¡Hola! ¿Qué tal? Aquí Romuald Fons, y hoy volvemos a tener un invitado muy especial, ¡Neil Patel!
Neil: Muchas gracias.
Romuald: Para los que no conocéis a Neil Patel, castigo gordo. Deberíais conocerlo. Neil Patel es una de las personas más influyentes del mundo en el marketing online. Podéis visitarlo en su web neilpatel.com, además ha sido fundador de empresas tecnológicas como kissmetrics, quicksprout, crazy eggs, y también es escritor, acaba de publicar un libro ¿Hustle?
Neil: Hustle, my book, yes.
Romuald: I´ve made my research. So thank you for allowing me to do this interview to you.
Inbound content for Ecommerce
Romuald: You know our audience is mostly SEOs and entrepreneurs with online businesses. So I would love to talk about content marketing, if this bee allows us. Just imagine an ecommerce, and we want to create content, but not transactional one, more like inbound content…
Neil: content that´s viral, that people want to link you and share, that ranks organically, that builds a brans and things like this…
Topic research
Romuald: Exactly. So the first step that I would love to talk about is the topic. How we should do the topic research for this kind of content?
Neil: The way you do the research for this kind of content is few things. One you can go to BuzzSumo.com, typing keywords and see how your competitors are doing and shows up which content pieces are really popular within your region or in your industry, not really region but also industry, Spanish, that shows you all the popular Spanish content, if you type SEO, you´ll see the most popular SEO, although some of it may be on first, and from there you can find out what´s hot, what´s popular and you can write a better piece of content, so if someone talks about ten ways to increase your search into traffic, then you can write an article call hundred ways to increase your search into traffic. So the first step is finding out what´s popular, I mean looking at those titles and then writing better pieces of content that are like those titles. So you want to give more information, for free, you want to educate more. Just give the best information where everyone´s -wow this is so good i´m not going to go to any other website to learn about… SEO or if you want to do it about shoes, this is the best website to talk about shoes.
Romuald: let´s say shoes
Neil: So zapatos (shoes)
So it could be, I want to have the best website on zapatos, nike or adidas, all the brands, and you talk about what´s cool, the styles, which one is faster for running, jogging, all these things. And if you have the best information, then people are going to keep coming to your site linking to it, talking about it and they´re going to call your brand.
Educational content creation
Romuald: ok, now we have the topic, so how we can create this topic so this converts into the ecommerce. So we can talk about shoes but I what I really want is that somebody buy my shoes. How we can create this content?
Neil: So they end up buying your shoes, right?
The first step is you create educational content that a lot of people want to learn of and then once you´ve created the content I may end up saying – if you´re trying to run, here are the best shoes for running. So now you´re educating, take this one´s the lightest, and this one works the best on treadmills, this one works the best on mountain… going up and down, and then you say, hey you can buy them each here, you are linking to it. You´re not only educating, you´re making it convertible, where they can click a bottom to go to the website to buy.
Romuald: so the idea is creating like… you´re talking about content that is shareable maybe in social media, like the best ten sneakers to run a marathon.
Neil: yes, because what works on social media, people want to read, and they want to read, and share it, the more likely to make a link to it if they like it, the more they link to it, it´s going to rank high. Suppose I do one social media people, and people are linking through sharing which means the title is very attractive, which means your victory on google will be high, so you also rank.
Link building
Romuald: So you said about viral content and obtain links, let´s talk about some actionable hacks or advices you would give to the owner of this ecommerce to obtain links through this content.
Neil: Sure. So first I want to show you how to get social shares and then show you how to get links. Because the more social shares you get more visitors, indirectly you also get more links.
So the first part is on BuzzSumo when you put in an URL, it shows you every person who shared that article and give you shares. If you don´t want to pay for buzzsumo, no problem, you go to search.twitter.com, put the url and see every people who twitted out, then go find their file, their profile, you then try to google them and try to find their email and you email them now, say hey Mario you know I notices that you shared this article of the five best shoes, I had a great article that talks about the 21 best running shoes and I did a very thorough review and analysis, let me know if you like to see it. A lot of times Mario´s going to say yes I would like to see it and share to others, very relevant. And from there, when he respond back yes, you send him the link and you say you´re free to share if you like it.
Romuald: so you don´t share the link at the first email.
Neil: Because you need to get the engagement, that way they get pushed. If you send the link is too much marketing, you need to get them to engage, and when they do, you share the link. The second thing I would do is I go to Ahrefs to see who links in my competitor URL, like the website that talks about the five best running shoes, then I email each of those people who linked to the five best running shoes article and talk about how I have a more thorough article on 21 best running shoes. And I say hey if you like it I think this will benefit your reads feel free to link at it.
Outbound links
Romuald: I´ve heard some podcasts in which you talk about the importance of rating links, outbound links, linking to other people that is talking about the same subject…
Neil: yes because then Google knows where to place you, plus it benefits the readers too, like if I talk about 21 best running shoes and then I talk about how to run right in a treadmill that´s not bad for your shoes and they don´t wave, there may be another article in another website and I link to it because backs up my claims, studies, the research. That way gives more authority to you because people are understanding that you are not making up this information. You´re being credible. and when you link out to people I then email them, i´ll be like hey Mario I want to let you know I link out to you, I think your content is amazing, you´re free to check this article, if you like feel free to share or link to it. And that´s it.
Romuald: at the first email you say that?
Neil: Yes.
Romuald: because you put a link there.
Neil: I put a link. And I let him know. If he doesn´t link to me I don´t care, if he shares that´s fine, even if he doesn´t want to do anything I want to let him know his content is amazing and I liked it.
Romuald: How do you control this kind of browsers that you´re talking about. First searching all this stuff… You use like a spreadsheet before doing all the content or you just create the content now and then you try to find the people that is sharing and the influencers that you want to link to…? you make like a…
Neil: So I first create the spreadsheet and then I reach out. Is that what you´re asking?
Romuald: Yes, if there´s any…
Neil: Yeah. yeah. I create the spreadsheet because then you need to keep track of who you´re reaching out to becasue if I write an article on ’21 running shoes’, I may do another article talking about ‘the 21 best basketball shoes’ right? or socker shoes. And it could be Mario again who shared that article too for someone else. So I want to keep in touch with the people i´ve built a relation. and then when Mario writes another article, I want to share his post for him too, to help him out, right?
Length of the text
Romuald: And there´s any other type of content that we can create that is not… I mean there´s this tendency right now in the SEO field and all this stuff that we have to create more long-format content and all this stuff. there´s like any other kind of content…?
Neil: No you don´t have to create long content. Like look… in America we have a site call Upworthy and another site call Buzzfeed.
Romuald: yeah, of course. We have these in Spain too.
Neil: They do really short articles and they go viral. Because their content is… what´s the best way to describe it? they leave you for wanting… they leave you for wanting more. it´s curiosity, they´re working curiosity.
Romuald: Absolutely.
Neil: if you can do that in your headline… but the content has to match the headline, you can´t so quickly and people coming and be» oh this is no the article». Like it has to be relevant. If you do that you´ll be fine.
Romuald: Buzzfeed is mostly images or gifs, no. And they´re ranking a lot. they begin to rank super well for a lot of keywords right now, no. it´s not just the social searchs that they have, they have millions… but also… I mean, you can make social content and they also rank.
Neil: yes.
Neil´s advice
Romuald: we will end here because we´re risking our lives. Just one last advice for people that want to create content for their e-commerce. Can you say something to them?
Neil: if you´re creating content for e-commerce, don´t just focus on selling a product, focus on educating and helping people and then through there people would naturally be buying products from you.
Romuald: Creating this trust before doing the conversion.
Neil: yes. that way people trust in your e-commerce willing to buy from you.
Romuald: Ok. thank you Neil. Has been a pleasure having you here, very good advices.
Y hasta aquí la entrevista. Ahora voy a hablar un ratito con él, a tomarme una cerveza que estamos en el SEOKTOBER FEST.
nos vamos
Chao