Research-Backed Content Creation | Get Fact Up #93

- [Chris] G'day world, Chris Hogan and Andrew Groat coming to you live from MeMedia Studio here at Burleigh Heads for episode 93 of Get Fact Up! And today we're talking about Research Backed Content Creation. So, Andrew, why are we talking about this?

- [Andrew] Well, basically, this is how everyone should be creating content. And we talk about this a lot, like, why are you even bothering creating content if you don't know what you're doing it for, if you don't know what keywords you're going for, if you don't know what your competition is like. If you don't know if it's going to contribute towards sales or just people visiting, like that sort of thing. That's kind of what I want to talk about today.

- I think this is also putting the consumer at the central part of the conversation.

- [Andrew] Mmm.

- Around content creation. They are the ones that are going to be your customer. They are the ones doing the searching. They are the ones consuming the content.

- [Andrew] Yeah.

- And if you don't actually know what it is they're searching for? You're just, pissing into the wind really.

- Yeah, effectively, yeah. And talking about what they're searching for, that's basically where you start with all this, so, on this next slide here, I've got a bunch of keywords, and I'm using AdWords data here, so it's pay-per-click info. But it also shows the average monthly searches. So I decided we'll use home insurance as an example, here. Because it's competitive as, I mean if you look at the keyword bidding range over there, your minimum you're going to spend on a cost-per-click is 12.67, maximum about 40 bucks, so.

- I love home insurance, or I love insurance as a test case. Because realistically, it's a boring topic, and I think we can take this somewhere, so let's have a look. So home insurance top,

- Yeah, so.

- What top of page bid range, what's the top bid there?

- [Andrew] Okay, so that's to get to the top of the first page.

- [Chris] Of course.

- [Andrew] The low range is sort of the minimum you'd probably be spending to get there. Obviously different times and when different competitors are active, it's gonna change. And then the top of range, sorry the high range, is the most you'd be spending. I would suspect it's probably higher than that as well.

- Yeah, so interestingly, $48 per click, on homeowner's insurance.

- [Andrew] Mmhmm.

- For that keyword, but has a relatively low average monthly search, so that's quite interesting, that that's the most expensive keyword. - It either means people are really not being smart with their ad spend, or that's a really high buyer's intent sort of keyword, so maybe that particular keyword tends to convert better.

- True. - It could be one or the other. Probably a bit of both.

- Or, or the campaign managers for the insurance company advertising are bidding heavily on the wrong keyword.

- Yeah, could be asleep at the wheel. Could be just a bidding war for the fun of it, you know. My point is, it's crazy amount of money you'd have to spend to rank for this, so what do you do next?

- Exactly.

- What's a better place to look than keywords? Because if you haven't got your funnel tight, and, you know, all the leaks patched up in here, you're basically wasting money here, so, what's a better place to look?

- So using, we use this place, this tool as a starting point for our research, and then we take it to a whole another level using various other tools, and our own smarts. But it is an interesting conversation starter for this type of research. And you know, it gives you, just some ideas around average monthly searches, and which keywords are more popular than others. You know, homeowners insurance quote, 30 average, 30 searches on average per month. Homeowners insurance, 140 searches on average per month. Home insurance, 12,100 searches per month. Now these are--

- [Andrew] Australia. - Yeah, these are for Australia, and they're also very high level keywords.

- [Andrew] Yeah, yeah. - So let's keep diving in, because--

- So, yeah, moving on, like, obviously you could spend money to rank for these, but you prefer to get organic traffic for these,

- [Chris] Hmm.

- But, with that level of competition, and if we go to the next screen, we can see the organic competition as well. With that level of competition, I mean, how would you get to rank there? The difficulty here is 60, and that's just looking at the page authority and the main authority for all the competitors on the first page. Which is extremely high. I mean, you're going up against Allianz and Budget Direct and things like that.

- [Chris] Compare the market, yup.

- Also, if you wanted to rank organically here, obviously you would want to get maybe like your service or listings page, like the page with all your products, to be on here, not an article or something like that. So, how do you make that interesting? How do you get that on there? Well, you kind of can't.

- [Chris] No.

- You have to think outside the square, and I know that's where we kind of want to go here.

- Well, sorry, let's rephrase, because you can, we know you can, but--

- You can't just make that page get there, you have to, just like a-- - Do a lot of stuff around it. - Call it like a hot air balloon method, where you're sort of using a lot of stuff around it to drag it up.

- [Chris] Yup.

- With everything else, so, the next thing you want to do is find related keywords, related long tail keywords to home insurance, and also what we call shoulder niches, which is more generalised verions of the same keyword. So I collected up a a whole bunch of different keywords that sort of fit in that category, they were related, or you know, very similar category to that but tied in, like someone that's looking for home insurance is also thinking about this. And amalgamated them, and we have a look here. So what we're trying to do next is find opportunities. First thing we see here is the difficulty is much lower for all these keywords. And you can see there's a couple examples down at the bottom I just sort of pasted there.

- [Chris] Yeah. Organic click-through, right? Which is the purple one, is pretty high.

- [Andrew] So that's good, so low difficulty, high click-through rate for all of these sorts of topics. And then the next thing we want to do is look at SERP features. And it's a little bit small here, but basically what that is, is I've analysed, what, other than just simple text results are there. So is there images, is there videos, is there local pack, is there maps?

- [Chris] Yeah, so what are we seeing on those SERP features there, the first two, they're really high.

- [Andrew] Okay.

- [Chris] Competitiveness on content.

- [Andrew] That's AdWords.

- [Chris] Yup.

- [Andrew] So basically, everyone's fighting in the AdWords space here.

- [Chris] Yup.

- [Andrew] The next one is there's a lot of maps listings, which obviously, everyone is gonna have Google My Business set up.

- [Chris] Of course.

- [Andrew] In this industry, one would hope. And then the other two bigger are shopping related. So obviously buying policies directly on Google. There's not an awful lot in the way of imagery. There's not an awful lot in the way of, like rich media articles, which is the one in the middle, that's dead flat. And there's not a lot in the way of video, so, this is where we can see there's some opportunity here.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- So rich media content, and we always talk about this.

- Yeah, absolutely, we do always talk about this. And what we mean by that, is that obviously text content is where we all start. Our previous videos have indicated that a video, a two-minute long video, can actually cover about a thousand word article. You know, you can fit a thousand words into a two minute video, pretty much.

- And best of all, it's high engagement, but I'm coming up to this soon. So, some pretty good related keywords I found here, like home insurance tips, why have homeowners insurance, that's not the exact keyword, but it's related enough, and then looking a little bit outside to broader sort of categories, how we calculate your insurance policy, and I like this one, how building materials affect your premium.

- Yeah, that's really interesting.

- I thought that was really cool, like, that's something people would probably want to read before buying a house or-- - Building a house.

- [Andrew] Building a house, yeah building house.

- Absolutely. So that's really interesting and I guess this is what I was talking about earlier, is putting the consumer at the central part of your content marketing strategy. What is it that they're interested in? What is it they're searching? You know, I know we didn't put it in here, but I started thinking like, well, the biggest thing that I want to know is how to save money on my home insurance.

- [Andrew] Hmm.

- You know, how do I hack, hack my insurance to--

- [Andrew] Yeah.

- To get the biggest bang for buck.

- [Andrew] Mmhmm.

- Not just home insurance, insurances across the board, health insurance, am I wasting my money? Or how do I get the most out of it? If I'm gonna pay for it, how am I gonna get the most out of it? And funnily enough, I think maybe, insurance companies might be thinking, no, we, well at least me as a consumer, I think insurance companies are thinking, no, we don't really want people to get the most out of their insurance, because that's gonna cost us money.

- [Andrew] Mmm.

- Well, regardless of what you think, insurance companies, consumers do want that.

- So if you actually deliver content to them that they're really interested in knowing, then essentially, you're going to attract them through organic and not have to pay per click.

- Yeah, and something that people are probably wondering is, so a lot of these topics don't necessarily mean somebody's immediately about to buy.

- [Chris] No.

- So how do we get to that?

- Don't worry about that for now. That's sort of in the last step here. At the moment we just want to get highly engaged traffic, relevant traffic, to your website. And then we sort of tie that back in. But moving on, I'm looking at okay, so just a slightly more related keyword to home insurance. We've got home insurance tips. Big difference here, difficulty to rank this organically is 27 as opposed to 60. You're going up against some, just slightly more general stuff, so you can fit in quite easily when you look at you're up against insurance council and finder.com.au. And best of all, organic click through rate for that is 100%. So people looking for home insurance tips are guaranteed to go into something on the first page. And that they're doing their research.

- [Chris] We can't get better than 100%.

- [Andrew] Yeah.

- [Chris] Yeah, this is really interesting, yeah so, insurance council, finder, iselect, all non-insurance companies creating content which we know full well they're making money out of because they're probably doing affiliate marketing or something along those lines, and getting a clip of the ticket when people actually do sign up. But they could actually be selling advertising to those insurance companies or whatnot.

- Mmhmm.

- Now, insurance companies shouldn't be relying on these third parties. We're speaking--

- [Andrew] That's right, yeah.

- About insurance companies as any business. Any business shouldn't be relying on third parties creating a bucketload of content about their industry niche, to then drive traffic to them.

- As much as affiliate, an affiliate channel is a good income stream, and channel in its own right, if it's too big, it floods the market with content that just pulls people away from you and your direct brand, so it's an issue. So, slightly better difficulty, slightly better competition here, like it'd be easy to rank for home insurance tips. But how do you do that? So, we have a look at what obviously everyone else is doing. And we've seen that they're not doing much in the way of rich media content, so go for that sort of thing. Video, with subtitles, podcasts, relevant interesting images in your content, infographics, subheadings and sections to your content divided up so it's skimmable, and combine it all together, basically, like--

- [Chris] Combine all that content together.

- Video, blog, images, all that sort of thing. Basically, you're looking for engagement. Interactions with your page, time on site, low bounce rate, pages per visit, that's what will get you above finder.com.au for home insurance tips.

- And then, as an insurance company, if you actually surpassed all those third parties.

- [Andrew] Mmhmm.

- And they click directly on your content, you've saved yourself that affiliate marketing.

- [Andrew] Yeah, they're not taking your clip at the ticket there.

- [Andrew] So. Coming right back to that, how does that relate to you getting your service page, your home insurance page up? This last step is what everyone forgets. That's,

- [Both] Internal linking.

- [Andrew] So all of this awesome content that you're putting out there, it's getting you ranked for all these relevant terms to your industry, make sure you're linking back. In your content, inline your content, and in the footer with a call to action back to your home insurance service or catalogue page, I guess you'd say. Because all of these well-ranked articles that you're putting out there, they're all going up the Google ranks. They're all linked back to your main one, and that gets dragged up with it. Whoa. It's a little bit hard to do these movements. Your main page gets dragged up with it. So that's how you, basically, would rank a page that's difficult to rank with really high competition.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- And that's also what other people aren't doing, yeah.

- Yeah, so this is tip of the iceberg, I guess, snapshots, of where we would start with our keyword research, you know the actual, I think the half hour prep time that you put into this, we didn't dive into all of the opportunities that would come out.

- Aw, yeah, it's huge, and just the research phase in itself, you could do an entire three or four episodes on.

- Absolutely.

- You know I just,

- Got the data ready.

- Well, maybe we're geeks, maybe we're not, but I know there's high fives get thrown around the office when we find the, this awesome piece of gold, which is a keyword or phrase that is being searched, thousands of times per month, tens of thousands of times per month, and has super low competition, and/or has no competition for that rich media content.

- [Andrew] Mmhmm.

- And guess what, we're going to overtake you, as the competitor every time when we see that, every time.

- Yeah, like we always say, we find and go for the low hanging fruit first, get results quickly. And we've seen some clients have, like one piece of content drives 50% of their traffic to the website now.

- That's the role that--

- Hundred hundreds a week.

- Well, that's right, but that's because we haven't just stopped at creating one piece of content.

- [Andrew] Yeah, yeah.

- We've created bucket loads of relevant, engaging content, yeah? Related to the keywords.

- Mmhmm.

- That have high search terms.

- That we know people are looking for in.

- And we're internal linking. And we're driving traffic back to those important pages. What do people want to know after they've started reading every piece of content? They want to know how much it is. If you know, even if they're not ready to buy, they still want to consider it, right, that's really interesting, how much? Wait, what? Okay, is there an opportunity to buy now? Well if I was going to buy now, how much is it? So, what's the details? How do I go through the process, if I wanted to? Tell them that. Link them back to that page, that conversion page, that you want to rank really well. People may not buy now, but they still want to know the process. And in an insurance case, just for example, it's going to be a year-long consideration, or at least half a year. Maybe halfway into the year, I'm going, hmm, where's my health insurance or home insurance sitting at the moment? Where could I save money on that? How can I maximise those costs?

- And there's going to be a lot of searching, in between there as well. They're going to be researching a lot, so I'd say this is probably a niche that needs a lot of content out there, and I'm not seeing enough of it out there, to be honest.

- Super slow burn, and again, we're just using home insurance, and house insurance, and health insurance, and car insurance as one example. This is the same case for everybody. Everybody is taking longer to consider what their next steps are. They're doing a lot more research. They're getting more educated. They got the resources.

- Mmhmm.

- You know, are sitting there. The internet is sitting there, giving them those resources as and when they want them or need them. And so, having all of that content, if people are constantly hitting your website on the topics that they're searching, and not somebody else's, for the course of a year, guess who gets considered, is the highest to be considered when buying.

- Mmhmm, and who gets ranked the best.

- That's the obvious sideline benefit, yeah? And we all know that Google organic traffic converts best out of all traffic. The pay-per-click stuff, it hurts. It actually hurts to pay that, geez, $48 per click. But the reason why they're doing it is because potentially, it's a high converting keyword. But if you get that for a lot less, as in free through organic, you'd take it every time, wouldn't you? But it does take an investment, a front-loaded investment.

- Yeah.

- To get it to that point. Cool.

- Time. I hope everybody got some value out of that. Data-backed research on content creation is super important. If you're not doing it, like we said, you're just pissing into the wind. If you don't understand that, basically you're throwing money away, on your content creation. - Yeah, it's not worth, it's not worth doing it.

- Yeah.

- [Andrew] Because you could actually be having a detrimental effect to your brand and SEO.

- Yeah.

- [Andrew] If you don't do the research.

- Yup. And you're just putting content up for content's sake. If you're not putting up rich content now, in this 2018. Forget about it.

- Basically Google doesn't like trash content. Google is a garbage collector.

- [Chris] Yup.

- It has to clear out the crap constantly, so. If you're making Google's job harder, then it's going to consider you basically a pollution.

- Yeah, and if you're not structuring your content to be skimmable, and you're just dumping that content on the page, copy-paste out of your word processor, with no formatting whatsoever, then essentially, yeah, you're going to lose me as well. You're going to lose the consumer. Yeah, I might come to the page thinking I get this awesome article, and all of the sudden I just see paragraphs of, you know, 12 point text, with no bolding, no headings, no images, no infographics, no video, nothing for me to share, nothing for me to take away, no reason for me to bookmark it and want to come back again.

- [Andrew] Mmhmm.

- [Chris] See ya later, I'm out, three seconds, you've got three seconds to keep me on that page. You'd better make that content look awesome for to start with. Anyway, let's wrap it up. Thanks for watching guys, MeMedia, Get Fact Up! We've been running this for a little over two to three years now. Two years, a little over two years now. And it's proof that content marketing works. If you want to talk to us about content marketing, you can tell that we've got the smarts, the know-how, and definitely passion to drive your business above and beyond on Google organic search search results, which is what converts the most, so give us a call. Thanks, and see ya next week.

- [Andrew] Thank you.