Beth Gladstone, Content & SEO Strategy Consultant
Stories are great. But stories with a bit of intention and a few hard stats behind them? That’s like putting a rocket under your words and whizzing them up to the Google stratosphere.
Beth Gladstone is a content and SEO strategy consultant. She’s also someone who knows how it feels to get back up and build something new in the face of extreme knackeredness and burnout.
We caught up to talk about how to make a content strategy, think about your customer’s journey and why walking the dog is totally important.
Beth, you went from freelancer to a content role at ScreenCloud and now back to freelancing. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Yes, I’ve always been a generalist marketer but more recently I’ve been specialising in content and SEO strategy for startups, mostly in tech. That mainly involves either going in right at the beginning of their journey and completely setting up what should be in their marketing flow or otherwise going in because they've got masses of content and they don't really know what's working. I try and “clean up” the historic content so they can move forward with a better structure and plan.
One of the questions people always ask me around content is whether I’ll write blogs for them but before I answer I always try and dig more deeply into why they want to do that and why they believe it will help them. What would you say - to blog or not to blog?
Yes, I hear that constantly too and where this comes from is that there’s a part of the Google algorithm that asks for new content but it’s actually not relevant to everyone.
If you’re a site like BBC News or The Daily Mail, everything you're doing is current, it’s about right now. Tomorrow those things that people clicked yesterday will be out of date so you constantly need new content for those kinds of sites.
But if you're not within that kind of industry it's a myth that you have to constantly publish new content. If ever you look at page one of Google, there'll be results from a couple of years back, even if someone has written something more recently on the same topic. Older content can still rank well.
People get into this mindset that we have to create new content but I tend to come at it from a completely different approach, especially when it comes to SEO.
When I work for a company I start with a plan that will be anything from 10 to 30 blogs for SEO and then obviously some sort of website roadmap and what should be on the website. Once that plan is complete we might not blog again specifically for SEO for two years because that should be all you need to bring in the traffic.
Instead we might blog around brand or customers, webinars, events. It's the things that we want to talk about that are currently happening and will build the brand but don’t necessarily bring in organic traffic.
Blogging every week for the sake of blogging means you’ll just end up with this whole backlog of content, do the same ideas twice and make your own content compete against itself. It’s a bit of a mess that’s come into the industry and it can be hard to break.
So, you’re saying that blogs are still a good idea but actually, you want to get those kind of really strong, evergreen bits of pillar content based around what people really want to know, not just keep churning stuff out?
Exactly. And don’t be afraid to have a plan that once it’s fulfilled, wait and see what happens and see how that content performs. See how many leads you get.
But trying to blog every single week for SEO is never going to be a successful strategy. You’re going to put out poor, thin content that Google ignores, just for the sake of saying you blog every week.
It’s a longer term strategy isn’t it? People have got to stick with it for a little while. How do you encourage clients to do that and measure if it's working as they go along?
That's always a conversation that I have up front with clients. If you just want a quick win then use Facebook ads or find a different tactic to bring people to your website. SEO is definitely a long game but it’s like paying into savings. What you put in now pays out in time to come in terms of traffic.
There are two things that I really track with SEO. The first one is the amount of leads or sales you’re getting from organic search - so many companies I work with have no idea where their sales are actually coming from.
If you go in to Google Analytics, you can set up goals that track a customer from their first point of entry to the thank you page you redirect them to once you’ve made a sale. For everyone that gets to the thank you page, Analytics will tell you if they came from Instagram or from Facebook and what was sold.
So that's the main thing I'd be looking at from an SEO perspective. How many leads and sales did I get from organic search traffic?
Google Search Console is another handy tool as well, maybe not as user friendly, but if you can just pick two or three functions that you know how to do, that's enough. You’ll be able to see where your website ranks for a key search term and over time, you should see incremental gains before it continues to improve.
What about e-commerce businesses if they want to get to grips with SEO? I know it can be complex but are there some easy wins there?
In terms of the structure of the website, I'd be looking at the product listings on the pages. Look at what the titles and the descriptions are.
Then in terms of the blog, I'd be looking to answer questions around the product. A really good example of this is Patch Plants. They’ve totally tapped into the millennial trend for keeping plants and have written all kinds of articles to answer the questions that people are typically asking Google around plants.
I typed a question into Google, ended up on their site and the next thing I know, I’m in their shop, spending £50! That shows the power of understanding your user’s search intent.
Answer the questions people have and really find out what they want to know. For example, if you're a jewellery brand and people are searching “What is the birthstone for Sagittarius?”, make a blog post that answers that in as much depth as possible.
If you can find out what those questions are, that maybe aren't directly related to your products but have a lot of interest around them, they’re the ones that will bring in traffic. I think that's the best place to start.
When there are so many platforms a business could publish content on, how do you help them to prioritise where and what?
Yeah, it's definitely a difficult one. I mean Instagram is now five channels in one. It’s actually a whole wealth of things.
I think the key is to not try to do everything. Choose one or two, maximum three channels that you want to use to connect to your audience and just focus on those. Use the channels that are actually truly effective for you.
One thing I think a lot of companies miss out on is that they focus so much on content creation on their channels but they they never actually look at the user journey. The whole point of using Instagram or a newsletter is probably because eventually you want a person to come and buy from you. But say that a potential customer goes to click on their website link from Instagram and it’s broken. Or they’re using Linktree but there’s no actual link into their shop.
They're putting all this content out, building all of this brand, but then the very basic user journey is broken. With your channels, yes, do the content but also focus on how people are going to get from your content to where you actually want them whether that's a newsletter or an inquiry form or a sale.
Do you think we're going to see some kind of saturation point with fast content where the world is just so noisy that everyone is sick of it? Or do you think that people are just always going to want that kind of content because it's easy and it's fast and entertaining?
Yeah, I agree with you. The content fatigue is real and I actually think that will promote the return to longer form content. So newsletters or blogs that are a bit more editorial and feel more like a magazine article.
Podcasts too. A podcast might be 40 minutes long or more and take a lot of production but think of the investment of time from a listener. No one is ever going to spend that long solely with your brand on your social media channels.
Unfortunately we’re just addicted to scrolling so I think fast content will always continue but people will also crave something longer that gives them more value.
I really hope that's true. Because in my worst moments, I've worried that people will basically stop reading and writing completely and to me, the ability to think and imagine and read is one of the wonderful privileges of what it is to be human. It's like we kind of don't need that any more. Everything is so fast and we can get it all in a bite-sized, two-second chunk - but is that necessarily a good thing?
Yeah, that totally resonates, what you just said there. That's what makes us human. It's the connection and the stories.
Can you tell us what a content strategy is? How can we start to make our own framework for content?
I think that having a framework is is a great place to start. When I talk about content I normally think about a website whereas a lot of people would think about social media. First of all I think you just need to look at your channels - your website, your blog, your newsletter, social channels. Think about what the user journey is on each one. Think about why people might be there.
Somebody on your website probably wants to buy from you. Someone on your blog might be looking for an answer to a question, somebody on Instagram might connect with your social mission. Understand your audience and each channel first.
The next level is then the content and it should be defined by the channel and the user on that channel. So for the companies I work with, we will hardly ever put the same content on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram because each channel has a different audience and is being used for a different purpose.
Yes, that’s why I love your approach Beth. I love how intentional it is. Once you’ve nailed those analytics and intentions I think that’s where creativity can start to run wild.
Yes, absolutely. That’s one of my values. Whenever I work with companies I don’t want to be wasteful. I don’t just want them to post on Instagram every day because someone told them they should.
There needs to be purpose and it doesn’t have to be about making money. You might want to build community or engage with certain people or just feel that the world needs more photos of dogs or cats! The purpose doesn’t always have to be sales.
I couldn’t agree more. I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you’re feeling now too as I know you’ve spoken about having experienced burnout in the past. How are you now and did you have any signs that it was coming?
Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing and there were lots of signs but, and I hear this from lots of people, I think it takes you to get really bad, either mentally or physically, before you wake up to yourself and admit there is something actually very wrong.
For about a year I was working very hard and I had red eyes, I couldn't sleep at night, I had stomach pains and yet even with all these physical symptoms I would just blame it on an allergy or something else external.
I wasn’t looking internally at what was going on. I was working in a high stress environment and just ignoring what was happening. In the end I realised I needed a total reboot and I’ve tried to take the experience and build it into my freelance work so that I don’t fall back into the same habits.
What do you think that you've learned through that whole experience?
A lot. I love my career and I think that’ll always be true because it’s just the way I'm wired but I've learned a lot about what gives me energy which is deep work.
I enjoy doing the actual, deep work but having lots and lots of calls and meetings, doing Slack messages - that stuff completely drains me. So now I've intentionally set my week up and I only do calls on Mondays and Wednesdays. I have three days a week where I do deep work on projects.
I try to set boundaries with clients in terms of what I will and won't do and I don't work in the evenings and rarely at weekends. I've really tried to put things in place, pivoted the way I price, and scheduled in things like acupuncture to take better care of myself. It’s all just more intentional.
Is there a sense of having to give yourself permission to do these things?
Yes, I still feel guilty when I'm not working because there's always more to do. You'll never reach that point where you think “Oh, everything's done now” so it’s a constant battle to fight against that fear.
I've got friends who are very successful but they’re also good at drawing boundaries and I often look to them for inspiration.
I think that’s great. Are there other women running their own creative businesses that inspire you too?
I find Imogen Roy fantastic. She's got a marketing background but now she does business coaching. She uses SEO in a really user friendly way by just thinking about the key questions her audience are asking and then writing blogs for them. They really feel just like she’s speaking to you and she’s so intentional too with her channels and her audience.
I also admire Holly Pryce who’s a website developer and not someone most people will have come across. She’s fantastic with Wordpress and she has great SEO knowledge. She shares blog content in a way that’s so accessible and easy to understand.
In the e-commerce sector I like 1 of Seven Candles which has a great content theme running through it from Instagram to the website to the actual product. It’s all about inclusivity and championing strong women and the female form. I think that consistency is exactly what a brand should be.
Read Beth’s excellent newsletter, ‘Work With Empathy’ here or say hello…