Connecting Content to your Customers - #seopdocast 186

...owner of eWebStyle. Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. How are you guys doing today? Oh, wait, they can't answer that, can they? Fine, we need a studio audience. You are watching the most popular internet marketing and SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of all of y'all, so we really appreciate you. Thank you for tuning in. This is podcast number 186. As always, we have a tip from the previous podcast, and the tip is for e-commerce sites, make sure to have a guest checkout option. Yeah, you want to give your website visitors an option to check out fast. Don't force them to register, don't force them to log in. Maybe they just want to buy this one thing and leave, and if you're preventing them from doing that, you very well could be losing the sale. So offer the guest checkout option if you have an e-commerce website. I use it from time to time, and actually you can follow up with it and say, hey, do you want to go ahead and make an account? Exactly. Because you've entered all the information already, sometimes it feels like it's a hindrance. You want to check out and then leave. If you can add it later, it's great. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, and our mantra is... Don't be a deuce. If you're in a position to, and you probably are... And I'm not. ...please tweet, and what you should tweet is... Hashtag SEO Podcast. This is number 186. Be sure to tag us in it, at eWebStyle. That way, we can link up and network and do all that social media stuff. Of course, you could do us a small favor. There's two options. One is only three steps. Go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review. If you choose to, you could send us an email, podcast at... E-WebStyle.com. And let us know. We'll give you a punch in the face. We actually do have a couple reviews for you today, or for us today. The other

thing that you could do to help us out is you could go to our gpluslocal page and write a review. Write a review? How do you get to the gpluslocal page? Well, there's a couple of ways. You just go to e-webstyle.com slash gplus. Or slash gplus. Or slash google plus. Or slash google plus. If you haven't figured it out, all of those things will take you to our gpluslocal page, and you can write a review. You do need a Gmail account. We're kind of nerdy, and if you're into SEO, you better have a Google account, because you need Google Analytics. And all sorts of other stuff. Let's see. What else do we got here? I think... Let's check out... We've got some really cool stuff in terms of reviews. We'll do listener question. I'm going to start with... We'll start with the bad news. Here's a review. It says, Rolling Downhill for me. Three stars. This is from... Jumby Group. Love this podcast. When I first discovered it a year ago or so. Seems to be a lot of filler lately and a brief review of a Search Engine Land article. Would like to see some better, more diverse content. That's what's up. What's the name again? I said her, but... The Jumby Group. Search Engine Land, Search Engine Mars, Search Engine Journal, Wikipedia, some articles we create ourselves. But what we try to do is pull some content that you may feel is relevant, that you may haven't reviewed or not, and give you our take on it, give you our spin on it, what's right about it, what's wrong about it. So appreciate your comments. Yeah, we'll certainly keep that in mind. Next, we've got a really long one. I really appreciate this. This is from goldennumber.net. And Gary took the time to really... Man, it's like a... Look at that. It's a long email, right? So he's got a lot of oomph behind it. And so I'm going to just cut out a couple pieces here. It says, First, let me say

you guys are great and have the best SEO podcast in the known universe. No, no universe. Punch in the face. Thank you, Gary. I even called and spoke to Chuck regarding our services once. Punch in the face to Gary. I don't want to... That's all good news. Now we're skipping through. He says, The audio has deteriorated to a level of somewhere between distractingly poor to unlistenable. Ouch. Ouch. It says, There are 7,000 of us worldwide who really enjoy your content. What can we do to get the audio improved so that we don't have to be distracted by it or just turn it off? And I... And you know what? This podcast and the previous two podcasts, the audio is significantly better. We think we've gotten it straightened out. No, I'm just going to say we got it straightened out. And his website is goldennumber.net. Thank you for taking the time. I really... We really appreciate that you would go through all of that, put all of that together and let us know that you appreciate the podcast that much and just want to see us improve because... New and all 7,000. Yeah. That's what's up. Something he said I really liked is, You deserve the best in everything, including your sound system. Thanks for all the work you put into the podcast and in sharing your expertise with us. That's great. So punch in the face. In fact, what I'm going to do is actually cut a clip of one of the recent articles and send it to Gary so he knows what's coming up. I think we're probably one more podcast that would be marginal quality and then the rest of the week. We'll be, okay, current and what's online. All right. Sergeant Rob, number one for a reason. This is an iTunes review. Five stars. Five stars. I was curious about how I could make my site better and downloaded several podcasts from various other SEO gurus. And I'm going to read this quickly because it's long. And quickly grew tired of them

because either of their boring presentation or heavy hitting sales approaches. I ran across the guys at eWebstyle who have put together tons of valuable information and a fun atmosphere and was immediately hooked. They are like that teacher in high school who somehow turned a boring subject into something fun and entertaining. I quit listening to the radio and anything else for about 25 days, worked my way backward for about 10 episodes and then started from the beginning and listened to every episode, some twice. Now I find myself wanting more than one episode per week, so I'm going to start over and soak it all in again. Anyone who can keep a captive audience through all those horrible audio glitches has got to be doing something right. Like Hendrix through a blown Marshall stack. Ouch. Still a golden nugget. Punch in the face to Sergeant Rob M. Man, that's what's up, man. I'm glad we're doing something that's helping you. Yeah. Especially to the point where you're going back. That's a lot of podcasts to go back through. Man, didn't listen to some of them twice. So just thank you for your support. Thanks for tuning in. If you have some time, watch it one day. Just see how that works for you. We do broadcast live on Friday mornings. Yeah. All right. So now we've got a letter. This is from Mark out of the UK. He says, thank you for your awesome podcast. I was looking for a little advice. We were trying to push our business to the coveted front page. After a little research, I noticed that how is and how to phrases for a particular process in their industry receive way more visitors. So to lure those and promote their brand, they've included an additional section on their website. I need a little help on the structure of heading tags and how to use them. Can I only use H1 on one occasion or after a few paragraphs, can I utilize H1 tag again? You can view how I have used that

link at this particular location. I actually sent a response to him. And what I said was, why not have a what is and a how to kind of H1 at the top, and then have a separate H2 specifically for what is, and then an H2 for how to, right? So the H1 covers both phrases, and then the individual H2s are more focused. I think it just depends on it. That's one way you could go at it. It also depends on the content you have available. Yeah, for a limited amount of content, that's a great way to kind of maximize it. But if you have a ton of content, let's say this is several how to statements and several what if statements and things like that, then it's fine to use more than one H1. But I would keep them in the same section. And so maybe you have a primary H1 statement, whatever it is, supported by several H2s that are all how to statements, all within that content, within that section. And then the next section, do that same process all over again, another H1 for the next section. And if it's that much content, you may even consider putting them on separate pages to reap the most benefit for it. But it's definitely fine to use more than one H1 when you have the appropriate amount of content. Yeah, you don't want like your entire paragraph to be H1. Yeah, exactly. Or multiple H1s. We're actually talking about content today, so this will work out pretty good. All right, Mark, thank you very much for the email, punch in the face. And hopefully that helps. And I did already reply in an email. So we actually do answer listener mail and viewer mail. So yeah, hit us up. Podcast at e-webstyle.com. While we're at it, there's a couple of ways that you can contact us or follow us or hunt us. Facebook.com slash e-webstyle. Twitter.com slash e-webstyle. YouTube.com slash e-webstyle. And again, podcast at e-webstyle.com. Just a little bit of news. I only

found two pieces that were marginally. Oh, Gino, huh? Foursquare is gunning for Yelp. I thought that was pretty cool. The CEO of Foursquare says if they continue on the path that they're on, they're going to make the previous versions of local search irrelevant. I like that. I love strong phrases like that. There's some Trojan attacking Mac browsers. You just don't hear that very often. So that actually makes news. And this was pretty cool. A nine-year-old girl has a Kickstarter account. You know, Kickstarter is the crowd funding website. And so she posted a project. She made a bet with her brothers that she could actually create a game. And they were like, no. So she posted it on Kickstarter. She wanted $829 to attend a seminar where she could learn and end the seminar. They learned how to do it like a camp. And so her target was $829. She has $11,000 already. I just thought that was pretty cool. Yeah, that is cool. That's what's up. Yeah. The only thing stopping you is your age. I mean, if a nine-year-old girl can get out there and do it, so can you. Yeah. All right. That is the potatoes. Let's get to the meat of the podcast. All right. Cool. So I did find an article, right? I got this one from Searching the Journal, actually. It's called, Why Your Customers Aren't Connecting With Your Content. I went through the article. It had five different points. We'll bring out five different reasons. But it was interesting because we create a lot of content here. Most clients who come in tend to need content. That's one of the biggest things that probably all web agencies deal with. And so when we're creating content, you learn a few things to make that content convert or why it isn't converting or why it isn't going viral and things that you want your content to do. So we'll get into these and see if they can help you. Reason number one, your content is dry. Now, I would caveat these

for blogs. A lot of times when you're having refreshed content and you need to constantly update content, it's usually because it's a blog site or something like that. If you're a service provider, you probably should be blogging, by the way. But if you're just a service provider and let's say you have a services page with whatever content you have on there that doesn't change, then this may not be applicable to you. But if you're pushing content frequently and it's not connecting, then it's probably dry. And what does that mean? That means it's, well, they put effective websites notice and as a result, they capitalize on the casual conversational style. And so when people are reading your content, they think it's boring, it sounds like school, they're disengaged and therefore they're not converting, they're not taking that next action you want them to take. So make sure your content isn't dry. Like we just said earlier, it's not like... Not like a tasty martini dry, it's just dry. Just dry. One thing that can help is tell stories. Definitely tell stories. Everything that I've been reading has really kind of pushed me in the direction where we're going to be telling, helping our clients tell stories. Because the story is, does a number of things. I was just talking about this last night at a networking event. One of the things it does is it turns off the sales alarm, right? So if you're telling a story, people are like, okay, well, he's not trying to sell me something. This is a story. Exactly. Stories are inherently more interesting than dry facts, right? Just inherently, you can actually tell a story about the drive to work. And if you're telling the story, it's more interesting than if you were just like, you know... Than the actual drive to work was. And what was the... People tune into stories. They remember stories more than they're going to remember those facts. So storytelling, good. Definitely. Reason number two, your content doesn't offer anything new. And so this is,

I think this is a huge problem because we do a lot of research and you come across sites that have the same content. Maybe it's reworded, maybe it's reformatted, maybe it's pulled from different sources, but it's the same subject matter. And so I think your content has to give something new, something that people haven't already read before, something that they're maybe not extremely familiar with. I mean, after all, if they're researching you and they find your, they find your webpage, they find your content because they're looking for some sort of information. And so you want to make sure that the content you put out, that you provide is, is worth that time. Make, make, let me find something new that I didn't find on whatever site that's similar to yours or your competitors. So, so, um, yeah, offer something new, if you can. Um, reason number three, your content is poorly formatted. Um, that's huge. You come across a lot of sites where the content is just, it's, I mean, even small examples like a bad choice of font and things like that, where they're just not real legible. Um, especially like on a mobile device or something like that. And, uh, and people just can't find it or images are too heavy and they're blocking things or you got overlapping stuff because it's the formatting is, was done incorrectly. Um, things like that. So definitely, uh, make sure that your, your, your content is formatted correctly. Now, take it a step further in browser check, make sure that it's formatted for different areas. You know, if it looks right, if these days, it's kind of not as big as a problem as it used to be. But every now and then, it seems like, especially in Firefox, you'll get, um, it just won't render correctly. Right. Um, it'll render right in Chrome or IE or Firefox. So you need to have to check Safari a little bit more now, check mobile devices, check tablets, how it's going to look, uh, because you don't want

how it's presented to be a hindrance to people absorbing. More and more searches, more and more web views are happening on, on mobile devices, tablets, or, or whatever, smartphones. Mm-hmm. Does that get into bullet points? Yes, it does. To get there. Okay. Well, yeah, what talks about this, uh, keep paragraphs to a maximum of three to five sentences. I think that's a great point. Yeah. Uh, break up article sections with headlines and subheaders. We're just talking about H2s and H1s. If you have enough content, then, then, then it's, feel free to use more than one. Um, yeah, that way the, the, a lengthy article doesn't look like a long time uphill. Mm-hmm. It looks like, okay, well, I can get that far if I want to keep reading. It's a... Well, and that's the third one. Use pictures to provide a visual relief. Right? So if you have, you know, uh, several pages, a long article, um, use several pictures, maybe sprinkling a video, some bullet points, some quotes, some block quotes, things like that, to make this whole, you know, long page of content you have easier to, uh, read and digest, frankly. Number four. And I can't, I can't stress bullet points. Bullet points are key. I, I think you shouldn't bother, almost shouldn't bother to put something on a webpage that doesn't have bullet points because often that, that's the only thing that's going to get read. Yeah, bullet points are, attract attention. They stand out, um, from a, from a coding perspective. It's a list item. Um, it has some SEO value. Um, Google understands the fact that you wanted to list these means that they have some importance. So, so yeah, definitely use bullet points. Your content doesn't solve problems. I like, this is a good one, but I think this is more for people who, who may be in an industry like that, maybe healthcare or something like that. And people are finding your content, um, and they're leaving. They're not filling out a contact form. They're not downloading

anything. They're not calling you. They're, they're bouncing. And that's because your content didn't solve the problem they were looking for. Um, we actually have an account here thinking of, um, of, um, of a doc. And you know, uh, one of the things that does is the, the content solves the problem. People come to the site with various issues, whether it's a, a medical, you know, orthopedic issue or, or, or something internally like a cold or cough. Uh, but the site helps them diagnose that and processes it and gives them that information. And so we end up with a low bounce rate and we end up with a lot of time on site because the content works. And so, um, help your content solve problems. By the way, go check out that, that website, docresponse.com. Um, it's got a pretty cool process. We've been working pretty hard with that client for some time. Definitely. Um, number five, your content can be assessed. So yeah, let's say you, it's just for some reason, that kind of like the formatting issue is, it's not done right. And so people can't access it on, let's say a Android device or an iPhone device. I talked to a girl the other day. She saw my phone. She's like, that's the Nexus. I'm like, yeah. She said, I hate mine. Cause I can't, I can't, I can't message people on iPhones. And so it's kind of off topic, but her, her messages can't be assessed. And so make sure your, your content is accessible. Make sure that, um, however people are trying to get to it, whether it's from a phone, a tablet, a laptop, a desktop, um, wirelessly online, I mean, however they're trying to get to it, make sure that they can and make sure, uh, more importantly, I would add that your content can be shared to this. A lot of times, you know, your content will go viral and it'll get more exposure if the people who are reading it and using it are sharing it. And

most of the time people put content out that's, that's not shareable or people don't want to share it or, or worse, you didn't provide the tools on the website to help people share it, Facebook and Twitter and things like that. So, uh, make sure your content is accessible and shareable. Um, and I think that will help your content, um, come connect. That will help customers connect to it and, um, eventually help them convert. So that was content today. Cool. Cool. It was a short article that we found on a search engine related site. Um, we got any blanks there? A little bit of blanks there. A little bit of blanks there. Yeah. So this one was, uh, goes to Google, uh, Google Alerts. So Google Alerts is down. It's been down for a while. Oh, really? Um, and so, so they had some problems with it. Danny Sullivan ended up writing an open letter about how he was frustrated with it and, uh, then it got worse. But, um, I saw something this morning that said it was supposed to be improved. I haven't checked it out yet, but it's interesting though. I did notice a lower, uh, count of emails coming to my inbox. Right. And that's because the alerts probably screwing up because I have a lot of alerts set up. Right. And so, you know, they usually fill up a folder quick in my email. Right. And, um, and yeah, and I wasn't getting those. So that's good. So get your alerts straight. Like, yeah. That's a, by the way, if you don't know what Google Alerts is, it's a way where you can tell Google anytime new information is posted on the web about a particular phrase, uh, probably want to put it in quotes or a particular subject. Uh, they'll send you an email, uh, notifying you of the new link that they just indexed that has that, that new information. Yeah. They send it to you daily, weekly, however you, however you get some options on how you want

to subscribe to it. Um, but it's pretty cool. Use it. It's great for like brand management, things like that. You want to hear what people are saying about your company. So you should definitely set up alerts for your company name, maybe your name, uh, maybe your top product. Um, and maybe the keyword that you want to rank for, set the alerts up for that. See what's, what's happening in regards to that phrase. Well, yeah. And if it's a keyword you're targeting, then it, that that's potentially people that you could link with, you know, exchange links with. Link with competitors, potential affiliates. I mean, it could be anybody. And so it's good to know that. Very cool. All right. Well, that has been podcast number one 86. You just listened to the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Again, that is because of all y'all. Uh, thank you very much for listening. Um, go ahead and send us an email with some questions or some of your job. Podcasts at today's website. Uh, until the next podcast, my name is Christopher. So bye-bye for now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.