Martin Huntbach says: “SEO companies should focus on creating content that their customers need rather than creating SEO driven content.”

What does that SEO driven content look like in 2023?

“I think a lot of the time we measure our success as SEO agencies by the number of keywords we've got ranking by how high they are on the first page, and sometimes that drives the actions we take when creating content. But that's not necessarily the best way to do it if you're trying to get real, true, valuable customers that are going to transform your business.”

Is it possible to serve both customers and search engines equally well, or do you have to tailor what you're doing primarily towards one of them?

“So, let's say that the entire goal is to rank on the first page of Google and that's your entirety of the measurement, and your goal as to what you want to achieve for you and your clients. What that means is that you're going to do things like rely completely on keyword research and trying to force those keywords in as many natural places as possible. But in reality, there are lots of ideas when it comes to content creation, that keyword research tools don't show you. There are certain things that your clients and potential customers are talking to you about when they ring you up on the phone and when they send you emails and they tell you the problems they’re having. Yes, SEO can help. But actually, it's a far, far better SEO strategy to think about content from what your customers need.

This is what I’ve found from doing both approaches over the years, from being entirely focused on creating SEO-driven content, trying to get keywords in as many places as possible, and seeing the end goal as being number one on Google, to thinking about content that serves your customer’s needs. Because these people are asking you questions, sending you emails, jumping on calls with you, and Googling things that maybe don't have that much in terms of search volume, we're missing out on an entire kind of client and potential client because we're just trying to do what keyword research tools tell us to do.”

It certainly makes sense when you look at the SERPs and you see ‘people also asked’ or you look at tools, like AlsoAsked (from Mark Williams-Cook), and you get some great longtail questions that people tend to ask in relation to the types of queries that are relevant to your website. The challenge, obviously, with that is that there is often no keyword volume related to those keyword phrases. So how do you justify that to people within organizations that to say that you're targeting these terms, but you can't actually say there's any definitive keyword volume behind them?

“You have to think about what the end goal is. If your end goal is keyword ranking, that's all my deliverable is, then you might have to go down an SEO route and you might have to say, this is the best keyword, I'm going to try and go for it, I'm going to find loads of backlinks at it, I'm going to put my full weight behind this particular set of keywords.

The thing that I’ve found when we write content for clients, is there’s always a battle between the customer service department and sales who are telling us one thing, and then we've got search engine and keyword research tools telling us another thing. So sometimes you have to split your attention and you have to think ‘this is a keyword we want to go for, so let's create some amazing content around that keyword’ to try and tick that box and get ranking so that we can justify an ROI because you're ranking on the first page of Google.

But then you've also got salespeople and customer support, and they're taking up time because you're not answering questions that your customers have, even though the keyword research tool doesn't say so, but this doesn't mean it's not going to support the entire team. You're going to support everyone from top to bottom, from people managing customer support through to getting people over the finish line to actually start working with your organization. There's a whole set of questions that they get day in, day out. But if you were to throw those questions into a keyword research tool, you might have less than 10 searches a month or less than 50 searches a month. Is it worth not writing that content when it's going to dramatically improve the processes and the organization within the business and when you're going to save people time? You're going to be able to sign up twice as many customers faster because you have that content to support those people.

As long as you have a content-first mentality, you can go for keywords and rankings with one piece of content. You can then assist the team and support people signing up with you and becoming more aware of you through other forms. Just because people aren't searching for it doesn't mean it's not going to be extremely valuable.

As an example, a few years ago, one of the pieces of content that we created for our agency was based on a concern that people constantly asked us about. They were constantly saying, ‘Okay, why are we not ranking on the first page of Google? We've gone to this agency, and we have a good-looking website, and we're really not sure what it is and why our website is not ranking.’ So when you actually use a keyword research tool to analyze that, what would you even type in - not ranking in Google? Or - why is my website not performing? Or is my website broken? It's so varied because it comes from a problem that people have, and people describe problems in completely different ways. So, when we did the keyword research, nobody searched for it. We didn't even know what to put into keyword research because people used different language and different vocabulary to describe that problem.

So what we did is we created the content anyway. We created all the reasons you might not be ranking in Google and what you can do about it. And we started to get quite a lot of traffic on that particular post. And then since that, we've seen lots of other people repurpose that content and do longer versions, and just completely go all in on that and teaching people how to do it. But at the time, nobody was searching for it. But it was something that our clients wanted. Now that particular piece of content eliminated a large chunk of explanation time at the start of sales calls because we already had that piece of content, which meant we were building trust and credibility. But it also meant that we started to get sales from it because it's quite a heavy sales post in the sense that these are all the problems, and this is why you're not successful right now; here's how to fix it. And if you want us to fix it for you, here's a big button to click. Now, if we were only to focus on keyword research tools, it would focus on things that people actually typing in, you know, so that's the key to this. It's navigating what your SEO department and your metrics are, but also how can we help this business improve their business.”

You started off talking about how SEOs need to work more closely with other departments (if they work in a larger business) and actually define the content that your sales team that your customer service team knows it needs to service the requirements of inquiries of people who are nearly customers, but not quite customers yet. So, would you advocate that the whole keyword research process that an SEO undertakes also needs to incorporate internal discussions with these kinds of departments?

“I think one of the best things that an SEO can do is to actually reach out and have genuine discussions to ask ‘what are the problems you're facing right now? What are the concerns? What are the questions people are asking consistently? What is the thing that's stopping people from being successful with the thing that we help people to achieve?’. There's always going to be questions that pop up that customer support has to deal with and contend with every single day, and sometimes they don't have the content to support that. This is something we think about when it comes to communication within an organization because you can have one conversation with a client, and then somebody else in a different department will have another conversation, so it's nice for everybody to be on the same page and align the communication and messaging within an organization.

If you are working in an organization, then one thing you should do is try to understand the sales process, because this will give you so many additional content ideas. We always say, especially when it comes to sales, that you when have salespeople on phone calls/Zoom calls every day and they're constantly saying the same things, then you should publish it.

If you're prepared to put black-and-white text on your website that says, this is how you need to do it, this is the best way to approach it, etc, then you've always got that as an extra asset that you can use when you're selling to people to say: ‘It's good that you've asked that question. What is it that makes SEO so powerful? Well, actually, here's a comparison poll between Google ads and Facebook ads and SEO.’, and if you have that proof that you've published that content, then it adds a certain weight because when it's public, other people can see it.

So actually publishing content to answer certain questions is a very basic methodology, but it just helps so many other departments, especially salespeople, and the more you publish content, the easier that becomes. From our perspective, it means that we were able to take a 90-minute sales calls down to around 20 to 30 minutes, because we had all that supporting content for when we were trying to sign up new clients. Now are sales calls are more informed, because they've got that content there already, and they trust us a lot more because we are prepared to say the same thing on sales calls as we do on our website.”

How do you define the precise elements that need to be incorporated within the content that you publish? Because it's all well and good actually deciding on the headings, you're having conversations with your sales team, your customer, service teams, things like that, and actually deciding on what kind of questions need to be answered. But how do you decide on how you go about answering the questions and what form the content takes?

“So the first step that we use with all our clients is probably the same step that a lot of SEO companies have, which is to have an initial call with the client and talk to them about their goals and their objectives for the organization to really try to understand the intricacies of what they do and how it impacts people in the real world. The more discovery that you do on a call with a client, the better you can understand their business and their objectives.

The next step when it comes to planning a series of content in our content campaign is to really think about how you can take what they've said, and put it through your knowledge machine of an SEO and say, ‘okay, so if we were to write these pieces of content that we think this company needs, what keywords would we target and what keywords are relevant?’. So look at the client the clients use and see if there is a better way to say it, and that's where your brain and your experience come in. We all have this knowledge machine that a client says one thing, Google says the other, and it's our job to merge these. Usually, it means structuring your headings properly and including relevant links or anchor text, images, and everything that we know about SEO. It comes from taking what the goals for the business are, rather than just "Yes, we're just going to go after rankings", because if you're just going to go after rankings, what's the point of even speaking to that client in the first place? You want to focus on rankings, and that's fine, but if that's all you're going after and you just want a massive spike on that graph so that you can screenshot it and add it to LinkedIn to show everyone how good you look, then we're not really helping the client.

The key to all this is to use your knowledge and experience, take what the client says, align it with what people are actually searching for, and you can't go far wrong.”

You've shared what SEO should be doing in 2023, so now let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“Well, it's exactly what I do when I'm procrastinating, and that is checking stats, checking graphs, looking at the latest keyword research tools. We love tech, and we love looking at numbers and graphs and rankings.

I’ve found that when I'm in a content production mindset, there are things that come into my brain which usually involve ‘Oh, you know what, I'm just going to check the rankings on this’ or ‘I'm just going to do this. I'm just going to do that.’. So you need a very specific time within your week to focus on what makes an impact, and checking rankings is not going to impact your rankings, checking website traffic isn't going to impact your website traffic. So be very, very careful that you're not spending time as an SEO company getting distracted with checking on results, checking on rankings, and actually getting bogged down in the consumption of what you've done, rather than the production of what you can do.

It’s something that I struggle with myself and I'm trying to help myself fix it, but it's always there in the back of your mind as an SEO that you just want to constantly check graphs and stats.”

Martin Huntbatch is owner of Jammy Digital.