The Virtual CMO

5 Simple Search Engine Optimization Hacks for Small Businesses with Jeff Baker

November 09, 2020 Eric Dickmann, Jeff Baker Season 3 Episode 7
The Virtual CMO
5 Simple Search Engine Optimization Hacks for Small Businesses with Jeff Baker
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, host Eric Dickmann interviews Jeff Baker. Jeff is the CMO of Brafton and a passionate expert on SEO. He helps clients grow their website traffic and create compelling content to rank on Google. Jeff is a featured writer on SEO and has many useful articles on Moz. He is currently a digital nomad and travels the world with other passionate professionals.

Jeff is also a podcaster and hosts “Above the Fold”; where he has conversations with top industry leaders.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/above-the-fold-a-content-marketing-podcast/id1413932916

Read Jeff's article on Moz: https://moz.com/blog/7-search-ranking-factors-analyzed-follow-up-study

 Eric Dickmann can be found on Twitter @EDickmann and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/edickmann and my website https://ericdickmann.com

Jeff Baker can be found online at Brafton or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bakerseo/

Episode Summary: The episode summary can be found at https://fiveechelon.com/search-engine-optimization-small-business-s3e7/

If you'd like to contact us with feedback or guest inquiries, please visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/podcast

For more information about Virtual CMO strategic marketing consulting services, visit The Five Echelon Group at https://fiveechelon.com
 
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The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group. If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit Five Echelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.

Eric Dickmann:

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. This week, I'm excited to welcome Jeff Baker to the podcast. Jeff is an accomplished SEO expert and digital marketer. He is also the chief marketing officer at one of the world's largest content marketing agencies. Brafton. Jeff has built an impressive list of accomplishments in his 10 years of digital marketing is passion is making SEO accessible to everyone in a way that's unintimidating and fun. He likes to share his knowledge on his own podcast, Above The Fold. Jeff has also a digital nomad and has some really great practical SEO tips for you today Jeff welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm so glad you could join us today.

Jeff Baker:

Hi, thanks for having me, looking forward to it.

Eric Dickmann:

So I wanted to start out and understand what is the wifi tribe.

Jeff Baker:

So I'm part of a company called wifi tried and what it is, it's a community of people that are all remote workers in some sense, like a lot of them are. Our developers lends itself well to that. Some people are marketers such as myself, we even have a brain surgeon who works remote. We have a lawyer that works for mode as well. It's just people that are location independent, and don't have to go into a, like a nine to five typical building. They come, they can work remote. They could work online and that's me basically. So the way it works is that this company will set up what they call chapters. So every month there are different locations around the world that you can sign up for. So for example, this is pretty pandemic obviously, but for example, we've got August coming up and you'd be able to slice from Lisbon or Rio or Bolivia or somewhere in Mexico. And. What you get is you get a month long experience with other similarly minded people, remote workers. you got accommodations, nice housing and guaranteed good internet. And you have a normal workweek. You go and work with those people. get inspired because they're from different backgrounds and they're all just naturally curious about this kind of stuff. And, on weekends you explore. The new place that you're in. So for example, last year it was a Columbia. I did Bolivia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and a little bit of Paraguay. So on the weekends, you get to go out and meet the locals and see all the local, all the local stuff. So let's just a fun way to work and travel.

Eric Dickmann:

That's so interesting because you're now the second guest that I've had on that has been part of a similar organization that basically sets up this digital nomad experience, but take some of the work out of it and being able to provide you a place in the connectivity. It sounds really awesome because. Being a digital nomad I think is going to be increasingly popular, especially now that we've gone through COVID and more people have started to experience remote work. How has that been for you at Brafton? has the company really adopted remote work for its workers?

Jeff Baker:

For the most part, we can do everything that we need to do remote. Probably always have been, but there's this shifting mindset, especially all across the world now, especially, but with Brafton over the past, Five years or so seeing that everything that we need to do, we can get done online. We are a content marketing agency. Would your digital marketing and content marketing. So there's very few things are required to be on location. Visiting clients, you can do that over zoom. Now I'm writing content. You're always able to do that over the web, doing podcasts and do that over the web. And, I think a lot of companies are looking at it like, yes, it is. It is nice to have a physical location where maybe you get like a shared workspace or something, but is it really necessary to spend all that money? look at downtown San Francisco rent. That's the closest major city I lived next to. You could be paying$100,000 a month upwards. but for what you know, like. You get, I'm sure you get to some of that in person comradery and all that stuff, but you could get that out of a shared workspace for one fifth, the cost and get your job done just as well, if not better or working from home because you're not distracted, not screwing around a lot, I think we're very similar to most companies that are realizing, Hey, we can actually manage remote. Pretty damn well.

Eric Dickmann:

I think one of the, Drawbacks that some companies have felt about having a remote workforce is, how can I watch them? How can I monitor? How can I make sure that they're being productive? In your own work, how have you adapted to, moving around, being in different places and finding that time during the day to be productive?

Jeff Baker:

For me, it's It was specifically when I'm on a chapter on wifi tribe, I'm surrounded by professionals. These people work a lot. This is a group of strong work ethic people. And that just creates that environment where, when you're around these people, you want to work more. You want to. You want to impress and you're inspired because other people are doing other things. From a remote's work standpoint. It's not a problem for me. Usually the problem that we experienced as digital nomads is not knowing when to turn it off because it's just so accessible. Go to an office. You get that physical distance between you and home. You're in work mode and the same thing. When he come off, come home, you shut it off. You get on the train and you shut it off mentally. When you got your computer sitting in the other room, it's just too easy to access. So I'd say that the main problem is knowing when to when and how to set those types of boundaries. And it's something that the whole, the digital nomad community, we talked to a lot of these people and they have the same types of issues. They have to send some sort of boundaries, but they don't just work themselves into a stupor.

Eric Dickmann:

I'm a big believer in work life balance. And I think one of the things I appreciate about somebody who's got a digital nomad life is you get a chance to get out and experience different cultures, different, attitudes towards business and work life. Have you found that you've really been able to take things back into, your own personal work ethic based on your travels and the things that you've seen and experienced another. Cultures.

Jeff Baker:

Okay. Spend the most meaningful thing that I've ever done is sign up for this and travel and work, for a number of different. From a business perspective. Absolutely. Just the inspiration that you get from other people I'm teaching other people, SEO, I'm worth other people. And we We'll do a skill share. if you're adept in a particular area, you can share that with other people and give them like a training course, like a introductory training course. And it's, um, makes you think of new ways. I think you understand your skill set and much better when you're forced to teach it. So I've taught this so many times that I've gotten better at teaching and it's making my writing better. so from that standpoint, it's been helpful. It's also helpful in talking with people in different. And with different skill sets, they do the same thing. And you're inspired in your job thinking, Oh my God, I've got, there's so much more potential. And web design, you know, I'm working with a web designer, hanging out with a web designer every day and they got these new insights and you're like, okay, I can use this in my company immediately. So from a professional standpoint, it's been very good, but also from a personal standpoint, I don't think there's many things more valuable than, embracing other cultures and learning about other cultures. it makes the world. A little bit smaller and less scary. The more you experience other people in different, like very different cultures. good examples. I was in Bolivia and you wouldn't think this, but you go to Bolivia and he walked down the street and everyone's wearing old bowler caps. Mostly the women wearing old bowler caps. What is that? What is that all about? It's so unusual. And come to find out, Europe accidentally sent a huge shipment of bowler caps. They sent it to the wrong place and landed somewhere in Bolivia and they all loved him. And so it turned into a fashion for over a hundred years, almost 200 years. Now people started wearing bowler caps because of an accidental. A ship accidentally landed near the Olivia and brought him up there. these are things that you just wouldn't learn, having. If you're not traveling and experiencing these cultures and really, getting a feel and empathy for different. Different people, different cultures. So it's been incredible for me. Like it's, I wish I would've done it sooner.

Eric Dickmann:

It's crazy. I think the statistic here in the States is totally like something around 10% of the population has a passport. it's a very small number. It's a very small number.

Jeff Baker:

I won't be towns. Yeah. that's fascinating.

Eric Dickmann:

There's so much to see out there. So I know, uh, your day job is, is Brafton. You're the chief marketing officer there. Talk a little bit about how you got there and what your role is, uh, at Brafton.

Jeff Baker:

Yeah. So I, like I said, I'm the chief marketing officer at Brafton and I started back there. A long time. It's almost about eight years ago. I started as like a content strategist would be the equivalent of what it is today. So working with clients. Looking at their website and, determining what types of content to create from an SEO standpoint, from a reader standpoint. It was, um, just typical account management work. You're doing some strategy, your, Trying to keep your clients happy. That whole thing. and I took, I immediately took an interest in SEO. That was like a side part of the job, learning how to do web analytics and SEO. But for me, that just clicked, you have one of these things in your life every now and then. Somebody gets some sort of skill that just makes sense. Like you just, you see it. Like artwork. And that always happened with me with SEO. It just made sense. So I just kept pushing along that vein. And, started learning more and more about it. And Brampton was great. Cause. They carved out specific roles for me, where I could do SEO related stuff. And eventually I moved out of the client work. I haven't talked to a client quite a long time. And, I started working internally for the brand and specifically doing a lot of the SEO work type of stuff. And then over the past three years, I've Stuck with SEO because that's my baby. That's my passion. I love it. But, it's moved into more of a broad, like general, marketing type of role, a typical marketing type of role, as you would think of it. Email campaigns, SEO content, all that kind of stuff. So that was pretty much the evolution, but the through line really here as always been SEO has always been web analysts. Cause that's been my real fascination. Since the beginning.

Eric Dickmann:

I've been looking forward to this conversation because I really wanted to drill into some SEO ideas and talk a little bit about strategies that you found are working. So one of the questions that I have is, SEO is evolving, Google changes their algorithms, but it is the Holy grail of marketing, It's content that. Gets exposed and people find it without you necessarily having to pay for any advertising to get people there. But there are all these rules on what works and what doesn't work. For example, I see out there that they say, if you're going to do a blog post, you want it to rank. It should be somewhere in the 1700 word. Range, but then you go and you look for certain keywords and you see what the top ranking pages are. And they're these short little articles, they're you know, a couple hundred words at best. Is there really a rule? For content length.

Jeff Baker:

No, there's not as a matter of fact, Should we go on a tirade shold we. Should we do this? I would say the majority of things that you hear about SEO are. Wrong. For the most part and over complicated. Alright. So if we think about SEO, what it, wasn't the first thing that comes to mind when I say SEO, like what concept comes to mind?

Eric Dickmann:

Keyword rankings, organic content.

Jeff Baker:

Yeah. So a lot of it is, I think that's probably a better starting point, but when you say SEO too, A lot of people. a lot of people Freeze up a lot of small business owners, one person organization to say SEO to them. If they don't have a background in it immediately is an overall overwhelmed white washing on their face. They're just. Terrified. It's it's almost like, you know, bringing your car to the mechanic. You have no idea what is wrong with your car and you're stressing the mechanics going to tell you something that's truthful. Same thing with SEO. I talked to a lot of small business owners and. They don't know the first thing about it and they just get overwhelmed when they assume it's going to be way over-complicated over their head and they're going to need some sort of specialist, to help them do it very technical. They always think it's very technical. Truth of the matter is that we SEO is this whole SEO community as over complicated. SEO to a point where it's almost like a black box to most. To most people, to most specifically, small business owners. Which is definitely untrue and it also doesn't help. Doesn't help it. so the way I look at it is SEO. This is something that can absolutely be done. By anybody by any small business owner, anybody that's trying to get their business off the ground can absolutely do it. The problem is just overlooking the over complication that has been put out there by my people in this market. Yeah, let me explain here. Mostly what people hire SEOs to do. If you've got a small business owner, it happens all the time. They're going to try to find some SEO vendor. And what you're going to get is an SEO vendor that does a lot of technical SEO things. They're going to throw a technical SEO. It's a whole sub sect of. Search engine optimization and that's about 95% of what's taught go out there and search SEO. You're going to tell you how to do title tags, metadata, all kinds of things that usually frees people up and they think I can't do this kind of thing. right. That's about 95% of it out there. And that's about 95% of what you're going to pay for. Problem is, these are a set of rules. Like most of what you see out there you read about, and most of what you get, these are a set of rules that basically. Is tech is actually SEO and it will keep your website running, but it really does nothing for your performance. So if you're a small business owner and you want. To get more traffic. You want to get more traffic? Cause he want to make more sales. Doing technical SEO and working with these SEO agencies, 95% of the time, we'll probably do nothing. Because technical SEO is basically just keeping the cars, the tires on your car. If I can use an analogy, pretend that, your website is a car and the SEO are the tires. All right. Replacing the tires will never make your car faster, but a pop tire we'll slow it down.

Eric Dickmann:

Google has a website analysis tool, That gives you a score zero to 100. Red, yellow, green, how your website is performing. Is that where technical SEO is going to show up?

Jeff Baker:

Generally that's 99% of the time when you use one of these tools and it tells you is your site SEO optimized. That's what it's doing is going through these technical components and it's going through a diagnostic checklist. Are you doing with this, and this? If the answer was yes, then everybody feels good because your website is SEO optimized from a technical standpoint. Yeah. That's what you're going to find out there. That's exactly right. Oh, promise. That's not going to do anything for you. Basically, if you break one of these rules, it's going to just prevent your site from doing what it ought to do. So if all of these things are not broken, then, okay. You're a baseline that your cars cruising. You have no flat tires. It's not going to make your website any better. It's not going to drive you any more traffic. What's going to do that is good keyword research and then writing really good content the right way. That is what drives traffic. And fortunately, this is a lot more accessible, to people that don't do SEO, like the classical SEO talking about like technical, SEO, metadata, all that kind of stuff. So in theory, you could set up a website where you just follow this very basic set of rules. That you just use the analogy it's like going to Google and saying is my website, SEO optimized. That's just a set of rules. Like making sure Google can find your pages, making sure you haven't broken anything. And then go into the real part that actually drives traffic to your site, which is really good keyword research. And then really good content writing. When you do those two that's 95% of the results is keyword research and really good content writing. The other part, the thing that everybody worries about is just a set of checklist items to make sure that people can find the content. And the keywords that you researched. All right. So it's almost like a mismatch of priorities here. Really. That makes sense.

Eric Dickmann:

yeah, it does make perfect sense. So you want to have the technical SEO stuff, But you don't want to overly focus on that because that's ultimately not going to get you found it just could. Maybe be a hindrance if you've got the other content where it needs to be.

Jeff Baker:

Yeah. If you focus on the technical SEO and you've already checked off the minimum checklists, for the most part, you're going to be fine. It's is mainly. Yeah, like a diagnostic checklist and usually what happens is you create a problem. On the site. So if you a good example, you take a very bare bones website with nothing on it. You've got four pages, right? And then you've got maybe a tiny little bit of content that is a perfect se optimized page. You haven't created any problems yet. You start. Perfect. And then you just layer problems on. So if you've got this set of rules that, you know, as you're building out your website, You will never need any of those technical SEO services. All you ever need really is to know how to write content and how to, How to do some decent keyword research so that you can drive traffic to your site. it's a lot more simple than people think it is.

Eric Dickmann:

Well, a lot of things that I see; commented on are on the technical SEO side. the speed of your website, how fast it loads and it's mobile friendliness. whether it works on mobile, do you put those things in that technical SEO bucket?

Jeff Baker:

I would, yeah, there's a few things in there that should be paid attention to you could not knowing anything about SEO. Go through this diagnostic checklist and that's one mobile, mobile speed. mobile friendliness. Yeah, definitely. those are important things. Can your content be index? That's an important thing. Do you have a ton of Redirecting pages like you accidentally moved your page and then you moved it again. And got Google hopping back and forth. They're all things that you just go through a checklist without knowing anything about SEO and see, Oh, okay. Accidentally see this thing. I should probably fix that. And then once you've checked that off the box, you're good. Like you're. Your site's clean and then you just focus on writing. Good content.

Eric Dickmann:

Talk a little bit about this idea of domain score. What is it and how do you get it?

Jeff Baker:

So generally this is referred to as domain authority and that's a metric used by Moz. Moz is like one of the most reputable SEO companies out there. They make tools and they write articles. People contribute articles to it, advanced SEO types of stuff. They have a metric called domain authority. And what this is meant to do is it's meant to be a relative score for your website and basically tells you how authoritative is your website. Versus another website in the eyes. So you'd have one website. That's a 45 domain authority. Now the one that's a 65. So that should tell you that. The 45 website is relatively less authoritative than the 65 website. if you want to audit and you want to see where you stand against your competitors. That would tell you, you are behind your competitor in terms of authority. And the leap that you can make from there is that if you were trying to rank for the same keyword against that website, You would struggle. You'll be punching a little bit of, but above your weight class, because there are more reputable website in the eyes of Google, and you're going to struggle to do that. Uh, An important thing to note is there's no good or bad domain authority. People always ask me that what's a good one. What's a bad one. It's a relative scale. There's only good. Compared to your competitors that you're going up against. There's only bad going up. Compared to the competitors that you're going up against. So if all your competitors are at 80 and you're in 60, when you've got a bad domain authority, but if you're a 69 competitors or a 30, and you've got a good domain authority.

Eric Dickmann:

So for many smaller businesses, their domain authority might be zero, right? They might not have any domain authority yet. So how do you build it? What are the factors that go into moving that number up?

Jeff Baker:

There's 40 different factors over 40 different factors. Built into the equation. The majority of it is links like, so on linq is any website that sends a hyperlink back to your website, which is in essence, it's a vote of confidence. it's a vote that says. This website is reputable. According to me. So the number of those links that point back to your website and the quality of those links are huge determinants to Google and says, all right, basically all of these websites. have voted their confidence. In this County and this website. So that sends a signal to Google that, okay. Maybe these guys are authorities in their space. And especially if you're getting. Quality links. If you're a, you got a website and you're getting links from Forbes and Wall Street Journal, those carries so much more weight than, Some. A tiny little blog with a tiny domain authority link to you a thousand times. That may carry the same weight. One link from a Forbes might be the same as a thousand mediocre links. So that's the major factor. the name of the game is not to increase your domain authority. Domain authority is just a metric to let you know where you are. Increase your domain authority. Does that mean you're gonna increase your keyword rankings or your traffic or anything like that? That just gives you a sense of domain authority gives you a sense of where you stand. And your potential to rank. So it's not a goal. It's not an end goal in of itself. It's just more of a measurement of how you're doing.

Eric Dickmann:

So again, keeping in mind sort of small or midsize businesses, maybe businesses that haven't built up, that kind of domain authority. One of the things that I have seen with various is SEO agencies is that they come in and they say, okay, we're going to get you to rank for a bunch of key words. And so they go out and they built some content that eventually gets ranked, but it's a bunch of key words or long tail phrases that have nothing really to do with the business. Their search volume is very low. But the agency can come back and say, Oh, look, you're number one for this, and this. We've got your number one. And 50 different keywords is that sort of a game or is that a real strategy to start building up that authority or to start building up those backlinks

Jeff Baker:

probably both. Really. SEO is still the wild West. Really? there's no oversight. There's no regulations. There's no real standard for what qualifies as good SEO. Now we talked before about this, the technical SEO side of things, where you find 95% of the work goes into. You could have an SEO agency that you hire and they go through this diagnostic checklist and they check off every one of those boxes. And technically they did SEO and your website. We'll probably not gain any others. Additional traffic, so technically that is SEO and they did their job. Same thing with this instance that you just talked about, where they get your website to rank for some keywords. Why not be helpful keywords, but they did their job. They got you to rank for keywords might not help you at all. This is very prevalent. It's an unregulated industry where you're just Again, It's worse than bring your car into the mechanic. At least the mechanics expect to get car running again. This may not get your car running again. so to your point, this does happen. And the reason why is because it's still. I see how it's been around 15, 20 years, but it's still in the grand scheme of things. It's an emerging industry. People don't know how to quantify it, but I don't know how to measure quality yet because most of the people that are hiring SEOs are just taking their word for it.

Eric Dickmann:

So when you rank for a bunch of unrelated keywords or keywords that have really no search volume. You're really not doing anything to help you on those key words that do matter.

Jeff Baker:

Not really? No. it looks good. I could show you the number of ways that you could. It's very easy to manipulate data and Google analytics is where you probably do a lot of your reporting to show. to show the gains that you've made, you can adjust timeframes a little bit and you turn that red number and do a green number. You can. Get keywords that are not important to rank. And you can just have that show up on your, your SCM rush or your SEO tool that shows that you made some gains, but you didn't make any. Financial gains for the customer and really that's what it comes down to you. When you're doing SEO. Your number one focus should always be, is this action tied to revenue in some. Way, shape or form. So really what a good SEO should do, and there's a lot of good SEO is out there and I've been a little bit rough in this conversation. It's a lot of good SEO. SEO is out there. Where they're going to try to do is focus on two main areas. One is the commercial side of your website. So you got a website that sells widgets, right? You've got a homepage and then you've got maybe five different widget pages, So they should do SEO work to find keywords. That people are searching where their intent is due by this particular widget. Let's use Brafton's website as an example. People are looking for content, right? I want to find a keyword that people are going to use, to find services where they're going to buy those services. Typically people that search content marketing services. Have their checkbook out and they're comparing vendors. It's a damn good keyword to rank for because as direct commercial direct tie to revenue. And we can measure this. Like we get a hundred visitors per month. search, content marketing services, one out of four of them. We'll fill out a form and then. One out of two of those will get allocated out. And then one out of five of those will turn into actual deals, right? So this, you can make this, it's not much of a jump. You can make a connection between this keyword. And driving money. You can do that with every single business, no matter how obscure it is that they make their money or that it's affiliate marketing, or whether it's just a blog, where they drive ad revenue. You can always make that jump to. Some money, as long as you figure out that very basic format. So good SEO will do that. They will always try to figure out how to get traffic to your site. That's going to spend money with you or create money for you. And then they should also focus on the other side of your site, which would be nurture. And that's like a blog, the whole reason why you create a blog. And so you can drive traffic to your site. For people that are looking for answers to questions that you can. That you can answer, or like somebody asks a question. What is content marketing? They're not in a buyer's mood. They just want to learn. However, if I answered that question, they come to my site. I will answer that question for them and hopefully put them on my newsletter with a popup or some sort of form, and then I can nurture them. Down the road. To a point when they might be in the buyer mood and they might be the person that searches. Not what is content marketing, but content marketing services. So in SEO should think of a website is two sides. One the commercial side that drives that. Buyer intent. And then the other side is the blog side, which drives that. What'd you call it informational intent. And then nurture. Really. So if you do those two things, you're a pretty good SEO and you're doing a good thing for your, for your client.

Eric Dickmann:

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO onsulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. Let's talk a little bit about that blog side. So let's say I've got a website. Put it together. My technical SEO looks good. I've got good product pages And now I'm going to write a blog and I sell blue widgets. So I'm going to write a blog on top 10 blue widgets, and I know I've done my keyword research. And blue widgets gets pretty good search volume. So I go and I create an article on top 10 blue widgets. And I'm a WordPress user. So I've got Yoast or I've got a Rank Math installed to be able to do an SEO analysis of my article. It's coming back as a green light in your cluster, a score and rank math. So everything's looking good. I hit publish. Have I done everything that I need to do for SEO for that article?

Jeff Baker:

those tools. Aren't going to do anything for you. So I'll just throw that out there. I did a study like a long term study with. nine months worth of data points from Brafton content to see if there's any relationship between content performance, keyword performance, and these different factors. One of them was the Yoast screen light thing. I was trying to prove if there's any relationship between those two things and specifically in there, like a big part of that green light is you enter your keyword and it shows you, did you use enough keyword density? Did you use a keyword enough? And so I measure performance relative to keyword density. There is no relationship between those two things. So using, doing that keyword density thing and that little green light. Is most likely not going to do anything for you at all. Same thing with the workout. I used a correlation. A correlation formula to see if there's any relationship between word, length and performance. There's not, there's almost perfectly zero relationship. Serial correlation. So what you need to do, in order to. Satisfy the SEO gods with your content is to do what you did. You picked a good keyword. You liked it. You found a good search volume. But then the trick is to. Write the content in such a way that you fully satisfy the intent of the searcher, right? So imagine if you search for something, a scenario where you search for something and you land on a page. The answer is every single one of your questions you could possibly have about that topic. You have no reason to go back into search results and weave together more information through other search results. You've done everything that you possibly need. That's the goal of writing the content. So when you land on that keyword that you want to rank for, it's your job to answer every potential topic somebody would ever want to know about that. Just imagine you're writing a Wikipedia page. And there's ways that you can do this. More quantitative rather than qualitative ways that you can do this. You don't have to do it by instinct. You can do it manually. And by he picked that keyword and then you just go through the search results and you see what people are writing about. Make note of all the major topics that they discuss, like topic is discussed by. 80% of first page results. Topic bees discussed by 20%. And then you've got this weighted priority list of all the potential topics you could possibly talk about. From all the results. So with this information, theoretically, you would have a exact blueprint on everything you could possibly talk about and exactly how you should wait it and out which areas you should emphasize. So really you're grabbing, you're stealing ideas from everybody, and you're going to write something more comprehensive than anybody out there. Which would do a better job for the reader. Google knows this. Google knows how well you cover a particular topic. So when you write on that topic, if you've got better content, the better satisfies the reader, you're in a rank way better. And we've done this in experiments. started doing this back in. 2018. And our page one keyword rankings have gone from, about 400 to 2,500 in two years. Something like that. Our traffic is, more than tripled over that time period, just by using this one particular technique. As a matter of fact, it happens almost instantaneously too. So if you take an old now, imagine you take an old piece of content that's, it doesn't really perform very well. Like you've got a keyword that ranks and position. Nine or 10 just gets a few clicks. We will do that will make the piece of content more comprehensive, republish it, and then see what the results look like. And so I did this a few times and I took where we ranked beforehand. I updated the content. And I resubmitted it to Google. And within 60 seconds, we went from position three to one. Another case we went from 32 to four from 10 to four within a snap of the fingers. you're immediately driving five X more traffic. And sustainably. So we know this technique works really well. And what I really like about it is it's much easier to comprehend than all this technical SEO stuff they were talking about are small business owners. Yeah, you tell them here's your keyword. This is how you write really good content, really easy to. To internalize that.

Eric Dickmann:

So when you said that you republished it, you republish it as a new page, or do you just republish the old page with the additional content? So you keep the same URL.

Jeff Baker:

Same page. Same page, same exact URL. Um, rewrite the content and then republish it with the current date. Is the key.

Eric Dickmann:

What I heard from you is in my earlier example, I said that I've seen, especially for keywords that I know I go after is I look at the top couple of rankings and maybe they're very short, little post, 500 word articles let's say those are the top three. If I would come out with a post, a 2000 word posts that would encompass the ideas of those top three and publish that as a page, an article. that is in sort of encapsulating what you're talking about. You're taking the best ideas from those shorter or other competitive pages. And you're saying now the reader could get all of that information in one.

Jeff Baker:

That's exactly right. And that's something that, especially if you're competing against somebody with, I'm glad you mentioned domain authority earlier, because if you're say your website's a domain authority of 30 and at one that's ranking, number one has a domain authority of 60. Then they're seeing are ready as more reputable than you. So you have to do extra work with your content just to keep up because you're punching. Punching up Hill, right? So you may be able to compete with them if you overcompensate with better content and you would actually have to overcompensate with better content because they're already, they already got a headstart. they got a five second head start the sprint. So you need to catch up.

Eric Dickmann:

How does this compare to a pillar page strategy? So maybe define for the audience what a pillar page is, and then what you think of that as a strategy in terms of your website design.

Jeff Baker:

So pillar page is a core concept. Alright. So say I want to rank for something broad, like inbound marketing, there's so much that goes into inbound marketing. you could take two different approaches to this. You could write an entire tome about inbound marketing on one particular page covering. All the different facets of it. SEO, email marketing, content writing. And the whole kit and caboodle on one page, or you can make that like a core hub page. Would you call a pillar page? And have this page cover all the main ideas, the concepts of inbound marketing, but it links out to other individual pages that support it. So this is the pillar. And then the support for the pillar would be an entire article about email marketing and the entire article about SEO, an entire article about keyword research. So it links to all of these resources that support the main concept of inbound marketing. So you've done is you created this pillar of. strength that are supported by a whole bunch of other very strong. Topics in their own little niche, right? So you've nailed every one of those niches talking about everything you could possibly talk about and, covering all the main subtopics of that niche. And all of those are linking into a main page. that started me inbound marketing. So this is. A pillar page is basically just a, an awesome resource center that supports a broad topic and it gives you. A good chance of ranking for that keyword. Probably a better chance of ranking for that keyword because it shows a very strong topic authority.

Eric Dickmann:

It's a lot of work to put one together, but if you do it right, it can really benefit the business.

Jeff Baker:

Yeah, if you wanna, if you want to rent from a very broad core term to your business, that's a very good way to do it. Definitely.

Eric Dickmann:

One of the things that I think is challenging as a business designs, their web presence is it seems like they're conflicting. priorities. Number one, you want to have a presence that explains what you do in a way that supports key words so that it can be found. You don't want to jumble too much together. So you design your website to break up topics. But you've got to have enough texts there so that Google understands what it is that you're trying to talk about at the same time. There's a lot of focus now on video, on pictures, on reducing the amount of text, because people don't like to read a lot on a web page. And then you've also got this issue of mobile friendliness, where now things even have to be condensed further. You don't want to have a lot of heavy graphics. You don't want to have too much text cause people aren't going to read that on mobile. And so all of these things together seem to, in some ways, conflict in terms of how you build out your website for SEO,

Jeff Baker:

Yeah. Yeah. if you do that strategy, I just prescribed and writing content to cover fully cover a topic. An early, that content is going to be longer. It's just going to be longer content. and the. Main struggle people have is how do you accommodate that on a page in such a way that it's not terrible to look at? like you mentioned. Do people want to read? giant walls of text? No, of course they don't. so your content writing and your web development have to be seamless really? What we do is if we're going to write a landing page, it's going to be 2000 words. We have to write the content first and then hand that over to somebody that works in development and graphic design. Does design that out in a way that flows well, so that it's not overwhelming. So you have to figure out ways to. Chunk the text we read in chunks. We don't read in massive walls of texts. We read in small paragraphs. It's just the way our brain works. So you have to figure out a way to break this thing up into small paragraphs. generally supported by some sort of visual to break up the eye gives it the visual, gives your eyes a break and your brain a break. And then when you're done with the visual, it keeps you reading into the next section. So generally that's what we try to do. And that's the whole point. Really of like graphics, like you talked about in video, it just gives you your brain, a different type of media to consume in between. Reading, all the texts. And so you get a break, you get like textbook, you get work, get a break, you get a textbook, you get work. and if you have that seamless flow, you can keep somebody engaged throughout the page. So it's not an easy task. you write all this content and how do you get it on the site? you really have to think. Creatively about how would I want to read all of this content? there was a problem. A lot of times people are, we're very self centered as businesses and business owners. We think people care about our content. They absolutely do not. You have to, they don't care about you. and they're not going to be as interested in it as you are. So you have to figure out ways that if you were them, how would you want to consume this content? How could you make it interesting in such a way that other people would want to get through the entirety of it? And a lot of times that involves, Natural human behavior. We'd like to look at pictures. We'd like to look at video and break it up in such a way that makes it very interesting. And this is a very indirect. tied to rankings as well. if you keep a visitor on a page, For a long time before they go back to search results. That's an indicator that sends Google a signal that people stayed on there for a long period of time. For a good reason. Whereas on the flip side, if you've got this page with a giant wall of text, see people, or you assume people are gonna read, they're absolutely not. They're going to see that wall texts. They're gonna panic thing, our freeze over, and then they go right back to search results and find something. Something easier to consume. That's also a signal to Google that's probably not a good result for them. I'm glad you mentioned that because that is, that has to work with this program. You can't just write tons of content and dump it in novel format and hope people are going to read it. That's just not gonna work.

Eric Dickmann:

Yeah, that's so true. I know we're third of coming up on our time here, but before we wrap this up, I would love just to hear from your perspective, if you were a newer business or a business that really hasn't put much of a focus on SEO with an existing website. What are some pieces of actionable advice that you could give somebody to say, okay, we're starting a program today around SEO. What are some actionable things that we could do here within the next? Let's say couple of months. To start to build a process of getting us to rank on Google.

Jeff Baker:

Yeah. Okay. So I always start, we talked to earlier about getting your commercial landing pages down. I always start with that with a brand new website. You're gonna want to figure out what are my products and or services. And then through keyword research, you're going to want to figure out what people are searching to get those products or services. A lot of times it's not going to be the same language that you use. You're so in the weeds with your business, you're going to use different terminology probably, then your audiences. So you're going to find out you're going to want to meet your audience where they are, and you're gonna want to figure out what they're searching to find your products. And you want them to be, want to find keywords that people are using where they're definitely going to buy something and what you'd call commercial intent. Like we talked about before. So I would start with keyword research. I would find out what those words are and then once you are selling on what those words are right out, a couple product landing pages. Using the techniques we talked about before. Two really cover the depths of those services and everything somebody would want to know about those services that you provide. So nailed down that part, cause it has the most commercially relevant, impact on your site. So keyword research, content writing, build out those pages and that's very manageable for us. A small business owner just getting started because you're looking at, you probably don't have that many products yet are likely looking at maybe between could just be one, could just be your homepage a lot of times, and that's fine. Or maybe it's a homepage and two solutions pages could just be three pages. So taking that first bite is going to have the most commercially relevant impact. and it's also worth noting that. As part of that study that I did, I wanted to know. I wanted to see how long it'll take for this stuff to work. Generally, when you create a new piece of content, it takes a hundred to 150 days for it to show us potential. So the second you get that thing up there, you get those four product pages up there. You can start. Start your timer and you can say, all right. In a hundred to 150 days, maybe I can start to see results. So it's up to you. And when you start that timer, but obviously you're going to want to start that as soon as possible.

Eric Dickmann:

And by results. Do you mean an initial ranking or, top page ranking?

Jeff Baker:

Starting to rank and then around 150 to 180 days, like that's the one, you'll see a piece of content generally, max out. That's probably where you're gonna see your true ranking potentials like around half a year or so. So if you see in about half a year, you're in position nine. It's probably where you're going to be. And maybe you need to do some work to get that page up there. You may be needed to do better content writing. Or you need to assess the competition a little bit better. Maybe you are punching too high above your weight class and you can't compete. You need to find a different keyword. so first starters, some keyword research on your products and services. I published a piece of content on how to do keyword research just came out about three or four weeks ago. it's pretty comprehensive anybody that's doing keyword research for the first time. Can probably follow it pretty easy. It'll. Show you how to do it. And there's a couple of templates in there. On where to put your content or where to put your data for your keywords and how to choose the right types of keywords should be fairly easy to follow. And then write the content and get alive. That's the main thing is just focus on just a couple pages really nail that down and get them up and live and then the second part of that is start to build out a blog, right? Using the same techniques with keyword research, build out your blog. And start collecting emails. The entire purpose of a blog is really to collect emails. Which is like a weird thing that nobody even thinks about. It's yeah, somebody, why do they have a blog? And they'd be like, because you need to have a blog or because I want to drive traffic. One of the things really do anything for you though. Do you have spent a lot of time writing a blog? What good is traffic? That's just not going to buy anything right. None of that's traffic that comes in at your blog ever buys anytime they bounced at a high rate. So that second part would be start a blog and understand why I blog exists. Blog exists to nurture people. So you're probably gonna want to incorporate that with some sort of. Very basic email program, right? collect an email address. You use a popup, your conversions will go up 500% as opposed to not using a popup. He's a popup. And just start emailing once a week. Newsletter could be as simple as here's the most recent article that I wrote this week. Send it out to your audience and keep them nurtured. The whole reason why you create a blog. So for the tear, these things to your one, get your products and service pages mailed down. Write really good content. Get it live as soon as possible, or to get a blog going and start nurturing people through a newsletter, to the point where they're actually ready to. Hopefully buy something from you at some point in the future. Then all the other stuff has nuance, the technical SEO, all the other stuff. That's just nuance. Unless you break something, you'd probably be okay on your own

Eric Dickmann:

And the blog content should be tangentially related to your primary business.

Jeff Baker:

Yeah, it should be questions that people are asking related to your business. We're in content marketing, people will be asking, how do I do a newsletter? How do I write content? That's going to rank, that's all like dead central to the, to our authority, what we do. So we're going to write that content and we're going to answer those questions. Most people aren't buying. Like I said, anybody searching that they're not buying anytime. but they might subscribe to our newsletter. So topics that are related to what you do and finding out questions, the people that your potential audience are asking, you can get that through keyword research. You can also get that just by asking to people, asking people, ask your friend, alright. If you're searching for a blah, blah, blah, what kind of things would you ask? because it's really about your audience. It's not about you. And you'll get really good ideas about blogs that you could potentially write. That'll satisfy your searchers.

Eric Dickmann:

Jeff. This is fascinating stuff. We could talk for hours on it. I think those tips that you gave, especially at the end, there are really helpful for businesses that are just starting to put some focus on SEO and want to know what to do next. How can people find you in the article that you mentioned on doing keyword research?

Jeff Baker:

Sure you can find I've got a profile on a Moz, moz.com. They have a blog where SEO is an industry in the industry contribute original research and one of those pieces I did was analyzing seven ranking factors. I can send you the link to it afterwards. Helpful to give you a level set on what actually matters in SEO, that particular article. So I've got six articles published there. You can also find me on Brafton. Brafton.com. I'm the CMO there, and we do content marketing services and we also run a podcast called Above the Fold. It's unstructured, chaos, where we just talk about all things marketing related, sometimes not marketing related. But we have a lot of fun on there. So you can find me on

Eric Dickmann:

That's great. And I'll make sure to have all of that in the show notes so that people can find it. Jeff, I really appreciate your time today. This has been very helpful. It's great interview. I think a lot of great content for the audience. So thanks for taking a few minutes out to talk today.

Jeff Baker:

Hey, Eric. Thanks so much for having me. It's been fun.

Eric Dickmann:

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.