Luca says: “Today we're going to talk about zero lead content.”

Zero lead content? Okay, you told me about zero lead marketing beforehand. Is that the same thing?

“It's kind of the same thing because, when I talk about marketing in SEO, it's mainly about content.

Zero lead marketing means that you produce content and you do marketing on your website without immediately thinking about generating new leads but thinking about more of a long-term strategy to develop your brand online.”

It sounds good to some people, but how do you justify that to marketing directors and CMOs who are just looking to measure the impact of your activity and ask how many leads you got today?

“Well, that's a very good question. I think we all know that the value of a brand in SEO is very, very strong. Lately, we have seen lots of research and lots of studies that confirm that big brands are dominating the top 10 results. In SEO, unfortunately, if you don't have a recognisable brand that people know, you don't really get success – or, you do, but you're missing out a bit.

One of the biggest ranking factors is having a recognisable brand. There are countless examples of this. One of the most obvious is when Mailchimp was trying to rank for ‘email marketing’. They managed to build a brand that is larger than the volume of ‘email marketing’ and all the variations combined.

Now, when people think about email marketing, they automatically think about Mailchimp.”

Do you try and measure the value of having a brand? Because you look at something like Amazon, as another example, and Amazon gets a much higher click-through rate for generic search results because people recognise the brand ‘Amazon’.

Do you try and actually put a measured value of a brand because of that?

“Yes. One of the goals that I have for my clients, as an SEO consultant, is to increase the search volume for the brand name because you can't get it wrong; you will always be ranking on top. There is no other way.

Think about it. If you search for ‘Amazon’, Amazon is on top. If you search for ‘Apple’, Apple is on top. If people already know your brand and they search for it, your competitors are not going to be able to outrank you.”

Yeah, that's a great thing to be doing, certainly, because the click-through rate from a brand is going to be optimal because people are seeking precisely that search term.

How do you know it was the SEO efforts that led to the increased search volume for the brand, though?

“That's when zero lead marketing comes to help because, when you produce content that is engaging and helps people without necessarily thinking about leads, then you are creating the brand.

One of my clients is the largest personal training provider in the UK. We have our top content on the blog generating about 100,000 clicks a month just from one article. It doesn't produce any leads because it's about gym quotes, but it's been ranking consistently on position 1 for 2 years.

I'm sure that, even though it's very difficult to measure, nobody wants to delete that article. Even the directors kept asking me how many leads they got, but eventually they gave up asking that question. There are no leads coming through on Google Analytics, but they still don't want to delete the article because they know that something good is happening from it.

People know the brand. We are thinking about printing shirts with the gym quotes and the brand on them that people can use in the gym – kind of like what Gymshark did in the beginning. Of course, they sell clothes, they don't sell courses, but this is the idea. You start to develop this type of content and then you enlarge it for other channels, and you suddenly become associated with the product that you're selling.”

For people who land on that article, that's a high volume of traffic there. Do you try and measure the path they take on the website after consuming the article? Or do they just consume the article and then leave, so you can't really measure after that?

“Well, we tried. Now, in Google Analytics 4, it's more difficult to do that because, in the previous Universal Analytics, we had the reverse funnel, if I remember correctly.

We were starting from the lead and then working our way back through to the content that we were producing, checking all the paths that the users were taking. Now, you can still do it, but we decided not to go too much into the details. It’s more like a strategic decision that they take because, when you start to measure things that are really difficult to measure, it can get a little bit messy.

We are trying to leave things as they are, trusting that it's doing well, and repurposing the content on social media and the other channels that we use, and then we try to measure it that way because it's a little bit more simple. That's zero lead marketing.

There are other companies doing it as well. I do it for other clients as well. It's not for everyone, I understand this, because you have to be an established brand already. You have to have a good level of traffic already to be able to afford this kind of risk – if you want to call it a risk.

For a new brand this is probably not the right tactic because, if you need to make sales or generate leads straight away, at that point, even SEO is probably not a good tactic because it takes time, right? Everybody knows it takes 3 to 6 months and things like that. In which case, you're probably better off doing PPC.”

But you also talk about standalone insights and information that you can generate as a result of doing zero lead marketing. So, what insights and information do you track?

“Right, so we track everything like, for example, the amount of backlinks that these articles are generating – which is something that we would have to do anyway as part of the SEO strategy but we would have to pay someone to do it – a link builder, an agency – and this can become very expensive.

We tend to measure how successful the article is, not just in terms of how many visits it got but also how many backlinks it is generating because these are things that are easily shared on other websites.

Another thing that we do is produce original studies and research, statistic articles, and things that help the brand to be seen as an authority in the sector where they operate. This kind of content doesn't produce any leads or any sales, but it does help with the sharing of the content. When you hear people saying, ‘This content needs to be good enough to share’, that's how you do it.

You produce studies like SparkToro does all the time. There are a number of other brands that do this as well. They don't generate any leads from that, but they are shared everywhere on the internet in the industry – and that's successful too. You can't argue and say that this content is completely useless because it's not. There are other factors, if you look at it, and that's what marketing is.

It's also healthy to position marketing in a different way to sales. In my experience, what companies tend to do is that they take sales as the main goal, and they base everything on that. Every activity that goes on within the company is to support sales, so if marketing doesn't generate leads, it’s not good. If it doesn't generate sales, it’s not good. If this article doesn't have a 10% conversion rate, it’s not good.

But this kind of mentality is hurting the growth of a company because you can't have everything producing sales or leads. You need to have something that also helps with generating word of mouth as well.”

Absolutely. It's like looking at the bottom-of-funnel keywords for paid search and only focusing on that because it converts well. Eventually, you're not going to grow the overall pie of the market that's attracted to you.

I was also intrigued by the fact that you talked about things like t-shirts with the personal training providers that you were talking about as well. That's obviously not a traditional SEO activity.

So, are there other marketing channels and marketing departments that you'd like to work with and learn from in order to assist with your growing of the brand?

“Oh yeah, that's a very good question, and I'm happy you're asking it because this is part of my research when I start a new project in SEO. I work with the support team because they handle most of the complaints and support questions that people ask about the brand. This is the best way to learn about what customers want.

It's like you enter the customer’s mind and you understand exactly what they expect and what they want. You start to see trends and you start to see the bigger picture. This can also drive keyword research, and this can drive social media as well.

This is another controversial topic, probably: zero volume keywords, which is another thing that is talked a lot about. But I don't believe this is controversial. I believe this is one of the basics of doing SEO right. Even if a keyword is showing 10 searches per month, but is asked a lot within the company, then you should write about it, in my opinion.”

Absolutely. And even if it's showing zero searches, it might have more in the future or perhaps Google isn't disclosing the full data that it has.

“Yeah, especially when something is new. If you take a ChatGPT, back in 2022, it was showing around 90 keyword volume, but now it's around 50 million. You can't predict the future, so you always have to bet on it.”

Yeah, and you need to be ahead of the ball. You need to be where the ball is going.

“Yeah. Yeah, exactly.”

So, how do you decide on the content that you need to write then? You've given an example of an article that gets a lot of traffic. How do you define that opportunity that you need to write about?

“Right, well, a little bit of it is experience. I know what type of content can get the most backlinks. I know what type of content is more likely to rank. It's something that you develop with experience. I'm able to identify an article that can have a little bit of success.

If you don't have experience with this, you need to look at the website and see how successful it is in SEO already. When your website authority is great, your page is indexed straight away, and it’s ranking on page 1 after one day, then chances are that most of your articles will be successful as well.”

Do you not look at keyword volume?

“Keyword volume, yes, but I'm always very careful because, when the keyword is really high in volume, everybody is targeting it – so the competition is really, really tough. There is no point, especially with a new website.

Last year, there was a dentist who wanted to grow his website with SEO, but we couldn't really rank for any high-volume keywords – especially not in the US where the market is even more competitive. So, we had to be patient and rank for the smaller ones until we got to a point where everything was ranking. Then we started to be a little bit more ambitious and target the bigger ones.

But it depends on the website. Like everything in SEO, it depends – but it really depends on the website. Another client of mine is already established, and we have no problem targeting high-volume keywords.”

You've shared what SEO should be doing in 2024. Now let's talk about what SEO shouldn't be doing. So, what's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“Great. One thing they shouldn't be doing is using AI and blindly following AI for content. I know it saves you time. It's very tempting. You can produce a thousand articles in a week, but don't do that. We have plenty of examples of companies that did it in the past. I shared a lot of examples on LinkedIn as well. They got high engagement.

People were surprised by the power of AI, and how much content you can create, but it's factually incorrect. Not only that, it's also not very well structured and it doesn't read very well. Now, after almost 2 years that AI has been out, people have started to realise that they shouldn't be doing that.

If you want to use it and you want to save time for your clients and increase your margins, obviously you can do it, but use a methodology that makes sure that you don't get it wrong. You need to humanise AI content, let's say.

One of the things that I always do is cut out the fluff, because AI is terrible for that. No matter how many details to give in the prompt, there is always a lot of fluff. It's factually incorrect. Even if you ask the AI to provide you with a link to a source, the link can be wrong and go to a broken page. So, you need to review the article.

You need to make it look like it's properly written and checked. You need to become almost like an editor in your job as an SEO, from a writer to an editor, and be able to check everything before it gets published. There are lots of other checks you can do, of course.

Still, AI can be very useful – especially if you don't know the topic very well. It cuts down on the part where you have to do the research. But, if you produce original content, AI is obviously not going to help you with anything.

One thing that AI doesn't do is it doesn't give you anything more than what is already out there. Information gain is very important in SEO. There are Google patterns that you can learn from (and if you go to the good old SEObythesea.com website, you can learn more about it), but AI doesn't do that. With information gain, it's something that you still have to do manually.”

Luca Tagliaferro is Senior SEO Consultant at Luca Tagliaferro Consultancy, and you can find him over at LucaTagliaferro.com.