SEO Outcomes Over Outputs with Stephen Spencer and Jeff Coyle

This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about SEO Outcomes Over Outputs with Stephan Spencer and Jeff Coyle on the Marketing Muse.

How do you come and make sure they know that's the way you work? The way you operate is very strategically and critically about what is a good fit for them, a good fit for the way that they could operate or they currently operate.

So what I do is make sure that they can differentiate the tactics from the strategies because some things they call strategies aren't really strategic at all; they're tactical. And then some things that they consider tactical would actually be strategic, which happens less. A lot of things get mislabeled as strategies when they're just merely tactics. And I love this quote from The Art of War, "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." That is my favorite quote from this timeless book by Sun Tzu.

And if you're going to, you know, focus on the tactics, tricks, the hacks, then you're going to get slaughtered on the battlefield. It may not; you may win a battle, but you're not going to win the war. And so, strategy will always trump or leapfrog the tactics. And so if you're coming up with a crazy, brilliant idea that no one else has thought of because you have put a bunch of pieces together and come up with something completely new or an improvisation or innovation that hasn't hit the market yet.

You know, back in 2003, nobody was talking about using a proxy server or a reverse proxy for SEO. I was toying around with reverse proxy and proxy-based rewrite rules in the httpd.conf file, realizing that I could actually do an end-run around all the technical roadblocks that we were facing with these various e-commerce platforms and content management systems that were not very easy to re-engineer to be search engine friendly.

You can turn and burn, go for it. That's not my choice, but that's the only way that those types of tactics fit. And that's one example. But what are the things that you see that get misrepresented as? I can do it with this weird exception; thus, it's a great strategy.

Yeah. A lot of the loopholes have been closed. Here's an example that would make my eyes roll whenever I heard it. So they scanned for old articles, old blog posts that looked like a link from the site, maybe it was a really old site that hadn't been updated for a long time, had good authority metrics and so forth. And then they would approach the webmaster and say, Hey, I'll pay a hundred bucks.

Just take a phrase in this old article from 2007 or something and turn that into a link to my money page on this website. How ridiculous can you get? That wouldn't look at all abnormal to Google, like this blog post, which is many years old and hasn't been touched since it was written. Suddenly, a term in the article is turned into a link to a commercial website that has low trust and low authority.

Yeah, that was never a good idea, and it may have worked for a little while, but that loophole is certainly closed now and has been for I don't know how long. I never wanted to embark on that because short-term tactics, like that one, that may work for a period of time, will end up getting you into a big hole that you have to dig yourself out of, and it's costlier to dig yourself out of a hole than just to do nothing.

The top three things website owners should do to move the needle besides writing great content, of course. So, I guess I know it's a little general, but if you were looking at a brand new site, what are the most common kinds of things that you typically see that are going to have huge outcomes for SEO?

Yeah, I'll often see content that wants to be free and is not; it wants to be released to the world. For example, podcasts, show notes, pages that are just a short bullet list of five items that were concepts talked about and the bio of the guest are thin content.

You have the whole transcript, hopefully. If you don't, then use Otter.ai or something to turn that audio into a transcript and then turn that transcript into a long-form blog post. So, if you look at GetYourselfOptimized.com, which is my podcast, that's the website for the podcast on personal development, and MarketingSeak.com is for my marketing speak podcast.

Every single episode has a long-form blog post based on the transcript, and it isn't a wall of text. It's broken up with images throughout that we pull from Pexels, Unsplash, and so forth. We click to tweets and pull quotes and every book that's mentioned. There's the book cover, links to Amazon and so forth.

So, we even have a checklist of actions to take from the episode. That's a lot of work, but it turns an audio-only piece of content into something really substantial that a lot of people can read pretty quickly without having to invest an hour or listen to the entire episode. You can do that with video content as well.

Also, if you have, say, a member area of your site and you're like, we do these quarterly meetings for our clients. And so we videotape them, and then they're in a member's area. Take the best stuff and make that free. You know, create even free mini-courses that are feeder courses based on some of that video content. Apply the same strategy of long-form blog posts based on the transcripts of those videos. You'll end up creating a lot of value for people, and then they'll appreciate that and sign up. So it's a win.

I love it. It's an e-commerce site. Here are best practices from Stephan's point of view for e-commerce product pages.

Yeah. So, think of the uniqueness of your product page versus the competitors who sell the same product. If you're just using the same manufacturer-supplied product copy that everybody else is using, that's the very low end of the spectrum. Right? So, if you want to create your own. Super valuable write-up of a product description copy.

That's not the other end of the spectrum. That's kind of mid of mid-road. I highly recommend you actually create a resource page out of it. If you're going to write a book and you have competitors in the same genre, you go to their Amazon book pages and read the reviews. That is incredible.

Competitive intel. By the way, that idea comes from Jay Abraham, a marketing legend. That's just a brilliant idea. And why is it Amazon and not Barnes and Noble or Goodreads or somewhere else that we automatically will go to to get that competitive intel on our competitor's book?

Amazon has the best quality and quantity of user-generated content. Conversely, you'll see some sites that don't even check the spam comments. They just let everything through. And so there are Viagra links throughout the comments and reviews, right? So you want to curate an amazing high-value page of product copy, and you can think of ways to add.

Value, masking value for the user. And it just so happens to be keyword-rich and great for SEO. That's the best. Yeah. If it's a product page and it's about, I don't know, let's say, sheets, right? It's nice Egyptian cotton sheets. You could have information about why Egyptian cotton. You could have some content around thread count. Not just say this is the thread count of this sheet, but why it's important and what it feels like compared to a lower thread count.

You may alienate yourself or make yourself fighting against when you do have the opportunity to amplify why those people have jobs. If it's an editorial lead, they are awesome. They are subject matter experts. They are beautiful at their craft. How do you make them better? How do you amplify the whole business as a function of your work? And I love that, is the way that you think it, you know, is that when you go in, and you see a silo like that for these purposes, is that kind of. Guide you or reinforce your mission.

Yeah. So I kind of try and look at it from a 30,000-foot view perspective. It is not just serving the user because that's Google's go-to phrase, serving the user or writing content for the user, et cetera. And. If you, again, go back to intention and intent, if you're trying to create something with as little effort or cost as possible to dominate the search results in the SERPs, then that's not a benevolent intention.

Whereas if you're using, whether it's Jasper or GPT3 or whatever, to write content, it has to meet a threshold where it is quality enough that you would be comfortable putting your name to it as the author or the editor of it. Then, by all means, crank away. It's not spun content; then, it's quality content.

I don't care if you employ a content writer or utilize an AI or machine learning algorithm to write the content. It eventually reveals light as long as it passes muster and adds value. If it's a great article, there's an example here on coffeechronicler.com of the ultimate guide to AeroPress.

I don't drink coffee, so I don't really care about AeroPress, but I know that article is in-depth. It's been quality-checked. It's comprehensive, a very substantial piece of content, and very valuable. I don't care if an algorithm wrote it or a human because it passes muster.

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