Kerry says: “My additional insight is to stop focusing on copying your competitors and to make your content uncopyable”

How do you become uncopyable?

“I like to divide it into a few different categories. One of them is leading into product-led content, which is particularly relevant for people like SaaS companies. This involves creating a strong brand voice, a brand persona point of view, creating more templates and resources, and collaborating with influencers in your niche well known for the thing that you want to be known for.”

How do you create a strong brand persona?

“It comes down to positioning, which I think is a concept most marketers are a bit more familiar with. You've got you versus your competitor, how are you going to differentiate yourself? Essentially, that just comes down to things like how you're positioning yourself in the market, why you? Why are you better?

This is obviously tied to what unique problems you solve better than your competitors for your customers. A strong brand voice and point of view, and values that your customers are going to resonate with. FYI, friendly, but professional is not a brand voice.”

I guess you often hear marketing teams, saying ‘This is the brand, this is what we're about’ to content teams, to SEO teams. Should SEO teams and content teams be involved in that initial discussion?

“A lot of what I see as a writer, particularly around briefs is here's the content we want to produce, here's the brief. That brief is usually done by the SEO team and it's usually just the target keyword, secondary keywords, links we want to include, and here are some competitor articles.

So what kind of happens there is it gets a bit decontextualized. So why are we producing this content? Why is this important to our customers? What questions are we answering for them here? Why does this piece of content exist, essentially?

I see the Head of Content role weighing in on that: why is this content being produced, rather than just this is a keyword that we want to rank for.”

So when you're creating a piece of content, it's about the subtleties around how it relates to what your audience is looking for, and wrapped up in that as brand values, as opposed to mentioning the brand within the piece of content?

“You can mention the brand within the piece of content. For instance, a lot of product-led content does that. It's not that you don't have to mention the brand or the product at all, but when it comes to the kind of brief, what you want to be sharing with people who are writing for your brand, who you're essentially becoming your brand voice, and that sort of prospect or customer-facing point of contact, you want to essentially show them what's our take on this topic.

That all comes down to that brand voice and the brand values like: why are we uniquely positioned to answer this? Why is this important for our customers? What's our take on this? Then even bringing in things like certain subject matter expertise.

A lot of times people will do a monthly stand-up with the CEO or something similar. So fire them questions related to the content that they're going to produce in that quarter, and then pass that on to their writers. That's a great practice if more companies can get into that because again, you're just building that thought leadership.

Try to give an opinion and strong point of view to the brand that people are going to be more likely to remember it rather than the abstract kind of content that doesn't really have much personality.”

Does that mean that you can write an article on a topic and then maybe take it to a thought leader internally, and then get a strong opinion on that piece from them and incorporate both the article and the opinion pieces as part of the same article?

“Yeah, I've done that quite a lot for one company, and they did some quite complex work. We always had a meeting at the beginning of the month about the content we're going to produce. I would be asking them questions like ‘How would you deal with this?’ Or ‘what questions are coming up about implementing this Martech solution?’, and things like that. Then they would actually be reviewing the content as well. For instance, it was the head of sales who would sometimes review the content or someone else on the team.

I do want to say that I understand that you can't do this for every piece of content, that would just be crazy, depending on how big your company is. But if you want to produce thought leadership content, it's incredibly important that subject matter experts within your company have some sort of input on that.”

When you're talking about the subject matter experts inside your company, is it absolutely key to incorporate people from inside your company? Can you incorporate external thought leaders, maybe people who write authoritative blogs in your industry as part of your content, as well?

“I think that's a great practice and a great use of if you have some sort of budget for influencer marketing. Bringing people on to your site to produce content who are well known within that niche. I was actually just watching the YouTube video of Lidia Infante. She just created a ‘GPT’ for turning author bios into optimized schema, which you can use on your website. Just kind of having your content associated with certain subject matter experts who are outside of your company but well-recognized within your industry and your niche is another great way to immediately build trust with people who are coming to your site to get information on it on a topic.”

Do you try and record videos at the same time when you're talking to thought leaders to embed a video as part of the content?

“That would be brilliant. I'm always trying to push people to do more video content, but it's not always easy. People are like I don't really have time, I'll just send you an email with some quotes or things like that.

I think video is an awesome way to get more sort of bang for your buck out of your content that can be repurposed well across social, and even YouTube and other platforms. So if you're doing any type of interviews, either with people in the organization or people outside of it, I usually would record those, so I don't need to take notes because I'm a terrible note taker. It's really great to be repurposing those for sure and it helps your content team a lot just repurposing to different channels.”

I can certainly understand the value of creating a strong, consistent content theme with opinion pieces, so people can recognize your content so when they're reading it they associate with your brand. I'm also thinking that if you do incorporate consistent pieces like that, then to a certain degree, it helps deal with AI bots that may be scraping your content and perhaps incorporating your content and other answers as then at least they may be featuring your brand as part of their answer somewhere else. Is that a valid thought process to consider?

“I think so. It's interesting because we're still in the Stone Age of AI and AI content. I hope in the future, there will be more. I think it's already happening though, right? They're starting to cite their sources a bit better and say where they're getting content from.

If you're incorporating a lot of what we mentioned earlier, like product-led content, that’s a lot harder for a competitor to just copy word for word or to recreate on mass with artificial intelligence or ChatGPT and that sort of thing.”

Something else that you do is lean heavily into your own customer stories. So how do you go about doing that and what value does that provide?

“When it comes to making your content uncopyable, it's very hard for a competitor to copy your customer stories, because that would be weird. So for instance, you can have content that speaks about a certain topic and incorporate things like your case studies in there.

Case studies are great pieces of content, not just for sales enablement, but also, because they are very easy to repurpose in different forms of content. You're telling people, here's how to do this thing, you can do it with our product, and here's a little snapshot of what's possible if you implement this using our own customers, and the success that they've had implementing this solution.

So it's really building that authority again, and that trust that we don't just tell you what to do, we show you how to do it and we've got evidence to back it up that it actually works.”

Is there any type of consistency or theme that you're seeing in terms of content length, and also content publishing frequency?

“In terms of content length, obviously, glossary content is going to be much shorter and snappier than ‘ultimate guide on cornerstone topic’, whatever that may be for the company.

I do think, in general, sometimes you can blow an article out of scope by being too long. So as you know, a lot of the advice before in SEO was if the top 10 have 2,500 words, then you should write 10,000 words. I don't agree with that because I feel it kind of blows the topic out of scope, and you start bringing in so many other things almost from outside of that topic that it is not very specific and very focused. That could potentially hurt your rankings, but I don't really have evidence for that. It's just kind of my gut feeling on that because you just start to bring in so much, so many other things that just aren't focused on that specific topic.”

I love that phrase, ‘the article is out of scope’ because I would think that a lot of content writers don't even have a goal for their content so they can't measure the success of that particular piece of content. Is it not fair?

“It's very hard to measure the success of a piece of content. I think it's very hard to say thanks to this piece of content we generated 500 signups. Often the metrics that content is measured against probably is unfair, as well. I don't think it's entirely fair to say: well, we're not seeing anyone sign up for a free trial from this piece of content. So it must be bad, right?”

What are fair metrics?

“Thankfully we're starting to move away from things like bounce rate or time on page in terms of this must be a great piece of content.

My friend Matt at rockee.io has developed a tool that it's helps you measure your content in a qualitative way, which is like a kind of Trustpilot type thing. So people leave little star reviews and things like that, which is really interesting because he has a story where one of his clients said ‘This piece of content is our best one.’ It has really high time on page, low bounce rate, all those types of metrics. And when they implemented his tool, it was the lowest-rated piece of content that they had or something like that.

It's difficult to say which metrics would be fair because when it comes to content, what you're looking for above all is micro conversions. So for me, nine times out of ten a micro conversion looks like signing up for a newsletter, signing up for some sort of email, downloading a resource, those types of things. I think content is much better at producing that type of conversion. than I read a blog and I'm downloading this software. That's not a very realistic buyer journey, especially if you're in something like B2B, software or similar. Measuring it against those micro conversions like newsletter signups, and downloading resources is much more realistic and fair.”

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 2024?

“I think, copying competitors. I feel like bad skyscraper content is a bit of a self-fulfilling legacy because they sort of say: ‘Take these 5-10 top articles, this must be what Google loves.’ Did they really rank it because they used the ‘what is keyword h2 subhead’? Or is it because this is just a very authoritative website on this particular topic, etc? The idea of copying competitors of skyscraper content really needs to be sort of relegated to the dark ages.

Instead, SEOs should start, collaborating more with the content marketing team, because now people are much more conscious of the content that they're consuming, especially in B2B where we sort of hear more about AI and things like that. People are becoming more and more skeptical whenever they read something that is quite devoid of personality, unique opinions and things like that.

My feeling is that it's going to be harder and harder to keep those people on the page, on the website and interested.”

I think the scary thing about a lot of online digital activity nowadays is it leads to the ‘shortening tail’. Maybe 20 years ago, a guy called Chris Anderson wrote a book called The Long Tail, all about this incredible choice that consumers are going to have in the future. But all these websites now are recommending things like people who bought this also bought this and it leads to shortening tail where you're getting less recommended, short tail products. It relates to the point that you're actually sharing, what you're talking about and the skyscraper pieces that you're talking about there because many SEOs look at the existing SERP and think that's what ultimate success is, if Google was ranking this article, number one, that we have to copy that. So it leads to everyone doing the same thing and no long tail of consumer choice. But I guess the argument against that would be, look, Google's already tested lots of articles and they're obviously delivering high converting rates in terms of clicks to these pieces. So how do you advocate producing something different if you don't necessarily know what the conversion rates or click-through rates will be?

“The top thing is what happens after the click. So you might get clicks by targeting certain keywords using certain LSI keywords to help it rank and optimizing the content around a certain keyword. But what happens after that?

As SEOs are we just saying: ‘Oh, you got a click, that's all that matters’. I don't think that that's good enough anymore. I think we have to be considering things like ‘what is our content doing once people get there?’. I don't think it's enough just to say, ‘Oh, well, it's ranking’.

If you are just copying competitors blindly, and not producing any kind of real value in your content, then you're getting clicks and that's it. I think we all have experienced that ‘Oh, great! Look these numbers’ moments, but then when we've looked at it, it's not actually doing anything and it's not serving any kind of business goals.

I've written and ranked content that does very well on the SERPs with little optimization or any type of sort of comparing it to other articles. I've definitely had success with it by not obsessing over what's already ranking.”

Don't think of your content as a standalone piece just to drive traffic. Instead, where does it fit into your funnel, where's the context in relation to your business and other pieces of content in your design?

“Definitely, I feel like that's been missing a lot. I've certainly fallen into that trap, which is why I advocate so strongly against it. No one sits down with the CEO and sort of says our big vision is to get more traffic. No one’s creating business goals around traffic and if they are I think they're in trouble.”

Kerry Campion is an SEO Copywriter and Content Strategist at God Save The SERP, and you can find her over at GodSaveTheSERP.com.