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So you want to optimize your block for search engines, but do you really need the block to to be optimized for search engines or do?

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You need your entire content platform to be optimized for the people, the audience, the pentagons. You want your business.

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Hey everybody, this is Cam, chief market tonis that made grand by Cam and I am excited that you have decided.

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To come back and join me for another episode of the Market tuning.

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We’re focused on helping you get.

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All of the insight, all of the frameworks you need so that you can do business, do marketing, do.

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Digital commerce and make it work for you while you sleep.

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I’ve been contributing to a lot of the articles.

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LinkedIn has had on for thought leaders and for people who are beginning to explore how to do content marketing and very useful ways, and as an opportunity to really rethink thought, leadership and the skill sets.

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That you need in order to be successful and one of the articles that I recently contributed to was why around do you want to optimize your blog for search engines and what tools can help you achieve this. The article is broken down into keyword research, content creation site and site auditing.

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And one of the things that I would encourage you to think of.

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Before you launch into a massive campaign to begin rethinking your entire strategy for SEO is really to think around. Who is it that you’re trying to communicate to? Whose problems are you solving? If you don’t know very intimately?

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Who your audience is, who? Your target aren’t. It is you’re going to have a very difficult time optimizing anything for search.

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And here’s the thing to think about. Google doesn’t want you writing content optimized for search at all. They want you writing content producing creating content that is.

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Optimized for people.

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Because that is the business Google search is in. Helping people who have questions, having helping people who have situations.

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People who have problems find the absolute best answer.

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For them. So if you want Google to be an intermediary and helping drive traffic to your landing pages.

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Your products, your blog, your.

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Your website you really have thinking about. Who is it that you’re trying to target? Because if you’re trying to just simply get higher ranking on Google, you’re going to waste a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money. And you may spend and waste money with so-called SEO experts that are going to rip your budget.

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And here’s the problem. Whether you even spending money with so-called seos.

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Is every time you make a change in your content platform.

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You need to get new insight and new data so that you can find out if it actually made a difference. You need to have deeper insight of which.

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Which phrases?

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Or even worth ranking for, or how difficult will it be for you to rank forth that so that you can build a really great strategy around it. So one of the tools that I use and I particularly love because it has helped me really.

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Think differently about strategy and content and some rush and some rush is is, is is related.

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To this conversation and that some rushes are tool that helps people think about search engine.

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Organization, search engine marketing and really think through. All right, do I have all of the pieces in place in my content to make it ranked world class and when we say world?

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Yes, this is easy for you to stop right now and go and check for yourself and your own content on your website. So if you know the keyword that you want to be ranking for on your website, go and type that into a question or a query in Google search and then look at the top 10 results that come back for you.

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Whatever those top 10 results are, web pages in particular, that is what Google considers world class. If you’re not in the top ten, then sorry.

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You’re not world.

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So that is the place that you want to start and you want to look at a variety of different dimensions across that. Do they have video in their content? What are they of semantic keywords that you’re using sometimes people.

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When they’re doing keyword research.

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The goal is OK, here’s the work that I want to get ranked for, so I need to find how many ways I can incorporate this particular phrase or word in my content and how many times should I incorporate it into my content in order for it to be ranked which ends up being.

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A little bit like you were stuffing.

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But Google’s search engine is so much smarter than that.

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If you are thinking.

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The way people talk, which goes back to my first earnest statement for you, you need to know who your audience is, who your target market is, and have an intimate understanding of the way they talk about the problem that they have so that you know the way that they search for it.

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The words that they’ll use, the conversations that they have with their friends.

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And then you begin to start.

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Content that incorporates not only the keyword that you want to rank for, but all of the synonyms that are related to that content. And if you look at the top ten websites that are ranking for that keyword, you’ll see that they’re using all of those synonyms.

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And we call those semantic key.

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And when we look at that and it’s really coming to a conversation about what is the completeness or comprehensiveness of the content on your website and if your content is not as comprehensive as those top ten, then you’re not going to break into the top 10.

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There are a number of factors that go into ranking, but I want you to just start thinking about right the way you speak.

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But more importantly, right the way your.

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Paradigm persona speaks.

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If you miss that opportunity to really think about the way they connect, the way they communicate, you’re going to miss a whole.

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Realm of opportunities to think through, talk through and expose them to the way your business can help solve that problem. So that’s keyword research before you even start doing keyword research. Really think through.

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Do I even know who I’m writing for and make sure that you’re writing information for them and the article? One of the things I talked about is Google’s keyword planner. It’s a free tool, but it’s not.

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The tool will ask you to put in a credit card because the whole work, the whole purpose of Google’s keyword planner, is to get you to start by add search add.

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And knowing what the keywords you’re going to use to rank for for those ads. So they ask you for a credit card.

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If you pay attention and actually read through the instructions, you won’t get duped into giving Google a credit card for a tool that’s free. So think through that before you start putting your business or personal credit cards into these tools, make sure that instead of just agreeing to everything.

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Read the fine print and you’ll see how you can get around that and get insight into.

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Keywords you want.

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Also know that when you’re doing keyword research, there are some keywords that are informational. There are some keywords that are navigational. There are some keywords that are transactional and then there are some words that are commercial.

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If you’re trying to do business with your keywords and you want to convert your audience or the visitors to your landing pages, your website to move into your funnels, whether that be a marketing funnel or sales.

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Funnel you need to be thinking strategically. Am I using the appropriate keyword for a?

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If you’re using informational or navigational keywords, you’re looking you’re using keywords that are really targeted for.

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We’ll just earlier in the sales stage earlier in the buying process, they’re not really looking to make a purchase. It’s when you store it using keywords that are transactional or keywords that are more importantly commercial that they’re to buy. These are active people in the market ready to spend money.

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When you use those commercial keywords, you’re going to be far more successful in getting the right people to convert in your.

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And then when you go back and check the rankings of your stuff and qualified against all those other things that we talked about, you’ll see far more success there.

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Around this space of content creation, you know, I think today as we get into this new world of generative AI being involved in search, we have to think much more comprehensively and.

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Basically about our content platform and we’ll have other podcasts when we talk about the what you need in a content platform. But I want to make sure that we’re super clear on just blogging alone.

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It’s not the only way that you can start getting ranked on Google. Google use all types of data and signals to get content into it from.

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Podcasts to books, to events to video host smorgasbord, cloud opportunities in terms of content creation, exists. So as you’re creating all of your content.

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You really need to be thinking strategically on how do I want all these keywords to play together and I want to give you a practical example we use.

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My platform for doing all of our webinars. I use easy webinar. I don’t get any money from Casey. I’m telling you that, Casey, we might have to work on that.

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Future. But I love easy webinar. It’s a great platform, but one of the things that Casey does is.

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He’s made the platform so that you can actually create.

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Basically everything you possibly could imagine that you need for a webinar on their website from the landing page for registration to the welcome page. The thank you page.

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All of those things can be done entirely on their platform.

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And you can also put in your SCL content.

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For your webinar so that it can show up in the search rankings, but I don’t use all of those tools, I prefer to keep all SEO traffic coming to my website, my domain. I spend a lot of time trying to make sure that the content strategy is holistic across the board, so I don’t want to.

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Splinter My SEO ranking by putting net those keywords on 3rd party platforms.

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And you might feel differently, but if I’m going to spend all of the energy building and content strategy for a people first content experience.

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Why would I want to splinter that with third party platforms across the board? So I use a lot of their tools to integrate back into our website, and when those tools are integrated back into our website, then you can still do the registration. I can send them to a custom thank you page that puts them into another funnel.

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And I can send them to the web page. The only thing that I need the webinar platform to be is the host for the actual.

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Webinar but for registration I want all of the keywords for that on my own page so that one I can do internal linking.

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On that website so that when I write A blog article or a podcast, I’m linking within my own website to the event to register for that. If I want to create a pop up for it, it’s back on my website, I don’t want.

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To have a.

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Touch point scattered across the Internet. I’d rather keep all.

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That on my own website the same is true for podcasting. If I’m creating content on my podcast, the podcast is host domain, grand vicam.com, so why would I want the Mark Attunity scattered across the Internet? All that’s doing is pointing traffic to those other domains when my domain is the one that I want to build.

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Authority and ranking forward. So as you think about content creation.

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Especially as you’re building out your marketing stack and you’re building out all of the content channels that you need to have. Be very specific about how you want to incorporate those third party platform services back into your own website so that the experience can be seamless and so that you can control.

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The entire funnel customer journey.

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Heaven it splintered.

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Across the entire Internet, plus, with so many of these services, they’re designed to be integrated into your website, but they allow you to build it on their platform because it’s just super easy to do and they’re they’re catering to people who don’t know how to integrate these things into their own website. So.

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Think through that when you’re looking at the content creation piece.

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And then finally.

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We have.

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Thinking about site audit and so. If you’ve never done an on it before, you’re going to be.

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Surprised, or maybe completely shocked when you do an audit because audits are going to look at both the technical things that you’re getting right and getting wrong as well as your content to show what you’re ranking for and what you’re not ranking for, but also what is the quality?

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Your website.

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One of the biggest challenges that I see is that if you really want to store using audits effectively, then you need to have some type of standard, some type of policy, some type of objective criteria that you use for publishing content creating.

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Content in the first place.

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I started doing audience when I was the CIO in education because we were not only having financial audits that we need to attend to in those finance audits. I worked closely with the CFO and she was my mentor. But I worked closely with the CFO on every aspect of the audit.

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And what the findings were, what the what, the remediation plan was.

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And in every case, the question was did a policy exist?

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And so when you look at a policy that’s regulation, board policy, a standard or some objective criteria on what is it that you’re supposed to do? Has it been documented and published somewhere so that when we are auditing, we’re auditing on whether or not you’re following your own guidelines or some established?

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Practice. So does it exist? Does set policies? Does that standard exist?

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If that is the first problem, you’re doesn’t matter what your audit results are. It’s not going to be objective because you haven’t done the first thing, so you need to establish that. And when you’re thinking about establishing it, there are two pieces that you need first. The first thing we talked about #1 you need to know.

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Who your target audience target market is and I don’t use those words interchangeably. I want. I want to. I might need to clarify that when we’re talking about audience, we’re.

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About everybody, that would be your ideal customer and.

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What? Where they are, where they’re hanging out on social media. But when I say market, I’m talking about the buyers, the people who will actually spend money with you. And so you need to think about that you have a large number of channels where your audience exist, but if they’re not.

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Buying anything from you if they’re not subscribing to your newsletter and your e-mail marketing, downloading anything to put into a.

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And marketing or sales funnel, they’re just audience member.

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It’s not until they actually take a positive affirmative action to give you some detailed information that you need phone number and e-mail address or a credit card number that they become part of your market, the buyers.

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That you want to do business with, so you need both of them. But your goal is to convert your audience into your market and you need both of those audience and market continuing to grow large and exponentially. We’ll talk a lot more about that in future episodes, but.

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Write a profile for the business. Get a persona, the avatar. Who is that Paragon persona that you want to do business with and are you targeting them and their needs, their desires, what they want to get solved and how they want to get it solved? And now do you have a standard?

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Which you write the content.

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Too, so that we should be thinking about if I write A blog, what does that mean? It’s an 800 words. Is it 1000 words, 12102 thousand etcetera? Do we need to incorporate graphics? Can those just be any stock photo we need to make sure that they’re the photography is relevant.

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And it also has been edited so that it fits in with our brand and branding communication brand voice.

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Do we need to use infographics that provide more value in a?

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Visualization of all of the content that we wrote into that article. Are there video pieces that need to be added, and do we have those video pieces optimized for search? Have those videos been closed captioned, made available so it can be translated?

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Languages as well as the hearing impaired and are we thinking about all of the keywords that we need to make sure that this content?

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Connects to and all of the internal links that we need to establish to point back, and most importantly, do we have a call to action that puts people towards the next thing that they should do?

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Whether that means sign up for an event or webinar download this.

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Get a content upgrade loadstone or make a purchase, whatever it is, but don’t just create content for the sake of content.

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Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Give your content a mission so that you can see if it’s objectively fulfilling the mission. The intent.

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And when you set those standards in place, your auditing will help you.

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How well are you meeting them? If you’re meeting them at all, or if you’re completely off the mark?

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Another thing that I learned with another client was to check your templates. Oh my goodness. So so much of web content now so that we can have consistency across the platform is really template driven and that’s healthy. That’s wise. That’s smart to do. But in this particular case the client.

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And errors in the template. So every time they publish content it was wrong from an SEO perspective.

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And you can’t get around it being wrong because.

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It’s baked into the code of the template and they hired a third party to create the template and they didn’t have the expertise expertise on their bench in house to fix the tip.

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And because they didn’t have the expertise in house to fix the template, they didn’t even know that they had technical errors that were impacting their SEO in the template. And I’ll tell you what the technical error. It was multiple H1 tags.

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And on every page, and if there’s anything you learn from anybody that knows.

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Anything about SCO? You only have use for one H1 tag.

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This page H1 tag is your top heading for the page and it tells search engines that this is what this page about. This is the main thing you got to keep. The main thing the main thing and if you’re using multiple tags within a document with an article or post, it confuses the search engine.

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To figure out what is important about this page, what is the main thing? So one focus, one page, one H1 tag can’t bake that stuff into.

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The heading or into the template. Otherwise you’re going to have a prop.

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And then finally, I want you to think about when you set up your audit standards, set up those audit standards across all of your content channels, whether they be social, video shops, profiles, directories, it is likely that if you.

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Have a problem.

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In the content that’s on your web.

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Website You’ve replicated that poor performance or that sub optimization across all of your content channels, so mediocrity one and one.

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Place is oftentimes assigned that that mediocrity is being contagious and also everywhere.

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Spread and been.

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All your contents help infiltrate it with that. So go back and once you audit and set your website.

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To your content standards, back to your paragon persona. Make sure that all of the channels you publish content, particularly on social meet that same standard, so that every touch point, especially digitally.

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That you have for your clients and your audience. Your market is the same richness variance experience across the board. And also when you think about OTT.

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For over the top, for you. If you’re doing ads and streaming, or if you’re doing out of home like billboards and and and and signage that people would see if they’re in a.

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Airport or in the shopping mall. Make sure everything connects back to those content publishing standards that production.

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In a book print it put it online if you have third party agencies, share it with them and say don’t bring us crap that doesn’t match our standards because we don’t want to have to keep checking work behind you. We need you to give us the stuff the way we need it from.

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And so here’s your zero day guide so that on day one, we don’t have to go back and remediate all of the stuff.

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This is our paragon.

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Donna, this is the voice that we use when we’re talking to our Paragon persona, and this is the level of quality that must be in every piece of content that we produce. And when you start doing that, you have a people first approach to content.

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But more importantly, you’re going to.

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The search engines to know who it is they need to serve the content to and what is the level of quality that you’re producing your content so that they’ll know this is the best in the world to give it to them. Because trust me, if you’re not aiming to be the best in the world, then don’t freaking do it.

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It’s not even worth your time. Be mediocre anymore. It’s too much content on the planet and too much content being published every day for.

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You to even think about mediocrity.

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What is most saying? What is the market tourism that I want you to don’t be half asked because it’s usually more asked.

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And yeah, that’s a marketing ISM, so don’t be half as mediocre. Do the best work. Make it world class. Benchmark what you’re doing against everything that’s in the in your market, in your region and your geography, so that they have to pause and raise their game up. But if you’re.

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Positioning yourself right.

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It may be impossible for them to race their game up to meet their level, and that means you have competition.

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Paragon, who is the ideal person that I want to be buying from me, organization enterprise that I want to be buying for me. Even if you’re thinking about an organization.

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Thing. So you need to find the person that’s going to make that decision and understand all of the other people they need.

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To talk to.

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When they make a decision so that you have their personas and their needs, their desires, their interests, their hang ups, and their Hangouts all targeted in your content.

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Strategies that you can.

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Feed your advocates the right information at the right time. So first and foremost, get your paragraph for.

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#2.

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Published!

Write and publish your content standards for what is world-class for your organization.

It can be different from mine.

It can be different from your competitors.

Whatever it is, you need to know, what is the benchmark for world-class by looking at the Top Ten.

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Do it in a way that you slant it, or “tilt it” as Joe Pulizzi says, so that you are creating content that nobody else in the world can create.

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Your perspective is unique.

Your approach is unique.

And your voice is unique to your target market so that you resonate with them.

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Start auditing your website to make sure that it reaches your target audience and your target market with your content standards.

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Next, take your content standards and check all your channels to make sure you don’t have mediocrity floating out there.

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There’s no point in being optimized in one place and have all of the channels that you’ve created to bring traffic to the Nexus of your brand be sub-optimal.

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You got it?

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If you have questions, reach out to me online. But more importantly, subscribe to the show so that you can ask questions all the time.

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mgxc.co/marketunity

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We’ll talk again real soon.

Thanks for listening.

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