I was recently going back and forth with a client about their digital marketing needs and how our services can help them when I asked them about getting started on their web content.
They replied they wanted to start on their SEO first, and at that point I knew we needed to have a conversation.
Because writing website content is part of an SEO strategy. At least it should be. If your content writer isn’t taking SEO into consideration when writing for you, or at working with an SEO strategist, the content isn’t going to be able to do its job.
I got the sense this person thought their SEO issues would be a quick fix, and while that’s a common misconception, the truth is there’s no such thing as a quick fix in SEO.
Search engines are ravenous, and if you’re not consistently feeding the machine, it’ll just make stuff up, especially when it comes to the chatbots.
So if you want a comprehensive SEO strategy, here’s what that looks like.
- Website Content
- Branding
- Social Media
- Google Profile
- Advertising
- What’s Not Included?
- Ready for a Comprehensive SEO Strategy?
Website Content
First, the content on your website needs to be optimized for search engines.
What does that mean?
It means it needs to answer the questions your audience is asking and it needs to be formatted to make it easy for the robots to “read” your content and understand what it’s about so they can figure out which searches to match it with.
All the content on your website needs to be optimized for search engines. That means your landing pages, sales pages, and your blog.
Yes, blogging is still an integral part of your SEO strategy. It feeds the insatiable monsters that are search engines. Not only are search engines constantly looking for content that answers the questions their users are asking, but they’re always looking for the newest, latest, shiniest, most up-to-date content to provide the most relevant answers.
If you haven’t published any new content on your website in the past year, the robots are going to assume everything there is obsolete. At that point they will either not mention you at all, or they’ll just make stuff up and attribute it to your company, and that’s definitely not something you want.
So, yes, you need to think about your website copy when thinking about your SEO strategy.
Branding
I’ve written before about the connection between SEO and branding, but it’s worth repeating here.
There’s a reason I won’t create any content for a client without a brand guide in place. I don’t care if I’m the one to create the brand guide for you or if someone else put it together, but there needs to be a brand guide in place. Without one, I don’t even know where to start. Who am I talking to in this content? What differentiators should I be focusing on? What’s the core message we need to introduce or reinforce in this content?
No one is consuming all the content (that’s not possible, even before AI started regurgitating slop all over the internet), and no one is searching for everything.
Certain people are searching for certain things. The more you can narrow down your ideal client, the better you’ll be able to narrow down what they’re searching for, as well as how they’re thinking and talking about the problems you solve for them.
Social Media
I don’t know if the chatbots are scraping social media more than Google ever did, or if it just seems that way. I’ve seen people (on social media) lately talking about how to leverage your social media to show up in AI searches.
But Google pulled from social media all the time and continues to do so. How many times have you tried to Google someone and the first thing that comes up is a link to one of their social media accounts?
That’s not an accident or a fluke. That happens because social media is one of the first places Google looks when trying to find someone, especially if they don’t have a website.
You may have also seen the news from a while back that Google and Meta came to an agreement that made Instagram content more searchable. Suddenly everyone was talking about Instagram as part of their SEO strategy.
On the other hand, once people figured out the chatbots were heavily sourcing from Reddit, bad actors started flooding Reddit with their content to try and influence the chatbots. Then the chatbots pulled the plug on that and significantly downgraded Reddit’s content in the content they’re scraping.
The lesson: Know your audience. If your audience is hanging out on Instagram, then you should create content on Instagram and be sure to spend some time there engaging with content from other accounts.
If your audience is on Reddit, then it makes sense to hang out on Reddit, asking and answering questions there.
But if your only goal for publishing content on a certain platform is to improve your SEO, then you need to go back to step 1: Branding.
I also wrote a whole blog post about how to leverage social media to boost your SEO.
Google Profile
I recently had a funny experience in which a client said a ChatGPT search for their services in their area showed their information, but with a photo of someone my client has never met.
So I started by asking ChatGPT how to remove the image, and ChatGPT told me to remove the image from my client’s Google Profile, which was hilarious, because the image was never on their Google Profile or their website.
The fact that ChatGPT specifically mentioned the Google Profile shows that it is a source, not just for Google searches, but for chatbot questions as well. The problem my client had was they hadn’t posted anything new to their Google Profile in more than a year, so ChaGPT looked for more recent content and decided to throw something in that had nothing to do with my client.
The lesson: It’s not enough to create the Google Profile. You need to be constantly feeding the machine, and that means regular updates (at least once a week) on your Google Profile.
Advertising
Even pay-per-click (PPC) ads should be done as part of an overarching SEO and digital marketing strategy.
Google ads are displayed when someone searches for something, and if ads in chatbots aren’t already doing the same thing, they’re bound to do so soon.
That means you need to know what your audience is searching. When done right, organic SEO and PPC advertising can complement each other and make each other stronger, but only if you have a solid understanding of your ideal client, what they’re looking for, and how they go about looking for it.
What’s Not Included?
The only part of a digital marketing strategy that doesn’t involve SEO is email marketing, which is used for nurturing existing leads and clients rather than attracting new leads.
Email marketing aside, if you look at every other element of an SEO strategy:
- Branding
- Website Content
- Social Media
- Google Profile
- PPC Advertising
What’s the other common denominator among all those things?
They’re all essential elements of a digital marketing strategy.
Ready for a Comprehensive SEO Strategy?
If you had told me when I got into this business that I would need to learn SEO to continue in this business, I would have been too intimidated to even try. Good thing no one told me, because SEO is an integral part of everything I do (except email marketing).
An effective SEO strategy requires so much more than just keyword research. It requires understanding what stage of the buyer journey people are in when they conduct certain searches, how to help them find what they’re looking for and lead them all the way to the end of the buyer journey in a way that makes them feel like they were in control every step of the way.
That’s how you get people on the phone who are ready and willing to buy what you’re selling and pay your rates, no questions asked.
If that sounds like something you need, let’s talk.
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