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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
(00:00):
One of the questions that I get all the time is around SEO and, and how much content do I need to put out. And I need more organic leads and organic traffic. And it's like a nightmare to feel these kind of questions over and over again, because everybody thinks you've gotta do a ton of stuff. You have to produce all kinds of things. And when you actually think about grouping your content into really, really smart clusters, you're able to do so much with so little. And so in today's episode, I'm actually giving you a, a snippet from a, a paid workshop that I did going into topic clusters and pillars, and how you plan this information. I think it's really, really valuable stuff. My name is John Aikin. I'm the CEO of Web Canopy Studio, and this is the website conversion show,
(00:46):
But the topic clusters are gonna be the organic traffic portion. How are we going to generate net new visits over time organically? And ultimately what we wanna do is own the search engine result page. So if someone's looking up you know SAS marketing agencies, what I want them to do is find two blogs by web canopy studio. And then I want them to find our homepage or maybe a series of videos we produced, and then they can find the Wikipedia article. They can find a HubSpot article, but then I want them to find another blog post by webcam. The studio Google already thinks like this, right? So Nike shoes is, is the example here. Google's already thinking in this format. So when you type in anything, you get the entire list of what the, the other popular search terms are around that.
(01:33):
So if I type in Nike shoes, I'm getting for men, for women on sale 2018 for girls basketball, baseball, the solution is to provide valuable content in a way that people will naturally want it. So people have to be able to find content that is similar in nature to what they're looking for. And then they can go deeper when they're ready. And so what we wanna do is organize content in a way that helps people move in a natural buying cycle, awareness, consideration, and decision without being over the top salesy, like what we just went through in, in that diagram of our sales funnel or our marketing funnel. And so we're going to group content together in pillars or topic cluster. We have this little oval with a triangle in the middle of it, and we're gonna call this our main topic or our core topic.
(02:16):
And so this is gonna be something that is a service or a problem that your clients have, or it's a product that, that you're selling then around that we have these subtopics. So they're relevant, but they're not maybe as heavily searched as the core topic. There's something that is a little bit more secondary than what that core topic might be. For example, or inbound marketing is a core topic for one of our company's topic, clusters, inbound marketing services inbound marketing agency. They might be subtopics that are coming out of that core topic. And then off of that, we have blog content. So we're gonna use those subtopics to come up with the kind of blogs that we wanna be generating. So using that same Nike example, I'm gonna say running shoes is the core topic. Then we have to come up with our subtopics and we're gonna say, like running a marathon trail, running track shoes, running gear, men's running shoes, women's running shoes.
(03:15):
They don't have to be exactly the same as running shoes, which was the core topic, but they're very relevant and they're coming up with information. That's gonna be pertinent to the topic and then stemming off of that, we have blog posts. So there's a, there's how we're using that content, those subtopics to create really valuable content that's relevant, that's search friendly, and it's using the terms in a way that's very natural, the best women's running shoes of 2018 running a marathon, get this gear three secrets to improving your trail running. So we're using those subtopics to generate our blog topics. Does that make sense? And then you simply replicate that process for all the different kinds of pillars that you need are topic clusters that you need. And I'm good. I I'll go into more details here as well, but so for Nike, they might have team uniforms, sports training, clothing, workout, accessories, basketball shoes.
(04:07):
So, and in every different kind of group that they need to have. And then they're given all of this blog content to run off of. This is how they're gonna plan, what kind of content they're gonna be producing in an editorial calendar or a blog publishing schedule. We use the SCM rush keyword magic tool to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us. And it will show you all those, but it also shows you the search volume, the difficulty of ranking for that. And so it's, it's telling you, these are the similar things that people are searching for relevant to what you're typing in. You're gonna plug the core topic in, and then you're gonna see what other terms are performing well based off of that inside the magic tool. And then you simply make a list of the ones that you want to export, and then you're gonna make a master spreadsheet of all of that information.
(04:48):
You, you can just export from the keyword magic tool directly to a spreadsheet, which is helpful. It's a little bit in the weed. So if I'm losing you, you have questions or you you're completely lost flag me down. That's a screenshot down at the bottom of what the keyword magic tool looks like. So this was one for us. We were looking at sales and marketing, and we're simply saying, like for this example, sales and marketing, we added that to our list had 2,400 searches and marketing versus sales came up. We added that to our list, had 880 searches. So that allows us to find the specific term and see what, what, what else we're we could be relevant for. So here we go again, we have the, the funnel, we have our, our topic cluster. So how do we path content to that? And I would start something like this.
(05:34):
I would write the majority of your blog posts around that top of funnel content, because that's how people are gonna find you. I think that's where you spend a lot of your time and energy in writing content as top of funnel, then you're gonna use a little bit more of your content or a little bit less of that content towards middle of funnel. We're currently building out an entire new blog section of our website called case studies. And it's not gonna be gated. It's just information that people can digest and their actual blog posts. And then at the very bottom, we use a small percentage of those blogs and actually write bottom of funnel information. Here's why we are better than another agency. Here's why we'll save you so much more money than doing this. In-House, here's why you need to choose web canopy studio.
(06:16):
So very small amount of the content is gonna be about that, but it's still important and we're still gonna make sure it exists. Some examples, high level introduction to topic for top of funnel. So blogs that are like, what is, and why those are really good topics for top of funnel content, middle of funnel are gonna be more tactical. It's gonna be processing stuff, and they're gonna include things like strategies and tips. Bottom of funnel is gonna be about why work with web canopy studio. And then it's gonna say, have, have information around scarcity and case studies to talk about that bottom of funnel interaction and why, and case studies could also be up in the middle of funnel as well. But that bottom of funnel scarcity, what's gonna happen. If you don't work with us, what's gonna happen. If you don't or what's at risk, if you run this inhouse kind of stuff, and then we get into offers, what are the offers that you can do again for top of funnel checklist, quizzes, high level things are really good.
(07:13):
Interactive is really good. I think the more that you could do that, people engage with you the better. When you get into middle of funnel, you run into tangible assets templates, step by step guides, tutorials, things like that. And then the bottom of funnel stuff is literally actual phone calls, consultations, demos, one-on-ones assessments and things like that. And we have this idea of a pillar page. So remember we have that core topic in the middle of the diagram and that core topic has to exist somewhere. It can't just be a core topic that has to be an actual page. And that pillar page is intended to be a very long form piece of content. It's a it's not something that is just an 800 word blog post, or a thousand word blog post pillar pages can be, you know, 3000, 5,000, even 10,000 word pages.
(08:03):
They are extensive. They are very, very resourceful and they answer the questions. It should be the go-to guide. Your pillar page should be the go-to guide for what it is you're offering. You wanna make sure you're describing the, what of your pillar topic, the why, why is this important? Why is it needed the, how, how to get involved, become active and how to do, and then details list as much information as you can about the topic. A really good way to come up with pillar topics is, or, or we call 'em chapters on the pillar page. What should you include in there? Look at the subtopics that you've you've chosen that they get a high search volume already. So if you're subtopics can act as also the same kind of chapters, you not only have another piece of information to write and to read about that, that pillar chapter, you also have a, a blog post that's relevant to that same chapter as well. So you have additional information and then of course, all those blogs have to link back to that pillar page.
(09:02):
There you have it. At the end of each episode, I like to give a recap of some of the major takeaways and having gone over this a ton with clients and with staff, and just thinking through the best ways to get the right kind of traffic to your website, that workshop was a really, really great synopsis of that little snippet inside of there. And so, again, it's not about all doing all these things and all this kind of stuff that you have to be creating at all the time. It's about doing stuff in a smart way. Okay? And so if we can zero in on core topics, what are the core pieces, the main pillar pieces that we can produce, what's that pillar topic. And then we start to expand and think about what are those subtopics around that core topic. Right now we're able to start getting into really cool content pieces and honestly, quite easy to produce if you do it the right way.
(09:50):
And then lastly, we're gonna group that content together and we're gonna allow it to scale and to grow with us. I think that's it. If you guys have any questions, let me know if you have not done so yet, please go to webcanopystudio.com/assessment, take the website, conversion assessment. I promise you are not gonna regret it. This is, it's a 30 question quiz. It's really, really awesome. It gives you all these different pieces of your website conversion, and you're basically asked to evaluate yourself and how you're performing. And once that's done, you're given a score on each section, how well you perform, where you need to think about maybe focusing a little bit more a checklist on how to do that and all kinds of other resources. So check it out. Webcanopystudio.com/assessment. I think that's it. We'll see you next time. Thank you.