In this week’s video, I share some amazing marketing tips from the speakers at YoastCon, an incredible conference put on by the team at Yoast (the SEO plugin for WordPress). I grabbed every speaker and had them share one tip for digital marketing, and when we edited them all together, we ended up with an episode that’s absolutely packed with brilliance!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. I’ve got another awesome set of tips to share with you this week… This time, from all the speakers at YoastCon in the Netherlands!

I was lucky enough to get invited to speak at YoastCon last month. Honestly, I’ve got to thank Luke Carthy and Barry Adams for letting me know about the pure awesomeness of vending machine burgers…
But that’s not really important for today’s episode. If you didn’t catch last week’s episode, I shared my entire presentation from the conference, but as always, I also grabbed all the speakers and had them share quick tips about digital marketing, and I got some really great ones this time. You can’t pitch to speak at this conference, you have to be invited – so these are the best of the best speakers. Check ‘em out:

Work on defining your strategy first. We do with that a VMOS. So define your vision, split it down into missions, come up with some objectives that are measurable, write a nice strategy to achieve those objectives, and then work on your tactics so that everything ties into that ultimate vision.

Right. Uh, my tip is don’t sleep on the Knowledge Graph. I strongly believe that the Knowledge Graph underpins a lot of what Google is doing in search results in terms of search enrichment, search features, as well as top rankings and things like top stories, carousels. And I suspect, and this is just purely speculative, that the Knowledge Graph will be the way by which Google makes their large language models accurate to keep them honest and to make sure they reflect the real world and don’t just hallucinate the answers. So the Knowledge Graph, that’s my one key tip.

Your one marketing tip? If you’re on WordPress, install Yoast SEO.

When you’re thinking about marketing to young audiences you have to stop thinking about text on a website. They’re gonna want to consume the content in many different forms. So as an SEO, you do need to be thinking about vertical video. You need to be thinking about audio, so podcasts. You need to be thinking about tweets because they are something that gets indexed a lot by Google in various circumstances. And you have to st- start thinking about Google Discover especially because that is essentially Google’s social network. What are you doing to talk to your audience there?

Uh, so my tip is to take all of your videos across your website and to build a new page that is basically /videos or similar, uh, that becomes an index for directory of all of your different video content. On there you can have page type, which is just basically a simple video with a description, tiny bit of text. This is now what Google are looking for if they want to index your videos and give them results in the universal search results. So instead of just having videos on the product page and getting those nixed, you now have to have video pages as well. So make sure you have all of your videos in that lovely sort of video library that people can watch through and binge and watch all in one place. So a good tool for that is Wistia Channels, but if you want to use a different platform, there’s plenty of options out there. Um, but go and create that video page type that’s gonna sit somewhere on your website, whatever business you are, if you have a bunch of video content.

A quick tip if you’re running NPS surveys. Don’t ask people so much what they like about you, but what they dislike about you. So if you’re doing NPS, be sure to always ask a right follow-up question and tailor that follow-up question to the score that people give you. So if people give you a very low score, you should actually start your follow-up question with an apology ’cause, you know, they gave you a one or a two. That’s not good news.

Maybe you should say something like, “We’re sorry to hear that. Can you tell us what went wrong?” If they gave you, like, a middling score, you can say, “Thank you. Can you tell us what we need to do to improve?” If somebody gives you a nine, you say, “Wow, that’s great to hear. Please tell us the one thing we need to do to make it perfect for you.” And if people give you a 10, ask them the one thing that stood out for them the most. That way you can sort of pick, uh, your way across different types of feedback from people who have different experience from you to make your product or your service even better.

So when you’re running your WordPress site, it’s really important to take into consideration where you’re hosting because that is actually almost as important as how great your website is. Uh, using good high-quality hosting for your site means that it will be fast performance, scalable, and secure. And all of those things are things that you want to make sure that your site is doing the best that it can for you.

Start thinking about your website not only as something which your visitors consume, but also something that systems and search engines and robots consume. And market to them too proactively using things like schema markup, which incidentally is something that Yoast SEO for WordPress is very good for.

Okay. So I’m gonna share with you a copywriting tip and it’s call the We We Test. Make sure your copy passes the We We Test. All to often, when we’re writing about business, we get into lots of sentences that start with we. “We have experience. We have 20 employees. We work with these brands.” Try and flip that over and turn the copy to focus on you, the customer. Never refer to the customer in the third person. You don’t talk about your clients. Remember, you’re only ever talking to one person. One person is reading your copy right now, so make sure that you focus on them.

Marketing tip, what would I say? So everyone focuses on, on traffic, whether it’s paid, organic, social, whatever it is. What’s really important is… Hi, Jono. What’s (laughs) really important is that conversion is way mo… A way more efficient way to deliver the same kind of performance. So let’s say you convert at 1%, right? And you’ve got a million visits a month. Um, how about we up that conversion to 1.5%? That’s 50% better with the same traffic. CRO is underrated. Focus on converting your existing traffic before you go and get more.

Make your website faster. And then when you think you’ve made it fast enough, make it faster-er. And do that today and tomorrow and the next day until you die.

That’s all the time we’ve got left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means:
Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome.
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.