In the last podcast, we talked about keywords. We did. We kind of used a, hopefully a plain English approach to talking about keywords, what they are, where you find them, why they're important, etc. and it seemed that a natural lead on from that would be to talk about how we use those keywords. You found some keywords, and it seems to be what your ideal customers are typing in, but you still need to ask that question, is it actually worth ranking for this?
I guess what we're really looking at is here is just because a keyword is searched often, and just because it's obviously relevant to what you're doing, it doesn't necessarily mean that the people looking for it are now kind of ready or looking to buy something specific, right? The question then is kind of like, is it actually worth your time to go after that keyword?
Like everything with digital marketing and business in general, you need a strategic approach to this.
Yeah, absolutely.
Welcome back to From the coalface, the digital marketing podcast created by the team at Red evolution. I'm Dave Robinson and I'm with Alex, and we're both together in the office in North East Scotland at the studio, as it's called in North east Scotland.
Where it is both dark and raining.
Where it is both dark and raining, and it's only twenty to four, mind you, twenty to four. Winter heading towards the shortest day, dark at twenty to four. It's about right. Yeah, it's about right isn't it?
Just feels very typically Scottish.
Yeah, it does a wee bit. It's um. Yeah, it's just the weather for the last seven days, what with Storm Arwen and now Storm Barra, not Barra. I'm from Barra.
Storm Barra.
It's Storm Barra. If you're from Barra Barrow in Furness, where I'm from, then you call the place you're from Barra. Hey, I'm from Barra.
There we go then.
But it has actually got a W on the end. So it's barrow o w in fact. Right. Um, in the last podcast. Yeah. In the last podcast, we talked about Out keywords we.
Did.
We kind of used a. Hopefully a plain English guide. We. We, we used very plain English approach to talking about keywords, what they are, where you find them, why they're important, etc.. Um, and it seemed that a natural lead on from that would be to talk about how we use those keywords. Now, again, at this juncture, we're not going to talk necessarily about on-page optimisation, like where you put the keywords and title elements and all that kind and, and things. We're not going to talk about that. We're talking about, um, the fact that you've found some search terms, words and phrases that people type into Google that seem to be or would appear to be the kind of search terms, search phrases that your ideal customers might type into Google. Let's not get too bogged down in the whole kind of whether they are your ideal customers, let's just take it as read that they're ideal customers. Yeah. And you've got that information. And armed with that, you're gonna set out to try and get your company a web page on your company's website in front of the audience, the people that you know are typing that stuff into Google. Yeah. Yep. Off you go. Then. I'm gonna have a cup of tea.
Okay. So what you do is you get your keywords. And you went to them onto a little pile on your desk, and then.
You're gonna make a Jew a Jew out of them.
Whisk them up.
Everything modern cooking involves a Jew, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Well, it used to. Now it's got that foamy stuff.
What kind of.
Every time I see chefs like cooking stuff and they put. It looks like spit. It's like, what, what what's what's the big deal with foam.
Foam and jelly nowadays, isn't it?
Foam and.
Jelly. Sous vide. Anyway. Sorry. Go on, on a detour today. Um, so yeah, I mean, I guess the first and most obvious thing is we're gonna create content with them, right? That's the, the thing that's a given. Um, I guess the question is what kind of content are we going to make with our keywords? How to kind of, I guess, best choose the right sort of content to target with our keywords.
And how might we do that? Alex.
I feel like often when we have these conversations, you're leading me down a path so that you can shout at me later.
Um, I'm definitely not.
Um, without I don't want to get too bogged down in like a discussion about kind of intent and what different keywords mean and stuff like that. I mean, there are lots of different ways you can use keywords.
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about intent. Yeah. I mean, I have got I've got some, I've got some for once, I've actually made some notes before we start our podcast. And I think like, one of the things I've put into my notes is like, you know, you've, you've, you've found some keywords and you, it seems to be what your ideal customers are typing in, but you still need to ask that question, is it actually worth ranking for this? Do you want to be the company that they find when they're ranking, when they're searching using those search terms?
Yeah. And I guess, yeah. So I guess we do have to talk a little bit about intent then, don't we? So I mean, I guess what we're really looking at is here is just because a keyword is searched often, and just because it's obviously relevant to what you're doing, it doesn't necessarily mean that the people looking for it are now kind of ready or looking to buy something specific, right?
So people using it.
Yeah. I can imagine a situation where somebody is, is googling green cars and you sell green cars. And that sounds fantastic. What a brilliant opportunity. I'll go out and are you called.
Green cars arrows.
I've called Jaguar. Oh, okay. So that's what they're known for. So we'll stick with it. Um and if you have a Jaguar and it's not green. Yeah. What are you doing. Um. Yeah. No. So the question then is kind of like, is it actually worth your time to go after that keyword? Are the people searching it actually going to see your content, whatever kind of content that is, click it, end up on your site and turn into a customer? Or is that keyword kind of, I guess, indicative of somebody who's still very on in the early on in the buying process and maybe just kind of shopping around trying to see what green cards there are, trying to see what a green car is. And you don't necessarily want to waste a lot of time.
Yeah. So there might not be commercial intent, but that in itself doesn't mean that it's a key phrase that you don't want to rank for just because there's no commercial intent. That's very true. It might help other content on your website that that is does have commercial, um, uh, commercial relationship, if you like. Might help that to rank. It might help your website to become stronger overall. Um, yeah, I think you're right. We're going down a bit of a blind alley with that one, I think.
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess it's an important point though, isn't it? Because we've said before, you know, one of the pieces of content on our site that we spent quite a lot of time over is a page titled what is SEO? And it doesn't on the surface of things, that's a keyword that people might use very early on in the buying journey for digital marketing services. So, you know, they're just literally kind of trying to find out what one of the channels we use is. Um, we spent quite a lot of time and effort on that piece of content. Um, not because it was going to send loads of leads to our website, but just because it was a really good way of kind of cementing our reputation, building authority, getting backlinks.
So agreed.
Yeah. I mean, there's, there's generally a kind of case to be made for making content that maybe doesn't have commercial intent behind the keyword that you're targeting. But by and large, you want to sit down and look at your keywords and say, is this keyword likely to be used by somebody who is looking for what I offer at a stage in the buying journey, where they're likely to be useful to me as a business owner or a marketing manager or whatever.
Okay. Okay. So let's, let's take it as read that it's a search term that has commercial intent. It's a search term that we would like to rank for. We would like people to find us when they type that into into Google. So is a good starting point, perhaps to execute the search, type the search into Google and see who's dominating the first few places of Google. You know, even the whole first page of Google. Are there lots of adverts for when you, you know, Google ads, when you type that search term in, what sort of content is ranking and who is ranking? Yeah. Good starting point.
Definitely. And I guess there, what you're looking for is, is, is several things, I guess really, first of all, like you say, if it's saturated with ads and ranking a piece of organic content is still going to leave you kind of six or seven places down the page. Maybe that's a, a sign that you should invest your time and energy elsewhere.
You make a good point there. And, and we've had this conversation with one of our clients, haven't we, where we have moved them significantly up the rankings. Well, they were nowhere. Right. And they ended up when we actually took them on as a customer. Their website was no indexed. So it was actually saying to Google, ignore me. And Google went, okay, I'll ignore you. Yeah. So now they actually do have rankings and they do appear on page one for a search term that we know lots of people are typing in, yet we're still struggling to get clicks, right?
Because when you go and look at the page, they're even though they're, you know, page one, position three or two or even one, sometimes they're still buried under a whole load of paid ads, in which case organic rankings don't really serve.
What you might call a really noisy search result. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And we've all seen them.
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And the other thing I guess I would personally say to look out for is if you're kind of googling your key phrase and you notice that the site's, you know, maybe there are less ads, but the site's ranking at the top of the page are people like Amazon or Apple or somebody where you know that, you know, you don't have the time or the resources or the energy to kind of match what they're doing, and you're unlikely to be able to knock them off the top spot. That maybe that's a sign sometimes to dodge that keyword.
Yeah. And I think one other tip is if you're, if you're looking for who's dominating the search engine results for a particular search term, it might be worth using a tool like SEMrush, SEMrush dot com because it will then it will give you search results, which are impartial. They're not being twisted based on your own search history, for example.
Right. Yeah. And also like your location is a big one too. Like if you're googling from a specific place, it'll try and yeah, tale of the search results to that. So yeah, something like SEMrush is a really good one. But I guess if you type in your keyword and you don't see a load of ads, you don't see a massive multinational corporation that you can't compete with. Um, what you're then looking for is of the, of the competitors, if you like, who are ranking at the top of the page, what are they doing? What kind of content have they got up there? Um, what kind of investment have they made in ranking for that search term. And sometimes that might literally be a three hundred word blog post, right? That, you know, just by, by sheer luck or because nobody else has thought to come along and try and knock it off. The top spot is ranking number one for that search term. Sometimes it might be a three thousand word piece of content with videos and images and moving graphics and that kind of thing. And I guess here we're not saying try and try and, you know, copy what your competitors are doing. Exactly. But we're saying look at what they're doing and understand that you're going to have to at least match that to, to rank for it.
Yeah. Um, interestingly, again, going back to SEMrush, um, it now, I don't know. I think I mentioned this in a previous podcast, but it now will also tell you like this search term, if you want to rank on page one highly for this search term, um, you will need a website which is, has a particular authority, trustworthiness, rank ability. You will need a certain number of backlinks. You know, you will need high quality backlinks. You will be competing against people who are going, you know, hard at trying to rank for that. Yeah. Um, in other words, you know, the tool will tell you it used to just have what was called keyword difficulty. Yeah. This is going to be hard, but it's kind of got more detailed than that now. Yeah.
Kind of always been, always been kind of a useless thing to tell you, isn't it. This is a really competitive keyword. It's like, well, what does that mean? You know, because ultimately it is very dependent on market, on niche on, on audience. But yeah, it's really good that it kind of gives you more detailed information. Now, I would say, though, just as a kind of quick caveat that one of the things I do think Google is getting much better at over time is picking search results that match the intent of a query, too. So quite often nowadays, if you're if it's a very specific question, like, I don't know, what's the what's the green car with the best mileage? Say, it may be that a shorter piece of content will rank very well for that, just because it directly answers the question very quickly and succinctly. So it's not always a case of kind of like, go out there and expect to create massive pieces of content because other people have done the same. It's just kind of look at what's ranking currently and think about how you can answer the query better, I guess.
Yeah, I'd agree with that. So we're looking to see what sort of content is dominating the search result for that search term. And we're trying to figure out if it's any good. We're trying to figure out how strong the website's holding that content are. And we have to then make a decision. Can we create content that is both better than the content which is currently being served up by Google and is our site. Does our site have enough credibility and authority? Whatever type of content we create.
To actually.
Potentially knock them off the top spot? Yeah.
Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.
Maybe we need to unpick that a little bit. I think, you know, given our audience, I mean, we're not pitching this at digital marketing experts. We're pitching it at people who want to try and understand this in a bit more detail. Um, I don't know if we can maybe just dig a little bit deeper into the, into that question of making that decision as to whether or not to go after a search term.
Yeah. I think just to pick up on the credibility point, I guess one of the things that we often look at is something called the domain authority of a website, right? Which is basically it's a third party metric from a company called Moz, but it's basically supposed to kind of mimic the way Google understands or measures a site's authority. So it looks all the backlinks pointing at your site. And it says, out of one hundred you have, you are this trustworthy, right? And the number might be twenty eight, or it might be sixty two, or it might be thirty five. And that's just a kind of rough understanding of how many good quality links are pointing at your site. Um, and I guess one good exercise is to go and kind of plug the, the site ranking number one for your chosen keyword and maybe number two and three, two into something like Mars and have a look at their domain authorities. How do they stack up against yours? If you're kind of, if you've got a domain authority for your site of, say, thirty and they've got a domain authority of sixty eight, that's a huge difference. Yeah. Um, if you're kind of like twenty four and twenty five, you can reasonably expect to be able to knock them off the top spot if your content's better. Um, and again, this isn't really to deter anyone. It's not to say like, if you see somebody with a domain authority of seventy, just run away from the keyword. I mean, there are still ways of outranking sites with a really high domain authority. It's just a really important thing to kind of know and understand and consider. So yeah, when we're saying kind of like check the, the kind of power or authority of the site's ranking, that's probably the best way to do it, I think.
Yeah, that's, that's really good advice. And one of the things that we do when we're looking at a particular search phrase is we'll put the search phrase into Google and see how many search results come up. Yes. Then we'll put, um, quotations around the search phrase and see how many search results. And you can often go from like ten million search results to two hundred thousand just by putting quotes around.
And the other thing you can do, I mean, I know you didn't want to get into the whole kind of like how to optimise a page. Um, but if you, if you type in intitle and then a colon and then in brackets, and then your search phrase, you'll see all the pages that currently have your target keyphrase in the page title in brackets. Uh, did I say brackets? You did. Ah, I meant quotation marks.
You were trying to sound clever. Fell flat on your face.
It always happens, man. It always happens. I should know better.
Title. All one word. I n t I t l e colon. That's the two dots. It's the number of times I've been speaking to people. Say you're on the screen. Share. Yeah. That's right. And I'll type that in and type the colon. And they're like, what's that? What's what's what's one of them?
What's it call them.
In the colon and no spaces. Open a quotation, put the put the search phrase in and then close the quotation and hit return. What that basically does is.
It tells you how many people out there are trying to optimise pages for that keyword. Probably, probably. I mean, unless they've accidentally stuffed in the title.
There's lots of rankings are accidental.
Right?
But this is, this technique helps you try and uncover that.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, and what you'll see very quickly is whether or not I mean, first of all, if the number one result for that search is the same as the number one result, just for the normal generic keyword search that tells you something, which is that, you know, optimising your page for that keyword is what will get you ranking for it. The second thing it tells you is how, how aggressively are people chasing that keyword? Is it accidental? Because if the number one result for the search term doesn't actually have it in the title, then nobody else is really optimising for your keyword and you've kind of got a free pass there, I think, or at least it's much easier than if people are kind of out there aggressively optimising their pages for it. Yeah.
It's actually worth investing a bit of time and learning how to use Google Search creatively because you can, you can using just in the search box, there's lots of things you can type in to, to, to narrow down a search and really find some great information very quickly.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's a really good one. I mean, just in general, knowing how to use those kind of search operators, they call them, don't they? Is really useful for this kind of thing.
I think it's all described. I think this might even be a link on Google's on, on, on Google dot com. Just on the home page. It's like, you know, advanced search or something. How to.
We can probably shove a link to a guide in the description to this podcast or something.
If you remember to do it.
Yeah. All right, all right. Being attacked from all sides. It's not all sides. It's one side. It's the same side.
So where have we got to? We've got to the point where we, we, we found a search term that we know our ideal customers are using. We want to put our offer in front of those people who are doing that, carrying out that search. We've looked at who's currently ranking. And we've decided that by by a process of elimination and analysis, we've decided that we have got a website that's strong enough to rank for that search term. And we can create content that's good enough to outrank the people who are currently ranking for that search term. It's a bit of a simplification, but broadly speaking, that's where we are.
Yeah, I think that's good. Yeah.
So then we need to think about going off and creating the the content.
Yeah.
I think you're gonna say something.
I was gonna say that before that, I think the most essential step, and I think that everybody misses at this bit is like to sit down and actually kind of, you know, divorced from all the information you've just uncovered about what other people are doing to rank for the keyword is spend a little bit of time thinking about what people searching for that keyword actually mean and what they're looking for. Because a lot of the time, it's really easy to go off at a tangent and assume that somebody's searching for what is SEO is looking for SEO services, for example, and that you can rank a piece of content out there that'll tell them what SEO is and then convert them. And, you know, sometimes it's, it's much better to actually sit down and think, okay, what is my prospective customer actually looking for? And how can I actually answer that? Often it's not going to be the same as what other people are doing. Um, if you think a little bit, you can sometimes uncover, I guess, insights into the way people are thinking what they might be maybe trying to get to and then serve them up something. I was just thinking I was writing earlier about scintillating subject of heat exchangers. Um, and the keyword was obviously heat exchanger manufacturing. And it's really easy to go off at a tangent and just like write a page about manufacturing heat exchangers and, and you know, how a heat exchanger is manufactured and that kind of thing. But no, you know, the people who are actually using that keyword want somebody to make someone. And what they want to know is how good are you at making heat exchangers? Yeah. And if you miss all that subtext or just kind of like skip straight past it and start writing something, people might land on your page, but they're probably not going to care about what's on it that much. Mhm.
Yeah. yeah. I mean, what you're really saying is that that like everything with digital marketing and business in general, you need a strategic approach to this. Yeah, absolutely. We kind of use that term a lot. But but what we're saying is it's, you know, it's thinking it through.
Um, it sounds really simple sometimes, doesn't it? Like it's really simple advice to give. Oh, just sit and think. Think it through. But nine times out of ten, that's where, you know, the actual hard work happens, isn't it. And the results are generated. So yeah.
Oh, by the way, if you're listening to this and you're you haven't listened to some of the other podcasts. And we did actually, um, quite early on, might have even been back in September. We did a podcast about content and why digital marketers bang on about content all the time. Because I think some people listening to this who miss that, um, maybe recognise or understand that content seems to be important where digital marketing is concerned, but you're not entirely sure why. Um, yeah, so that would be a podcast. I think it's called something like why do content? Why do digital marketers bang on about content all the time? It's in it's one of the earlier shows that we did. You'll find it in there from the coalface dot com, where you can also go if you've got a question you'd like us to answer, or if you'd like to come on the show and talk about some aspect of digital marketing, then go to the contact tab on from the coalface dot com, or just go to evolution dot com and go on the contact page there.
Yeah. Um, where were we? Well.
We were kind of wandering around a little bit, and I think it's just because it's kind of a funny, stormy old night and, you know, we've already done, you know, a fair day's work and our brains are a bit scrambled, uh, before we jumped on to this. But I think we've got to the point now where people are, you know, the they're going to create content. They've decided that all the all the stars have aligned. And it's worth going after this piece of content. And I think we did think we'd maybe try and shoehorn in, um, a little bit of chat around the subject of evergreen content. We talk.
About.
Content being important, and if content is important, then evergreen content is the crowning glory of content, isn't it? And I know you hate the term, really hate.
Talk about it. Just dig into this for a little bit. Um, no. So the idea of evergreen content is obviously it's content that is kind of eternally relevant that, you know, you, you work really hard on this piece of content and you write something really long and authoritative and informative, and then it ranks forever. And everybody always finds it useful and.
Becomes the seminal piece.
Exactly, exactly. Um, long words for a Tuesday afternoon. But yeah. Um, but I mean, it's kind of horseshit, isn't it? AM I allowed to say that?
Yeah. You can, but why is it, why is it horseshit?
You can't plan for success like that. It doesn't really work. So you. Well, in my opinion, what tends to happen is you invest a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of energy in making the ultimate piece that answers a question like, what's the best green car? Or whatever. Which tree should I plant in my garden?
Close your.
Car. It's black, actually. But, you know, we get stuck in these loops. And I feel compelled to talk about cars on this podcast for some reason. Um, yeah. So, but nine times out of ten, you'll invest all this time and effort trying to make the ultimate piece of content in inverted commas and it won't really perform so well. And then you'll find a blog post that you trotted off at half past three on a Friday afternoon ranks forever for a search term that is really valuable to you, and you just didn't expect it or see it coming. So I think in a way, my problem with the whole idea of evergreen content is it's saying, oh, you know, you should put all your time and effort and money into kind of creating this massive piece of content for this keyword you've identified, and it'll be fantastic and it'll pay dividends for your business. I think often it's a case of get something up, get something authoritative and useful, something good, something that will rank.
Something better than the stuff that's out there. Yeah, but as a starting point.
But don't spend six weeks trying to write the ultimate guide to something because it is ultimately a bit of the.
Big guns. Some of the big guns in SEO, people like Neil Patel and Brian Deans and people like that. I mean, they would suggest they would probably say that that's not right. If you set out to create an all conquering, PhD esque piece of content on a particular subject, then you could dominate and dominate forever a particular search phrase, search term, or series of search phrases. If it's a huge piece of content.
You just have to be very confident that you have both identified the correct keyword and that you can create something that is that much better than anything that anybody else is ever going to write about. Something I cannot count the number of times I've produced stuff, and then it's been overshadowed three months down the line, when somebody realised what I've done and produced a bigger, better article. Um, you can't plan for those things. So I guess that's, that's my problem with the whole idea really is it's like if you invest all that time and effort and energy and then somebody else does pip you to the post two months later, or you find that the keyword you spent all this time and effort targeting doesn't actually drive the kind of customers you thought it would, or it doesn't have the intent you thought it did behind it. It's a sunk cost. And then people turn around and say, oh, content marketing is rubbish. It didn't work for me. I spent six grand and I got nothing for it. It all comes from this idea. I feel personally of overinvesting in in one idea and putting all your eggs in one basket. Really?
Yeah. I mean, when I look at the stats for our own blog, um, I can see there are some blog posts in there which inexplicably seem to have resonated with people. And you know, there are some blog posts in there that were written in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, and they're bringing in traffic nearly every day.
Yes, absolutely.
And, and it is amazing because when I wrote it, I wasn't thinking, I'm going to write this piece of content and it's going to bring traffic to our website for the next five or six years. Plus, I was just answering a question I knew that our customers were asking and it was maybe of its time. Turns out it wasn't. Turns out it's relevant Still not totally relevant.
But you can't always predict these things.
That's it. I think that's the point. It's it's it's not always easy to predict. But again, going back to, to the big guns, they they would pick on, it's easier for them in some respects because they've already got very highly authoritative websites. So if they choose to go after a piece, a search term, they can create a powerful piece of content, skyscraper content. It might have thousands of words and videos and all sorts of FAQs. You name it. The pages just rammed with content. And yeah, they secure that ranking. But it's not just the piece of content, it is around.
Their historic authority.
And yeah, I mean, it used to be a few years ago, we were in a fortunate position with our site where we, we seemed to be able to pick a search term and go after it and have a reasonable expectation that two or three months later we would be on page one, maybe even at the top for that particular search term.
And but and I think that's a I'll be honest with you, I think that's a position that a lot of SEO companies find themselves in. And I think it kind of. It it, it breeds a kind of arrogance that's really difficult to shake. You think, oh, well, this is how you do it. And you forget that like a lot of businesses, a don't have the time and resources to do that kind of thing. B you know, are operating in a market where things are maybe not as kind of regimented and people don't play by the same rules as people play around in SEO keywords, for example. Um, so you can't always be that sure that it's actually going to work for people. Um, and again, you know, I would say with people like Neil Patel and that, that it's often a numbers game. If SEMrush or Neil Patel or whoever writes a big article and it doesn't rank, they shrug their shoulders and they do it again next month for a different keyword. For a lot of small businesses, that's kind of game over at that point, you know, it didn't work.
That's like when they use Google ads and they run their ads for two weeks, they didn't nail a load of fantastic leads, so they just decide Google ads doesn't work.
Exactly, exactly.
It's very easy with all a lot of, a lot of, um, a lot of aspects of digital marketing are a longer play than people are really up for.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we've said before and we did a podcast, I think, on how long it takes for digital marketing to work, and especially with this kind of thing, especially for this kind of thing. Did I do good? Do I get a gold star call back? No you don't. Oh, shame. Um, no. Especially for this kind of thing. You know, we say six to twelve months or whatever to rank a piece of content. I mean, the honest truth is it could be longer than that. So you have to be, I think, quite agile with it. You have to say, okay, this keyword is good. I can beat whoever's, you know, I can, I can put out better content than whoever's in number one right now, and then just go and do it. Don't, don't spend six weeks trying to write something amazing. Just get something good, better than the competition up there and see what happens. Move on to the next keyword. Do it again and you'll learn as you go. Um, and not getting stuck on one keyword and thinking, oh, this is going to be it. This is going to be the keyword that makes my business means that you will be much more kind of, I guess, adaptable and adaptive. You'll go out there and actually just kind of try different things and find something that works for your niche.
Okay, okay. Have we done this to death? Is there anything, anything else around this subject? I mean, we set out to talk about. Well, to create something that led on from the previous podcast about, you know, explaining what keywords were, why they were important, how you find them, etc.. And then we've, you know, then moved into the, okay, we've found a keyword, we're going to create some content or are we, I, there's a process to go through to decide whether or not to, to, to go after it. And I think that is important because I do think a lot of businesses, you know, they find a keyword and then just immediately pump out some crappy content that uses that keyword and expect wonderful things to happen. Yeah. And it's a, it's a bit more involved. First of all, you know, for a, for a keyword that's worth, worth ranking for the chances of crappy content ranking very low, however good your website is, is very low. Yeah, you're gonna have to produce something decent. But more importantly, I think it goes back to something that we've said before. We might have even said it earlier in this podcast about picking your fights.
Yeah, I don't think we have actually, but it is, you know, it is a very good point, isn't it? Yeah. Pick them carefully. And. Yeah. Like you say nowadays, I mean yeah, okay. I just I just went on a big tirade about not spending too long creating content. But ultimately, if your content is not good, it really doesn't stand a chance, does it? So yeah, think carefully. Plan out what you're gonna do. Attack it. I guess the only other thing I potentially wanted to talk about was the idea of repurposing old content on your site, um, for keywords, but maybe we should leave that for another, uh, another.
I don't mind exploring that a bit now, because we did discuss it earlier when we were having a chat about, about this recording, weren't we?
Yeah. Well, it's just because, you know, it just goes back to that whole idea that, you know, sometimes, often you've got a piece of content on your site that you can kind of tweak so that it's so that it fits the keyword you've uncovered. And if it's not currently doing very much for you, and it could do with a little bit of love and a little bit of attention, that's often a lot quicker than creating a page from scratch, right? I mean, we had a thing recently where we noticed one of our really old blog posts was just kind of drawing in a little dribble of traffic every month. Um, and we went in and kind of rewrote it, bulked it out and added some references and some images and that kind of thing, and suddenly found that it was ranking much better for a really good keyword and drawing in traffic all the time. And sometimes there's a real value in just instead of thinking, okay, I've got to go away and write a new page from scratch is, you know, find something that's already kind of good on your site. And yeah.
I mean, I, I've often broken what might be described as the golden rule. The golden rule with content is like to figure out who it's for, figure out how they're going to find it, what are they searching for and do all that work. But there are times when I just want to get something off my chest, or I just want to write about a particular subject, and I'll just go and create a blog post. I'll just create some content about it because I enjoy creating content. So they might be examples of pages where they weren't necessarily created with a specific audience other than people interested in what we're talking about digital marketing, but they weren't created with the people who were carrying out a very specific search term. So they might be good candidates for repurposing.
Yeah, definitely. I think everybody's got old blog posts kind of sitting on their site that they don't really know what to do with. They don't do very much. That could easily be repurposed for for relevant keywords. So yeah.
I'll tell you a great tool for that. And we did speak about it very recently is Google Search Console because in that you can, you can interrogate a specific URL web address for a particular blog post, and then you can say the search console will, you know, when what causes this, this a link to this page to show up in a search result. And lo and behold, it's a search term that you rank for, but you're on page sixty or whatever, page six, position sixty or whatever. And you know, and so, you know, I mean, we're kind of going over, you know, an older, uh, you know, previous podcast with that, but this stuff's all interlinked. It's hard not to talk about.
Yeah. You can't get away from it all feeds into each other, doesn't it? And at the end of the day, once you. I guess that's the thing, isn't it? Once you're in the habit of doing this and kind of interrogating the keywords, you're trying to rank for the content currently on your site, you end up kind of going back over and over again to tools like Search Console and SEMrush and saying, you know, what can I use to rank for this keyword? What's kind of sitting around doing nothing? Those those become the kind of routine tasks, I guess, don't they, for us.
So okay. Right. So, um, you have been listening to digital marketing from the coalface, a podcast brought to you by Red evolution digital Marketers at the coalface. If there's anything we're not covering that you'd like us to cover, just get in touch. Go to from the coalface dot com. Click on the contacts tab. If you'd like to come on the show, we'd be delighted to have you on as a guest. We would. We haven't had a guest on now for about a week or so. Bruce was on, wasn't he? Bruce came back and spoke to us, which was really good. Um, so we are keen to have other guests on and feel free to put yourself forward and pitch to us what you'd like to talk about. Other than that, that's us.
I think that's everything.
That's everything. Yeah. Brave the wicked weather. Nice bit of alliteration to finish with.