Chris Thompson is the CEO and co-founder of Mike Mandel Hypnosis, a global online destination for world-class hypnosis and personal development training.
This week I had the pleasure of hopping onto a Zoom call with Dennis Yu. We had scheduled an SEO audit of my website. I went into the meeting thinking we were probably doing pretty well, but would naturally have some decent opportunities to improve.
Then Dennis started ripping through various reports from SEO tools, Google Analytics, and more. He beat me up. But I say that in the best possible way. I knew we had opportunities, but Dennis blew me away with just how much opportunity SEO offers us in our niche of hypnosis and personal development training.
The first thing Dennis pointed out to me was that we only have about 600 pages indexed in Google. For a global business offering online education, having been around for over 10 years, we should have a lot more text for Google to crawl.
Simply put, it’s like we’re showing up to a target shooting competition, and every time we hit the target we get website visitors. But we hardly have any ammunition, so we’re just sitting out of the competition most of the time.
To solve this we simply need to publish more content, which, as it turns out, is a relatively low-cost investment path compared to what we’ve been doing with paid ads on Facebook.
We’ve got three clear paths to get more traffic.
First, we can take the shotgun approach.
We have a huge library of content published in audio and video format. We’ve never published most of this in text format. So other than some lame (from an SEO perspective) podcast show notes, we’re just not showing up for a bunch of keyword competitions.
Solving this is something I can do with a bit of money, but thankfully without investing a lot of my own personal time. I simply need to build the proper support network of assistants who can take existing content and turn it into articles.
The second path is the sniper approach. Dennis showed us examples of keywords that we should be able to dominate with a little bit of work. These are keywords with reasonably high traffic, for our niche, that we have simply never written about.
Fixing this means researching the top-ranking articles, writing something better, and publishing it to our site. We’ve done this before, but we clearly need to snipe off more of these important keywords by writing best-in-class content.
We’ll approach this by hiring skilled writers to join us on Zoom calls, plan out the content, and give the writers access to the recording and transcription of the call, in order to pull together some killer content.
The third leg of our strategy is link building. Dennis pointed out that our overall link profile is pretty weak. If we put a bit of effort into approaching industry friends with custom-written guest posts, we can build more incoming links in an entirely ethical way.
After the SEO audit with Dennis, I sat down to do some back-of-the-napkin math. If we took the money we are currently spending on PPC traffic and simply invested that in original content creation for the next six months, we may well boost our organic traffic by 100%, which could drive 50% more revenue.
Considering the SEO benefits would be long-lasting, whereas buying traffic is a monthly expense just like household groceries, it seems like a total no-brainer to expand our traffic investments with content marketing.
If you’re reading this I obviously don’t know what opportunities exist for you in the SEO world, but it seems to me that it’s worth finding out.
Get a professional SEO audit. The return on investment could be superior to any paid traffic campaigns you are currently running.
