We have Pankil Shah with us today. And what we’re going to be talking about is how you can increase the ROI of your content right away. And this is actually a little unique because most people have heard about content marketing, how in order to generate thought leadership, you have to get content out there. But almost every thought leadership strategy I’ve seen has a long term focus, long term not measured in days or weeks, but months to years to decades. I have an ulterior motive here because I am looking to extract as many ideas as I can from Pankil on how to increase the ROI of my content. So, Pankil, introduce yourself. Don’t let me talk too much.
Sounds great. Thank you so much for having me on the show. My name is Pankil and I’m the CEO of Outranking IO VR, an AI assisted search engine optimization platform that caters to smaller, medium enterprises and also the writers aspect of it. And I bring a tremendous amount of experience in generating ROI from content, whether it lives on a small or small site or that lives on a very huge enterprise site and quickly increasing the amount of either leads or revenue that you can pull out from your existing contact. So that’s what my specialty got.
And so one of the things that naturally have to ask is, in your experience, because you’ve obviously worked with a lot of people in this domain, what is the most effective strategy or strategies for monetizing content? Because at least in my simple mind, in my mind, right, the way that it works in a quote old days was that what you would do is you would write enormous blog posts that would rank for keywords. You get people onto your site and then you display banner ads or pop ups and you’d have some kind of cost per thousand impression or cost per mile in traditional terms. I think recently a number of companies have popularized the idea of putting together sales funnels, which is where basically instead of focusing on trying to sell ad revenue, what you do is you focus on trying to get a lead capture, and then you work those leads up a value ladder where you start with something free or very low cost and then move them up to a one time offer to something that’s higher costs. And then over time, as they get to know you, you can send them to a higher average revenue. And then that average revenue offset your ad spend to acquire them in the first place. And if you get the economics right? You can grow a list really fast. Now that all sounds great. Like everything it is a thousand times harder to do in reality than it is to withdraw on a whiteboard. Is that what you focus on or what you mostly work on? Or is there something that is there a different strategy that I missed?
There’s a different strategy, right. So we’re not talking about monetizing the belong
in order for you to monetize in any way, whether that’s your selling ads or whether you’re selling a product and you want people to be aware about your product.
What you essentially need to be doing is getting your content discovered. Right. If nobody is discovering your content, it’s just worthless. So what we focus on is, hey, you’re writing great content, but it’s a deadbeat. It’s probably living on second, 3rd, fourth page of Google, which is considered graveyard. Nobody’s looking at your content. So that means you’re not getting any leads, you’re not getting any ad revenues or whatever that your goal is you’re after, right? You build out those funnels once a user lands on your content. And there are many ways to optimize that particular funnel and having to either click them more or get them deeper into your product and sell some other things. You can do all of that once they’re on your page. And what often is missed out with many of these large scale websites or even medium scale websites, which is ranking for thousand keywords is that they tend to create lots of content and it even starts performing a little bit in Google. But rarely anyone has the time or the abilities to go back and optimize what’s written so you can improve ranking. So the goal is not to live in that 7th or 8th position on Google, right. You’d get less than 1% click through rate, I mean, percentage of traffic that’s overall coming to your page. But what if you can get in that top five and increase that 1% to 16% to 8%, right? That’s the kind of ROI you want to generate. And there are some really quick things that people can do in order to get this going really fast and get tremendous amount of traffic coming to their website. But optimization is the least looked opportunity when it is actually the largest.
If you don’t mind, can I share a few of those Nuggets of wisdom? There’s another thought that I want to bring up in a little bit, which is that also I’ll give a little bit of a preview of coming attractions. So a lot of the SEO things that I’ve read are, generally speaking, targeted, broad market, because SEO for the most part is a broad market, targeted type of thing. But what I’ve seen very few people focus on is if you have say like a niche, B2B type of business, broad SEO, like, for example, let’s talk about one of the businesses that I’m involved in helping people source IT headcount. If you’re trying to either bring on IT contractors, IT heads. I am looking to connect specifically with people who are looking to do those types of activities in addition to other things that I work on in my case. Right. Broad traffic isn’t necessarily what I’m looking for. I’m looking to isolate those specific people. And so what I’m really interested to find out is whether there is a kind of a splinter strategy or a piece of the SEO strategy that can help in that domain. Because almost everything I’ve seen is broad market business to consumer targeted, which is fine if you’re a business to consumer company. But if you’re a niche B2B, then I think there could potentially be a blue ocean here. Because of course, most B2B companies, they just ignore SEO altogether because they figure, okay, well, it’s not really going to help me. I’m going to be doing a lot of optimization for people who aren’t my clients.
Through that, right. So specifically, we’re talking about a domain that you mentioned. It outsourcing. Like engineers outsourcing. Right. Like developers outsourcing. If you are targeting the right keywords, you would find that B2B persona. You need to be going after what their pain points might be and then create content around that. Right. So what often happens is that let me give you an example of something totally different. But you’re writing about the best places to visit in Africa, for example. But what you really want to be doing is optimizing for best centuries or best parks to visit in Africa. Right. So that’s a major disconnect. Right. Like you’re writing for something and you’re probably ranking for it, but it’s not valuable because you are selling something else. Right. So what I suggest and our platform can also help do that. But
you can start with a broad idea and then drill down into something specific related to your service and only create content around that, no matter how low the volume is. Don’t go after the keyboard volume, go after the value that it can give you a business.
Right. So even if you get one qualified lead out of it, it’s great because you have twelve leads and that will still do much better than having no leads with 700 in traffic. Right. So you are going after things which are specific and aligned with your business interest and just keep working towards excellence and content around that focus area. And eventually you’ll build up as much authority to start ranking. And then once you start ranking, you need to start focusing on optimizing it so you can start ranking even better and just out beating some of your competition.
All right, now we can get back to the original question. Before I took a soft track, when we’re talking about optimizing to rank better, what are some of the things that people can do in order to do that? And of course, I think the back end hook that we’re going through right here is that I’m certain it’s rather complicated for people to do on their own, which is why they work with the agencies such as yours. But anyway, go ahead and share some of the strategies with us.
So the biggest strategies for on page SEO optimization is when you’re optimizing content. So let’s say you’re already ranking. What we look for is in larger websites. We’ll look for opportunities that we can quickly optimize with as little time as possible without changing the content. But just changing a few things here and there that could lead to that quick win. And what we often look for is those low hanging fruits and those low hanging fruits can have many information that you probably need to optimize and there needs to be some sort of software involved. Otherwise you’ll be doing all this manual work. But what you do is you analyze your content against the competitors who are ranking for the same objective that you have and you find out the difference between them and start addressing those differences in the way that the product or the analysis would suggest. Start including some keywords, some adjustments and some meaning changes and stuff like that. Right. Like just including things that users are actually looking for. And once you have that optimized, you will see improvement in your ranking. If you’re already at 28th page, you start moving up. And that’s the goal, right?
To keep moving up. And the only way to do that is aligning your content with the interest of the audience. And to do that you need to take a data driven approach is analyzing your competition, which is called SERP analysis, and then you gather the intel from it and take that information and just quickly tweak your content.
So that’s the primary way that anybody would want to optimize their content. And I’ve seen notions that people say AI can go and do that. Now if you want AI to go and write all of those things and optimize this for you, you probably can hope to lose all your ranking. So that’s not going to happen manually. Someone is going to go and change those headings and change those descriptions or titles or headlines based on the recommendation this analysis is suggesting. Right. And what you focus on are things that you can quickly just adjust quickly adjust. The quickest thing to adjust is add probably a keyword or take away a keyword from title, then title is the most important on page SEO element. Just like goes without the doubt, could you not major amount of people who do not rank is because they do not optimize their title for the right keywords. That means the single most important thing is misaligned with the user intent.
That’s actually interesting to hear because I would think that with some of the Google algorithm updates that headline keyword, I don’t know if I’d say keyword stuffing, but headline keyword optimization would have been worked out or kind of diminished by now because I think that seems like a fairly simple strategy and Google’s made it pretty darn hard to rank with simple strategies.
No, it’s not simple. So that’s not the only ranking factor. You cannot just throw a headline and with the content that has zero depth to it and hoping it to rank. Right? That’s not going to happen. You need to write like mix of all the information, and that’s why you need an indicator that shows you all this information that you need. But coming back to your point, title optimization still works no matter how 2010 it sounds like it doesn’t work. Because think about any search algorithm, like whether you’re searching on site, whether you’re searching on stack overflow, whether you’re searching Quora. Every search algorithm that you type your query in is going to start looking for the first thing, which is exact search. And then if it does not find exact search, we’ll start looking for other things. Sure, Google made it a little interesting with adding a few more pointers to it, but again, that is a ranking factor. And optimizing your titles the right way can significantly lead to improved ranking. Not saying significant improvement in CTR, but improvement in ranking. And then you can work from there to improve other things as well.
Okay, so for the people who aren’t familiar with some of the industry lingo, CTR, what does that acronym mean?
Click through rate. Right. So people are looking at your content but are not clicking it. That’s a second problem to have. Right? So even if you are on the second place of Google and nobody is clicking on your content, that could be something else. So there are other things that you can do to really increase the ROI from your existing content. You already spend hours and hours creating this amazing content. I just need to do a little more to have it discovered. And I think this is where you need to start with and content optimization tool that can do the analysis for you and help you come up with a list of suggestions that you can quickly execute and start seeing improvements in ranking today, not tomorrow, not after a month. Today. Right. Easy things that you can improve. This will definitely make a big difference in how your website performance in terms of getting leads and revenue.
Okay, excellent. Well, that sounds great. Well, let’s see. So can you tell us a little now, is one of those Optimizer tools your product or are there multiple products that are out there who can help you?
There are a few products out there. Some are basic, some are more advanced. Ours is a little more advanced, but with a little more guided assistance for people who have absolutely no idea to all the idea about SEO and content altogether. So we do a little more helpful hand holding. And we help you analyze the top pages that you can go after. Not the ranking ones, but the ones that you can go after to quickly improve and see increase in ROI. We want you to make or to get more traffic, more revenue, more leads right now, not after five days, not after ten days. Right. Your content is long term goal. And in the long term, this content will probably even give you a higher ROI. But it’s something that you can do right now, and that’s what our product helps you do. Simply come in, you put in your website, create a project and start scanning and start getting the suggestions. And then you can take it and use our platform to optimize it really quickly and publish it. So there’s a tremendous amount of case studies also that we have done on our own content that outranks our competition, hence outranking. This is the quickest way to go about and pulling in additional revenue and lead sources.
Okay. And let’s see if the scope of what you’re looking at do you only look at, for example, the page text content, which is, I think the majority of what gets indexed. But then there’s also like video and audio content, which rumors are that Google is getting better at figuring out how to scrape and index those files?
Absolutely. There are other search engines for YouTube, such a report. Right. But when transcribing a video, it’s out of Google zip possibility to go and do this on the fly, transcribe all the video that I can read and stuff like that. So that’s still going to be very limited. I wouldn’t say that Google doesn’t look at it, but I just don’t see any clarity there that they have given out. So I’d say Texas is still the number one consumed by any living being on Earth. But what we have noticed is that if you have video format of similar content or some content that’s related to it and you put it on the same webpage, when someone is reading through it, it will increase their timeouts page, which could also increase their engagement on site. And it can trigger some other matrixes that can help you sound better to Google.
Got it. Okay, well, tell people where they can find out a little more and then give us one last nugget of wisdom before we call it for the day.
Sounds great. So they can find all the information on outranking.io that is outranking.io. And the name is because we help you really outrank your competition and generate more traffic and better content ROI. So check out the website. There’s a free trial. You can register, scan your website and start creating or optimizing your existing web pages. And what you want to get off with them from me is that with the rise of AI, don’t think that it’s going to take over your writing and optimization process. Humans are always going to be needed in the process. Ai is only here to assist you in being a better writer on SEO and tools like our training can really accelerate your process and your learning curve towards that achievement.
I think that’s really good. And I completely agree that, yeah, I don’t think it is realistic that AI is going to completely replace humans in all domains. I’m sure there are some areas of repetitive tasks where AI can absolutely step in, but otherwise I think of it as more an augmentation than a replacement.
It absolutely is. But the reason why I give this system is because there is a rise of AI content writing about all over the place. And people think that, hey, I’m going to click one button, it’s going to understand everything that I want, and it’s going to create the blog post that’s going to rank tomorrow. Right. All of these unrealistic expectations around content are being generated by so many companies that are trying to sell this kind of spun content. And it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. It hasn’t worked before. It’s not going to work in future human eyes, human value and additional value to what’s out there is always important to start ranking. Otherwise you’re just doing what everyone else is doing.
I totally get it. I’m on board with that too, just because the thing that I keep thinking about. Right. Is that as time has gone on, everybody’s trying to figure out some way to either scam or hack the algorithms, depending on your perspective. And ultimately, I think the thing is, what it really all comes back to is figuring out ways of getting traffic so that you can convert somebody from who are you? Who are you to? Ok, I think I know you to. Ok. I think I’d like to connect with you. And then once that happens, then that’s where your funnels go in. But it’s getting somebody from they have no clue who you are to. They figure you’re probably credible enough to where they’ll at least let you send them some emails before they decide whether or not whether you’re foolish or not.
Exactly. Right.
And that’s the thing is spun content doesn’t help with that process at all. It might help get someone on the page. But if you get someone on the page and they see spun content, that doesn’t make any sense, you’re not going to convert them.
Right? Exactly. It’s going to bounce and that’s going to signal other things, which is going to lead to dropping and ranking across your sites, too. Right? So people hate this kind of too good to be true sites that have so much content overnight and stuff like that. So just try to avoid that altogether. This is like, again and again, this industry is growing so fast, AI and content, and there’s all sorts of hacks that people have produced that just is not the right thing for your business, right?
Yeah. Outstanding. All right. Well, hey, I really appreciate your time today and again that’s outranking. Io. That’s. O-U-T-R-A-N-K-I-N-G-.-I-O. All right.
Thank you so much.
Let’s definitely do this again sometime and I hope everybody has a wonderful day.
