So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.
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In this week’s episode of So What? we’ll cover a variety of SEO questions from you! Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Are core web vitals over-rated?
- Do you need to follow a keyword strategy?
- Where does intent fit in?
Upcoming Episodes:
- Last minute sales tips 12/2/2021
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:25
Well, hey everyone, Happy Thursday. Welcome to so at the marketing analytics and insights live show. You know, for the past few weeks, past few episodes, we’ve been talking a lot about SEO and content and planning and keywords. And we know for ourselves that when we create content around SEO specifically, it tends to do well. But we also know that there’s a lot of questions that people still have around the mechanics of SEO, but then also more specific scenarios. And so we thought we’d do something a little bit different this week. And we’re doing an Ask me anything. And so with this, ask me anything, it’s focused on SEO, we’ve collected a fair number of questions from our Slack group, if you’re interested in participating or asking a question there, you can join us at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, or if you have questions about SEO, you can drop them into the comments. So Chris, we’ve collected a fair number of questions around SEO. So where do you want to start?
Christopher Penn 1:24
Let’s start. Oh, yeah, cuz we got a ton here. Um, let’s start with Hannah’s question, which is, at what point, if any, can content creators say, Screw efia SEO and simply create quality content, they know their audience loves SEO appeals so prescriptive, so cold, it’s as if content creators outsource ideation and creativity to whatever the keyword research tells them. I know, keyword research is only one aspect of SEO, we can use search tracks to optimize assets and track records of that assets. But I am bearish on using SEO as a starting point for content creation. So I was the long question. What’s your guys take on it so far?
Katie Robbert 2:02
Well, it sounds like the short question is, do I have to follow an SEO plan if I already know what my audience wants? And so I guess to that, I would say, well, you’re already sort of ahead of the game, because part of SEO is understanding what your audience wants, what kinds of things resonate with them, what kinds of content attracts people to your website, if you already know what that is, then really what you’re doing is just making sure you’re creating those things. And so I would say, yes, you should do some keyword research. But if you already know the kind of content that your audience responds to, and that they’re craving, it sounds like you have other mechanisms for getting that information. So I’d say go ahead and keep creating that content. John, what do you think?
John Wall 2:49
Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it. Because like, for example, when we were talking with H refs about what kind of marketing they do, it’s so funny that Tim Soulo is like, why do we need all these analytics? And what are these things? And we said, Well, Tim, it’s because you are your customer, like you’re selling this project, to your product to CMOS, and you are a CMO. So you know exactly what they look for every day. But the majority of businesses are not that at all. It’s, you know, the marketing team thinks they might know what prospects want, but in reality, they’ve never actually bought what they’re selling. And those are the situations where you need SEO to figure out, you know, what are the most common things people search for when they’re trying to answer these questions, and they’re in the buying cycle? Because everybody makes the mistake of asking the CEO and the VP of marketing, you know, what the topic should be? And they take that as gospel when they’ve never actually verified that or tested any of that.
Christopher Penn 3:43
Yeah, when you read Google’s search quality weight rating guidelines, the 172 page document they publish on it, there’s two big dimensions, right? You can boil the whole thing down to two big Well, three, three dimensions, but really to search quality needs met, search quality is is your content, high enough qualities? It does demonstrate expertise, is it authoritative? Is it trustworthy? Is a sufficient amount of main content is that main content, high quality? That’s one dimension. The second dimension is needs met does fulfill the searchers intent. And if you know, the intent of your audience, at the various stages of the your customer journey, then yeah, you don’t need to spend a whole lot of time on, you know, ideation from keywords because you really should be ID ating on intent. If though you don’t know the intent of the audience, then that is where keyword research can really helps. Because there’s six layers of of search intent, right? They are recurrent search intent, which is people looking for your thing again, right. There is branded search, which is people looking for you by name. There’s competitive search, which is people looking for your competitors by name. There’s unbranded, right, which is people looking for the solution that your your cohort solves. There’s adjacent which are the search terms that people search for, for the problem that they have, and they don’t know the solution. And then there’s created intent, which is where you’re trying to create something net new, like IBM just created this term called Data Fabric, which I think sounds like something you buy at Joanne’s Fabrics and make, you know, cute little dresses out of but apparently, there’s a whole enterprise thing with that. So if you don’t know the intent of your audience and the language that they use at each of these stages, then yes, this is where topic research really comes in handy. And I would say, try not to be slaves to the keywords themselves. Try to focus on the intent and all the topics in that intent. So like, if you’re looking for, say, analytics consulting, right? You don’t just want to focus on analytics, right? You also want to focus on the problems, you want to focus on change management, all these things that go with that, because that’s going to cover multiple stages of the customer journey.
Katie Robbert 6:09
Yeah, I think, you know, if you already have some kind of a feedback loop set up with your customers, then you’re doing essentially the same thing that SEO keyword research does, which is understand what things people want to hear about. And so you know, I think we’ve all sort of answered the question and similar ways of SEO, keyword research is not the be all end all of how or what kind of content you should be creating. If you have other mechanisms to get that information, then that is completely acceptable, because Because SWOT you’re answering that question of intent.
Christopher Penn 6:45
Exactly. Okay. Let’s move on to our next question. Our next question comes from Edwin asking, while written content focused on your target search intent will always help your rankings. How should we prepare on page factors like multimedia technical factors, like structured data, considering Google’s mum, which is the multitasking Unified Model intentions, that search models coming out next year, and it promises to change SEO? So what do you think a?
Unknown Speaker 7:18
I’m back to you, Chris.
John Wall 7:22
Well, I have to jump on the first one, no, just writing content, not gonna guarantee any good SEO action read it, you can write garbage so that you know that is a an assumption right there out of the gate. You know, technical analysis, everything is out there, you can go dig into it to find out. I mean, that should just be table stakes, you should be getting the technical analysis straight. When you get your content delivery platform built, you know, that should be taking care of itself to when you post videos or images or audio, you shouldn’t be shooting yourself in the foot every time that goes out. But, you know, that’s just my take on how you want to structure that.
Christopher Penn 7:59
So in a Google’s own podcast search off the record, which is clearly by fact they publish it not off the record. In the most recent episode, Episode 29, they were talking about the importance of things like structured data, because at one point, while the the technical folks that are machine learning models are good enough now to infer structure data do we do we still need it? And Gary Ilyas, who’s one of the tech leads in the SEO group was saying, Yeah, you still need it not because we need to know you know what it is, but it’s a way to sort of fact check and or override the machines inferences if the machine scans a page and infers that it’s about, say, strollers, right, and the page is actually about wagons. Your structured data that you provide will override the inference to say, Okay, you’re telling me explicitly this is actually wagons, and yes, our wagons look like strollers, but it is really about strollers. So from from that perspective, structured data is still very, very important. And from what they said in the podcast, it was it will continue to be important for some time until they feel like the machine learning models are, are good enough to not make as many mistakes as they do right now. The multimedia one, and this is really important. You’ve got to provide the metadata with your multimedia. So every time for example, Trust Insights, uploads a YouTube video, we take the audio from our show, and get it transcribed by Otter.ai. If you go to trust insights.ai/otter, you can see what that’s all about. And that produces the closed captions. And we load that because we’ve trained the model that we use with otter on our specific way of speaking even how to spell Katie’s last name properly. And that overrides YouTube’s built in auto captions and also says to Google hey, here’s what this is about. And we publish with our video, the tags, the description, the title, all these things. these things that are attributes that Google can then return in search when someone searches for Trust Insights. You know, our YouTube videos may show up. In podcasts. If you’re using the mp3 format, you have ID three tags. And any good podcasting goes like Libsyn, for example, we’ve been using Libsyn. For jonway. We
John Wall 10:20
start, yeah, 2005. So it’ll be coming up in 12 years, No, sit down and do the math out of
Christopher Penn 10:34
one of the things you can do is you can edit the ID three tags that the metadata is burned into the file itself, it says this is what this audio file is about. It has your show image, it has the length, it has the ratings, and that’s all in the file. So again, multitask unified model is looking at how do things in different formats relate to each other. So if I type in best socks to wear for hiking, Mount Fuji, it’s going to look at images about food, just going to look at product reviews, it’s going to look at podcast, audio, and all these things bring together search results that say this is what we think is you’re really searching for. So if if we’re doing a good enough job, with this data, providing this metadata with our all of our multimedia, we’ll do better. Where I think people are going to run into trouble is if you have a lot of services out there that promise like super easy podcasting, which is fine. But you can’t tune the metadata. So it may not be as good in search, because you don’t have that granular level of control over as you do with a service like Libsyn, where you can just type stuff in and say, Hey, burn this into my audio file, please.
Katie Robbert 11:41
So lots of work to be done there for people got it.
Christopher Penn 11:45
Lots of work to be done. We’ve got a one came in live here. So from Brian, how long until RankBrain makes keyword targeting no longer useful or effective? And don’t want to take us
John Wall 12:00
do I’d wager that it’s already too late from what I’ve read, but what do you Where are you at?
Christopher Penn 12:07
So a couple things. RankBrain is only a part of Google’s model. And it is this part that is specifically on how to deal with sparse query. So where is where almost nobody searches for it. So for example, a search would be like, what color shirt is John were all wearing today. Right? That’s a query that probably not many people’s right.
John Wall 12:29
Everybody wants to know.
Christopher Penn 12:33
So RankBrain will attempt to infer based on the language being used, here are some the related things that we think could possibly help to answer this query we’ve never seen before. It is not part of the core stuff. Where John, you’re absolutely right, is that the BERT model, which came out in 2019. Keyword targeting is not useless, but it is elevated. So remember, five or six episodes ago, we were talking about natural language processing, we talked about the token, the word, the phrase, the sentence, the paragraph, the document, so is hierarchy. The key word at the word level, or the token level, really is devalued, right? Even at the phrase level, it’s now at sort of the topic level. So Google saying, if you type in espresso, it will return results in your local area that are coffee shops, even a cop the coffee shop does not have the word espresso necessarily, like on their homepage, because it knows from a semantics perspective, when you’re talking about espresso, espresso is a kind of coffee is a kind of coffee shop. So what we have to do is, and this goes back to what Hannah was asking intent, what is the intent of a query? As we put together our keywords and phrases, what is the intent of it? And then if you’re, if you know your customers, well, what are the two following intents after that? So somebody sits in a coffee shop near me, what’s the next thing? They’re gonna ask? Is it open? Right? What’s the next thing to ask? How do I get there? And Google will try and answer these and find the content that will best satisfy these queries.
Katie Robbert 14:14
So it sounds like it’s not that keyword targeting won’t be effective or useful. But keyword targeting on its own, with no other, you know, piece of the puzzle basically, is what will make it no longer effective. And so it needs to be layered within all of those other pieces.
Christopher Penn 14:34
That’s exactly right. Exactly. Right. All right. So Brian, thank you for the question. Whoops. Let’s go to next JC asking, Do you have some examples of some core content models? And we do I think probably the one that we’ve talked about the most, or like, I don’t know, five years is the what we call the transmedia content framework and it’s a Fancy fancy way of just saying, make stuff in the richest format, you can, and then use it to spool out. So Katie, you actually want to talk through folks what this this model really talks about?
Katie Robbert 15:15
Yeah, so it’s basically sort of the definition of work smarter, not harder. And so what we talk about with the transmedia framework is that you can create one piece of content and use it multiple ways. And so it helps you scale the amount of content you’re able to create. So today, right now, we are creating a video that also has audio associated with it. So our video is one piece of content, then when we pull out the audio, that’s another type of content that can be a podcast, we also will have the AI transcription, that’s another kind of content. That’s not a blog post. And so we can put all of those things together into one, you know, big piece of content, or we can continue to pull them apart into smaller and smaller pieces. And so we can take a snippet, and post that on Twitter and like, Hey, did you catch our episode today, it was about this. And so quoting it directly, or we can take little 32nd videos and post those across, you know, Instagram, or Tiktok, or wherever people are watching us. We can then repurpose this episode, and repost it in the newsletter as, hey, here’s some answers to common questions about SEO. So there’s a lot of different ways that we can use this one piece of content that we’re creating right now, just by sitting down and talking to each other about here the questions people have about SEO. So that’s really, the beauty of a transmedia framework is you create something once in a super rich format, as Chris mentioned, and then you start to pull it apart into smaller pieces.
Christopher Penn 16:53
And one of the keys with this framework to is pay attention to the metrics for each of the fragments of content you make, because you may find that something resonate better with others, right. So a 32nd video you put up on Instagram may not do anything, but you put it up on LinkedIn, and it might take off and then you go ah, even though it’s the same thing, we’re testing in different places, and we can see what our audience reacts to, you put it up on Tik Tok, and you know, 18, people will message you and you’re like, I don’t even know how to reply.
Unknown Speaker 17:22
That would be me.
Christopher Penn 17:26
But you can tell where your audience is when you atomize your content like this. And this is a concept, this is not a new concept. Our friend and former coworker, Todd Jackson came up with this concept 2008 It is just we’ve decided to make it video first, because that’s where you get the most data from, and then spin it to a whole bunch of different ways.
Katie Robbert 17:48
Yeah, I mean, the other thing is, you know, so we’ve been one of the strategies we’ve been doing in the background is taking all of our different videos, whether there’ll be you know, webinars or talks or live streams or podcasts, and we’ve started to bundle them together into playlists on our YouTube channel. That playlist then becomes our, basically our training library for other people to figure out well, what do they know about this topic? Or what can they teach me about these things, but also then becomes, you know, somewhat of a sales tool for John. So when someone says, Well, we want to hire Trust Insights for SEO? What do they know about it? He can point to 15 different videos where we’ve been talking about the mechanics and the, you know, theories and philosophies and tactics about SEO. And so we’ve created a sales tool without creating a sales tool.
Christopher Penn 18:41
Alright, next up, Chris asks, not me another Chris. Our core web vitals overhyped?
Katie Robbert 18:51
No, absolutely not. And so what so I’m not the expert on core web vitals, but I do pay attention to our monthly reports. And so we talked about core vitals, you know, on the podcast on the live stream. And my interpretation of core web vitals is this is Google’s way of telling you, your technical SEO pieces, the performance of your website. So are your images, taking too long to load, therefore, you’re getting dinged on how quickly you show up, or the ranking in which you show up for a search result. And so it’s the technical side of your SEO of your website. So basically, it’s Google’s way of saying, Hey, your website’s really good. Or your website needs a lot of work. And if it needs a lot of work, we’re just not going to show you in the search results because it’s not worth your time or the users time.
Christopher Penn 19:42
Exactly. Be what we don’t know and Google’s and it will never tell us he is how much weight in the search algorithms and models core vitals play. But we do know they’re in there. They have publicly stated they’re in there. And we know that they’re, they’re part of an old Overall larger initiative, right? So, core web vitals are a subset of mobile friendliness and mobile usability and mobile usability is a subset of page experience. If you look in Search Console, that’s how it’s laid out. And we know that page experience is a ranking factor. Google takes this into account. So if you get core web vitals correct, you reduce the any, any penalties or any drag that they have on your search results, kind of like, you know, running with a five pound weight strapped to your leg, it’s slowing you down. It’s it’s not doing good things. Or if you get it right, you can you can outrun maybe somebody who’s bigger, but not as fast.
Katie Robbert 20:45
Things I will not be trying.
Christopher Penn 20:51
Okay, let’s go. Next we have Betsy asks, In a world where we all wear a lot of hats, how often do you suggest looking at your SEO page performance and optimizing?
John Wall 21:10
First, I just have to laugh. It’s like in a world in a world where we wear many hats. In that world, you’ve got to have, again, it’s just back to the table stakes of is that I don’t even think optimizing text on the page is that big a deal anymore, because you just it needs to be quality content that goes back to Hannah’s thing, just right good stuff, you don’t have to worry as much about arranging it as long as you get the right voice. But then you’ve got to have the, you know, search console stuff, it’s like the pages have to load you can’t have so much JavaScript that it chokes to five seconds, you know, all that kind of stuff has got to be there. Because the worst thing that happens to is you’re just not getting crawled because something’s broken. I mean, then you’re basically dead in the water.
Christopher Penn 21:55
Exactly. There’s three layers to Google, right? There’s crawl index and rank. Crawling happens on pretty much Google’s own schedule. But roughly they crawl sites, anywhere between 48 hours and a week. And at a minimum, I would say if he was I would say, if you have a good multi touch attribution model, you should be looking at it on a regular frequent basis, like monthly, right. And in that attribution model, if organic searches in your top three, you know, source mediums or channels that drive conversions for you, then you should be starting to look at your your search traffic and data in Search Console, probably weekly, to see like, Did something go wrong this week, we have had cases with clients where they lost a substantial traffic, and didn’t even know until we did the next month’s report, like by the way you lost half your traffic. They’re like, what did somebody tell us like? Well, that’s why we keep telling you to check, check those search console stats and sign up for the free alerts as
Katie Robbert 23:08
well. And I think that that’s the thing, you don’t necessarily have to be, you know, every day trying to go in and optimize. But at the very, at the minimum sign up for those alerts to see if anything is breaking. And then you can go in and optimize. And so I would say you know, once a month, once a quarter, you know, going through all of your content re optimizing it prioritizing like your most valuable pages, the pages that are most visited the pages where people convert the most, making sure those are fixed up, not broken content, refresh those things. But yeah, I don’t think that it’s necessary to be in there every single day, just getting the alerts of like, things are good things or bad is probably enough.
Christopher Penn 23:49
Exactly. I would but I would say the more important searches, the more and more attention you’ve got to give it its is there’s no way around that. Hector asks, as this came in live, are you using similar approaches to optimize for voice and type searches? Optimizing the least of all searches through voice? How do you guys do it?
Katie Robbert 24:13
You know, it’s, it’s interesting, because we we know that the way people interact with a smart machine or whatever they’re called a Google Assistant, an AI system. I know, I have terrible terminology. But basically, you search in a different way. And so if I’m talking to my phone, I might say, hey, Google, where can I find the nearest coffee shop? Whereas if you’re on a Google search bar, you might say nearest coffee shop? And so you’re taking out that where is or how do why. And I think if you’re covering optimizing for the question, the how do i Where is, you know, what is then I think you’re kind of covering both things, but you know, Crystal What do you guys think?
John Wall 25:03
Well, I have two people that just say people jumping in on this, you have your use case first. Like, if you’re getting minimal traffic from the website, and you know, a few leads a month, don’t presume that suddenly hundreds of people are going to be asking their smart speakers for all kinds, you know, all kinds of questions about you, because that’s not the case. And yeah, you know, I have she who must not be named on my desk right here. And, you know, I can tell you throughout the whole family, the use cases are all like, what’s the weather and play this song for me? You know, so I think people are getting wrapped up in that. But a short answer, though, and I’d be interested in what you think about this one, Chris, is that it’s just only one result comes up. So if you’re doing good SEO and are number one on the search page, then maybe you have a shot at voice, but otherwise, get back to work on the search results.
Christopher Penn 25:52
Yeah, exactly. You’re number one or nothing. With the the voice searches. Again, this goes back to what we’re talking about with natural language processing, you have a core token or Core term that you’re focused on. And then to Katie’s point, you have all the stuff that goes with it. So one of the things that you should be looking at is in your search data. You know, I’ll pull up H refs here as an example, almost every SEO tool has the ability to spit out questions, right? So I put in coffee shop, and it spits out, you know, there are 6000 different questions that people ask. There’s another one that we love to talk about here. Let’s go to answer the public. And we’ll put the exact same thing able to put in coffee shop. Let’s go you don’t want UK because we’re not there.
Katie Robbert 26:41
But I would imagine you would get similar results.
Christopher Penn 26:45
That’s, that’s true. And it’s going to generate a similar set of questions. And in a fun visualization. This is sort of the the way that you, you approach a nested search strategy, that’s a lovely ad. So where is coffee shop, which coffee shop, and so on and so forth. A nested search strategy means a page has a concept or a core token. And then they’re they’re augments you put on prefixes, suffixes, additional words, clarifications, location indicators, things like that. This is how Google’s NLP works. And so on your page, you might have, you might say, this page, we want to target turn coffee shop near me, and then you have literally on the page, you know, where’s the coffee shop nearest to Boston, Massachusetts? Or what are the hours of, you know, this coffee shop in Boston, Massachusetts, and you figure out the voice specific questions that someone is going to ask in a very natural and speaking way. But it’s in those in those questions are embedded the core search terms, so you still checking the box? And those that’s one of the things we say about highly competitive search terms, you may be competing with, you know, Starbucks, if you have a little indie coffee shop, but in local search, and in voice search and things, you may have opportunities, if you structure your content really well.
Katie Robbert 28:03
Well, and I think that that goes back to a couple of the other questions that we were talking about in terms of the intent and the quality of the content, if your content is answering those what, why how were questions, then this becomes less of a concern for you, because your content is already doing that. It’s so Google’s going to pick up on that intent. So as you’re writing your blog post about natural language processing, what is natural language processing? How do I approach natural language processing? How do I use it? Where do I get started? You should be answering all of those questions so that when Google’s trying to find the responses, they’re like, Oh, well, John answered those questions in his content. I’m going to serve his up because it’s right here. He organized it really well.
Christopher Penn 28:50
Exactly. All right. Next up data asks, How do you set up your on page SEO for optimal search for the content you’re creating? If you don’t know how to code?
Katie Robbert 29:03
You need to be able to code to do this. I mean, that’s I mean, I don’t know the answer to that question.
Christopher Penn 29:09
That’s a very good question. And in again, in the most recent episode of search off the record, the Google folks said, yeah, you need to know HTML. Yeah, you need to know at least some HTML to tune up. Because there’s a lot of things like a CMS, like WordPress will do automatically out of the box for you. And there are great plugins like Yoast, or rankmath, that can help optimize and build those things without you having to manually stuffing the page. But there’s some stuff you have to do by hand, like sub headings on a page, you should know how to do that. And more important, which is what they were saying on their podcast. You’ve got to be able to open up the source view source in your web browser, look at your page and go can you understand the HTML on your page or even better go into search console and look at how Google sees your page and say, Okay, can I tune up what Google sees? So that what Google sees what I want it to see. And for that you do have to, you have to at least be able to read HTML, you might have to type it by hand manually, you know, but you’ve got to be able to examine it.
Katie Robbert 30:17
So this, this is probably gonna sound terrible. And I’m sure I’ll probably get some hate for this. I don’t associate HTML with code. And so I know, I mean, I know technically it is writing code. But I guess to me, it’s one of those second nature things of like you, to your point, you need to understand it, you know, it is my brain doesn’t even associate it. When you say coding, I’m thinking more of like, you know, Python and R and those kinds of things. And I’m like, it’s HTML go? Of course, you know, it.
John Wall 30:47
If it’s not compiled, it’s just markup. Well, and
Katie Robbert 30:50
I think that that’s it. So that’s why I was like, what do you really don’t need to know. But yeah, HTML? Absolutely. But, you know, there are a lot of really good, like writing assistants out there that you don’t have to know. So you don’t have to like, pull it up from scratch and be like, Okay, is it bracket full be this embed whatever, there’s a lot of really good free resources out there that will help you, you can say, this is what I want to do. And I’ll say, this is how you write that in HTML.
Christopher Penn 31:20
The other two things that Google engineers said you need to be able to do is CSS, and JavaScript, particularly JavaScript, you need to know because you need to know what’s running on your page, and how to diagnose what happens when scripts lock up and basically prevent your page from loading. Which kind of sucks. Alicia, real quick example. This is Google Search Console, which we’ve shown many times on the show. And you can see, I put up just the Trust Insights web homepage. There’s a button here called View crawled page. And this shows you what Google itself sees in and your code and your content. This is the HTML that they’re talking about, you need to be able to understand, if you compare this to your pages, actual source code, you will notice there are substantial differences. And the reason for this is that remember, we talked about the three stages of Google crawl index rank, part of crawl is to download the HTML, and Google cleans it up for you because they’re like, people are morons, when it comes to writing HTML, my first time ever. So it makes its best guess as to what it sees on the page and renders it for its indexing. If you see stuff in the crawl version that is not in your production, or you see something in here that is, then it’s not, it’s been removed from your page, you need to go back to your website and go, Why did Google remove that? Like, why did Google cut those things out? And then ask yourself, do we need them? Are they important? Because if Google says this, I’m gonna bother indexing events bloat on your site? Because Google’s not gonna see it, it’s not going to impact your SEO unless it does things that are you are very user interface specific. But this is fast, because Google also reorders things, it changes the order of your text, it will it prioritizes things like headings and subheadings. It says, This is how I understand your page from a language section. If you say, you know, what is change management, how does change management work, and these are, you know, h2 subheadings. Google says, I understand that these are more important blocks of text in the paragraph, you wrote about change management. And so when somebody’s searching through this page semantically, I should probably match it more towards somebody searching for what is change management, that somebody’s talking about the process of change management itself. The LLP is very good. But this stuff, the structure data helps a lot. So for to Donna’s question. Yeah, you need to build these to some of this.
Katie Robbert 33:49
So it sounds like what you’re saying is moving, you know, next few months, not two years, it’s not enough to just know how to write content, you need to either be paired with someone who can do the technical piece, or you need to learn how to do that for yourself.
Christopher Penn 34:06
Or hire an agency to help you.
Unknown Speaker 34:09
If only we knew one.
John Wall 34:13
Yeah, it doesn’t only have to be built once, right? I mean, you’re not going to have some kind of system where somebody has to go in and be cherry picking each one through six and every single post like you get that built in you get it done.
Christopher Penn 34:26
Exactly. Last question here, cuz we’re running up on time is from Matt and Matt asks, How much or can you tell in SEO, how much or how little a specific page contributes to conversion goals from SEO?
Katie Robbert 34:44
Yes, you can.
John Wall 34:47
Impossible.
Christopher Penn 34:49
Tell us more. Okay.
Katie Robbert 34:51
Well, you know, I don’t personally know of any good out of the box tool that you could do this with. But basically what you’re talking about is attribution law. you want to know, on your own website, which pages are contributing the most towards conversions. And we Trust Insights just happened to have a report that does this using a Markov chain model, which is a kind of attribution model, attribution model being basically what gets the credit for doing the work. And so similar to an attribution model that would show you which marketing channels are doing the work, and in which order in which order, we’ve applied the same methodology to the pages on a website, to say which pages on our website are helping to assist drive the most conversions, it’s not a true assisted conversion. But these all played a part. So they may have been, they may have played a big part a small part, or there may have been multiple pages that led to it. But these were the pages that contributed the most. So they’re the kids within the group project that stayed up all night doing all the work and everybody else like the Contact page, just you know, gets the credit.
Christopher Penn 36:03
What isn’t shown here that specifically answers Max question, I think really well is because this is based on Google Analytics data. This is what pages overall helped conversion. We can run this restricted organic search traffic to say, Okay, what pages that were organic, Search Driven, converted the most, because it may be different you may have, if you have a really strong email marketing program, you may have, you know, a TATA page, and they’re featured in your emails, but you’re not seeing it’s masking what search is doing, because your emails, just just your jam. And so it’s possible to build this just with organic search traffic. So yes, the answer in short is yes, you can see how much a page contributes to overall goals. And the other. The flip side is you can also see if a page is doing well at being efficient. So in this case, how many visits does it take to a page before that, that page helps convert somebody. So we have our Instagram webinar from last year, seven visits to convert somebody, which is great. On the other hand, our expertise page 270 visits, so that takes a lot more traffic to get somebody to convert. And then the one question survey, obviously, you know, is huge right now, because it’s not, there’s not a conversion for. So these two reports paired together can absolutely tell you where you should be focusing your time. And I would say that, from an SEO perspective, run these just organic search data to see like, what, what pages search is helping drive the most. And then the pages that are the most efficient and the most effective. Those are candidates for priority optimizations. Okay, can we add more content? Can we improve the quality of the content? Can we make sure that Google’s indexed it you know, one of the things we discovered recently was that not everything was getting indexed, and a few pages kW would put up recently on our case studies? They weren’t in the index. So we forced them through manually.
Katie Robbert 38:11
And we said, you know, just to be clear, that’s a report that’s methodology that we have built ourselves, the other have, you know, of any tools off the shelf that can do that kind of analysis?
Christopher Penn 38:27
Uh, I think there was a there’s a similar, there’s a channel level report that’s available in analytics 360. So if you’re willing to invest, you know, the quarter million dollars a year for that, you can have that in the attribution 360 product, the content level one, I don’t think that he don’t think there is one that I’ve seen. I could be wrong. I have not had just try every tool on the market because I have a day job. So I don’t know.
Katie Robbert 38:57
So basically, come on down and get your reports from Trust Insights. Big winter.
Christopher Penn 39:05
Oh. Alright, I think that’s a good indicator that we’re probably gonna wrap up here. Thanks, everyone. Thanks to everyone who submitted questions. We’ll see you in the slack group. If you had a question that we somehow missed, we can answer in the slack group and things. They will be no show next week because it is Thanksgiving here in the United States of America, which is where we are based, so we will be injuring ourselves with copious quantities of food. If you are not in the United States, we wish you a Happy Show. Catch up on the replays over on our YouTube channel, which you will have in the credits, but thanks for tuning in. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust Insights. AUC AI slash T AI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, see you next time
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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