I have been blogging since 2008, and to be honest with you I really didn't think strategically about blogging since fairly recently when I started talking about the freshness of content on episode 129 almost two years ago. Since then I have come to realize the mistakes of my own blog as well as those that I have helped in a variety of capacities over the years. Since Google is the biggest digital influencer of them all, I wanted to share with you the 11 blogging mistakes that I see businesses make yet very few podcasters or people in the blogosphere talk about. I hope after listening to this episode you will have a much more strategic look at blogging and how impactful it can be for your business.
For those of you interested in my fractional / outsourced CMO service, please contact me here: https://nealschaffer.com/contact/
Episodes mentioned in the show:
160: SEO and Social: Honing the Skills Needed for a Modern Marketer [Cyrus Shepard Interview]
137: How To Optimize Your Blog Posts For Higher Search Rankings And Stay Ahead Of The Competition
129: How Fresh is Your Content?
Key Highlights
[04:57] Three Areas of Digital and Social Media Marketing
[08:23] The Base of Digital Influence
[11:10] How to Perform Keyword Research
[13:51] How to Perform Search Intent
[15:35] Why Blogging One Topic is Better than Random Things
[21:03] Mistake #4
[22:41] Mistake #5
[24:08] Mistake #6
[26:44] Keyword Stuffing
[31:43] Why You Need to Find Strategic Keyword
Notable Quotes
Links mentioned:
SEMrush: https://nealschaffer.com/semrush [affiliate link]
The Blogging Millionaire on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-blogging-millionaire/id1072931592
Ahrefs study on blog traffic: https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/
The 10 Best Social Media Marketing Podcasts to Listen to in 2020: https://nealschaffer.com/best-social-media-marketing-podcasts/
Yoast SEO Plugin:
Learn More:
I have been blogging since 2008, and to be honest with you I really didn't think strategically about blogging since fairly recently when I started talking about the freshness of content on episode 129 almost two years ago. Since then I have come to realize the mistakes of my own blog as well as those that I have helped in a variety of capacities over the years. Since Google is the biggest digital influencer of them all, I wanted to share with you the 11 blogging mistakes that I see businesses make yet very few podcasters or people in the blogosphere talk about. I hope after listening to this episode you will have a much more strategic look at blogging and how impactful it can be for your business.
For those of you interested in my fractional / outsourced CMO service, please contact me here: https://nealschaffer.com/contact/
Episodes mentioned in the show:
160: SEO and Social: Honing the Skills Needed for a Modern Marketer [Cyrus Shepard Interview]
137: How To Optimize Your Blog Posts For Higher Search Rankings And Stay Ahead Of The Competition
129: How Fresh is Your Content?
Key Highlights
[04:57] Three Areas of Digital and Social Media Marketing
[08:23] The Base of Digital Influence
[11:10] How to Perform Keyword Research
[13:51] How to Perform Search Intent
[15:35] Why Blogging One Topic is Better than Random Things
[21:03] Mistake #4
[22:41] Mistake #5
[24:08] Mistake #6
[26:44] Keyword Stuffing
[31:43] Why You Need to Find Strategic Keyword
Notable Quotes
Links mentioned:
SEMrush: https://nealschaffer.com/semrush [affiliate link]
The Blogging Millionaire on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-blogging-millionaire/id1072931592
Ahrefs study on blog traffic: https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study/
The 10 Best Social Media Marketing Podcasts to Listen to in 2020: https://nealschaffer.com/best-social-media-marketing-podcasts/
Yoast SEO Plugin:
Learn More:
Are you looking to build more digital influence than you should be starting by trying to influence the biggest digital influencer of the mall? That my friends is Google. And I'm going to give you some advice on the blogging mistakes that I see businesses making, and hopefully some input that's going to help your blog, help you and your business yield more Digital Influence. Stay tuned for Episode number 177. Welcome to the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help marketers, entrepreneurs and business owners grow their businesses using innovative marketing techniques, leveraging the concept of digital influence throughout digital and social media. Hey, everybody, welcome to episode number 177 of the maximize your social influence podcast. I am your host, Neal Schaffer, how are you today, I am at the end of a three day holiday weekend here in the United States called Labor Day. And I couldn't think of a better way to take a day off work to celebrate Labor Day, then to record this podcast to all of you, because this is my labor of love, right? You know, content creation, and it's a central theme in yielding more influence for people for business. It can be quite lonely. You know, some formats like Instagram, you get immediate gratification with likes, I suppose with podcasts, you get downloads, but without your reviews, without your comments without just an email saying, hey, Neil, I love that episode. It's pretty lonely up here. So anyway, I'd love your feedback whenever you feel inspired to give it to me. But today, I am inspired to give you all feedback based on my career, my experiences, and all the different clients that I have helped with their digital and social media marketing. And I really want to focus today for this episode number 177. On blogging, some of you I have been in touch with you regarding the age of influence, have already started to make a few announcements that I'm already conceptualizing my next book, and I'm actually trying to get closure on the age of influence for me closure is, is hitting certain KPIs. If you listen to my episode of two weeks ago, episode number 175. I talked about getting that KPI of being able to be interviewed on 100 different podcasts. And I'm on target for that, by the way. In fact, you know what, maybe I should just give you a little update there since we're on the subject here. So right now I actually have 64 different episodes have been published, and 34 are already scheduled to be recorded, or have been recorded. So hey, I'm on target. And I'm really happy about that. The other KPI I have is Amazon reviews, I have another KPI for podcast reviews. But those people that go out of the way to review my book on Amazon, are going to be part of a secret VIP list that I'm going to hold close to my heart that Well, I think good things are gonna come their way in the future, especially as I write new books, embark on new projects, including the group coaching that I've been working on for a long time, hopefully going to implement that soon. So it's a great opportunity. If you've read the book, I'd really be honored if you would leave a sentence or two on Amazon. And if you do, let me know, you don't even have to use your name. Just send me an email saying, Hey, I was whatever. And I will remember I do make a list of all those people that have reviewed my book, and it really is an honor and those that I consider my biggest fan. So if you're wondering, I have a lot of people say, Neil, you've helped me so much. How can I help you? That's it. That's to me, that's gold. So I'll stop there. But part of the thought process around my next book is and we've talked about it before in this podcast, you have Coronavirus, right, we have a pandemic. And things are different. And I think we all know, well, there's going to be a vaccine sometime maybe in the next month or two if we believe politicians, and maybe in the next six months to two years if we believe the medical profession, especially if we believe those that think that even the first or second instances of a virus are not going to have the sort of success rate that influenza virus has or vaccine, I should say. And even the influenza vaccine, as we know is not 100%. So I do believe that as a marketer, as a business, that this is the way things are gonna go for some time. In fact, as I've mentioned before in this podcast, really we're just seeing an acceleration of this digital transformation that people have always been digital first. And now businesses are forced to be digital first. So when we think about digital, right, how do we engage with our customers? How do we find new clients? It comes down to digital and social media is actually part of inside that digital right. And what are the three areas it's Google Search, right? It's email, and it's social. So I've talked a few times about blogging on this podcast because it is important for digital and social media marketing, obviously, we start with episode number 129, where I was going through my old blog content realizing that I had content of that we're talking about things like Google Plus and StumbleUpon. And maybe if you've been back to the archives of this podcast, you've seen me a podcast about I even had a podcast episode about ello, believe it or not, but episode number 129, I really look at this idea about the freshness of content, and it becomes sort of a pillar of mine. I extend upon that in episode number 137, where I talk about how to optimize your blog posts for higher search rankings and stay ahead of the competition. And I really unveil my own internal process of doing this, which I have maintained course on, and I have seen very positive results from and then more recently, episode number 160, I did an interview with Cyrus Shepard and advisor over at Moz, one of the leading SEO tools, talking about SEO and social honing the skills needed for a modern marketer. So if you want to get more deeper education from me on the subject, I urge you to go back and listen to those previous episodes. But today, as I work with my clients, and I think I mentioned this before, but a lot of the work I do these days is more like fraction or outsource cmo work. So I'm sort of on the team at clients, anywhere from an hour a week to a day a week, literally as their VP of marketing director of marketing or marketing advisor, whatever you want to call it. And just over the last few weeks, and even with my own blog, I've just become more aware of issues that I don't see a lot of people podcasting about or blogging about. Because you see, whenever you listen to someone about blogging, it's always like, the more the merrier, right? Oh, you have a podcast, you should make a blog out of every transcription. And and just this idea that just you know, the more you blog mysteriously, the more traffic you get, the more business you get. And I'm going to break it down to you because it does not work that way whatsoever. And maybe you're nodding your head. But here's the thing, right? When we talk about digital and social media influence, there was no one more influential than Google. Email is up to you, you need to build your list, you need to realize how to engage with your list best to generate revenue. Social, yes, there are algorithms, they're split across many, many different social networks, right? Some we can control some we can't control email, there's no paid component, unless you want to buy suspicious lists and be reported for spam. With social obviously, there is a paid social component and width search, there is a paid component with pay per click. But you know, I've been saying this a lot recently, Google is the biggest digital influencer, Google can deliver so much to your company, right? Would you rather get likes on an Instagram post or actual traffic back to your website, I would take the traffic assuming it's relevant. And assuming my website was optimized, especially if it's on a subject, that's going to vet that person as being someone that's interested in my products or services. So therefore, and because email, normally, you build a list through lead magnets on your website. And social media requires content that often comes from content that you build on your website. So whenever I work with a client, even if they hire me, as a consultant for influencer marketing, for social media marketing, for email marketing, I always start with the blog with the website, that is the starting point that is the base of all of your Digital Influence. And that's why I'm really excited about today's episode, because I think it's really, really important. And like I said, these are things that I didn't read anywhere. And although I'm one of the 10 points I'm going to talk about I was influenced by another podcast recently. But these are just things I've learned from experience that and I'd like I said, Episode 137, I go into more detail. But today, I just want to skim over these 10 areas. And you know, you may be doing all these perfectly, I don't know. But even if one of these 10 areas gives you some inspiration to optimize what you're doing, I'll be really happy. And I'd love it. If you reached out to me and let me know which of these you already knew about what you didn't know about. Right? So I'm going to start with my own blog. And once again, number 137. I talked a lot about this, but this is an error. I see many, many bloggers making the error is blogging without keyword research. And if I was to think about on site, I'm no SEO expert. I'm gonna give you a disclaimer right there. But if I was to think about on site SEO, well, if I was just thinking about SEO in general, I'd say keyword research is probably 1/3 of it, of trying to understand where you might be able to rank for compared to your competitors, or thing keywords that are related to your product or service that you may not even thought of that a lot of people search for. Whereas the titles of your blog posts and No one is searching for right. So 1/3 keyword research 1/3, the actual content creation, and then 1/3 Trying to get backlinks to that piece of content, which could include just exposure in social media, you know, the promotion of it. But there's also a lot of other things involved in and that's, that's a completely different subject for another podcast, perhaps, in fact, we do have a podcast episode on that. In fact, while I'm talking to you, let me just go back in history here so that we can make sure to put it in the podcast notes. That would be where we talked with my friend from response. And that was in episode number 164, how to skyrocket your qualified organic traffic, you'll want to listen to that, if you want targeted advice on the subject of generating more website traffic. But needless to say, the keyword research is something that a lot of bloggers don't do, I did not do it for the first 10 years of my blogging career. Hey, you know, you're coming along for the journey. And I'm telling like it is and you know, what I thought I was doing okay, and this is the thing, this is actually, I think the 10th thing I'm going to talk about is complacency with your blogging, but you need to do the keyword research. Now I work with guest bloggers. And, you know, I get a lot of guest blog pitches, and I do a search now the tool that I use, and I'm gonna link it up in the show notes, which is the description for this podcast episode for those that aren't familiar with the term. And I use a tool called sem rush. There are other tools out there, I think sem Rush is is the best. So we can put in a keyword and say, okay, in the United States on a desktop, how many average monthly searches do we get? And what I find time and time again, is that a lot of people are blogging for keywords that people are just not searching for. Now. They sound like great titles. But if no one's searching for them, guess what, once again, Google is the biggest influencer, Google generates an overwhelming majority of my traffic. I have over 500,000 social media followers spread across networks, right? No One Out close Google? Well, you remember that? I know it's different. I know. There's some some sites that might get more from social than Google. But the potential for website traffic from Google has to supersede any social network. In fact, probably all of them combined. So with that in mind, we have to do keyword research, if we want to get that traffic. And here's what I do. And I do this to clients, I do them on my own website. So let's say and I'll give you very real example. I want to be found for influencer marketing. I want to own keywords related to influencer marketing, because I wrote a book on the subject, right? That's it goes without saying that I want to try to own those results. So the initial part of keyword research is, well, what are the top now I make a list of 52? Okay, if I could blog on this weekly over the course of a year, I'll have my content. Maybe there's only 26 strategic keywords, maybe there's more. If you stick to 52, you have a weekly editorial calendar for a year, that's not bad. Now within the 52 Not all of them are relevant for my product or my service for me for my website, what have you. So you want to find the 52 that are relevant. And you also want to find the 52 that don't have too much overlap. Like there's social media influencer, there's social media influencers, there's Instagram influencer. So for me a social media influencer is a more general topic, Instagram influencer, obviously is focused on Instagram, we're a social media influencers has no value. And if you rank for social media influencer, that same post might rank for social media influencers. And this actually brings up the second point, and this is a new one, this is going to become the 11 mistakes now, instead of 10, that I see a lot of businesses making this is something called search intent. And what search intent means it's very simple. You go over to Google, if you want to be careful, go into incognito mode on Google Chrome or private mode on Firefox, or Safari or whatever you use him and do a search for that keyword. What comes up on the first page, this is going to give you a good idea as to when people put in that keyword, this is the type of content that they're looking for. Your content may be irrelevant to that. In that case, you may not want to target that keyword. Always, once you confirm the keyword volumes, and you want to obviously try to go for high volume keywords. I'm going to talk about that a little bit later as to what is a high volume, what is a low volume. But I really want you to look at search intent because Google has spent a lot of money and a lot of time trying to surface the best content on the first page, or I should say the content that people actually click on. So that's going to give you a really good idea. A real good sanity check on each one of these keywords to determine Yeah, I can write content, my content should be up there. Right. I can write about this. This is what people are looking for. And my contents better. This is a perfect scenario for you to write a blog post on that keyword. Once you have your 52 keywords, okay, you put them in a tool that has tracking like sem rush does. And literally on a well, I tend to follow it on a daily basis, but it becomes a KPI in terms of your search visibility. And you're always trying to get all of those posts into well, sem rush begins with the top 100. Obviously, you want to be first page, that is going to be almost impossible unless you're called Wikipedia. But get as many of those in the first page as possible. It begins with ranking in the top 100. So sem rush will give you a score top 100. And you know, right now, there are 52 keywords in influencer marketing, I'm targeting I'm ranking the top 100 for 35. And this is something I just started doing about a year ago. So this is what's possible. In fact, I'm really proud because one of my posts based on this that I published just a few weeks ago is already ranking number two, no joke. So what happens is, the reason I like to pick one topic, like influencer marketing, is you want to build authority in that topic in Google's eyes, you want that to outweigh other content on your blog on your website. If you're blogging about random things, then Google doesn't know what you're an authority on. If you have if you serve one market with one product, one service one industry, and you focus on that keyword, and Google sees you creating a lot of content around that. And that content, you know, social signals, there's obviously a lot that goes into this, right? There's social signals, there's the actual quality of the content, when people come on, how long are they staying? What's the bounce rate, there's a lot of factors that go into it. But if they find that you have an authority in a certain subject, it's going to be easier for you to rank on that subject with new blog posts. This is what I've found. This is especially what I'm finding right now with influencer marketing. So just something to think about. Because I've seen in certain niche subjects, companies that only blog about that subject are hitting really, really high in the organic search results, because other people are sort of all over the place. Which isn't to say if you're all over the place, you're not going to rank because in the world of social media, there are still sites at HubSpot, Social Media Examiner, etc, etc, that have just tremendous authority, that still will rank. But it's going to be easier over time, I believe, for you to compete, if you can stick with a niche like that, and create a lot of content around that. Now, if you've done that, we get to the mistake number two. So let's say over the course of you know, hopefully by January, February next year, I'm going to have all 52 posts created, hopefully, they're all going to be ranked in the top 100 How do I get as many of them to rank in the top 10. Now this is going to go back to episode number 137, which I really hope that you'll listen after this, because I talk about how blogging is a war. So here's what's going to happen I ranked number two for a post, there are 10s if not hundreds of 1000s of companies that are doing the same thing that want to compete for that keyword, and they're gonna come back at me they're gonna see why rank they're gonna do an analysis, they're gonna try to write a better post, and they're gonna do their best to to improve upon. And especially when I look at my posts, like the top influencer marketing statistics, the top influencer marketing tools, this is content that's evergreen. But every year, there's going to be new blog posts that are going to say the best things for 2021. For 2022, it is going to be a never ending battle. And therefore, at some point, you might already have enough content. At some point, you need to shift into maintenance mode, you need to shift into republishing old content that's now revised for today. So I'm already starting to shift to a republishing editorial calendar, probably in the fall, because the fall and the winter is normally when you create posts for 2021. So all these, you know, best posts for 2020, they will become republished into 2021 posts. And what I used to do, because I didn't know any better is every year, I'd publish a new post best social media books 2009 of 2010 of 2000. They were all competing each other. But if you create one URL, which is best social media books, and every year you republish to that URL, using a new publishing date, you maintain the backlinks, you maintain the authority, and you get a new date. And this is what people are doing. This is what my competition is doing may not be so much in other spaces out there. But I do believe that once you get the content out there, you need to shift may not be 100% in a maintenance mode. And I'm not saying I'm going to do 100% either, but some of it into maintenance mode and then guess what? It's a lot easier. Then you have your 1000 word content. The next year you make it 2000 words and 3000 words and over time. They become really, really solid content that you build upon. Instead of always trying to reinvent the wheel. What's the call to the content hamster wheel You don't have to be on that other time, if you switch part of it the maintenance mode. So you need to maintain your old posts, obviously, irrelevant posts, you need to get rid of my Google Plus stumbleupon, digg, ello God now podcast, I leave them in there, I think it's, it's almost like a historical artifact to be able to listen that stuff. But as far as your blog, where you're competing, and you don't want Google to see that you have a lot of old and irrelevant content on your website, either, right? So who I didn't realize this was gonna be a T, MIDI and beefy episode, but we've only done two, or I should say three, because I threw another one in there. So let's go on to number four. And a lot of what I'm going to be talking about now is work that I've done with various clients over my career, and I can't name company names, obviously. But anyway, just to give you you know, examples of how I know these things are happening. The fourth one, so the number one was blogging without keyword research, right? Number two was not looking at search intent before finalizing that that's the keyword you should go for. Number three was not maintaining old posts. Number four, you're only being found for branded keywords. I have a lot of clients like this, right? They're getting web traffic, they might be building a list getting some ecommerce sales, but at the end of the day, when we review their content, an overwhelming majority of traffic comes from branded keywords, meaning keywords that are the company name or the product name. And guess what we look at their competitors, their competitors are getting a ton of content for non branded content. So my website Neal Schaffer calm is full of non branded content, that's where I'm getting all the traffic, the demand for traffic for the keyword Neal Schaffer, or the age of influence or maximize your social or windmill networking or maximize social business, any one of these brands or books that I have is nothing is minuscule compared to the traffic for influencer marketing trends, influencer marketing tips, influencer marketing tools, I think you get the picture. And it's really the same in any industry. So you need to have non branded content. And this goes into, you know, the whole idea of a blog is it's giving your company a social voice, it's allowing you to build influence with Google, by blogging on content that people are actually searching for. This is resourceful content, that may not be directly related to your products and services. Hopefully it is. But even if it's indirectly related, if it can bring people into your sphere of influence, you've already had some success. So a lot of companies that have not blogged just do not have non branded content. And therefore, they're getting very little from Google organic search outside of them being found for their brand and keywords. And I want to help you fix that. Number five, some companies are being outranked for their branded keywords. Now, if you're a pretty niche b2b company, I don't see this happening. But if you sell through distributors, or partners, or if you're an E commerce and you sell on Amazon, or on Walmart on eBay, your branded keywords, the names, your company and product might just be out ranked by these places. Now, this might be okay for some of you. For others, where you want to be the top ranking, you want people to come to your website, first, where you have control, you might need to have more product content. And what I mean by this is, your product pages may not be enough, or they might not have enough content on them. Or you have a product for which you, you have five different products that you put on one page, instead of maybe creating five pages for each one of the products so that when someone searches for it, Google says, Oh, this page is all about this product, I should be sending traffic here, this should appear in the search results. Now, the great thing about this is you can mix this product content as part of your non branded content. The beautiful thing is, the more product content you have, the more you can link to internally from your non branded blog content to your product pages. Make sense? I hope so. Alright, I just want to make sure I get all of this without you tuning out. So let's keep going here. Number six, targeting low volume keywords. So I mentioned sem rush will give you a number of the average monthly searches on either desktop or mobile for any country in the world. So I use United States. And what I found is if you really want to target a minimum volume, like I said, Nobody taught me this. And one of the podcasts I listen to I'm going to give a shout out to Brandon Gailey, I believe is his last name at the blogging millionaire, my favorite blogging podcast that you should be listening to. It's included in my list of top marketing podcasts, which I'm going to be revising soon, but I'm going to put a link to both his podcast and that blog posted in the show notes as well. He recommends 100 I will cut off at 50. Okay, what this means is that you're targeting keywords that have a minimum of 50 monthly visitors on us desktop. If you throw in US mobile, if you throw in Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, you know, English speaking countries in Europe, English speakers in Asia and Africa, there's obviously more demand than just the 50. But I think it's a really, really good cut off. And in fact, when I work with my clients, I had to inform some of them that that's, that's the cutoff that we're going to target going forward. Depending on your industry, there may be tons of keywords that are at least 50. For one of my clients who were very a niche b2b client, you know, it made it so that there were fewer keywords. But guess what, if there are 52 keywords, then that's enough, you don't need to have 500 blog posts. So that would be my recommendation. And if you don't see enough keywords, you may want to think a little bit more broader in your non branded content approach. So that maybe you can targets, more popular keywords with related keywords to your product or service. Once again, this is an art my friends, this is not going to be something that you're immediately going to be able to find. If if you're interested, I mean, I'll let you know at the end of this podcast as well. But this is something that I work with, with companies on this outsource fractional cmo basis. So feel free to contact me, you'll know where to find me, but I'll mention this at the end as well. So we're just going to keep on going. So I make sure I get through all these so that this podcast doesn't turn out to be outrageously long. We are now up to number seven. Now one of my clients was blogging a lot. And some of their content was getting ranked. Some of it wasn't. Now a lot of the stuff they were targeting where they were one of the ones that were targeting a lot of keywords that were less than 50. So I did a little bit of research, you know, into their content. And I was finding really, really long blog posts that had a lot of keywords in them. Okay, we call this keyword stuffing. Now, what I noticed was, and this is a search that maybe you know, maybe you don't know, but if you do cite si te colon, and this is in Google Chrome, site, colon, Neal schaffer.com, or whatever URL, you put a space and then in quotes, you put a keyword, you should see the content from your blog posts come up for that keyword, whatever is relevant. I put in the exact title of my client's blog posts. And they were not appearing anywhere in Google. What this is telling me is that Google did not index that content, even though it was a brilliant article. And this is in the 1000s of words. We're not talking about a 100 to 100 page blog post here. But I noticed that it just seemed unnatural. How many mentions of the keyword there were. Now interestingly enough, I'm going to give another shout out to the blogging Millionaire podcast because this is where I first heard it on a recent episode, and I looked it up. It's actually from RF, which is you have Moz, you have sem rush you have RFC has been the three leading SEO tools. And RFC had a report that says, and this is pretty incredible. But this talks to the state of blogging and SEO today, 90.63% of all pages in their index, got zero traffic from Google. Can you imagine investing in blogging and then getting no traffic from Google? Wouldn't that suck? I think it would. And this speaks to a lot of reasons. I think part of it is not doing the keyword research. But another one is even if you do do the keyword research, you might be doing things wrong. Some of it is like the meta title, meta description. Other parts, it's just if Google sees that your keyword stuffing, this is an indication, they're just not going to index your content. They're just not going to serve it up. And here's the thing that really scared me when I saw this is that Yoast, which is the SEO plugin, we'll put that in the show notes as well, that everybody uses and WordPress will not warn you. If you go overboard if you go excessively overboard and may get a warning. But my client was basically using a keyword every I want to say 50 or so words they were using. So in other words in a 1000 word blog post, it would have been mentioned like 20 times, right? That's really excessive. But when I went back into Yoast, there was no red flag on that. So here's my rule. One keyword, every 200 to 300 words is probably natural. If you're writing a 2000 word, blog post, that is seven to 10 times. And guess what, on a recent blog post that I ranked for. I mentioned, maybe once every 1000 words, I mentioned the keyword and I still rank for it. So actually, the fewer instances of that keyword that you can use, probably the more natural the language looks to Google. And the more you might get higher rankings with with that aspect of the Google algorithm. Another rule I would try not to use the same keyword more than once in the same paragraph. So if you are in Chrome, after you finish your blog post, just do a search on the screen for the keyword. And with Chrome, it actually like highlighted or light up where that keywords mentioned. And if you see it, you know, mentioned twice in the same paragraph, just delete one. And I think that'd be an easy way, if you're worried about keyword stuffing, that you can reduce the number of keywords while still maintaining the integrity of your content, something I highly recommend you do. Because I want to make sure that all the content you're publishing is actually getting indexed, then guess what, it doesn't happen all the time, which partly explains this 90% of blog posts not getting any traffic from Google. Alright, number eight. Number eight is you might just not be producing enough product content. Now I know there's a lot of cool sites out there where they just have one page of content that describes everything. I would rather you have a few pages of content that describes features, benefits, products, services, that then you can create Cornerstone content for for each one of those keywords that you can then link to from all your blog posts. Make sense? So you want to make sure you have enough product content trying to rank for, and there are pages that can rank for dozens, if not hundreds of keywords, I just think you're gonna have a better chance of ranking for distinctly different keywords, if you have a different page for that keyword. And if these are products that you sell, you probably want to rank for the product page versus a blog page if you could, right. All right, number nine. So there are some of you that may be thinking you're already getting lots of traffic from Google. Congratulations, I am too, right. But I tell you that there are still tons of opportunities out there to get even more traffic from Google to increase by 10% 20% 50% to double. And it goes back to that strategic keyword research. And specifically, you know, I have a client that has one really, really big competitor in the space. And it's really hard to outrank them, which they do for some keywords. But we're focusing on the keywords where that strategic competitor does not show up where the competition are domains with lesser authority. So find strategic keywords where your competitors aren't, is the advice here. Now, this is somewhat related to this. But if you're getting a lot of traffic, and your means you're already probably ranking well for some keywords, I see a lot of companies paying Pay Per Click bids, where they already own the top 10 search result, or the top three search result, which to me, I get it because your competitors are probably going to appear above that. But if you really want to optimize your pay per click spend, I would start with those that you don't rank in the top 10 For and therefore you know that you're at least going to appear on page one. And it gives you incentive to create better organic contents that organically you appear on the top 10. And hopefully that saves you money, when in doing so in being able to reduce Pay Per Click budget, or be able to refine it for other keywords. Now, if those top keywords that you're organically ranking for are also giving you the best ROI from your pay per click, by all means keep doing what you're doing. But if you're looking for ways to optimize, that would be the first place that I look. And finally, finally, finally, number 11. And I sort of hinted at this earlier, but no matter how much traffic you get, there's probably way more you could be getting. So don't be complacent with lots of volume. Now I had a client, well, I still have the client, but they get tons of traffic, right. But when we did some domain research, in SEM rush, it turns out, they're getting like 1/10 of the traffic from organic search that a few of their competitors are getting and that they were losing on strategic keywords. It's a good sanity check to run this sort of audit using sem rush. And it really will go to show you that you just can't be complacent with all this. Going back to the theme of that episode number one or 237. It is a war. We are always at battle. We need to be smarter, we need to be more efficient, and we need to be more targeted. Alright, well that ended up being a longer than expected podcast, but I hope you found that to be a value. If you did, I would honestly appreciate your comments on iTunes. As well as you're subscribing to this podcast for future episodes. If this is something where you're looking for help from, you know, I'm in the midst of revising my website. But one of the things that I do as I mentioned is this fractional outsource cmo it's anywhere from one hour a week two one day a week. I still have a few openings. So if this is something where you'd like to consider having me help your company as well, feel free to reach out to me. I will put a link To my contact form in the show notes as well. And I would love to help you reach the potential that your business has this sort of taps into maximize your social, also this sort of leave no stone unturned strategy that I have. And all of this, including the age of influence is going to be part of this new book, which I'm still working on early days, but I'm just really excited. And I think you're going to hear more and more podcast episodes about this in the future. So I'm going to sign out for today. I'm wishing you all a great close to your q3 For those of you in sales, you know what I mean? But even if not, let's hit our q3 goals. We got a few weeks left, and wherever you're on the world. Never forget to make it a great virtual social Day. Bye Bye everybody. And sayonara