By I’m tired of seeing blog posts, videos, webinars, articles, guides, resources, social posts whose entire raison d’etre is an attempt to rank for keywords in Google. It limits our creativity AND the likelihood that meaningful marketing improvements will happen. Content marketing is bigger than SEO. I’m tired of 99% of my LinkedIn feed pretending it’s not.
This week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard explains the three big problems with limiting content to an SEO tactic (and it’s also exactly 5 minutes long; patting myself on the back for that one because I didn’t even use a timer to record!) 😎
Transcript:
I find it intensely weird that 99% of what marketers call content marketing is actually just SEO. When your CFO, your CEO, your CMO says, “Hey! We need to invest in content marketing.” What they’re really saying is, “Let’s make content for SEO.”
I think I know why this is. It’s because Google drives an overwhelming majority of the traffic on the web. Fair enough, but that’s not where people spend time. So here here’s the three reasons why I think it’s really dumb to turn all content marketing into “just make SEO content for Google.”
#1: Google is an Inherently High Risk Channel
First off, Google is a really high risk channel. It’s never been higher risk. In fact, there was a great story from Barry Schwartz over at SERoundtable about HardBacon that had just a an awful experience in some of the past year’s Google updates. They actually recovered their traffic, but not before they went bankrupt.
There’s a million ways that Google can mess with you. Our research shows that Google is sending more and more traffic to fewer and fewer websites. People talk about Reddit dominating Google. They talk about these big brands that dominate Google. It is absolutely true.
Close to half of all of Google’s traffic is going to just a handful, a few hundred websites. There was a big analysis from Detailed.com that looked at these sixteen brands that own five hundred and eighty eight different properties that essentially dominate all of Google’s search results. This is across tens of millions of of search results.
If you’re not one of these 16 companies, good luck. It’s just not happening. Google has become a reward for getting marketing right in all the other channels rather than the place to start.
#2: Search Rankings ≠Conversions
If you get rankings in Google, that doesn’t necessarily lead to conversions. This is one of my favorite examples because I search for it all the time:
HubSpot’s been ranking well for this for years. I bet they get a ton of traffic for it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s one of the higher trafficked pages on their site.
But, it probably does nothing for them. I just really like the little shrug emoji and I need a place to copy and paste it from so I click on the HubSpot link or or just copy and paste it right from the SERP here.
But, the reason this happens, the reason so many people over invest in Google is because anytime you go to your analytics and you look in here, I’ve sorted by events per session. Events is essentially conversions, a sign up for us at SparkToro. Not necessarily a paid one but a free or paid one. And you can see that organic search, Yeah, man. They’re at the top.
So CFOs, boards of directors, and CMOs and people who are auditing your marketing analytics are looking at this and saying, “all the good traffic is coming from Google.” So go marketer. “Just get me more traffic from Google.” But the reason this happens, right, the reason this happens is because when people hear about you elsewhere, they go to Google and they search for your brand or they search for a word or phrase that they know is associated with you and then they click on on you. They might not even remember your brand name until they see you in the search results for an unbranded keyword and then when they find you, you get the click. And so Google looks like it’s sending such great traffic but what’s actually happening is all the other stuff around your brand and product and word-of-mouth is driving that Google search activity.
#3: Unshackled from the Demands of SEO, Content Can Do Much More For Your Marketing
Content can do so much more than just rank in search engines. Content’s ability to positively impact your brand, to increase signups for your email newsletter, to influence people to buy your product or service is powerful, but keyword targeted content limits that creativity.
And it limits the reach that you could have with your audience as well. So, you know, things that content could earn you like more subscribers, press and media coverage, partnership opportunities, increased affinity in sales. Right? You can see your conversion rate go up when you publish the right kinds of content.
All these different kinds of content that can appeal to, you know, has wide appeal, niche appeal, advanced audiences, beginner level audiences around your topic.
It’s limited if you just go after keywords. This ain’t gonna work for Google, but it might be powerful. It might be optimal for reaching your audience through their existing sources of influence. Right?
If I’m targeting hotel owners with my new product, I know that they visit these websites and subscribe to these newsletters and, they pay attention to these social accounts and they listen to these podcasts and follow these YouTube channels. And I could be in all those places if I weren’t limited in my creativity and my content thinking by just keywords.
So what I’m urging you to do is stop making all your content for just Google.
And start instead making content that is designed to attract and retain and convert the audience you want to reach and the sources of influence that reach them.