smart SEO teams are like, smart SEO people are like, embedded in marketing teams today, and they're not just thinking about Google. What's your take on that?

Yeah, I think there's a couple things that we should be keeping an eye on. I do think that one of the advantages of being in SEO this long is you get to hear the doomsday that SEO is dead every couple years and I'm still working in it. So there's always that, hey, everyone's just going to search on Amazon and in TikTok. They're not going to search on Google anymore. And those are on the rise. People are searching on those platforms, they're using other platforms. There's more ways than ever to educate yourself on a topic. And I think what I've seen happening is it's not do I Google this or do I search this on TikTok? It's just both. It's just more. And it's not that you have to pick one or the other. It's actually harder on the marketer because you kind of have to be in more than one place. You could build a whole business off just ranking well on Google in the past. I don't know if that's as possible today. Because if they find you on Google and they think, I think I might buy this, let me search on TikTok. I don't see anything on it. I'm not gonna, I'll go. So, you know, it's more important, I think, to be omnipresent across the multiple channels of which your audience might be checking and learning and understanding. So I think there's just more opportunity to get in front of somebody across multiple channels and not overly rely on one or the other because it's not like a either or it's a. Yes and, and, and and it depends on the audience. Right. If you have a more B2C commercial product, you should be worried more About Amazon and TikTok taking your search terms away and things like that. So I think that the only kind of big scary iceberg in the water is what Google is going to do next. And in its reaction to generative AI and how that relates to search, you know, do people want the old school list of sources that they can click through or do they want a chat GPT style answer? Right.

And you notice that more and more, I mean even prior to chat GPT but Google started doing more of like sometimes they'll just answer your search without ever sending you that traffic in the website. Right. Like, hey, what's the time and temperature to cook, you know, salmon at? Right, right. Or like whether you're asking a consumer question or to B2B question. I do notice that a lot of times Google's just giving you that without sending you to somebody's website.

Yeah. And that, you know, that position zero they call it, or the knowledge graph has disrupted a lot of folks sites Especially, you know, if you did song lyrics sites or recipe sites or temperature for cooking fish sites or whatever it is. Like, yeah, you've probably seen that traffic go away in the last couple of years when those things get introduced. And even voice search and stuff like that, that switch to mobile. You know, a lot of those different types of searches are easier, more easily done on a different medium. So it could be interesting because that, that kind of sets off a doom loop of if they stop giving people credit for the content, will people stop creating it? So Google then has nothing to. They still have to play that balance of rewarding good content producers so that their users find that content. And I still think it's going to be important that people know where the content is. Like, who's saying this? Who's saying that the fish should be 350 degrees? Is it the Food Network then? I trust it. Is it Mitch's cooking blog? I don't know. I don't think that guy knows who's talking about it. So yeah.

Cool. All right, Mitch, this was great. Really helpful jamming on SEO. If you got any value out of this episode or for Mitch at all, which I know you did, go to LinkedIn, find Mitch Briggs, send him a connection request and a note and say, I listened to you on the Exit 5 podcast. This was really helpful and just wanted to do a different episode where we talk specifically about a topic to help you get a little bit smarter on that. Maybe you learned something new. Maybe it was a little bit of a refresher for you. Mitch, thanks for helping Exit 5 listeners stay sharp. Get sharp about SEO on the quest to become better B2B marketers. I appreciate your time, my friend. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Dave. Had a lot of fun.

All right, man, we'll see you later.

Bye.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community, a community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want to play place to go where you can see what people are talking about. Get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every, every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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