Maddy (The Blogsmith), Marijana (Freelance Bold), and Omid (Marketer Milk) joined the Clearscope webinar to share How to Create the Perfect Content Briefs & Outlines.
Watch the full webinar
Here's our biggest takeaways from the panelists:
A well-crafted SEO content brief allows writers to consistently produce high-performing content. Key elements of a content brief include: target audience, competitors, pain point, tone of voice, and customer journey stage.
Analyzing "search intent" is a critical part to SEO content performance. The two main reasons why content doesn't perform are low domain authority (backlinks) and serving the wrong search intent.
Getting the right "subject matter expertise" is a critical part of making sure your content stands out from other "cookie cutter copycat content". You can source great quotes + insights/angles by directly reaching out to people on social media or combing through podcasts.
About Maddy Osman:
Maddy Osman operates The Blogsmith, an SEO content agency for B2B tech companies that works with clients like HubSpot, Automattic, Kinsta, and Sprout Social.
Follow Maddy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MaddyOsmanAbout Marijana Kay:
Marijana Kay is a freelance writer for leading B2B SaaS brands like Shopify, Hotjar, Zapier, Pipedrive, and ConvertKit and the founder of Freelance Bold.
Follow Marijana on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarijanaKayAbout Omid Ghiam:
Omid Ghiam is an Organic Growth Manager at Webflow and the founder of Marketer Milk.
Connect with Omid on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omidghiam/
Read the transcript
Bernard:
Let's get this show on the road. We're going to kick this off. We're going to talk about how to build the perfect content briefs and outlines. We have three wonderful guest speakers today. I'll introduce them, I guess, in the order that I have on my document. Maddy here operates the blogsmith and SEO content agency for B2B tech companies that works with clients like HubSpot, Automatic, Kinsta, and Sprout Social. Maddy's background in word design contributes to well rounded understanding of SEO and how to connect brands to relevant search prospects.
Bernard:
Marijana is a freelance writer for leading B2B SAS brands in the marketing analytics, sales, and e-commerce space. Since 2016, she's written long form content for companies like Shopify, Hotjar, Zapier, Pipedrive, and ConvertKit. She's also the founder of Freelance Bold, a library of resources for freelance writers.
Bernard:
Last but not least we have Omid. He is the organic growth manager at Webflow focused on user acquisition through SEO and content. Webflow allows designers and developers to build professional custom websites in a completely visual canvas with no code. We're going to kickstart then with Omid on his process for creating content briefs. And then we'll go to Maddy on her process for creating content briefs. And then lastly, we'll have Marijana who will walk you through how she approaches content outlines and what she expects to see when she receives content briefs as a freelance writer. We'll have then 20 minutes for each guest speaker, and there'll be lots of room for questions at the end of each presentation. So definitely drop them into the Q&A box in the Zoom interface. With that in mind, I'll pass the mic over to you Omid.
Omid:
Cool. All right. Thanks for the intro. Yeah. So today we're going to be going over different content briefs, how to create them. I'm going to just preface this and say that I am not the best when it comes to creating the physical content brief. I'm sure you're going to learn a lot more about that part from Maddy and Marijana. Basically what I'm really focused on is creating the right brief and how to identify what to create. And focusing a lot behind the search intent, which would be a major theme today. So I'm just going to share my screen. And if you can't see my screen, somebody say something, but I assume everyone can see it. Yeah. So my name is Omid Ghiam. I'm an organic growth manager at Webflow focused primarily on SEO. As Bernard mentioned, Webflow is a web design and web development platform that makes it easier and faster to build production ready websites in a completely visual canvas.
Omid:
So if that flew over your head, think of functionalities of WordPress and the design flexibility of something like Photoshop and combining those together. That's Webflow. I also run a site called Marketer Milk, which is a place for marketers to discover the latest marketing news, resources, and guides, and it's curated every weekday.
Omid:
So enough with the self-promotion we're going to go into creating smart content briefs that actually drive results. And I'm going to start off with kind of a little story of, and basically that goes back to 2019 before we even discovered Clearscope. So in 2019, our blog traffic was pretty flat. Numbers wise, we were averaging about a couple thousand visitors a day, it's no small blog by any means. But it was like this for over a few years. It hadn't moved. As you could see from this graph, we're actually declining in 2019 slowly.
Omid:
And so we had pretty much plateaued and this was mainly because we had no clear content marketing strategy. We created a lot of content around our product, how to use Webflow, which was really great for the people that had just discovered us, but not so great in getting new people to discover us for the first time. And so we didn't have a lot of top of funnel traffic coming from SEO to our site. We weren't targeting a lot of non-branded keyword terms. And so we started to think about a strategy behind how we can start growing our SEO traffic, specifically starting with our blog. And towards the end of 2019, we started thinking about a new approach. And we also discovered Clearscope around this time, which was great through our research. We created a framework that allowed us to increase our organic acquisition from SEO.
Omid:
So not only did it increase our traffic, but we actually focused on increasing signups to our product as well. Because as someone that lives on the growth marketing team at Webflow, that's kind of the goal is traffic is good, but it needs to convert. And so we needed a combination of both.
Omid:
And so in 2020, we focused primarily on non-branded search terms and we increase that SEO tract to the Webflow blog by 130%. And 130% is, again, just non-branded search terms. So searches that are not related to Webflow at all, essentially. And the graph looks a little bit something like this. We went from a couple thousand visitors a day to several thousand visitors a day. And we did this using a four step framework. And I know it sounds like I'm about to sell you a course with this whole format, but I'm not. I'm going to show you exactly what that framework looks like today.
Omid:
So the four step framework to scaling our SEO content, it's basically split into two parts, but it's four steps. So steps in order are identifying our opportunities. So understanding our audiences, our topic, and then most importantly, our search intent, which we'll get into. Based off of those deriving our keyword ideas. And then once we have our keyword ideas using Clearscope to help us generate kind of an outline. And then we have actually a article brief template that we use internally that I'll be sharing with you too. I'm going to use the term article brief and content brief interchangeably here, but that's basically a template that we use.
Omid:
So step one, identifying opportunities with search intent. So what is search intent? Well, search intent is actually really important. It's actually the root of our ideation process. And if you look online, you'll see things around search intent being it's informational, it's transactional, it's navigational. I think that's a very old way of looking at it. And I didn't always think like this. But I credit it a lot to a great blog that some of you may have heard of called SEOfortherestofus.org. They have an amazing article on search intent. And actually, if you want to check that out, if you go to marketermilk.com, it's the first [inaudible 00:06:58] right now up, if you want to check that out. But understanding search intent in this new way is going to help us cover as many search queries our target audience is searching for. So we're always there when somebody that might be a user of Webflow and they're searching things related to their industry, we always want to come up.
Omid:
And so we can think of search intent as a level of awareness someone is in when they're searching for something on Google or any other search engine. It's just a level of awareness and what the intention is behind that actual search. And so we can look at levels of awareness, if you want to take a screenshot of this, feel free to, as these kind of four stages. There's also another stage called problem unaware, which would be the first one. But given this is Google search and people already come to Google with a problem, doesn't really apply to us here. So we're looking at it from step one, problem aware. And we can think of this as kind of a funnel of top of funnel all the way to bottom of funnel. Problem aware is when somebody knows a problem and they're looking for a solution. And all this, I'm going to explain this from the perspective of Webflow because that's the easiest for me to explain.
Omid:
But let's say a problem aware where search term might be how to make a website. Somebody needs to make a website. Maybe they're a small mom and pop shop. They got to move online. They have no idea how to build a website, and they are aware of this problem. So they look up how to make a website. Once they search that, they might land on an article where it says, "Hey, you can either build it from scratch with custom code, host it to your own server, or you can use a website builder. There's tons of different options." And now they're solution aware. So they know a solution exists and they need to know if it solves their needs. And so they might look up something like best website builders. And once they read an article on best website builders, they might find that two of them stuck out to them the most Webflow and WordPress.
Omid:
Maybe they need a membership functionality. Maybe they need to be able to take orders online. Maybe they want a fully custom website. They realize those two solutions are probably the best for them. So now in terms of us as Webflow, their product aware. They know that we exist. And so they know your product can solve their pain, but they need to know if it's best for them. So what they might do next is search something like Webflow versus WordPress to see kind of which one is actually the most ideal for them. And once they go through that, their own process of trying to figure that out, and they say, "Okay, yes, I want to go with Webflow." Now they are most aware where they know their solution is the right one and they just need to know what the deal is. So they might look up something like Webflow pricing.
Omid:
And so we take these levels of awareness and we combine it with our target audience and the topics around that. So in this hypothetical example, we'll say that we'll sit down for a given quarter and we'll be, okay, what are the audiences we want to hit? Maybe it's one, maybe it's multiple ones. In this case, let's say it's web design beginners, freelancers, and DIY enthusiasts. And then we derive topics that we want to talk about. So we want to cover things within the web design industry. We want to cover also things within eCommerce and tie those back specifically to freelancers, to design beginners, and DIY enthusiasts. And sometimes, not always, we can actually break these topics even further into subtopics. So within web design, we might say we want a cluster of content around learning web design. And we want a cluster of content around web design inspiration.
Omid:
And so if we look at this from kind of a more visual perspective, and you can take a screenshot of this as well. We'll actually come back to this slide again at the end. But this is kind of what it would look like where we have our audience that we want to go after. We have then our topics. We can have subtopics. I haven't include that in this graph, but we go from topics to then our stages of awareness. So problem aware, solution aware, product aware. As you'll notice, I didn't include most aware. One, because it didn't fit on the slide. And second, because when we're thinking about specifically non-branded search terms, if that's our strategy, we're not too focused on the most aware stuff. And so based off of those search intents and the topic and the audience, we derive our keyword ideas.
Omid:
So in actual real world case, this is what it would look like in the spreadsheet. And so we have our audience, we have our topic, we have our subtopic, and then we have our intent. And these four variables are what we can actually interchange constantly to think of new ideas. And so right here I've shown seven different columns of information, but you can sit down in a quarter and say we want to ship 12 posts. We want to ship 50 posts. And then we can just come up with your own split of, we want this percentage to be problem aware, this percentage to be solution aware. And again, not always, there's a lot of nuance in this, but in most cases, the problem aware tends to have the most traffic.
Omid:
And then the product aware and most aware tends to have the least traffic, but tends to convert higher from a signup perspective. And so what we have is this framework, and now we need to just figure out what briefs to create and do keyword research. And so step two, we can do keyword research. I use a tool called Hreps, you're probably familiar with it. It doesn't really matter what tool you use, as long as you're just going through this process I'm about explain. And so we go into keyword explorer, type in something like web design, we hit matching terms, and we see a bunch of terms related to web design. Now we can break this down even further. Say you're a website that's pretty brand new, or you don't have that high of a domain authority or domain rating.
Omid:
You can change the KD, which stands for keyword difficulty, to whatever you like. In this case, we just gave it a number of 50. Hit apply and now we see a bunch of other easier topics we can go after. Sometimes these will be immediately our keyword ideas. On other times, it's not too clear. And so what we can do is think of different modifiers. So for problem aware stuff, generally people might be searching how to, or what is, and that is also in this case of web design that makes sense. But that's not always the case. How to can also be a product aware, because somebody can say how to use Webflow. So there's a lot of nuance in this, but in this case of web design, how to is our problem aware. So we include that modifier, how to, and now we have a bunch of keyword ideas. How to learn web design, how to get web design clients, how to start a web design business. These are a lot more relevant to our product and their company.
Omid:
And so now we go back to that spreadsheet and we start adding these in. As you can see, I've done it for how to learn web design, web design for beginners, best web design software, WordPress versus Webflow, Webflow tutorial. We'll come up with the blog post names. A lot of times these aren't final, the writers sometimes have better titles. And we have a draft. We have the writer name, and then the due date. And the draft is pretty much our content brief. Our content brief and where the writer writes the actual article is one document. So now we get into actually creating that. Start with using Clearscope. So what we do is to maximize our time, we type in the keyword, we run the report, and as it's loading, we jump back into Hreps. And in HReps what we do is we look at the keyword that we're now generating our report in.
Omid:
So in this case how to learn web design. And HReps has this really cool feature where you can see the serp history from the past two years. And so what we look at from an intent standpoint is what is Google keeping in the top rankings? What has Google kept in the top rankings for the past two years? Because this tells us that this article is actually serving the right intent. And so Google is keeping it there for this long. As you'll notice, a lot of times for different keywords you see these peaks and these valleys where Google is testing out different content in the serp. And sometimes it puts an article up, it figures out, oh, it's not the right intent, and it immediately drops it. And I've seen this happen to our content as well in the past where I'm, yes, we're already on the first page.
Omid:
And then the next day we're, I can't even find this at all. I'm like, "What happened?" It's because we were getting this intent wrong. And so the way that I look at this to quickly understand what is a really good article to model your article off of is find the articles that have a steady line with no dip. So usually there's multiple ones that have study lines. In this case, for how learned web design, we see there's just one. And it's this red line where it's been steady, pretty consistent in the serp and it hasn't been dropped by Google. And we look into the article and we see it's an article by Mockplus. And so you go into that article on Mockplus, we look at the article. I'm not going to scroll through the whole thing, but we basically see what is this post?
Omid:
Should it be an ultimate guide? Should it be a listical? What should it be? And we noticed that what they did in this article was they actually created kind of a checklist or a listical style where they have step two, step three, start to learn and then they even have lists built within lists. And so what we realize is that people, when they're searching how to learn web design, they don't want an ultimate guide. They basically just want a checklist of things that they can look off of and see, okay, what are the action items or things that I need to learn? And so that's where we realize this is the right way to write this post. And so by this point, our Clearscope report has been generated. We jump back into Clearscope and we start to outline it.
Omid:
And so a lot of times for these listical style posts, we'll have a what is web design and then how to learn web design as H twos, and then the list items all as H threes. And then another H two as the concluding paragraph. And we come up with all the H three list items through a combination of using Clearscope, looking at the terms it's suggesting, as you could see four of them are from Clearscope recommendations. We're a web design company so we have a lot of expertise in house. We'll either have someone look at this or the writer that's writing this actually has a web design background. And we tell them that, "Hey, what are some other items you think are important from your perspective because you're the expert here?"
Omid:
I know some writers want it all listed out for them. And then some other writers that we've been working with for a long time, we kind of just give them the freedom to figure it out themselves based off kind of just a guideline that we give them. And so we take this and we create our article brief or content brief using a template. And so we have this template in Google Docs. Everything that's highlighted in yellow is essentially what we're saying the writer needs to pay attention to. They're going to fill it out and they need to pay attention to it. And so you could see we'll fill out the title, the goal, the audience, the channel. The subtitle and lead are really dependent on the way that our blog is designed. Not every blog is going to have a lead or anything.
Omid:
So it's kind of just tailored to the way that your design of your article content is. So we have the subtitle, the lead, author, bio, that they've never written for us before, resources to link out to. So this is something we need to pay attention to where it's content that we want them to either mention or link out to. And then at the bottom we have a Clearscope report. And so our writers know that once they write a draft, they need to paste it within a Clearscope and try to get it to a score of at least an A minus. We say A plus sometimes they get it to an A minus and we're okay with it. We'll go in our editor. We might tweak a little things here and there. And then we also take what we wrote in Clearscope and we paste it into this document. So we then just send this one document to our writer.
Omid:
One thing I also want to mention is Clearscope has an add-on for Google Docs. And that's what I actually use if I'm writing the article myself or somebody in-house is writing the article. We'll use that. But when we're working with external writers, we'll use the Clearscope share link because they don't have to even have a Clearscope account, which is awesome. But in the end, we just send them this one document and we tell them to fill the top part out and then start writing their article in here. They write their article. Then we go the store editor, it gets published. And in three months, sometimes less, sometimes more, we start ranking for the piece. And in this case we rank number one for how to learn web design, pretty much following all of this that I mentioned.
Omid:
Granted, we also do have a very high domain authority. So that's one thing I do want to point out too, which I think is probably first, the most important thing is just how strong your domain is, which is why when we do keyword research, we want to make sure that they're actually keywords that we can compete with by changing that keyword difficulty level. And then I think the second most important ranking factor after domain rating, in my opinion, is search intent. In this case, looks like we nailed it after many times of doing it completely wrong. We've just kind of learned over time. And that's pretty much it. So a recap of just things if you wanted take screenshots of. We went through kind of this framework of our audiences, our topics, understanding our levels of intent, and deriving our keywords from those levels of intent.
Omid:
And then we went into taking this into our spreadsheet. This is what it looks like. I just realized, I forgot to screenshot the other two columns. I say topic and audience. Apologize for that. But then we go through this kind of spreadsheet. Then we run the Clearscope report. And we look at again, what has been in the serp consistently that we can model our article off of. We start modeling it out in Clearscope, and then we put it into our template and send it off to the writer. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So yeah, I know we can open it up for Q&A or anything. I know I just went through a lot. If I don't get back to anyone in here, you can feel free to email me at omid@webflow.com, but also do know I get a lot of spam and a lot of cold emails there. So it might take me a couple days to respond to you. So yeah. But yeah, that's it.
Bernard:
Dear website owner, you have three critical [inaudible 00:21:57]. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But yes, that's to say we have three amazing content strategists, SEOs, definitely start hitting the Q&A stuff. But for the sake of time, we do want to move on to the next presentation and then we'll cover as many Q&As as we can. Probably we'll see where we can squeeze them in. All right, Maddy, shall you take us away?
Maddy:
I will.
Bernard:
Excellent.
Maddy:
All right. Give me one second to cue it up. Can everybody see this? Okay, cool. So I just want to preface this by saying that this is a process in progress. This content brief template is something I've been working on and I know it still needs some work. And I also want to say it's really long. So I think that what I want you to take away from it is what are the things that would most help you from it versus trying to fill it out from a completeness standpoint. And I also want to mention that some of these things you can fill out for the same client and have the same things filled out time and time again. So that would also help to speed this process up. But I have shared this same thing that we're looking at right now on my Twitter.
Maddy:
So it's just @MaddyOsman if you want to follow along. I'm not going to go into every single little detail. I've made it available so that you can kind of look through it more on your time if the spirit moves you. But in the meantime, let's kind of go through the different sections here and the why behind including them. So on every document I make for anybody on my team, I'm usually giving some sort of cues about how I want things named. That's just for an organizational standpoint. I'm sure that you guys will realize as you have more clients and content that you're creating, having a good organizational system is crucial for being able to easily access that information when you need it. So that's what that is. And then I just have a little thing at the top.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Maddy:
So that's what that is. And then I just have a little thing at the top that's any sort of admin details. The way that I see a content brief is that it should be the single point of truth for anybody on your team that's working on this piece of content. So for me, it's my writers, my editors, the person who helps me with keyword research. We all need to be on the same page about where this project is going, and we need a place to go back and just reference if there's any questions about direction that we take, so that's the point of this, and that's the point of reiterating some of the details that we would already have in the process management tool, kind of like a project management tool that we use, which in this case, is Process Street. And you could see just a fake link that I put in, that it would be a real link if it was a real brief, but again, just kind of reiterating information for everybody's sake.
Maddy:
And you can see here, there's things like when it's due, who's assigned, and even things like what's the priority level because sometimes we're having to shift things as new clients come in, or there's a rush project or something like that, and I want the team to be able to make that decision about what to work on next if we have limited resources.
Maddy:
So then this client-specific guidelines section is the one that I would say you can mostly fill out once and then reiterate content brief over content brief. There are some things that'll change. So for example, you can see here that I have a link to our intranet, so basically for every client that we have, we're creating a page for them, and it has things like who are their competitors, who are their customers, an intake form with a lot more detail, and any other sort of things like if they have a custom style guide, you can see here. There's also a section if they do have a custom style guide so that the writer can easily reference that and work off of it, and the editor, too, when they're going in.
Maddy:
And I have some reminders in the brief too, besides just stating the details, also giving them some actionable guidance for how to use the brief, so that might be useful in your process as well. This is something that I've started thinking about for clients. I should have been doing this from the beginning, but defining what is that voice and tone, and I would suggest to everyone here to run through this exercise for your own brand or the clients that you work with. Nielsen Norman Group has a really great article about this that goes through the different dimensions and how to define them, so this is now a section on my intake form where they can define the extremes of what their tone is. And so I took a stab at Clear Scope's tone here. I'm not sure if I totally nailed it.
Maddy:
We also have things like we create custom graphics for clients, but some clients have their own graphic design team and style that they want us to make use of, and so in some cases, we're just leaving for those clients for their own graphic design team versus trying to source images ourselves. And then it's always useful to have some past article examples. For the most part, this would live in that client's Wiki folder, but it might be useful if there is something that's super relevant to include that in the brief.
Maddy:
So then the audience section is something that could be the same for some clients, and it can change over time, just depending on those different personas that you're targeting with the content that you're creating, so it helps to spend a lot of time here, even more than anywhere else on the brief, just because there's really no point in creating content if you don't know who that end audience is, if you're not super clear on why you're writing that content.
Maddy:
So a couple questions are like, who's the intended audience? Defining that. I think another extremely important question is what problem of theirs are we trying to solve? What is the reason why they're looking for this query? And how can we help them? And how can we, perhaps, tie our product back to it or our solution back to it? And then kind of along the idea of intent, what stage of the buyer's journey are they at? Because we want to be creating content that addresses people at all the different stages because it's not going to serve a brand's purposes to only be getting people at the top of the funnel when people have questions at the bottom of the funnel as well.
Maddy:
So then we have questions about who's the competition, and half of the reason for this is we don't want to link to them because if we're creating SEO content, we don't want to pass on the benefits of what we're doing for somebody else to benefit from that is a competitor to the client. So it helps to prep the writer to be aware of who that competition is. This is something that would also live in that internal Wiki, but could be beneficial to reiterate here, especially. The example that I like to share of unintentionally giving the competition a boost is like, think about email service providers, like ActiveCampaign or something. They'll publish a report based on all the data that they have about email open rates and deliverability and things like that, but if I'm MailChimp, I don't want to link to that, right? So it might be the only great source of industry data, but in this case, I really want to avoid using that. And so to sort of head up a writer doing that, I would include that here.
Maddy:
And then, this is kind of fun, and this is if you really have the time to dig in, but having a section about the content that you want to beat and how you can beat it more specifically, to have some actionable guidance about what it is that content did really well, and Omid kind of did this in his process, just going and looking at what that top ranking result is and what the structure is and what type of article it even is. And so for this, it's things like what's the pros and cons of what they were doing, and I'm looking at things like user experience, formatting, image use, and then also is it just awkward text? Were they able to rank, but was it not telling a good story? So things like that, you can kind of take a look at some of the ideas I shared here in terms of ways that I think that we could do a better job of that content.
Maddy:
So then we get into the specific topic here, the brief details, part of it being what's the end goal of why we're creating this content? It goes back to that customer section where we're talking about what their problems are and things like that, and just kind of taking it to the next step. And defining the goal also helps to lead to what should the call to action be? What do we want people to do as a result of reading this article? And I think that by getting ahead of things, that also helps you to structure the article better because I feel like in my early freelance days, this was kind of a second thought for me, where I was really focused on the topic, but not necessarily how does it actually go back to the business and how do I benefit the business in a way that's not just shoving it in at the end and sign up for a demo or whatever. So that's why this section is important.
Maddy:
So then we kind of talk a little bit about the topic in general. What is it? This might not be a complete title, but just the direction that you can use to start flushing it out. And then another thing that's become more and more important, I think everyone here could probably agree, is having a unique angle. So what are we going to do to make this topic actually interesting to read, not a reiteration of everything that's already out there? And just thinking with a journalistic brain, there's the topic, but then there's the way that you approach it, and so one topic can go so many different directions based on the formatting or based on who's the person that you're interviewing for it, or any number of things.
Maddy:
Another thing that I want to make sure to include in my content briefs are any sort of client supply details. What do they need to see in this for it to be good for them? What are some things that they've told me? And then that way the writer's aware of them, the editor's aware of them, and I can be sure that at bare minimum, we made the client happy with their inclusion. So that's another really important thing.
Maddy:
Now, as we get deeper into this brief side of things, we're starting to create the structure of the article, so this list of major points to cover or just questions that come up during research, during looking at those top ranking articles for the query, as well as this, here, just anticipating those different questions and maybe starting to answer them. That might be something that the writer would do. Maybe we would just have the questions and not the answers, but if there's something we want to make sure to include, this would be a great place to do that.
Maddy:
So then also some clients have certain files. They might have a blog post template that they want to use, so I just included Clear Scope's content brief process here since they sent that to me to create this, so I just wanted to have a reference. So it's always good to have those details at hand.
Maddy:
And then this next section is just about the scope of the content we're creating because for every client, for every project, it's a different story. So for example, you might reiterate what's included for this specific client, so some clients that work with us, we're doing the keyword research, and some of them do it themselves. Some of them provide the Clear Scope link, and anybody who doesn't, we provide that. And we also have some clients where we're uploading that finished content to their content management system for them just to kind of ease that whole process of content creation. I find that's where things tend to fall flat because clients just get busy, it falls to the end of their list of responsibilities, and so this is a good place to just make sure to define all those things.
Maddy:
And then this kind of goes along with that competitor section, but what kinds of things do we want to make sure to avoid? Also talking a little bit about the format of the content, what does it look like? Is there a specific template we need to use to create that content? So just to give an example, we have a different blog, or we have a different template file that we would use for new web copy versus a blog post versus a press release or something like that, so that's what this is all about. And then I also like to define the word count. If you're using Clear Scope, there will be a suggested word count, so for any clients that have the budget to use this suggested word count versus having a flat per word blog rate, we are going with what Clear Scope says on that.
Maddy:
So then, I think this is the last section or one of the last sections, and it's really about the SEO side of things. And so for our process, before outlining happens, keyword research happens and generating the Clear Scope report. Having all those details is really necessary because they help to define the structure, so I don't want the writer to dig in until they have them. So I've also made suggestions here for things like sources the writer could reach out to to flesh this topic out and make it more unique, so that's something that I want to be doing more moving forward with my clients is making sure to get those first person interviews, and so that's something that I'm going to be pushing more and more by having these details ready.
Maddy:
It's also things like if you have internal links that you know would be a good fit, this is a great place to make sure they get included, having a link to any content optimization tools you want the writers to use, and then we get into the keyword. So we also use hrefs, so that's where we're coming up with the primary keywords, and once we've defined the primary keywords, that's when we then plug them into Clear Scope. But then we use Clear Scope as well as hrefs, and we also use Google search data. The people also ask the related searches in auto complete data to come up with things like this secondary semantic keyword ideas and the questions to answer as well as the keywords to use in heading versus body copy. I think these, oh, the body copy is from Clear Scope here.
Maddy:
So a lot of things go into the keyword research process from start to finish. We also try to figure out what their intent is based on what we're seeing in the Google SERPs. We also look at competitor data. You can do that in hrefs partially using like the content explorer. You could do it just from Google data, and also we're trying to optimize for featured snippet for every article, but for this one, after plugging in a couple sort of how to queries, I couldn't find one, so interestingly enough, this is not one that seems to benefit from that. And then this is kind of in addition to that angle section I had at the top because the angle section was more about just what's the angle of this article? But this one's more about how to make it unique, so you might combine those things. This is just how I'm doing it for now, but essentially that is the full process if you wanted to overdo it with all the details.
Bernard:
Wow. You have now gotten, I think, at least four or five questions from a variety different folks, that is all saying how much time does it take you to make a single content brief? So that's, yeah. How long?
Maddy:
Yeah, I would say something like this would take anywhere between one and two hours. And I think that the reason is, or the thought process is, it's as much detail as you want to put into it. It's as deep as you want to dive into the topic, and it's also your familiarity with the questions that I'm asking on the brief. So it's easier for me because I came up with them, so I don't have to question why I put them there, why I would bother. But I think for you, again, you have to make it scalable, you have to figure out what's the most important things, you have to figure out how to repeat certain things, but then if I were to recommend one section that you fill out, it would be this brief detail section followed by the probably customer section followed by the competition section.
Bernard:
Totally, totally. And then a follow-up to that is, when you're creating the briefs, this is a question from Jonas, do you create one brief at a time or do you actually map out multiple briefs around the topic cluster before writing anything? Is it just one at a time or do you kind of work across a topic?
Maddy:
Yeah, I think it's mostly one at a time. So part of it is when do clients approve topics for us? If they're pitching them or if we're pitching them, if they're pitching us or we're pitching them, it just depends on when things are available to take action on. So in terms of the keyword research part of the process, which I would say is actually an additional one or two hours for that, and somebody else on my team does that, she's doing that as soon as the topics are assigned in our process management system. So from there we can kind of plug them in. So yeah, it's just whenever we can, whenever they give us the topics or approve them.
Bernard:
Yeah. I guess just as a one additional question on my end, how does working, how much would it cost to work with somebody that's so thorough like you, and what does that process look like? Because I think a lot of people are like, "Oh my God, one to two hours of brief, is it worth it?" and I think that, you have to understand from Maddy's perspective, she's an agency owner, she wants to make sure that the deliverables that she's giving you are top-notch, so there's going to be more overhead like in that process, so it's not something that you need to sweat too hard about, but yeah. What does the process look like from a timeline perspective, working with somebody who's so thorough on content briefs, and what's the cost structure look like for this?
Maddy:
Totally. Yeah. So I think we're quoting new clients about seven business days turn-around, and the way that it's set up internally is the project manager assigns it out, and then we have the keyword research process that's due pretty much immediately, and then the outline stage comes right after that. We have an editor who approves the outline before it goes to draft, or clients can approve it, too. We can also accommodate that as well, and so then the drafting happens, the edits happen. There might be a round with the writer and the editor to fix anything before it goes to the client, and then the client gets the draft through the drafting process, and then they can also request edits from that stage. So yeah, about seven business days at least. It really depends on what else is in our queue. And obviously current clients get first dibs on that, but in terms of pricing, we charge 50 cents a word. We can also offer retainer deals and yeah, that pretty much covers it.
Bernard:
Cool. Well, there is some more left for you, some questions actually for everybody, but I do want to make sure that Marijana has her time to shine, so let's pass the mic over to her and then-
Maddy:
Take it away.
Bernard:
You have Q and A. Definitely drop it into questions, and we'll get around to them when we can.
Marijana:
Sure. Hi. First of all, thank you so much. Can you hear me well, by the way? Just confirm. Cool. Thank you so much for having me. I'm a fan of each one of you individually and then your respective company, so this is a dream. I'm going to share my screen so that, hold on, so that we have something to look at. Okay, cool. So I love how my session is coming after Maddy's and Omid's because so much of what I'm going to mention is going to very much reference that. Even though like, I have not seen Maddy's brief beforehand, but there's so much in it that I'm like, "Yep, please do that. Please put that in your briefs. This is what I do. Please have that." So you're going to see what I'm talking about now. But basically what I want to say is I am a person at the under other end of this process, and so I'm the one receiving these briefs. I'm the one trying to make sense of them and end up with a piece of content that does his job really, really well.
Marijana:
And because I'm adjacent to content teams, it's kind of a struggle when I don't have an insight into their strategy, their reasoning for a keyword, and so this is where the brief kind of answers the question because a single keyword can have many different shapes, and it can go in many different directions. And so what ends up happening if we don't use a brief is, and this happens with a lot of companies, not just new companies. Many companies just keep doing content the way they've always done it and never really go back to question that, and so what ends up happening is a lot of info gets lost in emails, or we need to go on calls, and that's a very inefficient way to do things. It's a very inefficient way to just communicate in general, it's not scalable, it's not efficient. It's not scalable for the clients and then it's not efficient for anyone. But most importantly, it's really, really hard to document.
Marijana:
And so this is where we come to when we agree that this is a better way to go. And so many of my clients would have their own brief templates like Maddy's agency does and as well as Webflow does, but many of them don't, and so what I've done over the years after learning how hard it is to kind of gather that information is I built my own content brief template. This is kind of a simplified version of it, but it's going to serve its purpose really well because I made up a topic, I'm pretending to be my own client, I filled it out, and then I'm going to show you what I do with it as the writer.
Marijana:
And so basically on the left side, you'll see my process and on the right you'll see what comes out of it. So first what we're doing is we're basically brain dumping things from Google and from other resources that I'll show you to get kind of a brain dump, which is exactly what I called it here, and then also to get an actual outline out of that. And so first I get the client to fill out the brief. So what we basically have is a summary or objective, which is what they think we need to achieve with this. So we are targeting this type of audience to have them learn a specific thing. So in this case, it's e-commerce businesses that are not really strong in copywriting, but they know the value of cart abandonment because the topic is cart abandonment subject lines, which is right here.
Marijana:
And then this is, I know Maddy mentioned this, some suggestions for what the client thinks needs to be in, so this is some statistics and reasons and examples. Then we have the target audience. This is really important because cart abandonment could be talked about for brick and mortar. It could be talked about for massive retailers. It could be any range or any type of any seller. So we are talking midsize e-commerce, so they have to be very kind of online, present online and selling already online. We have the focus keyword. What I forgot to put here is also keyword difficulty and volume because it kind of helps to understand how big the term is. Then we have the customer journey stage, which is in this case, top and middle of the funnel. It's pain and problem aware which is what Omid talked about, which is a really, really good way to think about it because we want to understand where the mindset of the target reader is.
Marijana:
Then some hypothetical links. So in this case, some case studies, product features. We have an internal blog post about preview text for emails and then an external article, which is about statistics, about cart abandonment, so this is something that I can come back later as I research and write and add it into my outline. And then also competitors, which is what Maddy mentioned, I do also get my clients to say what they like and don't like about what's ranking, because that's really helpful to understand, oh, we really like this formatting, we like that this is going in depth, but it's poorly written. It can be written better, just literally from wording perspective. And so things like that really help me understand how they feel about things.
Marijana:
Then we go into Google and Clear Scope. This is kind of the first half of this process. I analyze intent, which is basically just looking at the SERPs and understanding, do we have examples? Do we have tips? Do we have definitive guys? What's the shape that the things that our ranking are currently taking? And so we have four pieces that are pure examples. I also added numbers of how many examples, which is a pretty wide range like from 5 to 177.
Marijana:
Then we have two pieces with strategies and examples. Then we have two with examples of tips, which is kind of similar to strategies and examples, but of a different. One definitive guide and one best practices, and there's 50 of them, and so I also listed how they're ranking at the moment. Then I grab related searches, really straightforward. I do it either from Keywords Everywhere, which is a Chrome extension that gives some of this data on traffic and the keywords it's ranking for, or you can also just grab it from the bottom. It really doesn't matter. It's the same. Then I grab, people also ask if it exists, it kind of shows me the actual questions that people want answered. Pretty straightforward. Sometimes you won't see it, but sometimes you will have four and then you can start clicking into those that seem the most important. Like this one, how do you deal with abandoned carts? Seems-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Marijana:
Those that seem the most important, like this one, how do you deal with abandoned carts? Seems pretty relevant to this, so I click, and then I basically start generating more suggestions, which is great because it starts showing you different ways people do actually Google this. Then I go to image results, this is pretty much to check if there are any patterns, and so in this case, when we go to images, you will see that there are just screenshots, pretty much nothing else, just screenshots of cart abandonment emails, which means that this is what people need, they're looking for literal proof of how good emails look like, and so we are talking about subject lines, but it helps to merge them with the context obviously, and so that's what I do.
Marijana:
So I basically list all of this here, we come to the image results, I do grab these subtopics or related terms at the top, just in case none of these upper ones grab them, and that's what we... When we go into Clearscope, which I did show a bit here, but I'll also go into Clearscope. And basically, what I do is I copy all of this, which gives me a lot of related terms and things like that, and I past it into Clearscope. So this is from here to here, and then I have a lot of terms that I haven't used, I do order it by unused, and then I go basically one by one and type them in here as I deem them important. So for example, marketers I can go without mentioning, because that's probably going to come up, but if I don't mention, it's probably not going to affect relevance, but all of this, so I guess from here up to here, it's all just similar ways to say cart abandonment emails or email campaigns.
Marijana:
And then from here down, we have types of subject lines, examples, templates, different things relating to cart abandonment subject lines, and then what I do is basically list all of these that I feel are important. You'll see some of these here that I haven't used but I felt like if I don't include them, I'm going to be fine, I can always come back later and fix that. And then I just group them by something they're similar to, and so for example, discount code, offering discounts, first email, second email, reminder email, set some kind of a flow, limited time, sense of urgency, so things that are similar, I group them together and then I copy and paste them right here.
Marijana:
I just bolded these ones that are similar ways to say cart abandonment or cart abandonment emails, things like that. And that's basically where I stop with Google related data, so the Clearscope data and then the actual surf data. And then the other part of my process, and it's also what I mentioned at the beginning about using AI or machine learning to write, is what machine learning can't do is go out and ask for experts to contribute a unique thing. It cannot find the most talented or creative person to help you out with this, and so what I do is basically look for expertise, I look for uniqueness, I look for angles as well, because Maddy talked a lot about uniqueness, and so this is where I go into making this something that no one could replicate.
Marijana:
If someone wants to replicate it, they have to go and ask those same people for opinion, and quotes, and things, and most people just won't do it, it's just hard work that no one is willing to sit and do, and send follow up emails, and connect with people on LinkedIn, or Twitter, or whatever. And so I'm looking for unique things, and so I use LinkedIn and Twitter a lot, Twitter especially. I have a solid following, it's nothing massive, it's four something thousand, and so what I sometimes do is I do ask for people to contribute to a topic that I have in mind, but then also I use the search function.
Marijana:
And so here in this case, I went and I just typed in cart abandonment email under quotation marks to make it a direct match, an exact match, and so you can look at top things and then because that's going to surface some older posts, this is a year-and-a-half ago, or you can go to latest, and then you'll find people sharing examples, you'll find people sharing different experiences, statistics, even just customers sharing an abandonment email that they liked. And so I will grab any that I like and I will just screenshot them and paste them into my document. This is actually a really good example, someone loved a cart abandonment email and actually tagged an e-commerce email marketer asking him if that was him. So I just put it here for reference, it might be great to use, to embed. And then I do the same with people actually, I just click people...
Marijana:
This is wrong, actually, I don't want cart abandonment email, I just want email copywriter, or a email strategist, or something like that, and then I look for anyone that could have a lot of expertise around this. I do the same with LinkedIn, so I type in... There it is. Cart abandonment email, which is pretty specific, it could just be cart abandonment, but then I look at people and also at posts, and then people basically tend to share things like this. Last evening, I received an email, this is why it was great, and I can look through what they're sharing, maybe I can follow up and ask more things about it, I can look through comments and see what people are saying, find someone to reach out to.
Marijana:
Basically what I do is screenshot things, add them here, and then also list any people from LinkedIn and Twitter to potentially message. Val didn't show up in the results, but I know her as an email strategist, she's a pro, and I can just send her a message and ask her if she wants to contribute, and get angles and different things about it.
Marijana:
And then one other thing I do with experts and uniqueness is going to search through podcasts. I don't think a lot of people know this, but Listen Notes is a great way to look through topics that have been covered on podcasts, and the reason I love podcasts so much is people often share snippets of unique, great things they've done that they have not written about anywhere else, it just comes up in great conversations. And so this is great because you can pretty much go in and look for... I had it open here, there it is. You can look through episodes, they can be really basic and solo episodes where people just share things they would share in a blog post, but you will find conversations where people share really great insights, case studies maybe, that are not public, just pretty great things considering you can often see transcripts, which is marked in each of the episodes, you can pretty quickly find something that is quite unique that most people will not find just by Googling things on Google.
Marijana:
And so that's a pretty great way to just add that more angle, more of something that other people aren't doing. And so what we end up with is this outline brain dump that has all of the things that I covered in little sections. And it's three pages, not nothing too hard to get to, and then I use all of that information to build an outline. So I'll scroll through this outline and you'll see that basically everything that is listed above is in this doc in different places, and so I basically go through these terms and look for how they relate to each other, what has to come before the other part comes. So if we're talking about examples, we may as well talk about some common questions around subject lines or about cart abandonment that people need to know before they see the actual examples.
Marijana:
And so I used my common sense, I used my knowledge, my research skills, really, to realize that maybe text message examples might go lower, or we might not come to it at all because we're talking about subject lines, but what should I write in abandoned cart emails? That could be part of a strategy section, when should I send them? Same thing, how do you deal? This is a big picture question about cart abandonment emails, what is the average? We can talk about statistics before we talk about the examples. And so I basically copy and paste all of these and move them into an outline, and so here we have, what is cart abandonment? The highlighted gray parts are the actual... It's the data from the brain dump, and so here, we have to mention that this is for e-commerce, they have to be fully online.
Marijana:
Let's talk about lost sales and conversion rates, this is what Clearscope told us people. It makes it relevant to people, then I pull the links that the client would have filled out in the brief, I pull them and add them here, so they mentioned an external article with statistics, I add it here. Then I mentioned this from the data, but then also I know from experience that these are also some reasons why people abandon carts, the topics that you could include in your cart abandonment emails, there's all of this, because if we're talking about subject length, and we have to talk about this as well, subject line is directly related to what your cart abandonment email could be about.
Marijana:
And so we talk about this first as well, and that's when we get to types of cart abandonment emails, this is from very loose, light research that I came up with a few ideas, and then we have the main part. All of this up here can be a couple hundred words, three, 400 words, it doesn't have to be nothing too deep, it needs to be enough to give context, and then we get to the meat of the article, which is the examples, which is where we show them. here's how successful companies have done this and how you can too. I went with 15 examples purely based off of this number here, I think it's a very broad range, so I just decided to go at 15 because it's something that is enough to give a lot of ideas, but also not too much to make it not easily digestible.
Marijana:
I grabbed that tweet that I found earlier and then I turned these into templates, templates is a big one that's mentioned in the Clearscope report, and then we have strategy with parts of the strategy. So remember how up here we had... Where is it? Oh, in this research part, we had conversion rate, we had A/B test, we had CTA, this is all important, but it wasn't important until now, we had to talk about some things first. And so if you want to make your subject lines of your cart abandonment emails... This is a mouthful. If you want to make them successful, you need to also consider these things, the workflow, when to send it, preview text of your email, it's also important, how to sequence it, see, this is from the actual Clearscope report, automation, how to make it more efficient for yourself and your team.
Marijana:
Then we also add here the links that the client would have put in, so product features, internal blog posts, things like that. And we basically have a... How long is this? This is 250 words, pretty lean, I'd say, but it gives me enough to show to the client that this is how this is going to end up looking more or less, and this is what we're going to go into. This is also a great time for them to say, "Okay, well, this section looks great. Let's include this and this as well," because they start having more ideas then as well.
Marijana:
And this is how when we get to the editing process, which I'm sure Maddy for sure will know, but also when we get to the editing, it's not going to be, "Oh, but I thought you were going to also do this, and that, and that, and that, and you're going to have videos and a million case studies," and this heavy product thing where I'm like, "But you told me this is top of the funnel," problem aware, we have to talk about examples and why this is important, not just about the product. And so it helps so much in the early part to do this, to front load the work, and I know people have asked Maddy how long this takes to fill out the brief or to create a brief, and this is why it's important.
Marijana:
I think Jonas said, "Well, do it once," something like that, so that's pretty much it, it's expensive, your time, your money, your everything grows into this piece of content. And good writers are not cheap, and so doing this work upfront is so valuable for both parties, and then also for the writer to give this to the client before going into research, before going into interviews, getting people on the phone is very valuable and a smart way to use their time before you actually spend hours and hours to write something that does not align with the general idea of what it was supposed to be.
Marijana:
So yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah, I've covered everything, I could actually start writing this right now, it would be great. So yeah, I would love to hear questions and things like that because... Oh, I just wanted to say if you're a freelance writer and you do not get your clients to fill out briefs, literally copy and paste this, this is a very basic version of what I would ask for in bigger projects, but this just answers so many questions up front, so do it. And if you're a client, just fill out briefs and you'll be good. So yeah, that's me.
Bernard:
Amazing stuff. At this point, we do have some questions, but also just want to open it up to all the panelists. I don't know, that was some mind-blowing stuff to consider. I feel like I wasn't really looking at Google images to get more visual ideas of intent, the idea around podcasts was pretty mind-blowing as well because yeah, a lot of people say stuff and don't write that down. And yeah, what do you all think? Maddy? Omid?
Omid:
I definitely-
Maddy:
I've learned so much from all of you.
Omid:
Yeah, likewise. I definitely have to go and look at my template again and see, okay, what are some things that I can include in there? We tend to work with a lot of writers on a consistent basis, so I know there was a question like do you onboard writers? I'll actually hop on a call with one of them and then I'll explain our process around it and give them the control while I offer just the guardrails, but yeah, definitely learned a lot from both of you about being more thoughtful about your content briefs. I think coming from our perspective is content briefs, I think it's important to take the time to do them, for us, it's like we're a small team, and so I get lazy, and I'm just like, you know what? Just get a good grade in Clearscope and we'll be fine. So probably a better way to approach it would be something similar to what you two just mentioned.
Bernard:
All right, so some people want to know, Marijana, how much time does it take you to put something like that together and how much would it cost to hire you?
Marijana:
So it actually doesn't take long, what you saw me show you right now, it probably wouldn't take me much longer to do it live, I just didn't want to do it live because that would be a lot of pressure for a very limited amount of time. I would say half an hour to an hour, Twitter and LinkedIn can be black holes, and once you're in, you can't get out. So that's like you find a person who talks about interesting stuff, and you start reading their past tweets, and then you find a different... It can tend to snowball that part, but the Google part and Clearscope, it's pretty straightforward because you just have to think about the topic in a context that the client gave you, but also obviously listen to the data, what the data is telling you.
Marijana:
And so it's a lot of copy and pasting, but then also thinking about, okay, examples, we have to move that lower, let's put the answers first, that kind of stuff. So it depends on the topic, if it's things that I've done before a lot, many of these are because I specialize in marketing, and analytics, and those kind of topics, so with nicheing, it's definitely helpful for the writers, for sure. I know that Omid mentioned a lot of their writers would have a web design background, that helps a lot. And so yeah, I would say 30 minutes to an hour to do that, probably not more. It's more to get the process started and then just go until we have something that looks a good structure to work from.
Marijana:
It can change later on in the research and writing process as I get thoughts from people, interviews, things like that, it can shape the angles a bit. It can take me a while to find the examples, especially if it's emails, because those are very timed and you can't really just generate them out of thin air. I have to ping people to forward me their emails that they've received, that happened a lot. So yeah, I think the research process later on is a lot more complex than this, this is just listening to the data and structuring it around what the tools are telling you, really.
Marijana:
And about hiring me, right now, I don't think I work with anyone for under $1,000 per blog post, this is heavy stuff, this takes a while to do. And I also do work with very limited amount of clients, number of clients in any given moment, because they need someone to be deep and with them, even though I'm not part of the team, I'm on the side of the team, but I'm someone they rely on and count on. And so as Maddie said, people you only work with have first dibs, and so it's like we try to keep it lean as much as we can.
Marijana:
I'm not an agency, I don't plan being one anytime soon, and so it's pretty much like let's focus on the... And this is also the thing, companies that pay that much for a writer know what they're doing, and so that's where I come in with, "Okay, you have the strategy, let me do the writing, and research, and the whole thing," so yeah.
Bernard:
Yeah, Ruben says that, "I think we got to steer clear of trying to compete with Marijana and the content in the [inaudible 01:06:17]," so definitely a very... Process you got going on. An interesting point from Omid was breaking out intent, not obviously in those little square categories like transactional, but more in terms of awareness, right? And so question from Jonas, I think for everybody here is, how do you like to classify search intent? And more specifically, do you categorize things like transactional, informational, or maybe problem aware, solution aware? Is there that distinction in your workflow?
Marijana:
I can answer first because I was just talking about it. For me, I use the same structure as Omid does, and I think the problem solution, product classification awareness is pretty great because you understand how willing the reader is to do the next thing, whatever it is you want them to do, is it signing up? Is it trying things? Is it paying for things? That's a very different mindset you have to come from to do that. And so I think I would just go by... It's more so a case by case situation rather than having a one size fits all, in this case with cart abandonment, if you're an email automation software that sells among other things, automation and cart abandonment emails, you could target both examples, you could also target definitive guides, you could also target strategies and examples, I think that was the three that were... It's all of them pretty much.
Marijana:
So we do want people to see examples and then sign up for a trial, do you want people to read the strategy, and then take it to their team, and then do something with that? You know what I mean? It really depends on what you want them to do next, if it's straight up purchase, it's going to be very much what Omid was talking about, where they compare WordPress and Webflow. So I think it's a tricky one because obviously, every business is different, but I do go at it on a case by case scenario, I think that's what I wanted to say. Yeah, I think that's it.
Omid:
Yeah, there's so much nuance with it. I used to try to categorize it as transactional and informational, and then when I would do that, I'd be like, "Okay, well, this is informational, but this is telling me that it should be transactional, but I guess it could also be informational," so I could never really fit everything perfectly into it. And so when you just think about it from the problem solution, product aware perspective, yeah, there's definitely a lot of nuance in the... And it depends on what company you're writing for or what topics you're writing about, but you can always group it into those three categories. So yeah, I look at it from that perspective.
Bernard:
Yeah, I feel like I've started to... This is a previous talk that I did earlier this year, but I'm starting to see certain search perspective frameworks that seem to stand out based on the type of query that is happening. I'd say the most interesting example that I can think of off the top of my head is within the health wellness and consumer package good space, so you can imagine if you Googled right now, CBDT for anxiety, there's actually a lot of content that's being surfaced, that's like, I tried it and here's what happened. And that's a very unique point of view that I think people care about, but that's specifically within an experience, right? And so a consumer package, good, is an experience, but you can imagine that also maps to all kinds of other experiences.
Bernard:
And then you can take these things that you're starting to see in some types of searches, and I feel like extrapolate it to use it in a more compelling way for another thing. "I tried Webflow to replace WordPress and here's my thoughts," right? I feel like that would work for a Webflow review or even Webflow versus WordPress because it is an experience, I'm like, "Oh, man, it was so much easier doing X, Y, and Z, but maybe more complicated when it comes to integrating some plugins that I really love using," so on and so forth. I inspect the search engine results page all the time and I do think that it's an infinite pool of possibility, and I think drawing parallels from other types of searches and then leveraging that into your search categories is what I'm dabbling with or basically seeing happen in search. I do want to be conscious of everyone's time, time check, how are all the panelists doing? We're now getting some more questions here and there.
Marijana:
Yeah, I see a question that I want to answer really quickly from [inaudible 01:11:57], it's how am I dealing with the problem of copycat content? Because outlines off of existing articles is tricky...
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]
Marijana:
Because outlines off of existing articles is tricky because of we are looking... We're doing the machine learning thing. We're looking at what's there. And then just turning it into something new, which doesn't really work. I think this is where you looking for unique angles and contributions comes into play. For example, I've done content for Shopify. And their whole approach to content is we do things that no one else does. It's pretty obvious and very clear from reading their content, both of the retail and the enterprise blog. And you'll basically see that nothing you see there is just like the other stuff you've seen elsewhere. It's just doing a lot of the hard work to find unique examples, unique takes on things.
Marijana:
It doesn't have to be common agreement. If there's someone who says cart abandonment emails are not great, let's talk to them and see why they're saying that. Is there a better way to fix this issue of 70 something percent abandoned cart? Things like that. I'm just making it up. I don't know if anyone's against cart abandoned emails. But basically you go and listen to people who are experts or consumers and listen to them say things about the thing you're writing about and try to figure out if there is something there. It's what Maddy said about being a journalist. I come from a journalistic background and I didn't really realize this is what I was doing until a couple of years ago. I was like, "Oh, look at me being a journalist now again." So it's very much digging. It takes so much time. This is why good writers are expensive. I'm going to say that again.
Marijana:
And it's just, you cannot do great content if you just go off of what's already ranking, if you go off of what's already there. I'm going to also give some suggestions. Use your customer data. Not private data, but if your software usage data tells you things about your customers. MailChimp publishes their open rates. It's like a very generic thing, but it makes them unique because not many other... Their competitors aren't doing it. Use customer stories. Use unique examples of what your customers did. Shopify, for example, uses Shopify stores, the stores that run on Shopify to show an example of how someone from online went into brick and mortar or vice versa, how they survived the pandemic, how they did things that were completely out of the ordinary that other Shopify competitors don't have access to. They have their own customers, but they don't have these customers.
Marijana:
And so go into the stories that are kind of unique to you and also just spend time talking to people. I think that's like the Twitter, LinkedIn podcast thing that I showed and mentioned. It's kind of like you are using the data that's already there, but it's also giving you starting points to go into a new rabbit hole to see what people are saying and what's the general consensus, but also what's outside of that general consensus to see how we can... I think Hotjar does this as well. They're tackling the concept of best practices, like why are best practices actually not a good thing to do?
Marijana:
And then they kind of go and tell you why and show you their own customers with actual data, how them abolishing and completely leaving best practices out of their strategy had actually helped them. It's that kind of stuff that makes you completely unique. And nobody can swipe that from you and do the same thing, unless they're willing to talk to as many people as you did. That's the only way. And as I said, most people just don't have the money or time to do that. And that's where you get to kind of be unique and stand out in that. And in Google, which is a big deal obviously, and important.
Omid:
Yeah. I always thought of-
Maddy:
I want to add on... I'll go after you.
Omid:
Go ahead. Oh, yeah. I was just going to say-
Maddy:
I was just going to say... Freaking Zoom.
Omid:
You go ahead. Go ahead.
Maddy:
I'll say this really quick, okay? Besides external sources, think about subject matter experts that already exist on the clients' team or within your team internally. So that could be an easy way to get started with that.
Marijana:
For sure.
Omid:
A hundred percent. I was just going to say, to the question you just answered in terms of there's copycat content, because I know I literally just went through and showed an example of looking at another post in the SERP and modeling off of that. In that case, what we're really doing is just trying to figure out, is it more of a listicle? Is it more a definitive guide? And it's kind of just a guardrail for us to kind of fall. But I do agree with always having unique content because a part of me believes that when your content is unique, people actually read it and maybe there's a factor of time on page. Some people say it's a ranking factor. I can't say that with 100% truth, but a part of me does believe that it does make sense that if somebody lands on a post and they're reading it for a long time, it means it's interesting.
Omid:
Yeah. So that's one thing that I'm saying too. I also take a lot of inspiration from YouTube. So I know that, Bernard, you were mentioning about kind of more personal stories. And I wonder if it's kind of more the headline just having a really high click-through rate. And on YouTube, a lot of the headlines, especially people on the YouTube homepage, a lot of these have insanely high click-through rates. So the solution for going viral on YouTube, which is owned by Google is high to high click-through rate, which is your thumbnail and title are the most important thing, first thing someone sees when they click on it and then just having a high watch time. So getting people to consistently stay on your article.
Omid:
So with those principles, if we just take them to writing a blog post, it's like what has a really good click-through rate from a title headline? And then how do I write this piece, make it super original, include all these extra resources, put a lot of thought and time into it to keep a person reading it as long as possible? And hopefully Google rewards me for that.
Bernard:
Totally. Totally. I would think of this in a multi-part question is like, okay, well first of all, is copycat content actually bad. Right? And it's like, you have to first dissect the search intent. Right. If somebody's Googling, "What is blah," the copycat content is literally the only thing that will work for that specific query. Right. So first it's like, okay, well what is the search intent? If it's more informational, then you, I think, have to say, "Okay, well this is just copycat content. How can I make it better and obviously augment it with different points of view?" And then I think also that said, you should take some more wild swings, right? I think classical SEO, best practice, if you will, is simply saying, "Okay, let's target the keywords that have monthly search volume," and that's it. Right. That's the formula.
Bernard:
But I feel like you should allocate 10%, 20% even maybe a higher percentage depending on the industry and the topic that you're in to just kind of crazy content, which I feel like is also kind of an interesting question that Lawrence is asking, right? It's like, how do you guys approach creating unique search intent on content for clients who already have blog topics in mind? I feel like this is something that Maddy and Marijana could really speak to. It's like, okay, somebody comes and they're like, "I want you to write a piece of content on cart abandonment." And then you're like, "All right, well, that's a little too broad." How do you navigate exactly that scenario? Go.
Marijana:
I can be quite quick. I have made it pretty hard to even start talking to me, to work with me if you don't have a specific strategy, if that makes sense. I will ask you in my intake form, before we even ever exchange emails on my website, you will have to answer, what's your current issue? Are you struggling with strategy or are you looking for a writer who can execute the strategy you have? If it's the former, we are probably not going to be a match. And I'm going to send you someone who can work with you on a strategy if you're looking for external person. And so there's a lot of questions that I think a lot of people get to the end of, and they're like, "Oh, wait. She's not the writer for me. I can't answer these questions. She's asking me, what's my struggle with content and who are we speaking to?"
Marijana:
And their answer is something really vague, like B2B businesses. And I'm like, "No, that's not specific enough." And so I think they get to the point where they see that this is not sufficient for me to actually do something with it. And they probably see that it's not worth paying any money or that much money to have some big undefined conversations and results. And so yeah, I think that's kind of the big one from the writer's side. I'm sure Maddy's going to speak to the actual, when someone is your client, maybe for a longer time and they have these kind ideas. Maybe that comes up more when you're a full blown agency setup.
Maddy:
Yeah. I mean, it's like every client's so different. Right. And they all come to you with different things that they're looking for. And I would agree that it starts with a good intake process because I need to understand what they want, what's the goal and then who they are, who their audience is, who their competition is, all that good stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think that if a client is coming to me without an idea fully defined, and I need to define that before starting, it's definitely a matter of we need to have a call. I'm not going to start this content without having a clearly defined division for it. And if you want, I could take a stab at it, but it's just not going to be exactly what you have in your head. So we need to have a meeting of the minds to figure out what that is exactly. So I think it's just good communication is what it comes down to. Communication, organization, planning.
Bernard:
Totally. Totally. When we used to run our own SEO agency, we found that they're taking the Marijana approach, is honestly kind of where you want to end up, right? Somebody comes to you and they're like, "Oh my God, I really want to work with you." And you're like, 'Good. Well then this is exactly how it works. And you define the process if you are the freelancer or the agency," because that's oftentimes exactly what the client wants. And then we were pitching proposals and we were also kind of notorious for being really expensive and premium. So there was this one time, just random story, where a lot of people submitted technical SEO audits. And I think we were doing an audit for some website, it was a large website that eventually got acquired by G2. And there was a lot of URLs.
Bernard:
And everybody submitted proposals. And then we submitted a proposal that was $40,000 for a technical audit. And one of the founders calls me and they're like, "Bernard, your proposal is 10 times more expensive than any other person's proposal for this project, except I really want to work with you." And it's like, that's kind of where you want to be is just in that spot where you define what working with you looks like. And I think that a lot of that comes down to the communication upfront and being like, "Hey, this is how it works. This is what I'm going to do. And this is why I'm going to avoid basically these pitfalls where I get assigned a very broader generic topic and I'm just beating my head against the wall, trying to make this work."
Bernard:
All right. One last question. And then it was a wonderful time with everybody. I guess this is it from Constantine. How's your experience working with content AI tools and incorporating them into your content creation process?
Omid:
I don't really use them. Or, I mean, sorry, I use Clearscope. I don't know if you consider that content AI. But I don't really use the ones that kind of generate the content for you and stuff and write blog posts for you and all that. I've experimented with them. And I'll be honest that I've been pretty mind blown by some of them, the fact that they're able to write such cohesive information. But I also do need to supply a lot of information for the tool to output good information back. And so a part of me is like, it's not too worth it. I could see it maybe being useful for generic social posts for some companies and maybe some generic email copy or product descriptions. But in terms of writing blog posts, I still think that these tools are still a long way to go until they actually have the creativity and intelligence of an actual human being.
Omid:
And so I still think that the posts that have a human touch will tend to do better. But I also do see a future where for some people, for very generic topics, like I think Bernard mentioned earlier when we first started this about Investipedia, sometimes I think it might eventually get to the point where it could be a little bit difficult to tell if it was written by a robot or if it was written by a human. But if you're staying in the field of writing where it needs to be a little bit more creative, a little bit more personal stories and all that, I don't think these tools that write for you are that great yet. That's just my take on it.
Maddy:
You brought up a good point, which is the social media side of things. I think it's cool to use those AI tools to summarize articles, like from a research perspective or something and possibly to share on social, depending on how the quality of the output of that article summarizer. So there's something to that. We talked about at the beginning, I think there's some good applications of using those tools to potentially rewrite something that you already wrote or to generate maybe not a full draft, but a section. And then you could use that as a jumping off point. But I'm with you, Omid. I wouldn't count on it to create a full article. And the other thing I was thinking from our initial conversation was just that you can't replicate yet the formatting and the coherence across the full thing and thoughtfulness about image creation or selection. And so that's kind of where that human element comes back in. Even if we could get the text generation figured out, there's still a lot more that would need to happen for it to be a final product.
Marijana:
Yeah, for sure. The storytelling and emotions. The computer doesn't really understand what we are feeling. It knows that it's called anger or sadness or happiness or joy or excitement or whatever, but it's not able to use examples and vivid pictures of descriptions of how this is. And so even some great introductions of blog posts, when you think about it, they're the hardest ones to write because they have the job of kind of announcing what's coming without revealing too much, but also, is this worth your time, especially for really long pieces.
Marijana:
And so it's kind of like, how do we do this? And then the really good writers, they tell a story within like a hundred words. They literally kind of contain so much about what's to come in just a couple of paragraphs. And a computer, I don't think is still going to be able to do that for a while. And that's just the intro, let alone everything else, the actual flow and story that comes after. So yeah, that's kind of my point. As we mentioned at the beginning of the session, I'm not going to be blind to it and pretend that I'm irreplaceable as a writer. I am as irreplaceable right now, as of yet, I'm not. You can't just take a computer and replace me. But it's just kind of a thing to keep an eye on and see what comes with it. But it's definitely not going to be a thing that's going to just write your content and make it really good for a good while.
Bernard:
Yeah. This is exactly what we were talking about before the call, was just getting started and my opinions are in alignment with what Omid was saying. I feel like factual, informational content, that's going to be just automated away. But I think the most interesting thing is that the whole like narrative of this entire talk was subject matter expertise. What's the angle? Bring the journalism, the emotion, the story. Right. And this is all happening because Google or users or both are engaging with content that isn't so cookie cutter and isn't so dry. And so we're seeing this shift in search engine optimization, where it is about bringing a unique perspective to the table, offering a story or experience that you had surrounding the topic. And so it's almost like content AI tools have come out, except users and/or Google are actively countering that as a strategy by giving their attention to actually useful and interesting pieces of content.
Bernard:
And we're seeing the shift away from keywords, more towards angles, topics, and subject matter experts. So that's to say that I do think content AI does have application for, you can imagine maybe 20%, 30% of informational queries out there, define this or market report for that. Right. It's very cut and dry, true or false, this is exactly what it is, except we're seeing then the rest of the SEO topics I think shift towards, "Oh, well I want your experience, but more importantly, who are you and why should I trust you?" Right. And then you're starting to see these more softer elements play a bigger role in, I think people's engagement and therefore Google's willingness to rank your content. So that's my thoughts.
Marijana:
I know we're way over time, but I just remembered a really good example. We could get AI to write recipes, right. It could just find really good ingredients and amounts and measurements and things and say, "This is how you make bread." Or I don't know, pasta with this and that, whatever. I know there is a whole thing about recipes being a whole story of like 70,000 words first and then an actual recipe. But the thing is, I recently started... not started baking, but I learned to bake doughs and things like that. And the recipes that I go to are those that have an actual video in the middle of the recipe that says, "This is how you need to mix things so they don't kill each other," the actual fermentation that has to happen, whatever. It's kind of like, I'm not going to just look at a black on white very dry article explaining this.
Marijana:
I need a person to show me this. This is so specific and fine. It's very fine work, right? And so I need this unique experience, this expertise of a person showing me how to do this. It doesn't have to be a video, but usually in this case, photos, very vivid explanations of what needs to happen with the bread and whatever. So that's kind of, I think, along what we just said, it's people want the person to tell the story, to tell what to do, to give the value. Even if it's B2B, even if it's super technical or whatever, we're still people on the other end of the screen, right? We still need to do things with what you gave us. And so it's not just getting a computer to regurgitate things. It's a lot more refined than that, I think.
Bernard:
Awesome stuff, y'all. Well, thanks to everybody who has made it to 35 minutes over. Thanks to everybody, all the panelists, Maddy, Omid, Marijana. Y'all were amazing. And yeah, we'll post this to YouTube. And we'll follow up with everybody with the documents where I have permission to share them. And hope everybody has a wonderful rest of your week. Take care, y'all.
Marijana:
Thank you. Bye.
Omid:
Thank you everyone.
Maddy:
Bye everyone.
Omid:
Bye.
