Niche Navigators: Marketing Agencies

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show for another week. Another few weeks since we last did an episode, but we're back.

ARTHUR: You know, what's funny. You know, what's funny. What's funny. The reason we didn't do an episode before was because I was sick. Yes. I got the flu. And then in our last episode, we joked around about you getting sick and me getting you sick. Cause I kept coughing and then funnily enough, you got sick, but not from me.

MICHAEL: Well, That's not confirmed. It is.

ARTHUR: What do you mean? It was, you got sick like over a week after we recorded the podcast.

MICHAEL: Yes. Yeah. About that.

ARTHUR: Yeah. You would have. Yeah. It wasn't from me.

MICHAEL: Okay.

ARTHUR: By the way, I'm Arthur Fabik. You're Michael Costin.

MICHAEL: I am. And we're back. We're fighting fit. Well, I'm not even fighting fit because I, I fell for advertising on a Joe Rogan podcast and bought myself some athletic greens, AG1 and it's made me feel sick. So I'm falling apart. Yeah, really. It's old age, I guess nearly 40. Oh, that sucks. I know. Hey, you're not far behind me, my friend. Still behind. All right. Well, you know what, what will cheer us up, make us feel good. A real good episode of Niche Navigators. And this week we're going to give away some of the secrets from our own backyard here. Cause we're going to go into the world of marketing agencies and what you could be doing with the content on your site and little things from an SEO point of view to try and get traffic and leads and all that good stuff that you might want as a marketing agency. Sounds good. What do you reckon? How do you feel giving away your secrets? Well, I just, I thought we had an intro for this. No, I never made one. Do you want to sing freestyle something?

ARTHUR: I can't off the top of my head. Niche navigators.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I could have sworn that we had one anyway.

ARTHUR: No, it's stolen from social that has.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: We've got an intro for that. Okay. Maybe we'll make one for this.

MICHAEL: Yeah. You know what? I'll make one after this. Okay. But for today, for today, it's just a, it's rough and raw. It's a new segment. We're working it out. Arthur's going to own this one. Talk, do most of the talking. I ain't going to throw it to him. What would you, if you were building a new website for your marketing agency, What's the first thing you do from an SEO point of view?

ARTHUR: In terms of the types of pages?

MICHAEL: Just the very, like, what's your plan to try and get results? Where are you turning to first?

ARTHUR: Content. Right. So we're building out different pages, targeting different keywords people will be searching for to get to the website. So service pages makes the most sense to me. Basically creating pages for all the different types of service offerings that you, your agency, I can't talk today. Your agency has or our agency has and building out pages for each one of those. So we're saying service SEO, SEO, Google ads, Facebook ads, social marketing, email marketing, web development, all those types of searches and pages that people would be searching for to get to your website.

MICHAEL: And I would say the deeper you can go with it, the better. So like with SEO, there's SEO, but then beneath that there's technical SEO, e-commerce SEO, enterprise SEO, local SEO. Link building. Link building. There's even penalty removals. Well, these days are AI SEO or, you know, using AI, whatever. Reputation management. Yep. I've seen. Because A, each one of them is a little opportunity for people to find their way to your site. B, it helps you build a bit of topical relevance. You know, if there's one agency out there that says they do SEO and they just have an SEO agency page, and then there's you over here that has a page for every single term that Google expects to see related to SEO, not every single, but you know, most of them, most of them, you're probably going to do better.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So first thing I'll do service pages. Yep. Internally linking them as well. Very important. So internally, I can't talk today. I'm getting sick. Internally linking from the homepage to the service pages using keyword rich anchor text. And then internally linking from the service to the deeper pages. So for example, linking from the SEO page to link building. Correct. Yep.

MICHAEL: Makes sense. I would go as far as, we'll probably talk about blogs in a sec. Let's talk about blogs right now.

ARTHUR: We will talk about blogs because it's on the list.

MICHAEL: There's service pages. Blogs, right? It is a great opportunity for you to build like a topical silo. So let's say you've got your SEO page at the top, you've got your link building, local SEO, all those service pages. down in the realms of the blog, you should be publishing content around questions your target market might be asking, you know, how-to informational stuff. So, what is PageRank as an example? What is PageRank? Well, it's a score that was developed by Larry Page at Google to help try and show the strength of a domain. That's a blog post. That's a blog post right there. But down in the blog area, you can be churning out a lot of the content around topics that shouldn't be up in the main navigation of your site, you know, your header and being linked to from your homepage, it's more supporting content. But if you churn that all out and then link up from those pages to those service pages and subservice pages, you're starting to build yourself a little silo there, starting to build topical authority. And, um, you know, if you're an agency that just does SEO, then your whole site then becomes about SEO, makes it very strong and appealing, pleasing to the algorithm. Peeling to Google does make it a bit tougher in my experience. If you have multiple service lines trying to then compete with like, just say Google ad specialist agency or an SEO specialist agency where that's all they do.

ARTHUR: Cause then you're churning out content, targeting all different types of aspects of marketing. Yes. It might confuse Google and.

MICHAEL: Not confusing, but I would say Google's going to favor those ones.

ARTHUR: Preference the ones that specialize in one area of marketing.

MICHAEL: Correct. So it just means you need stronger domain, more links, better content, more of it to compete.

ARTHUR: I find that's common in other industries as well. Yeah. Like Google preferences, for example, lawyers that specialize in one location or one area of law over ones that specialize in all areas of law in multiple locations. So yeah, the same applies here.

MICHAEL: Yep. What else here? Here's I, I don't know about these. I'm torn on these location pages in, in this world. I'm not torn on them because they do work, but I know with our site in the past, we've had like, we're talking location pages. Let's explain location pages first. Pretty funny. It's a page about a location.

ARTHUR: Pretty basic. So some examples would be if you wanted to target Sydney, SEO Sydney, SEO Perth, SEO Adelaide. So targeting one service and that location to try to rank. Yep.

MICHAEL: So each one's a page. Correct. You're using a keyword like SEO Sydney many times on the page, URL slug, your H1 tags, your heading, other heading tags, all use that keyword. SEO Sydney. You might bang in some reference to suburbs or council areas to give a bit of context. You might embed a map or something, you know, trying to make the page relevant to a location. I've seen this work well. I've seen it also not work well. So, um, I would say like we've gone down this path, like we had SEO Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane pages, you got to build links to them, you know, and then again, you're trying to compete with agencies where their entire website and domain is for that city because they're from there. Yeah. So generally if your domain is weak, it's probably not even worth doing because you're not going to compete.

ARTHUR: So if you're a SEO agency based in Perth and you're trying to rank for SEO Sydney by creating a page, it's unlikely you're going to outrank other agencies in Sydney. Correct.

MICHAEL: Unless you have a very strong DR. And what I see a lot on like location searches now, location keywords in this space, marketing agency space is the domain itself has a keyword in it. So like SEO Sydney,

ARTHUR: I've noticed stars.com.au or something. And they tend to rank better.

MICHAEL: Yeah. They rank easier because of it. Yeah. Um, but it is, I would say if your domain is strong, it's probably worth doing what I have found though, is. If you have a, let's say a generic SEO agency page, your main SEO service page, and then you're building these location pages too, quite often they can fight with each other for visibility, for rankings. And Google might favor the, if you type in SEO Sydney, it might favor your SEO agency page over the Sydney page that you have created. So then it has me wondering, maybe it's best just having one page for SEO agency.

ARTHUR: Rather than cannibalizing it and having two pages.

MICHAEL: Yeah, but if you really are trying to go after multiple cities, then… It's a tough one, something to test. It'll be different with every website, depending on your link profile.

ARTHUR: I mean, you can go deeper than cities and do suburbs if there's search volume, less competitive. So that's always an option, but I find that capital cities are always competitive anyway.

MICHAEL: I've never actually tested suburbs for like an agency. Like SEO Paramount? SEO Paramount. Would that page rank here for people searching in Paramount? for SEO Sydney.

ARTHUR: That's something that you'll do after the show and then report back on next week.

MICHAEL: Maybe we are working on a new website. So, um, some of this stuff I'm saying here will be tested as part of the new site and we'll report back on.

ARTHUR: I mean, you think in theory it would work. Yeah. Searching from Paramatta. I might do a little suburb. Well, my searches come a search from Victoria. Yeah. Here, which I don't understand.

MICHAEL: Mine was saying para before here. Yeah. Have you, have you allowed sometimes it won't let me in the browser and ask you to allow location. Yes.

ARTHUR: I have. Yeah. Weird. I've, I've followed every tutorial and it still shows only in the office as Victoria.

MICHAEL: Google thinks I'm in the UK constantly and I've done everything I can to try and change it. And did you check your VPN? Yeah. VPN off. I've, I've like adjusted my language settings. I've, I've done everything.

ARTHUR: It's common. I've read heaps of Reddit threads and people complain about it and there doesn't seem to be a workaround for those that it affects it. It's bloody annoying. Yeah. I noticed though, if you search for like a service and then a location, it will show you the results from that location. So it comes up with that little text at the bottom. So if you do like SEO agency paramatter, even though you're in Victoria, it will still show you results from paramatter. If that makes sense.

MICHAEL: Yeah, of course. Yeah. I reckon, which wasn't always the case.

ARTHUR: Uh, it doesn't matter.

MICHAEL: I think let's pick a couple of suburbs, maybe down in God's country and do some pages on them. Harrington Grove. No, I don't remember. What are you talking about? On the suburb? Nay. Um, putting it out there so that we can test it. Yep. Report back. We'll report back. So stay tuned people. Let's move on to the next one. This is a personal favorite of mine and I'm not sure that every agency does this. Why are we talking about this? Are you sure you want to give this away? You know what? If you are even 5% adequate at SEO running an agency, you should be doing this. You know, it's not a secret, but I actually haven't seen a lot of it done. I'm going to say it anyway. Ready? Drumroll. I think one of these buttons on this mixer does drumroll. Don't hit that one. That's the intro music. It is. Well, this is what we call them. Vertical pages. And what's a vertical page? It's like a really tall page. So when you scroll it, it's like one that you could climb up. Do you like that?

ARTHUR: No, that's awful.

MICHAEL: No. A vertical page is, it's a page that is specifically built for a specific customer type or industry. So a vertical is like a, I guess, a very narrow focused niche. Yeah. So that's how we're using it. I don't know if it's the correct terminology, but that's what we call these pages. So an example might be SEO lead generation for pool builders. So we would have a page on our website, lead gen for pool builders or lead gen for skip bin companies, you know, rubbish removal, whatever, where all of the content and stuff talks about that topic. The reason I like these pages is. Not because it's going to drive a lot of traffic because they won't, it's going to drive very little traffic, you know, a handful of visits a month per page, but the traffic, the intent is very high, very strong. Like those people, if they've typed that in there, they're on the hunt. They're looking for someone that they feel has experience in their industry that knows how to serve them. So if you pop up with a page that talks about you being the experts in that space, have some case studies and results that you've achieved in that space, it's much more likely that that visit is going to convert. Definitely. Yeah. So the conversion rate strong, the potential to land them as a customer is stronger than someone coming in on a keyword. Like what is topical authority where it's just informational and they're very unlikely to be ready to engage a agency at that point. Right.

ARTHUR: That's a lot easier to rank for these pages. Yes. So it kind of relates back to our episode on zero search for keywords. Yes, it does. Building our pages, I'm sure if you ran them through a keyword planner, it would return nothing. Yeah. But there would be someone out there searching for it.

MICHAEL: All sorts of variations of it too. Like just because you're targeting lead gen, it might be marketing, new customers, whatever.

ARTHUR: SEO, anything. SEO for pool builders, anything related to that kind of vertical industry. Yep. I like it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And it's something that can be scaled up. There's a lot of verticals out there and yeah, works well. So hopefully our competitors aren't listening to this, but if you are in a service business, what are the verticals that you serve and do you have pages for them on your site? If you don't go create them, it's a quick win. Well, not really a quick win cause you got to do some work. You got to create the content and put it up, but yeah, for the amount of effort.

ARTHUR: In the grand scheme of things, it's a quick win. Exactly.

MICHAEL: In the SEO world, that's a quick win. All right, let's talk blogs.

ARTHUR: We already did, didn't we? Well, we kind of tied it into the first point around service pages.

MICHAEL: Cause every, every agency has blogs. A lot of the time they sit there probably not even read by people. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Well, there's two types of blog posts, blog posts designed to drive traffic and genuine blog posts that are informative to people. And I think you should do a combination of both.

MICHAEL: I would say there's a third type, ones that exist just to cover a topic in depth. For topical authority? Yeah, just like you're creating pages around, you've done your keyword research, you've clustered all your keywords, you just create it.

ARTHUR: That's like the first option I said, isn't it? Like more for traffic.

MICHAEL: Yeah, but they might not get traffic, these ones. They just exist on the site. Right.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: So for SEO purposes. Oh, you're saying traffic overall.

ARTHUR: I'm saying like blog posts for SEO purposes and then blog posts, which are actually informative and like thought out properly and written to. Worth reading. Worth reading. So your potential clients or clients that come to the site have informative content on there that can potentially be shareable or. You know, trust building, trust building.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. So I would say the vast majority of agency content on their site is the first bucket. You land on it and you read one, the opening sentence and you bought instantly on a leave. Even our blog has a lot of that stuff, unfortunately, but we have tried to make it. We use gifs and memes and stuff, which everyone does these days, but I'm trying to make it a bit irreverent and engaging. Um, I would say with the blogs, it is a long tail traffic opportunity. Like, um, the examples we gave before of the vertical pages, some of these topics might not get a lot of volume, but in totality, if you're creating a blog post a day or something like that in time, it can really add up particularly in the agency world where something like marketing agency Sydney is super hard to rank for. You might be able to, if you don't have the domain authority yet, compete a bit better in those long tail spaces that the blog represents. I would say what you've got to do is build in lead capture into your blog posts or some prompt to get in touch or do something. Yeah. Because otherwise people come and leave.

ARTHUR: I'm just imagining how much content is going to get spun now with AI. Yeah. Incredible amounts. Yep. It's so easy to build topical authority now.

MICHAEL: Yeah, but then you're not really authoritative because if that's the baseline, how do you win?

ARTHUR: Well, I mean, not everyone's doing it, but those that want to do it moving forward have the benefit of using AI to write or rewrite content, come up with content clusters and topics. ask chat GPT to give you 15 topics on a specific area of marketing and then to write it for you. Yeah. Topical authority. Yep. So yep. It used to be a lot harder to actually put in the effort, you know, do the research, write the content, edit it, edit it. Yep. So.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Good for thought. It will be interesting. We haven't done any of it ourselves with our side.

ARTHUR: Well, we started doing content, but we were doing it the traditional right way.

MICHAEL: No, no, no. I'm talking about chat GPT approach to just churning out content and seeing what happens. We haven't really done it.

ARTHUR: I reckon we should do a little on our side or on a site to test it out. I mean, we could always just test it out on our side, right?

MICHAEL: I reckon let's do it. Cause we're about to change to a new design. Let's just blast out content. Like you create it and then edit it and put our own spin on it and put it up there. Pick a topical sort of area that we want to go hard on. Let's say SEO, that's our wheelhouse. Probably should be talking about this off air, not devising it on air, but.

ARTHUR: Well, this is a little thing that we can always update our listeners about. True. A little case study, if you will.

MICHAEL: Okay. Well let's, let's leave it as when the new website launches, we'll let everyone know. Okay. And we'll keep everyone updated as we, um, churn out the content and see what happens.

ARTHUR: And it is kind of related to this niche navigators because we are a service based marketing agency. So it all ties back to the main topic.

MICHAEL: Well, I'm the topic of the main topic. Do you have any other topics to talk about in terms of, uh, little things you have done from an SEO point of view to navigate the niche of marketing agency? There's only one, there's only one for me.

ARTHUR: I mean, really just building out and fleshing out the content, which is what we used to do. So making sure that all the keywords are covered, having a look at all the people also ask questions and making sure that their FAQs, all of that, like, Yeah.

MICHAEL: And that's a tough one in our space. Cause like I see the sites that rank well tend to have a lot more just text in the page. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Walls of text, paragraphs, like headings, just not even walls of text, but like accordion, just like, what is this link building blah, blah, blah.

MICHAEL: Like basically they've got that, but also texts like text in a page blocks of content, which doesn't always go hand in hand with a nice design. And, um, that's something that I've been struggling with, with this new site. Cause you gotta walk that, I guess ultimately if you're not ranking what's, you know, it doesn't matter. So,

ARTHUR: Well, I still think it matters because people are still going to find you other ways and you want to make a good first impression. You don't want to have a shitty site with walls of text. Sure. It's going to read some people, you know, like larger agencies will have sites with barely any content on it, but people are impressed by the aesthetic and the, you know, the look and it makes them look or appear larger than they are.

MICHAEL: Or like they're often not getting traffic by SEO or even paid ads and stuff.

ARTHUR: It's all like, you know, but I still think it matters.

MICHAEL: relationships wet her mouth. Well, anyway, let me show you this. This is the SEO agency page towards me that I've been building out. Yep. And, um, I've seen this going after that SEO agency. Yes. It's everywhere. What I've done here is, you know, keep the hero banner and the top of the page, I guess, conversion focus. But now I've just put this bang. So that would normally be hidden behind an accordion. So it's one, two, three, four, five paragraphs of text, SEO keyword optimized, but actually readable.

ARTHUR: I don't think that's even too bad. I've seen a lot worse.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And then it goes back into conversion focus design, but that's something I've just added. That looks like just a normal amount of text, but in the past we wouldn't have had something like that. Yeah. So now when we get this site crawled and indexed, Google's going to land on it and see a lot more just text content there. And it's going to be interesting to see.

ARTHUR: I wonder if like. if Google crawls a page and devalues stuff that's behind like read more, because it knows that people hide the content there because it's not very good. Yeah. Like you would think that in this day and age, it would be smart enough to figure out the tactics of accordion and read more.

MICHAEL: And accordion was always something people did. Then Google said they were cracking down on it and not counting content behind it.

ARTHUR: Well, yeah, we used to advise not to do it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So everyone said not to, then it changed again to them saying, no, we do read it. So it's all over the place at this point, I believe they've read it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, you can tell by copying a bit of the content behind read more and seeing or searching for it and seeing if the page comes up. Yeah.

MICHAEL: A lot of the time that text is just like painful to read on any website. Cause it's just been written for SEO benefits.

ARTHUR: I guess. Yeah. 99% of the time it is. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Like unlikely. Hey, write in, send us a message at the SEO show.co. If you've ever gone on a service businesses website and read every last FAQ on one of their internal service pages.

ARTHUR: I don't read anything on any site to be honest.

MICHAEL: I read the hero banner and then I'm instantly looking for like social proof, trust mark. 100%. Does this look like a legit business? Yeah. Then I'll probably get in touch.

ARTHUR: Like if I, if I was looking for, what was, what was the service I've used recently? But like, let's just say, uh, a carpenter, a carpenter website. Like I'm not going to read all their things, all the services they do. Like I know I need a carpenter. I'm going to look at reviews. I'm going to look at, like you said, social proof, um, testimonials like before and after images, but I'm never going to sit there and be like, Oh, you know, this is about us. This is their history. This is the types of services. These are the types of fences they build. Like what's their thoughts on mobile versus.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I'm not going to read their blogs. I'm just going to get in touch and typically go with the one that's the cheapest.

MICHAEL: Well, you go cheap. Maybe not. No, I wouldn't end up paying twice. Yeah. Anyway, I would say the last thing is internal linking. We touched on before. Yes. But going through your site, using Ahrefs and looking at all of the top link to pages and making sure that each of them has a keyword rich internal link back to your main pages that you want to rank. So let's say for some reason your blog posts got a ton of links, it got picked up by media. Go back to that blog post and make sure that it has a keyword rich link to your SEO agency page or your link building page or whatever it is that you're trying to push. Right. And just being methodical and doing that across all of your, at least your top 10, top 20 externally linked to pages, making sure they all link internally with a keyword rich anchor text. That's just such a simple win to distribute that sweet, sweet link juice to the pages that need it.

ARTHUR: I guess the link building as well. If you have the budget and the time, cause you need link juice to, you okay?

MICHAEL: Yeah. I'm just having an athletic green moment over here. Um, I would say if you're in this space, all of this stuff we're talking about doesn't even matter if you don't do link building, of course, because it's extremely competitive, extremely expensive to try and rank from an SEO point of view. So, um, we're assuming that you are link building.

ARTHUR: Yes. As a digital marketing agency. Yup.

MICHAEL: Yup. Cool. Well, that is one episode done and dusted. We will be back next week. I, I, I'm putting down an ironclad commitment to being back next week, not taking another couple of weeks off. Don't get sick. I won't. And I know we'll be drinking your vitamins and we're going to record another episode straight after this. So I can guarantee we'll be back next week. You'd hope so. But until then, happy SEOing. Happy SEOing. See ya.

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