Ep 181: SEO Copywriting That Generates Links, Traffic, Shares & Sales with Kerry Campion

Jaryd Krause: (00:00)

How would you like to earn more money and not just traffic links and shares from your SEO? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause host of the buying online business podcast, and today I'm speaking with Kerry Campion, who is an SEO copywriter who founded God Save the SERP. Being an SEO Kerry knows more than just writing, great copy that Google and humans love. She works on content marketing that increases traffic and sales.

And in this podcast episode, Kerry and I specifically talk about what SEO copywriting is, what it consists of and why you need it for your website? Then we dive into her four pillar content marketing strategy, which takes up most of the podcast because it's excellent. We talk about the different types of content that you must be creating for your blog to ensure the perfect combination of link-building traffic, social shares, distribution, and sales.

Jaryd Krause: (00:54)

We also talk about how or why we should be creating content for disabled people to ensure they have a great experience consuming our content and what we can do to ensure we can create that type of content and change our content to cater to those people that do have reading impairments and other disabilities consuming content on the internet.

We just talk about how to find the words that you should be using in your copy on your website, through all your blogs, through everything you say and your branding and everything based on your audience data and why that's key. Now I share a story around this, on how we do it and how it's worked for me and Kerry also shares a story on how it's worked for her too. There is so much more value in this podcast episode. I know you're going to love it.

Jaryd Krause: (01:39)

If you own an online business and need to know how to create content, and then you're going to love this podcast episode, let's dive into it. Do you want to build or grow your content website? Niche website builders have helped hundreds of people to take their content websites from a few hundred dollars per month to over tens of thousands of dollars per month with crafted content creation, buying age domains and link-building strategies.

These strategies have helped people increase their traffic authority, monthly earnings and website valuation too, head to a nichewebsite.builders/BOB/ to get 10% off, any link building or 10% more from their content creation services. I'll put a link in the description too.

Kerry, welcome to the BOB podcast.

Kerry Campion: (02:37)

Hi, thanks for having me. I'm excited, we're trying to work this out for a while, and we finally got a day at a time.

Jaryd Krause: (02:47)

It gets crazy sometimes doesn't it? We had a pre-chat, and I was really excited to buy some of the discussions and some of the topics that we decided we'd dig into, but for those who don't know who you are and what you do, you're known for SEO, like I just want to unwrap that a bit. People might be going, what is SEO copy? So what is that?

Kerry Campion: (03:09)

So actually it's kind of an interesting time at my business as well because we're doing a kind of pivot. It's still the same thing. So, I'm an SEO copywriter and content marketing strategist. So essentially SEO copy is the kind of content on your website, so your web pages, your blog content that is specifically written and designed, I don't want to say just for search engines, because it has a bad reputation but in such a way that it makes it easier for Google to understand what your content is and what you're actually talking about.

So yeah, it's essentially optimizing it usually around a keyword around a certain topic and trying to get that content to get ranked better in Google's other search engines but usually we're talking about Google.

Jaryd Krause: (04:04)

Yeah, of course.

Jaryd Krause: (04:06)

So you also said it's not just structured for Google. We want to make sure it's structured for user experience as well, which is going to be good for Google. Anyway, what goes into the structuring of a good article or a good blog post is it's around the main keyword. And then you have sub keywords, LSI keywords, whatever you want to call them. And then you have stuff like what are some of the things like that's just very broad. Most people know what I've just said but I'm sure you've got some more in depth explanations around what that sort of looks like.

Kerry Campion: (04:41)

One of the things that the more sophisticated Google and search engine becomes the closer, what they require to actually rank a page is closer to what people want and expect, whereas before it was just, plug your keyword X amount of times and boom, you'll get an article. So one of the ways I like to get people to think about it is, so in an article you have, what's known as, a title tag.

So that's essentially what shows up when you type something in Google and you read the titles of all the pages, that's the title tag. Then you have a little description underneath it, that's the meta description. So usually before it was super easy to manipulate, would've just written, a margarita pizza recipe, click this article to read a delicious margarita recipe.

Kerry Campion: (05:33)

But imagine if someone clicked on that and the actual content was about like cryptocurrency. Like all Google had to go on was the title tag and the meta description which would be ridiculous. So they need other indicators they need another kind of clues as to what your content is about. So that's, what's quite important about, what you just mentioned, I just like to refer to him like associated words, like that's your LSI keywords and things like that.

So essentially if you're talking about margarita pizza, well, I also expect in that article words like DOE, cheese, tomato, cheese mozzarella. You expect all these sorts of related terms and, there's not a great art to that because if you're talking about that topic anyway, you should be including those words relatively naturally.

Kerry Campion: (06:25)

So, that's a big one just to make sure that you're covering a topic with enough depth that you're covering also those related keywords, that if you're talking about that topic, they should be there naturally anyway. So there is a tool that I really like to use for this called Frase, that's Frase.io. So that's essentially a tool to optimize your content and you can optimize it as well around those types of related keywords and things like that.

So for me, that's where we're moving to. Make sure that you're covering a topic in an up depth that you're bringing in those other words, especially because certain keywords can have two meanings, for instance, there's like a deck, which I don't know if our American friends call this but like a deck in your garden like those little wood.

Kerry Campion: (07:20)

You can have like a deck of a ship. All those kinds of like related keywords, just help Google understand. So it's about a deck on a ship, not in like your garden. One of my articles is why key studies but I realized it wasn't clear enough that it was business key studies, and customer success stories because when you look at the search engine results page, there are also academic care studies, and scientific ones.

And I wasn't quite sure where I was really talking about because I wasn't talking about those other things as well. So that's a big one on the other more technical side. I mean, you mentioned the user experience and things like that as well.

Kerry Campion: (08:08)

So we have different headings on a page. So we have the big heading as one that's kind of imagined the title of your article. e have our H twos, which are like subheadings and H threes or the subheadings of H twos. It's like those Russian dolls, each one fits into the other. So using those correctly, for me it's not that it's going to have a huge effect on SEO but it's going to make for a better reading experience, it's going to make your writing more organized. So that's where I'm thinking about the true value that they actually have. And then like I said, Google likes what people like, nice paragraphs are not 16 lines long, this is the internet.

This is not a toll story. People want digestible information, they want bullet points. They want images, graphics, and videos. So, all of those things really come together to make a great article. And it's essentially thinking about what makes a great reading experience and then that's essentially what Google wants as well.

Jaryd Krause: (09:21)

It's a good word-reading experience. Nobody wants to jump on the internet and see text, like they see it in the Bible.

Kerry Campion: (09:30)

Exactly.

Jaryd Krause: (09:30)

That's just that, and as our attention span just gets like faster and faster. We need those different types of content to give ourselves a break because we're getting lazy these days with how we consume things.

Kerry Campion: (09:48)

And having related images as well, I mean that's also good for SEO because that's good for image SEO, one thing that happened to me the other day, and this was absolutely not thinking about SEO whatsoever when I uploaded this, but it just shows you like just the knock-on benefit that you can have.

So I have an article about how to become an SEO copywriter because I have a course for copywriters who want to specialize in SEO copywriting. And so I did like a little quote graphic of David Ogilvy's like the OG of copywriting and advertising world, kind of mad man type figure. And I think the description of the image was something like David Ogilvy's quote.

Kerry Campion: (10:29)

The tag is just a little short description of what the image is. I think I just put the actual quote in itself. Well, it got picked up by copy blogger and like one of their presentations and it was a branded graphic. Like it had my logo on it and I was like, oh my God! And that it was actually a presentation that I was watching and I just saw it pop up. I was like, that's shown to thousands of people.

Jaryd Krause: (11:03)

That's made when you watch something and you pop up and you're like, yeah, I've made it.

Kerry Campion: (11:08)

I was like, yes, thank you for that template.

Jaryd Krause: (11:13)

I had a similar thing happen to me the other day. I was going through a Facebook group and I was like showing a client what to do with this Facebook group with buying sites and stuff, and there was me just like, boom, like with my big headshot and in the way I'm like, this is embarrassing. Like I'm trying to show you this, and I'm just in the way.

Jaryd Krause: (11:34)

Good stuff though. So, Imagery coming back to that image, having the right alt text, and having a description as well is going to help it?

Kerry Campion: (11:44)

Yeah. So, I've been trying to up my knowledge more on accessibility, so accessibility refers to making your content more accessible for people with certain disabilities. So particularly when we think about that, and this is not the only disability out there but we're, I'm thinking, oh, people who use, what's known as screen readers, so people who are blind, who can't see the internet, have basically a machine that reads the content to them.

I had an expert come in with on my membership for copywriters and give a presentation on this. And one thing I was always like, how can we do better alt texts because usually alt text sucks. It just amazing traditionally, and it's traditionally just been a place where people try to like stuff, a keyword in, delicious margarita pizza, manhattan pizza.

Jaryd Krause: (12:36)

It's just exactly.

Kerry Campion: (12:37)

It's ridiculous so this alt text, it's basically like people who use screen readers, they can have an image described to them. So actually what she was telling me was it should, it can be just as basic as possible woman smile. But what you can actually leverage as well is the caption. So for things like, for instance, we're doing like a quote graphic.

I would probably do like the alt Text David Ogilvy's killer poet quote, and then in the caption, I would write the full quote or if it's like an infographic, I would try to maybe summarize some of the key points, like with a client I was working on one of his pages. We had it on the infographic. It was like the average salary of SDR in the US.

Kerry Campion: (13:24)

And so I just put in the caption an average salary across all the states or something like that, all of these things, they make it more accessible for people, and again, Google wants accessible content. It doesn't want if someone can't access your content well, then why should it be on the first page of Google essentially? So thinking about accessibility, especially around images there's so much more but that's like a big one that I think people have never understood what all text and how to present an image, what it entails.

Jaryd Krause: (14:03)

So let's talk, more about accessibility with our content. Because that's the way you're saying Google is leaning towards having content that's accessible to everybody, even if they have impairments in how they consume content, and it can change and differ from person to person, what are some of the other ways? Is it just looking at text and making sure we've got a description in the old text is really good to cater to those people or are there some other things that we can do as well?

Kerry Campion: (14:34)

So again I'm not an expert, but I have learned a few tips and tricks along the way just because I have a great network and I'm very lucky to benefit from all these people, so one thing that I realized that I was guilty of, was having the CM call to action. So call to action is text like a button on a website. I was very guilty of having the CM one all the way through. Or I was guilty of making the call to action dependent on reading the copy before it, it was almost like a continuation.

It wouldn't have made sense if you hadn't read the copy first. So one of the reasons why that's less accessible is because sometimes people with screen readers, skim content based on the links. So they read like the calls to action as a way to like skim the content. So imagine if you have your me and services pages say, and for me, it might be like website copy, content marketing strategy. Well, if both of those calls to action to go to both of those pages is the CM, the person with the screen reader doesn't actually know where they're going to go.

Jaryd Krause: (15:47)

They could just think, let's skip it.

Kerry Campion: (15:50)

Like if it's learning more and then they're scanning the links. So like we'll learn more about what you know.

Jaryd Krause: (15:56)

Yeah exactly.

Kerry Campion: (15:57)

So that was one thing that was quite eye opening to me, I hadn't really thought about that before of course as a person who is privileged doesn't have any disabilities. That was very eye opening for me. I was like, oh my God. That's I didn't even think they would've scanned content like that. But I think when you think about it, I think we do it too like we see a colored button I'm like our eyes go to it. We're just less aware of it.

Jaryd Krause: (16:24)

I definitely notice it when I'm reviewing some content on an affiliate post, and there will be just the image and the text and the bullet points, and I'll just skip past one. I'll read a bit and then I'll just skip past one to go to the next one and then go to the next one and just like definitely use it as a way to skim.

Kerry Campion: (16:44)

And I'd never thought about that before until this accessibility expert give a workshop, term to our members another thing I had no idea was forms are very hard to navigate for people with screen readers to a typical contact form. So, instead of having only one way for people to contact you, you can also say, oh, here's my email as well, if you would rather not use a form because there may be accessibility issues.

Another thing as well as sometimes even just like the language, like the copy itself, this was one thing again, so you don't realize how guilty you are of this until someone points it out. But I was reviewing one of my email sequences and it said something like poking the pink button below, and then I was like, oh, well, obviously someone can't see colors, poke the pink button below, so to take out that language, that's dependent on a certain sense or that someone might not have.

Kerry Campion: (17:49)

So I mean little things like that, and I think as well, just giving people options is always good for user experience in general that don't just have a form, have like an email there as well, because if someone can't navigate your form or even if there's just a problem with it, which sometimes happens.

Jaryd Krause: (18:09) It's pretty regular actually.

Kerry Campion: (18:11)

It's a very regular occurrence, the number of times people email me saying like, oh, I tried to get your form and it was offline because are you familiar with click up project management system?

Jaryd Krause: (18:22)

Yeah.

Kerry Campion: (18:23)

So I use their forms for my contact forms.

Jaryd Krause: (18:27)

Got you.

Kerry Campion: (18:28)

Sometimes it would just disappear for no bad reason, and so I was like, oh, thank God. I had my email there at least.

Jaryd Krause: (18:35)

I didn't even know click-up was a thing for lead capture. There you go.

Kerry Campion: (18:41)

They have forms and I was like, I could use this for lead capture because then it automatically creates a task for me. So it doesn't get like lost in my email. So that's where I was thinking of but yeah because I'd included an email, people were still able to get in touch if they couldn't.

Jaryd Krause: (19:00)

I'm very glad I've got my email on my contact page now.

Kerry Campion: (19:04)

It's something I think a lot of people are resistant to and then you're thinking, well, you could be losing leads because of it or maybe less successful.

Jaryd Krause: (19:12)

I think it's just crazy. I give people my email in all of my content, just like email me, like ask me questions. Like if you need help, reach out and get it.

Kerry Campion: (19:22)

I guess it's like your email but I mean, why I don't get an iPad.

Jaryd Krause: (19:31)

Someone to help you with it. If you get too many leads, it's a good problem to have.

Kerry Campion: (19:35)

Just hire a virtual assistant there done.

Jaryd Krause: (19:39)

So I want to talk about your four pillar content strategy or four pillar strategy for content marketing, just dive into that. What does that look like?

Jaryd Krause: (19:51)

Content marketing strategist, what does this pillar strategy look like? And then I guess we'll evolve into more questions as you explained.

Kerry Campion: (19:58)

So generally speaking, this is one I tend to use a lot with it's the basis for like everyone but what I like about it is, it's quite simplified because you kind of divide your content into these pillars, into these buckets because it can be quite overwhelming to be like, oh my God, like what did I write content on? You could change, it's just a jungle out there. There are so many options. So I like to think of content in this kind of bucket.

So there's content that builds links. There's content that is more likely to generate social shares content. That's more likely to rank on Google. So more geared towards optimizing around certain keywords and things like that and content that generates seals. So those are the four buckets that I would put in. I would put content in.

So content that generates links is super important a lot of people say, oh, I built this website with no link building, and look at it. It's amazing. Mostly they don't disclose that it's an aged domain. I already had a bunch of links and things like that out. I mean, it could still happen.

Jaryd Krause: (21:10)

I've seen this so regularly where people because I see it a lot, it's very big now, buying a site with buying, building content on it. I see so many sites for sale that my clients are sharing with us that it's just got this massive. I'm like, hang on, what do you mean? Did they buy, they buy this and they go. They went back and ask the question like, oh yeah, they bought this. And we found out like, oftentimes this is crazy to CRA. I want to share this with people as well. So I'm just going to steal the microphone for a bit.

When people do that and they build usually they're a rookie and they'll buy an aged domain and build a bunch of content on it. And I get them to ask a certain set of questions. Like did you buy this as an aged domain? If so, what was the Dr. when you purchased it? And then you can look at the Dr. what it is now? And usually, we see that there's a decline because the content isn't great or the website's not great, which is very interesting.

Kerry Campion: (22:17)

I don't think people talk about that enough people think that once you have a certain domain ranking, I guess certain domain authority like that's it, and then it can only increase.

Jaryd Krause: (22:28)

Well, it's just something that I have seen from the association of being in the space and I think it's quite fascinating but I stole the microphone. I want to give it back to you, no worries. People saying, Hey, I built this site and it just generates a bunch of links but was the site based on this link generating content? Is that what you're saying? No.

Kerry Campion: (22:52)

Just generally speaking that sometimes people there is a debate can say, oh, link-building is dead. I mean every year you have something dead within SEO. SEO is dead but there is this debate, oh, link-building is dead, you can generate mile traffic with no links. I'm not buying it personally, you can get traffic without having a ton of backlinks but generating backlinks is important for SEO.

And the way I explain this is it's like a vote of confidence from the internet like people are linking to your site, especially from well-respected websites. I like high Dr. Websites that maybe even have like .edu or those, those are the course golden eggs of links.

Kerry Campion: (23:39)

Respected sites, that's pretty impressive. That's going to like give a little nudge to Google that it's a trustworthy site. And also Google discovers content by following links, so if a very authoritative website they are going in regularly and indexing it and crawling it and if they see links to your website then that's a way for them to discover your content. So link-building is important and there are a ton of ways to build links, and a lot of it is very manual.

So it's for instance reaching out to journalists for quotes and pitches via their articles and like a digital PR but there is this horrible demotivating side of link-building, which is like the typical, oh, I read your article. I loved it. I've written a similar article to what you linked to me.

Jaryd Krause: (24:32)

It's so annoying.

Kerry Campion: (24:33)

And I think the only time I'm being quite skeptical with that, I think the only time like that type of outreach works is if you have a lot of leverage, so you could be like, okay, I see you have an article on this. Would you link to my article? Oh, by the way, I'm a writer for like moz.com and I can link to your site, I think like that's the only time it works, and I think a lot of people are told like, oh yeah, just copy this, like called email template and send it to everyone. And you'll get links and I've never seen that well.

Jaryd Krause: (25:06)

It's just crazy, that's 15 years ago type stuff.

Kerry Campion: (25:12)

Exactly.

Jaryd Krause: (25:13)

That's still being taught in courses and it's disgusting completely.

Kerry Campion: (25:16)

And from people who already have a huge network, lots of influence. If they send an email to someone and they can say like, oh, I've got this massive website. Of course, you're going to build links but like your average person, like no. So I prefer much more like the Digital PR route, but then as well, you can build content or you can build links from content because there is certain content that people are searching for specifically to link to something.

So there are a few different types but I mean, I'll go into one, which is typical which is stats, any kind of reports or statistics, people love linking to statistics, even when they're nonsense like that's a statistic, what is it? For every dollar you spend anemia of marketing, you get 43 bucks.

Kerry Campion: (26:07)

Such a bad study, it's like an old tiny sound size.

Jaryd Krause: (26:12)

All this, that, or a quote.

Kerry Campion: (26:14)

Oh, God? Oh, I had no idea, one more time. Like I don't think anyone has ever been able to link to the source of data because it's so like circulated.

Jaryd Krause: (26:23)

That whoever believes that is completely ignorant of the reality of every single marketing campaign, even within your own business has a different ROI.

Kerry Campion: (26:35)

It's just I hear it, and I've seen big respectable, like companies, it's like you have seen this study from there. It was a tiny sample size from years ago and yeah. Lots of other issues with it but it's because people are looking for statistics proof that is proven. An email marketer would like, oh yeah, I'm going to link to that stat and I'm going to make sure everyone knows it. So producing your statistics, and your data can be like powerful for SEO because people link to it.

That's why you see a lot of websites. Like email marketing statistics 2022 and all those types of articles. The problem is most people don't have access to an audience that's big enough to survey and produce data that's decent.

Kerry Campion: (27:36)

So one way around these two ways is leveraging other people's audiences, so for instance, let's say your market is copywriters, and you want to create a study say based on the average that copywriters are charging or something like that but you don't really have enough people in your audience to have enough data to be able to publish it. You could reach out to influencers in that space. So, they've got a lot of followers here, copywriters people and their email list, particularly their email list. And you can pay them to diffuse your study your survey.

So, you would need a budget for that but it can be worth it because if you can get enough responses to actually build a study, the links you can build to that, especially with the right distribution track, and tactics can be really incredible, so, reaching out to different influencers, asking them to share your survey and things like that for like a fee could definitely be worth it. And then if you have like some sort of digital product as well, you could like give people for free if they take part to incentivize it as well because who is like, oh yeah. I feel like taking a survey today.

Jaryd Krause: (28:56)

Always give a gift, always give a gift to our members. A really good gift when I ask for feedback on how to make our membership better. So that's one pillar, and there are three others let's dive into those three others.

Kerry Campion: (29:12)

So hopefully the others won't be quite as long.

Jaryd Krause: (29:16)

That's fine. We need unpacking.

Kerry Campion: (29:18)

So yeah, the other one that makes seals, so this one science is obvious but, this is your content should be looked at in a funnel. So you have that top-of-funnel content. So as people who like, they're trying to solve a problem but they don't know much about the solutions yet. I always use my dog as an example for this concept of the funnel, like my dog is reactive with other dogs. So she sometimes acts like a psycho on the street when she sees a big dog.

So my top of funnel content for trying to sort that was why is my dog barking and lunging at other dogs? I didn't know why it was happening. And it was hard to help reactive dogs because I'd done some research and I learned, oh, reactive.

Kerry Campion: (30:05)

That's like the word that they use for that. So that was my problem search. So those are your top-of-funnel ones. And the further we get down there, the more ready people are to buy. So for instance I discovered a course for reactive dogs. So I was starting to look at things like clicker training for reactive dogs, and online courses for reactive dogs.

Because I was starting to say, okay, these can be solutions to help me solve this problem. So yeah, when we're talking about content that makes sales it's really like those types of searches that either it's kind of reviews. So I have like spirit dogs review, which is probably someone who's got like an affiliate article and has written a good review on it.

Kerry Campion: (30:46)

So those are the ones that I refer to when I talk about content that makes a seal give an example from my own website. So I have an article that does really well because thankfully there's not that much competition in the best SEO copywriting courses. And that was one of those, like zero volume keyword or like super low volume.

I can't remember exactly but I said, well, it's still worth it for me because it's content that could generate a seal. So what I did there was I directly compared my course with other courses that are on the market. For my first of course but it wasn't even like a ranking. I was just like, okay,1, 2, 3 just giving people the options.

Kerry Campion: (31:30)

So I directly compared myself with competitors. A lot of people don't want to do that. And I say, well, if you're not going to do it, someone else is going to do it and they're going to make their course look better than yours. And why wouldn't you want to take charge of that conversation and present your course as you want to present it? And so I can't remember exactly how much traffic that's generated in the last couple of months that it's been live.

Not even that much, no. Maybe like 400 hits or something like that. I don't really know. But a couple of weeks ago it just made me a seal. Like someone literally went from that blog post to my podium and bought it full price and said 897-year-old course. I had to just blow the hair off my head.

Kerry Campion: (32:13)

I was like, I know that this works but to experience it yourself is just like, it's the closest I've ever felt to passive income where it was just like, I was just out there living my life and then this person's like, I don't know this person because usually people who come to my courses, I have some contact with them, through all my email lists. You knew them, maybe spoken to them about how to call or something but this one was completely random. And then I did a bit of dig in and realized that that was where they had, they just Googled that, and found my blog post bought the course.

So it's anyone who has any type, of course even membership kind of digital products. I mean, you need to be comparing yourself with your competitors and taking charge of that conversation. So it's one of the ways that you can generate sales directly from content. Another way for service providers as well is the best web developers in Chicago. And people who are surgeons for that, they're pretty like, okay, yeah. I want to hire this person. Like there are no two words.

Jaryd Krause: (33:21)

So this is what other bloggers will call high intent keywords.

Kerry Campion: (33:28)

Exactly.

Jaryd Krause: (33:29)

People that are ready to purchase.

Kerry Campion: (33:31)

Exactly.

Jaryd Krause: (33:33)

So that's the sales one and then also the link-building of those two pillars. What are the last two pillars?

Kerry Campion: (33:40)

So last ones are content that ranks, so essentially that's our Google content. This can be the hardest one for people to build content around because they're not sure what keywords they should target. They're not sure what's too competitive for them, what's not competitive enough, what's worth their time, is my audience really searching for this? It's difficult. So when it comes, I would say, SEO does not start with a keyword research tool.

SEO starts with your customers. So really understanding that journey, that customer journey is so important because that understanding that customer journey is going to later inform your keyword research is going to inform what type of content you need to produce. So I always say if you haven't already, you need to get on calls with people. Like you need to actually like sit down and have this scary Festo moment.

Jaryd Krause: (34:37)

Just to get to know your market.

Kerry Campion: (34:39)

I feel like you could do surveys as well. So like surveys, Festo but really the there's for me, there's nothing that really compensates for the market research interview. It tends to be easier if you have some customers or if you can incentivize people like they get a free module from your course or something. I always tend to incentivize people because they're giving you your time but generally speaking, what's good about people who've gone through maybe your program or your course is that they know you.

And a lot of people are very flattered. If you just tell them like, oh, I consider you like a dream customer and I want to attract more people just like you and that's like enough. They're like, okay. They're like quite flattered by that.

Jaryd Krause: (35:24)

One way that we do it is, I don't want to, once people are in my sphere and in my community membership or bought any of my products after that phase after they've joined, I don't like what they say about how about the market and what they want has changed because they've learned from me on the inside. So the words that they use on the inside are very different from the words they use to find me and discover me.

What I like to do is I like to ask just as people join, how do you discover me? What are your goals? And what is all this sort of stuff what are you looking to achieve? It's really good for me and us and our business to be able to help people move towards their goals. But what's super valuable is us taking and pulling those words out that they do use. And put that into our content. Like what people want to do is they want to replace their income.

Most people will say, I don't go to tell people and teach people, Hey, I want to help you buy a business. Nobody wants to buy a business because it costs money costs time, but they do want to replace the income right at the start. I was like, teach how to business for, they don't want that.

Kerry Campion: (36:35)

They're not ready for that yet. They just want, they're exploring options about replacing their income. And then the more aware they've become is how do you buy a website or how do you invest in websites and gets more and more aware until like you said, they're in those high intense keyboards. That's a brilliant point actually, and you reminded me of that. One thing I do with both my courses is I have an intake form for that same reason, it's helpful for them because it actually helps them focus.

Jaryd Krause: (37:07)

Their intention is when they come into what's their intention for what they want to get out of the course.

Kerry Campion: (37:11)

And I think it's a little micro commitment. Like you've actually taken the time like you've bought this and we know people buy courses all the time that just like rots away and digital Dungeons somewhere, no one ever, I feel like, with the intake form, they're really like clarifying their intentions and why they've actually bothered to show up and get this thing. So it's helpful for them but exactly what you say, it's the brilliant voice of customer research for that beginning fees as well.

That's why I always recommend course creators and stuff that they have some sort of intake form because I've gotten gold from that intake form. Like things that I never even knew were valuable to people that I'm like, oh, I didn't even think about that.

Jaryd Krause: (37:57)

I learned this from a guy a couple of years ago, from I think his name's John, I forget his last name from data driven marketing. And he was on the podcast as well, and a couple of years ago but such a good way to really get customer data and pull that and use it in your marketing. Not just like everywhere in your marketing, just iterate through it.

Kerry Campion: (38:21)

Copy particularly branding.

Jaryd Krause: (38:23)

Yeah.

Kerry Campion: (38:24)

Because in your copy as well you need to be using the CM words as them, so that they actually identify themselves as, oh, they're actually speaking to me because that's why I describe this, it's an example I always use and again, just to link it back to keywords is sometimes you have the curse of knowledge, you're in the jargon all the time and you're in like this world and sometimes your customers aren't.

So imagine you're a photographer and you have a beginner's photographer course and you think, oh, everyone wants the booger effect. Everyone's asking me about that. I'm going to write an article, on how to achieve the booger effect in photography but here's the problem. People who use the word booga, already know about photography.

But people are asking when they're beginners, which is the target market how do I get a blurry background in my photos? So you can see how one article or the other can pull in a completely different market about the same topic. So that's why knowing that market is key to understanding your keyword research.

Jaryd Krause: (39:29)

So that's content that ranks what's the last one.

Kerry Campion: (39:33)

The last one is content that generates social shares. So this is super underrated. I feel like there's been a shift away from content like distribution and sharing and social media. I think people think like, oh, article, it should rank on Google and I'm like, there are so many things you can do with an article. You shouldn't just be writing, SEO content.

So one of the reasons I like using content that generates social shares is because it's a way to get exposed to other people's audiences, which is super important. And in the beginning, you're not going to get a lot of traffic from Google. Like, it's starting. It's going to take a while.

Jaryd Krause: (40:16)

You can't be the keyword.

Kerry Campion: (40:20)

It's going to take a while and you need to be showing search engines that this is a real site. People do actually go here. It has some life on it. And that's me poorly paraphrasing, John Wheeler from Google, I was watching one of his, he does these really great office sessions, where people come in and they ask him questions about changes in Google and stuff.

And one person asked him, well, I've got a brand new website, what should I be doing to try and bring traffic to this? Because I mean, yeah, okay. I'm creating content that I hope is useful to my audience that will eventually rank on Google but what should I really be doing? And he didn't say, oh, well, go out and just create more content.

Kerry Campion: (41:04)

One of the things that he said you need to drive traffic to get from somewhere else. Like because that shows us that, okay, it's legit, people are going there, it's a thing, there's stuff going on there. One of the things we mentioned was obviously social media. So the way I look at this is collaborations particularly, and user generated content.

So user generated content is content that comes from your audience themselves. So you might have like an interview or you're promoting a certain member and then they want to obviously share that to their social channels who are usually filled with the same people and your target markets. So you're getting exposed to them and then they go and check right the interview. And then they like, oh, I'm going to sign up for this email list.

Kerry Campion: (41:49)

And that gets the ball rolling, for instance. Like I did an interview with someone who's a key study expert because again, I knew that we had shared a similar audience and that content made sense on my site, and because whenever you bring other people in with your content, they share it to their audience.

So generating social shares is a big one as well. And it generally comes about, I think best with collaborations and also silly content like, I imagine if I've been sitting on this for an agency to actually do it because I have done these types of articles before but not for my site in particular but like 19 memes only copywriters will understand like things that really like those selling inside jokes. Like those inside jokes, buzz feed-like stuff. I mean you like a pause for you.

Jaryd Krause: (42:48)

Well, they're king of social shares. Why not copy the king of shares content?

Kerry Campion: (42:53)

And it's this dumb, funny content. It can be that simple. And it's because people like to share content that shows that they're in on the joke.

Jaryd Krause: (43:06)

They're on the inside, they get the insider jokes.

Kerry Campion: (43:10)

That's why I follow this guy on Twitter. I forget his last name but it's bear or something, and he does these hilarious SA finder memes. I like the number of retweets, comments, and quote tweets that they get. It is just crazy because it's just that people like to be on the inside. They like those inside jokes, so sometimes even producing that like buzz feeding content like that can really help generate social shares.

Jaryd Krause: (43:38)

I like it, and so would you have like a percentage split, would it be an equal 25% of each of those pillars, and I guess it would be dependent on the site as well. And your brand and what you're about. So, that's a hard one to answer.

Kerry Campion: (43:57)

God, I really couldn't say the only thing is, when it comes to this sort of SEO content, I tend to focus on topic clusters. So that's like where you have a meaningful topic with a mean article, like covers something in like a lot of depth, very authoritative piece of content, and then you create all these little articles that are related to that mean topic and then you link between them.

That would be the only thing that I would have a sort of number on. Maybe we have like a topic cluster of like 12 articles or something like that but for the other ones, it's so dependent on so many things and like the clients and their type of audience. Even just like the niche seasonality as well. So I couldn't say.

Jaryd Krause: (44:48)

And I guess with those content clusters and the topics you could put maybe a couple of those in each of those clusters as well, right.

Kerry Campion: (44:56)

Like I've some topic clusters that I very professionally built out on a notebook, and I've definitely like, for instance, there's one around, like how to become an SEO copywriter. And one of that's related to it's in that cluster is, how much do copywriters earn? That's kind of an article that I'm building. And that's obviously in the link-building thing.

So I think if you're building out topic clusters, maybe try to include something from kind of all of those pillars and as well, you just get to know your audience as well. And what works best. I find people, I wrote an article recently about workflows building out a copywriting workflow that did super well like people were into that I'm like. So sort of get more ideas about maybe like, teasing this side a bit more.

Jaryd Krause: (45:50)

This is the best way to grow any business, right. Is to not guess what I should do or to listen to other people and do what they're telling me to do. But based on the data that you have for your business of what's working, like if exactly that type of content worked lean into it more so.

Kerry Campion: (46:06)

So it's really just about like experimenting as well, and I think, for instance, there are lots of different variations on it, like maybe with you have an article where you're just kind of sourcing expert quotes that might be your way to social share because then you get in touch with those experts again, Hey, the article's live, here's the link I would really appreciate if you shared it with your audience, if they are big on Instagram, maybe give them like a little graphic they can put on their face or something like that. And that could be your sort of way of doing that. So you, you do just kind of learning.

Kerry Campion: (46:45)

What works for your nation, your market by just experimenting. There is no substitute for that at all. Like you need to just produce and test and feel and yes my first pillar post. I think it was kind of dumb but anyway, it was like how to market your business without social media because I was trying to obviously promote search engine optimization.

I wrote a super like long post that went for like the big pillar thing, I just crashed and it's kind of picked up a little bit. No, I see people filtering through all that and I'm just like, God, I've spent way too much time on that. So, what I actually did once was my now that's actually one of my sort of pillar posts is a regular blog post length, it's not this huge 2000 plus words.

Jaryd Krause: (47:38)

Yeah.

Kerry Campion: (47:40)

Probably it's about 2000 because that's like my usual word and it's quite niche. A lot of people think for your pillar post, you need to go for those big authoritative keepers. You don't always, if it doesn't make sense for your business, why would I have a course for copywriters to become SEO copywriters. So it makes perfect sense that my pillar post would be how to become an SEO copywriter.

That's not a particularly competitive keyword or anything but it gets me a decent amount of traffic. It brings people only on my email list, and that's a regular blog post that I did put effort into but it wasn't as much as the market like social media, I thought that was going to be it. No one cared about it, no one cared.

Jaryd Krause: (48:27)

I've done that with so many pieces of content as well, and just like this is so important to me and so good to share it with you and just you guys don't care like what you're missing out but you got to meet the market where it's at Kerry, this has been so fun to chat. Thank you so much for coming on. You've mentioned your course, tell us where we can go away and check out your course and where people can find out more about what you are doing as well.

Kerry Campion: (48:52)

So, my website is God Save the SERP, SERP stands for search engine results page. So, it's godsavetheserp.com you can find everything thereby services, and my courses, I have a free keyboard research course. So it's a five day free email course that has gotten really great feedback. I'm super happy. I think the thing that people like about it the most is that it's showing you how to do keyword research without spending 114 bucks a month on these premium messy terms. You really don't need, if you're just doing keyword research, like there are other ways to do it for like literally the tune that I show you.

It's $10 for like a bazillion credits that last you forever. So for those interested in keyboard research, definitely sign up for that, my course is called SERP slay. So that's really for copywriters who we want to specialize in SEO copywriting. Basically is to find me it's really on my website. Go see if it's surf Twitter as well. It'll include links anyway in the description. I have an Irish Siri, by the way. It's really funny.

Jaryd Krause: (50:08)

Oh, that's cool. Mine is a robot and it just sounds disgusting, even though I don't use it that much.

Kerry Campion: (50:16)

When I was setting it up, I thought when they were asking, but like the accent. I was like, okay. Yeah, Irish, and then I asked something and I was like, she's speaking to me in an Irish accent.

Jaryd Krause: (50:26)

That's good, maybe Australia hasn't got the technology yet for an Aussie accent. So I'd love to hear some Bogan words. Bogan is like somebody that you'd have to look up, look up what a Bogan is. You’ll laugh.

Kerry Campion: (50:42)

I'm intrigued.

Jaryd Krause: (50:43)

Thank you so much, everybody for listening. Thank you so much, Kerry for coming on. If you have watched this and listened to this and you think this was valuable, please share this with somebody that you do know that has a content website or an online business that would benefit from some of the SEO principles and strategies and content strategies that we talked about in this podcast episode, selfishly is going to help us help more people, but it will help your friends too. So thanks again, guys. And I'll speak to you on the next one.

Kerry Campion: (51:09)

Thanks so much.

Jaryd Krause: (51:10)

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