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- [00:01]
Customer IO Ad
This episode is brought to you by Customer IO. You know that feeling when you open your inbox and it's just noise, bad marketing, spam, some brand sending you another, just checking in email, or hey, Dave, did you get trapped under the filing cabinet or referencing some line about your college that you don't care about? Most companies are out here just talking at customers, not talking to them. Marketing messages should do more than just land in an inbox. They should create an impact, mean something to your customer. And that's where Customer IO comes in. They help companies send smarter, more personalized messages using first party data. So instead of another generic, hey, first name email, you're crafting messages that hit at the right time, in the right place, on the right channel. Email, sms, push notifications. Wherever your customers are, your messages can meet them right there. And the best part is it's all automated. So you're not just blasting campaigns and hoping for the best. You're running a machine that delivers real human engagement at scale. This is why 7000 brands already trust customer IO to make their marketing feel less like noise and more like a real connection. You can join them by visiting Customer IO to get started. That's Customer IO. Check them out and tell them that we sent you at exit 5.
- [01:20]
Dave Gearhart
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gearhart.
- [01:24]
Danielle
Exit 1, 2.
- [01:32]
Tom Whatley
1, 2, 3, 4.
- [01:37]
Rita C
All right, so welcome to the ultimate roast of SEO. Can you hear and see me? Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you for confirming in the chat. All right, awesome. Little nervous. I'm not dg. I don't, you know, host all of these things so often. So I'm very excited to get into the ultimate Roast of SEO. We have some awesome experts I am so excited to introduce you to. Obviously, Rita. She doesn't really need an introduction. We've already heard in the chat that people love her. Head of Academy at Semrush. You're going to learn so much from her. So very excited to welcome her on stage in a minute. And then we have Ross Simmons, who's one of my favorite people to follow on LinkedIn. I'm actually holding his sunglasses hostage right now from our event at Drive, putting them in the mail soon. But he is awesome. He has such good content on SEO distribution, everything. So definitely follow him on LinkedIn. And then we have my friend Tom Whatley, who I actually met a couple of years ago at saasdoc in Dublin. And he has now become my go to person to bother about all of my SEO questions, not only for his awesome accent. He's British, but because of his fire knowledge. So, yeah, I'm excited. I'm going to pop them all on stage right now. All right. Adding you guys to stage. We're on stage. What's up?
- [02:54]
Ross Simmons
We're on stage. Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you, Danielle, for the introduction. Do you have my slides? I believe you do.
- [03:02]
Rita C
Let me pop them up right now.
- [03:04]
Ross Simmons
Okay, wonderful. We're very excited to be here with all of you roasting some great websites very gently. It's a very slow roast.
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Rita C
I love it. All right.
- [03:16]
Ross Simmons
I just thought, like, awkwardness.
- [03:18]
Rita C
Okay.
- [03:19]
Ross Simmons
Hi. I am very happy to be here. My name is Rita C and I am the head of Academy at Semrush, as mentioned earlier. But a little known fact about me is that actually I have done a bunch of B2B marketing myself. So I was the first B2B marketing hire at Zillow when it was first started and I built their first marketing funnel. So I got a ton of experience with SEO there. Actually, that was my first, like, little steps into the world of SEO and organic traffic. And after that, I managed global integrated marketing for Qualtrics, also in a B2B role. So really happy to share some of my background, experience and knowledge and more than that, really happy to collaborate with these two fine people on this call. So, Tom and Ross, I'm just going to give you a second to both introduce yourselves, even though neither of you really need an introduction.
- [04:06]
Tom Whatley
Ross, please, off to you.
- [04:08]
Ross Simmons
Sure.
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Danielle
My name is Ross Simmons. I'm the founder of a firm called foundation. We work with B2B brands on content creation, all of that good stuff. We've been doing this stuff since 2014. I am a SEO geek, a distribution lover, a dad of three. I'm also in Canada. My wi fi is bad. So hopefully we do not have any glitches throughout. But yes, excited to be here.
- [04:30]
Ross Simmons
Well, if you can say throughout more times, then we will. The glitches will be worth it. Love that Canadian accent. Thank you, Ross. Tom, please introduce yourselves to this wonderful audience.
- [04:41]
Tom Whatley
Sure thing. I'm the token Brits. I'm the founder of another content marketing agency called Grizzle. We work with a lot of B2B SaaS, solutions based companies focusing on SEO and content across the funnel. Yeah, been in the game since 2016 and very excited to be doing this with some of my peers.
- [05:01]
Ross Simmons
Well, I'm really excited to be sitting here with the both of you. It's actually most of what I do for Semrush Academy is work with experts to build SEO training curriculum to make SEO easily accessible for more marketers. Not just SEO, but a lot of other digital marketing topics. So I'm excited to be here with the both of you today. So what are we going to be doing together? First, we're going to be going through this wonderful slide deck that we have prepared for you where we will each share an example of a brand that we think is doing a great job in the B2B SEO space. I will for sure rep Semrush and Tom and Ross have two additional examples and then after we're done with that, then we will get into the slow roasting. I hope that sounds good for everyone. So let's get started. This is the mandatory what is Semrush slide. Given that Semrush has kindly supported this program. So we like to say that Semrush is an online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform. I like to think it's kind of like a super magical tool that lets you snoop in on every single website in the world. We are quite large. We support a lot of marketing professionals and brands around the world. We're super happy to be here supporting this event. Okay, so 2024, what is this? Like terribly off brand color, but for anyone who was paying attention to social, you probably. Yep, thanks, Laura. It's totally Brat green. For all the millennials in the room, that was like the moment in the year where you were like, oh my God, am I this old? I just don't understand what's going on with this color on the Internet. But in addition to 2024 being the year of brat and Brat Summer, it was also, of course, the year of AI. It feels like every year is going to be the year of AI for us marketers. And AI, of course in the world of SEO has had a quite big impact, as Dave said earlier. Is SEO going to be dead? I thought it was dying. It's actually not. And one of the reasons that AI has impacted the world of SEO so much is because it's made content creation quite easy. We all know this. Now this chart is quite interesting. It sort of shows the global data generated annually that is expected to increase 150% in 2025 and ongoing. A lot of that content is user generated, as Ross will probably talk about later here. But what does this mean for us marketers? That there's so much data out there? So much data out there. So much content out there. It makes it a lot harder for us to stand out, to rank, to capture Organic traffic. And so the practices that worked in the past, like, I remember when I first started at Zillow, it was the year 2004 14, and my job was to drive organic search traffic from real estate agents in the US To Zillow. So we built a blog, we built resources, we did keyword research, we optimized the site. And like, lo and behold, in a year we had a hundred thousand in traffic. Just one year of like solid content, great SEO. So we made changes, we saw results. Now the path is not so easy and AI has made it harder. It's very hard to stand out. It's a lot more complicated. So what do we do, right, like as marketers, like, what do we do to stand out in this space? And what are some examples of B2B brands that despite this expansion of content and this ease of accessibility that people have now to creating content, has led to the Internet just having a content explosion? What are some brands that are crushing it when it comes to SEO right now? Okay, so I'm going to pass the baton over to Tom, who's going to share his example.
- [08:34]
Tom Whatley
Thank you. Yeah, so sharing a client of ours, essentially, we've been working with Pidrive since 2016, which dawned on me earlier, which makes me feel like a bit of a dinosaur in the content world. But traditionally back then we were helping them to kind of scale up their top and funnel content efforts. Right. They already had a great brand in the sales technology space, and so it was just a matter of kind of capitalizing on on that. This is back when skyscraper technique and all of that jazz wasn't really prolific. As prolific or as outdated as it is now these days. However, especially after kind of reaching unicorn status, we found that we had a greater need to drive more signups. And yes, the top of final stuff was contributing to signups. It was fueling the paid acquisition efforts for the performance marketing team. But we wanted to make a direct impact. And so what we did is pivot slightly to focus more on the bottom of the funnel. And this includes SEO driven landing pages, comparison pages, as well as product to be sorry, product led, and jobs to be done content. So we'd look for topics both in terms of the content that already existed across the blog, where people are trying to solve problems that pipedrive's feature set can solve and just injecting those features in a very kind of contextual way while maintaining a value driven approach. And then of course, landing pages and whatnot. Now you might think that landing pages don't typically rank everyone over indexes on blog articles and listicles and things like that. But actually if you look at the right search intent, people looking for CRM tools in specific industries than a hundred percent people looking for product information. And it worked. We managed to achieve a 33% increase in user signups in about 12 months, more or less just by driving this approach. And we're still kind of working it today, focusing on optimization as well as fresh articles, landing pages, other content assets to kind of continue fueling that. And that's me.
- [10:40]
Ross Simmons
Cool.
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Danielle
I love that approach. I'm going to take a different page. I'm a massive believer you're in bottom of funnel. We've done that with clients as well Tom, where the Canadian and the UK all come together to embrace similar bottom of funnel strategies. I love it. Procore is an example that I'll point to. They've built a content moat by building more topo funnel. So they focused on like the high value glossaries and library style content where they identified keywords that their audience was looking for to learn about to help them run their contractor business, their construction company, things like that, and developed a series of assets that ultimately build out a handful of different keywords or pages that help speak to like things you would compete against Wikipedia for. So in Wikipedia there might be a page that would speak to a specific topic. They've taken the strategy of let's scale out these across a ton of different landing pages creating glossary content. Bob had the question around BofU content versus other content. Bottom of funnel content is essentially that content that is more closely connected to the sale. So if somebody is going to Google and they're typing in CRM alternatives or the cheapest CRM or highest price CRM, that would be a bottom of funnel query versus top of funnel which might be what is CRM. So they're just like in an information stating. The example that I was talking through around procore is that a lot of their messaging and a lot of their stories were around top of funnel. So having that content that really speaks to the user's kind of curiosity to figure out something like what is a general contractor? How should general contractors create their pricing things like that? One of the other things that came out of this is that Reddit is starting to show up more and more in the SERP for a lot of these queries. And we've started to support our partners by not only creating content that exists on their domain and their website, but also content that lives in Reddit and ultimately ranks for some of the Queries that would also be kind of bottom of funnel or even middle of funnel. No, nothing against middle funnel as well.
- [12:44]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, middle funnel needs some love. The chat is giving it some love over here. These are both great examples. I also love that it showcases two very different approaches, like a bottom of a funnel approach and the top funnel approach. So I'm going to focus on Semrush. That's the brand that I'm representing. So on the Semrush side, we kind of. How do you say this in English? I get all my idioms mixed up in English. I'm a native Spanish speaker. Many people don't know that. But it's. We toot our own horn. No, that's not it. Tom and Ross help.
- [13:12]
Tom Whatley
Yeah, tooting your own horn toot is a very, a very good British one. So I'm going to stand the toot.
- [13:17]
Ross Simmons
Okay, so we toot our own horn in this case here. We also practice what we preach is what I was trying to remember and now I remembered it. So you can see here the growth of organic traffic to our site starting all the way back in 2017 and there's a massive ramp up there and it's like an 18 month ramp up that led to 13x in organic search traffic. This data is public, by the way. It's available in Semrush if anyone wants to take a look at it. So how do we do that? Of course, the answer to that question is quite complex, but I'm just going to show some very, I think, key takeaways and things that are very tangible that you can apply to your own business today. The first is like table stakes. Like it's so important to go back to the definition of quality content. Like, what does Google consider quality? Google is in the business of delivering the best possible search results for a given query. What are the best possible search results? That is the question that most SEOs are always trying to answer. And we have some clues. We know some things that Google tells us. So whenever we develop any kind of content, we really like, go back to these as guidelines. Like, is the content of high quality? Does it provide substantial value? Are we showcasing our expertise? If you go to our blog, you'll notice that we do a lot of work to showcase both author pages and also have editorial guidelines that are publicly available so that our content is perceived as high quality, not just by the reader, but also by Google. Does the page provide a great experience? Is it people first and then does it abide by E, E, A, T or eat? Which Stands for experience, something, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. They added an E all. So that's why I forget what the second E is for. It used to be just eat, but Google doesn't make it easy on us. Okay, so how are some of the ways that we have very tangibly moved in the direction of better quality content and strategies that have really impacted the performance of our content and driven organic traffic? The first thing that we did, and we started this like about two years ago, so it wasn't really that long ago, was editing our articles to get straight to the point. I see this time and time again online. I do this myself where I feel like I need a really nice introduction to everything I write. That is not how people read online. Getting to the point and shortening that introduction led to a huge ramp up in our organic traffic and has increased like the amount of time that people spend on each page and how much they scroll down the page all signals that we believe as SEO contribute to a better ranking in Google SERPs. So the second thing that we did is that we write for scanners. We don't write for people who are looking for a comprehensive in depth guide on a given topic. We write for people like myself, honestly who are just looking at the main headlines and trying to understand like what the thing is about in a quick moment. So as you can see here from these different scans, like people are mostly just reading headlines on the left and scrolling all the way down. So we really focused on building really clear, legible, large subheadings. So if you go on the Semrush blog, you will rarely see a blog post that has large chunks of text. Everything is really parsed out in subheadings that are clear and easy to understand and easy to really skim through and read very quickly. We use bullet points and very short paragraphs and then within the longer paragraphs we bold phrases. So let's say that we're writing an article about the best tablets. Instead of saying something like we think the best Android tablet is blah blah blah, we will just start with best Android tablet colon, it's this. So give the people what they want and give it to them very fast and structure the rest of your article thinking that the person reading this is not going to read this like a Tolstoy novel. They're going to like just skim through the headlines and move on. So take that into consideration. That really is kind of the definition of people first content in the sense that take into consideration how people these days are consuming blog content. The next thing that we've done and this has been, I pulled this example because I think it's such a great sort of AI proof strategy. So SEMrush has invested immensely in programmatic SEO. Programmatic SEO is basically any SEO that is automatically pulling data or pulling stats to fit a given keyword and generate a variety of pages programmatically or automatically. So on the Semrush side, for example, we have programmatic SEO pages that answer search results such as Amazon 2024 traffic or Amazon traffic Stats insert almost any website on the Internet and we that is, you know, well known and that has branded search volume for brand name stat traffic stats and we've built a programmatic SEO page for that term. So you can see here the Amazon example and the chewy.com examples. The cool thing about this strategy is that yes, like you need development help. Like if you are not a programmer and you want to do programmatic SEO, you need someone to help you do it. So there is a certain investment. But once you have that investment in place, this is quite cheap to scale. It's really useful. It really nails a search intent like right on the head. It ties naturally with your product. If you choose a keyword that is very scalable and very tied to your product offering and honestly very hard to replace in the SERP with different SERP features. Even AI overviews are going to struggle to replace this because in this case this is prioritary semrush data that ChatGPT or any LLM does not have access to. Okay, so those are the three things that I wanted to share, like three tangible takeaway tips on how Semrush has really grown SEO traffic through content optimization. Now, I'm sure you have many, many questions. This conversation and what the conversation that Danielle and Dan were having before we joined was all about the future of SEO. What's going to happen? How has AI disrupted it? What threat does it pose to Google? How do US marketers react to something like AI overviews, which is Google's kind of response to ChatGPT? It's they're starting to test it in the SERP. So if you have any of these questions and are curious about what Semrush believes is the answer to these questions. We made available a slide deck that is not widely available to people. It is from our head of enterprise, Marcus Tober, quite a well known figure in SEO because he was the founder of Search Metrics. And so there's a link. I don't know where the link is Danielle, but we're also going to make it available, I believe, as part. There it is. Wonderful. We're going to make it available as well as part of the email. But this is all the content that I wish I could share with you in this session because it's really interesting and it's about AI and I can't because we don't have enough time. But if you're interested in that topic, please download it, give it a read, and I'll share my contact information later. I'd be so curious to hear what you think about it. Okay, so let's move away from slides and to some slow roasting.
- [20:27]
Rita C
Yeah, let's get into the roast. All right. Awesome. We added that link to the presentation, which is great. I got a chance to scan through it last night. I think it's like a must read for learning about how things are changing with SEO. So thank you guys for providing that. I also put it as a pinned message so we can see it up there. So now, Rita, I am going to turn it over to you to do screen share.
- [20:51]
Ross Simmons
We've picked.
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Rita C
What is it? 3. I think we're going to do. We're going to do a little roast. So let's get into it.
- [20:56]
Ross Simmons
Okay. Tom and Ross, do you have a preference for where we start?
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Danielle
Tom, do you have a preference?
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Tom Whatley
I'm easy. Should we start with Protext? They were the top of our list.
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Ross Simmons
Yeah, let's do it. Let's see. I'm sharing my screen. Okay, so Protext, this is the site.
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Danielle
Cool. Click on product. I might be triggered already.
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Ross Simmons
Overview.
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Danielle
Sure. Okay, so that was good. So what I was almost triggered by, and I still don't know what I feel about it is their homepage starts with. In their title, it's Protex AI. It's like the first keywords. What I like to do if it's a earlier stage company is to actually use like their category directly in the title. So, like Proactive Safety, powered by AI. Like Proactive Safety alone is probably not a highly searched query to get people to find Protex AI. So I would probably be looking to adjust that to whatever your category is versus Proactive Safety. Unless you're trying to do like category creation stuff and then it might be a problem.
- [21:59]
Ross Simmons
Yeah. I also noticed as we went into this product that I think there's a bit of like an overlap. This is actually a bit better AI workplace safety software.
- [22:08]
Danielle
But then you have the title. The number one title on the page doesn't match that. So you're trying to do Too much.
- [22:15]
Rita C
You.
- [22:15]
Danielle
If AI workplace safety software is like your phrase of focus, then that should also show up here in your text, which it doesn't.
- [22:24]
Ross Simmons
So, Ross, question, like, how do you decide if. Let's say you would call this your seed keyword, right? Like, if it your seed keyword, your core keyword is AI workplace safety software. How do you decide whether you place that keyword in your homepage versus your product page?
- [22:39]
Danielle
So I would say you would do a comparison of search volume in that sense. So I would try to use the AI as probably a modifier because I would assume that AI is probably going to reduce the amount of searches for workplace safety software. So I would probably, on my homepage, use workplace safety software powered by AI. Do a different approach there. So, like, my website is categorized in that lane and then I have a product page that has AI in it. So I'm able to get that longer tail where people are using the AI modifier in the search intent for my product pages. So it depends on your industry, your space, but that's how I would think about it.
- [23:17]
Ross Simmons
Well, yeah, I found that tricky in the past to, like, differentiate the keywords between those two pages. Tom, on your side, anything that you noticed, like, blatant, arose here?
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Tom Whatley
Yeah, I put pretext to Semrush, of course. Little product mention.
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Ross Simmons
Oh, yeah.
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Tom Whatley
I'd be picking a sport on this one, actually, after his example, because one thing I noticed is under the organic research tab, a lot of the traffic seems to be going to glossary pages. And when I kind of look at the messaging across the website, it seems to me that they are trying to target senior health and safety professionals. And I feel like even if you are going after individual contributors, you know, within those health and safety teams, are glossary terms really going to move the needle? Now, clearly it works because Ross has proven it. So it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. It feels like some of the content on the blog is speaking to the pain points of these individuals as well. But without digging too deep, I can't really see it making that much of an impact. And I wonder if it's because some of this content, while it is striking the right chords, it feels like it's a little bit thin.
- [24:30]
Ross Simmons
Take a look at this one. Like, rule, like when you're just so, you know, like this is what Tom is talking about. These pages, like, they rank number one for rule of meaning.
- [24:39]
Danielle
For example, zoom in a little bit.
- [24:41]
Ross Simmons
Dictionary the glossary. So I can go here.
- [24:44]
Danielle
Can you zoom in your browser a bit. I know. My eyes are open.
- [24:48]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, it's a little small, by the way. I have no idea what any of these things mean, so. Yeah, there we go. Reba and Rula.
- [24:58]
Customer IO Ad
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- [26:15]
Ross Simmons
So you were talking a little bit about how the content feels a little bit thin.
- [26:19]
Tom Whatley
So glossary pages are typically quite thin by definition because you're creating a lot of it usually, right? You've got hundreds of pages. You're trying to kind of cast a wider net, get a bigger surface area. So it's not necessarily this content because it's obviously ranking. It is the blog content specifically. So, for example, there was an article around revolutionizing warehouse safety.
- [26:44]
Ross Simmons
I have it here exploring AI technology.
- [26:46]
Tom Whatley
And there was a section under it. I just picked on this one, which is a little further down. Rita called detecting hidden hazards with AI monitoring. And in it, it kind of sets the stage about, okay, why is this thing important? But it doesn't tell us much about the why and most importantly, the how or even which could even be next steps in terms of additional resources or something like that. But it's like it makes a point and then it moves on very quickly. And I feel putting my very limited experience as a health and safety professional hat on that it's missing something. So I don't feel like it's just fulfilling search intent fully.
- [27:23]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, for sure. I'm not sure, to be honest, like what keywords and what intent this piece of content is trying to target. To be very honest, it feels more like a thought leadership post than anything else.
- [27:36]
Tom Whatley
Yeah, I did pick on this particular article at random. It doesn't like you say, look like it's geared for a primary target keyword, but it's a good example. Even if you're distributing it via like another dedicated channel. It could even be for sales enablement.
- [27:50]
Ross Simmons
Right.
- [27:50]
Tom Whatley
It's still got those same issues. It's a real experience.
- [27:54]
Ross Simmons
Totally. This is like textbook. What we were talking about with the slides that Semrush fixed in their blog of like opening the article was like, this article explores the latest, like just not getting to the point fast enough. Yeah, Ross, I was just going to.
- [28:08]
Danielle
Say I'm in a complete alignment on there. And if you think about double eat, like, this doesn't have that. So experience, authority, expertise and trustworthiness. So one, there's no author associated with the piece. So there should also always be an author assigned to the blog post or the piece that's being created. And it should be a real person. Then when you click on their author profile, it should go to a page that lists their credentials, the biography, all of those types of details that demonstrate to Google that this person does actually have expertise in all of the things that they're writing about. You want to gather like third party links that are from highly authoritative domains, especially when you're early in your business life cycle. So these URLs, if you hover over them, it's possible. My assumption is that they're probably linking back to other pages that they have on their own site, which is okay. But you want to also have links going outside to probably some higher domain authority sources. So that could be like public journals, that could be reports, white papers, things of that nature. Those are things that you want to do. The other piece is the URL is so ugly. That's one of the ugliest URLs I've seen in a long time. You need to make your URLs align with your search intent. No one's going to go and typing in revolutionizing warehouse safety, like, that's never going to happen. So the word revolutionizing has no purpose in your URL, remove it. Warehouse safety is probably what you want to focus on for this post. So that would be your URLs, and if AI has to be a part of it, then it would be warehouse safety, AI tech, and then that's your focus in your URL. Because again, as a part of the entire search program, you have to think about your title, the URL, the content, and when you throw in words like and which should never be in your URL, just remove those out. Another thing that often happens is like people throw the date in their URL. That shouldn't be there either. So that's a roast for protects.
- [29:56]
Rita C
Questions here, which I think are interesting. Anna asked, what's the ratio here on internal linking versus established external links and should external links be opened in a new window? From John so what do you guys have? Do you have opinions on that?
- [30:11]
Tom Whatley
I think when it comes to internal links, good hygiene is to have as many as possible that are going to serve the reader to add context. Right. Obviously, from a technical SEO perspective, super important. But also think about the reader experience first. If you've got a piece of content that goes deeper into something that you're covering in a piece of content, if there's a relevant feature that you kind of mention on one landing page from one to another, also super important, it's kind of using it as stepping stones to a better reading and learning experience, shall we say, or bioresearch process. And then when it comes to external links, Ross, why don't you share more about this? Because you just started touching on this.
- [30:53]
Danielle
Yeah. So for the external links, like links that are going out, I like to make it open up in a new tab. Like I'm all about the user experience and I want to keep people on my site as much as possible. So you want it to open up in a new tab so folks are able to click and then they go and experience that and then ideally they come back to your website and your domain. That would be the way that I would kind of approach it for internal links. It's definitely a great way to capture people. Like, I love trying to make the reader open as many tabs from my domain as possible. Like, I want you to get lost in the world that I'm trying to create, and I kind of view the website as a world that you should experience and try to create content so good that people want to get lost for hours in the materials that you're created. We kind of talked about this a little bit in the chat around, like, the glossary pages being light oftentimes across SaaS because of ChatGPT. Like, glossary pages are super, super, like, weak and not filled with images and graphics and charts and interactive experiences. But just because that is best practice and that is like, what is expected, should not be setting the bar for you as a creator, as an SEO. Like, go above and beyond that. So when people do click on your link and they go to something that's just a glossary page, that glossary page is a thing of beauty. Where there's a downloadable resource there, there's a checklist that they can download. Make it beautiful, make it great.
- [32:18]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, I think that you might be competing with that person typing that query into ChatGPT.
- [32:24]
Danielle
Yeah, exactly.
- [32:26]
Ross Simmons
Like, so much better. Yeah. I completely agree with the both of you and I think it just goes back fundamentally through creating great content. I also am a big fan of keeping people on the site. I think that's the right thing. Ultimately, even though there's no, like, hard and fast rule about whether your internal link should stay within your site or open a different tab. Danielle, I'm so sorry, I think I interrupted you. Was there another question?
- [32:49]
Rita C
No, not at all. I was just going to say let's rate this one. So what we're going to do is we're going to rate each of these and we want you guys in the chat to do it as well. So, like, 10 is. This is my scale. Are you ready? 10 is like gold standard. Copy this. This is amazing. Look up to it. One is like, please get this off the Internet right now. This is a roast, after all. So I want each of you to rate it on that scale. So Tom, Rita and Ross, and then one thing, just like one key insight that you would, like, have them change and implement. And then I want everyone in the chat to do that as well. So add your ratings to the chat and then you guys go, tom, what's your rating? Putting you on the spot.
- [33:26]
Tom Whatley
Thanks. I'll go for a five, I think, mainly because the building blocks are there if they're executed properly. Focus on refreshing, perhaps optimization. A lot of the stuff that Ross mentioned as well at the product page level.
- [33:40]
Danielle
Tom is super nice and I'm Canadian. I'm giving it a zero. That's.
- [33:46]
Rita C
You've got to even say zero.
- [33:49]
Danielle
It's getting 837 visits on a monthly basis. Like, it's broken. You need to fix a lot of things. Like, you need to fix a lot of things there. Like, go find Simon. Pardon?
- [34:02]
Rita C
I think we found The Simon Cowell of the panel.
- [34:06]
Ross Simmons
Again, it's me.
- [34:08]
Danielle
It's me.
- [34:08]
Tom Whatley
Yeah.
- [34:09]
Danielle
No, like I would start scaling out this content significantly. I would be trying to get backlinks as much as possible. Your domain authority is too weak right now. Your brand isn't well known enough. So like, you need to throw in a little bit of brand marketing in addition to SEO marketing to elevate this thing. Reach out just some partners to try to get them to link to your homepage and your website. Like, if you're getting 836 monthly visits, there's a lot of work to be done.
- [34:32]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, well, I am not exactly in between the both of you. The first number that came to my head was four because I agree with Tom that there's something there and there is, I think, a commendable attempt at creating content to target informational keywords, which is, I think, like, not necessarily SEO 101. It's a little bit like above that. What I think is problematic is that probably the most important thing that needs to happen is that your like homepage and product pages are ranking for non branded terms that have something to do with what you actually sell. And that is not happening right now. And so if I was Protex, I would be focused on like making sure that the pages that are meant to actually drive sales for my product, that are not targeting informational keywords, that are targeting commercial keywords, transactional keywords like those should be optimized first. And then you can decide to do a glossary. Like, that's a fun side project. Like that would be something you could do in a hackathon, but not without getting the real fundamentals down first.
- [35:37]
Rita C
Awesome. I love it. Well, thank you. All right, so I think we got, we got a bunch of fives and fours in the chat. We have Ross's Zero. I love it. Who's next? Who's getting roasted next?
- [35:51]
Ross Simmons
I have Gozigo here. Is it Gozigo or Gozago?
- [35:54]
Danielle
See, now we're talking.
- [35:55]
Tom Whatley
Yeah, these are the real questions.
- [35:57]
Danielle
This is traffic.
- [35:58]
Ross Simmons
Yeah.
- [35:59]
Tom Whatley
Amanda said Zigo Gozigz, right? Yeah, Gozigo.
- [36:04]
Ross Simmons
Okay, let me just show the website so people know what Gozigo is. It's a property management software service that actually allows you to do quite a lot of things like make payments, track utility bills, do a bunch of automations to make the life of your tenants and yours as a property manager a lot easier. So your thoughts on this?
- [36:24]
Danielle
Look at that. H1. It's perfect. It's aligned exactly with the Title, I think. Yeah. I don't know if they just did this because they heard us roasting and they were like, let's fix this real quick.
- [36:34]
Rita C
But.
- [36:36]
Danielle
But that is. That's what it's supposed to be. That's what it's supposed to be. To be.
- [36:40]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, yeah. Nailed the homepage. The chat is messing up my little hover. But yeah, it's property management software. Property management software.
- [36:47]
Danielle
Scroll down to their footer. Be curious to see what they've got now.
- [36:50]
Tom Whatley
Now we're getting to the nitty gritty, Ross.
- [36:53]
Danielle
Well, here's the play. Here's a play. Tom, do you want to take it? You can take it. I've got a lot of thoughts. So I believe that footers should be like really focused on high priority keywords because it's on every page. So what I would give them advice on is like, let's repurpose and think about the search intent of our highest value queries and let's incorporate landing pages down there that speak to our offerings. So you're talking about who you serve. Cool. But what is it that you actually offer and align that with like your solutions? If you hover over that, Rita, I have a feeling there's going to be a bunch.
- [37:27]
Ross Simmons
Where is it?
- [37:28]
Danielle
Sorry, in the nav.
- [37:30]
Ross Simmons
Oh, in the nav. Solutions.
- [37:31]
Danielle
Okay, so I would use the language that my audience customers use to find automated payment processing, operations management for property managers, CRM for property managers, et cetera. I would find all those categories and that would be in my footer as well. And then link to your priority pages. And I would also say that would be. One of my suggestions is like fix or ensure that your solutions titles are aligned with search intent. And you're not basing that off of like internal dialogue around what you guys want to call things.
- [38:04]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, they're calling it just like the product name when no one is searching for that product name ever. Yeah, I see that quite happening quite often. I always, by the way, back to like the footer discussion. I always love scrolling down to the footer and it usually gives me an inkling of like how together their SEO team has it. Because I feel like some footers you could look at, you're like, whoa, this is quite strategic. Like the Zillow footer. I don't know what it is right now, but when I was there we had a lot of like programmatic local SEO pages. So real estate listings in Arizona, real estate listings in San Francisco, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like all the way down. So I. That's like one thing that I thought about them, like I wonder how much property managers are searching for things at the local level, like how much should I charge for rent in New York, San Francisco, et cetera. I would imagine that like rent calculations are like a really big topic within the property manager community and like rental management community. So it's an opportunity for either programmatic or for building like a little widget product, like a little calculator that can help property managers calculate rental rates. So it's one thing I thought when I looked back at the footer it was like a blast from the past a little bit. What else? Yeah, Tom, sorry, no, all good.
- [39:21]
Tom Whatley
I was going to build upon Ross's comment. The photo is just like a entry ramp to. You could call them pillar pages if you're using a hub and spoke model. One thing I noticed again, I was looking through the data on Semrush and just kind of perusing through some of the content. The content is actually pretty strong. I think editorially you could make a few tweaks to improve what, Rita, you might call time to value. Right? You talked about this earlier and that people first approach, answering the question right away and just kind of getting out of the way, offering the reader as much value as quickly as possible. But when you kind of compare them to some of their key competitors, for example Door loop, they've clearly got a little bit of way to go in terms of increasing domain authority and therefore brand authority. Right. And so I reckon, because again, the content for the most part is relatively strong other than a few technical things, I think just improving brand authority and domain authority is probably going to help. And that could actually be in the form of perhaps a proper distribution engine or a digital PR approach. And again, at a cursory glance, I don't really see a lot of good original research content in the property management space. Creating some good original research that will definitely help to pick up decent backlinks if you have a good outreach or business development approach, which is really what good link building is these days. But yeah, it'll help with thought leadership as well. Becoming a known brand, picking up those natural links at the same time. And what I mean by natural links is, you know, you're creating something that's actually worth sharing. People are naturally going to link to it, especially other content creators in the space. They want to cite data that helps them back up their own points. So I think that's probably like the biggest priority. I think from a cursory glance, again, content's pretty strong From a foundational level though.
- [41:17]
Ross Simmons
Yeah.
- [41:17]
Danielle
Could you click on advanced filters? I think it's right next to the S. And then doesn't include. So instead of include, change that to doesn't include or exclude yet. And then keyword zego. So Z E G O. I did.
- [41:33]
Tom Whatley
This earlier as well, Ross.
- [41:35]
Danielle
So their value before. So like their traffic value before I think it was one hundred and something thousand dollars worth of traffic. Now it's 10K. So what does that mean? It means that their branded search volume is worth $90,000. So $90,000 worth of queries are happening on Google every month where people are going to Google and type it in. Ziggo competitors themselves, et cetera, are running ads against that query to a $90,000 worth of traffic. When you take all of that branded search volume out of the picture, they're generating $10,000 worth of traffic. What that tells me is that they have not yet achieved content excellence through search because the value of their traffic is still relatively low. What they should be striving to do is rank for keywords like property management software, best property management software, et cetera, these types of queries, because the cost per click on those are going to be significantly higher than a branded query. And if you can do that, you're going to now rank for higher value traffic. And you want to do this across all of the different things. So what you need to do is take a step back, think about again. Tom and I talked about this earlier around bottom of funnel. What are the most valuable queries that you currently run Google Ads against? Instead of just lighting your money on Google, like sending it to Google, let's create content. Whether it's a blog, a landing page, a resource, a checklist, whatever it might be that speaks to that same keyword. Put an author behind it, press, publish on those pieces, create an engine where you have briefs that are using Semrush or even Content Shake, which is a great tool that Semrush launched recently. And just like scale that out every single week like you should be producing 10 to 15 assets a month that are highly valuable speaking to these queries. And then you will, I believe, be able to see that dollar number go up. That should be your focus because at the end of the day, you don't get paid for traffic, you get paid for results. So let's make the money signs go up by increasing the value of our traffic.
- [43:43]
Ross Simmons
I would say too, just from this list, it's interesting to see this is a trap that Zillow, when I was There like fell in all the time. Like this is like one of their product pages is like ZGO Pay. It's ranking for Pay Rent online, which is a keyword that has decent search volume. Unfortunately, it's not targeting property managers. Right. This is like a keyword that someone like me who is a renter would be searching for. And so I would caution them to really think about what are property managers actually looking for. Maybe it's more something like charging for like renties rent or charge an easy way to charge rent. We could do that keyword research in another session. But the cautioning that this traffic, even though they're doing quite well, like they seem to be rising in the ranked position 8 for this informational keyword. It's ultimately not going to generate the right type of customer or lead for them.
- [44:37]
Rita C
Cool. I'm going to move us along to the roasting because we got about 10 minutes. We got to fit one more in. So let us rate them. All right. Remember zero, I guess that's on the scale now. Zero is you've just appointed Ross and 10 is this is the gold standard. So what do you guys think in the chat and then maybe Ross, you kick us off on this one?
- [44:57]
Danielle
Yeah, I would say that this one would get a solid six from me. It started really high. It started really high. But then I like there's no long tail traffic coming in. It's all branded search queries. So yeah, I would give it a six.
- [45:12]
Rita C
Definitely.
- [45:13]
Tom Whatley
There he goes. And here's Louis Walsh. I was going to say a five because yeah, the foundational stuff is there from a content editorial perspective. I think bottom of funnel is table stakes to Ross's point. Like if you're not focusing on the stuff people searching for to actually look for your product, if they're not in market prioritizing that then kind of what you're doing. But yeah, foundation stuff. Is there a good H1 on the homepage? That's what we like to see.
- [45:39]
Ross Simmons
Yeah. So I don't know, I kind of like these guys. I'm also a softy for any kind of real estate property management type website. So I'm going to give them a seven. I think that there's a lot of really cool stuff that they could be doing with like widgets, calculators, programmatic, like real estate and rentals are local and I don't see a lot of local content on this site. So there's a big opportunity. But because they have the foundations set and because they match their H1 with their Meta Title here. I'm going to give it a seven. Love it. Okay. Third site company called Catch that makes security and compliance software.
- [46:20]
Tom Whatley
I'm actually a fan of the H1 despite, you know, it. Not necessarily. It sets context. I think it could come across a bit wishy washy, but I think the sub header does a good job of saying kind of, this is what we do. Ross, would you disagree with that?
- [46:35]
Danielle
I agree with you. Yeah.
- [46:36]
Tom Whatley
Nice.
- [46:37]
Danielle
I'd love to see. Just like from my. I think getting right into Semrush would help on this one.
- [46:45]
Ross Simmons
Make it a little bigger.
- [46:47]
Tom Whatley
Traffic's flatlined a bit and I think again, I'm. I'm kind of beating the kind of blog, the content drum here. It looks like that's the lane I'm in at the moment. But I think if you were to kind of compare it to one of their competitors, Asana OS A N O Asano. Sorry. I feel that some of the content. There's a mismatch in search intent. There's an article in Asano Query.
- [47:14]
Ross Simmons
Is that how you spell it?
- [47:15]
Tom Whatley
OS O S A N o dot com. You kind of see that they're actually gobbling up a lot of the rankings for keywords that Catch are trying to rank for. And when you really compare, it kind of comes back to some of those principles we talked about and the ones that you shared earlier. Retail. It gets to the point very quickly. It doesn't kind of waffle and beat around the bush. There was one article and I've lost it now, but it had that kind of traditional setting the stage. H2 could be a definition that kind of what is X? It's a different one to this. But we will get to this because it's a good example of what I'm about to talk about. It said, before we can define this, we have to first understand it's like, just tell me what it fucking means. Excuse my friend. And then start adding some context. It had a lot.
- [48:00]
Danielle
Yeah.
- [48:00]
Tom Whatley
I think it has like two introductions in there as well. I think it might be this page again. Yeah. So underneath the H1 you've kind of got this kind of micro introduction and then you've got another one. And there was one page, there was one blog in particular that kind of says the same thing. And so it's just like, get out of the reader's way. Get out of the search's way. Give them exactly what they need.
- [48:18]
Ross Simmons
You're talking about the homepage, Tom.
- [48:20]
Tom Whatley
Sorry, I was talking about the blog content in general.
- [48:23]
Ross Simmons
The blog content in general. Okay, got it.
- [48:25]
Tom Whatley
Yeah. So you had one open a second ago, and it's a good example of it from, like, editorial perspective.
- [48:30]
Danielle
One thing that I'm noticing on this, there's a few things. I love everything Tom said around blog content. I do want to step back to the pages for a second, but I do have a ton of blog ideas as well. But if you click on, say, consent management there and then hover over the top into the nav, into the title page. Sorry, the. Right. On your tab, on the browser. Oh, yeah. See what it is. So one of the things that I noticed they're doing on a lot of their pages is they have text that doesn't really matter to the user in a lot of these. Like, it's. There's a lot of marketing words and the marketing words are nice for marketers, but they don't really do anything for Google. They don't do anything for your user. And I would question if they're helping much. So, like, sometimes it's like using marketing fluff, and I don't know if that's always needed.
- [49:21]
Ross Simmons
Yeah. To be honest, like, myself, I'm not sure what consent management is like. I think if you were to tell me, like, am I GDPR compliant? How do I become GDPR compliant as a marketer? That would be a better way to catch me. So, yeah, I think it's a good call. And like, a lot of this language feeling more internal than potentially, like, what people are actually searching for.
- [49:41]
Danielle
Yeah. I think the. I love the website. I think the team's done a great job with the brand, the aesthetic. The team does have author pages, I think, which is also nice.
- [49:51]
Ross Simmons
Yeah, they do.
- [49:52]
Danielle
I like that they also have.
- [49:53]
Ross Simmons
The authors are on the side of, like, on the sort of, like, side column of each blog post. Jump to it.
- [49:59]
Tom Whatley
You should check out the footer as well, Ross. I think you might be relatively pleased.
- [50:03]
Danielle
Pleased. I love that.
- [50:05]
Ross Simmons
And author pages here.
- [50:06]
Danielle
Yeah.
- [50:06]
Tom Whatley
I like how they've separated blog and news as well. It kind of sends a signal just to people who might become brand advocates. They know where to kind of find the stuff that they want versus just we're talking about our announcements and, you.
- [50:18]
Danielle
Know, so I think we can't just give them all the roses and sugar plums and say, like, this is where it is, so let's throw a little bit of shade in the wonderful world of catch. I think they're lacking on the image side. Like, yes, these visuals are all pretty, but then if you click into a blog post, I Think they do get a little bit text heavy and they won't compete with a lot of the best in class content out there because there's not graphics and visuals to allow people to really go on an immersive experience. And I think that's missing. And one of the things that Tom talked about and a lot of people in the chat are talking about is like, okay, if you're ranking for this content, you want to get SEO. Like, how do you increase your ability to rank? It's through links. So if you have images and graphics that are worth linking to or that are worth pinning on Pinterest, that are worth referencing, like data. If you take proprietary data and you turn it into graphs and charts and those live in your blog posts, it makes these blog posts more likely to be linked to. But one of the things that I see in the Catch blog posts is, like, not a lot of the info here is linkable. Like, ask yourself, what do I need to do to make this thing worth linking to? And if you haven't done that, then you're probably not creating a piece that is going to ever get any links. The URLs also kind of ugly. Like, you can see the and and the to and the with those words don't matter. Get them out of your URLs. So that's my Simon Cowell spiel. Get some graphics that are worth linking to make sure that they're shareable, worth linking. Clean up the URLs and add some images so people can really get lost in your experience a bit. And then I would gate a few things too, because gated assets still drive conversion.
- [51:57]
Tom Whatley
Who'd have thought it, right? LinkedIn says otherwise. Ross. Yeah, I agree with you on, like, the image side of things. Just content design in general. You mentioned the walls of text. The paradoxical thing about the kind of text heavy. You know, there's five lines to that paragraph there. It again, sets a lot of context, but doesn't expand on it. Like, why I should care how to do it. What is an example of this in action? So images from a distribution perspective, yes. But also just content design in general and the value that it's delivering. All right, and you are right. I agree with you there.
- [52:32]
Rita C
Gotta move us along. So we're going back to the rating. What do you guys think? Throw yours in the chat for this one. All right, Ross, Rita, you go first this time.
- [52:41]
Ross Simmons
I go first. Well, I am giving them. The brand is really nice and I'm a visual person, so that's like maybe Bringing the number up. But I would give them a five only because we didn't get to dig into Semrush data a lot in this last one. But when you look at their traffic, it's mostly branded. They're not doing well in terms of like a lot of potentially high value informational and commercial keywords. There's quite a lot of search volume for a lot of these like consent related keywords as I mentioned, like gbtr. And they're not capturing that value right now. So that's my spiel.
- [53:18]
Tom Whatley
I'm going to also go for a five. We've talked about how pretty it is and how they're doing a lot of things right, but look at that graph. Traffic stagnated or flattened. So something's not working out of what we've seen.
- [53:30]
Danielle
I'm going to give it an 8.2. I think it's one of the better ones for sure. Like the foundation has been laid. There's room for improvement, which I think exists for a lot of companies. But yeah, I would give it a solid 8.2.
- [53:45]
Rita C
Wow. I am shocked. Ross, you're really trying to shake that sign interruption.
- [53:49]
Danielle
I know, right? Indisporadic. I finished my kombucha, now I'm feeling happy.
- [53:53]
Ross Simmons
So I always in a good mood.
- [53:58]
Rita C
All right, so I just dropped a couple of links in the chat. I'm going to do it again because you guys are on fire. Please go to LinkedIn right now. Follow our amazing speakers. If you thought you liked their knowledge today, just keep following them. See if you like what you see. I just have a little word bonnet there, but we're good. So now thank you for our awesome speakers. Really appreciate the time with you guys and your expertise. And thank you so much for roasting the websites Simon, Rita and Tom.
- [54:29]
Danielle
I'll take it. Thank you all so much.
- [54:34]
Tom Whatley
Thank you for having us.
- [54:35]
Rita C
All right, awesome.
- [54:40]
Dave Gearhart
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what, I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out.
- [55:40]
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- [55:40]
Dave Gearhart
Exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.