How to set up SEO landing pages

Presented live on Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Register for our live tutorials

So your boss wants you to write blog posts for more “SEO juice.” But here’s the problem: blog posts alone aren’t gonna do the trick. You also need SEO landing pages – and you need to set ’em up right so Google finds them. In this tutorial, SEO instructor and CRO consultant Tiffany daSilva shows you why you need to go beyond blog posts for SEO and HOW to use “content groups” in Google Analytics for best results.

This tutorial is brought to you by the flowjo growth hacking box.

TRANSCRIPT

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yeah, I started SEO when I was nine years old. I made a website and became obsessed with whether or not I could find it on search engines. It was like, InfoSeek and Lycos and AltaVista at the time, and then it just moved on to Google.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Nice, very nice. Well, I know we’re starting late, and people are chatting over that they had no idea you’re the Tiffany behind FlowJo. For those who are interested, we have a special something for anybody interested in FlowJo, which is a box that … I have been unpacking my office, but I have so many cards from FlowJo for Airstory. Anyway, we can talk more about that toward the end. Sarah has a special link with a special code for that. But for now, let’s dive into the training you have for us.

Tiffany daSilva:                     Amazing. Yes. So, let me just share my screen here, and, we’ll pick that one. All right.

Joanna Wiebe:                     We can see it.

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yay. All right. So, let me just … I want to just preface this by, I was looking for different presentations in Canada and I saw this watermelon one, and I lost my mind.

Joanna Wiebe:                     I was like, “What’s the watermelon thing about.” When I saw it, but it’s so pretty.

Tiffany daSilva:                     It is so pretty, and I felt bad because, who’s going to do a presentation on watermelon? So then I thought, “I’m going to. Why not?”

Joanna Wiebe:                     I love it.

Tiffany daSilva:                     So in case you’re wondering why watermelon themed, just because. Because I felt like it.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Okay.

Tiffany daSilva:                     So, this presentation is about the difference between blog and SEO pages. Now, I called it the Content Showdown for a reason. It’s because as an SEO specialist, it’s something that I come across all the time. People will come to me in the beginning and they’re super excited about me doing SEO … to do so, and then we get to the point where instead of writing the content that I think we need to convert, I get asked to create blog pages. So I wanted to show you the scenario that I usually come across as well as the solution that I have found to combat that and to show the worth of SEO pages over time.

So, you’re probably saying, “I don’t get it. What’s the difference between the two?” I want you to think of blog pages like fun, engaging, brand-focused content that’s really meant to just educate you and motivate people to subscribe using their email address. Here, the goal is really to keep your brand top of mind.

Now, on the other side, the SEO Pages are a little bit more boring, I would say, but they’re meant to provide a backdoor into your website by matching the keyword that people are using when they actually search for your product or service and creating a page that matches that user intent. For example, if someone was looking up a psychologist in the Toronto area where I’m in, I would want to make sure that there was a page that just said Toronto, psychologists in Toronto, and sold that service to different people based on it.

Now these pages, I want to make it very clear, they’re meant to convert. The point of this isn’t to get subscribers. When you come in, they’re meant to actually get someone to either fill out a form or give you some kind of marketing or sales qualified lead. So, here are some examples. Here’s a Shopify blog, and in this blog, you are seeing 22 awesome T-shirts and templates and mock-ups for your clothing line. Perfect, really exciting, I want to read all about it, and you can see on the right-hand side, they’re asking for an email address.

The main point of this is, over time, you’re going to read their blogs, maybe get them an email just like you do at Copy Hackers, and, they’re going to warm you up and make you, over time, want the product. But this is very top of funnel. Really, they’re trying to sell you on their brand, their trustworthiness, their authority. This isn’t necessarily to sell you right away.

Now, this, on the other hand, is an SEO Page. Now, if you ever go to shopify.ca/sitemap, you’ll actually see a list of all the SEO Pages that Shopify creates, and a lot of them are things like sell jewelry online, sell … I’m trying to look around, sell crafts online, sell paintings online, and they’re really meant for a specific purpose. The people that are coming in don’t necessarily know that they want to use Shopify as an E-commerce software, but they do know that they want to sell their jewelry online in some way, shape, or form. Maybe they only know about Etsy. Now, they’re going to learn about Shopify.

So, this page is really specific because, here you see the sell jewelry online. That is the main keyword on the page. They’re going to have below this, if you want to check it at home, you’ll see a lot of content that speaks to that sell jewelry online intent. There’s lots of other keywords that mean the same things with that terms, maybe sell jewelry through E-commerce, sell necklaces online, sell rings online. All those types of keywords that mean the same thing will be on that page as secondary headlines throughout.

Here, the most important thing is, right away they’ve got you here under that backdoor and they’ve asked you to start your 14-day free trial today and asking you to get started. Now, this example is used, not only in B2C like it is here but also B2B. This is what a lot of the backdoor pages on a SaaS platform or B2B company might have.

In a lot of cases, they create pages like industry pages where, you may be selling accounting software for example. But you may say something … You may create a bunch of pages that say, “Accounting Software for Real Estate people.” “Accounting Software for …” I’m thinking accountants but it’s probably a bad idea but. “Accounting Software for Entrepreneurs.” And then, all those different keywords that you create. People would come in and the main point of that is for you to signup for a free trial.

On the other hand, that same B2B company might have a blog that just tells you a little bit about how to do accounting. What things you need to set up before you create your taxes at the end of the year. All of that stuff is very specific blog content that will bring you in slowly through top of funnel. But, it’s not intended at that time to really try to sell you on the Accounting Software right away.

Here’s another example, PetSmart. This works on E-commerce, as well. Here, they just … I picked a cat because I know Joanna’s so cat friendly. I’m more dog friendly but, whatever. Here I have the What you need to take care of my new cat. It’s a blog post. The point here, they want you to share it on Facebook and Pinterest. If they want you to subscribe for an email, if I were them, I’d make that known above the fold. But here again, it’s just making PetSmart a place that you can trust, that has authority and gives you information that you need.

Here we have a SEO Page. Now, SEO Pages can be just regular E-commerce pages also. But, they’re going after this interactive toys keyword. Now, they already have a page called Dog Toys, but they wanted to get even deeper. So, here they have interactive toys. They’ll have a list of all the different pages that they have. And then, they have a piece of content on the bottom that’s all about Interactive Dog Toys. Now, I’ll be nitpicky here. This isn’t the best SEO landing page because, you would want probably, about 500 to 700 words of content. You would want those secondary headings. I would probably add content above these different products. And then, on the bottom again, just to make sure I can breakup that content in different ways. And, I would make this a little bit more appealing and easy to buy. But, those are just me being SEO nitpicky. But still, in either case, this is still an SEO landing page because, it’s going after a very particular keyword with a certain user intent in mind.

So, this is the common scenario I have even as a client, when I was working in a company. I would come to my boss and I would be super excited and I will say, inside I feel like I’m always this lemon. I don’t know if anyone else feels that way. So, I’ll walk in super excited and I’ll be like, “I have this idea. I want to create SEO content pages. I think that they’re going to be not only, really useful for users to find us. But also, I Think that I can get them to really convert and get us more leads.” And, the boss will look at me and say, “Okay. But, I really like our blogs. And I’ve been reading articles that blogs are really, really important.” And then, the decision is made.

And like really, the CEO or stakeholder is really just trying to hold on for as long as he can on this blog idea that this is like the best possible route to take. And so, I usually just walk away in anger. But, over time and dealing with this over and over and having to write blogs that I really didn’t want to write. I mean, that’s for a lot of you copywriters out there. I’m not a skilled blog writer over time. I can do like, one or two but after like, about five. You’ve lost me, I have nothing else to write about.

So, the solution here was something I found actually, in Google Analytics, which was really exciting. It was called Content Groups. And what Content Groups allowed you to do, is group up pieces of content that are on your website and use them to compare how they do in terms of, conversions, average time on site because, sometimes you’ll have about 300 or even more than like, 20 pages on your website. And it’s really hard to see how they’re doing against each other. And it’s really hard to see the difference between your blog pages and, you’re SEO Pages. And sometimes people will think, “My blog pages are getting so much traffic. That must be more important.” But then, with Content Groups on Yahoo … I mean, not on Yahoo. On Google Analytics, you can see how the blog does in terms of, conversions, or how the SEO pages do in terms of, conversions. And at the end of the day, if your CEO is like any other CEO I’ve ever met in my life, and at the end even though they love blogs and they want to share, they really just want results at the end of the day.

So, I have this little walk through, I don’t know if it’s going to work on me. Of course not, because that’s just not the kind of day we’re having. But, I’ll share that link later. These are the steps … I knew that this would happen. So, these are the steps that you would do to make sure that it does … That you are getting everything that you can get from Content Groups. So first, you want to go and make sure that you have goals set up in analytics. And, the goal value can even be just $1 USD because, in some of the content, analytics reports … I don’t know if you’ve ever seen, they actually have page value as the last column. And, when you use that last column, you can compare how much value each page has depending on … Basically, let’s say someone went into the website and did the goal that you wanted them to do. That dollar goal value, will be spread across all the different pages that, that person went in to get to that last goal. So, you’ll be able to see, couple cents here. Couple cents there, through all the pages that they’ve moved through. Over time, you’ll see the most valuable pages in dollar amounts versus the other.

So, here we would try to do something like, create content grouping. Now, this is found in Admin under View, I think. And it’s called Content Group. And you would define different rules. So, you would say something like, all the pages that contain /blog and click Done. Then you would create another rule that says, all the pages that include, let’s say for the example that I had shown. It was a Psychology Clinic. So, we had certain SEO Pages that were setup that were therapies or, what was the other one? Treatments. So, those pages I consider to be my SEO Pages. So, I can create a rule that looks like this that says, all the pages that contain /therapies and all the pages that contain /treatments. And I would label it “SEO” and hit Done.

Now, the next one again, like I said, you would have blog. And then, you would do every page that contains Blog. So, once you’ve done this, you have to wait a little patiently, which it takes a while. So, this isn’t something that you’ll be able to go. “Aha.” To your boss the next day, who’s probably going to forget that this ever happened. But then, you can navigate to different sections, behavior site content all pages. Or behavior site content landing pages. And it would list all the different content groups that you have. So, you might have one that says “Blog” and you have one that says “SEO” and then, you’ll be able to compare things like page views, unique views, average time on page. And at the end of that, you’ll see things like conversions, conversion rate, and page value.

So, this is a really great way that I then can go back and say, “Okay, I know that you see blogs and I know that you see they get a ton of page views. But if we look at the value of the pages of the SEO is bringing. You can see that there’s all these conversions. All these leads that have come into the system. All these purchases,” if you’re an E-commerce company. And, you’ll be able to kind of, show him that you’re just as results focused as him or her is. I’m saying him because I had this just recently happen to me just a couple of days ago. So, I have it top of mind. But, him or her you can just tell them that, “I am as results focused as you. And, I think that this is the way that we should go.” And even though, you may have done a test with only five pages, from now on you want to prioritize the work that you do on SEO pages, over the pages that you may create for blog.

Now, I’m saying this as a disclaimer. Not in all cases, not all blogs or SEO pages are considered equal. You might find that in certain situations where, like Joanna, I wouldn’t know if because you have such a big brand. I don’t know if maybe, your blog does bring in more value than any of landing pages, or SEO landing pages that you can create. So, it’s a test that you would have to make. But, it’s a test worth trying out so that you can see if there’s opportunity in these different keywords. Main keywords or your secondary keywords.

So, the last step is just show your boss what’s up. And that’s me all the time, every time I get to say like, “I’m right here.” And, that’s all. That’s just a little tutorial of what you can do.

Thank you.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Thank you Tiffany, that was awesome. Oh, showing now on the screen as well. Sarah will chat that link out and then maybe we can talk a bit about FlowJo, but, that was awesome. I’m getting lots of kudos in chat, as well, so nice. Thank you so-

Tiffany daSilva:                     I’m not seeing you right now, because it makes me a little nervous, but I feel your love, and I’m going to take it.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Yes. Okay, cool, don’t. People are like, amazing, great stuff, bravo, thank you, great stuff, fantastic, so lots of amazingness. Now SEO was always something that other people did in organizations that I worked in, and so I’ve shied away also because it seems very like it’s constantly seeking and I could never possibly keep up with anything. So, I had a few basic questions and then we’ll get into … well, I’ll just ask one, but we have some here in Q&A, as well.

My first question was, I haven’t heard about the /sitemap page in a bajillion years. Are we still supposed to have one?

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yes.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Oh.

Tiffany daSilva:                     I’m teaching a course right now, and it’s still the first thing I teach. Sitemap and Robox text, and the way I look at it is that if let’s say that your website was a museum. When you walked into a museum, a really big one that you’ve never been to before, you need a map to tell you where to go. And, Google looks at it as, this is the map. Now I know, these are all the different areas I can go. Now, the Robox text file tells you where you can’t go. So, I think of it as that security guard that’s standing in front of that under construction place that’s just like uh-uh (negative), and on the Robots text, it tells you, “Here is the sitemap,” so that security guard is telling, you, “Okay, hold up. Here’s the sitemap. Go that way.” So that’s kind of a way to think about it, and it’s still really important to SEO today.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Fantastic. Thank you. I have what I need to do. It sounds like a big one. Okay, fine, but it’s worth it. Okay, one other question and then we’ll dive in. Sorry, but this is the copywriter in me. When I saw the SEO landing page for Shopify that was sell jewelry online and that was the headline, okay fine, great keyword phrase-

Tiffany daSilva:                     Oh, I knew this was coming.

Joanna Wiebe:                     What are your thoughts on, I’m not saying it’s even a sub-optimal headline, but what are your thoughts on keyword phrases and more optimized headlines on those landing pages?

Tiffany daSilva:                     If you feel like you have to, and you feel like it’s your brand and you want to stick with it, you can, but your H1 tag, no matter what, needs to be that main keyword that you’re bringing people in. Let’s say that you have that nice fancy heading that you want. You can make it big and you can make it in a paragraph tag, but underneath it, you should have the keyword that you want to go after and it should be held in by a H1 tag, to tell Google that this is the priority of the page, this is what the page is about.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Okay, and so I’ve heard before that you can put that keyword phrase at the front of the H1 and then put copy after that, like sell jewelry online with ease and skill, not that, that would be a good headline, but that you could do that. Is that still a thing, or would it just be better to say, “No, no, no, just stick with the pure keyword phrase as your H1 and don’t mess with it?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     Oh, no. If you can add more to the end, for sure, do it that way. That’s better probably, because that would bring people in, they would see that their keyword was whatever they searched in Google, they could see, okay, this is there right on the page, and so subliminally, they know they’re in the right place, and you’ve given them a little bit added touch to differentiate yourself between other brands.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Okay. Cool, cool, cool. All right, thank you, let’s dive into the questions. Kate asks, “For blogs and SEO, the pillar and spoke model is currently very popular and appears to be helpful with SEO. How are the SEO pages that we talked about much different from the pillar page for SEO?” Is that something you’re familiar with?

Tiffany daSilva:                     I don’t know what the pillar page is. Can they …

Joanna Wiebe:                     Yeah.

Tiffany daSilva:                     Sometimes there’s so many different words about SEO. One of the thing si realized when I started when I was a kid, and the realized SEO was a thing at 22, was that there’re so many technical words around SEO that it took me years to sound like an actual SEO even though I was engraved in it. If someone could describe what pillar and spoke is, like, it’s probably a normal thing.

Joanna Wiebe:                     If you want to add to otherwise and it feels like yeah, pillar and grouping are the same. I guess, you’re talking about what Google Analytics actually says in side GA. Outside of this concept of pillar and spoke.

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Okay. So, cool. Joey asks, “How many H1 and H1 tags should a page have?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     This is such a great question. Thank you for asking. The main rule, one H1 tag per page. There is one main idea on the page and you want Google to know what that is. A lot of pages … I use Screaming Frog, which is a great tool to use to be able to see all the H1s and H2s on a page. They actually will show you if there’s duplicate H1s on the page. So, I would make sure that doesn’t happen again. As far as H2 tags, I usually like two or three, and in those H2 tags I try to have secondary keywords within them. Not necessarily fancy language. I save that for H3 tags just to tell Google it’s less of a priority. I keep the H2 tags with any secondary keywords. As far as H3 tags are any of the other headings, you can have as many as you want. But, I would stick with one H1 per page and a couple of H2s.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Awesome. Anonymous asks, “How do you combine SEO content landing pages?” Like what you were saying. The blogs and the landing pages, “to attract traffic to your website to grow your list, but also try to get a paying customer?” So, you’re really talking about that with content grouping, right? But I also wondered, should I still have both? What should I prioritize? Should I still be creating a lot of blog posts? Or should I focus more on those SEO landing pages? So, think this is just like how do you … what’s the combination? Is there like and ideal formulae? Just [crosstalk 00:22:05].

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yeah. So, this is going to sound very intimidating. When a startup starts with me and they don’t have any pages, I usually try to get them to create 20 or 30 SEO landing pages on their site right away. So, 20 or 30 of the main keywords that people would possibly look up to get to their site. And that will live, not necessarily in the navigation, but it would live on the site. It would have the navigation of the site, but wouldn’t be included in it. You can see the example with the Shopify sell jewelry page. The navigation is there across the site, but you wouldn’t necessarily see sell jewelry, sell all those different things unless you looked at the site map. There’s that side of it. Once you create 20, or 30, you can wait and you can go on with your blogs for as long as you want until it’s time to create another big chunk.

I like to create, take a couple months within my year. Two or three months, and just head down, create as many of those content pages as you can. Five to 700 words each and then let them sit. A year later, I do the same thing. I do some keyword research. Find the keywords that I want to attack, and then do them again. The reason I do them all in one chunk is so that I can see … I just want to see that nice little blue … makes me look better as a consultant or as someone who’s managing SEO. You can do what you want in that way. As far as priority, I would say … I’m in SEO, obviously, but 70% of the time I would take would be on SEO landing pages versus blog.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Awesome. So, Leanna has a question around stages of awareness, and hopefully that’s cool. So, the question is, “I can think of SEO phrases for problem aware, solution aware, and even product aware. But can or would you create SEO pages for none problem aware. Is that even a thing?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     So, none problem aware, is they don’t know that they don’t have a problem and they don’t know that you exist.

Joanna Wiebe:                     I don’t know … talking about unaware. If Leanna is saying all the way back to unaware or if she’s saying also would you create … maybe you’re right. Okay. Go with what you’re [inaudible 00:24:17].

Tiffany daSilva:                     I’ll go with what I, maybe I’m going to hit it. In a lot of cases when people don’t even realize they have a problem, they might be looking up very basic questions. For example, I’m starting a business. I haven’t even realized that I don’t know what I don’t know yet, and there’s all these pieces to the business. I’m going to start looking up business 101. I’m [inaudible 00:24:41] how to start a business. I will look up very broad keywords and for me, I like to try with … I use a see-thing-do-care model on Google. The do is people are ready to buy. I start there, where people are ready to buy. Work my way back to that specific keywords that people would look for to find me but they don’t know I exist yet. So, do would be they’re looking at prices. They’re looking at comparisons between me and a brand. Think would be, if an email software company, they’re looking at email software. The see is they’re looking at their pin-point. So, can’t send email. Having problem with contacting my users. Whatever it is, I create pages there.

But I prioritize from bottom of the funnel up. That is even higher. With that I would look, in order to get content ideas, I would go and answer the public. You can put in the keyword and look at the questions that are being asked and create frequently asked questions or a resource center based on that.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Got it. Okay. Adam says, “Aren’t the best blogs at least mildly SEO driven though?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yeah, sure. If they’re like moz.com if they’re [inaudible 00:25:59] do a good job of it. But in most cases, no. I don’t even like to tell people to do it because I don’t want them thinking that they will. A lot of the companies I walk into, they’ll be like, “Don’t worry. We’ve been SEO in three years. We have our blog. We put the same keywords in all of them to make sure that everything is there.” For me I say, okay. Let’s say that someone was looking up … I’m trying to look … coffee cups. I want coffee cups that you’re selling. What if they show up on a blog all about the best coffee cups we’ve ever had in the history of our company? That’s not a very useful page, even though it’s really interesting. It’s not a useful page for someone how wants to actually buy coffee cups right now.

You want to make sure that you’re not necessarily using SEO keywords willy-nilly on your blog. It’d be great if you can capture their attention that way. Fine if they weren’t going to find you any other way. But, you really want to be able to capture their attention with that specific user intent in mind. And if your blog can do both, amazing. But in most cases, a lot of companies just don’t know how to … especially B2B, it’s really hard.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Yeah. As you’ve been answering, I love that you have the CRO background married with an SEO background. It’s so critical to think of both of those things and I find this easy to silo the two. Anyway, I’m just like, yeah. Nice. Anonymous asked a really basic question and maybe they joined late. But, “What is the difference between a landing page and SEO page?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     So, landing page is a generalized term. It’s any page that you want someone to land on … I would say to convert. It’s very specific based on user intent. The SEO page is a page that you make that has a navigation that you want organic traffic to come in through the back door. A PBC landing page would be something that doesn’t have a navigation to help you convert more effectively and you’re just sending page traffic to, and you’re probably not indexing it. Hopefully not indexing it on Google. Those are the differences between the two.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Awesome. Okay. I know we started-

Tiffany daSilva:                     [crosstalk 00:28:10] fire. I love this.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Are you still okay for time? Because we started-

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe:                     A little late … okay. Cool. Thank you. Okay. Adam asks, “How are you defining page value one more time, was it dollars per view or outbound link click?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     Okay. Say that again.

Joanna Wiebe:                     How are you defining page value? Is it dollars per view or outbound link click?

Tiffany daSilva:                     So, for this example, I use page value because that’s a section of Google analytics. It’s a column that you can find … and I’m so sorry that this didn’t work … but it’s a column that you would find in your all pages report that again uses your goal setup to show how much page value each has depending … you can put in that goal value, for every goal that you make, it’s worth $500 for you. Based on were that user goes along the site. That $500 will be distributed for every page they saw. So, over time, as hundreds of people come into your site, you’ll be able to see, which pages led to a conversion in a lot easier way than maybe looking at the flows. They have that flow view, which I still don’t understand to this day. I use page value instead.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Okay. Excellent. Awesome. Thank you. Sheila asks, “With the trend toward long form of story telling, couldn’t blogs be used to support your SEO to build trust, authenticity or robust examples as to why a person should select your product of service. It can also give you the content groups and fill out your consumers in the comment section of the blog?” So, you will take the first half of that around long form, doesn’t build trust and authenticity that leads ultimately to a sale.

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yes. In the perfect world you would want to be able to tell a story and hopefully grab them that way. What I found is … and I’ve tested different types of SEO landing pages, and I find that if someone is coming in under a very specific keyword, especially ones like E-commerce software or whatever, they just … they almost know exactly what they want. So, a story might not be exactly what they need at that point. So, you have to really test the types of content you create for these because you don’t want to necessarily give them an experience that is just too much for them at the time. Sometimes you just want to come in see E-commerce software. It does this, this and this. They see, to be legit with the logos that they have. Okay, I’m going to click to start-up.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Okay. Cool. And I think that if people have to choose, because not everybody has unlimited resources. If you have to choose if you’re going to write a log post, that’s a long form, or you’re going to put together a landing page, an SEO landing page, one of those is much easier, if I agree than the other. And it’s not the blog post, so, yeah. Okay.

Anonymous says, “What about when you need to delete SEO pages, will that ding you?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yes. So, you want to take any page that you delete and redirect it to a page not like … I would say to redirect it to a page that has the same intent. So, for the Dog Toys example I showed you, if we deleted interactive toys, we would to send them back to Dog Toys. A lot of people will take every 404, every broken page and just redirect it back to the homepage. But if that was ranking, and someone came in expecting interactive toys and they saw a bunch of pictures of like a dog, a cat, a lizard, and all these things, then they’re just going to bounce out. So, it’s not going to help your SEO at all. So, you want to make sure you’re giving them the right experience based on the keyword.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Awesome. Steward says, “I don’t recall the reference here but I’m, maybe … Tiffany mentioned 500/700 word of content statistic. Could you expand on the importance of that?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yeah. So, that’s just a number that’s been thrown around in the SEO circle for years. It’s just kind of, you don’t want just a little blurp of content because there’re so many other sites out there who are creating SEO landing pages with a lot of content and Google is going to prioritize more content over less. When I try to ask customers or our clients to create content pages for me, I always say minimum 500, maximum maybe around 700 to even 1,000. Best practice. If made up by someone.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Kim says, “Great stuff. Thank you. When you tend to include …” I don’t know what these is. These I assume is landing pages. Let’s go with that. “So, would you tend to include these in the primary nav where they’re purely for search or be based on page performance?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yeah. So, I don’t add them to the primary navigation unless they would speak to the user experience of someone coming right into your homepage if those pages would make sense. Sometimes when we do industries or cities for example, actually city pages are a good example. I could have people coming in to my homepage and looking up my SEO services for example. But, they would have a list of … if my navigation had all the pages that I promote, you might see cities and see like SEO out of Toronto. SEO out of San Francisco. SEO out of this. For you that would be a horrible user experience. You’re like, “Who is this nut case?”

But if you take that out of the navigation and have a back door and use your site map or even a file like Shopify had a nice example like a /site map, then it’s another way for Google to find it still.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Okay. We’ve 35 questions remaining. So, let’s cap it off at five more minutes thank you Tiffany, and then people can-

Tiffany daSilva:                     I love it.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Of course, you do. People can follow up with you maybe separately and we can tell them how to contact you. But, Carol asks, “Could a blog page also just be your SEO landing page? Is there ever a case where that’s possible?”

Tiffany daSilva:                     You can have your whole blog just be SEO landing pages. I tend to do that just because I’m lazy and I don’t want to make page templates with the stuff I have. There’s a few issues with that. Number one, if you have blog.domain.com, you won’t get as much value as if something was living right on your sub-domain. You can change that by maybe having your domain/blog but again, you’re moving all of your content down a level. So, I try not to use a blog for that reason. But, it’s still totally acceptable.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Jenifer asks, “What is the growth box that Sarah is talking about?” Interesting segue.

Tiffany daSilva:                     I know.

Joanna Wiebe:                     So, tells us about FlowJo.

Tiffany daSilva:                     FlowJo. FlowJo was an idea I came up with after working in a lot of companies and managing a lot of teams. Whenever someone came to us because they had a big goal like, we need to grow 100% month over month or something. I would ask people for ideas and they would immediately leave their desk. Go to the desk. Start searching a bunch of articles. Read all these tactics. Get super overwhelmed, and then come back three hours later and be like, “I’ve got nothing.” I got really frustrated. I wrote all the ideas I had on index cards, and I said, “Do not check the internet until you use these cards.” And I found when people started using the cards and actually go walking away from the computer and thinking about things in a more tactile way, they started actually getting more results because they had this one idea that they can move along with them, and moved from there.

I created FlowJo. It’s a box of cards that have ideas of how to grow your business from brainstorming new ideas to acquiring customers, converting, retaining, cashing out and the box is divided into things to do, doing, done, because I’m really crazy about organization as you can see. It allows you to help stay organized. Recently I had someone I know in Staples, Canada, and they used it in their meetings on Monday mornings to try to figure out what kind of ideas they have for that week. It’s been really cool to see it be used out in the world.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Love it. That’s amazing. People can get that at the link that Sarah chatted out.

Sarah Dlin:                              Somebody says it’s sold out. When do you have more?

Tiffany daSilva:                     It is? Okay. So, if you’re in the US you can go on amazon.com and find them there. I will try to see if I can open it up and send some boxes in the next … if it’s sold out, I’m sorry. I don’t know how that happened. I will fix it.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Good. Okay. So, how long is … there’s a coupon code that’s there that Sarah chatted as well. How long is that good for?

Tiffany daSilva:                     Forever.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Or when they’re back in stock they can use it?

Tiffany daSilva:                     Yes.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Okay.

Tiffany daSilva:                     I will try to put it through and I’ll make use that you’ll have boxes. How’s that?

Joanna Wiebe:                     Yay. That’s awesome. Fantastic. So, I think we’re tapped out on the questions here. I mean, there’re 36 still left. If you’ve got nothing else to do for the rest of the day …

Tiffany daSilva:                     I don’t know.

Joanna Wiebe:                     But where can people learn from you, follow up with you, all that good stuff Tiffany?

Tiffany daSilva:                     Sure. The best way is to reach me @bellastone on twitter. And you can write to me at tiffany@flowjo.co or go to the site flowjo.co to learn more about the box.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Yay. Thank you so much. I’m so glad that the computer issue has got resolved.

Tiffany daSilva:                     And everything came alive again.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Yes. That’s awesome. For everybody else, this recording will be of course available in our libraries. If you missed anything or you want to go back and see like, “What did she say about that again?” Go in and watch that replay. Tiffany thank you for joining us today. It’s great seeing you.

Tiffany daSilva:                     Thank you. Thank you for all the great questions.

Joanna Wiebe:                     Thanks everybody. We’ll see you in our next tutorial Tuesday. Have a good day guys. Bye.

 

Get our new articles, videos and event info.

Join 89,000+ fine folks. Stay as long as you'd like. Unsubscribe anytime.