Brad Smith | Codeless
When it comes to organic content strategies, Brad Smith really knows his stuff.
As the founder of Codeless, he’s helped well known SaaS companies like Monday.com, Chargify, and WordStream create high quality, high performing organic content at scale.
And as the CEO of Wordable, Brad and his team are making it easier for content creators and managers to transform content drafts into published articles.
In this episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Brad breaks down the process his team uses to create content, and digs into all the nerdy details that are important to nail as part of a truly world class organic content strategy.
Check out the full episode to hear Brad’s insights.
Resources from this episode:
Connect with Brad on LinkedIn
Visit the Codeless Website
Visit the Wordable Website
Brad and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:00):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Brad Smith, who is the CEO and founder of Codeless. Welcome to the podcast, Brad.
Brad (00:37):
I'm looking forward to it.
Kathleen (00:38):
Yeah. For those who are listening and can't see this Brad and I showed up in matching shirts. So, you know, it's going to be a great podcast when you have the mental telepathy to wear the same outfit.
Brad (00:50):
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what that says about my fashion sense, but...
Kathleen (00:53):
We're both wearing blue you know, button up Oxford shirts with little, I have white dots. I don't know what yours are, but ...
Brad (01:02):
Little well, they're, they're white too, but they're like little anchors almost. Nautical themes.
Kathleen (01:08):
So there you go. You ruined it. We're not really matching.
Brad (01:09):
It's close though. It's pretty close.
Kathleen (01:12):
From far away and on zoom, it appears that we are twins. So no, I'm, I'm excited to talk to you and you, so you are the, as I said, the CEO and founder of Codeless, you also have a couple of other companies. And what we're going to talk about is mostly related to what you do at Codeless, but just before we dive into all of that, can you take a minute and tell my listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, and also your, your various companies.
Brad (01:38):
Yeah, for sure. So I been in this like weird intersection of content and SEO for at least a decade now. I got into it kind of working for my parents' company actually, and like trying to redo their website back when I was in college and then got into this, like nerdy started getting this nerdy SEO stuff. So this is like back in the early, you know, dark, dark ages of SEO founded Codeless maybe eight plus years ago, something like that. We'll talk about it more, but then the other, the other few things I'm involved in kind of grew out of Codeless. So one of those is you serve, which is a PR and link building agency. So essentially it's like, we create all this content, how do you actually distribute it? And how do you actually get results, especially in competitive spaces.
Brad (02:20):
And then, so that kind of grew out of Codeless and then a Wordable, we were a customer of, so another agency we know, created it, we acquired it about a year ago, rebuilt it and re are relaunching it and doing a bunch of other stuff. So that's actually a SaaS product that we use on a daily basis, but basically it helps helps companies move content from somewhere like Google docs into any website platform like WordPress, BigCommerce, Shopify, you know HubSpot, all the, all the various things. So it's all the tedious stuff like having a format of properly clean the HTML, move images, optimized images, like all the things people should be doing or they're doing now, but it's taken them like in our case, usually around 30 to 60 minutes per article, you do a hundred articles or a couple of hundred articles a month. Like we do that starts to add up. So the SaaS product we'll we'll start to automate all that stuff for people, hopefully.
Kathleen (03:09):
Okay. So this is not the focus of this podcast interview, but I have to take a minute and just say, wow, that's amazing because I have experienced this pain as somebody who does, I podcast a lot, both personally, and for work. And so I'm always like pasting transcripts in, and then similarly, Google docs to blogs. And I have become quite the pro at one of two things either. It's like, it's like, choose your poison. You either paste without formatting. And then you have to spend a ton of time and go back and format and add links back in and do all that, which is a time suck or you paste with formatting. And then what I do is I open up the, the CSS and I paste that into a new doc and I do global find and replaces all the breaks and put in paragraph styling instead. And oh my God, it's a nightmare.
Brad (04:03):
It's funny, like even WordPress, because it's like a blogging platform in air quotes. I always tell people it's like, it's great for everything, but it's awful to write in and then trying to move content into it. It's like, it's a, it's like pulling teeth. So yeah, it's a huge problem. So many people have this problem. We, like I said, we are a customer of that product. We still use it a lot. So yeah. We're hoping to make this process a lot less painful for, for everyone that does this,
Kathleen (04:31):
I might be one of your next customers. So we'll talk about that afterwards. In the meantime. So with Codeless, as you said, you guys are creating content for a lot of, you know, well-known SaaS brands. You work with companies that I think a lot of us probably have heard of. And maybe you can, I don't know if you'll talk about some of them or not, but and you've had really good results in terms of building organic traffic and boosting rankings. And so what, and a lot of people who do listen to this podcast are big believers in, in what I would term like a content led strategy. So I'm, I would love to dig into like your approach to this, because there's so much talk about content out there. And I think we all know the basics, right? We all know, you want to understand the keywords your audience is using. We all know that you've got to focus on long tail. But there's, there's just so much more to it and it's constantly changing. So I guess let's start with when a company comes to you and says, we need help with content. Like, how do you think through what your approach is to get them from zero to wherever they want to get to?
Brad (05:41):
For sure. Yeah. It's a good question. It's a little different for everyone. It usually depends on like, where are they at now? Are they a small website, a new brand, a growing brand, a huge brand. Are they branching into a new, are they big with a brand unit of space? They don't have topical authority yet. So we'll get into like all the nerdy tactical stuff, but it's like, where are they at now where they're trying to go? Who's their competition, their competition. Isn't always direct competition, unfortunately. So it's not always like the other, whatever person that provides exactly what you do. It's like indirect competitors, like Amazon, or just huge Capterra or G2 in the software space, all these like huge brands you're going to bump up against yeah, exactly. Who are unfortunately, probably a lot bigger and better at this stuff than you are.
Brad (06:29):
So that's part of it. Where are you also seeing success already? So is there anywhere that we can kind of double down anywhere where that we can pour on some, like, kind of gas on the fire and there's you already got the kindling or whatever, whatever dumb metaphor I'm going to run with here, you already got the kindling going, how can we get that to like spark up and, you know, and drive? So it's usually a combination of these factors. Also two companies generally have a direction in mind that they want to go in Mo more often than not. It's not always super accurate or realistic. And so that's always part of this too, is trying to find a happy medium between what the client has in mind, what you have in mind. And then where's the best place to settle to to, to figure out where you're going over the next three to six months, because content has a payback period of 6, 12, 18 months. Unfortunately, for all of us in this, you know, in the world, it's not like 30 days like it is Google ads or something else. So it's definitely a long-term approach that you got to settle on a direction. You can't be switching gears one month in, two months in, three months in. That's that's what you want to avoid at all costs.
Kathleen (07:37):
So I have a lot of questions, but I think I want to start with building on something you said, which is that a lot of the times the companies come to you and they think they know what they want, but it's not really what they need. So are there certain commonalities that you see, like, are there common mistakes that a lot of these companies are making when they think about how they should approach content?
Brad (07:57):
For sure. I think there's a huge problem around just like topic identification. So what topics are we going to write about and why? That becomes a huge problem, because if you have a site that's like, I don't know, let's say even a business that's been around for awhile. If their website isn't already big and they want to start showing up for like all these huge commercial terms, like you gotta, you gotta help them understand, look, you're not going to rank for this for possibly years. Like very likely years. Are you okay with that? And are you willing to keep spending money in year three on trying to like chip away at this very, very difficult bank? Most people don't, aren't okay with that off the bat.
Kathleen (08:43):
I can't afford to be okay with that.
Brad (08:43):
Exactly. Understandably so. So you just got to fit, it's almost like, do you want results and can we come to agreement on what those results are or do you want to blindly kind of like follow this vision and like bang your head against the wall for three years to get there. So it's kind of it's something as simple as like what keywords you're going to write about or what topics you're going to write about it's you often have to figure out if the client tells you they are looking for like, whatever traffic or leads or sales. Can we come to an agreement then that that's okay, we're going to like align on those things, but we're probably going to pick very different keywords or topics or whatever, then what you're thinking right now, because you may or may not be actually able to compete with that for any of those things in, you know, within three to six months, which is usually when a client starts to get antsy or a company starts to get antsy because they're throwing money into something. And they're not saying anything back yet.
Kathleen (09:39):
So when somebody does come to you in that situation and they're, they're swinging way above their, you know, trying to punch way above their weight class and you kind of have to talk them down. What is, I mean, I assume that mostly happens when they're in very, very competitive topic areas. What is your approach to finding what they should write about?
Brad (09:59):
We do a couple of things? We try, we try to get a happy, medium going. So we do try to as much as possible, we try to be realistic with them and be blunt and honest with them of like, look, it's don't bother, you know, in some of these areas, like, you're probably not gonna, like, just realistically with what you're talking about, spending with what you're, where you're talking about, where you are now, where you're trying to go. It's probably not realistic within 12 months or whatever. So if you want to still go to that path, fine, we're still, you know, ready to go down that path of you. We think that there might be better options. And so are there, is there low hanging fruits that gets them going in that direction already on their site? There's two things we look for there.
Brad (10:43):
From a high-level perspective or a broad perspective, it tends to be topical authority, which we can kind of unpack. But generally speaking, topical authority is like, is this website already deemed an expert on these topics or in this area or niche or space or whatever. We use different tools internally to kind of gauge that or use MarketMuse to gauge that we'll use Google search console and just Google analytics. Like, do you already rank pretty well for certain terms around these spaces is generally what we're looking for. A perfect example of that is like, if someone's ranking, if, if they did a piece of content a year or two ago, it's ranking, okay. But it's actually not really targeted or optimized that. Well, as far as like what we're used to we're used to and what we want to see, but it's ranking like top of page two or bottom of page one, can we rework that?
Brad (11:35):
Or can we, you know, take a bunch of existing content, improve it, get it to rank much faster and better in three months. And it gets them going in that direction or the path they ultimately want to get in 12 months from now. So that's, can we find that happy, medium with them of saying, look, you got to trust our process and trust that we know what we're doing. We'll prove it to you with some of these cases that we're already seeing that usually buys you, and this, this applies to, if I'm talking about clients, if you're internal and if you're trying to like sell your bosses or upper C-suite, because again, they, they probably don't know what the hell we're talking about, where we could go into topical authority and all this nerdy SEO stuff. But can you prove to them that you're on the right track and that they should believe in the process? That's, that's the key. Can you get them to buy into the process and to believe you? And if you can do that, then you usually get the leash to go 12 months down the line, 18 months down the line.
Kathleen (12:26):
That's so true that buy-in element is so critical because I think I've experienced so many times when leadership teams or executives say like, oh yeah, I love the idea of creating content and doing thought leadership. But then when they don't immediately see results in terms of pipeline, they get cold feet. And so getting that buy-in and making sure it's it's, they really understand the strategy and the plan. And they're prepared that the expectations are set correctly around timeframes is really important.
Brad (12:53):
Yeah. To piggyback on that one more time, like often a lot of the things that those people want to see or that those people understand are lagging indicators. So traffic sales, all that stuff's going to happen in the best of scenarios, if you've already done all these other things. Well, so you already have to nail search intent and you already have to nail the writing and the creative component. You already have to nail like the leading indicators of, well how many links does this page have? Or how are we distributing it? What's the referral traffic look like? It's like we already out to do all these things, to get the rankings to move first before the traffic and the leads and the sales are ever going to come from that piece of content. So it's, it's very much like if, if people are only looking at the end of the process, it's like losing weight.
Brad (13:38):
If you're only looking at the number on the scale, you're missing all the other good stuff you're doing, like reducing body fat percentage, changing body composition, changing eating habits, you're missing the process. That's going to get you there. If you're only looking at the number on the scale, you're gonna get discouraged. You're gonna quit. You're gonna throw in the towel. Like when things get hard when, when you don't want to be patient, because you're not seeing the scale or the number on the scale move, you're going to throw in the towel. If you're looking at the, the other leading indicators.
Kathleen (14:07):
That's so true. And by the way, I love that you mentioned MarketMuse. This is like one of my favorite things with the podcast. I interviewed Jeff Coyle from MarketMuse. So we've got a little cross pollination between guests going there. I think it's an awesome tool. I've used it.
Brad (14:20):
Yeah. We're a customer. I just saw him recently at a conference like two weeks ago. So yeah, there, there there's other tools out there that are similar, but that in my mind, and again, I'm a customer, I'm not like just saying this cause I get a fee for it, but it's the best for analyzing your site, your whole site and what the potential is and how to improve it, as opposed to just page level based metrics of like the grading. Like there's a lot of these kind of greater tools that are out there where they'll just tell you, like, are you nailing all the semantic keywords or topics for this one page measuring this one keyword or article where I think what separates MarketMuse, they look at like the whole website overall and they're customizing and personalizing data across your whole website based on what you're already doing well, and I think that's like a huge missing kind of component and in this whole content marketing game in competitive spaces, for sure.
Kathleen (15:13):
Yeah. It's a pretty, pretty cool tool. And I don't think very many people are using it to its fullest extent. So I love that description you just gave. All right. So you, you, you work with these companies, you've narrowed down topic areas. Once you figure out what it is, you want to be focused on what then?
Brad (15:33):
So we do a few things before jumping straight into like, you know, the draft or the outline what is this piece of content? Can it be grouped into a similar type of template that can be used across other pieces of content or other types of queries or topics that we're going to go into?
Kathleen (15:54):
What do you mean by that?
Brad (15:55):
So a perfect example of this, we, we, we've done a lot of work with Monday.com or we've got a bunch of success, like to show for them to whatever, but instead of boring that stuff like they have a lot of content that they might be going after. Like what is a Gantt chart for instance that's very specific obviously to like project management topics, but that what is type of query or keyword or question is often used in other spaces too.
Brad (16:26):
So one of the challenges in writing for them is we might write for the construction industry, the project management industry, agile software development, because you have all these different types of people actually using the tool. We're going to figure out, are there content templates or types that are common across all of these things we might be producing for them? And then can we bucket those down into like eight rough outlines almost. So there's almost like the structure in place and the search intent and the way we research those and the thing, all the clues we're compiling are often going to fit in the same type of template for what is a Gantt chart or what is blank. You're going to have the same for how to articles for list posts for in more commercial affiliate spaces, like best of like best project management software or best Gantt chart software or this brand versus this brand or this brand alternatives. There's, there's all these like very common content types or templates that you can create to give structure for what the eventual content brief or outline should look like in the first place. So that's like another kind of missing ingredient I see that people missed the challenge with doing content well, is that you can't do it at scale and vice versa. Like when you try to scale aggressively content quality drops, if you're overly focused on content quality, you can't ever scale it. And so it's often this like, problem.
Kathleen (17:49):
I want to know what your solution is to that because that's like the age old question.
Brad (17:52):
Yeah. Part of it's all this, this boring stuff we're talking about. Part of it's like this nerdy operations we we'll, we'll create, we'll do the topic identification, we'll come up with these content types. That'll get translated into like a content brief, which is like for a specific article in the space from that brief, it goes into like the outline, the draft. We're also combining like topic experts where we can. So if we have like our editor doing all our overseeing, all the content being produced on in this project management realm has like the PMP certification or whatever nerdy association that is for project manager. So are we actually finding experts who understand the intricacies of project management for construction projects versus those for software development where there's similarities, but there are definitely differences too. So that's that's really hard. As you can imagine, you have to find those are two different writers, you know spoiler alert.
Brad (18:47):
That's not one writer that you're using across all the pieces of content you got find like people that specialize in those areas. Another component of this too, is like, can we do interview or can we interview people within the company or other experts if you don't have a subject matter expert who is that like technical point of contact, for lack of a better word, who, who is going to be able to add something into it, technical people, aren't always good at like creating a narrative. People want to read and making something interesting to read. And so that's where you need the writer and the narrative too. So it's, it's kind of like you're, you're bringing together all these various components that don't always fit well together. And you're finding ways to make them fit together through, through good processes, good operations through, through role specialization which we can go into, but it's basically like we're going to hire really good writers just to write, and we're not going to ask them to sit in client meetings, sit on email, so on slack. But conversely, we're also not going to like force them to go research, search intent or research at a deep level. We're also not gonna make them do keyword research. It's relying on a bunch of like experts in various areas and then kind of like making them work together in a very seamless way. And that's, that's, what's hard to do from an operational standpoint.
Kathleen (20:00):
I want to ask you about the writers because I'm in a lot of different online communities with other CMOs and marketers. And probably the question I see the most frequently of all is, Hey, I'm looking for a good writer and very often it's, Hey, I'm looking for good technical writer, anybody have any leads and nobody ever seems to have them. And so any, any tips for somebody out there who's maybe looking to hire a writer that I don't know that have helped you in terms of like where to find them or what they're looking for to make a position attractive, you know, anything that could help somebody in that position?
Brad (20:39):
Yeah, definitely. I have tons of ideas. So we could just maybe like rip off a few. The first is being very clear on the type of writer that you're looking for. And that's a big problem that most people aren't clear on, they don't totally know who they want. They don't totally know what it is. They know when they see it, but that means it's very difficult the way you could sometimes get around that is you can't expect to look for, like you can't, you can't look at like 10 writers or 20 writers and expect to find the one you're looking for. The easiest way I've found to hire good writers at scale is to just look at a lot of writers, which means you need like a system to whittle and narrow down and pick out like 1% of the people that you're looking for.
Brad (21:25):
So we're looking for a writer. And so when we often like we'll use a lot of job board ads, for example, and when we write, these will often be very specific to like a topic or a space. So we're looking for not just like a finance writer, but we're looking for a finance writer with experience in crypto and Bitcoin. And then we want to generate like hundreds of leads just for that very specific definition from there. Then we have all these various components like can they follow directions? So can you include things in the initial interview or the, or not even the initial interview don't interview writers to start with because it's, it's a bad signal. Can you include things in the actual job application process that will just, that will exclude them. So I want to see your LinkedIn URL. I want to see three published examples in this space.
Brad (22:15):
I want to see can you write me a cover letter using this one word, like 80% of the people won't do one of those three things they won't follow if they can't follow directions like that, they're not going to follow your directions when you tell them to do em, dashes like this or comments like this, or they're not going to follow your directions, like when you start working together. So use things like that. And then from the published samples, is this person's style of writing what I'm looking for? Yes or no. So not is this person a good writer? Most people that don't understand content just automatically assume that that this subjective space is whatever they think it is or whatever they like or don't like. And what I mean is some, some people like formal writing, longer prose, more complex sentences.
Brad (22:58):
Some people like the opposite, shorter sentences, simple sentences, more copywriting style, more informal. But they don't always have that like clear definition in terms of like, here's a style guide, you know, style guidelines for writer before we start looking for them. And so just because a writer isn't good for that one client or that one specification or style doesn't mean they're a bad writer. It just means they're not right for that scenario. So that's, that's what I mean by try to get really clear on who you want to find and why. And then from there again, like, do they understand your space? You can pretty quickly tell if you've been in the space long enough, especially a technical space. If this person understands it or not what you want to look for or gauge is like, are they, are they kind of just regurgitating what's already out there? Or do they actually understand the nuance? An example of this are absolute statements. Someone says Google ads are always better than Facebook ads.
Kathleen (23:53):
Yeah. That why I always say every writer that has ever worked for me, I've always said don't ever use an absolute statement about anything. And this is an absolute statement by the way, unless, unless you have data to back it up, like that drives me bananas, I'm so glad you said that.
Brad (24:19):
The world is not black and white. Unfortunately like there's very little that we all agree on. I think that's been abundantly clear in the last 18 months. Like most people in the world don't agree on everything. And that's okay. So just being clear on like what you're looking for here. And so that's a really good way to find, or are they like, are they telling you, instead of showing you is another big clue. So are they telling you that Google ads are better than Facebook or are they actually proving to you that Google ads are better than Facebook ads for this type of business or case in this scenario, with examples, with data, with statistics, with quotes, with a case study that that's a huge, a huge indicator to have a good, what makes a good technical writer versus a bad one.
Brad (25:04):
Spoiler alert, good technical writers tend to cost more money than bad ones. Unfortunately, if your budget is not a lot, do less pieces, but make those pieces better overall, don't, don't skimp on paying writers and then be surprised when they can't hit deadlines. They suck to work with, they don't follow directions. They aren't an expert. You know, I want to drive a Ferrari, but I, I don't want to spend, you know, a million dollars on a car. So I don't drive a Ferrari. Like you gotta, you gotta like, be realistic about what you're doing too.
Kathleen (25:36):
Yeah. Oh, well, I feel like that is easily an entire another podcast. And so I, I won't go any further on that one, but so let's go back to you. You, you know, you have your system for hiring writers and getting the content produced. I want to start to dive into some of the nerdy details around like really what needs to be in place for this content to, to rank and be effective. So I'm just going to throw it back to you because that's a really big topic, but I feel like I want to just ask you to narrow in, on like some of the top things that you think are important and that maybe also a lot of people either don't recognize or don't get right.
Brad (26:12):
For sure. I'll go down a bunch off the bat. Funnel stage. So why, why are we creating this content in the first place and, and, and, and why, so are we trying to drive traffic? Are we trying to drive trials and leads? Are we trying to drive opt-ins? Are people comparing alternatives or are they just looking for education? They'll know what those alternatives are just yet. Funnel stage, meaning top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. If someone looks for what is a Gantt that tends to be like middle of the funnel. If someone says, how do I keep a construction project on time, under budget? That's top of the funnel. If someone says is Monday.com a Gantt chart software? Better than whatever? Fill in the blank, Asana or whoever, ClickUp, that's going to be more bottom of the funnel.
Brad (27:01):
So just, just from that aspect alone, understanding why people are searching for those things helps you understand what are we actually going to write about? Like the person searching for, how do I keep a construction project on time under budget, they could care less who monday.com is. They could care less who competitor or alternative XYZ is. They're just looking for like, how do I, how do I, like, what are the common issues and problems with keeping a construction project on time? It could be change orders. It could be hiring vendors. It could be time of year that they're trying to build. Maybe they're trying to build in winter and that, I don't know. I don't know anything about construction, as you can tell, but you kinda, you kind of get the feeling of like the stuff you're going to write it out there is going to look completely different from the intricacies of, of different features within a Gantt chart software.
Brad (27:49):
Like I don't know what are those called? When one task can't start until the other task starts?
Kathleen (27:56):
Waterfall or critical path.
Brad (27:59):
Exactly. Exactly. Like if you're bringing up critical path to someone who's looking for, how do I keep a construction project on time or under budget? You're probably going way over their head. Yeah. So so, so this is a combination of like actually knowing the space you're in and actually knowing customers. What common questions do a sales team gets, do a customer service department get, do an operations team, get what are the most common problems, pain points, customer questions. What are the things that throw off construction projects in the first place? Like what are all these like actual customer stories with the search stuff? So if we're going through all the time and effort and expense to create content, it needs to perform for the longterm.
Brad (28:40):
I don't just care if it gives me a hundred referral visits from Facebook tomorrow, I care about how much traffic am I getting a year from now from Google. So unless you can also align all that stuff with search intent, you're gonna fall short. So this is again where I'm going to lean on something like a MarketMuse. I'm also just going to look at what's already ranking. So to our points, a lot of companies get this wrong there. They're trying to rank for like best CRM with like a product page on their website. When, when actually what people are searching for when they search for best CRM is a comparison of different CRM tools. They're, they're not, they don't want you to tell them why you're the best one. They want you to tell them why you might be the best fit among these other options for this specific use case.
Brad (29:27):
So it's a very different style of content that we're talking about for those two, like a product or feature page versus more of a comparison driven page. Just look at what's already ranking. Like if the top 10 in Google are all comparison, best of pages, don't think you're going to create a product page or a feature page and rank for it. You can build. And we've seen this time and time again on huge websites. You can build all the links you want or do all the promotion you want to that page. You're always going to struggle. So getting search intent, right, based on, what's already ranking based on what people are asking common questions, kind of like pulling all these variables together is what is going to give you a leg up in a successful piece of content over the long term, versus just relying too much on one of those things, relying too much on search, relying too much on customers. Whatever the case might be. So that's again very, still pretty high level, but that's again, a big problem that people don't pull together, all the right data sources to kind of work together.
Kathleen (30:23):
Oh man, if I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me like, why a product page wasn't ranking for something like that. I would be a very wealthy woman.
Brad (30:32):
Totally. And we, we have that, so USerp, our digital PR link-building company through Codeless. We have the conversation all the time with people where they're like they want to build links to, or get mentioned or whatever, to this, this page. And we're like, we could definitely do that. The problem is, is it's still not going to work any better. We might move you up. Like, you know, a couple of spaces, but it's not going to break you into the top three where 80% of the people are clicking. So you need to like, take a step back, redo that page and then we can talk, you know, how you're actually going to.
Kathleen (31:01):
Yeah, definitely. All right. So number one is understanding the stage of the funnel, understanding the audience and then number and number two was understanding search intent. I don't know if that was one or two combined,
Brad (31:12):
So yeah, they're all kind of combined. And this is, this is all assuming again, that you're picking the right topics at the right time for the right stage of sight. Yeah. So there's a lot of components already that go into this stuff before we even talked about like semantic keywords on the page headers writing, like before you get to like the real tactical stuff, there's all these critical kind of decisions that you need to get in alignment in an ideal world.
Kathleen (31:34):
So let's go into the on-page stuff. Cause I feel like that is kind of the next step of all right. So you have your topic for targeting the right stage of the funnel. You've got the right search intent, you've picked a structure for your article. Then you go and like you have an outline, but then you have to like get into the technical aspects of optimizing it for search engines.
Brad (31:57):
So yeah. Another big mistake people still people are still in like 2005 SEO mindset where they, their understanding of on-page optimization is like, oh, you just a sprinkle in the focus keyword a couple of times at the very end of the process. And then you hit publish. I wish, I wish that were the case. It would, things would be far easier.
Kathleen (32:20):
If you want to hear really bad, I had somebody ask me the other day, can't you just add the keywords in on the backend? No, we can't.
Brad (32:27):
Unfortunately. So like proper content optimization, on-page optimization starts at the beginning of the process when we're doing all this stuff. So when we're building an outline, like what should your headers be on that outline? Where does that information come from? It shouldn't come from like some arbitrary, you know, person's brain. It should come from like, well, what, what kind of content we're producing live? So in other words, go look for a topic like go look for what is a Gantt chart. Go look at the people. Also ask questions on Google, go look at how other articles are structured that are ranking. Well, go look in market muse, go look at the content that has the highest scores already. And then go look at what their articles, headers, and structures look like. Go look at the related searches on the very bottom of an article of, of, of the Google search engine result, page the search scroll all the way to the bottom.
Brad (33:16):
Look at the related searches. What we're trying to piece together is when someone looks for how to make iced coffee, we're looking for like, what are the three or four or however many headers and major sections of content needs to be in that too. So we don't just want to answer how to make iced coffee. We want to answer like how to make iced coffee at home or how to make iced coffee like Starbucks, or how to make iced coffee with a Keurig. Like what are the related semantic ideas that people are actually looking for when they search for this? And then from there, how does it, how does it tie into your thing that you're going to ultimately try to sell them? So the first step or two of the article might look like like the main problem and then we're agitating the main problem.
Brad (34:00):
So this goes back to copywriting, the problem, agitate, solution formula of like, what is the problem? What are the symptoms of that problem? And then how do we solve it? So the problem is how to make iced coffee. The agitation is like how to make iced coffee at home on a budget with your instant coffee maker that usually produces coffee that tastes like cardboard. And I'll take the same, no matter what flavor like pod, you put it in or whatever you wanna call it. And, and then like how to make it on the go. Cause I got a, whatever. I have five kids I'm running around after, and I don't want to like spend a lot of times doing it. I got to like multitask. So it's like, what's, what's the actual like attributes that are going to get back to your version of doing it or your product or services way of doing it.
Brad (34:43):
And then like connecting all those dots. And that's how you optimize something properly from a search perspective, because you're going to have the proper headers, you're going to have the proper semantic keywords and topics. The images that you're using are going to be the right images. And so for example, if we're talking about how to make iced coffee at home, well, take some screenshots, make an iced coffee at home and take some screenshots, but take some, take some images, take some photos of how you're actually doing that. Then you have a specific photo example of making an iced coffee on your Keurig. And now, you know what to write in the caption or the alt text for that image, which is for web accessibility and searching is use it to now, you know what you're supposed to write for those things, because you have a very, very specific concrete examples to provide the problem is when you don't have all that stuff or when you don't have a specific photo to use that shows something a very concrete step, the process, then your alt text or your image caption is going to suck because you have a bad example to start with.
Brad (35:43):
And that's what, that's where people fall short.
Kathleen (35:45):
Yeah. I feel like so many people forget about the backend of images, if you will. Like they get so focused on picking the right image and making it look nice. And then I've seen just so many articles and blogs and things that, that have no alt text. And so it's like the image name and the image name isn't even something recognizable it's, you know, Shutterstock, blah, blah, blah, or IMG underscore blah, blah, blah.
Brad (36:12):
That's the problem is is you, you chose a stock photo for no other reason other than to include an image in that article. Yeah. So there's the, the reason your tech sucks is, or is not existence is because there is no compelling reason why that stock image should ever be in that article in the first place. And so that's, that's the disconnect that people have and don't understand is like, yes, your content is not going to perform well when you don't, when you don't do it. Well, when it's garbage in, garbage out, if you, if you don't know why you're doing something well, or like putting it together in the first place, then, then yeah. Your alt text is going to stop. You can do, you can compress those images. You can add alt text, you can do all these things, but it's still gonna fall short because it's a bad image to start with in the very beginning.
Kathleen (36:58):
Yeah. And that's assuming you even remembered that you needed to do alt text in the first place because I find a ton of marketers don't. And then correct that like, then you also need to think about compressing your images?
Brad (37:12):
Yeah. So you throw it, especially if we're talking about photo images, like that example I just gave, which you should do, you should iPhone images are amazing, right? The problem is iPhone images are going to be like 3000 pixels by 3000 and they're going to be like these huge, massive files. They're going to look amazing. And at scale, when you produce hundreds of articles like that, and you have 10 images per article, your website is going to be slow AF for lack of a more descriptive term.
Brad (37:38):
So, so like, are you compressing these, if this, if, if the width on your blog is only 800, 900 pixels wide, a thousand pixels wide, why do you need an image? That's 3000 pixels wide. So, so for the people that aren't like savvy with all the nerdy stuff, basically you're trying, you're, you're forcing your website to take this massive image file, load it every single time, like from scratch if you don't have caching and other stuff going on or CDN and then you're also forcing it to automatically resize that image for this much lower our, excuse me, this much smaller, like spot on your website where you don't even need the massive quality or like files or resolution size, because the place on your site is so small that you're putting it. Like the naked eye is never going to be able to tell the, the difference between like that image and a much smaller one and a much smaller file size.
Brad (38:31):
So there's, there's all these little details involved with something as simple and easy as including an image in a, in a blog post that people don't, they either don't do it a hundred percent correct. Or they don't do it a hundred percent correct. 90% of the time. I think that's where that's where people fall short is let's say they do optimize their image properly, or let's say one writer on your team produces or does images correctly. The problem is you're not getting like all 20 writers to do it consistently over time. You're not having, like, you're not doing all blog posts the same every single time. And usually I find where marketers fall short. It's not the creative stuff. It's not the ingenuity. It's, it's just the boring operations and redundancies and processes and consistency that, that usually kind of kills them at the end.
Kathleen (39:22):
I always use the analogy that marketing is so much like exercise. And like, it's not that there's one magic exercise that's going to like give you the muscle you want, or have you lose the weight you want. It is totally about showing up every day doing the reps and sets.
Brad (39:40):
It's a hundred percent. Yeah. It's I think we're part of the, we, marketers are part of the problem in that we there's so much bad information online. And a specific example of this would be all these blog posts that say like 101 ways, you know, to build blinks. The, the problem with those are types of articles is that you really in practice only need two or three ways to build links. You just need to do them really, really well at scale and at a much higher volume than anyone else in your little space. And if you do that, you'll succeed and you'll, you'll crush them, but you don't, you don't need to chase 101 shiny objects. You don't need to use Tik TOK and Instagram and Pinterest and Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn. You can use none of those and you could still build a really big business and you could still build a ton of traffic and leads. You just need to like find where your little Venn diagram of strengths and resources overlap and go really, really deep and do the same thing every day. Like in a committed way, you don't need to like join to your example. You don't need to like join CrossFit and run marathons and starve yourself.
Brad (40:55):
Yeah, exactly. And I think that's, that's where people, you almost like running in circles cause you're, you're not really committing to one direction.
Kathleen (41:03):
All right. So, so going back to content creation and sort of what, what we all need to be doing in order to get it right. One of the other questions I have is around just the volume and frequency of publishing. And I know that there's not one specific answer of like, you need to publish this many blogs a week or whatever, but, but I also, at least in my experience have seen that there is kind of a generally don't publish less than acts and you, and if you publish more than X, I don't know. I dunno. Is there a, is there a band in there that you generally shoot for?
Brad (41:40):
Yeah. I was trying to think of like a clever, succinct way to put it. It depends a lot on the business you're in, it depends a lot on your business model. It depends a lot on if you've raised money, it depends a lot. And the reason I say that is because like, if you, if you've raised money or people outside funding, you have to go from zero to a hundred very quickly. It's a, it's a very different type of style of business and growth. Then like a business that's going to be around for 50 years and never take money. And just grow consistently. It's going to depend on if you're competing locally, regionally, nationally, internationally, it's going to depend on all these various factors. I would say the sweet spot is somewhere between like once and twice a week for most companies that are, that are serious about getting customers via content and SEO.
Brad (42:33):
I would say it's probably from like one to anywhere up to like five to 10 for most companies, a week. Sorry. So that would be what anywhere from like, you know, five to 10 ish on the low end to 30, 40 ish on the high end for most companies. A month. I was trying to, I was trying to break them into weekly and monthly. We have, we have clients that'll do a hundred a month plus because they're big companies. They can rank for anything. They have unlimited resources practically from, you know, five rounds of funding and anything else. So it's a very different style and it's very aggressive and they're trying to go public in 18 months. And so it's, their, their growth curves, very different. The problem with, I usually recommend that people should do less frequency or volume if they're more budget constrained so that they can put more money behind the piece that they are actually doing and make them great. The challenge though is if you only do one or two a month, you don't, this is very much a marathon that we're all doing and you don't, you don't get enough momentum going over the course of a year if you're only doing one or two a month, because 12 articles at the end of the year from an SEO perspective.
Kathleen (43:47):
They better be the 12 best articles on the planet.
Brad (43:49):
And you better have some really good promotion advertising link-building whatever on of that, to like get every dime out of what you put into those things. So it's, it's, there is kind of a sweet spot there of maybe, like I said, 10 to 20 to 30 for most companies in most cases in most spaces a month. Again, if this is going to be a primary channel for you, if you're going to do like 6, 7, 8 plus figures, just from content and SEO yeah. You might be able to do 10 articles a year and get like five figures of lead value or whatever for customers from that. But that's not going to move the needle for most companies in the world beyond a certain point, you know?
Kathleen (44:27):
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So focus on quality over quantity, but recognize that there is sort of a minimum amount of quantity that you need to commit to and be consistent about it. I feel like the other aspect we haven't touched on and, and stop me if there's something I've missed on the more technical side, but I feel like we should take two minutes and talk about once you have created this content and published it, what then? Cause I do feel like a lot of marketers miss that part too,
Brad (44:56):
For sure. Yeah. So going back to our conversation before, where, what kind of content is this and why and what does the actual competition look like? And the two reasons I bring that up is because top of the funnel content, that's more, educational-based more information-based, you can be a lot more creative in terms of like it's maybe more humorous, it's more interesting and engaging in or entertaining that style of content tends to do better with like advertising. So if you're going to like run Facebook ads or that style of content, we'll do much better in that medium. If you're trying to do like a best Gantt chart comparison in-depth guide, and you're going to like run Facebook ads to a cold audience, good luck. You're gonna lose all your money. That style of content tends to be more competitive from a a competition, meaning that people already ranking for that content.
Brad (45:44):
And therefore links is usually the goal there. So it's very different in terms of like top of the funnel content tends to be more interesting engaging. You can get referral traffic easier. You can pitch that content easier for things like links. You can pitch it to journalists, you can run ads and too cold, or even retarget website audiences and, and have a lot more success with driving in visitors to that kind of stuff. And then re you should always retarget those people with other pieces of content, your funnel bottom of the funnel content tends to be a lot heavier focused on more SEO, more classic link building. The challenge is it's hard to get good authoritative like legitimate links, like editorial brand mentions to content that sucks. And it's very dry and commercial. Yeah. So that's again where the execution comes into, into play.
Brad (46:32):
Like for those types of pieces of content. Can, do you have some unique angle on that topic that's new or different or contrarian to what's already out there that would work well to pitch, to journalists for brand mentions? Do you have proprietary data? Did you run a survey? Did you, did you survey your customers? Did you do, did you something unique or different that again, that information is not widely available, that you can go pitch to places or go write a guest article about and kind of like rehash a lot of that information and drive a link to yourself. Do you have a case study data for customer successes on how they were able to use that Gantt chart software to save a hundred percent material costs on their construction projects? Some like really compelling data points that you had given will make it much easier to build links to the, the content, the asset itself and how you do it will often dictate not only the success you're going to see, but even like where you should promote it or how you should promote it.
Kathleen (47:32):
Yeah, that makes sense. I want to shift gears for a second, cause I don't want to run out of time before I asked you you've worked with a ton of really interesting companies. And you've already said that this is about having a really good process focusing on quality and being consistent. And so do you have any examples you can share whether they're anonymized or not of like before and after? What kind of results have you gotten just following this sort of a process
Brad (47:57):
For sure. Yeah. The one I'll top my head only because I've, I've like been beating this dead horse of Gantt charts is when we started working with monday.com, I just did a talk on this too, is I like it fresh in my mind, but they, they were doing a lot of like paid acquisition for customers. They're also doing what I would say are like surface level traditional SEO and traditional content marketing. So it's kind of like, they're nailing all these things we talked about today. They're, they're nailing like five to 10, which is the vast majority of companies out there. Within I think three months of working with them, we were able to drive something. We were able to increase the traffic like 1500% within three months, which is super, super fast from a payback period standpoint.
Brad (48:39):
Cause usually contents 6, 12, 18 months. We did something like 70 articles within three weeks, like the first three, four weeks of working together, all these, all these kinds of like insane. And again, it's, it's really hard to do this, but we're, we're set up just to do just this. So it's, you know, it's arguably easier for us cause we're not, we're staying in our lane, we're not doing all these other like various components. That's one example of where we went on to do like over 850 articles over the course of a year with them. So you could like figure out how much like, you know, results they solve with that. And I want to traffic everything else. So that was like a huge success story, huge win. I think, I think a lot of it comes back from the other companies we've worked with too.
Brad (49:18):
A lot of it will come back to like role specialization, which we touched on. But if you like, like setting up your team, how it's hard to scale all this stuff because it's hard to find enough good people and then get them to work together properly. And that issue is compounded when we're all working asynchronously and remotely because we're all in different time zones, we're all spread out. Our clients are all spread out. We often don't, you know can't talk all day or every day. And so how do you get things to kind of line up perfectly so that the strategist prepares everything the writer needs, who then flushes out everything exactly like the editor wants to see ahead of time. Like you, you have to really figure out like how all these pieces are gonna flow together. And that is the hard thing. And then do it consistently or repeatedly. So how do you plug in then 10 writers, 20 writers, 50 writers into those processes without everything breaking down?
Kathleen (50:19):
Are you going to tell me you use Monday.com?
Brad (50:19):
Well we do. We use a lot of other things too, but it's even like the tool. What's hard is that the tool itself doesn't matter. What's, what's hard about it is creating the Loom videos and the Google docs with your step-by-steps and including screenshots for everything. And making sure that if someone is going to deliver something by a certain date, they actually do that. Like, that's the hard stuff that you're optimizing for. So we can talk about all the nerdy, SEO stuff that we want. Most, what I find is most people are doing all these nerdy things in one facet or another. So they're doing some people might be doing image, compression stuff. We talked about, some people might be doing the topic optimization stuff. Some people are doing whatever the expert writers, the hard part is linking all that stuff together and then doing it consistently over 850 articles over the course of a year.
Brad (51:12):
And I think that's, if you don't have good processes and systems and stuff where you can plug and play people that's where things break down. Cause you're you hit a glass ceiling. So maybe one last example here is I'll give is like a lot of times companies will take a good writer and they'll, they'll promote them in air quotes into like an editor or a content manager position. And that person's skillset is not well suited to that position. It's kind of like the it's like the Michael Scott problem of taking like a really good salesperson and making them a manager. What makes a good writer is the ingenuity and the ability to say things different ways. And the creativity, an editor is the exact opposite. The exact, the editor needs to be super consistent and need to have very clear guidelines and very same feedback.
Brad (51:53):
Every single time they edit something. And where you often see in practice is that the, a bad editor is taking longer than they should be because they're rewriting large portions of what a writer already gave them, because it doesn't sound like them. And that's a delegation problem. It's not a content problem or an editorial problem. And that's what people miss. It's, it's a hundred percent delegation. And at the a hundred percent, this person's not has the right skillset for this role has nothing to do with like the, the, the content, the writing, the writers that writer sucks. This writer just can't get my style. No, no, no. It's a process delegation issue. It's, it's a, it's an old school boring operations problem. It's not an editorial content problem.
Kathleen (52:37):
Yeah. All right. Well, we're almost at the top of the hour, so we're going to go rapid fire into the last couple of questions. I'll ask them quickly. You give me your quick answers. Number one. How do you stay on top of all the latest stuff when it comes to organic SEO? Are there certain resources you rely on stay educated?
Brad (52:57):
I purposely don't try to stay that on top of it because a lot of how the world works today from an SEO standpoint, fundamentally, and based on the principles of what search engines are trying to do are still the same as they were a decade or two plus ago. It's often the tactics that change and evolve over time and the interpretation of them. So I often am more of like a quarterly type of person or I try to catch up on things. And then I test I was going to say a bad word again. I try to test stuff, not, not the other word I was going to test. I try to test stuff and then learn by doing, I don't learn by reading anymore. Because once you get past a certain point, you need to be experimenting and doing things on different sites on your own site, on side sites, you need to be pushing the boundaries in different ways, and then seeing what actually works versus listening to people. Cause most people in the space don't know what they're talking about.
Kathleen (53:57):
All right, second question. This podcast is all about inbound marketing, who out there, company or individual, is really raising the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer?
Brad (54:07):
That's a good question. I think MarketMuse is really interesting. We've talked about them a few times. I think what they're trying to solve is very hard and difficult, but it's very necessary. I think, I'm trying to think of like another really, I'm trying to give an example like outside of, so one of my friend's companies her name is Bethany. She runs this website called primallypure.com. It's a cosmetics and like natural, organic skincare. They've had a ton of success and they do an amazing job in like all this inbound stuff, but they probably even wouldn't internally call it inbound. I think, I think people need to look outside marketing and sales and HubSpot for ideas.
Kathleen (54:51):
And the definition of inbound has really evolved too.
Brad (54:53):
For sure. So that's, maybe that's why I would give an example like that. They've done an amazing job working with influencers, doing all this really creative, interesting stuff. And, and like, frankly like kill it in their space as like a newish brand. So I would, I would look outside of your space or I would look for other examples from other industries to draw, to draw ideas from.
Kathleen (55:11):
Awesome. All right. Last question. If somebody wants to learn more about you connect with you, ask you a question, what is the best way for them to do that?
Brad (55:18):
That's a good question. I'm on LinkedIn. I don't use it. I don't use it that often. So I'm on LinkedIn. My, I think my handle or whatever is BS marketer. Those are my initials. And also because marketers are full of BS. My Codeless is getcodeless.com. And Wordable as a SaaS tool we acquired and rebuilt. It's Wordable.io. Those are usually one of the best places with the, with the usual caveat that I usually suck at getting back to people. And I'm I'm often very slow in response, but those are usually one of the best ways to get ahold of me.
Kathleen (55:47):
All right, I'll put those links in the show notes. So if you want to learn more head there, and in the meantime, if you enjoyed this episode, head to Apple Podcasts, leave the podcast a review. And if you know somebody else doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, but for now, thank you so much, Brad, for joining me this week, this was a ton of fun. And we had so much to talk about.
Brad (56:08):
Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. I hope I hope everyone's still awake. I, for all those nerdy buzzwords that we just covered,
Kathleen (56:13):
Thank you!
