 Okay, well thanks for coming and welcome to SEO Eavesdropping. I was really excited to put this presentation together because honestly spying on other people is really fun and whenever anyone is at the top of search results or getting a great deal of traffic from search results, it's for a reason. And they've invested a lot into content development. We talk about content all the time but I think sometimes it gets a little confusing to know how do we approach that. So we can learn from the investments that others have made and look at the techniques that they practiced and hopefully apply those to the sites that you all are working on or the businesses that you are working within based on what we can learn from digging into behind the scenes of a few people that are doing it really well. So I'm Leah Keontal. I work at Status Forward which is a digital brand development, web development design, SEO marketing company here in town and I've been doing search engine optimization for about eight years and it's a lot of fun. So a lot of people are interested in search engine optimization. We're going to talk about keywords, we're going to talk about search volumes but mostly what we're talking about is content and what users are really looking for and talking about keywords and search volumes as a way to help us understand more of what opportunities are out there and how other people are taking advantage of those opportunities. So search engine optimization itself, that word is searched 214,000 times each month on average in the United States so we're just going to get some kind of numbers out there because we'll be talking about this ongoing. Content strategy, 5.4,000 times each month in the US and this is really just a fraction of the total search volumes because we all know how we search and as Google becomes more sophisticated and search results are changing in the way we interact with search through voice and whatnot. What we see in terms of phrases is really like a fraction of what's out there. And so SEO examples which is something I'm focusing on today only registers 250 searches per month but I think one of the best ways of learning something complex like content strategy is to really have examples of how that functioned for someone else and what success looked like for the website in relation to that content strategy. So first I want to just back up a minute and talk about how content-based SEO works. So the types of sites we're going to look at today are people that rely on getting traffic from search results from people who could be anywhere. So we're not talking about like location-based local SEO trying to get traffic to like a brick and mortar storefront, we're talking about people that need traffic to their digital presence online and how does content and building content for search engines function in that capacity. So this is my graphic design skills in action, that's not what I do. But so SEO, traffic from search results, that is one piece of any kind of digital marketing effort. It is one channel and the purpose like many others is to drive traffic to your website. And then what you do with it when you get there is the function of your website. So that's how you begin to understand what does success for my website look like. So SEO is one channel, you might be trying to build your email list where you might later deliver promotions and then people could return to your site and that's where conversion happens. So SEO is often about ultimately building brand awareness and how do you do that? If people already know who you are and they're searching for you, that's the biggest win like you've made it. Your brand is known and searched for. But a lot of times how content and how SEO works to do that is by getting traffic to your site not because people would know to Google you by name but because they Google things you do, products you offer, services you offer, that type of stuff and then they arrive on pages and posts and you're building authority on topics across what your primary kind of expertise is and the more you do that the more people know who you are and ultimately search for you by your name which is going to ultimately lead to the best conversion rates because they already know who you are and what they do and they want you. So let's just kind of play through a couple, how some websites function in relationship to search results. So Best Star Trek Captain, we don't really need to Google it because everybody knows it's Picard. But this phrase gets 350 searches a month in the US on average. So let's just look at the search results. So what we see here is a rich search result, that's when Google is scraping content directly from a website and displaying it in search results, I'm sure you've all noticed this, it's more and more prevalent and it's becoming, I mean it's going to get really interesting honestly in the next year. So what we see here is if I'm the user and I'm just wondering, I'm Googling this, often times you know you click the first search result or especially like a rich search result like this. So I need to click on this because I want to contest this result because Jean looks number two. So if we get to this website, this is the website of the first search result. So how does SEO function to help them accomplish their objectives? So they're pulling in traffic from search results on this article. How do they make money? They're selling ads so the more people that come to the website, the more they can make off of the advertisements like this print ad and they're also trying to drive people to subscribe. So the more that they are blanketing the internet, and this is like a, I forgot, let me see what do they do. So yeah, this is like a culture website. So they're writing hundreds and thousands of articles on different aspects of pop culture and plastering it everywhere. And this one article, this one Star Trek article is optimized exactly for what I was interested in and I may not have known who they were and now I do. And maybe it's going to be something I start following to get more information on this type of news and that is success for them and that's how they can charge more for ads and that's how it plays into, how SEO plays into them accomplishing their objectives. Oops. Okay, so let's take another search. This may have been one I've done personally. So cat-themed clothing, who doesn't want that? But you're not looking necessarily for a specific company. Cat-themed clothing, 450 searches a month. So of course, e-commerce is really the most obvious like SEO play ever. If you're selling things online, you want people who are searching for things that you offer to arrive on your website. So cat-themed clothing, let's look at the search results. We see some ads and then the first search result, which is a website we're going to explore further. It's one of my favorites, Mowingtons. So cat-themed apparel, clothing for cat lovers. All right, I'm interested in this. I click on the search results and then how do they make money? Of course, there's the most obvious direct action. I could immediately land on their site and make a purchase, but then they're doing a good job of driving other types of conversions and trying to really like maximize the potential for me to convert when I'm a first-time visitor. So free earrings, father's day sale ads. So that is how SEO would play into them accomplishing how they make money online. And we'll go through this with the other examples as well. So who are we going to spy on? REI, does anyone not know who REI is? Right. So REI, like years and years ago, executed one of the most kind of masterful SEO content strategies that really ever happened ever. And I'm always really impressed with whoever convinced them to invest the amount of money they did to make this happen, because now they're pervasive. They are the case study for content-based SEO work. And we're also going to look at Mowingtons. And then I want to mix it up because I know everyone's coming from a different type of company or you have different types of clients. So we want to look at different ways that what success looks like for different companies online that aren't as obvious as e-commerce. So a nonprofit campaign called Water Use It Wisely, a real estate agency from kind of near where I grew up, and a blog, a blog that's purposes to make money, a personal finance blog. All right, so what I'm going to use to go through this is my favorite SEO tool called Atrefs. And what this allows us to do is really dig in to get numbers behind the content strategies that these people are employing on their site. So it gives us the data on search volumes and the amount of keywords that a certain article is appearing for in search results. And this information is really amazing when you are trying to figure out how you can fit into search results. So it is a paid tool. They don't pay me, but you can do a trial. And we'll talk more about ways that you can do this towards the end of the presentation. So let's start with REI. They are the content master. They have 3.1 million keywords for which their site is appearing in search results. And through those keywords in search results and their articles appearing everywhere online, they're getting 7.6 million visitors on average per month. And this is an estimate based on where they're appearing in search results and for how many keywords. And then I include in all of these sites an authority score because ultimately, ultimately what you're always trying to do is build the authority of your site and content as a part of that becoming an authority on the topics that matter to what you offer and what you do. So this kind of helps frame where different companies are at based on their journey in building traffic to their site. So this is their homepage. And what I wanna point out are these two folders. One of the biggest jobs for content SEO is to figure out how you're organizing your content. Like where is it going? What does the, what do the folders look like? Like what does the URLs look like and how do they relate to one another and how does the user find that content in a way that it's not, it doesn't impede the experience should they be just showing up from a shopping perspective. So REI has these two areas. Their co-op journal, that's their blog. And this expert advice section. And the expert advice section is the SEO content masterpiece portal. So why the architecture is super important because the way that search results are working more and more is certain types of content will rise to the top. You might write like thousands of posts and they're going to be like five or six that are accounting for the majority of your traffic. And likewise, it's the kind of folding and how you put that together. So let's talk about some numbers here because we're gonna go over them for a lot. So this number is an estimated amount of monthly traffic that these sections of the website get. And then the value, we don't have to worry about that. It's kind of an estimation of if you are paying for advertising on those keywords instead of appearing organically in search results. What is an estimated value of what that would cost you per month? And then the keywords, which is really fun is how many keywords these sections of the site appear in search results for. And then pages is how many pages in that section. So the expert advice section of REI which we're gonna dig into, there's 521 pages in that. So part of what this shows to is the amount of the significant amount of effort that it takes to really be the best in search results. But there's opportunities for everyone. REI's objective was to take over on everything related to the outdoor industry in search results, and they did. But it took a whole lot of work. And part of that is these 521 pages that are all in this expert advice section. So the first lesson that we're learning from evaluating these competitors is that good content architecture makes it all possible. And that is a huge part of site planning. And if you are in web development and design, or you're working with clients to create new websites, like I find that this part gets missed a lot. And it is where all the future opportunity is from an SEO perspective. All right, let's dig into REI. So this, I think, is really fun. So again, and if you have questions or something's not making sense, you can ask along the way. So here, what I wanna look at is sleeping pads. So sleeping pads, the keyword, has 12,000 searches per month on average in the United States. And what we're seeing here is that this sleeping pad article on REI in their expert advice section earns about 12,000 visitors on average a month because it appears for about 1,600 different keywords. And this is really important because whenever you're writing content, you are not, not for the last many years, are you optimizing for a keyword phrase? You are optimizing for a topic. And the more that you can comprehensively cover that topic, the more keywords you appear in search results for, because honestly, half the time we can't even anticipate all the different ways that someone's searching. But once we start digging into this and getting some results, you can then see how are people getting to this and how can we do a better job updating the post to appear for that. So sleeping pad, they appear in the second position in search results. This is the page. So REI's objective, you know, they want, I'm researching sleeping pads. They want me to buy one from them. It's pretty clear. Here is the page where that should happen where the purchase is made. One thing I want to point out is as they've approached how they're organizing their website and content on their website in their shopping areas, they're including links to primary resource articles which is helpful. So these are the search results for sleeping pads. What we have is of course for some ads and then REI's category page, which is this, this is their actual product category page is appearing first in search results. They're number one. Everybody wants to be number one. Good job. And then further down, like scrolling down, we make it to sleeping pads, how to choose REI expert advice. And that's in their expert advice section. It's not part of their store. It's the educational content that they've created as part of their net of how to build traffic to the website. And the reason I want to point this out is because even though the product category page, where the conversion happens in terms of purchasing a product is number one and the educational page is number two. The educational post gets twice as much traffic as the product section. And that's really important to underscore because it's about thinking about the intent behind the searcher. So when I'm looking at search results, I am way more interested in something like this that's how to choose the right sleeping pad. When I see that in search results, I'm way more likely to read about how am I going to make this decision? I need help making this decision. And then ultimately, I might from this article click on here, shop sleeping pads, from their educational article because now I'm an informed decision maker. But if I just see search results that are just products and people that are advertising themselves as the best solution, you see this a lot for software companies where they're trying to advertise themselves as the best for X, Y, Z. But the searcher, they don't want you to tell them that you're the best. They want to read an article that's comparing features or talking specifically about how those features will make their lives easier. That speaking to the challenges of walking through that kind of customer journey. So I want to know how am I going to make the right decision about the sleeping pad I want based on all of these things that they anticipated by doing some kind of content and keyword research, which I'm sure they've updated this all over time. There's charts. It's really long. This is great for search results and there's no way that their product page can ever comprehensively cover the nuance of the decision making process that me, the end user might have when I'm trying to think about what kind of sleeping pad do I want? Okay, so that was the lesson there that product searches and again, the supplies to services as well, like software companies, software solutions, anything that is a product type. They're usually education seeking searches first. So when you're thinking about the content that you're developing for your site, of course you want to optimize for exact services and exact products that you offer just like REI did, but the strategy for building authority in traffic comes a step before that and those are those educational components that can lead someone to working with you, but it's also incredibly valuable and the more valuable it is, the more people interact with it, the more time people spend on that page and the better you do in search results. So let's do another one from REI. So this is marathon training. Like I said, they have optimized for absolutely everything related to the outdoor industry. It's mind-boggling. So this marathon post for marathon training, they get 9,500 visits a month on that one post, which is crazy and they appear in search results for almost 3,500 different keywords. For one article about marathon training and you see that they appear in the rich search results and what I'm showing you here on the left is just the first like 15 of those 3,000 keywords that this one page appears for. So we see like the variations of the phrase, the position that they appear in search results for and this little quote means they're the rich search result, the volume of each independent keyword phrase. So marathon training is searched 9,300 times and then some things you don't have to look at and then the resulting traffic. So this is how each individual post, each individual article is its own net, capturing traffic across keywords that all contribute to building the same topic. And part of what I like about evaluating competitors using these types of tools is it gives you a sense for how they started structuring content to comprehensively cover a topic. So marathon training is about more than just marathon training. It's about how to train, how to prepare, what the schedule will look like. Like if we kind of click through, let's see, I can, so I have it kind of open here. If I actually click down on all of those keywords, it gives you a sense for what does that topic really include. So people are interested in like, what's a part of training? How long, how to prepare? Sometimes it's how many months? And as we scroll through this, you start seeing how comprehensively this article ends up covering this topic based on all of these keywords that it appeared for. So that's where content, like after your content is live for a long time or a few months even, you can kind of go back in and use tools like these or engage with kind of content development people to analyze what is it appearing for? And now that we know, could we better optimize it to appear higher in search results for keywords that are it's currently appearing for? So for example, marathon training schedule for beginners. Right now they're at the bottom of the second page of search results. So one to 10, page one, 11 to 20, page two. And if I was going to say, okay, could we do a better job? I might say, let's add a section to this blog post that's specific for beginners. And maybe that'll do the job and we can move up and capture more of this 800 search volume because right now we're only getting nine. Okay, so part of the lesson here is that you have to produce a lot of content and then see what rises to the top. And I know that's a difficult piece for a lot of companies and sites, especially when you're smaller, like how much time and energy do you have to devote to content and content development? And my, like a rule of thumb, if you are lacking in resources, if you can even just get out two posts a month, like at your minimum, that will make a huge difference over the course of a year. And then at the end of that year, you can dig in and evaluate like, what was the impact and how does that work? If you can invest more, like if you've got an REI budget, go for it. Because the more that you can do, the more you have to work with. But it's not until you actually get content out there that you can begin evaluating it to see what works. So much of it, no matter what anyone tells you, is like trial and error, especially because the search results are so competitive. So it can't hurt your feelings if you write 10 posts and one of them doesn't really get any traffic or it takes a long time. You got to just kind of keep doing it and then learn as you go to see what's resonating and where you're starting to build. Because like I said, even with REI, if we look at their thousands and thousands of pages, there's really only a handful that are accounting for the majority of the traffic that they're getting to their site. And that is the case for almost every site. So another lesson from REI. So I've kind of wanted to go down. So now we're looking at a page on their site. It's called Rockshoe Care Repair. And if we look, I mean, part of what's just fun about this is seeing like the different things that they're targeting and these are the top keywords. So you can tell from this the breadth and scope of the different topics that they're writing about within their blog. So how to put things into some perspective, they're also targeting keywords that don't have nearly as much search volume. You know, some of the stuff they're getting traffic on has 20,000 searches a month. But this is a topic that's 300 searches a month, how to clean climbing shoes. And they're not even in the first position. They're in the third position because there's probably some rock climbing site that's more authoritative than REI is on dealing with your rock climbing shoes. But still in position with that, they're appearing for 344 keywords, but they're only getting like about 154 visitors per month on that. And that's fine. I mean, that's great. I mean, especially for sites that have conversions where one conversion is really great, like 354 visits or 100 visits a month on a blog post is great. So it all depends on kind of what you're offering there. But what I want to point out too with what they do, so here's cleaning climbing shoes. And again, we get to see what does that topic really include? Like what is cleaning climbing shoes really about? And again, this is really just demonstrating the exercise that should happen when any content development work is occurring. Like what are all the problems that people have? Why is anyone Googling how to clean rock climbing shoes? Like what are the common challenges that they face when it comes to that exercise? I mean, I don't know what they are. So that's why I just look at the keywords. I just spy on these other people to see what they targeted. So repair, can you wash, the questions, can you put them in the washing machine probably? And so that's like the breadth of the topic. And we see in the search results, 99 boulders is number one, they have the rich search result. And then we see REI after that. And what I want to point out too is how this works, how your educational content contributes to this, to the overall optimization of your site is that they're interlinking from their blog posts. So here it says rock climbing shoes, how to choose. So they have another article on rock climbing. Like they have an article for every aspect of what you could want to know related to their core activities that are ultimately what they're selling products for. So they give you opportunities to learn more and they're linking to the actual product section of the site where someone makes a purchase. So the end game again, and I brought this up at the beginning, but your content and SEO based content strategy is all about building that net of traffic to your site across your posts and pages. And a conversion is not always like, people aren't, you may not happen. Like they might not buy something from you. They might not sign up for your email, but they will know who you are. Because at the end of the day, becoming an authority is winning with your brand. It's like they know to search for you and you have become pervasive on a topic. And so that actual conversion might take place a lot later. But again, like this is how that authority, how you start contributing, building that authority. All right, so we've got a half an hour left. I've got, I'm gonna try and link, I'm gonna start going a little more quickly through these other sites. And then at that, mm-hmm. I'm sorry, I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff. Is the stuff on the left, is that the actual HRF stuff that you're looking at? Or how do you, I don't even know, like that. Yes, so this is, yeah, so this is the part where it's like spying on, so I have access to, HRF is a tool that not everyone has. I was looking at that, but the pricing plan for that, what is, is this like the Mac Daddy pricing plans and look at everything at all times? Or is this just, is it essentially? Remember, this is one of the lower tiers. Okay, cool. Thank you. Sorry. But there is a seven day trial for $7, which is pretty useful. But that's part of what I'm hoping really out of this is that not everyone is, you know, not everyone has the agency tools, but I think what we can extract by having, like this brief behind the scenes of the stuff that we're looking at and how we're making decisions about content, you can kind of internalize. And even if you don't have the tool or you only have it for seven days, it's about like shifting the perspective of how we approach the purpose and the rationale behind the content. Sorry. No, no, please. Okay, let's talk about Mowingtons. So Mowingtons appears in search results for 58.2000 keywords, so not nearly as much as REI. And they get a whole lot less traffic than REI, but they're not as pervasive obviously and they're not as known. So 64,000 visitors per month and their authority score is a lot lower. So again, what I always like to start with is looking at how do they organize their site? Like where do they put their content and where are people arriving that isn't like their category, their shopping category pages? So here you see that the majority of their traffic is on their homepage. It's people searching for cat products, like clothing for cats, cat themed clothing, all that kind of stuff. But we see that like of their traffic, a little less than half is coming in through their blog. Like this is everyone's dream, right? Like I have a blog and people are arriving on it and coming to my website and learning about who I am. So how did Mowingtons do this? Because ultimately they don't, a lot of people, what you're writing about in your blog, the end game is that you're building authority for the things that you do that make you money. And this is a piece of that. This is how you work towards that end game. So we see that like their top keyword that is not their brand name is cat puns, which is searched 29,000 times a month, but they're not even on the top of the first page. They're at the bottom. They're in the ninth position of search results. That's the very bottom of the first page. Yet they're still, that's still one of their top organic keywords. And I think this is important to point out because of what we're gonna learn about how they get traffic being far down on the first page. So where do they put this content? The user, this is the user experience part. On their homepage, to get to the blog, you have to scroll all the way to the footer. Their blog is in the footer because people who are arriving on their homepage, they don't need them to read the blog. They already know who they are. They just want them to shop for like cat pillows and stuff. The blog's sole purpose is for people to arrive on the website from posts in their blog. So you don't have to make it easily navigable because people aren't going to Mowingtons to read blog posts about cat puns. They're going there to buy like cat hats. So this is the top content. Again, this is from the tool. So what we see here these are all of the pages in their blog that are driving the most traffic to their site. So again, it's the first few that always contribute for the majority of traffic. And what I'm looking at here is that they're writing blog posts on different types of cats. So is that gonna convert? Maybe, maybe not. But what we saw earlier is as soon as you arrive on their site, they have these pop-ups with these deals like free earrings if you buy something. So they're doing their best job to try and make someone who doesn't know who they are like a fan of some kind that they can target later. Be that on like social media or in an email newsletter because if I'm just searching orange tabby cat, like I'm not necessarily the kind of person that's gonna like shop at Mowingtons. But I could be. So that's the guest part of SEO. So let's look at, so here's orange tabby cat. And what I realized when I started looking into that post, so we see orange tabby cat, they appear in the seventh position of search results. What, Dar? And this post appears for over 2,000 keywords. They get over 2,000 visits per month on this post. So here's the search results. And when I explored what are the different keywords that they're appearing for related to orange tabbies? So we've got like, are all orange cats male? Like why are orange cats so affectionate? People really ask a lot of questions about cats online. But part of what I wanna show this again for is to show the diversity of a topic that this post is optimizing for and all those types of things that you could not anticipate that people are searching for. It's amazing. So what makes their post stand out in search results and what makes Mowington's really good at earning traffic from search results, even when they're far down on the first page or they're not appearing higher up, is their metadata. And then this is their meta title. Six things you didn't know about orange tabby cats. And then we don't see the meta description in here, but the meta data is what appears in search results. And that is so important. The meta data is what can inspire a user like me to actually click on the post. Cause if it just said orange tabby cat facts, like that's not nearly as exciting as six things I didn't know. I don't know what I don't know. I've got to find out. And Mowington's does that across their posts. They have really catchy titles, really catchy meta descriptions, and their content angles help their results stand out in search results against whatever else is there. So that's really important, especially for blog writing and content work where you are competing, you are expecting to earn traffic for an educational piece. Like what is your meta title? Like in your meta description, like for service based companies, a lot of times I recommend putting in, put in what makes your brand stand out. Maybe it's like a 30 day free trial, or maybe it's like in the business for X amount of years, or something that would inspire yours to get clicked on. Because if you're at the bottom of the first page of search results, but everyone clicks yours, you're gonna move up. Cause that's part of how it works. Because you're basically showing Google that you're a good result and you're what people want. So that is huge. And here's another example too, like of their metadata, 14 perfect puns for your pun loving Valentine. And then the other piece I wanted to point out, you know that looks, that just, I would much rather click on that and cap puns reader's digest. I'm sorry for reader's digest. So even in reader's digest is at first because their site's so much larger, I'm sure. Like they have more kind of overall authority, but Meowringtons is totally moving up. And their company in relationship is relatively new. I've kind of been watching them for a long time, like watching their growth and they're ruling. So the other thing I wanted to point out here that we can learn from these people is like timeliness matters. So it's February 14, 2019. Like it's a Valentine's Day post about Valentine's Day cap puns. So I didn't expect, I did not expect anyone to see my messy desktop. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. So timeliness matters. So here's a non-profit campaign. If we're gonna continue through the different types of examples of how people are using content and SEO to make an impact on what their business is supposed to be doing. So Water Use It Wisely is like a group campaign to help educate people about ways of conserving water. So what does success look like for them? Success for most non-profit campaigns is impacting policy. It's like, you know, awareness building, ultimately changing people's hearts and minds and changing the world, which is really tough to do with SEO. But anyway, 30.6,000 keywords this campaign appears for. They get 33,000 visits per month and they have a very high site authority score which usually non-profits do. So this is what their campaign looks like and it's a coalition across like several kind of state and municipal efforts. So they have 100 plus ways to conserve water. The reason I wanna bring this up is because their objective, if you could think of it from an SEO perspective, water conservation would be the primary topic. That's the point of the campaign. But that type of thing is very competitive but we see ways to conserve water has 2,100 searches a month and they're in the third position. And it's this campaign that it appears for 447 keywords. They're getting like 1,400 visits but what happened for them is they developed a site that allowed them to comprehensively dig into all what those different types of ways are. So a piece of that is drip irrigation and zero-skate designs and designs and rainwater harvesting. All of these are subsets of ways of conserving water and they're doing it by creating this URL structure that allows them within this 100 plus ways format to create an amazing method for developing content on every type of way of conserving water but it looks good and it's fun and it's interactive and it's super working for them. So I'm gonna go to that one. So one thing I think is really cool about what they did is that they're beating out in search results places like Lowe's and Home Depot and Amazon for things that like water irrigation system, you're not really expecting nonprofits to appear in the search results for that. You're thinking it's gonna be large companies that sell water irrigation systems and are spending a lot of money on SEO and optimizing because they wanna convert for that. Let's go. So here's that search result and so we see products, you know, whenever there's products appearing, people are paying money, they want your dollars and this is a nonprofit campaign. So we do see Home Depot there and we do have to go down a little bit but here they are and part of what I think stands out for them is when they're not, like if I'm looking, if I'm looking, again, a lot of product searches are not actually product searches, they're people looking for more information so they can make informed decisions. So water saving irrigation methods from a nonprofit, like it's gonna get a lot of clicks and it's super well done. They create this great interlinking structure. They're like thoroughly covering the topic as a whole. It doesn't look like it here but it works well on your phone. And then, you know, it's just quite comprehensive and I don't feel like I'm being misdirected by being sold something. I'm just doing education or it's just educational work from a nonprofit. So the lesson there is kind of to make it epic and again, this goes into content planning as a whole. Like what I was saying before about architecture and how content works on your site, it's super important that you come at that, like spend the time plotting it out and something like this 100 plus ways of, like you can tell, so much thought went into that. So like design, development, like URL structures, like there was a plan for that entire thing and it came together and people like it. It's like interactive. That actual, the results of that campaign, it actually lots of other organizations linked to it because it was so interactive and great for education, great for schools, that that act of how comprehensive and well done it was earned them a lot of like press and in inbound links. Did the category recall post-free topics? I didn't check if they had a hundred actual ones but yeah, so the hundred ways is one folder. They have other sections of their site. I was just like focusing on that singular campaign section but we can look at it some more in the happiness bar. Oh right, like is it a category? That's a good question because that does raise, how do you approach it from an architecture section? How do you make decisions whether things are categories or tags or pages? And that is a huge part of the planning process but I think it depends on, I mean obviously there are lots of factors, like how much content do you think you're gonna create over time but actually let's look and do it. Okay, so this is not a SEO content master. This is a content grasshopper. So but I wanted to give you an example of like a property management company. So a lot of companies it might be difficult to think how do I have a content strategy to go along with this type of business that's useful and you know how to approach it. So real estate obviously is highly competitive and lots of people are trying to be in the same space for the most competitive keywords like for example, Asheville real estate or West Asheville real estate or anything Asheville plus any type of house. But I wanted to not focus on Asheville so this is a different area of the country with a lot lower search volume. So it's a small site, 3,000 visitors from search results per month and they only appear for like 3.8 thousand. So when I say only, that's so good. It depends on what your market is and how large your site is and what the search volumes are for the things that you wanna target. Like small doesn't mean bad, small could mean amazing. If there's a low search volume and that's exactly what you offer, that's not a lot easier thing to do to optimize for that than something like REI that has all of that going on. So for them, again I wanted to just show how the blog functions. So the majority of their traffic does come in on their pages of their site that are related to real estate in the region. That's what they do, that's where they're getting traffic. That is great. But how does the blog play in? Like when we're looking at SEO content strategies, what does the blog do? So the blog accounts for 20% of traffic to the site and there's 188 posts, about 3,800 keywords and about 3,000 visitors. So this is what the site looks like and again, I just wanted to point out again the blog's just kind of hidden because the purpose of the blog is not that people show up on your site and go read your blog. You're using it in different ways. It's appearing in search results. Maybe you distribute it through social media, through your email, but you don't need it like front and center because hopefully when someone's coming to a property's site, what they're doing is looking at your property. So here are the top pages within the blog. And again, what we see is the traffic, the amount of keywords that that's appearing for, the actual post, the top keyword driving traffic to that post, the search volume of that keyword and the position that this site is in. And so again, I like to bring these examples up because I think sometimes people get lost in thinking like if I'm a property company, why would I be writing about Finger Lakes? If I'm a Finger Lakes property company, why would I write about Finger Lakes hikes? Well, it's because you gotta remove yourself from into the building brand awareness piece. Like if I'm someone who's searching for Finger Lakes breweries, Seneca Lake boat tours, Finger Lakes hikes. I'm someone who is researching a vacation in that area. And if your site's there and you offer vacation rentals in that area, well, that made it a little easier for me. And so again, they're appearing in, I think it's actually impressive that they appear for this search. So it doesn't have a lot of search volume, but it's important for the area. Like they wanna do vacation rentals, they're competing with all of the tourism authorities in the area, which most tourism authorities in real estate groups are often trying to target the same keywords and topics. And which is again why it's important to just kind of write about a lot of things and see what starts to work. But they appear in rich search results. So this post is where the majority of their organic traffic is coming from that isn't related to real estate. So the thing I wanted to point out here is to when you are writing the content, like format it so you can, and that's not really hard, it's just kind of like, sensical formatting, like if you just use headers, bullet points, like it's pretty intuitive. So this is what that post looks like and you see how Google scraped it out to appear in rich search results. Like it's not overly complicated, but it's doing a great job. And what I would think is there's less competition in this area going on for these types of searches. So this would be the type of post where you might like come back to later or get beat out because someone else, because ultimately it doesn't look that great, but it's a start and you gotta start somewhere. And if you don't start building traffic, like you're not in the game. Okay, last one and then we're gonna kind of summarize. So Dollar Sprout is a personal finance blog. Like this is a blog where the whole purpose is educational content. It's like the original blogger's dream, like I'm gonna build this blog and I'm gonna make a lot of money from it. And they do and part of that is because of the amount of traffic that they earn. So 766,000 visitors a month on 262,000 keywords. So what I wanna point out with them is again, it's the site architecture. It's how did they organize content on their site? So they have in their, so they have this top level. Their core topics, it's personal finance. This is their homepage. Their core topics make money, money management, banking and investing. What they have in here are some of their top kind of content and it separated, this kind of speaks to what was brought up earlier. They're linking both to pages and blog categories. So they're experimenting with what is important for users as well as what do they want to target. So this fast make money fast is a blog category. Versus how to get out of debt, which is a page. So basically when you're looking at how you're organizing content on your site, especially if you're developing a lot of content over time, it's really great to sometimes link to posts that are the most important or individual pages that are super important. But also you can just link to categories. There's so much you can do to merge SEO decisions and user experience and how you put together your navigation. So if I can, let's just click on one. So this is what their posts look like. So how to invest a beginner's guide to investing in the stock market. And then they have the resources on the side. Like they just do a really good job of organizing their content and interlinking to other content. And most specifically updating their content. So what they have here is their top post is work from home jobs. Which this is kind of mind boggling to me. Like over 350,000 people search work from home jobs every month. Like that is a state. And so this post appears in the seventh position organically, but it's accounting for this whole post is accounting for almost 100,000 visitors per month on their site. Like that's pretty amazing. And if we look at their keywords across the board, how to make money fast, make money online, data entry jobs, they've basically created a post to cover every aspect related to home finance or making money online. And I'm sure they've been doing it for a long time because again, they're an SEO master that started a long time ago. It's the dream of the blog that's gonna make money. But what it demonstrates is the diversity of topics that they've covered and created posts on. So for example, like birthday freebies. So when you do like kind of content research or even blog research, part of what you're looking for are these like random elements, or seemingly random. Like birthday freebies, yes, this is a part of their like free money online that I would not have thought about, but it's one of their top posts earning traffic to their site. Like, you know, it's probably about where you get like free ice cream cones and stuff on your birthday. And here's the content itself. So work from home jobs. What I want to point out again, what I always like to point out is how they appear in search results. So they are, and I've noticed like looking into them, they kind of, they are experimenting with what their meta titles and meta descriptions are to inspire greater click through. So the meta title is 12 best work from home jobs hiring now earn $35 to $50 an hour. That's pretty compelling for a click. And this company's spending a lot of money on blogging and content development and really sussing out the nuances of the difference in their meta titles. So big blogs like this, some of the best takeaways is looking at what are they titling their posts? What are they doing in their meta descriptions? Because they're putting a lot of time and money into like A-B testing those and seeing what inspires greater click through rate. So it's a great way of looking at how to evaluate your own kind of metadata in sites. So the other thing that they do, and if you are relying, if you have a few posts that are accounting for the majority of traffic to your site, update it. Like at least once a year. And then when you update it, there's ways of like it can be an updated post. And you should expand on it. And that's the time to evaluate what is this supposed appearing for? Like how many keywords and what are those keywords? And how can we re-optimize it to better cover this topic? So these are the kind of overall takeaways from evaluating these five different sites in terms of how to approach your own content work. So first is definitely paying attention to the architecture. If you're redoing a site, if you're building a new site, even if you're just reworking your blog, like what is the structure? And how does it work from a user experience standpoint? But what do the folders look like? Like what types of content are you gonna be developing over time? And then that compelling metadata, like the title and the description that's appearing in search results, it doesn't make you wanna click. And then of course, always interlink from your posts and pages to those core areas of your site where you're really trying to build the authority for what you do or offer. Update your content. It's so much easier to update existing content to do better than to start from scratch. So you kinda wanna be doing those things ongoing. Building new content and editing existing content to do better and move up further in search results. And then make it epic and of course, make it so. So the final piece, I know like part of what I wanted to expose here are numbers that most people don't get to see and don't have access to because I honestly think that that's what makes SEO really fun is looking at how many people are searching for random things like cat-themed apparel. And what do the search results look like for that? And what are the related topics? So, because it is all about not just the key, it's not just the keywords and it's not the search volumes. It's about the topic and what you're solving for the perceived intent behind the search of what people are looking at and like how do you sort through that and figure what that is? And I think answer the public is a really great tool that can help you with your research. It doesn't give you search volumes, but it helps you understand all of the aspects of what a particular topic includes that allows you to create better outlines for content to target the breadth of a subject rather than like if you can only think of a couple of keywords that seem relevant. And then always, always, always Google it. Like always Google it and see what is there. You can get search volumes with Google keyword planner. It's very difficult to use. And then there are, for example, answer the public. A lot of keyword sites you can do like a one-off, one-month thing where you can have paid, you can pay for a month and get traffic, but you can also work with agencies. Any agency that does any type of SEO will usually, you know, that's a huge piece of it is looking at your keywords, getting your, the relevant keywords, the search volumes. If you see, I'm gonna be in the happy minutes bar for half the day tomorrow and we can always look at your top keywords, your top five or you can kind of follow this link on here for us to help you understand what your keywords are. So yeah, I've got like two minutes if anyone has a burning question. Yes? The question was how important is blogging to drive traffic to your website? So it's indirectly very important because, and I say that it's indirectly because you do it over time to build authority on the areas of your site where you actually want people to arrive, which are typically like service pages or product pages, but you build that authority by writing content in your blog and interlinking it to those pages. Yeah, so the question is like, basically how to approach updating existing content so that you don't like shoot yourself on the foot. So yes, don't change the URL. Don't do that. But I think that's part of where it can be tricky. That's where it's like best if you can look at like where do you rank for the keywords that are driving traffic to that post and then make content edits and add new sections. Like the longer your post is online, the more you have a sense for what's missing from it. It might even be comments people make on the post or questions that they ask or things that came up on social media when you shared it. Anytime you're just adding extra content, you're definitely not gonna hurt yourself, but you can always add new resources like interlink to some new additional resources. So you can't ever hurt yourself by adding. Don't delete a bunch of stuff and don't make it slower. Don't change the URL. Thanks again. I'll be hanging out in the happiness bar tomorrow if anyone wants to check.