This interview with Krista LaRiviere of gShift is part of our Webinar Series. To view the transcript of Krista’s entire presentation visit our webinar library. A transcript of the Q&A portion is available below.
McKay: Yeah, we’ve got a lot of questions so let’s jump into those. All right, let’s start here. Okay. Now, you used the Forrester statistic about SEO, I think, in your presentation, Krista. Does that ring a bell?
Krista: That’s right, yeah.
McKay: So Richard asked just about that piece of data. He said, “Is that based on revenue generated from SEO marketing or SEO investment?” In other words, does that include in-house cost or just the agency fee that companies are spending on SEO?
Krista: The $4 Billion by 2019, that is a combination of… So first of all, it’s actually a small sample size. And I wish I have the number off hand. I can get it to you, if you send me an email, I can send it to you. It’s U.S. data only, which I think is, you know, U.S. is a big market, but it’s not the whole world. So it’s U.S. only and it consists of technology and services, and it’s in-house and agency, but it’s a small sample.
McKay: Great.
Krista: If that helps.
McKay: Okay, that makes sense. Now, this is a question that I get a lot, actually people are asking me and it’s something I’ve wrestled with. In terms of content creation, how much is too much? What rules do you use around or even best practices around creation of content? And that a whole other webinar frankly, but just give us some top-level stuff, if you can, Krista. And I’ll throw my two cents in once you’re done.
Krista: Yeah. So how much is too much? How much is enough? I don’t have the answer to that. I can tell you what we recommend. What our marketing team does as well as what we recommend, it really comes down to put yourself in your client’s shoes. What is it that they want? How much do they need to be convinced to go through that funnel? And so a typical content campaign here at gShift typically consists of about 10 to 15 pieces of contents all linked together, all about the same topic. Compare that to a B2C or a smaller business, probably you don’t need that much.
So my recommendation is don’t overdo it. Don’t create content if you don’t have to create content. We all have other things to do in our lives. But think about how much and the type of content and where that prospect is going to be interacting with you. So think about video, versus audio, versus text, and the type of content they want to engage with, I think, is a better way to look at it.
McKay: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s less about quantity and more about quality and making sure it matches what your audience is looking for. The only area where I would say it’s about quantity is in regards to a blog. I’ve talked about this at length and written about it. Especially when you’re starting a blog or if your blog doesn’t have much of a presence or much traffic, writing a lot is necessary because if you just write once every week or two weeks, you’re just not going to see any movement in terms of organic search in long-tail keyword results specifically, and certainly not with leads.
But if you write consistently and a lot… So we’ve experienced this, we have clients experienced this, and we have partners that experienced this, some other agencies with their clients that say, “You know what? We started writing three times a day for a 100 days or for 50 days, and suddenly, our organic traffic increased.” And we have that experience as well. We started to do that and our organic traffic increased by 3500% to the blog.
So I think in certain aspects, probably only the blog does just raw quantity. And that has to still be good, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying everyone, but quantity matters in those areas where you’re really trying to gain, “prime the pump” is what I call it. So I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that, Krista?
Krista: Yeah, I agree with that completely. And you’re right, it’s quality and quantity. And it’s essentially you have to train Google, you have to convince Google. And, yes, I know there are other search engines right there, but you have to convince them that you’re serious and you’re committed to the content. And perhaps there were some inflection point there for you, guys, where Google just said, “Okay, these guys are for real and they’re relevant,” and that helped with whatever that giant percentage was, is that you said, “increase in organic traffic.”
McKay: Right. Yup, there was definitely an inflection point about five weeks in, doing that. Okay, let’s keep going here. All right. So a man asked a question, he says, “Follow-up on content creation. Any tips for boring industries, things like junk collection or home services, in terms of content production?” Any tips you have for those folks, Krista?
Krista: Yeah, I get asked that a lot. I don’t think that’s a boring industry. I think that’s quite interesting. You can do lots of interesting, creative videos about people’s weird junk. You have to get creative, you know, the blender guy who blends chainsaws and stuff like this. I think it’s about creativity to stand out. And, yeah, I don’t think that junk is that uninteresting.
McKay: I agree. I think that if you an industry is boring, you don’t know what’s interesting about your industry, I guess. Because for example, if I saw an infographic, I’m just thinking this off of my head here, if I saw an infographic that talks about the amount of junk people have in their homes based of 50 homes that you helped clear, I’ll read that because it’s interesting.
Krista: Yes. Okay, we need to write that now.
McKay: Yeah, exactly. I’m sure there’s all sorts of data around how many pounds, or however you measure junk collection, from certain properties or the top 10 weirdest pieces of junk you removed. I’m sure the junk collection folks can tell some stories of stuff they have taken from houses. I would very much like to hear those stories, and I would click on an article about those stories. So there is no such thing as a boring industry. I just don’t believe that. I think that every industry is interesting, you just have to find the interesting elements of it.
All right. Let’s see here. Okay. Talk about the impact of content on SEO. We’ve got several people asking variations of that question. Just talk about the impact that that has on SEO from what you’ve seen and from the data you’ve polled. Is it predominantly a long-tail play? Do you go after main your keywords with the content? What’s your approach? Just give us some general thoughts on content and SEO, Krista.
Krista: Yeah, that’s a really broad question, the impact of content on SEO. So obviously you can’t do SEO without content. It comes back to that final definition that I gave, that summary – the long-term process of enhancing the brand’s discoverability in search and social. And so if you come at it like that like, “How can I intercept my prospect’s buying cycle with content? What is it that they’re searching on? What is it that they’re talking about in the social channels?” And we have some unique data in our system. You can track a keyword in Twitter to understand conversations and then to create content to then publish out to the channel to become part of that conversation. And by doing that, you’re being discovered.
And so don’t think of it so much as in, “Hey, I want to get ranked number one for this keyword.” It’s that, “I want to enhance the opportunity to be discovered for that keyword and a cluster of keywords that are similar, to insert myself into the conversation that my customers are having when they want to have it.” And so keywords to a content, to content distribution, is something that we really preach.
We’re always trying to fill the top of the funnel. And now, I’m talking about the challenges we have here at gShift, too. And it’s amazing, when we try to track back, where does that lead, or new contact, or new audience, where did it originate? And we’re always pretty shocked at where it actually originated. It could be somebody from Twitter, we started to follow somebody in Twitter, or they heard about us and then they Googled us.
And so really the answer is think about it as a whole. Think about it as a long-term process where you’re simply distributing really great content out into the search engines and into social to enhance that discoverability. I hope that helps as opposed to, “I want to get ranked number one for these keywords, or I’m going to write a blog about it,” it’s not about that.
McKay: That’s great, great advice. Well, Krista, thank you so much for taking the time. We really, really appreciate it. There are some great nuggets in your presentation, and I hope people learned a lot from it, and I think they did. Everybody, just a reminder that you’ll receive the recording of this presentation as well as the actual slides from this presentation in an email tomorrow. We encourage you to go to Convirza.com, click on Resources, you’ll see webinars, you can see recordings for past webinars, as well as registering for future webinars as well there. So please take the time to do that. Krista, any final words of wisdom from you before we conclude?
Krista: Words of wisdom – think thoughtfully and strategically about content campaigns and you will see an impact in the discoverability of your brand online, guaranteed. That’s a guarantee.
McKay: Awesome. Krista, thank you so much for taking the time. We really appreciate it. And have a wonderful day up there in Toronto.
Krista: Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Take care.
McKay: Thanks guys.
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