Building a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy: Video #5 — Creating a Content Plan

Below is the transcript from this video.

 

Building Your Foundation: Hi, this is John Jordan with Go Local Interactive and this is the fifth installment in our series on How to Build a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy From the Foundation Up. We, in previous episodes, talked about your website and the importance of getting it right in terms of being able to accomplish all the goals you seek to achieve with your customers that are visiting that website as well as the data and collection of data, correct. 

 

We spoke about local listings and the importance of those listings to establishing local relevance. We spoke about SEO and ensuring crawlability and readability of your site so that Google can properly ingest everything you have to say and when you’re pertinent or relevant to display to users. Today, we’re going to talk about content and establishing topical relevance with those search engines on specific search queries that users are making.

 

Creating a Content Plan: The first thing to understand is that it is an ongoing process. You’re never fully done with content development. You will have to continue to develop fresh and new content to remain relevant in the search engine’s eyes, primarily Google. That starts with an evaluation process of your existing content. Every piece of content on your website should serve a purpose, meaning we’re trying to inform users of a specific thing as it relates to the products and the services we offer. And, we’re trying to marry that up with the way users will search potentially on Google to find the answers to the most common questions they have about that product or service. So, think of every page of your site as having a mission. “What’s the mission of this page? What do we want this page to rank for? When do we want it to display to users? And, what type of content should exist on that page so that Google believes it’s the most relevant content out there when someone is searching for that specific thing?” 

 

Once we understand how our existing content, or where we stand with existing content rather, we need to start researching new content opportunities. These would be any gaps that we identify in our existing content, times that we want to rank, yet we don’t have a page that serves that purpose or we don’t currently have content on a page that serves that purpose. We need to research those new opportunities. There’s a variety of ways to do that that we’ll discuss today. And then, once you’ve gotten through that evaluation phase of both looking at existing content and determining where we need new content, you have to get into the actual development of that content ensuring that it’s both high quality and useful. That “useful content” is not a term that we’ve made up. That’s one that Google actually uses to define…If they determine your content is actually pertinent to users that are out there actively searching, they call it useful. They rolled out in 2022, actually, two, what they call, “useful content updates” where they’re telling us a little bit more about how they evaluate content and whether they determine if it’s useful or not to users. So this is the process. Once you get through that development of content phase, we go back and start over again. We evaluate the content we have. “How is it performing? Is it meeting our expectations and ranking when we need it to? And, what changes or tweaks need to be made?” And again, look for new opportunities. And that cycle just continues on an ongoing basis. 

 

Evaluating Existing Content(Where You Stand Today in Local Organic Rankings): Now, you might ask, “how do we start that evaluation process of existing content?” Here at Go Local, there’s a variety of tools that we use. This particular tool gives us an idea of where we’re winning from a local search perspective. I blacked out the name of the company in this instance. But, we did this evaluation for one of our clients where we were looking to see one of their locations, how it was ranking in a seven-mile trade area for pest control. And you can see all these little numbers on the map on the right side here represent where they rank relative to competitors if someone was standing in these spots and conducting a search on Google Maps. 

 

You can see there, it’s hard to understand, right? If you’re standing on their doorstep, they're doing great. They’re showing up number one in the map pack as you would expect. But, you just go a few blocks to the west, and you see that they drop to tenth. Whereas if you go a few blocks to the east, they rank third. And so, identifying these anomalies in local search rankings and tracking them over time can help us to better understand, “what is it we lack that Google is looking for when someone is searching in these specific locations that will improve our chances of being displayed to customers?” Usually, Google Maps is a pretty good indication of what Google perceives about you in the local marketplace, and your organic rankings will somewhat model what you see in Maps in terms of your prominence of your website and the rankings. So, if we can get these map listing rankings to improve and trend those over time, we will see a corresponding lift in our search organic rankings in the position of our website when people are out there actively searching. 

 

So in this case, the customer was capturing a, roughly, 24% local visibility in this seven-mile service area when people were out there searching for pest control. So, roughly three-quarters of the market was never seeing it. And this was based on them displaying in the top three in that map pack. So, only 24% of the time were they showing up in the top three within this seven-mile radius around their location. So, a lot of opportunity for improvement. The second piece of this is not only understanding how you perform but actually looking at your competitors, which we will show you what that looks like here in a second, and then identifying from that view of the competitors relative to yourself where the areas for opportunity are for the most dramatic improvement and then monitor those rankings over time so that you can continue to see if your efforts are paying off. 

 

Evaluating Existing Content (Competitor Insights): Here’s what it looks like and, again, I’ve redacted the company name so as to protect those that are involved. But, wanted to show you their top competitor in this marketplace, the same seven-mile service area, is actually capturing roughly 75% of that impression share meaning that they’re showing up 75% of the time in the top three when someone searches for pest control in this seven-mile service area. So, that gives you a little bit of an idea of how much room for improvement there is to go from, for this particular client, from 24% to as high as 75% as Google’s awarded the top performer in this market. So, a lot of opportunity to improve and this company that’s ranking at 75% should serve as somewhat of a model. We can actually look at them and see what they’ve done from an SEO and content development perspective that differentiates them in Google’s eyes from the company that we’re actually working for. And, that will give us at least a rough idea of what we need to improve upon to start to see some improved rankings in these local search queries that are happening. 

 

Evaluating Existing Content (Content Audit Guidelines): So, now that you understand where those cold spots are and hot spots are in terms of the map and where you can improve geographically, now we need to actually start the process of evaluating the current content on our website and there’s no better place to start than the actual guidelines that Google provides to us. Now, it is a deep read, I’ll warn you in advance. It is over 165 pages that Google has provided to us of their general guidelines for evaluation of content and the quality of a website’s content. So, I’m going to condense it down for you here in a second, but I just wanted you to know this is out there. It is something you can search for and find. If you are so inclined, you can read through it. But, I will tell you it is quite a bit to digest. 

 

Evaluating Website Content (Content Audit Quick List): Here’s some quick guidelines for you and things that you should think about when you’re evaluating your own content. Starting with “does the content include strong visuals like images, graphs, or diagrams?” We are, increasingly so, a visual society especially the younger demographic. We would like to start to see the use of imagery more heavily in websites, video content as well. So, if we are going to tell a story, we want to tell it in different formats. That doesn’t reduce the value of a text format. That’s still very much required for your success. But, you also want to think about, “how can I tell the same story through different formats in my website as well?” 

 

“Is the content purposeful and original?” Emphasis on original, really both. Purposeful meaning, as I said earlier, every page needs to have a specific purpose on your website and specific goals that you set out for it in terms of ranking. But, it needs to be original. Google will ding you and they can see very quickly if you duplicated someone else’s content or perhaps even your own content from different companies you own or different pages on your website. So, you definitely want to avoid that duplicate content issue.

 

“Is the content readable?” Are you using short sentences, simple words and concepts, bulleted and numbered lists? We are a very impatient society and people will bounce off your website very quickly if you have paragraph after paragraph of content and it’s very difficult for someone to skim and get to the information that they’re looking for. 

 

“Is the content informational and accurate and not deceptive?” “Is there a strong call-to-action in multiple places?” These are all things that you need to look for when you’re evaluating your content. “Are the tone and voice in line with your company values and personality?” “Are major keywords present in the headers and throughout the body of the content?” “Are internal and external links utilized?” These are really, really important. Linking, you don’t necessarily have to talk about everything on a page. But, if you think that your users will be interested in you expanding on a certain type of topic or certain content, and you mention that in the body of the page you’re on, you can simply link to that other page where you will expand on that content and give that page its own set of goals for ranking when people are searching with that specific intent. And then you also want to address, as we discussed in the prior presentation, all those on-page SEO elements. These are all things that you want to look at from a content perspective. This is by no means a complete list. As I showed you before, there are 165 pages of things that you can evaluate in terms of your content and Google’s evaluation of your content. We’ve just tried to give a bit of a shorter, quicker list to look at here. 

 

Researching New Content Opportunities: In continuing this process, starting to look for new content opportunities now that you’ve evaluated your current position from a content perspective. You can use tools. In this case, I’m using the visual of a tool that we license here on the right that can give you some ideas about how people are actually searching on a topic in the marketplace. In this instance, I plugged in pest control and it gave me 50 or more different questions that are often posed through search queries when people are searching for pest control. Those can give you or stimulate some ideas you may have or reinforce that there are actively people out there searching for the topic that I’m thinking of. 

 

We also want to do a level of keyword research. This would likely entail some SEO expertise and really digging into data and evaluating, “how are people searching today?” What is the intent of that search? Looking at how they search, what keywords they used in this search to evaluate what type of content they’re looking for. And, then informing our content writers of that information so that they can try to write content that is topically relevant to that keyword search. 

 

I always like this one too and it’s very rare that I talk to people that are actually doing this. But, record calls. You know, it’s so easy and so inexpensive these days to set up call recording. It serves two purposes. You can actually track your call activities from your different marketing efforts. But, it also gives you a way to check in on your staff operationally and see, are they handling the calls the way they should be handling them? Are they following the script that you’ve laid out for them? Are the quality of the leads that are coming in good? But, in this case, for content, it also serves as a great vehicle to capture information. What are the most common questions that are being posed in these phone calls to your service reps? And, how can we better answer those questions through quality content on our website? If someone’s asking a question consistently when these calls are coming into your call center, or wherever these calls go, more than likely though you’ll see that correlation between those questions and search queries, meaning people will also be asking the search engine those same questions in different ways and our job is to kind of find that correlation and write content that directly addresses those most common questions we’re getting that can be identified through call recordings. 

 

The other way that’s very frequently not taken advantage of is start talking to your service reps and technicians and find out, “hey what’s happening in the marketplace right now?” What are the most common problems your technicians are seeing? And, seasonally, when are they seeing them? Talking to service reps and asking them directly, “hey what’s hot right now?” “What are you hearing about?” “What are you starting to see as the seasonal trend that’s starting in the marketplace?” If you can train these service reps and technicians to funnel this information to you, it can be very informative in terms of timely content that you might produce. Maybe a blog post that needs to be put out that speaks to a very specific pest pressure that’s happening right now that’s really hot and can give you an advantage over your competition in terms of people that are actively searching right now for that topic in Google’s eyes. 

Developing High Quality Useful Content: What do those different types of useful content look like once you’ve actually done your research and you start writing them? For the most part in this industry, these are the three categories. You’re gonna find service area pages very, very important. That’s why I put them first. That local intent is already expressed and understood by Google. When someone searches for pest control, they know it’s a local search in nature. So, they’re gonna try to put that user in front of someone who’s close in proximity that offers the information they’re searching for. In this case, pest control services. And, so the content that exists on those location pages is really, really important to you winning some of that local search. 

The blogs. This serves as a fresh form of content. We’re not going to frequently update or change the content on our location pages or on our pest pressure pages but we should be adding fresh content to our website. The blog is just a good way to do that. So we can address those seasonal pest pressures as they come up and arise. We can talk about what’s going on in that local community and then we can link back to either those pest pages or those location pages where that particular blog is relevant. That will give those pages some lift with the search engines in a timely timeframe when people are out there searching. 

 

The third different type are our pest pages. This is where we’re going to elaborate on specific pest pressures and how we particularly address them. Not only as a company but in that particular area of the country because sometimes treatments can vary from one area of the country to the next depending upon that specific type of pest. So, these are not, by [any] means, not all types of content but these are the most commonly used ones that you should be thinking about as it relates to your content plan and strategy.

 

Developing High Quality Useful Content pt. 2: Next, I just wanted to give you a few examples of this put into practice. Again, our goal being to establish topical relevance in all these search queries that we’re trying to target with our goals on each individual page. That content, I can’t express enough, how key it is to winning SEO, winning that organic position on the page. But, it should be very measurable and held accountable and that’s something we’re going to talk about here in a second. But, here’s a real example from where I’m at here in Austin, TX. Scorpion treatment in Austin, TX, was my search on Google. And, you can see ABC Home and Commercial showed up. And, why did they show up? In addition to the SEO things I covered in the last video in this series being done right, they actually have content that’s very relevant for the search I put in the query. They have a scorpion page in Austin, TX, on their website which very directly addresses through the content what I would be most interested in in Google’s eyes as it relates to that query I conducted.

 

Developing High Quality Useful Content pt. 3: Here’s another example of treating carpenter ants in Austin, TX. And, I thought this example was interesting because it demonstrates that, what I mentioned earlier, the different forms of content can be important. In this instance, the very first result that came back was actually a piece of content, a white paper, that was developed by Texas A&M Agrilife and this particular paper was several pages in length and it dealt specifically… The only topic in the whole document was carpenter ants. So, Google deemed it as the most relevant piece of content out there relating to treating carpenter ants in Austin, TX, and that’s why it was served up first. That’s a non-traditional type of content. A white paper, an infographic, there’s lots of different forms that would fall into the same category. But, I thought it was important and gave you a good example of why developing those different types of content is important. And then the second position here was occupied by Arizona Tech Pest or AZ Tech Pest, I guess. Aztec, late in the day sorry. Aztec Pest. These guys have more traditional content on their website where they have a carpenter ants in Austin page. And that’s why they were showing up in second position. From a content perspective, Google valued that and thought it matched up closely, at least the second closest match to my particular query.

 

Content Reporting: Now the last piece I wanted to discuss today is “how do we measure this?” “How do we hold it accountable?” And, I love that word accountability as an agency because it really, in my opinion, translates to longer term partnerships when both parties are accountable. And, so, the first part of accountability is understanding the metric that we’re trying to track towards. “What are we trying to achieve?” In most instances, with content, we’re trying to achieve a ranking that exceeds where we are today. So, we’re developing content with a specific purpose to rank for very specific keywords and we’re going to track that over time to see, “are we making improvement year over year in those keyword rankings?” Now, obviously as a business owner, we’re not only interested in rankings, we’re interested in what happens as a byproduct of those rankings. We want to see increased customer visits to the website as a result of those increased rankings. We want to see increased leads and ultimately increased sales. Those are all things that are trackable. But, it all starts with that first goal which is rankings. And, so, in this case, I’ve left it more open-ended in evaluating the visibility in key performance metrics. I always suggest doing that quarterly. Content can be a little bit more of a slow moving creature meaning Google doesn’t always ingest your content and interpret it as valuable right away. They might need to see a certain number of people visit your website, engage with that content, and follow through with contacting you and achieving a tracked goal through Google Analytics, also something we covered in the last SEO presentation. But, that’s Google's way of interpreting, “was this content valuable enough that the customer or end user ended up actually contacting this business?” The more of that that happens, the more likely Google’s going to start moving that content up in the rankings and deeming it more relevant to users. So, that’s why we say evaluate it quarterly because it can take some time for enough customers to flow through and engage with that content that Google starts to see it as valuable and then you’ll start to see slowly those rankings increase more and more. 

 

We also say that you should include an analysis of sitewide performance and visibility into location-specific content performance. This is especially important when you start to produce sitewide content overhauls like you’re literally looking at every piece of content on the website. You’re changing it on an ongoing basis. You want to see, “what is the overall lift in performance to the website?” This is critical for things like the blogs I mentioned earlier. A blog, in certain industries, you’re not gonna have people waiting on the edge of their seat to come to your blog and read that new piece of content you just posted. The intent behind it is to be there when people are searching and the content you’re providing is helpful to them. But, the larger intent here is to increase rankings for other pages on your website that will actually produce a lead or a sale ultimately. So, by having that blog, you may not blow the roof off in terms of the traffic generated to that blog. But, if the blog’s generated, is structured in the right way and it links to location pages and it links to pest pressure pages, when someone is in the market searching, your ranking will be lifted for those location pages and for those pest pages because of the existence of that blog. It lifts the overall, the saying of all boats rise with the tide, they all lift together and rise together. So it’s really, really important to measure that sitewide performance once you start your content initiatives because you can typically see when you make some major overhauls of content an overall lift to traffic across the site and specifically on those location pages is where we tend to see it first. 

 

And then the final piece is you should have takeaways [that] should be detailed and allow for prioritization of future efforts. So, in order to hold the content accountable, if you’re not seeing a lift in traffic or in rankings or any of the key metrics you’ve established, you have to go back and reevaluate why. “Who is outranking me and why are they evaluating me, oh, outranking me?” And that’s why you can… That's how you can go back and prioritize future efforts and decide “these pages are performing as expected. I can kind of leave them, let them sit and continue to grow for a while. Now, I can redefine and focus in on those that are not meeting my expectations or goals and figure out why and make those necessary adjustments.” Again, content, I gave this analogy in one of our prior presentations, content is the third leg on the stool if you think of it that way. The local listings are the first leg on that organic stool meaning they establish local relevance. SEO is the second leg on that stool. It increases the readability of your website ensuring Google can properly ingest everything on your website and interpret it properly. Content is the final leg on that organic stool. It reinforces topical relevance and when you should be displayed in a search query to potential customers. All three are necessary for a successful organic effort and understanding all three is really important. I hope this series is helping you in that regard.

 

Thank You: That’s it for today. Hopefully that’s enough to give you a good head start on your content strategies going forward. Again, this is John Jordan with Go Local Interactive, and I hope that you have a great day.