Dec. 21, 2020
How to Outrank Your Competition with Creative Content with Liam Carnahan
This week, Eric Dickmann interviews Liam Carnahan. Liam is a content strategist, SEO expert, and writer. He owns Inkwell Content and helps subject matter experts develop search engine optimization driven content strategies to increase organic traffic and drive more leads. He's also the founder of Invisible Ink Editing, a fiction editing company for authors on the road to publication.
Liam currently lives on a beautiful lake in Maine and is looking forward to returning to a digital-nomad lifestyle when such things are possible again.
Liam's advice for blog writers on LinkedIn: https://inkwellcontent.com/blog/advice-for-freelance-writers/linkedin-for-writers/
Eric Dickmann can be found on Twitter @EDickmann and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/edickmann and my website https://ericdickmann.com
Liam Carnahan can be found online on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/liamcarnahan/, on Twitter @liamcarnahan and his website https://inkwellcontent.com/
Episode Summary: The episode summary can be found at
If you'd like to contact us with feedback or guest inquiries, please visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/podcast
For more information about Virtual CMO strategic marketing consulting services, visit The Five Echelon Group at https://fiveechelon.com
Episode #49
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The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group.
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If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit Five Echelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.
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Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
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I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
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In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business.\ This week, I'm excited to welcome Liam Carnahan to the program.
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Liam is a content strategist, SEO expert, and a writer.
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He owns inkwell content where he helps SMEs developed SEO driven content strategies to increase organic traffic and bring in more leads.
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He is also the founder of invisible ink editing, a fiction editing company, for authors on the road to publication.
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Liam currently lives on a beautiful Lake in Maine, but is looking forward to returning to a digital nomad lifestyle.
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Please welcome Liam Carnahan.
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Liam welcome to the virtual CMO podcast.
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So glad you could join us today.
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Hey, Eric.
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Thanks for having me.
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Now, this is fun.
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We were talking a little bit about, where we're located, before the show I'm down here in Orlando, Florida, you're up in cold Maine.
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There's a vast difference between the temperatures were both dealing with.
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But I'm curious, in addition to being a content marketing expert, you also live a digital nomad lifestyle when we're not trapped by COVID where have you journey's taken you.
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I have been my first big trip.
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I was down to South America through Peru and Argentina.
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I lived in Europe for awhile in the Netherlands, and I also most recently was living in Sydney, Australia for six years.
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So I just got back to the States in May.
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I think, we've all experienced a difference in our work lives.
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even though many of us I've worked remote for many years, but this is a different kind of remote.
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This is truly being isolated at home.
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And I think so many people have looked at this and said, I could be a digital nomad.
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I can get most of my work done on the road.
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I'm very curious to see if we see more of it in the upcoming years, I've had several guests on the show.
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And they've been doing it as well.
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And it sounds great.
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Yeah, I think that ship has sailed.
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I think a lot of people are realizing how easy it is to work from home and also how much more productive it can be.
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Not for everybody.
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And I also think a lot of businesses are probably thinking, why am I paying all that rent when I could get the same quality of work from people living where they want to live.
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So I hope so.
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I love the remote lifestyle.
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I'm so excited.
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You're on the show today because we're going to get to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is content marketing, and really building out a content marketing strategy.
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So just by way of definition, talk to me a little bit about how you view content marketing
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yeah.
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So content marketing to me is, so I focus on content strategy.
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And that involves approaching a business.
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Figuring out what they want to achieve and then creating a plan that uses different types of content in different promotions strategies to make those dreams come true.
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Basically.
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and so most of what we are focusing on is creating content that people find us.
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And especially because I focus in search engine optimization, it's about creating content that people can find on their own engaged with on their own and enjoy it.
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So thoroughly that they become a customer all in their own.
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So it doesn't involve as much of the going out there and looking for leads and pulling them in.
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It's more about, getting people to come onto your website, but through methods that are organic and useful to the end user.
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So not through paid advertising, but that can involve some content marketing, but more about organic traffic to your website.
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That's really where I focus.
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Bringing that traffic, that organic traffic to your website is so important.
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But I think for businesses who really haven't embarked on a true content marketing strategy, They may look at content as a brochure, as something that explains what their products do, features, functions, that kind of thing.
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What you're talking about is creating content that the audience really wants to read, not necessarily that describes your product or service.
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Correct.
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Yeah.
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brochures and product descriptions.
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That is part of content marketing.
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And you obviously need to have those things down, Pat.
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But, brochure is not the most exciting piece of content.
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People don't remember that you don't ever hear people talking around the water cooler about this wonderful brochure that they read last week, but they do talk about interesting articles, strange videos, curious graphics, Instagram accounts, all those kinds of things that actually excite people and engage people, answer questions that people are asking on their own.
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And the reason.
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that is such an effective form of marketing is because it is interesting.
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It is engaging and it's about meeting the customer where they are, rather than trying to have to drag them somewhere and make them read about your product.
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You just show up where they're already looking and you show up with the information that they want, and then they build you build trust with them a bit more of a slow burn, but it's a much more robust long-term strategy.
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So when you think about what makes good content, you talked about interesting and engaging, those are two, obviously very important factors.
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What else would you put under that bucket of what makes good content as opposed to bad content?
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So the best thing for a piece of content is that it is a useful to someone in some way that's even more important than engaging, people don't, aren't going to stick around if you're not giving them something back now, it doesn't mean that every article has to be a how to, but it does mean that after they engage with your piece of content, they need to walk away feeling like they got something out of it.
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Maybe it was a new perspective.
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Maybe they found a new piece of music.
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It doesn't really matter.
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You just need to apply that helpfulness, the other things that go into it, besides making it entertaining and engaging.
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Is that it needs, especially if it's written content, it needs to be done by a professional, someone who is either a good writer.
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A professional graphic designer.
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I'm not saying you have to get the most expensive stuff, but too many people try to do everything on their own.
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And you end up with poor quality.
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And when it comes to search engine optimization, the number one thing is high quality writing.
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Writing in a clear way that reflects your voice.
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That is understandable for both users and Google.
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That's the real key to success.
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It's interesting that you say that because I've had several SEO strategists come on the program to talk a little bit about technical SEO and how to get your content to rank.
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But I think one of the things that's deceiving for many people is if you install a plugin like Yoast, if you've got a WordPress site or rank math or one of these.
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You can very easily game your content to score your articles in order to get the green light or get 100% score or whatever.
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But that doesn't necessarily mean that your content is going to rank.
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Those are more technical, hindrances, right?
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So if you have a good score, it means you've got the possibility, a better possibility of ranking, but it's no guarantee.
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Yeah, look, I don't want to trash top Yost.
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It's a useful plugin.
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I use it myself on my website, but you need to think of Yoast more like taking a temperature rather than a cure.
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So if you have a fever, you use the thermometer to take your temperature, but that doesn't mean that you've done any of the things that actually need are going to cure you.
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You need to put things into practice and also use like any automated tool, similar to Grammarly.
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I use that so that, measure.
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My grammar, but I review everything I do because robots aren't perfect yet.
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And so Yoast is gonna miss things.
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There needs to be a human element to it, at least for now, hopefully forever or else I'll be out of a job.
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But for now, it needs that objective human eyes from someone who has experienced with content and someone who, if you're going for SEO has experienced with sir.
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Search engines and what they want.
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I'd love to drill on this a little bit more and let's use your business as an example.
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So inkwell content is your company.
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You have a blog, you do all sorts of content for yourself to promote your own business.
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What kinds of articles do you look at to say?
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I think this would be valuable and useful for people who might be interested in my product or service.
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Sure.
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So I tried to build all my content strategies to fulfill every single part of a sales funnel.
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Some people will tell you, top of funnel is more important or bottom of funnel is more important to me.
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You just need to have content slotting into each part.
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for example, I have a huge article on my website that just talks about the basics of SEO.
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And in the sense that article is ranking for search terms, like what is the CEO and what does SEO do?
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so that's obviously my audience, but it's also a filtering process for me because I don't really want anyone coming to me who doesn't know what SEO is and at least have a basic understanding of it.
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So hopefully if they've read that article, it means they already have somewhat of an understanding.
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They're curious about it and that's why I like content.
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Cause you can kind.
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Tailor your content to go right after the type of person that you want to target.
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So for me, with that article, I'm looking for business owners who are curious about SEO, but they don't understand it fully well.
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I've got an article that gets them even more curious about it.
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And by the end of the article, they know more information, but then they're also going to come to me because they realized that I'm the expert who wrote that article and therefore might want to hire me.
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but then there's other things like right now, the next thing that's going up for me is a huge case study that I put together after working with a And having a major success with some of their content.
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That's obviously way more, further down the funnel where I'm using that to people who are already thinking, should I hire this guy?
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I don't know if he's the best in the business.
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And then they read a case study, realize what I've done for other businesses, like theirs and think, okay, I'm going to go for this guy.
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So a lot of my content is about trust building.
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A lot of it is going after keyword terms that I know my audience might be looking for.
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And some of it is just to build up my own personality, my own brand, so that people recognize me when they see my name and.
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And interviews like this one.
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I think that's really good because what you're really talking about is a strategic approach to your whole content strategy.
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And I know on your website, for example, you talk about different elements of the strategy, and I'd love just to get your thoughts on a couple of these.
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So you talk about audience insights as a place to start.
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What do you do when you first engage with a client to really understand their target audience?
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All of my strategy conversations begin with an interview.
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I have a questionnaire that I run through.
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I tailored it for every client based on their business, but.
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the first, one of the first things we talked about his audience, the first question I always have is tell me about your audience.
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And I asked the client to tell me what their audience is.
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Sometimes they might have already done some work in this area, so they might have some profiles built up.
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If that's the case, I start interrogating that profile now because I don't believe my client, but because we really need to go into the psychology of these people.
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It's not just enough to know.
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Okay.
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we're 46% males.
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You.
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And we are mostly located in North America.
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That's good information to know for a lot of things, but what I'm more interested about in content creation.
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is what is, what are your, what's your audience worried about?
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what's keeping them awake at night.
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what do they want to happen next year or in five years?
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What's the biggest frustration for them in their life.
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Right now, these are questions that answer.
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My bigger question is what can we give them to make sure that they are happy with what we were giving them, that they remember what we're giving them and that they trust us to give them more of what they need.
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And those kinds of questions often are left out of those, generic demographic overviews, but that's really what comes To, when it comes into play with content strategy.
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So we've talked on this show before about this idea of many businesses cast too wide a net.
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So they're creating content.
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for two large and audience, and at the same time, you don't want to be overly specific so your net is so narrow that it's, you're missing potential customers, potential people who you want to drive to your website.
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How do you look at finding that balance between being overly generic in the content that you're producing or being too specific?
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That's what strategy is supposed to do.
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if you spend the time doing the research and thinking, I, obviously everything I'm going to talk about has a search engine optimization bend to it.
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But keywords are, The data is there to help us decide these kinds of things.
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keyword intent is just as knowing what the intention behind a certain searches, that's something that takes a little while to start to understand.
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But once you have that, you can weigh the different options.
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Does this keyword have enough volume that it makes it worthwhile for me to go after?
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Is it, is the intention clear that what these people are searching for actually has to do with my business and what I sell?
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Or is the intention not really there.
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And how difficult is it going to be for me to rank for this keyword, is this keyword already ranking on major websites and therefore it's a waste of my time.
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and so with that, you, once you start to look at these things and pull the keyword data, you start to see patterns emerging.
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You start to see where certain topics might overlap and you can combine them into one or create series.
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And that, the other end is to do with some of that in the rear view mirror.
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So if you are running a content strategy, you should be reviewing it frequently.
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I keep an eye on my Google analytics for my clients all the time, but you should at least be doing quarterly reporting so that, okay, this piece, flopped, this piece sailed what made this piece sale and what made that one flop.
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And as you do this, that's the nice thing about content strategy.
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The more you do it, the more clear things become too.
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And the easier it gets.
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So I know we talked a little bit about defining that audience.
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And you also talk on your website about when you work with customers, you want to do it in a content audit.
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You want to see what they have.
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Do you find that there are a lot of customers who have content that's being underutilized, or is it more a case that they just need to develop content that they don't have enough content.
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that's really usable.
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It depends on the each business, but I will tell you, Eric, there isn't epidemic right now of underused old content, that I find sitting around on people's websites when I do audits.
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So obviously there are some businesses that are brand new, have never created a piece of content.
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They're starting from scratch.
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Those people are in a good position because it's very easy to start your strategy on the right foot.
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If you start it at the beginning, but more businesses have.
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Especially because of the COVID pandemic they've been operating in business as usual and suddenly realized, Oh my gosh, we don't have a digital strategy.
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And what are we going to do?
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And they've had everybody from the CEO to the janitor, write a blog article for them at some point.
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And no one has thought about SEO when they've written these and they are potentially sitting on a goldmine.
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So I've done this with a few of my clients now where they, they blogged when they had time and maybe they got lucky with one blog and that one really took off, but not much else has been happening.
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Rather than paying someone to start from scratch and start creating new content, which is important as well.
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You do want to create fresh content, always a part of your strategy.
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If you have a library of content, should be going into that content, taking a look at why it isn't performing.
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If it hasn't been performing, figuring out how you can fix it and then repurposing it for a new life.
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And that's actually something that anybody who has a content strategy should be doing, because content to K, which is when content falls out of favor with Google, it happens to anybody.
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Even the best piece of content will decay after awhile.
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If you are forgetting about content pieces, once you've published them and never touching them again, you could be losing quite a bit of money and organic traffic.
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Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast.
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But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level?
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If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO onsulting service may be a great fit for you.
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We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step.
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We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads.
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How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers.
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How to strategically package and position your products and services.
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How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business.
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To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services.
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Now back to the podcast.
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When you're thinking about what to do with your content or how to refresh it.
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How do you look at your competitors?
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Many small businesses, for example, they may have some great ideas, but they may be competing against somebody who has such high domain authority.
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That it's very hard for them to rank against that competitor.
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So how do you look at a competitor analysis when you're creating your content?
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Yeah, so that is a problem.
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And there are plenty of times where I take a look at a keyword that I want, and I look at it in the top 10 results are from Wikipedia, HubSpot, Salesforce, and I just look at them and I say, all right, there's no way that my client with a 25 domain name is going to get into that position.
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And I'll just put that one aside.
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But there are tools that I use.
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I use a ref's, SCM rush is another one that people use that will show you the difficulty of a keyword right off the bat.
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They give it a one through 100 ratings.
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It's not always perfect.
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the one that I use, I giving away my secrets here is not much to it.
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You just look at the ones that have lower competition.
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And when you use that tool, it actually pulls up the people who are currently ranking for that piece.
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Sometimes you'll see a big name in there just because there's one big name and there isn't a reason to run away because you might look at that purse, that big name, piece of content and realized that the only reason it's ranking is because of the big name attached to it.
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It's not optimized.
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It's from 2006.
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it's only 300 words.
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If I see something like that, even if I'm working with a little client, I start to salivate because I think that article is not worthy of being on that first page.
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And even though my client has lower domain authority, Because that article is so outdated.
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I have a chance to rank that, outrank them.
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If I put my mind to it.
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and so when I'm creating a piece of content, I usually look at the top 10 results.
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Who's on the first page right now.
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I opened them all up in 10 different tabs.
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I get my notepad out and I go through each one and I write down this article, talks about these subjects, and then I crossed them off.
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If they're on other articles that I know that they're all talking about, that this one has a video, this one has an infographic.
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This one has an interview.
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And I look at that shape.
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I might say, all right, what's missing.
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Where are these pieces?
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Not.
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where, what hasn't been done yet, and that's the sweet spot, but you've got to go after.
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You spoke earlier about this idea of content getting stale, and starting to fail.
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How do you look for those signs?
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When do you know it's time to refresh a piece of content?
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