In this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve sits in with Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. Andy has over 22 years of experience in SEO and website visitor psychology research and shares two case studies on topics such as website redesigns, keyword targeting, user engagement metrics, conversion optimization, content marketing, and the impact of AI on search behavior. 

Through this conversation, Andy covers various aspects of digital marketing and emphasizes the importance of analytics and SEO for promoting a business. He also highlights the value of original research in content strategy and shares what skills make successful marketers. 

Finally, he reflects on his past experiences to provide hindsight insights into areas such as long-form content production and SEO services. 

Key learnings from this episode:

• Building pages with search in mind are essential for increasing website traffic and improving keyword targeting.

• Dedicated pages per keyword or topic should be created to improve search rankings and visibility on search engines like Google,

• User engagement metrics such as dwell time and user engagement can serve as proxies for quality content.

• Original research in content strategy is a powerful tool for engagement, social sharing, and backlinks.

• Skills in search and analytics are important to differentiate successful marketers early in their careers.

Connect with Andy Crestodina and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.

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Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26 on the interesting B2B Marketers podcast. I'm joined by Andy. Andy, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Steve. I'm glad to be here. Awesome. All right, so as we always. Do. We're gonna jump in with a quick 60-second intro about your background and then we'll jump into the case study.

So tell us about who you are. 

Andy Crestodina: Sounds good. I'm one of the co-founders of Orbit Media Studios. Orbit is a web development company founded here in Chicago 22 years ago. Today we're a team of 53. Specialists across all different, you know, project management, design programming, support strategy. So I'm, I've been an s e O for 22 years.

I've done a couple of decades of website visitor psychology research and analysis. I have access to 500 plus Google Analytics accounts, and I've been part of like a thousand plus website projects. Quite a few .

Steve Goldhaber: Awesome. I can feel the, the good and bad tension of any website review going over into the thousands.

Those are all unique and they all have their own challenges. But let's do this. Let's jump into the first case study. You're gonna share one about a staffing company as it relates to doing a website redesign. So take it away.

Andy Crestodina: Yeah, so Bay Area Staffing Company, kind of a hot category. Even now, not doing bad, but there are lots of tech firms there that are doing things like building prototypes, not just for software but for hardware.

And this is a company that can pull together. Diverse groups of people, of specialists and teams that can be sort of deployed as a unit in a, um, a lab or in a product development team. So well-established firm, very sales-driven, go-to-market strategy. They know all the companies, they're building relationships, but how to grow.

How to grow without having the clients. You know how to find new clients because they're already kind of saturated and they're big players. I mean, they work with Google and Facebook and PayPal and all kinds of different businesses. So search. Search is about discovery. Search will add, add. The pipeline search will grow the awareness for their brand.

The problem was the existing site wasn't built with search in mind at all. So Steve, this is one of those classic examples of simply building a site that has some sensitivity to keywords and to relevance and to, you know, a page per phrase, a page per service. So really this was some pretty low hanging fruit, but the results are dramatic.

46% increase in traffic to those high value commercial intent pages. Just by thinking in advance, the real takeaway here is that sites are either built with search in mind or they're not. Yeah. You've got a page called services and it's about all of your services. That page isn't relevant to any specific service, so this was really about just building out the generic pages into small sections of keyword focused pages.

I mean, it's not uncommon for website projects to be sufficient to have a big impact on search traffic without any other activity, just because there's lots of URLs, targeting lots of phrases, and the content on them goes, has lots of detail on that topic. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: Do you find, you know, I imagine that every website is a little bit different because someone in an organization owns it and sometimes it's brand, sometimes it's content, sometimes it, it could be SEO or parts of it might be seo.

Do you find that as like your first challenge in any project is to understand who owns it because that is gonna have a dramatic effect on how they think and structure it? Yeah.

Andy Crestodina: If you work backwards from the ideal outcome qualified visitor land on webpage because they saw something good at search results and clicked it.

Because that company or that page ranked in search for that phrase. So if it's going to work well, regardless of who the, who the owner is or what their domain expertise is, you have to have URLs that are relevant to specific topics. Now, how does that align or misalign with different roles? I love your question brand, not always really keyword focus.

Not always thinking about how to reverse engineer demand. They're thinking more about the big picture and the story and the strategy and what wins the sales conversation. Very important for conversions, but sometimes that those people tend to deprioritize search other marketers. Maybe a little bit overly focused on search.

People who have a background in pay-per-click, maybe they're just sort of, they over index on this keyword stuff. There's more to it than rankings. You're trying to convert a visitor. So it's, it's a great question. We've, we've seen it work all different ways, but ultimately somebody needs to. Be willing to do the upfront research and then during copywriting to make some of the little compromises or to adapt the content and and keyword targeting a little bit.

When those things combined, it works very well.

Steve Goldhaber:  Yeah. Do you recommend, I mean, is there a one size fits all approach, or is it best to say, and you know what, there are certain parts of the website that need to do a lot of storytelling. Some might be more long term SEO driven pages, like is there a hybrid model?

What do you suggest?

Andy Crestodina: Well, it's not true that every page is a keyword opportunity, so you're really, you know, Right there on the nose. That's it. Exactly. The about page doesn't need any keyword targeting at all. That page is not optimized to rank for any specific phrase. Just look at any URL and ask, like someone trying to find this would search for what?

And there's lots of pages on the internet that no one's trying to find. Yeah, they're doing other jobs. That's normal. That's fine. So, no, there's. The homepage is typically a good keyword opportunity. It's the page that has the greatest authority, therefore the greatest ranking potential. So you can target the most competitive key phrase on the homepage.

This is why home is the all time worst title tag. For a homepage, please use your business categories, your homepage, title, tag, and header text. That way you're, you know, you at least got your best competitor in the toughest competition. And then all of those top level interior pages can target often, you know, the commercial intent, key phrases, in other words, the names of your services as described by your audience.

Right? In my experience, people that really search for solutions, the only people who use the word solutions are people who sell stuff. Yep. I've hundreds of hours of keyword research in my career. I've never seen the word solutions appear. People don't search for solutions. I don't need it. My, my sink's leaking.

I don't need a plumbing solution, honey. We need a plumbing solution. Like nobody's ever said that. Yep. And then those deeper interior pages can target the more specific phrases. Some of those don't have to be in the main navigation. They can be off nav pages, but that's step one in, in an SEO strategy. 

Steve Goldhaber: So for this client, we've mentioned redesign, but what's the balance between like, all right, there's a big concerted effort for a, a redesigned push versus. Now, this is an ongoing thing if you really wanna do a good job. How did, how did you balance that for this client? 

Andy Crestodina:The blunt way to put it is that search is a job that's never really done.

There's no such thing as like finishing SEO in a way, because there's gonna be new content and new pages published on that topic. Whatever key phrase you're targeting, there's gonna be more, more competition coming along here before long and algorithms change. Although that doesn't. Affect search rankings as much in my experience as people think.

So it is sometimes efficient or uh, sufficient to just make a page that targets the phrase and that page ranks and can rank for a long period of time. But if you're ever unsatisfied with the, your performance in search, then that just means you're not done yet. You have to go back, look at that page, see what it's currently performing for.

Ask if you've really sharpened the focus on that as your keyword to target. If not, maybe adjust the keyword targeting. If it is a good keyword for that page, then you need to add depth to that. Go big on the details, answer all the related questions, touch on all the related subtopics. So it's really just a matter of revolution.

Rebuild the website if you're not done yet. If you're not yet, if you're not attracting qualified visitors yet, then you move to evolution. Which is that ongoing battle of just continuously improving pages. It's fun when it works well. It's like a sport and you get to, analytics are your scoreboard.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep.

Yeah. So for this client, were they already there philosophically with you or was it a bit of a pushback? Cuz I imagine some clients are all about, Nope, we're gonna do the redesign, we're gonna need you guys for like 30 days and then we can part ways. How were they to work with? 

Andy Crestodina: Well, this is an example of a client that had a lot of business success and evidence that their current go-to-market strategy was working.

So they're selling and they're successful as such. So they didn't, we didn't have to put a ton of prioritization on search. They were okay with us doing SEO O as we planned and built the pages, but they didn't feel like they weren't overly detail oriented on the construction of these pages. They let us do the job that we had planned to do, and that was nice because there are clients that are poorly suited to get search results performance in SEO because they want to, they're unwilling.

To adapt their content to help it get discovered. Search as an information retrieval technology, and to have your information retrieved, you need to align it with the things that people are searching for and trying to retrieve. So there are brands that are just. Unwilling to make any changes to their, you know, the writing to them is precious and they don't want to change the headline.

They don't wanna change the brand story. They don't wanna go long or deep. They wanna just prioritize being sort of clever, I guess, sometimes. Or they like their tagline as the header, even if that's not a keyword focused thing. But this company was fine with all of our suggestions and just let us run the plan and almost a 50% increase in qualified visitors post-launch.

Steve Goldhaber: It worked well. That's great. What kind of timeframe are we talking about for those results? Two months. Wow.

Andy Crestodina: Yeah. Sometimes that's visible within one month. You can't see results in less than one month. Really? Because it's not reliable. You're doing pre-post analysis. Mm-hmm. So basically going to the organic search as your default channel group in analytics and looking at the current two months post-launch, the two months pre-launch, assuming there's no seasonality in that timeframe, if there is some seasonality.

This is a company that has some ups or downs, depending on the holidays or whatever. Then you choose the year over year. So it's all a question of, in website redesigns, you're making many changes changing the the code and the design and the copy. So you really need to let it bake for a little while before you can start to do that measurement.

Yep.

Steve Goldhaber: Makes sense. Anything else on the first case study before we jump into number two? 

Andy Crestodina:No, but I just, I mean, if there's a takeaway for anyone listening, just make sure that you've got a page per phrase. Google does not rank websites. It ranks webpages. Google's never ranked a website. URLs are what ranks.

So if you're wondering why you don't rank for something, just ask yourself, do I have a page on my site that is totally focused on this topic? If not, that's your next step.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right, makes sense. Let's jump into case study number two. This is a professional service company, and I'm sure you get this request, I don't know, once a month, which is we want to rank number one on Google four X.

So tell us how you actually were able to achieve that for this company. 

Andy Crestodina: This is not an easy one to report on in a way because I was disappointed with the results of this project. They are darlings in the media. They're mentioned in the press all the time. They have original research on the site that is cited by major publications.

They're on the news and on, you know, public radio and you know, New York Times all the time. So they have lots and lots of links to their site. So their site is lots and lots of domain authority, as in ranking. Potential links are a huge factor in how, how sites rank. So because of that huge domain authority, it's like extremely high.

I've done 20 years of seo and their authority was higher than mine. They weren't even trying, they're just good at pr. So I thought all we have to do here, authority box is checked now. We just checked the relevance box, just like the last case study. Make pages on topics, right? Target phrases go deep into these topics.

So homepage of course, targeted the phrase and it just sort of didn't work. It took a l like that ideal. You know, first, a quick disclaimer. You could call that a vanity metric ranking for one specific phrase. It may actually drive qualified visitors, but there are no pages that rank for just one phrase.

Search is not really about targeting a specific key phrase. It's about targeting a topic. On that page and spreading out your meaning to cover all the related phrases to you. Any page that ranks for one thing should rank for dozens of closely related things. So I squirm a bit when people tell me they wanna rank for one specific phrase.

That's not what the veteran SEO thinks about. That's not a senior marketer's mindset. It's just one phrase, like exact matching quotes, key phrase. But I predict that it would work and it didn't. Steve. It took a lot. It's. I'm not sure. I don't know for sure why, but it took almost a year of time going back and checking that phrase and like making some minor edits to the page.

But they slowly climbed up from like 15 to one. It took a long time

Steve Goldhaber: So that's gotta be the fun part of s e o is like, it's a very technical understanding. The downside is what you just described, where you're doing. Everything that you know is to be a good thing. Do you often find that is you're kind of, sometimes you just are like, I dunno why this is happening.

It shouldn't, but it's a little bit of a treasure hunt, I imagine. 

Andy Crestodina: it's a black box, so there is no correct answer. There are best practices and there are experts and you can talk to them and kind of everyone will have a perspective. I've had people call me and use me. As a third party neutral perspective on why something is not working.

So a bunch of SEOs get on a call with me. They say, Andy, can you look at this url? Look at this key phrase. Look at this data set. Tell, tell me what's what I'm not doing here. The simplest version is to say that there's two main search criteria, authority and relevance, as in links and content. If both those boxes are checked, then you fall back on some things that get much more squishy things for which is less research and evidence, such as user interaction.

Do the visitors who click. This is fun actually, and it's important perspective. Do visitors who click from Google and and land on the page stay for a while or are they. Annoyed or disgusted it or confused and hit the back button. That is not something that we can ever really measure because there aren't data sets large enough to find a true correlation between dwell time, time on page from search and rankings, because you can't see everyone's dwell time.

You'd have to have access to every website's analytics. Mm-hmm. Therefore, a common explanation when nothing else seems to be working is that there's something wrong with the user's experience on the page. The page is not adding enough credibility. The other page is that rank are somehow more satisfying to the user's first impression.

Examples of how to, how to improve that. Shorter paragraphs, more specific subheads, adding visuals, adding video, kind of getting to the point more quickly, indicating the credibility or credentials of the author. These are things that make visitors stay on pages a bit longer. So if authority's high and relevance is strong, yeah, make the page more engaging.

Steve Goldhaber: I have thought that dwell time is perhaps the most confusing metric when you at least look at it in aggregate because. You think it's good? More people are spending a longer time. But then at the other side of that story, it can be, no, they're not accomplishing a task, therefore they're frustrated and spending more time.

Like how do you reconcile those two different mindsets? Well, it's

Andy Crestodina: similar with like e-commerce and pages per visit. It's like, wow, this, this site's super engaging. The average visit has 12 pages. That's actually sometimes a sign of confusion. So there are such a thing as like the Goldilocks metrics where they shouldn't be too high, they shouldn't be too low.

Dwell time though, is probably less of a concern that way because. It's only for visitors who come from search, and if time on page is is very low for visitors from search, that's probably bad. Really what we're trying to do is to keep the visitor from pogo sticking. If I see a search result, I click and I hit the back button.

Three seconds later, Google recorded that. Google knows that, and Google may. If that happens enough, Google may decide this page is unsatisfying to visitors. Yeah. Google's basically trying to find proxies for quality, so this is a qual and so dwell time is considered a proxy as a quality metric, and we have to do whatever we can to kind of keep that visitor engaged. Hopefully not going back to Google at all.

Steve Goldhaber:  Yep. The recent shift in AI and the whole theory that well is AI really helping people find information in a new way. I saw some data, uh, recently that said, no, we actually looked back at the last six months, and search volume on Google has increased. That's another fascinating topic.

Maybe we save that one for q and a, but as it relates to dwell time and things like that. Mm-hmm. I'm always interested in the impact of, of new methods, of people finding what they're looking for within solutions as opposed to just Google, which is indexing content. Yep. All right. Let's do this. Let's jump into the third case study.

This is the software company, and this one's focused on, you know, For lack of a better word, conversion And click the rates. 

Andy Crestodina: So we are doing cheese, cheese and now mouse trap. So our first two case studies were about attracting qualified visitors. This one's about maximizing the percentage of visitors who take action.

So if you think of conversion as a chain and the thank you page is the last link in the chain, what percentage of people who've made it to the contact form. Completed and went to the thank you page. What percent of people we saw the call to action clicked and went to the contact form. So you can look at the links in this chain, use analytics and find the weakest link and try to improve them.

Often one of those important links is the calls to action on top pages such as the homepage. This software company had a call to action at the top of their homepage that was like, see how it works? I think something like that. And that was not a very compelling call to action. It had a very low clickthrough rate.

So part of our job was to actually, this was prior to the website relaunching. I was just doing consulting with them during the website redesign and try to maximize the impact and the benefit of the, of the existing site. So, oh, it said learn more and the, the clickthrough rate on that call to action was 3.8%.

To see this in analytics, you need to go to create a path exploration with the homepage as the starting page path, as the node and the homepage as the starting point. And then watch to see what percentage people click on each different item. You can measure the performance of your navigation and all your calls to action, uh, path exploration.

So it said learn more. It was 3.8%. Simple suggestion. Change it to sound more valuable, you know, who are you gonna talk to? An expert. And to sound easier, what action are you taking? You're just talking to an expert. The framework for improving calls to action is to make the call to action sound more valuable or sound easier, or both.

People click when they conclude it, that the benefit exceeds the cost, so make the benefit bigger or the cost smaller and you can improve your click-through rates. The click rate jumped from 3.8 to 10.9. Wow. Talk to a personalization expert. Yeah. Schedule a time with X, chat. With X, speak to X. So that sounds, so if X is an expert, sounds more valuable.

And then the fact that a lot of CTAs are actually am confusing or ambiguous like. Get a demo. What do you mean a video? Or am I gonna schedule a time? Is that person gonna pitch to me? Like, so specificity correlates with conversion, and I've seen that many, many times where you just add specificity to your CTAs, especially when that specificity makes the value high or the cost seem low.

Steve Goldhaber: Interesting. Do you see, I guess two-part question here is, one is the call to action. Once you've, you've found something that you think works, does that tend to translate across categories? And then the second part is, How long does that work? Because I imagine there's some element of like, well, now everyone's doing that.

Therefore you've, you've ruined it for everyone. Right? Everyone knows that, that phrase help us understand category and then tenure of how long something like that might work. Yeah.

Andy Crestodina: The best answer for all these things, so that was an AB test. Right now I'm reporting on the results for a specific visitor, a specific.

Value proposition, a specific ux and you know, the, and the content around it. So in that scenario, it worked that well. So I could say like, specificity is a best practice. You know, manipulating the ROI calculation of the visitor's brain is the best practice, right? How to improve click-through rates and cost action best practices that worked for other people and worked in the past.

So what works for you will be different. How it works across categories is the perfect question cuz it varies. And the only way to really know is to actually take an action measure yourself because your audience is different. It's not the same. Otherwise we'd all the same website. Having said that Get Started is a weirdly high performing C T A across all categories.

Yes. I don't understand why. We've done tons and tons of, we're always doing AB tests here. We have a hundreds of clients and we are doing optimization for dozen of them. And get started is something that I would say is worth testing because for some reason that's just a high, seems to perform very well.

In our experience. I can't explain it. That's just what I'm seeing.

Steve Goldhaber: That's always fun to look at the data where you have a hunch, right? Like it's always good to have a hunch, but. Good to keep your honest with the data and that that has always been the most rewarding part of any performance driven marketing effort is the big reveal.

You know, it, it feels good to be right sometimes, but it also feels good to be humbled and completely wrong. 

Andy Crestodina: We had a new client and my early conversations, I threw out a, some ideas, there were four of them. I said, any of these could make a difference. In the end, none of them made a difference. That was my just heuristic making it up thing.

When we got into our process with our client following rigor and data and validating hypotheses, that's when they started to see results. Was I disappointed? No, I actually didn't care. When they came back to me and said, Andy, none of your ideas worked. I said, so what? They were just hypotheses. So nothing to me is precious.

I don't care. I don't have to be Right. It doesn't matter what, what matters is waiting for the client in the long run. Yeah. By, you know, following your. You know what, you know to be an effective process for testing the right hypotheses. Every marketing idea is a hypothesis and analytics is where it's validated.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, right. That makes sense. Let's do this. Let's jump into q and a and the first question I'm gonna ask you is tell me about your first marketing gig. What were you doing?

Andy Crestodina: Well, I was not trained as a marketer and never had a job as a marketer prior to forming this company. So I, I got certified as a teacher.

I was gonna be a foreign language teacher. I got a degree in Mandarin Chinese, and then, you know, did some other things. As soon as I graduated, finished learning Chinese and then decided to do other stuff. Now, after we started this company, 2001, I realized like we can't be an outsourced partner to agencies forever.

That's where we were. They hired us to do their programming, to do their animations. So instead of just, you know, always letting us be our destiny guided by these giants around us, my first marketing gig was basically figuring out analytics and s e O to promote our own business. And it was a long road. At the time, everything was very uncertain.

Google hadn't even finished winning the battle to be the dominant search engine. Mm-hmm. But I loved it. And you know, Google Analytics wasn't even a product yet. We used urchin and web trends, but I had so much fun when I realized like, this is kind of a game. It's kind of a sport. It's really motivating.

It's not just about opinions and emotion. I can actually try something and see like my input and see the output. And then iterate. So it's about two more years before we started creating our own pipeline. Today we have, we spend nothing on advertising and we're a $7 million a year business. And you know, I haven't done outsourced project work in many years.

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Steve Goldhaber: Yep. That's great. What do you like about what you do the most? I mean, is it the ever changing field? You know, you've got big companies changing platforms and trying to do a better job at helping the users. Like what gets you excited?

Andy Crestodina: Well, as a content marketer, this is the last 15 years, it's been like a hardcore content marketing strategy.

I'm motivated to teach, and as I said, that's kind of the full circle story in my life. I'm sort of still a teacher, so what I get excited by is learning something useful. I remember when I realized like, oh, This is how to track video views using Google Analytics and then quickly teaching it, like learning it well enough to be able to make the deck, shoot the video that shows it.

So I love to see the light bulb moment when I do like during presentations, like there's a lot of people when you say to them like, best practices are just good hypotheses. Wow. Like they real, like that's a moment of insight and you help someone. Like a lot of marketers are still thinking best practices are like rules or they must be followed or don't break them.

But when people realize that like, oh, they really are best practice is just a good hypothesis. So that's what I find to be the most fun, the most interesting, is to learn something useful and teach it. It makes it hard. I just had to learn everything. Again in GA four, I have to, right now, I'm updating all of my tactics to align with AI because it's very, very powerful and quite useful.

So it's hard work. I lose a lot of sleep because I have to get up early and write. I have little kids and I don't compromise their family time, but that to me is the most fun is to teach. Yeah. What gets you most frustrated? I find it difficult to align with marketers. And team members who are really biased toward their own views and opinions, and I'm always looking for diplomatic ways to remind people that what they just told me is their personal preference and has nothing to do with the target audience.

It's not about, you know, achieving a result. And I can, we can teach this to every client, right? It's like, I appreciate that, that perspective. I like that color too. But what we're really trying to do here is to maximize qualified leads through traffic and conversions. You know, re adding clarity, removing friction, you know, keyword focus, adding evidence.

So I get a little bit frustrated. Now I'm like in my fifties, repeatedly explaining to people that although I respect their opinions, we should stay focused on the target audience. And on our research into what their needs are. That for me is. I'm not getting better at that. It's still hard for me. Like, why do I have to keep telling these people one at a time and educate every client one at a time that this is not the way to make to do good marketing?

Steve Goldhaber: I remember I used to work for a big agency and we would do these large website rebuilds and my, my job was the account lead essentially, so I got to staff the team and UX was just starting to become mainstream and I'm like, I need, I need someone with a really good UX perspective to be on this. And she was amazing at doing what you just said, which is like, it's not about our brand and our story, it's about putting yourself in the customer's shoes.

And I really feel like that whole practice, I mean, U UX has been around for a long time, right? But it was just formalized in more or job titles recently. But that field has just done so much for content and SEO because it just, they just like slap you into. Submission in a good way of like, no, no, no, no, no.

You have to think about it in the correct way and I, I've seen that do wonders for website projects that may have checked all the boxes on design and brand, but just did not do anything to really be a good steward of the site when it came to whether it was lead gen or creating content that needed to help a user accomplish a task.

Andy Crestodina: I have ways of teaching this. It's like clear is more important than clever. I have tools that help clients see this. By using like a, like a, a usability hub five second test where you put in the client's very clever tagline as the header, and you put in a very specific keyword focused user, you know, user focused header.

And you show these two things to a, to a focus group. 25 people see this 1, 25 people see this one. Or you do 50 and 50, whatever, and the client understands because the question, what does this company do? Nobody can tell what your company does. They literally fail the five second test. Yeah. A simpler way to explain this is like the backyard barbecue test, and this is only for one, one element.

The homepage headline. If I met you at a backyard barbecue and I said, what do you do for a living? And you read to me the headline in your homepage, would I know what you do for a living? Or would to be confused? Would I have to ask subsequent questions? Are you being overly clever? So the first question I every visited, every website is, am I in the right place and to meet their information needs, which is our job.

If you're building a website, It's to be specific and descriptive in the homepage chatter.

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. I'm gonna focus on the next question about original research. And I know that, that your company has done blogger studies in the past. Right. And I think the thing with so many content marketers is they feel the pressure of, I have to write original content and it's a it's perspective and they always think, I just have to write, I have to be a journalist.

And I wanted you to take us through. That shift of sometimes it's just sourcing original data and that becomes what makes the content very interesting. So tell us about when you started doing surveys as a means to kinda get to better

Andy Crestodina: content. Yeah. It's a bit of a myth to say like what the content marketer does is write.

I think of it as we dev our job is to develop content that starts a conversation or you know, becomes visible in search or gets a lot of engagement in social or email or whatever. So the things that work there are not necessarily just writing long form content, visuals are as important. I try to never write an article that doesn't have something of visual interest at every scroll depth.

So con, there's a famous quote from Eugene Schwartz. This is, you know, the copywriting legend from decades ago. Copy's never written. It's assembled. So I think of it that way. I'm building these things, right? I'm constructing them. So contributor quotes, highly formatted content, lots of visuals, you know, yes, I'm writing something, but that's really maybe a third of my total time.

Original research checks a bunch of these boxes al almost automatically. Surveys are the toughest ones to do because you have to promote them twice, once to get respondents to your survey and once after the post is live. But surveys are magical because you can get data that would be otherwise impossible to get.

I did a survey about a year ago. I'm gonna try to repeat it, you know, do you get spam text messages? I'm trying to start a conversation. I'm taking a stand on marketing. I'm saying certain types of marketing are unethical or negative, and I got data points on this. The blogger survey, is even better. For example, how much time does it take to write a blog post?

Can't answer that question without a survey. How long is your typical blog post? Are you adding videos? How many images do you add? Do you work with contributors? Like all these things. Yeah, so in the end, your site is categorically different forever. I. Your site is the primary source of new information.

If I was doing a content audit for anybody, I'd ask them, is your website the primary source for any information? In other words, have you published something that's unique to you where you, you added to the internet, you made something that not everybody could make you? Were the only ones. So it is a magical source of, I mean, it's a magical format for content in its ability to drive.

Engagement and social to get mentions to drive links and authority to empower PR efforts. Journalists love it. It opens up all kinds of interesting contributor quote ideas or collaborator ideas. Yep. Ask influencers to contribute or give you perspective on one of the data points. So there are research pieces on my site that have been linked to, from thousands of other websites, making me sort of invincible in seo.

Very hard to compete with me now. Yeah. And that I just get, continue to get mentioned all the time. All the time. So if I had to recommend one thing to differentiate content strategy, it would be that publish original research.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, we're gonna do two more questions. The first one is gonna be on talent.

So you've built a really successful company. Talent is a huge part of that. What do you see as people early on in their career who are just, they're molded, right? Like, what are they bringing to the table where you can identify someone and go, that person is gonna do really well in this type of environment?

Andy Crestodina: Well, two of the skills that really differentiate a marketer, Are search and analytics, partly because they're just categories where most people switch off or weren't motivated to learn those things. They got into marketing because they wanted to be creative. They love storytelling or something. They're just not that focused on searchers or analytics.

Even if that's not what you do in your career as a marketer, if you're just, you know, digital marketing specialist moving up through, you know, an organization, those things are awesome things to have in your background because you'll have another perspective. All the time. If you understand how search works, you're looking at a list of headlines that happens.

We do it all the time. You're gonna know which of those has an advantage in search. If you have a background on analytics, you're gonna know that that idea being presented is, you know, what impact, what metric it would impact. Right? Like adding a video to a page. What would that do? Well, that should increase dwell time.

Time on page engagement rate, you know, and, and then plus the YouTube studio metrics. Okay. Now you're gonna be much more valuable to your organization because you can bring that data-driven measurement marketer perspective to all the meetings. You're gonna be the one who they lean on and ask for help and look this up.

You're gonna properly frame every idea that you have for the rest of your career as a hypothesis. So those are the two things that I think there's just, there's more of a shortage on those, and those people are just better positioned to drive impact. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that makes sense. All right. This is my Barbara Walters question.

You know, you're looking back at yourself maybe when you started your company or a long time ago. What are some things that you've looked back and said, you know what? I had it wrong. I would do that differently now because it didn't work or there's a better approach that I've used. What are some things that you look back on in your career and kind of can grow from?

Andy Crestodina:  I mean, I eventually figure things out, but I'm not very fast. I should have done long-form detailed content sooner. I should have done collaborations and influencer marketing sooner. I should have been active on social media years sooner. I should have gone deep into video and started publishing how-to videos years sooner.

Original research, I should have done that sooner. Offering SEO as a service to complement web development should have started that year sooner. I was just a little bit slow to see the trend and adopt the technology. I remember thinking like, why do I wanna be on social media? I already, there are already enough ways to contact me, and my inbox is a mess.

I don't want another inbox. It sounds terrible, but my friends who were active at those times, you know, they, they have massive reach now, hundreds of thousands because. We were all right there. Right? We saw it all emerge and we, what were we doing? Could have had a huge, very, you know, large audience on YouTube.

If I just published some of these things as videos, you know, five years before I did. But it all works out, Steve. I don't have any regrets.

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Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. I like that. Well, Andy, thanks for joining us on the show today. I enjoyed the conversation and thank you to the listeners for watching another show.

Just as a reminder, you can download everything on Apple, on Spotify, and we archive everything on the 26th Characters website. So thank you again, Andy, and thank you, guys, for hanging around for another podcast. Look forward to having you back for the next one. Have a great day. 

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