The content marketing cohort ends with two in-depth content strategy presentations from our trainees, Chitra Iyer and Festus Eze. They discuss how they plan to improve search engine rankings and engage with target audiences effectively for their clients and much more!
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Name:Erika Varangouli
What Erika Does: Head of SEO Branding at Semrush
Company: Semrush
Noteworthy: Erika is also a public speaker, regular webinar host, and awards judge.
Connect with Erika;
💡Making Templates Your Own
Erika mentions that while she provides templates and tips, she knows that each client is different. She applauds Chitra for tweaking the framework to fit her client’s needs.
According to Erika, being flexible and tailoring the strategy to suit the client is key. She believes it’s all about adapting theory to real-life situations for the best results.
💡Creating Content that Counts.
Erika stresses the importance of making sure content strategy lines up with what the client wants to achieve in business. She gives kudos to Chitra for weaving audience insights and pain points into her strategy.
This kind of alignment ensures content hits the right notes and speaks to customers’ needs. Ultimately, it’s about using content to build trust, credibility, and connections with the audience.
💡Keep It Simple for Clients
Erika thinks Festus did great with all the detailed research, but she suggests toning it down a bit when presenting to clients. She thinks it might overwhelm them, especially if they’re not marketing experts.
Instead, she advises creating shorter, easier-to-understand documents or presentations that give clients a quick overview before diving into the nitty-gritty. Erika’s main point? Make sure clients get what you’re saying without getting lost in the details.
💡Go Beyond the Basics in Content Fixes
Festus did a solid job on the technical stuff for his presentation like title tags, but a client would want to see more. She suggests beefing up the content itself, not just the technical bits.
That means making sure your content is top-notch, using the right keywords in the right places, and giving people what they’re looking for. Erika’s point is simple: make your content the best it can be to rank higher and keep people interested.
Festus’ Presentation on Trainer Road
Erika Varangouli 0:06
I want to say, before we start with your presentations that the assignments I received, for me were at a really good level, like, obviously, I had feedback and thoughts to share with everyone. But the level of, for me, they showed that, you know, for many of you was not easy to do some things, but you did it, you spent the time you had questions, and then there was a back and forth in some cases of what I would do differently, or things that I would look out for, but they were already at a good level.
Now, I wanted to try to present this to you try, you’ve been doing all your work in one document, and you’ve done a lot of good work with a very difficult website and niche as well. So I think yours was one of the most difficult ones in the course, I have to say. And I really like how you’ve approached it. And I also asked festus who, please no one been mad, but I think fastest probably has spent the most time working on assignments and like implementing the things like discuss, and it shows in the in the results he’s turning over.
So I also wanted fastest, although he presented in the previous time I did this, I want him to present to everyone because he has a very comprehensive approach to this. And I think it will pose many opportunities for us to ask him questions or to discuss how he made choices and talk about it. So I wanted to also Peris because Peris had to work on a very small client and very small, very niche, tiny websites pose different kinds of challenges, right? It’s like how do you compete with very big brands? Right?
Or how, for example, if something is very niche, how, what do you write first, what do you do to create that authority, but I think parents will not be able to make it today. So I think what she dragged on was festus, we have two very strong assignments. Now that sounds like overall approach. I want us to talk about your journey list and what you ended up proposing, and then post the questions there as well. So Chitra Do you want to go first?
Chitra Iyer 2:31
Okay, sure. Let me just share my screen as I speak. Is that okay? Okay, just let me know if you can see, can you see my screen?
Erika Varangouli 2:44
Yes, it’s loading?
Chitra Iyer 2:47
Yeah, I think it’s on now. So my client was thrifty.com, which is a car rental company that is particularly strong in the US and Europe. And not very strong in other continents, but they do some amount of traditional work in those markets as well.
So how I approached this, and I think, probably where I differ from Festus Is that mine is, you know, you can see I’ve kind of leveraged my strong points, which is content strategy, and, you know, recommendations based on many years of experience and stuff, but I haven’t been as successful in you know, sitting with the SEO tool and you know, really going through it with a fine tooth comb the way I should have, I have done some amount of analysis based on for someone who’s doing it kind of for the first time, based on what Erika taught us, I guess it’s fine.
But it would mean a lot more practice from me to kind of be at a level where I could say that okay, you know, a really good piece of SEO research that I’ve been able to do to fine tune the keywords and topics and things like that. Okay.
However, I think a lot of background research and everything which supplies most of the most of the insight that I needed, okay, so let me just get started. So first of all, I define what were the goals of the client based on the original brief that Erika had sent, okay, and I’ve just highlighted they want to increase the brand awareness.
They want to drive more traffic to the website and of course convert more from the website and using content and they also want to retain existing customers because obviously car rental is a repeat purchase kind of category. So they not just want to acquire customers but they want to retain customers and have them repeat their business.
And finally, how did market so differentiation is important as well, like what do they stand for? Why should customer choose them instead of somebody else? Is something that they also want called And to do so their goal really when they came to me was how do we build awareness drive conversion, drive retention and also growing up in a very crowded but still evolving market.
Okay, so how I planned out and landscape this project is first I did the competitor and and you can see I would ever classes are recorded whatever topics we tackle together, I have kind of put them in four stages here. I haven’t done the fourth stage, it was not in the scope. But I’ve done a landscaping competitor analysis, I’ve done the content strategy, I’ve done the data summary of the content marketing plan is not as detailed as I would like yet, but I’m definitely, you know, have have total clarity on what the content plan should look like.
And I’ll show you that as we go through this. Okay, I had some open questions, and I’m not going to spend time on that I just enough for you to know that I did kind of have questions for the client, which I kind of had to assume the answers to it this way at this stage. So let’s just move forward. So first is a landscape analysis, I think from you know, everything we did in this class.
This for me is like super most important stage because it really helps help understand the space that we’re playing in, what’s up with the brand, what’s up, what’s up with the industry, then the company and then you know, specifics like the the website and different elements of their content. Okay, so here’s how I did it. Market Analysis, basically showed me that this is a very competitive, very mature, very crowded market. Okay, the US and Europe are the two biggest car rental markets in the world.
And once after the pandemic, the whole travel and hospitality industry has picked up like anything. So this is a growing market, and it’s dominated with such a large market, it’s dominated by just five companies. Okay, so even though the it’s crowded, it is fragmented, but there are five dominant players, okay. And the revenue per user is kind of hovering, it is growing, but it’s not growing very fast. Okay, so that is an area that a lot of car rental companies want to focus on increasing the value.
Okay. Secondly, opportunities. Please stop me if you have any questions. Okay. At any point? I can’t see you because I’m on my screen. So just speak up. If you have any questions. Yeah. Okay. So the opportunities that I saw in my in that market analysis was that why tourism is growing new generations of travel enthusiasts See, self driving is definitely an expression of, you know, travel experience. There are a lot of untapped markets, especially with the gig economy, people working away from their usual place of residence, there could be a bigger market for car rental.
So they should be exploring low penetration and untapped markets as well with their content at some stage. You know, there are a lot of pain points, like people have very low trust in this market. So again, content can play a very important role in establishing trust and credibility for the brand. Okay, and some of the challenges are, you know, it’s super competitive.
There are different regulations in every country in every continent, regarding driving the rented cars, there are risk factors. And there’s one complication in this industry that is that it’s not just other car rental companies, which are competitors, but also travel into travel influencers, and travel aggregator companies, these companies also compete for the same keywords.
Okay, so we have to see how to address that in our content strategy as well. Now, did a very quick self analysis of the brands Okay, of the brands thrifty, thrifty, is a low budget, self drive car rental company in the US in Europe, you know, they have kind of played in the space between 2002 1023 kind of data, historical analysis of their website and their brand promise and they’ve always positioned themselves around the prices, okay, which shows in their name as well. So that’s what they’re known for.
And I would consider, I would, I would recommend that we double down on that positioning, although they are even getting into luxury cars and stuff. Now, at this stage. The top three customer problems that is always against the best prices on several rental cars. They give a whole wide range of cars to choose from, and they have a big coverage in the important markets of your us in Europe. So it’s very easy to find a pickup and drop off point near you. These are the three major problems that they are solving for customers today.
Let me quickly show you how I analyse them started with their website analysis. Okay. If they have like, the biggest problem with a website is that they have so many different URLs with 50 something or the other you can see on the right hand side thrifty.com, too, because for and then you get every country has its own URL as well.
Okay, and their own internal companies from the same company, parent owner, which is dollar.com and hertz.com. Also compete for the same keywords that thrifty is competing for so they’re kind of cannibalising their own search optimization in a way they’re not really coordinating or collaborating on that. That’s an opportunity missed opportunity as well.
Erika Varangouli 10:39
Chitra question? Sorry, I didn’t realise thrifty was under Hertz. Is it? Is it owned by Hertz?
Chitra Iyer 10:46
Yeah, same parent company Hertz, Dollar, thrifty. .
Erika Varangouli 10:50
Right Okay. Because then, okay, the first part, then the different country domains, country level domains should be fine. Like, as long as they’re set up properly with their hreflang tags and everything else that they need to separate? It’s fine.
There’s the different domains, the thrifty cars for rent.com is a potential issue only, but like the.co.uK would be targeted. Okay, so that should be fine. But I didn’t realise though they have also dollar. Being the parent company who owns also hertz and then what you found is repeating for exactly the same stuff to? Yes, yes. Yeah. But I imagine companies anyway. So they’re just.
Chitra Iyer 11:37
yeah, they function as different companies. Yeah. But honestly, there is not much differentiation. You know, neither. None of them are very clear about their positioning and branding at all, which is surprising in this day and age for such big brands like I was also shocked. But that’s how it is. So here we go. If you look at these, these are just these are visuals of their different websites.
So you will see they all have different look and feel. This is thrifty cars for rent. This is the UK side. This is the US and global site, which has a blog right in the front, but none of the others have a blog. Right in the front, they have different problems different. Even here, here are some all the German one, the Ireland, one, Australia one. So each one of them looks and feels entirely different.
It’s obviously very fragmented experience for a traveller that might be going to different countries around the world. So it’s a very unfamiliar experience. So that is one problem. Secondly, there are it’s not just thrifty sites, which are providing information about thrifty, but even other tribal comparison sites talk about thrifty. Okay, so they are comparing them and thrifty themselves don’t have a comparison feature on their own site.
So, you know, the chances of someone booking through one of these is obviously higher, because it’s much more useful information, right? That’s what people want in terms of content. So that’s another complication. Other missed opportunities and identified on the website is that they could streamline their website URL to compound SEO benefits. But what Erika just said it should be fine. They’re technically handling it correctly, even if they have
Erika Varangouli 13:21
They are different domains Chitra. So there shouldn’t be any problems there at all. But there’s different country level domain, so that should be fine. Yes.
Chitra Iyer 13:34
Yeah. But what about the look and feel so like you have different kinds of companies or country domains, but then you’re look and feel and search optimization is not at all streamline? Isn’t that going to affect their new traffic
Erika Varangouli 13:43
So the question because we do not, unfortunately, we do not speak with a client to know what has led them to this decision. So sometimes things look different because the user habits are very different in different markets, right? So then it makes absolute sense. You don’t have to have the same kind of design and feel across everywhere because people search or behave differently.
However, we don’t know if this is because of that, or because of a fragmented marketing function. Like you know, maybe the team in Germany is different to the team in the US and they communicate to each other. So they only have like the standard brand package like this is the logo, these are the colours design what you want. There can be many reasons why this is the case.
For me personally, to the degree that you can create a consistent brand experience it’s better because you want to be like a global brand covering clients everywhere you want to do that. I only have one but which is if this is done on the basis of people like you know conversion rate optimisation. Yeah, only then I would say okay, I would still try Right, just sort of ensure some things are consistent. Yeah, yeah, no, you’re right. But it’s kind of like this is part of what we cannot Unfortunately, no. So yeah, I’d have or you cannot have a definite answer on whether it’s a problem, or it’s actually a great solution. No one knows.
Chitra Iyer 15:19
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So keeping that in the context, I guess, you know, I can move on with like, I do feel like a framework for all websites would provide that, especially considering this is an industry but credibility is a huge pain point, okay, like people just have a hard time trusting a company and a brand. I think consistency and looking feeling, user experience would go a long way in reassuring customers that my experience with thrifty, Ireland is going to be as good as the one I have in the US, for example, just because there’s so much negative reviews about customer care and the brand, how they handle the problems in one country to the other, if you go on the forums and look.
So you know, Erika again, like I said, connecting to into between various areas or sources that we do our research from, you know, we can definitely say that I think they can do a better job with some consistency in the in the user experience, but it doesn’t have to be exactly the same. But you know, a framework would help. And using certain keywords, to build, you know, consolidate on things like, you know, good customer surveys, reliable, some testimonials, all of those things across all the websites would help them.
Okay, so I think like I said, consistency in the brand identity, the other opportunities, content hubs, so they don’t except for the Thrifty US website, which has a very half big blog, they’re just not big on content. So content is a huge opportunity for them that they can leverage to engage with their customer base, as well as create, you know, meet those credibility goals.
And trust. Of course, like I said, these are the three areas that are missing, there aren’t, you know, they aren’t also adapting some of the new technologies, like they don’t have a chatbot to have someone who’s searching for a car on the website, okay, they could incorporate those kinds of content as well, which will also help them collect more data on the kind of questions people are asking if they had a chatbot. I think in their in that case, a chatbot will be actually very helpful on the website. Okay, so that was on the websites.
Now, let me come to search. Okay, so as you can see, I did do some you can see that in all cases, thrifty is pretty well low in the surface, or in the competitiveness of this organic traffic compared to the kind of traffic that this industry drives actually. And secondly, you can see, while they have a decent amount of organic search traffic, when you compare it to the numbers of other companies, it is not that big in this space, it is not that big. Again, I think my analysis is not as sound as it should be.
But I’m pretty confident that this level of research combined with the other stuff that I have researched is pretty conclusive. But still, if I was actually going to a client, in reality, I would get someone who knows SEO really, when to use a tool who can use an SEO tool really well to kind of supplement this with the right slides in terms of data points.
Okay, so yeah, so here, what I’ve tried to do is I’ve done an analysis analysis based on the report that I got from sem rush on organic search, what we do well is, uh, you know, generally I see the reports that we’re getting are pretty clean, the audit the site or the site itself are not that problematic from the technical SEO point of view. Okay. However, we do have a lot of competition. So a lot of keywords we are competing, where hertz and order are showing up. So we are kind of competing with each other for the same keywords.
Whereas if we were to collaborate better and you know, define what keywords each one of us wants to win for, we might actually be able to make better or leverage our content resources better, perhaps, okay, although I do not know what is the relationship at the corporate level. So how it functions, maybe they’re designed to compete with each other.
Secondly, you know, our website is mainly optimised for brand related keywords. So it’s missing out on multiple other keyword opportunities right now, which I will come to you share with you when I’m talking about my content pillars and clusters. Okay.
And then, in the same vein, what we do well and where we can do better I also analyse the competitors, all three groups of competitors, so the direct competitors which is like budget and dollar and even though dollar their own company, same group company competes with the exact same target audience and my I guess that they acquired dollar at some point maybe planning to merge them or something because they have you know, sort of exactly the same target audience as thrifty, hertz plays at a higher price point. Okay, second is a travel aggregators like autoslash, Pricelin,e kayak.com. And then third is, you know, a travel influencers and you know, TripAdvisor kind of companies.
Erika Varangouli 20:24
Chitra let me very quickly say something here, because this is a great approach and slide. And I want to I think it applies to everyone like for potential clients in the future or current clients. Remember the competitor analysis, there are a few different sources to find competitors.
So it’s like who your client names are their competitor, what you see using tools online, what you see using some main keywords who comes up, but like how, especially in the travel industry, what Chitra has done is quite a standard nowadays, right?
And with many like hotels, and I think Onize, you had another client in the hotel sector. So it is a very, very competitive sector. And you have to think, when you work with clients that are in such industries, think about types of competitors first before you identify your actual competitors. So you know the aggregators for example, I see autoslash, Priceline, kayak.
It can be like in the UK, I’m sure it will be different. It could be like, what’s their name? Rental cars, there’s, there’s a lot of them, right. So it’s a type of competitor, you need to really see how they do you have your direct competitors. And then you have like your, let’s say, content competitors, often that come up, right? Like nine out of 10 times anyway, you’ll see Wikipedia coming up everywhere, that’s fine. I would disregard Wikipedia.
But apart from that, you may have like the influencers or other types of competitors who may not be direct competitors, but they may be competing for that space in the SERPs, which is important too. So I really loved how you you identified this tutorial here and how you split them into like, okay, these are, you know, derived Europe car, six thirds, all of them, but it goes beyond that. There’s also they’re competing against this types of competitors who yes, we know are very similar.
Chitra Iyer 22:31
Yep. Good. Okay, cool. So when it comes to direct competitors, what they do well, is that they are, you know, some of our direct competitors are really ranking for the you know, they’re basing their search on keywords, okay, on on queries, basically, what are people searching for questions, whereas they don’t have a you know, so they’re ranking for they’re ranking for if I show this, I need to explain this.
So with this, so let me just jump forward to here for a second. Okay. I want to show you this first. Okay. So what I did was that I went through all my sources of insight, okay, and all the competitive groups and distil it down to these content, these kinds of keywords that they’re using okay, that can be grouped into three one is brand related keywords, one is pain point related keywords and one is purpose related keywords okay.
So, in the box as you will see under brand related you know, all the keywords like thrifty were thrifty or thrifty Island, thrifty, whatever, you know, so, the brand and the country, the core services like you know, car rental car, which is directly related to the core service, and keep the third one is directly related to competitors. So like hertz you know, best alternative to hertz in Ireland or, you know, can you you know, what’s a good comparison not to compare to all our car rental with Okay, so those kinds of questions.
The second grouping of keywords that I saw was pain point related where people asking questions they don’t really want to know about the brand new they asking questions about travel. One is what’s the best low budget car rental service in Greece for example, okay, or travel related, Route planner for, you know, East Coast American drivers drive trip or something like that, okay, or US National Park parks by road or you know, those kinds of queries which are related to travel.
The third is safety related, which is a big group actually, and actually a nice low hanging fruit for content because not too many people in our industry writing about it yet. So you know, what’s the safe parking in London? What are kid friendly car models to rent? You know, safety wise.
How do you get international driver’s licence videos to show how to change a car tire If you’re driving a self driven car and things like that, applying for travel insurance in a foreign country, those kinds of questions which people have which are related to safety and security, and another growing and emerging area for this industry sustainability related, so people want to dry, loose and drive trips, but they care about using polluting cars.
They want to know more about how well the cars maintain how polluting it is, is there an Eevee option? Where are the battery charging stations for that, and so on, and so forth. So that’s another emerging area of keywords that they could kind of grab on to and when with, especially for younger renters, younger generations of car rentals.
And third kind of group of keywords, I could find word like purpose related, like what’s my purpose, what’s the job to be done for me right now, like, I want to pick up a car at LAX, or in Barcelona, or I want to go to the Eiffel Tower, we don’t like specific location related, like where you actually typing in the name of a location. Second is type of car or small car, hybrid car minivan, whatever. Third is type of travel, self drive, business, family road trip, you know, adventure, RV trip, those kinds of things.
So these were the three which are coming up again, and again, like any keyword I was finding, I could definitely put them into one of these three. So I thought, ultimately, these are my three content pillars, I should build content around these three pillars, and we’ll make clusters related to each of these pillars. So really, this becomes the backbone of the content plan, when it comes to that. And each of these pillars, it is, like most of the blog titles, I haven’t done like a Excel sheet content plan.
But I would think that each title would be a combination of this, right? So brand plus pain point plus purpose, or brand plus purpose, or purpose plus pain point, you know, when I make those combinations, I can come up with a lot of titles that could fit you know that that will have a lot of traffic. And that’s one thing. And the second thing is that
Erika Varangouli 27:06
Chitra sorry for interrupting. Typically, or most often, when companies approached like a content marketer or writer to write it, it’s very rarely about branded traffic and keywords. Two reasons for that. One is that, you know, because they’re branded they, they think that you know, they dominate them anyway, not true in many cases.
Number two, because the the biggest search volumes are in the non branded sphere. Well, unless you’re Amazon or something, but so I personally think that the brand keyword and branded search does have merit with clients I would own I would always like propose it as the last part of what I’m proposing just so they don’t get the idea that oh, this is the biggest unless for example, you see that you know, there are so many that you’re not dominating and you should it could very well be the case in a sector like travel because a lot of those branded searches I bet you would be dominated by the car aggregator the aggregator on comparison sites.
However still the big opportunities are with non brand and then I would always want to see the case also say that you know, you have these brand searches here which you should address maybe not as part of like an organic traffic kind of content programme, but you should look into them for sure.
Chitra Iyer 28:34
Okay, so this expanded version of or expanded interpretation of brand which I have in my first column. So the first one in that is thrifty, really directly brand, but what about the second like core service which is car rental, car hire car lease and all of that, and the third which is from hertz
Erika Varangouli 28:51
third one, the second and third is just a matter of definition. Like they wouldn’t put them under brand, maybe the competitors is still about alternatives, but I would put them at like, maybe the purpose
Chitra Iyer 29:05
I think travel related just travel, budget price and discount related maybe.
Chitra Iyer 29:12
yeah, but I mean, like, these two are not brand like I see what you meant when you closer to the to the brand itself, but in reality under brand, I would always just keep branded searches. Everything else I would split into different categories.
Chitra Iyer 29:30
Okay, got it. So and this would be the least you know, obviously I want to talk about this last as you mentioned, because I don’t want them to think I’m being lazy about their search optimization. Okay, got it. Thanks for that. Okay.
So this is what I was trying to say when I was here like this is a work I did to understand to arrive at these three organic search for direct competitors organic search for travel aggregators, and organic search for known car rental companies and influencers, I kind of understood what were each one of their strengths and weaknesses with their search. And that’s how I was able to then come up with these. And also literally make a list.
I made this list of seven groups of keywords that most of them are focusing on. And from those seven groups further distilling, I was able to come to those three pillars, which are now just two pillars, because brand is not a pillar that I want to be focusing on right now.
So it’s the core service related keywords, price related keywords, location centric keywords, travel related keywords, problem or pain point related keywords, car type related keywords, and competitor and car and related keywords such as like car rental, plus BMW, or car rental and Tesla, you know, car brands, not the rental brands.
Chitra Iyer 30:10
I dont think that’s 5 categories Chitra, i think that’s seven categories, like these are amazing.
Chitra Iyer 31:00
Thank you. So yeah, so these were these were, this was kind of my what the outcome of all my backend keyword research is I’m not taking a cool the Excel sheet and everything however that is available. If anyone wants to take a look, you can ask me. And then social media I also so that was I’ve talked about the website, I’ve talked about this search, organic search.
And now I’m talking about the social media, I’m not that deep dive into it, but enough to know that they are showing missing massive opportunities on social media in terms of engaging with clients. So they are very bot generated kind of responses to every you know, complaint, they’re not leveraging it as an opportunity for customer service, or to showcase success stories.
So it’s a pretty grim picture on their social media with a lot of complaints and people just, you know, throwing angry comments on them. And they could actually leverage it positively rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. But right now, they seem to be pretending it doesn’t exist. And it’s just a autogenerated response to every single complaint saying, please email us at this address, and we will get back to you.
Instead, they should be really showcasing families who had great vacations, find people who will give them testimonials and use that to create a healthier community atmosphere on their social media. Okay, so definitely from the content point of view. And also, I think, because most of the target target audiences have price and value conscious, they should be leveraging social media to engage them by running lots of contests and giveaways.
Even if they don’t give away product is giving away merch or swag, you know, like tote bags, and caps just to get some enthusiasm about the brand going and interest about the brand going on social media. I think we’ve chosen them then. Okay, so finally, just the last bit, I have also done an audience analysis what I just spoke of, I spoke about the target audience. So I did spend some time trying to understand exactly who their audience are. So that all of this falls into context, okay, all the topics that we write what needs to be written for this guy, okay, which is like the customer.
And here you can see that I have identified four pain points with jobs to be done, which are high priority for them. So there are other smaller ones, but these are the lowest hanging fruit to content that aligns with giving them this kind of information. The two target segments that I could identify that for very clear were family leisure travellers and business travellers.
However, for this presentation, my recommendations are around the first group which is family leisure travellers, okay, because b2b would have a whole different kind of content strategy that they would need to do and they would not be speaking directly to the car Hira but probably to the administrative department or the HR department or whoever authorises those kinds of purchases. So I’m not getting to that in this presentation as limited to D2C. Okay, or b2c? Right.
So here, it’s like optimising budget, which is really around price and discount related keywords. Managing complex holidays is all about our travel pillar pillar about travel related keywords, keeping my family safe, which is all about safety and being responsible, which is about sustainability. The last two, in my opinion are emerging opportunities and something that they could really latch on to the first two are very competitive. So they have to be really clever about which keywords they want to really optimise for in the first two categories to meet the needs of the first two categories as an optimised budget and manage complex holidays easily. These are the the reasons I’ve narrowed it down.
This is because like I said, travel related keywords can be a huge area, right like there can be so many things within travel related keywords. But given this insight about our target audience, I can say that when I’m talking about travel I want to talk about on how to make your holidays fuss free, how to keep them really how to plan without complexity, how to, you know, pick up and drop off cars in a way that your holiday doesn’t get broken? Those kinds of topics is what is of interest to this audience. Okay, so that is why I think if we correlate the two, we’ll be able to come up with a stronger content plan. Here, so that goes through each one of those. And then finally, just a quick summary, last slide. And we can go on about my time, Erika, I’m so sorry.
Erika Varangouli 35:38
It’s okay, we have you and festus so I think we can do it like in the next three minutes, you’ll be done anyway, so we can take Yeah,
Chitra Iyer 35:47
yeah. So really this quick summary of what I’ve spoken so far, who we are talking to in this is a b2c b2c leisure family and roadtrip car rental specifically for Europe and US. So I’m narrowing it down to this definition. Why? Because we want to build awareness. Why do we want to build content because you want to create awareness, credibility, community, and also look for new audiences and reach new audiences with the content right?
In these categories? Which was the whole sustainability piece and looking at those kinds of audiences? Where do we want to go with our content, we definitely want to be on these there might be others that come up, but I think high priority right now is have content on every website that we own every domain.
Definitely start engaging with customers on x and Instagram, because that’s where most of the complaints are coming right now. And they’re not leveraging those, creating a much stronger YouTube presence like in like YouTube or Tik Tok with short with short format videos, explaining things to people about travel would be really useful. There isn’t much actually it’s not very competitive as far as car rental brands are concerned. Okay.
So I think it might do of course, influencers and all are doing it but an influencer would never focus a video only on car rental aspect of the travel, there will be one small piece of it. Whereas we can own that space. Okay, like, and then travel groups, like communities on Facebook, Quora, and Reddit. There’s lots and lots of travel threads and groups where people are asking really relevant questions, particularly and specifically about renting cars, and thrifty is not there answering any of those.
So that’s another low hanging fruit where you should be creating content. And finally, I think there’s another opportunity in terms of creating content in partnership. So for example, with brand travel guides, or Lonely Planet, we could do like a mount with this, you know, US by road kind of guides that we could sponsor and create some excitement around the content.
Again, it will also help us reach new audiences that might be missing us today. Because we only have a website, and what we want to create already taken you through that content around those three pillars and clusters. So yeah, that’s it. Thank you. Any questions?
Erika Varangouli 38:12
I’ve asked a lot during our presentation, so I’m going to put it to the class. Thank you so much chitra. Um, Class thoughts, questions? Challenges. Clapping. Yes, we want that big thing to come. But who has any questions or thoughts? Sandra go,
sandra Tabansi 38:33
Oh, wow. First of all, Chitra This is very, very detailed. I can’t imagine how much time it took you to really go through every and especially since you the company you’re working with has different locations have done all of that. And it’s it’s just not Whoa, you did an amazing job. I like the way I think something that really stood out for me was the way you you grouped the keywords, you know, and I’ve never like I I wouldn’t have really thought of it that way.
Right? But I like we you grouped it, you basically tailored it to the pain point of thrifty and if I were just hearing about thrifty today, I wouldn’t have a question that this would be an effective strategy. So yeah, I not a question, just a comment. I guess this is just the comment. So yeah, well done. You did a great.
Chitra Iyer 39:49
Thank you. I think what I wanted to do was just, like make it as easy as possible for the client to take away two or three things like concrete things that they can do at the end of this presentation, which is where the grouping helps. And it just makes it more tangible for them that, okay, here’s where I need to focus, otherwise it can all get lost and so much of data insights
Erika Varangouli 40:16
for me as well, Chitra Um, this is a perfect demonstration of you’ll remember in the classes where I said, Okay, you do your content strategy, and then you do your content plan. And it many times these two are used sure, in different ways, different people and companies, they may mean the same thing, you know, content calendar, content planner comes in strategy. However, for me, especially when we’re talking about like bigger sites, right, or more challenging work that needs to be done.
The distinction between the strategy, which is where you, you group, this kind of reasoning as you did, right, it’s a perfect with every strategy, you also tell a story, everything we do is, especially if we’re selling it by selling it, I mean, we’re getting buy in from people, either a client or internal, they may be managers, it may be the president of a company, we’re telling a story.
We’re not just going somewhere and say, look, here’s all the key words, right? That’s, that’s not it. Like who? Like, first of all, let’s start with the admission debt, probably, we cannot know that business any better than the people who run it or work in it, right? So I always approach it in a very humble way of like, okay, tell me about this.
Tell me about the challenges your clients you your industry, face. But then we tell the story of what we see through data, right, we use data to sort of understand what we need to propose. And then it’s a story, which is exactly what you’ve done in this deck is like, Okay, I looked at your site, I looked at the industry, this is what I’m getting. And this is where I get your audience being this is what they struggle with their pain points, and how you grouped it, like I really love like, you don’t need to be three, like the seven groups are perfect.
If you want to have higher categories, that’s also fine is like, you don’t have like, all the branded ones or the painpoints ones. And then the other ones could be everything else, right? Sometimes the category can be other. But the strategy shows it could show to anyone. So I think Sandra is right. Even if it’s like the President or someone who’s not in marketing, and manager, like a branch manager, you can say, okay, here are top level categories of topics that people search about, right?
And then you have a plan, which is the details like, Okay, how are we going to cover these topics, here’s 10 pieces of content, or 100, to write about it. And, and for me, that is the distinction between the strategy and the plan. The strategy is the story of how you got to create the plan. The plan is something that everyone from a writer to an SEO manager to a project manager can take, and actually work with it know exactly what they need to do.
So I think you did a splendid job. And as I said, I think you had, if not the most challenging client, like definitely one of the most difficult ones in this cohort. So that that is a great effort to try. Thank you so much for this.
Chitra Iyer 43:29
Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share it.
Erika Varangouli 43:34
Anyone else got any other questions or anything else for Chitra? Before we move to Festus?
Chitra Iyer 43:40
Um, so I have a quick question. Sorry, about that Erika. Uh, you know, typically, I would think, for me, the next stage, I would present this and the next stage would actually be the retail content plan, right?
I mean, it’s okay, if I don’t go with a detailed content plan at this stage, because I think get their feedback, and then only focus on the character, as you said, they know the industry best. So once they see this, and they give me their feedback, I think I can. It’s not hard to come up with 100 titles like No,
Erika Varangouli 44:10
yeah, well, that’s the thing like the the, the right, and the good scenario is this. And it’s happened to me many times where you go and say, Okay, we’ll address these kinds of things. Maybe at that stage, I have a few examples for each category of like the kind of content and then I would spend time to create the full content plan for everything. Other times though, because clients either do not appreciate the level of work or they think, Okay, I just want the plan like I don’t care everything that comes before that.
I just want you to tell me what to write. And that is again, something you kind of know from the discovery called like, what they want, what format they wanted in and what they can appreciate. This is the work that you have to do anyway, right? Whether you create a deck to present to a client to agree on, or whether it is the research you do. So you can create your plan. It can vary.
But yes, for me, the good scenarios are exactly like this to train your hardware discovery calls, you do your research, you come up with a whole plan, like the overall idea of strategy, how you’re going to tackle it, you discuss it with a client, maybe they say, Okay, leave this because sometimes with at that stage, a client might say, okay, but out of those three types of users, for example, or types of queries, I don’t want to target that because my profit margin is too low.
Let’s go for it. So maybe at that stage, someone would say, Okay, that’s great. But let’s also look at the business travellers, because for us prefer, like as a business, they are great. So yes, you need that input somewhere to steer it further. Sandra.
sandra Tabansi 45:56
Hi, Erika. This is off topic. Actually, I just wanted to I haven’t been able to reach out to you personally. But I wanted to just mention that I had an event that I had to work on and plan and so I’ve just been out of the loop for a bit, but I’m good to send in all of my assignments by the end of the week, so I wanted to mention that.
Erika Varangouli 46:28
That’s, that’s absolutely fine Sandra. Anything you need let me know on slack or email and we can discuss there. No problem.
sandra Tabansi 46:35
Okay. All right. Thank you.
Erika Varangouli 46:36
Cool. Peris?
Peris muthinja 46:38
Okay. My My question is for Chitra. I think from after you, after you do the is it the topic research, where we did the topic cluster? The last slide where so you did the the content strategy Summary you?
Chitra Iyer 47:02
Yeah, I’ll share it hold on.
Peris muthinja 47:05
Yeah. Okay. Now my question is either to you or Erika, like, after we did the topic research, you gave us the content strategy breakdown. So like, my question was for Chitra is this now your content strategy.
Chitra Iyer 47:25
Sorry, peris I lost you there. What was your question again?
Peris muthinja 47:32
The content strategy summary for you, is it the same as the one Erika told us to do for the content strategy breakdown. As in after doing the clusters
Chitra Iyer 47:44
It’s not the exact same format, it’s not the exact same format.
Peris muthinja 47:47
oh okay
Chitra Iyer 47:48
But all the elements are there. It’s like you have clarity on who you’re talking to what you want to set as the objectives from content. I guess the only thing missing here might be metrics.
So I’ve said, you know, build awareness. But what is a metric to measure awareness, like how much traffic or I don’t have those metrics here, but I have the goal, the objective, and then yeah, and then where I want place. So just giving some degree of clarity on which content channels, we would want to focus on initially based on all of the research.
And finally, which content formats we want to focus on initially, as well. And I think that will also give us a good insight into the amplification part, like how, you know, what will be the promotion plan that’s also missing from this. But Erika did speak about that in the last class.
Erika Varangouli 48:35
No, no, absolutely. And for me, the this is also another example of someone taking a template or a guidance, right that I give you, I give you guidance. Remember, I’ve always said, you have to make it yours, you have to make it work. And even if it works for you now for one client and may not work at all for another client, right.
Some clients will have will come to you with very specific requirements, some others not so much. So, yes, varies in terms of the essence of the assignment. I think everything is there. Like I’m seeing a strategy, everything is clear. I’m seeing even like I don’t have a plan, I have like the distribution channels and ideas for things to do, which in the plan would become like very specific and if the client said, Oh, I’m interested in partnerships, let’s explore this, you would then come up with more so I absolutely love how to draw made hers and she started it from the start this way.
So she started with the presentation from the first assignment a thing to try. No, that was from from the start. And this is actually like we know in a real life scenario, you have a client, maybe you have a week, two weeks a month, I don’t know depending to come up and present them like your whole strategy and your plan. And what you have to do like maybe you have some accompanying documents, you may have some spread sheets are a Word document where you have a lot more detail.
But 99% of the time you also build the deck to present to them, like the main ideas, because in the same room, you may have people who are higher up in the hierarchy and are not into marketing. And you may have the people who will be directly working with you, right. So you have to have that storytelling element so everyone can understand what you’re saying.
So yes, thank you, Peris. That was a good question. And I think one of the reasons I love how Chitra approached it this whole time was that she was building that story, and connecting all the assignments together because she could see that like, they’re all connected, they all lead to that final outcome. So yeah, absolutely. Fine. Thank you. All right. I’m gonna pull us all back. We have half an hour, but we had some good questions and discussion here to try. Thank you very much. Let’s go to Festus. festus You’re here.
Festus Eze 51:01
Yes. Hello, okay I’m going to talk about the content strategy the content audit, but I will start with, I gathered keywords for the topic research through competitor keyword gap missing, I used three direct competitors and the competitor keyword gap widthand competitor keyword targeting. I targeted keywords with the volume of 500 and above. And then also low hanging fruit keywords I use the keywords at positions 11 to 20.
Erika Varangouli 51:45
Festus, I’m sorry for interrupting you. Do you are you on in front of a screen like a computer? Can you share your screen? Do you want me to share my screen
Festus Eze 51:55
I had to add to break this interaction so I won’t want to share my screen, my network break two times using this particular presentation so I wont want to share my screen because of network problems.
Erika Varangouli 52:19
Okay. Got it. Let me let me do something then because I think for everyone else, it’s very hard to know. So give me one second festus if you can. Where is that? Give me one second. Let me just find assignments, you have saved yours in the right folders, right festus?
Festus Eze 52:56
Yes.
Erika Varangouli 52:57
Okay. And now do you want to talk about the audit or the strategy?
Festus Eze 53:02
I’m talking about the content strategy.
Erika Varangouli 53:05
Okay, and Alright, for trainer road and topic research trainer road, right?
Festus Eze 53:26
Yes.
Erika Varangouli 53:17
Okay. festus I’m sharing your document let me know if you want me to share this spreadsheet. Hey, so I’m sharing my screen. You keep on with the presentation I just wanted everyone to be able to see what you’re talking about.
Festus Eze 53:34
Okay, I gathered keywords in the topic research throug keyword gaps missing, keyword gaps weak. Left low hanging fruit keywords, I used black it was two positions 11 to 2400. So what are these keywords to try to optimise them to try and bring them to the best speech and I targeted computer keywords with a volume of 500 and above. And then added keywords such complexity was a lot of keywords from sit keywords and keyword research.
I was targeting getting about 50 keywords. So I located approximately 10 keywords for each group, each of the five groups to select the 50 keywords based on highest volume. I did this to ensure there is a variety of source in the keyword the content strategy for keywords already ranking on clients websites. I filtered out user generated content from column because it was difficult to optimise column keywords.
I also selected only one keywords for each page and confirm its relevance to the page content by looking at The title, URL and then the meta description to see the keyword is in these places are a variation of the keywords. The minimum search volume I targeted was 100 monthly search volume, I was able to select at least two keywords based on highest volume, at least keyword content for the content strategy.
Then some keywords have similar intents. So those keywords that have similar intent and merge them together by merging them together, the keyword lists reduced from 52 to 45. So, I have two types of keywords, I have 53 keywords there are no there are no ranking in any page on my clients website and have 52 ranking keywords, so new pages will be created for the new keywords.
While the ranking pages will be optimised to rank higher. I researched and wrote various data attributes for the keywords that might help writers including suggested title I use squad AI to understand the meaning of some keywords and proposing a suitable title, the keywords are updated in the editorial content calendar implementation Now over to the content audits, my findings or recommendations- in technical elements title tag more than 50 characters, meta tags 160 characters to suggest that they reduce the left for the title tag to less than 50 characters.
and meta tags to less than 160 characters to that cannot be cut off in the search engine results pages. There are no main page headings for some pages. So I suggested that add a main page header, there are no meta description for some pages. So I suggested they write meta description under performance. Then there is a blog page, that is a subscribe page, It has no traffic, no ranking keywords or backlinks.
So these are essential page. So I suggested the add this subscibe page as a short posts in the main blog collection page, so that visitors will be able to see it and maybe subscribe to their web blog content. At some pages have zero traffic, zero ranking and no backlinks. This is a sign of poor performance. So I recommended optimising those pages to rank for keywords.
Under keyword optimization, the primary key was not in some titles. So I suggested they add the primary key. So some primary key words is not the main header. So I suggested they add the primary key words to the main header. So have nine pages that are not it for the primary key words. These pages are ranking for the keywords and have some backlinks, which means they’re performing very well. The titles and keywords they used show the pages are duplicates in the pages that are ranking. So I recommended optimising the pages to rank or merging the pages after analysing the ranking keywords for the pages.
Final action will depend on discussion with the clients, whether they like to pitch the pages or without do like to just optimise the pages or rank alongside the pages that are ranking. The site has no main navigation in the website, so it’s difficult to find information have a sitemap at the bottom. But for me, it was difficult to locate that sitemap so as I suggested they add navigation on the website.
Then I did some grammar check and spelling check with Grammarly so I discovered some errors, but those errors are not obvious when looking at the websites. So I suggested that writers should try and use a grammar check to minimise such errors. So this is just an overview
Erika Varangouli 59:56
Done? Okay, okay. Sorry Festus , I mean your connection and your network is a bit off. Alright, well, first of all, thank you very much for doing this, although it’s I understand the circumstances are a bit difficult and hard where you are, I was trying my best just sort of show to everyone, some of the things you have delivered because you have turned over, like many documents and and research. So some things from my side, I couldn’t hear a few things you said I didn’t hear the part about the sitemap. But that’s not the important thing right now.
So some some comments from me for you and the class, right. So as I said, at the start, for me, festus probably worked the hardest in terms of how much time and effort put into it. So please, no one take this as anything else other than a great compliment for festus he knows how hard he’s worked. And he’s done a very, very thorough job, right?
By spending all this time he’s, for every assignment, he delivered a very thorough job, which makes it a bit easier for me, because by having so much detail, of course, I can pick a lot of things that I could feed back on and sort of spot even more than details, because, unlike you, I’m not hired by Claude. So I don’t have to look into every every one of your websites in detail.
So I know what you tell me. And then depending on what I see, I will explore a few things to be able to feed back to you, but you have the most in depth understanding of your client at this point, right. And one that I will never get so fast is from my side. Overall, I would say yes, very thorough job for the future. Again, it depends, it depends on a client’s a lot.
But I would say that if you give someone oldest information, and they are someone who are not doing marketing, they may end up feeling confused, and you may get the opposite results. So the assignments for us here are great, right? Because I’m not terrified of content, I love content. But bear in mind that in the future, if you do all this work, you might still want to create like a very condensed document or presentation to show to a client, right, just to show them top level view, tell them a story.
And then if they want, they can see the whole research as well that you’ve done. So that is the overall comment. Because I’ve had it in the past where I was going to clients, and I was like, Oh, I have all this, I’ll have all that. And they were like, Okay, but what did we do? We’re lost, like, what are the three things we need to do? So over time, you realise that, in some cases, people need the top level view, and then depending on the role, they might want to know more as you go.
Number two, very important thing, because you did such a thorough analysis, you had many, many keywords that you found, okay. And I think the first time I heard back, I said, Okay, that’s great. I can see some similar intent here. So I don’t understand if something warrants a separate piece of content or not. So this is a, this is like a thought for the whole class.
The more keywords you find, I think the more difficult it gets to understand which ones need to be one page, which ones not like if you have access to things like, for example SEMrush helps you cluster you still need to review it a lot manually, by the way, right? Don’t just take the clusters and say Okay, that’s it, because it’s still a machine that relies on machine learning needs you to review it. But bear in mind search intent, it is very important to check either on the SERPs or on SEMrush.
And the results you see for that keyword. If the content that ranks for 2,3,4 different keywords is very similar as the same pages, that is an indication for you that the intent is very similar, right? So remember to remember to use your logic, we are still in the era where human mind is still better than AI, I don’t know if that will change. But for now you need to be reviewing and consider what the users want to find. You may have 100 different keywords, they may still just be one piece of content.
So make sure you do you can see that right now. I would say it’s probably 50% of a successful content marketing strategies like how well you plan your content around the target topics and queries and how well you build that relevance around it. So Festus, you have some amazing ideas you put there. You you investigated your topic, so well. The other thing I would say I noticed from the audit which is a also important. So festus this is a bit, I think more technical than the majority of the class.
So I think you know, you did a very good job of of investigating the technical elements of the content audit. The other thing I would like to see is in the content suggestions, I noticed that you often propose, you know, optimised for the keyword included an h1 included in title tag, which is absolutely fine. Like this is a minimum kind of entry point to optimise a page better, of course, you start there.
But I would like to see as well, more of your thoughts on how do you actually improve the content? Right. So if you want to optimise for a term or a query or topic, you’re most likely going to have to do it across the page, not just on a title tag level, like they do not, they’re not able to take you very far, let’s say if you only do that. So I really would like to see. Now, I mean, let’s say I’m a cloud, and we’re working together.
And I’m doing a content audit. And I’m saying, okay, festus, whatever you say, we will do tell us what to change. But content audit is where you have to tell them otherwise is like you have all these issues, some of those would be solved by a technical person, I think not necessarily the content marketer. The title tags in h1, yes. But do you feel that they would perform much better if he only changed the title tag an h1? Or do you think that they should change the content, if you think that they should improve the content, you should also include more information in the audit.
So that was my other only feedback. And ah, one thing that came up in our discussion with Festus just based on this assignment that I wanted to just mention to everyone, remember that sometimes when you review pages, and for me that was part of that, not a trap, I’m not setting up traps for everyone, but for anyone, but I wanted to see how you approach it in the audit, you have pages on websites that are not there to rank necessarily read.
So even if your job is to help a client attract traffic from organic rank, better do all of these things. Some of those pages will just not be relevant to this. So a good example, I think Festus raised it was like a lot of like terms and policies, legal pages that every company needs to have.
You don’t necessarily do anything with them, you just leave them be in peace, you make sure you update them, like you know, you have your copyright across the website, all of those boring stuff, but you don’t necessarily look to them to to make any any improvements in terms of traffic. When you get pages, like subscribe to our blog, subscribe to our newsletter.
Again, this is more a matter of UX and conversion testing rather than something about organic, I think so. So just bear in mind that some pages are more important. We play another part another role, they’re not to be leveraged necessarily in this way.
Erika Varangouli 1:08:26
And final bit that I also found very interesting in Festus analysis reminded me of that, it will be the case, often that you will find the same page ranking for many keywords, right. So especially in less mature websites, or websites that do not do a good job in content, you’ll probably see the homepage ranking for many terms, right?
So festus identified a lot of terms that they needed to create new content for, make sure when that is the case, like even if you find Okay, here’s 50 keywords, and they rank position 20,25 or 15.
With their homepage, you always need to challenge is this the right page to rank for that, like some pages will rank just because they’re the most authoritative page on that website, right or because it has some relevance, but it doesn’t rank so high because also Google knows it’s not the most relevant page, right? So even if you see pages ranking, position 10 or 15.
And then a quick win, there might not be a quick win. I’m saying that if that page is the homepage and that you shouldn’t rank with a homepage, you should have a dedicated guide for something you’re not actually ranking is just your probably your homepage pulling from its authority and ranking somewhere because Google can tell it’s relevant to your website.
So consider this don’t just say optimise the page to rank better for all those terms. If that is the wrong page, it will not work. blank and even if it does vary a bit, it will not stay there. So you have to consider it as a new keyword for a new page if that page is missing from your website. Does that make sense?
Festus Eze 1:10:10
It’s Okay, I have an issue with the audit conducted some pages, the pages, when you look at the titles, you’ll see the same keywords that you phrase in a different way. You know that the intent is actually the same. It’s actually a duplication, you see the same keywords in the titles, even if the URL, the meta descriptions, showing that these are actual duplicates of the same title with different ways.
But those are the titles are ranking better than the ones I audited? This was what I observed. So I suggest that reinforcement that is optimising the pages or merging the pages, what’s your opinion about?
Erika Varangouli 1:11:03
Yeah, I think when you’re when you’re having very different pages, I don’t remember because it’s been a few weeks now from the audit, Festus let me know on Slack, like send me some specific screenshots and we can discuss those specific pages. I can look into their content specifically, overall, in your question, and when you get a website that has the same targeting, in terms of keyword on topic across very different pages, it probably ends up cannibalising itself, right.
So your suggestion to consolidate and merge those, especially if the intent is the same. And that it’s not just the keyword, it’s the intent as well, because they may go for the same keyword with very different types of content. Right, let’s take that scenario, you have a keyword that you see on Google, it serves commercial pages or product pages.
It also serves like informational content like guides around so it’s not uncommon to have a keyword with different intents. So then maybe, you know, they’ve chosen to tackle it by creating different types of pages to target that same keyword. There’s still a question of whether they’re cannibalising themselves, right, that can only be answered by looking at how they rank who ranks above them.
But the other scenario, which is like why would you have different pages to target the same keyword or very different content, but having the same keywords in the titles? That would probably be down to an error. So you wouldn’t do that.
So either those pages if they drive traffic, if they are talking about something that is important, they need to be targeted to to a different keyword in the titles and h1 the content themselves, or they need to be merged. If they’re about the same thing. Just slightly rephrase, they need to be merged into one page that will talk about that topic. Does that answer your question?
Festus Eze 1:13:06
Oh, yes.
Erika Varangouli 1:13:07
Cool. And let me know on slack if you want first just like send me those examples, specifically, the ones that you noticed it down, because I don’t remember. I don’t remember now.
I saw it a few weeks back. So yeah. Um, okay. So we have like 10 minutes. And I want to either answer any questions you had that you didn’t have a chance throughout all this time to ask or hear your thoughts. Like, what are you doing next? Anything? Just tell me Chitra?
Chitra Iyer 1:13:44
Yeah, I was just saying that I think between Festus and me, we have a complete content strategy doc
Erika Varangouli 1:13:51
I was thinking also Peris because I had asked Peris as well to present she just had some technical difficulties. So that’s why we didn’t do it. But you can find her work in the shared folder. I was like, I wish they just reach out to those people and tell them look, this is part of my of my course. And maybe you can find some good ideas. And then you got you got the job.
Chitra Iyer 1:14:13
But I think if I had Festus’ help to do my content audit, like really have those Excel sheets with all those keywords. And with the intent, it will make my pitch so much more compelling. And it will give me also a lot of more specific ideas. So I think Festus next time, I have a client for whom I’m doing content strategy. I know who to come to for the keyword part of the audit and I think also I was thinking
Erika Varangouli 1:14:41
yeah,
Chitra Iyer 1:14:42
sorry,
Erika Varangouli 1:14:43
sorry, Chitra sorry, go go.
Chitra Iyer 1:14:45
No, no, I was just totally different, unrelated but one of the feedback you had given me in my deck was like when we were looking at all those different looking websites.
I think one of the things I could have done was to look at competitors with are not only the same company like enterprise and stuff and see whether their websites was similar or different. And that might have given me something to say to the client if they brought it up, you know? Yeah.
Erika Varangouli 1:15:12
Yeah, I think initially, I remember you looking at one of them. So I remember early on, you said, Oh, they have all these different sets. And I said, focus on the US focus on the.com. And I don’t know if it was hertz, maybe because you mentioned it a few times today.
Ashleigh Ferguson 1:15:28
I think that is it.
Erika Varangouli 1:15:31
But look, first of all, I don’t know what happens like after our cohort is done, I don’t know if I’m kicked out of slack or not, or if you guys remain, but if we remain, just continue the discussion there, right, because I think it’s a great space. FCDC is a great space for advice and sharing and stuff, it doesn’t have to be within the cohort, it can be within the whole community.
So continue that. And I think also, I asked you all to start adding your assignment there, and everyone to have access. So you can see what each other has done. It doesn’t even matter if you forget to put your name like it’s a very different client, it’s a very different approach from each one of you. So festus’ documents, chitra should be there, you know, you can see how he has approached it.
You may disagree with things or not, but still like you have it there. And you can always reach out to festus or me or anyone else in this cohort and FCDC to sort of discuss, I would still advise you like if you get time, I know we’re all working and have also families and stuff. But those assignments are meant to be quite close to reality in many aspects, right.
So even if you haven’t done them as part of the deadlines, and the court heard here, still use them to the degree they’re useful to your as an exercise, right? And you can always be like you have me on LinkedIn, I think most of you if you don’t, I’m on LinkedIn, you’ll have me on Slack. Ping me anytime and say, Erika, I just managed to look into this. What do you think? Give me an idea And I will try my best to sort of feedback and share some thoughts. If that happens. So yeah, I think Peris had raised her hand. Who had raised their hand? I’m not sure.
Peris muthinja 1:17:18
Okay, um, okay. Thank you, Erika, for, for commenting that at least am somewhere almost close to the content strategy breakdown as in. Because I think by the time I was doing the site, the audit. I wouldn’t cheat. But I think I was almost giving up. I was like, let me just stick to contemplating. I don’t think this is what I signed up for. But no, let me let me just do it.
And they finish and then, and then I see. But you know, I’ve actually come to love it. I think I’ve come to appreciate the guests who give us the content briefs, they will do the keyword research. So I’m very grateful for the whole process. I’m feeling a bit energised, I think I’ll try to do for one of my clients who is also having a hard time. But my question was on. When we, when I did the topic research, there was this issue of doing the clustering. And for my for my website, which is the eddy’s wheel, um, I was a bit cold. I was a bit not confused, but I was questioning.
So I’ve given my clients the topic clusters that we should try and rank for or have on the website. But now the client doesn’t have a blog has the product product pages. So now like for every like one of the clusters, the one the one the one you recommended that I do the DIY. So does the client now create a new page? Or because I saw like the client already has a dog, was it a dog wheel for backlinks. Now, assuming we are doing a cluster keyword, they have the cluster keywords and I want the client maybe to rate for a small dog small dog wheelchair for backlinks. The client doesn’t have a blog.
Erika Varangouli 1:19:49
Yes
Peris muthinja 1:19:50
So how then we have maybe how to make a dog wheel for backlinks or
Erika Varangouli 1:19:57
I think you had asked that as well in another class or Somewhere peris on slack. So here’s the thing, sometimes clients may not, I don’t know what the website is built on, you can easily check their Chrome plugins to tell you what a site is built with. Sometimes, it’s just because they didn’t have the content in there, we’re not planning to creating content, right?
So launching a blog, if it’s a WordPress site, for example, should be very easy many times as well, it’s just a matter of a smaller brand, not having that plan to create content, you always have to check in advance, like in the discovery called, is where you would say, you know, I see you don’t have a blog, you don’t have a place to publish content. Is that because you cannot, do you have any limitations?
Or are we okay? If there are any development or you know, the website is built in a very weird or bespoke system or something? You just agree with them that like, Okay, we need to publish content, what would we do the may be able to build a guide section, for example, right? So you just, you just have to address it.
But the idea that you need to put content on the site to be relevant to queries, remains blog or not, like the blog is not the place where all the content goes. Sometimes, like, the content itself, goes to the blog, because it’s the easiest place on a website, because it’s there, it doesn’t mean the blog is the right place to put it. So don’t let that limit you. But it is definitely something you should raise with a client early on, if you’re hired to do a strategy or content to say, okay, where will this content sit? Because I don’t see necessarily a place for it on the side right now. And you would clarify from the start.
Peris muthinja 1:21:40
Okay.
Erika Varangouli 1:21:42
Who is next? I think
Ashleigh Ferguson 1:21:46
I have, well, I just wanted to I’d sent the remaining assignments, I think on Sunday or Monday. And I said sometimes your email does this thing where it puts your stuff in spam. So I hope that’s not the case.
Erika Varangouli 1:22:00
You sent something on Sunday, Sunday or Monday. That means did I respond to you? Ashleigh? I think I know something.
Ashleigh Ferguson 1:22:11
December 10 was the Yeah, so it was this day yeah. And so my client actually rebranded in the middle of everything, um, took glimmer.io so story Hunter rebranded to glimmer IO. But throughout the assignment, I kept the story on too, because that would have been what I started when I was doing the competitor analysis, because when you change it to glimmer IO, then the competitors kind of get skewed.
And even in evaluating them. There were like some really smaller competitors that wouldn’t keep that weren’t even coming up in, like Google search, I should say, for the Okay, initial keywords. Okay.
Erika Varangouli 1:22:59
Actually, let me let me look at the email you sent me a few days ago. Because I was going over everyone’s assignments over the weekend. So maybe that came if it came after December 11. Yeah, so I had closed pretty much this round. Um, let’s just go some slack or an email. The thing is right now because it’s also like half past and a half to go, but I see Festus, Mae and peris have raised their hands. If there are if you have questions around your clients and assignments, please slack, right? Send me messages on Slack send me emails are a bit weird.
My inbox like a thing is just overloaded with many unread and spam. But slack, you can find me LinkedIn, you can find me for some reason you cannot reach me on slack, Ashleigh, I will look into that. And we can discuss what happens because in a real life scenario, like a client hiring you for content would not necessarily change everything without letting you know. So that’s a weird case just because of how we do things for the cohort. Anyone else had any like, general thing if you have any questions, or you want an update on any assignments? just slack me afterwards? It’s fine.
Mae Josémaria O. 1:24:19
Erika I have a question.
Erika Varangouli 1:24:22
Oh, Lord. Haha
Mae Josémaria O. 1:24:25
I just want to ask a different question. It’s not related to a client Yeah. Um, yeah, this may seem like a no brainer. But throughout this cohort, we’ve done different there are different stages, we don’t have competent analysis, keyword research topic clusters and all those things. Now, for people like us trying to integrate this different things into our content marketing services, henceforth.
What would you suggest do will you suggest that we do Do everything like offer everything, like keyword research, competitor analysis, content plan, content strategy, or we’ll pick just one. Because I know like Peris said she was overwhelmed.
A lot of us were overwhelmed with the content audit, I for one was overwhelmed. I just wanted to know if I’ll be leaving money on the table. If I say I don’t want to do content audits, I want to just focus on clustering, or just focus on, you know, competitor analysis. Yeah, that’s what I want to know.
Erika Varangouli 1:25:33
Let me run from my phone because I need to get ready as well. So I need to continue wait one second.
Chitra Iyer 1:25:39
I would say jump on the project and collaborate with the others, like I could like work with Festus or anybody else on certain parts that and rather than say no to a project,
Mae Josémaria O. 1:25:50
anything that involves content audits, I don’t think I want to be a part of it, because it’s haha
Mae Josémaria O. 1:26:00
I don’t think I want to be a part of it. So I just want to know If it’s something that I could just keep totally and leave for the SEOs or just focus on I enjoyed competitor analysis, I enjoyed the keyword research, even though I’m not so good at it. But the audit part of it? No, no.
Erika Varangouli 1:26:18
Okay, can you all hear me now?
Mae Josémaria O. 1:26:20
Yes, yeah.
Erika Varangouli 1:26:22
Cool. So very quickly, I’ll say two things. Three, first of all, what you want to do, what you do is up to you. So leaving money on the table is I think no one can answer that. For you. We don’t know your clients, we don’t know you know what you’re doing. In terms of what you’re focusing on. I couldn’t say that I think you’re leaving much more money on the table.
If you say you do everything, and you don’t do it? Well, because it’s your reputation on the line as well. And this is a no, especially if you’re freelancing, it’s a lot about word of mouth. And so your reputation is probably the most important asset you have, right. So my suggestion would be to do the things First of all, that you know how to do well, or you train yourself to do them, well, if you want to do them.
And then of course, you do the things you want to do more often. Whether the market needs something more than something else, everything is changing very rapidly. Right now with AI. My suggestion is, I think, especially the the content writing service is commoditized much faster than other services, okay. But that doesn’t mean that you should be doing keyword research. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that, obviously, the more skills you build in content marketing, the more the more you learn, the more you’re securing yourself for the future. However, my my principle, I don’t say to be yours is that I don’t do anything unless I feel I can do a good job.
And I can do a good job. If I get to practice it. If I get to train if I get to read, if you know, I get to see it in real life and work with others. And remember, we’ve said many times that a content marketer is is a very difficult profession, right? You’re not just a writer, you’re not just an SEO, like an SEO is also very diverse.
But you have to be strategic, you have to understand many things. I would say me, you start with the things you know how to do you feel well doing, you can do a great job. And then you continue building skills like this cohort, this class was not for me, it was never about that, at the end of it. You’re not an experienced content marketing, content marketer, you haven’t done this before, right? I don’t expect you to do great content audits, because you know, I showed you some things for an hour. And then you had an assignment and you got a bit of feedback, like no one got good at anything by that, like, I didn’t do that within an hour.
So we’ll just say, hopefully, it just gave you a little more insights into some areas and how they combine with each other to build a whole plan. And then you can explore further from here how you want to progress. Sorry, that was a very long answer, but I found a way to be able to speak to you while getting ready, so that’s fine, mae?
Mae Josémaria O. 1:29:40
Yeah, that’s okay. Thank you.
Erika Varangouli 1:29:41
Cool. Anyone else had any further questions or want to say some of this? No. Okay. All right. So, my dear students, I am going to leave you I’ll put the camera on just for now. I’m going to leave you Thank you so much.
I’ve learned a lot and you had some amazing questions throughout the whole series which I loved. My initial fear was that no one would ever ask anything which kills me.
I wish you all like if you have like any time off or you have holiday season coming ahead for any of you enjoy it and stay in touch. Please, please do I mean it. If anyone reaches out to your client with what you did and you get the job, just let me know. it’ll be a proud moment.
Peris muthinja 1:30:34
thank you.
Erika Varangouli 1:30:35
Thank you, everyone. Bye
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