Season 2: SEO Trends and Topics for 2023

Voiceover: Welcome to Page One or Bust, your ultimate guide to getting on page one of search engines. Season two is here. In our first season, Drew and Ryan introduced pillar based marketing and busted outdated SEO practices. Now that you've heard how PBM can drive page one rankings, we're discussing the emerging trends for 2023 and previewing what's to come in the new season. Before we get into it, here's a brief word from today's sponsor. Page one or bust is brought to you by demand, jump, get insights, drive outcomes with Demand Jump. Get started creating content that ranks at demandjump. com. Today and now here are your co- hosts Drew Detzler and Ryan Brock.

Drew Detzler: Welcome to Page One or Bust. This is your co- host, Drew Detzler with me as always, Ryan Brock. Ryan, how we doing?

Ryan Brock: Yo, how are you today?

Drew Detzler: Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Because we're kicking off season two with a quick look back at what we learned last year and then we're going to spend some time talking about what we're looking forward to in season two and some of the guests that we have lined up.

Ryan Brock: That's right, Drew. Today it's January 4th, which means that almost all of you, I'm sure I am sick and just coming out of whatever misery my son and my wife, who's a pediatric nurse brought into my house over the holidays. How about you Drew? Are you feeling healthy?

Drew Detzler: The kids are back in school, that's the plus. A little bit of a breather from the sickness until they catch a new one, I guess, but I'm healthy as of now.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, I was told by one of our coworkers yesterday that even though I was telling him I felt better, that I didn't sound better, he's like, this must be one of those things where you sound worse than you are, and I was like, I didn't know. I sounded bad, but thanks man.

Drew Detzler: Yeah, how nice of him to talk you up and get you going on the first day back to work after a long break.

Ryan Brock: Speaking of long periods of time, I can not believe that we have been doing this show for a year now. This is season two

Drew Detzler: Full year. Neither can I.

Ryan Brock: Congrats to all of us, especially you, to your listeners. I can't believe you're here. Thank you for being here.

Drew Detzler: That's why we created it, right? We did not want to be self- serving. We wanted to tell genuine stories of SEOs and marketers and how they get their word out there.

Ryan Brock: When I go to a conference or I tune into some sort of digital event or something, it's the conversations, the sessions, the workshops that people are leading that I find myself drawn to are always like, " Here's what I did and this is the results that it gave me and this is how you can do it too." The concept of the experiment of the, let's try something, let's figure it out and let's see what it does. That's so essential to both the science and the art of content marketing and in organic content now and in the world that we're living in that I can't imagine going about a show like this any other way, which has been awesome. The fact that we've been able to maintain such a steady flow of really intelligent guests who all bring different perspectives and different expertise and they've just been able to share stories of here's something that I did. Here's something that I did. Here's something that I did. Here's important to me. Here's what I've been doing that's working. I think that's what keeps me interested in this show and I think it's probably, I would guess what keeps our listeners coming back. I know we're planning on doing a lot more of that in this second season.

Drew Detzler: I agree. I learn the same way. I learn the same way that you mentioned there, whether it be a session, a podcast or whatever it is through a story and learning how to apply that story to my own use case and not through a step by step go do this type of session. We've all sat through those in conferences and we've all sat through podcasts that are that same way and yeah, I agree. I hope that's why we have so many listeners is that they're learning through the stories that we're telling.

Ryan Brock: The kind of audience, the community that we built around this show in the last two years is just flabbergasting to me. We look at the numbers and there's well over 35,000 of you listening to this show, and that's amazing to me. It's incredible to me. We're just talking to people who are trying stuff out and trying to figure out a game because at the end of the day, organic content is a game where the rules aren't available to you fully and the people making the rules will give you a little glimpse, but not everything. The kind of community you can build when everyone's just trying to figure something out with an unclear set of instructions, I think is pretty compelling. Funnily enough, I think number one was let's do a podcast that isn't just marketing people talking about how cool they are. Then number two, to me, what we didn't realize when we started the podcast I don't think was that this whole thing, pillar based marketing that we have sort of built as a methodology that is driven by the technology that we have available to us, it's its own thing. It's not just SEO, it's not just content. I mean, we talked about this a lot over the last year, but it is a new methodology that does things differently, looks at the world differently, looks at the outcomes that you should be expecting from your organic content differently and how you make decisions and everything from the technical to the creative, and it's very clear to me now that when you're doing the sort of play that we're doing, Drew, Mr. VP of marketing, basically trying to say, look, we don't know if pillar based marketing is its own new category, but it's at least a subcategory and it's something a little bit different. We have to have space like this to have this conversation, and I'm just grateful that others have been willing to come alongside us and have that conversation with us.

Drew Detzler: Yeah, I totally agree and that's why we coined the phrase pillar based marketing and why we're spreading the word is because that does work. Now, let me ask you a question. Is pillar based marketing SEO?

Ryan Brock: Yeah, that's a good question. I think I'm at a point now where when I hear the phrase SEO, I think of two things. I think of old tactics and tricks that people have used to try to get on page one, and then I think of technical stuff. I think of if I wanted to hire an SEO agency right now, I am more interested in, or I'm assuming that what we're going to be talking about is page load speed, site maps, like stuff that's on a technical level important. When I think about the actual work of doing SEO, that to me is now PBM, that is pillar based marketing, the work of saying, I'm going to produce content that I will hope is aligned with my audience and is giving them what they want, and it is connected in such a way that the search engines are going to recognize our authority on this topic and therefore reward us with top rankings. That is different. I don't want to hire an SEO agency that doesn't understand the concept of networked content and the methodologies of pillar based marketing when it comes to actually creating and strategizing and publishing content. I think it's a totally different thing.

Drew Detzler: Yep. Yeah, I would agree with that. It's a great answer. One of the things you said around if we break down SEO, what PBM does, what pillar based marketing does is it optimizes for not only search engines, but humans and users or SEO is just strictly focused on that. A lot of that technical aspect of it that you mentioned.

Ryan Brock: People have been saying for years, I mean it's like it is the most trite thing you can see. Don't write for robots, write for humans, don't write for SEO, write for humans. The difference with PBM is what it's actually doing is it's saying, okay, you have all these ways marketer of collecting perspective and information from your target audience. You can ask for survey input on in an email blast. You could conduct an actual interview with a good customer, but every time you do that, there's just so much room for bias, for variability, for variance. What PBM does is it helps you optimize your content for the net of the entire marketplace surrounding the topics you care about. Where people are going on the internet to learn more about a given topic. Pillar based marketing is helping you say, now, if we average that out and we look at the most common questions that are being asked and we look at the most common journeys because there are so many infinite ways people can search for information, now you can translate that you. That is something that is quantifiable now that wasn't quantifiable 10 years ago, and that is always going to be a more reliable starting point for a content strategy than talking to five of your customers and assuming that they represent all of your customers.

Drew Detzler: We came into the year wanting to get the word out about pillar based marketing and we did so by discussing SEO and other marketing tactics with tons of extremely qualified marketing leaders. Why did we do that?

Ryan Brock: Why did you want to do that Drew? I'm going to turn your question right back around on you. I want to hear what you wanted to do because it was, I mean, this was ostensibly your idea.

Drew Detzler: Yeah, back on me. We wanted to do it because it works. I talked about how anyone who says they know how to do SEO is lying. That's pretty much the case. It's tough. It's been a tough nut to crack. It will always be a tough nut to crack because if you crack it, then Google will kill you.

Ryan Brock: They'll find whatever loophole you're exploiting and close it.

Drew Detzler: When people think about cracking, they think about gaming the system, think about figuring out some loophole. You're right. That's not what we did with pillar based marketing and that's not what users are doing. They are writing useful, helpful content, and it's working.

Ryan Brock: Over the years, there have been a million different tactics, the link farming, the back link farming that have worked for a while and then not worked anymore. There's a fundamental difference between exploiting something Google doesn't understand properly enough to shut it down and instead benefiting from Google's own understanding of contextual relevance within any given topic and the way people search for it. What we're doing is we're leaning into the biggest search company in the world and the research they've already done, they've already invested money in trying to understand if someone searches for this term, they're more likely than not to search for this term and then helping to make those recommendations that guide users along that journey. We're saying, why would we try to recreate that through building our own keyword lists because we can't have the same impact. Looking at a list of keywords that just sort of says, oh, I like this one. I like this one, I like this one. I'm going to write some blog posts about these things, but we can get really close to understanding how most of our customers are going to move through things, and so what we're doing is just taking data and understanding it better, and it's working for the record. It continues to work. It works every single time we try it, so why wouldn't I want to talk about this.

Drew Detzler: Here in a sec, we'll jump forward and look at the year to come in season two and what we're going to talk about and what we are excited for, but I wanted to ask you a question and I'll answer it myself first, and that's around what did you learn most this past year? Mine is around the Google helpful content update, and this sounds so simple and so stupid that it took this for us to really think about vocalizing this, but creating helpful content is what we should all be doing and what we should all be focusing on, but how do you create that helpful content and I think talking with our guests, that's what they all talked about. They all talked about creating helpful content in different channels, different avenues. It wasn't all SEO, but it was all about creating helpful content.

Ryan Brock: Google has ways of measuring that, and so I like my answer to your question, Drew, what do I think is the most important thing I learned this year is that authority with a capital as a concept, it is no longer about your website. For too long in this industry, the concept of authority has been applied to your domain. You want to get your domain authority score as high as you can get it, which means that you are more likely when you post new content going to rank high. What we've seen again and again is you can start with a website with an authority of 4 out of 100, that could have no authority whatsoever, but you can build a content strategy that is striving for topical authority or another way of thinking about this is pillar authority, building out networked content around a given topic and suddenly it's easy to become an authority on a given topic really fast. It's easy to not only become an authority, but to take over top page rankings from the biggest companies in the world, and you can do this overnight practically if you think about what you're doing from a topical standpoint, not from a standpoint of like, oh, I got this website, I need to make it look pretty and what am I going to call my blog? I'm going to call my blog news incorporating, oh, nobody cares. Nobody's coming to your website. Nobody's trying to navigate it. It's not about your messaging. It's not about this user experience you built on your website where you think people are going from A to B. It's about meeting people where they are and providing that network experience, and that's the only thing that matters at this point.

Drew Detzler: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I love that you went British for that example. I think it was British.

Ryan Brock: You can ask my wife. I don't know what it is, but that's always my-

Drew Detzler: Anyone other than you?

Ryan Brock: Oh look at me, I'm fancy.

Drew Detzler: Well, I can tell it's well practiced.

Ryan Brock: I've been on NyQuil and DayQuil for six days, Drew.

Drew Detzler: Doesn't show. Well, a little bit.

Ryan Brock: One of the last thing I want to do if we're looking back, I want to stop looking back because people who have been with us have been with us. They've heard these things before, but I do want to say I think it's important. We talk about pillar based marketing all the time, but we don't really talk about what is actually happening in that subcategory. What are practitioners of this methodology that we're teaching and talking about? Actually accomplishing, just this morning we got a message from one of our coworkers about a demand jump customer. They're working with an agency that we partner with, and we've been working with them for a while, but they just started a new pillar. They've already got a few other pillars of content built on their website. They just started a new pillar. It looks like they probably published it in the middle of November, so we're talking six weeks ago is when they began publishing their content. They published about 40 pieces of content and since, let's see, actually since November 26th, they started with five first page keyword ranks, so they were on page one for five terms relevant to their new pillar, and as of the third yesterday, they have 66 keywords they're ranking on page one for across their 42 pieces of content.

Drew Detzler: 13x.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, 13x. Similarly, we published at Demand Jump. We decided we made a shift this year to focus on softwares a service companies, and we work with literally every industry, but when it comes to our outbound, what we do to reach out to people, we really love working with SaaS because they're usually people who are willing to try new things and willing to invest in data and think the same way that we think, and it just results results in good things. We decided that we needed to create some content for our SaaS audience, so we produced two pillars of content. They each had about 20 pieces in them, I think. Not a whole lot of content. One of those is SaaS marketing. We published that back in the middle of October. We ended up, we had one page one keyword, so when I say that, we showed up on page one of search results for one keyword within the topic network of SaaS marketing. We said, okay, let's understand how people search for SaaS marketing. What are all the most common questions in things that they asked? We can map that network. We then understand that in that network, our domain at that time, middle of the end of October, we had one keyword where if you search that keyword, one of our pieces' content would show up on page one. Publish those 20 pieces by the end of this year, so about two months, we have 96, so we are showing up on page one of 96 keywords within that topical network, 802 keywords were on in the first 10 pages. Additionally, we did SaaS content as a pillar starting out in the middle of October. What day is that? October 8th, so beginning of October, we had 72 keywords that we were on page one four in this topic network of SaaS content. Today, 488. We went from 217 top 100 keywords to 1, 862. Now, I like to talk about page one because if you're not on page one, it doesn't matter, and what I mean by that is the top 10, right? Because the infinite scroll thing is happening, but idea that we could go into a completely new idea, a new topic that we've never written about before, drop 20 pieces of content, and then over the course of two months earn 488 page one rankings. That's driving a significant amount of new traffic for us without any other tricks or anything. It's just networks content that's all interconnected. It's amazing, and these are the kinds of results that people who use pillar based marketing get every single time, every time if they do it the way that we recommended and the way we teach.

Drew Detzler: That right there is why I wanted to get the word out about pillar based marketing and the pillar based marketing approach. Quite frankly, I take it for granted.

Ryan Brock: It's SEO of 2023. Drew, what are your plans for 2023?

Drew Detzler: One thing that I am following close attention to in 2023 as we were in 2022, but very hot right now is AI content.

Ryan Brock: You can't go anywhere without hearing about it.

Drew Detzler: Can't go anywhere without hearing about it, including here. I'm sure that is a topic we will discuss with guests in 2023. What do you think, Ryan?

Ryan Brock: Yeah, we've got at least one of our upcoming guests. She's an amazing storyteller. We like to talk about AI content and I know she's coming on this show, so maybe we'll talk about that a little then, and why? Every single possible signal from Google and from common sense land tells us that we are not ready, that AI content is not ready to replace creatives when it comes to developing the kind of content that's worthy of winning top rankings in search, so I'm excited to keep harping on that. AI content, it's looming over our shoulders, but the future I think is still very bright. Drew, I've heard you getting a little bit excited over the evolution of PBM into multi- channel marketing. That's something we've been talking about a lot lately. I mean, is that something that gets you fired up for 2023?

Drew Detzler: Very much, and I know we'll have some guests that we'll be talking about that, but yeah, the idea of multichannel content and multimedia SEO, I don't know whatever we want to call it, but pillar based marketing and SEO for the most part has been focused on the actual words on the page, and I think there are some interesting plays out there to utilize both video and audio and some really creative ways to boost SEO and boost your pillar based marketing and really give a halo effect to all channels, which I'm excited to talk about.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, we've got an upcoming guest who represents a technology that I think is doing for audio and video content what Demand Jump has done for written content in addressing this issue. That is, I think, the biggest challenge that we're going to keep seeing new and creative solutions for in marketing. I think this year's going to be a huge year for it. It's just take this tactic that has not been successful and you haven't been able to tell us why, but you've been told that it's something that you should be doing, so you want to do it and then break it apart and actually be able to analyze it and actually be able to quantify it, and then to use it to inform your next steps while also understanding the impact those original steps are having on your marketing outcomes. Whether it comes to organic content podcasting, like this podcast we have here, figuring out how to better analyze and better just understand having intelligence in marketing on the same level that finance has had for years, sales has had for years. That's what's happening right now in marketing, and it's really exciting to see that the reason we don't talk about SEO anymore, talk about PBM because it's bigger than just what we've always traditionally thought of is keywords and written words on a page. It's about data and it's about networking and understanding how to make the most of what you got, and I'm really excited for that in 2023.

Drew Detzler: What do you say we start talking about what we're looking forward to in season two.

Ryan Brock: Ronald McDonald's going to join us and talk about how he changed an entire generation of American health forever. Right?

Drew Detzler: I'm a Grimus guy.

Ryan Brock: Ooh, does Grimus talk? I hope not.

Drew Detzler: He has a mouth.

Ryan Brock: But I think that's for eating milkshakes, right? Whatever.

Drew Detzler: Yeah, you're right.

Ryan Brock: Do you remember when they made the hamburger hot for a few? This was like maybe 15 years ago, 10 years ago. Yeah, that you went from being a little cartoon boy to a grown man with a five o'clock shadow. It was so weird. Maybe we can get that actor on to talk about what a wild ride his life has been.

Drew Detzler: If you're listening and you have any details, please reach out to us about the hot Hamburgler so we can learn more.

Ryan Brock: We need to start making merch. We need to have a hot hamburger for this show.

Drew Detzler: Can't say it.

Ryan Brock: Yeah, I'm excited. I know we have a big slate of guests that are already signed up and ready for their shows coming up here, and we got some interesting people on that list. We've got people who are CEOs of tech startups. We got one guy, Matt Hunkler coming on. Known Matt for a long time. He heads up the powder keg community that is sort of, they've spearheaded this whole Un- valley concept. The idea that the coupling of tech growth in our economy to the coasts is not the way forward for the future. That actually innovation happens everywhere. I think it's going to be really awesome to talk to somebody with that perspective on this show, talking about he's meeting people all the time who are engaged in the business of trying to capture the market's attention and grow, and how that aligns with what we're doing and our goals. I think it's super important and I'm really looking forward to that.

Drew Detzler: Yeah, it's going to be a great conversation.

Ryan Brock: Print is dead. Long- live digital. Speaking of which, I got a book coming out in 2023. Very excited about that myself in our original host Toph Day. We've been working on this since we first got started on this show, and we'll have more details coming out over the next few episodes, but within a few months of you listening to this, you should expect to see the real world publication of the book, Pillar Based Marketing, so more info on that to come, but the idea that we were able to take all these conversations and all of this learning that we've done and turn it into something that is like a how to guide, a manual for changing the way you think about organic content and using data effectively, I can't wait to get that one into the world.

Drew Detzler: When did you write a book?

Ryan Brock: Just half the time over the last six or seven months.

Drew Detzler: When have you not been writing a book is the real question. Yes. No, we're very excited for that book and to get it out there in the world, so stay tuned and we'll be sure to get it in front of you some more.

Ryan Brock: All right, Drew, we got a new feature I think that we want to talk about here on the show. We are wanting to get the audience involved now that we've gotten through our first season. We've built such a great community around the show. We've actually decided to make it a recurring part of the show moving forward to have some audience interaction and actually talk about the topics that you want to hear about and engage in answering some of your questions, that sort of thing. Drew, how can people do that? How can listeners get involved?

Drew Detzler: Yes, exactly. We want you to get involved and if you have an idea for a topic or a proposed guest or something that you wanted to get out to us, you can reach out to us at pageone@demandjump. com.

Ryan Brock: Just so you know, the funnier your email, the more likely it is I'm going to want to read it on the air, so may the odds be ever in your favor.

Drew Detzler: That's exactly right. Seriously, do not hesitate to reach out to us with a topic, a theme, an idea, someone that you would like to have on the show, and we will make it happen. If we can.

Ryan Brock: inaudible question, if we can, but I mean probably we'll do it. If you talk about hot hamburgler, we're probably going to get you on the show.

Drew Detzler: Any details on the hot hamburger we would like to follow up on. Got it that time.

Ryan Brock: All right, well, what a beautiful start to this new season. I don't think we ever talk as much as we did on this episode in our other episodes. I'm sure the listeners are excited to be done with this episode and ready to move on to our next one with our next amazing guests. Any closing words of wisdom, Drew?

Drew Detzler: No. All I can say is that I assure you we will not talk as much in future episodes here in season two.

Ryan Brock: That's a guarantee. We're excited to have some smarter people than us on this show to really bring some value and hopefully help you do great at your job and succeed and grow in all the ways that you want to. Season two, baby, we made it.

Drew Detzler: Season two, here we go. Looking forward to it. We'll see you guys next time on Page One or Bust.

Ryan Brock: Bye.

Voiceover: Page One or Bust is brought to you by Demand Jump. Know the exact content to create to increase first page rankings and drive outcomes with Demand Jump. Get started for free today at demandjump. com.