So What? What to do when SEO isn’t working

Well, hey howdy everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I am joined, as always, by Chris and John. Uh John is coming from a two super top secret remote location that you cannot disclose, aka uh his relatives.

Yes, somewhere in an undisclosed location, the Don Runsfeld compound. Um in this week's episode of So What, we are talking about what to do with your when your SEO isn't working. And so this came about from ourselves. And so we've been behind the scenes talking a lot about have we exhausted our keyword lists, are we doing the right things? Are we moving the needle?

You know, all the good stuff that leads towards, you know, at the end of the day, a conversion. And so we feel like we've been doing a lot, but we want to see if we could do more, do better, or even just explore if the tactics that we're are tried and true for SEO are working or not working for Trust Insights. So today we're gonna talk about how to analyze the effectiveness of your SEO, how to rethink your keyword list, and what other actions you can be taking with your SEO. So Chris, where should we be starting? What's not working?

What's that? Before we start. Um that that's that's a valid question. What's not working? Because there's three different places SEO can break down, right?

There is conversions, right? Our search traffic isn't converting. There is we're not getting search traffic, right? So we've got organic searches is is is an empty uh uh empty pipe. And then there's search visibility.

We're not even showing up in search, so we can't get search traffic, we can't get conversions. The first place we have to start is to figure out which of those three things is broken, where is the leak, if you will, in the order of operations. And if you don't know that, that would be my suggestion to as a place to start. Um well, so I feel confident in saying we're getting search traffic, we're just not getting the volume of search traffic that we would like to be getting. And we are getting conversions from search, but we're just not getting the volume of conversions that we would like to be getting.

And so technically, to answer your question, all of those things are happening, they're just not happening at a volume and consistency that we would like to be seeing. So we need to be doing more of something. So let's take a look at how you might figure this out because I think that's an important uh uh point. So let's start in at the bottom, a conversions, right? So Google Analytics 4, which um reminder, public service announcement.

It is July 14th, 2022, as we record this. You have less than a year now to uh uh switch over to Google Analytics 4. And every day that you wait between now and July 1 of 2023 is a day you will not have for year over year comparisons. So get it done. Um we've got a whole bunch of resources, we'll put them up uh in somewhere uh about it.

But we go into the conversion paths, we look at our multi-touch uh model, and we see that yeah, organic search, we're not really getting the conversions not the level that you like you said, the level that we want. And we see this here, organic search is kind of coming in third, email really winning the day. So Google Analytics is telling us for sure the conversions aren't there. Okay, let's take a step up then. Are we getting traffic?

Right? So go into Google Search Console. Um, what kind of clicks are we getting? So we're looking at the last three months, we're getting about a thousand clicks. That's about 300 clicks a month, right?

That's that's not great. Um, that's that's pretty thin. Then we look at the impressions. We have 195,000 impressions over the last three months. That's what, you know, uh six uh 60,000 impressions a month.

That's pretty good. So I think in terms of our uh where things broken, visibility is we're we're okay there, right? You know, we can always want more. It's we're not getting the clicks, right? We're not getting the traffic, and then that in turn means we're not getting the conversion.

So that would be my first stop on the on the train of uh SEO to figure out what's broken. Is for us, it appears that traffic is the issue. So with that, the first thing that we would probably talk about is well, are we writing about the right things? Are we putting out enough content? And is that content providing any value?

Is the content structured correctly? Is it you know, does it have the snippets and the keywords and the you know correct meta tags and you know all that good stuff that goes into people understanding at a glance what the heck the content is about when they're searching for? And so we know for ourselves the answer is we're actually in the process of fixing a lot of our content to have those correct things. So I feel I can confidently say that that is why we're getting the impressions and not the clicks, is our content was missing a lot of the technical structure that it needed in order to perform better, but that's not true for everybody. That's not true for everybody.

And I think one of the things you have to remember with Search Console data in particular is that these two metrics, clicks and impressions, really are indicators of what's going on with your search. If you're getting impressions, that means Google thinks it's it knows to show your site for certain search terms, right? And it's showing your site. In our case, it's showing our site a lot. So that's sort of Google's you know, upvote.

Okay, your your site doesn't completely suck, you're gonna get shown in search. Like if your site was just totally sucked, you know, that total impressions would be zero. You know, nobody no one Google wouldn't even bother showing it. The clicks are what users think of your site. So users and they see the result in search, they look at it and go, yeah, that that's aligns with my search intent.

I'm gonna click on that. And so we're now at a point where we have to figure out sort of three new layers, right? Do we have the right audience? Do we have the right offer? Do we have the right creative?

This is Bob Stone's 1968 direct marketing framework, which is applied search. When you see what we have, which is lots of impressions and not lots of clicks, it means we've probably screwed up one of two things. Either we've misaligned the search intent, or we've got the wrong offer, the offer being the search listing itself. And part of that goes to the knowing what our search intent is, because there's two basic forks to search intent, right? There is commercial intent, like I want to hire trust insights.

That is commercial intent. You're gonna buy something. I want to price of uh an Apple iPhone 13, right? You you're intend to buy something that's those are commercial intent searches, and then it's the educational searches um or you know, educational navigational. These are people who aren't in the market for buying things, but and they're gonna search for things that are like you know, typically unbranded searches, like you know, analytics recommendations, how to migrate to Google Analytics for um my analytics stopped working.

Uh, these would be the educational terms where the intent is not there. And if we haven't done a good job of figuring out what topics, because we're trying to get rid of the concept of keywords for people, or what topics fit in which category, so that when a listing comes up, Google's back in the background trying to decide whether a query is navigational or commercial. They and they've said this in their documentation. This is how we bifurcate um search intent. So we have to figure out have we are we ranking for terms and showing up in search for terms that are misaligned with the commercial intent.

And so the easiest way to figure this out is if you scroll down and in Search Console and you look at the clicks and impressions columns, you can get a sense of you know what are the what are the intents here? So branded search is generally a pretty good proxy for commercial intent. If you're searching for trust insights by name, it's not because you're bored and you're looking for entertainment, right? You're not looking for you know uh us playing video games on YouTube. You want to talk to us.

If you're searching for the disadvantages of predictive analytics, you may not care who the information is from. You're just trying to get the best information, the knowledge that you're after. When you have a big gap between these two, it means that you're you've got misaligned intent. So I'm gonna sort by impressions. People searching for for my name, data quality framework, 4,400 searches in 90 days, zero clicks on it.

Right, that means that whatever someone's searching for there, when they see our listing, they're like, uh-uh, this is not what I'm looking for. They don't even bother they don't even bother clicking on it. They don't even dig in. They're like, nope, just go on to the next listing. So we have to figure out what's gone wrong there.

And to what you were saying, Katie, that's often the wrong offer, right? They see our listing and they look at it and go, uh that's not it has nothing to do with what I was what I'm looking for. The intent is is mismatched. What's interesting is, you know, as a human, as someone who does my own, you know, Google searches and you know, web uh web searches. A phrase like data quality framework, I mean, that really doesn't tell you what the intent is.

Are you looking for an example of a framework? Are you looking for you know just a template to fill in your own framework? Are you looking for an image of a framework? Like this is good, but as the person who then has to fix the thing, I still don't know what where it went wrong. Exactly.

And so this is a concept that um our friends over at Market Muse, uh, Jeff Coyle was writing about recently, uh, about intent fractures. Uh, and it's where this the term you don't know what they meant, right? And there's a lot of possibilities. And so the solution for that is uh longer tail keywords where you can start to suss out what that intent is. So if someone's searching for data quality framework PDF, okay.

Now you're starting to figure out okay, they're looking for some kind of image or some kind of download. If someone's searching for how to make a data quality framework, okay, that's uh a different intent than someone who just wants to download one. There's a that's a person trying to create one. So part of our work is to look if we find that there's a lot of things where we get impressions but no clicks. Is are we doing a good enough job with the longer tail on those things to make clear what it is?

So, for example, someone's searching for Google Postmaster Tools. A lot of the time, the intent is I can't even remember what the address is I'm supposed to be Googling for. So I'm gonna find it. It's like people who like Google to log into Google. Um, and or people who Google to log into Yahoo.

They I it's one of those things people just use as a mental shortcut. That's so it does not oh, I click on the paid ad too. That's it. Um but someone searching for B2B marketing analytics, that is, you know, there's a lot of of impression volume and no clicks, which means that we've probably not figured out what the intent is. So we might want to to look through our stuff to see what else, you know, what are the longer tail terms, if any, uh, and if we can't find them here, we might want to look in um some other keyword tools to figure out okay, are there terms that use that phrase but are longer tailed that could help us create content tuned to that intent?

So B2B marketing analytics help would be very different from um, do I even need B2B marketing analytics? I don't even know where to go with my line of questions because I feel like there's a lot because it sounds like what you're saying is there's more research to be done before you start trying to fix the problem because you still don't know what the problem is. So, what you don't want to do is get yourself on this treadmill of trying to answer every possible question under the sun, because that's not a good use of time. That's right. Um but and this is where again, the a lot of people who are creating content don't have sufficient enough domain expertise to know what the intent is of that audience, right?

We are very fortunate in that we are marketers and our customers are marketers. So we have a better sense of what a customer, you know, to your point, if you put yourself in a customer's shoes, you can do that pretty easily. If we were selling something like, I don't know, uh biological assays um or reagents, we have a lot, and and as marketers, we're like, I don't even know what these words mean, uh, much less how do I how to successfully market them? We could be dramatically off target um and not be able to recover from it. So a big part of this is also having that subject matter expertise.

You as a marketer, you know what you're looking for, so you can look at a term and go, okay, I can kind of guess why I might search for that. Yeah, I think uh as a consumer, I think my first search would be how to spell biological assay so that I'm getting even the right thing. So that might be a good safe place to start. Exactly. So the other aspect is you know the the appeal of it.

So you know, from what you were saying, let's go here and go into our website. So while he's pulling that up, John, I have a question for you. Um, you know, you talk with a lot of our community members and a lot of our prospects, and you know, by no means is this meant to call anybody out, because I, you know, as I was still learning, you know, SEO and how it works, I did this myself. Where are you seeing that, you know, when people are just sort of like starting out understanding SEO, that instead of going to SEO tools, they might actually go to Google and look up a keyword and see like, well, because Google will respond back with, here's how many searches there are for this. And then they might say, Well, I don't show up on page one.

How do I fix that? Yeah, I mean, it's a huge challenge, really, especially because you know, things that tend people tend to search for us for, like Google Analytics or just analytics, you know, in front of us, there's a huge line of tools and Google Analytics itself. So there's thousands of related results. So you kind of get into this trap of you either find, you know, very specific granular terms or you're going long tail, you know, you're going four or five-word or more to try and find something that you know, at least you have a chance to compete at and and go at I you know, from looking at our list, I I get that feeling immediately that that's just there's so many pretty much generic terms that it's no surprise that there's no click-throughs because there's just so many different angles you can take from you know what's up on there. So as we're talking, um you have your snippet, right?

So when we're talking about the wrong offer or the wrong creative, the wrong offer in organic search is the search preview. What does this look like in search? So in this case, if someone was looking for demographic data as a search term, would this essentially add, because it really is a pay-per-click ad that's not paid for, would this be enough to make you say, click, yep, that's what I was looking for? Right. If I'm searching for demographic data, this is a case where there's an intent fracture.

We don't know. We don't know what are you searching for demographic data sets to download? Are you searching to try and figure out what is demographic data? We don't know. And as a result, this listing probably is not going to do very well because we don't know what the person really actually wants.

Yeah, and the big thing with that is making sure that you've got your SEO tool there configured right because you know a lot of plugins are just gonna drop the title tag in there as opposed to maybe you know your H1 or whatever, you know, your first sentence is, which is a lot closer to what you actually want the thing to be. So I guess the next question is well, how do we figure out what the intent was? So there's a couple different ways to determine search uh intent correctly. Um the first way, uh of course, is your your traditional keyword tools, um, looking at all the related terms. You go into any keyword tool available, and you can get a sense of what are the the related terms uh the questions people also search for the usual stuff.

So let's go ahead and pull one of those up. We go to our friend Href's here. Let's go into keywords explorer. Let's put in demographic data. United States, and we see demographic data, definition of demographic data.

What is demographic data, right? Some of the questions, uh rank for US population. And so something like what is demographic data? There's a that's an informational intent, right? I don't know what this thing is, tell me about it.

And so we might want to take that post. If we care about people who are searching for that information, we might want to take that post and retitle it and clean it up and make it clear, like you know, the ant demographic data is this, and that and that also goes in the snippet. However, one of the challenges that we'd have to go back to is is that the right audience, right? If it's uh, you know, a 12-year-old writing a book report, do we want that as an audience? I mean, in the long term, yes, because in 20 years they'll be ready to do business with us.

But for I won't be retired in 20 years, Chris. Um but for for our purposes, that's probably not the case. Um, so we might want to look at other kinds of things, like here, which two types of data are included in demographic targeting, right? Demographic targeting rather than demographic data might be a better term to use because there's there's it's more clear what that's about. What is demographic targeting?

Uh and it's so from a research perspective, this is one of the reasons why people have been encouraging the SEO industry has been encouraging people to get away from the idea of the keyword, because the keyword is too narrow when you have the intent, take an intent, break it into topics, then split the topics down into words and phrases that indicate the intent that you're after and whether it's something that would match us as the target audience. I would so I might be looking for like demographic data download as a data scientist. So we want to attract more people like me, or you know, or free demographic data sets. Okay, there's we know what we we know what that you're after now, and that might be a way to attract more people who are like me who would search for that thing. So, John, if you were thinking about demographic data, what would you be searching for that would indicate you wanted to buy or download something?

Yeah, even you know, slicing and saying demographic data, including race, age, software platform, like whatever, something else to slice by. Because it you'd be actually the intent would be to be buying some kind of list or other research on a specific topic. Exactly. Another way to look at this is to look at the terms that are used by competing sites and see where, if anything, there's there is intent. So here I've pulled up demographic data in market muse, and we have and we can see here the sites that rank for the term one through 20 in terms of rankings, and then the a list of terms and how often those terms appear on those pages.

So what you can see is down here, there are certain terms that when the row turns all red, it means that term doesn't appear even though it's been identified as being semantically relevant. So we might see something in here that we could use that essentially would we would not be going you know head to head uh with the top ranking pages like statistical data. Um if we have a page, you know, demographic uh data and statistical data or statistical techniques. Now there's an opportunity to narrow down that intent by combining some of these terms that don't appear on the on the headline pages, which means that we're not in a knife fight with people who are who are much bigger than us. If you go back to Hrefs, um, does it make sense to do something like marketing demographic data?

Because then, because that's sort of where my brain goes when you talk about are we attracting the right audience? And so we want to attract other marketers to our site to learn about the kinds of things that we do, how we can help them, so on and so forth. And so to me, it kind of makes sense to add that qualifier of marketing or you know, business or whatever the industry is that we're trying to tackle. And so it's it looks like there are questions that we could be answering to try to narrow in on the right audience. And I'm guessing that wouldn't always work, but maybe at least in this case it would.

It would work in this case because again, this is this is starting to dig into in the intent of the searcher, right? You know, uh what is what does demographics mean in marketing? What are demographics and marketing? And you can do things like you know, look at the matching terms and the related terms to get a sense of what are the volumes on those things, um, and and what else uh what other things could we bring in, right? So there's sit for 700 searches a month, marketing demographics definition.

Um, what is demographics in marketing? And so this is a case where we might change the focus of that page from demographic data to a longer search term like this, accepting a lower search volume, but understanding that because we're now fixing the intent of the page and the intent of the content, um, we might get higher conversion, right? We might get uh more traffic to the page because the intent of the page uh matches what the person's searching for. So we one of the things that you know is is sort of symptomatic of of an earlier mindset around SEO is trying to rank for that big headline term, like Google Analytics. Like ranking for Google Analytics is really tough, particularly when you're competing against Google itself.

That's a losing proposition. But something like Google Analytics for migration techniques or migration tips. There's gonna be 50 searches a month for that, but you know that if you have a page that's about that that looks good in the results, you're gonna get more traffic than you would from a Google Analytics Square that you're gonna get no impressions on because Google owns that space. Let's go into uh TalkWalker. This is an example of their trending themes.

So I typed in Google Analytics 4 and Google Analytics just to see, you know, what are sort of their trending uh themes? And you got one of them that's uh doing well very recently, this is the last 30 days, is open source, right? So one of the topics, and we talked about this. Um I think I mentioned this in my in my personal newsletter this past weekend. Google Analytics 4 isn't the best fit for everyone anymore.

It's no longer the best tool for the job for companies that don't have analytics capabilities, right? So open source alternatives like Matomo are a better fit, like my my martial arts teacher school. Uh you know, it's a he's a one-man show. Google Analytics already is barely on his list, like he looks at it once a month. Um, Google Analytics 4, yeah, it is it's it's unusable to him.

You know, something like Matomo that is so much more slimmed down, it's an open source product, it's not gonna change you know arbitrarily. You you get to choose when you update your server. Um, it's a much better fit for him. And so it's not surprising to see that term starting to appear as an emerging trend. And so we might want to say, okay, well, that's interesting.

Open source. What is what can we do with that? Um, if we go into our keyword tool now, well, now we're going to look at open source analytics. There's some search volume there, right? Google Analytics Alternative Open Source.

Ah, okay. Now we can start putting together a you know some content around that, and maybe a blog post about Google Ads alternatives that are open source. And you have Matomo and Plausible and all these uh different tools. And we could create content that would probably do okay, but most important would fit that intent. Someone's looking for information about that.

And of course, us being marketers, it would end with, and if you'd like help with your analytics. Of course. But that's that's fixing the your search intent, um, which is a big part of the process. And so I guess one of the questions that I would have for you is so, you know, we've just spent like the past 10 to 15 minutes going through these two to four different systems, five different systems. You know, I think that, you know, for us, like we can handle that.

We have the bandwidth to do something like that, but that's not something that a lot of content marketers necessarily have the bandwidth to do for every single piece of content they're writing. So that then becomes almost like a scalability issue. They can't do that kind of research for everything they're doing, they're just sort of given a list of here's the keywords, right? Some content around it. Yep.

And the solution to that is what you wrote about in the Trust Insights newsletter this week, which is when you talk to your actual customers, you know, real human beings, and you get a sense of what's on their minds, that would inform your understanding of the customer intent. Like if all your customers are saying, Oh my God, I can't handle this this migration to Google Analytics 4. Okay, that's the intent. That's where people's heads are right now. And we can you can then make that your priority.

And you can say, Oh, yeah, we had that. We're you know, we're thinking about um you know, email marketing analytics as a blog topic. It's not on everyone anyone's mind right now. Um so yes, that can go that goes a little lower on the priority list. And and right now you you put all your arrows for this month in into helping people figure out which way is up on Google Analytics for because that's what the customer said.

So that that would be my prioritization hack, if you will, is talk to actual customers, see what they say, and then uh make a decision from that. Well, and you know, I would say, you know, building off of that, if you don't have the bandwidth or resources to you know, reach out to customers and talk to them, talk to your sales team, talk to your customer service team. So, in this example, what you're saying is, you know, what I would be doing is I'd be like, I'd be sitting down for like a one-on-one with John, being like, John, you talk to a lot of our prospects and our customers. What are the conversations you're hearing and leave it open-ended? You know, I would let John just tell me, like, well, this is what I'm hearing.

Like, so go in without an agenda and just let the person tell you what they're hearing because you don't want to bias the type of answers that they're gonna give you, you know. And so, John, I guess the question would be like what are you hearing people talk about these days? Yeah, obviously, Google Analytics is huge. There's a lot of people concerned about, you know, how do we make the transition? If things are gonna break during the transition, it attribution is always a theme that keeps coming up over and over again.

Um I don't know. We've done a lot of stuff as far as GA4 resources. I think that would be one thing to dive down deeper and look at some of that content and how it's been doing and see if we can't find, you know, what's been outperforming other pieces. Because I know that there's even a couple roll-up uh posts of as far as like, okay, here's the five other things we've done on GA4, and uh, you know, see if any of that stuff has legs and has been pulling. Yep.

Yeah, we were actually talking about uh that idea on the podcast earlier this week, John, where you sort of have that piece of pillar content uh that sort of explains here's everything, you know, we know about the thing, and then you have all of your related posts all organized and linked back so that people can find it all over the place. And so that way you're not just constantly uh rewriting the same post over. You can create those supplemental posts as you learn more of like, okay, so now people want to know about Google Analytics alternatives. Great, we'll write about that and then link it back, you know, to all of the other content we've already written so that it all you know becomes that one sort of big mega resource for people. Yeah, and be able to split and divide too.

I mean, that gives you another picture of intent too. You know, if they come in from one piece, where do they go in subsequent steps and where do they bail or where do they stick? Yep. Okay, so suppose you have no visibility. Suppose like your impressions are are not where they want to be.

The good news is in terms of diagnosing that, that's actually one of the easiest things to diagnose because so much of Search Console is actually built around that. So you first stop, and you know, of course, you look at your coverage, you know, fix your errors, uh, would be an obvious one. And if you don't see pages any, like if you if you know how many pages you have on your website and you should, um, and you don't see the valid number plus these two numbers add up to the number of pages you actually have, you know something's gone wrong. You know, you go look at your site maps, you know, how many pages did it discover? If the answer is if that number is not close to the number of pages you have, you you got some fixing to do.

Um, same thing for core web vitals. You know, look at your core web vitals, look at your page experience. If you've got enough data in there, look at your mobile usability. Um, a lot of this stuff, um, if you want something, you know, more than 20 seconds of talking about it. Uh, we actually have a Search Console course, uh, which shows like three hours of walking through this entire thing, the top to bottom.

Uh, you can grab that. And then the big one from a visibility perspective that isn't really in here, but is very relevant because we just did this study for ourselves. Um, I think it was in this week's newsletter. No, it's it actually, oh, we haven't published it yet. Um if you want to know what gets search traffic, you know, the the short answer is inbound links, right?

It is still the the gold standard for making search engine marketing work. And and if you're not getting inbound links, you you're missing the boat. Um, you can see some of that, like you can see what Google thinks, and then look in your SEO tools for for all the additional ones, but like where your links are coming from, uh, where you're and and making sure that you're you're building them up because that's what's gonna create that visibility that will give you those impressions, right? If you don't have a working website that is fast, that is mobile ready and stuff, and that people are linking to, your impressions number is going to be like zero. So I don't want to get too far down a rabbit hole, and maybe this is a topic for another uh live stream, but you know, obviously we talk a lot about Google and Google search because it is the dominant search engine, but there are other search engines.

I know that there's Bing, there's Bing webmaster tools. How much should we be paying attention to other search engines and their search results versus Google? It depends. Uh it depends on what's showing up in your data, right? So if you look at your sources in your in in Google Analytics and you start seeing search engines you don't recognize in here, uh like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia or something like that.

Um, then yeah, pay attention to those. If you're using uh multi-touch modeling, like uh actual multi-touch uh models, you may want to look at them and say, okay, well, what are the the sources and mediums, or even just a traffic monitor? What are the sources and mediums that are sending us traffic? Because if you know that, then you can make a decision and say, um, I need to spend more time on X or Y or Z. Uh, let's say pull one up here.

So when we look at ours, right? Uh, we look down the list, so there's Google. Those other search engines, at least for our um form completion, they're not in there, right? There's there's just nobody home on those other on those. So we know from a conversion perspective, that's probably not moving the needle.

On the new users goal, Bing is in there, right? It's very small, but Bing is doing at least a little bit of lifting in terms of getting us some new users. So that falls would be in the category of okay, let's make sure we're set up and register with Bing Webmaster Tools and stuff like that. Um, but Google is Google's the the king of the hill for us. But I would definitely encourage you to look in your analytics data and say, okay, are we already getting traffic from Ecosia?

Okay, then we can go figure out A, what the heck is that? And then B, you know, should we what should we be doing about it? If you're getting traffic from Yandex or Baidu or all any of these, these you know overseas search engines, you gotta you gotta go where the audience is. I mean, it always comes back to that is you have to understand your audience first, and then you can create content around what they want. I mean, that's really the core of the conversation.

Um you can't do it without understanding your audience, you know, otherwise you're just guessing. Exactly. So that pretty much addresses um the visibility portion. The other thing you may want to look at um in terms of you know effectiveness is it for conversions is look at your engagement numbers, like look at where uh where your engagement's coming from. I would use Google's explore hub or data studio for this because the built-in reports are not super helpful.

Um, and it would take uh about half an hour to to hammer this up. But the short version is um in Explore Hub, um, look at your content filtered by organic search over time to see which pages are are are getting good search traffic and then conversion events on them. If you can do that, then you have a good sense of what pages might are getting search traffic but not converting from organic search traffic, and those are the ones to optimize. So to summarize where we've been in this crazy uh half hour, we've identified what's not working, right? On the three levels.

We have tried to figure out why it's not working. Audience offer creative, and then the different remedies. Um, search intent is the biggest one if you could because a lot of the times that is the underlying symptom to why SEO is not working for you. Well, I my wheels are already spinning in my brain. Um, you can probably see the smoke coming out now of how I want to start uh researching for our uh ed cal moving forward because that's where this conversation started from was that I was telling the both of you that I felt like I was struggling to plan out our editorial calendar because our keyword list has been exhausted, and my question to you was like, what else can we do?

How do we look at this differently? And Chris, thankfully, you've just given me a bunch of ways to look at look at it differently so that I can stop just relying on the same static keyword list. Even if we update the keyword list once a quarter, we're basically rotating through the same list of terms that we want to be known for. But what we're seeing is that's not good enough. We need to be thinking more intent-based and more intent-based, is not just Google Analytics.

We have to be more specific with our content, be like, how do I use Google Analytics? What are the alternatives to Google Analytics? Do I need Google Analytics? Like really answering people's questions. Exactly right.

And you know, there are so many different modifiers that you can look even in text. You know, one of the simplest ones that changes a term from an educational intent to a commercial intent is near me, right? Gas prices is one thing. Gas prices near me means you're about to go get gas, right? Um, Chinese restaurants is one thing.

Chinese restaurants open now means that you're about to buy some Chinese food, right? And so, and so if you're if you're ranking for these things and you're and you're where you're not ranking for these things, again, look at those in what you are ranking for and the intent behind it. When we were looking at our keyword list and uh our term list in Search Console, you could tell there were a lot of ones where you're like, what is the intent behind that term? And and we don't really know. So we know from just from that list alone, we need to narrow things down and be more specific.

And the irony is the the narrower you go to a point, the better you'll perform because you will be attracting people with the specific intent, and the content that they land on will match what they're after. Well, and we've talked about this in other contexts in terms of our marketing. I would rather have a small but mighty email subscription list of all of the right people who engage than have millions of subscribers who just delete the email every week. It means they're not reading it. It's a waste of my time, it's a waste of their time.

So I'm perfectly comfortable with smaller audiences, smaller lists, smaller engagement, if it's the right people. Exactly right. Any final parting thoughts? Write more, get the inbound links. That's it.

Yeah, if you want a copy of the the flow chart for the mind map from this episode, we're going to put it up in the analytics for marketers groups you'll be able to download the PDF there. Thanks for tuning in, folks, and we'll see you next week.ai slash TI podcast. And our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers.

See you next time.