SEO for Revenue: Grow Your Business Not Just Rankings

In this recent conversation between Jeff Coyle and Dale Bertrand, it’s clear that content creation is more than just optimizing for keywords. Content creators should be aware of customer intent and conversion points and use keyword research to understand the intent of each keyword.

They should also strive to create content that is trustworthy and accurate, and associate it with authoritative individuals and organizations. Companies can then use an omnichannel approach to marketing, including video, to differentiate their brand and inspire customer confidence.

Content creation isn’t just about optimizing for keywords, it’s also about understanding customer intent and conversion points.

Jeff Coyle highlighted the importance of “content quality, comprehensiveness, and making sure your teams are working together.” Dale Bertrand agreed, and added that content creators should be thinking about conversion points “upfront, before [they] start thinking about what content to create.”

“So typical things that we would do, like doing an audit of your brand’s content, but also an audit of competitors content,” said Bertrand. “We want to understand what’s performing for your competitors, what’s performing for you now, because there’s insights in that information that will be really useful to you.”

Coyle asked how to “tie together SEO to bring the sales team potentially or bring the ecommerce team together with the marketing team or the content team.” Bertrand suggested doing “keyword research” and “talking to real customers” to “come up with those upfront before [they] start writing copy.”

“The goal is really important,” said Bertrand, “that the page is targeting an intent.” He added that content creators should “make sure that [they] have a call to action that is aligned with that intent.”

Coyle pointed out that “every content item… needs to have a clear purpose” and that “we should always be looking for conversion on every page.” Bertrand agreed, adding that “it might be an ungated piece of content, like a price list or see my service offerings or whatever is aligned with the intent that the piece of content is targeting.”

When it comes to SEO, keyword research is key. Understanding the intent behind each keyword is essential for developing an effective SEO strategy.

Bertrand emphasized the importance of keyword research for SEO success. “You might be a brand who’s just getting started, and then really, you’re going to have to be tight with your keyword targeting and your intent targeting,” he said. “If you have more authority, you can get away with going after more broad topics or more intense in the same article.”

Coyle added that understanding the intent behind each keyword is essential. “If it’s a broad keyword with many different intents and probably high search volume, you’re going to see a number of different types of results,” he said. “How you’re going to learn what the multiple intents, or maybe only one or two intents, are behind a keyword.”

Bertrand suggested that the best way to understand the intent behind a keyword is to type it into Google and observe the search results page. “It’s time to type them into Google one at a time and see what shows up on the search results page,” he said.

Coyle brought the conversation back to how SEO can help drive conversions and revenue. “How do you get a team to realize that they’ve got to build a lot of pages to have the honor of that page of performing, so they may have to build some stuff,” he asked.

Content should be created with trustworthiness and accuracy in mind, and should be associated with authoritative individuals and organizations.

Bertrand highlighted the importance of creating content with trustworthiness and accuracy in mind, saying, “What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to build content that’s trustworthy and authoritative and accurate.”

He also emphasized the importance of associating content with authoritative individuals and organizations in the space: “We worked with one brand where we hired an MD not to do the writing, but to spend 1 hour a month reviewing the content that we put out there so that we can have that reviewed byline and have that big box of his affiliations, his academic papers, letters after his name, all of that, and then link out to those.”

Bertrand also suggested creating a “content fragment, spreadsheet” to help “extract the amazing expertise out of [experts’] brains.” Coyle then added that this could help drive “conversion metrics” and “tactics that can be used for conversion generating conversions.”

Companies can use an omnichannel approach to marketing, including video, to inspire customer confidence and differentiate their brand.

Bertrand suggested that companies could use a “bundle strategy” to combine a purpose-driven angle with their product offerings. He also proposed creating a separate FAQ page on the website and providing more information on the product grid.

Coyle added that companies should focus on creating educational content that can be used throughout the sales funnel, while also leveraging video as part of an omnichannel approach. He noted that this “unique differentiation” is something that “Fire and Spark and the work that they do” excels in.

Bertrand then asked what type of materials could be given to customers to inspire the confidence needed to move forward. Coyle replied that it was important to pair a company’s understanding of how video can be used with “the most beautiful blank and videos you’ve ever seen.”

Featured Guest

Dale Bertrand has been an SEO specialist to Fortune 500 companies and venture-backed startups around the world for two decades. His clients include global brands such as Citizen Watch, Nestle, Raymond Weil and Bulova. He applies his graduate school work in artificial intelligence to search engine marketing. Dale speaks at industry conferences and leads corporate training events.sly shifting landscape.