Pan your business for thought leader gold

Paige says: “For 2024, I want you all to get to know the thought leaders in your businesses. Go and get to know them, bake them cakes, and build a friendship. They are gold dust.”

I thought SEOs didn't have to talk to people?

“I wish that was the case. There is a lot that can be done in isolation, but if you want to be proactive and unique and push a business to the heights that it can reach, then your thought leaders are amazing resources.

Your sales reps are talking to prospects and customers day in and day out. They know your FAQs and they know the common themes that are coming up right now. There are also your product evangelists. I am lucky enough to have someone in my company with this as their job title. Product evangelists are the people who work on your product and are always trying to improve it. They will have loads of influences that they're building from. There are people in your company who are advocates on social media, always talking about how great your company is on LinkedIn. You want to know why they think that way. Your CEO should be your number-one advocate for your business. They should always be looking at the competition and what the business should be doing next to stay ahead.

All of these people are such a valuable resource for an SEO, so you can be more proactive than reactive.”

Where does this type of content fit into your overarching content marketing strategy?

“It can fit into lots of places. We've spoken before about the Pump and Funnel Marketing Model (If you haven't already, go and check out SEO in 2023 and David’s LinkedIn Learning course!). As we know from EAT and EEAT, you want to be genuinely helpful and produce content that is genuinely helpful throughout that model. Utilising your thought leaders can really help.

In SEO, we tend to rely on search volume but search volume is inherently reactive. It looks at previous months and how many people have searched for a query in the past, but it isn't very good at looking forward. Your thought leaders, on the other hand, are on the pulse.

For example, we've just launched a piece of ‘AI-Powered Intranet’ content. It doesn't really have any search volume at all, but we're getting a lot of traffic because it’s something people are looking for right now. It hasn’t been picked up in terms of search volume yet but there is a demand. My product team told me that it is really hot right now. We got that page up, it is getting traffic, and it is getting conversions. From my perspective, it didn't look like it had any value, but my thought leaders knew that it did.”

Is targeting zero search volume keywords the way to go?

“Not for everything, but maybe when you’re looking for the next thing.

If you've been in-house for a while, you know what your core pages are, and you know where the volume is. High search volume doesn't necessarily mean high intent. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to convert because it could be that people are just at the start of their journey especially if they're looking for big broad search volume terms. That doesn't mean you shouldn’t be visible there, but there is a lot of value to be had in zero search volume terms.

Sometimes search volume can be misleading. One of the things I used to say to my team is, ‘Google it.’ Don’t go after a keyword just because it's got a number next to it. Search for it, because it's not always what you think it is. Sometimes, what Google's actually serving isn't appropriate for you and you're not going to rank there even if you really try to. You should always be looking for those other opportunities.”

Can you change the type of content that Google serves up for a particular keyword phrase, or should you just accept it?

“I think you should do both. If you believe that what you're putting out there is genuinely a really good result for that query, you've got to try. If you produce something that's exactly the same as the other successful articles, you still might not get in. You might as well try and do your absolute best, even if it is slightly different. It might not work, but we're nothing if not a little bit experimental in SEO. If you think that it is going to be the best answer for that query, put it out there.

If that format isn't working for you, take elements from what is doing well. Maybe blog content is what’s coming up, but you want to serve a product page. Maybe there are elements from those blogs that you can take and tweak.

Eventually, you might just give up and produce what is getting ranked for everybody else to get onto page one. However, I think you should always be optimistic and try to produce something that is unique and better than everyone else, rather than just doing the same.”

How do you identify who to speak to and how do you reach out?

“Identifying people and getting them to want to speak to you is sometimes quite difficult. The best strategy I found was inviting them to critique what I was doing and give me their input. I would set up collaboration sessions on individual topics I was covering.

For example, that might have been accessibility in the digital workplace. Creating a digital workplace that works for everybody is really empowering for people who have certain requirements or experience barriers in the office environment. It's a good thing to have in a big business. I was able to talk to sales teams who have clients and customers with specific requirements and I was able to speak to our own digital accessibility manager. Then, I was able to get all of their points of view onto a page that I was creating. It was really insightful.

I would run this for every single topic. I would have different people show up for different things because people care more about some things than others, which is fine. You start to build a network of people who know who you are, know what you care about, and know that you're interested in what they have to say. When you invite people to help you, they're more likely to come to you later when they have new insights and observations.

I'm also lucky enough to have a Competition Analyst in the business who purely focuses on our competition. She said, ‘We're a Microsoft Gold partner. None of our competitors are saying this and it’s something we’re not taking advantage of.’ In two seconds, I put it on the website. Now, that USP that no one really knew about is being promoted, and it is because of those relationships.

In terms of FAQs, the sales team is constantly talking to customers. If they're getting the same questions all the time, help them out and put those questions somewhere so people can easily find that information. It saves them time in their pitch because they're not talking about stuff that can easily be answered.”

What type of content should you be producing as a result of conversations with product evangelists?

“Our ‘AI-Powered Intranet’ content was product-led, and the product evangelists were really helpful. They noticed that our competition was talking about AI, but they weren’t saying much about it. They were just saying that they use it. I worked with them to pull out all the features of the AI we work with and explain how we use it. We have AI that will help you write an article, we have AI that will translate the captions on a video into another language, etc.

AI can seem a bit scary. It affects all of us in all of our industries, and explaining how we are utilising it is super helpful for our customers. They can come and read about all the tangible things that could benefit them, as an internal comms manager or an internet manager, for example. They can then identify where it can save them loads of time and see that our software already has that capability.

The product team has a roadmap of all the things they want to do to improve the product. They're already looking ahead and being proactive. Pick out what they're thinking and talking about and turn those ideas into landing pages. Do a little bit of tweaking here and there and keep an eye on it and the keywords that come in after you go live. Obviously, when it's zero search volume, you can't identify the H1 and the title tag as easily beforehand. Sometimes you have to put it live, monitor it, and see which phrases are getting picked up more than others. It's a learning curve.”

Would you also partner with paid search and test by driving paid traffic to those landing pages?

“Absolutely. My paid search counterpart is incredibly helpful, and we work together on quite a lot of things. They are really helpful with simple things like adding ‘award-winning’, ‘best’, or other little phrases into your title tag or meta description, which is going to improve your click-through rate.

The other day I had a page go live that wasn’t quite ranking for what I thought it would rank for. There’s a selection of terms that could all be relevant. I said to lovely Hannah in PPC, ‘Could you please test these and tell me which ones work best?’ Then, I was able to use that data. In this instance, the topic was collaboration software, but there are loads of different ways that you can describe that in the industry.

I give PPC 10 or 20 keywords that are all saying the same thing, they go and test those, then they tell me which one I need to optimize for. I can sit back, drink a cup of tea, and go over the results.”

Are you using author schema to try and build a profile of the individuals that you're featuring on your pages?

“It is a work in progress. I don’t have it currently, but it is on the roadmap. Watch this space.

We have identified our thought leaders who are being promoted on LinkedIn, they are doing webinars, and they are speaking at conferences. Those are our people, and we want to make sure that, from a Google perspective, they have author pages, and they are at the bottom of the articles we want to have a bit of clout behind. It can't just say, ‘published by Unily’. No one cares. No one cares what a company has to say. People care what humans have to say.

I was thinking about Dragon's Den (Shark Tank) earlier. Why is that such an interesting TV show? Why is that even a TV show at all? It's because it's really interesting to watch people who are passionate about the topic, the business, the USPs, and the market. It's what makes good television.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“I’m going to reiterate part of what I said last year because it echoes what I'm talking about today: stop creating content for content's sake. If you are a content writer and your KPI is to do four articles a month, or two articles a week, or post X many things – if it is a number, it is a rubbish KPI.

It is a rubbish KPI if it is an amount because you should be thinking so much deeper than just getting it out the door. Each piece of content needs to have a KPI – whether it's traffic, conversions, or shares – and you want to achieve those. Write for that, not just because you have to. Stop creating content for content's sake.”

Are all metrics equally accepted by marketing directors nowadays or do marketing directors still prefer certain metrics for SEO?

“I was really hoping I wasn't going to have to say this today, but it depends. It depends on the boss. Ultimately, conversions are what counts. However, if you have a good strategy in place that is looking at things like shares and coverage, then that's absolutely important.

If your strategy doesn't care about that, and it's more about getting traffic because you know that some of it will convert, then those are the KPIs that are important. It really depends on the overall strategy of that business and the marketing strategy.”

Paige Hobart is SEO Manager at Unily, and you can find her over at Unily.com.