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In the first episode of Grow and Convert Marketing Deep Dives, our new series, where we go in-depth on marketing and business topics, we discuss:
- The backstory behind Pain Point SEO
- What Pain Point SEO is (and is not)
- Both B2C and B2B examples of how we've applied it to clients or other companies
- Common Objections that we hear about our process (and our answers to them)
- And how we'd get started
Sorry about the audio quality in our first episode! It gets better starting at the next one!
We share our thoughts and ideas on how to grow a business.
_
All right.
So this is going to be our first episode
are we even calling it episodes?
Our first video slash podcast episode,
where we just deep dive into some of the stuff
we've talked about and appropriately, I want to
do this first one on pain point SEO.
Pain point SEO is is a term we coined.
Um, and even though
we in the article, it says last modified
in 2022, I went back and WordPress and it was
published in 2018 around this time, I think around August.
So we're doing this about four years later, which is kind of crazy.
It has search volume.
So here's what we're going to do by the way,
in this we're projecting our screen and doing
this on zoom.
For YouTube.
And if, when we turn it into a podcast, Benji, what we can do is just try to
like, talk about what we're showing so that it's useful.
If you want to listen to it in the car, you
know, while you're working out, whatever, this
is great, people will learn about pain point SEO, a lot of their work.
Now.
So four years later it has search volume,
according to clear scope, which is pretty cool.
Um, I could bring that up.
I think it's like 20 volumes or something, according
to Clearscope and let's see pain point SEO.
I'm going to verify as 20
monthly searches.
And so let's, let's just talk about it.
And I think we've learned a lot about
how to do this in the four year since, with,
I don't know, dozens of clients and hundreds of these pieces, the foundational
I was going to say.
I think when we first wrote this, we didn't
even have real client examples to put in the
blog posts we had to use hypothetical's, so
yeah, we've learned a ton and we've written up a
bunch of case studies since proving pain point
SEO works for a bunch of our clients actually for
all of our clients.
And if you are listening to this on podcast
or whatever, and you want to read the article,
just Google pain point SEO and frustratingly to
us, don't click on there's some other results that may
not be ours, looks like on the one that says grow and convert.
And then there's also, if you Google pain point SEO
Leadfeeder that Leadeeder article does that, does that
work?
Let's test it pain point SEO
Leadfeeder that article tells the founding story, content
marketing case study, how we scaled Leadfeeder's thing to this,
that and the other.
So you said we didn't have find examples.
That's true.
But at the same time,
I think we published this one right after we
publish the foundational article on pain point SEO.
We published Leadfeeder right after?
I believe so.
Yeah.
So how we discovered this is through working with
clients at that time, Leadfeeder but not just Leadfeeder.
And it was when we first started the agency,
we kind of intentionally were quote unquote, not an
SEO agency.
We shied away from SEO.
We did those stories.
So stories would be like, you know, some marketing
software like Leadfeeder is you can read about it
if you Google that, but it's like ,you know,
software to give you some more in-depth analytics
on who's visiting your website.
And so we'd be like, okay, like they're targeting
startups and CMOs and marketing teams.
And so the content we did was like interviewing
some famous marketer at so-and-so.
Like, I think we have an article for some
client back in the day where we interviewed Rand
Fishkin, formerly applause and all these
people, and we would get their insight.
And those did well from a community, social media, like traffic perspective.
Yeah traffic.
And then who was it then?
It was the Leadfeeder CEO.
We had a conversation and he was just like,
well, the stories are great and they're generating
traffic, but what are you going to do about the
SEO side of things?
And we had just had this long conversation.
And so we started testing some SEO pieces
and a few months down the road just realized that
they were converting at a way higher level
than any of the pieces that we had previously done
for them.
Well, not any of the pieces.
I think we had tested a couple SEO pieces
for them, but majority of the stuff that we
were doing was this top of funnel stories.
That would be interesting to, marketers.
Well, most people would just call it thought leadership.
It was just, it was stories that we would want
to read as marketers of how someone accomplished
something in the marketing industry, grew
traffic to their site or did something like that.
Yeah.
And, and so that's like how Rand Fishkin
grew Moz from XYZ, but when you stop and think
about it in hindsight now that, you know, pain
point SEO, you're like, yeah, why would that bring
in trials and signups for Leadfeeder that has nothing to do with it.
It's just an interesting marketing story, but that's
what kind of everyone does, but they don't even do
the interviews with interesting people.
They do this kind of top of the funnel content
marketing with just like ultimate guides and 10
tips and trends and marketing and marketing analytics.
And then you sit down and measure it and you're
like, well guys, why isn't the blog generating
any leads?
It's because the act of reading posts like
that does not indicate that the reader is at all
ready, willing, or even in the market for that
piece of software, the company who's blogging, it lives
on.
Right.
And what we noticed, there's another example that
you didn't mention that I have a vague memory of,
although I have the memory of a small
rodent is some survey monkey alternatives.
Didn't we do that.
I
Somehow I have a memory of survey monkey
alternatives and then code mentor or something.
We did another one where we happened to do some of these.
Serendipitous kind of comparison posts?
No, there, there was there, there was a survey tool.
It was either survey monkey or one of the other survey tools like Typeform.
Yeah,
Wait a minute.
Like when we mentioned the leads were like this
random, you know, alternatives to blah, blah, blah tool
is converting like crazy way more than any of the other ones and surprise.
It's a lot easier to produce that because you
don't have to go like emailing famous people to
ask them to be interviewed for this blog post for one of your clients.
And so I think slowly, slowly like that and the Leadfeeder CEO.
Yeah.
He, he asked us and
we were like, okay, let's do more of these.
This started to coalesce.
It has been four years since that.
But that's the basic idea is most marketers approach,
content marketing, most content marketers, approach it from, I'm
going after traffic.
If they're doing it from an SEO perspective, it means
type in something like marketing analytics, software marketing
analytics hit enter into a keyword research
tool and then go high volume to low volume.
Like, and then you get on Twitter and you brag
about how much traffic you're getting for your
clients.
Look at this search console graph.
Look at my client's GA graph, but no one is measuring the leads.
And when we measured, the leads were like, oh, the
vast majority aren't converting the, the screenshot I'm
projecting now for those that are not going
to watch the video, it shows an example of that,
of like a landing pages, reporting GA a
bunch of URLs that we've blurred out a bunch of
traffic.
And we noticed that the, that the conversion
rate on the right side to sign up are these
minuscule numbers 0.02% , .04%, ,.04%, .08%.
And you're just like, why would I invest in this when
I can invest in lead generating channels?
So
pain point SEO is hold up before you decide
to write content based on the general topic area
of the company or the product first figure out
what are the pain points of the prospects that end up converting?
What do they ask?
What are they looking for?
Right at the time they sign up, upgrade to
paid, join, whatever it is to get that information
from within their brains.
How do you do that?
You ask people in the company, so you could
be listening to this as an in-house marketer
or an agency or a freelancer agency, freelancer,
you have to interview people inside.
If you're an in-house content marketer,
you still have to interview people inside.
They're just your coworkers, right?
And it's typically who?
Sales or whoever is interacting directly with the customer.
And you ask them that like,
what else are these people considering?
What questions do they ask when they're looking?
You know, what questions do you get that
is indicative of a client that you think is going
to close, or a prospect you think is going
to close versus who are the tire kickers?
What else am I missing?
what's the key value proposition or value propositions of your product?
Why is your product better than any of the alternatives?
What are the key features that people are
coming in for, and then use inside of the product?
So, you know, if you were to produce a piece
of content on, let's say X feature, that's
the thing that most people sign up for.
And so you can find keywords that are around that as well.
Yeah.
And the idea is, now, if you, you do your keyword research,
looking for things that map to those pain
points, those features those things that
via your conversations with sales or whoever is close to that
are indicative of someone who's ready to sign up.
So that flips it.
You're now prioritizing your content on conversion potential,
which like, it seems like a shock because people, despite
this being done for four years, we still get pushback on social.
Sometimes, you know, people are just like, are we just see let's put it that
Way.
Even from clients and prospects
Are like, no, we don't want to be too salesy.
Like give, you know, the content should be
about educating and giving and giving and giving.
And you're like, that's fine.
I see, I see the point of that.
But if there are search terms in Google that the
act of Googling, it means they're literally looking
for your product or service now, or your client's product or service.
Now, why the hell would you not rank for those?
Well, I would also argue that if someone's searching
for a lot of these keyword terms, alternatives to
X service lists any of this best product, why wouldn't you sell it in there?
You're educating at a different stage in the funnel.
It's like getting on a phone with a salesperson
and the sales person explaining to you the key
benefits of the product, why you should use this product over anyone else.
It's the same kind of thing.
Just translated into content.
And so I would argue you are educating people.
You're just educating people who are more ready
to buy than just these general top of funnel terms.
Yeah.
I mean, it's said another way, what you're
saying is, and if you write on these bottom of
the funnel terms, you can throw out the, like,
don't be too salesy out the window because you
know, so what I'm doing right now is I'm projecting
this five bullet point thing in the middle
of pain point, SEO, where we say the content frameworks
we've found are the highest converting for SEO
content.
Okay.
And I'll go over these in detail, but to complete Benji's point, um,
some of the examples are like, again, best marketing
analytics software, best small business accounting software.
If you sell a small business accounting software, some
alternative to QuickBooks, and you're trying to rank for
best small business accounting software,
you need to sell your accounting software.
You don't do the thing that like normal content marketing.
What is the truism of like, give, give, give some
Gary Vaynerchuk thing where you're like, don't ask
or whatever don't ask for the sale.
No, they're literally looking for software, they're comparing stuff.
And so you need to sell that's the bulk of your blog posts.
Um, and then surprise when you do that, you rank
for something that indicates they're looking for small
business accounting software, and then your blog
post is about how you make one of the best small
business accounting softwares.
You're probably going to sell accounting software.
It's going to actually convert.
Um, so these five
frameworks that we wrote into the post are number one, comparison posts.
So that's like
quick QuickBooks versus zero versus FreshBooks do
use my accounting thing continue to best the best, you know,
or X software type posts.
Those are like small business accounting software, best accounting
software, small business, those kinds of permutations where they're
literally just like looking for that thing.
And by the way, I'm using software, I'm about
to give some we're about to go through some
examples about like a D2C
Tea e-commerce company.
This works for anything.
We've done this for services.
We've done this for ourselves.
We've done this for non-software, um, like marketplaces, whatever.
I'm just using that as an example, alternatives, we
talked about that, you know, survey monkey alternatives, blah,
blah, blah.
They're kind of in the same group as comparison kind of.
And then, um, pricing, we'll skip over that for a second.
And then, and then this last category,
which is kind of in, a tier by its own, which
is we called it in the post product or service use cases.
What I call it internally is like how to,
and this is really where the pain points begin.
So if you read this post, I want, are you an easy way to think about it as
frameworks, 1, 2, 3, and four comparison, best alternatives
and pricing, you can bucket them into mentally.
All of this is subjective, right?
Like the point is just write on stuff that's going to convert.
But these mental frameworks help bucket them into,
like, these are the extreme bottom of the funnel, or
like really bottom of the funnel, which is like, they're
looking, they're just typing in like small business
accounting software.
Doesn't even a pain point.
That's like a solution.
That's a difference between how to stop a headache and Googling Tylenol, right?
Like Tylenol is not the pain point.
Like they already know.
And they're looking for the solution.
Those are obviously the highest converting.
If you are doing content marketing, you're serious about it.
And you think I want my content marketing to
generate leads and sales and you are not somehow
targeting and trying to rank for those
and those keywords exist and they have volume.
You're doing it wrong.
I don't know what to tell you.
Right?
Those are like, you absolutely must.
Then you can bucket one and three comparison and
alternatives as kind of the, like in that category
as another sub category kind of equal, which then
instead of Tylenol, if you are Tylenol, it's people
writing like Advil alternatives, aspirin alternatives, or whatever.
Right.
Um, and, and those are like this versus that.
So the accounting example would be like
QuickBooks versus zero accounting or whatever.
And you're some other like third-party entrant into the accounting sphere.
That is also a very high converting type of keyboard
because they know two competitors they're looking to
compare.
They're like ready, right.
This isn't like, wait, we have to drip
them nurture the lead, none of that stuff.
And then number four articles, talk about pricing.
We included that.
That's kind of more of an enterprisey thing.
Um, Benji, do you want to explain that
The example that I gave it is just if,
if you had like a demo based product that
didn't display pricing on their site, and
I would say this has changed a lot because I would
say a lot more companies are transparent in their pricing now, but.
There historically, there were a lot of companies
that didn't share the pricing publicly.
If you were a competitor to that company
and you had a ballpark of the pricing, one of
the key, search queries that a lot of people
enter in is just that company name and pricing,
because they're interested in getting a ballpark price
and the company doesn't display it anywhere on their site.
And so you could potentially own a pricing query
for one of your competitors, if that was something
that they chose not to display.
So just another way of kind of owning that conversation
and steering people towards your product.
And I think that's also very bottom of the funnel.
If they're literally looking for like a competitor's
pricing, they're pretty deep in, right.
They're ready to buy then comes number five.
And in my personal opinion, again, this is all slicing hairs to finding stuff.
But in my opinion, and the way I like to think about it is that's the real pain
point SEO, right?
Cause that's the
pain point.
Just uncovering all the different things that someone
would search for to find a solution to their problem.
That's the way that you can think about it.
And I think the examples that we're about to share really shine a light on us.
And that's when the number of keywords expand.
So to kind of jump ahead a little bit, one
of the objections we're going to talk about
is like, well, what if I don't have a
lot of these or whatever, cause I'm in some
new niche that may be true for some of
the best, like I'm using things that there's a
ton of players in like accounting software as an example.
But you may be in a more like other niche.
And we're gonna talk about some of those examples in a second.
Usually the pain points, number five, that's
not going to be limited because there's going to be a
ton of how to do X.
How do I accomplish this?
What do I do about this?
The simple example, the headache example was like
what to do about a headache, where do headaches come
from?
There's I haven't even looked at keyword research
for headaches, but I'm going to roll with that example.
There's probably a ton of headache queries, right.
Even after you've completed like ibuprofen alternatives or whatever.
Um, so let's get into, so, so I think we should, you should work your way up in
that way.
Um, do the absolute, this is going to convert.
They're looking for our solution.
Make sure you are ranking for that.
Or you have an entrance into that competition to rank for that.
Like you've produced an article that you're trying
to rank for that otherwise, like what are you doing?
Yeah.
And one thing I'll say with the point number
two, so the best product or service list is
it's not only just your category name.
Um, so oftentimes people are looking for software
that can do X or some feature inside of your
software and you should also rank for that.
And then every variation or synonym that someone would have for your category.
If you're a SaaS company, it would be feature
and then software added onto it so that you
know, that people are looking for a software solution to that problem.
Um, but we'll go into specific examples that kind of shine that on us.
All right.
So since we've used a bunch of hypothetical examples
from B2B and accounting and all this boring stuff,
let's talk about Nat Eliason using pain
point SEO on his tea, um, brand cup and leaf is
an e-commerce store.
They sell a bunch of like tea, so you get bags of tea.
Um, and I'm projecting now for those that
can't see like that he wrote a case study
It's not bags.
It's loose leaf.
That was, excuse me.
That was, yeah.
I'm not a tea person.
It's loose leaf.
All good
Apologies to our
I'll excuse you,
Uh, to our British, uh, listeners and employees.
Um, so it's an article you can Google
like Nat pain point SEO and it will show up
towards the top.
Um, and what he said, or maybe you can
tell the story cause he talked to you about
it, right?
Yeah.
I chatted with him.
Yeah.
We used to have calls all the time and
he, when he was explaining what he was doing
with, Cup and Leaf he was just saying he
was growing traffic a lot, but not getting a
lot of conversions.
So we were just chatting about pain point SEO.
And historically what he had done is gone
after a lot of these high volume queries.
So for example, green tea shot, was something that he ranked for.
Another thing that he ranked for was like Green
tea side-effects and I think green tea recipes
and things like that.
He was growing traffic a ton, as you can
see from some of the screenshots above in the
blog posts, but he wasn't getting many sales from them.
And so
Let me give an example to read it out
loud of that in the article, it says green
tea side-effects brought in over 60,000 visitors
in the last three months and $0 in sales
would brag about that.
So when we were just looking at some of
the keywords and just kind of looking through a
site together, what we, what we realized is just,
he didn't really have any buying keywords that he
was ranking for.
So he's selling a loose leaf tea, but then
he is ranking for things like green tea, side
effects or green tea shot, which has no indication
that someone actually wants to buy green tea.
So just challenged him to kind of relook
at it through the pain point SEO framework.
And then he started writing articles and trying
to rank for terms like best oolong tea, best green
tea.
So again, if you just think about the mindset
of a customer, someone is trying to find a
new tea brand or a new tea product that
they can buy, which changes the intent a lot.
And so after he started ranking for these
things, I think the stats are above, but his sales
started skyrocketing.
Oh yeah.
And then, so those are, those are the best
tea ones, but then we started getting into,
Oh, hang on.
So for, his thing, tea there's like a couple bagillion right?
Because it's so happens unlike software, like what
I'm showing right now on the screen, best green tea ,
best oolong tea, best black tea, best white tea best how do you pronounce this?
Rubois tea, best herbal tea, best
pu-
ehr
tea people are
Really fancy best tea in the world, best Jasmine tea.
And so it's just like, I think for B2C a lot of B2C
There's a lot, there's a lot more keywords for sure, for B2C
companies.
And I think about that in contrast to the two
counterexamples green tea side effects, you may think
now, come on, like they're Googling green tea, side effects.
Some fractionals people want team, do they,
you got 60,000 visitors and $0 in sales.
Maybe those people took some green tea and
like, or are, are doubtful, or they have a headache
or something like that.
Or, and then green tea shot.
I don't know what the hell that is.
But the screenshot from Google that he showed
natural in the article, it a green tea shot includes
peach schnapps, Jamison sour mix, lemon, lime soda,
and then ice cubes, meaning I'm not even sure that
has anything to do with green tea, but just be called the green tea shot.
And they were getting a bunch of traffic for that.
Versus if you're Googling best green tea, you want to buy tea.
Sorry.
Continue.
So then
All good.
So, so then going into, so that would be
the number two example that we had shared in
the post, but this would be now we're getting
into more of the number five example, whereas the
different use cases.
And so some of these different teas have different benefits.
And so oftentimes people are drinking tea for a certain reason.
Maybe they're trying to come off coffee or they're
trying to lose weight or they're having sleeping issues.
And so there's all these different search terms
around, um, some of these pain points that people are
trying to solve a problem for.
So for example, in the post, we talk about
best tea for weight loss, best tea for sleep,
best tea for an upset stomach, best tea
for a cough best tea for a cold best tea
for stress.
And so if you have a lot of this product
knowledge about which tea would be best for
all these different purposes, then you can now
write blog posts that go after some of these various
search terms and explain how someone could solve
one of these problems with a certain type of tea.
And so that was another approach he took to,
to expand the amount of keywords that he could
go after and help people solve problems with this product.
Yeah.
And then, um, the next part of the post
is ties to what we just said also earlier,
which is now when you are ranking for things
where people are looking for tea you, it makes
sense to link to the tea that you can buy on your tea site.
Right.
So then you don't need to do this whole like,
no, no don't sell content marketing thing.
You're like, Nope, I'm going to sell because they're literally looking for tea.
Um, So, and then he talks about, he shows
examples of like inside his posts, links to the
tea that you can buy, um, from his site.
And there's a bunch of, um,
screenshots and analytics about, uh, traffic growth
and also of course, lead growth that he thought from it
or in this case not lead.
So,
yeah.
So that's the B2C example, um, we can do B2B,
shall we do, uh, uh, let's do, we're going to publish.
So this blog post is literally in the works
of being published as we are recording this.
Um, and the title is how to do B2B content marketing without domain expertise.
And here it is about a client we worked with for awhile called rainforest QA.
So shift your mental thing from something easy to
understand, like tea um, to something very nerdy, which
is QA
software QA, starting for standing for quality assurance.
So for those that aren't familiar, this is don't worry.
It's not going to get super technical, any website
or software company when they release new code or
push something live, they have to QA it, meaning
they have to like test whether it's buggy or
not.
That's basically all you need to understand the typical that's not true.
I'm gonna explain more, the typical way to do that is like coders code,
these programs.
That basically pretend to go through the
software and like click on a bunch of stuff.
And they say, okay, like when they click
add to cart, does it actually add to cart or
when they click sign up, does it actually start
the free trial for their software or whatever.
And they sort of like code software to test the software.
Right.
Um, and what rainforest does, that's really
cool is they let you set up these, what are, I'm
just going to call QA scripts.
I hope I'm not like making
Automated automated tests.
Yeah.
That without code.
And why is that transformative?
Because now the development team developers in
the organization, aren't the only people that can do QA.
So it's like kind of a no code software
where you can say, well, click on this, do
this check for that check for this.
And that's that QA script or that automated
QA test, but it can be done by non-developer
people on a QA team that can do people on the product team.
It can be done by people in the customer support team, anyone.
Right.
And anyone can edit it and look at it,
see how it's running and sort of, it, it,
they use this term, I think, in some of their pieces of democratizing QA.
So I dunno, Benji, if you want to talk
about, um, bottom of the funnel, but I think
to just go into our pain point SEO types,
I'm going to scroll down to some of the
keywords that we're ranking for that we're putting into that
piece.
So like, let me just kind of do
it and
Keep going.
What would, what would, what would you typically write?
Right.
So if you're not doing pain point SEO, the typical
content marketing thing is like the ultimate guide
to software QA
Or what is quality assurance?
What is QA?
Right.
A lot of those type of posts.
And I bet you, in keyword research, they
get a ton of traffic and that's what most content
marketers do.
I want to preface, like I think, and you can object Benji, if you disagree.
Unlike the Cup and Leaf example where he
was like, we got zero sales from green tea side
effects.
I think if you ranked for, if they ranked
for like, what is QA ultimate guide to QA,
blah, blah, blah.
Like they'd probably get some leads.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
But, but I think what's important here
is there's a lot of nuance to their product.
So
again, this is automated testing with no code.
And typically how people do QA is they hire
a bunch of developers and create these manual tests.
And so their product solves a very specific
use case for a very specific type of customer.
And that's also why we chose a lot of the
keywords that you're seeing here, because it's not
just web application testing.
The automated component is a key thing where someone's
trying to run these automated tests instead of manual.
So they don't have to have a team of testers
recreating the same tests over and over again
manually.
Um, they can now do this in an automated way.
And so a lot of the keywords you'll see
how automate is a very key component in all
of the keywords that we chose, because that's
a core value proposition and feature that is offered in
the product.
This screenshot is a little misleading, I think.
Um, Olivia,
Okay.
Cause that's the one, sorry.
Yeah.
That's the one post that we rank for all
these different automated, uh, variations.
Right.
And she's showing an example of how one post
can rank for a ton of different, variations.
So let me, is there not other keywords
in here, but she uses examples in here that I
can find, but it in contrast or, you know, what you can do, we can pull up some
internal stuff on the, in the meantime, in
contrast, um, to like the, what is the QA ultimate
guy, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
You can things around like visual.
I believe we had a bunch of keywords around like
visual automated testing, visual QA software, and there
might've been some no code.
And so there you're like, listen, if,
and you can, you can pull up some of those.
Yeah, we did.
We did a lot of alternatives pieces.
So all the different manual variations or all of
the different, more technical tools that people would go
for, um, that this product would be an easier solution to.
Regression testing.
So all these different variations of ways
that people might call this type of testing.
Automation was a key component and a lot of this stuff, codeless testing.
Um, so yeah, again, trying to think through all the synonyms
Codeless Automation Testing was definitely one of them.
Um, some of the verses was Cypress versus selenium
and Cypress and selenium, at least selenium for sure,
is, is one of the traditional, like selenium is the mega player in this space.
It is a code based way to create software tests.
And so anyone comparing them, actually a bunch of
people comparing them, most of them will wouldn't have
heard of rainforest.
And this is a good, like strategic use of the versus keyboards is just right.
Some versus between two of your competitors and then add versus you.
And you just sort of like crashed that
party and people are comparing comparison.
They're like, oh, who the hell is this?
Oh, that's interesting.
They have some good value props or whatever.
Assuming you sell in the article as well.
Maybe we do another video later where I walked
through like how to sell your product in the
article and how we actually write those.
But I want to contrast just from pain point SEO
standpoint, the difference is instead of like, what
is regression testing, whatever, which is really beginner,
the type of people like buying these things don't need
to know what it is instead.
It's like the bottom of the funnel are like codeless automation testing.
It's like that.
If you're Googling that you can imagine why the
conversion rate is so much higher and you're ready,
like RainforstQA is literally that then moving
into that number five, I've lost my screen here.
Number five of pain point SEO, which is
Use cases and the how to stuff, the real pain points.
I see things here like how to write a test plan
manual versus automated testing, um, quality assurance metrics.
Where did we get those ideas from flaky tests, flaky
tests, isn't codeless automation testing software, right?
That's just like a concept it's from interviews with
sales account managers or customer support or whatever that
was interacting with customers saying, this is the problem.
Flaky tests I believe refers to like other
tests you could code or write that don't pass, fail
properly or perfectly.
And so it's an issue and rainforest can
be one thing you can use to solve that issue.
If
I mangled that I'll, I'll hear it from Olivia later, that's fine.
Well then the QA testers that yell at you in the comments,
Right, or how to write a test plan is the how to, but we know that like, if
people are doing QA testing methodically, that they
want to write test plans, et cetera, that rainforest QA
can be a good way to do your testing.
And it sort of like make sense, you know,
it's, it's, it's, you can find a way to
pitch the product in these.
So there is still pain point based.
We know that that's an issue, um, and we're not just chasing search volume.
We could go over more, but I kind of want
to get to the objections because I think
everyone should have an idea by now.
So, um, objection, number one that I have,
or we have heard, um, that I want to get
your take on Benji
is isn't this just long tail SEO.
I believe some guy who worked for Google or Google
search one time, many years ago, someone mentioned
this on Twitter.
And he was like, I don't know why people,
what are the, what this is, it's just long
tail SEO.
SEO is I've been doing this forever.
Right?
Haven't we been doing this forever?
I have my own answer to that.
But I'm curious.
Yeah.
I mean, I think long tail is something different.
I actually think that example that you showed in rainforest,
of all the different keywords that, that one post
rank for would technically be considered more like the
long tail variations of the main keyword that you're going after.
But I would just argue that if you actually
look at a lot of these keywords, they're not
long, they're not like question queries.
They're not like five, six words.
A lot of them are head keyword terms.
That just the, the very, the difference in the
way that we're approaching this is truly just looking
at it from a search intent perspective and really
trying to understand what is the value of the
product or service you're selling and what
would people be searching for in order find that,
Yeah.
It's not a long tail query.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
So I think that's, that's the difference is this
truly just looking at it from an intent perspective
and trying to find all the variations of things
that people would search for to find a solution
like your product or service, that's it that's
pain point SEO is simplified to a T, but yeah,
it doesn't necessarily need to be long tail.
It doesn't need to be a question.
It doesn't need to be five plus words.
It can be very short, queries that we rank
for that just indicate someone is ready to buy
a product.
Yeah.
I think that's basically my answer.
I think what I was going to say is like,
I just think that that question approaches it
from like
an angle that's irrelevant to pain point SEO,
like pain point SEO is like, I don't care how
long or short the thing is like.
Just approaching it from a completely different lens.
It's like we don't care whether it's a head
term or long tail as traditional SEO's would, would
describe it.
It's like, is our search intent, then you should rank for it.
Like the other example that we kind of, I had as up as a tab, but I didn't
want to belabor this too long.
Is this video editing one you can, um, it's basically you can Google, like what
keyword strategy for new products grow and convert and run into it.
It's also one, if you're watching this recently,
it's also one of our recent posts right now.
Um, and a couple of examples we have here.
So like a video editing, uh, client is video,
text editing because that long tail online video editor
is that long tail collaborative video editor,
but they qualify as pain point SEO because the lens is
not about the length.
It's about the conversion intent.
And as we argue in this post, this is a very
innovative, um, video editing tool that where
you can edit the video by editing the text.
And so video text editing is really, really
perfect from a conversion intent perspective.
And it also, as a result of editing text means
that collaboration is really easy, which is a
huge issue in video, right?
Because like normal video editing is these ginormous
files that you're like transferring on a hard disk or
whatever, like Adobe final cut pro this and that premiere.
And so like collaborative and online video editors actually
pretty innovative, but long tail head term doesn't have
anything to do with this.
And a sense that you only know that these keywords are very interesting.
You only know that adding the word online to
the search term video editor is very appropriate.
Whereas collaborative is
very impossible.
You only know that by knowing the details
of what Benji said at the beginning of this video,
which is
knowing that the features, the value props that
people are really coming to your product for not the
entire feature list in the feature dropdown on your site.
It's like, no, no.
You know, every time a client does that, we can be like, yeah, yeah.
There's 400 features here, which ones do they come in?
And like the sales rep will be like, oh, everyone comes in for this one.
Right?
It's like, there's always, everyone comes in for like one thing.
And in this case, it's like that, like you,
when you need to know that information and that's
the lens in which you're doing pain point SEO conversion,
it doesn't matter whether it's long or short.
So don't just think, oh yeah, this is long tail.
My other answer that I have written in my notes is IDGAF.
Even if you're doing, you knew this before nobody's
doing this, we talked to how many companies that
reach out to us over and over again.
Like it's not nobody, very few of our clients have
systematically gone after SEO keywords based on like
conversion and tap a few have
shout out to Ashok Varma of rainforest.
Um, right.
Like a few have ...
Reportgarden Yeah.
But a few have, but very few do that.
And so that's the lens.
Okay.
Uh, objection, number two.
But these bottom of the funnel keywords have such little search volume.
Yeah.
I mean, this one is like opening a can of worms, but simply I would just say,
as you saw from that post on tea you
can rank for keywords that get 60,000 search
volume, but that gets zero conversions.
So I would pose the question back to whoever's
listening to those who, who thinks this way, volume
is really important.
Well, volume is really not important if it
doesn't do anything for your company, it's like,
Good is that 60,000? You can say, oh, well, impressions.
It gets 60,000 people that care about tea on my site every month.
And it's like, okay, is it driving any sales?
Is it really doing anything for you?
Oh, well it's building brand awareness.
It's like, great.
But there's also keywords that you could
go after that would drive actual sales.
So even if that was the case, why wouldn't
you want to go after the keywords that drive
the sales first.
Right.
That that's what doesn't make sense to me.
And when people give that objection.
And then the second thing I'll say on the,
on the volume thing is even if it's small,
that conversion rates can be so high.
And I think that's, that's the point that you're going to hear that
these small volume posts outperform, even
the ones with high volumes that do convert.
So I don't know if you want to elaborate on that point.
Yeah.
So I'm showing a screenshot.
This is going to be hard if anyone's listening to this audio only.
Um, but I'll try my best.
It's an analytics screenshot.
Again, it has a bunch of URLs at different
rows and it's showing traffic is from GA showing
traffic in the first column and all the way
on the right hand side, it's showing actual signups
for the software company.
And there's like two things to take away.
There's three of these rows, three of these posts that we've circled.
And those three and whatever date range,
this is have 41, 33 and 51. Sign-ups the other,
whatever I'm going to read off the number
of signups 5, 3, 0, 8, 0, 0, 3. Whereas
those 41 33 and 51. So it's like, if you
do Pain Point SEO properly, like the posts
that have buying intent, don't just have a little bit more buying intent.
This is like 10 X or more, or in the case of,
So just share, share the conversion rates
because I think that really helps elaborate.
Yeah.
So the conversion rates of those three with 41 33 31 is 0.34% 0.38% and 4.
3%,
4.3%. The commercial rate of the other ones not bracketed are 0.04% .05% , 0 .
19% . 0 0..15% So it's like,
again, what good is that traffic, if it's barely converting.
And if you're thinking about brands like his brand,
there are typically conversion keywords that also get some
volume and that'll help your brand first.
And why wouldn't you just first get the ones
that are, people are ready for you and then
work on brand building later.
Um, so yeah, and even compare that to the
bottom one, there's 10,000 visitors to the first
one in that timeframe.
41. Pretty good.
Very good.
The bottom line.
That's awesome.
Just want to touch on a point here.
Cause I think that's, that's something that people
misconstrue about pain point SEO, as they think we're saying,
don't go after high volume keywords or
that be these ones that get 10,000 or 20,000
visitors a month, aren't going to do anything for your brand.
And our argument is no sure.
Or you can, you can rank for those, but go
after these buying intent keywords first and then
work on those brand building keywords later.
Because again, if you're focused on results and
ROI and getting return on either the money or the
time that you're investing in the content marketing,
why not rank for the things that are going to
bring in sales and customers now, and then
work your way up the funnel and focus on those
high volume, less buying intent keywords later?
If you think about it, just like any startup
that you're trying to grow, you need sales and
revenue coming in first before you're going to be
able to invest more money into, your marketing department
or your content marketing department.
And I think it's the same thing here with,
with pain point SEO, you want to focus on
all these buying intent keywords and then brand building
and investing in these really high traffic pieces and
growing the brand and growing your audience and things that you can't measure
that comes later after you've already built
a business that gets predictable revenue.
And so that's, that's all we're saying with this
approach is there's terms that you can rank for,
whether they are very low volume, like zero
to 20, or they have this high intent and they're
like 200 1,000, 5,000 depending on the
brand high intent keywords can be five or 10,
000 searches a month.
We're not saying that they always have to be small.
What we're saying is that the intent is what matters
is more important, is more important than the,
the volume.
And so we would say we would rather go
after a term that is deemed high intent for
the brand.
Even if it has 10 volume than going after something
that had 500 volume that had zero intent.
And again, I would just think back to that,
that tea example because that one's the simplest one
to understand.
Yeah.
Okay.
Next objection.
What if I don't have a lot of bottom of the funnel keywords in my space?
Yeah.
I think this one is, is a good one to show that, the case study that we just
wrote, because I think that's exactly what this product was.
So this product, a newer product, they do
video editing in a very unique way where you can
highlight text in the transcript and remove parts of the video.
And so for, for video that, uh, is very interview
focused or has a lot of people speaking
where there's like hours and hours of footage.
This is a really quick way for people
to edit out certain sections of their video.
And so there is really nothing like this on
the market, all the alternatives were final cut or
movie or whatever people are using to edit there.
There
Was a good one or two, but very few
There's very few.
And so it's a new category.
And so there's not people searching for how to
edit with text or like all these different variations
that you would call it.
There was no category name, like content marketing software.
Uh, so we had to then basically lean on
number five of all the different use cases.
Again, we had to know what people wanted or what
people found valuable about this product and what
made people want to sign up.
And then back into what keywords would people
potentially be searching for to find a solution to this
problem?
So, for example, here are some of those.
So how to edit an interview video.
Again, I just said that this product is
very useful if you needed to, edit clips of a
lot of people talking.
And that was one of the main use cases that people are using it for us.
So this keyword makes a lot of sense here.
If we're able to show up, we can show how easy it is to edit an interview video
with the product.
Are there any other examples in here
of different ones?
I think we were being very careful, not for
Other things like how to edit quickly,
how to edit it fast.
Exactly.
So those are the ones that come to mind.
So just thinking of all the different alternatives
that someone might be searching for to find a product
like this, that they didn't even know existed
Was
Going to be hard to do
How to edit video fast, actually, a really great example.
Um, and, and the other one's rough cut, video
editing, but I actually like how to edit video
fast, like
that doesn't say anything about them being to use marketing
terminology solution aware, like, they're not, they're not
saying a video editor where you can transcribe and edit the text.
They're just like, I just want to edit this fast.
They're not even aware that something like this, the client's product exists.
Um, but it's a perfect tie-in to the product.
So that's the whole concept of like fine.
If the extreme bottom of the funnel, like editing
video, like texts, there were a couple of those
online.
What was it?
Text, video editor or whatever we were showing earlier.
If you run out of those, that's okay.
There's usually a ton of mid-funnel pain point.
And if there's really not in a bunch of
those, then maybe SEO is not the channel for
you.
Like, what are, what are you selling right then?
There's nothing, there's no demand, no one's searching
for anything remotely related to your thing.
Right.
Then maybe SEO was not the channel for you,
but how did every video fast as like, that's
just a pain point.
Like they want to edit video fast, it's too slow.
And so you're like, Hey, actually you
can really do it with ours is, is perfect.
Um, and I think that's kind of the solution to that, that problem.
Um, the other one I wrote down, you might
be surprised to, this is, well in my space,
bottom of the funnel, keywords are way too competitive.
We've had a couple people say that, right?
Like, so like I use some of those examples, right?
Like CRM and accounting, if you actually wanted
to rank for best CRM, like I've never tried, we
don't have a client, but I can imagine that is ridiculously competitive.
Right.
Or like the examples that I've heard in B2C spaces,
like by flowers online, like, like good luck,
right.
It's going to be really competitive.
I think this is something that we touch on
in the underdog SEO posts, but essentially the way
that I would think about doing the content strategy
for those is maybe not going after those really
highly competitive terms right away, like best accounting software.
Like there's there's brands that are spending millions
of dollars protecting those keyword terms that I think it's
going to be very difficult for you to rank for.
But I think taking this middle of the funnel approach
or thinking about the core features that differentiate
you from the best accounting software and,
and in this case, they probably are more long tail.
Cause they're, they're,
very specific features or very specific use cases
that your product solves for, but going after those and
owning those keywords first and really using that
to build up the authority of your website and to,
to basically just own the valuable keyword terms that
distinguish your product from the others and not trying
to rank for just the category terms.
And then
that's the approach that I would take is just
going after mid funnel first, because I think that
is a really good way to drive conversions.
And these keyword terms will be a lot less competitive.
And this, this is a challenge.
Like not everyone has millions of dollars to spend on content.
Like some of those big companies like NerdWallet
or something, if you're going against a nerd wallet, good
luck.
But I have done keyword research for companies that do compete in those spaces.
And it's those longer tail, not obvious opportunities that you can compete in.
Uh, and we explained that whole framework and
just how we would think about doing this in that
post on underdog SEO you could search for that and read through it.
Yeah.
I agree.
It's that last category five with pain
point SEO is go a little bit more long tail go
to those little features or differentiators that you're uniquely good at.
So yeah.
Forget best CRM, but what do you do?
You must have some angle, right?
How to solve XYZ problem in Salesforce.
That's really annoying that you guys happen to do really well.
Right?
Just like how to edit a video fast?
Um, okay.
Last objection.
And then I have one more thing and then
we can close last objection is this is so
repetitive.
Like we're just going to keep talking about
the product over and over for all of these different
keywords
We get a lot is that if you let me elaborate on that objection.
So you understand before Benji kind of counters,
it is if you end up doing actually maybe we
go to the tea one like best green tea, best oolong tea, best black tea.
That's why people or the video editing one,
what was the, what were the three examples?
It was like online video editor, collaborative
video editor and video text editing.
What that subjection is about is that it's come from
more directly our clients actually, because until you
start to do it or see how we do it, you actually don't even know enough to have
this objection, which is when you start to
see these posts, a huge chunk of the posts, right?
For these
are selling
the features and benefits of the client's product or service.
Now
that ends up being the same thing, because the
features and benefits of your product don't change from
post to post.
So you may position in there's some twists for online
video letter versus collaborative or best black tea
versus green tea or whatever.
But if you had, you know, a set of competitive
advantages on tea or on video editing software
or on CRM or whatever, you're probably going
to make that same pitch over and over again.
That's the premise behind this.
Objection.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, because we're doing pain point SEO and
the whole way that people are coming into these blog
posts, most people aren't going to your blog and
clicking into every single one of your articles and
reading the same pitch that you make over and over again.
The way that people are finding these posts
is searching for a problem that they have coming in
through the search results to one of the blog posts.
Then they're learning about the product.
And then they're probably clicking to other pages
on your site to do research on whether the product
or service that you're selling is a good solution for them.
So I wouldn't worry about that too much.
And it's, I mean, we do it on our own site too.
Like recently all the blog posts that we've published
are going after keyword terms and we have a
set process and a set way of doing things
in our agency and that's what we sell and
it, and it's, it doesn't change all the time
and we don't need to provide new information because
there's not new stuff that we're doing all the time.
And so I would say, I wouldn't worry about
that because you have to really think of how
someone is finding this piece of content and the
likelihood that someone is going to click into one
of your blog posts and then subsequently read another 20 or 30.
I just think it's unrealistic.
And then two, the only other thing that would
be similar in those blog posts is just the
sales pitch of how the product solves that problem.
And those keywords would have to be really closely
related because we might change the sales pitch depending
on what we're talking about.
And so the sales pitch always ties in with the keyword.
And so we would talk about how to solve this
exact problem, uh, in relation to the keyword
or, or the problem where we're setting out to solve with the product.
Yeah.
I mean, to say it in a more kind of Jack assey way, like you have some company
stuff thinking about your blog, like it's the
New York times or something, or like a magazine, like
get over yourself.
Nobody is like refreshing your blog, trying to figure out what you just wrote.
It's a tool to get traffic in from Google.
It doesn't matter if a lot of the blog posts
have the same arguments, literally no one cares.
Um, okay.
Last question.
Not an objection.
How do I start?
Like if you were to give someone someone's listening
to this and they're like, okay, yeah, like I'm
bought in this makes a lot of sense, like, but how do I immediately get going?
And this question
sort of rings home in the sense that in
addition to us being an agency, we have our
course and community, our, our courses more
than just like a static course it's built inside.
Um, I didn't mean to do this as like an advertisement,
but it's coming across as this way.
So bear with me, it's built in a community like it's built in just
Discourse?
Discuss?, Discourse.
Um, and it's, and so like people ask these
questions and we do these monthly live Q and
a isn't a lot of the Q and A's, everyone's
like, wow, like I've been, you know, I
joined the course and I thought about these things and blah, blah, blah.
And there's a lot of people that are like,
come on, like, let's go like take action.
So what is the immediate first step of someone,
whether they're, you know, a marketer and owner of
a business, whatever.
I mean, if you're, if you're an owner of the
business or you're in marketing or you're customer
facing, and you often hear the problems that
your customers face, I would go, go sit down.
Think through if you're a sales person, if you
listen to sales calls, write down what people are
saying on a sales call.
It's like, what are the questions they're coming in with?
What are the features that they're
saying they're looking for?
What are the problems they're looking to solve,
write those down and then go into some keyword tool
after that and start typing in keywords around
those problems and see what comes up and then look
for the keywords that match the intent of what the person said.
Or another way that you can do this is just
think about the core value propositions of the
product or the service that you're selling.
So again, like what is the main value prop for us?
It could be, I don't know, we're a conversion focused content marketing agency.
So if someone was searching for conversion focused
content, that might be a keyword that we would want
to own on that.
That's basically how to think through it.
And then go find a list of those keywords
that are high intent, and then just write a
blog post around one keyword and see if you can rank for it.
Yeah.
I agree.
What I have been thinking of when I wrote
down this question to ask is like even more,
I guess what shoot from the hip, maybe reckless,
but like no easier start is just like,
just think of the first two to three, absolute,
no brainer bottom of the funnel keywords.
And I think most people that are working
with, unless it's a brand new client and you have
no idea if you're the owner, for sure.
Or anyone that's been working for awhile, like
that should be pretty obvious, right?
Best category name.
Yeah.
Like best this, or like this software,
that product, you know, it's kind of like
Natural alternative,
Like green tea or something like that, or this alternative, this versus that.
Like, you should be able to think of that without interviewing anyone.
Um, what are your, and just start listing this
literally in a spreadsheet create it, it'll become your
new, like conversion focused keyword sheet or
whatever, instead of wherever your SEO agency hire did.
And then be like, okay, which ones are,
it's like this, we have to rank for this.
That should be intuitive.
You shouldn't have to think that hard.
It should be very obvious.
And then you can do to some of the stuff
that we talked about, like, well, what if
it's really competitive, blah, blah, blah.
Then you move to something a little bit more
strategic, but that's the beginning, like pick three.
And as you said, write one, write it, hit
publish because the number one thing is just all
these mental objections.
And you're like, listen, if you just do it
and you see the results, then you're going to
get over it.
Um, and you're going to keep doing it.
Yeah.
Thank you everyone for,
sticking with us through the whole thing.