How To Let SEO Determine Your Content Strategy ...with John McDougall

Summary

In this episode, Jeffro interviews John McDougall, a seasoned SEO and content marketing expert, discussing the evolution of SEO, the importance of consistency in content creation, and how businesses can leverage podcasting and YouTube for SEO and lead generation. John emphasizes the need for strategic content planning, the role of AI in the future of SEO, and practical tips for optimizing multimedia content to enhance visibility and engagement.

Takeaways

• Being consistent in content publishing is crucial for SEO.
• Quality content should be strategically linked in topic clusters.
• Podcasting can be an effective tool for SEO and lead generation.
• YouTube videos should be optimized with relevant keywords.
• Video content can significantly improve Google rankings.
• AI tools can assist in content creation but should be used wisely.
• Competitive analysis can streamline keyword research.
• Content without a clear strategy is less effective.
• Planning ahead is essential for successful content marketing.
• The future of SEO will increasingly involve AI technologies.
  
  

Chapters

00:00 The Evolution of SEO and Content Marketing

07:06 Leveraging Podcasting for SEO and Lead Generation

14:08 Optimizing YouTube for SEO Success

24:15 The Future of SEO in an AI-Driven World

Links

https://talkmarketing.com/

https://www.mcdougallinteractive.com/

Free Website Evaluation: FroBro.com/Dominate

Transcript

Jeffro (00:01.479)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, we're diving into the intersection of SEO content and multimedia marketing with someone who's been in the game since the early days of digital. My guest is John McNewgle, a seasoned SEO and content marketing expert who's been helping professional service firms rank higher and attract more business since 1995, which is way before most people even knew what SEO was. John has written three books, including a college textbook on SEO and content marketing. And today he's here to share how businesses can leverage

podcasting, YouTube and SEO for maximum impact. If you've ever wondered how to create content that actually moves the needle, you won't want to miss this one. So John, welcome to the show.

John McDougall (00:41.516)
Welcome, thanks, yeah, sounds good.

Jeffro (00:44.957)
Well, I mean, John, you've been doing this since 1995 when the internet was barely a thing. So let's start. I'm curious for your thoughts on what is one core SEO principle that has never changed despite all the algorithm updates and new trends.

John McDougall (00:59.062)
Number one, being consistent, you know, because if you don't keep publishing content, you're gonna be seen by Google as flaky basically, and you're just, your ranks are gonna drop off. So all the fancy AI and all, you know, everything that changes, that doesn't change.

Jeffro (01:19.826)
So when you say consistent, does it have to be like a certain cadence? Like is daily better than weekly or does it just matter that you're consistent with when you do it?

John McDougall (01:27.232)
I think most important, even if it's once a month, mean, a lot of small businesses struggle to do huge volumes of content. if, if, if your cadence is once a month, I'd rather see people do, you know, a monthly really good article or podcast video, whatever that's your weekly blog post. I are monthly blog posts in that case, that was a little more in depth and robust, you know,

tied strategically to a topic cluster or like, I'll an example. We work with some HVAC companies and so we've attacked a couple of brands like with content, you know, adding content on like Mitsubishi, Douglas, LG. So we got a new HVAC client and the first thing we did was we wrote 12 articles strung together Wikipedia style on LG, Douglas systems.

So like a pillar page generally talking about, these are like the 11 flavors of LG, Duckless, whatever's. then, so this pillar page is designed to generally just a couple of paragraphs about each of the main things you'd wanna know about LG, maybe the different models or brands or compared to Mitsubishi or.

whatever, and then you click read more about Mitsubishi versus LG or LG Red for New England, super cold weather where you need a different type of system. Those are sub pages or cluster pages of the topic cluster. So you might say, man, that's a lot. did that like in the first month, you know? Well, okay, you could do that for the year. But you'd be better off to have...

12 articles on a strung together theme or topic that were interlinked together from the general pillar page that like a table of content, like it's like a small book. In fact, you can turn it into an ebook and you can even do the content from podcasting, which we can get into. But, you know, let's say you wrote the articles. If you if you launch the pillar page every the next month, the first two paragraphs to talk about

John McDougall (03:45.742)
You know, the general concept or maybe about LG red or versus Mitsubishi, whatever the first chunk of stuff you were talking about of the 11 or 20 or five, whatever your topic cluster is, you know, whatever amount of sub pages makes sense. then put a link next month. Cause now you have an article that you're launching next month. You know, when you, when you launch it, you can put a link from this page. And at the end of the year, you'll have had 12 monthly articles on your blog.

But then Google will see at the end of the year and they'll see it building. But at the end of the year, when people search for, you know, LG heat pump installation, Sacramento, California or San Diego, whatever it is, that pillar page could pop up and possibly if they're searching for LG red.

you know, tips or YLG Red or LG, LG Red California, what, you know, something like that. It's either going to be that pillar page or maybe the LG Red page that pops up, but it's more likely to come up because it's networked. Think like whenever you've gone to Wikipedia, right? You're like history of Scotland. Next thing you know, you're like, well, bagpipes and Highlanders and swords and you know, and you start clicking next, you're lost in the spider web of things.

But Wikipedia ranks pretty well for a lot of stuff because Google sees it as, you know, this like deep cluster of stuff that's pretty well, you know, really well linked together and organized as opposed to the average small business owner and service companies. You're just trying to get that heat pump installed or get the dental work done for your client, you know, and you're like, you know, just blog, you know, like all this stuff just goes up and it's kind of haphazard. And I think since chat GPT.

came out, it's been even worse where that's just not doing a lot, you know? I mean, anyway.

Jeffro (05:41.84)
Yeah, they're creating content, but there's no internal link structure. There's no strategy there to connect it all. So it's just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall.

John McDougall (05:45.954)
Right.

John McDougall (05:50.55)
Yeah, and sometimes we're even guilty of it because we have clients that pay us for 15 articles a month, 13 articles a month. And you say to the writer, okay, do 12 on LG. Let's do this topic. You really map it out. And then you kind of get a little lazy and you're like, hey, right. Okay, another 10. Give me a 10 more. Like, what do you want them on? Pick something, you like you pick, you know, I mean, the best thing is when you're really brainstormed together and map it out. But sometimes it doesn't happen.

And when you do that, I think it's less effective. I think it's nice that there's something on your blog regularly if your writers are just going for it and churning out content. 10 years ago, yeah, because 10 years ago there were less people hardcore blogging. I mean, they were. Now it's just so much content. you're not strategic, you can't really get away with it anymore being lazy.

Jeffro (06:31.052)
Strategy matters. Yeah.

John McDougall (06:47.018)
shitloads of content isn't enough anymore. Sorry.

Jeffro (06:49.828)
That makes sense. Well, let's talk about one of the other ways to generate content. So podcasting, you know, that's gotten really popular in recent years, but a lot of businesses still see it as just a brand awareness tool, not necessarily an SEO play. So can you talk a little bit about how you can use a podcast to help with your Google rankings and even lead generation?

John McDougall (06:54.498)
Yeah.

John McDougall (07:06.454)
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I wrote this book from podcasting and it was two hours of me and not to be like Mr. Pitch, know, like buying my book. But, you know, I think it's relevant to say that, you know, well, I'll step back in time and just tell this as a little bit of a story because I think, you know, not as a pitch that it makes sense. My first book took me three or four years to write and I spoke at Harvard and I said, how stupid was that? It took a long time.

Jeffro (07:17.007)
Mm-hmm.

John McDougall (07:36.054)
You know, so like, wow, wrote this big book. Yeah, but it was a nightmare. And I have to work with an editor and they're like, another hundred pages. And I'm like, geez. After I finished the book, I realized, I've got to get an editor to help. And then it's like, they have problems with some of the stuff I did. Now we're going back and forth on so much content. Now that became a college textbook for five years and got me all kinds of business. I've mailed it out to thousands of people.

And that was very effective, but kind of difficult. This book, Content Marketing, I say, with law firms took half that time to write. This book took almost no time to write. Talk Marketing, because it's a book on talk marketing. So we should use talk marketing to make the book, right? So John and I, my right-hand man, it was.

Jeffro (08:26.851)
Yeah, makes sense.

John McDougall (08:31.022)
I woke up one morning with a whole like, you know, in a flow state, kind of like, I get this idea for how this book's going to be structured to teach people about how podcasting and YouTube can be used for SEO. So I made some, some concepts for eight, 10 to 15 minute podcast interviews that would make the table of contents for the book. But

The way that we do it now, that was more manual. If you wanted to write a book and do this more easily, you just go to Chat GPT or Google Gemini or your favorite AI tool and you say, write a table of contents for a book about HVA services in Southern California or something. Say, oh, here's a table, your guide to, might even suggest the titles, your guide to HVAC services.

And I usually say like a six chapter book. This was like a 15 minute podcast. So that would have been eight chapters. The average small business owner, say, you know, think about developing blog content. Like, okay, the next six pieces of content. It's a good little chunk because you can do an hour and a half without burning out pretty readily. I mean, in our average lawyer, dentist, HVAC company can do this, you know.

especially when they get the hang of it. I have a dentist who might knock out 10 podcasts in a couple hours, pretty amazing. The average person after six, it's like kind of a long hour and a half or two hours. But it's quite realistic to say, okay, chat GPT, give me the table of contents for a six chapter ebook about HPAC services installation for Southern California. Okay, bang, it's gonna spit it out like.

you know, hey, was shocking, like a pretty good concept. Now I was super specific with my book and I've written books, so I did a little different, but we've done this for dozens of people where they're like, damn, that's a pretty good six chapter table of cards. Cool, let's go with that. Maybe tweak it a little bit. And then you follow that up with, you know, even if you tweak it and throw it back into AI and say, hey, here's a cleaned up version.

John McDougall (10:53.612)
you know, now give us five podcast questions for each of the six chapters. You know, just spits it out. And then usually the AI comes back with like these two part kind of long podcast questions. I like to just cut them in half or like shorten them up a little bit. And John, my right hand man does our podcasting with clients, but you know, that's pretty effective. Like for the average small service business owner, really, I mean, we've done it with big companies too.

But you can pretty quickly get this little six-chapter or six-part chunk of content that you know that if you choose after you do the hour and a half of six 15-minute little mini podcast interviews about the six topics in the book, those can be given to a writer to turn it into, either just use AI like Descript to

get the transcript and then put those up individually as blog posts so that Google sees, you know, the SoundCloud player or whatever lips and whatever player the transcript underneath it. And if you want to write like nicer show notes and put a little plus minus sign for the transcript, if that's, you know, looks nicer, you can do that. You can have the writer clean up the transcript to make bold headings. So the questions aren't just all like a big wall of text.

Jeffro (12:15.158)
Mm-hmm.

John McDougall (12:18.062)
But that's kind of the process. Like, you know you're going to get six blog posts out of it. Why not make it an ebook too while you're at it, right? You know, because... and a topic cluster. So back to what we first started talking about. So be strategic. Kill five birds with one stone. You know, you're going to make a little ebook. Later you, you know, again, you're going to give the six audio files with the video to... you can give to your agency like you or...

Jeffro (12:25.686)
Yeah.

Jeffro (12:44.833)
Mm-hmm.

John McDougall (12:47.886)
If people want to use people in the Philippines and have it done, you know, super cheap, or maybe they want to learn it themselves, you know, you can teach them audacity or iMovie or whatever. you know, or just say, you know, to, your agency, if you don't want to do it yourself, say, Hey, if you're, if you're, if you're paying for SEO 500, 1000, 2000, 3000 a month.

A lot of the agencies at that level don't do an awesome job. You know, they might do okay, but they might be kind of keyword stuffing or getting bad links and things like that. But if you come in and say, Hey, if you, if you like them and they're pretty technical and they keep things together on your site, maybe they write some content say, Hey, I'm going to knock out this hour and a half every other month. And I'm going to give you access to Riverside or Squadcast. You log in, download the

the audio and video files, turn that into a weekly blog post with the podcast player, the transcript, and then you could make a short out of each of the five questions. You can make a summary video. So it's like six videos for every podcast. They're not like the best videos on YouTube, but yeah. So anyway, so that's really kind of what we call talk marketing is like the average service company.

Jeffro (13:48.47)
Sure. Yep.

Jeffro (14:00.171)
Yeah, so.

John McDougall (14:08.682)
knows what they're talking about, they're passionate about what they do, they're not going to sit down and write. And even if the agency's writing, the agency or they can supplement the content pretty effectively with the strategy and generate topic clusters of content that gets you through the whole year with an hour and a half of talking every month. And then you end up with eBooks, with blog posts, with videos. Anyway, that's the idea.

Jeffro (14:33.336)
Well, that's a great strategy for business owners to create a bunch of content and then they have multiple ways to repurpose it like you talked about. Let's move into a different area. YouTube, know, it's the second largest search engine. But even when businesses do create videos there, they probably don't optimize their videos properly. So can you talk a little bit about how you what's a YouTube SEO strategy that helps your videos rank and actually, you know, get views and bring in traffic?

John McDougall (14:40.546)
Yep.

John McDougall (14:52.589)
Yeah.

John McDougall (15:02.466)
Yeah, so that's kind of at least two parts. One is like on your website and one is on YouTube, right? So number one, Google likes video and it's, I think it's almost not really optional if you're into SEO these days to like, well, maybe we'll do some YouTube. You know, it's kind of insane almost at this point because like if you use a tool like SEMrush and you look, you put it, you do keyword research.

And then you see the SERP features and for like pick a keyword like HVAC company, Santa Cruz or something, you know, and then it will say like for that keyword videos, know, videos, images, articles, you know, various things are what we were featured, what are being featured at the top of Google. So like, if you're not doing video and that's what's coming up, I mean, you have to have a screw loose. I do it too. So I.

making fun of myself, but you know, we're trying to be really conscious of that, that, know, whatever's in Google is what Google's favor. So, I mean, it's, you know, kind of makes sense. Like put two and two together. If there's map listings, if there's YouTube, if there's blog articles, if there's service pages, you know, what's there, you got to replicate that. And so I read a thing, I think it was Harvard Business Review years ago, put this thing out like,

They did a study like 50, you're 50 times more likely for a page to rank in Google if there's a video on it. I don't know if that's true 50 times, but you know, it's significant, you know, to have video on your website pages, especially if you use schema markup and you tell Google like, hey, there's a video on this page. And it's even more so of course, if it's like.

Jeffro (16:36.508)
significant.

John McDougall (16:52.706)
how to install LG Red or something. If it's a how-to or something, Google's gonna definitely rank that. But even just like solar installation services or something, like if there's a video on the solar company's website explaining the process of like helping you get started in like hiring a solar company and a little tool to like audit if you, like how much it's gonna cost to get solar, Google's gonna like that page better.

Don't disassociate entirely and be like, just it's all YouTube is separate from your website. That's what we try and start with because we come at it not from like we're the best YouTube people. come at it from we've been for three decades since 95. 96 is when I took an SEO class, 95 selling websites, but you know, trying to get people in Google. so

We're SEOs first, YouTubers second. There are certainly people way better than me at YouTube. like, so we have an HVAC company as another example where the owner was phenomenal. Like we would, he would podcast, we could show up and do video and he had a huge showroom with all these examples of Mitsubishi Douglas systems. And so before we show up to do the video, we pick the keywords. So number one,

Don't even shoot video till you pick the keywords. Because when you, you know, what are the steps to optimize the, the next step is on YouTube and YouTube studio. Like, like you got to make a title for your video, right? Of course, everything's got to have a file name and a title. That's anything you optimize is going to have that. But people, it's unbelievable how many YouTube channels we come to where small business service, professional service companies.

and they have these like half-assed names of their videos, like, here's Joe on Thursday, you know, like that's the title, you know what I mean? Like practice, you know, but we did one that was how to use the Mitsubishi Duckless remote control. We have a million views on how to use the remote control. It's insane, like we weren't even hoping for that. just, we're at over 2 million views for this HVAC company.

Jeffro (18:59.049)
You

John McDougall (19:20.438)
And we started with just talking head videos around keywords. We show up kind of like the podcast thing, like we're making topic clusters with a main keyword and all these sub keywords. We're doing all these audio interviews. Then we moved to video. Sure. There's video from the podcast, but we like to get real, you know, in quotes, real video too. so in-person video are always done with keywords in mind, script or no script. If people are good without a script, that's better.

If necessary, we'll write a script and use a teleprompter. And then you upload it to YouTube Studio and it's so much easier because the title is already like how to use the Mitsubishi Duckless remote control. We know that people search for that. So putting it in the in the title is both a value proposition, like you're going to learn something people are looking for and a keyword. So that's probably number one. Then, yeah, a description.

Jeffro (20:01.714)
Right.

John McDougall (20:16.45)
big mistake people make with the descriptions linking to their website because social media, they want you to stay on YouTube. know, like YouTube wants to stay there. Facebook wants to stay there. Early social media, we're all the SEO, all the SEOs were like, great. Another way to promote our link bait, you know? So click from Facebook, click from YouTube, go to the client's website. Unless you're really established and...

Again, I don't consider myself the leading YouTube guy of its own right, but that's my understanding of the algorithm is that unless you're really established, a link from your description can hurt you. So we're really hesitant to do that. Even the clients are like, of course, put the sale in there, you know, put the coupon or, the other thing is like, you know, putting the spinning logo at the beginning. You know, we used to put the, you know, title bar.

Log client logo, like at the beginning of a YouTube video, like, you know, uh, Joe's plumbing and heating and, and then it's like, then Joe comes in that those days are gone. Like you've got to jump like right in with like trying to figure out your remote. Here's how you do it. You know, you got to like start, you got to start right away. And so put keywords in the title, put a description with some keywords, make a good about us page on your YouTube channel that

says like come back every week for one long and one short video a week or whatever it is. So those are the basics. And then ultimately, if people don't watch the video, the ultimate YouTube algorithm is like watch time, you know, so like, you can pick keywords all day and you can jack it up with like, keywords and chapters are great, you know, like if you do those topic clusters, and you have a series of videos, the YouTube equivalent of links is sort of like the chapters and like go from one video to the next.

Jeffro (21:46.15)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (21:53.83)
Yeah.

Jeffro (22:07.334)
Hmm.

John McDougall (22:09.166)
But yeah, then it comes down to like, okay, the old SEO days of like just quick talking head videos around the keyword with the client logo at the beginning and the end that's kind of died down. Yeah. Yeah, don't brand it. You know, don't worry about the brand is they're on your channel. So you know, you can say little things like subscribe tiny bits after anyway.

Jeffro (22:21.627)
Yeah, you got to get right into the content now. People are, they'll move on.

Jeffro (22:35.527)
Yeah. All right. Well, that makes sense. And I thank you for giving us that overview, both on the SEO side and how it relates to YouTube. I think the biggest takeaway here is to plan ahead and pick your keywords and then create the content. Because if you're just creating stuff off the top of your head, it might not be what anyone is searching for. And even if it is, they might be using a different term for it. So you want to make sure you're using the right term that people actually are typing into Google. Otherwise, it's going to miss.

John McDougall (22:39.714)
Yeah.

Yup.

John McDougall (22:50.295)
Yeah.

John McDougall (23:00.088)
That's right.

Jeffro (23:03.502)
So if you want it to rank, gotta just plan ahead, do some keyword research, and then make your stuff.

John McDougall (23:09.61)
And a quick add on to that is to use SEMrush or any tool like that and put your competitors URL in and then export their keywords. So I'll put in like four competitors or five, and I can export up to 50,000 keywords. So I can just put in five HVAC companies. I got all the keywords that we could eat for like, you know, years, you know, in like one click. And then you can go through that and you can filter it by

you know, LG or whatever you're focused on. yeah, don't do keyword research, but also sometimes like save time by just doing competitive analysis, which gives you the keywords super quickly.

Jeffro (23:50.406)
Well, that makes a lot of sense. And I appreciate you being here today, John, sharing your decades of experience with us. For you guys at home, John's links will be in the show notes. So make sure to reach out to him, especially if you are based in Massachusetts. Check out his books. He's got a lot of stuff and ways he can help you guys. So real quick, last question for you, John. Give us the 30 second version of where do you see Google search and SEO going in the next few years?

John McDougall (23:53.666)
Yeah, absolutely.

John McDougall (24:15.232)
It's inevitable that AI is going to be a big part of it. And I wish that we could just say, you know, it's all, you know, original content by, by humans just doing it. It's not going to happen. mean, we have to face the fact that AI content doesn't rank great right now. Unless you heavily modify it, but just keep your eye on multiple AI tools, mix and match them, try things, but don't go just push button and throw content up. Cause that will hurt you right now.

but use AI and be prepared for that to be a big part of the future.

Jeffro (24:49.616)
Yeah, I agree. Makes a lot of sense. Well, thanks again, John, for being here. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you guys found this episode helpful, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. And in the meantime, keep working on your SEO and we'll see back here for the next episode. Take care.

John McDougall (24:52.478)
Absolutely.