SEO Challenges for SMBs and Content Strategy

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Rebecca, I see your hand is raised.

Yep. I have 2 easy questions that maybe the team has asked you guys before, but I'm new here. I've only been part of the group for a few weeks. So here's— so HubSpot agency, SMB, primarily focused on startups and VC-backed startups, had a really rough year because of that. So we're a little bit in a bit of a pivot, but it's all good, man. So from an SEO perspective, So we're in the SMB, right? So it's smaller groups or up to $50 million. We saw the big hit. And so everybody's looking at how they can get their SEO back. So we had— I told someone I would ask these questions of you. There's a rumor that too much content being posted beyond the industry standard in your area could get you deranked. For example, we have an Atlassian reseller who does a ton of blog posting and they cannot get their SEO back. Have you ever heard of Google being that smart?

So there's not necessarily an industry standard on how much content you can or can't have.

Right.

The problem that you have is, let's say, call this Atlassian reseller. If they're just posting tons of content, the problem is, and I'm going to make an assumption here because I haven't seen the site, I bet you the majority of their content is crap, right? Where it's just like junk and they're just putting out a lot of me-too content. When I say me-too, I'm not talking about the MeToo movement. I'm talking about me-too, which they're putting out a lot of similar content. There's nothing really unique. great or differentiating than all the other articles that have been around the web for a long time.

Okay.

And what ends up happening with Google is they'll look at your website and be like, oh, you got 5,000 pages of articles. A lot of them are junk and get no traffic. We shouldn't rank your website highly at all.

Yeah, basics 101s, okay.

Yes, so what I would do in that case is I would go look at my Google Search Console and Google Analytics, look at all the pages that get no search traffic and figure out, do we actually need those pages? The reason I say need those pages, a lot of times you may need them like if you're a reseller and it's some technical support document that barely gets any traffic. But some of these pages you can noindex, some of them you can delete, some of them you could merge and prune. You can use the right redirects.

Get that yield.

That usually does help a lot of these sites recover in the long run. The second thing with that site that they're probably going to end up facing is if you're just cranking out tons of new content, When we did analysis of the best performing SEO sites or sites that are continually growing in SEO traffic, you know, looking at like the top 5, 10%, like the ones that are really growing in double-digit growth year over year consistently with all the algorithm changes, we saw that they spend 60-something percent of their time updating content and 30-something percent of their time creating new content. So when you have sites that have tons of content—

Yeah.

A lot of times the issue is, is it's outdated, stale. It's like, would you, when you do a Google search, would you rather read a 3-year-old article or a 3-week-old article? And this is why Wikipedia does so well. A lot of their content is fresh, updated, right? That's one of the keys to doing extremely well.

Okay. And I'm not trying to dominate. The other question—

No, no, no, ask away.

Don't push. No, the other question, and this all came up, As an idea that my colleague heard from some other SEO agency is that more positive inbound signals from many sites is helpful. Therefore, running dumb little campaigns inside of Facebook or Twitter or Outbrain or whatever creates inbound signals that would help Google. We're trying to help these tiny businesses.

Yeah.

So one of the factors in Google's algorithm is brand queries. Okay?

Brand queries, okay.

How many people are typing in the company's name or product on Google and clicking on their result? So not just the number of people that are typing in the search, but what's the click-through rate of people clicking on your listing? If it's extremely high, that shows really good signal.

They love that.

it helps with your rankings for all your terms in that case, right? Even the words that don't necessarily have as high of a click-through rate, especially when you have a strong brand. So when you're using a lot of things like Facebook and Instagram and Outbrain and all these other channels, people see the brand more often. You know, in marketing they call it the rule of 7.

Yes.

When someone sees your brand 7+ times, they're much more likely to buy from you, evangelize you. So you want to make sure that you're using these channels to help build up your brand.

Okay. Last question, and then I'll take it to everybody else.

Oh, wow.

This is a harder question, and you don't need to— you could direct me to a resource. So also in the SMB, also with this business, as I'm working through the pivot, I woke up and went, oh, LinkedIn appears to be really important. Where have I been? And so I've been working on LinkedIn this year and helping my founders. We work with a lot of founders, a lot of, you know, guys with cool tech toys, helping them. I'm trying to— I'm experimenting, I'm listening to all the videos, watching everybody and trying to see what is the advice I could give to these founders on using their LinkedIn for lead generation and getting their voice proper. And I'm wondering if there's somebody you think I should watch or a paper that's relevant that kind of summarizes your strategy or your philosophy, because I'm just watching it all. I'm trying random things and I'm like, okay, I need a playbook here. Any thoughts?

Eric, do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah. Yeah.

So go to, um, there's a guy named Justin Rowe who does a really good job with his own LinkedIn organic. And ironically, um, maybe it's not so ironic, but that's what, that's what gets him more LinkedIn paid media clients. Um, his, his LinkedIn agency is called Impactable, I believe. Um, I just— Impactable.

Yep.

Justin Rowe. R-O-W-E. Thank you. I just need a guy with a good example that I can have everyone follow. So awesome. Okay.

David's nodding his head over there too.

Thank you, Ginger. Good. Thank you.

There you go. Perfect.

Thank you, guys.

Agency owners, if you want to grow faster, my partner Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills, and you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people and You're going to be hanging out with like-minded people such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you on the other side. Matt, did you want to say something? I saw you unmute before we move it to Anita.

I was just going to say, Nick talked about his strategy a little bit yesterday if you want to watch.

I was listening to that too. You were?

Okay, yeah, yeah.

I just want to ask— And he mentioned someone— I wanted to ask the big dogs here.

Cool. All right, over to Anita.

There we go. Hello. So going back to something that Neil said at the beginning of the call, I was listening to Jay Schwedelson yesterday and he was talking. You guys know who he is, the guru guy, right? No. He puts on that email marketing conference, the virtual conference every year. He does subjectline.com. Anybody know him?

Yes, I know who you're talking about now.

Okay, cool. So he was talking about in the beginning days of starting his agency that he would go and pitch to clients and without success, and he was a full-service agency. So he said finally, after many a sales call, somebody said to him, you know what, the last thing you talked to me about was email marketing. And that was probably the thing that was most interesting to me. And maybe I would have hired you if you would have only talked about one thing, but you talked about so many different things that it was overwhelming. So Jay's point was, sometimes when you're trying to do everything, you do nothing. And so our agency, just for context, works in the property and casualty insurance space for marketing. Very difficult. These are non-marketing minds. And so if we were to go in, and so I'm curious, Neil, when you talked about how important it is to have more than one service, which we do, most of our clients we do 5, 6, 7 different things for, and we actually have a pretty low churn rate. But our bigger problem, especially right now in new client acquisition, is that we go in depth and listen to all of the things that our clients need. Which is usually everything. Um, but you pitch that to them and they just can't get their head around it. So would you say that you would be better off to go in with a single service and then build from there? Because that's so— that feels so contrary to me, right? Like, if you choose one thing, what if somebody else comes in and chooses something else and that thing resonates more with them?

You follow?

Yeah.

So I'm going to break down the response in 2 parts.

Okay.

If you look at the majority of the largest agencies in the world, they tend to offer all services and they deal with all verticals. When you're starting off, it is hard to do everything for all verticals well. So most people either stick to a specific marketing skill like SEO or email or paid ads, Or they stick with a specific vertical, like I'm just going to do marketing for mortgages. I'm just going to do marketing for e-commerce, D2C, right? And then they'll say, we'll do SEO for them, paid ads, and the list goes on and on. It sounds like you're in the latter camp, and that's a great camp to be in, especially when you're starting off. Either one is fine, right? Either specialize in a service or vertical. We tend to tell people earlier on, specialize in a vertical. 'Cause it just builds up a lot more case studies. It's faster to grow from what we've seen. And then eventually you can add on more verticals, right? But when you're pitching people, yes, they may be overwhelmed, but this is what I discussed a little bit earlier with land and expand is how you grow.

Mm-hmm.

Some clients will be big enough and will be ready and will be prepared to actually pay you for the whole suite of services and actually want that. Some you can tell when you talk to them, they're just overwhelmed. They just want to get started and they want to see a little bit of results before they invest more dip their toes in. For those, you figure out which service do you think is going to have the biggest impact on their KPIs, right? Their key performance indicators. And you only pitch that service.

Mm-hmm.

And you tell them, look at all these other services we offer, and these are the results we're providing clients in your space. But for today, we want to focus on this service only. You're probably wondering why. Well, we think this is the one you need the most, and it can provide a lot of results. We think the others can too, but we want to tackle this first. And then eventually, if you're happy within three, four, five months, discuss the other services and how we can make you even grow faster.

Right?

But you're getting your foot in the door and then you're expanding. It's much, much lower commitment and it's easier pill for people to swallow.

I love that. Thank you.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency. So NP Digital. So Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services, and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. Um, Anita, one thing I'll share, maybe it's not even just for you, Anita, this is for everybody. Um, so I did a podcast with Seth Godin, um, on Monday, and he said something really interesting. So he doesn't post to Instagram. He doesn't post to Twitter. He only blogs. That's all he does. And he does— he's on a book tour right now, so he's doing podcasts. And so his logic is, look, I can choose to be pretty good at many different things, or I can be world-class at one thing. So I didn't know this, but he actually writes 4 to 5 blog posts per day, and it's like his little snippets of wisdom, and only one goes out. And he's been doing that for the longest time ever. And he's like, you know, I'd rather just be known for that. Sure, I can get pretty good at Twitter, but I'd rather just be known for one thing. And he's like, yeah, it's that focus that's helped me be successful. And I thought it was interesting because he's kind of like the godfather of marketing. So just wanted to share that story with you guys.

Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you.

Of course.

All right, guys, that wraps up our call for today. If you're watching this live, you can always go to marketingschool.io/aoa. and you can apply for the community. We'll see you next time.

Bye.