Blogging Branding and How Content Blogging, Branding and How Content Marketing Changed the Entire Swimming Pool Industry Swimming Pool Industry M Marcus Sheridan Sh id Owner / Principal River Pools & Spas River Pools & Spas The Sales Lion
I’m just a pool guy… 2
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Inbound Marketing and becoming “the” guy at the dance… 4
The curse of knowledge… 5
Long Tail Keywords: A modern day David vs. Goliath 6
Assignment Selling and the Power of Page Views
The blue collar blogging revolution is here… 8
Question ‐ and ‐ Answer Session Q 9
wwwTheSalesLion com www.TheSalesLion.com mar marcus1@thesaleslion.com s1@thesaleslion om 10
When I first tried breaking into the world of SEO, felt like a man at the bottom of Mount Everest, looking up into the clouds and wondering how I could possibly get to the top. And when I say top, I mean website traffic, and lots of it. I wanted to be the site (www.riverpoolsandspas.com) other companies in my industry looked up to when they set their traffic goals. I wanted to be the industry standard, the example, the hub of consumer information….But the task was going to be difficult, and even worse, I was attempting to climb a mountain – for the first time. I own a fiberglass swimming pool installation company. In terms of web traffic within this industry, fiberglass pool manufacturers dominate. Why? Mainly because their SERPs rank is so high with two simple phrases: ‘fiberglass pools’ and ‘fiberglass pool’. Those two words garner over 20,000 searches a month on Google and therefore catapult the manufacturers to the top, with most builders like me lagging way behind. Why Small Biz Web Traffic Stinks In fact, the majority of pool builders get very, very little web traffic. And when I say very little, I mean between 10-20 unique visitors a day…if that. The reasons for this are many but the main cause of the problem reverts back to poor SEO practices—They have awful websites that don’t offer the consumer remarkable content. They don’t teach. They don’t inform. Essentially, the sites are glorified business cards. But this problem within the swimming pool industry is no different than 90% of other small businesses around the world. Carpenters, plumbers, builders, electricians, home improvement companies—they are all the same. When it comes to web traffic and web lead generation, they stink. In fact, many of these companies depend on their suppliers and manufacturers to give them all their leads. And if they ain’t getting leads from their manufacturers, they immediately turn to Google Adwords and start throwing money their way. Needless to say, it’s a nasty cycle. Less Dependency Luckily, when I started this process about 2 years ago, I understood this cycle for what it was, and I didn’t want any parts of it. In fact, if there is one thing I learned a long time ago in business it’s the more a small business is dependent on ‘others’ for lead creation and generation, the more they’re in trouble. I didn’t want to ever sit at my desk and wait for my pool manufacturer to send me a lead. In fact, I wanted to beat them to the leads. Frankly, I wanted to beat all the manufacturers to the leads. This is what my SEO quest has been all about.
This quest started with blogging. My initial blogging goals were simple: I wanted to get on the first page with the words ‘fiberglass pools’ and ‘fiberglass pool’. After the first few articles though, I realized my positioning with those two words weren’t really moving. In fact, the blog seemed to be a failure. I was bummed. Common Sense Blogging and Content Creation= SEO My experience was nothing unique though. Many bloggers, especially small biz bloggers, deal with a sense of hopelessness at the beginning of blogging escapades. We live in a society of results . And we want fast results at that. Unfortunately, blogs don’t typically work that way. But with lots of persistence mixed in with common sense, blogs can take any business’ SEO results to new heights. And what do I mean by common sense? I mean that you need to start blogging to answer questions of consumers . Stop thinking like a business owner or marketer or even SEO and start thinking just as a consumer would. This is why ever business should make a list today of the top 20 questions a consumer asks when they are considering the purchase of your product. These questions will form the foundation of a company’s Long-Tail Keyword strategy, or as I like to put it, a company’s L ow-Hanging Fruit. Low Hanging (SEO) Fruit We have Mother Nature to thank for the expression low hanging fruit . A fruit-bearing tree often contains some branches low enough for animals and humans to reach without much effort. The fruit contained on these lower branches may be not be as ripe or attractive as the fruit on higher limbs, but it is usually more abundant and easier to harvest. From this we get the popular expression “low hanging fruit”, which generally means selecting the easiest targets with the least amount of effort. This concept of low-hanging fruit is the whole reason my company’s blog eventually exploded. Instead of worrying about more difficult keywords such as ‘fiberglass pools’, I started focusing on questions/topics regarding fiberglass pools that consumers would be asking themselves and therefore turning to Google for answers. As you can imagine, so many longer phrases lead to a serious ‘long tail keyword’ campaign, one that had not been done at all in the swimming pool industry, and is the reason for so much amazing success over these two years in terms of traffic, leads, and sales. To expound on this much further, I’ve listed 7 examples of unique content and long tail phrases that have had a huge impact on our business.
7 Content Ideas that Will Forever Change Your Business 1. Pricing Articles I’m always amazed at how often I’ll go to a company’s website and they are afraid to discuss pricing. I’m telling you, this is just about the dumbest thing ever. For whatever reason, many companies want to have customers meet with a sales person before that evil thing we call ‘pricing’ is ever brought up. But think about it for a second—When you’re interested in a product, what’s the first thing you look for when you’re on someone’s site? Yep, you want to know how much the dang thing costs. And if you can’t find any pricing info? That’s right, you move on to the next site. So if you’re a business owner and you’re not talking about product pricing on your website, then get with the program, because you’re not only losing business but it also appears as if you’re embarrassed about your own pricing. ( Keep in mind here that you don’t have to always give specific pricing per se. Ranges are fine, especially if your product or service varies in its cost.) Just to give you an example of what I’m talking about, type in ‘fiberglass pool pricing’ in your little Google box. In the first couple of places you’ll see this article that I wrote about 1 year ago. And how many views has it gotten during this 12 month period? Well, to be exact, a decent 31,279 reads. Not too bad… 2. Cost Articles I know what you’re thinking—“Marcus, you just talked about this.” Yes, I did, but in the eyes of Google and their algorithm, I clearly did not. You see, when it comes to product pricing, there is a large group of people that will type/search (let’s assume your company sells widgets) ‘Widget Pricing’ or ‘Prices on Widgets’ and then there is another group that will type in ‘Widget Costs’ or ‘Costs of Widgets’. Are you seeing what I’m saying here? When it comes to awesome content that gets major love from the search engines you need to write articles that address exact phrases and words , not just general ideas. This is very, very critical to understand if you want to be successful. Just to shed further light on this, the most successful page on my pool website is far and away the fiberglass pool cost page, which, in the last year alone has been read exactly 54,305 times. (And no, I’m not kidding).
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