Host: Alex Valencia, WDW
Guest Host: Jason Hennessey, Hennessey Digital
Guest: Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting
Last week’s episode of SEO Happy Hour featured special guest Eric Enge, author of The Art of SEO and owner of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO agency and a Fortune 500 company. Eric was named 2016 Search Marketer of the Year (Male) at the Landys and the 2016 Search Personality of the Year at the US Search Awards.
Listen for key insights on:
- The marketing ecosystem
- SEO case studies
- Why you need better content
- The foundation of content
- Social media branding
- Influencers and how they can help your brand
Transcript:
Alex Valencia:
Hey friends, happy Friday and welcome to another episode of SEO Happy Hour with We Do Web Content. Today I am absolutely stoked to have this guest on with us. He is the CEO and founder of Stone Temple Consulting out of Massachusetts. Eric Enge is going to be with us today. He’s going to be answering questions and presenting to us on content marketing and what content Google loves. He’s going to be sharing some of his case studies of Fortune 500 companies that he works with. He’s going to be telling us what content you should be creating and what Google thinks of it. He’s going to be answering our questions. This is an awesome opportunity for you to be able to get up close and personal with a pioneer like Eric Enge, who’s been a student of Google for years. So we’re lucky to have him. Make sure you have your questions, make sure you’re listening.
I will be sending out a recording to the people on our list. So thank you again for registering, everyone. We hope you have a good time and enjoy the content that we’re going to share with you. Eric is awesome. He’s a good friend, he’s super successful. He works with tons of companies and if you’re legal marketer, SEO nerd, you’re going to get a benefit out of this. We’re super stoked to ask him some questions about our own strategies that we use for our law firm clients and learn what he thinks and what he’s learned from Google himself.
Especially coming from a content side and a link building side. So with that said, I’m going to pass on over to Eric Enge again who won SEO Personality of the Year, Large SEO Agency of the Year, and SEO Marketer of the Year. How cool is that? So Eric Enge, thanks so much for being on the show. I pass it on to you and I look forward to your presentation.
Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, please, we’re we’re going to let Eric go through the presentation. Make sure you raise your hand or post questions and then we’ll stop somewhere in the middle or at the end, answer your questions. And I’m sure we’re going to have our own questions for Eric as well. All right, Eric. Thanks so much, man.
Eric Enge:
And is the presentation showing okay for you guys? You’re seeing it in full screen [inaudible 00:02:37].
Alex Valencia:
I’m seeing it.
Eric Enge:
Yeah. Okay, cool.
Alex Valencia:
Yeah.
Eric Enge:
So what I want to talk to you all about today is, as it says right there, why good content must die. And so I’m going to explain that as we go through things. So Alex already gave a nice intro for me, so I’ll kind of skip by this and just keep going. And I want to start actually with a little story. And my story is about Sally. And I want to find out why is Sally so sad and what we can do to make her happy. Well, Sally has a problem. She’s an SEO director for career related website, and her traffic has been going through a withering decline month over month for many months now. In fact, over a small period of years.
And she’s got no clear plan to turn things around. And certainly this is plenty of reason to be sad in today’s digital marketing world. But what happened is we came in and helped Sally with a recovery plan. It’s like a full site audit, comprehensive onsite content optimization, competitive backlink analysis, and a content marketing plan. And it didn’t have to be us, a lot of people know how to do this. But the idea is, had to take Sally back to ground zero and rethink about what her situation was and what was the best approach for moving forward. And as a part of that content marketing plan, Sally ended up getting placements on all these kinds of sites. Literally these sites. And again, keep in mind this is a career oriented site. These are highly, highly relevant sites for her to be on. And this is what happened to Sally’s rankings.
And so this is actually a real anonymized case study. I just kind of wanted to warm you all up with the point of which is that really effective content marketing can have really large scale impact. Certainly we see here more than doubling of traffic from where it was in February of ’14 and triple roughly where it was in mid 2015. So that would certainly be plenty of reason for Sally to be much happier now. And keep that in mind as we go through. This is our objective is to get a similar kind of results. Just a few more content marketing proof points worth putting out there. First of all, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, provides three times the leads. demandmetric.com. I’m not going to read each one of these. You can do that for yourself. But there’s several data points for many different organizations that shows that content marketing is a very powerful way to go ahead and do your marketing.
But of course, it’s one thing to know that you need to do content marketing or should be thinking about doing content marketing. It’s another thing to figure out how to do it right. And we’re going to get into all of that. And starting off, the first thing I think you really need to look at is how do you think about your goals? So many of us, right? Many of us are in it for SEO benefits. We want to grow our traffic from Google and make more money that way. But what my experience has taught me is that if you’re going to be really good at content marketing, you have to think about reputation, visibility and audience first. And then I have this almost parenthetical statement at the far right. Oh, yes, let’s get some links too. And oddly enough, this sort of approach to how you think about content marketing is how you get the best overall SEO results.
So as you think about it though, realize that you’re working in an ecosystem and this audience, your target audiences are over here on the right. Media/bloggers, your prospects, influencers, and your content you create is over on the left. And the things in the middle are the channels that you use to distribute that content. And the reason we want to talk about it as being an ecosystem, if you need to think about it, is not something that you manipulate, but something that you join and participate in. This is a really important part of the mentality about you approach content marketing. So you may have SEO goals, but you need to think about it holistically.
Okay, so now I’ve kind of set the stage and I’m going to dive into a good old fashioned SEO topic, which is just how important are links today. You’ve probably seen lots of content out there, a lot of people arguing that links are declining in importance in Google and they just don’t matter as much anymore. But I participated in a webinar, actually a Hangout with Google’s Andrey Lipattsev back in March. And as part of that, one of the other participants of the webinar, a guy called Ammon Johns asked about, “Gosh, since you’ve told us that RankBrain is the third most important signal, what are the two first ones?” And it was reiterated then by Andrey, content and links. So quality of your content and links going into your site. So that’s what Google wants to say, what the most important factors are. So links according to that are still really big.
And here are the most recent studies. Don’t worry too much about what the numbers are, but there’s studies done by Moz and Search Metrics of what are the most important ranking factors. The numbers are measurements of correlation between links and ranking. And just know that these are actually pretty strong numbers. And links showed a stronger correlation in rankings in both Moz’s and Search Metric’s studies than any of the other factors they looked at. So that’s a pretty important backup to Google statement, that links are still really important. So now that we have this, let’s get into what the real story is. And I’m calling it the real story because we actually also did our own study of the importance of links in ranking. And here are our correlation numbers. Again, don’t get too hung up on what they are. If you want to know the details, you can read about a thing called Spearman’s correlations and you’ll learn how these measurements are done.
But just know that these are pretty strong indications that links remain a driving factor in ranking. And we actually took a wholly different kind of look at it, which showed even stronger correlations. It was different than what Search Metrics and Moz did. But to sum it all up, all of these things actually suggest that links remain a very strong factor in SEO. So I promised a few pauses along the way. I’m going to take one there and see if we have any questions before I go on to the next section. Guys, any questions for me, either from the audience or are the two of you so far? We good?
Jason Hennessey:
I don’t see any questions. Alex, do you see anything there? Let me see.
Alex Valencia:
We had some come in. Not through the… I’m pulling them up now. Sorry. Let me just see if they’re related to… How does integrating PR into your content and link building strategy help?
Eric Enge:
It’s a great question. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more later. But the short answer is PR can create visibility for your content or your pages that will cause other people to write about it and link to it. That’s the best way to think about PR. In old fashioned SEO, it used to be that you could just publish lots of press releases with links in the press releases and those links would add SEO value. That’s not the right way to think about it today. It’s more about really good PR can gain visibility for your site and your content, and hence drive SEO that way. So with that, I’m going to jump back in, if that’s all right?
Jason Hennessey:
Sure.
Alex Valencia:
Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Eric Enge:
Okay. Let’s talk about what kind of content works. And I’m going to start that by sharing some data that I found from company called Chartbeat. And this chart that you’re looking at shows on the X axis, the read time of all these bits of content. And you’ll see that there’s some bright colors and a whole bunch of stuff on the far left here. And that’s the majority of the content. Doesn’t get very much read time. But if you go out on the X axis, out to the right, you’ll start to see more and more things that there are a lot of content that actually gets a fairly good amount of read time. The Y axis is social activity. So again, a whole bunch of things down on the bottom left here. So most things don’t get that much social activity, but there’s some things that get extremely high social activity.
What’s most interesting about this chart is the quadrant that’s empty or almost empty. That’s the top right quadrant. The intersection between content that gets high read time and high social shares is almost nonexistent. So this is pretty interesting when you think about how would search engines potentially want to value social shares and what it says about the connection between social shares and content value. So cute cat pictures and memes and things like that don’t tend to get very high read time. They might get a lot of shares. And here’s another data. This is from a study done by Moz and BuzzSumo. And they looked at a 100,000 random posts and 75% of the posts they looked at had zero links. And most of them have very, very few social shares. So that’s by itself, interesting. It says most content does pretty poorly. But here’s another dive into the correlation coefficients. I’m going to walk you through it in a little more detail now.
So in this study, they tried to measure the correlation between social shares and links to content. Okay? So just so you understand what these scores mean, a minus one means a total negative correlation. So that’s the worst score you can get, and it means you get more links as you get fewer shares. If that were the case. It’s not the case, but I’m just explaining sort of the ranking scale. A plus one is total positive correlation. So as you get more shares, more links goes up kind of linearly. Anything over 0.3 represents a pretty significant correlation, plus 0.3. And a score of zero means basically no correlation whatsoever. And what this study showed is the correlation between shares and links came out at 0.01 or pretty darn close to no correlation whatsoever. So what this study showed is that just because something gets lots of social shares doesn’t mean it gets any links. And it’s just completely unrelated.
That’s pretty interesting when you start thinking about what kind of content you need to produce. And I’m going to dive a little more deeper to that now. Because when the Moz and BuzzSumo team took a closer look at some of the sites that they had in their study they found some individual sites actually had a very strong correlation. So four of them are listed here. There’s a lot more than this, but this is representative. And gosh, these sites are doing pretty good. And it turns out what they do is pretty unique. They’re really big on opinion forming journalism. All right? So they really push this concept of putting an opinion out there. Important subtlety to this. Their opinion is only working in terms of gathering both social shares and links because people care about their opinion. So it isn’t enough to have some stranger start writing on your blog and issuing opinions.
You have to develop a reputation first. But that was kind of interesting. So some content does correlate really strongly between social shares and links. Here’s some more sites that actually correlate strongly between shares and links. And they were a little different than the first set I showed you. What they’re big in is actually data driven research studies. And they pump out a bunch of this kind of stuff. And I’ll tell you from my experience here at Stone Temple Consulting that we do a lot of data driven research and publish a lot of studies. That works extremely well for us. What’s nice about data-driven research studies, if you can show that you have a sound methodology, you don’t have as high a threshold of proving that you’re an expert first, like you do with opinion forming journalism.
And so data-driven research studies also do really well. So here’s an example from our own site actually. You publish a study on the original Mobilegeddon release by Google. And it got 3,100 social shares, not bad. And you go look at the links, it also got 2,800 backlinks from 208 different domains. So that’s a pretty good yield for a piece of content. And you can see for this piece of content, because it was data driven research, it actually had a good combination of links and social shares.
So next off, in terms of thinking about content or what kind of content to focus on is what type works best. And so this is kind of funky chart. Look at the yellow, green line there. Which is labeled ad hoc enhanced content. So for this one, just imagine that you produce an infographic occasionally, or maybe a data-driven research study. And you kind of do it in a sporadic way, and each of them are not that related to each other and they’re standalone pieces. They can help you grow your traffic over time. This idea is, as these lines get higher, theoretically your traffic is going up.
Contrast that with the idea of campaigns, the orange line, right? Campaigns might be, okay, I did a data-driven research study that I connected with and contacted ten media people and gave them advanced access to the study under embargo and said, “Happy to give you some images and you could publish at the same time we publish or within an hour or so. Or I’ll do an interview for you or I’ll write a custom post for you.” So rather than just doing a standalone piece, you do some companion supportive marketing.
And the idea is, the campaigns that you see a bigger impact. And then finally the third line, the maroon one, thematic campaign. The concept here is that we’re doing the same thing that we’re doing with campaigns, but each of the campaigns is following the common theme. So in other words, in my orange line campaign one and campaign two and campaign three might not be that closely related to each other, but in the maroon one, they’re very closely related. So they’re much more reinforcing as to what your business is about and your special area of expertise. So as you think about the kinds of content you’re going to produce, you want to think about opinion forming journalism, you want to think about data-driven research studies, and now you need to think about what’s the theme for those and how you’re going to have a constant thread amongst all the content that you produce.
Okay, so now what? I never thought you’d ask. So Seth Godin, way back in 2003, published a book called Purple Cow. And the whole concept was you’re driving through the Midwest of the United States and you’re going by farm after farm, and you’re seeing cornfield and cows. And doesn’t take very long before you’re not talking about them. But when you drive by the farm where there’s a purple cow sitting there, suddenly you’re shocked into, “My gosh, that really stands out.” And this is sort of his theme, which is a very, very good one. If you’re going to produce content, be remarkable. If you were to write the next greatest article about how to make french toast, nobody is going to care. Because it’s been written about tens of thousands of times before. And as I’m fond of saying, I haven’t had french toast in more than 25 years, and I can still tell you how to make it.
So you have to think about what’s the exceptional kind of content that you’re going to produce that’s going to attract attention. In fact, just to think about that from another perspective, here’s a typical market adoption chart. For any given market, is characterized [inaudible 00:21:38] these kinds of people. I’m sorry, it looks like it’s a little blurry actually. But in the beginning you have the innovators who are the first to adopt something, and then you have the early adopters that are next. Then you have what we call the early and late majority, and then you have the laggards. Well, if I’m trying to get social shares and links from somebody, who do you think that’s coming from? Well, of course it’s going to be the early adopters and innovators that link and socially share stuff. And so as you produce content, you now need to be thinking about, “Well, who am I writing it for? Am I writing it for the early and late majority or the laggards?”
Well, not if it’s part of your PR/content marketing efforts. If you’re using it to promote your business, try to get links to social shares and reputation and visibility, your audience is the early adopters and the innovators. And your target is to produce content, which is remarkable enough that they will want to share it and link to it. And the refinement that I started with is that means it needs to be opinion forming journalism written by a recognized expert or a data driven study. So now I think you can see that I’ve kind of worked you through a model here, the kind of content it takes to be successful in building a business using content marketing. So just to underscore it, good content isn’t good enough. You’ve got to be thinking about a lead content or what I sometimes call “anchor content.”
Again, those data-driven studies and the opinion forming journalism pieces. Got to target the right audience and create content for that audience. So I’m going to stop there and see what other questions might have come up in the meantime and see what you guys think so far.
Jason Hennessey:
I think it’s great. Can you hear me okay, Eric?
Eric Enge:
Yes.
Jason Hennessey:
Okay, great. So I love this. This is amazing. I guess most of the people that are probably tuning into this webinar are attorneys. And so historically, when attorneys have their content strategy, they want to make sure that they’re optimized for personal injury lawyer, Dallas, Texas. So those are would be considered the landing pages that are necessary to drive just their target audience to their website. But then what you’re talking about now is more of the creative type of content, doing data driven research to attract a lot more social shares and links. So are you talking about two different sides of content strategy?
Eric Enge:
I’m glad you asked that, Jason. It’s a very important clarification. Of course, you’re going to have conversion oriented pages on your site and you’re going to have pages which are designed for your target customer base. And nothing I’m saying is meant to say that you shouldn’t have those pages because you should. But I think what I’m focusing on is, if I’m going to try to do things to drive the visibility and reputation in my business and get more links and social shares so I’m getting more exposure, then I have to create, call it exposure oriented content. And that has a different focus.
So for those of you watching, just keep that in mind that I’m talking about promotionally oriented content. And I got to use that word carefully too, because by promotionally I don’t mean self promotion. I mean creating editorial content that will cause other people to talk about you, creating more visibility for your business and bringing in more leads.
Jason Hennessey:
Perfect. Great answer. No, I just wanted to clarify that. Thank you.
Eric Enge:
All right. Any other questions before I go on?
Alex Valencia:
Any questions from the audience? We had some come in, but they’re not really related, so these can wait till the end if you want to keep going.
Jason Hennessey:
By the way [inaudible 00:25:55]. Hey, one last thing. By the way, Eric is a very influential person in this space. He’s highly regarded. He just got an award as the… What was the award that you just received, Eric? It was…
Eric Enge:
[inaudible 00:26:10].
Jason Hennessey:
You have it?
Eric Enge:
We were the Best Large SEO Agency, if you can see that on screen now.
Jason Hennessey:
There you go. Bravo. Congratulations.
Eric Enge:
US Search Personality of the Year and from a different awards organization, Male Search Marketer of the Year. So all happened in the past six weeks.
Jason Hennessey:
That’s amazing. And so I commend you on that. You definitely earned it. You’re a pioneer of this industry. And the whole reason why I bring that up is because those that are listening, it’s not every day you can get Eric on a webinar like this where you can ask him questions for free. So his hourly rate is probably very high. And so if you do have any questions, I would highly encourage you to raise your hand here. So absolutely. Thank you, Eric.
Eric Enge:
No, thank you, Jason. Appreciate that. So I’m going to haul through the next piece probably a little more quickly, but I wanted to really set the stage and your clarifying questions Jason, were very important. So I’m glad you did that. Okay, so the next thing to think about is, I’m now doing content marketing to promote my business and gain visibility and links and social shares so more people become aware of me. And that’s great, and I know I need to do that. But the thing to think about is, can I make it quantitative somehow? So I know that I’m going to go produce ten pieces of content to achieve this particular result?
And the answer is, yes you can. And I’m going to walk you through a way to do that. A conceptual way to do that. And make your investment more efficient. So you might have data like this if you look at SEO rankings, and I’ve got my money keywords over in the first column, and then I have these ranking terms, ranking from position four to 43 as shown on here.
And the third one, which I’m kind of highlighting here, is in position eight. So I have a key search term, the money keyword in position eight. Well, what if I could do something to move it to position five or four or three or two or even one? That’s worth money. And it’s better to target something that’s kind of close to money than the next one down, which is position 43, which is probably going to take a lot more work. So that’s the first conceptual stage of, how can I do a content marketing campaign more efficiently? The next thing to do is figure out how to take it to move that up. Now I know which one I want to move. I’m going to try to take this [inaudible 00:28:47] of this position eight and I’m going to try to move it up. So imagine that this is your scenario, and abusing a fictitious example here.
Because none of you own HRSA.gov. I don’t own it, I haven’t worked on I. It’s a made up example just to illustrate. So imagine you’re this site in position eight and you’ve got these three people in front of you and you want to move up in the search results. Okay? Well, you can go into tools like Open Site Explorer and you can pull data on who’s ranking in the seventh slot and find out what their domain and page authority are. You could do that for each of the competitors in front of you. You can also go in and get data from other tools, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, we use all three of those. And then you can put those into a process where you build a master list of links. You dedupe the list across all the sources and prioritize the targets. We have a tool that does it here, but you can do it in a spreadsheet.
You don’t need our tool to do it. And so you build a master set of links and then you get a common set of metrics. And we do actually still like to use Moz domain authority and page authority numbers. And so here’s a sample actually related exactly to the specific search result I showed you as an example a moment ago of the links pointing to a particular competitor that’s outranking our page in the example. And it was pretty interesting for this one that we looked at. It actually tells the story pretty simply that this page was outranking us in position eight because it had two links with a domain authority of 93 and page authority of 46. And one with an 81/28. And then you look down the rest of the link chart and it drops off extremely fast. So the first supposition I’m going to give you is that for this particular ranking example, I’ve already identified why this guy is out ranking me. And it’s because of three links.
So think about that for a moment. You do this level of analysis, you suddenly realize, “Gosh, I just made it quantitative. I’ve got to go get three, maybe four, maybe five links. They got to be this good. They got to be really good ones.” But this is a fascinating approach that we use and it actually works pretty well. So what you do is instead of just looking at one page, like we were looking at, you tabulate this across your major ranking competition. And what I’m showing you here is completely made up data now, but just for illustration, imagine you ended up with a little spreadsheet that showed, here’s my competitors that are out ranking me, and these are all their most important links.
And I’m ignoring the links that actually aren’t that valuable. Right? And you can get a picture of this, “Gosh, what would it take for me to get into the top five or the top four, et cetera?” So to be fair, links aren’t the only thing in ranking. It’s a big factor. And I just want to be clear that it’s obviously not the only factor. And sometimes you’ll build a spreadsheet like the one I just showed you, and you’ll have a situation that looks like this is that, “Gosh, the site and the number two position links don’t seem to explain in any material way why it’s ranking.” And of course, the point is that quality of content or diversity of content are still huge components of this, and arguably more important than links.
So if your content stinks, you’re not going to be able to get it to rank just by getting it some links. So let’s just, as we talk about this side of the story, the very link focused side of the story, let’s just keep in mind that you really have to work on the quality of your content along the way too. But the idea is when you’re done with all this analysis, you want to get to a recipe. You want to get to, “All right, what are the things that I need to do to win and rank very highly on this key search term?” And I’ve actually got a very hard example here that would require three DA 90+ links, four DA 80+, et cetera.
So your examples hopefully aren’t that hard because that’s a big budget to solve that problem. And maybe some on page things I need to do as well. But the idea is to get to a formula. So once you go through this process, the benefit is it’s very quantitative and clear where you stand and what you have to accomplish. So here’s just an example of what we did for some very, very competitive terms for a number of different people. And these are actually real case study examples. I had to anonymize them. But a search term, looking at the fifth line here, 201,000 searches per month. Took us 25 links to get it to position one.
But then a few lines below that, a term 18,000 searches a month, five links. We took it from six and above position to number one just by using this kind of focused analysis. And to be clear, focusing on high domain authority links in small quantity rather than getting tons and tons of crappy things. So that was kind of the approach. So next up I want to walk you through another case study. So this is a true story, once again anonymized, but we had a client two years ago on November 15th. A competitor leapfrogged over them from the three spot to the two spot in the rankings, and our client dropped to position three. Which doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but for this particular client, they make all of their profit, literally every single penny of their profit occurs in December of each year. It’s a very holiday focused business. For the rest of the year they work to break even, and then they make all their money in the 12th month.
So this caused excitement at the board level, and we actually did our success by design analysis. And here’s what we found in looking at the competitor that jumped over them. It came down to one link that turned out was a new news story that the competitor had gotten, caused them to jump over. So we did a simple thing. We called the people who wrote the story and said, “Can you add our link?” And they did it. And within a week, we were back in the number two spot. So what’s cool about this is it shows how simple it can be at times to gain these kinds of rankings. So I’m going to stop again there just to see if we have any more questions. And then I’m going to have one last segment to blaze on through.
Jason Hennessey:
Doesn’t look like there’s a lot of questions being raised, just on the webinar. I guess I have one question. There’s a lot of tools out there to track the keywords and the movements. What is one of your favorites?
Eric Enge:
So Advanced Web Ranking is what we tend to use here. And that works quite well. Authority Labs also has a very good one. So those are the two that I think that I would recommend.
Jason Hennessey:
Those are great. And I would even say that even Ahrefs now has a keyword ranking tool, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, so cool.
Alex Valencia:
I just want to jump in. Oh, looks like we got a quick question here before I ask mine. SEO Moz or “Yoast?” Came in from Don. What’s your question with it, Don?
Jason Hennessey:
I guess for local, I guess.
Alex Valencia:
As far as…
Jason Hennessey:
He’s [inaudible 00:37:39] Yext.
Alex Valencia:
Oh, Yext.
Jason Hennessey:
Yext.
Eric Enge:
Moz Local or Yext actually, would be the… So yeah, they’re very different. Moz Local is going to be cheaper and more affordable. Yext is more expensive. The advantage Yext has is a, give you real time updates of your local listings. And so what I mean by that is you update your data in the Yext console and then all the business listing and yellow pages sites within an hour or so are up to date with your new information. Whereas Moz Local, you make the changes and it might take a month or two for those sites to do their updates.
Jason Hennessey:
So now is it redundant? Would it be redundant like to do both if you have the budget for it?
Eric Enge:
They overlap some. But they’re definitely different sites that they cover. So going off the top of my head here, Jason, I don’t remember at all, but I know that Moz Local focuses on Axiom and InfoUSA. And Yext does a different aggregator, but they overlap on some yellow page sites. So if you can do both, it’s good. The disadvantage Yext has by the way, is if you end your agreement with Yext, all the changes you made disappear. [inaudible 00:39:12] Whereas Moz sustain themselves. So there’s some balance there to be thought about.
Jason Hennessey:
Right.
Eric Enge:
All right.
Jason Hennessey:
That’s a good question.
Alex Valencia:
Yeah, we’ll go ahead and proceed.
Eric Enge:
Yeah. Okay. So I want to talk about some creative channel strategies, and I’m going to go through this pretty quickly because it’s just meant to stimulate some thoughts. Think about, I say here, leverage a mega brand, but think about leveraging partnerships. Are there ways that you can do partnerships to get more visibility for your content? If there’s some journal that covers your particular area of law frequently that would take regular content from you or would help co-promote something with you? So here’s an example of a brand, a small nonprofit that partnered with Intel. And what they did is… Well, Intel partnered with them for a few reasons. Because it was an area that Intel was interested in, but they weren’t able to move quickly on. They didn’t have the budget or the focus or the right experts, and the small company was able to do that.
And all of you guys listening have your own areas of expertise so those people can benefit from, and you might find some promotional partnership you could do. And what 10 x 10 got out of this is after they launched this partnership with Intel they got this huge spike in visibility and they get written up in USA Today and the like. So just think a little bit about the power of partnerships as something to focus on. Another idea is to invest more, not just generally, but in one specific area. So here’s a brand called Best Made. Makes a product called American Axe. They got very focused on Instagram and they created a bunch of pictorial essays, which works really well for Instagram. So they didn’t have to spend a ton of money. They focused on one vertical, in this case, a specific social media site.
Oops, my thing jumped ahead on me automatically. And then they invested more on that one site. And just by focusing on a single social media site and going deep with it, here’s what happened for them over the years. You can see a constant up and to the right for visibility for their brand. This is a Google Trends chart for their brand name. So if you are active in social media, think about being very active and very successful on one social media site rather than doing a not so great job on many social media sites. Focused, so to speak. The other idea is to be unique. This brand is Seventh Generation. They sell household products, cleaners, paper towels, toilet paper. I mean, how’d you like to be the guy given the challenge of writing exciting content marketing about the stuff about toilet paper. But what they did is they got focused on an eco-friendly theme.
So these guys, I mean, entered the market like five years ago or ten years ago, something like that. I mean, there were hundreds of companies already selling household products, yet they managed to establish a strong niche by focusing on one area of content marketing. And here’s what they did. They found a vertical concept that they could lead. They built their subject matter expertise on that, and they built their reputation and proved to be a leader in a very specific segment. And this is what it’s done for them. 76,000 followers on Twitter is not bad. 1.3 million fans for their page on Facebook, and they’ve been very successful as a result of these things. Another idea is just get an early mover advantage. Here’s a guy called Zach King, who was one of the first people on Vine. Last I checked he had over three and a half million followers there.
When you get early and actively engaged on a social media property, a new social media property, you could build followings really quite quickly. And to do that, you kind of have to recognize a new channel when it emerges and you have to test it, and you have to be willing to test that social media platform. And if it isn’t working for you, dump it. And you have to recognize if you’re going to try to play this game, you might try some new social media sites and figure out that it was not a good thing and dump it. But if you do it, you might have to try it a few different times and you might get one that works really well and establish leadership in a really good new channel. So that’s a thing to think about.
And then for Zach King, he has gotten a lot of good deals out of it, so it’s worked out really well for him. Then there’s a notion of when you create content, promoting it more effectively. Here’s a few tips for how to create better content and promote it more effectively. I’m not going to read the chart. You guys can do that. And I want to make sure we leave some more time for questions at the end here.
And then there’s the idea, it sounds unappealing. Work harder. Yes, put another ten hours a day in. No, that’s not what I mean. Here’s a study that someone did about singers with the greatest vocal range. It was done for a company called Concert Hotels, and they literally took all the recordings of hundreds of artists and measured their entire vocal range. Found out Axl Rose, by the way, has the biggest vocal range of anybody out there. So that was a ton of work and a lot of manual effort that went into that. And it’s like, “Gosh, could that possibly have been worth it?” It’s a fair question. I mean, they had to go deep into a lot of manual research, put a lot of hours in where others didn’t. This post got 111,000 shares on Facebook and 7,100 backlinks to their site. So this is an example of really being very remarkable in what they produce.
Okay, so last thing and then we’re done, is the notion of cultivating authority. If you followed SEO for a long time, you know that we used to have this thing called author photos that Google put in the search results. And this is kind of the way that they showed you that authorship mattered to them. And they killed it, they killed that program. So the question might come up does being an authoritative author matter? But just remember this is what Eric Schmidt said at one point, is that information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher. So Google obviously saw a lot of potential in authorship. But frankly, I don’t care that much whether Google is measuring it so much because what I do know is that when you build your own expertise, that it causes people to share and link to your stuff more. And that actually has a very, very important impact on your content marketing efforts.
And Matt Cutts did say this in an interview I did with him four years ago, “Doing the things that help build your own reputation, you’re creating the signals we want to find and value the most anyway.” So I do think it’s a really important thing to think about. So you want to work on building your engagement. I showed this chart a little bit before, just a reminder that effective content marketing… I mean, you look at the third line here, 18,000 searches a month. Three lousy links. Went from position six to position one. That was worth money.
And then just thinking a little bit more about expertise, there’s a concept of achieving reputation critical mass. Which you’ll start producing great content, you put it out there, you’ll get a little bit of response, and then you do some more and you get a little bit more response and it kind of builds over time. And then you get to a point which is kind of like a tipping point where your reputation goes up enough that your engagement rate starts to scale very rapidly. So that’s a thing to think about getting to. So with that, I’m going to pop back here and because we have just a little over ten minutes left, see what we’ve got for questions. And so I’ve been talking about content marketing the whole time, but please feel free to ask questions about any topic and let’s see what people have.
Jason Hennessey:
Sure. Well, yeah. Looks good.
Alex Valencia:
Go ahead. So we had a couple questions come in and like Jason mentioned Eric, most of the people that are watching and are on the show right now are law firms somewhere from small to mid-size, some large law firms that have their own marketing departments or using an SEO and digital marketing agency to help them with some of the work.
So a lot of the questions we’re going to get are going to be targeted towards legal. This, I got to thank you, was a great presentation because it totally shows how important links and content are going well together and especially great content. It just proves what we’ve been teaching and doing for our clients, especially your case study with the Fortune 500 company that you did the research and found that it was one link that made the difference. And we see that quite a bit. I know Jason, you see it a lot when you’re doing your research. We dig in and do in depth digital marketing and SEO strategies and look at the reverse engineering. But the question came in, what is the benefit, and we talked about this, but what’s your side of it on gTLDs, the URLs? What do you think? Is there any benefit in that?
Eric Enge:
You mean like [inaudible 00:50:01].
Alex Valencia:
The .law?
Eric Enge:
Oh, .law. Okay. So I actually had a conversation, email dialogue very recently with someone at Google about the new gTLDs. And so there is no SEO reason to think that .law will be better or worse from a pure Google perspective. In other words, they’re not going to rank it higher or lower just because you go .law. However, there may be some user impact if they see .law, that they might react to it in a more positive way, potentially. So I mean, that’s the way I would address that. In other words, the user sees that you’re at shearsonandlawsonpartners.law. But from Google’s perspective, what they’ve told me is that there’s no ranking boost or negative to it.
Jason Hennessey:
Great. Any other questions so far? Can I ask one real fast?
Alex Valencia:
Yeah, you can jump in. We have a couple more, but go ahead.
Jason Hennessey:
So what’s your thoughts on, let’s say you have a lawyer that’s listening to this call right now. And they started out and they had an EMD domain name. So let’s just say they had a domain name that said that they did… Joesmithcriminalattorney.com. But let’s just say it’s an exact match domain name. So let’s just say dallascriminaldefenseattorney.com. Okay? So they have that EMD and then they decide that maybe that they want to also expand their practices to include some personal injury and things like that. What do you think the effect would be if they transferred that whole site over to a new URL that wasn’t an EMD? Maybe it’s just joesmith.com law firm or whatever. Do you think that there would be a lot of loss in their rankings if they 301 redirected the EMD over to a new URL?
Alex Valencia:
You were cut off. I don’t know if you caught that, Eric. I didn’t catch it on my end, the question.
Eric Enge:
Okay, well, I heard all of it. So we’re going to go from dallascriminaldefenseattorney.com to joewilson.com.
Jason Hennessey:
There you go.
Eric Enge:
And the reason we’re doing that is we originally focused just on criminal defense, but now we’re in three cities and we cover more than just criminal.
Jason Hennessey:
There you go.
Eric Enge:
Or whatever the reasons are. So we’ve broadened. So I don’t ascribe much value to keywords in the URL. I won’t say there’s none. It’s just not big. So I think that that should be a move that you should be able to make without too much cost to it, especially because nowadays Google has said that they no longer erode links passed through 301s. That they pass all the juice through. However, initially after you make the move, you should expect that for a period of something like six weeks, you’ll see a temporary loss in traffic while Google figures out the move.
Jason Hennessey:
Yes.
Eric Enge:
But after that time period, I think you’re fine.
Jason Hennessey:
That’s great. Yeah, because there’s a lot of attorneys that start off as a small practice and then they grow into something much bigger. Like you said, now they’re focusing on three different cities, and their URL that they first worked on was specifically for one of the three cities. And so yeah, that’s just a common problem that we see in the legal community. So I appreciate you addressing that.
Eric Enge:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jason Hennessey:
Couple questions are coming in.
Alex Valencia:
We have another. Yeah. A couple questions are coming in. Eric, what are your opinion on niche sites, versus sub domains, versus just case types within the site? So that’s question number one. So in the legal industry, there was years where people would create specific sites if they were a PI attorney, they would do one for car accidents, one for truck accidents, and they would split it all out for different niches that they were doing. What are your thoughts on that versus different sub domains and just case sites within the website.
Jason Hennessey:
Or just the root. Yeah, or just keeping it on the root too.
Alex Valencia:
In the root domain, yeah.
Eric Enge:
Yeah, so for me, it used to be that separate domain thing worked pretty well for sites and Google liked that. But given that there’s a fairly strong relationship and they’re all legally related and they’re all… I would be much more a fan of getting them all on the main domain. Because to me the problem of each individual site, is each site represents a marketing problem. I’d rather have one marketing problem than five.
Jason Hennessey:
I agree. I agree with that completely.
Eric Enge:
Yeah.
Jason Hennessey:
And what about the difference between using sub-domains versus putting it on a root? So for example, making it personalinjurylawyer.xyz.com versus criminal defense versus putting in on the root.
Eric Enge:
If you were to ask a Googler that question today, they would tell you that there is no difference. For me, I am still cognizant of the fact that it’s pretty easy to have a subdomain operated by a completely different webmaster, and that’s not true with a subfolder. So I think there’s a very small risk, but nonzero risk that a subdomain won’t be interpreted as part of the core site. So I would lean towards the folder, but if I was already on subdomains, I wouldn’t bother moving it unless I had evidence there was a problem.
Jason Hennessey:
Great. Looks like there’s another question.
Alex Valencia:
Okay. And [inaudible 00:57:05]. Yeah. So any advice on increasing local map rankings?
Eric Enge:
Well, I mean, the first thing is to get consistent listings across the local business and yellow page sites and the business listing aggregators. And it means really scrutinizing and making sure that your phone number is shown exactly the same way. The address is shown exactly the same way. If one address says you’re at 301 Nichols Street and the other one says you’re at 301 Nichols Street, suite 201, you got to clean stuff like that up. It sounds small, but if Google has any reason to believe that it can’t be confident in the information it has about your site and your locations, then it will be less happy about showing you high in the map pack results.
And you might say to yourself, “Well, my gosh. I have validated with Google My Business, and so I validated my listing with them. Why don’t they just use that?” Well, the problem is that you might be that one person in a 1000 business people that actually keeps your Google My Business listing up to date, but most people don’t. So even though you validate, is an important step, and you should do that, you also have to police how your listings show up across the other sites on the web. So that’s very, very important step to take. So that that’s the number one thing that people have to do and they don’t do enough of.
Jason Hennessey:
Now, do you think there’s a difference between the way exactly you spell it out? So if it’s on your website and it’s on your Google Plus, My Business profile as suite, spelled out suite, and then you have some listings out there that just use the pound sign or STE, do you think Google is smart enough to recognize the semantics, or should you go in and just kind of modify it to be exactly the way it is on your website as well as your Google My Business profile?
Eric Enge:
I’m going to give you the relatively squishy answer, is that they should be smart enough, but who knows how many different scenarios they actually face. You gave some examples, Jason, that sounds simple to parse, right? Oh, number and suite and room and office number. Those all sound like they equate to each other. But the reality is, in the real world there’s probably 15 other scenarios that we can’t think of off the top of our head, which are just impossible to sort out. So if you’re going to go in and work on cleaning up your listings, I’d get really strict about it and take the risk off the table.
Jason Hennessey:
I agree. Yeah. That’s what we practice and preach too. Same thing. I just want to know your thoughts on that,
Eric Enge:
Guys. I apologize, but I’m going to have to drop. I have to go to another call. But appreciate [inaudible 01:00:27].
Jason Hennessey:
This has been great.
Eric Enge:
Yeah, appreciate you having me [inaudible 01:00:30].
Alex Valencia:
Yeah. This is awesome. Thank you so much Eric, again.
Eric Enge:
Yeah.
Alex Valencia:
Appreciate it.
Eric Enge:
Excellent.
Alex Valencia:
Thank you so much. Have a happy Friday and a great weekend. Thank you everyone for joining us.
Eric Enge:
Thank you all for listening. All right. Bye.
Jason Hennessey:
Bye-bye.
Alex Valencia is an influential entrepreneur, marketer, speaker, podcaster, and CEO of We Do Web Content, one of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing businesses in America. His agency implements game-changing content marketing strategies and produces top-ranking web content for law firms, medical professionals, and small businesses nationwide.
