So What? What to do when SEO isn’t working

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on what to do when your SEO isn’t working. We walk through how to diagnose your SEO, rethinking your keyword list, and alternate tactics for when your SEO isn’t working. Catch the replay now:

 

In this episode you’ll learn: 

• how to analyze the effectiveness of your SEO
• how to rethink your keyword list
• what other actions you can take with your SEO

Upcoming Episodes:

• TBD

 

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

 

Katie Robbert 0:27
Well, hey, Howdy everyone, Happy Thursday. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show, I am joined as always by Chris and John. John is coming from a two super top secret remote location that he cannot disclose AKA, his relatives

John Wall 0:45
somewhere undisclosed location, the Don Rumsfeld compound

Katie Robbert 0:52
in this week’s episode is so what we are talking about what to do with you when your SEO isn’t working. And so this came about from ourselves. And so we’ve been behind the scenes talking a lot about, have we exhausted our keyword list? Are we doing the right things? Are we moving the needle, you know, all the good stuff that leads towards, you know, at the end of the day, a conversion. And so we feel like we’ve been doing a lot, but we want to see if we could do more, do better. Or even just explore if the tactics that were our tried and true for SEO are working or not working for Trust Insights. So today, we’re going to talk about how to analyze the effectiveness of your SEO, how to rethink your keyword list, and what other actions you can be taking with your SEO. So Chris, where should we be starting?

Christopher Penn 1:41
What’s not working? where we start? That’s a valid question, what’s not working? Because there’s three different places SEO can break down, right? There is conversions, right, our search traffic isn’t converting there is we’re not getting search traffic, right. So we’ve got organic searches is an empty, empty pipe. And then there’s search visibility where name is showing up in search. So we can’t get search traffic, we can’t get conversions. The first place we have to start is to figure out which of those three things is broken, where is the leak, if you will, in the order of operations. And if you don’t know that, that would be my suggestion to as a place to start?

Katie Robbert 2:19
Well, so I feel confident in saying we’re getting search traffic, we’re just not getting the volume of search traffic that we would like to be getting. And we are getting conversions from search, but we’re just not getting the volume of conversions that we would like to be getting. And so technically, to answer your question, all of those things are happening. They’re just not happening at a volume and consistency that we would like to be seeing. So we need to be doing more of something.

Christopher Penn 2:46
So let’s take a look at how you might figure this out. Because I think that’s an important point. So let’s start in at the bottom of conversions. Right. So Google Analytics 4, which reminder public service announcement, it is July 14 2022, as we record this, you have less than a year now to switch over to Google Analytics 4. And every day that you wait, between now and July one or 2023 is a day you will not have for year over year comparisons. So get it done. We’ve got a whole bunch of resources, we’ll put them up in somewhere about it. But we go into the conversion paths, we look at our multi touch model. And we see that organic search, we’re not really getting the conversion. So not the level that you like you said the level we want. And we see this year organic searches kind of coming in third email really winning the day. So Google Analytics is telling us for sure. Conversions aren’t there? Okay, let’s take a step up, then. Are we getting traffic? Right? So go into Google Search Console? What kind of clicks are we getting? So we’re looking at the last three months, we’re getting about 1000 clicks? And that’s about 300 clicks a month. Right? That’s that’s not great. That’s, that’s pretty thin. Then we look at the impressions 195,000 impressions over the last three months. That’s what you know. That’s 660 1000 impressions a month. That’s pretty good. So I think in terms of our where things broken, visibility is, we’re okay there, right? You know, you always want more, if we’re not getting the clicks, right, we’re not getting the traffic, and then that in turn means we’re not getting the conversion. So that would be my first stop on the on the train of SEO to figure out what’s broken is, for us, it appears that traffic is the issue.

Katie Robbert 4:33
So with that, the first thing that we would probably talk about is Well, are we writing about the right things? Are we putting out enough content and is that content providing any value? Is the content structured correctly is it you know, doesn’t have the snippets and the keywords and the you know, correct meta tags and, you know, all that good stuff that goes into people understanding at a glance what the heck the content is about when they’re searching for and so we know for ourselves, the answer is we’re actually in the process of fixing a lot of our content to have those correct things. So I feel I can confidently say that that is why we’re getting the impressions and not the clicks is our content was missing a lot of the technical structure that it needed in order to perform better. But that’s not true for everybody.

Christopher Penn 5:29
This is true for everybody. And I think one of the things you have to remember with Search Console data in particular is that these two metrics, clicks and impressions really are indicators of what’s going on with your search. If you’re getting impressions, that means Google thinks it’s, it knows show your site for certain search terms, right. And it’s showing your site in our case, it’s showing our site a lot. So that’s sort of Google’s, you know, upvote, okay, your your site doesn’t completely suck your gut, you get shown in search, like if your site was just totally sucked, you know that total impressions would be zero. You know, what, no, Google won’t even bother showing it. The clicks are what users think of your site. So users, and they see the result in search, they look at and go, Yeah, that’s aligns with my search intent. I’m going to click on that. So we’re now at a point where we have to figure out sort of three new layers, right? Do we have the right audience? Do we have the right offer? Do we have the right creative This is Bob stones 1968, direct marketing framework or supplied search? When you see what we have, which is lots of impressions, and not lots of clicks, it means we’ve probably screwed up one of two things. Either we’ve misaligned the search intent, or we’ve got the wrong offer the offer being the search listing itself. And part of that goes to the knowing what our search intent is, because there’s two basic forms to search intent, right? There is commercial intent, like I want to hire Trust Insights. And that is commercial intent, you’re gonna buy something and want to price of an Apple iPhone 13, right. You’re You’re intend to buy something as those are commercial intent searches. And then there’s the educational searches, or educational navigational, these are people who aren’t in the market for buying things. And they’re going to search for things they don’t like, you know, typically unbranded searches, like analytics recommendations, how to migrate to Google Analytics, 4, my analytics stopped working, these be the educational terms where the intent is not there. And if we haven’t done a good job of figuring out what topics because we’re trying to get rid of the concept of keywords for people, we’re gonna what topics fit in which category, so that when a listing comes up, Google’s back in the back on trying to decide whether a query is navigational or commercial, they and they’ve said this in their documentation. This is how we bifurcate search intent. So we have to figure out, have we are we ranking for terms and showing up in search for terms that are misaligned with a commercial intent. And so the easiest way to figure this out is if you scroll down and in an Search Console, and you look at the clicks and impressions columns, you can get a sense of, you know, what are the what are the intents here. So branded search is generally a pretty good proxy for commercial intent. If you’re searching for Trust Insights by name, it’s not because you’re bored, you’re looking for entertainment, right? You’re not looking for, you know, us playing video games on YouTube, you want to talk to us, if you’re searching for the disadvantages of predictive analytics, you may not care who the information is from, you’re just trying to get the best information, the knowledge that you’re after. When you have a big gap between these two, it means that you’re you’ve got misaligned intent. So I’m going to sort by impressions people searching for, for my name, data quality frame with 4400 searches in 90 days, zero clicks on it. That means that whatever someone’s searching for, they’re when they see our listing, like, Ah, this is not what I’m looking for. They don’t even they don’t even bother clicking, they don’t dig and they’re like, Nope, just go on to the next listing. So we have to figure out what’s gone wrong there. And the to what you were saying, Katie, that’s often the wrong offer, right? They see our listing, and they look at it go as it’s not it has nothing to do with what I was what I’m looking for the intent is as mismatched.

Katie Robbert 9:27
What’s interesting is, you know, as, as a human as someone who does my own, you know, Google searches and, you know, web web searches, a phrase like Data Quality Framework. I mean, that really doesn’t tell you what the intent is. Are you looking for an example of a framework? Are you looking for, you know, just a template to fill in your own framework? Are you looking for an image of a framework like this is is good, but as the person who then has to fix the thing, I still don’t know what, where it went wrong.

Christopher Penn 10:08
Exactly. And so this is a concept that our friends over at marketmuse Jeff Coyle was writing about recently about intent fractures. And it’s where the term, you don’t know what they meant, right? And there’s a lot of possibilities. And so the solution for that is longer tail keywords where you can start to suss out what that intent is. So if someone’s searching for Data Quality Framework PDF, okay, now you start to think, okay, they’re looking for some kind of image or some kind of download someone searching for how to make a Data Quality Framework. Okay, that’s a different intent that somebody just wants to download one this, that’s a person trying to create one. So part of our work is to look, if we find that there’s a lot of things where we get impressions, but no clicks, is, are we doing a good enough job with a longer tail on those things to make clear what it is. So for example, someone searching for Google postmaster tools, a lot of the time, the intent is I can’t remember what the address is supposed to be Googling for. So I’m going to find is like people who like Google to log into Google, or people who Google to log into Yahoo, is one of those things people just use as a mental shortcut. That’s so it does not,

John Wall 11:17
oh, I click on the pay dad too.

Christopher Penn 11:24
But someone searching for B2B marketing analytics, that is, you know, there’s a lot of impression volume and no clicks, which means that we’ve probably not figured out what the intent is. So we might want to look through our stuff to see what else you know, what are the longer tail terms, if any, and if we can’t find them here, we might want to look in some other keyword tools to figure out okay, are there terms that use that phrase, but or longer tail that could help us create content tuned to that intent? So B2B Marketing analytics help would be very different from? Do I even need B2B marketing analytics?

Katie Robbert 12:06
I don’t even know where to go with my line of questions. Because I feel like there’s a lot because it sounds like what you’re saying is, there’s more research to be done before you start trying to fix the problem, because you still don’t know what the problem is. So what you don’t want to do is get yourself on this treadmill of trying to answer every possible question under the sun. Because that’s not a good use of time.

Christopher Penn 12:31
That’s right. But, and this is where, again, the a lot of people, we’re creating content, don’t have sufficient enough domain expertise to know what the intent is of that audience. Right? We’re very fortunate, in that we are marketers, and our customers are marketers, and so we have a better sense of what a customer, you know, to your point, if you put yourself in a customer’s shoes, you can do that pretty easily. If we were selling something like I don’t know, biological assays, or reagents, we’ve and as markers were like, I don’t even know what these words mean, much less, how do I successfully mark them, we could be dramatically off target and not be able to recover from it. So a big part of this is also having a subject matter expertise, you as a marketer, you know what you’re looking for? So you can look at it and go, Okay, I can kind of guess why I might search for that.

Katie Robbert 13:27
Yeah, I think, as a consumer, I think my first search would be how to spell biological assay, so that I’m getting even the right thing. So that might be a good, safe place to start.

Christopher Penn 13:40
Exactly. So the other aspect is, you know, the, the appeal of it. So, you know, from what you were saying, let’s go here and go into our website.

Katie Robbert 13:55
So while he’s pulling that up, John, I have a question for you. You know, you talk with a lot of our community members and a lot of our prospects. And, you know, by no means is this meant to call anybody out, because I, you know, as I was still learning, you know, SEO and how it works. I did this myself, where are you seeing that, you know, when people are just sort of like starting out understanding SEO that instead of go into SEO tools, they might actually go to Google and look up a keyword and see, like, well, because Google will respond back with, here’s how many searches there are for this. And then they might say, well, I don’t show up on page one. How do I fix that?

John Wall 14:39
Yeah, I mean, it’s a huge challenge, really, especially because, you know, things that tend people tend to search for us for like Google Analytics, or just analytics. You know, in front of us. There’s a huge line of tools and Google Analytics itself. So there’s 1000s of related results. So you kind of get into this trap of you either find it You know, very specific granular terms, or you’re going longtail, you know, you’re going for a five word or more, to try and find something that, you know, at least you have a chance to compete at and go at it, you know, from looking at our list, I get that feeling immediately that that’s just, there’s so many pretty much generic terms that it’s no surprise that there’s no click throughs, because there’s just so many different angles you can take from, you know, what’s up on there.

Christopher Penn 15:29
So as we were talking, you have your snippet, right. So when we’re talking about the wrong offer, or the wrong creative the wrong offer in organic search, is the search preview. What does this look like in search? So in this case, if someone was looking for demographic data, as a search term, would this essentially add? Because it really is a pay per click ad that’s not paid for? Would this be enough to make you say, click? Yep, that’s what I was looking for. Right? If I’m searching for demographic data, this is a case where there’s an intent fracture, we don’t know. We don’t know, what are you searching for demographic data sets to download? Are you searching factor? What is demographic data? We don’t know. And as a result, this listing probably is not going to do very well, because we don’t know what the person really actually wants.

John Wall 16:18
Yeah, the big thing with that is making sure that you’ve got your SEO tool there configured, right? Because you know, a lot of plugins are just going to drop that the title tag in there, as opposed to maybe you know, your h1 or whatever, you know, your first sentences, which is a lot closer to what you actually want the thing to be.

Katie Robbert 16:40
Exactly. The next question is, well, how do we figure out what the intent was?

Christopher Penn 16:46
So there’s a couple of different ways to determine search intent correctly. The first way, of course, is your your traditional keyword tools. Looking at all the related terms, you go into any keyword tool available, and you can get a sense of what are the related terms, the questions, people also search for the usual stuff. So let’s go ahead and pull one of those up.

Go our friend H refs, here, let’s go into keywords explorer, let’s put in demographic data. You United States. And we see demographic data definition of demographic data, what is demographic data, right, some of the questions rank for US population. And so something like what is demographic data? There’s a that’s an informational intent, right? I don’t know what this thing is telling me about it. And so we might want to take that post. If we care about people who are searching for that information. We want to take that post and retitle it and clean it up and make it clear, like, you know, the demographic data is this. And that also goes in the snippet. However, one of the challenges that we have to go back to is, is that the right audience, right, if it’s, you know, a 12 year old writing a book report, do we want that as an audience? I mean, in the long term, yes, because in 20 years, they’ll be ready to do business with us. But

Katie Robbert 18:20
it’s hard in 20 years.

Christopher Penn 18:24
But for our purposes, that’s probably not the case. So we might want to look at other kinds of things like here, which two types of data including demographic targeting, right demographic targeting rather than demographic data might be a better term to use? Because there’s, there’s, it’s more clear what that’s about what is demographic targeting? At its ilk. So from a research perspective, this is one of the reasons why people have been encouraging the SEO industry has been encouraging people to get away from the idea of the keyword. Because the keyword is too narrow. When you have the intent, take an intent, break it into topics then split the topics down into words or phrases that indicate the intent that you’re after, and whether it’s something that would match us as the target audience. So I might be looking for, like demographic data download as a data scientist, so we want to check more people like me, or free demographic datasets, okay. There’s, we know what we know what they are after now. And that might be a way to attract more people like me, who would search for that thing. So John, if you were thinking about demographic data, what would you be searching for? That would be in case you wanted to buy or download something?

John Wall 19:33
Yeah, even you know, slicing and saying demographic data, including race, age, software platform, like whatever something else to slice because you’d be actually the intent would be to be buying some kind of list or other research on a specific topic.

Christopher Penn 19:52
Exactly. Another way to look at this is to look at the terms that are used by competing sites and see where where If anything, there’s there is intent. So here I’ve pulled up demographic data in marketmuse. And we have, and we can see here, the sites that rank for the term one through 20. And in terms of rankings, and then the a list of terms and how often those terms appear on those pages, what you can see is down here, there are certain terms, that when the row turns all red, it means that term doesn’t appear, even though it’s been identified as being semantically relevant. So we might see something in here that we could use that essentially would, we would not be going head to head with the top ranking pages like statistical data. If we have a page of demographic data and statistical data or statistical techniques, now there’s an opportunity to narrow down that intent by combining some of these terms that don’t appear on the on the headline pages, which means that we’re not in a knife fight with people who are much bigger than us.

Katie Robbert 20:54
If you go back to H refs, does it make sense to do something like marketing demographic data? Because then because that’s sort of where my brain goes, when you talk about are we attracting the right audience. And so we want to attract other marketers to our site to learn about the kinds of things that we do, how we can help them so and so forth. And so to me, it kind of makes sense to add that qualifier of marketing or, you know, business or whatever the industry is that we’re trying to tackle. And so it looks like there are questions that we could be answering to try to narrow in on the right audience. And I’m guessing that wouldn’t always work. But maybe at least in this case, it would,

Christopher Penn 21:38
it would work in this case, because, again, this is this is starting to dig into in the intent of the searcher, right? What is What does demographics mean in marketing? What are demographics and marketing? And you can do things like, you know, looking at the matching terms and the related terms to get a sense of what are the volumes on those things? And what else? What other things could we bring in, right? So there’s for 700, searches a month marketing, demographics definition? What is demographics in marketing. And so this is a case where we might change the focus of that page, from demographic data to a longer search term like this accepting a lower search volume. But understanding that because we’re now fixing the intent of the page with the intent of the content, we might get higher conversion rate, we might get more traffic to the page, because the intent of the page at matches what the person searching for. So we, one of the things that, you know, is, is sort of symptomatic of an earlier mindset around SEO is trying to rank for that big headline term, like Google Analytics, like ranking for Google Analytics is really tough, particularly when you’re competing against Google itself. That’s a losing proposition. But something like Google Analytics, 4 migration techniques, or migration tips, there’s gonna be 50 searches a month for that, but you know that if you have a page just about that, that looks good in the results, you’re gonna get more traffic than you would from a Google Analytics square that you’re gonna get no impressions on, because Google owns that space. The other thing that you can do is if you’re not clear about Sherm, you can go into social listening software. So let’s pull up example here, let’s go into Talkwalker. This is an example of their trending themes. So I typed in Google Analytics 4 And Google Analytics just to see, you know, what are sort of their trending themes. And yet one of them that’s doing well, very recently, this last 30 days, is open source. Right. So one of the topics and we talked about this. I think I mentioned this in my in my personal images a lot this past weekend. Google Analytics 4 isn’t the best fit for everyone anymore. It’s no longer the best tool for the job for companies that don’t have analytics capabilities. Right? So open source alternatives, like matomo are a better fit like my my martial arts teacher school. So he’s a one man show Google Analytics already is barely on his list. Like he looks at it once a month. Google Analytics 4 is it’s unusable to him, you know, something like matomo That is so much more slimmed down, it’s an open source products, it’s not going to change arbitrarily, you get to choose when you update your server, it’s a much better fit for him. And so it’s not surprising to see that term started to appear as an emerging trend. And so we might want to say, Okay, well, that’s interesting, open source, what is what can we do with that? If we would go into our keywords? Well now and look at open source analytics. There’s some search volume there, right Google Analytics alternative open source, Ah, okay. And now we can start putting together a, you know, some content around that and maybe a blog post about Google lacks alternatives that are open source, and you have matomo and plausible and all these different tools. And we could create content that would probably do, okay. But most important would fit that intent. Someone’s looking for information about that. And, of course, us being marketed as the it would end with ad if you’d like help with your. But that’s, that’s fixing the your search intent, which is a big part of the process.

Katie Robbert 25:34
And so, I guess one of the questions that I would have for you is, so, you know, we’ve just spent like, the past 10 to 15 minutes going through these two to four different systems, five different systems. You know, I think that, you know, for us, like, we can handle that we have the bandwidth to do something like that. But that’s not something that a lot of content marketers necessarily have the bandwidth to do for every single piece of content they’re writing. So that then becomes almost like a scalability issue. They can’t do that kind of research for everything they’re doing. They’re just sort of given a list of fears, the keywords, write some content around it.

Christopher Penn 26:17
Yep. And the, the solution to that is what you wrote about in the Trust Insights newsletter this week, which is when you talk to your actual customers, you know, real human beings, and you get a sense of what’s on their minds, that would inform your understanding of the customer intent, like if all your customers are saying, Oh, my God, I can’t handle this, this migration to Google Analytics 4. Okay. That’s the intent. That’s where people’s heads are right now. And we can you can then make that your priority. And you can say, oh, yeah, we had that we’re thinking about email marketing analytics is a blog topic. It’s not any anyone’s mind right now. So yes, that can go that goes lower on the priority list. And right now, you you put all your arrows for this month in into helping people figure out which way is up on Google Analytics 4, because that’s what the customer said. So that, that would be my prioritization hack, if you will. Talk to actual customers see what they say, and then make a decision from that?

Katie Robbert 27:15
Well, and you know, I would say, you know, building off of that if you don’t have the bandwidth or resources to you know, reach out to customers and talk to them, talk to your sales team, talk to your customer service team. So in this example, what you’re saying is, you know, what I would be doing is, I’d be like, I’d be sitting down for like, a one on one with John, being like, John, you talk to a lot of our prospects and our customers, what are the conversations you’re hearing? And leave it open ended? You know, I would let John just tell me like, well, this is what I’m hearing, like, so go in without an agenda, and just let the person tell you what they’re hearing because you don’t want to bias the type of answers that they’re going to give you. You know, and so, John, I guess the question would be like, what are you hearing people talk about these days?

John Wall 28:01
Yeah, obviously, Google Analytics is huge. There’s a lot of people concerned about, you know, how do we make the transition if things gonna break during the transition? attribution is always a theme that keeps coming up over and over again, I don’t know we’ve done a lot of stuff. As far as GA for resources, I think that would be one thing to dive down deeper, and look at some of that content and how it’s been doing and see if we can’t find, you know, what’s been performing other pieces, because I know that there’s even a couple roll up posts as far as like, Okay, here’s the five other things we’ve done on GA four. And, you know, see if any of that stuff has legs and has been pulling.

Katie Robbert 28:41
Yeah, we were actually talking about that idea on the podcast earlier this week, John, where you sort of have that piece of pillar content. And that sort of explains, here’s everything, you know, we know about the thing, and then you have all of your related posts, all organized and linked back so that people can find it all over the place. And so that way, you’re not just constantly rewriting the same post or where you can create those supplemental posts as you learn more of like, okay, so now people want to know about Google Analytics, alternatives. Great, we’ll write about that and then link it back, you know, to all of the other content we’ve already written. So that it all, you know, becomes that one sort of big mega resource for people.

John Wall 29:28
Yeah, and be able to split and if I do, that gives you another picture of intent to you know, if they come in from one piece, where do they go in subsequent steps and where do they bail or where do they stick?

Christopher Penn 29:38
Yep. Okay, so suppose you have no visibility, suppose like your impressions are not where they want to be. The good news is in terms of diagnosing that that’s actually one of the easiest things to diagnose because so much of Search Console is actually built around that. So your first stop and of course, you look at your coverage, you know, fix your air This would be an obvious one that if you don’t see pages any like, if you know how many pages you have on your website, you should, and you don’t see the valid number plus these two numbers add up to the number of pages you actually have, you know, something’s gone wrong. You know, you go look at your site maps, you know, how many pages to discover? If the answer is if that number is not close to the number of pages you have, you got some fixing to do. Same thing for core web vitals, you know, look at your core web vitals, look at your page experience, if you’ve got enough data in there, look at your mobile usability, a lot of this stuff. If you want some more than 20 seconds of talking about it, we actually have a Search Console course. Which was like three hours of walking through this entire thing, the top to bottom, you can grab that. And then the big one, from a visibility perspective that is really in here. But is very relevant, because we just did this study for ourselves. I think it was in this week’s newsletter notice it actually Oh, I haven’t published it yet. If you want to know what gets search traffic, the short answer is inbound links. Right? It is still the gold standard for making search engine marketing work. And and if you’re not getting inbound links, you’re missing the boat. You can see some of that, like you can see what Google thinks. And then look in your SEO tools for all the additional ones where they could where your links coming from, where you’re in and making sure that you’re you’re building them up, because that’s what’s going to create that visibility that will give you those impressions, right? If you don’t have a working website, that is fast that is mobile ready and stuff and that people are linking to your impressions number is going to be like zero.

Katie Robbert 31:52
So I don’t want to get too far down the rabbit hole. And maybe this is a topic for another live stream. But, you know, obviously we talk a lot about Google and Google search because it is the dominant search engine. But there are other search engines. I know that there’s been there’s been Webmaster Tools. How much should we be paying attention to other search engines and their search results? versus Google?

Christopher Penn 32:20
It depends. It depends on what’s showing up in your data, right? So if you look at your sources in your in Google Analytics, and you start seeing search engines you don’t recognize in here like duck, duck, go or cozier or something like that. Then, yeah, pay attention to those. If you’re using multi touch modeling, like actual multi touch models, you may want to look at them and say, Okay, well, what are the sources and mediums or even just a traffic monitor? What are the sources and mediums that are sending us traffic? Because if you know that, then you can make a decision and say, I need to spend more time on X or Y or Z. Let’s pull one up here. So when we look at Rs, right, we look down list. So there’s Google, those other search engines, at least for our form completion. They’re not in there. Right? There’s there’s nobody home on those on those. So we know from a conversion perspective, that’s probably not moving the needle on the new users goal being is in there, right? It’s very small. But being is doing at least a little bit of lifting in terms of getting us some new users. So that fall would be in the category of okay, let’s make sure we’re set up and registered with Bing Webmaster Tools and stuff like that. But Google is Google’s the king of the hill for us. But I would definitely encourage you to look in your analytics data and say, Okay, are we already getting traffic from ECOWAS? Yeah, okay, then we’re gonna figure out, Hey, what the heck is that? And then be, you know, what should we be doing? Right? If you’re getting traffic from Yandex or Baidu, or on any of these, these overseas search engines, you gotta you got to go where the audience is.

Katie Robbert 34:01
I mean, it always comes back to that is you have to understand your audience first. And then you can create content around what they want. I mean, that’s really the core of the conversation. Exactly. You can’t do it without understanding your audience. You know, otherwise, you’re just guessing.

Christopher Penn 34:19
Exactly. So that that pretty much addresses the the visibility portion. The other thing you may want to look at in terms of effectiveness, is it for conversions look at your engagement numbers, like look at where we’re engagements coming from? I would use Google’s explorer hub or Data Studio for this because the built in reports are not super helpful and would take about half an hour to hammer this up. But the short version is an explorer hub. Look at your content, filtered by organic search over time to see which pages are Getting good search traffic and then conversion events on. And if you can do that, then you have a good sense of what pages might are getting some traffic but not converting from organic search traffic. And those are the ones to optimize. So to, to summarize where we’ve been in this, this crazy half hour, we’ve identified what’s not working, right. The three levels, we have tried to figure out why it’s not working, audience offer creative, and then the different remedies. search intent is the biggest one, if you could, because a lot of the times that’s the underlying symptom to why SEO is not working for you.

Katie Robbert 35:41
Well, I, my wheels are already spinning in my brain, you can probably see the smoke coming out now of how I want to start researching for our ED Cal moving forward, because that’s where this conversation started from, was that I was telling the both of you that I felt like I was struggling to plan out our editorial calendar because our keyword list has been exhausted. And my question to you was like, what else can we do? How do we look at this differently? And Chris, thankfully, you’ve just given me a bunch of ways to look at look at it differently so that I can stop just relying on the same static keyword list. Even if we update the keyword list. Once a quarter, we’re basically rotating through the same list of terms that we want to be known for. But what we’re seeing is that’s not good enough. We need to be thinking, more intent based and more intent based is not just Google Analytics, we have to be more specific with our content view like how do I use Google Analytics? What are the alternatives to Google Analytics? Do I need Google Analytics, like really answering people’s questions?

Christopher Penn 36:56
Exactly right. And, you know, there are so many different modifiers that you can look at even in text, you know, one of the simplest ones that changes a term from an educational intent to a commercial intent is near me, right? Gas prices, is one thing, gas prices near me means you’re about to go get gas, right. Chinese restaurants is one thing Chinese restaurants open now means that you’re about to buy some Chinese food, right? And so if you’re, if you’re ranking for these things, and you’re and you’re where you’re not ranking for these things, again, look at those, what you are ranking for and the intent behind it, when we were looking at our keyword list and our term list in Search Console, you could tell there were a lot of ones where you’re like, what is the intent behind that term, and we don’t really know. So we know from just from that list alone, we need to to narrow things down and be more specific. And the irony is the narrower you go to a point, the better you’ll perform, because you will be attracting people with the specific intent and the content that they land on will match what they’re after.

Katie Robbert 38:03
Well, and we’ve talked about this in other contexts, in terms of our marketing, I would rather have a small but mighty email subscription list of all of the right people who engage then have millions of subscribers who just delete the email every week, it means they’re not reading it. It’s a waste of my time. It’s a waste of their time. So I’m perfectly comfortable with smaller audiences, smaller lists, smaller engagement, if it’s the right people.

Christopher Penn 38:34
Exactly right. Any final parting thoughts?

John Wall 38:39
Write more get the inbound links. That’s it. Yeah, if you want a

Christopher Penn 38:45
copy of the the flowchart for the mind map from this episode, we’re going to put up in the analytics remarketing scripts, you have to download the PDF there. Thanks for tuning in, folks, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

 

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