How Shaun Els Builds an SEO Content Strategy That Drives Conversions

How do you balance your focus between driving traffic and conversions?

If you ever struggle to find a happy medium for your SEO and CRO efforts, you'll want to check out this great convo with Shaun Els.

Shaun has been building online businesses and helping others with web design since he was 18.

Over the years, he's tried all sorts of marketing tactics. But as an agency and niche site owner, he's found SEO and content creation to be the key foundation for success.

And because of his background in design, he takes an interesting design-first approach.

He recommends building a pyramid structure for a website, with the homepage at the top, followed by money pages, and then supporting content. The supporting content adds tons of design and content value by building internal links and what he calls 'themed content', which helps create a useful resource for users and increase your site's authority in Google's eyes.

Shaun discusses how many people are hesitant to engage with marketing content that is too sales-focused. And so blogging can be a solution to this problem, as it provides valuable information to potential clients. By creating blog posts that address common problems or questions in your industry, you attract search traffic and more.

He also shares a framework for getting the most out of this content by repurposing it into smaller pieces for easy sharing. These include posting counter-arguments, summaries, and bulleted lists. The process of repurposing content for social media takes about half an hour and can be done using tools like ChatGPT. And he mentions how it's important to intersperse blog post links with other types of content on social media to avoid penalties.

Shaun uses this content structure to funnel visitors to money pages with great lead magnets to grow mailing lists.

He uses email marketing to stay in touch with potential clients and nurture relationships. He argues that emails should be informational and include quick resources to help readers achieve their goals. And the ultimate goal of email marketing is to build trust with potential clients.

So while his strategy is grounded in SEO, he understands that marketing requires several touch points before earning a conversion.

But by building a content ecosystem that includes search engine optimization, social media, and email marketing, you can create a flywheel of lead generation.

Don't miss the full interview to get his tips on how to turn this strategy into a reality!

Topics Shaun Els Covers

• How he got into online business
• His journey into SEO and blogging
• Taking a Design-First Approach
• Looking at a website like a pyramid
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• FAQs on a landing page
• Niching down for local SEO
• The importance of supporting content
• Being a problem solver
• Nurturing an audience
• How to maximize a content strategy
• Content themes and topical authority
• Internal linking
• Business blogs
• Using ChatGPT to repurpose content
• How to promote on social media
• Email marketing tips
• Staying top of mind
• Leveraging these tips on niche sites
• And a whole lot more!

Links & Resources

• Shaun Els (@ShaunEls) / Twitter
• Automated Customer Generation | nanopage
• And as always, this podcast episode is hosted by Jared Bauman, co-owner of 201 Creative SEO Agency

Watch The Interview

Transcription

Jared: All right. Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Baumann. Today I am joined by Sean ELs. Sean, welcome. 

Shaun: Thanks a lot, Jared. I'm a big fan, and it's actually, like we said before, jumped onto the call. It's quite a, quite a strange experience talking to you. Since, since having watched you for so many years on YouTube.

It's an honor. It's an honor. Nice to meet you. 

Jared: It is great to have you. I appreciate the sentiments. It's always good to have a fellow listener on the on the podcast, right. Like joining us and we've been working on setting this up for quite a while. I mentioned how jealous I am of all your travels.

I'm sure we'll we'll get into that a little bit, but 

Shaun: yeah, I do, I do appreciate I appreciate your patience. It's it has been a bit of a, a bit of a nightmare trying to set this up, but I appreciate you, you Constantly getting in touch with me. I'm really, really sorry it took so long to get this sorted.

Jared: Well, it's good. Well, good. I mean, it, it'll be well worth the way. Why don't you start us off by, you know, a as we like to do here, give us some background, maybe how you landed in the projects you're working on now, the specialties you have, and catch us up on Sean to to where we, to where we get going in the story today.

Shaun: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I suppose some background as far as why I'm into web design, seo, those sorts of things, it's my background is we run an agency essentially that specializes in search engine optimization, creating content, that sort of stuff. Business general agency type stuff. I started out when I was about 18 years old.

In web design as in basically you remember those those page builders, static page builders used to get, that used to build really, really straightforward websites, not even attached to a database or anything. So we used one of those and we, we used one of those and we tried to, at the age of 18, build our first business online, and that was.

A local business directory. And they did we didn't make any money from it, but it did quite well. We went as far as even branding some local business cars, vehicles that drove around, had having a little sticker on there for a local business director. Yeah, so that was, that was cool. That was my first sort of venture into, into online business didn't last very long as, as first businesses always do, especially with a business partner.

It's a, it's, it's an interesting, interesting exercise to that. But Yeah, so we started out with that. I sort of discovered what online building was, what, what, what creating, creating a website was all about. Using this new knowledge of building in these little really static, small sort of one page website builders.

I started getting in touch with people around me asking, well, I've just learned this new skill. That's the nice thing about these skills that they stack. So it design stacks on. Conversion rate optimization stack stacks on search engine optimization. So this is essentially the introduction of the first bit of skill that I ever learned, and I was able to make some money from it just doing some simple web design work for some people I knew.

One of the first websites I ever did was for a urologist in South Africa. It was a, an interesting exercise. But yeah, the, yeah, it was, it was really, really interesting. So yeah, basically I got into the web design side of things, but what, what I found and what, what my customers would was asking me, great, you've made this thing for me.

It looks amazing. This website looks really, really great. My customers are really impressed. But I'm not getting any new customers, not getting any. What's happening? Like what is the point of this? It's a, it's a, it's a white elephant essentially. It's sitting there not doing anything. So I ventured into how do we get traffic to websites first, looking at things like paid ads.

It's obviously the first, the first avenue everyone sort of ventures down. But it's not always gonna be the best, the best solution for everyone. Not everyone's got the budget for it. They've got more time than money, so what solution can we come up with? And I was very fortunate that When I was moving into search engine optimization and sort of discovering how to generate traffic online, we were sort of moving.

It was around the time of the, the, the, the big sort of penguin updates when people were moving away from spammy back links. And yeah, that's I, because I, I initially, when I, when I first got into web design, I sort of discovered SEO and. Explored it a little bit but it just seemed too convoluted for me.

You need to build the, you need to build these networks of blogs and you need to link them all a certain way to make it work a certain way to be discovered. I mean, it sounded really interesting, but it just sounded too difficult for me to do. So I specialized in ads for a while, but when I get. When we moved into seo, we were fortunate that the whole movement was moving away from this, this spammy sort of behavior more towards quality content.

And yeah, basically foot told we got a foothold in essentially . Building, firstly, service pages for people. Just making sure that they, they were search engine optimized locally. And that started, started getting some, some business for people and that that's inspired us to startling. What else can we do?

What else can we do with this idea of search engine optimization? What else can we, how else can we bring traffic to people's websites? Cuz some is good, more must be better. So that's when blogging sort of came into, came into our, our sort of field of, of knowledge. And how it could essentially be used for, for grain businesses.

But yeah, that's why. So that's how we got to this point. Every, every SEO I suppose journey is moving from some sort of digital online marketing, whether it be web design or ads into seo, which is always the most scalable long term. 

Jared: It's interesting you bring that up cuz I, and I have in my notes already to ask you like a lot of us land.

First in terms of building a website with the content in mind with, and then design second, you know? Mm-hmm. Like, Hey, let's get traffic to it. Oh boy. We have traffic now. It doesn't, it doesn't look very good. It doesn't convert very well. Like you almost came at it from a let's build something really beautiful.

Let's design this awesome thing for a client and then, oh, let's get traffic to it. Now. How do you think your approach or your vi kind of vision in, in, in that process maybe is different than an an average s e o or somebody like myself who kind of goes content first and then thinks design second.

Shaun: Yeah, I think it's more to do with your offer. It's got to do with are you a business trying to get traffic or are you trying to get traffic to sell an offer? That's the biggest difference because you have to take into account when you start a business, you're gonna need some sort of online presence and it's going to be a simple four to five page website before you do anything else.

So ideally, those service pages are going to be optimized. But yeah, the, the reason, the reason I go with the design first is one, that's one of the elements is one that needs to be there. The website needs to be, therefore, for you to launch any sort of campaign email ads, whatever. But the idea being.

Firstly, you're gonna be pushing ads to these, to these pages, mainly for split testing. You need to be able to understand all these pages. We're we're building these service pages, are they going to be converting? Because obviously we can split test with SEO long term but that's not gonna be able to give us the results we need now to make sure that the work we are doing now in the span that we're working for the clients.

I'm talking from an agency perspective now. Or the, is the traffic that they're receiving 12 months time when we're maybe no longer working with them, is that going to be converting on the service page like we needed to? So that's why we go design first, build out the page using solid copywriting principles.

It's one of these things that I'm really, really interested in. It's, it's fascinating to me that you can get people to buy or not buy based on how. The quality of the writing on your page, it's, it's unbelievable. So you really, you really do a good job of building out that service page making sure that that search engine optimized and that sort of, The way that I like to think about and the way like I like to explain to my clients is if you think about your website, like a, a permit, for example the top of your permit is your homepage.

It's gonna be the most important page. It's gonna be the most high authority page. Cause everything's linking back to that. The level below that is gonna be all of your service and product pages. So again, you your second most important pages. But th those are your money pages and those are what you're gonna be wanting to sort of bring traffic to.

They're all search engine optimized, but then you need to build out. The rest of your pyramid using search engine optimized content. And that is all going to be linking back to your service pages, back to your own page. It's just really good practice as far as search engine optimization's concerned, as well as, as well as user journey.

Now, I know from a blogging perspective, you always wanna sort of grow, build your, build your money pages too. So that all, all of these supplementary sort of blog posts that you build in addition to the money pages you can link back to otherwise, I mean, you, you know what, trying to do backlinking or not backlinking.

So internal linking on websites is like if you've got a lot of content and now you wanna create one many page and start linking back to that, it's just, it's a nightmare. 

Jared: So you touched on it and. This idea of having good site structure, starting with the, the, the end goal in mind, homepage you know, money pages and then supporting content.

Let's talk about, let's, let's center in on that, that middle section, those money pages for a second. Again, I'm gonna throw you a question that a lot of us have, and I'm speaking for listeners. I'm kind of speaking for myself too, to be honest with you. So you get a money page and you put it together and it feels like there's always a juxtaposition between good design and good seo, right?

Like it feels like if I put the information above the fold that I want to put there to rank, it's not what would be best for cro r o conversion rate optimization. And again, I'm using air quotes. It feels that way. How do you recommend kind of maximizing a lot of the SEO things we're taught, right? Like the on page basics, like make sure your keyword is in your title, make sure it's in the header structure, make sure that you're delivering related keywords and all this SEO stuff with Yeah.

Kind of more conversion rate focus. Like make that the only you know, use, use copy, like you said, that is conversion focused but might not include keywords like this. Is that juxtaposition, that tug and pull that I think we all kind of end up with, 

Shaun: right. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's that delicate balance of do we wanna draw traffic and do we wanna convert that traffic?

So it's there's a few ways to go about doing it. Right. And there's some sneakier ways and some more sort of straightforward and sort of compromising ways, compromising in the sense that you need to compromise and safety. I wanna hear both for the record. Okay, great. Perfect. So the way that we go about it is we just, we just go about doing it the way we normally would.

Your H one is gonna include your keyword. It's gonna include a, a. A well-written headline. It's not just going to be, for example, if I'm offering search engine optimization services in London, right? My landing page isn't going to be SEO in London or SEO services for London. It's just not going to be that straightforward.

Copywriting doesn't work that way, but it might be expert SEO in London without whatever, right? We wanna deal with pain points there. So it, you need to include that in your, in your H one. And it's just, it, it's gonna be a compromise of. Let's see if we can, we we're not, see, we need to include our keyword in there for, for best practice, but we need to make it work for copyright.

And, and most of the time it's not difficult. You want your keyword in the main title, your main H one, because it resonates with the person when they land on the page, especially above the fold, you want it there. Mm-hmm. Now that's, that's now obviously you wanna dot your keyword and, and, and, and. So the, the associated keywords throughout your page relevant terms, long term keywords, you wanna include your FAQs on the landing page as well, because those FAQs aren't always going to be aren't always gonna warrant their own blog posts if they, if they're relatively short.

So including all of that on the page is gonna give . Google really good context as far as what is your page trying to target what is the audience that you're trying to, to solve problems for? And we found that that works pretty well if you just speak to the customer as if they're a customer. And you're not trying to game the system for, for the algorithm.

Google ranks your page. And I find if you try to keyword stuff, it does, it does tend to damage your reputation. I mean, we've seen these things. So. That's one way, right? That's but then you get sneaky ways of, of, of doing it, where I've seen people actually make the H one a smaller font and actually use it as a sub-headline below an H two or above the fold, right?

So you might have SEO in London as a sub-headline above an H two, which would then be your copy written, your copywritten headline for the page, which works as well. Because, because you, you, you are telling Google the H one is this But it depends on, I suppose, what you want the page to look like. It is sneakier.

You're not gonna get, you're not gonna get penalized for it because you're still, it's, it's just, yeah, I, I've got my way of doing it, but I suppose other people have this, I just prefer to include it in, in the headline. 

Jared: Yeah. No, it makes sense. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. I, I just, I appreciate that you're kind of, you know, acknowledging there's a juxtaposition or at least a balance, maybe that's the better word.

They don't have to play against each other, but they can balance with each other. 

Shaun: Yeah, it has, you have to, you have to balance it if you, if you want the benefits of both of both SEO and copywriting. But like I say, Google has done a really good job, I mean, as, as much as, as, as annoying as all of their algorithm updates have been.

And as, as they're accelerating as we go it's a good thing because it's it's improving Google's understanding of what's on the page. And if you are really, and that, that's something I like to tell my, my clients is SEO is the most straightforward. Supply and demand way of doing sales. I want this, I'm going to a search engine optimization to find this thing, or search engine to find this thing.

And you've got this thing. I'm, I've got the supply view demand essentially. And Google understands this, this is the journey. And some pages don't need to be built out to a thousand words. If it's a landing page, if it could be pretty short. If, if it's a relatively simple service and there aren't too many frequently asked questions or too many benefits that need to be built out, so, Yeah, Google's getting much, much better at understanding what money pages are and how they are distinguished from things like in informational content on a website.

And that's why it's good to have a good balance of both too, which is an important part of, of how Google wants to understand E E A T at this point. Are you, do you offer a service? What is that service and what sort of knowledge do you have about the service? And that's where blogging comes in. 

Jared: Let me ask you a super broad question, like what are some of the biggest mistakes you see, whether it's an online business or online content creators making when it comes to design and when it comes to balance that, that balancing act right and being able to blend good design focused on serving the readers, focused on conversion where necessary, but also balancing out some of the content focus that they have.

Shaun: Yeah, Mo most of it is, One of two things. Either it's not optimized at all and it's or they're optimizing too broadly. For example a service page might, you might be a lawyer who's based in New York, for example. But you are trying to show whoever's coming to your website, you are, you are.

Larger than you really are, which is actually the opposite of what you want to be doing. You wanna be nicheing down. So instead of saying lawyer in the United States, which you're going to be competing, you're gonna be competing with everyone from California to to wherever. You want to be going for something more specific, something much, far more niche, because one, you're gonna have.

Far fewer competitors in your, in your local market. So if you're going for lawyers in New York, probably not a good one. But if you want, if you wanna go, go for something really specific, really specific to your niche it might be area specific. So it could be which location are you trying to market to?

What, what is your, what is your customer type? Or what. What industry are you trying to go forward? Might be lawyers for divorce lawyers in New York. Then you really ing down. And you'll be surprised how often there are these long tail keywords that the people are searching in Google who are looking for divorce, divorce lawyers in London.

In London or in New York. So that's one thing is, is one too optimizing too broadly because you're trying to show everyone you're larger than you really are, or yeah, essentially that or you're not optimizing at all. On the page. For, for search, mainly because of lack of understanding of what ACO should be and how it should be sort of implemented on a page.

But again, this is just not understanding what, what, what needs to happen on the page. The biggest issue I think would be just trying to optimize too broadly niche down and, and really speak to your market cuz you're gonna convert more people that way too. 

Jared: You know, I, I wonder if you have any insights into maybe, is it, how, how do you figure out how to niche down?

I think pe it makes sense to a lot of people. Mm-hmm. But at the same time, when people, when they hear niche down, they, they can sometimes struggle with how to go approach that. Like and, and I know we have some of the stuff to talk about, so I'll stop asking this, but I just, I really wanna lean into that person who might be.

Hearing this, but going, man, how do I find a way to niche down without without knowing, having the tools to figure that out. Mm-hmm. 

Shaun: Well, it depends on sort of, What is your specialty? Who can you help best? If you are a, now I'm speaking specifically to service, service delivery websites now is if you are a a gardening service in, in your specific town th that's, that's your niche, right?

That that's what you do. You're a garden service in your town. That's, that's as, as straightforward as I can make it. If, if you're trying to niche down, if you're looking at something like a, a niche, Blog site. If you, if you're looking at something like that then it's a case of trying to find qualifiers.

So for example, I've got a, I've got a martial arts website and we, some of our articles focus on things like self-defense, right? Self-defense is the broad keyword. Four women. Self-defense, four old people, self-defense four. So these are really, really general ideas for how to add a niche down as far as trying to create content for these types of people.

Again, these might be buying in 10 keywords. It might not be buying in 10 keywords, but the more you can niche down the, the more you can sort of. Narrowed down the message that you, that you're speaking to on your page one, it's gonna optimize for search two, you're gonna be speaking to your, to your, to your to your market more, more effectively.

And you're gonna be able to convert more of those people now trying to niche down. And that's why, sorry Jared, that's your question. The, the biggest thing is what are you doing? Who are you doing it for? Where are you doing it? That's the best way to mesh down when you're talking, specifically delivery. And I suppose that's, that's the best advice I can give cuz that's, that's my specialty.

Jared: No, I love it. I love it. I just wanted to, to maybe ask the second or third question on that note. Yeah. To just make sure, you know, again, if you're running like a content website, that's a topic that's talked about a lot. But I also loved your example about being an attorney, being an attorney in the United States, being an attorney in New York, being a divorce attorney, et cetera, et cetera.

And so just kind of walk into that a couple times is really healthy. You mentioned in terms of design, the importance of supporting content you just mentioned in terms of content. The importance of supporting content. Let's, let's talk about that. I know that, I know you have a great framework that I really want to lean into for this idea of content and how to get the maximum value out of it.

Maybe let's transition into that and kind of kick off some of the things we want to talk about as it relates to content and getting more value out of it. 

Shaun: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean that's where we, like I said, when we sort got into search engine optimization, we understood how it benefited service pages, but then we wanted to build out, we wanted to understand.

What this whole blogging thing was. One, yes, we could understand that it could bring traffic to a website, but we had other challenges that our agency clients were experiencing. Things like, we don't have content to put on our social media platforms. We can only talk about our services. So many times people don't want to hear about what, what we are offering cause they know what we're talking about.

More often than not, that's gonna be chasing people away from your pages, LinkedIn or Twitter, wherever you might be marketing. That's one thing. So we don't have anything to share in us on our social media or if you've got an email list, right? A lot of people have lists of, of of email addresses that they might have built up over time.

I've got nothing to share with them. I've got nothing to show them. What do I send them? These are all sorts of questions. We were, we were, we were getting from, from our clients and What we found was that blogging actually answered a lot of these questions. And so I'll give you a very quick example if you don't know what, what to tell your cl or what to share on your social media platform, right?

If on, on LinkedIn, for example say I am a digital marketing company, right? And I, my ideal client, I want them, the ideal client's going to know that they've got a problem and they're gonna know that they've got certain elements of that they need to try and solve. And, and they need to know that they're gonna need to try and find some sort of resource for this problem that they're looking to solve.

And they're, they're gonna go to Google for that, right? Say for example, this. Person is looking for traffic on their website and they're gonna search something like how to get visitors to my website. All right. Now this is a blog post that would work perfectly for me as an as an SEO agency. I could put that blog post on my website.

One, it's gonna get search traffic from Google. It's optimized for search two. I can use that as a repurpose that as a resource on social media. So anyone that's following my page say guys. By the way, just include a nice little blur bar on LinkedIn. Little run into the, into the blog post. The guys. If you're interested in how to get traffic to your website, here's a guide.

Go, go look at it. Now, why would you wanna do that? Why wouldn't, why would you wanna give away your special source? Right? Why would you wanna outline in, in your blog post how to do essentially what you are going to be doing for. Doing for your clients. And what I think is important to to understand here is, is you need to distinguish who your, your clients are.

Your clients are people with money, people who don't have the time to do what you do, and people who are gonna re be reaching out to you to take care of this problem for them. If the person is clicking on your link and they want to read how to bring traffic to their website they're actively looking for a resource like this.

They're doing one of two things. Either they're looking for you as a service provider or they're looking for a resource to teach them how to do it for themselves. So you, you're solving two problems. One, you're generating a lead for yourself. If the person doesn't have the time, but they've got more money, then they've got time.

If the person doesn't have the money, they've got the time to do it themselves. At very least, you are the problem solver in this person's mind. At, at the, at the ground level stages of their business, you've shown them how to get traffic to their website, and they're gonna remember you for that. They're gonna get their business to a point where they can now afford someone like you.

And they can realize at that point, they'll realize, okay, there's a lot more other things I need to be doing in my business beyond just marketing, just beyond create, creating content. So I'm gonna pay Sean. Well, I'm gonna pay Jared to create this content on my behalf. I've seen the potential of it because they taught me how to do it.

I saw it bring traffic to my website and now I need to keep doing it. Let me go to Sean and he's gonna solve this problem for me cuz one, he showed me how to do it, and two, he's got other resources showing me how to scale this over the long term. So that's a very broad understanding of why you want to be sharing.

Type guide, informational type content. One to show you expertise to prove to one Google that you're an expert to prove to your visitors on your social media platform, on your email list, you're an expert to get the people that can't afford your services yet over the line so that, that they'll get to a point where they can afford your services eventually.

Right? So that's, that's, that's a few, a few reasons. But they, it's it all sort of now, now, These are sort of reason ways of repurposing your content, but it all sort of, its cyclical process because remember, every time you send someone to your, to your blog you're gonna have a lead magnet. Now, if you're not familiar with a, with what a lead magnet is, and I'm sure you are, Jared, it's, it's something that someone is going to Give you their contact details for in exchange for, so it might be a pdf guide, it might be a a video, short video course, something, something that's gonna get them from A to B.

Now, this is applicable for service businesses. It's applicable to nite owners, something that's gonna get them from point A to point B, and it's gonna solve this problem for them. They're gonna give their, give you their email address for that. So now what you've done is you've brought people into your ecosystem via ads, via social media via.

Seo. They're on your blog, they're reading your content. You're now building that authority. They give you their e email address. It's a certain proportion of them because obviously you don't want them to come to your website and leave. You want to grab as many of them as you can and keep them in your ecosystem as long as possible and keep nurturing those leads.

So the, you get them into your ecosystem onto the blog. They, certain portion of those people sign up and get your free resource and give you the email address. You use the same resources on the blog to keep marketing and keep nurturing those people. You were interested in how to get traffic to your website.

Are you interested in how to convert those people when they actually get to it? Another guide. You just keep taking down the pro, the process of, I've gotten you from A to B. Now I'm gonna take you from A B to C. C to D. D to E. And when you get to E, you're gonna ask me to, to, to, to take over because at that point there's gonna be too much outside expertise required.

There's going to be too much time. Commitment required. So the whole idea is you wanna take them down this process of making their businesses successful, using your guides, using this process of, in your ecosystem, in your mating list, nurturing customer. And it's circular, the whole process. So yeah, very, it, it, it's, I get pretty excited about it.

I, it's, I, it's like a flywheel of, of lead generation and, and something we've, we've implemented across multiple industries across multiple types of niche website. Like I say, I've got a, a, a, a website about, Heavy machinery. I've got a website about martial arts. I've got websites, but a whole bunch of different things and they've all taken on the same structure because it just works really very well.

You've got content to share on social, you've got content to go on seo, you can get email addresses from that and you keep, keep marketing to them. And what's quite nice about that is if you wanna take it another step up. You've got all this traffic coming to your website through search engine optimization and through your, your, your social media platforms.

Now what you can do is you step up by including things like retargeting ads, because obviously with, with a cookie situation at the moment, it's, let's be slightly more there are ways of, of dealing with, with, with, with the cookies and, and, and tracking, tracking users across the internet. But the idea being now you can not only track them and market them using your mailing campaign that, that they've signed up to, but you can also track the ones who haven't through remarketing ads because you've now installed the cookie onto their, into, onto their browser because they've come and read, read your content.

So, sorry. Like I said, I get, I get pretty excited about this concept. 

Jared: For those of you listening, Sean just gave you a five minute. Sean just boiled internet marketing in 2023 and beyond. Down in a perfect five minute summary. As a, as a fellow I guess a fellow agency owner slash content creator, niche, website builder, or whatever you wanna call it, like, it's interesting to hear you talk about this strategy cuz I agree with you.

It applies on both sides. It applies if you're serving businesses, it applies if you're building websites. And so I. I real, I have a lot of questions for you that I want to drill into because Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna assume most people have probably heard some of the generics of that conversation before, right?

Like, I know I need to be taking this and, and really actually using content in the scope and the breadth of the full life cycle of a viewer, of a business owner of a purchaser, cuz it does apply to everyone. Maybe let's kick off what you just went through and, and talk about how people. Take the content that they're already creating and what questions they need to ask themselves to learn what they can do with it beyond what they're doing with it.

Is it looking at where that content slots into the funnel, the buying funnel, the viewer's funnel? Or is it more looking at, I wrote a blog piece, now how do I translate that over to social media? Like how do we take the content we're creating and figure out what to do with it next? In the scope of what you just went through.

Shaun: Yeah, so if you've got existing content If it's search engine optimized the ideas, if, if you want to try and mix it up. If, if you're doing things like search, if you're doing things like sharing on social media, it's good to change it up. It's good to touch on different topics. Now there's different ways of going about it.

You could mix it up and make it make your, your, your timeline pretty eclectic in the sense of, today we're talking about traffic tomorrow we're talking about conversion rate optimization, just as, as a general sort of as a general sort of Overview of that process the, or you could take the approach of this month we're focusing on how to get traffic to your website.

This week we're focusing on how to get. How to do keyword research. Next week we're focusing on how to create the the, the blog post. The week after that we create focusing on editing and making sure we're doing proper internal linking on the website. So it depends on how, how you wanna structure your marketing campaign, but the idea is it's all centered around centered around the content on, on your website.

Now, again, it depends on how you want, want to go about How, how you wanna go about sharing what your, what your social media strategy is. If your content isn't search engine optimized, that's probably a very good first step because you don't want to have an entire website full of company updates.

This is what we've done lately. No one cares about that. That's not gonna come up in search. Go ahead. Optimize your, optimize your content and decide how you want your timeline to look and share it that way. If If you're planning your, your content strategy, I've got some pointers. So what you want to do is you want to have, you wanna build top down.

So you're gonna have your homepage, you're gonna have your service pages, you're gonna have or still money pages, but for example, best off. So comparisons of the types of services that you offer. So just below the service page. Then below that, you can have sort of informational content, build your blog out in that, in that order.

Build the guides because they're gonna be the, the most competition they're gonna need, require the most time to age in Google. They're gonna require the most amount of back links, and all the content below that are gonna be linking back to these, these higher the higher tier sort of content pages.

It's gonna make your life easier as you, as you scale your website, but, Now as you, as you use this for for your marketing, if you are now repurpose this content and social media, it makes it far easier because now you've got these silos that you've created with, with the different services that you might have, different comparisons that you might have, different products that you might have, but then you can really focus it.

So if you've, if you've decided I want to have a weak theme, and, and this week's theme is, Just for the sake of, of this, this conversation, SEO and, and we're talking about keyword research this week. Now, under the keyword research topic, I might have how to do free keyword research. I might have best keyword research tools, paid keyword research tools best keyword research services if, if you're looking for someone else to do it for you.

So all of these might fall underneath the same silo. It's gonna help you, excuse me, for search engine optimization. But what this is gonna help you is also. Share really rich content with, with your users, and you'll have a whole week's worth of or more worth of content based around a specific theme, all within a single silo of content.

Now, again, you could, you could be sharing within one content for a span of time, or you could be sharing across your silos of content to make your timeline more eclectic. I hope that answers your question, Jared. 

Jared: It does. It does. I, you, you keep saying that. I wanna ask you about it. You keep, I love this idea of themeing.

What you share mm-hmm. And, and whatnot, like it really seems to align a lot with how we, we build out topical clusters as we're mm-hmm. We're blogging, right. Or, you know, topical authority is, is, is a big buzzword and conversation topic with Google these days. And, and again, the concept is, hey, if you're gonna be an expert in something, you need to.

Kind of talk about all the things. In other words, a theme, like I feel like they're so synonymous. Maybe can you go into more depth about why you like sharing, why you like content in themes? Because I think there's something there for all of us. We might think about themes more as, Hey, I'm gonna publish five articles around the same topic.

But how are you processing themes and what are some of the success or or benefits you see in that? 

Shaun: Well, So, I suppose there's two ways to look at it. One is from the user perspective. If, if you are a business and you are trying to, these two things you're gonna be doing, either you're gonna be offering advice to people who can't afford your services, or you're gonna providing the service to the people who can pay you.

And they already know what you do for them because you've outlined it for them. So you've built that value out in their minds. Now, the, the idea is with these themes Oh, I disappeared there for a second. I yeah, the, the ideas with these themes is from a user perspective is you want to create the most useful resource for people.

So if someone comes to your website this is where internal linking is very important. If, if I'm talking about keyword research, again, just, just touching on this, on this topic, if I'm talking about keyword research, I know that the next question you have is, how do I put these keywords into my blog content?

How do I create a blog post out of these keywords? I might then, I might then link to that blog post. Cause I know that that's the next question you have. The more, the more I can do that, the better resource I'm creating for my clients, for my, my potential customers. So one, I'm increasing the authority in their eyes, but I'm also solving problems for them, which is what I'm trying to do as a business anyway.

I'm solving problems for people even without knowing it, because my content in there, people are finding it through seo. That's great. For customers or, or for people who are on the edge of, of. Deciding who, who, who the service provider is gonna be. So they, they know what their problem is, their, their problem, where their solution, and where they're just trying to find the right service provider with the content, with a body of content around a specific theme.

Say company's looking for a specifically search engine optimization as a service, and you've got all this content around seo, they're gonna say, well, these people know what they're talking about. I can see it. It's, it's, it's, it's shown to me in, in their blog content. So. Because of the credibility, I'm now going to get in touch with these people.

So that's from a user perspective. So author is a big, big thing when it comes to just being and, and also just being a really good resource. What are you in business for? You in business to solve problems for people? If all you are is a sales page and you're just trying to push traffic to it, Using ads.

That's very transactional to me. You're not really trying to build a business in that sense. Now that's, that's from a user perspective. If we're looking at it from a, from a Google perspective, Google wants to know that you are a deep resource, not a shallow resource. It wants to know that. You're not just trying to be a shopfront and when people actually walk into your store, you've got no real substance to offer them.

Google wants to know that when they walk through that door, you're, you've got a deep mall that they can walk through and actually look around at all the resources you've got for them. Google will much rather send someone to a blog post attached to a website. That has a, a, a mall's worth of resources that someone who's just got a, a service page about SEO and, no, no more resources on it for the person.

One, it, it increases engagement in Google's eyes. So if you're looking at, at, at metrics that actually increase rankings, so the e e's sort of metrics, the usability re metrics, it increases engagement. Cause people are looking at more pages on your website because they're moving down the. I, I need keywords.

I need how to write a blog post. I need internal linking. All of this is linked internally on the blog post. It increases engagement increasing in Google's eyes authority moving you up in the search rankings. So yeah, anyway, long story short, it's good for both users and, and for Google. Do you wanna rank and you want to be an authority in those people's eyes.

And another thing I suppose we should touch on is the fact that. By building out a blog that is going to be generating leads for your business, you're increasing the value of your business. Now, Jared, I don't need to tell you what, what? Niche site blogs or, or selling full these days? What, what, what, what are they selling at the moment?

Now, and I imagine you've got, you've got a, a bolted on lead generation process. Flywheel bolted onto a service business with high ticket items or product business high ticket items. It increases the value of your business and it makes it a completely standalone asset that you can say, look, I've got it.

A digital marketing business. Now, again, just talking in this theme, I've got a digital marketing business. I've got a blog that's bringing in ready to buy customers every month, and it's converting at X amount. There's the asset that increases the value of your business. Substantially. And that's, that's one of the, that's one of the big reasons.

A lot of the big players, you'll see them and, and, and, and I'm sure you've seen this too, a lot of the big players will be building out blogs. They, they, they don't depend on ads. Yes, they are injecting money into ads, and that's where they're getting a big part of their business from. But if you go into most of the big websites, big companies, big, even service-based businesses, they're all building blogs because that is, That is the value of the business.

If you've just got a, a landing page attached to a process for fulfilling services, that's, that's barely a business, that's a service page with a, with a, with a process attached. If you've got a service page with a lead generation process attached to it, that's a business. That's, that's how you build it an an online business.

Jared: Let's get really practical for a second. Let's speak to the person who's listening and saying, okay. Well, for starters, you said, Hey, if you are. Publishing a lot of content anywhere that's not s you know a search engine optimized, like that's kind of the first spot to start, take that content and start making it optimized for search.

But let's assume, since this podcast tends to attract a lot of people that, that do focus on seo, let's assume that people are, are, are producing optimized, search optimized content like, Overwhelm can quickly set in when we think, okay, I need to start sharing on social media. I need to build a lead magnet.

I need to build optimized landing pages. I need to start an email newsletter and start sharing on email. I need to start advertising. I need to start repurposing. So let's maybe walk through from a really practical standpoint how someone who is writing as a part of their week. Search engine optimized content, what steps they can take from here in a practical approach to start to repurpose that content?

Shaun: Yeah, so if I suppose it very much depends on, on the, the structure of the business, right? If it, if it's a niche site that isn't service based a lot of what you're going to be doing is is going to be. Without front, sort of front facing processes. So you're not gonna be having sales calls with customers, for example.

You're going to have traffic that you're trying to convert into into revenue somehow, like you said, through affiliate office, through things like display ads, if that's something people still enjoy doing. I'm not, I'm not knocking that. I've still got display ads on some of my websites. But the idea, so say, say for example, you're writing your blog post.

What this process gives you, it gives you a a process for marketing a blog post when it's done right. Assuming you're writing a blog post a week, you publish a blog post at the start of the week or whenever you, you publish it, you this, I'm just giving you a sort of an idea as to how we do, how we do it internally.

It might give them an, an ideas to how, how they could do it themselves. If you, if you have got a social media page for, for your niche site, Create your blog post. You then create social media posts around this blog post. Now it might be an and for however long you might wanna do it. It might be for five days, it might be for two weeks.

For different things. It might be a controversial take on that specific topic and say, what do you think? And link back to it. It might be It might be a quick summary of that and, and link back to it. Now guys, guys online guys on Twitter, the, the, the, the builders community have got really good ways of repurposing content like this.

Gary V's also got got his way of doing it. So if you take this larger piece of content, Break it down into just, and, and have these posts that you can, that you can create, have a a useful practice that I saw one of the guys online do. And Justin, Justin Welsh really, really cool guy on Twitter.

He, he's growing substantially. And, and the way that he does it, he's got a, a framework that he uses. For example, if you, if, if you visualize a spreadsheet, if you've got your, your, your co columns across the top and you've got your rows across the bottom, Take take a blog post. It's gonna be a row in your, in your, in your spreadsheet.

And each column is going to be the type of content that you could create or the type of post on, on LinkedIn that you could create for this blog, blog post. It could be a contr a counter-argument to that. It could be a, a summary of that. It could be a bulleted list of that, right? And what you do is then you essentially just using this It's mainframe frame.

I can't remember what the term is that he uses for it. The idea of being it, it makes it far easier to have a piece of content that you know you want to use, have five types of posts on LinkedIn that you would repurpose this blog post full. It makes it far easier. Okay. I need to take that bit, put it into that post that bit, put it into that point that now.

It sounds, it sounds like it, it could take a bit of time, but this process, once you've published the blog post and you've gone through the process of, in adding your internal links and all that fun stuff, this, this additional added on process of one, understanding what the blog post will be and what the five types of LinkedIn posts that you'll be using are about a half an hour process because it's especially if using something like chat, g p t, cuz you just put the blog post in there, so, Come up with these themes for me or these these types of LinkedIn posts for me.

You get summary, a Bulletted list or this, it'll spit it out for you, put it straight into your schedule a tool, and you've got your social media scheduled for the week. Now obviously, you don't just wanna be sharing links on your social media cuz your, your engagements and, and your and your reach is gonna get, get a bit of a penalty, but, Intersperse that with other, other posts that you're going to be sharing on, on your, on your LinkedIn and, and your Twitter, wherever else you might be doing your social media marketing.

It, it's just basically the best way to do it is systematize it. I've got this blog post, I've got these five types of posts I know I will be creating over and over again for each one of them. Bang that out every week. And, and you've got your, and you've got your social media marketing strategy iron out.

That's, that's no straightforward way I, I can explain that honestly. 

Jared: No, I wanna highlight that. Cause I think there's a couple things in there. There's a couple things you mentioned that I think get lost in the shuffle or in the weeds. First off, you can break apart every blog post into different chunks.

Like if we're just, again, I'm just trying to replay what you said, like, I'm just thinking visually like, man, I write a thousand word blog posts. I'm probably gonna have three or four H two s, right? Like, those are probably three or four different things that I could write social media posts about. Right.

We have that whole thing where we're breaking apart article, but then you also talked about the different types of social media posts you can make. And I think that's really, really interesting because we, I haven't heard that talked about a lot. You're right. You can ask a question. I'll use Twitter as an example cuz that's where I live.

You can ask a question on Twitter that relates to what you wrote about. You can write a listicle, like top five blah blah blahs, or top five takeaways from this article. You can summarize the article. You can you can almost be a negative, right? They talk about the negative sentiment, like what if blah, blah, blah wasn't the case, or you know, you can go ne and so there's these 5, 6, 7 different types of social media posts you can make from each of the five or six different.

Breakdowns. I mean, and so you're right, you can take a piece of content and I mean, I'm thinking 25, 30 different social media posts. Does it take time? Yes. But does it take much time in the grand scheme of things, given that you've already put all that effort into creating the content, to your point? No. 

Shaun: No, exactly.

That's it. And, and You don't just want to be publishing pieces of content for two reasons. You don't just wanna be publishing pieces of content, leaving them on the blog to just one, hopefully index and, and goo and Google You want to. Get the content out there mainly because it's, it's going to be putting, putting it in front of people's eyes.

And social media is still a thing. People are still using social media and, and they want to be reading blog posts. People click on blog posts every day, especially if it's a, if it's a, if they're, if they're following your page on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter, wherever you are, they know the types of content.

You are gonna be talking about if, if, if they're following me, they know I'm talking about seo. They know that the, the content I'm sharing is gonna be all about seo, how to grow your website, those sorts of things. So when they see a, when they see a link from me and they know yes, they, they, they know, they can expect some sort of some sort of Prompt to, to, to read a blog post off of, off the platform.

And they know that it's going to it, it might be clickbaity in some instances. But the idea is I've got this valuable resource. You know, I've got this valuable resource because you've read, read some of my stuff before you following me already. Go read this thing. And sometimes it requires more than he has a blog post.

Go and read it. It does require. Couple of bullet points a bit more of a, a, maybe a quote from it. Like you said. You can really create a nice framework if you sit down and actually understand what are the key takeaways I want my potential customers to be able to take from my blog post. And use that as a framework for understanding the types of blog posts you want to be sharing to be sharing on your social media.

Jared: Let's talk about email now. If we can maybe transition a bit. Let's say that I have my. Search engine optimized content, and I have a good process set up for repurposing that on social media, but I don't have an email list. I don't have a lead magnet. I'm not marketing and nurturing and talking with my audience via email.

How do I take content that I'm writing for my blog or even for my social media pages and turn that into something that I can then use via email marketing. 

Shaun: Yeah. So when you're, when you're doing email marketing in the sense, right, if you're sharing blog content, it's more in the nurturing process rather than the, the call to action, call to actions are gonna be more interspersed between these types of emails that, that, that are more information rich.

The idea being. I'm not trying to sell to you. The idea being I'm trying to be a useful resource so that I'm trying to like, like Alex for Moses says, I'm gonna give, give, give, give until it hurts. Until you tell me, please help me. I need what you're telling me to do. I just don't have the time to do it.

That's, that's essentially what we're trying to do with email marketing. And the reason we wanted to do email marketing one is cuz you, you own the list, it's yours. It's, it's the most. Reliable way of staying in touch with your, with, with your potential clients, prospect and clients. Social media can shut you down.

You, you, I mean, we've seen this all the time. People are getting canceled all, all over the, or they used to be canceled all over the place. Accounts being shut down for all sorts of reasons. I mean, I, I've been locked out of accounts because I, I lost the password and I can't remember the email address I used for it.

So the idea of being get people off the term is de platform people. Get them off of platforms and get them into your list where you own the data so that you can keep sending them the resources. Now, these emails that you send to them like I said, they're informational. It might be a Hi guys.

Hope you're having an awesome week. Here's a quick resource on keyword research. If you're struggling to get traffic to your website, doesn't even need to be a long writer. People don't want to be reading long emails. What they do want is a quick introduction, saying this is a quick resource that is gonna help you get from A to B.

If you want, if you're interested, click and have a read if you're interested. One that's gonna get them from their inbox to your website where you can control a customer journey. You could have popups for, for things like services promotions that you might be running. Now the various things now on your website, you can have various conversion, eight optimization customer journey elements that you, you're gonna be having on those blog posts.

It's gonna take them. It might, like I said, popups, it could be embedded forms that, that you're putting onto the page. Again, the idea being. Get in touch with us cuz we wanna help you achieve whatever you're trying to do. And. Obviously it doesn't, you don't always have to only include call to actions in every four or five emails that you send out, you can include a lot of these guys at newsletters that I've signed up to, newsletters is, by the way, has become an entire business model.

Like, if you can get people onto your newsletter, you can mark them with, with products, with competitive products, whatever you want, essentially. But it's a really, really powerful way of growing an audience sustainably and scalably. Because the same, you're doing the same thing if whether you have a hundred people on your mailing list or 10,000 or a hundred thousand.

And, and the results really are, are. Your leverage in that sense is far, far larger. And like I saying I've, I, I've got a few newsletters that I subscribe to where in the ps, so basically after their signature in, in these newsletters, they'll say, by the way, if you're interested in anything that I've got to offer, these are the services I've got.

It might be courses that they're linked to. It might be services, it might be whatever. Right? So yeah, you could, there's, there's many ways you can go about doing it, but the idea is stay top of mind. Get these people's email addresses and stay at top of mind so they know who you are and what you're all about.

So they can, you can grow this process of know, like, and trust. Like what's his name? You've interviewed him before. He always talks about the customers need to know, like, and trust you. Goodness me, I can't remember his name now. But anyway, 

Jared: unfortunately my, as I've aged on this podcast, my encyclopedia of my interviews has started to vary in its in, its, in its accuracy.

Shaun: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that, that's the idea, right? Is we want to want to nurture the relationship, grow the relationship, get them to know you, and most importantly, get them to trust you. And the best way to do that is just prove yourself over and over again by being useful. Yeah. 

Jared: I love it. I mean, let's, let's start to bring it home here and let me ask you how you've, maybe if you could, whether it's a specific case or whether it's whether it's some more broad tips, but I mean, how have you used this on your own personal websites?

The application makes sense to talk to other clients and certainly for like a service based business, it's very easy to visualize this, but, With a niche website or a personal site, you have, like maybe how have you used some of these concepts? How have you used 'em successfully? What have been the results of kind of tying all this together into a, a re a repurposing plan?

Shaun: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So like I said to you most of what we do is for clients. It's what we've sort of focused on for the longest, for the longest time, I've only in the last three years started growing my own assets outside of, of service, essentially trying to leverage my time a bit more, right?

That's what we all try to do. But I can give you a good example, right? One of the websites I've got a, a a martial arts website I do, and jujitsu. So it was one of the first. Niche sites I actually moved into because I thought, well, it's something I could write about every day. It's, I really, really enjoy this and We, we basically took the process of, we create content.

So the content we create is very big, big, beginner friendly. It's a top of funnel. People that are interested in martial arts, people that are just starting, are trying to decide what type of martial arts they're into and figuring out what type of equipment they need for these different types of martial arts, right?

So you can imagine the types of affiliate products you could be linking to within these blog posts, the types of roundup posts you could be having for these. So. That's sort of the approach we took and, and we took the same approach of, of having this permit structure. So you have your, your buying pages and supporting that.

You'll have your informational posted all sort of link back to, to the buying pages. You wanna funnel them all to that. So we've taken that same, that same structure. We've also to get as many people. Off of the website and into our email list. What we've done is we've included a a self-defense course, so do it yourself at home type self-defense course.

I think it's consists of five to eight modules where you can practice a few things at, at home with your family. At the very least, you, you'll be. You'll be competent in a situation where you might be in a life-threatening situation. And that what that helps us do is it as a free resource, gets people into our mailing list.

And then once they're in our mailing list, and also another thing we do is we, we very strongly lean on social media because in martial arts, what we've found is people just don't spend money. There's, it's a very long buying process, one because. There's very few things to buy. Once you bought your boxing gloves, you bought your boxing gloves is you're gonna have to only buy in five years time again.

So it's, it's you have to be very creative with the way that you monetize. So trying to monetize them on the website isn't like on the, on, on the journey that they're experiencing on the website for the first time isn't going to work. So we, we figured out we need to get them into the mail mailing list.

We are going to have to grow a relationship with them, whether it be through the mailing list. Or on our social media pages. So we did both. So we, we are, we are using the free resource to grow the the mailing list so that that belongs to us. And then we are also linking to our Facebook page because we know that most of the people that read our content are on Facebook.

This is just how it is. So we've got a Facebook page which we push people to. They go and like the page. I think we've got over five or 6,000 people on there at the moment. On the page and the, sorry, 10,000. The group is about five or 6,000 at the moment, the closed group. So what we've done is we, we've got varying stages of engagement with, with this, with this audience.

One top of funnel. You're interested in martial arts, what are you interested in? Martial arts. Decide what you wanna do. Two, great. Now you know who we are and you've subscribed to us via email or you're part of our Facebook group or part of our Facebook page. Now that you know who we are, let's grow this trust.

And now what we do is we take the content from our from our blog. And we repurpose that in our, in our, in our group. In, in, in the, in the martial arts group, share the content in there. People come back to the website. We get revenue on ads. We get the opportunity to, again, push them towards our affiliate products.

And again, again, it's a cycle that, that we take potential visitors through, or visitors through potential customers, through of, they have, they've read a piece of our content through seo. It might have been through social, if they found it through that they've read a piece of content. They've signed up through our mailing list or, or through following our social media page.

And we cycled them, them through the process of reading our content, nurturing that, that relationship and converting them either through affiliates or some sort of digital product that we've created for them. 

Jared: Uhuh. That's a great way to sum it up. That's that's a good way to go out on and we, we, we danced around a lot of topics here today, but I hope that everybody listening kind of had the chance to take a lot of notes.

Because we, we touch on these individual topics a lot in the podcast, but again, you kind of brought in an entire content strategy full circle. Yes. There's that five minute part where I was like, oh my goodness. That's the section if you want a full content strategy. But there's bits and pieces throughout the whole thing about how to leverage content and how to think about content, how to grow content.

So, Sean, thank you for coming on the podcast and just really appreciate all the value you shared. Where can people stay in touch with you or get in touch with you or stay involved with what you have going 

Shaun: on? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we've got a bunch of things going on. As, as you'd expect, entrepreneurs always have got these little projects going on, but our main businesses search engine optimization agency, nano page dot code uk.

But you can find all of my, my details at my Twitter. It's at sean ELs s h a u n e l s. Very simple. All my stuff's linked there and yeah, you can find me there. Yeah, 

Jared: that's great. That's where I know I keep up with you on Twitter and you share some great stuff there. We'll get all that linked in the show notes.

If you're listening here on watching, you can follow along there. But Sean, until we talk again next time, thanks again man. 

Shaun: Cool. Thanks a lot buddy. Good talk. Okay.

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