How to Get to the Top of Google

Episode 966: How to Get to the Top of Google, with Tim Cameron-Kitchen

How to get to the top of Google? Learn the strategies from Tim Cameron-Kitchen on how to get to the top of Google.

How to get to the top of Google? This is what many business owners ask themselves when they want their website to be visible on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). If you’re also asking this question, then it’s perfect that you’re here because Tim will discuss with us his strategies on how to achieve this.

Tim Cameron-Kitchen is a Digital Marketing expert and Head Ninja at Exposure Ninja. Exposure Ninja works and consults with businesses in every imaginable market around the world, helping them to increase their website rankings, traffic, and profit. Tim has been working in Digital Marketing since 2005, setting up Exposure Ninja in 2012.

Tim’s five bestselling digital marketing books, online courses, seminars, and the Exposure Ninja podcast, teach tens of thousands of businesses each year. Tim is a regular speaker at the B2B Marketing Expo at London’s Excel and at private seminars and workshops.

When he’s not Ninja-ing, Tim’s trying to persuade his son Luca to come to the cricket with him, going to the gym with his wife, or fixing the destruction caused by three cat children, Ninja, Samurai, and Shinobi.

What you will learn from this episode on how to get to the top of Google:

• How to get to the top of Google with the help of SEO fundamentals from 2012
• Why the quality of your content is growing to be more important than ever before as Google’s algorithm has evolved over time
• Why posting content without a clear content strategy is the biggest mistake businesses are making in their SEO today
• How the three stages a person will go through when searching for content (curiosity, research, and intent) differ, and why it is important to target people at the right stage
• Why just a few posts will drive the majority of your blog traffic, and how creating a volume of posts is important for creating a few truly powerful posts
• Why having dedicated pages devoted to specific topics is more effective than catchall pages, and why long articles full of interesting content can be highly effective
• Why mapping out potential questions prospects would have about your business can help you determine what content to create to address those questions
• How consulting with your sales team can help you better understand what questions prospects are commonly asking and can give you guidance on your content
• Tim shares strategies for turning your content into more leads and potential customer conversions
• How creating content around trending topics within the news cycle can be a powerful way to be helpful to new audiences
• How to get to the of Google using the best SEO techniques from Tim

Resources:

• Tim’s bestselling book: How to Get to the Top of Google in 2020
• Website: https://exposureninja.com/
• YouTube: www.youtube.com/exposureninja
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/timcameronkitchen/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/exposure-ninja/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/ExposureNinja
• Twitter: @timninjakitchen
• Twitter: @ExposureNinja
• You can listen to this podcast on how to get to the top of Google using a secret SEO guide

Additional Resources:

• Sell With Authority book written by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library
• Connect with Stephen Woessner on LinkedIn

 

 

How to Get to the Top of Google: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success on how to get to the top of Google from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

 

Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interviewed today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and scaled their business. In fact, my team at Predictive ROI, well, we’ve been talking about it now for several months about how we continue to try to double down on our free resources section.

 

Really, we’ve turned it into a resource library on PredictiveROI.com. So you can download free practical and tactical guides for everything from how to build your own authority sales machine, everything from how to create your ideal client avatar, how to create a value ladder, a sales funnel, and how to make sure your content strategy aligns with the ten truths to what makes someone an authority within their niche.

 

Just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources. And as always, it’s all free and everything. Request. We will send it right to your inbox. Okay onward nation. If you ever wondered how you can get your website content to rank at the top of Google in 2020, then today’s encore interview with Tim Cameron-Kitchen is for you. Tim is going to share his opinion around what he and his team of experts at Exposure Ninjas consider to be the biggest mistakes.

 

Business owners just like you and me, are making online. Those mistakes are acting like real traffic constraints, and they’re keeping your business from moving onward to that next level. We’re going to talk about all of them, and some of them are. We’re going to dig deep into why you need to have a content strategy before you just go out and start creating and posting content.

 

You need to think strategically about the type of content that you’re going to be creating. And there are several layers that you’re going to hear Tim share with you that are awesome. We’re also going to walk through the typical sales funnel or the customer journey, and how you need to think strategically about the type of content your prospects are looking for and when, according to where they are at in their exploratory journey with you.

 

And we’re also going to dig into the best strategy for you to build high quality inbound links, those links from around the web that are pointing back to your website. We’re going to cover all of that and more on where are you ready? This is an awesome conversation. So without further ado, welcome back to Onward Nation, Tim.

 

Learn how to get to the top of Google using this secret SEO guide

 

How to Get to the Top of Google: Tim Cameron-Kitchen’s Introduction

 

Thanks, Stephen. Good to be back with you and the Onward Nation listeners. it’s great to have you back, my friend, and thank you for saying yes to the encore. And Onward Nation, as you heard in the introduction, that I just shared, you know, briefly ago, a few minutes ago, Tim has graciously said yes to also coming back to Onward on August 27th.

 

So Thursday, August 27th, he’s going to be teaching in SEO webinar how to become more findable. How to make sure that your content becomes more findable. But he’s also graciously and generously said that he will take us behind the curtain and share actual campaign data, which is a unique and rare opportunity, which is awesome. Just speaks to his teaching style, his generosity.

 

So be sure to register for that. It’s a great opportunity to not only learn directly from Tim about how to get to the top of Google, but then to also be able to ask him whatever your questions are. So that’s a predictive roi.com slash, Tim, and we’ll be sharing that registration link. you know, very frequently. So you can make sure to take advantage of that opportunity okay.

 

So Tim, there’s a litany of things that I want to ask you during this conversation before we dive into it though. Actually, because it’s been a couple years since we had a chance to do this, and you guys have continue to grow and scale and be super helpful to clients, prospects and audience. Take us behind the curtain and tell us what’s new and then we’ll dive in.

 

Yeah. Sounds good. So I think it was 2017 that we last spoke, our business has doubled since then. We’ve been very, very busy. And with regards to kind of what’s new, I suppose the interesting thing with SEO is that all of the new stuff isn’t actually that new. So for me, one of the things that’s most surprised me since I started my journey in SEO in 2012 is that actually, although there are kind of new flavors that come along every year, actually, the fundamental is haven’t changed at all.

 

And that’s the trend that we’ve continued seeing since we last spoke in 27. So, 2017, the basics, the things that we’ve been doing over the years. Actually, there’s very little difference in them in 2020 and going into 2021. Okay. So that is a really, really cool place to start. And the reason being is because I think we as business owners and as you and I were talking earlier, you know, we typically serve agency owners, coaches, consultants.

 

And there’s so much, in my opinion, hyperbole around. Everything’s constantly changing and the practices are constantly changing. If you’re not reinventing the stuff that you’re doing every several months and you’re going to get left behind. 

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Quality of the Content is Very Important

 

And in my particular view is, and maybe this is aligned with what you’re saying. But I’m asking you to do a litmus test here is that know the fundamentals of creating great, helpful content with depth and with clarity for your audience that matters.

 

It is always mattered, and it matters even more today. But as far as like, you know, black hat tactics, sure, Google has done a great job of sort of blocking those holes and that kind of stuff. But the way you serve up content really matters more for your human visitor. And if you do that consistently well, then maybe Google’s going to reward you for it.

 

But tell me, I mean, is that consistent with what you’re seeing? Or maybe that’s different. Yeah, absolutely. And I, I think as Google’s algorithms get more and more sophisticated, the things that we were saying even over as early as 2015, like quality content, that’s such an overused phrase. But actually what we’re seeing today is that the quality of the content is more important than ever.

 

Things like links still hold power, which to me, I’m kind of a little surprised that here we are in 2020 still talking about links. Because honestly, when I started in 2012, I thought, you know, this is something that looks like it has a pretty finite lifespan. But here we are still talking about links and still seeing them have an effect.

 

But the thing that, you know, the kind of core central piece that you just mentioned, content quality hasn’t changed. And actually Google’s better now understanding quality and rewarding as well. So that’s for me, the area that we can only see increasing over time. And it’s a very sensible area for business owners who are looking to invest in long term visibility to put their attention.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Don’t Panic if You Have Low Quality Links in the Past

 

And I know that we’re going to talk about links here in a few minutes, but maybe just kind of giving sort of a peek into that. So has anything changed with respect to like the quality or the measurement of the quality of the links? So like any link, like getting any sort of link or doing like a link farm campaign or some sort of like, you know, I’m going to go out and get a thousand links tomorrow, like, that’s changed, right?

 

So, like the emphasis on where the link is coming from that’s changed, right? Yeah, sure. So I think there’s a lot of misconception around this as well. We often get clients that are absolutely panicked because at some point previously they’ve done some low quality link work. They’ve been on a site like five or whatever. Five ask me to stop saying this, but they’ve been on the site like Fiverr and they’ve bought 10,000 backlinks for like $20 or something, and they’re terrified that they’re going to be penalized.

 

Google since like May 2018, I think it was much better ignoring that kind of trust. It’s not really looking to actively penalize you unless there’s evidence that you’re consistently doing this and it’s picked up by one of the spam team. But the data that we’ve seen and the experience that we’ve had is very difficult to get penalized for low quality links.

 

More likely they’re just ignored. So on the flip side of that, just getting links from anywhere that you possibly can doesn’t mean that they’re going to have impact because Google’s weighting those links much more differently than it used to back in, say, 2014, 2015, when it wasn’t sophisticated enough to be able to tell the quality and the relevance of each link.

 

So it just kind of weighted everything pretty evenly. And that’s why they had to bring in things like Penguin and Panda was now that much more savvy on that type of thing. Okay. That’s huge. And that’s a great golden nugget right there in on rotation. We’re going to loop back to the link topic.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Writing Good Quality Blogs

 

Tim and I are going to loop back to that because then it’s like, well okay, now that we know better how Google is evaluating the quality links because of what Tim just shared with you, then how do we get good quality links? Like how to get to the top of Google? And so we’ll talk about that in just a few minutes. So on rotation, in our pre-interview chat and also just in our conversations back and forth. As we were preparing for this encore, I asked him, it’s like, okay, you’re in the trenches every single day with your clients, thinking about how to help them improve their findability, how to get better with search, how to create the right content.

 

And we talked about a few really big, missed opportunities, money, training, mistakes, whatever you want to call those. And one of those is essentially posting content or creating content without a strategy at all. So, Tim, let’s slice that apart. So when you mentioned that as your first and foremost biggest money training mistake, tell us a little bit more about why not only did you mention it, but why you put it first.

 

Yeah, sure. We put it first because usually the strategy that gets our clients first is the increase in traffic. And most significant increase in traffic is a few really good quality blogs. So the question obviously, right now we know that a few good quality blogs can transform a traffic volume. Great. Let’s just go write a few good quality blogs.

 

In order to get that few good quality blogs, you’ve got to write a whole lot of good quality stuff to find out what’s going to win. Let’s just kind of go back a bit and think about how do most businesses approach their blogs. Usually there’s two diff. Well, there’s three different types of approach that businesses use on their blog.

 

First is to completely ignore it. You know, it’s this white that they know they should be doing. You know, it’s this kind of thing on their back, you know, dragging them down. I know it should be writing blogs. People have told me always, I need to be writing blogs. I just never have the time. The second approach is to treat it as a bit of a news broadcast thing.

 

So it’s like a soap box that they can talk about, you know, accreditations that they’ve won, stuff that’s going on in their industry, things that they care about and that type of thing. Usually those type of posts get very little readership, very little engagement. The business owner eventually gets tired of writing stuff that nobody reads, and then they forget about it.

 

The third approach is the one that we advocate, which is to use your blog to target questions that people are asking who are maybe earlier on in the funnel than ready to buy now. So they might not necessarily have commercial intent, although they might do, this kind of three phases of business. We can talk about this more in detail if you like. But you’ve got visitors that have curiosity about something, visitors that are in the research phase and then visitors that have intent to buy.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: The Early Stage Funnel

 

So the curiosity and the research visitors, these are the ones that should be best served by your blog. but very few businesses actually use that blog as a way of targeting these people. And then the intent visitors. These are the people that should be served by the service products and category pages on your website. So we can unpack that a little if you like.

 

But broadly, that is the approach that we’re talking about here. Okay, I love that. So let me, our audience knows I love to draw. Oh here we go. For just a second here. So when you’re talking about early stage funnel right. So the top of the funnel this is the type of content.

 

This is the type of using your words blog content. I know my handwriting is awful, but if we’re answering key questions, that’s going to give us a chance to not only rank well, but maybe even get into the featured snippet, right? Which is great for text, you know, based search results. But then also, voice search too, right?

 

Yeah, absolutely. So with this, if we imagine the curiosity, research and intent as like the levels in that funnel. So just to give an example, let’s say we’re talking about teeth whitening and you’re selling teeth whitening services or teeth whitening products or whatever. Someone who’s in the curiosity stage right at the top of the funnel, they might be watching American Idol and they see.

 

So we’re really white teeth and they’re like, right on their phone teeth whitening. So that is someone who is very, very early on in the funnel. Unlikely to see a featured snippet for something like that because it’s so broad. There’s so many possible intents behind that. Google doesn’t really know. Is that a research phrase? Is it a commercial phrase?

 

Doesn’t really know what sort of thing that person’s looking for. You might write a blog post for that because actually, you probably wouldn’t want to run ads for a phrase like that. It might be a little bit broad. As you start moving down the funnel though, people might start looking, you know. Once they’ve been in the curiosity phase, they might start thinking, okay, so there’s different solutions to solve my problem.

 

I could get teeth whitening strips. I could get a teeth whitening toothpaste. I could get a teeth whitening service. So at this point, they’re trying to kind of narrow down their options. And they might be searching for something like teeth whitening strips reviews or best teeth whitening strips. So these aren’t necessarily commercial intent phrases, although they could have commercial intent.

 

They’re more in the research phase, and this is prime featured snippet fodder, because if you can write a blog post that gives people, you know, teeth whitening strips, reviews or teeth whitening strips, the truth by dentists, you know, things like this. This is the sort of stuff that Google loves to show feature snippets and people absolutely love because it helps them get further down their research.

 

And then if you’ve got a really well-written piece that targets someone at the research phase, you can often push them into intent and actually get them to buy as a result from that even if they didn’t have that goal in mind when they started the search. So that is the real sweet spot that we’re talking about here for content strategy.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Understanding The Customer Journey Is Very Important

 

Okay. So just to emphasize this is the fact that none of that happens by happenstance even if you know how to get to the top of Google, right? Like somebody maybe get lucky with a particular blog post. Sure. But what you just mapped out there is awareness of not only the content that fits into the multiple stages of the funnel, but then also where the audience is at with respect to their customer path or journey or whatever you want to call it.

 

And you’re specifically asking, affecting content for all of those different stages up and down the funnel and the customer’s intent, like where they might be at in the journey. That does not happen by accident. You just gave us a great blueprint, but that was freaking smart. Yeah, you’re right. I mean, I’d love to take credit for it as the team here explosion into the that are much smarter than me.

 

But you’re right, it doesn’t happen by happenstance. And it also importantly is not something that a tool is going to give you. The question people ask is what tool is going to give me my blog topics? Well, there are great tools out there like Answer the Public and SEMrush, which can give you either ideas or they can give you data.

 

But really, what we’re talking about here is someone who understands the customer journey and understands the funnel that understanding is crucial to this content strategy. This isn’t something where you just put a dentist into a tool and pop out, come out of your blog topics. This is something where you’ve actually got to think about the buyer journey.

 

So, you know, we’ll ask clients and we’ll talk to sales teams to find out what questions people are asking during the sales process. We’ll back up things like, you know, we’ll use the tool like Answer the Public, which allows you to put in your teeth whitening phrase and they’ll show you all the questions around that. And then we can look in SEMrush to see how much people are spending for each of those different phrases, which will give us an indication of commercial intent so we can begin to map out where each of those phrases might sit in the funnel.

 

But really, this is something where you absolutely have to think about what is going on in this person’s head. This isn’t just like a data exercise. Yeah. And and it requires work, right? It requires the business owner and or their team to actually be smart and to be generous and to actually provide content that is helpful as opposed to, oh, I’m going to hire some AI service or whatever, that’s going to create all of my content.

 

Right? And and it sounds and oftentimes it sounds like, okay, did you get that from an AI service? Because it’s one it’s not very helpful. And two, doesn’t make you sound smart, right? Yeah. You’re so right people think of blogs is just this thing that you just pump content into. There’s this phrase like pumping out content as if it’s this big kind of fountain that you just stick a bucket under and out, it goes into your blog, and then it’s done it.

 

It’s really not like that. The other thing to say, though, is that just because that’s the process, it doesn’t mean every post you write is going to be a direct hit. We’ve noticed the thing across our clients where there’s this 8020 thing going on, where 20% of AI blogs will drive 80% of the results. It doesn’t matter how many blogs we’ve written for them, doesn’t matter how many blogs they’ve written previously.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Match Your Topic with Audience Interest

 

There’s always a few posts that drive the majority of the traffic. I’m thinking of one, legal client that we’ve got in this example, which works in a specific area in London. They specialize in a specific type of divorce and, world renowned experts in those areas in that area and very high net worth individuals. So the leads are very valuable for them.

 

They’ve been writing blogs and we’ve been writing blogs for them for years. And then we wrote a couple of pieces towards the tail end of 2018, which have just completely blown up and not just blown up their website traffic, but blown their lead volume as well. Because the great thing that we’re talking about here is posts that actually resonate with your audience at the point where they’re moving in to having commercial intent.

 

So if you match the topic with where the audience is at, and then you give them a call to action in the post, which makes sense based on where they’re at. You can drive a lot of leads through this method as well. So yeah, 1820 you’re not going to just because you understand the process. And you might have a great question that people have asked. Doesn’t mean every post that you write, it’s going to be a smash hit.

 

You’ve got to put in the effort and you’ve got a chunk of some volume as well. Yeah, I love that. I love that because it really speaks to the discipline to not only getting findability, getting a search. Because the discipline around being helpful if you know,if you’re truly trying to build your business and you know, the Google’s requirement is that you are helpful in your content there, you can’t circumvent that.

 

Just be helpful and actually share your smarts and Google will reward you for it. So let me go back to the curiosity research intent in my notes here, because I want to make sure that I have this dialed in correctly. So I think I heard you say with curiosity, and this is kind of the three sort of stages, if you will, of the journey.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Your Service Pages Should Do the Heavy Lifting

 

So if someone’s at curiosity and then if someone’s at research and someone’s at intent, at the curiosity research stage where you’ve really seen the type of content you’ve seen to be really helpful is then some really rock and awesome, deep, helpful blog content. Right? Yeah. That’s right. Well, blog content is just like an umbrella term that we use.

 

It can mean content on blog, news, article, knowledge base, that type of thing. But basically non-core website content. Okay, perfect. Thank you for that clarification. And then when somebody is at intent, this is where we’re going into really having services products. And then other sort of category pages I’m trying to write quickly and I’m not even spelling right.

 

But I think yeah, if I’m understanding correctly in the intent stage, that’s where we need to have have excellent services. Pages. We need to have good product information. We need to have the right categories and so forth. Am I tracking with you there? Absolutely. Yeah okay. Because when you went through that I was thinking about our pre-interview conversation.

 

And I’m just looking back to my notes here where you mentioned that like service C level content because that happens there too, right? Where they’re not going deep enough with services. They’re not explaining the full capabilities, features, advantages, benefits, whatever success stories for products of the categories is very vanilla. I mean that’s been that tends to be a problem.

 

Area two right. Huge problem. So this happens both for service companies and also for e-commerce businesses. I know that most of our audience here today are in the service companies, kind of bracket. So if we talk about just a very ballpark example. So let’s say that an accountant wants to increase the ranking of their site, what many accountants sites will look like is they’ll have a home page, they’ll have an about me page, they’ll have, you know, maybe a what we do page, blog contact, you know, that type of thing.

 

And this what we do page has to do almost all of the heavy lifting. It has to talk about the different accountancy services they offer. It has to talk about the different customers that they service and all that type of thing. And the trouble is, if I’m looking for a tax return accountant or I’m looking for a, you know, finance accountant or something like that, you might be competing with a whole bunch of sites that have a dedicated page about that topic.

 

So very different, difficult to outrank a site that has a dedicated page all about tax accountancy. Furthermore, if you’ve just got one page which is trying to rank for all of these loads and loads of different terms. So what we typically do in that situation is break them out into separate service pages, and then take exactly the approach we’ve just taken.

 

Think about increasing the amount of content on that page, and people freak out about this. They’re like, I don’t really want long pages on my site. Like, who’s going to read all of that text? What we’re not saying is that, you know, pages need to look like, you know, Wikipedia entries or anything like that. This is all about thinking who’s coming on to this page, what questions they need to have answered before they’re going to come up with me, and nobody’s going to convert and become a lead.

 

If they’ve read like two paragraphs of text, it’s just not going to happen. So there’s a process that people can go through to think about what needs to be included on that page in order for it to be good enough. And by the way, if it’s good enough, then it will be absolutely fine for SEO and for search and rank ability as well.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Think About the Questions Your Audience Might Have

 

And so what might be a couple of those things if people are freaking out about Wikipedia, I mean, what, like 500 to 1000 words, maybe somewhere around there it really depends on their service, like on their own site for, service like SEO. We might have a thousand. I think we’re just about to redo our site on the 1500 2000 words on some of these pages.

 

The people don’t turn off because it’s a long page. They turn off because it’s boring. So if you’ve got headings on that page and you allow people to skim through and find the stuff that’s most relevant for them, and if it’s not just like long unbroken paragraph copy, there are nice subheadings which are interesting and you’ve got it presented nicely, then that’s cool.

 

People are like, yeah, we don’t know. You know, we don’t know what we should be writing about or and that type of thing. Again, it just comes back to think about what questions your audience might have. Think about what objections they might have before doing business with you. There are so many questions that someone might have before they’re even willing to talk to you.

 

To think that someone’s going to convert after a couple of paragraphs of text is almost insulting to be honest. Fair point. Yeah. No point. Especially because in the certainly in the professional services realm, like what you just talked about with, you know, somebody who’s going to be a tax planner, it’s not an insignificant investment. No, it doesn’t. Your prospect or your client deserve some of your smarts so they can make a judgment about whether or not you’re the right expert for them.

 

Right? I mean, that’s a fair expectation. Yeah. For sure. If you think about like imagine your best salesperson going in to meet with a prospect, would they just have a pitch that’s two paragraphs long and say, are you ready to buy now? Absolutely not. So that person would need to ask on all of the questions that they might have.

 

They might need to tell you how the process works. They might need to tell you what people should expect. There’s a whole topic around the call to action. And if you’re going to say free consultation, like what that needs to look like? How do I know that this is a good thing for me? Who’s done it before? Like we would spend an entire page just selling a free call to action, because there are so many questions and concerns that people might have about that before they even become a client.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Get Output from Your Customers

 

So yeah, there’s so much that needs to be done. It’s exactly the same with e-commerce. You know, we see e-commerce sites where they’ve got one picture of a product’s crappy low resolution picture and are expecting to sell it with a paragraph of text. And you imagine someone going into a shop, they’re going to pick it up. They’re going to look at it from all angles.

 

They’re going to ask someone how it works, like that’s a much richer experience. Why do we think it’s going to be any easier just because it’s on the internet? It’s going to be harder, if anything. So yeah, this kind of theme of like put in the work I think is really, is a sensible approach to take online.

 

And isn’t it funny to where, you know, having a conversation with a business owner about this. Right. We need x number of pages. This sort of the recipe, this is the depth and all of that. And then the initial responses when they’re staring at the flashing cursor in the word document. Well, what in the world am I going to write however.

 

Right. But if a prospect, if their very best prospect, somebody who they’ve been courting for years and they would just dream about doing work with, you know, alongside that person’s team. If that person walked in the door or called or something, they’d have no problem sharing all the depth of expertise and everything and a very, very helpful conversation and probably turn that prospect into a sale.

 

And yet, yeah, when you think about, well, what am I going to write? It’s amazing to me how business owners in their teams forget about the amazing, awesome, wonderful, beautiful and incredible things that they do every single day when they’re staring at that flashing cursor. Yeah, you’re right, it’s never lack of knowledge. It’s never lack of knowledge. And the question often is, well, you know, a thousand pages or a thousand words for service page.

 

How are we going to write about that? Well, that’s probably ten questions that your prospects have. Each 100 words, thousand words. And it’s really easy and it doesn’t take very long. And yeah you probably actually end up once you get into it and you start mapping out all of the questions that people might have before doing business with you, before conversing with you.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Consult With Your Team

 

Actually, you’ll probably find yourself actually having to edit yourself down. Yeah. So yeah, fair point and onward. And if you’re thinking about like what Tim’s advice is right now and thinking, well, jeez, I’m going to struggle with that too. Okay. Interview somebody on your team and ask them the ten questions, you know. Ten questions that are most commonly asked by your best prospects.

 

I mean, this conversation that Tim and I are having right now, if we sent this out to get transcribed, I’d probably gonna be about 7 or 8000 words. And we can take these golden nuggets that Tim is so generously sharing with you right now. And we could probably create 7 or 8 blog posts around the smarts that he has sharing.

 

That’s done. So don’t make it more complicated than it has to be. You’ve got a lot of smart people on your team. Ask them questions, record it, transcribe it, turn it into something that is a little bit more polished than just conversational speak. You’ve got it right, Tim. Yeah, And sales team are great people to ask for this because sometimes as a business owner, we can become a bit detached from the front line service if we’re thinking about processes and training all day. Whereas the sales team, they’re fielding questions from actual customers all the time. So they’ll both help you, come up with the questions that people are asking.

 

And they’ll also have really well rehearsed answers in their heads as well. And they’ll be able to have tested those answers against prospects so they’ll know what is most compelling. So you might have trouble getting them to write it down because they’re salespeople. But, having a conversation and transcribing it can be a good way to go for sure.

 

A lot of intention and a lot of good quality information there in the sales teams. And so we’d love to get your take on this as well. And I want to go back to my notes here. Let me see if I can switch screens here real quick. Okay. Because we’re talking about to I don’t want to say different pieces of content.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Learn The Best Approach to Convert Your Visitors

 

It’s really just more about purposes. So we’ve got the blog. You broke that down. It could be blog, could be knowledge base, could be articles, a litany of kind of things fit under that. Maybe somebody thought leadership, right, like podcast episodes and so forth. And then we talked about services, products, categories. You just broke that down with excellence, which was awesome.

 

So do these. I don’t want to say if my question is like interconnect. What’s the role that those two play together? Are they linking back and forth? Like is there some sort of relationship between those two categories of content? Yeah, there absolutely is. What will often happen is people will start writing blog or knowledge base content, and they’ll start ranking and they’ll see the traffic spike.

 

But conversions don’t move because all they’re basically doing is just giving Google and giving visitors information without actually trying to make them do anything. So there’s a couple of different ways that you want to start monetizing that blog knowledge base, article content once it’s ranking. Obviously you want to be linking internally to the service or the product pages that you’re talking about.

 

If we go back to the teeth whitening example, let’s say that I write an article, let’s say I’m an e-commerce site. I sell teeth whitening kits and I might have like five best teeth whitening strip reviews. Then I’d be linking three to each product page from each of those in the article. The other thing that you might want to do, particularly for your service company, if you’re a coach or consultant, is that you just try to convert people right from the blog post.

 

There’s a couple of different ways that you can do this, depending on how far down the funnel they are. So let’s say that you’re well, let’s say that you’re, you know, a tax planning account. So for example, if you’re writing an article which is about a particular tax code or something like that, you can be fairly sure that someone is in the nitty gritty.

 

They’re actually going through that process now. They’re doing their taxes right now. So what you might want to do is have a call to action there, which is something like, find out how much you can save with your tax, you know. Take our free test, fill in this form, and, you know, we’ll be in touch for something like that.

 

So that could be a way of actually just slipping them straight into becoming a lead from the blog post. So they don’t even need to go to your service pages if it’s further up the funnel, such as, you know, ways to minimize tax. When running a small business, that’s someone who’s maybe not looking to do something right now.

 

So you might want to drive them to a lead capture author where there’s a guide or book or something like that which they can fill in. And then once you’ve got their email, then obviously you’re going to send them through to your service pages and give them other content, which is more commercial intent later on. I love this, this is just so awesome.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: The Best Way to Build Links

 

I know that we’re quickly running out of time so I want to make sure that we also loop back to the piece on links. And so when we think of like, great or when you think of great ways for someone to build links, what might those be? Yeah, there’s really two. Let me say there’s the three categories.

 

Okay. You’ve got links which you pick up because you’ve done something newsworthy. You’ve got links that you reach out for, and then you’ve got links that you just naturally acquire over time. So links that you just naturally acquire over time. By doing this sort of content strategy, we’ve talked about, you’re going to pick up stuff anyway. For example, when we write a post that gets featured in featured snippets and gets a lot of coverage and search, we’ll find that post starts getting picked up.

 

Because when someone’s writing about a topic, they’re usually, you know, they’re looking for sources and they’re looking for websites to link to. So that just kind of happens naturally. Links for being newsworthy is quite an interesting one because this can give you a lot of media coverage. So some stuff that will often do will be things like running surveys and studies for our clients, where we’re looking to get data around some sort of topic, where there’s been a bit of news coverage because what often happened in the news cycle is something will happen.

 

Let’s say, I mean coronavirus, fantastic example. Something will happen and publications will start to write about it, and then trends will start to emerge. And when they want to write about the trends, they need to refer to some kind of underlying data. So if you’re in a position where you can talk about coronavirus impacts on small businesses, for example. If you’re the accountant and let’s say that you can collect some data from your client base, or you can run some surveys on Google surveys, which tells you that, you know, small businesses are kicking back into life after coronavirus.

 

You can then put together a piece like, you know, an article, which is really well researched and all that type of stuff and has a good number of participants in it. And then when the news media want to talk about this topic, your piece can be referenced. So we’ve had some great successes for clients picking up on trending topics like this. Giving them the data, and then we can do a bit of outreach to them as well and say, hey, have you seen this survey that’s been done?

 

But also knowing that when those journalists write about these topics, they often want to reference actual data anyway rather than just talk about opinion. So you can pick up some links naturally there. 

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Reaching Out for A Link Opportunity

 

That is brilliant. And it actually just gave me a huge golden nugget for our team here. We just recently finished, a research study around the return on investment as it relates to thought leadership, which actually unintentionally syncs up so beautifully with some of the other data about how to get to the top of Google that’s out there with respect to trust and particularly the emphasis around trust as it relates to coronavirus and what audiences are looking for now, and trust, credibility and so forth.

 

And it just dovetails so nicely in how to be helpful to an audience during these challenging times, even though we didn’t necessarily design the study that way. It just happened to be one of the unintended outcomes. And so when you said that, I thought, Holy bananas, there’s an opportunity here for us to be able to share that in even different way. In potentially an even more helpful way.

 

So that was huge. My guess is Onward Nation business owners, you just really turn on a whole bunch of light bulbs when you share that scenario or several scenarios. Yeah. Well hopefully, I mean, so what you could do with that amazing study then is, what we normally do is put it on your blog first. So that’s the central place that everyone will go to to get it.

 

And then I’d look at sites like Inc Magazine and Business Insider and startups. Any publication that the target audience might be interested, you know, whether there’s a fit with the target audience. And I look for the names of the authors of pieces around that topic, and then I just reached out to them, because often you’ll be able to find them on Twitter.

 

They probably won’t have, you know, they won’t be getting huge numbers of DMs. These people aren’t like Fox anchors. They’re not going to be, you know, they’re not going to be blasted with that. So you can say, hey, we just put this together. I’d love to know what you think. You’re probably going to get a low success rate, but hey, I’d rather take a low success rate than no success, right?

 

And if they’re writing about something else, then they can reference it or, you know, whatever. They might write a piece specifically about it if it’s newsworthy enough. This is so very helpful. So Onward and, this is the type of stuff that we’re going to be. 

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: Final Advice from Tim

 

Actually, let me take that back. So we covered these opportunities during this encore. And then for Thursday, August 27th, again that’s PredictiveROI.com/Tim. Tim is coming back to go into full on teaching mode and taking us behind the curtain and showing us data from actual campaigns that he so generously offered to do that. So of course, I’m like, yes, please. That would be awesome. So thank you for that suggestion.

 

So this was obviously a great conversation with Tim and some wonderful golden nuggets on things that you can take and apply right away. And then please do come back for the August 27th webinar. So, Tim, I know that our time is running short. I know we covered a lot. Obviously, before we go, before we close out for this encore, any final advice that you want to share?

 

Anything you think we might have missed on how to get to the top of Google? And then please do tell Onward Nation the best way to connect with you. Anything you might have missed? I got one really cool tip. Another way of getting some good links for you. So if you’re on Twitter, then everyone’s on Twitter. So two hashtags that you want to follow. Hashtag journey request. Hashtag PR request. These are hashtags used by journalists. 

 

If you’re used to journalists inquiry services like we have response source in the UK, I think you got like go Connor and things like that. Journalists inquiry services where journalists would go out to if they need a star or they need an opinion for a piece that they’re writing rather than actually having to find people. They can just blast out to one of these inquiry services.

 

They’re using these less and less because they’re just going onto Twitter. So they’re searching for things like, hey, any entrepreneur is able to give me an opinion on Trump’s latest tweet, hashtag journey request or hashtag PR request. And if you’re quick, you can give an opinion. You can be featured in some super top tier publications. We’ve been in Forbes, we’ve been on Inc, we’ve been on loads of national newspaper sites.

 

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How to Get to the Top of Google: How to Connect with Tim

 

As a result of that really quick, really easy, really free. Oh, that is fantastic. Okay. thank you for that. That was another huge golden nugget. Okay. Best way to connect with you if you will. Best way to connect with me is actually seen it with Exposure Ninja. So if you just do Exposure Ninja, we put a lot of videos on our YouTube channel and we do a weekly Friday live YouTube where we just get people’s webinars up on the screen. We rip them to shreds, and everyone in the audience piles, and we give in ways that they can improve that conversion rate and also generate traffic.

 

So usually through organic search, PPC and social, we then build them a prioritized action plan that they can follow as well. So these are really popular. So you can go to youtube.com/exposureninja. And that’s probably the best way to find us. 

 

Awesome. Thank you for that. Okay. Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and relisten to Tim’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do. He gave you a litany of golden nuggets this morning that you can take and apply right away into your business. I highly encourage you to do it, because if you do, you will absolutely, without a doubt, accelerate your results in. Tim, thank you again for your generosity. A second time here on Onward Nation. Thank you again for accepting my invitation, to teach on Thursday, August 27th.

 

I am very, very much looking forward to that because I know that both of these put together are going to give our listeners the opportunity to move their business onward to that next level. Thank you so much, my friend. Thank you, Steve. And like you say, this is the kind of next level stuff.

 

I know that some people aren’t particularly theoretical and they like to actually see things in practice. So that’s what the webinar is going to be. I’m going to show you these things in action, but also what sort of results can be achieved because the frickin ridiculous we’re talking business is going from five figures to eight figures in on revenue using this stuff.

 

So I’ll show you all the stats and give you some kind of real life examples too. I think that I’ll make it seem a bit more real. 

 

This episode is complete, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

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