 Before we start, are there non Bulgarian speakers? That's not Bulgarian. Okay, so we're going to stick to English. Can you read it? Dark screen. Excuse the technical difficulties. Okay. Where do we stand? To clarify, there was a lot of juggling for the numbers because then now we don't know our own numbers in terms of traffic. So, this is the number per year. Yeah, this is the number per year. It's the total from all the blogs we run. Okay, let's get to it. Square on the top is the head of the blog. It coordinates everything that happens. And I do a lot of content in all of the off-site optimization. We work for a company called... Plastic Services. We are based in Varna. How many of you are from Varna? How many of you have heard about Plastic Services? Okay, interesting. We thought we were one of the biggest companies in Varna that nobody has heard of because all the people don't actually know about Plastic Services. Actually, this year is going to be our 10th year. We recently are very branded. What we do is we actually operate on three different markets. We have people in the UK, in the US and in Australia. And what we do is home improvement, domestic and commercial services for UK households. Actually, we have other websites in our brand family. We have a website for cleaning, for hand events stuff, like bears, electrician spawners, and all that jazz with home repairs. We've got fantastic gardeners, everything about gardening, both domestic and commercial. Of course, pest control and removals. Actually, our team leader for removals is our there, Sampras and Gryff. And our leader... Actually, we do have two more blogs. That are our business-to-business acquisition websites. We're going to talk about them later on. All those services, they have to be performed by people. These are our franchise partners. So each of them is specialized in different services. And our job is to actually do all the marketing stuff. And we also have a big sales team in Varna. So we are kind of handling all the operations. It proved to work pretty good. Alright, but why are we really here? We want to talk to you about our blogs. And because this is a WordPress event, we wanted to share with you a successful blog story. And maybe just inspire a little bit along the way. So what happened in the beginning? Actually, we started around five years ago. And we didn't actually have any idea what to do with WordPress stuff. Or many posting from Google plus or stuff like that. It was really... In the beginning, we really had no idea what to do. We had zero idea of keyword research and optimization. We just posted random content. And if something worked, we were happy about it. There was no strategy, bad linear resources invested. Contrary to now. Now, we actually dig deep into a lot of things in the digital marketing, in the search world. We are deep in semantics, in natural language processing, in keyword research. So all those topics in between as well. Yes, that's it. Ranging from page level to the entire architecture of the blog. Alright, so we are going to take a second story of timeline. In the beginning, as we told you, the brand websites that you already saw from the different services, they didn't even have a blog. So we decided to install. We built them. But as we told you, so there was a problem with so many different things that we were trying at the beginning. Actually, the blogging part was something we did as a side gig. And we were mainly focused at the money pages and actually leads. Yeah, the service pages. That kind of stuff. But gradually we got the brand site, so we had to start doing something on those sites. Okay, let's get a blog. We got a blog here and there, gradually again step by step because honestly nobody in the company believed in blogs. Yeah, but the issue was that when we were doing the blogs in the beginning, we didn't have the main strategy where we were going to get the traffic from. So we were trying to actually write topics that maybe the people would be interesting like doing some lists or doing something that could get viral or whatever. So we, shortly we understood that this is not going to work, so we had to concentrate on something that is actually bringing people consistently every day. So our main thing was to switch to consistency. And this is where the growth happened. So we actually targeted keywords that are always bringing new users, new readers. This is called quite evergreen content. And this is what helped us in the beginning to really start doing. Well, to say in the beginning, as we mentioned, we just stuck it with random content. And at one point we had a lot of content that wasn't performing at all, neither research, neither user engagement, or anything close to those. So when actually Kawa was assigned with managing this stuff and he was like, let's just cut everything that doesn't work, so we trimmed pretty much all the bad content and started again with the ACO mindset, like let's actually target something. Go after keywords, schedule. Yeah, we had a schedule, but this was not because we had some fancy kind of like settings that when we post the blog on the blog, then it goes automatically to the social media. No, we just wanted to be consistent for us and for our team. And to know that by this day and this day we're going to have a blog so that we won't get like being consistent. So this was the main reason. Just follow the simple schedule. Yeah. Posting. And this is how the fantastic blog was like in the beginning. I don't know how many years. Six, five. In the beginning it was just... Yeah, like five years ago. It doesn't hit that I had much of an architecture and some categories just to post so that all screenshot. The next one is pretty close, but we actually have categories that we started to structure the content and to go after pages and support on the pillar, Western model, our business pages. We're going to mention about this in a bit later. And this is now. We're going to go deeper actually why is different and it's a big deal because it was a big deal to get where it is right now. And actually, where is that? Yeah, that's the next level sheet basically. So now what we do is actually we're trying to write naturally for Google and also for the user. So we are trying to catch these little snippets which are usually amazing. Is there a snippet who's not familiar with the future snippets? Not familiar. Okay, so basically in fact you can explain. These are the top boxes that you're going to see more often when asking simple questions to get a straight answer and it's randomly pulled around. It's pulled from one of the below so it's a position zero and it brings it off track and everybody wants it. Basically you can get this position in Google if you optimize well your pages, your book pages and then you can get another one depending from one to ten where you are actually ranking as well. So you get actually two positions. These are constantly changing and new formats pop up. They constantly test different results for the future snippet. There's a lot of tweaking on that. Just as normal. So this is why we started to get deep into natural language processing. This is a term that you may also get familiar with when you Google it is basically how Google reads things online and understands it and is trying to make sense of it and trying to make it a little bit more recognizable to humans. For anybody particular there's a tool. Google is natural language processing tool. It's free and you can just test how it works. It's going to show you in a simple sentence what it is to what and how it actually does that. The idea is that if now the basics of how it works it's way easier to go for future snippets. If you find us on LinkedIn you will see that we have our presentation from the online advertising conference in Sofia from October last year where we talked in more detail spots. How do you test us? Basically what was next? Well, numbers started to rise. We saw traffic rising, keywords, some that we didn't even expect. Some articles started to get a lot of hits. One recently hit like 100,000 just for one piece which was big for guys that didn't have it as a target and we started seeing results. This is why we had to see how we can improve so we decided to increase the steam size and to also implement some team-blog services as well so we were using a lot of stuff like Google Analytics which we're going to mention later so Kotjar is a tool that is actually creating heatmaps on the site and you can see where the users are actually interacting. Anybody that's not familiar with Kotjar or Yandex Metric a long story short you can see videos of your content and it allows us, for example, for our business-to-business content to see where people have difficulties in later on improving, improve the content and the good thing is that we actually start to get franchisees coming from informational content. People signing up as our partners so that works and it's not really worth it if you have the final goal that you want to achieve something work this much effort. It's good to mention that we have a big team. How many people? I think about 20 people that somehow one way or the other works in informational content top of the funnel stuff. Actually we cover content that's all the way from top of the funnel almost to the bottom the hottest we got like prices information on how to start a business, how to buy a franchise these questions may sound simple but people actually have the intent behind those so depending on what everybody's after even though they sound simple don't underestimate the traffic because if it satisfies a person we're gonna get a new client or a new deed. Right now we have I think the blog is the biggest channel bringing free traffic every day to our business. Okay so now we can go a little bit deeper into some of those aspects that we already mentioned. One of the things that we found in the last couple of years was this kind of structure that is kind of getting hot right now in the SEO digital marketing field Is everybody unfamiliar with the pillar cluster concept? Okay, long story short as image shows if you have a page that's important and you surround it with sub topics or how we call it similar or wider topics or narrow topics we don't see this as a cluster seeing that the page in the center is important so internal links matter coming from relevant pages it actually works great. So for example in the middle you have an article about carpet cleaning tips so this is kind of like quite general article and then you can have different sub topics which you can spread into different other articles for example in Blood from milk, from blood, from coffee from all the jazz, there are details for all those searches. There are all the different carpet cleaning methods Yeah Are those links bi-directional centerpiece links to Yes, they are bi-directional and we are actually trying when we are linking from the sub topics we are trying to link with the at least with the keyword we want to run the main one for but we make it naturally we don't try to spam it too much so that's quite important most of the time so this is kind of like a visual representation of what your question might look like you already saw our brand so you can google them and you can see when you go around if you can see Again, that's a theme we are out there because it's possible from that website the peculiar thing about this example is that the entire structure is outside of the blog I mean something like the blog directory it's a standalone part of the website each of these insects you see cover is its own cluster full with various long-tails anything is structured on search and there is no page or URL that doesn't go after solid keyword search Alright another thing is that when we are talking about keyword cluster and stuff like that we are thinking about how we can make the categories more valuable and what we can do so that our categories is not just there, like you know in WordPress you just have the categories but what can you do more with those pages like there are even not pages you think about them just when you take a default WordPress they are just for navigation right but no you can actually make them more valuable when you make the content like when you concentrate your tips for example like we haven't worked for tips as you already understood so for example we have the darling tips it's quite useful that the categories kind of summarizing everything it's like the pure sort of darling tips now how I want to share here is that this blog tag it became very liquid and we are trying to shift it to something called a library or just to have a mindset it's another blog and you can transform it into pages that make sense beside the regular category blog which is back to the door when you see a category of in a simple WordPress site then you see all the blogs there like they don't have the pagination down there and it's kind of like very very simple we try to make it more valuable it works yes so these are basically our main categories this is something we launched lately after we resented to a while to go live but we are going to share a bit details on it, these are just our main categories to go after some of our main services and just a bit of advice you may want to go with the pure and clusters under the blog so a blog post can also be your cluster it depends on your niche it depends on your way of working but you can also if you really know how you will structure your content at one point you can really take the leap and try to put the informational content under the service pages which is something the pages that work more like the topics, content that works great from a standard blog post we started to slowly migrate it under our service pages because when you publish a piece of content an example in our handyman niche we are not sure if it's going to go under the blog bar sometimes it doesn't really fit in one particular sub-folder so it's okay to taste it first and when you see what works you can segment cut in the structure what goes where because we've been asked a lot are you doing silos, the silos structure is when you put something under a folder in a stacket alright another thing that we implemented to grow the blog further was to implement CDN which is content delivery network which is actually a way that you deliver some of your media like images for example question is there anybody unfamiliar with the CDN concept when you work on it perfect, let's move on it's good to mention that our own blogs who are really slow, technical and low in speed we were using shortcuts broke every here and there and the loading time was more than I would wish to admit this is why we wanted to look great as well and as Petemiko said in the morning we have to upgrade to the latest versions because otherwise we are going to be lost so we upgraded to Gutenberg and now we are exploring the reusable blog's versions which are going to help us with the structuring of the blog posts it's all about getting faster because as we mentioned we have a big team and it's pretty hard to get consistent all over the board and that's making it easy another thing that we implemented in the design is that we tried to find to make the content more final so we implemented search cards on the com page it's more prominent right now and it's also on the category pages and now we see some increases in the searches so in the beginning there were 5 or 6 per month now there's much much more and it's good to mention that back then we didn't have a dedicated home page that we actually thought of usability, we didn't have that much traffic and now people are actually going to the home page because it's more usable and there's sort of edge kicking and learning that is there so it's sort of fun to not see that what is this, this is the second section and this is the above the top this is below we just have our newest posts here we got a call to action which is another whole world user experience and below are our pillars because the way we structured the block we try to keep concept to juice up, I don't know if anybody is not familiar with the power of internal links and how having good structure can result but these are the ones we want to juice up in terms of thematics, all these are targeting general keywords below each of these 6 main pillars we have subcategorities again everything is based on search but they are not yet indexed because we want to fill more content inside but slowly content links are going to get there another thing that we implemented structure data but we didn't go that much into details yet there are a lot of new things coming up from Google I don't know if you have followed but a couple of days ago the IO conference and they said that they are going to bring us a lot of new things about especially about informational content in terms of structure data so if nobody is familiar with structure data it's for example these little stars who is familiar with structure data ok ok ok alright so when you go a website and when you see it when you go with something and then you have the results and then sometimes you may see stars for example stars ratings, price ratings these are part of structure data so these things that you see in the meta description in the meta stuff in the Google page so basically we are going to explore in the future the how to ones which are going to be released very soon from Google if you are working on how to work or stuff like that just pay attention we are bringing this how to thing because we figure out it for us even though it sounds simple it's how to how to tie your shoe how to change a light bulb there are actually a lot of people searching for that and many of those can serve a business goal and at least for now this is still to run for such terms and it's bringing a lot of traffic as you've seen in the first number per year it's growing actually our graph is growing rather than alright it's worth going after six queries which is what I want to share another thing is tracking we don't want to shoot in the dark anymore we want to know how our users interact with the website this is why we have a few custom metrics as well but we are also using the main things that almost everybody is using it nowadays like we'll go on analytics and code jar as well but before we started to do it we go tag manager tracking like specific events and triggers we had a lot of analytics data that wasn't accurate and that's why we have dedicated person who actually dug in to the matter to figure out how what works and get into that kind of thing and these metrics which part? yeah but we also think that when a user is interacting with your website and if you are mainly writing for help when you want the people to actually read and engage with your content and then if they are not actually clicking on something are we going to just call them a loss? not really because they might have engaged in the point but we really don't know if we are just looking at the simple google analytics like the bounce rate triggers when the user is not interacting with anything there are some results about some of the operations it didn't work for some we had like 5, 1 help clicks if you had no change positions going back for seeing videos then sometime seeing the general data okay, scroll depth it has a result this is why we wanted to combine the scroll depth and also the time on the page so if a person is scrolling at least half 50% of the page and staying at least one minute on the page we are going to win because they might engage with the content actually better than people who didn't do that so this is why we have this adjusted bounce rate and pretty much 20% 30% of our traffic is actually going into this category which is amazing and to put it in perspective we see people from these pages going to our home page and about us we have a club page a membership page is rising and we are tracking people that actually subscribe and buy our membership program we see that happening which is amazing from a guy who is searching what to use instead of a hammock which I personally believe is never believe it's going to bring traffic and it's bringing a lot of traffic and we are going to becoming clients which is why you can see a few words about this in terms of what we want to say here is that back then, three years ago we had never had any problems with using images but to put it just the one our example is we found out that there are people uploading images said to be free for use free for use with CC0 license we have a website like Pixabay Pix here, Flickr and later on it turns out that those images are actually commercially licensed we even had to kill a few domains that had an image posted in a Google plus account that was verified on behalf of a brand and it was copyrighted and we were under a lawsuit I went to the Pixabay forum posting, hey guys, what are you doing this these images are said to be free and I was banned so it was one of the cases that we figured out that it's a scam and if you are using images on a page with commercial intent you can get a nasty email and you should really triple check images to do even after we figured this out we were supposed to check all the images and a few times again turned out that the images that we thought were free to use and turned out they weren't and now it's something we are really scared of because the numbers were big enough to matter and we are buying all this just paying for license from now on but yeah, if you don't have the money to buy the images because they can be expensive we use different checks like T9 for example it helps you T9 is a Chrom extension from Yandex which searches great it's better than it finds images in the other zone okay, moving forward so we mentioned images so how we actually made this box just a few words to share our process what we do is something we call KISS, keywords, intent, semantics and SERPs those are four aspects of research with undertake we actually start to write or order what topic or whatever concept content keyword research standard we use tools, you find the keywords you cluster those they help you figure out what you should have in a post, what not, what fits what's too broad, etc then when we have the keywords we start to dig into SERPs to figure out intent we've had posts that we thought were targeting the topic but later on the information inside was not the intent that the real user has and it took us a lot to figure this out up to a level that we can constantly shape be certain that the intent is okay so semantics we're just going to mention again that NLP natural language processing module, we were just getting smarter and we are working in an English speaking markets where you can sense that strong so besides our keywords our exact match we started to dig in 7nm related keywords just to make the semantics as rich as possible and last we constantly check SERPs because there are a lot of updates in the last year and we've seen SERPs just change totally and before you start investing into a blog post or page, you really need to see what's working right now there are tools that allow you to see history back in time just so you know where you're investing and not shooting in the dark and when we have all these we go down to a summary okay, go forward come back for this one yeah that's it, so okay let's hear about the keywords, intent, semantics and SERP information, what we do then alright, so we compile all of this in a content brief but we do that because we we work with writers so we work with copywriters with professional copywriters who need the whole information that Meet could just set so we compile it in a nice Google document you can use whatever you want if you're compiling your content briefs so in a content brief we usually put the title of the topic, the deadlines and these kind of things that you have to put the number of words that we need as well because everybody can write it takes a lot of writing so it can, unless you're a natural but if you want to get a page that works, it will take 5 minutes okay, okay we went to a process that we're certain in every state that we're not wasting time we're not wasting resources because it takes a lot of time to research one post in 2 hours to get it to the brief before writing so that was the content brief let's get back to the historical when everything is said and done and when the post is published we may go to another one as well it happens but usually we also go back because if you don't improve your older posts you're going to be hit by the competition or basically somebody else is going to come up or just Google is going to get smarter and they're going to say, okay your content is not good enough anymore so this is why we always dedicate resources to research older post and to fix them so we have a checklist there are many people who are going to stay consistent and not everybody knows what's happening for all the things mentioned so far we have procedures and then so even if you come today at that company you can really go very fast what how and why happens so how do we do that we have the content management system as well content management sheets so we have this kind of master sheet where we keep everything so we have the idea depository of future topics that we're going to have we have our calendar with topics that are upcoming for topics that we're going to edit we also keep track of our keyword posters there and what we're missing and what we're not and a content depository of all the work posters that have already been published so we can find them easy because the things stacked up if you're going for big traffic at one moment you have tens of posts with keywords you need to somehow keep everybody on the same page which is small the thing we want to show everybody is that if you're going big you have a clear idea about how and why it's happening because as we mentioned earlier we had to cut like 90% of content that was paid for to be produced and there's no point in that happening anymore yeah and finally we have it all nicely stuck in this fantastic academy this is an internal website for us just to keep it easy for every employee that is already in the company or is changing the department that's coming to work with us so we have this really on-boarding process we're trying to work with it of course but we keep all the documents and checklists in one place because as I mentioned if you have 20 people doing the same thing and that's wonderful like informational content or SEO and we have a bunch of other departments and at one point the company realized that we need to centralize information like guides and steps and that's where a fantastic academy is a relevant and new project but it's already working it's getting better but it's proven to cut the patent information on-boarding like who, what, why, why as I said it's simple but it takes a lot of communication from tens of people just every detail about it on the same page and once solved a problem never occurs again let's say about keyword research just how to get a procedure with service department we had this issue going back for tens of times wasting hours and hours and now that's really saving us a lot of nerves by my results alright that's one story short how we run the block without getting too deep if anybody has any questions okay, let's start okay, you're number two yeah, number one hello can I ask why the booking is a subdomain not in a subdomain why would that kind of excuse probably it wasn't our decision to make we kind of get into this situation where we started to work on the books and they were already on subdomain and there was not resources for that at the moment to kind of bring it to make it happen is it better to be in a sub-director generally yes but our most successful book is on a sub-directorate so it really depends after some time we will catch it if it's a big site because honestly our domain is really big and we're constantly pumping it up if you're on a small domain it's better to be on the sub-directorate and that's it before we got big we saw those blocks under the sub-directorate that were working better than the subdomain but for now we're just we're stuck to this that makes it work with the internal links so our Google did catch up if you can afford it it can work, that's it but this way you can target both page and the website page of a similar keywords so you can have two results that has happened and then it appeared and it happened again and at one point we had the first two results we put a lot of attention to the content we make and actually so far it's worked good for us because we had the top results so I know what you mean in terms of problem but for us it's a problem to work with and if your site is big is it better to be on subdomain or sub-directorate in all cases it would be best to have it on sub-directorate and as mentioned earlier we are slowly migrating content that's worked that's in cleaning or in pest control as we showed in the earlier example of the blocks we are migrating it under pages that are money pages so it's an asylum so if we are trafficking for free without using Google AdWords are we vulnerable to Google Penguin? you know the one that's decreasing links well actually to be honest basically if you are doing a really good organic strategy and if you are really good at keyword research and content production you might not even need backlinks to rank well you already know which our websites are and you probably have access to different tools and if you are going to check them out you are not going to find a lot of links because we are actually betting on the blocks we are actually betting more on the content strategy so even without a lot of backlinks and I am talking about backlinks because Penguin is actually hitting some backlinks that's a really deep topic there is a lot of ups and downs but we weren't we didn't just not do backlinks because we were afraid of Penguin we didn't do them because we saw that we don't actually need to allocate resources for that because we are managing to rank without backlinks on the big topics only proper keyword research that's only question just a moment how often do you write articles and how long are they in terms of words alright basically now because we are like a team of 5 people that are producing articles regularly we publish at least 2 per week but before we had experience with completely different kinds of schedules we even posted once a month sometimes on some of the books that we have we posted twice a month we posted daily and what we saw is that when you are posting daily you don't really have the time to go deep into the topic so this was kind of like an issue for us this is why we decided to post at least 2 times per week so that we have enough time to do it but even when you are posting monthly and you are in some time when you build up at least a few topics then you can again if you are good at the content research then you can allow yourself to post not so often you can end up having one article and when it comes to the length it really depends on what the user is going to be satisfied from we mentioned briefly the searches in there so basically if I am looking for if I am searching for something like how to tie a tie I am not going to write the 5000 word article about how to tie a tie but if I am going to do some medical issues or wiring an electrical cooker or wiring an electrical cooker which happened then we have to go in a little bit more detail so it really depends on how much the user is going to be satisfied from we have an article that is really shocked and is bringing thousands in traffic and it really depends on the query some as he mentioned you don't need 5000 words to tie a shoe or see a result from football or something like that when you look at the SERPs and when you are doing research and when you look at the SERPs and you browse all the results and you get familiar with the topic you are going to figure out how much you need it's not about the battle I am going to write more it also depends on our own knowledge about the topic we also draw knowledge from our own departments, our own experience so if we know something that we have to say for this kind of topic yeah, of course Have you ever deleted an old walk post in order to Have you ever deleted an old walk post in order to clean up the walk? Yes because does it affect the CEO at all or it's that's a really arguable question they haven't been rocking before for anything, we didn't get any traffic from them for the past year we were looking at how much traffic we were getting from those articles and if we had to link backings to those articles so sometimes when we have a lot of backings but we don't have traffic we could do 301 with redirects something that is useful but it really depends it doesn't matter in all guys in the industry in our case, it didn't matter at all we actually got positive results from cutting the content but we also had to replace it with something that is actually running so basically we didn't have any problems but we had to write more and better in order to get results Honestly, sometimes I just really had a post just to get the links I gather some links to carton because getting links for service pages it's carton, sometimes you just get what you need so you can, there's a little space you can both things can work and it really depends on what's at stake in a specific thing one of the things that are you for or against backings well, we don't need to buy we have the level of technology that gets us all the good links without buying them but the industry is blooming their bosses auctions anti-markets there are huge markets doing that so if you can't or don't have the time know how to build links you can always buy I guess but we don't do that we rather invest in something that that was so can you go back briefly back to the cluster concept of the keywords it's not necessarily to be on the computer you said when you focus you want to raise one keyword you write a lot of blog posts with related content and single keywords and the answer to the question is something they call the Topical Lab I think it was officially announced in September and if you read what the Topical Lab it's like many dots that Google is connecting in its AI, figuring out which dot relates to which dot and the idea is that if you have one general topic that's general let's say Instagram marketing and the idea is that you're not going to write everything a single article absolutely everything, because now I'm going to read it and you just cut it into different pieces that the Google Spider is going to see imagine it as a web so the mother piece is being supported or being pointed from with internal links yes for example you can when with the topic of Instagram marketing you can go down to tips to take Instagram pictures some others but you can go you can go deeper into the concept of the same as the silo structure but with internal links you don't need the silo pretty much the same as the silo when you have the mother topic in those below because we're not always sure if we should build such a URL structure we just go flat, see what works rely on internal links and when we get the results we just either migrate or redirect or blend merge and have there's already a lot of resources on the web about your requesters, you can also see them as HubSpoke this is another term, so your fancy you can google for more information and you can see for yourself if that's actually going to work for you because it's not the one size fits all model of course so you just have to figure out for yourself if that's going to be useful for you for us it proves useful does it answer the question I mean you mentioned that because of copyright issues you have to kill one or two domains did they ask you to do that or couldn't you just delete those pages the decision came I think from a legal the thing was that when it comes to copyright issues about images they have your history so they've seen that you've already been using it for quite a while and they're going to say no matter if you have deleted it you still have to pay us so because we're a big company with momentum we can't escape I guess if you're a smaller website you could just kill the project and vanish but we couldn't really escape from this situation they had us and the decision we got from our legal department was that I think they had some negotiation or something like that and the result was just let's kill it we waited for some time and then we directed it which you can do so we can take the value of your domain but we had to sacrifice it for the greater good I still have to make it to be honest anybody else no well thank you very much