Welcome to the second season of the FCDC Expert series. We’re kicking off the season with Bernard Huang with this content teardown.
Understanding search intent is crucial for effective search engine optimization and achieving higher rankings in search results.
In this episode, Bernard uses examples of search results for different keywords and demonstrates how search intent can vary and how it impacts content creation and ranking.
Name: Bernard Huang
What Bernard Does: Co-founder at Clearscope
Company: ClearScope
Noteworthy: He is the co-founder of Clearscope, one of the best-in-class SEO content optimization platforms that drive search traffic.
💡Importance of Gathering Comprehensive Information for Content Briefs
Bernard emphasizes the importance of gathering comprehensive information for content briefs before starting a content marketing project.
He suggests adding sections such as search intent, due dates, and client expectations to ensure that all relevant information is collected from the client.
💡Significance of understanding search intent
Bernard highlights the importance of search intent in today’s intent-driven world of search engine optimization. He explains that simply categorizing search intent into broad categories like informational, transactional, commercial, or research is not enough.
It is crucial to understand the specific reasons why searchers come to a particular piece of content and what they are looking for.
💡Analyzing Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
Bernard demonstrates the process of analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs) to understand search intent better. He uses the example of searching for “how to get rid of pimples” and examines the different intents reflected in the search results.
By analyzing the title tags, search snippets, and SERP features, he identifies the various intents related to the topic and explains the significance of addressing these intents in content creation.
💡Broadening the Scope of Search Intent Discovery.
Bernard expands the search intent discovery process beyond the front pages of the SERPs. He explores additional sources of intent, such as the “people also ask” section, autocomplete suggestions, and related searches.
By examining these sources, he identifies further intents related to the keyword and includes them in the overall understanding of search intent.
The evolution of SEO practices and the significance of hero images.
Bernard discusses the evolution of SEO practices, specifically mentioning the shift in the importance of hero images. He explains that hero images were once considered a best practice in SEO, but their significance has diminished over time.
Bernard draws a parallel between hero images and citations, suggesting that their inclusion in content was based on the assumption that it would be beneficial. However, as more people began using them, their value decreased. He highlights the need for content creators to focus on answering questions directly and improving user experience instead of following outdated practices.
Maintaining content flow and reader engagement.
Bernard responds to a question about maintaining flow and reader attention from heading to heading and paragraph to paragraph. He admits that it depends on the specific piece of content and its subject matter. He emphasizes the importance of understanding what the audience cares about and tailoring the narrative accordingly.
Bernard suggests that immersing oneself in relevant communities and interviewing subject matter experts can provide insights into what has been working and what hasn’t, allowing for a more cohesive and engaging content flow.
Connect with Bernard;
NB: The striked-out content is what Bernard has removed and the content in red is what he has added
Chima Mmeje 0:06
So we’re back for season two of the FCDC expert series. And our first guest for this season is Bernard. I’m so sorry. I should have asked how to pronounce your last name. No worries. It’s your last name. Wow, one. Yes, one. Okay. All right. So we have been on one with us today. And he’s going to be doing a content theatre.
And I’m personally feeling selfish, because I’ll benefit from this. Everybody who is going to keep showing up is also going to benefit from this. This is an awesome series. So I’m gonna hand over the mic and video and everything’s been out and I’ll just disappear into the background and he can take over.
Bernard Huang 0:45
Thanks so much Chima. So my name is Bernard, I am the founder of clear scope in SEO content optimization platform. And I’m so excited to kick off content tear downs with the freelance coalition. I know there’s a lot of questions a lot to unpack. And so I’ll just dive right in. I want this session to be as interactive of a session as possible. So if you have thoughts, if you have questions, I know you know, the first segment is me going through explaining my methodology explaining how you should approach content for search. And then really jot down your thoughts jot down what you want me to go over more. And we’ll dive into this after the content teardown.
So here, Chima has provided me a content sample for this particular teardown. And the target keyword that we’re going after is content marketing for tech companies. As you can see, here, we’ve identified the audience, the goal of the piece of content, and the marketing agency, which is a really good start, I think, to add to this list that you should be compiling in we’ll call it your content brief. What you should also be including are things like the search intent. And also other things like just so you’re aware, the due dates, and kind of the expectations expectations of the client, right?
Do they do they kind of expect one to two revisions, all that good stuff. So I’m going to say that this as a starter brief of what you have up here is good. And then I’ll just suggest that you add a few extra sections below to make sure that you are gathering as much information as possible from the client before you get started. So this idea of search intent is probably the most misunderstood, but most important aspect of how to be approaching search engine optimization in today’s intent driven world.
The reason why I’m saying that this is the most misunderstood aspect of SEO, is because a lot of people will simply bucket it into the five high level categories that you probably have heard of right things like informational transactional commercial research, something like this. But this is really not that flavorful, in the sense that it’s not giving us enough context as to why the searcher is going to come to your piece of content, and what specifically it is that they’re looking for, in terms of the answer to the question that they have. So let’s backtrack from here and really think about this idea of search intent.
I’m going to pull up a text editor on the left to really kind of jot down some notes, as we kind of take a look at some search engine results pages. I typically use this as an example because it illustrates a really good example as to what’s going on in search, and why you should care about it. And so as you know, a lot of people will pursue the idea of keyword research and keyword research, you’re generally looking at a couple of different criteria. Number one is monthly search volume. And number two is going to be this idea of keyword difficulty. And number three, maybe you have something along the lines of search intent.
So you’ll see here just as a cookie cutter example to deviate. Let’s look at how to get rid of pimples. So if we Googled how to get rid of pimples over here on the right, you’ll notice that the type types of results that we’re getting back in the SERP have graduated into different levels of intent. Right? This one says how to get rid of pimples fast. You’ll notice this one says natural and fast like this.
You’ll notice this one says How To Get Rid Of Pimples stat, fast, fast, different types of acne, things to try when acne will clear, you have easy home remedies, how to get rid of pimples, home remedies for acne. So right if we’re like thinking about the SERP in terms of the intent that the user is likely to care about, then you can imagine that there’s a lot of these instances of fast or home remedies that we see showing up. So as part of this idea of search intent discovery, what I recommend that you do is to Google the target keyword, again that the client wants to rank for, and two buckets together, the key themes or intents that you see surfaced in I usually like look at title tags, and the
the what are these called the search SERP features like that. So if I were to do now this for How To Get Rid Of Pimples like this, you’ll notice what this looks like is that we would say okay, well result number one, or the Featured Snippet says fast like that. And you’ll see here result number two outline says, you know, natural, and then we have this thing that says fast like this, you’ll see here there is a video carousel. So we’ll mark down that there is a video carousel.
This one says How To Get Rid Of Pimples stat stats kind of is part of fast, but we can say home remedies to get rid of pimples fast right? We’d have then something that looks like this home remedies. And then you have this one glamour how to get rid of pimples fast, right? So for you that have treats different types. So that’s pretty different different types. And then nine things to try when acne won’t clear as an indented search results. And that’s sort of a different intent, as in, you know, things things to try when stuff doesn’t work when doesn’t work like that. And then you have easy home remedies like this.
And then you have How To Get Rid Of Pimples, best home remedies, right. So this. So you can imagine, right? The reason why we’ve gone through this specific exercise now is because this How To Get Rid Of Pimples should be thought of as a topic. People who are searching for this topic, are now graduating into different levels of intent. If we’re to now synthesise this, right, we would say there’s about five occurrences, someone wants to get rid of pimples fast as soon as possible.
Right. And if we’re to now think about this, in terms of a search engine results, page probability, then we’re looking at about a 50% chance or likelihood that if you covered this particular topic that you would break in the Google search results, you can imagine right if we bucketed this together, which is also thematically the same. People want to use home remedies, natural home remedies, right basically without chemicals, something like this. And this would graduate into something closer to eight 40% shot at breaking into the SERPs, you can imagine right to then conclude this.
I know this doesn’t add up to 100%. It’s because there are over there are title tags with overlapping intent. But for the most part, right, we could then kind of assess it like this. So about a 50% shot for fast about a 40% shot for home remedies, naturally about a 10% shot for different types of 10% shot when acne doesn’t work and a 10% shot that creating a video will work. So we do all of this, right? Because back to this idea of search intent. Again, the saying research or informational is really bland in the sense that it doesn’t say anything about what the searcher is actually caring about.
And a lot of people skip this specific step and jump straight into creating a piece of content. How to Get Rid of Pimples like this. Or right maybe we add a little bit of clickbait Enos to it well, Best Ways To Get Rid Of Pimples like that or we take a topic clustering approach like this ultimate guide to getting rid of an bowls like this. But you can imagine that Problem with all of these as directional places to take your piece of content is that they are not addressing the intents that the user actually cares about. So these are going to have a very difficult time ranking, because you’re not addressing the core intents that the user cares about.
Alright, now that we’ve gone through that, and we’ve explained the importance of search intent, let’s actually do this live for content marketing for tech companies. Right? So if we’re to now Google this as a keyword, and inspect the search engine results that are not ads associated with what’s ranking, will notice that there is one for seven content marketing strategies, right? So just simply strategies. And then you can see here, generally speaking, we’ll also be looking at to the people also asked to infer intent, how to how to do marketing, how to do content, right?
So it’s like sort of this how to, can I do marketing? What are the company’s best? So you know, companies best is sort of this idea of examples, right? What are the company’s best at doing content marketing? You’ll see here top performing content marketing strategies, right. That’s another occurrence for strategies for content marketing, tips, tips and strategies, I think, more or less go together in terms of an intent, top content marketing strategies like this. Six content marketing strategies, some more strategies, six best content marketing examples, right.
So that’s another occurrence. For this examples, the tech giants guide to effective content marketing, that’s sort of this like topic cluster Guide, which I suppose how to kind of can go into that five examples of successful tech. Right. So there’s something there, the definitive guide, so another one for this guide, technology content to drive. I don’t even know what this is really saying. So let’s go and take a look. optimised technology strategy, we address. Yeah, I, I guess this is sort of like a,
like a landing, like a, like a use case, or, you know, features use case, you know, like, request service type page. It’s interesting. It is from Gartner. So maybe they’re an authority. And then generally during this stat, I only did it for the front page for How To Get Rid Of Pimples. But I’m also looking at second third page content, and some other places, which we’ll cover in a second. So guide, we’ve covered that tactics, right tactics are sort of within strategies and tips. I’m not like jotting down the percentages anymore strategies.
This is interesting research. Right? That’s 2023. So we’ll just say research. 2023. Right. This is showing up on the second page. It’s an interesting new intent that we haven’t seen before. Why it’s important. That’s kind of interesting why it’s important. Like that. I mean, key strategies, why it’s essential. It’s the same as as b2b Right? This is, this looks like a service page. Yeah. So it is a service page. So services service pages can exist for this query, which is interesting strategies. And then yeah, services. Cool. The last place I’m going to look, so just so that you’re aware of what we’ve looked at now is front two pages of Google SERPs for the key word we’ve looked at. People also ask, and then we’re going to look at this.
These are autocomplete suggestions for IT companies. You see strategies for IT companies IT company marketing strategy, marketing plan for software company PDF. PDF, I guess, is kind of interesting. sales strategy technology. Alright, so write down PDF, because that implies that perhaps somebody might want to download the by content asset as as a PDF, and we’ve documented all of that the last place. So now we’ve added auto complete autocomplete suggestions. The last place we’re going to be looking is the related searches, which we see right here it best IT strategy, sales, sales, sales strategy. All right, that’s sales strategy.
We see the PDF thing show up again. And then you can see here, this is actually starting to be a little bit interesting. I’m not sure what to call these. But we’ve now looked at related searches and we’ll Okay, Google, Google bubbles, is what I’ll call these three examples best to videos, right? So free examples and best are definitely not within the normal context of what we expect. So we already have examples best is sort of covered by strategies. I mean, we can just kind of say like, Best Pop, right? Boom on top of there. And then three is this other, like, hanging sort of thing. Alright, so this is what search intent discovery should look like for this particular keyword that you’re going after.
Now, if I were to summarise all of this into the key densities, right, of things that people care about, obviously, people care about the top and best strategies, tips, tactics, right. So this is predominantly the thing, and it’ll be like, you know, talk best strategies. Obviously, secondarily, people will care about to the examples, right? Examples of companies doing this well. And then thirdly, they will care about actually how to implement or guide like that. And then you know, some percentage of them will want to actually just reach out to the marketing agency, because they just want it done for that.
And so the use case and request service page is pretty cool to see that that can rank, we then have these extra interesting things or intents that show up research, why it’s important, the PDF, the sales strategy, and free. So back to this, right, what we want to do with search intent is to be very descriptive and flavorful with how we’re thinking about it, right. So people, people searching for content marketing for tech companies, essentially want wants to know, what are the best strategies, tactics, tips are to implement for, for content marketing for probably a lead generation?
You know, like, additionally, additionally, citations of examples of tech companies who are doing this, well, are very nice to have. All right, examples of tech companies doing this well. And then lastly, right, like, lastly, lastly, a like how to how to slash guide, slash guide, slash guide will then inform them, inform them on you know, how to get started with a impactful strategy, something like this. You know, other considerations, I’ll just put these in bullet points, right? Like these, these things, like over here will say, you know, other other angles, they the searcher, searcher will care about include law like this.
Alright. So you can see here, we have a very distinct search intent, now that we can operate from these things, the due date, the expectations of the client, right? These are things that should be gathered within the client intake method, right? I think that making sure we’re all clear about all of these are core parts of setting up the client, and you your relationship with the client for success. And obviously, you know, we’ve all been here, in this revision nightmare, where you send it back, they’re like, No, do it again, do it again. And you want to make sure that you’re clear as to how many times you will revise it before you get off the ground and start delivering your content.
Now, we’re finally to the point where we can actually tear down this piece of content, right? So I’m gonna flip over to suggesting note 11 ways content marketing drives value for technology companies, you can imagine what I’m already going to say about this is that it’s not talking about the best companies or best strategies. It’s not talking about examples of companies doing this well. And there’s no like, how to write so it’s missing all of the key elements in terms of intents that we’ve defined here, and something that would be better would be like 11. Best away like best strategies.
Best, like con Content Marketing Strategies for tech companies, you can like, imagine something like this, where including, including, you know, like, plus, like 2023 examples. Again, I’m not like word smithing this well, probably on the spot. But something like that’s content marketing strategies, including examples of, you know, good stuff, you can even call out like, you know, downloadable downloadable PDF or something like this, right? You can imagine, that’s why all of these here are important to consider or guide download, like downloadable, you know, guide guide, a PDF, right, some combination of all of that will be good.
All right. So now on to the core body of content, this is something that I see a lot of people doing, which personally I don’t particularly like, which is including statistics, and including this like block around the you know, why content marketing is the key for success to tech companies, blah, blah, blah. The reason why I don’t like these is because and I’ll just go ahead and kind of, say, remove this, like this. We don’t have to, we can take this and like push it to the bottom, like this here. Alright, so the reason why I don’t like this whole block of text is because somebody’s here to learn about the top and best strategies, right?
What we’re saying in all of this is like, you know, what is content marketing or tech companies, why it’s important, blah, blah, blah, but really, right, the user wants to come to read this, oh, it’s because you know, increased brand awareness or increased website traffic, also, right? If we’re now starting to get into the block of main content, which we will in just a second, I think, here to start, or if we’re ready, re angled to this whole piece of content, that’s content marketing strategies for tech companies, we know they want the best examples how to write. So we would say something along the lines of, you know, basically, content marketing, content marketing is an important lead generation channel for tech companies.
Right? So that’s sort of why why it is, all it needs to be is one sentence, then it’s like, below, I don’t know, let’s say like, in this article, in this article, you will learn what are the best strategies and tips to consider for your own content marketing strategies in 2023, we’ll walk through some examples of tech companies and companies we see doing well in each of the strategies and provide short how tos, how tos, to get you off the ground off the ground for each tip. Read on, right. All right. So right, this is that’s it generally one sentence on you know, like content marketing, one sentence, then that addresses right, the key intents that we see, you can even then say like, you know, downloadable guide, slash PDF here, or whatever. And you have now kind of talked about this, obviously, right?
There’s this consideration, that is why it’s important, but it’s really more of a side consideration, than it is the main reason why somebody is here. So how content marketing brings value to tech companies, you know, this, essentially, this is a piece of content, because we’ve gone through and done the search intent analysis is already kind of off base, in that were really just addressing the why, at this point. And, again, the core reason why somebody came here not to consume the why is to concern what’s what’s working.
So then the you know, instead of just reshaping this entire piece of content, you know, what I would probably do here is I would say, you know, this is just a new new like, this should be a new piece of content on, you know, why content marketing for tech companies, really, and then, you know, the rest of this piece of content. I’ll just go through how I would think about outlining this, but are the top and the best strategies
So here, we would take a look at, you know, what, what we see ranking, I think, you know, what a lot of people will also do. So just places to look right, is that you will be interviewing, you know, SMEs, these are subject matter subject matter experts. And you will be, you know, coming to people who are practising content marketing in tech companies and say, you know, like, you know, what, what’s, what’s been working? What’s been working for you?
Or what hasn’t been working? Like, why? Why this? Alright, so you know, that’s obviously going to give you a good sense of things that are working things that are not working. Obviously, the classic inspect the other Google search results is just a very great place to look in terms of what we see ranking right. So for content marketing, tips, content marketing strategies, right, taking a look at this, see, okay, position it as a thought leader, master the art of storytelling, you know, the thought leadership, topical content, evergreen content, success stories, diversified content.
All right. So people are talking about all these different like strategies you can imagine we can infer thought leadership, and, you know, like diversified, diversified channel channels, including SEO, social brand, that kind of stuff. So master the art of storytelling, publish a different type kinds of content. So inspect thought leader diversified different kinds of content. Right now we’re talking about like written, like infographic trends, video, right, that kind of stuff. So that’s kind of where we would look at that particular insight. And then there are obviously content optimization tools.
You know, I’ll give out a shout out to clear scope here, where we would inspect the top ranking Google search results, just so that you kind of see how this works. In clear Scout, we’d come we’d run a report for content marketing for tech companies, and then their scopes using natural language processing to extract relevant concepts and entities to give you insights, then into how to build the most comprehensive, best piece of content. We’ll come back to that in just a second. So we have these typically, at this step to write interview clients is a step I’m gonna say it’s optional, right?
You don’t always have to interview the client, sometimes they want to talk, sometimes they don’t want to talk, but it’s an interesting place to look. And then other places to look are going to be communities. And communities will include things like Reddit, things like SCGC, you know, things like Quora, and other slack communities, Facebook groups, right, where you can post a question, and you can get thoughts on what people are saying. So generally, right, during this particular step, we’ll call this the outlining phase. This is where they will get the core nuts and bolts.
And you know, depending on your appetite, there’s also a chat GPT, you know, I would be not comprehensive if I were not to include something like this, where you could ask chat GPT to provide some insights and ideas on how to how to produce an outline on, you know, the best strategies of content marketing. So this would then get you all of the different ideas. And then, right, what we want to do is an I like, I kind of like this a goal, right, though, what’s been working for you
What hasn’t just as somebody who practices, content marketing, right? The variance, or the shifts that we’ve been seeing happen has been fairly dramatic with the introduction of AI and everything that’s been been going on. So you can imagine, right, we’ll walk through what’s been doing well and what hasn’t, right? What hasn’t? So it’s like, you know, something like,
what’s what’s been working, what’s been working, you know, top strategies, top strategies for 2023. You can imagine what’s not been working or falling out of favour. Like And then maybe like some sort of a shocked face? Cool. All right, what’s not been working like this. And then yeah, you’ll probably see, you know, like thought leadership, like super important but hard to do go through. And then we would include, you know how to how to like start doing thought leadership like this. And then within this, we will also have examples of companies companies doing well in thought leadership, and then you can imagine, you know, produce different kinds of on that, and how to, like, think about that. And then examples of companies doing well with different types of content.
And then you can imagine, right, what we would do here as well, is the same thing, what’s not been working, right, there’s probably things that are not working nearly as well. And these might be infographics, infographics, trends, I don’t know, infographics feel like they’ve fallen out of favour, you know, like, why are they not doing as well? And then, let’s see, what else would in my, like, volume on a lead magnets also seem like a little bit out of flavour for content marketing strategies, you know, why are they not doing as well? Okay, so you can not generate the guides here, the examples here, we’ve covered that exactly what somebody is here to consume.
And then the rest of our outline, you can imagine would be actually answering the these things, right. Use Case request service. So now we can say, you know, contact, I think you had it, like the actual business somewhere around here. Yep. Experts, like this name of company. It’s, uh, yeah. Alright, so, you know, like, where were we, we were here, there. Alright. Kanye, you know, something like content, like done for you done for you content, content marketing service, you know, you can now plug plug business name like this. Okay, so we’ve now covered this, and then you could imagine, I mean, we’ve sort of covered the research in 2023.
In that, right, what’s been working top, we’ve demonstrated that we’ve done the research. So we could probably you know, ignore that we can then talk about you know, like, why content marketing for tech is important, right. But you can see here I’m putting the section this is you know, your like h2, this is like you know, your h2 This is like your h2 Right, this is like your h2. So, this section goes way below there like this. And then right h2, you will like download this as a, as a PDF. Like that.
We might talk a little bit about how it relates to the sales strategy, right? So h2, you know, how to like capitalise capitalise on leads. And to capitalise on, like leads from a sales perspective, that were generated through content marketing, and then I don’t really know where free goes probably here, I download this as a free PDF like that. Okay. So we now have the the way that we’ve accomplished, right, this is how to build a. Alright, so this is outlining. And then right, basically, the step before outlining was search intense.
And in search intent, what we were doing is we were looking at, at these search intent, right, informs how you structure and want to build your piece of content. Outlining, right these are the places to look to get different ideas to circle back around to clear scope like this for our piece of content, you can imagine, as the final step, we can take the piece of content like this, put it inside a content optimization tool, and content optimization tools, right will give insights into what you want to be using as a heading. What are the most important terms or concepts to put within your piece of content, right? All of these start to kind of make a lot of sense.
We also streamline aspects of looking at how other people have outlined their pieces of content and places to look in terms of the questions, the places to be linking out to the different communities that we see talking about this particular topic. So then we finish a piece of content, we’ll just go back to this because we’re sort of building out more of a process at this point. Right, we have search intent, we have outlining. Now we’re done here with outlining.
The next step is going to be, like, you know, at draft like this drafting. Generally going in filling in each one of these, I would just add a note here that before, like within draft, it’s usually a lot better when you’re first working with a client to send to send send over the outline to the client for review. Right? A lot of people just hop straight into draft, you have this 1000 2000 word piece of content, you send it to the client, and they’re like, bernera. No, like, this is not what I wanted. Right? And so essentially, right, if you just sent them this, like, hey, Bernard, or Chima, right, this is the this is what I plan on covering it in this particular way, very lightweight, send it to them for review, right, that way, they can have some back and forth before you hop into the heavy lifting of crafting the piece of content for them to come back and say you know what?
That was not, that was not what I wanted. So send over the outline for the client to review first, and then hop into drafting, drafting. Pretty straightforward, not really going to cover that too much. Just fill in all the stuff. And then you have revisions, which again, is there’s not too much to say about that. And then you’re done. So in revisions, that’s where if you want it to have a high likelihood of shooting ranking in the SERPs, you would use like a content optimization tool sheet for an A plus, plus that kind of stuff. And then we’re good to go. So that about wraps up my content teardown, I know that we basically didn’t look too too much into like this, I’m sure there are parts of this, where it makes sense as in like, there is right establish thought leadership is definitely a strategy build a community is also definitely a strategy, increasing brand awareness and increasing website traffic are not strategies, right, they are effects of what content marketing does.
So you know, you can obviously take pieces of this, we’re thinking about this from a holistic point of view, right? Like examples of companies doing this? Well, we’re seeing three of those show up and so we would probably kind of have this like afterwards right done what we might suggest to the client is that there are maybe two or three additional piece of content that you could create to support this piece of content, it would be like 2023
You know, examples of tech companies like doing well with content marketing and that because we see three occurrences of that showing up and then just a straight up you know how to guide on getting started with content marketing like this and then this use case and request service page right so these are now as you can imagine articles like that and then you would have one more shot at a use case and request quote page and that would be a just like you know Content Marketing Service services dash you know company cool there That about wraps it up. Hema seen that is I feel like I feel like when
Chima Mmeje 39:02
I thought my content briefs were solid but Bernard, this is next level. This is incredible. This is just mind blowing. Honestly, this is mind blowing. I, I love the fact about using like separate documents to analyse SERP does the question. The question is I haven’t even ever looked at bubbles. If I’m being honest. I look at everything else but bubbles I just need to do Lastly, I look at everything else you’ve mentioned.
But bubbles, I just seem to get at something. You know, and it’s just insane that you use that and you you managed to like take all of all the different intent and synthesise every single thing into the outline. Instead of picking one or picking the ones that are most recovering. You take every single one of them I’m putting into the outline. That is amazing. That’s amazing. If anybody has questions for Bernard, please use the q&a or raise your hand. Okay, I think we have a first question from Sakina Sakina says? Yes. Is clear scope accurate in the links it gives for references?
Bernard Huang 40:23
Sakina Great question. So over here, you probably looked at the common citations, we’re clear scope does, and it’s pretty simple is that we’re just looking at commonly linked out to resources that the top 30 results are citing. And so if we see this domain, Content Marketing Institute or blog, the hubspot.com being linked up to then will surface the links that we see people pointing out to.
So you can imagine, right, you can click around on these to then get insights into what what people are linking out to you. Right? So but face a big hurdle content operations, so clearly, right? There’s a bunch of stuff around, like, attributing Content Marketing ROI, that’s very difficult. You can imagine what that could mean is during the outlining step, examples, right? Not doing well, right, we could put maybe what’s not working well, or like, you know, caught word of caution, you know, like, ROI on this is tough stuff to review.
And that, is that something like this? So yeah, I think that, you know, to speak to the idea of how important it is to include citations, or, you know, people will call this EA T EA T, right expertise, authority and trustworthiness. I think it is pretty important to backup, you know, claims that you’re making. And I think that I mean, you’ve seen it most in your money, your life, why mi L. But I think that as AI content continues to proliferate and generate a bunch of mediocre content on the internet, that you know, more EA T and links will be important.
Chima Mmeje 42:18
Okay, I Hi. I have a question. And you said something earlier about? Not you don’t like seeing statistics on the contents is that you don’t like seeing it anywhere on the content? Or you don’t like seeing it in the introduction? Which one is it?
Bernard Huang 42:31
And why? Yeah, I don’t like seeing it in the introduction. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, I know that we were we’ve worked we work with a lot of different freelance writers. And every single time they deliver a piece of content, or there’s like a citation or statistic, that’s let’s say, like the first three paragraphs, I think somewhere, some someplace along the line is became best practice. Like the remember when hero images were a best practice. And if you are familiar with like, hero image, I don’t know if I can even find one these days.
But a hero image would be this is an add on hero image would be? Let’s see, I don’t think they have hero, right? They’re just straight into the content, right? What a hero image as you can imagine would be right? This is more or less straight in the content doesn’t even exist with a hero image. And then the images like this, like this, right? That’s this is the hero image. Right? So you remember when this this was like the best practice of SEO like 510 years ago? I, I think that if I were to guess, right, what happened with hero images. And probably what had happened with citations is that you should think about this from a Google manual search evaluator evaluator, the evaluator standpoint like this.
Chima Mmeje 44:05
Can you explain?
Bernard Huang 44:07
Yes, so Google Search manual evaluator or the Google Search manual evaluator. PDF? is? Okay, Google Search manual e elevator. That’s evaluator. Ah, um, let’s see, it should be here. We’ve got so essentially, what Google has is page quality rating guidelines, and they have an army of people who literally pull up websites are presented with websites and content. And essentially, their job is to do Tinder on it. They’re like, look at the content and they’re like, does this look good? Or does this not look good, left or right? And imagine that lowest quality The types of pages, right?
Basically, their screening on all of these different things is lacks, you know, something where it’s it’s, yeah, it’s not trustworthy or blah, blah, blah, no, like showcase images of what, you know, they think is a, like low quality. Yeah, like, piece of content, right? It’s like, oh, okay, this, this seems to like be like this. So my hypothesis about what happened with hero images is that you can imagine at some point, basically, Google Search evaluators looked at, they looked at, they looked at this, right, and they’re really okay, when it has a hero image, right, hero image equals good, which swipe right on it.
But that time and era has come and gone, right? Like the manual search evaluators don’t care about that anymore, because what happened was that everyone said, Okay, well, let’s, let’s all include hero images. And because everybody included hero images, that sort of made it worthless. I think that, you know, citations in above the fold for the sake of it equals good was then let’s all include citations above the fold. And that’s why we got into this like state of things. I don’t think that that matters anymore. I think that what matters is really just say, like, jumping straight to answering the question.
And, you know, this, we’re more in like UX, right, this that same sort of user experience, you know, kind of like legibility, legibility. You know, like, how does this this website feel? Right. That’s why you kind of see more emphasis on page experience and, you know, readability and that kind of stuff. So that’s, that’s my answer to your question.
Chima Mmeje 46:54
That’s a very detailed answer. Thank you so much, Bernard. Alright. I think this one is pretty straightforward. So on is a subpoena is axon. What is PA stands for?
Bernard Huang 47:05
People also ask? Yes. People. Oh, so please, can
Chima Mmeje 47:10
you show an example? Use using your screen?
Bernard Huang 47:13
Yep. That’s right. So people also ask, is this right? Pa people, SEO people just shorten it to people also ask, if you wanted to get super in depth here, like what some people do, you can see here is when you fold them out, you’ll get more questions that Google will automatically generate. And these can also act as additional places to generate research.
Chima Mmeje 47:38
I have a follow up question to that. Did what was like the best practice for using people also acts in question content, you like looking at the top three? Or like, how do you figure out what to take from people also act and add to your content?
Bernard Huang 47:55
Yeah, so when I was doing it, I simply use it as another data point. So I’ll just refresh this, right. I use this as another data point for like, Okay, how to how to what companies are best or the exam, right?
So companies best came from that. So I literally, like take these and use it as like for additional, like data points on the front page of Google and then I like, jotted them down.
Chima Mmeje 48:24
Okay. Okay. Thank you so much. All right. Oh, this is a good one. Okay, McNabb wants to know, how do you keep the flow of content from heading two heading? And paragraph to paragraph? Basically, how do you maintain that flow and hold the reader’s attention? From the brief? That’s a very good question.
Bernard Huang 48:47
Yeah, you know, I can’t, I can’t give you a very good answer, like, because it obviously depends on the piece of content. I would say that, in my opinion, if you are writing for search, then this, this should act as sort of the guiding light, right? People care about this, you know, people that care about that, you know, how you manipulate this into Jay, by cohesive, strong narrative? I don’t know.
Because it’s going to look different every single time, right, the way that I went about doing it was that, you know, I, I put on my own subject matter expert hat, and was like, Okay, if I were reading this piece of content, I would want to know what’s been working and what’s not been working, right, because I feel like content marketing for tech companies specifically has been one very competitive and to changing very quickly.
And so that’s sort of why I took the approach to say what’s been working, what are the top strategies and examples of companies doing this well, and how to implement it, but don’t worry. We’ll also talk about what’s not been working Uh, and that’s just kind of been like a gut like read. I do think that, you know, back to this whole process that we’ve outlined in the outlining thing here, you’ll find that probably most in communities, and probably most in interviewing us in the US, right? That’s where I think you’ll start to get the lingo and the narrative down, because people in communities will be like,
Oh, my God, this is not working, please help, you know, and subject matter experts will be like, Oh, my God, you know, your ROI is so hard to attribute. And that’s not been working. And you just hear all these things about what’s not been working? And you’re like, Okay, well, what we got to talk about what’s not been working? And so anyway, that’s to say, it all just depends on what you’re writing about. But the way to uncover it, in my opinion, is this. And that, and maybe, maybe this but have to say,
Chima Mmeje 50:58
Okay, so now case, Aruna wants to know, if the client has already given me a content brief to work with, can I use this approach and suggest changes in the outline?
Bernard Huang 51:10
Absolutely. And I think that you should, and, right, this is, this is ultimately, right. If you want to be a top producing freelance writer, that’s what that’s what you need to do, right? You need to flip the conversation. And you need to say, hey, you know, like, when you’re buying my writing services, you’re not just buying the article, you’re buying my methodology, and my process. And so right, if somebody is handing you the brief, which is very common, you know, it’s, it’s your job to review it and make sure that, you know, they know what they’re talking about.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. And if you can get it to a point where, you know, you’ve pushed back and said, No, right, like, you’re talking about why, you know, I’ve done the research, people want to know what the best strategies are. So this is my, you know, this is what I propose, they’re going to have, the client is going to have, I think, a lot more respect for you. If they don’t, well, then, you know, maybe you should fire that client and, and move on to a relationship where somebody actually values what you have to say,
Chima Mmeje 52:25
someone wants to know. Hi, Bernard, can you go over? How to? Can you go over search intent from Google bubble once again? And secondly, do you include subject matter experts, interviews, as a H2 to in the content, or just as a data source for the overall content quality?
Bernard Huang 52:49
Cool, yep. So Question Answer data source, right, where we would then kind of put it in here, right? Like, let’s just say, you know, me examples of companies, how to start doing it, something like this, where it’s like, you know, thought leadership thought leadership is something we care a lot about clear scope, thought, but ROI and attribution are really hard to hard to do. Right?
And then you be like dash Bernard, co founder of clear scope, right. And so that’s, that’s sort of where, you know, those come in. Ultimately, though, I think that there, there’s, like, the reason why this is important is not only to get this quote, which a lot of people do and and so we’ll give you a backlink and, you know, all that good stuff. But I think it’s really to, to get more of that narrative and that qualitative feedback, right? When Bernard says, wow, you know, this ROI and attribution are really hard to do. You know, like, you have to read between the lines and say, oh, you know, what, well, is that okay, for leadership, you know, like,
Tell me more, right? And so you’re trying to get and learn the narrative behind the the expressions, the quotes, right, that the subject matter experts are, are saying, and that’s really, you know, like, helps inform and shape your outline, you know, how the narrative you know, the earlier question, how to really think about the draft and how it flows. So, I answered that last part of the question first, the other one is right, if we do search engine optimization, right, books, images, techniques, examples, right course. So, these, these are like, just they change the base off of like, what, and I’m like,
Okay, how to do and then right we have for beginners PDF. So I do think that this this is really interesting, and it just it like adds another Yeah, adds another flavour of what you would probably see just from like Google Autocomplete suggestions like this. You’ll also notice I think, as you start to like refine the searches and like, you know, go back and then do this.
Yeah, anyways, I like to do that. Other interesting tactics, if you will, is that you can do things like this, if I’m like, how, and then you can see here, like, there’s, there’s this, there’s all these, like, you can now this autocomplete suggestion is that how and search engine optimization, I can then do like something like this and then do this. It’s like, okay, well, no, nobody does that. But you know, you can actually like, kind of put, like, get extra flavour of like, you know, the in betweens of all of these by by looking looking at, you know, different verses or placement. So, I think those are, those are interesting as well.
Chima Mmeje 56:01
That is a very cool trick. All right. Well, this is just the final question. And obviously, we have a question about AI. So, someone wants to know, may want to know, with everything going on with the AI wave, should we be focusing on boffo keywords? And using AI to like, you know, right, top and middle of the funnel content? I know, this is slightly unrelated? Well, I don’t think we can escape anything about AI these days?
Bernard Huang 56:31
No, of course not. And it makes sense. So I think that it’s a good question. I’m glad you asked it. And I The answer is really hard. Because it honestly really depends on a lot of different things, right, like, client expectations for one, you know, target target keywords for another, right? Like, I’ll just take it in as high of a level as possible to say, Okay, what, what’s going to happen with AI?
I have generative search on one of my Google accounts. So like, what is, you know, artificial intelligence like this? And then, right, you got this thing on the search, generative experience, or S, G. And right. It’s like, This is it? It’s like, Okay, that’s interesting. But you know, if I did this over here, like that, we get this right. And so, all right, right. This is now the world of where we live in to the world that we might live in.
Chima Mmeje 57:42
You have access, you get you got you got access to generative AI. Yeah, that’s so cool.
Bernard Huang 57:46
Yeah, yeah. So if you want to get access to it, by the way, I believe this this thing, I think y’all have this. And then since I have it, you can see here, it’s like SG I just toggled it on, but you just sign up, and then at some point, they’ll they’ll let you in, and then you can come in here and you toggle that on. Okay. Anyways, back back to this, right. It’s like, well, this, and that.
I mean, they’re more or less, let’s say, so I guess my take here is that generative search, is that somewhat better than a Featured Snippet, right, like in that sentence, and then you have this, and then you have, you know, the top ranking pieces of content. So I think that what’s going on with at least generative search is that a whole class a whole class of queries will be replaced by like, Ste, generative search, and in some ways, shapes and forms the content that like you will get from GPT is all going to be commoditized. content, as well.
So essentially, you can imagine that this has this has just been happening throughout the course of search as we know it, right. In the past, people will have Googled weather. And then you know, like weather.com would have shown up, but now right people, people don’t google weather, they just go to their like weather app weather app on the phone. And then the searches for whether disappear.
So I think that generative search is is alongside of this. And I think the assessment that you have, right of the bottom of funnel, I think is actually better thought of as like, you know, long tail keywords with interesting perspectives. I think the short tail, right like what is search engine optimization, you know, blah, blah blah. I think that’s going to be gobbled up by you know, instead of them just going to the weather app, they’re just going to be gobbled up by SG EA.
But that’s nothing new in that, you know, featured Featured Snippets are essentially gobbling up a whole class of queries as well. Right. Google’s been cannibalising their own ecosystem with Featured Snippets with rich like SERPs, all that all that stuff. And so yes, I do think that from a pure, high level content marketing strategy as it relates to search, the types of content that are going to be least affected will be like the longer tail keywords with interesting perspectives. As we see shorter tail head topics can get gobbled up by the Google ecosystem.
Chima Mmeje 1:00:57
Wow. So impressive, Vinod, you are so I’m just so impressed with everything you just you just done today. This is so good. This is good. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. This was incredible. I’m so happy because I’ve learned so much. And I’m pretty sure everybody here has ever just xe when we get this little we get this. When can we get this? Because it’s so good. It’s so good. Thank you so much for doing this.
Everyone who is asking when you can get this when it goes live on the website, we’ll attach the document that Ben had edited so that you can review it. So just be patient in the next week or two weeks. It should be live on the FCC website. Then, thank you so much for doing this to everyone who said thank you. Yes, please let me just stop this recording.
