How Content Is Evolving Thanks to AI — Whiteboard Friday

There's no question that AI has already started to have a meaningful impact on organizations that create content every single day. 

"The wonderful world of AI is changing rapidly. ChatGPT4 is driving even more improvements in the output from the technology and the space continues to take off," says today's host, Ross Simmonds. "The best piece of advice that I can give anyone looking to use AI in their marketing workflows today is to take the time to plan and create a culture where embracing the evolution is not only embraced but also celebrated. The future is here."
- Note from the host, Ross Simmonds.

In this video, Ross shares how our workflows, processes, and content creation will positively evolve thanks to AI.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz friends. So are robots coming for your job? That is the question that a lot of marketers and creators are asking themselves today and for good reason. Every single time that you log in to one of your favorite social media channels, you're probably seeing a plethora of news around the new AI, ChatGPT 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, who knows, right?

The evolution of AI is always in the press, in the buzz. It is taking off, and there is a real reason why you should be paying attention to this rise of AI. I'm not here to strike the fears of marketers around the globe to make them think that the robots are going to take their jobs and the robots are going to send them out into the streets to be unemployed.

That is not the message that I have for you today. There's no question that AI has already started to have a meaningful impact on organizations that create content every single day. An evolution is happening. The same way that an evolution happened when the modern printing press was evolved with technologies like laptops, the same way that evolution took place when we went from people who consumed content on VHSs to DVDs to Blu-rays, to now streaming sites, technology continues to evolve.

That evolution now today is through generative AI and how it's influencing the way that we create content every single day. In this video, what I'm going to share with you is how our workflows, how our processes, and how we create content is going to evolve thanks to AI. Now, some of you might be fearful.

Some of you might work for organizations that are actually viewing AI as a replacement to writers, and I hear you. My heart breaks for those who would consistently be met with the idea that a boss would tell them, "Yeah, I can just replace you with an AI," because that is not the intent of these tools. These tools are kind of like our Ironman suit, so to speak, right, or vibranium if you're in the world of Wakanda, and you understand the fact that you can take these things to just elevate us as humans, that is the power of AI.

AI is supposed to be a tool that we can use to be better. I do have some bad news. If you are a mediocre writer and you use an AI tool, you're still going to be a mediocre writer. You're just going to be able to create more mediocre content faster. But if you are a great writer, if you are a great creative and creator, you have the opportunity to use AI tools to elevate and improve and enhance the rate in which you can create great content, and that's the magic of this stuff.

Evolve to the new way

So let's jump into it. All right. There was a great quote from Howard Stark. Howard Stark, Tony Stark's dad. It's not a real quote. It's not a real person. But he said, "I am limited by the technology of my day, but you have the opportunity to unlock something special. You will be able to figure it out."

Even today, technology that we have at our disposal is going to continue to evolve, but we are only limited to the technology we have today as long as we make the decision as creators, as marketers to embrace the technology instead of rejecting it. My goal today is to show you why you need to evolve from the old way of creation to the new way of creation, which is rooted, in many ways, in leveraging tools like AI.

So let's go back into time a little bit. Let's go back to 1992 when we're creating content on our typewriters and things like that. Things shifted, things change because that's a part of life, that's a part of business, that's a part of technology. Then we got computers and we got laptops. Fast forward now to, let's say, 2018. We're now using computers to create content.

We're writing blog posts. How do we do it? We embrace a process that we would call content creation, content workflows. Every organization is going to have a different workflow, and every single type of content is going to have a different type of workflow as well. Let's talk about the writing workflow. Let's talk about creating content with the intent of search. If you're watching this, you're probably someone who's interested in search.

So let's talk about that. You start your process with research. You start your process by understanding the keywords that your audience is going to Google to type in. You're trying to understand the search intent behind the behaviors that they're going to Google to understand a certain topic, a certain industry. Why would they type in a certain thing? You want to understand that.

Then you want to do things like interviews. Let's talk to our customers. Let's learn about their pain points, let's learn about their needs, and use this information to inform us on the stories that we should be creating. Let's analyze social. When Facebook comes out, Twitter comes out, we start to use these tools to gain insight into, "Hmm, my audience is talking about this thing. Maybe I should create content about this." These are things that we should be doing today.

These are things that your organization might be doing. Diving into the SERP, using great tools like Moz to understand the SERP and understand what is already ranking for certain keywords, and then using that to inform your decisions on the stories that you should create. That's happening today. Since the beginning of the creative industry, we've started to do things like brainstorm. So you get all this insight.

You get all this information and you brainstorm. You might drink coffee, you might drink wine depending on your appetite and what you're into. But you're going to brainstorm. You're going to come up with new ideas, new stories, new headlines, new topics, stories that you think your audience is going to love. Then you start to create them. You put on your suit and you walk into the class, "Everyone, I have new ideas that I want share with you today."

Then you start to share them. You write a brief. You write a brief on why this idea is going to resonate, why this idea is going to rank. You create content based off of the research that you've developed. This might take two to three days, right? Like this might take maybe even a week depending on your industry, your space, your company. It's taking time to create these briefs.

The briefs get approved by a creative director or a content director, whoever it might be. Then you brief your writers, your creators, and they're developing drafts, maybe in Google Docs. Maybe they're going in and they're actually writing it up. They're having coffee. They're hitting a writer's block. They're getting stressed out. They're leaving.

They're having a smoke break, whatever it might be. They're struggling to create this draft, and then boom, it hits. They've come up with an amazing piece that they believe is going to set the world on fire and everybody is going to give them applause because they just identified a great topic. Then they press Publish. They upload it to the CMS, content management system. It goes live, and an SEO team starts to throw SEO stuff on it. They start to audit it.

This is the workflow of 1.0. That is the workflow that probably sounds very similar to a lot of you. It might be the process and procedures that you are using right now within your company. That's okay. But as you look ahead, as you start to look at the SERP, you're going to start to notice a shift. You're going to start to notice a shift in the fact that more companies and more organizations, more people, more creators are going to be able to produce higher volumes of content at a higher rate because they have embraced the evolution of content. They've embraced the evolution of content by embracing AI. 

AI content will get better

Now, some of you are probably thinking, "Ross, AI content is garbage. AI content is not good. It's not high quality. Nobody wants to read that stuff, and it's just going to put a bunch of spam on the internet." I hear you. But Google is smart. They understand the difference between bad content and good content. Over time, as their algorithm continues to change, just like the AI tools that we're using continue to change, they're going to start to understand the triggers of what is a great piece of content and what is a mediocre piece of content.

So in the short term, yes, we might see a lot of trash content, true. But over time, the content is going to be forced to elevate due to things like Double E-A-T. When Google announces Double E-A-T, the new requirements around what they're going to actually rank and what they want to see from creators and marketers and businesses, that gives us an insight into where things are going.

Think differently

This is why I think AI can still be embraced, but we have to think differently. Now, when we're going through the new workflow, where does it start? It still starts with research, but it's going to be a different type of research. You're going to be able to go to an AI tool and you can say, hey, give me the top 20 keywords that I should be going after if I want to increase my SERP visibility based off my analytics, which the AI can actually pull data from, and give me a recommendation on the keywords that I should go after.

This can happen within minutes now. It's no longer taking a human the time to go through a spreadsheet, to pull up Tableau. They can use a tool that's going to analyze this on your behalf. Then from this detail, from this data, you can then start to dive into the SERP, and there are AI tools that will allow you to do that. You can start to look at social media and start to use AI tools that will analyze on your behalf the topics that are trending in your space and use that to start getting into something very special, which is when you actually start to create content using AI.

What does that look like? So imagine you're using generative AI, which is essentially a tool, a technology that has taken all of the content on the internet, and it's scraped a bunch of it. It's using language processing to understand it and come up with stories and messages that really sound natural, human, right? Natural language processing is at the core of all of this. If you go to a tool like ChatGPT, if you use their API, you can do what I'm going to share with you as the future of content creation in AI, and this is what it looks like.

You go to one of these tools. You set up a Google spreadsheet. You can tell that spreadsheet, you can tell the AI that you want them to find 10 blog posts based off of the keywords that you pulled out of your research. So if a tool like Moz gives you 20 keywords that you need to actually rank for, great, you've got the starting point. Now, I want AI to take each of these keywords and find 10 blog posts on these topics.

Give me 10 headlines. You now have a list of 10 headlines. You tell Google Sheets that you want each of these headlines to be on a separate cell, right? This is all pretty basic Google Sheets efforts right now. Once that's done, you tell AI to hit those headlines and write an outline for this headline using headline, actually using the cell with five key points.

Now, ChatGPT is now creating for you an outline that outlines all of the things that should make up these different blog posts. This is essentially the briefs, right? The briefs are being replaced. Now, after that is developed, you say, hey, ChatGPT, based off of this headline, can you write me an introduction using AIDA, Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, that formula to create a great intro for this blog post based off of the headline that they computed and actually created for you.

Now, here's where it gets even more interesting. Now, you take all of that information that ChatGPT just gave you, right, and you're able to say, hey, ChatGPT, write 400 words based on the topic and key point. This is what the outline gave you. The outline gave you five key points. So you're now able to tell it to take the headline from that output and write 400 words based off of that topic.

It creates that on your behalf, and you tell it to write it as if it was in a blog on this headline. If you wanted to get really fancy, you can say using a tone that Ross Simmonds would use, using a tone that somebody else would use. You can use other information to make it tell the story the way that you want it to. What are you met with?

You're met with a draft. You're met with a draft that you might be thinking is going to be trash, that might have some inaccuracies. All of those things are true. But you didn't have to have coffee, you didn't have to have wine. You didn't have to lose sleep. You didn't have a writer's block. You didn't have to have a smoke break.

You didn't have to do any of that. You didn't have to go through Docs. You didn't have to go through any of those things. You didn't have to do any of those things to get to your draft. So where do humans start to come in? We come in as it relates to elevation. As I mentioned, these are not tools to replace us.

They are tools to augment us. We then go in on that asset and you elevate it. You elevate that content asset to make it worth reading. You set the bar for what content excellence looks like in your industry, with your brand and with the story that you want to tell, and then you start to look at things like this. This is the elevation checklist. You're looking at: Do we have, can we incorporate in this blog post two DA60 URLs being linked to?

High-authority sites, can we make sure that we're referencing high-authority sites? Can we ensure that we have four images within this blog post? So in point three, where they're talking about a certain topic, can we create a custom visual that showcases this? Can we double-check to make sure that AIDA introduction is actually strong, and that the facts and the information within it are actually real information and not something that ChatGPT just made up?

Can we do that? Can we make sure that there are two third-party quotes, meaning I'm going to reach out to two people in the industry to get third-party quotes to elevate this content and ensure that Double E-A-T is being met with its expectations of having people with experience in my content? Can I ensure that I have one internal reference where I'm talking about my product, where I might even upload pictures and screenshots of the thing that I'm selling?

Can I ensure that I am embedding a YouTube video that has been uploaded? Why? Because Google bought YouTube for billions of dollars, and you can leverage that to ensure that you are increasing your ability and your chances to show up in the SERP. Can you ensure that that conclusion is inspiring? Can you ensure that the humans on the other end of the keyboard, when they're reading this blog post that AI essentially developed, feel inspired to take action to do something when they're done reading?

Can you ensure that there are charts and graphs? Can you ensure that the definitions that are being made and talked about within the piece are actually isolated from the content so it could possibly show up as a featured snippet? Can you run this content through a duplication check to make sure that there's no duplicate content where this isn't already been written, that there's no plagiarism happening in this piece that was created by AI?

If you can do this, you will have on your iron suit, right? This is where the magic happens. Then you're able to do it much faster than you would have the old way. Will the content still be good? No doubt about it. But as long as you have that commitment to content excellence, as long as you are there to elevate the content and embrace a culture that actually cares about the end reader, the content that your AI tools, your AI workflows produce might still be mediocre.

But when you add that human touch, when you add that expertise, and when you take that piece and you take it up a notch through elevation, that's when you get a piece of content that is worth reading, worth sharing, worth bookmarking, and ultimately worth creating, because at the end of the day, you still have to hit Publish.

You still have to share it. You still want to understand whether or not it's going to show up in the SERP. You're going to use elevation to ensure that it's ultimately set up to do that, but you're going to do it much faster because you embraced the evolution of content. Content is at the foundation of society. Every single piece of content that you create has an impact on the people on the other end of the screen.

Do not take it lightly. Create content today that you can distribute forever and ultimately have a massive impact on culture. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you want to learn more, check me out online @TheCoolestCool. Thank you so much. Have a great day or evening.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Our Online Reputation Management Playbook

Online reputation management can be daunting – but advantageous – for brands or individuals that are seeing their search engine displays implicated by third-party content, and want to take the reins. When the media controls the narrative, it can lead to untrue perceptions and a more biased sentiment down the line. 

At Go Fish Digital, our team works closely with our clients to understand the sensitive issue they’re facing so we can meet their goals and rectify their online reputations.

The situation

We would not perform reputation management services for any company that was a scam or has participated in fraudulent or misleading activities. Prior to taking on a client, we fully research the business and ensure we are 100% comfortable in helping them with their problem.

When big brands come to us communicating their search results complications, our team thoroughly reviews the situation before we decide to take it on. Our vetting process includes doing due diligence on each client to be sure we can validate the issue. Most of the time, a brand has a controversial topic or story in the current news cycle that is populating their search results. In such cases, the project goals usually include two things: changing the sentiment of the narrative and getting any negative articles off of the page one search results for their brand.

To give you a better idea of how our team would approach a situation like this let’s take a look at the semi-current SERP complication we’re seeing for LuLaRoe, a multi-level marketing company that sells women’s clothing. 

Back in September 2021, a couple very authoritative news sites, Forbes and The Guardian, published stories about the “downfall of the company” based on the documentary The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoe, which came out that December. While this is not necessarily a company we would take on as a client, we are using them as an example as there are specific ORM strategies that we could identify to help improve the SERPs for their brand name. 

Our research

When researching LuLaRoe, we saw that both the Forbes and The Guardian articles were ranking at the bottom of their page one search results, just below their Facebook page and just above their Amazon Storefront profile listing. We recorded what each link was, the position it was ranking in, and the sentiment of each for the first 30 results we found. 

As part of our process, it’s important we research and consider all the variables before putting together our plan of improvement. As mentioned above, we begin by gathering the search results rankings and assessing each URL we see in the first 30 positions. Our team tracks all of the factors and signals Google will look at when determining which URLs they rank for a keyword. Some of these factors include the relevance of the page, the keyword itself, backlink data, click-through rate, and social engagement. Gathering this data can be done by using tools like MozBar or Moz Keyword Explorer. Once we gather the important data points from every link on the first three pages or 30 positions using infinite scroll for our keyword, it’s time to put together our approach. 

For LuLaRoe’s case specifically, here’s some of the data we found from the  SERPs:

Our approach

The ORM goal remained to control as much of the first 30 results as we could, as well as move the negative articles off the page one results. After doing the data collection as shown above, we took note of the areas that we could influence. For example, you can see that the Amazon link ranking in position eight has zero backlinks, so building new quality backlinks here is a strategy we would recommend to increase the quality of this signal to Google.

In addition to launching our best ORM strategies, we decided that we would identify many new pieces of content, as well as update as much existing content as we could. The action plan for each business situation is specific to what we see ranking for that brand. 

Below, you can see our ORM strategies, broken down into three different categories, including pre-existing content, existing content, and engagement tactics.

Pre-existing content strategies

Setting up subdomains on the client's website  

In some cases, we recommend setting up subdomains that specifically address the controversy. For LuLaRoe, we would help them build out a subdomain on their website.

Identifying news articles 

A benefit of a business being in the spotlight is that they may already have plenty of mainstream press. We can identify any positive articles from high Domain Authority (DA) news sites and other industry publications to promote. 

For LuLaRoe, we would not recommend this strategy, as there’s an overwhelming amount of negative press out there. They could potentially work with an authoritative news site to publish a piece detailing their side of the story or where the business is now, but we would suggest doing so down the road,after the dust settles from the bad press. This could produce ranking potential because it could be something unique to the results of the brand.

Reviewing Wikis & other profile pages

We recommend taking stock of any Wikis and existing profile pages a brand already has out there. For example, LuLaRoe could update its Crunchbase profile regularly. Doing so may have the potential to move the profile upward in the brand’s SERP.

In LuLaRoe’s case, we would also recommend taking full advantage of its YouTube presence by adding new videos with a “new light” sentiment, and turning off all comments on each video. Since we see their YouTube profile ranking highly on their page two search results, this is a domain that has the potential to move above the negative stories ranking on page one.

New content strategies

Post on sites you have relationships with (or own)

This could be a partner that has a completely different domain than you, or another brand that you have worked with in the past and have a good relationship with. Reaching out to these confidants to create new positive press surrounding the topic could help to get something new in the SERPs. 

Leveraging any existing relationships, or forging new ones, is a strategy that could potentially work for LuLaRoe.   

Research article directories

Random directory sites are not to be forgotten. In doing research on the specific industry you’re looking to influence, you can suss out directory listings to expand your presence on. 

That said, this isn’t a strategy that would make much of a difference for a huge brand like LuLaRoe, but it could be used to make their n overall reputation look cleaner and more put together. 

Establish mini blogs

We would recommend setting up a number of mini blogs on WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, and Tumblr, as well as  a few other WordPress MU sites we have identified with high ranking potential. 

But again, these mini blogs may not have the high-ranking potential to make a significant difference for a bigger brand like LuLaRoe 

Take ownership of other domains

We would recommend purchasing the .com, .net, and .org versions of the exact match domains for the search phrase –including the brandnamecharity.com. The general content we would recommend adding to these pages would include customer testimonials, positive stories, general information about the company, satisfaction guarantees, posts that debunk misinformation, and other stories that either didn't pertain to the issue at all or show positive aspects about our client. 

Also, creating new profiles on sites like Medium, or doing an IdeaMensch interview, could help positive controlled content to rank highly in your results.

Engagement strategies

Link building

We highly recommend the link building tactic for all brands, especially LuLaRoe. When it comes to positive sentiment that has a low backlink data number, building links can help to increase that number. To do this, we would work with niche bloggers to build new links to the URLs that are ranking below the negative links on page one. The goal is to build backlinks to more than one target so these blog posts aren’t all about a specific brand as the topic, but rather, mention the brand in passing. 

Interlinking

Another helpful tactic involves taking advantage of interlinking opportunities from the brand’s main website to the positive URLs we see ranking within the first 30 results for the brand. This will help to show Google that they’re relevant, important, and should be associated with the brand.  

Click-through rate (CTR) search team

The goal here is to send clicks to certain positive targets in the SERPs to help move them above the negative. Like other tactics, this is about sending signals to Google that the target is a valuable piece of content to put on the first page of the SERPs. We would recommend sending high-value, US or local, clicks to the target URLs you identify. For LuLaRoe these include the Amazon Storefront, thredUP, Poshmark, LuLaRoe Bless, Twitter, YouTube, eBay, and Pinterest URLs.

Competitor research  

Another tactic we would recommend is to take a look at competitors in your industry. Gathering a bigger picture of what’s ranking in a similar brands’ SERP could give you ideas of what to replicate. Sometimes, you may even find a random profile ranking for a competitor that you don’t have a profile on. LuLaRoe should take a look at other big brands facing similar controversies to gain knowledge on where and how they responded and moved forward. 

Influencer engagement 

Working with influencers and other social media engagers in the space is so important. Not only does it bring awareness to the ideas you're trying to promote, but it helps to increase engagement to articles that your brand would like to see higher in the search results. LuLaRoe could really benefit from working with any influencers who support their new business direction and are willing to help clean up their reputation.

Case study & tracking progress 

Without giving away any of our past client’s project details, we wanted to give you an idea of some of the results we’ve seen after applying our tactics. The questionable situation was surrounding a commercial about a controversial topic at that time. After getting negative news coverage, we saw a few negative articles “stick” on the page one results for their brand. Using our proprietary technology for reputation management tracking, we calculated what’s called the “Sentiment Score” of the search result to be a 91. 

Our team took the time to thoughtfully review all aspects of the brand’s search results, as I detailed above. From there we applied the tactics we thought would make a difference and made sense considering the industry. The strategies that were successful in this case included increasing click-through rate, link building, and social engagements. Other strategies that helped to move the negative links on to page two included new profile creation and updating pre-existing content that was dated. 

It was great to see the positive results of our work, although it did take time due to the relevance of the article. The client also took part in charitable events that helped to create new press to surround the brand, which helped to meet their end goal even. 

These initiatives resulted in a Sentiment Score of a perfect 100 with no negatives on page one. You can read more about how we calculate the overall sentiment score for a query here. 

Conclusion

The results from implementing the ORM strategies above vary from brand to brand. It all depends on how each ranking factor is determined by Google. The authority and relevance of an article also make a huge difference in how it’s placed. Our team has seen a ton of success utilizing and being strategic when implementing many of them, but some of our techniques work better than others because of the industry. This proves the importance of doing research to find out what tactics are best suited — and will be most beneficial — to a given brand of business.

Mining for Content Ideas - Next Level

Not to state the obvious, but as marketers, part of our job is to create content. Whether it’s in the form of blog posts, landing pages, social media posts, emails, newsletters, and so on - there’s no way to get around it. It is a critical component of our job. And sometimes, it can be challenging to come up with new ideas or ways to iterate on old ones. With the world consuming content at lightning speed, it is becoming even more difficult to keep up with the expectation of turning out fresh content.

We’ve recently published some excellent pieces on the Moz Blog all about content distribution and strategy, including the Whiteboard Fridays “How to Maximize Content” and “A Content Engine that Drives Revenue” (both from Ross Simmonds). And, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, content ideation and inspiration can come from anywhere. But what if I told you that you can also use the Moz tools to mine for content ideas? Let’s dig into different ways to use the Moz tools to supplement our content strategies.

Find gaps in your existing content

When supplementing or modifying your content strategy, a good place to start is by examining your existing content and finding the gaps. This can help identify new content ideas and areas where your content strategy may be missing key opportunities to thrive.

The Keyword Gap tool in Moz Pro allows you to enter your site and up to 3 competitors to identify Keywords to Improve and Top Competing Content.

Pro tip: Not sure who your online competitors are? Or just want to confirm and scope out who they may be? Check out the True Competitor tool to find out.

The Keywords to Improve section is instrumental when identifying gaps in your existing content strategy. After entering the sites you’d like to compare, the tool will list keywords for which you and your competitors rank. You can then use the filter option to see only specific segments of keywords. For example, we may want to see only keywords where we’re ranking on the second page to identify opportunities for content improvements. We will even show you the Traffic Lift for those keywords, which is the amount of traffic we estimate you can gain by overtaking your competitor in the SERP.

Another great use case for this tool is to identify new content ideas. Let’s say we’re working on building out the “best of” section of our foodie blog; we can filter to see keywords that include “Best,” as seen in the screenshot below. We can then identify keywords for which we’re not ranking, but our competitors are and work to build content around them. In this case, we’re not ranking for “Best Pizza in Los Angeles,” so we may want to see about creating a blog post about this topic.

Spotting these content gaps can strengthen your content strategy. It can not only help spark ideas for new content but also help identify places where your content can be improved or refreshed for better performance.

Identify what type of content is performing

One of the best places to get ideas for content is to see what kind of content is already out there and performing. Top Competing Content in Keyword Gap can provide insight into what is performing well by listing content your competitors rank for with the Content URL and Top Ranking Keywords.

In this example, we can see that one of the competitors I’ve entered ranks well for keywords related to choosing a mattress size and, perhaps more importantly, that the content ranking is from their blog. We can now look at the blog posts themselves to get an idea of what format has been successful for them and what information they are including. We can ask ourselves:

• Is this a topic we can cover on our site? 

• Do we already cover this, but it’s not ranking as well? 

• Is there a way we can improve the content or add a different perspective, format, or content type to the space? 

The possibilities are endless!

Spot tangential content ideas

Sticking with Top Competing Content in Keyword Gap, let's see if we can spot some ideas for tangential content. As Amanda Milligan discusses in her Whiteboard Friday episode, content ideas which aren’t directly related to your product can often lead to positive outcomes like links, social shares, and brand awareness. These peripherally related topics can supplement your content strategy and help create a well-rounded library of assets.

Sticking with our mattress company example, let’s say we are looking for content ideas to help build out our newly launched blog. We may know that there is value in creating pieces around mattress-related topics like deciding on a mattress size or determining what firmness would be best, but what tangential content ideas can we identify in our research? The example above shows that our competitors are ranking for content related to topics like weighted blankets and sleep hygiene. These could be great opportunities for me to create new content not directly related to mattresses but still related to the sleep industry.

Uncover hidden gems

Just like content creation, keyword research is a fundamental part of SEO and marketing strategies. And as you’re out there digging into things like search volume, difficulty, and SERP analysis, you may be able to uncover some hidden gems to inform your content strategy as well.

Hopping over to Keyword Explorer, we can mine for content ideas in the Keyword Suggestions section of the tool. Keyword Suggestions will provide a list of keywords related to the seed keyword entered, sorted by Relevancy to the original term. You can also apply filters for the source type, grouping preferences, and volume to further define your results.

Let’s start by looking at the option to filter titled Display keyword suggestions that. This filter defaults to Include a mix of sources, but an option in the drop-down could be the ace up your sleeve when it comes to content ideation - the filter option called are questions. By selecting are questions, we can see a list of the types of questions searchers ask in relation to our initial keyword.

In this example, consider that we work for a real estate agency and are researching content related to buying a house. Filtering our keyword suggestions by are questions will provide us with specific content ideas related to what people ask when buying a home. This can offer a gold mine of content ideas to flesh out a real estate blog or website to help clients find the information they seek. 

We can even take this research one step further by grouping our keyword suggestions by lexical similarity. Just a reminder here that lexical similarity refers to how closely related or similar the keywords in the group are. Low lexical similarity will result in fewer groups with more keywords since the tool will group keywords that are less similar. 

Grouping keywords can help us identify additional keywords we may want to target and broad-match keywords that may be worth including in our content. Be mindful of over-optimizing, though! We want to avoid keyword stuffing and cannibalization since they may negatively impact rankings. That being said, consider the below example of how grouping keywords has helped to identify a few content gems. 

Using our previous example of “buying a house” as the seed keyword, we’ve grouped our keywords by low lexical similarity. Within the “What to consider when buying a house” group, there are two long-tail keywords which may be great inspiration for a new piece of content for our real estate agency - “what to look for when buying a house checklist” and “what to know when buying a house for the first time.” We can now take that information and create a dedicated resource or a blog post that includes a checklist for what to consider when buying a home for the first time and what the buying process looks like. Imagine the inspiration you can get from digging into these suggestions even further!

Scope out the competition

So far, we’ve identified content opportunities, uncovered new ideas, and found gaps in our existing strategy. But what about our competition? What are they doing? We touched on this a bit using the Keyword Gap tool but let’s dig in further. When modifying your content strategy, it’s important to understand what your competitors are doing and what their audience is engaging with. Although you won’t have access to their traffic data (unless they give you access to it, which is highly unlikely), there is a way you can get an idea of what content may be driving traffic to their site. Or, at the very least, what content is of high value. This is through link analysis. Moz offers quite a few ways to do this, but I’m going to highlight a feature which can help get us started with this research.

Top Pages in Link Explorer will return a list of the pages on a site with the most backlinks. This can provide insight into the types of content people find valuable on a site - pages with more links are more valuable. This is partly because backlinks are a ranking factor. Additionally, all those links provide benefits like traffic, brand exposure, and more. 

After inputting a competitor into Top Pages, we can get an idea of which pages on their site provide the most value. In the screenshot above, we can see that this particular competitor has a lot of “best of” articles which gain a lot of links. We can now explore these pages and see if there is an opportunity to create or modify content on our own site to meet similar demands.

Pro tip: Once you’ve created your content, you can use Link Intersect to find domains and pages linking to your competitors and not to you. This can offer a great way to supplement a link building strategy!

Discover opportunities for elevation

Just like creating new content, refreshing your existing URLs is essential to any content strategy. Elevating your existing content is like polishing your jewelry - it helps keep it in tip-top shape, extends the piece's life, and keeps it relevant to your “collection.” There are many ways to identify and update content in your existing library, but here are two ways to get started (and find new content opportunities in the process).

First, let’s investigate featured snippet opportunities. Once we’ve created a Campaign in Moz Pro and are tracking keywords over time, we will have access to the SERP Features section. This part of the tool tracks SERP features included in the search results for your tracked keywords, including featured snippets.

Exploring which of our tracked keywords have featured snippets in the SERP can help us identify opportunities for content refresh and new pieces of content. When looking for opportunities for a content refresh, we can seek out keywords where we are ranking on the first page of the SERP but are not included in the featured snippet. In this case, the tool will provide insight into what page is included in the featured snippet and our current rank. This can make it easier to spot high-value pages with a chance of moving into that coveted top spot of the SERP.

Alternatively, looking at which of our tracked keywords include a featured snippet but where we are not ranking on the first page (or at all) can help to identify possible opportunities for creating new, high-value content. We’ll just want to be sure to optimize for the featured snippet right from the start. 

Pro tip: Export a CSV of the SERP Features data in your Campaign to sort and filter outside the app. If a SERP feature is marked Included in the CSV, it means your site is included in that particular feature. If it’s marked true it means the SERP feature is present for that keyword, but your tracked site isn’t included. 

Next, we’ll pop over to the Page Optimization section of our Campaign. Although the primary purpose of this feature is to illustrate how well-optimized a page is for a particular keyword, there is a hidden gem that can help identify refresh opportunities, new content ideas, and tangential topics. The Content Suggestions tab will list keywords and topics often used on the top-ranking pages for the keyword we’re optimizing for. 

In the above example, we’re optimizing for the keyword “best pillow.” Looking at the content suggestions, it may be a good idea to format this content as a list (like “11 best pillows”) or to include information about what types of sleepers would benefit from each pillow listed (like “side sleepers”). These content suggestions can also help us to find ideas for other pieces of content, tangentially related.

Find the sweet spot of innovation

If there’s one thing we can take away from this exploration of content ideation with Moz Pro, it’s that there are infinite ways to do it. This post only covers a handful of them; the reality is that the world (of content creation) is your oyster! The key is to find which features, tools, and processes fit best with your strategy and make them work for you. How do you use the tools to investigate new ideas? I’d love to hear about it!

Google vs. AI — Whiteboard Friday

Large Language Models have taken the world by storm in recent months. In today’s episode, Tom goes over some of the new threats to Google from recent advances in machine learning models like ChatGPT, and how Google might react to those threats.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans. Today I want to talk about some of the threats posed to Google by recent advances in large language models and natural language processing and chatbots and this kind of thing.

I want to talk about how Google might react to some of these threats because that's obviously going to affect us, whatever happens, as SEOs. Now the lens that I want to look at this through is think about some of the different kinds of query that we currently use Google for. Really it's kind of an artifact of Google's dominance in the last decade or two that we use Google as the go-to tool for such a varied set of uses.

So I've got some example searches here, and obviously this is just some random things that came into my head. This is not representative of everything people use Google for, which is even more varied. But I've got like a commercial query, "running shoes £ 50." So a lot of people know now and the data has been around for a few years that Amazon is actually a bigger product search engine than Google in the U.S.

More product search journeys start on Amazon than on Google. So that's not anything to do with large language models, but that's sort of some context to this scenario for Google. Then we've got things like "pancake recipe," sort of very informational, uncontroversial where, yeah, actually a chat AI can do a pretty good job just sort of aggregating all the different recipes that it's consumed in its training set.

"COVID symptoms" way more authority sensitive query, right? So at the moment, this is kind of a strong point for Google because, weirdly enough, as consumers we trust Google more than we might trust something like an NLP model right now. Then "Moz blog," so this is your bread- and-butter navigational web search, where really a web search engine, this is what they originally set out to be good at, and they are the sort of natural tool for a problem like this.

Whereas for some of these other ones, it's not obvious that what I want is a website at all, let alone a web search engine. Now I think the interesting thing here, so I talked about how Amazon was probably the natural competitor for some of these product queries, but it's a more complex picture than that.

So though Google is trying to compete directly with this threat with things like the product updates, making sure that they are a good product search engine, and if you want to be a bit conspiratorial, you could say, well, maybe they're trying to make sure that Amazon affiliates aren't too dominant in the SERPs. It's also the case that these are big money terms for Google in terms of AdWords.

But like I said before, we're using Google for everything these days and have done for some time. Part of that is making sure that you're locked in with these kinds of queries. You get in the habit of using Google. You're in their ecosystem, so you're more likely to use them for this kind of thing. Now I've written loss leaders here, and I think that's an interesting concept, an interesting way of thinking about this.

In retail, you might have a loss leader, which would be a product that the store does not make much money on or it might even lose money on, but they've got you in, so you're going to buy the high-margin products as well. So these kinds of query, these are not so obviously easy to monetize, but they can be loss leaders to get us engaged when we do make these high-margin searches.

Now that's kind of why I've included this search here because I want to explain why these searches, which might seem like they are not ... something like a chat AI response to this is actually very expensive to produce relative to how easy it is to monetize.

You can kind of see that with how Amazon and Google have both struggled to make money on their sort of home chat devices, Alexa and I think it's called Google Home. They both sort of struggle to make money on those because these kinds of query are hard to monetize.

But they are loss leaders that will engage you for this kind of thing. So that's why they're important. Obviously, for this kind of query, this is the one where Google is most obviously threatened by things like the new Bing and things like ChatGPT and that kind of technology as an alternative to a search engine for now.

So how might they respond to that? Well, obviously, if you can't beat them, join them. Google is launching Bard. Their original announcement on February 6th and most sort of logical predictions are that, well, suggest that it was going to end up in the SERPs sooner or later.

At the moment, it's a separate interface to SERPs. But it seems like it will end up looking like a SERP feature sooner or later. Then we should expect to see more and more sort of Knowledge Graph results. At the moment, there are a lot of things you can search for on Google where you won't see a website as a result. If you search for something like "five liters in gallons," then you won't see a website as the top result.

You will see a Knowledge Graph result, and I'd expect that to become more and more common because that is a better answer for these kinds of queries often than showing a website. Now what about COVID symptoms? What about the more authority sensitive query? Well, I'd say the threat here is kind of the other way around. It's not that Google thinks you might use a chatbot to ask for COVID symptoms, although in time you might.

It's more that if Google's own results are not high quality, if Google's own results were written by AI, then they've lost their differentiator, right? At the moment, we trust Google more than we would trust some of these new technologies, more than we would trust some other search engines. They need to maintain that edge, and the way to maintain that edge is by making sure that their results are written by people, at least by authorities or at least checked by authorities.

Whereas some of these alternatives are not. So that's why you see things like the Helpful Content Update, which now looks extremely prescient, that was late last year, and also core updates. The core updates are Google refining and improving its algorithm over time, but making sure they stay ahead of the game.

Similarly, that goes to these kinds of queries too. They have to make sure they're still the best at this kind of thing. At the moment, things like Bard and things like the new Bing, the chat interface on new Bing don't really work for web search. But in time, there's no reason why they couldn't. So Google has to maintain an edge in this area as well.

So that was a quick, whistle-stop tour through how I think Google might react to some of these new threats. Let me know what you think on Twitter or on Mastodon or on any other or on LinkedIn or on Facebook. I'd love to hear more people's opinions about these kinds of emerging trends.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How to Create an SEO Strategy [Plus Free Tools & Templates]

Starting as the SEO Director role at Moz has been a bit daunting. As a search engine marketer, how can I add value to an organization that has been a thought leader in the search marketing space and built industry-defining SEO tools for over a decade?

When taking on a new role or client — from local businesses to niche online retailers to enterprise-level Fortune 500 companies — the first thing I do is put together a new SEO strategy and organic search measurement plan. I lead this process with data, which highlights opportunities for improvement and instantiates goals to rally your organization around common objectives. Even with Moz being the team of data-driven SEO rockstars it is, strategy is still where I began my new role, And today, I’ll share the process.

What is an SEO strategy?

An SEO strategy aims to improve a website’s visibility in search engines such as Google and Bing. An SEO action plan, on the other hand, typically involves a combination of on-page optimization, technical SEO fixes, content strategy, link building and SEO reporting.

A strong SEO strategy will:

• Improve your website’s rankings for any existing keywords for which you are currently ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

• Increase the awareness and influence of SEO within your organization. Consider budget and resource challenges to get the most value and SEO improvements out of your team.

• Prescribe some combination of SEO initiatives, potentially including:

  • Widening the scope of your ranking organic keywords through content marketing.

  • Fixing any technical website issues that could be negatively impacting page load times (ex. PageSpeed), search engine crawlability or user experience.

  • Increasing the number of backlinks from high quality domains to your site, through effective social amplification and digital PR strategies.

• Imply or explicitly state priorities or beliefs that guide future action — especially what you will not do.

Whether you’re a website owner that is new to search engine optimization or a seasoned SEO taking on a new project or client, creating and following a clear SEO strategy is absolutely crucial for improving your site’s organic traffic and conversions.

10 steps towards a better SEO strategy

Like any other kind of strategy, to form an SEO strategy you need to understand the state of the game, set attainable goals, and plan to iterate. Below is a 10-step plan for finding those opportunities and insights to get you started.

1. Crawl your site to identify on-page and technical SEO issues

The best place to begin an SEO strategy is by initiating a website crawl to see if there are any issues that you need to remedy in order to maximize your SEO visibility.

There are many options for technical auditing tools that will emulate a search engine crawl of your website, and most SEOs have a favorite. Of course, here at Moz, we have our On-Demand Crawl. Moz’s tool will allow you to view all detected technical SEO issues on your site, and all of the impacted URLs. The data you will get from the On-Demand Crawl can be viewed within the UI of Moz, or exported into a CSV. This focuses on essentials to help kickstart your SEO strategy.

Initiating your site audit is a good place to start because it can take some time to complete. While your crawl is running, you can begin your competitive research.

2. Assess your competitors’ SEO strategies

This is crucial, and often overlooked, at least this early in the process.

Analyzing competitor SEO strategies will help you set realistic goals for your website. After completing this exercise, you’ll have a sense of your competitors’ most valuable keywords. These are some of the search terms you’ll want to compete for by optimizing your key site pages. This step can also be thought of as a “market analysis” task.

You’ll also want to leverage a research tool for competitive analysis. I recommend an SEO tool that offers a “gap analysis”’ functionality, Which will be the backbone of comprehensive SEO competitive research.

Within Moz Pro, the Keyword Gap feature will highlight prominent competitor keywords for which you have room to improve in the rankings. Keyword Gap will automatically sort the results to prioritize the keywords where your site has the highest traffic opportunity if you were to overtake your top-ranking competitor.

Once you’ve identified some keywords where the competition outranks you, investigate why that might be. If you were Google — or better yet, a searcher — which site would you prefer to see?

In addition to looking at the keywords that competitors are ranking well for where you have opportunity to improve, examine the types of content they are regularly producing. Do they have a blog? How much content are they publishing on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? How are they showing their expertise?

When it comes time to align the necessary teams within your organization and rally them around your SEO goals, you’ll need to understand the competitive search landscape of your company. How much effort are your competitors putting into SEO? If they don’t appear to be optimizing their site for search, you’ll have an opportunity to pull ahead. If they have been actively involved in content creation and their core technical SEO is solid (you can even audit their sites to determine what they’re doing well), then you can use their strengths to guide your SEO roadmap.

3. Create SEO goals and align your teams

Despite the fact that there are professional SEOs who specialize in driving business goals via organic search optimization, SEO is a team effort. A good SEO strategy builds buy-in from web developers, content teams, and company leadership, as SEOs often straddle the intersections between teams. For example, you may need to collaborate with your editorial team to create a blog post that was ideated by data-driven research, and your web development team to create the page. Or, after you conduct your SEO audit, you may realize that you need the assistance of your developers to remedy several technical issues.

As mentioned in the section above, even if SEO is not a new endeavor at your company, I recommend thoroughly investigating competitors’ SEO strategies before attempting to get buy-in from other teams. If you can frame the need to optimize your site for organic search through the lens of deficiencies your site has against your competitors, you’ll be able to make a more powerful case to your leadership and cross-functional teams.

4. Create an effort vs. impact matrix [FREE TEMPLATE BELOW]

Now that you’ve completed the research steps of your SEO strategy, you’ve reached a good point to create an itemized list of all of the tasks you want to accomplish. These can include on-page or technical SEO fixes resulting from the audit you did at the beginning of the process, blog posts to write, existing site pages to optimize for search, and more.

My recommendation for outlining these steps is to create an effort vs. impact chart that organizes each item. Nobody knows your business better than you, so the effort required to complete each item will be highly personalized to your company. Sometimes finding the internal resources to write and publish a new piece of content can prove to be a larger endeavor than, say, fixing a redirect loop, or vice versa.

Whatever the dynamic of your business, an effort vs. impact matrix can help you organize your seo strategy into tactical jobs to be done. Here’s a link to a free template.

More often than not, running a crawl of your site using a tool like Moz Pro will highlight a ton of SEO issues you probably weren’t aware of, which can be overwhelming. Moz Pro can offer some guidance on working through these issues by flagging certain items as “critical”.

If you’re looking for a place to get started on prioritizing your SEO action items, I always recommend looking at your site’s meta titles first. Meta titles are one of the primary factors Google considers when deciding where to rank a page, with respect to how relevant it is to a given keyword. They’re also what users read when they’re deciding where to click on the SERP, and thus can have a significant impact on click-through rates. Moz Pro will find pages for you where meta titles are missing, or below Google’s recommended 60-character length.

If you’ve never optimized your meta titles, I recommend manually reviewing all of your core site pages to ensure that your titles are optimized for the keyword you want to target with each page. After you’ve done the keyword research and determined what your meta title should be on core pages, they’re typically relatively easy to update in your CMS or the backend of your website.

5. Build an SEO report or dashboard

After thinking through your priority list for optimizations, you’ll want to establish a baseline of current SEO performance and create a method to track your progress.

Moz’s Campaigns feature allows you to track a list of keywords for your site on an ongoing basis. Moz Pro will automatically build a dashboard for you that visualizes position improvements for your key organic search rankings. Google Analytics can also be integrated into this dashboard so that you can monitor your site traffic along with rankings and your site’s Domain Authority.

Setting up a Moz Pro Campaign will also automatically run a site crawl for your domain once a week so that you can track the number of outstanding technical SEO issues on your site as you work on fixing them.

6. Iterate through technical SEO fixes

The SEO process is a bit like building a house. There will be plenty of time to add window dressing and furniture, but first, you start with the foundation. Your website’s solid foundation is its technical SEO frame.

Using the SEO audit you completed in step 1 and your effort vs. impact matrix, begin identifying issues that are contributing to critical crawl issues (as identified by Moz’s Site Crawl tool, for example).

This is also a good point in the process to establish a baseline of your site’s PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores. After running your domain through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, you’ll be presented with a list of opportunities to speed up your website. These can include tasks like image caching and JavaScript reduction.

PageSpeed Insights is an important tool to leverage because:

1. It’s free.

2. The recommendations on improving your site health and technical SEO foundation are coming directly from Google.

7. Optimize existing content for search engines

Now that you have your progress tracking infrastructure in place and your list of SEO opportunities to attack, it’s time to start optimizing your content. Use the effort vs. impact matrix to guide your priorities, beginning with low-effort/high-impact items such as meta title optimization.

After completing this work, I also recommend taking a closer look at all of your sites’ core pages. A tool such as Moz’s On-Page Grader will help provide even more detail on how well-optimized a page is for a given keyword. For example, AT&T is doing an above-average job at optimizing its wireless page for the “cell phone” keyword, but there are still optimizations that can be made:

8. Identify new content opportunities through topic research

The best way to close keyword gaps is by publishing targeted, SEO-driven content on your site. The list of keywords that you get from a tool like Moz Pro’s Keyword Gap can be used to ideate on topic ideas.

Hub-and Spoke content model

A good SEO strategy will often use a hub-and-spoke content model. This is the practice of creating “hub” pages that will rank for high-volume keywords and convert Google searches into customers through CTAs. These hub pages will be supported by “spoke” pages containing related content, generally living on a blog or resources section of your site.

For example, let’s say one you’re AT&T, and one of the keywords you want to improve rankings for is “cell phone”. Your first step is creating a URL on your site that targets the “cell phone” keyword. After this page is created, SEO focused, and conversion-optimized, you will want to create a series of supporting content pieces that link into your main ‘cell phone’ page.

Using a keyword research tool such as Moz Pro’s Keyword Suggestions feature can help you quickly identify topics related to your primary term. As opposed to guessing at topics that people might be interested in, dedicated SEO tools allow you to use data to power all of your decision making. For example, these are questions that Google searchers have related to “cell phone”.

9.  Amplify your content on social media, and investigate backlink opportunities

Even in 2023, high quality backlinks are an important part of SEO. The number of backlinks a site is receiving from high authority pages is a major component of Moz’s Domain Authority score, which is the industry-standard KPI for measuring the overall ranking ability of a domain.

The best way to increase your Domain Authority is by creating high quality content that people want to share. In addition to creating the content and publishing it on your site, creatively promoting it on social channels such as TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, or additional platforms where your customers (and prospective customers) spend their digital time will help drive brand awareness and can increase branded search volume.

There are also ways to engage in manual link building efforts that aim to gain links to your site from high-quality site publishers. This is an especially important exercise for newer domains with low Domain Authority scores.

10.  Measure, optimize, and test

Your competitive landscape will evolve, and so will your company. Even within the scope of a year, an SEO strategy for 2023 may involve unexpected priorities in November that you didn’t account for in March.

But despite the constant state of change in the digital world, it’s important to continually track your high-value keywords using an SEO tool like Moz Pro, and to monitor the traffic growth of your content in platforms like Google Analytics. Over time, you’ll notice areas of topical strength and weakness for your site. You can continue to play into the strengths of your site and publish content related to your strongest topics, while simultaneously identifying keyword gap opportunities and improving areas of weakness.

Get started on your SEO strategy today

There are several free SEO tools on the market that can assist you in kickstarting your search engine optimization strategy. Moz even has free versions available of our own Keyword Explorer and Competitor Research, which can help you find opportunities for your site’s search engine visibility and help you set SEO goals.

Whether you’re an experienced SEO taking on a new client or a website owner approaching SEO for the first time, it’s crucial to create a roadmap of defined tasks and actionable goals. Having an action plan will help keep you focused on your goals, and prevent aimless work and incomplete projects. In search engine marketing, it pays to be methodical, yet adaptable.

Daily SEO Fix: How to Use Keyword Labels in Moz Pro

Tracking keyword rankings is an essential part of any SEO strategy and helps inform how changes you’ve made to your site have made an impact. No matter how many keywords you’re tracking it can be incredibly helpful to segment your data in various ways to monitor and compare groups of keywords. Within Moz Pro you have the ability to label keywords any way you like so you’re able to do just that. In this edition of the Daily SEO Fix, we’ll look at how you can apply labels to keywords in your Moz Pro Campaign along with different ways to segment your data and how to create reports for different keyword clusters.

How to Label Keywords in Moz Pro

Before we can segment our keyword rankings data to compare metrics we have to properly label our keywords. In this video, Emilie will walk through how to add labels to your keywords in a Moz Pro Campaign.

How to Use Filters in Moz Pro

Once your keywords are labeled, you can filter and sort to compare metrics and rankings over time for different sets of keywords. In this next video, Emilie will show you how to filter by label in Moz Pro.

Ways to Label Keywords

There are an infinite number of ways you can label and segment your keyword data. This includes by sales funnel stage, product line, and market location just to name a few. In this video, Emilie will talk through a few different ways you may want to consider segmenting your keywords and rankings data.

How Labels Impact Metrics

When applying filters in Moz Pro, you’ll see that certain metrics and graphs update accordingly. For example, when filtering by label you can see Search Visibility over time for each set of keywords. In this video, Emilie will walk you through how filtering by label impacts the metrics and graphs seen in the Rankings section of your Moz Pro Campaign.

How to Create a Report with Segmented Data

Now that your keywords are labeled and you know how to filter or segment your keyword data, it’s time to create customized rankings reports! With Moz Pro Custom Reports you can have segmented data sent right to your inbox on a regular basis. In this video, Eli will show you how to create a Custom Report for labeled keywords so you’re able to keep an eye on changes to your rankings.

With that, you’re ready to get out there and start labeling your keywords and tracking your success. Thanks so much for checking out this edition of the Daily SEO Fix and we’ll see you next time!

Practical Tips for Presenting SEO Projects to Executives — Whiteboard Friday

Any time you have to present your SEO work to other departments or executives, you're going to have different groups of stakeholders with different interests, so you need to approach them differently. To help you, Bethan walks you through her top five tips for sharing your work with the C-suite.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi. So my name is Bethan Vincent, and I'm the Managing Partner at Open Velocity and I'm here to talk to you about how to deliver better presentations to executive stakeholders. 

1. Set the groundwork

So we're going to start off with a tip that kind of occurs pre-presentation, and essentially it's setting the groundwork to understand your stakeholders.

In any situation, you're going to have different groups of stakeholders with different needs and different stakes, and you want to approach them slightly differently. So I love a magic quadrant. So here we've got one that basically shows you within any decision-making process you've got people with high influence and low influence. Stakeholders can be individuals or groups of individuals. Keep that in mind.

You've then got people or groups with a high stake, so they've got a high kind of interest in the outcome of the decision, and people with a lower stake. So essentially in any process, you want to divide and conquer, and this is something I advise you do. Don't spend loads of time on it. It's more a thought exercise. You can do it on the back of a napkin. But think about who are the people with high influence and low stake, because those people are very interesting and they can be your champions in the decision-making process, because essentially you can leverage their influence.

I would be as explicit to go and speak to the individual or group of individuals that I think fall in my champions box and say, "Hey, would you champion this decision? Would you help it get pushed through? This is what it's going to mean for you. This is what it's going to mean for the organization." You've then got the high influence and high stake groups, and those are the people that really you want to spend the majority of your time on engaging, persuading, and inspiring.

Essentially, you want to show them: How is this decision, how is what I'm proposing going to be better for them? How is it going to produce better outcomes? How is it going to contribute to revenue for the company? How is it going to contribute to something tangible? So spend a lot of time with those people, because ultimately, actually, if you can't get it past your kind of priority stakeholders, the decision is probably not going to go in your favor.

So you've then got the people with a high stake and low influence. This, I'm afraid, is often marketing, especially when it comes to projects like, let's say, CRM changes. We love a surprise CRM change. Essentially with this group, you do want to consult them because the impact of the decision is going to be so high on them that you want to consult them and make sure that you're not really frustrating them, you're not going to introduce something that makes their life, their work unworkable.

You've then got your kind of low stake, low influence group, and those are people you want to inform and you want to basically monitor their kind of feedback on the proposed decision because you might actually find those people that you think are low stake and low influence move into one of these groups when you fully get to the bottom of actually what their work is, what are they trying to achieve.

So that's something to be mindful of. So set your groundwork. Engage people pre-presentation. Get those champions on side. 

2. Keep it succinct

So secondly, when you come to present to executive stakeholders, and whether this is a formal presentation with a whiteboard and slides and all of that kind of stuff, or whether it's in a meeting and you're just proposing an idea, I want you to keep this slightly weirdly named BORA acronym in mind.

So you want to keep it succinct. Any presentation, any kind of pitch to senior stakeholders, you want to keep it really digestible and understandable. The way I like to structure my kind of presentation, or even if it's a document that I'm presenting to senior stakeholders, is I'll start off with the background, start off with the context, paint the picture.

I'll then get straight to the opportunity. So what tangible thing is on the ground? What can we actually get out of making this decision? How is it going to impact the company? How is it going to drive revenue? Then you want to move on to the request, and I think this is something that people often miss out of presentations. So that they'll kind of set the background, set the opportunity, and then kind of leave it up to the senior stakeholder to kind of figure out what they're asking for.

Be really explicit. What is your ask? Is it budget? Is it resource? Is it a decision to be made? Then finally, stick all of your appendices with this information. If people want to go into detail, make sure they've got the data, make sure they've got the contextual stuff on hand, but don't try and get through all of it within a meeting, because frankly you're just not going to be able to get through all of the nuance of the material within a tight time frame because I think it's fair to say that when you're presenting to senior stakeholders, their time is often really precious, and if you've got an hour or half an hour for the presentation, frankly that's all you've got, so you need to keep it very, very time-bound.

3. Anticipate interruptions

This brings me on to point number three. You've got to anticipate interruptions. So I think a lot of us have been in meetings with senior stakeholders where we've started off doing our presentation, doing our pitch, and we've been interrupted with questions. A lot of people find this quite frustrating. You know what?

To some degree it is a little bit frustrating, but I think we've got to understand that senior stakeholders are often questioning stuff because they're really invested, they're interested, they're trying to dig into things a little bit deeper. Actually, there's nothing worse than doing a presentation to senior stakeholders and there is tumbleweed and silence. That's a worse sign. So the very fact you're getting those questions is excellent. But you've got to anticipate them.

You've got to build them into the meeting structure. So again, this comes back to keeping it succinct. Start off with the background and your opportunity, maybe in kind of 5 or 10 slides, or a one-page document. But then give that space for those questions to happen and just anticipate. It is going to. You can't fight against it. But then also at the end of the meeting, you've got to bring it back around to the request, because again, if you've been derailed, some people run out of time, oh my gosh, I've got five minutes left, or have run out of time and those people have got to go and they've not got anything out of the discussion.

So anticipate interruptions. Bring it back to that request. You've got to know your request, know your ask before you're going into the meeting. 

4. Weekly updates

We're going to move on to a point that's linked with almost my first point, which is about setting that groundwork and before you kind of do your proposal or your presentation, making sure you understand the stakeholders, you understand the landscape. You've done some of that pre-work.

After you've done the meeting, I think there's a lot of kind of post-decision work. So hopefully you've got the decision. You want to basically keep people abreast of the good work you're doing. What I love to do is send around a weekly update. It's a really super short email I'll put together, or it can go on an internal wiki, for example, as well, if you've got that. But I'll send it to the wider organization, not just stakeholders, and it keeps people abreast of the good work you're doing.

It can be as simple as a summary, so this is what's happened this week, a little bit of, again, setting the background, and then a bulleted list of updates. This is what we've done. These are the results we've achieved. These are the things we've launched. You may not have loads of stuff that you've launched. It could just be this is what the team has been doing. This is what they've enjoyed working on.

It doesn't have to be really in-depth or anything like that or anything scary. Then finally, this is the most important point of this communication -- close with an invitation to engage. I've done these before and sent them around organizations and sent them to developers and engineers, and actually opening that door and saying like, "Look, this is what Marketing is up to. These are some of the things we've been doing. These are some of the results, the outcomes we've got. Hey, does anyone have any questions or thoughts on them?"

It invites that conversation, and it really helps you kind of nurture your internal audience. We're very good at nurturing external audiences, but I think we can do better internally as well. 

5. Why I pass

Finally, I just wanted to kind of give a little bit of context on why I'm now relatively, well, pretty senior in my career, I run a company, and why I pass sometimes on things my team brings to me.

So firstly, I pass on stuff because frankly I don't understand it. I think there's this kind of misconception that people in really senior positions know everything. We definitely don't. Especially when we're dealing with specialists, like SEO specialists, you've got a whole depth and contextual information that I may not have. So sometimes I just don't get it.

I don't get what I'm supposed to do here. I don't get the context. I don't get the background. So then that goes back to keeping it succinct. Secondly, I just simply don't have time or budget. I think when people are kind of proposing and ask, that they've got a proposal to do something, they might put in the budget cost of it, they might put in the financial cost of it, but they don't necessarily recognize that there's a time cost.

Budget and time are the two things that are very, very finite within an organization. So have a little bit of a think about the time implication and what you're asking for and does the organization have the resource to deliver on that. So sometimes, yeah, I just don't have time and I don't have the budget for it. Thirdly, I don't see the big picture. What I mean by this is you're pitching something to me, and I don't understand or I can't make the link between what you're pitching and our organizational goals, our business goals.

This is where it's really important, even if you're an SEO specialist, PPC specialist, whatever, that you understand that organizational objective that you all should be working towards. Any good business should have a business plan and should be able to communicate that to you. So wherever possible, make sure what you're proposing fits into that bigger picture.

Then finally, I just don't see how this is going to make us money. Businesses exist to make money. We live in a capitalist world. We kind of can't fight against that. So sometimes I just can't see the route to ROI. I don't necessarily have to see the direct route. It doesn't have to be we are guaranteed this ROI within this time period.

I do understand, especially in things like SEO where it takes time, there's a lot of unknowns, that it can be a bit more intangible. But I need to be able to see the causal link. If I can't see that, I'm not going to sign it off. So I hope that's given you some context about how to approach those conversations with senior decision-makers. Thank you.

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