Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #32: How to Write a Great Blog for SEO

Chris Raines: Hello there and welcome to the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast, Episode 32. We're glad you're joining us. Thanks for joining us.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Michael, how are you feeling again?

Michael Utley: Doing great. Happy Friday.

Chris Raines: Happy Friday to you.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: But Michael, our topic today that we're going to talk about is, how to write a great blog for SEO. Now, I guess there's a lot of reasons you would write a blog.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: The primary reason. And obviously, the primary reason we're talking about is to show up in more search results, to get higher rankings in search results that you want to have search results in.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So we're going to go over five things you can do or five things you should think about when you're writing blog posts to accomplish just that.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Number one, create helpful valuable posts or blogs. A lot of times people think that maybe there's sort of a debate between whether you're just pumping out content for keywords, or if you're trying to write something that you want people to actually use?

Well, the answer to the question is write something people actually want to use. A good way to think about this is, what are the sales conversations that folks are having in your organization? What are the questions that are coming in about your products or services? And turning those questions and those conversations into actual topics. That's a really good kind of main path into the mindset of the person who's going to be on your website and looking for help. And that naturally lends itself to how search engines work to help guide people to the right place.

This is really common. Someone's looking at a particular topic. Maybe they're looking at your website, looking at a competitor website and they're bouncing around. They're not necessarily just doing one search. They might be doing searches in a sequence and comparing different things. So, we talk a lot about the long tail sort of the keywords that don't have a lot of volume, but they're really important. So yeah, a lot of times, those are things where people are trying to get into the nooks and crannies of comparing their options. And sometimes they're not even long tail, sometimes they're kind of mid-tail like pricing. So having a post that answers the kinds of questions that you come across during the customer journey of them buying is really key. So yeah, making sure it's good, real content.

Chris Raines: And helpful. And I will say too, it's a lot of times you're talking about lower funnel items. A lot of times this stuff is upper funnel activity. So we can give an example like, so let's say you're a janitorial company.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: What kind of problem... What kind of posts would you want to create that aren't promotional?

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: Hey look at us here, here's our value proposition, but are sort of in that same field of like if you're a property owner that needs a janitorial service, what would you blog about?

Michael Utley: Yeah. You can have a blog post on the sizes of companies that you serve. So if you're a janitorial services company, you can say, "We serve these types of buildings." And have examples of the square footage. And to think about the types of searches someone might do like janitorial services, 2000 square foot office, best pricing or near me. So that's localized information, but people would put things in like square footage. Those are the types of searches people are doing when they're trying to find a solution.

Chris Raines: Yeah. That's great. Number two, blog for your audience not your peers. And this is really easy to do if you have really deep subject matter knowledge in any field. And most people that are professionals, do have that deep subject knowledge.

Michael Utley: That's right. They kind of get hung up on that because they do know so much.

Chris Raines: Right so, you know, the shorthand here is like, imagine that you're someone who knows 80% less than you do about—

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: —about a given subject. And the example we have here is a blog titled how to tell if your utility pole is damage versus anchor bolt remediation, best practices. Now, I suppose... I don't even know what that second one is. . .

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: - but if I were as an insider in a utility company, I would know exactly what that means. That's the problem is if you're that insider, you're not blogging for other people, like you, you're blogging for your customers who are coming to you for your expertise. That's why they don't know about it. So always phrase things in language, avoid jargon, avoid the little acronyms that insiders use that don't really mean much to your audience, and can maybe turn them off because they're like, "I don't know what this means. This is not accessible to me".

So making sure your content is accessible to the people that you're trying to reach. And sometimes that means almost dumbing down the content, but contextualizing it in a way that they understand it.

Michael Utley: That's right, and home base for that question of “are we dumbing it down too much or is this too inside baseball for a blog?” Is to use keyword volume. So if you're using keyword research and following this example, and you have a keyword like pole repair, that's pretty simple, straightforward term, as opposed to pole remediation. Remediation, it means repair. It means we're not going to necessarily replace we're going try to fix this one.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: But remediation is a little bit of a different word. So what you do is we do the keyword research and we see which of those is being searched more often. And often, it's a 10 to one difference. Often it's a really big difference between something simple and straightforward. That's more common because some facility manager, who's got a shopping mall with 50 poles that he or she is responsible for. They may be looking for “is this pole damaged” or “is my light pole damaged”, or “pole repair”. Sometimes it's much simpler for them. And so yeah using keyword volume is always the guide to helping you blog for your audience and not your peers and not falling into that inside baseball trap.

Chris Raines: Perfect

Michael Utley: Yeah. Next step. I will talk about this one, a little bit, answer questions your customers ask when you're thinking about how to write a great blog for purposes of SEO. We talked about the beginning sales conversations that are happening, but there's a really good source of information. And this is called PAA or People Also Ask. So if you do a search on Google, you can go and see the search results. And then either at the top of the page, or maybe at the middle of the page right now it's pretty common for Google to show other questions that people asked the advent of phones and verbal search appliances for home or office have led to a lot of longer search queries.

And Google is essentially using AI to say, "if somebody asked this question, they're pretty likely trying to figure out something around the same thing that these other questions tend to go with"

Chris Raines: Right. Reaching for intent.

Michael Utley: Yeah People... They're trying to find intent and try to get you where you need to go faster. And that people also ask block of content is really helpful. Something that we do is we'll do a search using a keyword that we know is a high volume keyword. And then we'll look at the people also ask entries on the search results page in Google, and we'll straight up develop pages of content just for those sentences-

Chris Raines: So word for word.

Michael Utley: Yeah, so People Also Ask is a really great insight and then something else that's good about People Also Ask is you can start to see the pain points that are being expressed that are rising to the surface of the subject matter.

And instead of it being like the problem we talked about earlier, the inside baseball jargony language, you can say, "wait a second. These are the pain points. These are the things that real people are searching for and using to try to find these services". So not only can you use this for creating a good blog post and having just kind of a head-to-head match, almost word for word, if you want to have that people also as sentence, but you can also start to feed those bits of content into your services pages or your product pages.

So whatever your products and services are, you can start to let those topics feed into either the keyword content of those pages. Or you can actually list out the People Also Ask questions in your content and say something like "if you have questions like these, feel free to check in with one of our team members and we'll be happy to help you" and that's a good way to kind of sneak in some of those PAA pieces of text so that you have the People Also Ask content in your services pages in addition to your blog content. So those are good ways to kind of think about things and get into the head of the user and not so much how you're thinking about things internally,

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: That's great. Number four is use real insights in every blog, as opposed to something you would call good ideas or things like, one of the main purposes of producing blog content, no matter what company you are is establishing authority around a given subject. Right?

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And so the reason why using real insights is more powerful is because it shows that, you know whatever you're talking about, you can prove that this has worked. And here's why, Or "here's, some research on why using this particular substance to clean a high school gym is more effective because of X, Y, and Z" if you're going back to the janitorial company example that proves to your audience that you're not just giving them kind of ideas on things to try, but you're actually bringing forward real insights that have proof in the real world and that work and our actual best practices and things like that. So anytime you can bring forward things that are actually insights and best practices, as opposed to just kind of throwing things out as ideas is going to-

Michael Utley: Or being a repeater or just repeating stuff that other people are saying.

Chris Raines: Right. It can really move you forward in developing the perception in the customer's eyes that you are the expert you have domain expertise and you can be trusted in this area.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: One of the things that we're starting to do is developing “deeper-dive” pages of content, where we do have more of that original information. And that's a good way to develop a reason for someone to link to your page. So part—

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: —of the way that search engines work is not just indexing the page, but then looking and seeing who all is linking to a page and saying, Oh, "this page has something unique to offer"

Chris Raines: Right

Michael Utley: There's unique copy on it. And these other sources are linking to it. And they're going to do that. If you have some original data, some original checklists or tools that people can use to solve problems, they have anything that's original and structured well, so that it can be used to solve problems. And doesn't already exist. I think when internet marketing was sort of in its early days and everyone realized, Oh, "we've got to be a publisher". "We've got to be", here's the word "thought leader" there became kind of an echo chamber for every subject matter. And I think Google is now they'd been doing this for a long time with not highlighting duplicate content. But even now I feel like there's more tightening up around original information.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Yeah. And lastly, you can take this one Michael Utley, is number five is make blogs personal to the pain points of your audience what do you mean by that.

Michael Utley: Yeah. So making blogs personal to the pain. So, you know, your audience, you know your customers and for most businesses, there's some real aspect to their lives that is impacted by what you're doing. It could be that you're a contractor or a healthcare provider or you're doing any kind of financial services, whatever you are.

There's some element of what you're doing that interfaces with the real day-to-day problems that people face. If you've developed personas for your company, or you've developed a picture of what your sales funnels should look like. And you know, the typical customer journey that a customer of yours is going to go through, then somewhere in there, you've listed out the pain they're trying to solve. Well, guess what? You need to go in close on that. You need to really find what that is because there's plenty of top 10 whatever's for whatever. But if you really get close and intimate to the problems that people have, that they're going to the internet to try to solve. . .

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: You're going to connect. People are going to go to you and think, "okay, they get it they understand where I am" and interestingly, that's where a lot of the keyword activity is, is around those pain points

Chris Raines: Well, it's the sales funnel, right? You, you move up the sales funnel. A good example might be, if you are an orthopedic surgeon or orthopedic surgery, practice, not Everybody's down here in the bottom funnel with searching orthopedist in Nashville or knee surgeon near me. Right. You move up the funnel and they're, they're going to be searching for things like how to stop chronic knee pain.

So that's where you capture them. If you wait until you're... And you only produce content down here where you've lost a good portion of your traffic, you know, as people move through, they're going to search for different things. So how to stop knee pain. They're not right inside your customer set yet they're trying to explore ways to stop the knee pain. So they might want to buy products. I might add home remedies or whatever, but the more you produce content that kind of captures those upper funnel searches.

The more you're going to build that trust earlier in the sales cycle. And then you might be the one later on with, if they've tried the patches and the, and the over the counter stuff, and it's just not helping. Well, you were the one that helped them further up.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: And then when they, when they're ready for the alright orthopedic surgeon near me they're going to remember you and you're going to have that brand awareness with them because you address their problems earlier in the session.

Michael Utley: Yeah. You're the closer you are to that pain. The more you're advancing the relationship. You're...it's really a way of scaling up empathy or making...understanding, showing that you understand the pain points in that example, actual pain, physical pain, but yeah. Problems like, you know, how, how soon can I play soccer after ACL surgery? You know, these are the things that when people in ministry or whatever, there's a saying, people go where they feel loved. And I think that's true with marketing too.

I think people go where they're getting answers. And when it's through the internet or someone's website, you may not get them... They may not say it just like that. When they come into the office or they buy your product or service, you may not have any mechanism to collect that. But often there's a sense or a spirit of they got the problem I was trying to solve. They understood where I was coming from. And this connected for me.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: That's generally what increases conversion rates. Did we correctly articulate to them what the problem was?

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: That's good.

Michael Utley: Hey, yeah. Thanks, everybody for listening in to episode 32 and subscribe and drop your comments below and we'll see you on the next one.