Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Thursday everybody my name is Aaron Conant Co-founder Managing Director of BWG Connect we're giant networking and knowledge sharing group with 1000s of brands to do exactly that we network knowledge share together to stay on top of newest trends strategies pain points even collectively help each other with partner selection as a whole so if you're looking for any help or recommendations across the digital landscape around you know partners that are out there service providers that work we all know that there's you know 15,000 people out there that are the perfect match for you but we're we're able to do here is just over the course of 5000 conversations is really narrow and narrow it down based on recommendations from the brand and those that were and, and and are really performing in the space. So that's everything from Amazon direct to consumer platforming this you know SEO, drop shipping, digital age three pls are huge international expansion marketplaces or retail media. Don't ever hesitate to reach out we'd love to have a conversation just shoot me an email Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com. The last couple things here we're starting a little bit after the hour we're to wrap up with a couple minutes to go in the hour as well make sure you have enough time to get out to your next meeting without being late. You have any questions along the way hit star five a handle go up in the screen here we can unmute you and bring you in and get those answers. And if you can't come off mute because maybe you're working from home. Go ahead and just email any questions to me Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com and that is also an hour after the call tomorrow next week you have any questions in the digital space. I'm talking with 30 to 40 breads a week so I have a ton to share across the board and more than happy to answer any questions you might have out there. We don't sell anything here at the BWG Connect though there won't be a sales pitch. I always tell people I don't want to be Amazon but let's go ahead and kind of kick off this conversation you know, the very best teeth of SEO content is you know five key screen special SEO landing pages you know a lot of conversations that time of year around the direct consumer website you know especially if you don't have enough faces in this episode then there's not giving you enough face one e three p huge focus on direct consumer but you know also from the standpoint how do we maximize SEO as a whole right paid media has gotten incredibly expensive across the board how do we how do we manage the SEO side of things and so great friends partner support is the network working with tons of brands within the network across the board is you know great friend, Jordan Brannon from Coalition. Jordan you want to jump in give ensure on yourself in Coalition and kind of jump into this.

Jordan Brannon 3:03

Love participating the network. I've been working in eCommerce and digital marketing for nearly 20 years I got my start as a way of paying my way through college and covering room and board and all those sorts of fun things doing drop shipping back in the early 2000s. And that grew into the collection agency and we've been at it as a company now for 12 years. We have around 250 team members today. And we are a full service agency focused on small to mid sized eCommerce brands, either digitally native or as a part of a bigger operation that operates retail or manufacturing and a couple of other channels. So a lot of experience there and today I tend to sort of be the jack of all trades, the TLDR guy who knows a little bit about everything but has a really great team to help me know what I don't know and so usually where a lot of the information from these calls comes from as my team I'm really pleased to represent them here.

Aaron Conant 4:07

Awesome love it listen let's go ahead and kick this off so work area and out for you know the holidays already. I think in a lot of cases there shouldn't be a lot of money spent earlier than normal. I think there's a lot of you know, kind of foreboding thoughts saying hey, if you see it in October and it's on the shelf or you see it online, buy it then because it might not be in stock just because of all the supply chain issues that are happening so I see a lot of companies pushing out more landing pages and content various promotions, you know, all these offers and hopes to kind of get in early on you know, everything that's that's going on across the board, you know, trying to capitalize on sales and just move the product as soon as possible. So that's driving you know, on my side a ton of question on what goes into a really good landing page, right? You're driving people places, you know, whether it's being Use SEO or PPC or, you know, whatever other marketing channels you might have, you know, so given your expertise, you know, I want to put a real emphasis on the SEO side of things, they kind of have our stand at this at the beginning. So we covered around, you know, five key points to show that are really important to great search ranking, you know, from a, from a landing page standpoint as a whole. So, before we, before we kick it off there, though, you know, I already had a question come to mind, which is, how differently should brands think about SEO focused landing pages, versus those use for other landing pages? When I think about it?

Jordan Brannon 5:46

That's a great starting starting point, I think. And I think, I think for us, we really strongly emphasize that a great landing page is great, because it's going to work with a lot of different audiences is sort of one of the nice things you can certainly build landing pages that are very finely tuned for a particular audience. But a great landing page usually is going to cover a lot of territory. And so I think you know, that if you have a great landing pages that search engines are going to want to rank, it's going to probably have a lot of commonalities as a great landing page for paid search, or paid social or email or some other campaign that you're running. And so and I say, there's probably more commonality than less. It's not a universal truth. But in general, I think if you have something that is really working well on one channel, it's a solid opportunity for you to leverage and test in another channel. Sometimes that's a way of kind of proving out a theory about what's driving success to a particular product, or product line, or a particular landing page. And so as an agency, we do audits, and we're kind of beginning to say get, and we often will look at a client site and say, you know, hey, what's working well for other channels, and then starting to dig in and try to understand why, and then think about what those takeaways might be, and we can get some good clues on how to grow SEO as an outcome of that investigation.

Aaron Conant 7:02

So if I'm trying to pull something out of their brand, shouldn't you know that they shouldn't take everything on this call the points that were in chat on today, these five things, you know, as being the the only, you know, only going to work for SEO? It shouldn't be evaluated for other channels? Is that Is that a fair statement?

Jordan Brannon 7:20

Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, I think some of the conversation is going to be very tailored around, you know, why a specific type of content and the landing pages is going to work for SEO, but I think chances are that the same type of content, the same type of content strategies are going to work well for other channels.

Aaron Conant 7:36

Awesome. Love it. All. Right, that might, yeah, I might just follow up as different questions comes in, you know, and, of course, our conversation, just, you know, on that thought, as a whole, you know, so just, you know, looking at, you know, some of the thoughts that we wanted to cover, you know, in the conversation here, one thing that surprised me, and you know, that that was a, you included, any, you hadn't included anything related to keywords, you know, kind of, in our, in our discussion on this before, in our interviews, I think about things that are coming up, is that intentional? Is it just too obvious to cover? Or is it something that, you know, hey, this is just something people should be doing anyway? Yeah.

Jordan Brannon 8:13

I mean, it's probably a bit of both, it's a little intentional, maybe people know, Sharpies also been learned something new. And so not talking about keywords, sometimes new. And I think there's probably a little bit of sort of unintentional omission. I think, you know, keywords are always going to be a bedrock components of a good SEO strategy. I mean, a solid keyword research, you know, implementing your keywords in the right way, ongoing keyword optimization, and selection and refinement, those are going to provide really sustainable SEO results, you know, and more so than a lot of things that you can do, you know, you think about, there's still such a huge emphasis on link building and SEO tears. And a lot of times, it's a counterproductive strategy. And you can spend a little more time on keyword optimization, I get a better outcome of that, instead of just trying to funnel more LinkedIn. But part of the reason I excluded, you know, talking about keywords specifically is that we've done quite a bit of research and seeing others doing it that really shows that Google is not as interested in sort of keywords as it once was, you know, increasingly, it's really focused on on matching the intent or theme or topic of a person's search query to a page that addresses those things. Well, I keywords are no keyword nit. So I

Aaron Conant 9:23

do I want to pull on that a little bit. Anyway, what comes to mind and I'm seeing this, you know, we did a couple is eight panels over the past couple days of different topics right in, in what was really irrelevant evident to me was we're getting into, like digital 2.0, right? That, that we've covered the baseline. And just, you know, that's just table stakes as a whole. And it's not just brands and how they're addressing whether it's content or it's paid media or you know, it's marketplaces or famila fulfillment. We're going into digital 2.0 right now. And it just Well, you're saying those two is your Google's eyes You know, interested in keywords, the ones was like Google's going into 2.0, then too, so can you I do want to pull that thread. I didn't know that I had heard that before. Can you explain that a little bit further? Like?

Jordan Brannon 10:11

Yeah, it definitely talked to SEO, SEO today, you read it, you read SEO content, we use sort of fancy internal firms to make us feel a little more cool. And we can get out our lab coats and throw a PhD on it seems to make sense that your SEO needs to have a PhD. But we like to do things like LSI and NLP to describe sort of the concept that I'm getting at there. Again, I think sort of a core web vitals, they just are there and they create some confusion. And so what I mean to say is sort of Google is really good at associating different concepts, and how we describe them with words together to form patterns of relationships that can take the place of an exact match keyword. Maybe like a simple example this, you know, that sort of word association game we used to play when we were in elementary school, you know, you'd say words and then someone sort of free associate that to something else. So maybe actually, Aaron, hold to a test here. So if I'm going to say I'll say the word blue here, blue, what pops in your head?

Aaron Conant 11:14

I'll tell you so last weekend, I took my family. So I went to University of Michigan, right in the the phrase Go Blue. So that's, you know, we were just there last weekend, you know, watching the game, so it's Go Blue, so it's whatever Michigan football.

Jordan Brannon 11:29

Okay, all right. So yeah, I mean, so most people are going to have something similar happened, if people listening kind of thinking Oh, blue, they usually had something that sort of their mind went to, you know, usually your head sort of instantly will sort of create this, this awareness of a specific shade of blue, most of us will sort of be able to associate a word to a color right away, again, you know, that may be associated to Michigan, specific color blue, you may, you know, associated to the sports scene, the political party, kids show, you know, you got younger kids, there's Blue's Clues. And there's any blue is another one that might make kids are watching these days. And so you sort of have this sort of association of concepts that get grouped together. And so, you know, a single word means a lot of things to different people. And a lot of those things don't necessarily require that you actually use the word blue to establish relevance. And so Google is really good at establishing similar levels of association. 10 is associated images and video content and audio content to these words, these concepts, associating written content, these things. And so if you want to rank for a term, like blue clothing, for women, you don't necessarily have to hammer on blue clothing for women as sort of a keyword and really make that sort of the depth of the content of your site. You don't want to use them naturally, for sure, but you also don't have to, you don't want to forget about these associations that people are making, and the relationships that are going on in their head when they hear that phrase. And so you know, for that keyword lilulu clothing for women sort of example, here, we take blue, you know, show pictures of Ranger blue clothes on women use terms like indigo, or royal or Navy, or sky or maybe even denim, you know, sort of I think most of us think of denim as being a blue, blue material. And you can skirt that core term almost entirely and still have a lot of success, ranking on that term, and ranking competitively on that term without actually having to use that exact match keyword.

Aaron Conant 13:20

Just got so much harder. It's super interesting, right? So you guys, have you been running? Like, different testing? What's the sample size? I mean, you guys, you know, you guys are leaders in the SEO space. So you're dealing with tons of brands and clients in this space, you know, sample size? You know, we've been testing this on, like, what does it look like?

Jordan Brannon 13:40

Yeah, we have, we're working off of, you know, pull, I think north of 100, north of hundreds of 1000s of euros at this point. And that these are generally not including sort of dynamically generated pages with some clients that are just catalogs are hundreds of 1000s of skews and so, but the pages were actually running from testing on and so the sample size is really good. And we do look at sort of being sort of a shared information repository. So we have the each client is sort of an opportunity to learn a little bit more about what's driving real outcomes. And then we try and for knowledge, share and leverage that across our different industries and clients we're working with. And so based on just simple testing, we bet real high confidence that you don't have to be using that exact term, you want to rank for it to rank highly for that term. And in fact, you can hold the number one spot on a competitive competitive term where other people are really targeting and pursuing it without actually ever using it in your page.

Aaron Conant 14:32

It says one more I do want to get to the successful landing pages, but this is this day, I've always said do you recommend using exact term still, in spite of that, like, how does that fit in? Yeah, okay.

Jordan Brannon 14:46

Yeah, yeah, I mean, so we do recommend you know, where you can, it's sort of a low hanging fruit, it's just as no longer a requirement. And part of the reason I highlighted is so people can start to make that association and think about their content. Not necessarily Simply as sort of how many times are hammering on that keyword, you can kind of as an analogy, you can climb a mountain without having done any climbing before, but it's probably ill advised, right, it's a little bit harder than it needs to be, you know, a little prior experience is probably going to go a long ways towards making the climb so much easier. And same situation applies, you know, so we have, using the exact term is going to provide some advantage to ranking for that term. You know, in the past, not using the term would probably have been an insurmountable hurdle to ranking, unless that term was just sort of devoid of competition. And we've tested this a bit in operation as well take a page that ranks off return without using that keyword, we add that keyword back in and that rank better. And maybe just as a quick sort of addition is that this is, you know, long form content really ranks well, quite often because it tends to address both the exact keyword. And it's related terms and concepts more naturally, you think about some kind of our top performing content that we're seeing really being successful. Building sort of the top of funnel and competitive terms is generally going to be over 1000 words in length, with the average being around the mid 1400s. Not exclusive. There's some variations for industry here. But that when you have that much content, if you're writing naturally in a way that's good for a consumer to read, then usually you're going to really be developing these concepts more fully than if you were to just sort of rely on a short paragraph or something and that thing.

Aaron Conant 16:29

Awesome. Love it. Sorry for the detour there on that one. But thanks for being open to sharing. just incredibly interesting. I just everything just got harder over the past year, right? More complicated, more difficult. Yeah, digital 2.0. We got to get ready for it. So anyways, moving on then, from what you didn't plan on covering today, but thanks for being open to sharing. What's your, you know, we get back to content, SEO landing pages, what's your top content tips to make a successful SEO landing pages? That's the first part of the question. The second one is, you know, does it apply elsewhere in digital marketing, as well.

Jordan Brannon 17:08

As any top tip for me is really to make sure that the landing page immediately and I'll say this immediately, for me put the emphasis there, it immediately communicates relevant to your user search query. People make their determination and their judgment call on the landing page very quickly, even if they spend more time on it. And so once they've made that decision, it's harder to move them away from that. And so if your landing page is not immediately and hammering on that word, feel relevant to them and what they're looking for with their specific search term, then you're going to lose some of that audience really quickly. Now, that means your investment as SEO to get to the point where you're getting that person to your site is not only wasted, it also means that your audience that you work so hard to get in front of is now communicating to Google that you shouldn't be ranking for that term. You're basically you're working against yourself, you sort of have invested into rank. But now you have these user experience metrics, that sort of show that the audience is really not as relevant to this page as Google had thought it was when it ranks in the beginning. And so you've made your future investment and SEO. more challenging and more significant. And that's really painful stuff.

Aaron Conant 18:16

Awesome. Sorry, I was just like taking a couple notes here. This is crazy. You're gonna break down that this is, this is incredibly crazy to say if you're ready, if you're breaking that down into, you know, content structure and strategy. Right, that's, that's I want to pull that part out. Tell me what that looks like.

Jordan Brannon 18:33

Yeah, so I think if we're looking at that, then you know, I think every search term is going to have an objective behind it. Nobody really is randomly, I don't think there probably maybe there isn't, I don't want to sort of take away someone's fun, but they're probably very few people who are randomly typing text into a website, like Google or an app just to see what comes up. And most of us aren't sort of doing this random, like, Hey, I wonder what I can type in and find today. And so most landing pages, your best landing pages really should be targeted clearly towards addressing the objective behind the keyword that a search user is expressing. And so you know, when we think about an SEO strategy, one of the important tips is really to focus first on building up your landing pages where you have clarity around search terms and their objectives, and then work on terms that are more ambiguous. There's a few different reasons for that, and maybe kind of touching on them. So maybe with an example, we look at like a term, buy cheap black couch, you get a pretty good idea what the person's objective is when they're searching for that type of keyword. Now, if someone's searching for black couch, it's a much more vague, objective. Maybe they're looking for different designs, colors, you don't know the material, you don't know the size, you don't know really much about that person's objective, and even after purchasing customer and so really focusing in on those terms, we have sort of clear objectives expressed where you really feel like you have a good understanding of the users objective is going to give more consistent success, in part because you are getting to that point of getting some positive user metrics and feedback going back to Google that says, hey, this brand really knows what they're doing and knows how to handle these consumers. So kind of getting back to your question. I think, you know, practically, the content strategy for me with this sort of first tip would be something like this, you know, first, I would really look at the above the fold content that loads first on your mobile devices and on your desktop, and really make sure that that clearly and directly meets the search users objective. A lot of times sites have generic templates, which don't allow you to do that you have a category page that has a big heading, and maybe a promotional banner talking about some other category. And then you have a bunch of products, this product may not be organized well to meet a specific search users interest. And so you really want to start to evaluate, does this really immediately meet the needs of that search users objective when they put in that keyword, and that may require change, you know, sometimes they're gonna want a picture up top, sometimes we want a little bit of text instead, sometimes it's a lot of text up top, and someone's asked the question that needs answering, sometimes it's a video, whatever it is, you really want to make sure that you're meeting that objective head on and straightaway. And this is sort of where load time and page speeds, which everybody's been talking about a lot over the last couple of months is really important. Because part of the challenge is you not only want to put the right content up in front of them, you also want it to be immediately accessible and available to them. They're not waiting for that. So that's really how we want to sort of look at the first step, we want people to be able to see their objective, their need behind that search query met very quickly.

Aaron Conant 21:42

So you know, if I, if I kind of summed that up a little bit, content type and format, doesn't matter as much as in ensuring that it meets the searchers, objective that right?

Jordan Brannon 21:54

That's exactly right. So if you look at the, you know, highly competitive landing pages and highly competitive terms, and less uniform, a monster domain, you're gonna very rarely find one that sort of holds the top ranking without delivering on that objective. You know, when you do this, you take this sort of tip, you know, it's one of the things that does improve conversion rate, it benefits almost all forms of marketing, and the landing pages you're sending people to when you do that, well, if you have a page is ranking pretty well, right now, try playing with how you're responding to that searchers objective. And you might see that your ranking improves, you do so maybe change up that, that sort of first load, first visible content, first interactive content. And you might see that that actually improves your ranking by several spots. If

Aaron Conant 22:37

You're doing this all the time. So tons of practice, in what, you know, any, like common ways you can share to do that, you know, examples?

Jordan Brannon 22:47

Yeah, a few that we use a lot. A lot of searches are basically short form, phrasing of questions. You know, most people are not sort of explicitly stating a question as part of their search query, although some well, but a lot of them have sort of a question behind it. And so a really good strategy is to simply restate what you think the question is, you know, in a more full length form, and then answer it as directly as possible. You know, you can make some assumptions again, about that audience and what they're looking for, and then test some of that at the top. And you typically will see that search engines do respond well, if the search is really sort of geared towards a product, you know, lead with some of the best sellers that really align with the query up top, maybe in their own featured area, avoid showing product, maybe that are out of stock, or have a price that you don't think is going to be aligned with like a broader user interest. You know, maybe they're too cheap, or maybe they're too too expensive. You know, avoid showing products that lack reviews aren't on sale, maybe have, you know, something that is delayed or it's it's going to take a while to get a hold of, you know, most people when they're inputting a product search, like that black couch example, they're not only looking for a product, with that query, they're also looking for a product that is well reviewed, that is well priced. And then a user can get soon, those sort of criteria are built into most product searches. And so you put those sorts of answers those products in front of them, they're going to have a better search results in terms of your ranking. And so you kind of want to assume those natural inferences that maybe not aren't expressed in sort of just a keyword itself. Video also is really effective at answering search queries. But you do want to make sure that if you're abusing video at the top of your pages, you want to make sure it loads quickly. And you also want to make sure that it has enough clarity around it, what it contains what it answers what it speaks to, that it still feels immediately relevant. If you some brands sort of going with the, you know, fashion, you know, the sort of very stylized videos where the first load is just a black screen with a play button or something that's just so stylized. It's not quite clear that it's going to answer my search objective. And so think about how your video is presented in terms of that format. And again, you'll typically see that improving that will will usually get a page that that relies on video to rank more effectively and higher in Google.

Aaron Conant 25:11

Awesome, super, super helpful. What's your second tip for content, landing pages strategies, you know, just, you know, from an SEO perspective, again, getting back like one I really harp on, you know, SEO, just keep drilling down deeper.

Jordan Brannon 25:27

I think, you know, unless you're a publisher, I think maybe the second tip for me, would be that there really are very few SEO terms that you're going to want to target and just that are purely informational. Certainly, I think for some products and brands, there's some informational opportunities that are sort of very top of funnel and you kind of are starting a search user down sort of a research path and hoping to sort of present a product in front of them in the course of that or make an argument for your approach to a particular product. But you know, for most of us, we're really not looking for some of the pure informational terms of sort of the audience, we want to hammer on, or not hammer that rank in front of mainly because, again, informational queries don't necessarily pay the bills, if you're an eCommerce brand, it can again, but not not always. And so we really want to make sure that we are thinking about the fact that our terms that we're targeting are usually ones where the user is intending to do something on your landing page, they have some sort of interaction intent, that is also assumed inside of their search query. And so one of the things we see a lot of brands making mistakes on in their SEO kind of landing pages, is they're not really presenting the desired interaction for that search user really clearly, or making it really easy to access and to find without having to scroll through content. You know, if a user is wanting to buy something, make sure you're giving them the option to buy something right from that page. If they want to browse or shop, you know, they're kind of looking for doing some comparisons and kind of want to see what's out there, give them opportunities to filter and navigate through product quickly, again, don't sort of hide your filters and your different sort of shopping sort of experience features lower on the page. If they want to see the best of something, make sure you highlight the things that sort of make everything else look not as great and really highlight sort of the best things above the fold. Again, sort of kind of organize your products in your content presentation, highlight sort of these qualitative evaluations, maybe in that instance, give them reviews to interact with, or read or sort. People love those interactions. It strengthens the user behavior metrics, we see when people are starting to interact with the site. conversion rates increase, commensurately, and it doesn't necessarily always really require that that person is more engaged at all, just the fact you're able to get them to start interacting with something, it does create this opportunity to, to engage in a way that they're sort of feeling under unspoken need is being addressed. And so point to really ensure that you're providing a very prominent opportunity for interaction on any of your SEO landing pages. So make that sort of a high high value. And again, try and match that back to that sort of objective that we talked about earlier.

Aaron Conant 28:12

So you know, a lot of websites I go to they feature some big call to action, or a form or something above the fold is, is that what you're aiming for here?

Jordan Brannon 28:22

Yeah, I mean, it can be. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it can be I just stress, you know, aim your interactivity options towards what the user of that search term is looking for. We sort of get lazy sometimes as marketers, as SEOs are thinking about these pages, we sort of just lean into what the template has available for us, or we just try and force users to take an action that we want them to take before they're ready to, they usually want to take the action that they came to your site for first. And then we can get them to engage in what we're asking them to, you know, buying and all those other things. So we sometimes have clients come in, that are trying to sell a particular product to audiences that are clear looking to shop and compare. And they've tried to force sort of this idea of you buy my one product right now, instead of allowing these people to shop and compare products, they're gonna fail almost every time as a result, low conversion rates and all that sort of thing.

Aaron Conant 29:19

So I mean, I don't think that's uncommon, right? And he just says people are rapidly evolving their digital strategy as a whole and how they're, they're managing the site everything down to SEO and a example like that. How do you close the gap? Right? I'm a small eCommerce retailer, handful of products want to make the sale? You know, you know, I have this idea of creating and shopping or browsing interaction, you know, pretty shallow, how do you how do you address that? Right?

Jordan Brannon 29:48

It's a it's a real challenge, right? I mean, different businesses can, you know, have sort of some built in advantages. You know, just, you know, kind of right out of the gate and others are going to have to sort of face that, you know, again, limited inventory limited collection limited number of skews. And when you know people are trying to do that shopping, browsing, evaluating comparing sort of thing, it can be more difficult when you've got one or two skews to feature. So a maybe a few options that come to mind, I think, you know, one is certainly expand your catalog. This is something we worked with a lot on our clients over the past year because of pandemic related drop shipping issues. And in just all of us are not drop shipping, but just inventory and supply chain issues, we came up with strategies that involved, you know, alternative products through drop shipping, we came up with collaborative collaborator strategies, you know, where we found, you know, other brands that had complementary products, we found some affiliate type opportunities where, you know, our client could, you know, you know, essentially sell another brands product, and have affiliate dollars when they were low on inventory, or had limited selection available. And so we could monetize some of these search audiences that way. You know, some of those issues are persisting or worsening today for some of our brands. And so, you know, these these strategies are really working out well as a way of sort of preserving the dollar value of visits to those pages, I think second would maybe be to look at, you know, creating a comparison experience that really emphasizes your product over competitors. You know, some brands, you know, tend to shy away from showing competing products on their site. But if you can really create and build a favorable comparison that can work really well. You can kind of use the old, you know, TV QVC sort of strategy of anonymizing the competitor, you know, talk about leading brands, you know, sort of, you know, cover up their logo or whatever. So that the product, the focus really does sort of stay on your brand and your product. And those can be really compelling. We've seen some really fantastic conversion rates and some strong ranking for pages that are sort of designed with that, that that in mind, you know, I think third maybe is to look at presenting your products in a way that seems to show more options and selections and what you really, you know, what would otherwise have, you know, break out your product options or variants into separate listings, so that your page feels you know, more fully populated as people are sort of looking for something for themselves. Maybe maybe final tips that I would kick in here, just to expand on sort of what limited products you do have. So the the overall experience feels more meaningful, even if you're not presenting them a selection. So what I what I mean by that is, you know, instead of leaning into the default eCommerce category, or collection page template, that really just highlights and compares, you know, that, you know, kind of, in a very sort of vague way, a list of products, you know, four rows of images, you know, for images for product page, instead of just sort of leaning on that page template, you know, have your collection or category page template, you know, created so that it really highlights and compares your one or two products or more against each other. With more sort of long form content and criteria. Amazon does as well, with a lot of product pages, you'll see sort of these side by side, in most categories, where it'll show you sort of top selling products, one against the other, and have a page template sort of mimics that for your own product. And again, can be a really effective strategy and sort of giving people that shopping and comparison experience, even when you don't have a lot of products offer for them.

Aaron Conant 33:20

No, I love it. I mean, you're awesome ideas across the board. Just as we keep going as a quick reminder, those who dialed in, you know, halfway past here, have an awesome conversation with Jordan Brannon Coalition Technologies, you know, five keys, creating successful SEO landing pages. You know, we're here on tip number three. So you know, Jordan, what's number three for you.

Jordan Brannon 33:44

Okay, I don't know that I need to probably add a ton to this one. But I would just stress it because I still sort of see a lot of misses when we are talking to new clients that we have, again, no 200 and something clients that we actively are working with in a couple of different capacities. And we'll talk about the same number of brands on a monthly basis. And so we have a lot of conversations have a chance to look at a lot of different websites. And I still see a lot of brands is sort of missing on this. And so the tip is really make sure that all of your content works just as well on mobile as it does on desktop. Or vice versa. If you're sort of in the mobile first category now. And you've kind of forgotten about desktop users in regardless of vertical and industry that you're in a desktop and mobile audiences still represent a really big opportunity pool, there is a lot of money channeling through those two different device types and even tablet users still sometime. So you know really I would say that for that highly visible first interaction type content, that content I talked about earlier that's supposed to meet the objective need of someone's search query. Really make sure that that is really well done for both of those audience types. Google is really getting into segmentation of search results. Based on mobile and desktop experiences, and it's going to continue to fine tune that more and more. And so you can rank really well on desktop and on mobile, or vice versa. You can rank really well on mobile, but not on desktop, simply because you're not ensuring that that prioritized content on your page. And the first interactions people have aren't really well represented for both device sides.

Aaron Conant 35:21

So again, this this move to like, digital 2.0, I feel like a lot of, you know, landing pages are not responsive. Is that not enough?

Jordan Brannon 35:31

Yeah. I mean, is it a lot of landing pages? Are you responsive? Sure, sure. And so sort of a default for for templating. But I again, I just I don't think responsive, it's not enough, I kind of I grew up in a family of three boys. And so sort of I, I tell people being responsive, and 2021 is sort of the equivalent of wearing your older siblings hand me downs in elementary school, they may be cool, but they don't fit, right, they don't look right. And no matter how many times my mom would cut the legs or on the pants, or that the sleeve on the shirt, it doesn't really help it's just this sort of thing. And it doesn't really doesn't really work.

Aaron Conant 36:07

So you're in the middle of three boys and-

Jordan Brannon 36:12

I'm also the shortest of my brothers. So everybody else got sort of the, you know, close cut the length, and here I am waiting. I guess it worked, because it was a baby Panthera born the skinny jeans are probably would have been in trouble. But yeah, I mean, so responsive really isn't enough. If you want a landing page, be really successful in SEO, adapt your content, modify that contents, etc represented on desktop and mobile devices, there is a cost factor here. This is not sort of easy to do. You know, because there's some technical limitations depending on your eCommerce platform, there's content creation challenges and cost that can be associated to it. But so the stress, the point here would be really invest the money on the content, and the pages that you believe are going to have the highest value for your brand. You don't have to sort of Nestle go out and redo the entire website, look at those ones that are really getting those sort of mixed audiences where you think there is an opportunity for your investing in SEO and so and then that'll help you save and kind of focus that cost, but more we're gonna get an ROI.

Aaron Conant 37:13

Now love it. Okay, that makes sense. Especially within analogy. It does make sense. Okay. So jumping on, you know, for us, content landing page tip for for SEO?

Jordan Brannon 37:26

Yeah, I think this one is, it kind of comes back to sort of that idea of Google understanding topics and themes in a way. But it's also a bit of a conversion, you know, optimization element. really invest and be strategic about how you can get your customers to vouch for you on your landing pages. I think this is becoming more obvious today. But you know, customers love social proof. And it can be an enormous difference maker in your success with any one landing page, just from a straight conversion standpoint, regardless of that channel that you're you're advertising through. It matters so much to consumers, that social proof has really been given a high value to Google and other search engines as well. And so whether you're really highlighting one good testimonial, maybe a video testimonial or 1500, reviews, social proof really goes a long ways in determining if a page is going to have the opportunity to rank well or not. And, you know, once you get the people to visit the page, whether they're going to stay engaged. And so, you know, from a content strategy and SEO strategy, there are also some big advantages, just in terms of managing a marketing campaign that does this socially generated content piece, well, first, you'll find that it just allows you to naturally cover more of the related topics and terms and themes that you would otherwise be able to have you just used your in house content team or you had written the content, or you hired an SEO company that writes the content. You know, mainly because people just tend to think and speak in particular, and really peculiar ways that all sort of end up arriving at the same destination and all sort of amazed that you know, how diverse our clients and their customers will describe the same thing. And so you open up sort of a microphone, and you allow people to have some input an opportunity to provide reviews or comments or interactions on your site. And in terms of content, it really does go a long ways. And so if you can find a way to automate your content so that other people, those customers are regularly leaving that new content of, you know, on your sight, all the better. And in some ways, you're sort of outsourcing your SEO to your customers, which is really sort of a great feat, to be able to they're probably buying things from you. They're also helping you rank better which is really cool. And you can look at other sites for sort of how to do this. You know, a lot of us I think you're probably using some sort of review generating tool, you know, which sort of was popularized in part because of, you know, Amazon, but also look at some of the other ways that Amazon allows people to feature user feedback and comments in product detail pages, think about sort of the q&a section, which is really popular, and I don't see enough site, especially for more technical or expensive products or products that say, there's a lot of questions around, that's a really fantastic way for getting that extra content on your site, you know, fit type interactions, and how things fit, can be really fantastic for clothing retailers. And so I really think that there's some some wins that you can have that that way when you have customers, providing that sort of content for you. And I will note, just because we do a lot in the fashion space, we tend to work with in a more fast fashion, there's a lot of turnover, um, consider sort of that Amazon strategy of product substitution, updating and replacement, rather than sort of simply wiping out a product, discontinuing it. And then moving on to a new URL each seasonal upload, you know, kind of an example that maybe if you've got a great cable knit sweater that was super popular last year, and you've got inventory for coming, coming in for a new similar item this year, you know, overhaul the old product page and product URL for the new product, rather than just launch a new one, you know, even play some of the older reviews, you know, make sure you're clear which product was reviewed previously, but allow that existing content to pass value to the present iteration of the product. And that can be a really great way to sort of advance, you know, a new product inside of search rankings, where you already have done some investments.

Aaron Conant 41:21

Awesome. You know, is I see here, you know, if we, if there are other key things, right, we start to wind down a little bit, right, as a whole, right? Are there other things that have popped up? Did we did we get through off, you know, five of them, I want to make sure that just because we've only got about, you know, nine minutes left here, as we keep rolling through this, you know, what's, what else? Should we cover on this call?

Jordan Brannon 41:51

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think one of the final points that I'd had for maybe the fifth tip is, you know, I think really making sure that your content is up to date, kind of a missed opportunity that we see a lot of brands that have been doing SEO for a while, have been around for a year or more, we sort of see them missing on is they'll have these wins with a particular landing page, you know, they invested in the SEO strategy, they invested in a link building, they sort of had the right you know, mix of user metrics that sort of reinforced this page is a good fit to Google and, you know, maybe they mobile optimized, you know, put extra effort into that. And, you know, they're they've sort of had this when in their rearview mirror. And they're seeing that that particular page is sort of slipping and ranking, you know, a really good strategy is to refresh your content. There are sort of technical ways of doing that. So you know, if you're familiar with, you know, some of the microformat and schema markup for particular pages, there is sort of a, you know, last updated date, which you can use, you know, as you make some content updates and changes, some content management systems will automatically make that change for you. Others will require that you sort of update that in sort of a hard coded way, you have to change that yourself. But that sort of just that little technical indication that, hey, we've updated our content can be helpful and saying that, hey, we've refreshed this content, it's ready for you to look at again. And then again, just sort of straight line meaningful changes to the content, Google's often going to be able to pick up the pie itself. Google doesn't recrawl pages that are already in its index without some purpose in mind, right? You know, most of you are familiar with this concept of crawling, which is, you know, Google continues to sort of go out and explore these different pages on the web. And a lot of content is already in the index, but Google will continue to re crawl that content. And the reason that it does that is that it really is intended to allow Google to quickly refresh and update the index. And so if you are going through, you're making edits to your content, making those changes to your content, you will find that Google is sort of tracking that, and I think there is sort of a one of things we're testing and we're trying to find some sort of more direct correlation to is we're trying to see, you know, is there a frequency of updates and content refresh that Google actually sort of looks for and then factors in as a potential as a ranking factor? You know, is more frequent updates good? Is it bad, you know, what is sort of a right pace? And you know, what size of updates Do we need to make to our content for Google to really consider this as sort of a refresh. And so I think when you do that, though, when you know, at any level, if you're spending some time refreshing that content, updating images, changing up some of the text, you know, the shows Google's at that page is really being cared for well, and I think that that content is really going to be current to whoever that, you know, today's user is of that search query that was that it was ranking for in the past and so and maybe as a final sort of tie into that same one, I That, you know, this is true even for pages that don't rank particularly well, maybe you did invest a bunch of money into that SEO campaign around a particular keyword. And that page never really got off the ground. But it's just sort of been sitting in your, you know, page library and archive for for a few years now, go back and actually try to refresh that page content, you might find that that can flip a switch for you. And you'll see a lot of ranking acceleration as a result. So that's probably my final, I think, tip on the topic today, I think we've kind of covered a lot of the ones that I would have maybe just a straight line content strategy. A lot of companies today are using SEO landing pages that are really primarily sort of shared, they are sort of geared towards broad audiences. And so they tend to sort of invest and strategize more around branding and some of the things that you know, existing audiences will care more about, it's not a bad idea to start developing pages specifically for that top of funnel audience, and specifically for an SEO audience was less familiar with your brand. Because it does tend to sort of be that new audience, they don't know you, they don't know who you are, they don't really care who you are, until you give them a reason to. And so rather than sort of, you know, sending search users SEO, you know, generated customers to a page that is really geared towards people who are already know your company know your product. Having that sort of SEO dedicated landing page, it is really sort of built for the very top of the funnel isn't a bad idea, either, you can share that with other top of funnel, you know, type of marketing channels, but that that's probably another maybe a free sixth tip, if there's one.

Aaron Conant 46:41

Well, can I can I just pick your brain on maybe a bonus one in here for for my aspect. And it's just, you know, when we talk about landing pages as a whole, we're getting into q4, you know, there's the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, in those landing pages, right? Get a lot of traffic and build up a lot of value. thoughts around maximizing that value year over year, including running into the following year here driving that much traffic, right. And it's not only you're spending money to drive in some time, in case you're you're spending money to dry it, you spend a lot of money to drive people to a landing page, which then you want to convert and so SEO, you know, starts to go up. But then how do you capitalize that going forward? Any any thoughts there as people we're about to build a lot of landing pages and drive a lot of traffic to them?

Jordan Brannon 47:34

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it Well, that's a great example, sort of that content update versus content creation sort of idea. We've talked about this. And if you're the holiday called, you know, where we've been really focused on that is that a lot of brands will create these sale, gifting holiday gifts, Black Friday, Cyber Monday type pages. And then every year, they roll over and create a new version of that page for the new year, and they just leave that old ones sort of lingering out there. And that's a really big myth, you can really think about how you can sort of stack value for that same page, that same URL by continuously updating that content, year in and year out. You know, we talked to our customers a lot about doing really aggressive last leading discounts that go to these pages, as a way of sort of building links and building social interest on a particular landing page on their site on getting Google more interested in on using that particular loss leader item and sort of gift guides and things like that with third parties. And once you've done that, you've made that investment, you've kind of taken a narrow margin on it. One of the great ways to make that have a lot longer life, and a lot longer value to your brand is to keep that page alive and use that page. Again, And again. And again, you know, for these Black Friday, Cyber Monday promotions for gift giving, you know, intense and things like that, because Google does respect for that legacy value. And there's a lot of indications that Google will look at sort of accrued authority over time, it's really a hard thing for people to sort of cut in on your ranking on it's one of the ways you can stabilize your rank on some of these competitive terms. If I haven't this page, it's been around for a long time, and has this very sort of strong legacy value that shows that you've been taking care of it. So yeah, that's a great point.

Aaron Conant 49:27

Awesome. Love it, love it. And I see we're pretty much right here at time. I don't know if there's any last minute questions if anybody has any, you can just hit star five or we can unmute and bring you in. But you know, Jordan, as always, thanks so much for being such a great friend and partner, supporter of the network and a lot of different brands in it. You know, I'd say anybody on the line today, you need a follow up, you know, on any of this stuff. Jordan, the team of Coalition are all around leaders in the SEO space, great, great friends and partners to a lot of brands in the network as a whole and 100% worth a follow up conversation. It's not too late to kind of get some of this stuff ramped up for the holidays, we're not quite into q4 yet, but we're fortunate rapidly, but pick their brains on 101 different strategies that are out there. And with that, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up. You know, anything else? You know, Jordan, is we get to the last minute here.

Jordan Brannon 50:18

No, I mean, we have a great team. And so you know, if SEO is sort of the the key pain points, you know, we certainly would love to talk and help that if you are looking for some more actionable tips based on sort of carrying forward you know, value saw last year that's been declined this year. You know, or if you wanna have a conversation about email marketing, and, you know, SMS certainly another area, we have a great team, and so we can we can cover a lot of territory that way.

Aaron Conant 50:41

Awesome. Yeah, I know you guys are just crushing it. And so anything, not just SEO, anything of the digital landscape, worth a follow up conversation. With that, we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up right in time with three to four minutes to go on the hour. hope everybody has a fantastic Thursday a great rest of the week. Everybody, take care, stay safe. Look for a follow up email from us. I'd love to have a conversation with you as well. Just pick your brain and what's the next topics for calls. With that, everybody, take care, stay safe and look forward to having you on future events. Thanks again, Jordan. Alrighty. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you bye bye.