Links Mentioned & Helpful Resources from Episode

• Kevin Dieny’s LinkedIn Profile
• Branded Paid Search previous podcast episode page
• SEMRush Keyword Research tool (paid)
• SpyFu PPC Keyword Research tool (paid)
• Ahrefs SEO Keyword Explorer tool (paid)
• Google’s PageSpeed Insights analyzer tool
• Website Loading Times previous podcast episode page
• Grammarly spell check tool (paid)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello, welcome to The Close the Loop podcast. I’m your host, Kevin Dieny, and today we’re gonna be talking about winning non-branded traffic. So let’s define this for everyone so that we’re all on the same page. Non-branded is talking about the keywords, right? So your brand name, your company name, our company name is CallSource, right?

[00:00:26] Kevin Dieny: That’s a brand name. Might be something like Johnny’s Plumbing or Bill’s Roofing, or 24/7 Plumbing, right? Certain things like that are when they are the company name, the brand name, they become your brand keywords, the things that people use to find you online when they search. So, today we’re gonna be talking about winning search, when people search for your brand using non-branded keywords.

[00:01:00] Kevin Dieny: Okay, so CallSource, let’s just use our company example. If someone types in all one word, “callsource” right? They’re probably looking for our company. They could have misspelled and meant to type in “call space source”, right? Or I don’t know, maybe there’s another brand out there that has a very similar name to us….

[00:01:20] Kevin Dieny: But generally speaking, when they type your brand names in, they’re looking for you. That means that they remember you, they know your brand, right? That’s, that’s what makes brand searches very unique, non-branded searches would be the things that you do, that you’re about, what services you provide.

[00:01:38] Kevin Dieny: Obviously Johnny’s Plumbing probably had… Probably would be providing plumbing services. So if someone types, um, you know, “clogged drain”, are they always gonna see Johnny’s plumbing in the search result? Right, that would be winning a non-branded search. So how do brands, how do companies, marketing teams, how is everyone winning search.

[00:02:01] Kevin Dieny: Specifically for non-branded traffic. Now it makes sense how brands are able to win their branded traffic. Because people are looking for them, right? They, they already know your brand. So when they search it, that’s how they’re ending up there, right? So that, that makes sense. Brand recognition, brand awareness, getting, you know, doing what you do really well, right?

[00:02:21] Kevin Dieny: It’s how you kind of win brand traffic. And we’ve talked in a prior episode, a previous podcast episode about how do you win branded paid search campaigns. So how do you do this in advertising with branded keywords? So this episode almost totally different, okay. How do you win the non-branded traffic? And that is something totally different because it’s not, it’s, it’s something where the keywords aren’t, don’t have your brand name in them!

[00:02:52] Kevin Dieny: Right, so how do you become relevant enough with that keyword when it doesn’t have your brand in it? Right? So “clogged drain” okay, yeah, right. You’re a plumbing company. How do you win “clogged drain” as a keyword. Now, the other thing we wanna define is winning. Okay? Does winning mean you always have to be number one, ranked number one in a search result?

[00:03:13] Kevin Dieny: Does it mean that you have to have a hundred percent impressions, you know, share? Does it mean you have to steal all the clicks? Get all the clicks? Does it mean you have to convert at a certain rate to a certain amount? Winning is basically achieving the goal that you want, that you’ve set out to do, that your company needs.

[00:03:33] Kevin Dieny: Okay? And by that I mean when you’re out to win non-branded traffic, it’s gonna cost you something. There’s some requirement, right? You’re gonna need some amount of content. You’re gonna need to spend some amount of time. It could be you’re gonna have to change the way you do things. Maybe your website needs to be changed.

[00:03:50] Kevin Dieny: Maybe how you operate, your day to day has to change. Those are all sacrifices. Those are costs. So winning has to make sense for what it costs, right? So even if you’re number one, if it costs everything to get it and it doesn’t pay you back enough, enough return, that’s not really winning, right? Sure, you’re number one, but what is it costing you to get that right?

[00:04:13] Kevin Dieny: Is it sustainable? Is it a positive return for what you’re, what resources and and investment you’re putting in? So we’re really focusing on winning. Meaning, you know, having a positive result, achieving a goal. The non-branded side of search, which is typically keywords that don’t have your brand name in them, that are still highly relevant for your brand.

[00:04:37] Kevin Dieny: And in that way, long term you have sustainable growth, sustainable channel of revenue, stream of leads, of visitors to your website. The other interesting thing that I’ve always found is that the more you grow your non-branded versus your branded, right, there’s those two: branded, non-branded. So anything that has your brand name, company name, trademarked keywords, those are brand, right?

[00:05:02] Kevin Dieny: The things that are unbranded, right? That’s the other slice of the pie. The more you increase your non-branded side, the more your branded side seems to tick up When, especially when you’re doing a good job delivering on those relevant searches. Someone searched for “clogged drain” they get to your website, they call you, you fix their drain.

[00:05:21] Kevin Dieny: Great, now they may go, “Oh yeah, I remember that company by name because they delivered such a great service. I remember them. I remember something about their logo.” I dunno, whatever it is that your brand awareness stuck out to them, right? Boom. Now, you’ve got brand branded searches coming in, and, and it can, it tends to flow that direction because people tend to, you know, go back to the things that worked and things that worked well.

[00:05:46] Kevin Dieny: So again, we’re focusing on those non-branded traffic, those non-branded keywords. So a few of the obstacles that people are having businesses are having out there is where we’ll start. We usually do this, right? Talk about what are the oppositional ideas in the research that I’ve done. What are the antagonistic, what are the most common difficulties you might expect when going down this path?

[00:06:10] Kevin Dieny: All right, so first one, smaller brands, right, who are trying to win non-branded traffic. The smaller guys, the guys with less resources. That’s basically how you define a smaller brand. The smaller brands can never compete with the big behemoth, giant corporate mega brands out there. So why try? Right, like the, the big companies can afford all the SEO expertise, the marketing teams, they can dedicate tons of content development, production.

[00:06:43] Kevin Dieny: They can make sure everything, they can make videos and great pdf eBooks. Uh, they can constantly be putting out content and great content faster than you can. So how do you compete with that? Right? That’s like a common thing in all businesses. The idea that only the biggest brands can compete, but that’s not the case.

[00:07:08] Kevin Dieny: Right? In a lot of ways there’s so much more businesses can niche down to that the bigger brands just don’t get to. Meaning yes, they may have tons of resources, but they’re spending them to win the more broader keywords. So let me explain by using an example this will help. So the keyword “plumbing” right? Just that one word alone gets about 45,000 to 60,000 searches a month.

[00:07:43] Kevin Dieny: All right? And that’s in the United States. So just to scope that. Now, when you add things, add, so going, it’s, it’s, I’ve heard it called tail. When you add more keywords to the end of it or to the, before it, you make a keyword go from one word to multiple words. I’ve heard that rephrase that described as making it more long tail, adding more words to a keyword.

[00:08:10] Kevin Dieny: Okay, tends to make it more niche. It usually results in the searches going down because people can type one word. It’s a little harder to type two than to type three than four and five and six, seven, right? The more words you add in a phrase when you search it, probably means you’re asking a question, right?

[00:08:28] Kevin Dieny: Like, where do plumbers go to school? Like, that’s a lot of words in there, okay? Versus just plumbing. Now the word plumbing by itself also doesn’t, you don’t really know what they’re looking for, but there could be a lot of people searching that keyword cuz it’s just one word. Okay? So a bigger brand can go, “Well, what are all the possibilities that people could be searching for in plumbing?”

[00:08:51] Kevin Dieny: And they can make ton of content web, they can spend lots of resources, basically winning the, the shorter tail, shorter number of word keywords. And that’s what they can do really well. The small businesses, they have to pick and choose, right? So they have to pick the keywords that are gonna be higher intent, you know, closer and relevant to what they do.

[00:09:13] Kevin Dieny: The, the searcher is looking for what that business offers. I mean, if it’s plumbing related, you know, is there something closer to that that they’re looking for, uh, maybe than plumbing, like let’s say “clogged drain plumbing in Los Angeles” or a suburb of Los Angeles. You know, if you put the suburb instead of “LA.”

[00:09:32] Kevin Dieny: That adding onto that keyword makes it more, in my eyes, more niche, more specific, narrows it down. That does mean this amount of searches go way down with it, right? Uh, there’s just less people searching for, let’s say, “clogged drain plumbers in Westlake Village California” right? There’s just way less people searching for that.

[00:09:55] Kevin Dieny: But if you’re located in Westlake Village, California, and you’re a plumber and you do clogged drains right now you’re seeing, wow, you check all these boxes off. That’s awesome. So smaller businesses can sometimes win in these nicher categories. That doesn’t mean that the big guys don’t go after them too. It’s just that if you’re a smaller business in an area or you have anything niche about you at all that makes you stand out or more unique, you can usually win in that way.

[00:10:23] Kevin Dieny: And so you position yourself that way and you can still win the non-branded. Those are possible. Uh, there’s so many possibilities in this conversation. By way, here’s like a major disclaimer, . There’s very little es that you’re going to hear in this, in this episode, right? There’s gonna be, no, this is the only way, or this never works, or anything like that.

[00:10:45] Kevin Dieny: Anything of complete absolute, You’re not gonna hear that because search is such an evolving adaptive. Imprecise thing that no one really quite understands, but we know enough to give us really good indications into what we should do. But nothing is perfectly precise here. All right, so the second thing that people say that really frustrates them when trying to win non-branded search right, is all the best keywords are taken and are too difficult to rank.

[00:11:20] Kevin Dieny: There are actually some really interesting, and I, and they’re kind of proprietary, but there it’s more common. I’ve seen it quite a lot now, something called keyword difficulty, so, So a term or a keyword or a phrase, The difficulty for a new company, a new brand, a new website to rank when it does not yet rank for it.

[00:11:43] Kevin Dieny: Right. The difficulty to then begin ranking for. Right and showing up in the first. Something to that degree is what difficulty stands for. Difficulty tends to mean there are variations on that. Right? So how difficult would it be for your business today to rank for a specific keyword? Sometimes those keywords are gonna be very difficult for you to rank for , Right.

[00:12:08] Kevin Dieny: And the reason are difficult is because other companies, yes, have spent a lot of time, a lot of resources. They have invested into doing the research to get it. To thinking about what people are really intending, what’s their intent when they search this particular keyword or phrase, right? There’s a lot that goes into keywords.

[00:12:31] Kevin Dieny: Search engine optimization, seo. It’s not just splattering your page with keywords, right? Or needs to be a lot of thought gone into, Okay, someone searched for this now they clicked on my page. Now they get there. Now what are they looking for? What is it they are after? How quickly can they get what they’re after?

[00:12:53] Kevin Dieny: Right? What’s gonna be their experience while they’re there? Anything like, why is it that they may leave? Why is it that they move forward? It? What is it about their experience that was so that they liked or they didn’t like? You know what I mean? There’s just so a lot to consider that goes on with with an individual search, right?

[00:13:13] Kevin Dieny: There’s just so much. The keywords that are more difficult to rank for, I would say also correlate with the keywords that have a lot of volume, meaning impressions, There’s a lot of people searching for it, right? Like just the word plumbing. There might be quite a lot of people searching for that. I think though, in an interesting way, you know, plumbing near me or plumbers near me is, is from what I’ve seen, a much more searched phrase than just plumbing.

[00:13:42] Kevin Dieny: Because that’s so ambiguous and plumbing, plumbers near me is very much higher, has a much higher intent. You kind of have some idea, okay, they’re looking for a plumber that’s near them right now. How difficult is that to rank for? Right, so to win to from what I would, Let’s say your business just wants more traffic.

[00:14:06] Kevin Dieny: Than it’s getting. And it’s going to invest some amount of resources into some content, into some writing, into some research, some hours, some um, maybe some paid ads, right? Think about what that’s gonna cost you and go, okay, well, to recuperate that, right? I would need, let’s say 5 leads in a month. And you go, Okay, well I converted about 10%, so I need.

[00:14:31] Kevin Dieny: You know, so 10 times 5, I need 50 visitors to my website, added to my current traffic to come from this effort. Okay? 50 quality visitors I need to add every month from what I do. All right? So maybe that’s an achievable goal. All right, So how am I gonna get them right? That’s the process you go through now to get 50 more visitors.

[00:14:58] Kevin Dieny: You know, and you’re on, you’re not even ranking, not a ranking page yet. You have to realize that if you make a new page, you put in tons of resources, you write all these great articles, you make videos, you make, you make, you basically just make the, the best use of resources to get this ha going and you do it quickly.

[00:15:16] Kevin Dieny: You do have to realize that there, the search takes time. This is very unfortunate, . So let’s say you deployed all your resources today. They may not even rank for what could be 30, 60, 90 days because Google won’t see it, rank it, test it, and then start positioning it in search, you know, for a little while.

[00:15:43] Kevin Dieny: That might take some time. That might be frustrating. You go, Whoa, now I’m three months behind, right? I need five leads a month. So no, 5, 10, 15. Now I need. Right now I’m, I’m in the hole , right? So that’s where organic or search or search engine optimization or, or you know, website optimization. That’s where all those strategies, that’s where all of that really, the rubber of that needs to hit the road is, okay, how quickly can I start trying this around?

[00:16:13] Kevin Dieny: And that’s what also makes the part of the difficulty there is it may go, Okay, fine, now I’ve waited the 90 days. Now where did I rank? And it’s like, okay, I ranked on page. Like what happened here? I thought I would rank number one, , what happened? Right? So you’re gonna need, you need more traffic to rank too.

[00:16:31] Kevin Dieny: You need your resource. You need people to see it. You need people to start, you know, who are searching it to find it. Page three is not a great place to find it. You know, I think, uh, Is it Ryan who said, and this is a previous episode, that anything after page one is dead. You know, like there’s no, very few people go to page two and three and four.

[00:16:50] Kevin Dieny: I’m sure there are. I’m sure there’s lots of people that do. But precipitously, the chances of getting a click right drops off. So there’s just a lot of things that when I see a high difficulty keyword, you may. I, I would suggest let’s maybe start with a less difficult key word. You know, let’s get the ball rolling, the snowball going down the hill with the lower difficulty, easier stuff first.

[00:17:17] Kevin Dieny: Obviously, you know, what do what’s best for your business. You know, you’re the one making the best decisions, but it’s usually something that I would favor is okay. I would like to get the ball rolling with some earlier, fast, quick. Then to have to wait, you know, nine months before things start to trickle in.

[00:17:36] Kevin Dieny: Just the way I, I’d rather some faster stuff come up first. Obviously the higher difficulty stuff may bring in a lot more in the long term, but what’s so difficult about search again? Is you’re sort of front loading the pro, like the, the goal that’s gonna be achieved in the long run because it just takes time.

[00:17:57] Kevin Dieny: You can trigger algorithms, you can trigger crawlers to come to your site. You might be able to get things going a little bit faster in some way, or be able to achieve, you know, a quick jump to rank one or you know, just the front page. I think that’s less than 12 or 14 right now. You might be able to get there quickly.

[00:18:16] Kevin Dieny: Usually it’s gonna take some time. All right, so the last big, Oh man, this sucks. I hate this about trying to rank, trying to win non-branded traffic that I, we could find is we only care about branded traffic because these people know our brand, are aware of us and they tend to have higher intent. Right.

[00:18:38] Kevin Dieny: That’s something I saw online and I, and I. Necessarily disagree, right? Branded traffic are the people that know your business. They are typing in Johnny’s Plumbing, maybe even where you are. You know, Johnny’s plumbing Westlake, right? If that, if that exists. And so the searches for that are people who know you, they know your brand.

[00:18:59] Kevin Dieny: Like why would you want anything else? Right? Now, here’s the big pitfall of that, and it’s mentioned before in a previous episode. How many, What’s the volume of that, right? Like how, how vast of a brand do you have? Are you like a Microsoft where you, your brand recognition is everyone knows it or McDonald’s, Everyone recognizes it, everyone knows it.

[00:19:24] Kevin Dieny: Or are you a brand where it’s like, Yeah, I’m, you know, the people that drive by or the customers I’ve had probably know it, You know, how, how many is that? How many are searching for that in a month? Right. The volumes of branded search are very constricted. They’re limited. You can only go so far, guaranteed, right?

[00:19:44] Kevin Dieny: Uh, the smaller the brand you are, the more that’s the case and the more you’re gonna have to win more of the non-branded traffic. So you’re gonna have to win non-branded traffic, right? You can go and do all the free events and stuff all day, all the time to get your brand out there, to get it recognized, and people will search for it.

[00:20:04] Kevin Dieny: But is that scale? Right. Do you have a dial that you can crank up and go, Okay, let me two x that you know, this week, this today, tomorrow, this month. Can you 2, 3, 4, 5 x that you know to get to the growth you may want or need? I don’t know. I am doubtful . Okay. So yes. A brand that’s, or a company that says, I only care about branded, I understand what they’re saying.

[00:20:30] Kevin Dieny: You know, they, they wanna rely on their brand. They don’t want to pay or put the effort or the resources, whatever it takes to get non-branded traffic up to a point that it is sustainable. If you’re sitting there and going, Oh yeah, SEO is, SEO is very affordable and easy. You’re , let me just say you’re about to discover that it is the opposite of those things.

[00:20:56] Kevin Dieny: Yes. Organic traffic once it’s there is technically free traffic, but what it costs, the requirements, what it takes to get that going, to get that engine going is definitely not free. Right? It could take months, even some of the best. SEO, full on agency is the best, highest paid, greatest SEO marketers out there don’t look at, you know, exploding growth overnight.

[00:21:23] Kevin Dieny: It takes time. It takes sometimes trying something, it not working and then figuring out the right way to do it. So it takes some experimentation as well. It’s not a, you know, it’s not like a guarantee. I’ve told you there’s no absolute. There’s no absolutes here, so we’re focusing on the things that are gonna put us in the best direction, right, for our business.

[00:21:47] Kevin Dieny: All right, now, what is the best direction? What things should we do? Right? There’s four steps, and then we’re gonna dive into them. Seven. Number one. Your business has resources, processes that it’s got today, right? It’s got someone who can put in the effort to write some articles, someone who understands your business, someone who understands how your business wants to grow, and is willing, your business is willing to, let’s say, implement some changes or some new processes that will help the business grow.

[00:22:23] Kevin Dieny: Okay? That’s like basically the requirement. To win non-branded traffic, you’re gonna need a website, right? You’re gonna need content on that web website that you’re gonna wanna rank for, or you’re gonna wanna send traffic to. That’s very relevant. Typically, your website also needs to be structured, built, designed.

[00:22:42] Kevin Dieny: So that it loads well, okay. There’s, let’s say the first step here is just like getting the, the basics. Getting your house in order, your quotes there. And that means, yeah, you gotta have technical seo, right? And that’s, that’s not, And by saying that, I’m not trying to distance you here, that’s very simple, right?

[00:23:01] Kevin Dieny: Your website loads, it runs well. It’s not off putting right. Um, it, it is function. When you click on a button, it goes somewhere. Okay? So you’ve got maybe an analytics like Google Analytics set up. You’ve got Search Console, Google Search Console, and there’s being Search Console. You’ve got things there to measure how well your website’s performing in the traffic and where it’s coming from today.

[00:23:26] Kevin Dieny: All right, great. That’s the first technical check is could you, could you win at non-branded traffic if you put in the effort? Yes. Right. If you, you have the foundation laid right, which is making sure your website is in order, things are in order. You’re not shooting yourself in the foot, making all this content and putting all these resources in.

[00:23:50] Kevin Dieny: The traffic that comes to your website doesn’t work like something’s broken. Okay? So it’s very important that your website, the foundation, the website, everything going on on your website is functionally working pretty well. If you have questions about that, wondering what the heck, I’m not the person to go to

[00:24:07] Kevin Dieny: Right. But there are companies that are tools. There’s things out there that will help and check your, There’s a what? Google’s insights page, speed insights that will tell you how fast your website’s loading onto on mobile devices and on desktops. Don’t trust when you go to your website cuz it’s cashed.

[00:24:25] Kevin Dieny: Okay. Oh wow. My website loads so fast when I load it. Yeah. Okay. Go out into the Hills and try loading it on a phone with two G or 3G Internet, right? Who’s never been to your website before. All right, let’s see how long that takes. That’s the kind of stuff, that’s the kind of testing that we’re talking about in terms of web speed.

[00:24:43] Kevin Dieny: And we’ve done an entire episode on web speed, so if you wanna check that out too, we have that. So check technical, SEO off. And again, just keep it simple. The basics are there, right? Now this, That’s number one, right? Have the resources and processes in place, what are the requirements of the journey you’re about to embark on?

[00:25:04] Kevin Dieny: All right. Step two, you not need to dedicate some attention to a. What you currently rank for. So you need to look at your data, your website. Okay, What traffic am I traffic Are you getting today? Right? Where’s your traffic coming from? What keywords are you ranking for? Are you ranking even for any branded searches?

[00:25:25] Kevin Dieny: Are people typing in your branded? What non-branded stuff are you ranking for already right now? Impressions tell you that you’re ranking for it. Clicks tell you are a better approximation of how high in the ranking you are. So being rank one means you’re getting a lot your click rate. So a lot of people both see your, um, result in the search and are clicking it.

[00:25:52] Kevin Dieny: The farther you get from one so you know, ranking 40, you might have very single digit impressions and you’re most likely have zero clicks cuz very few people get there. An impression means someone potentially saw it, doesn’t mean that they clicked right. Now organic traffic coming to your website today came from a search.

[00:26:14] Kevin Dieny: So what were they searching for? You do have to have search consoles, I believe, connected to your Google Analytics or your analytics. Um, you, you need to have something communicating what the searches were to get them. Otherwise, you just see not provided. If you don’t have it hooked up, you’ll just see not provided, which you’re gonna be like, What is this?

[00:26:35] Kevin Dieny: Right? There’s also companies. We’ll tell you all refs a h RDFs and Sam Rush are tools. SpyFu, another one I mentioned before. Um, companies that do a lot of keyword analysis, keyword tracking, things like that for companies. So there’s other ways to get it if you haven’t already set up your site with all this on.

[00:27:00] Kevin Dieny: Again, all this setup doesn’t take that long, so my, you’re like, Okay, I see what I’m ranking for. I see what keywords people, what queries people are searching for to get there. The keywords, the phrases, the terms, again, all those things, all those are synonymous. You all mean the same thing, what people are searching for Now, you’re all about finding opportunities.

[00:27:20] Kevin Dieny: Okay. That is okay. What keywords are delicious to your company that you would love to have searches on coming to your website? Right? What are those keywords? What keywords today would you like to increase? Are there keywords that your competitors, which you can find out? Rank four, what strategies maybe are they using?

[00:27:42] Kevin Dieny: What page? That they have ranked for them? Are they home pages? It’s important, right? Or are they just at, are they, you know, blog articles or, or actual pages? Look at all this. And then I do what I would call finding opportunities, right? How difficult are they? Again, that’s something you can get from tools like Sim Rush, SpyFu, rfs, things like that.

[00:28:05] Kevin Dieny: And I think that those are, Checking out, worth investing, putting some time in for a tool so that you get this right. When you’re planning your strategy, what you’re gonna do, they’re worth it. So you know, find one you like and then go, Okay, I have all these opportunities. Narrow them down. Until you’re like, Okay, I’m gonna focus on a couple easy ones.

[00:28:25] Kevin Dieny: One hard one. This is what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna write this, I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna add this page. I’m gonna link these pages together. I’m gonna post them in social. I’m gonna run some page search campaigns. I am going to have someone I know post this and share this, and they’ll get some traffic.

[00:28:43] Kevin Dieny: And all of that encompasses your strategy, right? , That’s what it looks like. That’s not so simple, , unfortunately, but that’s basically how it works. That’s what’s required. So you execute on them. I would try. I mean, if you’re smaller, just do one at a time. Get one going at a time. Have it planned out what you’re gonna do.

[00:29:05] Kevin Dieny: If you’re gonna, I think at most this requires writing one, spending one hour every week writing something. Okay. And then spending. I don’t know, maybe 30 minutes. Scheduling, publishing, social, getting things going elsewhere to promote it. So an hour and a half a week. Okay. That’s, that’s really what we’re looking at here.

[00:29:28] Kevin Dieny: We’re not talking about 15, 20 hours. We’re not talking an hour and a half for an expert. We’re talking really generally an hour and a half. Spend an hour, okay. Researching, writing something, creating something of value, then write a half hour, put a half hour of work in promoting it. Right. You could spend more initially.

[00:29:46] Kevin Dieny: Maybe it takes you longer, you know, you’ll get a better, you’ll get a more pro closer approximation. You’re not writing a professional research paper, you’re just writing something you know, between 602,000. Maybe not go above that words, you know, on the topic, and you’re making it as valuable as you can to the audience you’re writing it for.

[00:30:06] Kevin Dieny: Put yourselves in their shoes, you know, that’s usually how it goes. The key word will dictate what you write. I’d say something like Clogged dreams in the bathroom, strategies, tips, something like that, like getting it. And so you know you’re an expert and say you’re the plumber. You’re like, Okay, well these are things people have tried.

[00:30:31] Kevin Dieny: These are things people have tried, but don’t do them. Okay, , you make a list and then you write a little blur about each one of the things you can think of, and then you put that all in one article. Boom, done. There’s your one hour. Then you promote it on social and you go, Okay, well here’s three tips to get the rest.

[00:30:47] Kevin Dieny: Read my article. Right? People have the worst drain clog. Recipes . Here are some that, that actually work coming from a professional plumber, right? That won’t completely destroy your drain . Something like that effect right now. You’ve nailed your social. Um, that’s kind of how it works. So there’s a lot of times that a company will just struggle with all of this cuz they’re like, it’s just too much.

[00:31:17] Kevin Dieny: The research knowing what’s best writing. I’m not a writer writing, you know, in a, in a professional voice. That’s not me writing for the Internet’s, not me figuring out, so that all, this is not a waste of time. I’ve done this before. It’s a struggle feeling like, Oh, all the brands are just gonna do this better than me, so why try?

[00:31:36] Kevin Dieny: Okay. There’s a, it’s, it’s a real struggle. You can do it. It’s really not that complicated. If you need help, Google’s, you’re probably your best friend. Yes, you can get an agency. Yes, you can get professional help doing this. You may want someone to teach you. You may just want to go, Look, I want someone to do this cuz I got, I have better stuff to spend my time on.

[00:31:58] Kevin Dieny: I understand. But generally speaking, you can prove that this works so that you’re more confident when you spend money. So you really know what’s involved and what’s required, what’s expected. If you take a run at this yourself, okay, you can do it. It gives you the experience of having done it, and I think that’s very valuable for you to try.

[00:32:20] Kevin Dieny: So here is a playbook for you for how to do this. I’ve talked about can you find a keyword? It has some volume shoot for something. I mean, I love, I’d love to find a keyword with low difficulty, high volume, meaning lots of searches. Okay? This is the dream, okay? The dream playbook is you find a keyword that has a lot of searches for it, but is very, very low difficulty.

[00:32:51] Kevin Dieny: It has high intent to you, right? Someone who is looking for something that you serve, you solve, you have a service for. And that tells you, Okay, I could rank for it. It’s not that difficult and there’s a lot of people searching for it. This is literally like the dream because all it takes is you take that keyword, right?

[00:33:13] Kevin Dieny: Write it down, maybe search it. What are the related keywords? What else are people searching for? What are longer, um, tail things? Are people adding to it or adding before it, right? How does it fit in, in the context? Now, what does that come to mind as? You, the expert, you know, What does that what, When you look at that keyword, what do you think they’re searching for?

[00:33:33] Kevin Dieny: What is it that you think the problem that they’re having is, how aware are they in all the things that they need to know about that problem? Jot down just bullets. Just get your thoughts out. Okay. Being creative is hard. It’s hard for sometimes even the creative people. Just get your ideas, put ’em out there, bullet ’em, boom.

[00:33:50] Kevin Dieny: Then write just a little bit about each bullet. Then you compress it, boom, you’re, you’ve got something, right? You’ve got some content. You may wanna use a tool like Grammarly to help you with making sure it spells right, but keep it in your voice. It’s okay, you know, it doesn’t need to be a professional master’s degree writer to be able to edit and tweak your stuff.

[00:34:14] Kevin Dieny: It’s okay, you know? Um, separate just one huge paragraph in two little chunks, maybe one or two sentences. Drop in an image or two that corresponds with. What you’re saying, go to like a stock site or something. Maybe if you don’t wanna spend any money, there are, uh, Creative Commons media out there. You can put ’em in there.

[00:34:36] Kevin Dieny: Then you’ve got an article, then you’ve got a page, you know something, and then you can put that, add that to your site. Now, if you, you know, if you know how to do that, awesome. If not, maybe look. Make sure that it’s not gonna blow up your whole site to add something to it, but at the end of the day, you’ve just done it one time, one week, and you may be like, Whew, I’m exhausted.

[00:34:53] Kevin Dieny: I’m not gonna do this again for another month. It’s like, okay, fine. If you have that persistence right, to keep going, if you’re disciplined to keep going to do this every week. You know, a year from today, I think you would be shocked at the benefits that it’s provided you and the long term benefits it’s now bringing in.

[00:35:14] Kevin Dieny: When you get this right and you do this right, it’s incredible. It’s worth doing. The benefits of non banded traffic, just to highlight a few, right, is to drive. Traffic from people who don’t know your brand to your website, which is most of it, right? The search market. How many people are searching for businesses like yours in the serviceable area around you, or that in an area that, or in a country or who have a need that you can satisfy is vast.

[00:35:44] Kevin Dieny: I guarantee it. And it’s way bigger, way bigger than your branded, your branded traffic is. So to tap into that is a huge well for your. They can be very intent driven. They can be very interested, they could be very great converting, high value, high ticket, longer retention. They can convert to, you know, branded traffic after.

[00:36:06] Kevin Dieny: It’s fantastic to get this right to win at this. There’s usually a balance. Your branded traffic’s gonna bring in some in your non-brand. It’s gonna bring in some, the healthy balance, I don’t know. Can’t tell you. Not an absolute, but generally speaking, you know, there’s a healthy balance between the. I like to think that non-branded is very high and branded traffic is much lower, and that that represents your strategy of bringing in and leaning heavy into new customers that may switch in businesses that are really dedicated in retention.

[00:36:45] Kevin Dieny: I kind of lean more toward a heavier, non-branded traffic being healthier, more balanced for a business. So you’ve got your keyword, you’ve written bullets, you’ve now populated it with sentences. You’ve got a page, you publish it. Now you need to promote it. So, I mentioned before, you could swipe a few things out, give a tease, share some of it, make a video of yourself talking about it.

[00:37:12] Kevin Dieny: You can promote it paid social can promote it with paid search on the same keywords that you’re targeting when you use them. In paid search, I find that it speeds up. The time for things to rank because you’re sending the traffic on those keywords to the webpage that you wanna rank for. And I also see, generally speaking, as long as you’ve done your, you know, as long as you’ve written a very relevant page or article that you’re gonna get high relevance, high scores, meaning your paid search campaigns will over time cost less and drive higher results.

[00:37:49] Kevin Dieny: And so that’s a great thing to do in Tand. That’s why I really like running, putting out my content, trying to push it organically and lifting it with some advertising to give it additional eyeballs. The more eyeballs that are hitting the page, the higher chance that it’s eventually going to rank. This seems to be the way it works.

[00:38:12] Kevin Dieny: I don’t understand how it all works perfectly, but I do know that that works. So, You got your promotion going. Now comes the monitoring and the measurement. Right now you’ve gone from business leader marketer to SEO marketer. Now you’re gonna put on your marketer analyst hat on. So you wanna look at things like, okay, how many pages you use, how many visitors am I getting here to this article, to this page, whatever it’s that you’ve done.

[00:38:44] Kevin Dieny: All right, and a certain over, over a span of. Could be a month, month to month to month, You know, you could look at that too. And then you’re gonna wanna say, Okay, what’s the time on page? How long were people there for? Before they left? How many people bounced or exited? Left, right? How many people went to another page, um, pages in this, in the session that they came in on?

[00:39:11] Kevin Dieny: How many converted? What brought them to that page? Right. Was it a search or was it paid traffic? Was it social? All those things are very interesting to look at. Now, after that, you can assess, Okay, let’s have three scenarios here. Number one, if it’s going really well, , and you’re like, Yes, and you pet yourself on the back.

[00:39:37] Kevin Dieny: Good job. This is great. I’m gonna do more of this situation two. You’re not sure if it’s going well or if it’s going bad, . Cause maybe some of it looks good and some of it looks bad. So it’s like, I understand what’s going on here. You’ve got a lot of traffic, but everyone’s bouncing, you know, or got very little traffic.

[00:39:55] Kevin Dieny: But it’s, you know, when they hit the page, it’s going really well. Each of those has a specific diagnostic thing you need to understand, which gets a little technical, so we’re not gonna go into it entirely here, but basically know that if any one metric. Seems a little off or you want to know more about it, there is a diagnostic reason for it and a strategy to use to correct that.

[00:40:20] Kevin Dieny: It may be that you wrote, you’ve written an article and it ranks for ranks for the keyword, but it also ranks for something else that you didn’t intend. And then that is driving traffic. And those people are like, What heck is this? Right? , it happens, happens a lot in paid search. That’s why you have negative keywords, but you don’t get that luxury with, uh, organic.

[00:40:39] Kevin Dieny: There’s then maybe the need to make it more specific. There may be the need that what’s on the page isn’t really all that helpful. So take a look, maybe show it to someone else who’s not an expert and say, Does this answer your question? What’s your feedback on this? You know, things like that. Um, make sure the page is loading well for them.

[00:40:58] Kevin Dieny: Okay? So things like that. Those where you pivot, right? That’s where you go. Okay. And what do I need to update? What do I need to. And monitoring and measuring gives you that idea, tells you if it’s hitting your goal, if it’s successful. Um, you should know sometimes, let’s say you started it today, I would say nine months from now, you could be fairly confident in something working.

[00:41:22] Kevin Dieny: Now, after about three to four months from now, you should have some idea if you need to do a smaller minor. After about six months, you should know whether you need to do a major tweak or, or what’s going on with that nine months. It should tell you if it’s successful or not. Something like that, kind of a cadence for things you start today.

[00:41:43] Kevin Dieny: So let’s say you do one this week, next week, next week, next week, next week. Right for a year. Then at those intervals, 3, 6, 9 months from that week that you started it, you should have some pretty good things you could do to update, and now you can circle back around to updating or tweaking or changing existing articles or existing pages, things like that.

[00:42:04] Kevin Dieny: That’s the feedback loop that you want to be in when you are trying to nail down and get the most non-branded traffic you can. Again, there’s some time required. You’ll probably get to the point where it’s less than two hours, but, and really focus on, yes, you’re gonna have keywords you’re focusing on.

[00:42:27] Kevin Dieny: Yes, you’re gonna have, you know, some, something on the page that you want them to want readers to look at or want people want visitors to be attracted to. But really focus on what your brand does really, really well. I wanna make sure this is cemented here at the end. Your brand does something really well to something better than everybody else’s.

[00:42:46] Kevin Dieny: What is that thing, right? What service? What unique aspect? Why are you in this business? Why do you care so much? What is it that’s so valuable about working with you? Make sure that’s cohesive, that that’s felt in everything you do. Right? Make sure that’s there. Make sure that that’s a part of it, and they’ll feel that too.

[00:43:09] Kevin Dieny: It’s not just about. Writing about clog drains. Okay, here you go, right? It needs to be helpful, needs to be valuable, and it needs to resonate with people that go, Oh wow, this was nicer. They do care about helping me. This is a brand or something. I like to trust. This is someone I want to, you know, connect with or, I like this.

[00:43:32] Kevin Dieny: All of that, all of that is essential to doing this. There’s a lot of search traffic out there. I guarantee it. There are tools. I mentioned a lot to this episode of all the things you can do to get the correct information so you can go, Okay, I think this is possible and these are the good opportunities.

[00:43:52] Kevin Dieny: These are the opportunities that are okay, but they’re too hard. , there’s a lot. You’re gonna need a lot of information to progress, but you can do it. And winning non-branded is all about. At the end of the day, people searching for non-branded things are searching for something that isn’t tied to a brand.

[00:44:16] Kevin Dieny: So they’re looking for someone who maybe they don’t know a brand that can do that. Maybe they don’t know that there are solutions or that they’re how bad their problem really is. You know? Those are the things you have to consider and think about and get and do really well at Kick butt. But it’s not like you have to be a psychologist here or an expert market or an expert writer.

[00:44:44] Kevin Dieny: You can write all these, you can do these. Look at some of the ones your competitors have done and just do it a little bit better than them. You know, it’s usually a great place to start. So, um, all of this comes, comes around again. That it’s another topic you can do. It’s bite sized. You can do it at less than two hours a week.

[00:45:07] Kevin Dieny: You can win in non-branded traffic. You can figure out what’s going on and you can change it. You can figure out that and get it going. Well. This can completely transform your business, drive higher quality leads, and grow your business in such a phenomenal way. Smaller brands can do this, businesses can do this, and they just have to kind of shoulder that.

[00:45:29] Kevin Dieny: It’s gonna be a semi long term strategy. It always is. So I encourage you to go out and try it. If you have questions, if you have any feedback on this, feel free to get in touch with me. I’m on LinkedIn. Uh, again, we really appreciate you listening to the podcast and have a great week.