Name: How pillar-based marketing is changing SEO
Uploaded: 2022-11-08T09:19:53.059Z
Duration: 1023.67

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English

We're looking at a transformation
that takes organic content and turns

it into something as measurable
and damn near as quick as paid.

I began my career in the content
marketing world as the founder and

CEO of a small boutique content
agency called Metonymy Media

In the beginning of this case
study, and it really is a case

study, is a little bit of just
level-setting what my experience

was: looking my customers, my clients
in the eye, and saying "organic

We're going to have to waste
a lot of time for like six

months before we figure out
what we're actually going to do.

4.4 million blogs are
produced every single day.

Not well, mind you, but they're
produced every single day.

The reality that I faced in trying
to make a case for the return on

investment for content is that
90.63% of webpages get zero traffic.

The reason, I believe, is not
any lack of alignment to brand

voice or a misunderstanding of how
to actually do the stuff right.

In my experience, every single time
I brought a new customer on to- let's

do an organic content strategy, let's
get your SEO rankings out there, it

became a battle of wills between me
and my opinion, and the opinions of the

marketing leaders, the subject matter
experts that I had to talk to, and

usually people who are close enough to
the topic at hand to understand a lot

about it, but also too close to get
around that recency bias of who is that

loudest customer that I just talked to,
and what do they care about, or what

are the things that we think are most
important about our product -- that

domain expertise that we're all trying
to tap into when we develop content.

I think, the back and forth between
the people trying to execute this

stuff and the people trying to lead
this stuff and make those decisions,

leads to, whether it's an informed
guess or not, a lot of guesswork,

SEO is something that we've all
gotten used to taking a year.

I believe that is so far from
the actual reality, if done the

right way, that we're looking at a
transformation that takes organic

content and turns it into something
as measurable and damn near as quick

And I'm going to prove that by
talking about how we learned this.

Once we learned how to apply the
right sort of machine learning math

to a specific data set, we were
able to target the term 'content

marketing' (it's no accident that
I'm talking about that term here,

at this conference) and say,
"Look, we've never written anything

And by the way, content marketing
is, like, one of the hardest terms in

all of the world to rank for, because
you're competing against content

In a matter of just six weeks
of production time, we went

Every single rule, every single
best practice you've heard for

the last 10 years about SEO,
everything about backlinks and

content density and semantics,
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We said, we're not going
to worry about any of it.

Instead, we're going to think
like a search engine does.

Because what we've learned over
the past several years, and really

anyone here who's got their pulse
on it, really in the last 3 or 4

weeks as Google has released the
useful content update, and then

the core algorithm update that came
out, was it literally yesterday?

They're not thinking about a
funnel anymore because we are

We have to give ourselves
and our buyers more credit.

None of us shop for something
in a linear fashion.

None of us, especially when you talk
about B2B-level, considered purchases,

are going from, "I would like to buy
some content marketing services".

So we're searching the phrase
'content marketing', and

There's all different kinds of
intent and there are a million,

million different ways that
people can go from something very

broad, like content marketing,
to something very, very niche.

Or, more often, I think is our
experience, if you think about how

you search for things, you start
with the specifics and you say "I'm

going to go look for the answer that
I really need, and then I'm going

to learn and fill in the gaps and
do what I need to fill that in".

An example of what this looks like:
if you access Google's readily

available data around search behaviour,
I'm talking about the stuff that

happens when you type- you start
typing and you get an auto complete.

The 'people also ask' questions
that are 25% of the way down that

SERP, the related searches that
come all the way at the bottom.

If you can access that data and
you can analyze that data, and

contextualize it, it's possible to
turn that data into something like a

3D map like this, where you understand
that rather than being an island of

target- targeted search behaviour, any
topic, and we like to use the phrase

pillar topic, any pillar topic in
truth represents branching pathways

of tons of different hubs and spokes
of questions and important related

Now you go into something like
Yoast SEO plugin, or a legacy tool

that is trying to optimise for a
single keyword, you're going about

this and saying, "I'm going to
go to the center of this hub, and

When, in reality, we believe it's
the aggregate of all of the search

behaviour, and the buying journey
that happens throughout this network,

that results in the kind of qualified
traffic that organic SEO work needs

And so what we've done with our
platform is, we've learned how to take

Event Session

Ryan Brock, CCO at DemandJump, talks us through how he transformed SEO from a 6-12 month-long guessing game, into a 6-week ROI, with his innovative pillar-based organic content strategy. With the possibilities provided by machine learning, data that is readily available from search engines like Google can be collated into a search behaviour network, allowing marketers to publish content that is specifically tailored to the priorities of Page 1 rankings.

Audience Behaviour

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Ryan-Brock-Headshot_501959_1678736439.jpg

Ryan Brock

Discover insights from other experts

Chief Solution Officer

Organic content strategies are often guesswork, and SEO can take from 6 months to a year to get right. But with machine learning and the right data sets, organic content can significantly compete with paid in terms of ROI results.

The Problem

Forget backlinks, content density and semantics. We don't shop in a linear fashion, and 'people also ask' or 'related searches' are testament to that. Instead, consider the aggregate of all search behaviour.

How did we do it?

To recreate networks of search behaviour, begin with a pillar page that reflects the pillar topic. From there, move on to sub-pillar pages and finally niche blogs. Reproducing the network can be done easily with modern technology.

The Plan

Content may not appear among the highest rankings for broad search terms, but for the questions and topics people actually search for, they appear at every stage of the buying journey.

The Results

The details, hints and tips on pillar-based marketing techniques, including a step-by-step guide to optimal implementation.