367: Brainstorming Content Ideas with Ranking Potential and Writing Great Blog Posts with Ashley Segura

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is actually sponsored by our sister site Clariti. I’ve talked about Clariti before on the podcast as a tool that we use. It’s just come up naturally, but also as an official sponsor, as an official advertiser on the podcast. The reason that we’re advertising on the podcast is because it is a perfect fit for the people who listen to this podcast. People who are thinking about how they can optimize and improve their existing content.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s why we built Clariti, it really came out of this need for us, as we were working on a Pinch of Yum, to have a tool that would kind of facilitate our projects and the work that we needed to do on posts in a way that we were doing, but with a giant spreadsheet. We created this tool called Clariti. It’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I, so it’s Clariti with an I. The simple premise of Clariti is to build something that will allow you, or to have, it’s a software app, that will allow you to look at your content kind of at a high level, and you can filter and organize and understand your content.

Bjork Ostrom: Then, you can build projects around the things that you need to do. What does that look like and how does that practically work? I can give you some specific examples of what Pinch of Yum is doing right now. One of the projects that we have is adding internal links to posts. The reason why that’s important is because you want to make sure that the content that you have on your website, on your blog, links to other places on your site.

Bjork Ostrom: Now, of course, want it to be relevant content that makes sense to link to, but if you don’t have any internal links on a post, that potentially could be an area for you to optimize, it could be something for you to look at and to add internal links. For a Pinch of Yum, what we did using Clariti is we filtered and we said, “Show us all of the content that doesn’t have any internal links,” or in your case, you could say maybe just one internal link, and you might want to add two, three internal links to that post.

Bjork Ostrom: You could filter using Clariti. Then, you could take all of that and add it to a project called add internal links. Another project that we’re doing is simply adding alt text to images that don’t have alt text. We have 772 different posts on Pinch of Yum that have an image that is missing alt text in some way. We filtered using Clariti and we said, “Show me all of the posts that have at least one image with alt text missing.”

Bjork Ostrom: Then we took all of those posts, and using Clariti, it takes 30 seconds, we said, “Create a project where we are going to look at these pieces of content and find those images and add alt text to those. There’s lots of different things that Clariti can do. We’re still in the early stages with it. Because of that, we’re offering what we’re calling 25 Forever campaign. We’re allowing the first 500 users who sign up for Clariti to get their plan, to get a subscription to Clariti for $25 a month forever.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re not going to raise that, even down the line when Clariti becomes more full-featured, and it’s already pretty powerful with the things that you can do, but even when it becomes more full feature and we increase the pricing, maybe we change it based on how many page views you have or how many posts your site has, whatever it might be. Anybody who signs up in this early stage will continue to get that $25 a month forever plan. If you’re interested in doing that and getting that deal, you can go to clariti.com/food.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. That will bring you to a page where you can sign up and we’ll follow up with you once you’ve signed up expressing your interest. We’ll talk through how you can do it, how you can sign up, and really what comes with a Clariti subscription. Thanks to Clariti and the Clariti team for sponsoring The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. We have, it’s kind of a tight-knit family here, with the TinyBit companies, but it is an official sponsorship and we want to thank the Clariti team for sponsoring The Food Blogger Pro Podcast and for building an incredible tool that we’ve been able to use across the TinyBit brands.

Bjork Ostrom: If you want to join, there’s still time for you to sign up. It’s not like we’re going to run out of those 500 user accounts right away. But they also won’t be there forever, so you can check that out by going to clariti.com/food. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring the podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello. Hello. This is Bjork. You’re listening to The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Today, we are talking to Ashley Segura from TopHatRank. They also have some kind of sister sites, TopHatContent is one of those. That’s actually what we’re going to focus on today, which is content, content and SEO. It’s the world that we live in as publishers, and as is true for many of you, one of the things I’m constantly trying to figure out is how do I do content better? Or how do we do content better?

Bjork Ostrom: How do we do SEO better? There’s an art and a science to that. It’s the art of impactful, good content. What does that actually mean, right? You hear people say good content. What does good content mean? Ashley is going to talk about what that is? How do we find good content? Like how do we come up with ideas for the next thing for us to write? Then also, how do we go about structuring that in a way that’s going to set us up for the highest likelihood of success.

Bjork Ostrom: That would be kind of the technical science part of it, kind of the SEO optimization around content structure. We’re going to hit all of these different things with Ashley. She has a ton of experience. She’s advised on SEO. She’s a speaker. She has tons of experience herself, and day in and day out she’s working with bloggers and publishers, and she’s going to be talking about what they see as best practice and giving advice around how you can increase the effectiveness of your content and get found on search. Let’s go ahead and jump into this interview with Ashley from TopHatRank. Ashley, welcome to the podcast.

Ashley Segura: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we met super briefly at Tastemaker Conference. It’s one of those things where you probably met 300 people. I met 300 people. So we’ve met in person, which is rare for a podcast interview for me to have like an in-person meeting and then to do the Zoom meeting. That’s fun. Good to see you again.

Bjork Ostrom: At the Tastemaker, you were talking about all things SEO, ranking, search, and really, that’s your background, Ashley. I did a quick LinkedIn review before jumping on the podcast and see that you have a long history, not only in content, background in journalism and creative writing, but also background in search engine optimization. It seems like where you are now, those two things have kind of come together. How did that evolve and how did that happen for you?

Ashley Segura: Yeah, that’s exactly it, and it’s really funny. I mean, I started in journalism, right from college. I was writing for the Times-Standard and absolutely loved writing stories and telling people stories. My first gig right after college was from my insurance agent. I was having a conversation with him, because I was about to rent another apartment, so I needed to get new insurance and he’s like, “Hey, you just graduated college. Could you build me a website?” I was like-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like, “You’re a young person.”

Ashley Segura: Yeah, Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: “Can you do computer things?”

Ashley Segura: That’s basically how that conversation went. I, not knowing how to say no to new opportunities, it was like, “Yeah, sure. I’ll figure that out.” Watched, well actually back then, it really wasn’t watching, it was reading articles and learning about WordPress. I created a site, wrote all the content for it and then the next step was social media pages, because I was doing the college of social media, so I was like, “Hey, you’re going to need these as well.”

Ashley Segura: One thing led to another and I basically got his whole insurance company online and developed an online presence. After I did that for him, he’s like, “Hey, can you come and speak for the Board of Insurance in California? Kind of explain what you did and tell them a little bit more about this whole online marketing thing.” I did my first speaking gig, absolutely terrified. I think there were like only 12 or 14 of these insurance agents representing the State of California.

Ashley Segura: But went in, did it, and then I got clients from that. I started doing the same thing, writing content for them. That’s where I was able to still kind of have that journalism background and tell their story. But then, also through doing research and a lot of what I do now, trying to figure out what users actually want to know from this insurance company, not just how they got founded, what they do Monday through Friday, outside of the fluffy information.

Ashley Segura: I definitely needed to learn a lot more. I started working in-house, and became a director of marketing for an in-house brand, and then wanted to really grow my clientele, so I knew I was going to need agency experience, so started working for a couple different agencies to really learn how they run their business, how they run clients, and…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. The agencies, you mean like-

Ashley Segura: yes, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s do an agency, see how an agency works.

Ashley Segura: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: In hopes of eventually doing your own?

Ashley Segura: Exactly. Exactly. I wanted to get hands-on experience. Meanwhile, I was still managing these insurance clients, then a couple other referral clients that I would get here and there, but working full-time.

Bjork Ostrom: You kind of had your own agency, like your side hustle agency, in the insurance niche, and then were working, your full-time gig with an agency that was a little bit bigger and established to learn. I think it’s so smart. The idea of you are learning on the job for what you want to be, an entrepreneur. It’s like lots of different, you’re a doctor or you’re a dentist, like you’ll do on-the-job training.

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Painting, whatever it is, construction. I think sometimes as entrepreneurs, we think, “Hey, we’re just going to go out and learn by doing,” which is great.

Ashley Segura: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: But one of the other great things you can do is learn by working underneath somebody. It’s cool to see that you were doing that. Along the way, what did you learn? What were the pieces that you started to pick up around what it takes to run an agency?

Ashley Segura: Well, I learned what I liked and didn’t like. I loved doing social media marketing and I loved content marketing. From an agency’s perspective, I was writing the content still. I wasn’t really doing the audits yet or the science behind the content. I was doing more of the topic ideation and creating the content.

Bjork Ostrom: For the agency, for your full-time gig.

Ashley Segura: For the agency. For the clients. Doing that, allowed me to hone in, “Okay, I’m not doing website development anymore. I’m not doing graphic design.” I dabbled in all of it. I was like a one stop shop, by myself and realized, “Okay, that’s not sustainable. If I want to really grow and have my own agency become successful, I need to just hone in.” I just honed in on social and content and that’s where I really started studying.

Ashley Segura: That’s where I went back again and did another in-house brand, doing a director of marketing for another in-house brand, just focusing mainly on their social and content. Then, that’s when I started speaking a lot more. Because at that point, I had a lot of case studies under my belt. I had a good idea of what worked and didn’t work. That’s really what brought me to where I am now to really understanding how to optimize content, how to run paid social, and actually get a return on ad spend and just amplify both of those assets.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right now, working with TopHatRank, which is an agent that we’re familiar with, have worked with in the past, are you still doing some of your own work with your own agency or is that something that you decided to wind down? I’m always interested in somebody’s entrepreneurial journey and kind of the decision points along the way. Where is that at for you now? Where do you feel like you learned in that process of doing your own agency?

Ashley Segura: In 2019, I officially closed my agency doors. That was around the time that I was working with Semrush. I was a speaker for Semrush, so I would build out case studies and then go teach it around the world. That was a lot. That was really difficult to try and do a balance of keeping any clients and doing that. I closed my agency doors, connected with Arsen mid–2019, and started doing operations for TopHatRank. About three months into that, him and I both saw this huge opportunity.

Ashley Segura: So many clients that come into TopHatRank, and just brands in general, when they start with SEO, they generally need something else in addition to that, or they’re coming to SEO because they’ve tried content and social and it didn’t work for them. They got burned or something happened. With my social and content experience, we decided, “Let’s partner up and let’s create TopHatContent and TopHatSocial.” We actually have three brands now.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Ashley Segura: That allows me to still have those social and content outlets and definitely do what I love, and still have from an entrepreneurial aspect, still be able to handle the operations for TopHatRank.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Operations for TopHatRank. Then, there’s kind of these sister agencies, TopHatContent, TopHatSocial, where TopHatRank, if I’m understanding it correctly, would be kind of audit-related work around SEO, maybe technical SEO. Here’s changes you can make to your site structure, or opportunities where you might be able to tweak things. TopHatContent would be a little bit more in the world of your experience with how do you structure content? How do you ideate content? How do you figure out your content roadmap?

Ashley Segura: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: And there’s some science to that, but there’s also some art to that. There’s a little bit, kind of that balance. Then the social piece, obviously, would be kind of in the world of social media marketing, which we understand.

Ashley Segura: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Kind of those different categories make sense. I’m curious to know, just to talk a little bit more about your own entrepreneurial journey, what do you feel like you learned about yourself in that process? One of the things that I think is always a good reminder, and something that’s important to come back to, is this idea of like what we are doing, what we are after is finding the thing that is the best fit for us. That’s a constant evolution. For some people, it’s going to be an entrepreneur, but a solopreneur. It’s just you, you’re working on your own, freelance contractor.

Bjork Ostrom: For some people, it’s building a team and trying to scale that as much as possible. For some people, it’s partnering with somebody and working together on a business. For other people, it’s finding a job they really love and settling into that, and having a side hustle, if that works. What do you feel like you learned about yourself as an entrepreneur, as a creator, as you’ve kind of walked this journey of seeing inside of a lot of different businesses, a lot of different agencies, and even just working with other businesses. You get to see what those businesses are like. What did you learn about yourself in that process that has allowed you to kind of continually evolve and find something that’s a good fit?

Ashley Segura: I definitely learned my limits. I learned where I would max out working full-time, whether I was at another agency or I was in-house and still having my clients, my weeknights and my weekends was literally me on the couch with my laptop, doing all my client work and implementing everything that I just learned at my full-time job. After doing five years of that, that was enough. I was really scared to make that leap and go full-time on my own, but it was the best thing that I did, because so many doors opened after that. I also learned to limit myself in what I offer and provide.

Ashley Segura: That was a really big eye-opener. I started my journey with wanting to be a one-stop shop and offering anything online marketing-related, even branding and PR elements for a brand. Then, honing that in to where now, today, over at TopHatContent, instead of offering every service that a content marketing agency could possibly offer, we offer four, well now, we have a new one, five services. These are the best services that I’ve been able to find that actually make a difference with a brand’s content.

Ashley Segura: Instead of just trying to be competitive with every other agency that’s in this niche and offer everything that everyone else offers, we decided, “Let’s just hone in and offer what we know is going to get the most immediate results and actually provide a solution to what people are looking for.” That’s just basic business, but you get muddled with trying to be the best and offer it all. Then time goes by, and you’re still doing that. Limiting yourself has definitely been a big lesson and eyeopener throughout the journey.

Bjork Ostrom: Sometimes I think of the parallel with content and sponsored content. I think sometimes, when you’re in the early stages, it’s like the reason you do that is because you need to.

Ashley Segura: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like, “I need to pay the bills, and so if you need a website designed, I’m going to figure out how to do it, because I’m scrappy, and I’m ambitious, and I’m in the early stages.” At a certain point, you meet your needs that you have from a business perspective. Then you can start to say like, “Great,” you kind of hinted at this, “what do I actually like doing? How do I do more of that?” Also, I was just talking three, four hours ago with a friend down the hall who has a video business. He was talking about learning this new system and this different type of editing.

Bjork Ostrom: I said, “You can see why people start to specialize.” Like in the music business, why somebody gets really good at like mastering songs after they’ve been recorded, because they can do it really quick, and it’s really good, and they can charge an amount that makes sense, and because it’s really good, but then they get really quick at it, because they specialize in it. There’s a book by a guy named John Warlow who talks about content agency. I think the one uses a design agency in it. I read this maybe 10 years ago or something. I don’t know if it was that long ago. It was a long time.

Bjork Ostrom: But he talks about how, in the book, he gives this analogy of this kind of chaotic design agency and how they really unlock their potential when they focus just on doing logos. They have a logo package, and you go through the process of getting a logo, and it can be repeatable then. The analogy in the book is like building a service business that can be acquired. That has to be one that’s repeatable and has a process. But I think any acquirable business is acquirable, because it’s a good business to run.

Ashley Segura: Totally.

Bjork Ostrom: And so, I think it applies to anybody listening here that would be service based to think about like, what is your process, and what is your system, and what is your specialty? Even for those who aren’t in the services businesses, I think it’s always important for us to think, what is our process? What is our specialty? What’s the thing that I can do that has some element of repeatability to it? TopHatContent, you talk a lot about content. We are in the world of content creators. That’s what we talk about day in and day out.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m curious to know when you are working with content creators, what are the things that you’re helping them with? Then, let’s dive into, talk about some of the things that creators and publishers can be thinking about if they’re interested in leveling up and getting smarter about their content. You mentioned four or five different areas that you specialize in, but maybe we could take a look more closely at a couple of those, content ideation, we had talked about, and topic ideation, and content structure as well, but what are those buckets that you talked about before?

Ashley Segura: Certainly. Content creators have content already created. You really nailed it with starting with a lot of different niches and then eventually honing in. We’ll have a lot of content creators come to us who used to, maybe six, seven years ago, write about travel, family and food, and now they just want to be a vegan blogger. They’re trying to figure out, “What do I do with all that old content? How can I brand myself as just a vegan blogger? There’s hundreds of thousands of other vegan bloggers, where can I stand out in this niche?”

Ashley Segura: Usually, where we always start with a content creator, because they have content already published, is with audits. We’ll look into a content audit, which basically just dives in, collects all the data for all the content on a site. Then, we start to organize it. What we’re really looking for, and this is something that anyone can do as long as they have the time, resources, obviously, always a key factor, but we’re looking for patterns within the data. Some of those older posts that either aren’t ranking anymore or aren’t relevant, figuring out what to do with them is the most important part of the audit.

Ashley Segura: Just mass deleting them is definitely not always a recommendation. There could be opportunities in there. That’s where you got to look at the competition and see who’s currently ranking right now? How are they structuring those articles to get ideas and figure out why they are ranking over you when you technically have the authority here? You’ve had this piece of content published for six years, you’re clearly a blogger about X, Y, Z, and have been creating content about X, Y, Z for this long, so why are they out ranking you?

Ashley Segura: It usually comes down to how a blog post is structured, how many backlinks they’re getting, what the link profile entirely looks like, and what the user journey looks like. An audit will give all of that information and then allow us to put together a roadmap of, “Okay, here’s what to fix for your previously published, you’re already published content. Here’s what to do with all of that. Now going forward, here’s some ideas on where you should go next in terms of creating new content.” Because they’re content creators, they still want to create new content, maybe not at the capacity that they were doing before. Figuring out a way, we’ll usually recommend, saying, “You need to break up your time in a very number specific way and strategy.”

Ashley Segura: Two-thirds of your time should be focused on updating your existing content. A third of your time should be focused on creating new content. That’s generally a safe recommendation across the board for all content creators, whether they’ve been creating content for two years, a year or 10 years. It’s not always reinventing the wheel with new pieces of content.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think of it almost as a store. As much as possible, I think in the digital world, if we can, for myself, at least, if I can come up with examples of physical things, it helps me understand it. I think of it as a store, let’s say it’s a retail store and you’re selling whatever it might be. Let’s say it’s a jewelry store. I think that in my mind, what can happen as a publisher, and I think of this even for a site like Pinch of Yum, is we just continually bring stuff into the store. We go out, we wholesale buy it, we bring it in and we put it on display, and then we go and get another thing and we put it up, and just do that.

Bjork Ostrom: For us, for 12 years, we’re gathering things and putting them up, but what we’re not great at, we’re getting better at this. I think publishers in general are getting better at this, but I think there’s still a huge opportunity to get good at this is to actually stop and be like, “Okay, we’ve been gathering pieces for 12 years. Now, let’s stop and look, like when somebody comes in, where are they going? What are they looking at? What are they really drawn to? This one, like the gold watch, we bought six years ago, nobody’s looked at that in the past year. Is it because it’s not in the right place? Is it because it’s not polished correctly? Should we try moving it, adjusting it, seeing if anybody interacts with it? If they don’t again, okay, maybe we take it out. Then, when people come in, they only see things that they really like and are really appealing.”

Bjork Ostrom: Like, “Maybe we don’t sell watches anymore. We just get rid of that. We focus on necklaces.” But it’s really holistic strategy around your catalog of content, the whole store, as opposed to just looking at each individual piece and being like, “Hey, do I like this piece? I’m going to put it in my store.” But then after 12 years, you kind of have this chaotic store that hasn’t been curated and things haven’t been optimized. One of the things that I heard you talk about was the potential of deleting content. In this jewelry store example, it would be like getting rid of the gold watch.

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But you said that’s not always the best option. If somebody’s interested in looking at their catalog, and trying to catalog of content, and trying to make a decision around, do I keep this, do I not, where do you even start for that? Then the follow up question is, can you talk about the strategy behind potentially removing it, if that was a good idea?

Ashley Segura: Definitely. Trying to figure out what content is safe to delete, and what should be updated, where there’s still an opportunity, is literally looking at the traffic for the keyword. So often, those older articles that you published a long time ago may have, back then, had a lot of traffic, but now, people just aren’t searching for that. It’s just not, for whatever reason, that watch is not relevant to the customers that are walking through your store anymore. They only want to focus on necklaces, or only silver watches, instead of gold watches.

Ashley Segura: If you go in, and you don’t have to have fancy tools for this. You can just look at the keyword traffic. If you can see that there’s just not a lot of people searching for this to begin with, it’s not worth your time going in and trying to recreate that post, update it, do all new images, throw in a video with it, add 400 more words to it. It’s not worth that effort, because people aren’t searching for that to begin with. Even if you make those updates, and you may improve your rankings for it, those five people that are searching for it, it’s not going to drastically change the wheel for you.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. In that case, it would be, you’re targeting something that isn’t high-volume search. There’s just not a lot of people searching for, let’s say, I’m trying to think of an example of one that would be, somebody wouldn’t search for, pine cone, natural pine cone tacos. I just looked out my window and I saw pine cones, right?

Ashley Segura: There we go. That’s specific.

Bjork Ostrom: Super extreme example, but maybe you’re into natural foods. Nobody’s searching that, but you have that blog post on your site. It doesn’t make sense even to update it, because even if it was the most optimized post ever, there’s not going to be an audience there who’s going to be interested in it. An example in the jewelry world would be like, you have a watch, but it’s so big that nobody can wear it. Nobody’s ever going to buy it, because there’s not a market for it.

Ashley Segura: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: My follow-up question to that would be, what if there’s appeal in other areas. For instance, what if it’s a really funny post that a lot of people are sharing on Facebook? Or what if it’s gone viral on Pinterest? It’s less of the strategy behind it, because if it is getting traffic from other places, my guess is the answer would be you leave it. It’s more curious around search engine optimization. This is kind of a technical question, but like, would you potentially no index it? Then, Google is crawling fewer pages on your site, and you’re saying like, “Hey, don’t crawl this page.” Or is it more of an it depends?

Ashley Segura: It’s definitely not an it depends. This one’s a pretty black and white one, and one of those rare ones that it’s black and white. Before, for us, to actually recommend, “Hey, you should delete this post, or you should delete these 25 posts.” We’ll go in and look at the social metrics. We’ll use BuzzSumo. We’ll pull all the social data, and if there’s significant, and the word significant, that means something different for every single brand.

Ashley Segura: That could be 10 shares for one brand or 1,000 shares for another brand. If there’s significant social engagement happening with that content, then that, go ahead and just leave it, let it sit there. No index it. We also have instances where it’s a blog post, that was from 10 years ago and it was the family’s first trip to Yellowstone, even though they don’t write about travel anymore, but it means something to them.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ashley Segura: Okay. Go ahead and just no index that, that’s safe. The ones where you don’t want to no index them, but you’re still not sure if you should delete them, but pretty much the last caveat to that is the link profile. If you have one or two strong backlinks that are pointing to it, even if you’re not getting a lot of traffic, but you have high authority backlinks, that’s helping give your blog, in general, a push up by saying, “Even though this post isn’t getting a lot of traffic, this big website is linking to it, so I do have a little bit of authority and do know a little bit of what I’m talking about.” That’s another one that we’re not going to want to delete. We’re not going to want to touch. You can just leave it as is.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. In the case of the travel post, I think anybody who’s been publishing for a certain number of years will have these pieces of content that are personal in nature.

Ashley Segura: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: Significant enough that you want to leave up. It’s almost like a little milestone. We had a friend yesterday who’s like, “I’ve kind of given up on caring what it looks like for me to post on Instagram. It’s just become a way for me to remember a point in time.” That’s the value for them. I think there’s a little bit of that, depending on how you run your site, where for some people there’s these markers and they use their blog or publishing as kind of a milestone.

Bjork Ostrom: Maybe it’s like a cookbook is released and not a lot of people are searching about it, but you just remember that as a really significant thing. Or to your point, you do a recap of a family trip, or I think of Pinch of Yum, Lindsay was like, “Here are 10 things we did in Charleston.” It’s not a travel blog. It’s very much a food blog, but… You talk about no indexing. Can you talk about what no indexing is? Why it’s important and why we would use it and also need to be careful with it?

Ashley Segura: Certainly. No indexing is allowing that piece of content, that page to still live out in the universe, but telling search engines, “Hey, don’t worry about crawling this. I don’t need you to try and rank this piece of post. If someone’s searching for the things to do in Charleston, I don’t need this one to come up in search engines. I’m totally okay with this taking a back seat. This is just personally for me and on my site.” But that also is where you need to be very careful, because pieces of content that you actually want to rank and to be seen by people need to be indexed. They need to be crawled.

Ashley Segura: Search engines need to be made aware of them, so that they can put them in front of the right users. That’s why when you go through a content audit process, or say you’re even auditing your own content and you’re going back and forth delete or no index, or usually, those two bottom of the barrel options. Because if you delete something, you’re obviously not going to get traffic. It doesn’t exist in the cyber world anymore. If you no index it, you could maybe have some people from other pages on your website stumble across that article, but you don’t care if the traffic comes through, you’re not really concerned about that. The post is still live. It’s still living in the cyber world, which is important to you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Like somebody maybe has bookmarked it and once a quarter, they come back and they look at it. Or maybe would be doing an internal search on your site. Like using your site search would come across it, or maybe it’s on Pinterest somewhere and somebody clicks on it. They can still get to it if it’s no indexed, but you’re telling Google or other search engines, “Don’t show this.”

Bjork Ostrom: The word index comes from the index of sites. “Don’t put this in your index, don’t display it, don’t put it in your database, keep this out of search results.” The follow-up question, why would you do that? What is the benefit to a publisher by saying, “Don’t include this in search results.” Because it seems like you would just kind of want anything to be available at all times. What is the benefit of saying, “Don’t include this.”

Ashley Segura: Sometimes it can come down to content cannibalization. If you have other content that, say on Pinch of Yum, you have food-related content in Charleston, and you want Google to focus anything Charleston-related on the food portion and not on this travel blog that’s more of just a memory piece for you. This is kind of an opportunity for you to map the road out for Google, and for users, and search engines, and to tell them, “If you’re going to do anything Charleston related with my website, show them these pieces only.”

Ashley Segura: Then, this actually creates a proper user journey for both the search engines and for users, and it makes sense with my brand. Whereas if we go on the travel side of things, we don’t want anyone to drive over into that section on the map, because it just doesn’t make sense for either search engines or users with our brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That makes sense. One of the things that you had said a couple times is user journey. What is that?

Ashley Segura: Okay. I’m curious what the oven temperature needs to be for baking pork chops. I’m going to go to Google to type in baked pork chop, oven temperature recipe. I’m usually, my personal user experience, I’ll skip over the first few results that come up, because they’re spammy or they’re all recipes and ads. I’ll go down to the third or fourth, I’ll click on an article. I will then see the article. I’ll go through the images. I’ll go down to the recipe card.

Ashley Segura: I’ll get the oven temperature out of it. Then, usually a step or two in there, or an ingredient that I didn’t include will catch my eye. Now, I’m on the recipe. Now, I really like this recipe. I didn’t realize I should do sun-dried tomatoes with my baked pork chop. That’s going to make it taste amazing. Now, I like this brand. I’ve now had a positive experience with not just the recipe and the content on the page, but with the brand. I now appreciate them, because they just taught me something new and opened up my eyes to a different way to cook this recipe. Now, I’m going to go to their homepage. I’m going to see who the author is, learn a little bit more about them.

Ashley Segura: I may sign up for their email newsletter, I don’t know, depending upon how my user experience is on the homepage. If I kind of fall in love a little bit more with the brand, I’m going to go and see that they also have dessert recipes, and I need a dessert to accompany this, so I’m going to look at their desserts, and then go to their contact page, because I’m a marketer and see what PR opportunities they have available. That’s a user journey. That’s kind of describing user experiences. What a user does with your content before, after, I’m sorry. Before, during and after they’re engaging with your content.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. One of the interviews we’ve done before is with Kingston, who has a company called Slickstream. They just released a feature within Slickstreams called Journeys. It shows you like, “Here’s the journey that somebody’s gone through.” Obviously, there’s comparable things you could do within Google Analytics, but they’ve done it in a really user-friendly way. You can see, and they’ll send an email out and they’ll be like, “Here’s an interesting journey.” Sometimes we’ll see 30 people will come and they’ll look at 30 different pieces of content.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like, “Wow, what was it about that search that brought them in?” Like what hooked them in? So starting to understand those journeys better, you can see how that would be impactful for your content strategy. One of the things that I wanted to dig into a little bit that you had mentioned is this idea of backlinks. I think we talk about backlinks a lot, but can you just explain the concept of a backlink? Then, how can you find backlinks for your site or for a specific post?

Ashley Segura: Backlinks are when other websites link to one of the pages on your website. This is most common, we’ll stick with the baked pork chop recipe. This can be seen as, say another blogger, a travel blogger came across this baked pork chop recipe that she or he made while they were on vacation in Nantucket. Totally shooting from the hip here. They linked baked pork chops and it links to your baked pork chop recipe. Now, anyone who’s reading this Nantucket post is going to naturally, if they’re interested in baked pork chops, which generally is what happens, they’ll click on the baked pork chop recipe.

Ashley Segura: They’ll land on your website. They’ll land on that post. They’ll now have an engagement. If this is a website that gets a decent amount of traffic, it’s been around for a while, has some good authority, you’re looking at now having a strong backlink. Lots of times, not just content creators, brands across all spectrums, small to huge brands will get links from directory websites, or Wikipedia sites, or forums, and things like that.

Ashley Segura: Those, well, aside from Wikipedia sites, most of them tend to be low-quality backlinks. Where you see that big difference is when it provides value to a user. If you’re ever questioning, “Is this going to be a high-quality backlink or a low-quality backlink?” Ask yourself about the journey. If they’re coming from this Nantucket blog post and clicking on the baked pork chop recipe, that’s pretty clear that they actually want to learn more about this recipe.

Ashley Segura: They want to make this recipe and give it a try. If they’re going from a directory site, you’re most likely not going to get a lot of clicks. You’re not going to get a lot of traffic. Yes, you got one backlink from it, but you’re not really getting any traffic from it, so it’s not a strong backlink. It’s not very helpful for you.

Ashley Segura: Getting those links from that Nantucket blog creator, it’s not easy. There are a lot of different secret sauces out there that SEOs have in order to try and get them. Some of the best have been through collaborations. In the food blogger world alone, there’s so many great Facebook groups out there where they’re just literally collaboration groups. They find relevant niches or niches that compliment each other, like obviously a vegan niche and a barbecue niche wouldn’t be great to link to each other.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah.

Ashley Segura: Especially from a user journey standpoint, but there’s a lot of groups out there to where they try and help each other out. Like, “You give me a link, I give you a link.” But they make it relevant to the user, and they do it over time, instead of, “Here’s 50 new backlinks from this Nantucket person.” That’s pretty obvious. I mean, Google, as much as we all have lots of feelings about Google and search engines, it is pretty smart. It can tell when you’re doing something fishy like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right. An important point is that one, which is like, the closer you get to artificially manifesting links, the more dangerous it gets. I think, I forget what they were called, but it was essentially like, “Hey, 10 publishers, we’re all going to link to these 10 pieces of content in this single post, so there’s this web of connections.” To your point, Google gets good at understanding that. It almost feels like the opportunity is like the parallel in the real world, which is like, you have real genuine connections.

Bjork Ostrom: You have a network of people and friends who are doing similar things and you naturally link to each other. I think of our connection with Melissa, from The Faux Martha, who’s helped out with some of the design projects we have at the office. We link to her and her content, and she links to a Pinch of Yum. That happens in a really natural way over time. But it’s also, you want to be strategic about it and think like, “How do I do this strategically?” To your point, the importance of that. One last thing with it is there’s no real like metrics around low profile, high profile, quality, not quality. It’s kind of up to interpretation around.

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yet, there’s no rating system around links, officially. It’s just this general understanding like, hey, if we get a link from Minnesota’s biggest newspaper startribune.com, that’s probably going to be more valuable for us a better backlink than, to what you said, a directory of 1,000 different food sites that links to your page. Is that right?

Ashley Segura: Exactly. Kind of put on your PR, your public relations hat with this, whether you have experience in PR or not. The more popular you are, the more links that you’re going to get. The more popular you are at school, the more friends you’re going to have it. It can apply in the real world scenario. That’s a great way to kind of think about links. That’s why establishing authority is so important.

Ashley Segura: That’s such a broad term, but a way to do that is to really create great content within your niche. Great content is completely different from even a year ago of what great content looked like a year ago toward what it looks like today. Providing as much information as you can, whether you are an informative type of content creator, or an entertaining type of content creator, those are the two biggest, as long as you are addressing why a user would’ve originally come to your page better than anyone else, you’re going to be popular. You’re going to get links from everyone else. To see and figure out how to do that, it really comes down to looking at what’s currently ranking, take the all recipes, and take the huge corporate large brands out of the picture that show up on the first or second results.

Ashley Segura: Look at the third, fourth, fifth, six results of who’s ranking for a specific term and see what questions they’re addressing. I can guarantee you there’s a piece of information that you may not have yet. When you add that to your content and dive in deeper into that, that’s really helping to define the authoritative aspect that you need to really become popular and get natural backlinks without having to go out and ask everyone to be your friend.

Bjork Ostrom: Authoritative almost being synonymous with knowledgeable, like helpful, knowledgeable, giving people what they want, which in this world, it’s success with the recipe, but also answers to questions potentially.

Ashley Segura: Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: We don’t have to cover all the different pieces of it, but you talked about the content being different today than it was a year ago, especially true when you look at five or 10 years ago.

Ashley Segura: Totally.

Bjork Ostrom: We can think back to 10 years ago and read, write a piece of content and how different that looked and felt. It was almost more like a journal, but now you’re kind of structuring content in a way to make it as helpful as possible for readers. Then also what Google’s after, any search engine is after, is trying to understand what’s helpful and prioritizing that. What should a blog post look like? How do you actually structure the different components and pieces? Is there any kind of formula with it or loose structure that you can follow?

Ashley Segura: Kind of, a bit. I’m doing my best to not say it depends throughout this entire conversation.

Bjork Ostrom: But it also depends. Yeah.

Ashley Segura: Also it truly does. No, really, diving into the food content creators in particular, there’s this one blog post and I’ll look for the link and send it to you afterwards, but there’s this one blog post that I always use as an example of a great piece of content structured from start to finish. It starts out with an image of the final product that, I think was a chicken recipe. I don’t even remember what the recipe was.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah.

Ashley Segura: But the content-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not what you were looking at.

Ashley Segura: … structure was so good.

Bjork Ostrom: It was the content structure. Yeah.

Ashley Segura: Yeah. The content structure was so good. It had a photo of the recipe right off the bat, had a few very short paragraphs, then right away with bullets of what you’re going to get into this. Right after the bullets, I think it was about a 30 or 45 second video. Then it started to dive into the steps, but it didn’t do it in step one, step two. It still wasn’t even a recipe card, it was more conversational. It still brought the user journey going all the way down. Then it had a three minute video in there and then it had more bullets, more content, and then the recipe card.

Ashley Segura: You’re hitting every type of user there. The one that wants the short, quick video to see how to do it. The one that actually wants to see the details and would want to watch a three minute video. The users who are just looking for the bulleted information, the me’s of the world that just need that oven temperature, but end up staying on longer because something caught my eye. Then, you also have the ones that still appreciate the story, there are users out there who still appreciate the story, not of how tomatoes were created, but of how you need to peel the skin of the tomatoes so softly after you saute them and they start to burn off.

Ashley Segura: They still appreciate that dialogue. A perfect structured content to me and what I’ve seen as being the most successful is when you offer something for everyone within one piece of content. That doesn’t mean it needs to be 2,500 words to do that. In this example, they used video elements and bullets to do that. Then the recipe card to get to the point, if that’s what you truly wanted after watching the 30 second video.

Bjork Ostrom: Both my parents were teachers and they often talked about different types of learners. They talked about visual learners, people who learn by listening, and then kinesthetic learners who learn by doing and actually interacting with things. You can’t do all of that with a screen. But the idea is for myself, I’d rather watch a video of how something is done, but I know a lot of people, even in this podcast, and there is going to be somebody here who’s going to be reading this instead of listening to it because they go to the podcast notes.

Bjork Ostrom: Even though they could listen to it, they read the transcript because that’s their preference for how they consume content. The first piece that I hear you talking about that’s important is making sure as much as possible that you are providing different ways for people to consume the content, video, short bullet points, longer explanation. It also gets to the point where it feels like, man, that ends up being a lot. Do you feel like there’s been a shift where before, if you could do two pieces of content in a week, now you’re probably doing one because that one piece of content takes twice as long?

Ashley Segura: 100% and two things on that. The first being, not every piece of content needs to have that much of an in depth structure for it to be successful. The ones where maybe you used to be ranking, but you aren’t ranking for anymore, or you’re just really in the middle, you’re on page maybe three or four, and you still haven’t hit page one, and you don’t know why, those are the pieces of content to where it’s worth doing this in-depth structure to where you’re providing something for everybody inside the piece of content. The second part of that is really trying to figure out with your resources what makes the most sense with how much you can actually create quality content in.

Ashley Segura: People are obviously consuming content faster than ever, the more the merrier, but it’s not making a big tick in rankings by you publishing five to 10 posts a week versus your top competitor who only does one a month. But that one a month is that full structure, it’s distributed across social media, it has social ads on it, it’s on all the platforms, there’s an email newsletter to go behind it, it’s getting natural backlinks. Long gone are the days of quantity over quality. We’re very much so in quality, a user’s not going to abandon your brand because you’re no longer publishing five posts a week.

Ashley Segura: Some content creators that put out the expectation, totally not food related, but maybe more in the self-help space or the educational space to where someone signed up for a subscription and is relying on that, that’s a different story. But for content as a whole, it’s so much more important to focus on quality at this point and focus on updating your older posts that are not quality and were more on that quantity aspect and creating quality in the future.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. When you’re dividing that up, I would imagine those kind of naturally fall into different sections. One of the things I see people occasionally do and we’ve experimented as well is it almost gets to the point where you can build in internal links and you can say… Jump to recipe card is technically in the internal link, but you could also have one that goes to the video, or you could have one that goes to the story behind the recipe, whatever it is. Is that something that you’ve seen done? Is there any strategy for that? Or it depends?

Ashley Segura: No, no, no. I’ve definitely seen it done. In fact, that’s what we do for our monthly SEO for bloggers webinar. I’m very pro of this method because I’ve seen it be so successful. We do these once a month webinars where we talk about SEO for bloggers and a week after, we publish a recap blog post. Originally, the recap blog post, we have the video, we have the transcript, we have the Q&A, we have about the panelists, there’s a lot of content on here.

Ashley Segura: Originally, we just had all the content pasted on. Then about three fourths the away into the first year of doing this, we added the buttons. Buttons right at the top above the fold where it would say watch the replay, read the transcript, go to the Q&A, learn more about the panelists. Just like we’re going to have on this podcast alone, for those who’d rather read the transcript, you click that transcript button, you’re going to scroll all past that other information. It’s a lot of information that you don’t want, you’re going to see the transcript, you’re going to be able to open the transcript, and digest that information.

Ashley Segura: From a content creator perspective, there’s all sorts of plugins that do this, the jump to buttons, having them at the top is so helpful. It’s not something that you should be afraid of. We have a lot of food bloggers in particular who will come to us and be like, “Well, they’re just going to jump to the recipe card and not read anything else.” Oftentimes, we find that not to be the case because they get into the recipe card, and because you did internal linking properly, and you have here’s what’s made with this dish, here’s what to make for dessert, or you like lemons?

Ashley Segura: Here’s 10 other lemon related recipes. People will start to dive into those other sections and they may not stay on that piece of content as long as you may want them, but they’ll go to other pieces of content on your website and start to engage with your brand as a whole. That’s where you’re satisfying everything from traffic, user experience, and brand exposure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We’ve talked about looking back at the content that you have, the jewelry store, so to speak, being strategic about content updates, potentially removing content, or not indexing it if it doesn’t fit. For the stuff that you do want to keep and revisit, making sure that you’re offering all the different elements for how people would want to consume that content, updating, refreshing that.

Bjork Ostrom: How about looking forward? Let’s say you start to realize the niche that you should be in, you’re kind of honing in on that. I think usually, creators have an endless amount of ideas, but the question is which one of those ideas is the most important idea to be working on? It’s kind of like topic ideation and also topic selection in regards to a piece of content. Are there any tools or recommendations that you’d have to help guide people in how to be strategic about what’s coming down the line for their content?

Ashley Segura: 100% and this is where you no longer have to guess. We are so lucky as content creators and marketers that we have data to support this and that we can confidently create a roadmap and a topic calendar and feel like, “Okay, if I’m going to put my resources and my time to creating this next quarter’s worth of content, I can feel very confident that people are actually searching for this, and it’s not too competitive so I actually have a fighting chance of ranking for it.” My favorite tool is Semrush’s topic research tool.

Ashley Segura: You go in and you put in a keyword. If the location makes a big difference to you, you can put in the United States or California, or you can put in the location to match the keyword. It’s going to populate a bunch of cards. Inside these cards or other related keywords that have medium to high search traffic volume. You can then click on the card and it’ll tell you the who, what, when, where, why, how questions that people are actually searching for that keyword.

Ashley Segura: It will also, on the other side of the card, show you the top 10 currently ranking articles for those keywords. You can literally see side by side here’s what’s really working well, because these are the top 10 that are… this is in front of the jewelry store, this is that window display item. Also find out before people come to the jewelry store, what do they want to see when they walk inside that by understanding what questions they’re asking. Those questions dictate the content that you should be creating.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like you’re stepping outside of the jewelry shore, what does somebody think before they step in? The example in the recipe world might be chocolate chip cookies, we use this a lot, but a question that people might ask would be how do you make soft chocolate chip cookies? That could be a prompt potentially that people are searching that you’d want to include in your recipe. Is that kind of what you’re getting at?

Ashley Segura: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: What are the pieces of content within your content that are most important to include?

Ashley Segura: Yes, definitely. There’s a few different things that you can get from just one card inside this tool. One of the things you’re going to be able to see is when you see the top 10 articles that are ranking, look for any patterns just in the title alone, because they link them. Before you even click on them and visually look at them, see if there’s any patterns. Going to the baked pork chop recipe, I’ve actually done this for baked pork chops. I discovered that three out of 10 of the top ranking articles about baked pork chops have the word juicy in the title as a keyword modifier.

Ashley Segura: That’s a clear indicator, okay, I need to make sure that my client includes the word juicy in their title when they’re going to use baked pork chop, because something about that is working and users and bots are liking that. Another thing is I’ll go into the questions and a lot of the initial questions are going to be great opportunities for headings, which will dictate, okay, what kind of pork should I get or what makes a good pork filet? Those kinds of questions you definitely want to make sure and make those H2’s make those headings inside your content and actually spend time addressing that.

Ashley Segura: But then you’re also going to find some questions that are slightly different that don’t go directly to just how to make a juicy baked pork chop. It could be is it okay to add lemon when you’re barbecuing a baked… or when you’re barbecuing a pork chop? Separate from the baked. Then that clicks, not only are people looking for baked pork chops, but they also want to know how to barbecue baked pork chops, and they want to do it with something citrusy.

Ashley Segura: Boom, that’s a new piece of content that I know is getting traffic, I can create a keyword around it, do the research, make sure that there’s traffic coming there, confidently knowing that there is, and then create headings. I would then take this barbecuing pork chops, run it through the tool again, see what’s ranking in the top 10, see how I can optimize my title, see what questions people are asking, make sure those are headings, and I’m addressing that information. Then this kind of just repeats. You can literally create so many, hundreds of new content ideas from just running this manual experiment.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s really cool. That’s within the Semrush?

Ashley Segura: Yes. Yeah. It’s their topic research tool. There’s lots of other tools out there that do similar processes, answer the public and whatnot. I just really love the way they organize everything into one card. You don’t have to then go inside answer the public and then use an SEO tool to double check the traffic and everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It seems like it’s a really good compliment to kind of the open creative thinking that you’re doing around I’d really like to do this recipe or this recipe or this piece of content. Then allowing some type of framework to help you guide decision making around which you actually pick and what you include within that content. Because sometimes that can be difficult. Sometimes it’s easier to make decisions with boundaries versus no boundaries and this feels like it gives you some boundaries.

Bjork Ostrom: Here’s some general guidance of things that you could include as an outline or H2. One specific question I had with that, kind of a follow up question as we round the corner here towards the end is there’s an FAQ box that you can include with Yost. Yost is the SEO plugin for those who aren’t familiar and it structures the content in a way where Google recognizes it as a question. Do you have thoughts around including questions within FAQ structured data versus as in H2 within the content?

Ashley Segura: Here’s a clear one where I will definitely say it depends.

Bjork Ostrom: It depends. Okay.

Ashley Segura: It definitely depends. You can certainly use the FAQ card. I mean, that’s definitely the cut and dry way to address the information and make sure it’s very obvious to both users and the search engines that, hey, this is my FAQ section. Where we’re looking at creating that great quality, that full structure content, you don’t need to do that because you so naturally do that within the content and you create a user journey. The questions actually make sense from one to the next.

Ashley Segura: You’re not addressing a question like what temperature do I need to bake the pork chops at before you address the marinade of the pork chops. As long as you can do it very naturally, I recommend doing it as headings instead of throwing it in the FAQs. But some content creators are very comfortable just throwing it all into the FAQ and it works really well for them. That’s where the it depends comes into play. But if you haven’t tried one or the other yet, and you want to get started with addressing more information with your content, I would recommend starting it into the headings first.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s where the art piece comes in. Where does it make the most sense? How long is it? I imagine an FAQ area almost as being a catchall that doesn’t require any flow to it. It could be any question in any order, whereas if there’s something that’s a little bit more important, you’d probably include it. If there’s a little bit more narrative around the why behind it, it might make sense to have that in the actual blog post content.

Ashley Segura: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Actually, there’s going to be a lot of people who have additional follow-up questions who are at the point where they’d be interested in potentially working together. You talked about some of the different services that you offer, but what’s the best way for people to connect with what you’re up to? I know that you also have lots of great free resources for people as well who are interested in continuing to learn, just a chance for you to shout out TopHatContent and all that you guys are doing in the different venues.

Ashley Segura: Definitely. Yeah. You guys can reach me over at [email protected] for any content-related questions, happy to dive in and see how I can help. On Twitter, I’m @ashleymadhatter. But by all means, the content realm and the content world is always changing and figuring out how to optimize content is changing on a daily basis. There’s no question that it is too small or too large, because we’re all learning on a daily basis.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Ashley, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Ashley Segura: Thank you so much for having me.

Leslie Jeon: Hello, hello, Leslie here. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. We really hope that you enjoyed it. Before we sign off, I wanted to mention quickly a little bit about The Food Blogger Pro forum in case you don’t know how it works. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get full access to our wonderful forum, which is one of my favorite parts of the community.

Leslie Jeon: On the forum, we have lots of different areas such as building traffic, photography, video. In all these forums, you can chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. You can connect, collaborate, and troubleshoot with them. Maybe you just want to get some advice about your site or maybe you have a question about core red vitals. The forum is a fantastic place to bring those questions and chat with others in the community.

Leslie Jeon: Our industry experts are also always popping into the forum to share their expert advice, whether that’s Casey Markee or Andrew Wilder. They’re always willing and excited to help our members out with their questions. The forum is just a fantastic place to learn from others, to chat, and have a community to really engage with other food bloggers, and just really to show that you’re not alone on this journey of growing your site or growing your business.

Leslie Jeon: If you do want to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to this community forum, you can do that and learn more by going to foodbloggerpro.com/join. There, you can learn more about our membership and feel free to join us there. All that being said, we really hope that you enjoyed this episode and we can’t wait to see you in the next one, but until then, make it a great week.