Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #68: Never Run Out of Content Ideas for SEO

Chris Raines: Hey there. Welcome to episode 68 of the Dodgeball Marketing podcast. I'm Chris.

Michael Utley: Hey, I'm Michael.

Chris Raines: And Michael, we're going to talk today about how to never, ever, ever run out of content ideas for SEO. There are a billion things you could write about if you just sit, do with SEO and content ideas. But for some reason, some people just get stuck and they're just like, they're doing their own SEO, doing their own content program. And they just sit there with a blank screen and go, all right, I got to write about something. Now what?

Michael Utley: Yeah, and you don't want to throw up trash. You don't want to put trash on your website.

Chris Raines: Yeah. You want to do something meaningful, something that helps people but too often people just get stuck. This is meant to give you five kind of prompts of things that you can produce content about. And honestly, if you really dug into all five of these, if you're doing your own SEO, it could keep you busy for a year.

Michael Utley: Yeah. This is minimum two to five years of ideas.

Chris Raines: Actually just number four could keep you busy.

Michael Utley: Oh yeah, totally.

Chris Raines: Okay. Let's go through, Michael kick us off, number one way, ideas to never, ever, ever I'm changing the name of that. That was ever, ever run out of content ideas and not have an excuse for not producing content.

Michael Utley: That's right. And this is to get you away from the scraping the bottom of the bucket for blog topics, to broaden your idea of content strategy.

Chris Raines: Blogs are content.

Michael Utley: Blogs are good.

Chris Raines: But not all content is blog.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's right. Number one, create standalone pages for your services that list your sub-services and build pages for those sub-services.

Chris Raines: Michael, what is a sub-service?

Michael Utley: And I'll break that out. And the same thing everywhere, I said services, you could also say products, same deal. I'm going to talk about services just to simplify it but this translates directly over to products. An example of services would be tell you something we've done. I know I use this example a lot with dermatology but it's a good one for what I'm going to describe now. I'll just use it again at the risk of wearing out my example. If you have a service category for a dermatology practice called medical conditions or medical services, underneath that you might have cancer screenings, mole removal, scar reduction. Those are all sub-services. Well, guess what? If you have a services page for your medical services or medical conditions, you can have a bulleted list or even a block of bullets, bulleted list maybe in columns on a desktop experience and have those items listed in a bulleted list.

Don't just describe what you do in general terms, actually list it out because what that list is doing is it's putting those keywords on the page and tying them all together for search engines so that they have that thing that's common sense to you but has to be spelled out for a search index to know what you do. And then each of those bulleted items, you can create a standalone page for those and link to it. And sure, somebody may come in and go to the homepage, go to medical services, and then read, oh, how do they do this? That's one of the benefits, they may actually drill down and read all info.

And if I'm going to get a cancer screening, I would definitely read that before I set an appointment. But what it does that's more important is it creates more entry points to your website because if someone does a search for that actual sub-service and you've got a page and it's tied together nicely with the rest of your website, that may be the first page that shows up for them and they come directly into and we've gotten a ton of traction from using this tactic, tens of thousands of leads across the United States from doing exactly what I'm describing. Services page, bulleted list of sub-services on each of those pages, pages for each of those, really good tactic.

Chris Raines: Awesome. All right, number two, never run of content ideas, never, ever, ever run out content ideas.

Michael Utley: Ever.

Chris Raines: Number two, create landing pages for your major markets and regional identifiers. This is kind of similar to what we talked about, what you just mentioned, and what we talked about in the last episode, which is people search in terms of their own problems and their own, in this case, regional identity. The example we use was if you're a construction company, you need to have a page for kitchen remodeling because people don't always search for a construction company. They search in terms of their own need. Likewise, people search for their own region and not just major market but regional identifiers. This might be a neighborhood or a section of town that's not really a city but people will search in relationship to that. Where I'm from in east Tennessee, there's a small town called Maryville, Tennessee.

Michael Utley: Oh, it's pronounced Merville.

Chris Raines: Maryville. If you're listening to this in east Tennessee sorry, it's Maryville.

Michael Utley: Maryville.

Chris Raines: And so if you're a Maryville plumber, you definitely want to have a page for Maryville because that's your service area but there's also a little small town off from Maryville, bordering Maryville called Friendsville. Friendsville probably doesn't have any plumbing companies, it's probably 3,000 people. I don't know. But people in Friendsville will search for Friendsville plumbers because they don't know. The Maryville plumber needs to have a page for Friendsville plumbing companies because of how people search. When you're thinking about your content, think about the market that you serve and any submarket. We're in Nashville, so we'll be some submarkets of Nashville.

Michael Utley: Oh yeah. There's so many.

Chris Raines: Berry Hill.

Michael Utley: Brentwood, Cool Springs, Franklin, Antioch, Murfreesboro.

Chris Raines: Even neighborhoods, East Nashville.

Michael Utley: East Nashville.

Chris Raines: Bellevue.

Michael Utley: Green Hills, which is really more of a neighborhood.

Chris Raines: You can do this for your own city, your own market, you know the nooks and crannies, you know the areas of town that have a name and people identify as from there but there's not necessarily a government or municipality.

Michael Utley: Yeah, it may not be a municipality.

Chris Raines: Those are regional identifiers. Think about all the regional identifiers.

Michael Utley: Even saying Middle Tennessee.

Chris Raines: Sure. Middle Tennessee. Think about your major markets, your regional identifiers and build landing pages specifically for keywords related to that.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's a really good one. And often to tag onto that, if you have that page, even though search engines have gotten better at knowing where people are and since I'll call it October of last year, there was a big shift toward showing local service providers, not just letting providers with an SEO agency dominate nationally. Even though that's gotten better, if you have a local page often you'll get your homepage to come up and get an additional listing of your localization page or flip flop your localization page and then your homepage. That has a benefit frankly, of pushing competition off the page. We do that a lot. Even though search engines have gotten better at this, it's still a good tactic for a lot of reasons.

All right, next up showcase studies. Before and after content is very popular and helps people understand exactly what to expect from you. I had a scar on my face and I wanted that scar removed and when I went to my healthcare provider and I said, "Hey, can we do anything about this? I heard there's some new technologies." They said, "Yeah, actually we can. You got you as fast enough and we're going to do this. But the first thing we're going to do is take some pictures." And they asked me to allow them to use these for marketing. They were very respectful, made me very comfortable but it captured what they were dealing with and then they did pictures to show progress and then the pictures after the fact. People believe what you can do with their face, all the way to their garage floor if they can see examples that are similar to theirs before and after.

One of the best forms of content, and sure it takes work. We have a client in Boston that does commercial paving and something that they're starting to do is get the folks who are out in the field to get their iPhone out of their pocket and get just a bunch of pictures from the scene before the trucks show up and just show what the heck this thing looks like and really how bad it is. And this gets overlooked because most of us are kind of focused on delivering our craft. We really don't think in terms of shaming the customer with a bunch of before pictures. But you need to do it. You need to get that clincher.

Chris Raines: And it's not always like in healthcare, cosmetics would be like that.

Michael Utley: It can feel that way.

Chris Raines: But it can be, if you're a flooring company doing a new floor, that's an instant transformation.

Michael Utley: So dramatic.

Chris Raines: Every job you do is a potential piece of content that could stand alone.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Every job you do is a piece of content. Before and after pictures telescope through a lot of the barriers that people have in considering working with you because it shows something they can absolutely relate to, someone or a situation that has the exact same problem they do. Case studies are really great.

Chris Raines: Yep. Number four here, to never, ever, ever, ever run out of content ideas. And actually Michael, we could have done it with just this point. It would probably suffice. But it's simply answer common questions that your audience has, either related to the product or service that you deliver or related to that general category of things. And all you have to do is go to Google. I'm going to give you four different ways to understand what questions that people have about your product or service.

One, go to Answer the Public, answerthepublic.com. Now they used to allow a lot more queries but I think they only allow you to do two and then you got to sign it for an expensive plan. Doesn't matter. All you got to do is put in your keyword and it will generate, it's question-driven. It will do this circle with a bunch of branches on it and it will generate 80 to a 100 different questions, it's bizarre, that are related to if you're a flooring company just type in residential flooring and you'll instantly get 80 to a 100 questions that people have. Each one of those is a potential for a piece of content that answers that question.

Go to Google. Here's a second one, go to Google, type in a keyword that you're trying to target or a question and scroll down to the bottom and go to the people also searched. Google knows that people similar to that also searched, I think it gives you six to eight different questions. Bam. There's six to eight content ideas.

Michael Utley: And those can often go right to number one on the results.

Chris Raines: Right. And you can use that to do a rabbit trail. Control-click one of those, open a new tab, now you'll get eight more. Click one of those. You can use that to branch off different ideas. Go to reddit.com, type in your keyword. You'll find all kinds of things people asking. There might be a whole sub-Reddit devoted to it. Go in there, poke around, see what questions people have.

And then lastly, number four, just ask your own, keep track of your customers. When your customer has a question when you're out on a job site when you've got a patient in your office, how many times does a healthcare provider have, patients have question after question after question after question after question on stuff. Every single question they ask, sometimes they might not be opportunity but specific to them. But sometimes it's a really common question that you get. If you get it more than twice, that's a blog. People have that question, if they're asking you in the office, they're probably asking Google as well. And so just produce a piece of content on it.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Whatever the sales team is talking about on the phone, you need to start writing blogs about that.

Chris Raines: Write a blog post about it. And a lot of times that stuff can pre-filter people out as well and you can answer. The more questions can answer on your website, the more they're able to browse around and get questions answered, the less questions you're going to have to be on the phone. Actually save you some time and sort of pre-qualify people and pre-sell them because all those questions and objections are already answered on the site. Questions, questions, but answer your audience's questions. Most of the queries on Google are just questions. People are curious.

Michael Utley: Yeah. It's since voice search rose with the use of more audio search devices, it changed the role of questions and answers in search engines.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Your audience has a huge amount of questions. I was going to say, infinite number. That's not true. A huge amount of questions. Find out what those are using these tools I just told you about and answer them. Period.

Michael Utley: That's great. And that's of course sort of an evergreen idea and source of ideas. It's a fountain of ideas.

Last up, number five for this episode, compare and contrast options in the marketplace. In most businesses, people are looking at a handful of different options for what they can do. Yesterday, my wife and I decided that we needed to look at another option. We use a healthcare co-op for our family health coverage, our health insurance. We payout of pocket for whatever we do and then submit our receipts to the co-op and get reimbursed. And it's kind of a cost-effective way to do it. And for a number of reasons, we just decided to go out and look and the best example we found and you can replicate this, healthcare health share options. If you do that search in Google, you're going to find a website that has a very robust panel of articles.

It's an entire page of tiles where they compare, they take every option in the marketplace and do a head-to-head comparison as separate pages. Now it seems that there would be a more efficient way to do that. Just show a table, features, and benefits, give everybody that. They have that kind of stuff too. They have a roundup summary pages for the entire industry but anybody who's making a decision as intimate and important as healthcare coverage for your family is going to want to go through some process. They're going to end up with three options, then two options. And so as they're doing that, they're going to say, "Well, what about option B versus option D? And now what about option B versus option E? Or E versus C?" They're going to go through iterations of this. And so this company is one of the providers, they're in the mix but they've done just a good job of putting on a neutral editorial hat and providing better content to take all these options and go head to head.

Chris Raines: And you don't have to shout out your competitors. If you're the flooring company, you could do a run-down, huge post on different materials, different finishes, different interlocking mechanisms.

Michael Utley: Products, services, mechanisms, treatments.

Chris Raines: Compare them by cost. You could definitely do that. It doesn't have to compare providers. It could be comparing products that everybody, you know what I mean?

Michael Utley: That's right. And so that's another one of my examples. We've got a client that is a booming floor treatment company and they do polyurea. Well, polyurea is a newer option that's better than epoxy. And so for them, they want to show up for people searching for epoxy because people know the word epoxy but they don't offer epoxy. They have to do polyurea versus epoxy and so that's a very rich subject matter for them. And this is a way of being the editorial voice and the journalistic source of information in the industry for folks to help them make decisions. If we're marketing anything, if we're selling anything in life, we're solving people's problems. And if you're going to communicate that on your website to attract people to what you're offering, then you're going to have to take the gloves off and say, "We do this. It's better than this. Here's why." And you can do it in a way that's fair and even-handed and it's going to come off as very credible and it's going to be great for your SEO. All right, take us out.

Chris Raines: Perfect. That's all for this episode. Please follow us, Dodgeball SEO on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Get notified of new episodes coming up. Thanks so much for watching or listening.

Michael Utley: Thanks, everybody.