In this conversational video, Evan Carmichael interviews Michael, a marketer from AWeber, about effective SEO content strategies. They stress that modern SEO requires writing for real people, not just search engines, and that keyword stuffing is outdated. The discussion covers balancing keyword usage with genuine value, selecting relevant search terms, and ensuring each piece of content answers the user’s intent. They also explore how to generate content ideas from a list of keywords, and the importance of repurposing assets—turning videos into blog posts, transcripts into articles, and creating social media snippets—to extend the life of a single piece of work and continuously drive traffic. The overall message is that quality, audience‑focused content, combined with smart keyword integration and multi‑format repurposing, is the key to boosting online visibility.
Chapters
Michael, how can I leverage content to increase my search engine optimization?
Another great question. You know, when SEO first came out, everybody wanted to create content that was filled with all kinds of search terms, and as a result, it kind of diminished the quality of content that people were producing. Um, you would find a lot of articles that were just sometimes just didn't even make sense. Um, I remember my first marketing job, we had some blog posts that were questionable because they were written for, you know, a search engine. They weren't written for the person who's actually going to be reading that content. So it's important to kind of keep that in mind that, you know, when you're taking into consideration writing for SEO, you have to remember that it's, it's a balance because the ultimate goal is to educate your, your customers, educate your audience. And so it can be easy to let the SEO take over that. But there are a lot of ways that you can use SEO to kind of help bolster your posts as well. So for example, you know, working at AWeber, we want to rank for email marketing. So we often include the term email marketing in our blog posts. But it's a matter of, you know, really understanding like where it's appropriate and making sure that it makes sense and that you're still providing value to your audience.
Yeah, the advice I give is what— advice Google gives basically, which is write for people. Don't write for the search engines, write for the people. And so, you know, if I'm typing in email marketing as a search term and that's something that you want to get ranked for, then I expect to be given a page that provides me value about email marketing. So you might come up with a list of 50 different keywords that you're trying to rank for. With each one of those keywords, don't just write something that's 300 words and slap it up and, you know, you mentioned that word 10 times and you hope you get it ranked for it. That used to work like way, way, way, way back, but not anymore. You want to write for the audience. If I'm typing that in, you know, if I'm typing in salsa classes Toronto, I want to find on that page that I hit relevant information about salsa classes in Toronto. And it's okay to have a promo and a call to action and a, hey, here's your next step, but the content that you give me has to be value add and not just a sales pitch and not just something written for robots. So that's what I would do. Basically look at every search term you're trying to rank for and then create content that would be genuinely interesting for someone who had that question.
Yeah, and definitely to add on to that too, if there are a variety of search terms that you want to rank for, that's a great place to help brainstorm some blog content as well or video content. You can have a video that addresses one key phrase, You can have a blog that addresses another. So that really helps extend the life of your blog post. It gives you new ideas for your content, which is actually, which is really helpful too.
Yeah. And if you're spending all the time in making a video, you can also turn those into blog posts. I know you guys do that at AWeber. You take ideas from your blog and turn into videos and vice versa. You're spending so much time creating the energy and investment to make you one piece of content. You can leverage that in a lot of different ways. You can turn those into templates. Tweets that you send out or Facebook pictures or videos and vice versa. If you spend a lot of time making a video, you could take the transcript and turn it into a blog article and take out the ums and ahs and all that stuff. So, you know, use your content, use it as a multipurpose vehicle to help continually drive more traffic to your site.
