Ryan Robinson, the Head of Content at Close, joined us for a webinar on how he increased site traffic by over 40% in 4 months by updating content.
Watch the full webinar
Check out Ryan’s slides here.
And check out the resources Ryan shared below:
About Ryan Robinson:
Ryan Robinson is the Head of Content at Close and a blogger at ryrob.com where he teaches 500,000 monthly readers how to start a blog and grow a side business.
Follow Ryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theryanrobinson/
Read the transcript
Travis:
Ryan is the head of content at Close and a blogger at ryrob.com, where he teaches over 500,000 monthly readers how to start a blog and grow a side business. Ryan, the floor is yours. Go ahead, please share a screen, and as Ryan shares the screen, drop in comments in the chat section and questions in the Q&A box of Zoom, and Ryan will do his best to answer them today.
Ryan:
Yeah, please keep the Q&As coming. We had a few that I just got from my readers ahead of time, but I would love to hear your questions. That's going to be the most impactful part and the most fun for me. So please do. Let's share my screen; wow, we have so many people here. This is awesome. Okay, cool. Travis, can you see my slides well?
Ryan:
All right, amazing. Maybe we'll press play on these, so you don't see that. Ah-ha. Cool. So yeah, as Travis said, I've been blogging on my site ryrob.com for about ten years. It's had a few little iterations before it was the blog it looks like today, and also ups and downs over the years. I want to be the first to say that today I'm not seeing 500,000 monthly readers, but I've always kind of hovered in this range of 200 to 500, huge swings based on not updating content for a year or two. That's been my big lesson is that now I'm touching all my most important articles at least once a quarter, just to make sure that they're staying fresh and, again, following Clearscope reports, like making sure they're really high grades.
And this year, I recently rejoined the team at Close, which is an inside sales CRM. It's basically, it's a CRM for startups, and small businesses, and we have been in the market there for, oh my god, I think more like 12 years at Close, 12 or 13 years. And I've been back for five months. I worked at Close doing content marketing for them, gosh, four years ago, five years ago. And the team was really small then, it was like three of us doing marketing, and it's been really cool too; I kind of had this break in the last few years of working on my blog full time. And now that I've come back, there's this big team, and there's a lot of people working in marketing, and there's product marketing, content marketing. So it's been really cool to come back and see just how much the company's grown, the team's grown, and now I'm the head of content, so I'm getting to work with a content team of three to four people right now. And as you probably saw in the title of the webinar, there have been 40% traffic growth in about four months. That's kind of the top-line metric that we're working with here.
And this is a screenshot of our Google Analytics. The raw numbers are blurred out, but percentages you can see them here. So you can see, I just pulled this screenshot yesterday, and for the last 30 days of our organic traffic, there's actually been a 50% growth from the month before that I started back at Close, so from May to October, essentially. About a 50% growth and the number of users from organic search. That's kind of the top-level metric that we're most proud of on the team. And taking just another look kind of at Ahrefs for directional stuff, I never really rely on Ahrefs as a source of 100% truth for how much traffic a website's generating, but directionally, this is really useful.
We've seen a huge increase in the number of keywords that we're picking up on the blog now, about 7700, according to Ahrefs, again, and most importantly, a really meaningful jump in those top three keywords. That's what we're really focused on most. That's where the vast majority of our traffic gains have come from. And again, you'll see a boost in backlinks, referring domains, traffic and traffic value, making sure we're going after the right content updates that are going to be bringing us qualified traffic that leads to email signups and eventually trials for our CRM product. So all the traffic in the world doesn't make a difference. If we had a million readers on our blog, but the number of trials and email subscribing editors stayed static, that wouldn't be a huge win. So this is again, kind of a game of making sure we're doing the right content updates.
And this is the shout out slide. These are the people doing all the real work here. Our content team, Amy, Danielle, Ramin, Stefan, they've been amazing. Their collective work as a team has been really the driving factor in our success with our content updates. And I also have to give a huge shout out to, we partnered with Five Tool, a content agency, and much more, they do a lot of strategic work for us too, to kind of just help boost our capacity, give us some guidance, direction, gut check us, make sure that we're not doing something crazy or dumb. And they have been a huge help in delivering a high volume of really strong SEO briefs for us. They take on content writing as well, so they use Clearscope to optimize their content. So we've got this nice kind of Clearscope party going where I'm spending hours a day looking at either Clearscope or Google Docs with Clearscope plugged into them. And Five Tool has been a huge part of helping us do this well and kind of helping us to build a real process around systematizing this.
And I wanted to talk just real quick about how we're doing this. Tools, processes, because this is something I've gotten a lot of questions from people about. Updating one article is simple, but when you want to do 86 articles in just a few months to totally update, that's kind of a thing where processors are going to break, communication's going to get lost unless you have something going here. So we have this amazing Google Sheet that Five Tool gifted us with to track our updates. So making sure that we're kind of keeping an eye on where all of these, and I'm talking like a hundred to 150 different updates in this spreadsheet at a time in various different stages of progress along towards publishing, and Jasmine on their team's been amazing at kind of owning this, making sure to ping us on updates that are ready for our review and just kind of keeping everything on track.
And Google Docs, that's where we make the magic happen. I'll be talking in this presentation kind of about how to blend the art and science of content updates, and that's where so much of it takes place. You'll see I got the Clearscope add on here in this Google Doc screenshot because we absolutely love having Clearscope as kind of the science component to making sure that our updates are yes for readers going to be delivering quality. That's kind of the art, but the science, making sure that we hit the right marks for all the search engines too. And then, yeah, Asana, that's kind of our project management home base, and it's kind of where we like to manage our editorial calendar, keep track of all our content updates, communicate more as a team, and make sure that we're collaborating to get all of our content updates to the finish line.
Now, opportunity identification. This is where it gets fun because when I joined Close, there were I think just under 1300 blog posts already published on the site. And this became the immediate first question, where do we direct our attention? I knew from day one that we needed to focus on content updates rather than just pushing out a new blog post every day from when I started my job, because I could see in our historical Google Analytics data that we used to get significantly more traffic than we were getting when I rejoined the team back in May. So there was a clear decline that had been going on, a slow decline over the course of years, and the content just needed love, right? So how do you decide when an article's ready? Number one, look where it used to be. If it used to be higher, then chances are that you can do an update and lift that traffic back up, get it to the place where search engines appreciate it more and decrease that bounce rates, then people are going to be spending more time on your content, sending that signal to Google that, hey, this is actually really good content.
That's kind of the circle that we'd like to look for there. And beyond just seeing where your traffic has been for a particular post check out Ahrefs. I love Ahrefs just for keyword tracking as kind of a starting point seeing like, all right, what are the movements that have happened over the past six to 12 months? That's a good directional indicator. Not always super, super exact, but it helps me a lot in picking out which kinds of articles we should be prioritizing. And then of course, also looking at important keyword phrases for your brand, seeing where competitors are edging you out. In the SERP placements, I'll often take a peek at, if you do a keyword, if you use the keyword explorer in Ahrefs, you search a keyword phrase, you scroll down to the very bottom, you can see an estimate, again, directionally useful, an estimate of how much traffic the first result's getting, the second result's getting, and so on.
And so I'll often take a peek at those, see that there's a closed blog post for almost everything sales related, and a lot of them that haven't been updated in a year, two, three or more, they'll be kind of floating around the middle of the first page of SERP results, maybe position four to position seven, and I'll be able to take a peek and see, all right, if we can go from position six up to position two or maybe position one with some backlinks too, then we're going to be able to capture 2000, 3000 more estimated readers per month. And that's kind of how I like to think about identifying those opportunities with Ahrefs. It kind of just helps me sanity check that what we've found from our historical Google Analytics data is actually going to be a useful way to spend our time.
And then finally, the newest thing that's been helping me identify when to make a content update is currently a beta feature in Clearscope, but I hear they're rolling it out sometime soon. Content inventory, it's been humongously helpful for us. Essentially it allows you to upload, I think on our plan, up to 50 pages blog posts that you want to track their impressions, clicks, and what their content grade is. That's kind of what I'm most interested in, is we tend to optimize all of our articles when we're updating or publishing something new up to an A++ level. And you'll notice in content inventory that the grade for your content is pretty much always changing. And that's very dynamic because the search engine algorithms are extremely dynamic too. They're always changing what they want to favor and rank highest. So essentially what I'll do is I'll just keep an eye on our content inventory and when I notice something drops below, say like A- score, I'll flag that for another light update on our end. And that often means just doing kind of a tune up, connecting Clearscope to the blog post and making sure that there are a certain number of mentions of all the most important keyword phrases that the report recommends we include, and just making sure that we're actually hitting those and kind of lifting it back up to an A++ rating.
Now, as I was starting to get into what makes for a good content update, I think this is very, very subjective. In my opinion, content's always a challenge of trying to balance that art and science of giving the best possible solutions, which in my opinion is often actionable, very useful stuff that people can take and do something with after reading. So balancing that need for real humans and the robots. Maddie Osmond, one of my friends, published a book Writing for Humans and Robots. So I love that phrase. And if you're not doing both, in my opinion, you are leaving some value on the table either for real people, which sucks, or you're kind of short sighting yourself with search engine algorithms too.
So over here on the art side, this is where all the AI editing and writing tools in the world, I do not think, watch me eat these words in a few years, I don't think will ever be as good at writing and editing as real humans are. I think they're good tools to help you in writing and editing, but the people on our team, Danielle, Amy, Ramin, who have been so instrumental in having really high quality bars for the content updates that we publish, and also new articles going through our editorial process. So all of this art business happens in Google Docs. Tons of editing, we're ruthless editors, but still with a smile on, but giving each other really direct feedback and not sacrificing feelings for getting our audience the best possible content is what we try and focus on. Great editors, a lot of Google Doc commenting.
And again, the science component here, I know we're on a Clearscope webinar, but man, I can't stop shouting you guys out getting all of our updates to an A++ rating. That's kind of what we go for. It gives us the most longevity for an update too. That way hopefully we're having to not revisit an update for at least a couple of months. Oftentimes, Like SERP volatility, like Travis and I were talking about this the other day, we're seeing a lot more volatility lately that things are increasing and changing quite a bit. So using the content inventory feature to keep kind of an eye on when things are changing has been really important for us. And I also hear that there may be a feature coming out sometime soon that will send notifications when your content grades slip below a certain threshold you set, which is going to be amazing, very much looking forward to that.
And balancing new content with updates. This is also super important because no matter the size of your brand or blog, your readers want new content or you want to at least provide new content for them to lead them in the directions that they should be thinking about in your industry, especially if you take the approach of educating your audience. And likewise, search engines, they want to see new content. So I knew from the start that we didn't want to completely neglect publishing new stuff because we wanted to hit that balance of giving our readers more reason to continue returning to the blog and also showing the search engines that, hey, we're not completely neglecting publishing new URLs here. So this is our breakdown of the first four months of doing real content updates. For us, 53% of our time was spent on updates, 47% spent on new content.
And I think what's really interesting about the new content is that rather than just pursuing whatever exciting keyword phrase looks like it has the most volume and taking that approach like highest volume first, we tried to prioritize addressing fractured intent with our new content. And one example of that is, I'm not sure if it's number one today, but when I grabbed the screenshot the other day, sales emails, that's one of our guides that we just recently updated on the Close blog and before the update, it was one of those ultra-long form five, six, 7,000 word guides that was trying to do way too much. There were sections for sales email templates, sales email calls to action, and when to send sales emails. So one thing that we did that I think has contributed to lifting it up to the top result, or at least flirting with that position, was stripping it of trying to do too much.
And we broke it down into just being kind of a guide to sales emailing, and we took the core components of that guide. Again, this is with Five Tool's help, and this was their recommendation too. We broke it into new pieces that were going to be publishing on sales, email templates, sales email, call to action, when to send sales emails, and there's a few more that are going to be kind of in our pipeline related to sales emailing, but our idea is that this will serve, this sales email guide will kind of serve as more of a hub page and link out to all these more longer tail related resources and give us the shot to rank higher for more of these longer tail terms that are also still pretty high volume and very high value too for our brand.
And that's as far as I got, to be honest with you. I could go for hours about this topic because we're so in the weeds with it, but I wanted to just open it up for Q&A and try and make the most time that we could for useful conversations here.
Travis:
Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that, Ryan. We do have a couple questions and I think we can start with the ones from your audience, but the first one is when I already have a lot of content on my blog, is it possible to stop creating new content and instead keep updating old content, and they continue, the reason is it's taking more and more time to update all content as the market is constantly changing.
Ryan:
Yeah, it's kind of one of those tough questions to give a blanket answer to, but my gut reaction and what I do on my own blog, this is a whole thing I didn't even get to enough time to talk about how content updates have been going on my own blog, but practicing what I preach, I try and spend about 75% of my time now on content updates. And this is speaking for my own blog. I think on a company site where you have a lot of resources, a team, trying to get closer to that 50-50 range, if you have the resources for it, is what I would aim for. But in my experience, I also have a content library of 350 articles on my blog that I'm so embarrassed to say the vast majority of them haven't been touched in the last six months, 12 months even. So for me, it's more about what phase am I in right now? If I get to a place where I've updated all of my top 25 to 50 articles and I'm consistently keeping kind of a process and a system on that each quarter, let's say, then I'll try and shift my balance down to more of that 50-50 range.
Travis:
Awesome. Super cool. And next one is, will it affect my SEO if I only update old content and do not create any new content?
Ryan:
This is another, this is tough. This gets into predicting Google's answers, but in my experience, yes, I think it will negatively impact your search engine rankings across the board if you were to completely stop publishing new content, getting new URLs live on your site. The signal that sends to Google, whether it's true or not, is that you are not publishing new content. And at least in my experience, the times in which I have gone say a few months without publishing something new on my blog, I'll see a dip in traffic towards the tail end of that. It's not going to happen right away if you have a site that gets some traffic already. But yeah, I would say don't neglect new content. You'll do so at your peril. Even if you can just publish one new article a month and you're updating 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, try and just get some new URLs out there.
Travis:
Very interesting. And then Daniel has a question. He says they're kind of stuck around the 80,000 monthly visitors via SEO, and their main problem is their ranking say four to nine positions on most of their articles. And their question is, what is the most concrete tactics to make multiple articles move from position four to 10 to say one to three?
Ryan:
Now, that is a great question. In my experience at least, I'll say that back links are going to be a huge component of it. Take a look at who your exact competitors are. Use, I love using Ahrefs for this. Again, using that keyword explorer, searching for the primary keyword phrase you want the articles to rank for, and just scrolling down and seeing all the stats about who your competitor sites are. If they have a significantly higher domain rating than you, a significantly higher number of back links referring domains, that's the signal that you should be pursuing building links to your article. This assumes also that you've done your due diligence and making sure that your content's already kind of optimized. And in that A+ to A++ range with a Clearscope report. That's the assumed baseline that I always recommend. And once you've done the best you can do with your on page content, do internal links like crazy.
If you're neglecting that, that's a huge missed opportunity to pass more page authority around from even homepage. If it's really important articles, I would link to all your important content from your homepage if you can, but wherever you get the most kind of inbound quality links, make sure that you're linking to your important content pieces you want to rank as well. But we had, Stefan joined our team this summer and he's been focused on link partnerships. So getting guest posts placed, doing kind of three-way trades whenever there's kind of a safe, easy way that makes sense to do it, that's the kind of stuff that we're engaged in a lot right now. That's what I see as being most impactful once your content is already doing really well from an on-page perspective to getting from the middle bottom of the page up to the top results.
And I also think there's something to be said too for not needing to have more backlinks, more referring domains than the top couple of results. I think there's something, some magic that goes on just with link velocity. If you're acquiring more links, if you're going hard on building quality links safely to your content, then I think Google does a pretty good job of identifying that and seeing, hey, this other article towards the bottom of page one is getting linked to a lot more right now. Maybe we should kind of bump it up, see how it performs for searchers as well.
Travis:
I like that. Definitely agree. And then Karen has an interesting question. What are examples of updates that are done to a blog? You kind of covered it in your presentation, but what are some of the updates you kind of break out?
Ryan:
I think you, like most of the text-based updates, that's where I'm kind of spending the most of our time, at least at Closed and on my blog, making sure that there's a really useful feature in a Clearscope report. I think it's called research or maybe it's outline. Outline. And if you click on outline, you get basically a result by result outline of all of the main headers that are featured in the top ranking results for the particular keyword phrase. And that has been probably the most impactful feature for us to make sure that there aren't any major sections, headlines that we're missing in a particular article. So text-based updates, that's kind of where we spend the most time. I think you could get into things like making sure your images are on brand. We've done some infographics as well, just kind of around the goal of attracting links in the longer term. But yeah, text space updates, making sure that you just kind of hit all the correct main points in a post.
Travis:
Awesome. I have a question from Caroline, since you mentioned part of your success as a game of focusing on the right content updates. How do you know your target audience and discover what it is that they want to consume?
Ryan:
That's a really good question. I mean, this is tough. I think the best thing that you can do is actually talk to your target audience somehow and at Close, you can make all the assumptions you want, but at the end of the day, if you hear real people tell you the real things that they have problems with, that's going to be directionally, at least the most useful way to inform your content topics and balance that with giving people what they don't know they need sometimes too. But I find that at least with Close, we do a quarterly marketing call with our success team, where our success team shares here's this massive long list of all the problems, challenges, potential integration partners and tools. Here are the things that our customers are having the biggest problems with. And those have honestly given us some of our best content ideas.
And one example of that that Amy on our team wrote and published lately is this really in depth post on what's called talk tracks for sales teams. A term that as not being a salesperson myself, I had never even heard of before, but talk tracks are kind of replacing call scripts. And we found that a lot of sales teams, especially in our target market of SAS companies and more tech forward SMBs, are now using the term talk tracks. And they're a little bit different than just kind of a word by word script. It's kind of like, here's talking points for every single possible objection, question that your target customers are going to be having when you're on a sales call or communicating over sales email, whatever that medium is. But a great example of, that's a keyword phrase that I don't know if we ever would've identified on our own, but hearing some of our real customers talk about it told us, Hey, this is important. And it's been great so far.
Travis:
Awesome. And we had a question from Simone, What's your approach to, or Simon, what's your approach to including rich media and blog content, infographics, assets, images, even video, and how does that impact SEO?
Ryan:
In my dream world, there would be an embedded YouTube video in every single post on my blog, on the Close blog, that's something that we're going to be working towards, especially at Close, where we have the time to do these kinds of things. On my blog, we'll see, maybe it'll happen someday, it'd be nice. But where we have the time and the resources, we are going to be focusing a lot more on delivering high production value videos, and that'll be YouTube, LinkedIn, We're thinking about the different kinds of places that we want to publish video beyond those two very clear win platforms for a B2B company in the sales space. But I think there is some real magic. I haven't seen any sort of more technical or brainy kind of research done on this, but I think there's some real magic to having a YouTube video on the same topic as a blog post embedded directly within that content.
That's just this hunch I have and maybe my confirmation bias of me doing YouTube videos for several of my top blog post articles and seeing that correlation kind of get a lot more views, get a lot more readers, and increasing time spent on page as well for blog posts. But I would say if you have the bandwidth, do some quality videos at minimum. And I'm a big fan of having at least a custom featured image. I think that's something that Google likes to swoop up into the image packs as well, when it's not just a stock photo from Unsplash or something. And infographics, that's the real just nice to have if you have the bandwidth, the budget, the time, the resources. I would love to have infographics on more of our content, especially things like statistics articles or very storytelling focused pieces. I think that's when infographics kind of stand out. But yeah, they're really nice for attracting links. But ultimately at the end of the day, I haven't seen this massive correlation between every time I publish an infographic, it gets X number of links. It's very hit or miss, but sometimes it is a really big hit. So I would say try it, do it sometimes, but yeah, I wouldn't do it with every article.
Travis:
Super useful, great response. And Tom has a question, What do you do when updating doesn't seem to have an effect on a page's performance, even if it's been optimized?
Ryan:
This has happened several times at Close already, and I'll be the first to say, it's not Clearscope's fault. The tool is telling you basically they analyze what the main components are of top ranking content. That's something that always changes. And we've had a few articles that we've published, taken an article that was a C+ score and bumped it up to an A++ and a month later, even two months later, there's very little movement, not even cracking the first page of search results for a term that isn't necessarily the most competitive in the world. So we would think like, Oh, obviously we should be doing better than where this article is now. And I use that as a way to say there are two things possibly going on here.
One, we need a lot more links, a lot more back links to this article. That's kind of the other component, the off page SEO, right? So we'll prioritize that with Stefan on our team who builds links to try and include more of those links and see how it responds to getting, say, five to 10 links from high quality blogs over the next 30 to 60 days. And oftentimes that will move the needle. But I think the first step that I'll take is revisiting a post after 30 days. We have in our Asana workflow checklist, we have kind of a check in 30 days after an update goes live to see how it's doing in search results. Is it moving up the way we want it to? If not, why not? And the answer is often that we need to tune something up on the post, and sometimes the Clearscope grade will still be that kind of A+ or A++.
So we'll do what we can to include anything that the tool suggests has changed favorability wise with algorithms. But using Ahrefs as a really good stop-gap will show you which keywords if you just do the, I forget what it's called, but URL explorer, just paste in your URL search and see kind of the keyword movements, the organic keywords that your article's ranking for. You'll see which ones have gone up, which ones have gone down, maybe where something's been stuck for a long time. And I'll use that as feedback to go into the article and inject a few more of those keyword phrases for some keywords that have maybe dropped a couple of rankings or been static
Travis:
Super useful. And you mentioned 30 days as far as the wait period from publishing an update to when you kind of revisit it, why 30 days?
Ryan:
Call it arbitrary, but to me it seems like a good just one month later check in, see how it's doing. But oftentimes, maybe I'll get better at this one day, but I'm looking in Google Analytics every day. I spend a lot of time in there, so I'll notice when things are jumping or if something's dropping too. So I'll usually notice if something's happening before 30 days. And also Ahrefs is good for directional, kind of just keyword tracking, seeing things go up and down. But yeah, I mean you could say 30 days is relatively arbitrary, but it's more about just not forgetting to check in after an update goes live.
This is not a set it and forget it business. This is like it's a living organism that constantly has to be updated and checked in on. And if I were to impart anything with you guys today, that's the message is content updates are not just a one off thing. Once you start doing it, you not just have to keep doing it, but you get the opportunity to keep doing it because you'll be able to keep boosting your rankings over time, especially if you have the time and the resources to be doing guest blogging and building links back to that content too. That's just, if I were to distill it all down into the most simple form, getting your on page stuff dialed in and then doing the work to build links, quality links back to the content. It's that simple.
Travis:
Awesome. And Abby asked, Do you ever change the URL when doing content updates?
Ryan:
Oh, I'm so glad you asked this. As a rule, we will try and avoid changing URLs at all costs. There are some exceptions to this though. We had this article on sales objections that was such a head scratcher for us. A year ago it seemingly dropped out of the index, Google stopped even ranking it at all, despite it being, it was number one for sales objections, which is a pretty high volume term for us. For a very long time it was number one. And then one day, boom, it was gone. And looking in search console, there were no flags. The performance scores were all good. It had been crawled the day before in search console. So according to all signals from Google, this should be ranking, but we had no idea what's going on. And since the traffic essentially went to zero for that post, we were like, Well, who cares? Let's try something crazy with this one.
So we did do a content update to it, so we refreshed all the on-page content, which I think helped significantly. But we did change the URL when we published the new article and we redirected that old URL to the new one just to make sure that, hey, it's possible that we could send some link juice to the new URL. And we're seeing that one do great. Now it's, it hasn't client back up to number one yet, but I think it's in the top few results usually for organic search these days. But yeah, beyond that kind of edge cases, we'll try and avoid ever changing URLs, even though we have a lot of really long, not pretty URLs from the blog being 13, 14 years old, just not doing everything the way that we do it today. But I would say we have some guides on the Closed blog, just closed.com/guides, and we're going through the process of updating a lot of our guide pages as well.
And there we are changing the URL structure for all of our guides, when we update them. And we're doing that specifically to follow more of the kind of SEO hub approach that we were talking about before, because when the guides were originally created, the URL structure didn't make sense from an SEO perspective. Each guide page or chapter got kind of its own unique URL. It wasn't nested under like guide slash cold calling slash URL. So we're fixing that to make it make more sense from both an SEO perspective and just kind of getting the link tree fully in line. But yeah, maybe when we do a round two, we'll have something to report on SEO hubs back with you guys.
Travis:
I like that. Yeah, it's a very good explanation and example. And then Grayson and May both have this similar question. How much content is considered a lot of content? If you're a relatively new blog, would the ratio of content updates versus new content be different?
Ryan:
Yeah, I think for sure if you're a relatively new blog, definitely keep your focus on new. I think as you become maybe a year old with your sites, then I would keep looking back at how you should be updating content. And again, use the content inventory feature. I assume if you're here, you're either familiar with Clearscope or considering using it, I would highly recommend using content inventory when it becomes available for everyone, because that's really what tells me when we need to make an update that and tools like Ahrefs to see when keywords slip.
But yeah, if you were to focus your ratio more on 75% new content, 25% updates, just kind of keep an eye on particularly the posts that are either doing well or you want to do really well, those are the ones that I would revisit more frequently.
Travis:
Nice.
Ryan:
And always, I'll add this too, internal links. Oh my gosh, anytime you publish something new, take the time, no matter how boring it is to go back and add an internal link to your new article from, I try and do this from almost every article on my blog, at least every article that's somewhat topically relevant to the new one.
Travis:
Excellent.
Ryan:
And it takes a long time. It can take me half a day to do that now with having hundreds of articles, but it's so worth the time.
Travis:
Completely agree. And Lauren asks, When doing the hub and spoke model, do you recommend publishing an entire cluster in one month or breaking it up over time?
Ryan:
Yeah, such a good question. Oh my gosh. I would say at least my approach to this, I would publish the top level, your 101 level guide first, but before publishing, obviously I would map out what that hub and spoke looks like so that all of the different pieces that are going to play a role in this kind of hub model. But I think it's super reasonable to get your main page up and then publish all the different spokes as you go. I think if you have a couple of spokes ready, go for it. But honestly, the nature of content, it's better to get those pieces, those URLs indexed, get them live as soon as you have them, assuming you have the hub page first. Get all the spokes live just as soon as they're ready. Never sit on content, my opinion at least, never sit on content just as a draft or a Google Doc, publish it before it's ready. You can always come back and update, optimize too.
Travis:
I like that. And then a question is SEO dependence a bad thing? It said 75% of our acquisition comes from SEO, and our team is so small, we don't have a lot of woman power to work on other levers.
Ryan:
I think yes, at the very least, it's a scary thing. Whenever you're any platform dependent, it's scary to me. And that's our, now that we've gotten traffic under control, organic traffic, under control at Close, our next big thing is figuring out what are the next 1, 2, 3 major traffic sources for us, because we're in a similar position where the vast majority of our traffic comes from organic search. That's been changing as our brand recognition has grown in the sales and the CRM space over the last couple of years. So a lot of direct traffic too, but that's more product focused stuff. If we're talking about content, then SEOs kind of are our main thing. Social media a little bit. But we're looking now at how we can allocate some of our time on our existing team, but more importantly, since the company's doing really well, we have the resources to expand and hire someone who can just own YouTube or own video as a channel and create cuts of every video we do for YouTube, for LinkedIn, for Twitter. I don't know if there's a huge audience for sales on TikTok, but we'll see, because everyone's there.
But yeah, in my experience, the more platform dependent you are, the more volatile your traffic is always going to be. So it's so hard to balance that continuing investment, obviously in the channels that are delivering the most rewards for you right now. And also trying to carve out that time, the resources to plant seeds for what can come next. And I can't give a percentage breakdown of what I would recommend everyone do on that front, but for us on the content team, we had hired someone new on our content team to start to focus more on strategy and special projects like where our next major traffic sources are going to come from. So that's going to be about 25% of our time as a team moving forward.
Travis:
Awesome. Cool. Super cool. And then Phil asked, what have you done around eat?
Ryan:
Oh man. I would struggle to come up with something super specific other than making sure the really, the big thing you can control is making sure all your content is unique, original, and that you are linking to high quality sources from your content whenever you do external links. But the biggest factor you can control with eat is kind of that authority, that trustworthiness, getting quality links from reputable websites. If your post is published and it has no links, very unlikely that Google's going to serve you towards the top of any search results. And if you have a hundred links from a bunch of iffy, potentially spammy, kind of skeptical looking sites, that might even be worse than having no links at all. So going out and taking the time to really just build investments with publications where you can publish content and link back to your articles or different blogs, authorities in your niche, that's what I would say is the biggest impact is just getting your links placed ideally through guest posts where you're doing a win-win value trade and linking back to your content from that. And yes, it's a slow grind, but it's the only way I think to really safely do this without sending potential spam signals to search engines. If you're buying backlinks, please never buy backlinks. Definitely not on Fiverr or websites like that because it will do more harm than good.
Travis:
Yeah. And then roughly how long does it take to update an existing article?
Ryan:
Oh my gosh. Great question. Super hard answer. It varies so much. It really depends largely upon something we do really well at Close during our content updates is we categorize all of our updates before we get started on them. So we'll have a light update, immediate moderate update, and then a rewrite. And then we'll have something where any rewrite often involves breaking off for fractured intent. So peeling off those templates or examples, ideas away from this massive guide on a topic into its own unique articles. But yeah, that's kind of the approach that we tend to take is categorize them first. That will show you how much time and effort you think it's going to go into them. But something like a light update could be done in maybe an hour or two, and we'll plug that into Clearscope or a Google Doc with a Clearscope report attached and just do, maybe it requires adding a section or two sections or just making sure that we inject more of the appropriate keywords into an article. But once you get to talking about moderate updates or rewrites, that's when it just becomes kind of maybe a six hour-ish affair for something like a moderate update, or often a rewrite can run longer than six hours for something that's a super in depth guide, 4,000 words maybe, that could be an eight hour article.
Travis:
Nice. That makes a lot of sense. And then what do you think or how do you think about including the updated date on a piece of content? Is it important? Should you do it or does it matter?
Ryan:
This is such a good question. I think different people will give you different answers. So I'll give you that disclaimer. But what I always do, and it has never bitten me at least yet, I don't want to eat these words, but whenever I publish an update, I always update the published date for the article to the day of the update. I think, again, different people are going to have different philosophies on this, but it's never hurt me personally. So I like to always update the published date when I push an update live. Because I mean, especially when an update is pretty expansive, it is a new article essentially. It's the same URL, but it's often cases a pretty new article or at least mostly new. So I think that helps signal to Google also, Hey, take a look at this new piece.
Travis:
Gotcha. I know we're kind of running low on time, so we have time for a couple more questions. And the ones we don't get to, they can put them into Google Doc and try to knock them out before tomorrow's recap email because we have a lot of questions to kind of get to, but Emily asked, is there a minimal update you recommend minimal words added or how in way you think about that?
Ryan:
Yeah. This is a really good question. I don't think there's an across the board answer that makes sense for every use case. But again, coming back to Clearscope, I'm like, God, they give you an estimated word count that your article should be, and that's based on scanning the lengths of top search results. So when you look at the different competitors under that kind of outline or that research tab, you'll see what all of their word counts are. And oftentimes we'll try and land somewhere in the middle of that. But at least me as a writer with my own blog, I have a really hard time publishing something that's less than like 5,000 words. And oftentimes that ultra long-form content does really well for my niche and for my readers. So I will be very okay with being the longest word count article in the top 10 search ranking spots. So I have no issue with that personally, just as long as you're not falling victim to that fractured intent, trying to do too much with a single article. So find that balance.
Travis:
Nice. And then what's your experience with adding FAQ schema? Do you think it's worth it?
Ryan:
Ooh, I'll be totally honest, we have not experimented with using the actual schema for FAQs, but I do add FAQs to a lot of my content, and we're doing it more on the Closed blog now. I would say anecdotally useful and helpful. We've seen some longer tail featured snippets get pulled in both on my blog and with Closed. But my hunch is that when we, knock on wood, especially if Nick, our director of sales and marketing is watching right now, if we migrate to WordPress on the closed blog soon away from Ghost, I do hope to do more of these kind of arguably easier customized things like adding FAQ schema to our content. So yeah, that's on the roadmap.
Travis:
Excellent. I think we have time for maybe two more questions. In one of your blog posts, you mentioned using Google alerts to monitor factual changes. Do you use any other tools to monitor content accuracy?
Ryan:
Oh my gosh, Honestly, no. No. In the past, I've fallen victim to using tools too much to try and tell me what to do and when to do it. So right now I'm in a phase of my life and my career where I'm trying to minimalize the number of tools that I use to inform my decision making and lean more into my gut feeling, and then use something like Clearscope and Ahrefs to gut check and make sure that we're not missing any major gaps.
Travis:
Awesome. Awesome. And then I think our final question for today, until we move all the ones into Google document for tomorrow, but upon updating content, do you promote it similar to a new piece of content or how do you do the promotion of that?
Ryan:
Yeah. So content promotion is this black hole at Close that we are going to be solving for very soon. That's something we want to spend a lot more time creating a process around, a checklist of all these activities we do, any time we publish something new or update it. But yes, on my blog, whenever I publish a new update, I make sure to, my friend Andy, who I think may even be in the chat here, tuning in from San Francisco. Andy is such an incredible help for me. He writes, helps me with writing tweets, LinkedIn posts. He does a lot more too. He builds tools on my site, he keeps my site running essentially. But when I publish a new blog update, I will usually treat it as if it's a new article and create a couple new Pinterest images, get some social promo out there. If it doesn't yet have a video, if I'm in the mood that day, I'll shoot a video for it. So yeah, doing those things I think can... No one thing is necessarily always going to be the tipping point, but the more you can just kind of stack up what you're doing and especially on the promotion front, the more likelihood you'll have of that content being successful.
Travis:
Awesome. We're at time. Thank you so much, Ryan, for answering so many questions. And sorry we didn't get to every question live today. We'll put them into a Google document and send you the questions and answers tomorrow in a recap email along with this recording. Definitely let Ryan know how much you appreciate his time on Twitter and LinkedIn. Drop them in the chat. But Ryan, is there anything you wanted to share before we give everybody their time back?
Ryan:
No, thank you all for watching. Any questions too, as Travis said, we'll try and get to them all, and if something comes up that you didn't ask yet today, like I'm super accessible, I'm Ryan@close.com, ryan@ryrob.com, direct your questions however you choose.
