In this week’s episode, I share tips from some of the speakers and experts at MozCon a few weeks ago. This was my 14th MozCon, and it continues to be an incredibly stellar conference. I was having such a good time that I forgot to get any video tips the first day, so I scrambled on day 2 and grabbed speakers and experts during the breaks and at the after party. Check it out, it’s a stellar list of digital marketing tips…
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
You think of Google as a search engine, but Google is so much more than that. It’s a social network, it’s a news portal, it is a shopping website, it is a aggregator for jobs, for travel, for maps, for everything. Why are you treating it just as a search engine? You need to be thinking about all of the Google services. You need to know how all of these places track. You can get so much more visibility out of Google. You can do so much more with brand building for brand awareness, brand preference and conversions if you think beyond just search.
Hey guys. So everybody’s excited about the impact of ChatGPT on search. The chat part is not interesting, because it means we need to change search interfaces and all that stuff. ChatGPT really hasn’t taken off for search as the way people think it might do. The GPT part Google are already working on. They’ve talked that they were already working about, uh, talked about that they were already working on it. So this is the parts that’ll impact search. They’re adding these little filter buttons to their search engine, which extends your search query. This is GPT in action behind the scenes. This is gonna impact search way sooner than chat ever will. And so, keep an eye out for referrals coming in to your site and way longer search queries than before. And this is the immediate impact of GPT on search.
Marketers need to embrace the idea of leveraging all of the AI tools, but one in particular is Midjourney. It is a shortcut and a cheat code for creating visuals of all types. Whatever you can imagine, you can create. I know there’s ethical concerns, and all of that stuff is fair, but Midjourney is an amazing superpower tool for all marketers to leverage if you wanna be great. You can t- literally turn your dreams into reality. Check it out, it’s a strongly recommended tool by yours truly.
The way that we look at link building for local needs to change. There’s more at play than just the mandatory and the number of accolades your competitors have. The types of accolades they have also matter. And that’s something we’ve been looking into at RicketyRoo, because we find that it’s extremely important to know if your competitor are building true local backlinks, and they’re focusing on citations or topical. And then you can use that information to determine where you need to be building links the most to get the biggest impact.
So my tip is, if you have weird spikes or drops in your Google Business performance data, make sure you check your Google Ads account. Some people don’t realize that Google Ads data actually shows up in Google Business profile data as well, um, and a lot of people don’t realize this because they think it’s all organic. But if you have any type of ads running like performance max campaigns or location extensions, all of that data is actually showing up in there and could be responsible for those weird spikes or drops you see.
All right, if you wanna have less rework on content, with clients, with stakeholders, with writers, whoever it is that you’re working with on content, there’s a couple of checkpoints you need to know. One is the topic. Let’s all agree what we’re gonna cover and that it makes sense for the brand, and for our customers. Two is the outline. We don’t need to review 2,000 words together if we can agree that this is what the page needs to look like. And three is something towards the final draft, maybe even before it’s ready for publication where you’re actually ready to edit a piece of content. But at that point, you shouldn’t have to deal with deciding whether or not to keep an article or a page of content at all, figuring out how to rework entire sections of it, and what angle your brand is gonna use to cover the content. So, that’s what should be going in your content briefs. And that’s how you should be deciding what content gets produced all the way to a final draft rather than trying to get to the end of a project and having to throw out a bunch of work that somebody isn’t happy with.
So my top tip for today is that you should think of improving your content with features, advantages and benefits. Most content is just feature driven. People just talk about feature, feature, feature, feature, feature. And you see it on pages where it says, “Look at our product compared to someone else’s,” list of features versus list of features, right? But if you make this better you can add advantages to it. How do you do that? You write a feature and you ask yourself, “Which means that?” So your feature might be, we have 500 watts of suction if you’re a vacuum cleaner, which means that you can take more allergens out of your carpet. But the magic comes if you ask, which means that, one more time, so then you get a benefit. Feature, which means that, advantage, which means that, benefit. Once you’ve got that, your copy becomes much, much better. One more bonus hack for you, when you write this down into Blog Post, tell it benefits, advantages, features. So say, have a healthier family, that’s your benefit, by taking more allergens out of your carpet, that’s your advantage, with 500 watts of suction, that is your feature. So features, advantages, benefits tell the story, benefits, advantages, features. There you go.
Yeah, so my tip would be that right now people are underusing author schema, specifically the URL. Uh, authors and experts should have all of their content on one bio page and then use that URL as much on their website and others to help tie Google to one place to really establish authority.
SEO is getting weird and things are feeling a little bit more unstable than usual. Um, to me, what I think brands should be doing and SEO professionals should be doing to future-proof their careers and their organic performance, is invest in schema limitations, invest in brand building and make sure that your content incorporates a unique point of view, and is not just regurgitated content like any user could find anywhere else on the search. Have a point of view, work on your brand and be very explicit with scheme and markup.
Here’s a tip that you can do. I want you to get SEOs in the room. It doesn’t matter if you’re involved in product marketing, um, local marketing, it- it doesn’t matter, restaurants. You need to get SEOs in the room much earlier. They’re gonna help you with naming conventions, what people are actually gonna be looking for. Also, it educates and informs SEOs on what the customer actually is looking for, their needs, their expectations, the language and the culture that they’re using. So get SEOs at the table, in the room much, much earlier in the process.
Connect all of your recommendations to revenue. Whatever you do, connect to your recommendations, whether it’s SEO, PPC, connect them to revenue, and if you can’t do that, opportunity cost. It is so much easier to get by in when you are aligning your recommendations to key financial metrics that actually move the business.
Document your shit, motherf!cker. I think that right now we’re all starting new with GA4. It’s the perfect time to document how things are set up and what’s being used, so that when you give it to the next team, because it’s inevitable, they know what’s going on.
So one thing that I think marketers are not doing, and I think it’s because it’s super obvious, so it gets deprioritized, is looking at key metrics like scroll depth and video engagement in GA4. Why should you be looking at that? Because I think we are creating content without thinking about what users actually want or how they want it. Uh, we’re seeing websites and webpages where videos are at the bottom, people are not watching them because they’re not scrolling. People aren’t understanding what to do, what to create. Start from the beginning, understand how far people are scrolling, how much of your videos they’re watching and just give users more of that. Don’t put a video at the bottom of the page if you know people are not gonna scroll. Give users what they want. It’s a very basic, fundamental thing, but we just forget to do it. And do more non-text content. That’s my tip.
My quick tip is to use video for your on-page SEO and to use it intelligently to integrate your YouTube approach with your on-page video SEO so that you can get maximum exposure, both on the SERP and on YouTube, and also on your website. Make sure that when you are creating the content for your video, that it aligns with the content of the page that it’s going to be posted on in the end. And that will allow you to give great value to users that Google will be able to display on the SERP.
TikTok SEO tip. So if you use your keyword in the first three seconds of your video, that is going to push the algorithm to understand how to rank it. So you put the keyword in the text in the video and that is how you rank position one.
So the one tip from me is, get shortcuts and learn from someone who’s already been there and know the stuff that they’re teaching, and then practice, practice and experiment. Being curious, plus getting shortcuts will help you to do, to get where you want faster.
Hey there. My big tip is, be bold. And what I mean by that is, reach out to everyone in the industry who shares your type of passion that you do. If you’re doing local SEO, be bold and reach out to the people who are best in that space. And the reason why is, no one is doing it, and you’re gonna stand out. As long as when you reach out to them on social media, that you have a really good, clear goal for the call, what you wanna get out of it. And here’s what’s the really key piece, you’re not doing this in a transactional way. You’re not reaching out for them to give you something, you’re trying to find opportunities to collaborate and to help them accomplish their goals. And in so doing, you’re gonna become an invaluable person for them in their network. I know that I’ve done that for a lot of other agency owners. When they need people in their firm, they’ve reached out to me and said things like, “Hey, I need a data guy. I need a web dev guy.” And by building your network and growing it, and expanding, and helping other people accomplish their goals, when you need something and you reach out, you’ll have so many people who care about you and will do whatever they can to help. That’s my goal for today.
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