Monley Homes

Saturday, 3 July 2021

"“““““““““““““““““““““ Dana DiTomaso is the founder and president of Kick Point, a Canadian-based..."

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Dana DiTomaso is the founder and president of Kick Point, a Canadian-based digital marketing agency. She is well known for her ingenious and innovative presentations on tracking and analytics, as well as other growth marketing strategies. She’s presented at SMX, Local Search Summit, and Engage, and we’re thrilled to welcome her back to this year’s MozCon Virtual where she’ll discuss modern web development that puts SEO first. Check out what she has to share ahead of this year’s show!

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Question: 2020 was quite the year, what were you up to this past year? Any surprises or favorite projects you worked on?

Dana: Like many people I actually ended up moving! I now live on Vancouver Island and I can practically see the USA from my house — not that I’ve been able to visit. I also completed my first course, hopefully of many, for LinkedIn Learning on the topic of technical SEO. My next course is already in progress and will be covering how to transition from Google Analytics Universal to GA4, and that should be out in the fall.

At Kick Point, we grew over the past year and we’re now a team of 12! Like a lot of agencies, we did see some good come out of an otherwise pretty awful time for many, we’re very fortunate.

Q: What is the biggest shift you’ve seen in the SEO industry over the past year? How does that impact your work at Kick Point, if at all?

D: The biggest change this year was the rollout of Core Web Vitals, which as I write this, is only just happening now. I am extremely curious to see how it impacts SEO over the remainder of 2021. I don’t want to say too much more in case it ages badly!

Q: Last year, you discussed how to use a discovery process to turn red flags to green lights. Will we see any of the same themes come through in your presentation this year? How so?

D: Absolutely! This year is really a companion piece to last year. Last year I covered discovery for marketing projects, and this year I’m covering discovery for website projects. These discovery processes have made such incredible changes at Kick Point in terms of how we work with new clients — it’s really been amazing. I hope that people who listen to my talk are able to take away some of the lessons that we’ve learned and apply them to their own processes.

Q: In your MozCon talk, you’ll be discussing how to build a website with a search-first mindset. What inspired you to discuss this topic at MozCon 2021?

D: I think it’s a topic that isn’t covered enough. We unfortunately often still see a real divide between the developer and SEO worlds and I’m hoping that we can work towards bridging that. Particularly with the advent of Core Web Vitals, these two teams need to work together more than ever before.

Additionally, this talk is based on a lot of our own learnings in terms of better ways to run website projects. Since we have adopted this process, website projects are just more fun — less stress, on time, on budget, all those things that we all want in a website project but seem impossible to achieve. I’m not saying this will magically fix everything but it’ll definitely put you on a happier path.

Q: What are some of the challenges SEOs face in the web development process?

D: Being taken seriously! I’ve been working in this field for 21 years now and I can’t even tell you the number of times that I’ve been on a call with a developer or development team discussing SEO recommendations and just being completely dismissed — that these recommendations aren’t necessary, that we’re wrong, or that the developer knows better. And it’s an incredibly frustrating place to be in. I’m sure other SEOs reading this have had similar experiences.

Q: Why is it important for SEO to be at the forefront when it comes to website development? How has the relationship changed over the years?

D: Because it’s so much easier and cheaper to get SEO recommendations added in at the beginning instead of trying to shove things in later after the site is done. I think that developers are more aware of SEO now but there is still a lot of mistrust. I think it’s important to set the tone that you aren’t there to throw the developer under the bus — they aren’t an SEO expert, and shouldn’t be expected to learn all this specific SEO stuff. Showing that you’re there to help right from the start can really help that relationship thrive.

Q: What’s your #1 tip for ensuring that SEO gets a seat at the table in a website rebrand?

D: You need to start with education. Either the leadership team that you’re working with doesn’t understand the power of SEO or they may have a really outdated understanding of what SEO is and what it can do. Tom Critchlow has an excellent article that he recently published on how to convince executives to care about SEO and I’d say that is required reading.

Q: What are the key takeaways you want the audience to walk away with?

D: I want people to understand that there is a space between waterfall and agile when it comes to website development processes. I hope that people will enjoy our blueprint process and it’ll help them make better website plans. Finally, I’m really excited to show off the keyword research presentation idea that I got from Rebekah Baggs and Chris Corak — it’s so good!

Q: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

D: The talks by Dr. Pete, Areej AbuAli, and Britney Muller all look great! And of course I’ll be watching Brie Anderson’s talk since GA4 is very close to my heart. I’m also really looking forward to hopefully having an in-person MozCon next year! There is really nothing that can replace the experience of speaking to a live audience.

A big thank you to Dana for her time! To learn more about Dana’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

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"B2B companies are really focused on the middle of the sales funnel. They’ve got great e-books, lots..."

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B2B companies are really focused on the middle of the sales funnel. They’ve got great e-books, lots of good data published, but they tend to neglect the top-of-the-funnel content. That type of content is actually crucial to B2B success, as it allows your potential customers to learn more about your brand.

A great way for B2B companies to fill this gap is by creating pillar pages. To help get you started, in today’s Whiteboard Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven of Obility walks you through a simple strategy for employing pillar pages on your website. Enjoy!

Photo of the whiteboard walking through a pillar page strategy. — Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Carly Schoonhoven, and I’m a senior SEO manager here at Obility. We’re a digital marketing agency focused on B2B in beautiful Portland, Oregon.

Now one of the biggest struggles I find that B2B companies have, when working on a content strategy, is how to create content that’s able to effectively rank for those top-of-funnel, higher search volume, more conversational queries. A lot of times B2B companies are really focused on mid-funnel. They’ve got great e-books, lots of good data content, but they tend to neglect the top-of-the-funnel content.

However, that type of content is so important because it allows for your potential customers to perform self-discovery and really learn more about your brand, learn more about the industry you’re in before they’re ready to take a more meaningful step, like filling out a form or requesting a demo. So one great content strategy for a B2B company is creating a pillar page.

What are pillar pages?

Pillar pages, you might have heard them referred to as hub and spoke content or umbrella content, but whatever you want to call it, it’s essentially the same thing. So the idea is that you start with your pillar page. So this is one large piece of content that’s really optimized for one very broad topic that’s really relevant to your business.

Then it internally links out to your cluster pages, which are targeted at those longer tail, secondary keywords and really well-optimized to answer the questions that your customers may have. It’s so important that you’re linking back from the cluster pages to the pillar page and from the pillar page out to your clusters.

Again, this has multiple benefits. One that your customers are able to navigate to this content and get their questions answered themselves. Then, at the same time, it’s great for SEO because it’s so easy for Google to tell what this content is about since it’s all internally linked to each other and it’s all focused on one specific topic. So if this sounds like something for you, I’m going to walk you through step by step how to go about creating a pillar content strategy.

1. Pick a topic

So Step 1, of course, is you have to pick a topic. So there are a couple things you want to keep in mind when you’re doing this, one of which is that you want it to be broad but not too broad. So obviously it has to be somewhat broad because you need to be able to find enough secondary keywords that also have search volume that it’s worth your time putting the work in.

But if it’s too broad, it’s going to be really difficult to create one piece of content that covers everything you need to cover in this content. So, for example, a pillar page about SEO as a whole, that might be a little bit too broad. There’s a lot of stuff you’re going to have to cover, and it’s going to be really difficult to rank for a lot of those keywords. But something like SEO content strategy, that’s a little bit more focused, there’s still a lot of potential there.

You can talk about ideating content for B2B. You can talk about on-site optimization. So something that is definitely broad, has lots of keywords, but not so broad you’re biting off more than you can chew.

2. Keyword research

So speaking of keywords, obviously you have to do keyword research. This is SEO.

It’s so important. So you can start with that one topic, but then you really need to expand your list of keywords to find all of those secondary keywords that you want to include. Moz’s Keyword Explorer is a great tool for this because you’re able to put in your topic and then it will generate all of those related keywords for you, along with things like search volume and keyword difficulty. I also love that you can filter down to just the keywords that are questions, because again it’s so important to make sure that you’re answering your potential customers’ questions in your content.

3. Look at your existing content

So you’ve got your list, you’ve got your keywords, but don’t forget to look at your existing content as well. So you’re going to be putting a lot of work in. Find ways you can save yourself time. Maybe you’ll have some content buried in your blog or buried in your resource section that you can repurpose and include as part of this strategy. Definitely make sure you’re not neglecting content that you already have.

4. Plan URL structure

Up next, planning your structure. So you’re going to be creating a great new piece of content. You need to know where you’re going to put it. You can just link to it in your top navigation, or maybe you just want to feature it on your resources section. But one thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure that your cluster pages are in a subfolder of your pillar page.

5. Start writing (clusters first)

All right, Step 5, start writing. You actually get to start putting these pieces together. So ultimately, what do you want them to look like? Now ideally, for your main pillar page, what you want is to have sort of just an introductory section talking about the topic area as a whole, but really this page serves as that hub that links out to all of your other secondary pages.

So you want to make it really easy to navigate. You want to make sure you’re including lots of mid-funnel CTAs within that content, because ultimately this is that hub piece of content where everyone is going to navigate to from those cluster pages. So start with your intro and then have a nice table of contents and then a little header for each of your cluster pages with a little bit of a summary, but then that ultimately links out to those cluster pages so that someone can visit that page if they really want to learn more and get more in depth into that topic.

As far as your cluster pages, this is where you really want to get in depth, spend a lot of time putting your content together and make sure you’re covering it. I think that the question-and-answer format is a really good approach for this type of content because it really helps you optimize for featured snippets or for the people also ask feature. So you want to make sure that you’re putting your question in the header, and then summarize the answer to that question in about 40 to 50 words if you’re optimizing for a snippet.

6. Promotion

All right. Number 6 is promotion. So you’ve created your content. You’ve figured out where to put it. You’ve published it. You did all of this work. You want to make sure people see it.

So promote it internally. Make sure you’re sharing it on your social media. Share it with your team. But then also flex your link building skills and reach out to anyone in your industry who you think would benefit from this content or be willing to share it as well.

7. Measure everything

Number 7 is measure. So, of course, you put all this work in and you want to see how does it do. Did it perform well?

So you have your list of keywords, so use Moz to track your keyword rankings. Take a look to see if there are new keywords you weren’t expecting to rank for. Obviously, keywords are super important. Also, look at Google Analytics. Check out your landing page report. Are you getting organic traffic? Are people actually converting?

See what you can learn from that, if you need to make tweaks, swap out your CTAs. Just make sure you’re measuring and you don’t let this content go to waste. You’re bringing in this new traffic. Make sure you’re converting those people.

8. Repeat

Step 8, repeat. So once you have the process down, do it again. Find other topics that are really relevant to your industry you can create a pillar page about.

When you do, tell me about it. I really hope that this was helpful for you, and I hope you go out there and create some pillar content. So thank you so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Tweet your questions and comments about pillar pages using #MozBlog!

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"Dana DiTomaso is the founder and president of Kick Point, a Canadian-based digital marketing agency...."

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