At AWeber, our mission is to help small businesses succeed with powerfully-simple marketing tools and the support you need to use them.
That’s why we regularly host free summits and webinars about marketing. It’s why we write a blog focused on email marketing, and we send our weekly newsletter FWD: Thinking. And it’s also why we offer 24/7 customer solutions.
Now, I’m proud to introduce our latest free marketing education for small businesses — the FWD: Thinking Show. The FWD: Thinking Show is a free, monthly live show where you’ll get marketing and business strategy from the smartest marketers in the world.
Get-rich-quick marketing schemes don’t work. Top-secret formulas that cost thousands don’t guarantee results. Outdated marketing tactics don’t produce revenue anymore.
Marketing that delivers real business growth takes effort, a bit of risk, and planning. This is the kind of marketing strategy you’ll get from the FWD: Thinking Show.
The show is like a webinar, podcast, and keynote speech combined! Each episode of the FWD: Thinking Show will follow this agenda:
1. Quickfire Q&A
Liz Willits, the host of the FWD: Thinking Show, will ask the guest questions about their career, their best marketing and business advice, and more.
2. Innovative ideas
The guest speaker will share one innovative business or marketing strategy to accelerate your growth.
3. Audience Q&A
This is your chance to ask the smartest marketers in the world anything and get tailored advice.
Who is the first show guest?
Lee Odden is a lightly bearded B2B marketing strategist, author, international speaker and CEO of the fine team at TopRank Marketing. His work integrating search, social, content, and influencer marketing for B2B brands has been recognized by numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Forbes.
Who is the host?
Yours truly. I’m a professional speaker and marketing expert. I help run content strategy at AWeber. And I’ve taught hundreds of thousands of small business owners and entrepreneurs how to successfully grow their businesses online.
Get your ticket to the FWD: Thinking Show!
It’s free! You can get your ticket here, and access the show on Wednesday, June 22 at 2:00 p.m. ET.
For the best experience, I recommend attending the live show. But if you can’t clear your schedule, claim your ticket to get an on-demand video of the live episode. I’ll email
the on-demand video within 24 hours of the live show.
Apple TV+ made its first ever appearance at the Television Critics Association’s biannual press tour, though unlike most other broadcast, cable and streaming outlets participating in the two-week event, the company declined to put any executives for its new streaming service on stage or make them available for any interviews. That decision leaves the thinking…
Consider, for instance, what happens when I search for the term “Skiing”:
I’m immediately shown images of skiers, as well as top stories related to skiing, and even a local Google Maps panel with nearby ski mountains. I’m even shown videos of skiers before I finally reach the first article regarding the topic of “skiing”.
From a user perspective, this makes sense. Most people searching for “skiing” aren’t interested in reading a blog post about it — they’re interested in seeing it visually via YouTube, or finding nearby locations so they can ski themselves.
In 2020, search is going to continue to evolve in the direction of zero-click search. But that doesn’t mean your SEO strategy is futile. It just means you’ll need to get creative to rank on page one.
I sat down with Senior SEO Strategist Braden Becker to discuss his keyword research strategy, how you can use featured snippets to your benefit, and what he’s most excited to explore in the world of SEO in 2020 and beyond.
Keyword Research is All About Telling a Story
Let’s start with the basics.
Becker advises you start your keyword research with competitive analysis, which allows you to see what similar domains are ranking for that you’re not. SEO tools like SEMrush can help you do this.
“That’s where we start — constantly refining a list of competitors we want to keep an eye on, and whose content strategies we think are worth taking inspiration from,” Becker told me. “This is a good first step in keyword research, and you can explore related SEO opportunities from there.”
We won’t explore this concept too in-depth in this post, since we’ve covered it extensively before, including in our Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2019.
Additionally, Becker advises, “When you’re starting to create content, you should think about your opportunities in groups or clusters, not just one assignment at a time.”
“Not every keyword you find is just a single blog post. Instead, it’s the potential to create a larger marketing campaign that tells a story around that keyword. Then, you can use that keyword to find related queries you think the same visitor would want answers to.”
For instance, let’s say you find there’s high monthly search volume (MSV) on the long-tail keyword, “How to improve your open-rate.”
On the surface, it might seem like that only has the potential to be one blog post regarding “How to improve your open-rate.” But this misses the bigger picture you should be exploring.
As Braden told me, “Once you see ‘how to improve your open-rate’ is one long-tail keyword, you should be thinking, ‘Okay, maybe there’s a similar keyword with even more MSV, or maybe there’s another tangential topic we can cover, as well …’ and, as you explore, you might find tons of topics related to email marketing, and your marketing team might decide ’email marketing’ as a cluster of content is an avenue you want to explore.”
You Can Still Have a Strong Content Strategy if Your Product is One-Dimensional
So — that’s all well and good. But what if your product just isn’t that interesting to write about?
What if, for instance, you sell socks. There are only so many topics, and so many stories, you can tell about socks — right?
Braden sympathizes with this, but he has a solution in mind: “This problem is equal parts a B2C issue and a reality of e-commerce, where the customer journey is different than it would be for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. If you sell socks or clothing, for instance, you have to be a little more creative with the questions you ask yourself — like ‘What kinds of socks are you selling? What’s the purpose of these socks? Why are people buying these socks, and what are they using them for, and what else do they care about?‘”
For instance, let’s say you sell athletic socks. As Becker points out — “Well, then, what sports do they play? What other clothing do they wear when they wear socks, and is breathability a concern for them?”
“If that’s the case, suddenly you now have an entire topic around breathable fabrics for which you can create content for your customers.”
If your product isn’t as snazzy as “email marketing” or as Google-able as “skiing,” that’s okay. When your product is a little more one-dimensional, you’ll want to learn as much as you can about your customers and focus on the purpose of your product when creating a content market strategy and researching keywords.
Ultimately, your customers have other concerns, interests, and passions beyond your product or service. If you can tap into their related interests from a business standpoint, you’ll have hundreds of potential topics to explore.
How to Win at The New Zero-Click Game
For many marketers, the introduction of featured snippets, image carousels, and other new SERP features poses a problem, because these new features typically provide the user with an answer right on the SERPs page — so the user no longer needs to click on your website.
Becker admits, “Featured snippets are kind of like the lottery. There’s no real rhyme or reason why one publisher wins them over another, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take action that aligns with helping you win those bigger answer boxes at the top of the results page.”
Ultimately, Becker says that high-quality, succinct content always has a better chance at winning a featured snippet. Additionally, he says standard writing conventions, like including a summary at the beginning of your post and a conclusion at the end, can serve you well in SEO.
“High-quality content is also good SEO, and that idea gets lost sometimes,” he adds. “A lot of writers think they need to ‘SEO-optimize” their writing style, but if you’re a good writer, you’re already doing a lot of things right without realizing it.”
Along with high-quality content, it’s equally critical you lean into user experience, rather than trying to fight it.
Ultimately, zero-click search steals traffic from websites, but it’s still an opportunity to outrank your competitors.
As Becker notes, “Features like ‘How-to’ panels, ‘People Also Ask’ boxes, or ‘FAQ’ snippets below certain results … these features aren’t going away, and they can steal traffic from everyone on the SERP. So, it’s better that you optimize for them over your competitors. Even if some of them steal traffic from you, someone is going to get this real estate. You might as well be the one that gets it. You can still use these snippets to prove you’re a helpful, reliable brand through on-page SERP features, even without the click.”
Continue Growing Both Vertically and Horizontally
As a marketer whose role depends on a need to constantly publish high-quality content on a 10+-year-old blog, I often wonder, “Is there ever a point where companies have so much content that they’ve officially hit their ceiling, and all they can really do is update old posts?”
When I sat down with Becker, I thought it was as good a time as any to ask this question. Fortunately, it looks like there’s hope yet.
“You can almost always grow both vertically or horizontally,” he explained.
Vertical growth means more traffic using your current content channels and verticals. Horizontal growth would mean more traffic by expanding your audience, adding a new content campaign, and adding traffic through a new type of visitor.
Vertical Growth
“Vertically,” Becker said, “requires to you to be more creative with the ways in which you’re doing keyword research, or figure out if there are pieces of a story you haven’t finished telling yet, based on your topic clusters. Additionally, you can look at under-performing posts and decide if you want recycle the URL, re-optimize the content, or cut your losses and remove the URL from your domain — replacing it with content that better resonates with your readers.”
“‘People Also Ask’ boxes, featured snippets, and other emerging SERP features — yes, they’re seen as traffic stealers, but they’re also sources of data and opportunity. You can look at these SERPs, use certain tools to pile SERP data into a spreadsheet, compare the features you see to your current rankings, and look for gaps where you can try to be in places you’re not.”
To try the strategy he mentioned above, you might consider using STAT Search Analytics, a tool our SEO team uses at HubSpot, to pull reports you wouldn’t be able to with an average research tool and dive deeper into new areas of your content landscape.
Horizontal Growth
Of course, there’s also the option to grow horizontally, which means reevaluating the needs of your customers. Are there topics you haven’t talked about yet? Can you open a completely new bucket and explore new terrain to help your customers learn more about your industry as a whole?
However, while it’s critical you use data to drive most of your decisions around content, Becker surprisingly advises against leaning too heavily into your SEO strategy as an end-all-be-all approach to marketing.
First off, you never want to prop up your business on one channel. To ensure sustained growth even during natural search engine algorithm changes, it’s critical you diversify your channel portfolio.
Additionally, Becker mentions another critical reason you don’t want to rely solely on SEO — “You want to make sure your business is well-balanced and doesn’t become a copycat. Because SEO is becoming so advanced, everyone knows all the moves and all the players. This means there are redundancies in the information you get on any one SERP, so you need to have a competitive advantage.”
“That competitive advantage,” he adds, “can come in the form of thought leadership, and making big bets, like ‘Okay, there’s no search volume on this topic, but it’s something we want to take a stance on and it’s important to us, so let’s be willing to invest in something that doesn’t have an immediate attribution path to business.‘”
While the majority of HubSpot’s blog strategy revolves around SEO, and using traffic or ranking data to drive decisions, we still publish posts that can provide a unique perspective to our readers or involve topics that are at the forefront of the marketing industry but haven’t yet become high MSV players. This is still important.
This can demonstrate your brand’s ability to both supply content your readers are already searching for, as well as content they don’t yet know they need or want.
As Becker points out, “Just because SEO is a very high-intent traffic channel, doesn’t mean it’s the most important.”
A Final Word
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran in the SEO industry or brand-new to an SEO-role, it’s critical to note there’s always opportunity to explore and grow, and that ‘uncomfortable feeling’ of being in-over-your-head isn’t unusual.
In fact, despite Braden’s nearly two years fully immersed in SEO, he still admits to having a sense of discomfort around new SEO topics: “If something is not interesting to me right now in the SEO world, it’s because I don’t know enough about it. In my experience, the more I know about something, the more interesting it becomes. Not having control over a concept is an uncomfortable feeling, so it’s easy to say ‘That’s just not for me‘, but I’m at the point where I want to start charting new territory, even if it’s uncomfortable.”
For example, learning how to read, edit, and manipulate a website’s robots.txt file is a basic but often underused area of opportunity when looking for traffic growth.
“Things like a robots.txt file, or your blog’s sitemap — these are like your liaisons to Google’s index,” he told me. “You can tell Google what pages to allow or disallow in its index, make best use of your crawl budget, and ensure you’re not blocking pages that should be driving organic traffic for you. To me, that’s where technology meets creativity.”
Ultimately, one could argue SEO as a whole is where technology meets creativity — which is why there’s still plenty of space for you to use search engine algorithm changes in 2020 as an opportunity to explore new strategies and reach new audiences, rather than a hindrance in your way.
I was talking with my friend who works at Keap (formally known as Infusionsoft) and he was breaking down how people still make millions of dollars selling info products and ebooks.
Now, I don’t sell info products as heavily as I used to, but when I focused on it 100% of the time, my numbers were great.
Just look at the screenshot above. It’s my revenue on a bad
month of selling info products.
So today, I thought I would do something different.
Instead of just blogging about marketing tactics, I thought I would share my old business model with you and give you the exact emails, power points, and everything you need so that way you can replicate my results.
Are you ready?
Step #1: Figure out what you want to sell
Don’t worry about traffic. Instead, I want you to figure out what you want to sell.
Whatever it may be, it needs to solve a problem for people.
For example, I’ve sold marketing courses that teach people
how to get more traffic. This is a problem businesses have as they need traffic
in order to generate sales.
You can literally sell almost anything online, just make sure you are passionate about it and know that subject well.
If you want, you can just use my slides and modify them to
whatever product or service you are selling. You can download
my slides here.
I know looking at slides can be a bit confusing but watching
this video may also help as it breaks down the process.
Once you have created your PowerPoint, you’ll need to use a software like Webinar Jam to present to people who are potential customers (don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to get traffic in a bit).
What Webinar Jam does is make it easy for you to create a
Webinar that people can join and you can then sell them through it. That’s what
almost all of us do to sell info products… it works really well.
Step #4: Create emails and set up your CRM
Emails are key to generating income through info products.
And in order to succeed with email marketing when it comes to selling digital products, the right CRM will make all the difference in the world.
Without the right emails, you won’t do well. It’s really that simple.
There are 8 types of emails that you need to create:
Invite sequence – these are a series of emails that invite people to watch your webinar. (here are my invite emails)
Indoctrination – you need to build a connection with people. People are more likely to convert if they know more about you and trust you. (here are my indoctrination emails)
No shows – just because someone signs up to watch your webinar, it doesn’t mean they will attend. For everyone who doesn’t attend, you’ll want to email them and get them to watch the replay. (here are my no show emails)
Encore – not everyone will watch your whole webinar. If they don’t stick to the end they won’t see your offer. You’ll want a few emails that push the replay. (here are my encore emails)
Objection handler – there are a handful of reasons someone may not buy. You’ll want to answer each of those objections through email. (here are my objection handler emails)
Countdown sequence – you’ll want to close off your course. Letting people know that they only have a few days left to buy is a really effective way to generate sales. These emails will roughly make up 1/3 to half of your sales. (here are my countdown emails)
Last chance email – on the last day you’ll want to send a few emails letting people know it is about to close. (here are my last chance emails)
Free trial offer – the majority of people won’t buy from you. Offering the last chance free trial offer is a great way to roughly get 15% more sales. (here are my free trial emails)
I know that sounds like a lot of emails to create and it is, but don’t worry, just click the links above that contain the emails I used and just modify them for your product. 🙂
The key with the emails is to just not mail them out, but it’s to use automation. You can easily set that up with Keap.
The reason most of us marketers use Keap (aside from being a great and efficient tool) is because it connects with other tools that help us maximize our email revenue while also providing the most flexibility.
The flexibility you’ll gain by using Keap will help you make more money. Here’s what I mean:
PicSnippets – for you invite sequence emails you’ll want to use a customized image that has someone’s name in it. Just like how the image above has “Ben’s” name in it. And it dynamically changes to the person’s name.
Plus This – during the objection handler sequence I typically text everyone who watched the webinar with their “first name?”. Plus This automatically does this and what you’ll find is when you text someone their first name they will usually text back with “who is this?”. That’s when Plus This automatically responds with “Hey this is Neil Patel, I just wanted to thank you for watching my webinar. I wanted to follow up and see if you had any questions or if I can help answer anything for you.”. You’ll find that a lot of people will text back with questions, all you have to do is answer them and you’ll generate more sales.
Plus This – I know I mentioned Plus This above, but you will also need it for emails related to your countdown sequence, last chance emails, and free trial offer. You want to use a countdown timer within those emails. The time should adjust based on when you send each email off and the time zone the individual is in. Plus This does all of it for you automatically.
Collect payments – I also use Keap to collect payments. So, once I email someone, they can click a button and buy through pre-made payment pages that Keap provides you.
Step #5: Drive traffic
One of the key ingredients to making money through info products
is to have traffic.
And I know what you are thinking to… “Neil you did well because
you have a ton of traffic”.
Well, people like Sam Ovens and Grant Cardone don’t rank well on Google, yet they make 8 figures a year. They profitably sell info products through ads.
If you want to grow your traffic, go through the following
steps:
Run your URL through Ubersuggest. Click on the “site audit” report as it will show you what to fix in order to maximize your revenue.
You now have a handful of ways to generate sales. Facebook ads are probably the quickest way to generate sales and usually, for every dollar, you spend you should generate at least 2 dollars in revenue.
If you want a longer-term approach, consider SEO and content
marketing.
And a good mid-term approach is leveraging Instagram and
building a personal brand.
Or if you really want to see your numbers grow, consider
doing all of them. 😉
Conclusion
I know everything I broke down may seem overwhelming, but it
shouldn’t be. Just take one step at a time.
Plus there are a lot of tools that make your life easy and do most of the hard work. I pretty much mentioned them all above and you can get them to play nice by using Zapier, which can connect them easily if you aren’t able to figure it out.
And if you are wondering why I stopped focus most of my efforts on info products it isn’t because it was bad business.
It’s the opposite. It’s a good business… but to scale it to
millions a month in revenue is tough and you’ll find that your profit will
drastically drop.
In other words, your upside is limited and it’s not hard to
make a few million a year in profit, but anything above that gets really tough.
So, what are you going to do with the information above?
Are you going to try and sell info products?
Pinterest is such a key part of the buying journey for its users that over 90 percent of weekly active Pinners use Pinterest to make purchasing decisions.
Talk about buying power!
Not only are Pinterest users making purchase decisions on the platform, 83 percent say they are making purchases specifically based on the content they’ve seen from brands on Pinterest.
Pinterest is no longer simply a place to save ideas and build dream boards. Instead, Pinterest has turned into the world’s largest visual discovery platform.
And there are a lot of opportunities for brands.
We had a chance to chat with the team over at Pinterest about some of their best practices for brands looking to increase sales. We’re excited to share those lessons with you!
Here’s what we learned…
How people are using Pinterest
According to one survey, “47 percent of social media users saw Pinterest as the platform for discovering and shopping for products—more than three times higher than those who cited Facebook or Instagram.”
Pinterest might not immediately come to mind as a platform to invest in for many brands, but it should.
Pinterest lives in a unique space on the internet where users are discovering content related to themselves and their aspirations rather than focusing on others, and this has turned it into a powerful platform for users to make purchasing decisions and discover new brands and products.
Clearly, Pinterest is not one to be ignored when it comes to your marketing strategy. Here’s how you can use the platform to drive sales.
How to leverage Pinterest for sales: 5 tips from the Pinterest team
There are some really simple ways that you can start leveraging Pinterest to reach new audiences and optimize your pins and profile for sales. Some of these tips might be easy to implement immediately while others might play into later strategies, let’s dive in!
1. Brand your pins
A whopping 97 percent of top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, according to the Pinterest team. For brands, this presents an opportunity to stand out and gain brand recognition through the platform.
Pinterest recommends adding a small logo in one of the four corners of your pin, this can be done really easily in a tool like Canva. You can play around with the design, of course, and add your logo wherever it feels best. In this example from Quip, they went with top centered to fit with the rest of the text on their image.
2. Create mobile-first content
As with most sites, mobile is extremely important on Pinterest. Eighty-five percent of Pinners are using the mobile app, so it’s important that your content appeals to them while they’re on their phones and appears properly in their feeds. If you’re linking back to your own content, it’s also important that the page that you’re sending users to is mobile friendly as well.
A tip from Pinterest here is to tailor your font size to phone rendering to make sure your fonts are legible on small screens and to design for a vertical aspect ratio. The ideal dimensions are 600 pixels x 900 pixels.
3. Create a similar look and feel
Have you ever clicked on a beautiful image on Pinterest only to be taken to a website that looks nothing like the pin? I have, and it left me really confused.
According to Pinterest, the best practice is to make sure your pins and your website have a similar look and feel, and that doing this pays off. In an analysis from Pinterest, they found that “Pins that went to landing pages with similar imagery had a 13 percent higher online sales lift.”
This example from Ettitude is really great. The pin they are sharing fits seamlessly in a lot of home decor and design tags on Pinterest.
And although their website uses different photos, it still has a similar feel to the pin.
4. Time your campaigns
A big element to social media marketing and campaigns is timing. When are people online and when are people talking about the things you want to talk about?
Luckily in the case of Pinterest, they release annual ‘Seasonal Insights,’ which helps take away some of the guesswork. A report that contains more than a dozen specific moments that take place throughout the year.
For example, their 2019 report shared that users start sharing holiday content in June all the way through December and that content related to the Summer starts getting pinned at the beginning of February. They also have monthly trends reports. Here’s their latest for December 2019 trends on Pinterest, it shares specific trends like the search term ‘peach green tea’ is up 320 percent YoY!
These are great free resources that you can leverage to start timing seasonal campaigns around when people are starting to make specific seasonal purchasing decisions. I would never have thought that people start looking at holiday content in June but that’s super-specific information that can go a long way to help with timely campaigns.
5. Set up your shop
One of the main ways for Pinterest to help generate sales is for the products you are selling to be easily available through Pinterest. Luckily, the platform makes this really easy for brands to set up and feature prominently on their profiles.
The shop tab is just what it sounds like, a place where users can go to see all of the products your brand is selling. On the flip side, brands can leverage that tab to share pins that link directly to their sales pages for the specific product.
Pinterest makes this whole process quite easy, they even have a method for importing new products through Pinterest Catalogs. All you have to do is have your data source approved and then as you add new products to your website, they get automagically added to Pinterest as well.
We hope this guide helps you get started with or double down on your efforts with Pinterest. Let us know about your experience with Pinterest in the comments!
If you want even more Pinterest resources, the Pinterest team has created a free Pinterest Academy with tons of lessons in there.
Consider, for instance, what happens when I search for the term “Skiing”:
I’m immediately shown images of skiers, as well as top stories related to skiing, and even a local Google Maps panel with nearby ski mountains. I’m even shown videos of skiers before I finally reach the first article regarding the topic of “skiing”.
From a user perspective, this makes sense. Most people searching for “skiing” aren’t interested in reading a blog post about it — they’re interested in seeing it visually via YouTube, or finding nearby locations so they can ski themselves.
In 2020, search is going to continue to evolve in the direction of zero-click search. But that doesn’t mean your SEO strategy is futile. It just means you’ll need to get creative to rank on page one.
I sat down with Senior SEO Strategist Braden Becker to discuss his keyword research strategy, how you can use featured snippets to your benefit, and what he’s most excited to explore in the world of SEO in 2020 and beyond.
Keyword Research is All About Telling a Story
Let’s start with the basics.
Becker advises you start your keyword research with competitive analysis, which allows you to see what similar domains are ranking for that you’re not. SEO tools like SEMrush can help you do this.
“That’s where we start — constantly refining a list of competitors we want to keep an eye on, and whose content strategies we think are worth taking inspiration from,” Becker told me. “This is a good first step in keyword research, and you can explore related SEO opportunities from there.”
We won’t explore this concept too in-depth in this post, since we’ve covered it extensively before, including in our Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2019.
Additionally, Becker advises, “When you’re starting to create content, you should think about your opportunities in groups or clusters, not just one assignment at a time.”
“Not every keyword you find is just a single blog post. Instead, it’s the potential to create a larger marketing campaign that tells a story around that keyword. Then, you can use that keyword to find related queries you think the same visitor would want answers to.”
For instance, let’s say you find there’s high monthly search volume (MSV) on the long-tail keyword, “How to improve your open-rate.”
On the surface, it might seem like that only has the potential to be one blog post regarding “How to improve your open-rate.” But this misses the bigger picture you should be exploring.
As Braden told me, “Once you see ‘how to improve your open-rate’ is one long-tail keyword, you should be thinking, ‘Okay, maybe there’s a similar keyword with even more MSV, or maybe there’s another tangential topic we can cover, as well …’ and, as you explore, you might find tons of topics related to email marketing, and your marketing team might decide ’email marketing’ as a cluster of content is an avenue you want to explore.”
You Can Still Have a Strong Content Strategy if Your Product is One-Dimensional
So — that’s all well and good. But what if your product just isn’t that interesting to write about?
What if, for instance, you sell socks. There are only so many topics, and so many stories, you can tell about socks — right?
Braden sympathizes with this, but he has a solution in mind: “This problem is equal parts a B2C issue and a reality of e-commerce, where the customer journey is different than it would be for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. If you sell socks or clothing, for instance, you have to be a little more creative with the questions you ask yourself — like ‘What kinds of socks are you selling? What’s the purpose of these socks? Why are people buying these socks, and what are they using them for, and what else do they care about?‘”
For instance, let’s say you sell athletic socks. As Becker points out — “Well, then, what sports do they play? What other clothing do they wear when they wear socks, and is breathability a concern for them?”
“If that’s the case, suddenly you now have an entire topic around breathable fabrics for which you can create content for your customers.”
If your product isn’t as snazzy as “email marketing” or as Google-able as “skiing,” that’s okay. When your product is a little more one-dimensional, you’ll want to learn as much as you can about your customers and focus on the purpose of your product when creating a content market strategy and researching keywords.
Ultimately, your customers have other concerns, interests, and passions beyond your product or service. If you can tap into their related interests from a business standpoint, you’ll have hundreds of potential topics to explore.
How to Win at The New Zero-Click Game
For many marketers, the introduction of featured snippets, image carousels, and other new SERP features poses a problem, because these new features typically provide the user with an answer right on the SERPs page — so the user no longer needs to click on your website.
Becker admits, “Featured snippets are kind of like the lottery. There’s no real rhyme or reason why one publisher wins them over another, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take action that aligns with helping you win those bigger answer boxes at the top of the results page.”
Ultimately, Becker says that high-quality, succinct content always has a better chance at winning a featured snippet. Additionally, he says standard writing conventions, like including a summary at the beginning of your post and a conclusion at the end, can serve you well in SEO.
“High-quality content is also good SEO, and that idea gets lost sometimes,” he adds. “A lot of writers think they need to ‘SEO-optimize” their writing style, but if you’re a good writer, you’re already doing a lot of things right without realizing it.”
Along with high-quality content, it’s equally critical you lean into user experience, rather than trying to fight it.
Ultimately, zero-click search steals traffic from websites, but it’s still an opportunity to outrank your competitors.
As Becker notes, “Features like ‘How-to’ panels, ‘People Also Ask’ boxes, or ‘FAQ’ snippets below certain results … these features aren’t going away, and they can steal traffic from everyone on the SERP. So, it’s better that you optimize for them over your competitors. Even if some of them steal traffic from you, someone is going to get this real estate. You might as well be the one that gets it. You can still use these snippets to prove you’re a helpful, reliable brand through on-page SERP features, even without the click.”
Continue Growing Both Vertically and Horizontally
As a marketer whose role depends on a need to constantly publish high-quality content on a 10+-year-old blog, I often wonder, “Is there ever a point where companies have so much content that they’ve officially hit their ceiling, and all they can really do is update old posts?”
When I sat down with Becker, I thought it was as good a time as any to ask this question. Fortunately, it looks like there’s hope yet.
“You can almost always grow both vertically or horizontally,” he explained.
Vertical growth means more traffic using your current content channels and verticals. Horizontal growth would mean more traffic by expanding your audience, adding a new content campaign, and adding traffic through a new type of visitor.
Vertical Growth
“Vertically,” Becker said, “requires to you to be more creative with the ways in which you’re doing keyword research, or figure out if there are pieces of a story you haven’t finished telling yet, based on your topic clusters. Additionally, you can look at under-performing posts and decide if you want recycle the URL, re-optimize the content, or cut your losses and remove the URL from your domain — replacing it with content that better resonates with your readers.”
“‘People Also Ask’ boxes, featured snippets, and other emerging SERP features — yes, they’re seen as traffic stealers, but they’re also sources of data and opportunity. You can look at these SERPs, use certain tools to pile SERP data into a spreadsheet, compare the features you see to your current rankings, and look for gaps where you can try to be in places you’re not.”
To try the strategy he mentioned above, you might consider using STAT Search Analytics, a tool our SEO team uses at HubSpot, to pull reports you wouldn’t be able to with an average research tool and dive deeper into new areas of your content landscape.
Horizontal Growth
Of course, there’s also the option to grow horizontally, which means reevaluating the needs of your customers. Are there topics you haven’t talked about yet? Can you open a completely new bucket and explore new terrain to help your customers learn more about your industry as a whole?
However, while it’s critical you use data to drive most of your decisions around content, Becker surprisingly advises against leaning too heavily into your SEO strategy as an end-all-be-all approach to marketing.
First off, you never want to prop up your business on one channel. To ensure sustained growth even during natural search engine algorithm changes, it’s critical you diversify your channel portfolio.
Additionally, Becker mentions another critical reason you don’t want to rely solely on SEO — “You want to make sure your business is well-balanced and doesn’t become a copycat. Because SEO is becoming so advanced, everyone knows all the moves and all the players. This means there are redundancies in the information you get on any one SERP, so you need to have a competitive advantage.”
“That competitive advantage,” he adds, “can come in the form of thought leadership, and making big bets, like ‘Okay, there’s no search volume on this topic, but it’s something we want to take a stance on and it’s important to us, so let’s be willing to invest in something that doesn’t have an immediate attribution path to business.‘”
While the majority of HubSpot’s blog strategy revolves around SEO, and using traffic or ranking data to drive decisions, we still publish posts that can provide a unique perspective to our readers or involve topics that are at the forefront of the marketing industry but haven’t yet become high MSV players. This is still important.
This can demonstrate your brand’s ability to both supply content your readers are already searching for, as well as content they don’t yet know they need or want.
As Becker points out, “Just because SEO is a very high-intent traffic channel, doesn’t mean it’s the most important.”
A Final Word
Whether you’re a seasoned veteran in the SEO industry or brand-new to an SEO-role, it’s critical to note there’s always opportunity to explore and grow, and that ‘uncomfortable feeling’ of being in-over-your-head isn’t unusual.
In fact, despite Braden’s nearly two years fully immersed in SEO, he still admits to having a sense of discomfort around new SEO topics: “If something is not interesting to me right now in the SEO world, it’s because I don’t know enough about it. In my experience, the more I know about something, the more interesting it becomes. Not having control over a concept is an uncomfortable feeling, so it’s easy to say ‘That’s just not for me‘, but I’m at the point where I want to start charting new territory, even if it’s uncomfortable.”
For example, learning how to read, edit, and manipulate a website’s robots.txt file is a basic but often underused area of opportunity when looking for traffic growth.
“Things like a robots.txt file, or your blog’s sitemap — these are like your liaisons to Google’s index,” he told me. “You can tell Google what pages to allow or disallow in its index, make best use of your crawl budget, and ensure you’re not blocking pages that should be driving organic traffic for you. To me, that’s where technology meets creativity.”
Ultimately, one could argue SEO as a whole is where technology meets creativity — which is why there’s still plenty of space for you to use search engine algorithm changes in 2020 as an opportunity to explore new strategies and reach new audiences, rather than a hindrance in your way.
