Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #70: Getting the Most SEO Value Out of Your Webinar Content

Chris Raines: Hey there. Welcome to episode number 70 of the Dodgeball Marketing podcast. Michael, I looked at myself in the mirror and I do need a haircut.

Michael Utley: No, you're alright.

Chris Raines: So for people that are on audio, you don't get to see my Jason Sudeikis mirror. I wish, right? So that's what we're going to talk about today, my hair. No, we're going to talk about webinars. Getting the most SEO value out of your webinar content.

Michael Utley: Yes.

Chris Raines: So a lot of people, Michael, especially B2B companies will do webinars to attract people, gather leads, so forth. And they might not be thinking about the SEO value out of the webinar. They might just be thinking about-

Michael Utley: Huge missed opportunity.

Chris Raines: So we're going to talk about some ways that you can deploy a webinar, which is a piece of content for SEO.

Michael Utley: Yes. Shout out Chris Klinefelter, Chris Raines, your hair is looking very, Jason Sudeikis.

Chris Raines: It is very... Well, I wish. You can tell, it's a sore spot of mine.

Michael Utley: So this is something that I'm really excited about because one of the things that we do a lot of is planning content strategies. And I call it the French kitchen, nothing gets wasted. Like you got a little bit of this, a little bit of this, and no leftovers. I think a lot of people who are, especially in healthcare, I see a lot of planned effort, time, and expense to produce webinars. But then there's very little thought given to the massive amount of use of that webinar in other channels after it's produced. I think there's that sort of sugar high of, how many people registered for the webinar? How many leads did we get? You know, did we get the list over to the sales team? Did they follow up and introduce themselves quickly after the webinar?

How many appointments did they get booked? Well, there's a whole second wave of that recorded content that is usually really good, rich, thought leader content that just gets totally overlooked. And so, yeah, so number one is think of your landing page for the webinar as an SEO page. Often, it's just a really perfunctory title, two sentences, and a form or a registration button that takes you somewhere else. Well, go ahead and tease out the content of the webinar that people can expect. You're going to get a lot of good keyword-rich content by having not just two sentences or just the name of the event on some kind of registration platform. But go ahead and have a landing page on your site where you get at least a full paragraph or two of what's going to be covered. And then get into some of the questions that are going to be answered.

And don't answer them. Just cover, like, we're going to discuss this, we're going to discuss this. We're going to go from wondering about this to understanding this. We're going to go from being curious about this to having a framework for thinking about this. And then the bio. Who are the speakers, the participants? Get some of their information, with their permission, leverage them to produce some content. Because this landing page, it can go up, and then it can evolve after the webinar goes through its stages, before recording, gated content, ungated content. And so this landing page is essentially a foundational piece of your long-term strategy for webinar content. That's number one, use the landing page.

Chris Raines: Awesome. I love that. Number two, load the webinar with the full transcript up to your YouTube page. Now, quick caveat here, you might want to, after the webinars done, you might want to continue to have it gated with an email. So your immediate post-webinar experience might be like Michael said-

Michael Utley: Yeah, like for three months or six months.

Chris Raines: SEO optimizes your page and continue to get those emails because it's gated behind the email. After a certain time, it might age out and say like, yeah, we're not really getting a lot of leads from this anymore, so let's release it for free out to the public.

Michael Utley: And this is a good strategy for all gated content. E-Books, white papers, webinars, anything, have it gated, have a period of time and have kind of your own freshness meter for your industry, what you're doing and then expose it to search indexes.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Awesome. And so load that with the full transcript up to YouTube. You can go to rev.com to get a transcript of your video that you can bake into it when you upload it. And then that becomes yet another hook content in video format that you can get that content in the world. And then for bonus points, you can have a video editor clip out different segments of it that are pertinent, upload those as separate clips. And then there's even more hooks in the water for the YouTube video search side.

Michael Utley: You can build all those clips for that webinar into a playlist. And that playlist creates another set of URLs for your content.

Chris Raines: Yep. And then link all those back to your website, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But yeah, after a certain period, when you're comfortable just giving away for free, when you've got all the leads that you're going to get from your webinar, straight to YouTube.

Michael Utley: Yeah. All on YouTube and exposed and part of your branded material. Next up, this is related to the previous segment, make the full transcript available on the webpage, on your website with the video so the content can be indexed. So you may have an automated transcript on YouTube that you clean up. You may have a rev.com transcript that you generate and load to YouTube or you can also use that transcript on your own webpage. And the format that I like to use for a landing page, a long-term landing page for a webinar, is to use and keep most of the landing page content in place, but maybe review it for case and instead of saying something like the upcoming event webinar, you know, the webinar that we're going to have on Thursday, make sure you're editing that so that it's not unclear.

And then embed that video content right on the page from YouTube. Or you can use Vimeo on the landing page if you need to tighten up your customer experience. But having that embedded video above the fold, if possible, or pretty close, lets people not struggle to get to the video itself. And then below that, where you know people haven't missed the fact that the video's there, the full text transcript of the entire segment. And if you do that, you can add a little bit of value to that transcript after it's been loaded. The wall of text is not bad for search indexes. But if you want to make it a little bit more readable, a little bit more scannable, and better for SEO, because this is an episode about SEO, but go through and break it up with some subheaders. If you go through and think about that wall of text being a little bit more like a web page or format at it a little bit more like a blog post, you can go in and build some keyword-rich subheaders.

And a lot of webinars have a natural, they lend themselves to this. They have a really strong orientation toward a Q and A format anyway. And so you can go through and you can structure subheaders that are going to naturally hit QA-rich topics. And so that's a little bit of editorial work that you can do after the fact. Gosh, I don't think we can understate the value of breaking up a transcript with subheaders. I would say it might add 50% or 100% more value, just loading the transcript. Search engines are looking at the title of the page, the H1, and they're also looking at those H2's and saying, does this all tie together? Is this a coherent page?

Chris Raines: Yeah. And the people looking at the page don't want to see a giant wall of text either. As a general rule, people scan webpages, they do not read webpages. They scan them.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: So they have whatever's on their mind and they're just going to go look for headers to see what connects with what's on their mind. And they might read 10% of your page. So, if you want it to be the right 10% and really capture them, instead of having them bounce, like I'm not going to read this whole page, that's the best way to do it.

Michael Utley: In SEO, we're always kind of building on the best idea, or building on the situation. So you have this transcript, you load it. Oh, that's good. Now we're speaking to search engines. Well, then we can pivot from there with subheaders and breaking up the content visually. Oh, now we're speaking to people. And you can also add other things. One thing I would recommend if you're ever stuck on how to format a wall of text into something more readable, pick up an old school print magazine, if you have anything around. Even if it's something that you get from your university or a nonprofit, and just flip through the pages and look for the way they structure call-outs and little boxes, little pull quotes, call-outs, a little photo with a caption underneath.

That image can reinforce the story that's being told in the content. Stats and infographics that you have in other content that's relevant can be pulled in and teased. And so look at some old school magazine publishing to see all the different ways that you can take a long-form piece of text and break it up visually. And if you really want to get into it, you can even do things like take a little thing that's mentioned, make it a resource item and break it out and build other pages with it if you need to. But yeah, there are lots of ways to take a transcript and load it to a landing page and make it really valuable.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Cool. All right. Number four here, getting the most SEO value out of your webinar content. Build links that point to the webinar content from some of your older pages. So this is a really good way to kind of piggyback off of some other pages that you have that are older, maybe list higher, already get a good amount of traffic. Maybe they're thematically linked to what the topic of the webinar is, right? So you go back to those old pages, maybe you put in a sentence or a little call-out that says, if you want to go deeper into this, we covered this in the last half of our recent webinar, click here to learn more about the webinar. And then that takes them to the page. So you're sort of piggybacking off of all the other pieces of content that you have that are related and pointing them back to the newest, most relevant thing. So I really like this one, Michael, it's a good idea to.

Michael Utley: And that has, sorry to step on you. That has another benefit. When you do that, when you go and you make that small tweak to those older pages, that registers with certain engines that that page has been updated. So it's yet another freshness cycle for that page, that source of the link.

Chris Raines: And correct me if I'm wrong here, but the internal linking that you have, so if you say point four or five different pages that are already ranking to your new page, that's also a signal to Google that you think that page is important, so they will-

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: They will think that page is more important. All things being equal. Google will rank that page possibly higher because of the internal linking.

Michael Utley: Yep. That's right. Yeah. We often overlook and undervalue links that we can create. But in the literature, a lot of people argue that those links seem to be about as valuable as external links. And I'm just referring to people who know a lot more about search engine optimization than me, but that's a pretty common theme is don't forget the pages that you do control on the internet as a source of links. And so we call that a tent pole strategy. So when you have a webinar or a services page, it's kind of a big deal. There's a lot of money involved in producing something like a webinar. You really want to eke out every bit of value you can.

Chris Raines: And a lot of companies will put a little notification bar in the header, just so no matter where people are on the website, they'll see that this is the biggest thing going on right now.

Michael Utley: Oh yeah. That's a great idea. Yeah. We should have added that as a segment.

Chris Raines: That would be, that's just an extra if it's so-

Michael Utley: [inaudible 00:11:59] promotion of a new webinar.

Chris Raines: Of course, that would go away after the webinar's over probably.

Michael Utley: Maybe after it's not fresh.

Chris Raines: But then your post strategy could maybe be this tent pole strategy with taking some of your more popular pages and linking them back. So that's less intrusive and more...

Michael Utley: But even promoting the webinar when it's upcoming to drive, to keep your landing page. And that would be an argument for maybe keeping the same URL for the landing page before, during, and after the gating of the content. Yeah. Let's see. So, last segment for this episode, I'll take this one, Chris. Use keyword research to develop your topic, page title, subheaders, and your links to the webinar page on your site. So when we're developing all of the different touchpoints and the content itself, it's good SEO, it's better for SEO if we're using terms and keywords that better align with what people are putting into search indexes.

An example of this is you may have a webinar topic that's meant to be intriguing or to incite some curiosity, and it could be a little bit abstract. Or the example I've used for years is, you know, a day I'll never forget. Well, that doesn't tell me anything about what really happened. That's like this vague cryptic thing. And it's actually important when speaking to search indexes to say something that is the search term that someone would use. So you need to be painfully direct in what the content's about. And a lot of people struggle with that creatively.

It doesn't have that pizzazz or that feeling of being special. And so you've got to kind of negotiate this. We always say don't ever do SEO at the expense of readability. But I would say meet it halfway. Try to find a way to be creative.

Chris Raines: Don't ignore the robots.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Don't ignore the robots. Don't try to keep the robots from finding what you're putting out there. But also remember you're talking to humans. So I don't have like a corrected version of that example, but that's based on, I worked in publishing before. I was really just doing internet marketing 20 years ago, and authors have horrible ideas for titles for their own books. Never let an author title their own book. It's always a bad idea. It's always something like A Day I'll Never Forget. And it's like, man, if you want something that-

Chris Raines: You better have a strong subtitle.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah. If you want something nobody cares about, let the author title their book. SEO is the same way. You got to remember you're talking both humans and search indexes. And so you got to use keyword research and use the titles. And so all those touchpoints, it's not just the title, it's also the subheaders. And then we talked in the previous segment about building links on other pages. You don't want to link, click here or read more. You want to link something like see the full webinar; topic, to let search indexes know, oh, the target page is about this subject matter.

Chris Raines: That's great.

Michael Utley: All right. I think you took us in.

Chris Raines: Yeah. I really like this topic, Michael, and I'll take us out in a minute, but this is kind of, people look at webinar as like hunting. Going to go out and find leads, like drive, pay traffic to it. But this, it can be hunting and farming.

Michael Utley: Brilliant. Yes.

Chris Raines: Hunt it first. And then it becomes a farm where you can organically, without driving a bunch of paid traffic to it. So, I really like-

Michael Utley: Yeah. Webinars are, and long-form content are the domesticated cattle of SEO.

Chris Raines: All right. Cool. All right. Please find more at Facebook, Twitter. We're on YouTube. If you're watching this on YouTube, we're on LinkedIn. To find more episodes and more clips. We're 70 episodes in, so we have a whole catalog you can browse of all different kind of marketing topics. So just dive into those and binge-watch please or binge-listen.

Michael Utley: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, everybody.