In this week’s episode, I share some amazing tips from the speakers and experts at Brighton SEO San Diego. It’s an incredible list of tips this time around, check it out:
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
So when you’re at a conference and you wanna listen to the conference, and listen to what the speaker’s saying, and when you’ve got someone like Greg speaking at 1,000 words per minute and you wanna take notes, what you wanna do is record the session and get it to transcribe what’s been said. Then you take that trans, that transcription, pop it into ChatGPT or Claude, and then prompt say, summarize this transcript, s- give me the key takeaways, and it’ll list you the takeaways, the bullet points from what was said from that, from that, uh, conference talk. You can also use it for transcripts from vid, YouTube videos as well and it saves you a lot of time.
So the search journey is getting increasingly fragmented. And when people are searching for products or services, or solutions, um, they’re not necessarily conducting that search in a single place. So when you’re talking to clients about search data, um, I’m advising people more and more not to just think about Google, not to just think about the website, but to think about the entire search journey that a customer is going through when they’re in the searcher mindset. And mapping that for our clients, um, based on what the job to be done is at that stage in their journey, uh, where they might be searching, so Google, Bing, Amazon, TikTok, Instacart. And then how they’re searching, what is the need that they’re trying to accomplish and what king of language are people using to do that task? And then mapping tha from recognizing the need to starting to research and take action, all the way to completing the thing that the customer is trying to do. It’s a search journey.
Right, uh, my tip is that SEO has died again and again, and again, and it keeps dying. And for all those who wanna leave it dead, let- let it die, move on to paid search, wherever else. But anybody else that wants to know what’s going on in the SEO world and keep utilizing it, learn where SEO fits into your customer journey, ’cause it’s still there.
Okay. There are a lot of flashy new things coming out, really cool stuff with AI. A lot of platform changes, especially if you work on the paid social side, a lot of things are getting more streamlined. So just because it’s new and flashy, doesn’t mean you should let go of the things that are previously working, keep running things until you see adverse impacts to your campaigns, to your marketing efforts. But test things out as well, because things are heading in a future forward direction.
Whatever you plan, first align your goals with outcome. There are a lot of things happening in the ecosystem. It’s not about doing lot of things, it’s prioritizing, minimizing your noise and aligning business goal with activities and outcome.
So my tip is, if you’re doing any type of tactic for a specific outcome, you need an actual strategy to help with the tactics. Things you do to help increase your client’s rankings, your own rankings, those are tactics, but you need an overarching strategy to decide what tactics to use. Otherwise, you’re gonna throw a spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. That’s a waste of time and money, stop it.
So my tip is that if you are marketing apps, uh, and you have a website but you’re, and you’re doing SEO, there are ways to do SEO for apps and they tend to be much easier than regular SEO, because the app search engines are not as sophisticated. Um, so, if you have apps, you need to be checking your rankings in Google Play, in the iTunes App Store and also in Google. That’s three different algorithms and they rank the apps a little bit differently. And you can have different rankings, uh, for your keywords for all three of those algorithms, so be watching those and, um, research up on ASO, is what app SEO is called, um, for tips to get those apps to rank better.
So, quick tip on video. Just start. You’ve been scared of video for so long, and really and truly, all you need is this thing right here. Yup, you got one in your pocket. I just pulled mine out. Your cell phone is all you need. You don’t need fancy equipment. You don’t need anything like that. Just turn on your camera, figure out a question that your customers ask you, put it up, answer the question and then upload. That’s all you need to do, now you’re in video marketing.
I’d say one of the biggest tips… Uh, you know I do internationals. One of the biggest tips is, never think international is translation, it’s always marketing first, people first, then maybe translation second. So always remember that tip, don’t think translation. It never works, could be insulting and it could actually get you into worse trouble than what you think. Think marketing first, find the marketing experts, then do the localization.
Okay. So you can’t ask for Yelp reviews, but you can ask your clients to upload a photo. And then Yelp’s gonna be like, “Hey, with that photo, would you like to leave a review?” Doesn’t violate the terms of service.
All right. So my big tip is, think beyond Google. Yes, Google is wonderful and lovely, but we are marketers, we need more than just one channel. So think about Microsoft and all of its great innovations, think about Amazon and its super powered audiences. Which by the way, for providing that you sign up for its non-endemic audiences, uh, channel by, before December 15th, you get a $500 ad spend credit courtesy of Amazon. This is a great time to be in integrated cross-channel marketer and you better get on it before your competitors do.
Uh, so here’s my tip. Uh, one of the biggest wastes of budget in, uh, Facebook, Instagram ad campaigns is, um, delivering too much frequency. And it’s one of those lost art forms in media planning, uh, where we used to sweat reach and frequency, like it just used to be a thing we all just paid attention to. And then when digital marketing came about, we stopped caring about reach and frequency. It was just the weirdest thing in the world. However, frequency is a big deal and if you actually look at your reporting instead of Facebook, Instagram campaigns, you’ll notice, uh, that your frequency can be completely coo coo. Like we’re talking frequencies of like 20, 30, 40, whatever it is, and all you’re doing is making all your customers angry, uh, by showing them the same adds over and over, and over again.
So, uh, what you can actually do is upload your data from, uh, Meta and actually put it into ChatGPT and it will do some high-level, uh, data analysis, uh, ’cause it’s really good at statistics if you do data uploads, ’cause it switches modes. And, uh, you can actually get, uh, frequency analysis where you’re actually checking on, uh, diminishing returns, all right. And it’ll actually tell you at one point are you paying for clicks that aren’t converting anymore and just wasting money. And then once you get those numbers, you can finagle it a little bit, uh, but then you can basically set a frequency cap to say don’t bother ever showing it more than this, um, this is just a waste of money.
Uh, pay attention to internal links, um, by testing internal link coloring, underlines. We’ve seen, uh, bounce rate reduce by up to 12% and engagement through a site. So spend time on the- the highlight and the obviousness of your internal links for customers, and you’ll see value from it.
Don’t write shit content, people.
So, my tip is, when you’re going to write content, don’t write content just to write content. Turning out content for the sake of content is not going to help you rank, it needs to be helpful. So make sure that you’re answering someone’s question of you’re otherwise making their life better. Content for the sake of content is not good. Content that helps people will rank.
All right, so my big tip, though you’re not gonna wanna hear it, (laughs) but I’m saying it anyway, is when you’re making your content and you want it to be successful in Google, you ask yourself, “Is this gonna be successful with a person?” Somebody coming to this page from Google, are they gonna go, “Wow, this is like, it got exactly I want. This is answering everything I need. I’m feeling joy and I’m feeling delight.”? If you actually think about that content and making it from the very first perspective of that, that is what really should be getting you into the top results on Google.
My one quick tip is to not use AI to create content from scratch, but rather give it something world-class and then it can do something productive with it. Such as editing, you give it a great visual and the visual is the reason it ranks, maybe you could get a copy in that, how to create copy in that situation. Otherwise, think of it as maybe a data analyzer, a brainstormer, that’s how you can use it creatively in order to rank, but not just have it write content from scratch.
Okay, as a content marketer, a big part of content is creating topics that actually make sense for your persona and are topics that they’re actively searching for. And so, persona analysis needs to be like the very, very, very first step. You need to be able to have different customer profiles and know everything there is to know about your customers. I used to do this really manually, going into data and trying to literally put myself in the user’s shoes to understand more about them, but now with AI, you can do this at hyperspeed. So I’ll go into ChatGPT, give the data demographics that I have about the multiple persona types, AKA, my multiple types of customers. Then I’ll say, “Hey, can you create a whole customer profile for me based on this? And can you also create some topic ideas that are going to be relevant based on what Sonya and David are searching for?” Give these people actual real names, assign them photos and find everything there is to know about that person. And then you can use those character profiles, give them to your writer, attach them to your content briefs. And this is the beginning stage of really being successful at topic ideation and coming up with topics that are going to really meet the needs of your different customer profiles.
So one of the things that we’re seeing some really good success with lately is taking, um, the blog articles we have that are generating conversions, or at least they’re part of that conversion path as we try to move from awareness, interest, desire and then obviously, purchasing our products. So we’ll take a lot of those blog posts, we’ll summarize them or throw them into ChatGPT and ask it to give us back a bunch of clickbait ideas. We’ll get 10, 15, 20 clickbait headlines that we’ll then use and generate our ads for your LinkedIn and Facebook, and they’re just trying to build awareness and drive users back. Um, and so we’re seeing that that’s getting people into the funnel and causing conversions, but it’s helping us to better improve the content that we have and show that the blogs that we’re writing for SEO, we can generate more value from them and test, uh, some of those on the paid markets.
So if you’re into AI but you also wanna be able to encourage more diversity and making your messaging more inclusive, check out a took called QuDisc, Q-U-D-I-S-C. Uh, you can submit statements, questions. It’s especially great if you’re creating surveys, uh, to have it tell you what kind of biases might be included based on the language that you are using. Uh, so that way you can get a little bit more knowledgeable and make sure that your messaging is really benefiting all.
We’ve recently found that if you use schema markup to be disambiguating key concepts using properties, that click-through rate goes up. Go check it out.
So if are thinking of structured data for your website just for rich snippets for Google, stop doing that. ‘Cause large language models use structured data, so you should use all the vocabularies that are relevant to your page so you can have a better opportunity to rank in things like SGE and the new Bing. That’s all I got.
