How SEO Works in Digital Marketing
Episode 1006: How SEO Works in Digital Marketing, with Stephen Woessner
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How SEO Works in Digital Marketing—Understand the role of SEO in unlocking success in digital marketing. Learn how SEO works in digital marketing.
How SEO works in digital marketing? For over 25 years, Stephen Woessner has been in the trenches working alongside and consulting with hundreds of clients — teaching them how to plant their flag of authority within the markets they serve, grow their audience, fill their sales pipeline with right-fit prospects, and ultimately — drive revenue.
Stephen founded Predictive ROI in 2009 and remains its CEO and owner. He’s the host of Onward Nation — a top-rated podcast with listeners in over 140 countries and over 1,000 episodes. His marketing insights have been featured in major media, and he’s the bestselling author of four books, including his latest entitled, “Sell with Authority.”
He believes we’re entering the era of the AUTHORITY. Brands that occupy the coveted “expert” status are afforded the highest level of confidence and trust from their customers, prospects, and other stakeholders because they have a depth of knowledge and point-of-view that can’t be denied or easily replicated.
Stephen’s practical and tactical training sessions help companies capitalize on the huge shift taking place in the market today. In our hyper-competitive market for awareness and attention — brands need to plant their flag of authority and then leverage this position to fill their sales pipeline with right-fit prospects while developing deeper relationships with existing customers.
Our purpose is to deliver predictable and measurable ROI by positioning our clients as THE AUTHORITY in their niches and then monetizing that position.
What you’ll learn in this episode is about how SEO works in digital marketing:
- Why your goal should be to use search engine optimization to go narrow
- Why Seth Godin had it right when he urged business owners to focus on the smallest viable audience
- How SEO works in Digital Marketing and why you should learn it
- How to find long-tail super-niche “Predictive Keywords” and why they deliver big results
- How to take a meaty piece of cornerstone content, slice it into 4ths, and then optimize each piece for search with long-tail, niche keywords
- How to build your email list by converting your website traffic with your screaming cool value exchange
- Why attribution of results matters and why it’s so easy to get attribution wrong inside your analytics
- How to apply a simple formula/process for attribution
- How to scale your content optimization strategy and efforts so that you’re always helpful to your audience
Resources:
- This is Marketing by Seth Godin
- Learn in-depth insights about how SEO works in digital marketing and how you can monetize your agency’s authority position
- Tim Cameron-Kitchen, CEO of Exposure Ninjas and Onward Nation Alum:
- Enhance your knowledge of how SEO works in digital marketing by tuning in to this podcast with Fernando Angulo, Head of Communications at SEMrush: How to Score a Featured Snippet in Google
- MOZ keyword suggestion tool
- SEMRush keyword suggestion tool
Additional Resources:
- Free Executive Leadership Summary report from Predictive ROI: https://predictiveroi.com/research
- Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
- Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
- Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Full Episode Transcript
Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.
Good morning, Onward Nation. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI. And, of course, your host for this episode, and it’s going to be just you and me. This is where you and I are going to walk along this path that I like to call it solocast. And so it’ll be a chance for us to dig deeper into a particular topic, slice that apart, and hopefully be able to share a number of examples with you that you can take and apply with your team. And so for today’s topic. So let’s take into search engine optimization, but hang on just one second.
This is not going to be one of those, super technical types of conversations. I’m actually going to tie this back into a conversation that I had with a guy in forbes.com a few years ago when they asked me the question of what are some of the things about search engine optimization, or actually let me reframe that. What does every business leader need to know about SEO? I think it was the exact question to my response to Forbes’ was a business owner’s need to care about the return on investment business owners need to care about the attribution, the result of that traffic. And it’s not about rankings.
In my opinion, it’s not about rankings and traffic sort of it is. I mean, those are the leading indicators that you’re doing your job well, but ultimately, it’s not about those. What it is about in my opinion is what that traffic does, or how those good lead to qualified traffic, the traffic that you want within your website, or coming to your website or consuming your content, and then ultimately what that traffic does and how it’s attributed back to the content, but more importantly, how it’s attributed to the results.
And that’s what we’re going to break down here. And that’s what we were going to talk about. I’ll share some tools, I’ll share some processes. I’m going to highlight and try to shine a bright light on some of the amazing, super awesome SEO experts who have been guests on Onward Nation in the past. And I’ll give you those episode numbers as well as the webinar replay a webinar that Tim Kameron Kitchen and I. So he is the founder, Tim, is the founder of Exposure Ninja based in the UK, and he and I taught a webinar in front of our audience a few months ago. And I want to give you that link so you can watch the recording a replay it because this amazing Tim is brilliant and super generous in sharing his experience.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Simplifying SEO for Growth and Scale
So let’s go high level first when we think about SEO, I think it’s really common for agency owners, business coaches, and strategic consultants, and that’s our world. You know, when we’re sitting down and talking with business owners, they’re typically in, in that category agency, owner, business coach, strategic consultant, typically with sales about a million to $5 million a year, and really looking for ways that they can grow and scale. OK. So that’s, that’s our tribe. Well, it’s really common in those conversations that the thought of, or the desire or the goal of, gosh, we just want more, we want more traffic.
and then, and then the conversation unfolds, or I guess kind of gets sliced and diced as we kind of peel the layers behind it in ultimately what’s somebody in or what somebody really wants is I want more leads. I want more conversations with, with right fit prospects. That’s really what I want. That’s really what is going to help me build and scale the business. And that’s awesome. And so the reality is that when Drew and I sat down to Drew McLellan, CEO of Agency Management Institute he and I sat down to write our book, Sell with Authority, we talked about how you don’t need a million downloads of your podcast.
You don’t need 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. You don’t need a million visitors to your website. What you need is the right fit audience. You need to grow your right-fit audience. And if you do grow your right fit audience, when they come to your website and get all that helpful content that you’re creating on a consistent basis, then your probability of success of having them step into your micro audience, because they download a thing or a checklist, or the ebook as something, we call this a screaming cool value exchanges, then you have the opportunity. And now it might be a dare, a decade to nurture them over time because they’ve stepped into your micro audience.
Okay. So a few years back, Seth Goden wrote in, in his brilliant book, this, His marketing, you, we talking about the smallest viable audience. So I just want to share that concept with you here, because again, it, it may sort of, well, well, I hope it does. Is there a radically shift, the poppy or the thinking of, I just need more and I’m going to go after keyword. So let’s tie this back to search engine optimization for a second. I’m going to go after keywords to have the most traffic opportunity, because I want to raise essentially the tide or a really, really high, because I want more traffic coming in to my website.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Focusing on Your Smallest Viable Audience
How SEO works in digital marketing? OK. So, Seth, I think brilliantly said that you need to focus on the smallest viable audience. This ties into all of his work about permission-based marketing and building your right tribe and even being super differentiated and distinctive in his book. Purple cow. I mean, he’s a brilliant author of 19 best-selling books, but when he talks about the smallest viable audience, super contrarian, and really different than what is the sort of the popular thinking of, I just need more. And if I could get more at-bats, eventually I’ll hit the right pitch and get the right pitch.
You will learn how SEO works in digital marketing and then I’ll be able to win that right client, but let’s not do that instead. Let’s be super laser-focused with building the smallest viable audience because your building the right audience. OK. So when we think about search engine optimization, that’s what we’re going to really drill into today in how you can use a strategy like search engine optimization. We’re not going to talk about this specific tactics or the best practices. We’re going to keep this conversation relatively high level. I’m going to give you some resources where you can dig deeper into other Onward Nation episodes. If you want to do a deeper dive into best practices, but here we’re going to elevate the conversation into the high level so that you can really dial this in and then give that to your team for execution.
How SEO works in digital marketing? Okay. So, let’s think about the first keywords, right? Because it really does start with keywords. So a few weeks ago, actually, I guess it was probably a few months ago. I had the opportunity to sit down in interview Nate Woodberry, who is a YouTube or expert in. And so when Nate and I sat down in episode, gosh, what was it? 1002, I believe we are talking about the law or the strategy of finding long-tail keywords. So he used as a tool called SEMrush, some pronounce it as SEM rush rush, and there is a tool called keyword magic.
And you can go in and look at questions like a really long-tailed question. People are asking as a relates to potentially your content your business or your area of expertise. So you can use this tool to get really long tail questions. and maybe the search search traffic is relatively low. There’s zero competition, or maybe there’s 10 or 20 searches a month in organically for that particular question, like an answer to that question. So part of Nate’s strategy is, well, let’s go record a video, around your answers to that question, brilliant. Let’s put it into YouTube and let’s do it every single day while at least five days a week for the next four months and really start to lift numbers of subscribers and traffic like brilliant.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: A Winning SEO Strategy
How SEO works in digital marketing — Well, when we’re thinking about content pages on your website, same strategy applies. So whether you using SEMrush or a tool like my boss, it doesn’t matter. You need to go into a database tool to make data based decisions and find keywords that are a fitting maybe to different ingredients that maybe that are fitting two different ingredients. The first is the keyword is used every single day. Right? So you know that there is a search volume around a particular keyword. OK. So let’s bet on sure things, right? So, the keyword is used every single day, then take that keyword, and again, it’s niche and as long as you can get it.
So there’s the reason why I didn’t name this episode. What does SEO or something like that? There is a lot of traffic around that, but it’s not relevant to what we’re talking about and that keyword doesn’t really match up with what you might be looking for. Right? So we didn’t go generic and broad. We are going deeper than that. The second thing is to take the keyword that you found to be a winner. Again, we’re betting on S sure. Things than take a keyword pasted into Google in and do your browser in a Google surrounded by quote. So a bit of a beginning quote and an end quote, and then search that’s called doing an exact match search. As long as that keyword has less than a million competing pages.
So when you search for a keyword within the quotes, Google will return the results that it feels our, the best aligned with that exact match keyword. Ah, and as long as it’s less than a million competing pages, yay, then that keyword is not very competitive. And here’s the deal. If you’re looking for super niche, long tail keywords that tie into your expertise, the likelihood of them being very competitive is really, really low. So here’s what you’re going to do is then following the advice of Nate and whether you’re doing this on YouTube or as we talk about later in action steps and attribution, how to nit all of this together regardless, but you are going to be creating content around those niche keywords.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Turning Cornerstones into Cobblestones
Now what you can also do, and what we will do with this episode is we’re going to be talking to yes, this is kind of a longer solo cast, but our teams going to be able to slice and dice it into like four or five, a smaller chunks, but still meat each chunk. So we call those chunks cobblestone. So this entire episode as a cornerstone and we are going to take it in, cut it into basically fourths or fifth. And then those either the fourth or fifth will be what we call cobblestones smaller pieces. And we can turn those into blog posts and videos and so forth. And I’ll get to that in just a minute, as we talked about attribution, but each one of the subtopics is a long-tail niche keywords, right?
So then that gives us the opportunity to be helpful. We take the bigger piece, cut it into smaller pieces. So the big piece, long tail niche, right, that still covers the big piece. Then we cut them into smaller cobblestones that also aligns with the ingredients of the long tail and niche. So again, the couple of tools that work really, really well. No, these are paid tools, an SEMrush or an awesome tool. So I’ve tested it. It’s fantastic. And then a Moz, M O Z is another one that we really, really love. So in, and I’ve actually tested them against one another and they provide very, very similar data.
So in my opinion, ah, as a practitioner, this was really more about the user interface, which one you feel more, most comfortable with. SEMrush has so many more, I shouldn’t say so many more but they do have a lot of a kind of sub-tools and kind of niche areas. So both are fantastic. I think SEMrush as a little bit more expensive than Mazda, if I remember correctly, a don’t quote me on that, or they’re both fantastic. So you’re not gonna go wrong with either won that you choose there. OK. So that is as long tail niche keywords, How we call those Predictive Keywords ’cause before we sit down to create a piece of content, we want to do some searching in these tools to see how we can be the most helpful and around which topics.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Navigating Best Practices for Success
And then we know that when we create that content and then decide to optimize it, we’re already in the ballpark, if you will, to get an app, because we’ve already strategically aligned keywords with content. Okay. Okay. So let’s, let’s take that piece a little bit deeper and think about some of the SEO best practices. I promise we’re not going to get into the weeds on the SEO best practices. Here’s what’s important though. A so back 2009, when I wrote my first book, which is entitled The Small Business Owners Handbook of Search Engine Optimization, this is also a great example of how long tail your cornerstone content can be.
How SEO works in digital marketing — So again, wrote that book 12 years ago, right back in 2009. And literally just got a message the other day from somebody on LinkedIn who said, gosh, loved your book. A big fan. That book was super, super helpful, which of course on the personal side warms my heart, but more so is the helpfulness of that content. And here’s the reality is that search engine optimization for as much as we liked to talk about Google change and its algorithm. And of course, it does and best practices change a little bit because here’s, here’s the deal is that many of the things that worked really, really well and sometimes as referred to white hat SEO, best practices that worked really well back in 2009, guess what?
They still work well today, now, are there some differences from 2009 that don’t are no longer applied today? Yes, of course. And lots of differences and tools and processes and that kind of stuff. But as far as some of the fundamental best practices that worked in 2009, they’re still intact today. So let me give you a couple of resources, actually three resources or resources that I would encourage you to review and study as you think about best practices. Essentially. Now we have the keyword or what do we do with it? Where do we place it inside the content? So let me give you a couple of references here.
So first have I already mentioned Tim Cameron Kitchen, the CEO and founder of Exposure Ninjas in the UK? So I interviewed him for our first interview on Onward Nation in episode 409. And then he was gracious enough to come back for an Encore, which was number 966. So I would highly encourage you to go back to those two episodes of Onward Nation and intake and apply with Tim’s recommendations super, super smart. And if you do what he suggests in those episodes, my guess is you’ll be ahead of 95% of your competition, right?
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Winning Position Zero on Google
How SEO works in digital marketing? By just doing those things. Okay. Then I would also suggest you go and listen to episode 964. And this is where I had an opportunity to interview Fernando and Gula from a SEMrush. and Fernando really broke down. Like if your goal is to become a featured snippet or to win a featured snippet ranking, which essentially episodes episode position zero in the Google search results, right? So like on on a traditional search results page, there’s one through 10 on the first page, the next page 11 through 20, well, several years ago Google created what they called the featured snippet and that really ties into audio search results.
How SEO works in digital marketing? So if somebody is using Google Assistant or whatever, and says, Hey, Google, and then searches for whatever the feature snippet is, the audio resolves this red back to the searcher. So really, really important position, but it’s not technically number one is actually positioned. Zero is what Google calls it. And we’ve all seen that, right? So like, if you have a sort of a popular question in, someone’s created content around it, it’s the US if you’re looking at it in your browser, it’s typically maybe a photo and then a description and then maybe like a bullet, a checklist or something like that. It’s more in-depth than the traditional kind of listing in the search results.
Okay. So, Fernando in episode 964 really broke that down about, like How to score a featured snippet, which was amazing, amazing. It’s all based on questions. And then how you answer the question and then where are you putting the keywords within the content in order to rank well and when a featured snippet that’s amazing. So, and then lastly, as far as the best practices, I would highly encourage you we’ll include this link in the show notes, but I would highly encourage you to study the webinar that Tim Kameron kitchen. And I taught them to think, I mentioned that earlier in the solar cast, but to study the webinar he and I taught in. The reason why this was so amazing is because before the webinar, when Tim and I were comparing notes and about what we were going to cover and so forth, he said, look, would it be okay with you?
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Understanding the Impact of Your Efforts
How SEO works in digital marketing? If I took your audience behind the curtain and showed the data of actual campaign results in case studies, I’m like, oh, my word, that would be awesome. And so that’s exactly what he did. So the link to the free replay, the recording a replay is in the show notes for this solo cast, I would highly encourage you because not only does he talks about results and measurement and all of that, but he talks about specifically how they achieved those results in full transparency. This is not some sort of sales pitch. So there’s not like a Tupperware, a party webinar where there is a pitch at the end. There is not that, that, that is not what this is. This is just Tim full-on in transparency, teaching sharing, and giving you the real scoop about what they did in order to accomplish the specific results that he’s highlighting.
Once you know wow SEO works in digital marketing, you’ll see why it’s amazing. OK. So that piece there, so that’s best practices. And if you have any questions about that, just drop me an email. It’s [email protected]. That’s my actual, inbox. And I replied or read a reply to every single email. So, please let me know if I can be helpful around the best practices piece. Okay. So next let’s talk about attribution. So attribution is where we, as business owners want to be able to take a look at our effort and be able to attribute it to the result outcome that we’re seeing or potentially not seen.
And so oftentimes, tho we try to, it’s been my experience that we try to rely too much on tools, dashboards, and so forth. And we have super high expectations of what an analytics platform or a dashboard or a software or a tool should or shouldn’t be able to do, should be able to do right. We want to have all of our data sources flowing into this one thing, and then that one thing to throw out this dashboard on the screen and that be everything. And there are no leaks and the data is a hundred percent precise.
And we know exactly without a shadow of a doubt that this is what happened or didn’t happen. And it, maybe that tool exists. And I haven’t seen it and that’s entirely possible, but it’s been my experience. And now doing this for a couple of decades, that there’s always a story in the data. There’s always a nuance. There’s always something there’s always an outlier in the data. There’s something in the data set that needs to be reviewed a little bit deeper or sliced apart or some math done. There’s some algebra that needs to be done on that thing or whatever. There’s a very common, just like in your financials when you’re reviewing your PNL for the last quarter.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Crafting Your Data Story
So the last month, the last year or whatever, there’s always a story in the data. Now, when I say story, I’m going to talk about excuses. I’m just talking about the there’s the interpretation of the data to really get the crux of a story, or exactly what happened. So I’m going to suggest a way to do attribution that yes is labor-intensive, but in my opinion, this will give you and your team the best data set and be able to evaluate success. Okay. So using a tool to evaluate rankings and positions does that matter?
Sure. This is a leading indicator, right? So as you’ll see this, a module, see this in SEMrush, you’ll see this in other tools, like as far as the number of rankings that went up in the number of rankings, we went down and you’ll see green arrows, the go up and green or red arrows, the point down, you’ll see the number of top 10 positions did that increase, decrease all of that. You go into Google Analytics and you’ll look okay, did our traffic this month exceed traffic last month, or for the first quarter, did our traffic and the first quarter exceed fourth-quarter or did the first quarter, or this year, out-perform the first quarter, last year? And Kim was like, in same period, 12 months ago.
How SEO works in digital marketing? Can we go in and look at organic is an organic bigger this month or this quarter and compare it? Yeah. So you can do all of those things. Those are interesting things. ’cause they are leading indicators for the ROI piece. So I’m going to suggest a way to get more precise attribution. Now you might be saying you have a Stephen shouldn’t I be building out conversion goals inside Google Analytics? Yes, absolutely. You should totally do that. Now I will say also that sometimes Google or Google Analytics, especially if you’re using the free version of Google Analytics, Google analytics is kind of leaky.
It’s great. It’s a wonderful tool, but it’s not a hundred percent, so it’s a little bit Leeky it’s and oftentimes it has an estimate or something. And the conversion goals. Is that a little bit tighter? Sure. But here, I want to suggest an attribution model. That is yes. A little bit more labor-intensive, but it’s more precise. Okay. And so, and so this, this is what I’m going to suggest here. If you want to do it in addition to, in order to do a comparison, instead of building out conversion goals in Google Analytics, or looking at some other sort of aggregate tool that tries to pull all of this stuff together, I’m going to suggest that you create individualized attribution.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Crafting Effective Attribution Channels
If you wanna call them funnels. And if you want me to call them, gosh, maybe that’s the best word, some sort of attribution channel or whatever word you want to describe is fine. So for example, this is what I suggest, let’s say that in your search, right? And looking for Predictive Keywords, you come up with a great keyword string, or do you think, okay, not only is this a proven keyword and it’s not very competitive yes. In totally lines up with our expertise, I can teach a thing around or around this topic. Awesome. So I suggest that you do teach a thing around that topic, right? Create a piece of cornerstone content around whatever that long tail keyword is.
Maybe it’s a long tail keyword, or maybe it’s a video on YouTube, or maybe write a really deep blog post, or maybe it’s how you write an article or maybe a record, a podcast episode, or a solo cast episode, whatever you’re creating a piece of cornerstone content or around that topic. Okay. So now that content goes into your website and then you optimize it for search. Great. So now the keywords that should be attractive into that page. Awesome. So you can get, of course, leading indicators, right? You can get a ranking for that keyword. Awesome. You can then see traffic related to that page or Google Analytics hides the keywords oftentimes, but you can see that kind of in search queries and where you’re kind of bouncing up in the search results, but you know, that you’re ranking well for it.
You can see traffic coming to the page and you can go into Google Analytics and see what sort of channel is bringing that traffic and, or the source medium. So we can get a little more specific there, so this is how you can really best determine if that Paige of content, his driving results for you to make sure you have on that page of content, you have a specific form for what we call the screaming cool value exchange. Right? So on that page, you should be giving away some sort of checklist or tip sheet or e-book or something related to that topic.
Okay. So somebody comes to those content pages. So we visited that page, loves what you were sharing. It’s like, oh my gosh, this is exactly the answer that I was looking for, a really smart and helpful insight. Oh, look, they have a checklist. They have a tip sheet and a free mini-course. They have whatever micro-content that you decided to create off of the cornerstone and then have a specific form on that page in order to get that thing. Now, here’s what’s really important. The form needs to be created with the code, or that form will be created for that page. And that page only.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Channel-Specific Tracking for Success
So, for example, let’s say that you use Keep or Infusionsoft which is what we use here as our CRM. And so then on that content page, if this was in our website, for example, we would then create a form specifically for that page and that page only in order to get the thing. So the mini-course or whatever, now it’s super important. Let’s say you have that mini-course available on other pages. It’s really important that when somebody fills out that form, they’re tagged in such a way that they’re tagged for the mini course or whatever the screaming call value exchanges for this are, they’re also tagged as coming from that particular page.
Explanation of how SEO works in digital marketing – Okay. So oftentimes, this is what happens business owners and their teams will look at the aggregate, how many, new subscribers or new emails we get into our lists, and look at overall, this overall growth. And that’s great. That’s awesome. Right? How much traffic came from paid and how many sales do we have? How much traffic came from paid to that particular landing page? And then what ends up happening is organic traffic is also going to that page, and pay traffic is also going to that page. And then they throw that page, the URL for that page, into social media too, so now you’ve got multiple, multiple channels of traffic pointing to the same page.
People are filling out the form and they’re getting a bunch of new opt-ins or they have no idea how that’s been or, or, or what channel to attribute that to yes. People like, if you’re listening to this right now, you might be saying, yeah, but Stephen, you could use UTM codes, and there are better ways to tag that. And yes, you absolutely can be okay, but it’s not, it’s not, full-proof there’s gonna be some leaks in. So it’s been our experience. The best way to do this is to make sure that you create channel-specific page forms and tagging. So at the end of the day, you can say this page attracted X amount of traffic, and X number of people from that channel of traffic converted into that form.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Slicing Cornerstone Content into Actionable Chunks
An X number of people were tagged. Then, we can put them in the right follow-up funnel because we know their source of origin without fail. OK. So there are some thoughts about attribution. Now again, the pushback might be a holy banana. Stephen, how are you kidding? Let’s say you have that page or content and you want to drive multiple traffic sources too. So Stephen or are you saying that we need an organic version of it? We need a Facebook version of it. We need a paid version of it. We were doing PPC and we were doing paid social. Maybe we were doing organic social or do we need individual versions of those pages?
Yeah. You do with individual forms and so forth with the right tagging. Right. Because that is going to keep the dataset nice, clean and neat. Now if you’re listening right now and you’re thinking that’s crazy, not uses to much labor, we have a much better tool than I would love to know about. Got it. Right. So if, if you have a tool that will do that super, precisely aggregate all of that stuff without any leaks, please do tell me about it because I want to feature that tool because I’ve not seen it yet. This is the best way to really slice a part, the attribution. OK. So I’ve probably beaten up attribution enough, but let’s move on to the piece that I had mentioned before about sort of cutting it into fourths or fifths a before.
So let’s hear again, say you step into create a piece of cornerstone content and let’s say that cornerstone content, overarching covers, maybe four or five. So pieces for example. So this particular episode we could take this content and slice it into a blog post. Maybe we can title the first blog post, which is the smallest viable audience. Awesome. We quote Seth, and Drew and I will pull in a quote from Sell with Authority. The book we wrote together then maybe I’ll record a video that I can put into the blog post.
Then, we’ll optimize that blog post for search and create a form. So our team will create a form on that page and say something like would you like the new business or a blueprint out of the Sell with Authority book. And then when somebody fills that out, they’ll be tagged as obviously requesting the new business blueprint and also get a tag for that page that they came from. OK. So that would be the first topic, the smallest viable audience. Then we might also cut this cornerstone episode into another chunk and maybe that chunk will be about finding the best long-tail or niche keywords like Predictive Keywords.
So that would be the next topic. We’d follow the same recipe blog we’d record a video embedded in the blog. To optimize that blog post we’d create a thing that goes the screaming cool, a value exchange for the blog post, a form tight to that screaming cool value exchange and also to the blog. So that particular blog is associated with it. So we know that if we get organic traffic, try to do, or decide to do PE a social, then we’d have two different versions of that blog post. Okay. And so then we are driving traffic to those different channel-specific pages.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Mastering the Art of Repurposing
Next is the attribution piece. So we can definitely carve out the conversation that we just had around attribution and make that a blog post write with a video in and so forth and then the right corresponding forum. And then lastly, two scale, our effort, which we haven’t talked about yet, we’re still going to do that before we close out this conversation. So we can take that piece of conversation around scale, and your effort. Then, we can create a blog, post, and make a video. I follow the same recipe for optimization in the form and then the screaming call value exchange. OK. So that’s how are you? You can take and slice and dice a bigger piece into smaller pieces and then still keep the attribution intact.
Okay. So now let’s take and talk about the scaling piece and how to scale this effort. That’s really about applying some mastery to the slicing and dicing we just covered. So, for example, let’s go to the high level again here. So we’re going to do that slicing and dicing, a recipe that I just shared with you. We are going to do that for this solo cast, but we can do that for any episode within the Onward Nation. Right? So if I’m sitting down interviewing a really amazing, a super smart guessed, we can take that episode and we cut that into we, those golden nuggets, those different section areas that we can then take, we can record a video or, or use the video that was recorded with the guests as the video, put that on YouTube, bring it into the blog, optimize it in a better form, create a checklist around that particular episode.
And now we’ve taken the episode and we’ve cut it into four or five blog posts for predictive roi.com. You can do the exact same thing on your website. So to do that then at scale, right? So one piece of cornerstone becomes four or five meaty cobblestones. And then obviously you’re doing that consistently on a weekly basis as you’re creating your cornerstones, you’re creating them all of these cobblestones. So essentially, what you’re doing is you’re scaling the footprint. You’re taking one topic, turn it into six, a five or six. And now you do that week after week. So instead of having 52 pieces of just the cornerstone, now you have 52 pieces plus the five cobblestones, the one along with at least each of those cornerstones.
And so now you have almost 300 pieces. Let’s see if I did that, right. Actually, yeah, about three, almost 300, and 250 to 300 pieces of content because you slice and dice that. So that’s the scalability of this process. So you do that year after year after year, and boy does the footprint of your website start to really get big in your particular niche and your smallest viable audience. Okay. So let’s think about some actual steps here. So let me just kind of come full circle here with the actual steps. So I would highly encourage you to go back to it, let me give you three episode numbers, episode 429, and then episode 966, and then 964.
All of those links will be in today’s show notes to make it super easy to find. Then I would highly suggest that you go out to Moz. So MoZ and or SEMrush, which is SEMrush SEMrush and start a free trial. I think both of them have like a seven-day free trial maybe 14 days, seven or a 14-day free trial, and then start to experiment with the tools. And then you’re going to see that maybe you’ll do free trials on both. The data is going to be very similar or the data sets going to be very similar. So it really comes down to my opinion, user interface, a few of them, how, or each of them has slightly different tools that they as far as like the sweet and breadth of tools.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Mastering Predictive Keywords
So, I do a paid subscription with whichever one you feel fits you best. I should also say in full transparency, we have no financial affiliation whatsoever with Moz or SEMrush, or we just think there are some tools. So that’s why we were suggesting them to you. So, just to be clear about that. So when you’re using the tools, your goal, so step number three, is to define your Predictive Keywords. Find the keywords that are used every single day. And then take that into Google, do an exact match search to make sure that they are not competitive. So as long as it’s a million or less, you’ll be fine. Lastly, I should say the next is a crate.
The content creates cornerstone content around the keywords that you find the right, the niche keywords, and the keywords that focus on the smallest viable audience create great cornerstone content. Remember cornerstone content means that it’s a big that this meeting that is helpful, that you’re teaching generously, that you’re sharing, you’re taking somebody’s behind the curtain, giving them the best to what you got and its so big and meaty that you can take it and slice it and dice it in smaller pieces. Just like we’re going to do with the solo cast, write them, we can take and slice it into a fourth or fifth. So that’s the true test have is a cornerstone content and as a consistent, right?
So are you consistently developing the depth of content as opposed to once a month that you’re doing that consistently every week, unless you’re doing something like an annual research study, which you can then it’s B because that is so mean to you can slice and dice that for probably a year or more, or maybe you’re writing a book every 18 months? Well, that’s a big immediate tu that you can slice and dice for a long period of time. But if you’re doing something episodic like a video series or a podcast or a blog or an article series or something like that, then it’s probably more on a weekly basis that type of cadence. Okay. So, next is to optimize that content.
So optimize the content and then pay special attention to the attribution to get that super precise and get your attribution correct. Now I should also go backward, and I want to make sure that I address one thing that I actually forgot to mention when we were talking about attribution because you might be thinking, wait a minute, Stephen, if I take this blog posts that I really want to optimize for search, and now all of a sudden I’ve created five or six different versions of that and they’re all the same. Isn’t that duplicative content? Yes. It would be duplicate duplicative content.
How SEO Works in Digital Marketing: Last Bit of Advice and Connect with Stephen
I struggled with a tongue twister there. So, if you’re going to like the theme or if you’re going to be driving content toward whatever that campaign is, should pages be exactly the same? No. Right. So I think the definition of duplicative content is if it’s 70%, the same Google will consider it to be a duplicate. And so you’re going to want to make some changes to it. And the reality is that a blog post, which is about 802, a thousand words of content if you’re optimizing that for search or you are going to drive paid traffic to exactly that, probably not. Right. Especially if you’re going to be treating that as like a landing page, this is focused on conversions and that kind of stuff.
So it’s probably not going to be duplicative when it’s all said and done. The point that I want you to to take out of this is, is making sure that you get the attribution right on something that is really designed for an organic search to make sure that the screaming cool value exchange is tied to the topic and to make sure that there’s a specific form on that page that is tagged correctly so that exactly the traffic and the opt-ins in the ROI downstream, it came from the organic efforts. OK. So I hope that clarification was helpful there. And then the last piece is to do this at scale and win, right? So this is the process.
This recipe, if you will, is going to give you the opportunity to win as you scale it over time. Also, make sure that you’re looking at a clean data set regarding your optimization efforts. Okay. I hope that you found all of that helpful. Suppose you have questions or concerns about it. Please email me at [email protected]. I read and reply, like I said, to every single email, and I look forward to getting yours and being as helpful as I can possibly be. The last thing that I want to say before we close out and say goodbye, it’s really big. A few weeks ago, we aired episode 1000 of Onward Nation.
And I started off that episode with a big, thank you. ’cause a thousand episodes don’t happen by accident. And it happens because of you. It happens because of all of our listeners and subscribers around the world. It happens because of all the emails, all of the feedback, all of the encouragement, all of the support, and also all of the mentorship, all of the highlighting of ways that we could get even better and how we can do a better job and how we could be even more helpful. All of that has been amazing. And also having the privilege to walk alongside really, really smart, incredibly generous guests for the last six years and to be able to work with an incredible team at Predictive ROI, to make all of this happen in to be able to have mentors, to wrap their arms around us on enough to say, I love you.
I’m here to help you. And to also give us the push and the hug ’cause and knowing which we needed. And when, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you so very much for making this last six years, this really incredible journey of giving us the opportunity to serve you, give us the opportunity to a thousand episodes. I mean, how amazing is that? And we’re grateful for it every single day. So I want to make sure that I said another. Thank you because it really means a lot to us. Thank you very much for being here today. We look forward to being back with you next week with another great interview with a super smart guest, then this is the time to double down, Onward With Gusto.
This episode is complete. So head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food. If you are, or your ambition, continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.
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