 Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Engaging Ideas, the Parsons-TKO podcast where we like to talk to leaders and luminaries about ideas in the mission-driven and non-profit sector. Today, I am joined by Catherine Watier-Hong, and she is the owner of WO Strategies, a boutique organic traffic consultancy. WO Strategies is an organic traffic marketing partner and trainer to science-based organizations. She has run digital marketing campaigns for organizations ranging from federal agencies, foreign governments, startups, non-profits, and Fortune 500 companies focused on G2C, B2B, and B2C audiences. Catherine, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, so excited to dive in today and talk, and our audience can start to learn a lot. We're going to really dive into search engine optimization and what's really going out there, how your content's getting found even, and then how that ties back and you create it. Before we dive in, though, can you tell our audience a little bit more about your organization and how you get into helping organizations build traffic and think about things like search engine optimization? Sure. Yeah, so WO Strategies helps primarily science-focused enterprise-sized organizations with getting more traffic from anything that has an organic search algorithm. So primarily Google, YouTube, Bing, but then also some social platforms as well, if that makes sense. I've been running my own business for seven years, and we have worked with a wide variety of clients. Last couple of years, academic associations and helping them migrate their journals, so National Academy of Sciences Journal and Society for Microbiology. But I've also helped three different federal websites, Fisheries, Division of NOAA, National Cancer Institute, and HealthIT.gov. And part of starting my own business actually ran the online marketing and analytics team at Ketchum, helping their clients globally. So I've touched a lot of brands and a lot of industries. I think I touched 65 clients my first year at Ketchum. But I've actually been doing SEO for 17 years, no, 18 years, 18 years this year. And I got my start at a nonprofit. So I was actually at the points of light foundation director of marketing and sales for 1800volunteer.org. And, you know, rolled out without a business requirements document, I had sales quotas. So that's where I was focused. But the CFO came in one day and says, Hey, we're not on Google. Why are we not on Google? It's like a home built CMS system. I don't know. This is my previous SEO was like 12 page SEO kind of stuff. So I was like, Well, send me to this search show, and I will figure it out. So I go to the search show, they had a big panel where they audit your site. They don't do this anymore, unfortunately. But there's like 300 people in the ballroom who wants their site audited. I'm like, first up, and they're like, Oh, yes, you have a couple of problems. One, you have a redirect, because it was a phone number, you could call it. So you have a redirect for the URL that has the dashes to one that doesn't have the dashes. And you're doing a bunch of redirects at the same time for some reason. And one of them is the type of redirects that porn sites use. They're like, also there's this thing called a robot text file that the search engines read before they crawl your site. It's where you can tell them what you want them to do with various structures on your site. You told Googlebot to not crawl your site. Okay, good to know. Anyway, so I spent the week just doing like absorbing everything I could about SEO, totally phone love with it, and came back with a plan, which include training a lot of these volunteer centers on how to optimize that volunteer opportunity. The I want to volunteer to wash dogs at the animal shelter type opportunity, but I kind of joke because a lot of the folks running volunteer centers that I worked with were kind of like almost in retirement or came out of retirement type ladies, sweet women, but kind of the grandmother set. I got my start training grandmothers on SEO. It was very successful. I actually tried, one of the competitors tried to steal me at one point near the end. I know we started from zero, but we were the market leader by the end by the in three years. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Thank you for that. I mean, incredible, incredible setup, credible backstory. I mean, I love the classic no crawl TXT file. Anyone who's in the middle of launching something new or redesigning your website, please check your TXT file. Yeah, that just allow all right. Don't do that. Yeah, I've been there before. So can you help us a little bit with framing for SEO? It seems sometimes it's just kind of be such a big term. I think there's a faction that's it's just about the writing and it's where you play something in a headline and then there's the deep technical SEO audits that can be run. So how do you think about when you think about it, what's your framing and turning it from concept into action? Yeah. I mean, what I love about SEO, because I went to an integrated multi-disciplinary undergrad. So it's just how my brain thinks, but it does. It touches multi-disciplines. So the way I always explain SEO is that the base foundation is technical SEO because that, as we just demonstrated, could make it so that search engines aren't even putting your website and URLs into the index. So that's a problem. And then after that, it's creating content and at the moment, Google and all the other search engines are actually have intent basing engines. So it's not keyword matching anymore. It's actually understanding the intent behind the topic. So it's much more sophisticated. Then there's promotion and then there's UX actually. So whether or not your site is usable and fast and loads well and mobile and all that kind of other stuff. So as a professional SEO, I think you should actually have a background in technical, which luckily I do. I built my first website in 94. I'm not a developer, but I'm also not scared of looking at code stuff. And then an understanding of how to do research around your target audience and write, actually, yeah, research around personas and the journey they're at in search and what they're looking for and what type of content it should be and should it be a video, all that kind of stuff. And then being able to create content that matches that intent and desire, promote it to where they are hanging out and then make sure it's usable when they get there. And ideally they can complete their task when they're on your website. So an understanding of UX is actually a big piece of it. Yeah, that's a good point. I think it's really good for everyone to remember that. I mean, just tying into what you and I had an earlier conversation, just to go along the content creation part there. And I like you had said, if you don't know how to promote it, don't write it. And I see this combined, you had also talked about, you know, you don't just get to be on Google, there's like five steps to get there. Google is indexing less, you had said to. And I wonder if you could talk to us about what you see happening in the search engine space and yeah, what are those steps? What do we need to be thinking about here? I know I always work with these clients where I think historically people just think I'm going to publish it on the web and it's just findable and it's not. There's all these other steps in between when Google, the steps to get your stuff in Google and ranking. So Google has to first discover the URL and they have to discover it from another link from somewhere and go deep into where those are. But it has to be linked to from somewhere. Then they put it in their crawl queue. So they actually decide how urgently they're going to crawl your stuff. So if you're CNN, they urgently crawl you. If you're not CNN, they don't urgently crawl you. So anyway, they put it in a crawl queue. Then they actually crawl it. Then they render it if you've got JavaScript because that's sort of a separate process. They come out and kind of function like a browser and see what it would look like with a browser. And then they put it in the index, which is their database. Now, all of those steps, I was actually training one of my clients who were like, that's kind of like circa 1994 technology. I'm like, it is all that stuff is not as sophisticated as you would expect, which is why we talk about well structured HTML and have a link. That's an HTML link and some other stuff is because Google is not very sophisticated necessarily on those steps. But then they work on ranking it. And then when it comes to ranking, it depends on the keyword and the intent. There's multiple ranking algorithms and there's multiple signals for each algorithm. So that's where it gets fancy and more and more sophisticated because there's also artificial intelligence being used in all of those algorithms. So if you're, if you are no officially local aquarium, you have a local ranking algorithm and appearing in that search result includes not only having your website appear, which has a variety of different signals that are all local oriented, but also there's a Google Maps listing. So there's all this stuff related to Google Maps, you're going to want to optimize because that's on the top of the page. So anyway, the local is like a totally different beast. If you had just have a national, I'm looking for information. That's a sort of different algorithm. If there's video, you kind of have a different algorithm. If it's e-commerce, totally different. They use the Google shopping feed and some other things. So I'm here in this and I'm in the audience and I'm at an unprofit. I'm like, I want to do better at SEO, but you just talked about local and national and video and multiple algorithms I'm playing for. Like, and I'm a team of one or three, maybe. You know, how, how can you think about this if you're in that content creator seat within an organization? I mean, what is that content process like or their checkboxes and yeah, I mean, the first thing I always start with just because maybe they've never had it executed is get somebody to do a technical audit for you because you don't want to do all this work and stuff is being not presented well to Google or Google can't get to it. Like for instance, I helped Fisheries with they, it's a long story about how they got there, but they ended up putting some stuff behind tabs and Google doesn't view that as important information on the page. And so they weren't ranking very well. So some of the technical stuff, I've also, I did an audit of Razoo back in the day, which has now been shut down, but they moved that to AngularJS one, even though that's created by Google, that Google can't read a dang thing from it. It's a blank page. So some of the technical can really thank you. So, you know, get that out of the way, just checkbox, make sure that's not a problem. So then when it comes to content, you just have to know who you're talking to because all of these algorithms are personalized. So the search algorithms are personalized, the social media algorithms personalized to you, everybody gets a different piece of the algorithm. In fact, I have a video kind of showing you what that's like because I did a user session with folks in two different cities looking for something in particular, and you can kind of see firsthand how much things are personalized to the end user. So figure out who you're talking to, figure out what their intent is behind the key words they're looking for. And then you have to write content. Here's the easy part of it. Sounds complicated, but it's actually pretty easy. There's a quote from John Mueller, which I'd probably find for you. John Mueller is Google's advisor to webmasters and SEOs, by the way. But he basically said, you know, what does it take to rank in Google? And he's like, are you as good as or better than what's already ranking? We'll stop. It's pretty much kind of that easy. So that's different because I think a lot of folks, I mean, that mind you, we've been at SEOs have been doing this for about 10 years in this current environment. But for people that aren't following SEO, they might still be putting keywords on the back end. I talked to a client a couple of weeks ago and they're like, oh my God, we don't have anything in the keyword tag. I'm like, that tag has not been used for like 20 years. Don't worry. Don't panic about that. There's other stuff we should tackle. But I think a lot of people are like, oh, I just need to write it for this keyword. I'm going to put the keyword in 12 places. And that's not how it works anymore. And most importantly, you have to really look to see if the keyword that you love is showing information like you in search. So I'll give you a crazy example, because this was pretty obvious. But I was helping fisheries with keyword research, and they shipped over typical federal, they stepped over a bunch of acronyms, right? And they're like, help us figure out if these acronyms are things we should rank for. But the one that made me giggle the most was they had ACLU, or I'm sorry, no ACL. That's an acronym. And they're like, I'm like, no, that's definitely people looking for knee tears. Austin City Limits. Yeah, it was Austin City Limits. You're right, actually. Those two. It was totally those two. It was not whatever weird division of the fisheries. So I mean, that's an extreme example, but you do want to make sure that you know, the term you're working toward is showing your answer or your type of answer. And most importantly, people like you, that's the other part. So some of these search results take like the health space. The health space is highly competitive. The big major websites that dominate it have teams. So, you know, Healthline has a team of like nine SEOs. And WebMD has been doing SEO since before Google. They're like sophisticated jobs. So and most of those search results are kind of white listed. So Google shows the same set across all of these queries for the most part. And so if you were going for one of those terms, you just got to look and see, can I compete with that? Like if I'm a very small nonprofit, and all you get are those big guys plus a New York Times and plus of, you know, whatever CNN, are you the same authority? You know, so oftentimes what I encourage people to do is do all that work first, because I really don't want you to spend all this time writing content and have no chance of ranking because nobody clicks beyond page one of Google kind of full stop. So, you know, if the first page of Google is too competitive, get creative and find a more specific, they call them longer tail term, where you could rank, right? Where you're the perfect answer. That's where you should start writing. But don't start writing until you figured out that give you an extreme example. When I helped National Cancer Institute look at the entire breast cancer space, that space was so competitive, I told them to actually stop optimizing for it and move on to a different cancer type, because they would not rank. They were not being shown. And they would not be showed because of the sophistication and type of content from their competitors. Also, they have 260 different cancer types. They should just go after something less competitive first. But yes, if I'm telling the federal agency for cancer, give up on an entire cancer type, that's what I mean. Like sometimes these are so competitive, you're going to spend your wheels in waste time. Real quick, the video you had mentioned, is that on your websites? Yes, I can find where it is. I think it's actually my YouTube channel too. All right, we'll get that out there for everyone listening, so you can click on that and take a look. You know, one thing we talked about was for groups trying to come up with how they want to frame their content is to look at how they're being found via search, which you can see from yourself. I mean, how much does that play into then what you're talking about is going out and looking outward? But what about what people are looking to find you? Are you using a pairing of those two to sort of say, okay, well, here's where we should probably be looking? Or is it really just doesn't matter what they're looking for me for? If I really want to be in this space, I just got to see who else is there. And if I can't win, I've got something else. Everybody should look at, if you haven't set up your free search engine accounts with Google and Bing, you should. So you should look at Google Search Console, because that will give you data around how you're currently pairing in Google. Bing Webmaster Tools, same deal for Bing. YouTube has also same metrics. So you can look at your metrics inside YouTube and see where you're currently appearing. But that's just pure luck. That doesn't mean, and probably it's a small opportunity. That doesn't mean that you can't appear for more. But to figure out whether or not you should peer, you could appear for more. You're going to need a search tool. Luckily, they're all subscription though. Over the last year, they've distinctly raised their prices. So that's kind of a bummer. But you could turn it on for a month and turn it off if you wanted. I love Ahrefs for keyword research. But if you're somebody as big as National Cancer Institute, you're probably going to want SEM Rush, maybe. I've used both. Only because if it's a bigger topic, it's hard to get a handle on that many keywords. And both of these tools, I think Ahrefs now will break it down into like little subcategories for you in a tab and Excel spreadsheet. So you can kind of see the subcategory of breast cancer symptoms versus treatment versus breast tattoos to cover over mammogram scars or whatever. So if you show you the smaller segments in that bigger topic space. You mentioned being there for a second. I also loved you had mentioned to me that being often determines if your site is even worth crawling. I mean, how do they bypass, they don't crawl? I mean, you said it's a bit about saving their budget. How do they determine worthiness of a site? Well, I mean, Google sort of does too. That's what I mean about not indexing as much. But Google has more budget to crawl the web. Bing recently has released an API so it can't, you can just give it your URLs, which is a clear signal that Bing wants to figure out a way to reduce its budget around crawling. And it doesn't have as big of a budget. And so it does very interesting things. Yeah, it knows based on URL structure and the length and the quality of the inbound links and quote a bunch of other signals to determine whether or not your site is worth crawling or the URL is worth crawling. It's URL by URL. And my guess is some of that other worth crawling could be things like structured data like whether or not you've got H1H2H3 is in some sort of way that makes sense or schema markup. But ultimately, if your content doesn't answer the searcher's intent or it's too thin, like it's not a comprehensive enough answer, yeah, they won't even bother crawling. And then what's interesting is that when they do crawl, they actually add information on top of the URL in their database related to the structure of your web page, whether or not things are navigation or sublinks, and they sort of add in H1H2s on top of the data you give them in order to surface that effectively in results. Fascinating. How does something like that affect accessibility for screen readers and things like that? Yeah, that's the thing. If you actually optimize for search, you optimize for accessibility, basically. And everybody should partially because there's a lot of disabled people out there because it includes anything including your handshakes when you're trying to navigate a website. But then also, the number of lawsuits that have happened because sites are not accessible have been going up in the last couple of years. I've looked at plenty of sites that say they are 508 compliant and they're not. But yeah, it's always been best practice. There's many reasons destruction. So going back to the 1994 technology, some of that stuff is golden. It still matters. So structuring your web page like it's a thesis. Let's talk about it this way because that's where it came from. The internet was actually a network of theses. And so in a thesis, you get a title and you have an executive summary, which is your meta description. And then you break it up in headers and the headers are structured in a way in which you learned an English class. So you've got a bigger topic and then a subtopic. And then you have references down below, which are linked to other people. That's the internet. And so all of that stuff will really matter for accessibility. It also matters because Google can actually, the SEO community calls it fraggles, but Google is actually able to recognize chunks of text within your longer document or video or audio and pull out those fragments in search if you structured them well. So I had, and when I was looking at the stuff for breast cancer, I noticed that one of the competitors, Google had scrolled down, two or three scrolls down the page, grabbed an H2 and the text below and pulled that into a top ranking featured snippet. That's fascinating. Fraggles, not Fraggle Rock. Yeah, Fraggles. Yes. So using things like jump links, jump links to headers can help trigger that kind of behavior in a positive way, right? So the well structured markup matters. So on a YouTube video, you actually create a, in your description field, you create a transcript that has timestamps. And in your audio, you create a transcript that has timestamps. And then you pair that with the posting and that start to help you get to your Fraggles. Yes. Okay. All right. I know the way to Fraggle, Ann. Well, let's talk about YouTube a bit then. You had mentioned to me too that you think a lot of organizations are sleeping on YouTube. Can you dive into that a little bit? Yeah. So the most recent data I could find was 2020, but at that point, 62% of search results had video. And I'm sure it's more because Google's now indexing TikTok. So the growth of video is almost like a hockey stick. It just has been increasing over the past couple of years. And the things they show that are video, unless you're somebody like Fisheries, 95% of the time is a YouTube video. It's not Vimeo. It's not whatever. It's YouTube. So if you want to appear in Google search with both a webpage plus a video, because there's video intent to capture your target audience, then it's going to have to be a YouTube video that's optimized for the topic. But ideally, it's also, they also pull because it's coming from a high quality performing YouTube channel. So that means optimizing also YouTube is the second largest search engine. It's Google and YouTube. You wonder why I focus on the first two. I'm like, they're the biggest place you can get organic traffic from. But yeah, you need a performing YouTube channel. And when it comes to the YouTube algorithm, it's all about, again, like think about what is the company doing? So in Google, they want to make sure you never find another search engine. They want to make sure your search intent is so satisfied that you go to Google every single time because they sell ads, as well as get you roped into giving them your data in many other ways. In YouTube, they want to make sure that you go to YouTube and waste your entire afternoon watching YouTube videos so they can serve as many ads as possible, frankly. So if you have a channel that encourages them to watch the next video, doesn't have to be one from your channel, by the way. But if you have a playlist that has another video that encourages them to keep watching, that's a positive signal. They hang out in the comment. That's a positive signal. If they watch for hours after coming from one of your videos, that's a positive signal. But having a video that works on YouTube, so Google has computer vision is what people need to know. That's more about tell us more about that. Yeah, so they understand, they can literally see what's in videos and images. So they can tell which ones perform best of all this data on people on YouTube. And they can tell that the best answer to a how to cook salmon query is distinctly a chef cooking salmon with a picture of the same. I'm making this up. But they can actually know the elements of the video that make it a great response beyond just the text or the audio. So if you're going to perform well on YouTube, this is the thing that's common between the two. Are you as good to it as everybody else? Are you good or better than the results that are currently appearing? So I know it sounds like a slog because you can't just turn on a tool. But that's how both algorithms are working right now. You have to actually see who else is appearing and figure out how to create something that's as good as there. I mean, there's labeling elements on YouTube, but that's not the biggest piece of the algorithm. The biggest piece of the algorithm is this engagement, waste your afternoon on YouTube piece. Oh, you're morning or it's 3am every time it is you're on. Yeah, I've seen the rabbit hole. I mean, COVID and online learning didn't help kids. I can see my trying to keep my daughter up YouTube now. Thanks to all the school videos they posted on it and didn't think about where the next one and the next one. I take rest a little there. But some follow up questions for you. You mentioned having a really high quality YouTube channel. I mean, what are the elements of a high quality YouTube channel? And if you're an organization and you haven't thought about this much, but you've been randomly posting to YouTube, you know, what do you do from your random posts to get to a channel? And then I'm going to just dump a whole bunch of questions on you real quick. And then if I want to be as good or better, but I haven't been doing this yet, I'm probably not going to be as good as what's out there. So how do we get people to feel if this is really important, don't be discouraged because you're not great yet, but set up have the model find where you want to go and get better. And then yeah, so yeah, we've all got it in and talking about the channel. Yeah, I mean, I think the challenge was which I'll start from start from the first is to be really good at YouTube, you need to have somebody dedicated to supporting YouTube. So the very least you have to have a social media manager. That's that's a piece of what they do. I always nudge organizations as they get bigger to just assume you're going to have somebody doing part time or full time YouTube. So that's that's one because there's just a lot of interaction and you want the interaction. So a high quality channel there are it's similar to email we'll talk about email because nonprofits get that right. So if you have an email list, you want people to open your emails on the regular, not dump you into spam and click through on things and take action right. And so you're working on all of those types of signals. So you can on YouTube have a subscriber, you can get you can have them turn on notifications. You can ping them in a variety of ways in the community area. So you message them and you want them to respond and reply. So the thing that makes it a little bit different, which is not completely like email is that if a video gets a lot of engagement in the first 24 hours, it gets a little bit of a snowball effect. So putting everything you got into that video when it gets published is is a piece of it. But if you think about click through rate, that's where you talk about the thumbnail of the video, right. And what is that call to action does have a face, etc. You've tested that you can test some of that stuff to make sure that that's engaging. So you actually get both clicks when it appears inside YouTube search or Google, as well as when maybe you notify your subscribers, you can also put it in I spent a tiny stint at a direct mail firm that worked with left organizations. And so I did a lot of emails with them. One of the things we tested that was definitely successful was sending a video in an email like a video embed, but putting video in the subject line because that definitely encouraged more opens. So testing that kind of stuff. But the other bit is you just want to keep talking to your audience because there's a tons of things you can do once they keep you're creating a fan base, right. So envision it like you're you know, you're running like a music concert, right. All that kind of stuff where people are they're buying your swag eventually. And they want to know when the next thing drops. I mean, all of that applies to YouTube. I don't know if I fully answered all of your questions there. You know, podcasting like we're doing right now, audio is really popular. And we've been doing some research just for our own here. And YouTube is apparently the place to start. It is the biggest spot for podcasts, actually. Yeah. So fast. Because I imagine, you know, I hear more about organizations that seem to want to get into the audio space more so than the video space, probably because of the limitations of being able to have videographers, great editing. I feel like the audio seems simpler and a way to get out. You could do it with the less, I guess, if that's the way to do it. So I mean, how is audio comparing to video? And is there really a difference there on YouTube? And is it only because you would share this video on YouTube along with the audio? So the podcast that performed best on YouTube are what we're doing now, except you released the video basically. So it has the face element. There's actually something to watch. It doesn't need to be necessarily crazy, highly produced. That's the positive about the podcast space is that it's still so small compared to all these other marketing channels. And people get started and then abandon their podcast often. So the vast majority of the podcasts out there have 10 or less and they've stopped. So there's still an opportunity if you're a committed as you and I are a committed podcast host. I think there's tons of opportunity to still get visibility in that space. Though most podcast listeners, I think only listened to seven podcasts. So you do have to kind of compete to get into their cue to get listened. But yeah, it's an easy way to do stuff on YouTube, I think. I think you just turn on the video, you create a good, you know, some cover art and stuff, but you get easy additional listeners. Also, when you use a podcast distributor like I use Buzzsprout, you can distribute all these different players. That's the other thing. I see organizations all the time, they're on Lisbon and they promote to two places or maybe three if I'm being generous. But you're just missing out. Not everybody. Everybody's got a weird wonky player that they listened to. And you want to make sure you're in all of those places, Google's Spotify is big with podcasting, Amazon music has got podcasting, all those places. But as an SEO perspective, I think it's a great way to do thought leadership, usually get some links to your website, that kind of stuff. It makes it really easy. But it is something that I also see organizations just not doing very effectively. So I actually looked at what makes, so Google actually has these podcast carousels. So for different subjects on the top of the search result, they pull through suggestions for searchers of the top podcast in that space to follow. And it turns out, in order to be in that space, you need to have a top performing podcast, which Google can measure based on all sorts of things. So overall listeners, how long people listen, whether they listen to the end, all that kind of stuff. So the quality of the podcast in the middle will still matter. Well, yeah, I know they've got so much data. I mean, I think that's the part people don't realize. And if anybody listening has not looked at your own account with Google, I'd recommend you go take a look at that because if you've ever, like I'm an Android user, so I talk to my phone and they have recordings of your voice, you can ask for it to be deleted. But I mean, there's a lot of data that they can use to personalize to you. They don't say they use it all, but there's a lot of data they can use to personalize to you. I think probably everyone listening has probably had that experience where you talk about something and then all of a sudden your phone decides to show you a prompt and you're like, what? I know, very suspicious, huh? Yeah. I hadn't written the bus in like, I don't know, three or four months when I was living in DC and I was talking to my mother-in-law about the buses and the bus schedule. And then right when I finished talking to her and I was walking towards my friend's door, my phone was like, the bus will be here in exactly five minutes. Yeah, I have this presentation I always share and hopefully I can explain this via audio without the visual, but I was working at Ketchum in the DC office and we shared an IP with New York, so weird. So they, you know, who knows what IP that was. But I was talking to a colleague in Los Angeles and we were working on, I'm going to forget the tech company. It's one of the big ones too, but they develop ultrasound machines for, you know, OB-GYN, ULTRAPRO machines so you can like see the baby. So when I did a search, so we had her do a search first and she shared the screenshot to me and what she saw was like, we were looking for particularly 3D ultrasounds, I think was the term. And when she shipped the screenshot over, it was like Los Angeles, I had map listing, it was all 3D ultrasound, that made sense. So the background for me, because I was doing it for my account without being logged out, my brother was about to get married, this is almost a decade ago. And I had been talking back and forth with my parents about doing this trip to San Diego where my dad used to be stationed as like a family trip. So I do this screenshot and I had already had my first kid. So my screenshot had places in San Diego that I could go get a 3D ultrasound and pictures of what a 3D ultrasound would look like. I was based in DC. Fascinating. So they say they don't personize to you. But that was in my Gmail account and that's the kind of results I got. So I'm going to move around a few questions here and just pull this one up. I mean, has content personalization become a critical approach to gaining attention and engagement? I mean, yeah, in your content creation process, how do you really think about that? I mean, what advice do you have for nonprofits if this really is the game? And I've got to put stuff out that really starts to get to a personalized level. What do I do? I mean, I think the first part is make sure that you've got some clear personas because most folks don't, ideally by talking to some of your target audience. And beyond that, the approach that I've taken is I apply some of the corporate best practices around digital marketing to the nonprofit space. So when you're building out your content portfolio, because keep in mind, I should explain to you that, so Google not only has an intent engine, so they know if I'm searching for a variety of, I don't know, terms related to how to buy a cell phone, they're all about this one thing to buy a cell phone. But then on top of that, they understand, so they understand topics and subtopics, and they understand the searcher's journey. And they use that in search results because they've been watching your queries. So, you know, they have all this data they've been gathering. And so the intent engine was a 2015 patents, we're not talking about new stuff, this is kind of old, the understanding topics and searchers journeys was 2018. And now they can present information to people without searching in Google discover lens and voice or a little bit of voice, right, so they can do other stuff there. So it discovers somewhat, I forget when it rolled out, but it's also been around for a while. But if Google is focused on making sure that the searcher is always learning the next step in their searcher's journey. So say I keep searching SEO, I'm going to get more sophisticated stuff over time, basically. So because of that, you should really know who you're talking to, and then also think about how they touch your organization in relation to a customer journey. So the first step, if this was like e-commerce, you know, the first step is discovery and then consideration and then evaluation and etc. So take that same thing but apply to nonprofits. So you've got this discovery, and you've got an engagement, and you've got an action, but then at the end, you've also got donor and advocacy, like being a grassroots spreader of your organization, right, verbally or online or whatever. So you can map those, and then you can also map those to queries. So when you look at the whole bucket of queries you've got, think about which query goes under which stage, how much do they know your organization. And based on the search results, when you look at the search results, you can tell based on the queries at which stage they're at, what thing would be most useful for them to get. So is it text? Is it a video? Is it an image? Is it an infographic comparison? I don't know. It's a variety of different things, especially in the advocacy side. So maybe it's like, I wouldn't recall it when I was at an environmental working group, media center, right? So bloggers could come and grab your logo and grab the widget and make it easy for them to spread the word, right? So use that same kind of mapping, because once you do that for every persona, which means you're going to have more than one of these maps, you'll realize where you're missing content, because you want to be there at every stage. So if you are the organization, it's about clean water, and every query somebody has as they're learning about clean water and want to become more engaged in the clean water discussion and help you make sure everybody's got clean water, just make sure that you have something to answer every part of that query. So you get that searcher every time. Also, please don't rely just on organic search, because clicks right now are about 40-something percent. So 60% of the time they don't click on anything in organic search, and it's been a trend that's been decreasing because Google keeps putting other things in search that don't involve clicking through. So make sure you've got a good email capture. And I tell everybody this, including the feds, I'm like, please make sure you, if somebody's engaged with you, get them onto your list. You own the list. That way you can keep talking to them in a much more efficient manner. Don't assume they're going to find you in search again, because search results change constantly, more than hourly, and the algorithm changes nine times a day. That's a lot of change. Yeah, that's a tremendous amount of change. Yeah, we've been talking that forever, too. I mean, I was almost a whole premise panel engagement architecture, and we came up with the model, and you got to get people onto your email list. Or text, maybe text message, but get personal information from them. The thing you can own versus the thing you're renting, right? Because the algorithms change, same on social media platforms. They want to change your algorithm tomorrow, and you were trying to base everything you had on that platform, and they changed it. Sorry, there's nothing you can do about it, because you're not the shareholder. Well, and Google just rolled out an update. It stopped last week, and some sites just disappeared off of Google. That can happen. I mean, hopefully not if you have an SEO on board that has like a evergreen philosophy around SEO, but a couple people that get the rich, quick kind of schemes, they lost their websites. Well, it was a couple years ago, too, and they told everyone it was coming, but then if you didn't have a mobile opt to my site, you weren't going to appear anymore. Sorry. Make me think when you were talking, too, just in the non-profit space, the misstrips sector here, there's always such an emphasis on content production, which is important, but I think it's important to remember content production is a piece of content operations, and we have to start thinking, I think, to your points about the broader content operations within an organization that someone has to be able to sit there and do the analysis, look at this, and think about where the content's missing, just not that I'm producing it constantly, but how do I set up within the operational process to say, I need this, but we're really missing over here. So when you have downtime, we're going to start filling the gaps in these different places to get there. Also make sure you promote it. So actually the biggest part of content creation is the promotion part, because if you just create it, unless you've got a big audience already and you've got a big traffic website and you've got a big email list, it's possible that people are not actually going to see that, because again, every URL needs inbound links. If you're doing your website accurately, it's going to get some links from your website. It's going to get some links because it's in the XML sitemap file, but ideally you're getting it in front of the audience where they read. So if you're in the, I don't know, the tech or science space, it's probably Reddit, frankly. So make sure somebody's sharing it on Reddit, so that it could be discovered on Reddit. That's the thing is that it's a very splintered, which is why if you go back to that persona, you would actually know where your target audience potentially hangs out. So you're getting it featured in a particular magazine. So when I was at Environmental Working Group, we launched this cell phone radiation report about how the cell phone's gone cause brain cancer. They actually never updated it because the technology has changed. So I can't answer the question of whether it's still cause brain cancer. But when we were, we were thinking about launching it. It's the first time anybody talked about the topic. At the moment, the science was very sound with the types of phones we had. What we did is we did an embargo with different groups that would care. So their default was sort of, let's send it to Treehugger, which is fine. But I was like, no, no, no, let's do New York Times. Let's do Yahoo Health. Let's do Gizmodo. Let's do these other folks in the cell phone space. And that plan was so successful because we were first paid to dig, which also could tank websites back then, our website tank. But it's that kind of idea, like think about who else is interested, not just, not just the usual suspects. It's easy enough to come up with a pitch list from other places and don't discount websites that syndicate as well as social media. We did social media, we did the whole 360. But think about that when you're promoting. And if you have something sexy enough where you can do sort of an embargo, that works really well. Because again, if Google can see that suddenly everybody's googling and is interested in this one topic, you get a nice little snowball effect that has a very long-lasting effect. Because we went from 300,000 to like 1.2 million in the first two months. That's with the website being down for the first four days of launch. Wow. But yeah, that's how you're successful. The promotion part is really critical. If we just posted it and not told anybody, crickets. So it's making me think about, and if you could talk a little bit to it, how should we be thinking organization-wide about creating effective SEO practices? And what we were just talking about was making me think a lot of nonprofits are pretty good at having an air quote, editor-in-chief of a website or the content they're going to push or what they want to write. But it feels like that person needs to be paired with the COO of content, that content operations person who has a different tact, which is, that's great. These are the stories you want to tell. You're going to work on that and figure that out. But let me figure out how it's going to actually hit where it's landing, what's the data behind it and how the maneuvers. That's where my head's at from this conversation with you. But you've done this a lot. What are some effective tips for getting organizations to be participating in what you need to do to get out there and be found? Yeah. So I mean, the websites that are the most successful in this have been searched first, like Healthline. So their editorial directives are driven by SEO. There's no other way of explaining it. They have the data about what topics they should appear for. They write to those topics. I mean, that's it. And then they measure the success so it would be organic traffic plus conversions plus for them ads based on topics that are performing. But they have the KPIs clearly measured out. And when they think about what they're doing next, they look at the metrics and they use that to decide what they're doing next. And so from a content perspective, that's what the big guys are doing. That doesn't mean anybody else can do it, but that's the approach that works best for search. In relation to getting an organization who has not done search before to be interested in search. Since I was I've done that a few times myself in house, it's definitely a change. You're a change agent. You're trying to change the organization. So if you have senior support, it's best. I've been most successful in places where the CTO is interested in SEO kind of thing. So somebody very high up is like, we need this channel to work for us. This needs this is our future kind of thing. But it's still a lot of sea change because we just talked about how many different verticals kind of are impacted by SEO. So the SEO needs to be involved in anything to do with the website changes. They need to be part of the QA process. They need to be part of the planning before the QA process. That's probably the part that gets missed the most. When you're planning a new thing, ping your SEO person to evaluate what you're doing to see whether or not it's going to negatively impact your organic traffic and make sure they get to test it before it goes live and when it goes live. So there's that process. But then there's also reviewing UX, right? If you change UX, because ranking for a URL, for instance, Google looks at the parent-child relationship. That's part of how well it ranks. That's UX. There's a couple of the things that are definitely UX, but that is so the SEO should be looking at UX. And then your SEO point person doesn't necessarily need to be involved in every piece of content, but helping with the content strategy, like the topics you want to appear for, setting up the tracking, coaching people so they know how to write for the web, making sure they've got the headers and sub headers and that sort of way where you can get the frangles, also being involved in the YouTube strategy directly, I think. And then from an organic perspective, take the same philosophy and apply it to organic. So is the content performing? If not, why? Are we following the algorithm? And those change too. So like, for instance, the LinkedIn, actually, I think the big takeaway for all the social algorithms, and Rand Fishkin just did an analysis of this so I can dig up that data, because it's only like last year, I think, or this year, is that all the social platforms deprioritize you if you're going to get a person off the platform. So if you put a link in copy, you are going to be deprioritized in those personalized algorithms because you're not keeping people on the platform. So there's a way to work around it, but that's the state of the union in these social platforms, which is why just like the tiniest way of figuring this out. So that's why when you see LinkedIn, everybody posts it, but then puts the link in the comments. That's why people are doing it, because you don't want to put content out there that is set up to not even show in the personalized feeds. That's shooting yourself in the foot. And all of those are video first kind of algorithms now, to be honest, every single one prioritizes video for the most part. So again, your video strategy needs to be thought of in relation to social. And then the other thing I think people should keep in mind, which Joe Federer in my podcast, he's got a book, which is everybody should read, but he looks at how every different social platform has its own unique culture. So you're walking into pretend as a university, right? You're walking into a university campus, and every university campus is radically different. And if you try to interact with that student base exactly the same, you're probably going to fall flat. And I just think of that because I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was the 1970s hippies campus. I'm familiar. No grades, right? You know, no grades, no tests, no credits. Yeah. So it's a particular vibe versus Smith, which is a female college, all female, right? Very different. They were very different campuses. Social is the same. So if you go on to Reddit and you don't know the rules of engagement, and you just try to take whatever you post on Facebook and put it on Reddit, it's absolutely going to fail. And I see how people do that all the time. They take the same stuff. I know it's my work. But well, the other thing is most people aren't measuring. So they don't know that's failing. But I mean, you should measure. And if you're going to bother, do your best. So it has a chance to actually show up in the newsfeed. Otherwise, it is a wasted activity. What's the name of the book by Joe Federer? I know you're going to ask me and I'll not remember. I'll give it to you. It'll be on the show notes. Grab it for the show notes for sure. I mean, I like that. So he ran brand for Reddit. So that's where his background comes from after working with us at Ketchum. But I really like that. I mean, the rules of engagement for each of these communities. We talk about that a lot too. I mean, the last several months and to come into the pandemic and not just awakening people have been having, you know, we need to diversify your audiences. It was like, we don't just randomly show up and start screaming on a corner and expect you're going to get some new fans. Like, I think the same for these channels. There was, it used to be, well, there's so many people on all of these, I should be on all of them because I have a chance of attracting some new people. And I've never, that's never felt right. It feels even more wrong now just knowing how much cost goes into production and time, you know, and I mean staff time that's going into this to make this. And so you want it to be the best you can custom for each one of those channels, but don't be on all the channels. So you got to find the ones that you're going to win at, right? Right. And it makes way more sense to take the tiny resources you've got to actually follow the algorithm and create content that's going to be engaged with and engaged with the audience on two channels than beyond five or six. Like when I walked in to catch them, they actually gave me a VP of social media title when I was first at catch them. They thought the search title would scare people. So I did social media stuff. And the first thing I did was I was like, why are you on these five channels? You can't support it. What are you doing? Like let's cut some of these. So for instance, Twitter, my SEO peeps are on Twitter. I'm fond of Twitter, but US people are not on Twitter. So like there's congressional folks, reporters, yes, actual people know about like 10% of the US population. And I don't even know if those are active accounts. And so like Twitter doesn't make sense unless you're trying to go after a reporter and like just those job descriptions, right? So Reddit. Reddit has always been predominantly male, but it's big in science. It's big in tech. It's big in some other spots. So like if that's your jam, then you should probably look at Reddit. Also Reddit has huge amounts of information you can call when you're creating your personas to actually see what people are sharing content they're looking for. So as a research engine, I think people should look at Reddit anyway, but being there, maybe not for everybody. YouTube, let's go back to YouTube, second largest search engine. Everybody's on YouTube. Literally everybody. It almost doesn't matter what you demographic is at this point. More people are on YouTube than watching TV, right? So why are you not on YouTube again? It also, those YouTube videos show up in Google search, which is the largest search engine, which you can see why I know YouTube is more work, but bang for your buck in weeks, way more sense than some of these other ones because, you know, Facebook, Facebook is great. It's also would be the next big one that would make sense, but probably only if you're running paid ads because the organic reaches so dismal and younger groups are not there. So it depends on your target audience. And if you're a recipe chef, you should be on Pinterest, right? But it, you shouldn't discount that. That's probably your predominant one if you're doing that kind of stuff. But that was kind of how I got everybody to pivot. I'm like, who's your target audience? What's the demographic? Where are they? That's where you need to be. Ignore everything else. So I had a VA that was like, oh, you should be on TikTok. Oh my God, I should not be on TikTok. My peeps are on Twitter. We're going to be on Twitter. Thank you. And, and LinkedIn and probably ignore everything else and YouTube. For anyone listening too, I just, because I don't want anyone to get into this or like, all right, I'm going to align my content operations and I'm going to, I'm going to whittle my channels and I'm going to think about where I'm putting it. I, I think people also just need to think of email as its own content channel too. It's not just the press release out. So if you're thinking about how you're optimizing where you're going to build content for, like don't, don't undermine what you could do on email. Cause once you get it there, that's really where you want to maintain people. So it really is in my head, it's another, it's never talked about when people talk about the spread of channels. They talk about all the things that are external to the organization, not the bit that they control, which is how you can be using email as an engagement, like not just a press release mechanism. Yeah. When I was at environmental working group, my J didn't have tons of budget, but one of the first things, cause I was director of internet marketing. So director of everything, all the channels. But I, as part of hiring me, I said, I need an email marketing manager because that's where your dollars come from. Like duh, like you need one person, they had a list of 200,000 at that point. I'm like, you need one person to just love, care and feed this thing. And in fact, we had one person and a consultant in fact. But I'm like, that's, you don't ignore that. That's your most important hire. So like, if you were to start a profit from scratch, like don't make that email person do 12 other things. You should just have an email person and maybe, maybe give them text messaging because it's also donor driven, but that's it. That's all they do. And then find ancillary support for the other channels. I love it. Yeah. I mean, good advice for everybody. So we also talked a little future state, but current life with a little bit of artificial intelligence. And you were, you know, I think there was, why is that two years, I don't know how many years ago now, some years ago, everybody was listening. I don't know the years, but there was supposed to be a AI generated content management system where I could like speak into the computer and it would start building these things out. And I think we are seeing some of the fruition of that though, coming with content being created with AI algorithms. And it feels like it could be something good. Because if you need to play the content production monster role to fill the belly of the beast out there that always wants content, wouldn't having a machine that just could crank it throughout the night be useful. But according, you've found some interesting stuff out recently about Google and AI content. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. I mean, so I just talked about how this update tanks some websites. So they called it the helpful content update. Sometimes SEOs get to name it. Sometimes Google names it. That's what the biggest one recently was. That was one of three updates already in September. So big ones. Anyway, this is a broad update. So if they discover that you are creating content with artificial intelligence that has no authority and is not helpful, it's a site-wide signal and they can take your site out of Google search or they did. They did take some sites out of Google search. So, but that's not to say that AI is bad everywhere. Just like a little caveat. So I don't think you should use AI to create all your content because I have always been suspicious that because Google has a knowledge graph, I don't know if people know what a knowledge graph is. So they, Ray Kurzweil, who is the premier expert in artificial intelligence has been working at Google for over a decade. And I know Ray because I'm a dork and I did my master's thesis on consumer adoption of wearable computers. That's how I discovered Ray. I actually saw him speak at PopTech, which is kind of like a TED conference. And he's like far out in left field. He wants to have a chip in his brain kind of guy. Brilliant though. And he's been building the Google brain at Google. So he's trying to make Google into a brain. So in order to be a brain, you need to know how topics intersect with each one another. So you have to know that I'm Catherine. I'm the owner of owner, what that's a title of W strategies, which is an organization. I live in McLean, Virginia, which is a city in McLean, which is a state, which is Virginia, you know, that kind of thing, that structure. So that's what Google's been building forever, 15 years longer, probably. So they originally built it by pulling data from various databases, Wikipedia, CIA fact database, some other spots. So you can kind of get the original list of where they said they pulled this stuff from. They also pull it from schema markup across the web. They also pulled it by looking at search queries and figuring out what topics and subtopics sync together. So they have all this information like you are as a human about whether or not you are answering the question completely in relation to what topics and subtopics you cover. That goes into whether or not you win this ranking thing. That's hard to do with artificial intelligence. That's hard to do without a subject matter expert in the health space. All of those white labeled sites I was talking about, not only do they have inbound links from places that are definitely authoritative, but often they have a bio of somebody with a medical degree and you can see the bio. They have this algorithm called EAT, Expertise, Authority and Trust, and it matters more for websites that have a more impactful for the searcher. They call them your money or your life websites. Now, this is not like part of the algorithm that hits the front, but they have these human beings, all the search engines do, that evaluate search results. They're called human raters. And so they've been gathering this information from human raters, possibly getting baked into the algorithm. But ultimately, okay, so you go back to content. So I need to write something. I made it pretty simple and it is pretty simple. So you could just open up all 10 things that are ranking, see the subjects and subtopics they're covering, and you use that to create a plan. That's not the worst way of doing it. But at scale, what you could also do is buy some software. I could do some of that for you. So when it comes to an outline, it can do all that work with a click of a button and give you an outline based on all the top 10 things that are ranking for that term, around what stuff you should cover, what images you might want to use, what video you should have, what links you should have from other places to have a chance of ranking. So I kind of recommend most people do that because, again, it's subscription. You can turn it on, you can turn it off. So things like that I've used are content harmony, market news, keyword insights, probably the cheapest, clear escape. And then I've been playing around with a couple like copy AI, neural text, writer.me. So there's a couple like that that I've played around with. So I think using that as a template for what you're going to write is probably still fine. Using it to generate content completely, probably not. And there's a couple other places that artificial intelligence would be helpful. So like Google Docs now has an ability to create a summary of your document. Google's been creating meta descriptions all along. So if you don't have what it will write one for you, I don't recommend people do that because sometimes it's garbage. But if you want to quickly create, you got writer's block. I just need a summary, right? Tweak it. Let Google Docs do it. Sure. If it looks good, then add a call to action. Tweak a little and you're done. Suddenly a longer project became shorter. Or if it's audio, you and I, I think you use Fathom.fm. But I'm a fan of Fathom.fm. You can add it to Zoom. It creates a transcript off your podcast. It's editable. So in case you're sending it to an editor, it actually lets you pull out a transcript based on a chunk of video. Matches it for you. It's fabulous. Autodata AI just rolled out similar stuff. Also Google's text to speech is really good. So if for whatever reason you want to type faster, sometimes I do this. I used to do a daily SEO tips and I would actually, because I have to do a transcript. So I would hit record, narrate with Google text to speak on it at the same time. Just to see how quickly I could get both things happening at the same time. There you go. Transcript of me talking. Plus I got the audio done. So there's some things like that that you should use. But yeah, don't get caught with the whole I can use AI for all my content. Ultimately, I wish there were shortcuts. Oftentimes shortcuts become things that Google penalizes. You should be tracing, chasing the user. Create good stuff for the user. Create a good experience for the user and you'll be fine. Love it. All about high quality. We use Otter.ai. So yeah, we're not on fathom.fm. But yeah, big fans of Otter use it in all of our interviews too when we're just doing the massive stakeholder interviews with all of our clients. It's one of the tools that we always bring in. Super helpful for anyone out there. These tools are super affordable. They can bolt right into this to your point. Make things a lot easier for you. Catherine has been wonderful for anyone who's been listening and wants to find you. How do they find you out here in the interwebs? Sure. Yeah. So my website is wstrategies.com and I actually have a library that's free. So you can sign up and get tools and tips and templates to get started on some of this. Like if you want to write for featured snippets or you want a content brief, that kind of stuff. I'm also, as I said, on Twitter. So that's K-W-A-T-I-E-R. My main name's been on there for a while. I also have a YouTube channel which you can find off my website and LinkedIn. So LinkedIn.com and it's Catherine Watzia.ong-o-n-g-k-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e-w-a-t-i-e-r-o-n-g. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much. And I do have our final question we ask of all of our guests. So, and anyone who's been listening, you know you can grab this final answer from our Spotify channel. And Catherine, what is your go-to song when you need a boost and why? Well, actually, ever since the pandemic started, I use brain.fm. I have a subscription because it makes me highly efficient in 10 minutes or less. So just a tip if you need focus. But my theme song is, All She Wants to Do is Dance from Don Henley. That is going to be stuck in my head for the entire day now. It's great, Tune. That's very catchy. Yeah. Well, that's sticky, maybe the phrase, right? Well, thank you so much again. I really appreciate your time sharing so much of this today. We're going to have a lot to put into the show notes from this episode. So that is wonderful. And until next time, I'll see you then. Great. Thanks.