Content Creation for SEO
Casey: Market is of the world. Why do we work hard to solve small problems? It’s time to bring home bigger paychecks. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact. This is the fractional CMO show and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems.
The fractional CMO show is sponsored by CMOs. The number one company to teach you how to attract, convert and serve clients as an in demand. Fractional CMO, St. Charles, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis co-author of content marketing for local search and Amazon bestseller marketing solutions, architect and fractional chief marketing officer. Of change scape web I’m here with Ken Tucker today, Ken and his team serve independent financial advisors and residential services companies across the country.
They help create a comprehensive marketing strategy for their clients and execute it with his team of digital marketing experts. Ken, welcome to the program.
Ken: Thanks Casey. I’m excited.
Casey: Yeah, I’m really excited to jam and chat. Um, you’re inside the CMOs accelerator and I love getting to know you and your experience in, um, you know, excuse me for a second.
But like sometimes I think people think of like home services, businesses kind of being like boring. but I think that it’s a really wonderful niche to be in. And it seems like you’ve got a ton of experience just before we started recording. You were talking about your experience in, um, some of the different, um, uh, residential services company types, like solar and things like that.
And. I’m excited to kind of like dig in about that because sometimes like the companies that we kind of take for granted as marketers, you know, maybe we’re like, oh, I want to work on the startup. Um, maybe what’s really exciting is like kind of the stuff that’s always going to be around. You’re always going to have plumbing problems.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely. you know, and what’s exciting about working with, uh, with these businesses is that they, actually had great years. Most of the. Uh, you know, even during the COVID economy. So it, it, you know, it’s been really rewarding to be able to work with, uh, with the group of businesses that we have, they certainly had a unique set of challenges. We help them kind of pivot to adjust, you know, different ways of doing business. For example, the big thing was being able to offer, uh, virtual estimates. You know, many of these companies didn’t really have the ability to do that. We, we encouraged our, our folks to jump on that quickly and make that happen.
And now it’s, you know, it’s kind of become an ongoing option that, uh, actually can save them quite a bit of money and drive time and, and some of those kinds of things. So, uh, you know, it, it’s, it’s always interesting to see how you have to adapt your business. Uh, when, when the world changes. Yeah,
Casey: absolutely.
And I want to dig in and talk about that. Um, but one of the things that, that I think, you know, a lot about, because you’re the co-author of the book, content marketing for local search is about content marketing for local search. So let’s dive in and talk about that. Um, first, why didn’t you like, what is, what is it about content marketing for local search that you think is so interesting?
Ken: Well, I think. You know, there’s been this phrase around for a long time. The content is king and you know, that’s probably a pretty tired phrase by now, but, but the reality is if you want to rank for search, especially in a local market and by local market. I mean, if you serve an area, uh, you know, specifically what we’re talking about, most of the.
you know, home services, um, and home remodeling contractors, we work with, you know, they serve an area that could be 10, 25 miles, you know, in, in, uh, in radius. And so you have to have content to increase the chance that you’re going to be found online. And, you know, and everybody’s like, oh my gosh, I have no idea how to go about creating this content.
What do I do? And so I just felt like it was. A gap that I saw that needed to be addressed. And so I worked with a couple of other marketing friends of mine, and we co-wrote the book really to help, businesses understand, you know, the type of content they need, give them some strategies to create that content or recognize this is bigger than what we should be focused on.
And we need to, we need to focus on our business and maybe it’s something we need to hire experts to.
Casey: Yeah, I love it. I love it. That makes sense. So, I mean, it’s pretty simple. Anyone listening to this, they kind of understand the basics, which is, um, if someone has a search query on Google and you want to resolve in the top ranks for it, you need to have the content that’s better than the other content that’s out there.
It’s kind of that mix between, uh, as good as, or better than content with enough domain reputation to be able to run. Yeah, but how do you get, how do you get these companies that kind of say the same thing that other companies would say? I would think like home services company, like plumbers in St. Louis say the same thing as plumbers in Philadelphia.
So how do you create any content there? That’s, that’s actually unique or defensively
Ken: unique. Yeah. well, first of all, every piece of content that we do write and create is unique and we run it through tools to make sure that Google sees it as unique. Otherwise. You know, you run the risk of being seen as duplicate content, which isn’t penalizing, but it’s not helpful from an SEO perspective.
and you certainly never want to plagiarize. you know, and so we write you unique original content. And tell me,
Casey: why don’t you want to plagiarize? I know, I know it’s like in school you get in trouble for like, you know, plagiarizing, but like, why is it bad to actually plagiarize on the web? Do you get, uh, do you get hurt by Google?
Is Google crawling and seeing that a site that has a site map, uh, with a post that’s older than yours is the same content and they, they hurt you.
Ken: Yeah. Google is going to establish what they call the canonical URL. And so, uh, that’s the that’s where Google is going to attribute the, you know, the first posting of that piece of content from a search engine optimization perspective.
And, usually the, the place that publishes it and has a Google crawl first almost always gets that canonical URL. Everywhere else that it finds that piece of content. It doesn’t penalize you. It’s not going to make you drop in the rankings, but it’s not going to help you. It, Google’s going to ignore that content on the other sites that it finds that content published on.
you know, and, and we’re going to talk about, you know, financial advisors here in a bit, uh, you know, that’s an area where a lot of people sign up for syndicated content where all of the contents that’s written as go, it goes out. You know, dozens, hundreds, thousands of other advisors out there, it’s literally the same content.
If they think that that’s helping them from a search engine optimization perspective, it’s not
Casey: it isn’t, this is what you mean. Like a financial adviser gets pitched by some marketing platform or firm and they say, um, uh, just pay us $49 a month and you’ll get access to a weekly newsletter that you can stick your branding on and send out.
Ken: or put on your website or both? Uh huh. Yeah. So the email is actually, I’m sorry.
Casey: Get putting on the website, gives them zero value is what you’re saying.
Ken: Exactly. And, and you know, it, it, well, it does give them a little bit of value in the sense that if say visitors are on there, maybe it’s useful information for them to just to read, but from an SEO perspective, there’s zero value.
Yep. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. And so, you know, it’s just, um, it’s a challenge. Obviously, because, you know, I mean, painters, roofers, like you, like you mentioned a lot of these businesses, how do you really make them different? And I think one thing is really just to focus on the problems that you solve.
And actually that’s a really key element to search engine optimization because people are searching more and more based [00:08:00] on the way they express their problems. And if you have content on your website or when they land on your whole page of your website and you speak to the problem that they have, if you got them, cause guess what, 90% of your competitors, or more, and usually within market, very few competitors, if any are doing that.
And so you’ll immediately stand out. And so that’s one great way to differentiate yourself. And I think it’s important to, um, to realize that. You know, people express problems in different ways. Um, uh, I’m a big fan of StoryBrand. I love how simply it, it helps you understand how you need to create a clear message.
Um, you know, and, and people usually are looking at problems from two perspectives. One is, um, expressing an external. And then how they express the internal problem. And so the external problem is, and I can speak from this, but from experience right now, I have a Tuesday, um, and you know, that’s the way I express the external problem.
So I’m going to go look for a dentist, which I think is probably the person that can help me solve that problem. Um, I’m going to go out there and yeah, I’m going to go check out a few dental websites. Um, but I might pick the dentist. That addresses my internal concern or my internal problem, which might be every time I go to the dentist, I find it to be a painful experience or I find it very stressful and, you know, very anxious.
Um, and, and, and maybe that’s why I decide to go to the dentist is because they say, Hey, we specialize in pain-free dentistry, or we get that coming to the dentist’s office. You know, is not something that anybody goes out of their way to do. We help you, um, you know, deal with a stressful situation and the least stressful way possible.
That’s not a very elegant way to say it, but if somebody speaks to [00:10:00] that on their website, um, you know, then that’s going to sway my decision. And, uh, you know, that’s how I, I would S look at differentiation is if you can describe the problems that people have. Content and, and, uh, and, and guide people through that journey.
You’re going to win.
Casey: Yeah. I love it. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. So talk to me about how you go ahead and create content. And let’s just jump into the financial advisors. So the financial advisor, they can take the easy route, which is spend the 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, whatever it is a month to get this content pre-written for them, but it’s boiler plate.
And every other financial advisor down the street can do the exact same thing. So they want to differentiate and they want to actually have unique content. Um, how, how do you, how do you create.
Ken: You know, I think, um, most people are natural content creators. They just don’t realize that they’re creating content that could easily be put onto the website.
So go, you know, and obviously with financial advisors, they have to deal with the [00:11:00] world of compliance. So that’s obviously a big challenge for them, but go back through your emails every time you respond to a customer in an email and you’re solving a problem. That’s potentially unique content that you could use to turn into a blog post.
Um, you, maybe you record a video on it. Every frequently asked question, you have one of the things we’re really excited about depending we’re working on right now with a lot of our clients is, um, to develop a frequently frequently asked questions set. Uh, a lot of people may have that on the website, but many people still don’t.
Um, again, questions are problems, problems. Our way, what’s the key for search engine optimization. In my opinion, the way you can write problem-based content and put that on your website. And so pick an ideal client, um, and figure out what are the top frequently asked questions that they ask of you. And then what [00:12:00] we’re doing is we’re, we’re kind of building this content stack where if somebody is comfortable doing it, create a video answering that frequently asked.
Video is incredibly powerful from a content repurposing perspective. You can take the video element. You can post that on YouTube. You can put it on Facebook natively as a video. You can share it. Um, you know, through social media, you embed it on your website, but then you take that video. You transport.
And that transcription is going to be what Google is going to crawl from an SEO perspective. And so your, you know, plus it w when, when the people are going to watch the video, most people are going to watch the video. Some people may read the transcription. Um, video is the next best thing to being able to meet somebody in face-to-face.
And so you get a real feel for. How it would be like, uh, working with somebody. Uh, but, but the, you know, while they’re explaining how they would help you solve that problem. And so it very, very [00:13:00] powerful, then you take that video, you chunk it out, turn it into smaller pieces that you can push out through social media.
Uh, you can create social media posts, pulling out quotes. If you didn’t want to just chop up the video, uh, and, and then it, it powers that whole engine. And then what we do is we write a press release that drives high quality inbound links to the blog post that we created from the video and that little machine, that little content machine is super potent, uh, because you’re actually creating, you know, half a dozen different pieces of content from just one.
And so that’s, you know, that’s really, I think a, a critical thing. We’re all super busy and it, you know, it’s hard to sometimes sit down and a lot of people, I think actually when they sit down and they try to write something at the keyboard, or even on, you know, on paper, they get writer’s block or they get kind of frozen and, you know, you [00:14:00] videos a little bit tricky.
You have to get comfortable doing it, but, you know, we guide people through and you don’t have to spend a ton of money to. These types of videos. I mean, having a smartphone, turning it landscape so that it’s, you know, the right orientation, like a TV screen, um, getting an ice backdrop, getting, making sure that you’ve got the lighting and the audio, uh, and then getting a teleprompter, you know, makes it really easy to do these videos.
And these videos can be five minutes, 10 minutes long. That’s enough content. That’s going to give Google the ability to crawl that and search it and figure out what you’re talking. Yeah,
Casey: sorry. I got a quick question on that. Um, on the teleprompter side, um, do you do like a proper teleprompter or do you just like, do like a computer?
Ken: I would just do like a, there there’s an app, a couple apps out there. I’m drawing a blank on what they are, but, um, um, just set up an iPad on a different, got it. Uh, tripod right beside your, your, your, uh, video camera or your smartphone. Perfect.
Casey: Yeah, [00:15:00] that’s awesome. I’ve never used a teleprompter before and I’ve always considered.
The kind of 45 degree glass, proper teleprompters shoot through it sing. And I just haven’t done it just to put my iPad up next to the camera. Sounds a whole lot.
Ken: Well, and now there’s, I’ll get you the information of what this particular application is. I’m drawing a blank off the top of my head, but it actually will adjust the speed of the teleprompter to your voice.
And if you go off script, that’s fascinating and you’ll allow. It’ll pause and it’ll pick it back up when you’re, when you come back. Oh, wow. That’s a big deal. Yeah. And it’s only like 30 bucks or something. It’s an app you buy, you know, for, uh, you know, through Android or iPhone.
Casey: Okay, great. Great. Okay.
That’d be awesome to check out. Um, I’ve got a, I’ve got a question for you. So tell me more about the amplification of content. Um, how are you amplifying it? You said you do a press release. Do you go just through the wire? Typically just like whoa website
Ken: like where you don’t use. The traditional press release systems.
We, uh, we use a press release system where the press release actually publishes to the website first so that you, so that the website gets the canonical URL. So you actually get two pieces of content, uh, you know, uh, and that press release is then distributed to media sites, 40 to 60 different media sites across the us that all have domain authority of 50 or.
So these are meaty, um, inbound links that you’re generating. And that’s always one of the hardest things to accomplish from an SEO perspective is generating quality of valid links. And, um, and then from an amplification perspective, we build out a 12 months social media campaign for every blog post that we create that keeps driving traffic back from social, back to the blog post.
And it has a really great cumulative effect from a traffic perspective. But what’s interesting is again, in almost every single case, the traffic that’s being driven back from these 12 months, social media campaigns, they actually lead to greater dwell time because people click around and read other content on the website.
Sure. So it’s, it’s turned out to be a really fantastic little system.
Casey: Oh, that’s so smart. Um, People, most companies, most businesses, uh, it posts a piece of content. They might send an email about it. It might add it. It’s the worst when they do like one piece of content a week and they rounded up in a newsletter and that’s the only time people see it.
And then it’s just on the website for forever and no one visits it, but the 12 month kind of engagement process to, to kind of cross posted everywhere, seems like a really effective
Ken: way to do it. Yeah, absolutely. And by all means, I think you should include it in an email newsletter, right? Email’s still is a really important channel is long as you have a group of people who have legitimately opted in and subscribed to receive that content because, you know, it’s not just enough to write it and publish it and think that Google is going to make it immediately find-able by anybody.
So you do need to give it a push. You need to help get it in front of the right eyeballs. And if the, you know, those eyeballs could be, you know, the people that are subscribing to your newsletter. So you should absolutely do that. But then leverage the power of social media, you know, to get it in front of people who may not normally even be aware of the fact that you, you, you exist.
Um, you know, and, and, and also take advantage of, uh, you know, the serendipity of somebody maybe sharing that piece of content with, um, you know, with other people that they know on social media.
Casey: Yeah. That makes sense. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. All right. Let’s talk about financial advisors here specifically.
One thing that you and I chatted about kind of before we got on here was, uh, how the federal regulations have changed just recently. And we’re recording this episode in November of 2021. Tell
Ken: me about that. Well, the two biggest changes are in regard to social media, you can actually turn on comments now.
So before for certified financial planners who have very rigid, um, compliance requirements that they had to go through. They could post to social media, but they could not let comments be made on social media. That’s been relaxed and, you know, and so that basically just made it a wall. It’s almost like graffiti, where they could go write a message on a wall and hope that somebody might say.
But there was no way to really generate engagement. So, so I think that’s an exciting change
Casey: at the end of the conversation instead of a billboard.
Ken: Exactly, exactly. The other huge thing is that they could not go out and actively ask for reviews for online reviews. They can now as of may or June of this year.
And so if you want to. If you want to improve your search rankings locally, especially on the Google map results. And most financial advisors want to be found by people in, uh, in their own local market. Now, many financial advisors have clients all over the country, but the reason I have those clients all across the country is because they originally got them when they were locally close to where the advisor was, and then they’ve moved away and they’ve maintained that relationship.
But if you want to win, you know, to be found for. Uh, financial advisor plus city name. You’ve got to show up well on that Google map result. And the best way to do that is to get high quality consistent Google reviews and Google looks at this concept of reviews. There’s a concept that a lot of people miss called review velocity, meaning how frequently are you getting new reviews?
Oh, interesting.
Casey: Like just doing a campaign and getting 50 reviews, uh, once is good, but it isn’t, doesn’t give you stinky.
Ken: Um, it for a little while, but those degrade over time and after six months, they start to become a whole lot less important. If you think about it, you know, Google is ultimately trying to make sure that it’s giving the, the highest quality, most relevant information to people who are doing searches.
And if you’re, if you went out and you got that batch of 10, 20, 50 reviews, and you haven’t gotten any more. Uh, in the last six months or four or five years for that matter for financial advisors, that wouldn’t be that far back. But, um, you know, and somebody else’s actively going out there and getting new streams of reviews coming in, um, you know, one or two a week or even a month, you know, that’s, that’s going to be seen as more current, more relevant information, and that’s going to have a big impact on how they’re going to show up in local searches.
Casey: Oh, that makes sense. I, I didn’t consider, um, That’s that’s interesting. Yeah.
Ken: Yeah. The other thing is the interconnectedness between your Google, my business page, which is, I just saw an article that it’s being rebranded. Um, uh, Google my business is changing names. Uh, can’t recall off the top of my head, what the name of that is because I just literally saw that article come across, uh, five minutes before I hopped on with you.
But, um, the content that you have on your Google, my business page and the. Content you have on your website, uh, and the way that you interlink and connect to that. And that’s one of the things that we do with our press release tool is we make sure we embed the Google map, uh, you know, into the press release so that you’ve got the schema markup to tell Google, this is an advisor working at this location.
That helps with local search and also ties into their Google, my business property, because to show up on Google maps, that is the way you do that is you have to have a Google my business page. That’s the entity. That’s going to show up on the map. Uh, and so that you got to enter interconnect and interlinked [00:23:00] this.
Casey: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it looks like it’s Google business profile. Right. There we go. Now it’s the new name of it? Google business profile, which honestly better than Google my business. Exactly. GBP doesn’t work though, as well as GMB, so, right. True. Um, okay. So that, that makes a lot of sense.
And I think it’s really interesting how you take, you know, I think we all kind of know as marketers, like how important local searches. We say things like, oh, I know that it’s important. Uh, it makes sense. I need reviews. Um, but it feels like you’ve just taken it like a couple steps further than most marketers, uh, which is all about like the velocity of reviews.
Um, it’s about embedding, uh, the Google map listing inside of a press release that you get the scheme in there. I mean, all those things. I mean, obviously intelligent, but I think that they’re kind of novel too. Do you find that, um, just doing that stuff can set you apart when you’re in a more competitive?
Ken: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, one of the things that’s really fun and exciting about the niches that we work in, the financial advisors and the home services related contractors is that most of their competitors are not doing much of anything. Now some of them have made big investment. In, in SEO or they pay a lot for pay-per-click strategy and things like that, more so on the whole, you know, home services then on the financial advisors, financial advisors really they’ve been so hamstrung that they just kind of in, in my opinion, they bowl was kind of given up and said, you know, I can’t really do a whole lot.
So, um, I’m just going to have to work kind of the traditional market. I’m going to have to go press the flash at my local chamber. I’m going to join a business networking group, like maybe business networking, international BNI, you know, and that’s how I’m going to really grow my business and then rely on word of mouth.
But, you know, to the power, I mean, the next best thing to word of mouth marketing is a Google review. That’s, you know, people trust Google reviews as much as they trust recommendations from friends and family. And. Uh, you know, now they have the power of going and getting Google reviews. It’s still so novel for an independent financial advisor to be able to go do that.
That anybody who jumps on that early is probably going to win pretty quickly, which is not usually something that you can expect to see from a search engine optimization type of a campaign. Um, you know, we work with a lot of painters, for example, um, historically most painting contractors have done very little in terms of marketing.
So just doing, just doing some things is gonna position you pretty well to, to win pretty quickly, especially in certain markets. I mean, you, you may not dominate your entire market. It may take a while to build out your SEO for. Five to 10 cities that you care about ranking for the most, but you can definitely get some big wins from an SEO perspective that are meaningful, not just, you know, some obscure long tail keyword phrase, meaning a five word, uh, search phrase that you might rank for that has zero traffic.
Um, those are faults SEO claims in my opinion, for most businesses, I mean, most, most, you know, most painters need to rank for. You know, a house painter city, uh, if they do, if they do residential painting, if they do commercial painting, that’s a different animal obviously. But, uh, but yeah. So, and then, you know, the other thing about the interlinking between your Google, my business page, and what’s on your website is for home services, contractors or for, um, independent financial advisers.
They’re typically going to serve an area of customer. Eva and the financial advisors might have people come to their office, but they’re still, you know, going to try to rank for an area, you know, around where they’re located. And so you can define what that area is on your Google, my business page by incorporating the service areas.
But then you should reinforce that with content that you have on your website about the locations that you serve and most people, and that’s kind of an old SEL. Strategy, but it works really well. And then it makes sense that
Ken: local content is huge. Yeah.
Casey: Yeah. That’s great. That’s great. Okay.
So I want to talk about this. Um, like, so we just with tactic, let’s talk about you a little bit. Okay. Um, I want to know. Why you decided, you know, you’ve got this marketing agency, you’ve run it for how long, how long has the agency been alive?
Ken: Um, since 2005, so 16 years
Casey: 16 years. And you’re now in a role of fractional chief marketing officer.
He came in and he joined the CMOs accelerator. And, uh, you’ve got your niche with financial services and with residential services or financial advisors and residential services. Um, and I’m curious, like why the move to fractional CMO.
Ken: Well, a couple of things. One is, um, I’ve been fortunate to where I’ve been able to work on my business, not in my business most of the time.
Um, you know, we all periodically get drugged down a little bit. Right. I didn’t have to work in the business and that that’s fine. And that’s good. And I think it’s actually helpful because it keeps us grounded. But, you know, I’m excited about, um, the, the ability to look fundamentally. What I like to do is I like to solve problem.
And I, you know, and, and you’ve got a great phrase solve bigger problems, and that’s, that’s really what I love to do. I love to take a lot of information, synthesize it, develop a plan, a strategy, and kind of work on that. And that’s, um, you know, that’s something that, um, I’ve always done parts of, for every engagement.
I always do that strategy work, but I’ve never. Really guided somebody else’s efforts, uh, in the way that I’m excited about being able to do now.
Casey: Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay. So, um, I think one of the unfair advantages that an agency owner has when they become a fractional CMO, is that you have the agency to be able to do the backend. which I think is pretty neat. So do you feel like now you have the ability to get into bigger clients, potentially get compensated for the marketing strategy that you were kind of doing before, but now do it kind of more comprehensively and then uncover work for your agency and then for other people?
Ken: Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, and I think, um, you know, one of the challenges that we’re all facing right now is, you know, is, is labor and hiring talent. And so. Having the ability to leverage a fractional CMO, somebody who lives and breathes and works on this stuff on a daily basis and can help set up, you know, help set up a structured.
For a business to be able to succeed, I think is really exciting. And then, you know, being able to bring in some talent, because I think, you know, depending on the business size, they should have their own talent and, and in house to be able to do certain things, maybe some of the things they, they never wanted to do and they want to outsource that.
Um, I think it’s, it’s a really exciting thing to do, but it can be a challenge to hire the right talent. Uh, it’s pretty easy to go find somebody who’s really good at one. Channel or one component of marketing, but to be able to have somebody that can look at that big picture that can say, well, you know, we’re doing this campaign over here.
Um, we could get serious amplification if we integrated it with this strategy that we’ve been thinking about or have been already doing over here. But if you have things working in silos, you’re missing that amplification opportunity at, you know, the great thing is. Marketing is, you know, I, I did a lot of software development work early in my career.
Um, you know, you look at it. So, and I did it for the department of defense. So I use this phrase that I borrowed from them, this, this force multiplier, you know, that’s how I try to look at things is how can you get these force multipliers in place for your. And whether that’s, you know, hiring somebody that has the strategic vision to be able to see that and do that, and then pull the pieces together to make that happen, I think is really important.
Whether it’s internal team, whether it’s an out outsource team or a combination thereof, uh, you’ve gotta be able to take advantage of those things. Yeah. I
Casey: think it’s a huge deal. I think it’s a huge deal. I think the marketing agency also can find itself in a place where you’re trying to create change, but there’s no internal stakeholder change.
So you’re just kind of pushing the Boulder up. Trying to get people who don’t get marketing to try to get marketing. Right. But when you’re the fractional CMO for that organization, you then are deputized to make those decisions you’re paid for it. So you’re going to spend the time to get the right strategy that might include your agency, or it might include hiring an internal person, or it might include hiring a competitive agency because they’re the right person to hire.
Ken: Right. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Casey: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. All right. Well, this has been really helpful. I learned a lot about, um, uh, I guess I was reminded of the benefits of local search and content marketing. Um, but then I think you just took it like two steps past, um, what I’ve kind of been experienced in.
And I think that that’s like, it’s neat because it’s, you know what we want to master, I think in business to be successful long-term are the slow to change prints. And you brought up multiple times, things that are kind of old that are kind of new again, because they’re so classic to the customer experience or the customer.
Ken: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, and the thing is, you know, what’s, what’s worked well for SEO. Classically still works really well for SEO. You know, I mean, [00:33:00] people, people are always trying to find a way to game the system and they might be successful and they may win for. But usually if it’s, if it’s two black hat they’re going to get slapped down, um, you know, we’ve, we’ve never taken on those approaches.
Honestly, the best way to build your search engine optimization is by producing quality content that speaks to the, to the ideal customers that you’re trying to reach. It’s going to align with the search phrases that they’re typing into the search engines, and it’s going to. Communicate, uh, effectively and, and get people in that journey.
And, you know, and it’s really important for everybody to realize that, you know, the customer has so much more control over the buyer’s journey than they ever have. And you know, you, you’ve got to realize that and build out a set of content that aligns with the way people naturally buy. And, and you know, whether it’s moving through that know, like, and trust phased, or, you know, to understand.
Uh, and qualify who they even want to consider for doing business with before they ever pick up the phone and call you, or schedule a consultation online, what content do you need to have in place to make that happen? Do you need to have blog posts? Do you need to be doing social media? Do you need to have lead magnets like an e-book or a checklist or letting them sign up for a webinar or, or, you know, for home contractors scheduling a consultation is kind of the.
Opportunity to S to say, okay, this is a company I’m interested in working with. I want to see what it would be like to get a bid from them. And, you know, that’s, that’s taking that next step, but they’re, they still have control over the buying decision.
Casey: Yeah, totally, totally. I love it. I love it. All right, Ken.
Well, I learned a ton here today, um, and working listeners follow you are getting
Ken: so they can find us on social media, just patching. And then our website is change scape, web.com.
Casey: Awesome again, it’s been a lot of fun. really appreciate having you in the side of the CMOs accelerator, excited for you to be winning business there and serving as a fractional CMO and, um, uh, hope everyone got something out of this.
If you learned something, if you laughed, uh, if you took notes and you’re going to be using this in your business, um, please go ahead and give us a review on the podcast on the podcast app that you’re using. you can find us on apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, wherever, go there. Give us a rating.
Give us a. Let us know what you think about this episode and the podcast at large and Ken with that, we’ll take off. Thank you so much. Thanks so much,
Ken: Casey. I really enjoyed it. Thanks. Thank you
Casey: for joining us for today’s show. For more information and episodes. Visit our site@fractionalcmoshow.com.
Ken: Go ahead and punch that like and subscribe
Casey: button on your favorite podcast app.
You know content is important, but it seems so costly and complicated to create. Guess what, creating content can actually be easy and affordable and by putting it off, you’re missing out on all the benefits you already know of, but also the huge impact it has on your SEO. Thankfully, the sensei of SEO and content marketing, Ken Tucker, is here to show you the way! Learn how to create great content, how to get the most out of your content creation efforts, and how to differentiate your content and your company amongst the sea of competitors.
Takeaways
- Google creates a “Canonical URL” which it attributes to the first website that publishes a piece of content. If two sites have duplicate content, Google will ignore the site without the Canonical URL when ranking for SEO. This is why it is imperative to create unique content for your company and your clients.
- Differentiation comes from how you describe the problems people have and provide content to guide people to the solution. When crafting your messaging, consider how people approach the problem both internally and externally.
- A great source for unique content is any emails with customers where you solve a problem they have. You can write problem-based content that speaks to FAQs and common problems. This kind of content is great for SEO.
- Video is very powerful from a content repurposing perspective, it creates a “Little Content Machine.” You can post the full video, put the transcript on your website, create a blog post based on video, post clips of video on social media, pull quotes from the transcript and blog for social media, and publish a press release for inbound links.
- Creating video content doesn’t have to be a very elaborate and expensive process, it can be very easy and low-budget while still being good quality and impactful. Even just using a cellphone camera can be enough to produce content your company can use.
- Google uses “Review Velocity” when ranking for local search results. Review Velocity refers to the frequency of new reviews your business gets on Google. Old reviews “degrade” after ~6-months and Google marks them as less important.
- At present, customers have a huge amount of control over the Buyer’s Journey, so it is very important to be making the kind of content that your customers really respond to.
Quote of the Show: “Most people are natural content creators. They just don’t realize that they’re creating content that they could easily put onto their website.” -Ken Tucker Shout Outs: StoryBrand Links
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kentuckerweb
- Company Facebook: facebook.com/changescape
- Company Twitter: Changescape
- Website: changescapeweb.com
- Blog Link: changescapeweb.com/blog
- Book: https://www.amazon.com/Content-Market…
Ways to Tune In
- Amazon Music
- Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast…
- Spotify: https://fractionalcmo.libsyn.com/spotify
- Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0…
- Stitcher
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