Intro
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[Music]
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thank you
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hello everyone we are this is WP product talk we're new
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hosts so we're gonna do an intro just a second do we want to pop Lindsay out and do an introduction Zach
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yeah I'm sure but yeah so welcome everyone as Zach and I get things
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figured out um but this is WP product talk the Pleak we interview an experienced WordPress
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product owner on strategies tips experiences failures and successes of
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running successful and thriving WordPress product businesses I'm Amber Heinz I'm the CEO of equalized digital
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maker of the accessibility Checker plugin and I'm Zach Katz I'm founder of gravitykit and trusted login
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and today's topic is SEO to grow your product business and this is a great
Welcome
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topic because it's essential for any business to be found by customers and potential customers leads you want to be
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found you need SEO to talk about this today we have Lynn
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Lynn from path all right Zach I'm excited to be here
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yeah we're excited to have you here um do you want to give us a little introduction about yourself and what you
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do at Pathfinder sure uh I live in the salt Colorado and uh and I work in the
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SEO space probably not surprising based on the talk title and at Pathfinder SEO
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I work with digital agency owners who want to start grow and scale their SEO Services offering so they can grow their
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recurring Revenue so I I essentially teach and our software provides tools to
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other agency owners who who want to get going with an SEO Services offering often times alongside other ongoing
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offerings like web maintenance plans thank you Lindsay and uh for anybody
Why is SEO important
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who's watching live on YouTube please comment uh we can see your comments and if you have any questions for Lindsay
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please go ahead and we'll ask Lindsay to answer them and we can share so I I saw that uh Matt
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gave us party emoji because we are trying to figure out
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hosting on our own so so
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um I think so we like to talk about starting out with why is this important for WordPress product owners
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um why do we think that it is important that people talk about
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um SEO or think about SEO and do SEO in their business and I think for me
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there's always the appeal of its quote free marketing right now is it really
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free I don't know because you got to put a lot of sweat hours into it or maybe you pay someone else to do it for you
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um but it's it is a reach but I think another thing that really comes to mind for me especially with WordPress
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products that I think I've noticed haven't put effort into SEO is that if I have a hard time finding how to do
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something I'll frequently go to Google and I'll Google plug-in name this thing
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or like there was one where I was having a really hard time figuring out what
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their um attributes for their short code were and like I couldn't find in their
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documentation I was trying to search like the word attributes like in their documentation I ended up having to go to Google
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to search it and try and find it and so I think the thing about SEO is it can bring you customers but it's also
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something that is important for your existing customers because it might help them answer questions that they have
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which if they can't find those answers then they might turn absolutely and and we really see that
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traffic from Google is typically one of the most effective marketing channels for WordPress product business owners
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um and to me it really does two things for you one is it creates long-term value so it does take a lot of Sweat
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Equity and work but what you're building um is is going to kind of snowball and
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accumulate over time and it can do so like you mentioned Amber on both sides of the coin customer acquisition but
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then also customer retention um and and support and reducing your support time so
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um there's a lot of value there but one of the things that I like the most about it is that it feels like it's something you own so um in this Dynamic landscape
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that we're in you know you could have invested really heavily in say Twitter and that could have been one of your
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best marketing channels and then things on Twitter change and all of a sudden you lose a lot of of traction in that
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channel yes Google changes and evolves but for businesses that invest in what
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I'd call kind of like a holistic approach to SEO their traffic doesn't tank as that Evolution happens it
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steadily grows over time and and it is um it is like an equity that that you earn and and that you get to hang on to
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challenge um that we all face as as uh product businesses is time SEO is time consuming
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and we're already wearing so many hats and one of the things that we see people often do is say either I'm not going to
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invest in SEO at all because it's too time consuming I don't know how it works I don't have the budget for it Etc or
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they they really invest in what I'd call like low impact tasks so they kind of scan their site and they go down a
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rabbit hole fixing something maybe something technical maybe um something else without a lot of
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strategy and thought and and they spend a lot of time but they don't get a lot of return
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is that like like if I just use like I don't know ahrefs or something and it's like here's all your posts that are
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missing meta descriptions and I just like spend a bunch of is that you're saying like that can be not especially
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helpful to do that absolutely so if that's done sort of in a vacuum um or in
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a silo or done to some extent where you go and spend 20 hours on it I could probably you know confidently say that
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for most businesses that's not going to be the most effective use of that time um and and the two things that really
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help businesses and websites do well on Google and then what makes SEO relatively simple in my mind's eye is
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that if you invest in content marketing sharing your expertise and then you invest in kind of real world marketing
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meaning getting out there being on a podcast writing a guest blog posts sponsoring a word camp that builds trust
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and authority and that kind of secret ingredient when you combine those two things those sites do really well on
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Google despite not always how having perfect page titles and meta descriptions despite having broken links
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or meeting page you know pagenet Founders needing 301 redirects so if you focus on the big stuff Google will sort
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of Overlook site speed for instance um and if you go down a rabbit hole on something else saying well I'm doing SEO
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you are but it's probably not going to impact your your top line revenue as much as some other activities
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yeah I also like to think of SEO as foundational for an entire business like
How SEO affects your business
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when when starting a business and when creating a new product what is the name of the product how well does that
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product name rank is it a crowded keyword space that you would need to really spend a lot of time developing or
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should you choose a unique name that isn't already crowded uh does that help you hurt you
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um so it affects your product it affects the structure of your website from the ground up like how do you want your
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website to be indexed uh reflects to Google the structure of uh what you find
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most important you're telling Google that by the structure of your site and uh then it also affects the
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structure of your business like do I need a full-time person do I hire an agency an SEO agency an SEO
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freelancer a contractor um so I I'd like to think about SEO as
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soon as possible uh just from the beginning because it'll help you even determine product Market fit are people
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searching for this if not maybe it's not a great product so there's a lot of SEO
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that goes into the just the the core of any business absolutely we've learned a lot about our
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business by doing SEO on our website because it's helped us to get to know our audience and in the beginning
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oftentimes you know when you have a new product you don't always know exactly your product Market fit or your audience
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or you're testing a couple different areas and um by investing in SEO you're
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you're Gathering a couple more clues and pieces to the puzzle that help to lead to that product Market fit
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um and and so there's a lot of value as you mentioned Zach of thinking about SEO early and that it really does go beyond
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just traffic from Google Yahoo Bing it can be a big part of just sort of your foundation your business Foundation
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often the content you create for instance for SEO also goes out in email marketing social media Etc it might be
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the same thing you talk about when you're a guest on a podcast or if you pitch to speak at a word camp or
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something like that um you know it ties back all together and so um you know we really don't look
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at SEO as operating in a silo or necessarily even down and saying I'm doing SEO for the next three hours like
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you're kind of doing big picture marketing um you might be working with customers Etc you might be working on
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documentation for a customer question and you also publish it in a in a crawlable section of your site that that
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Google can access you know I found that doing SEO is no
Why SEO is important
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fun but implementing the strategies that you have when you have an SEO strategy is like is a way more creative and
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fulfilling act for me like doing SEO no I want to I want to make things more uh
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just like better structured when I'm writing a blog post and have that structure reflect the the the outcomes
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that the customers want when reading the documentation like there's so many things that involve SEO that uh are I
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have a mental block against doing SEO but I love creating good content and yeah and helping people
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yeah you know I think I think it's interesting you know circling back to what you said Lindsay but even you know
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at this broader discussion you know as we're talking about um why this is so important right that's
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what we're talking about right now is um that SEO I think is of larger activity
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then we might think about like we think about I I think traditionally it's like
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picking keywords and do you have some like percent of that keyword in your
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title and your menu description but everything that we're talking about now and that like you both have shared it's
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very like it is bigger picture than just like writing a blog post with certain keywords in it
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um absolutely and uh and when you do think of SEO as just sitting down and doing
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keyword research or something like that you usually fall into some common traps and you know when we started Pathfinder
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um we had spent 10 years in the agency space offering SEO services so of course we were going to use SEO as one of the
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tools to acquire new customers and to get the word out and and so we had a plan we had a strategy we of course
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didn't treat ourselves as well as we treat our our actual you know agency customers because we never work on our
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own business quite with the same um skill set sometimes that we do for our customers or or dedication and we
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knew we had no traffic from Google um and we knew if we just focused on two things in those busy days that concept
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of sharing expertise via content marketing and then building some domain trust and Authority we had a brand new
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domain Google didn't even index it we didn't even rank for our brand name which wasn't a competitive space and so
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we knew what we needed to do and um and the equation was pretty simple we
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created a Blog we started blogging about surprise SEO and uh and then over in the
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real world we started getting out there and we started going to word camps and sponsoring and speaking whenever we
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could and pitching to get on podcasts and in a very short period of time and in SEO that's like a couple of months we
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started to see really good traction we ranked number one for our brand um we were getting our blog post crawled
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indexed ranking you know top five and things like that and so we went and we doubled down on content we just created
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a ton of it and in SEO any topic you can explode it and like come at it on every
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angle and create a ton of content and we watched our traffic grow and our sales didn't grow and you know what we had
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started doing was the age-old Trap of chasing keywords you know doing keyword research chasing the volume without
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always thinking about audience part of that was because we didn't totally know who our audience was were we working
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with business owners marketing managers people in specific Industries or where
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we ended up going is we work with digital agencies and so over time what we found was really low conversion rates
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from this traffic we created even though we had a lot a lot of traffic and it's still something we deal with like kind
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of combing out some old content but what we kind of discovered over time is that where or identified over time is where
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we went wrong was audience we didn't know our audience so we created General content and sometimes when you do that
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you don't get any traction because the space is too competitive other times when you do that you get traffic without
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conversion really another neither of these impact your bottom line and so kind of the the big trap was just not
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putting audience first and now when we create content it's all like laser targeted and focused towards that
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audience which often means it's really actually pretty low in a keyword research tool on volume and then when we
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create it and get it live and give it a couple months and we go back and look at the result results were like whoa look
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at how many people we got and these are like a hundred percent are people whereas before we were maybe only
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getting like five or ten percent are people coming to our blog so
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um ah that was a little bit of a a School of Hard Knocks and a lesson we shouldn't have had to learn on our own business but we did
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yeah you know I think um and I'm jumping ahead a little bit on on my notes but
How to convert traffic
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what you're saying about trying to figure out how to convert the traffic like when I think about my personal story with SEO and where we are like
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that's that's sort of a challenge that we're having I don't think that we're in the
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not having the Right audience so we spent a lot of time before we um publish like even made our website
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public because we did a Rebrand we built our product and we spent a lot of time making backdated blog posts so
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because hey all right so we did and uh also a lot of time on our documentation
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for our plug-in um and when we were going through and building out our rule set for our
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employee and we looked at other accessibility tools and a really popular one is called wave and we ended up
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deciding to name some of our rules similar to wave um and then I wrote really really
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detailed articles about what is this issue mean why you know why is it being
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flagged how are we flagging it what is the accessibility implication and how to fix it and a lot of those articles
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actually rank higher than wave because wave has like I don't know
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400 words about their issue and I have a lot longer and they bring a lot of traffic like I just went this morning
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and looked and I was looking at one um I have my analytics open because I was
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looking at it it's like broken Arya reference which you know it's like but people Google that because they use
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other accessibility tools they see that problem and then mine ranks higher and
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in the last week there was 165 unique views one minute 27 seconds of engage
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time and I've seen that because I've run hotstar before and like you see people reading the article like they really do
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but but then I'm like I don't know how to turn this person into someone that's like oh and I have a
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WordPress website I should use your plugin instead of using Wave right so like that's something that we're right
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there trying to figure out um as far as like actually like I think we figured out what
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the strategy is to get it to rank and to bring the traffic and I think it's the right traffic because I don't know a random person who just Googled that
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right isn't trying to fix accessibility um but but yeah I don't know that's a
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challenge that we've had on that same front absolutely and what's your that that is
How to get the right traffic
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what comes down the road so you know step one your problem is getting traffic
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um and along the way you want to make sure you get the right traffic and then assuming you do those things all of a sudden you see your traffic go up and
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you see what you mentioned High engagement time you can see on hot jar people are reading the post
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um but then those blog posts also have um a high bounce rate typically and old
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old school talk of GA or Universal analytics yeah they did that one and then they left they did that one and so
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it's like oh I got them there for three minutes and then they're gone and you can look at that with two you know
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um pieces of the coin one is in this day customer acquisition requires a lot of touch points so we just had someone sign
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up for Pathfinder who said he'd been you know following webinars and reading our content for two years and so by creating
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that steady content and creating that steady touch point you just kind of naturally stay top of mind and and you
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might acquire a customer six months a year or two down the road so there is value even if the metrics only show
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engagement on the post but in the short run you know I need leads I need email
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addresses I need that engagement and you know the that's not necessarily my area
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of professional um expertise but I guess the the piece that I've noticed in in how we've
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approached that is when I do something like an exit intent pop-up um on my blog post because that's what
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people are doing and I can pop up something like schedule a free demo um or take this free course it has a
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super low engagement rate like they're out and the reason is because what I'm offering them is actually like two steps
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or three steps down the line what I need to do is offer them something that's in the moment of where they are so if they
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search on Google for SEO proposal template and I have a great blog post about how to create an SEO proposal and
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that shows they're like the perfect audience for us they're thinking about creating an SEO Services offering well
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the next thing for them is not not a demo of Pathfinder the next thing for them is probably an actual like example
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template or something like that and so if I can meet people with that exact next thing my conversion rate skyrockets
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on those posts and a lot of times that's just you know via some kind of a saved row that I can insert and say okay every
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time I'm talking about sales give this thing away as as something in the
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content when they're halfway down the page and then again at the bottom keep that you know salesy schedule a demo
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thing as a pop-up knowing it probably won't convert but if I can get their email then I can get them in a couple
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webinars of ours and then I can get them into a free course and then I can sell them if they're on that slower path
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you mentioned email and I I realized that search engine optimization even applies to inboxes I sometimes see
SEO and email marketing
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something that I saw in an email that I don't remember exactly what it was but I searched for the the term that I think
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it was you've gotta also optimize your uh your email marketing yeah absolutely
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I mean you do you search your email and like for that like two-word phrase and things like that and so you know uh you
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know the other thing that we always think about with SEO is it's time consuming so everything you do you want
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to be really purposeful and um when you create a piece of content you want to get content repurposing out of it so you
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know I think that was something I learned at content camp with Jennifer Bourne years ago and she's like everything needs three uses and SEO is
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just one of those uses uh that that you might find Value out of the other thing that people find Value out of sometimes
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is actually running Google ads to some of their um top performing blog posts so you
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think of Google ads as like more customer direct acquisition like bidding on SEO software for agencies or
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something like that in our context so like what it is you use the thing you do or plug in for this or you know best
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form Plugin or whatever it might be you think of Google ads as being like I only want to spend the money in that moment
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that they're red ready to buy but the reality is those keywords are typically pretty expensive because they're
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transactional and Google knows it and so if you then go ahead and you say okay now I've sort of used SEO and I've got
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this system right like when someone searches SEO proposal template they land on this blog post they read it we give
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away the template we pop up the you know demo our conversion rates are solid and
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if I go and I bid on that keyword in Google ads it's probably pretty inexpensive because there's low
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competition and it's not transactional and so all of a sudden then I can actually sort of put the wheels in
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motion that I built with SEO and get some repurposing by boosting that volume with a pretty modest ads budget too so I
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I guess kind of the theme Here is that nothing happens in a silo you know SEO is related to so many different other
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components of marketing strategy but I also want people to walk away hopefully feeling like this is doable if I just
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commit to creating like an strategy and then starting to go get the Reps in just
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like you do with going to the gym or something if you're trying to run a marathon you're going to get there and
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each step along the way you're going to learn a couple of things and it's going to build over time and and be a
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Powerhouse for your for your business yeah that's a good point what SEO often
What SEO often appears scary
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appears scary and I I might have reinforced that earlier and I apologize if I did no it is it is scary I mean
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everything's scary yeah when you first start working on it
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but I think I mean it's really it's something that you can modify over time and I think that's something that's
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important to remember about SEO right it's not a one and done you and say I optimize my website I'm done now right
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you're constantly tweaking and improving that and so to that effect I feel like it doesn't have to be scary because you
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just experiment check your stats see how things are going and then you go back and experiment again and as long as you
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approach it knowing that that's how SEO works right um
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I mean unless someone has has found a magic ball have you found a Magic Bullet Zach what are you guys doing for SEO in
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your company well we uh rebranded recently and uh
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from Gravity view to gravity kit and that was a big they changed your domain too right and we changed our domain yeah
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uh so we are still kind of recovering a little bit from that because we had so
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much domain value built up on gravityview.co and now gravitykit.com doesn't have the same level of backlinks
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so we still are trying to implement a strategy for for building up our backlink Network
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um but yeah I gravity view actually started because I was doing keyword research uh I was at SEO professional uh
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and I was getting into doing WordPress plugins for clients for the benefit of
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increasing their SEO so I would build a uh back then and I wonder if they
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changed this rule because of me uh back then wordpress.org did not have no
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follow on the links on the plugins pages so I would create a plugin for each new
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client that I had um and that's how I got into WordPress plugin development
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so I had a genealogy client that uh was having trouble ranking for genealogy and
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I created a genealogy plug-in and submitted it it was actually useful so that's good too but I created a backlink
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to their services and yeah uh it had a do follow from a domain ranking of 10
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and it helped their their products so I kept on doing research about keywords
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in the WordPress space and I was using gravity forms a lot and I realized that gravity forms had a lot of queries that
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people were asking to do this with gravity forms that with gravity forms so I just create Integrations with a bunch
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of different things that people were searching for and one of the common searches was gravity forms directory
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so I created the gravity forms directory add-on that is now gravity view so it is
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how I started my business it's WordPress uh and SEO and thank you.org for for
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that inspiration on this so you included gravity so it's
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kind of connected to gravity forms what maybe did that but you didn't call it gravity forms directory you called it
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gravity View is there an SEO reason or um you know we went back and forth with
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this on our own like our our plugin is equalizer accessibility Checker so it
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has branded for us in the front because accessibility Checker is super generic and I mean Microsoft Word has an
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accessibility right but it was like should it have a unique name versus literally just being the keywords of
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what it is and I'm curious if either of you have thoughts on that before I kind of share where we landed
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the wordpress.org plugin that I have uh that's still on the directory for free
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is where gravity forms directory um and when we were you do have one
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called that yes but it hasn't been maintained because we've been we've been maintaining gravity view instead when we
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did Gravity view I realized I didn't want to rely on a trademarked you know
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copyrighted name that we couldn't use so oh gravity forms at the time we weren't
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certified developers we didn't have permission to use the term gravity forms we do now but I still think it's it's a
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good choice to have a name that is Standalone from somebody else's
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trademark or uh you it's better to have your own name like if you were in woo uh
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like woocommerce like in the whole Loop territory uh I bet you wish you could use that name in your product at this
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point because they no longer allow it so um being well you could say like XYZ
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yeah you can say XYZ product for woocommerce right and we do that in our
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content yeah we do that on our website we do that everywhere uh but we having our own
Using keywords in your brand name
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trademark name is is a as a benefit that I see for that in our case at least
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what if it's not a trademark Lindsay do you have thoughts on just like using keywords in the name of a product like
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what you if you do keyword research like a lot of people search for this so I would go brand
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above SEO so if you if you can naturally add the keywords into your brand without
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it um doing a couple things one being really generic two infringing on trademarks or three
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um you're a little later in the space and so you're actually gonna have to work hard to rank for your brand because
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you're not one of the first players in whatever that little keyword you know um space that you're going into those
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are all to me like reasons not to put the keywords into your name if it comes naturally if you're one of the early
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players and if you're really confident you've got it right um you know and you can see like I can
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get number one for for my own brand name then that's that's a different story but you know our our original name was WP
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SEO Hub and the reason was because we saw everybody else in the WordPress product space put in WP and we thought
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well we're going to do what everybody else does and we're going to be WP SEO Hub and then all of a sudden we realized
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like six months down the line a everybody thought we were plugged again and not a SAS product so we had we had a
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brand issue and B we actually worked with people on platforms Beyond WordPress and so we had to we had to
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rename ourselves do a domain you know do everything Rebrand rebuild a bunch of stuff
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um and and it's because we chased the WordPress SEO keyword space a little too
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aggressively and um and so then we went with something generic that nobody was searching for we quickly were number one
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for our brand um and and we're not siled in if you go with Wu and then all of a sudden the
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trademark changes or your business evolves a little you may be in a in a Rebrand space very quickly
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so where did you land I'm curious well so of course our company name
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equalized digital is super unique and we did do a lot of key so we did and we
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also looked for something trademarkable so we did trademark searches also when we did that Rebrand um but but we were like we knew we
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wanted a.com so that was important for us I don't know Zach when you you went from a DOT
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go to a.com was it important to have a.com as you were doing that name we had a DOT Co for so long I just wanted
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the.com so uh we ended up buying the domain from an aftermarket uh and we
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paid more than I wanted to but uh we got it yeah I mean I bought the Twitter handle for
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equalized digital because someone else had it and we were like that was the only social media where we couldn't be
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at equalize digital that and I saw other people tagging it and I was like even though we keep saying that's not our
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handle I was like we just need to go buy it and I was like we should buy it now before we get really big and because he's gonna want more money
30:15
but yeah I mean I I think it probably is worth in if you can no they say it doesn't make a difference for SEO and
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whether it's a.com or not but I think people expected.com and you probably get lose people but um but yeah so we did
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that we did a lot of searches on um like we searched the phrase or phrases of other names we were thinking
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about and we would go multiple Pages deep to try and figure out who else owns the space as far as choosing a name but
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then for the actual plug-in we went with we did a lot of keyword research and
30:52
like we talked about do we do something like excessive check which is like a combination but it's like a
30:57
trademarkable word right versus a phrase accessibility Checker isn't um
31:03
which I think could have been fine but then we also had things like like one of my partner Steve was like oh that sounds
31:08
like a like do we make checks like we're a banker or something like it's just not
31:13
clear what it is and when we first submitted the plugin to dot org with our
31:18
free version we did it without equaliz digital on the front and so our slug is so accessibility checker
31:26
and then we updated our name to include that so that we could have like the shorter slug which I don't know how much
31:33
that impacts excess um SEO but it seemed like it might be helpful
31:39
yeah like everything so there's an art and a science um and the biggest thing you know I always think is like you just want to
31:45
kind of think it through from both angles of the coin you want to do your due diligence and um when you're picking
31:51
a name you know it's a big decision and uh yeah but that at the end of the day you know you kind of have to just go
31:58
like use good problem solving and good critical thinking skills make a decision run with it and then reevaluate it and
32:05
you know evolve and change as needed um because yeah when you're starting business you certainly can't get
32:10
everything can't get it all right right out of the gate Lindsay I wanted to ask you for product
The future of SEO
32:18
owners who are thinking about the future of SEO uh could you talk about the changes that are going on right now with
32:25
how to optimize for current Google but also how to optimize for AI
32:31
absolutely so everything you know in in the 10 plus years I've worked in SEO I
32:38
feel like everyone talks about change and I've just seen it a sort of study Evolution and the name of the game has
32:43
still been the same thing this content and sort of building domain trust and authority and um and now all of a sudden
32:49
AI is here and for the first time I was like oh this is actually going to potentially change things up like it is
32:55
probably across anything and everything and in every industry space
33:00
um and so one of the things that we see with with AI well a couple of things the
33:05
most immediate is people want to know can I use AI to create content um so all of a sudden I have this idea
33:11
I'm going to go fire up today like 50 blog posts all generated by AI publish
33:16
them to my website and set my SEO aside and Magic poof and you know ultimately
33:22
Google still values content that has genuine expertise and experience and you
33:28
don't get experience and expertise in that like human value and when you think about a blog or a blog post a lot of
33:33
times they start with real world experience like if I read something about health I don't just want the what
33:39
why when why I want to know like a little bit of what the person's angle is did they have this problem too is this
33:45
something that they see in their Clinic all the time like who are they why are they writing about this and am I in the
33:51
right place do I trust this resource you're not going to get that from AI generated content so when it comes to AI
33:58
content and just like um it's it's a great accelerator for the implementation of SEO in your business
34:05
but we're leveraging it to accelerate things like creating an outline for a blog post or looking at things from
34:11
every angle like people wanted to talk about how to create more autumn nation in their digital agency and I thought
34:17
okay here's the automations I have I bet they're a trillion more out there I kind of want to know about them in categories
34:23
and so go to chatgpt and get the categorical you know view of it and then
34:29
figure out how you're going to approach it so we use it for research and writing outlines and then we use it for turning
34:36
content we did write ourselves from that outline generally speaking into like social media messages and stuff like
34:43
that and we're finding a lot of accelerators out of AI without it being
34:48
the like thing that makes it so I can publish 50 blog posts today um so in the short run when it comes to
34:57
Ai and SEO and content um that's just kind of one thing to consider but in the much bigger pictures
35:03
like well what is Google going to disappear um what's going to happen with this
35:08
search generative experience which you can actually get your hands on right now at a Google labs and you can see what
35:14
Google uh what Bing is doing with its Integrations with openai Etc and from what we're seeing right now is first of
35:21
all Google's not going to build in like AI in a way that takes everything away from businesses that's what we're
35:27
worried about right we work so hard to get traffic and build this blog post and then AI comes along and no one clicks on
35:34
our business link they just read the AI and the generative experience and then they move on to another search what
35:40
you'll see if you kind of start to play around with Google's you know search generative experience is that there are
35:46
still websites featured in the in the results and that not everybody is going
35:52
to trust the AI they are still going to want to go to authoritative websites on
35:57
the topic and we also you know you want to get in there and you're going to get
36:02
in there and get in that kind of box at the top by having the content that Google still trusts and leverages sort
36:09
of this AI world with its algorithm world and what it's built um into whatever the future of SEO looks
36:15
like so I guess it's a long-winded it's an evolution we're going to keep an eye we're not doing anything different
36:22
um Lee in our agency or at Pathfinder it's still business as usual um but it is in my mind's eye more of a
36:30
reason to invest in content and creating quality content not less because you think oh it'll just disappear that
36:37
traffic will just disappear for me in a year from now
What is the end goal
36:42
is more important so they can scrape it sooner and integrate it into future models
36:48
absolutely and always think about like well what is the end I'll be all of I work with a lot of people in travel and
36:53
so they're like well if I create the top things to do blog posts and it's doing really well and then Google or you know
37:00
then AI just lists it and the generative experience and then somebody moves on and they just search for lodging or
37:06
hotels or whatever like help me plan my trip like roll right but isn't your end goal ultimately to bring this person to
37:13
this place and to get them to book lodging and to get them to book with you and they're like yeah I'm like so we might lose that click it's possible that
37:20
we will lose our things to do traffic um but and and that's one measure of
37:26
success but our bigger measure of success is lodging bookings and nights and revenue Etc and right now I don't
37:32
see AI threatening that that top part I see it threatening potentially some of the the traffic piece but if the AI does
37:40
a good job and is trained up and it still brings the person to that destination it just accelerates them
37:45
into the transaction um and you're there for the transaction then there's value there so I don't know
37:52
to me uh it's an evolution we're watching and it won't be the same for every business um but I also trust that Google's not
37:58
going to just become all AI because they want to protect their ad revenue and
38:03
their ad Revenue requires somebody to click on and go to a website
38:08
yeah I mean I think there were some concerns in the beginning when they introduced answer boxes that that was
38:15
going to and and certainly it does right like you know if you want to translate something you don't have to go to a
38:21
website anymore you can type it in and it won't do that so maybe if you were a publisher that was relying on ad Revenue
38:27
in that way but I think for like product owners it's very unlikely that
38:33
um the AI search will stop people from coming to your website because
38:39
I feel like even the answers it returns every time I play around like with Chad gbt or something like that I'm I'm kind
38:46
of underwhelmed and from like a technical standpoint when it tries to summarize things and so I feel like
38:53
maybe it will provide some answers but especially like if you look at things right like it will frequently link two
39:00
sources if you play around with their um chat search uh and so I think the people
39:06
that are more likely to become a customer are probably going they might
39:11
use it to figure out where to go but they're going to go to the website absolutely I think one of the things
Longer queries
39:18
that also we will see the evolution of how people enter keyword phrases into Google we'll see that evolve so you can
39:25
think about how we all used to search on Google like two three four sometimes like five or six you know word phrases
39:30
now I watch my kids do everything with voice and their searches are like ridiculously long
39:36
um but I also put in much longer queries than I used to and so with um the
39:42
introduction of AI and and SEO you start to also be able to add context to get more Nuance into your answers so before
39:48
I would put top things to do you know in summer in whatever the destination was
39:53
if I was trying to plan a trip but with AI I might start to put in the who for
39:59
families or four you know my honeymoon or whatever it might be you're going to
40:04
add context and in this space in in the WordPress product space you can imagine someone's trying to make a decision on a
40:11
plug-in there are multiple plugins in a space and they're trying to decide which one is best in the old days we you just
40:16
just put plug in one versus plug in 2 or plug in one or plug into and you read a
40:21
couple of things and then you move on and make your decision now I can imagine people are going to put in other things
40:27
like if cost is a factor if I have 10 websites if accessibility is my primary
40:33
goal or you're going to start to see this evolving nature and so the more
40:38
content you create I would say also that's very specific and puts that little audience in mind or kind of takes
40:45
a very specific angle may also be a benefit because I suspect that's the direction people will start to go with
40:51
their queries so you think product owners should be writing more detailed content targeted
40:58
to those longer queries so I'd be like how accessibility Checker is cheaper than other Solutions or something
41:03
something like that or or whatever it might be like trying to figure out what people are searching and writing really
41:09
long tail articles about our products for that specific angle it depends a
How to integrate content
41:16
little bit um you know how you integrate that content depends a little bit on on how
41:21
specific you're going so whenever you're deciding you know and you're getting specific it's like is the whole topic specific
41:28
um or should this be like an FAQ or a section of an existing post so if you
41:33
are going like really narrow you're probably getting to the place where it should be a section or an FAQ question
41:40
on an existing post whereas when you have something a little bit broader you can actually start to
41:46
um you know write that content so if it's this versus this for digital agency
41:51
owners or for you know whatever your space is um you know then that's going to be a
41:57
whole article but if you're starting to get really really specific and you feel like it's a stretch like the content
42:03
doesn't add a lot of value you're just trying to get words in there then it's probably a section of a of a post or a
42:09
page or something else well I wonder too um you know there's a lot with SEO
42:15
that's off-site kind of stuff uh how important it is because if we think
42:21
about best exployan for WordPress there's probably a handful of really popular websites out there that aren't
42:28
product websites right like wpbeginner or other sites like that that have articles like that that already show up
42:34
in page one and so rather than trying to write our own content for that like
42:39
maybe a better approach is trying to approach those websites and be like hey my plugin exists now it didn't before
42:46
would you update this article and include does that sound like a good strategy absolutely and so you know you
42:54
you see this opportunity and that's just PR and you're like actually my business should be mentioned here they they wrote
43:01
this when we weren't around or were small and so they wrote it about the three big players and we want them to
43:06
expand it it's very likely that that business wants to protect its traffic and the way it's going to protect is
43:12
going to be to evolve that content over time so if it was written two years ago it's probably due a refresh and that's
43:19
going to benefit its own legs and its search results and so reaching out to
43:25
that author and saying hey the next time you revise this post would you consider
43:30
including us and then giving them the talking points kind of formatted in the same way like make it easy on their
43:36
copywriters and say like hey and here are the you know based on the format of
43:42
this here's what we think our pros and cons are in this space and like you did the work for them that publisher is
43:47
going to be psyched because you just added value to their content and you took work off their plate and that is
43:53
oftentimes a better play than writing your same thing especially in the best space and trying to feature yourself as
44:00
best like it just doesn't really work very very clearly and so yeah that's a
44:05
great strategy and then rinsing and repeating that and say well there's 10 articles that are best whatever it is
44:11
and make sure that you kind of go and give that pitch to all 10 of them yeah so maybe this is a good transition
44:17
into our best advice for new product owners on the SEO front Zach do you want
44:23
to start yeah sure um so I think that in thinking about SEO
What to do before you launch your product
44:31
before you launch your product if you have a product in mind right now start writing content for it put it on a
44:38
website get it indexed and you don't have to have the product live yet you can talk about developing your product
44:44
like developing in public and each one of those posts that you write about your product on is going to help you
44:51
establish your domain help you establish your keywords help you rank when you do
44:56
actually launch that product so the second you have your idea if it's right now uh go register a domain if you don't
45:03
have one start writing content right now and describing the products that you're gonna the problems that you're going to
45:09
solve with your product uh in language that people would describe it to you I'm trying to do this and it can't do that
45:15
write an article about it and start right now and you can rank for a keyword before you even have a product to sell
45:21
and including not just on your own website but going to places like Reddit
45:27
and stack Overflow and responding becoming an expert there and saying hey I've got this product that I already
45:33
have or that I'm about to build um check it out so SEO is not just on your
45:39
website like I think Amber was just saying it's also um at places where people go to search for answers search engine optimization
45:46
optimize it by going wherever people are asking the questions and answering them there
45:54
yeah Lindsay what about you what's your top advice for WordPress product owners so I think that's a really great one
Top advice for WordPress product owners
46:00
from Zach and a hard one to follow of course but uh you know I'd go with writing down your target audience on a
46:06
Post-It note so it stays top of mind while you're investing in SEO that
46:11
little dislike always reminder and to focus your initial content in your initial strategy on their problems so
46:19
people go to Google and they search for problems there's always search volume there and so identifying what it is that
46:25
they're searching for sometimes by just going to Google and like starting a query and seeing how the search suggests
46:30
comes in is going to be really great fodder for all of this kind of initial building that Zach's talking about of
46:36
like just get going with it early before your product's even live because the sooner you get out there you'll start to
46:42
build some trust and Authority out of that content and you'll start to just build that build that long-term value
46:49
that snowball accumulation effect and down the road if your audience shifts a little little you might be able to just
46:55
pivot your content a bit you may you don't have to throw it all away you can just go back and revise content to be
47:01
more targeted towards the Right audience Etc but audience first is really a big
47:07
part of where Google's going to is we want you to be helpful to people online and you do that by knowing who those
47:13
people are yeah yeah I think for me one of the the
Im not a writer
47:18
biggest pieces that I would add to all of that especially for a product owner that's like I'm not a writer this feels
47:24
really daunting is we spend a lot of time talking about how we could generate
47:29
content that was trustworthy without having to put as much effort into it and
47:36
and one of the the key points on that is that at my company I am the person
47:42
outside of now we have an accessibility specialist but outside of them I'm the person who
47:48
knows the most about accessibility and uh are of course our Dev team does but
47:55
they're busy building things they're not right they're not writing they're right they're writing code not words copy
48:02
um and and then we have a Content specialist but she's not an accessibility expert or someone who's
48:09
really studied accessibility in depth and so for us it was a challenge on the blog post front because we were thinking
48:17
we don't want to you know our content specialist is a great writer but I don't want her putting out information that is
48:23
incorrect about accessibility because that could damage our reputation and then it and then it became I was a
48:28
bottleneck and that was one of the things that led us to starting our Meetup because we were like you know
48:34
what we can do we can run the Meetup we record the meetups and then after the
48:39
fact if you go look at our blog it's almost 90 meetups because this is the easiest way to get content that doesn't
48:45
require me to be a bottleneck on the content so we have other people come and speak we record we have a video we get
48:53
full we get corrected captions and a full transcript that's corrected by a human being it's investment we pay a
48:59
transcription company to do that um but that gets us some very long form
49:04
content that is helpful to users um on that front and so I think there
49:10
are ways you could look at it if you're like I'm not a great writer well you know maybe you can do videos and then
49:18
you could have someone else who is good at summarizing the video write a summary for the video and they don't have to be
49:24
the expert in code or whatever it is that your product sells or even your product but they just have to be good at
49:30
summarizing a video um and we've done this with some of our clients back when we were doing a lot
49:35
more of this is we would be like if a case study like we just say all right let's just get on a zoom call and you
49:40
can answer all these questions for us you know what is your what is the challenge who was the customer what was
49:47
your approach and how do you solve it and they just talk and then you go write it down right and so I think that there's maybe some creative ways that
49:53
you can go about producing the content um without having to feel like you have
49:58
to sit down in front of a computer and write 1500 words
50:04
so uh I think yeah do you have thoughts about that
50:10
I I was gonna I was gonna wrap up
50:15
all right well thank you Lindsay uh let's see if Pathfinder SEO
50:21
um so next week join us because we're going to be discussing uh customer Centric support enhancing the WordPress
50:28
product experience with special guest Jack Arturo of WP Fusion so come join us
50:33
for that and special thanks to post status for being our Green Room hit like And
50:41
subscribe and all those helpful things on YouTube to help us and we'll see you
50:46
here next week thank you all thanks Lindsay