Why SEO Content Fails

Transcript

All right so this is the first in a series of videos I'm going to talk about a number of different topics we'll see how it goes. We would love some feedback on these if you guys like them if you don't like them. What was clear, what was not clear if the audio sucks or if I'm sweating like crazy because I just finished a workout. That's totally cool let me know.

So one of the topics that we get from clients a lot is they'll be publishing content this is related to SEO. So they'll be publishing content and not getting any SEO results, not getting any traction and search. And there's really two major reasons for that that are the most common.

I mean they're obviously there's a lot of possible issues going on in search. Search is fairly complex but by far the most common reasons are that there's too much competition. So brand-new companies competing against big incumbents are going to struggle for a while. It's really tough to do SEO right out of the gate. If you're a brand new company I usually advise brand new companies not to do SEO at all until they're 2 years in at least.

And the reason for that is SEO has a big brand awareness component. So Google is indirectly measuring brand awareness for SEO and using that to determine how you should rank and obviously if you're brand new company you have no brand awareness. So all those signals that Google is going to measure that indicate you are a well-known brand are going to be non-existent.

Snd so it's going to be almost impossible. That's a pretty significant factor in the rankings so it's going to be almost impossible for a brand new company to rank unless there's just no competition. Vice-versa if you're a big brand if you're a big fish in the pond you're going to have a much better chance of ranking. It's going to be a hell of a lot easier for you so you can use that to your advantage. You don't have to try quite as hard is the smaller guys. So that's a big one the competition. If you're brand new and there's any competition at all you're going to struggle for a while. It's typically not a good idea to do SEO for a couple of years if you're a brand new company.

The other big thing that we see and this applies typically to existing companies that are doing ongoing marketing publishing a lot of content. Usually those companies have already been around for a while so they're not brand new. And if they don't if they're struggling to see results it's usually because they are publishing the wrong type of content.

This is a huge topic in and of itself and I don't have time in this video to go into it in depth. I'll try to cover it piecemeal and in various videos. But most companies are publishing the wrong type of content if they're trying to publish content for SEO. I mean frankly for any purpose a lot of what we see is organizations will publish content that's like it's got like a magazine style feel to it. It's like something you might find in you know if that organization published and a print magazine or like a newsletter or something like that. It's browsing content.

So imagine you see a magazine. Let's say you read The Economist right. You pick the Economist off the newsstand at the airport and while you're on the plane you're flipping through. You don't have an idea of what you want to read specifically you're just browsing. That's a very different behavior from how people behave in search.

People in search go to search to do a very, very specific thing. Hyper specific sometimes. Something like sixty percent of all searches have never been searched before so hyper specific. You go to search with a mission. You're like a Navy SEAL you're trying to get in and get out as quickly as possible.

And so the content that's going to appeal to you when you're in search when you're doing search and you're searching Google is going to be very, very different from the type of content that's going to appeal to you when you're on the airplane flipping through the Economist.

And that is often the problem that organizations have. They're publishing content that's sort of like roughly on topic for what they do or for their brand or whatever. And usually it's

this sort of magazine style stuff. It's stuff that you might you might read if you were browsing the website or if you were if you received it in a newsletter or you saw it in a magazine. But you're not going to go to search and look specifically for that content. That's a big miss that we see. It’s usually the most common mistake amongst organizations that are publishing content on a regular basis but still not seeing much traction in search.

If you switch that strategy I mean the results you can see are insane. Like just dramatic improvements if you really understand how people search and cater content to them and how they behave. So I'll get into more on that in future videos but yeah those are the two major problems we see with organizations right out of the gate that really kind of torpedoes their SEO strategy.

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