033 - Mastering SEO For Content Marketing: How To Make Your Content Google Friendly

Learn strategies to develop keyword-rich content that attracts your target audience. Seasoned search engine marketing consultant Eric Richmond joined me to discuss SEO strategies and the impact of  Google's recent "helpful content update."

Topics include

🔹Google's recent "Helpful Content System" and its implications  

🔹SEO strategies for website content and LinkedIn articles

🔹Finding the right keywords to attract your ideal clients

🔹How to use keywords in your content effectively

Download 25 Content Creation Ideas To Kickstart Your Social Media Posts  (Click Link Below)

🔷 Thank you for listening. I hope you found this episode insightful, educational, and inspiring. If you did, don't forget to hit that Follow to keep learning and growing with us.

*********************************************
🎦 Video is the fastest way to build that know, like, and trust factor with potential clients. If you're not creating video because you don't know how to begin, DOWNLOAD our new Social Media Video Quick Start Guide (It's Free) Click here to Download

⏬ Download 25 Content Ideas To Kickstart Your Social Media Posts (For People Who Don't Know What To Say (It's Free) Click here to Download

➡️ Need more? Check out the 200+ videos on my YouTube channel Click here for my YouTube channel

********************************************

For additional insights, follow Annette Richmond and Black Dog Marketing Strategies on social media.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annetterichmond/
LinkedIn Company Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/black-dog-marketing-strategies/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@blackdogmarketingstrategies
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@annetteadvises
...

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:45

Hi, I'm Annette Richmond. Welcome to Content Marketing School, where we will dive into content marketing strategy, specifically for coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs. Discover how effective content marketing can elevate your brand and grow your business. And if you enjoy the show, don't forget to hit that follow button. I'm Annette Richmond and this is Content Marketing School, and I'm so excited to be here today to talk about SEO. And you know I knew this wasn't important topic and I appreciate Eric coming on my show and spending some time to talk about it with us. And for inquiring minds who want to know, eric is my husband. So, yeah, not my brother, he is my husband. So, eric, for anyone who does not know who you are and what you do, please tell us a little bit about you.

Speaker 2: 1:43

Thanks, annette. I am a search engine marketing consultant, so, in a nutshell, my job is to help you, your business, rank higher on Google search results and Bing as well. That's the short answer.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Okay, Okay, so, okay. So, you know, I want to jump right into this and I want to start with something that you started talking to me about in the last couple of weeks, and it's Google's new I guess what's it called the helpful content system, which has plagued some websites. So can you tell us a little bit about that, Because you know there are coaches, consultants, business owners in the audience listening who likely all have websites. So can you talk to us a little bit about that to get us started?

Speaker 2: 2:41

Sure, Google applies a whole bunch of different updates to its core index over the course of the year, and the most recent one, and the one that's giving businesses fits all over the world, is called the helpful content update. It differs from some of the other updates that Google has pushed out in significant ways.

Speaker 2: 3:13

The usual update Google applies is for tweaking specific parts of the search algorithm to make them show better, more helpful results on the result page when you go there. The helpful content update is different in the sense that it doesn't change what your position is on the search result page. So it doesn't penalize you by moving you further down or reward you by moving you further up because of the content you've produced. What it does is it analyzes, using artificial intelligence. It analyzes all the pages on your website and if it determines that there are pages on your website that are not helpful and I'll define what that is in a minute it suppresses the number of times your website will be shown. So traditionally, if you did something bad, google would say you did a bad thing and you no longer have the number one position. You now are number 20 or 30. Now what they're saying is we don't think what you're producing is providing enough value to the people who are looking for it. So we're still going to show your your content, we're just not going to show it as often. You have the same position. You have the same, for the most part, the same click through ratio, but you have less opportunities to be shown, and this is. It's done with artificial intelligence.

Speaker 2: 5:12

As I said, it's been applied to website that is in Google's index. One of the things that's unique about this is that it's applied site-wide. Let's say you've got a website and you've got 100 pages of content on it. Normally, if there were five, six, 10 pages that Google found a problem with, they would provide some kind of a manual action against those pages. Specifically, the helpful content update says okay, we've looked at your website and your content is deemed to be not unique, not well-presented, not helpful to the user. We're going to suppress your entire website. It hits on websites pretty badly. Personally, I have a pet project that has lost about 90 percent of its traffic, but there are major websites, particularly the travel vertical, anything that provides lists of information. Some websites have been hit with 90, 95 percent losses in their traffic and it's forced businesses in some cases to completely redo their business models. It's a nightmare.

Speaker 1: 6:54

The lesson here is, when you are putting content on your website that you want to make sure that it is useful content. You want to have something that would be helpful to the reader. I imagine a certain amount of words, what? 500, 700, 800 words, something like that. Can you just give us briefly a couple of things that people should be aware of when putting content on their website?

Speaker 2: 7:23

I'll try. The key is still to do all of the things Google has been telling you to do for years Write thoughtful, unique, relevant content. Make sure it addresses the needs of the user. There's a little bit of science, a little bit of black box to that. I can't tell you that you should be writing 300 words, 500 words, 1,000 words, mainly because, for the most part, websites that have been hit with this update have not recovered yet, so nobody has been able to say, oh okay, I did A, b and C and that worked. It's very much still a work in progress, in fact. The buzz in the industry is that Google has received so much flack about this because it really has tanked some businesses that they are trying to find a way to mitigate this. It's almost as if they've turned the AI loose and it's out of control. It's just run amok.

Speaker 1: 8:36

Okay, so then, going forward, though, that's what I'm talking about. If someone is going to be working on that they haven't been hit by this so far they should make sure that the content that they do put on their website is helpful. If they're using AI, they're not just getting the content from AI and then posting it directly on their website that they are revising at least 20 percent of it, correct?

Speaker 2: 9:01

Again, I'm not sure that there's a percentage. The best thing to do here is, when you've written something, try to put yourself in the shoes of the person that you're targeting your content to. If you're writing something about a particular topic and it's informational content, put yourself in the shoes of the user and make sure that when you're coming and you're reading that from the user's perspective, that it answers whatever the question is that the user is likely to be asking.

Speaker 1: 9:39

Okay, I'm sorry Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 9:42

No, that's really about the best guidance you can give right now. If you can do that in 200 words, if you can provide a good, clean, well-written, thought-out response, then that's all you need. If it's going to take you 700 or 1,000 words to do it, then that's what you should do. But just make sure that whatever you're writing is really going to address those needs. As long as you can reread that to yourself and say, yeah, this is helpful, you're in the right place.

Speaker 1: 10:17

Okay, all right. Well, that makes perfect sense. One of the things that, since we're talking about content creation primarily on this show, I do want to talk about SEO for LinkedIn articles. One of the reasons behind that is the fact that articles on LinkedIn are indexed by Google. If you have something that's performing well, you have a good shot to have that article Maybe. I have a colleague of mine who says they get a lot of their business from an article that they created on LinkedIn, but it comes up very high in SEO on Google, so it's been a big draw for them. I also want to just mention that I found, reading the recent Algorithm Insights report, that articles that are integrated into newsletters get four times the boost. So I just want to mention that. But talk a little bit about SEO for articles. When it comes to putting an article together on LinkedIn, can you give us some strategies to write something that will be indexed, preferably higher, in Google?

Speaker 2: 11:38

Sure Top line. Think of the content that you put on LinkedIn the same way you would think of it when it goes on your website. Make sure the headline accurately conveys what the subject is going to be. Then, as you write your article, make sure that you use subheadings to separate out different pieces of the article, different sections. The subheadings help users and search engines understand how those sections all fit together for the overall topic. It's important to use keywords queries in your article the same way it would be on your website. Be careful not to overuse phrases. If it looks like your keyword stuffing to a search engine, they're not going to be too happy about it. Use the same thinking that you would for your website for your LinkedIn article. The only thing I would suggest that's slightly different is don't make what you put on your website or what you put on your LinkedIn profile exactly the same as what's on your website.

Speaker 1: 13:01

Okay.

Speaker 2: 13:02

Because you may run into duplicate content issues. Make it a little bit different. If you're going to include links in your article On your website, you're going to want to link to where you've got sources from, information from. That helps provide authority and lets the search engine know that you've done your research when you've created your content. I don't know that that is critical on LinkedIn. Part of the reason for that is LinkedIn has just got such a mass as a domain. Linkedin has a very high authority, so content that's on there, all things being equal, will probably outrank the content you put on your own website, even if it's the same article.

Speaker 1: 13:54

So would you recommend putting it on your website and then post it to Google, because that's a lot of content creators that I know do that. They create a blog and they put it on their website and then, after you know, they then use it as a LinkedIn article. So would you recommend doing that?

Speaker 2: 14:15

Yeah, the once an article gets into the index, which in most cases will happen within 24 hours and usually much, much faster than that that's considered to be the source of record, and then any place else it appears is considered to be secondary, tertiary. That's one of the reasons I say make it slightly different when you put it on LinkedIn, because you don't want it to be 100% the same. But yeah, if you publish it on your personal blog or your personal website or your business website before you put it on LinkedIn, even if it's by a couple of days, you should do better for your website.

Speaker 1: 14:59

Okay, I apologize for some of the glitches. As I'm looking at this, I'm seeing some of this stuff going in and out a couple of times. Eric, you know you popped out and I was just me and then, so I don't know what's going on, but technology is always fabulous. You know when it's working. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1: 15:17

So, you know, one of the things that I hear a lot about, you know often from you, is the idea that keywords are important, and you know and, as you mentioned, you don't want to be keyword stuffing. I mean, that goes for a lot of things in your you know people's in your LinkedIn profile and any kind of content that you're creating. You don't want to be keyword stuffing, but you do want to use them. Can you talk a little bit about two things One, how to use them sort of strategically within the content and we'll just keep on the LinkedIn article. So if you're putting in an article which I guess it would work for LinkedIn article or also for your website, how do you use them strategically within the content? And also, how do we find them? How do we know what to look for? You know, when it comes to the keywords, and where do we find them?

Speaker 2: 16:16

So there are probably two different ways you can approach this. Okay, depending on where you are in your content creation process. Let's say you've got a particular topic that you want to write about. If you're unsure exactly how you want to focus it, you can always go to Google, put your seed keyword into the search box and then see what shows up in Google Instant Search, which are the 10 listings that show up when you go on the Google page and you put a word in, and you can try using one of those. Those are the top 10 most requested variations on your seed term as of that moment in time. That's why it's called Google Instant Search.

Speaker 1: 17:07

Okay, so what's your seed word? What's the seed word? It's well, let's use, use, use me as an example. So what would be my seed word if I'm talking about content marketing? What would be my seed word that I would maybe want to put into Google, or what might be a few of them?

Speaker 2: 17:30

So you put in content marketing Okay, that's your seed term, that's the overall topic that you want to write about. Okay, now there's different facets of content marketing. Right, there's maybe content marketing research or content marketing for sales professionals, or video or different types of formats, okay.

Speaker 2: 17:51

So once you put your seed term in, you'll get a whole bunch of other permutations of it that are based on what people are looking for right now, and that all happens with Google Instant Search. You can also use a tool like Answer the Public, and there are a number of different variations on that. I particularly like that tool because it's been around the longest and I think it has the biggest database. If you put a seed term in Answer the Public, you'll get back anywares from a half a dozen to several hundred possible topics that you can use, and they'll be ranked in degree based on degree of difficulty and competitiveness. That's a good place to start.

Speaker 2: 18:44

The other way to do it is, let's say, you've already written something. You have your article written, but you want to know kind of how to optimize it. You can take that and pop it into ChatGPT or another AI engine and ask the AI engine to say give me the essential theme of this article. Okay, it will likely spit out one, maybe two different high-level this is what you've written about, this is. And then you can take those terms and see okay, how often have I used them in my article? Build your title around that, see whether you've used them in your headings, in your opening paragraph, if you've scattered them four or five times within the body of the work.

Speaker 1: 19:46

Okay, so that seems to be the key, like four or five times not. You don't want to keep using them. Sometimes people think more is better, but it sounds like much more is not better. No, not at all. Okay, so once we're we have our article and we're putting the keywords in and talking about the title, Do you have any suggestions, because I know there are a variety of different ways that you can get different titles. Do you have any suggestions for putting that together or am I just like off base with that?

Speaker 2: 20:26

No, not at all. I like using chat GPT for that. Okay, so I will take my art, and with version 3.5, you have to paste the entire article in. With version 4, you can just give it a link, which I do sometimes for my clients. I will put in a URL and I'll say please analyze this URL and give me three or four sample SEO titles and sample meta descriptions for the article, and it will happily chug away and spit that out for me, and then I can tailor those if I don't think they're quite right.

Speaker 1: 21:11

Okay, so I just want to let you know out in the audience. If you do put questions in the comments, we will be able to see them here in the studio, and I know we started late and I had a couple of comments people saying are you there? Are you there? But we are here now. So if you want to do that, so also most of the people. We both use chat GPT. Most of the people that I know use chat GPT or some type of AI. But what about for people who are not using AI? What do they do?

Speaker 2: 21:44

Old school. Read the article and say again you have to know what your topic is and you have to understand the. You have to write it for a particular user's intent. So intent is either informational, navigational or transactional, if the I'm sorry.

Speaker 1: 22:12

What was that again? What were those three words and why are they relevant? Because I for anyone who doesn't understand, because, you know, I'm not an SEO guru, so I want to make sure that other people who are not will understand what you're talking about.

Speaker 2: 22:25

Okay, so when you write a piece of content, it won't get shown on the search engines any of them. If it doesn't, if it's not presumed to address the user's intent when they type in a query. So, for example, this is a big one. Someone goes to the search engine and types in Amazon. That's a one word query and Google is not going to know whether you're searching for information about Amazoncom or the Amazon River or the Amazon Rainforest, or really tall comic book heroes, female comic book heroes, so it's going to present you with a variety of information. If you type in Amazon Rainforest, it's much more specific, but it still doesn't know whether you're trying to find out how you can book a trip to the Amazon Rainforest or whether you're interested in the geology and the vegetation of the Amazon Rainforest.

Speaker 2: 23:50

One might be. Well, if you're looking for a trip, you might be in the information gathering stage, or you might be in the stage where you're looking to buy a ticket. So one would be an informational query, one would be a transactional query. If, on the other hand, you were looking for Amazon, the retailer, that would likely be a commercial query, okay. Or it could be navigational, because you're trying to navigate to that website. The point is that every search that's done has some kind of intense behind it that falls into one of those three or four buckets and if the content that you're writing, if you're writing informational content and somebody's looking to buy a plane ticket to the Amazon, they're not going to show your page.

Speaker 1: 24:47

Oh, okay, so that's how it selects what it Google selects what they show.

Speaker 2: 24:51

Right. It's based on Google's understanding of the intent behind the user's query and matching that up with the content that you've written. So when you're crafting your titles, you have to be cognizant of the user that you're trying to target and what the likely intent of their search is. If you write an article and it lists the top 10 strategies for content creation, that's going to be an informational query. It won't show up if somebody's looking for information on tools to help them create content.

Speaker 1: 25:37

Okay, okay. Well, that makes sense and that's very helpful. So I always like to. The time has just flown by, as it always does, and I always like to ask my guests at the end of the show is we're getting towards the end? If there's something that they'd like to share? I mean, we've covered a few different topics that I thought might be most helpful, but what would you like to share? Something maybe that I haven't asked you, that you think is important for people to use? And as you're sharing that, I'm going to just bring up your LinkedIn profile.

Speaker 2: 26:12

Okay, I guess one of the things that I'd like to share is and this is going to be more relevant to somebody who's got a website but if you're writing your content for both the website and for LinkedIn, it'll still be useful. If you don't have Google search console or Bing Webmaster Tools set up for your website, you should do that. It's not required. There's nothing that says you must do this if you're creating a website, but having that will give you a lot of insight on how people are finding your content. You look like you're going to say something.

Speaker 1: 27:07

No, I was just going to say and those are both free, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, so that's important too, for people to know that there's something that you can download and it's free. So that's always a bonus, because I know a lot of consultants, entrepreneurs, we're on our little budgets and so it's always good to know. So, before I ask you to finish up that thought are you open to connecting with people on LinkedIn? This is LinkedIn, this is Eric's LinkedIn profile, and are you open to connecting with people? Oh, yes, of course. Okay, all right. So again, so, when it comes to setting up and hopefully people will take that down and if they do not already have one or the other set up on their website, because there are also analytics for LinkedIn, but that's like a whole other thing. So how often should people check their analytics and what should they be kind of looking for?

Speaker 2: 28:11

So let me break that down for a quick, for a hot second. Okay, so the analytics programs whether they're on LinkedIn or maybe not so much LinkedIn, but certainly for a website analytics programs analyze what happens after somebody lands on your website. They cannot tell you how that person got there, other than saying they came from a search engine, they came from a social post, or they came from LinkedIn or referral. Something like Google search console and Bing webmaster tools will tell you how they found you on search and, in the process of telling you that they came from there, they will tell you what keywords were used to get your content to show up on the result page. Yeah, okay, so those show you what happens before somebody hits your website and the analytics show you how they behaved after they got to your website.

Speaker 2: 29:13

That's why it's important.

Speaker 1: 29:15

And so I would imagine that not only, it can also let you know, if you are using keywords, that people are finding you for things that you're not looking for Exactly. For example, if somebody's coming to my website and they're looking for I don't know, I can't think of something, but they're coming for something that's not something that I offer. I want to make sure that I am not bringing in people who are not. I'm not going to help them and they're not my clients.

Speaker 2: 29:45

Right, somebody could come to your website looking for how to adopt Black Labs because of the name of the company. That's true, okay, okay, and that would not be helpful and, quite honestly, that kind of thing actually hurts you.

Speaker 1: 30:01

Okay, so I don't want to be talking too much about that, right? Okay, I want to thank everyone for joining us, and everyone who's joined us now is listening, watching the replay or catching this on my podcast. Any final words before we say goodbye?

Speaker 2: 30:21

No, Okay, I've talked enough.

Speaker 1: 30:26

Okay, okay Well, thank you everyone for being here. Have a great rest of your day and I will see you back here next week. Thanks for tuning into the content marketing show with me, annette Richmond. If today's insights have inspired and resonated with you, please share this episode and, if you haven't already, hit the follow button to keep learning and growing with us.