 Like everybody else, we've got either one minute or two minutes. Who are some difficult industries that you're stressed about writing for? Or find difficult. Give me some examples and we'll try to incorporate. Yeah. Oh, the government. They're the worst. You know, if only we made America great again, then things would be better. Sorry, was that political? No. Okay, government, that's a great example. Any other difficult to write for topics? Home inspectors? Okay. What's difficult about home inspection? Yeah. Okay. Okay, I don't have a home inspection client, but I've dealt with that before. So, are similar things? You got a home, I'm sorry. Another home inspection client? Yeah. Okay. Writing for limousines? Yeah. Okay, okay, okay. Writing topics? Those were all kind of scintillating. Yeah. No branding done? Okay, okay, okay. Well, yeah. Yeah. We'll see if we can incorporate these. Alright. Don't need an introduction? Hi, I'm David. Yeah. Oh. Well, thank you. I've been called a lot worse. No, my name is David Zimmerman. I own a little marketing consultancy called Reliable Acorn out of Charlotte, and I appreciate you guys bringing me here to talk today. This is actually a continuation of my talk last year, which was kind of a technical ICO, and everyone wanted to know about content, so I decided I'd bring a content talk this time, and I'm sure you'll have a lot of technical questions at the end of that, so maybe next year I'll come with a technical, anyway, no. I love doing ICO. I've been doing it for maybe 10 years or so now. Four years ago, I went on my own, started my own little thing, and that's Reliable Acorn. But feel free to tweet me. I'm still on the Twitter's. I'd love to reach out. This kind of topic got started because I was at an agency and it was a real challenge to write for some of my clients. I don't write, but I would often assign out topics to writers to write. It just takes me a long time to write, so it's probably better for some of you writers to write than me. But even my writers would be stumped. What the heck should we write? And if you know anything about SEO, you've probably heard how important good content is for an SEO campaign, right? Google's about the words, and if you want to be found on Google, we have to use them. Now, content could technically be about a lot more than words, but I'm going to be talking about the words today, not about video, not about images. A lot of great people around here have been talking about that this weekend. I'm going to focus on the words. But if we want good content, we really got to start by asking ourselves, well, what is good? Oftentimes people ask me, David, is it good for SEO? I don't know how to answer that question because I don't know what good is. One of my friends kind of, as I was rambling one day about how frustrating it is, when someone asked me, is it good for SEO? She asked, well, what do they really mean when they ask about that? And oftentimes, when someone asks if something is good for SEO, they're saying, does it rank? And rank is a great thing, but is that really what you want? Because theoretically we could think of any number of terms for which you might be able to rank. But rank doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get a visitor for it. Because just because you think of a term doesn't mean anybody else in the universe is thinking of this term right now. So rank isn't the end goal of good content. We want rank that generates traffic because people are searching for it. But we could think of any number of phrases that bring in traffic and that doesn't necessarily help our website or our clients. Because just because it brings in traffic doesn't mean it's bringing in customers. So what we have to say is good content accomplishes its purpose. What do we want the traffic to do when it comes to our site? And that can be varied based on the type of content you're producing. If you're writing a blog post, you might have a different purpose you want to accomplish than if you're writing a landing page, for example. A landing page, the purpose that what you hope to accomplish is someone landing on a page talking about a service or a product that you offer is that they become a customer. They contact you through your lead form. They call you over the phone. You want the purpose of that landing page to bring in the customer. So don't be distracted by rank when we talk about SEL. Don't just think about traffic either. Rank leads to traffic if it's valuable, but more importantly traffic helps accomplish your business goal from your site. And that's what makes content good. So if we talk about good content, we have to talk for a moment about what are the requirements of something that makes it good for content-wise. And the first place we've got to start is focusing on our audience. Now when I worked at an agency I'm going to say a bad word here. I hope they don't bleep it out. Keyword. I forbade my team from using the word keyword. Because when people think of the keyword that gets a laser focused, it becomes obsessed. They become obsessed with it. Google in its algorithm nowadays isn't necessarily thinking of a keyword. They're thinking more in terms of topic. For example, a client of mine asked media the day, should we use the word cybersecurity or cyber security? The answer is who cares? Because Google knows it's the same thing. Those of you guys have done SEL for a while, you remember when we used to produce a page for lawyers in another page for attorneys? Right? We used to do that. Now Google knows they're synonymous. If you're in England they might even include Barrister in that. I don't know. I don't do SEL for lawyers in England. But the point is let's not think in terms of the keyword. Let's think of in terms of our audience. What do our potential customers search for? When we start to think about what makes good content and we're thinking about what our customers are searching for, this will also prevent us from making some common