Erik Dietrich

Nate Matherson: 

00:00

You and I have joked, uh, in that shared Slack channel that we've got set up about the, uh, the randomness in search. Uh, and it seems like websites will always have a subset of pages that just tend to underperform versus the rest of the website. Um, and you know, when I tell folks that they often look at me like I'm crazy.

And, and so how do you communicate that randomness, uh, to your clients when you get asked about it?

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Erik Dietrich: 

00:22

Some subset of articles will never rank, and you won't know why, but don't worry about that. The metaphor I like to use is You're a casino, like you're creating a game where the idea is you're going to win more often than you lose.

And if you do something like that, and you can trace it back to like good ROI, if you, if you're anything I think of in content marketing is kind of like a, from a game theory perspective, like Gambling almost except that you're creating games where you win more than you lose. And when that's true, you want to play as much as possible.

So what I tell them is if you create a hundred pieces of content, you can assume, you know, if you work with us, that probably 20 of them might hit the top three, maybe 60 of them will be on page one and, uh, 20 of them just will never rank and we won't be able to tell you why, but it's kind of like if you're the casino and some player wins a hand of blackjack, you don't.

Stop the casino and try to figure out why you lost that hand. You just move on because you're probably going to win the next one. Odds are.

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Nate Matherson: 

01:29

Hi, and welcome to the optimized podcast. My name is Nate Matherson and I'm your host on this weekly podcast. We sit down with some of the smartest minds in content marketing and SEO. Our goal is to give you perspective and insights on what's moving the needle in organic search. Today. I'm thrilled to sit down with Eric Dietrich.

Eric is the CEO of hit subscribe, a marketing services business and the author of an upcoming book. SEO for non scumbags on this week's episode, Eric and I chat through content, marketing, and SEO tactics. Specifically, we touch on the nuances of building a program for companies and highly technical spaces.

We will also chat about Eric's new book, some of his key learnings, and of course, the changing search landscape.

Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Optimize podcast. It's brought to you by Positional. If you don't know by now, my name is Nate, and I'm one of the co founders of Positional, and we've built what I think is a pretty awesome tool set for content marketing and SEO teams. We've got tools for keyword research, internal linking, content optimization, and even a couple of tools for analytics.

We'd love for you to check it out at Positional. com. Eric, thank you so much for coming on this week's episode of the Optimize Podcast. Sure. Thanks for having me. You know, the first question I ask all of our guests is, how did you get into the world of content marketing and SEO?

Erik Dietrich: 

02:55

I have a pretty meandering career path, so I'll try to abbreviate this, um, as best I can.

I would say that there's Three acts to my career, uh, act one, software engineering, uh, act two, independent management consulting, act three, owning the services business. Um, and act three is where I really got into that. The first part of my career, I have a degree in computer science. Um, and I worked as a software engineer and in that org chart, it's not super relevant to how I got here, except to say that during that time, I started a blog.

Where I would write about technical topics. Um, when I went into management consulting, I, um, I started to grow a following with that blog and write a lot about static code analysis, which was part of my specialty with that type of content on the blog that I was writing. I started to get outreach from some of the tools I used a lot, and they would ask me to write for their blog.

So. This went on for a while, and I was doing 100 percent travel, so I didn't have a lot else going on in the Courtyard Marriott Bistro, and I would write blog posts for these companies. After enough of that, and kind of with a combination of wanting to get off the road and away from 100 percent travel, my wife and I, she was an editor by trade, decided to see if we could turn, uh, what I was doing into a done for you content business.

This was back in 2017. And so we did that and that's how I wound up in content marketing. So I guess I had been doing it before, sort of by accident with the blog. And, um, then I got more and more deliberate about it as I was paid. And eventually we decided to make a go of doing it. And even originally the business had subscribed wasn't full time for me.

I consulted for a few years. The idea originally was that my wife would run the business, but there was a lot of demand for this and developer tools. So the business kept growing and demanding full attention. 

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Nate Matherson: 

04:42 

Yeah. A lot of our customers and a lot of the listeners of this podcast are in developer tool categories, you know, in developer tools, it's often very hard to go to market, uh, you know, it's hard to reach a developer with an outbound email, they might not see your ads, they probably don't want to click on their ads.

And so many developer tool companies find content marketing as a, uh, more organic way to start that conversation with a prospect or a potential customer. Um, and. You know, typically on the Optimize podcast, we end our episodes with a lightning round. We've done that for, you know, 50 plus episodes thus far.

But today I actually want to start with the lightning round. Does that sound okay to you? Sure. Let's do it. So the first question I have is on the Google leak. Do you have any quick thoughts or takeaways regarding that treasure trove of information that was released a few weeks back?

Erik Dietrich: 

05:35

The main takeaway I had when I saw that, I didn't really dive into a lot of detail on it, but I did read some summaries of it because I found that interesting, and it sure seemed like they're potentially paying more attention to user behavior and their measurement of it than they let on.

And the reason I noticed that is because that's kind of at the core of our SEO philosophy with hit subscribe is assume that They're able to determine what the users are doing, what the searchers are doing and, uh, make the searchers happy. So, I don't know, I guess it could be confirmation bias, but I saw that and I thought this seems like it's affirming, uh, the approach that we have.

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Nate Matherson: 

06:12

Absolutely. It, uh, it certainly affirmed, uh, you know, a few of the documents that got released towards the end of 2023, uh, as part of Google's antitrust hearing, which, uh, you know, clearly said that Google looks at reactions to documents to determine if they're helpful or not. But that was very contradictory to what Google had publicly said for a number of years, many, many years, actually.

As far as AI overviews go, these are also a relatively new SERP feature. Uh, my question here is, do you think, uh, AI overviews are going to dramatically impact, uh, traffic that, that publishers will receive either positively or negatively from the search results? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

06:56

I think it's certainly a possibility. I, I tend to approach things and try to stay out of the business of predicting the future too much, just cause, uh, I'd rather contingency plan about what might or might not happen.

But I would say. Given the power of generative AI, uh, I think it would be silly not to assume that it was possible. So, what, um, we've been thinking about from kind of a contingency perspective is to say more and more, uh, content is, um, displaced, if you will, by this. You know, what would be other distribution tactics for the content?

So, I don't know, I mean, um, it does seem like there are an awful lot of memes, sort of, Dragging the, um, previews over the calls with like funny things they get wrong. So I don't know if traditional content is going anywhere immediately, but I think over the longterm, it would be good to have backup plans for, uh, entries appearing in search.

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Nate Matherson: 

07:49 

Yeah. I'd have to think for your customers or many of your customers. And I know that you don't just work with developer tool companies, but I'd have to think for that, for the developer tool companies you work with, like the content they're creating, like the questions they're answering are often my.

Fairly in depth, um, you know, if like we were targeting a keyword, like, you know, what is a, a dog bed, you know, that, that keyword can probably get served by an AI overview, but something, you know, more nuanced in terms of debugging, like, uh, Kubernetes, uh, issue might, might not be as well served, um, I'm curious, though, like, are your clients, like, asking you about these AI overviews?

Is it something that's been coming up a lot lately?

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Erik Dietrich: 

08:31

Less than you might think. Um, We get questions from time to time about, um, you know, should we fulfill content with generative AI? That's a common one. To some extent, for a while, people seem to be worried about the AI overviews and SGE and everything, but it's calmed down.

I don't know why that is, but I haven't heard a lot of questions about it lately compared to, say, six months ago.

Nate Matherson: 

08:53

Yeah, I agree with you. It feels like more people were freaked out about generative AI in search with SGE than the actual rollout of AI overviews. Um, I don't know. That might be one of those like life principles where like you stress about something happening and then once it happens, like you're now not as stressed.

I guess I at least Personally, that's something that I, I tend to do. Um, I also want to ask you about the, uh, the helpful content system. You know, Google has this new classifier where they basically designate your website as helpful or not. You know, there's been a couple of pretty volatile algorithm updates over the last like nine months.

Um, I'm curious, do you think like this new helpful content system or classifier is, is here to stay? Do you think Google is going to roll it back to degree? Do you have any insights there? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

09:44

I don't have much insight into what they're going to do. And interestingly, so, uh, with our clients, I have, uh, I have no idea how many analytics I'm able to monitor, um, through our client analytics.

We don't typically see much happen with algorithm updates. And I kind of attribute this in general to the ethos of a lot of these clients, especially in the developer tools world of trying to create helpful content anyway. Um, so. I sort of think that everything I understand about Google calling for helpful content seems to coincide with the principles of good content marketing in general.

And if you do all that, um, I think you probably ought to be in good shape, especially because even if, you know, they just had an AI widget that replaced the entire search, if you're helpfully answering people's questions, you can distribute that content through other means. Um, so for my money, I would think it would be here to stay because it just seems like good advice for creating content.

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Nate Matherson: 

10:39

Yeah. Distributing that content through other means, I think was a core point in your statement. I think that you and like many of your clients create great content, but like organic search isn't the only distribution channel. And, uh, but that's not necessarily the case for, you know, many websites that, that I've gotten caught up in these updates.

Um, but we're through the lightning round. That was nice and easy. We might start off future episodes with the lightning round. That was a little fun. But I do want to talk about your new book just to kick things off. Um, so you're about to release a new book. It's called SEO for non scumbags. Can you tell us about that and what led you to write this book now?

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Erik Dietrich: 

11:15

Sure. Um, I actually started writing it in installments and put it up on, um, the blog for my old consulting site, dead tech. And really the Genesis of this was, especially with the aggressive sounding title, which I do stake out a position on, but. SEO is kind of a, um, I guess a PR problem, uh, among a lot of technical founders.

So a lot of people would come to us and say things like, I understand you have to play this game. There's good content and then there's SEO content. So there is this PR problem. And I found myself in a lot of conversations where I was saying. You can create content and bring search traffic to your site without doing, you know, horrible things that create like collateral bad in the world and spam and all that.

So that's really the position that I'm taking. And so there is a marketing angle for our business, which is, this is how we do things. We don't spam your audience. We don't use, you know, gray and, Darker gray and black hat type tactics like you can actually create content that answers people's questions and also rank So that's kind of the idea is to differentiate these tactics and it's especially necessary I think among like technical founders and people in developer tools in that space Because I mean speaking for myself a lot of years early in my career as an engineer and then blogger My exposure to seo was mostly through things like comment spam link building spam So it you know You A lot of techies are exposed to it first and foremost in those unpleasant ways.

So the book is kind of a way to say, like, you can still reap the benefits of the channel without doing things that you give someone money and say, I don't want to know what you're doing. 

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Nate Matherson: 

12:52

You know, we work with clients, you know, we're not an agency. We're just a SaaS tool, but I talk to our customers pretty regularly.

And I would say like out of all of the industries that we serve, uh, I would say developer tool companies tend to. To call it SEO content more than any other industry. Like they'll say to me, Nate, like we want to hide our SEO content from our blog role. We don't want people to see it. Um, we actually want our good content on our blog role.

And I have to like argue with them. I'm like, you know, you can create great content and it can serve a keyword just because it's like trying to serve a keyword doesn't mean that it needs to be of some lower quality bar. Um, You know, going off script a little bit quickly, uh, do you ever have clients that like say that same thing to you?

Like we want to hide our SEO content and then like, what would your response to them be? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

13:43

Sure. I hear that a lot. And I think, especially in developer tools, there's some nuance to it because in some cases I could see, I don't know about hiding it, but decoupling it from the blog and positioning it as glossary or, um, you know, that maybe you have a guest blogging tutorial exchange or something of that nature.

And the reasoning for that is, I'll encounter a lot of brands that whatever their opinion of SEO may be, they're wanting to put out Advanced content that appeals to sophisticated advanced users. And that's often kind of inharmonious with SEO content, a lot of which is beginner premises. So, um, you know, how do I do X or what does this mean are typically things that individual contributors maybe on the beginner end would search for.

And if on their blog, they're wanting to put out thought leadership about the latest and greatest stuff with, you know, DevOps or whatever they're doing. You might want to segregate those two types of content and distribute them in different ways. But the thing that I try to tell them is distinguish between whether the premise is beginner and for SEO and whether the content is substandard, if you will.

You can create really good, helpful content about beginner premises that looks good on your site. So that's the real distinction that I try to draw there. But if you're saying, I want to, you know, go out and create some garbage content and then hide it, like, why are you Doing that at all. It's not going to, if you're creating garbage content, it may get people onto the site, but it's not going to do anything productive with them once they're there.

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Nate Matherson: 

15:19

I've asked this question to a few of our guests. Uh, can you define helpful content or how do you define helpful content for your, for your clients? Like what makes for a great piece of content? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

15:29

The way I would explain it in a vacuum, unless they're bringing editorial concerns to us if we're doing the fulfillment, but I would say, think of the content this way, it's, it's hard to define it in, you know, terms of like, a checklist or what's in the post, but imagine, um, and this is the sort of underpinning of our philosophy, I think that anytime somebody Googles something, they're asking a question and just omitting it.

Terms, so they're asking an abbreviated question. Helpful content is content that answers that question, and I would think your true north is, it answers it in such a way that when the searcher gets onto your site and they read all the way down to the bottom, they then close the tab because they're thinking, Oh, I'm good.

I mean, ideally, they take a call to action or something like that, but the thrust is the same, that they read your content in depth, and then they feel that their question has been answered and they don't need to do any further research. 

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Nate Matherson: 

16:21

We were talking a little bit about the book offline, and you told me that most folks just need to figure out what questions people are asking the search engine and answer those questions on a site that doesn't suck to visit.

Uh, so my next question is what makes a site suck to visit? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

16:39

I can think of a few categories of things, um, and, and what I'm talking about with this, this is kind of a tongue in cheek fashion. I said, like, this is our, you know, million point SEO value bomb. Answer people's questions, do it on a site that doesn't suck to visit, you're mostly there.

Um, and what I mean by that second part is, So, the way that, I mean, it's kind of a, um, hard to define, but you know it when you see it, but I can bucket it heuristically. One common and easy to reason about way that a site is unpleasant to visit is if it takes a long time to load or you have layout shift.

A lot of the stuff that you'll hear, um, about from a performance perspective for SEO is also just good user experience, so. If the site loads slowly, if it has performance problems, technical issues, that's a problem. If, um, I think of another category, and this is especially relevant in certain sectors of, like, B2B.

If you are really going heavy on trying to move people down the funnel, so you're flying out pop ups and you have advertising and other stuff. Somebody gets onto the site and they're just accosted by, you know, things of that nature, or maybe it's inadvertent and they get onto the site and you have a huge header graphic, so they can't even see any content at all.

All of those types of things are unpleasant for people getting onto the site. And I think of it as anything that makes people inclined to smash the back button And then there's other things that could just be in the post that are hard to define and it gets you know More into the weeds, but I mean I see all kinds of things like you accidentally have light gray on white font or something You know It's just really I think of it as anything If I were going to take a look at somebody's site and imagine myself as the searcher Is there anything that makes me not want to consume this content?

Uh, notwithstanding the substance of the content itself, but anything else around, uh, or about the site that is making you inclined to go to another site. 

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Nate Matherson: 

18:28

Yeah. You have just that split second to convince someone to like, want to keep reading your page. Uh, you know, you might have the best blog post of all time, but if someone lands on your webpage and their initial feeling is like, I should not trust this website, I should find something that's a little bit easier to read.

They're not going to read your content. And it goes back to that point we were making earlier, like Google is looking at signals in terms of how people react to documents. And if we just have a split second, we need to do everything we can to make it easy for someone to keep reading. Um, you know, I'm not a dark mode guy, but like we work with a lot of developer tool companies and I land on their blog and it's like a wall of black and there's like no images, it's white font.

I don't know, like, how do you feel about dark mode in developer tool blogs? Should we, should we make something a little bit more easy? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

19:20

I mean, so I have to separate my past as an engineer because I cut my teeth on Linux very early in my career. I was all dark mode all the time, even to this day, like I have a browser open in dark mode.

That said, I don't know how much I would endorse in a vacuum creating a site that was white text on black. Because I think that risks being, I mean, it might make you stand out, but from a searcher perspective, you might turn people off if you're going to do it. You might think about AB testing it or something to see, you know, what kind of results you get.

I would be leery of it, but that's my take. And it's probably kind of a strong take, given that as a consumer, I would rather see things in dark mode. 

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Nate Matherson: 

20:02 

Yeah, you know, I, uh, I wish, like, developer tool companies, uh, invested a little bit more. This is probably a general statement, but I feel like we should all think, like, B2C companies sometimes.

And in terms of, like, our blogs, the layouts, the UX, UI, I feel like it's often better. Done. Anyways, rant over. Um, I want to talk a little bit about competition, uh, cause I know you compete in some competitive categories. Uh, what do you think about competition in the SERPs or, you know, I've heard you say in the past keyword win ability.

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Erik Dietrich: 

20:34

Three, four years developed this model for taking a site and, um, recording its domain authority and then recording the difficulty of pull it out of Ahrefs for keywords. And essentially, modeling out where do we think this site should expect to wind up in the search results, ranking wise, um, if they target this keyword.

And that's the, the core of what we think of as winnability. So when we're working with clients, we're modeling and projecting out where we think that client would rank. And if you're curious, um, I did essentially a best fit. I have my background is in computer science and math. Um, so I channeled a little bit of that background and built a model that was essentially a best fit over a bunch of historical client data of different domain authorities, uh, as to where they would rank.

And it does fairly well in aggregate for projecting. Where it's reasonable to expect ranking. So that's the win ability piece. And what we'll do, and we're talking to clients is list out a bunch of keywords that we're both looking at together and say, we're projecting you in position 15 for this keyword.

That's a risk. If you target this, you could write a 5, 000 word pillar post. You might build a bunch of backlinks to it and still not rank. Do you want to do this? Sometimes the answer there might be yes, but at least we're going into it with reasonable expectations. But what generally winds up happening, we project rank and traffic, uh, based on click through rates and.

If you're off of page one, there's no click through rate to be had. So when clients see that zero projected traffic, they tend to steer towards winnable keywords. And a lot of our methodology, especially in developer tools, where, um, it's me and two other full time, uh, staff members that used to be software engineers as well, um, given that we have that kind of in our, We can work with clients to say, look, here's the set of terms that are currently winnable for your site.

And even if they're not exactly what you want to go after, we can still bridge the gap into nurture with the right kinds of calls to action. So for us, to answer your question, winnability is of paramount importance because We want to work with clients to get them, you know, I mean, obviously results, but like to also set expectations for when you can expect to have results.

And you can't really reason about what to do with your traffic on your site until you have traffic to your site. So we want to keep an eye on how quickly that's happening. 

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Nate Matherson: 

22:51

Yeah, especially for those early stage startups. Like they need to get that like quick win or feeling that like it's working. Um, and then, and then they'll kind of get addicted to it.

Uh, but if like they target like just totally unwinnable keywords out of the gate, it can be very, uh, I don't know, uh, demeaning. Um, I, I have a question from like an agency standpoint, uh, and I've never like worked, uh, at an agency or for an agency, would it be more fun to like start an engagement with a client?

That's like, you know, like a DR 80, but like they just haven't focused on SEO or would it be more fun to like start working with a client that let's say no one has ever heard of before. 

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Erik Dietrich: 

23:32

We have been in both situations any number of times, the, the high DR clients that we work with where they've never focused on SEO and they start to, it's really, it's probably like the feeling of climbing into some insane muscle car or something and starting to drive.

It's just like, Oh man, this is so easy. And like, you can go from zero to a hundred thousand visitors a month for this, you know, corpus of content, like nothing, like it's powerful. Just, you know, you see top front page in a week or two. Yeah. So that's fun in a sense. I would say that's fun because you can just pick your terms and rank the, you know, site starting with like a, you know, one DA or whatever it actually starts with when it's brand new, that's more rewarding, especially because one of the things we'll do, um, if the client would tolerate it as to actually.

Fully call out the question. So we think of these as response posts, like if their question is fully baked and typed out, like what is whatever they're typing that into the serve, you mirror that question back to them. A lot of times, those are ranked surprisingly quickly and give a little bit of traffic more than the tools would indicate.

And when you're doing that, the sort of reward of taking a site from nothing and building traffic to it is, uh, I think I would probably pick that in a vacuum.

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Nate Matherson: 

24:55

And now just a quick word from one of our sponsors. Actually our only sponsor. That is positional. com. Positional has what I think is an awesome tool set for content marketers. We've got everything you need to To take you from start to finish and help you scale this channel as I've done over the last 11 years of my career.

We'd love for you to check it out at positional. com. You know, I found that the keyword research tooling that exists is often like quite challenging for developer tool companies like typically, and you can tell me if you've, you see it differently, but I'll typically like find that the search volume estimates for given keywords are just like Um, you know, when I was building a blog in the Kubernetes space, like I, I found that like the search volume estimates for specific keywords to be targeted were like off by a magnitude of like five to eight X, uh, depending on like the SEO tool you were using.

Um, and I think it's because like developers just are not as well represented in like the population of searchers in which like the search engine marketing tools like aggregate to project search volumes. And so a question that I always get asked by developer tool companies is like, how do I, Find keywords, like maybe if it's not as clear.

And so I'm going to ask you, like when you're working with a client, you mentioned identifying those questions that people are asking to search engines. Uh, how do you determine what those questions are? Or like, what is your process to like scoping a content calendar for a new client? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

26:28

It can vary a lot depending on their editorial preferences, but I'll set that aside.

Um. If well, we can kind of think of two things. If the client has an idea of keywords that they want to rank for, what we'll do is map those keywords to the questions we think that people are asking. And that helps us pick the kind of content that we would write in order to address that question. So that's one aspect of it.

So if they want to. You know, do a comparison. We reason that usually if somebody's Googling two nouns, they're asking what the relationship is or which one of those things they should pick. So we trace that out in our briefing, um, to make sure we're answering the right kind of question. If we're doing wholesale, like freeform keyword research for a client where they're saying, for instance, I want to get Kubernetes engineers under the side, what should we do?

That, in particular, would be easy to think of that as kind of a tool user campaign, so you can just plug Kubernetes into Ahrefs or some tool like that and see what it suggests, and then, you know, document the particulars of the keyword. But, um, if they're really early stage, a lot of those keywords won't be winnable.

Another thing you can do for very early stage content is to start typing into Google and see what Google auto suggests. It's been my experience that even if all the tools say that a term is zero volume, if Google is suggesting it to you, it has volume. And we actually even, um, there's a site called make me a programmer that we built this kind of a community site and like content R and D lab, and.

Back in 2018, I want to say I stood up, um, 13, 15 articles or something targeting just long tail keywords that all had theoretically zero volume. And seven, eight months later, it started to tail up to about 5, 000 searchers per month landing on the site. So I guess that's kind of a wandering answer to the question, but, um, I would essentially use tooling or Google or something to kind of brainstorm and then, um, try to verify if the tools are saying there's volume, there's going to be volume, but the tools also all say zero when they just don't know.

And then I would go into Google and see if it starts to autocomplete whatever you're thinking. If it autocompletes what you're thinking, you can bet there's volume there. 

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Nate Matherson: 

28:39 

Yeah, I love that. And I have to pitch our product a little bit. Like we do have the autocomplete keyword search feature inside of our keyword research tool for anyone listening to this podcast.

Um, I, I agree with you. Yeah. Especially in the developer tool space, those long tail keywords that just appear to be like very low search volume can actually drive some really significant volume. And plus if like, They are like no search volume keywords, at least in an SEO tool. It probably means they're a lot less competitive to probably means that like your average SEO using a keyword research tool isn't, isn't going to target them.

I have to ask, like going off script a little bit again, you know, a controversial question, at least as far as this podcast goes, how do you feel about what is keywords? I'll give you an example. Like what is. The Kubernetes autoscaler are those like keywords that are just so high in the funnel, just a waste of time, or are they still worth going for?

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Erik Dietrich: 

29:35

Usually if we're going after a bunch of keywords that are definitional like that, what we're doing is working with a client on a glossary or a compendium. So they're not a client of ours, but the iconic example I go to for neutrality is always Atlassian's Agile Coach. So they have this whole content corpus, and it would be a weird look for Atlassian to blog about, like, what is a sprint or what is Scrum or something.

But they have it up on their site as a glossary, and so when they're promoting it, I'm assuming, like, we added this entry to our glossary, it makes sense from an editorial perspective. So then the question becomes, what does that content probably do for Atlassian? And if I had to guess, I imagine it's a very long play, they want to be the first project management thing that anybody sees when they're thinking of becoming a scrum master.

So there's value there. And I also think there can be value in larger companies, especially if they're marketing into the enterprise, to just show up in terms of brand awareness. So if you're googling everything related to Agile, and you're constantly seeing that brand that has some power. So I think if you're trying to attract people that are closer to a purchase, I don't know that I would be going with a lot of what is keywords.

It's a lengthy play. It's an expensive one. Those are more competitive, but I think it can have value depending on the organization's goals.

Nate Matherson: 

30:55

Yeah. You know, I not found in my career, like often those keywords, if you can rank for them, we'll accumulate backlinks like maybe more naturally than, um, You know, a piece of content that's further down the funnel, and then we can use internal links in a strategic way to, you know, bolster the rest of the content on our site.

Uh, yeah, you know, I was talking to a friend the other day who for the last two years has told me how much he hates what is keywords. Um, and then he, uh, he had a client that converted to like a six figure ARR deal from, from like a very basic, what is keyword? And it totally changed his mind. So. Um, it's, uh, yeah, it's a controversial question on this podcast.

You know, a question I always get asked specifically by developer tool companies is like, where do I find content writers? Um, because it's often more challenging to find folks who want to write technical content. They, they're both good at writing. They also have the technical chops. And so it's a question I always get asked.

I'm going to ask you, like, how do you go about finding, like, writing talent, um, for a client that, that maybe is in a more technical space?

Erik Dietrich: 

32:06 

So, HitSubscribe's content model from the outset was to create, like, a loose and large pool of, um, engineers that were interested in writing blog posts as a side hustle, so it was kind of low commitment.

That's what we've built over the years. And in full disclosure, uh, Angela, who runs our operations has been in charge of recruitment and owns that budget for a number of years. So I don't honestly know what we do anymore. But, um, as we've gotten more and more into strategy, diversified our offerings, um, I can speak to what I would do if we were brought into consult on like standing up your own program to attract engineers.

Or really like we've done a little work in commercial aviation, transportation, logistics, and developers is an interesting set, but like you could kind of generalize this to subject matter experts across the board. So if you, um, want to go find subject matter experts, the things that I would recommend doing, I think it's less important where exactly you recruit and more important how you structure the work with those people.

So like, let's say, Um, a company were in legal tech or something and they wanted to get lawyers to write for them. If you go out and you find lawyers that are participating in some kind of content activity, you can approach them and ask them to write for you. And what I would recommend doing is then bringing in editorial to your process and other review concerns that acted more to serve those SMEs than is like red pen.

Don't treat them like copywriters. Treat them like guest bloggers. The reason I'm framing it that way is because I think, and this is true in developer tools, when, when organizations stand up programs to try to solicit authors, they needlessly create a lot of attrition when they could just frame how that content was positioned a little differently.

Like, I think the harder part isn't finding them, it's keeping them. So, that would really be my advice. I mean, from a nuts and bolts perspective, if I were going to go look for, um, developers, I would probably go to community sites like a D Zone or Dev2 and start there. Running ads for that kind of thing, I think, can work at, well, we used to run ads years ago on Stack Overflow.

Uh, I don't know where you would do that now, but Um, I, I don't think it would be hard, especially in developer tools compared to like commercial aviation. There's not a lot of like community pilot blogging sites, even though find them.

Nate Matherson: 

34:28

Yeah. I don't think any Delta pilots are writing blog posts. Maybe they are at like, you know, while they're in the air, they're just like, They've got the, they've got the autopilot on.

They're just cranking on their laptop, trying to earn a couple of bucks. A shout out to Delta best airline. They've sponsored this podcast. Now I'm, I'm totally kidding. Um, so I, you know, and I totally agree with you that like going out and like asking people to write for you has always been like my favorite strategy versus something like an Upwork.

Like, you know, if you go to our blog, you'll see Lizzie's byline everywhere. And the way that I found Lizzie was I just, I had Googled like. One of the keywords we were trying to write about, which was like, um, SAS SEO. Like that's a keyword we wanted to target. And I saw that she had written an article that was ranking like fourth, uh, for that keyword.

And I just, I reached out to her and I was like, Hey, do you want to write content for us too? Um, I found a lot more success, a lot less trial and error than with that approach versus using something like an Upwork. You and I have joked, uh, in that shared Slack channel that we've got set up about the, uh, the randomness in search.

Uh, and it seems like websites will always have a subset of pages that just tend to underperform versus the rest of the website. And, you know, when I tell folks that they often look at me like I'm crazy and, and so how do you communicate that randomness, uh, to your clients when you get asked about it?

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Erik Dietrich: 

35:51

Generally with organic content campaigns, like content marketing, um, we set a lot of expectations out of the gate. So one of the things that I'll do when I'm on a discovery call with a client is, Uh, look at their domain authority and say, okay, first of all, you can probably expect Uh six months before something hits the front page or you know, whatever based on their domain authority So that's one bit of expectation.

This takes a while. The other thing that i'll tell them is Um some subset of articles will never rank and you won't know why but don't worry about that The metaphor I like to use is You're a casino, like, you're creating a game where the idea is you're going to win more often than you lose. And if you do something like that, and you can trace it back to like, um, good ROI, if you, if you're Anything I think of in content marketing is kind of like a, from a game theory perspective, like gambling almost.

Except that you're creating games where you win more than you lose. And when that's true, you want to play as much as possible. So what I tell them is if you create a hundred pieces of content, you can assume, you know, if you work with us, that probably 20 of them might hit the top three, maybe 60 of them will be on page one and, uh, 20 of them just will never rank and we won't be able to tell you why, but it's kind of like, if you're the king of content, Casino and some player wins a hand of blackjack.

You don't stop the casino and try to figure out why you lost that hand. You just move on because you're probably going to win the next one, odds are. So that's how we talk about it with them. And that message is usually fairly well received. I mean, I think people generally think of the search engine as inscrutable anyway, so it's not unbelievable to them that they might not know why an article does or doesn't rank.

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Nate Matherson: 

37:33

Yeah, the odds might be a little bit better than 50 50, like it might be like, you know, it might be like, we're betting the pass line, uh, we're backing up our bet. Maybe a little bit better odds than like a 50 50 blackjack bet. We should do like a live episode from a blackjack table one day. That'd be a lot of fun.

Um, anyways, um, I, I want to ask you about those user signals that we discussed a little bit earlier. Um, you know, Google is often criticized for giving a lot of bad advice. And I'm curious, like, on a go forward basis, how much are you listening to the official statements from Google? Do you plan on listening to them at all?

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Erik Dietrich: 

38:16

Generally, we don't, and this is, I'm sure, controversial. I might get roasted for this. But I kind of think, you know, to continue the gambling metaphors, Google is, um, they have a proprietary algorithm. And they have incentive not to be entirely honest about how that works. I mean, otherwise it wouldn't be proprietary.

So, you know, out of the gate that they can't really be totally honest about how things work or at best they're failing to disclose or unwilling to disclose certain things. And I don't blame them for that, but. I start to kind of this is an imperfect metaphor But if I were sitting across a poker table from somebody and the other players cards I couldn't see started to say i've got a really good hand.

What do I do with that information? Maybe they're telling the truth and That's not the best game strategy or maybe they're bluffing or I guess the opposite Say i've got a good hand. Well, you know, whatever they're trying to trick me. Um, but Eventually lest I get into some kind of princess bride situation of trying to guess I just Think like, I'm going to ignore that statement.

It doesn't, I can't really act on it. Instead. I'm going to pay attention to what you do, what kind of bets you place and I'll tune the rest out. That's not, I mean, because Google has, you know, things that I could see them being helpful about with the advice they give, but generally speaking, we don't, if I started to see clients get hit with a lot of algorithm updates, I would probably dive into things that Google was saying and see if I could find an answer, but we don't really see that.

And so I don't tend to find it particularly beneficial to pay attention to An entity that I know isn't incented to be entirely transparent or honest So we just try to observe what is ranking what is and run experiments feed that data back into what we're doing It's pretty successful.

Nate Matherson: 

39:57

Yeah, and given that you have so many clients at this point, you can probably like get a a very Great perspective across like the clients and what's working versus just working on like a single site.

Say if you were at like an in house team.

Erik Dietrich: 

40:11

Yeah, that's so with access to, you know, maybe like 50 Google analytics at any given time, when people are asking us like, is something happening, is Google doing this? It's very easy for me. You know, in an anonymized fashion to say, either your site is an outlier and these other 49 don't see this or, hey, this looks seasonal, it's happening to everybody, I wouldn't worry about it.

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Nate Matherson: 

40:31

Yeah, and you know, one thing we've talked a little bit about has been backlinks and domain authority. Like, how important are backlinks these days? Is it something that you spend a lot of time thinking about with your clients? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

40:43

We'll do backlinking, like we have an approach that we do to that, which I want to throw out there in line with the non scumbag things.

We don't do outreach for it. Uh, we don't do any kind of comment. It's, it's all own properties or places that we can guest post or post content in a way that is in line with the spirit of the site. So we do it, but I don't socialize it except in a few specific situations. Like, for venture backed companies, their PR arm is going to naturally take care of earning them a lot of referring domains.

So kind of by default, the thing I would say to them is, we could go on a campaign to get you a bunch of new referring domains. We could accelerate the timeline that you would earn those anyway through PR. And the reason that we might recommend that is if we're having Uh, talk about what content to produce and they're really wanting to target a lot of keywords that are unwinnable, then we might say, okay, let's talk about a referring domain campaign because it solves a problem that you have, you know, as just a matter of course, I wouldn't recommend linking, I guess the other situation where I might say, let's think about getting you some backlinks would be if they're targeting a difficult keyword or if they have a particular post and URL that they really want to rank.

Okay. We could think about giving that more of a chance out of the gate by creating a bunch of backlinks to it when it's published.

Nate Matherson: 

42:00

Yeah, I spent the first, like, six years of my career really stressing about backlinks. Like, they, I thought they were more important maybe than, like, quality of content. But, um, you know, with our current blog, uh, at Positional, like, we've spent, like, almost zero time thinking about backlinks.

And, It seems to be going in a positive direction. I, I, I don't know. It's, uh, I, it's frustrating sometimes when I, when I talk to early stage companies, especially, and they haven't done like those first two parts, right? Like they haven't, uh, you know, figured out what the right questions are and they haven't created great content.

And yet the first thing they want to do is go out and build backlinks. And I'm like, no, no, no, you got to do like the first, first two parts. Right. And then maybe then we can focus on some backlinks. And it sounds like you kind of agree with me there. 

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Erik Dietrich: 

42:47

Definitely. So I will say this as just, you know, for anyone listening, we have over and over and over again, built a lot of traffic to sites that have made no specific effort whatsoever to get backlinks.

You don't need to do it. It can help, especially in certain tactical situations, but you can absolutely earn traffic with zero effort put towards backlinks. 

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Nate Matherson: 

43:09

So we've talked a little bit about backlinks. They might be used strategically to like target a certain page, a certain keyword, maybe give it a little bit of extra juice, if that is a really important keyword to the client beside backlinks, say like I'm one of your clients and we've got a page that's, you know, ranking them the eighth spot for a keyword we care about.

It's on the first page, but it's really not made that much progress up the first page. What. What else can you do or like what else would you think about with that client if they said to you, Hey, we, we want to move up for this keyword. We don't want to build backlinks. What can we do? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

43:44

We've been doing a lot of this lately.

We think of these as refresh campaigns and I've actually been building out this, um, alpha offering that we're thinking of as content performance monitoring. So this is very top of mind. The first thing, procedurally, I would do if I'm looking at that 8th position is to say, How old is this? Like, when was the last time any major intervention here took place?

Like, did you just publish it 3 months ago? If it's recent, within the last 6 months, my bias might be, Let's leave it alone and see where it goes. Doubly so, if it has been gaining rank on average. Um, so the first thing I want to check is to see what the age of this is. Now let's assume it's older, and especially if it's declined into that position.

Now we would think about intervening with the URL. And there is a set of things that you could do from a best practices perspective on the SERP, like with the SEO title and meta description and then in the content itself. So we'll kind of run through a list like that, um, looking for low hanging fruit.

So I see a lot of wisdom, if you will, about SEO tactics, like, oh, you know, in the SEO title, you should make sure that, um, the keyword starts, uh, the title or what have you. And I think that's probably not the worst idea, but, like, really, it's about creating, you know, the user experience in the search results of the title and the meta.

So I'm going to look at that first and say, Does this seem to mirror the searcher's question? Does the meta have, um, assuming Google cooperates and puts your meta in there? Does it have a call to action that sort of promises, uh value from reading the article? That's the first stop then i'm going to look at the article and um, is it scannable?

Is there anything that's going to make me want to bounce right away? And so we'll run through a checklist of that nature now this is The offering that we call a standard refresh where we think that the content is You Mostly there and it's indicated by where Google's putting it, but you just want to nudge it across the finish line.

We're also doing something that we would think of as a comprehensive refresh. So let's say it's a particularly difficult keyword. It's in position eight and you've got some intractable longstanding ranking articles from high authority sites above it, we might want to take a more aggressive approach, and that's actually, these days, we're using a positional, as it were, to do a gap analysis, and that's basically, what are the ranking articles covering that maybe we aren't, and let's do an inventory of that, and then think about enlisting an author to add that type of content to the post.

So that is, at a high level, the set of tactics that we would deploy to bolster ranking aside from backlinks.

Nate Matherson: 

46:23

Yeah, specifically in developer tools, I feel like title tags are often forgotten. They don't maybe get as much love as they could. Um, and that's often the first place I look whenever I've got a URL that's Decently ranked, but we could move up a few spots.

I've just got two more quick ones for you, Eric, before I let you go. Um, I want to ask about, uh, undoing, like I'm sure you walk into some situations where like a client is. You know, they've, they've had a blog for like seven years and now they're bringing you in to help them with it. Like, what are like one or two of those things that like, you just have to undo or that you see come up that that's often problematic when starting work with a new client?

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Erik Dietrich: 

47:04

With larger clients, um, like late series or public clients, the most common thing that we deal with is extensive cannibalization. Maybe on the primary blog, they've talked about the same topic again and again and again, And at times they might have content silos where you have either different subdomains or just different tags that different groups are publishing to and they're cannibalizing So it's fairly common these days, especially as over the years.

We've evolved to do more technical seo type stuff for us to do a full on decannibalization audit Another common issue that comes up. I've literally had a conversation about this yesterday is Hey, we've lit our traffic on fire in some way through like a technical migration. We get that a lot. Like we went from WordPress to Webflow and you know, our traffic loss was about 80 percent two months ago and it hasn't bounced back or whatever the case may be.

Is that normal? And my answer is no, that's, that's not, uh, that's do you, you know, have the old staging site up still and it's being indexed, you know, so there's all, I think those are probably the two biggest, like red flaggy things. Um, They come to mind right off the top.

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Nate Matherson: 

48:17

Yeah, you know, I'm laughing because I shouldn't be laughing, but I was talking to one of our customers who will not be named, but they like migrated to a new CMS and they changed all of the URLs.

And they didn't 301 redirect like the old URLs. To the new URLs. And so they wanted to know why everything knows times. And I was like, you just, just gotta, just gotta implement a 301. I don't know how that got missed. You guys are engineers. Um, and the last question I have for you is, uh, complaining. I don't know if you're on SEO Twitter, but it feels like a lot of SEOs are complaining lately.

Saying things like SEO is unfair. Google's unfair. What would you say to those folks?

Erik Dietrich: 

48:58

I mean, I have some empathy, maybe, or at least sympathy, like, I don't share that view. But I kind of feel, a lot of people that get into SEO, it seems like it's, it's bound to attract, um, disproportionately people that like the idea of control, like, if I just execute this checklist, then good things should happen.

Uh, I think maybe because there's just so many Uh, like technical SEO type tactics that you can do. So I kind of feel like these are people who feel like they've been sold a wrong bill of goods. Like I took this course, I learned about SEO and, you know, I put the right number of keywords and I put the right age to, and I did all the things I'm supposed to do and it still didn't work.

Um, I don't think that's the healthiest outlook if you want to succeed at things, but I also understand that it can feel like. Probably extremely frustrating. I did everything right and I still lost. But I guess the thing I would say to them is, it's, I don't know what you mean by fairness exactly. Google is just trying to pick out content that will make people think around and use its search engine to view their ads.

And, you know, they're going to pick the things that resonate with searchers that doesn't really have anything to do with you. So it's kind of incumbent upon you to figure out what those things are.

Nate Matherson: 

50:10 

Eric, this has been so much fun. Uh, you're welcome back anytime. Uh, but I have to ask, how can our listeners, uh, you know, learn more about HitSubscribe or, uh, about your new book?

Uh, where can people go? 

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Erik Dietrich: 

50:23

Uh, in terms of easy to remember things via audio, if you go to Hitsubscribe. com, that's all one word. That's the business's website. And if you wanna uh, learn more about the book, right now there's blog posts up on my old site deadtech. com. If you just Google SEO for non scumbags, there's not a lot of competition for that term, so you will Find my site and be able to see more there.

And I'll update that URL with the actual book. Once I put it out, it's going to be a free ebook. It's just associated with our business and even in the channels that pay, I think I'm going to structure with the company to like do a charity or something like that, so it should be completely free to you when it comes out.

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Nate Matherson: 

50:59

Well, we will include a link, uh, to, uh, both URLs, uh, in the show notes. Uh, and yes, it sounds like a very winnable keyword, uh, SEO for non scumbags. Eric, thanks so much for coming on this week's episode of the optimized podcast. 

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Erik Dietrich: 

51:14

Well, thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun

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Nate Matherson: 

51:24

and that's a wrap. And I just want to thank our sponsor positional. They've got what is a pretty awesome tool set for content marketers and SEOs. They've even got a couple tools for social media. We'd love for you to check out positional and the tool set that we've created over the last 15 months at positional.com. And you can always reach out to me if you have any questions. My email is Nate at positional.com. Whether you've got questions about our tool set or comments and complaints, uh, or even positive feedback about this podcast, I'd love to hear from you. Um, and don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button, uh, wherever you are listening to this podcast.

Uh, thanks so much for tuning in.