Building Websites for Humans and Robots

Jacob:

Okay, Jeff, welcome to another episode and another season of the Human Friend.

Jeff: 

This is season two, and we are switching to a biweekly format. So you won’t hear our lovely voices every week, but we’ll still be delivering content.

Jacob: 

No, but we did 21 episodes in the first season. We’re going to do 21 episodes per season, just like a TV show.

Jeff: 

Yeah, like a sitcom, although they don’t do that anymore. Now it’s all 10 episodes. But today we are going to talk about site outlines and, more specifically, how you structure those to give you good SEO returns. So, you mentioned when we were doing our preliminary chit-chat about how you build a site outline both for humans and for robots. And so a good site outline will serve both of those ends. Do you want to expand on that?

Jacob: 

Yeah. So the problem—and I’m always going to pick on this because it’s so funny, and everybody gets it all the time, every time I bring this up—food blogs.

Jeff: 

Yeah, I hate them.

Jacob: 

They’re so long. This is where people have made it more for robots than they have for people. Most people are fine with a little paragraph about how this is a cute recipe and how it’s great with this. Like, if you go to a cookbook, you see a tiny little paragraph and then the recipe.

Jeff: 

Sure. Or maybe some notes about, you know, the best tools to use or the best methods or something.

Jacob: 

Yes. But imagine if a food blog was turned into a book—it would look longer than The Lord of the Rings for like five recipes. And that is because they’ve made it more for robots than they did for people.

So it’s a balancing act. Robots—search algorithms—like a lot of content. They like structures done the right way, they like photos, they like links, and they like all these forms of structure. But humans don’t like that much, so it is a balancing act of finding how to please robots, and how to please humans when someone gets to my site.

Because now they can find it because I did that stuff—how do I make sure it’s not alienating or falling flat in front of them? So that’s a really big balancing act.

Jeff: 

And so, how do you go about starting this process of just even figuring out what to put on your site? Where does this begin?

Jacob: 

My favorite cup of Kool-Aid is Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. Do you know it?

Jeff: 

You mention it all the time.

Jacob: 

I do. It’s my favorite cup of business Kool-Aid. I drink it once in a while. But it’s a great structure.

So the whole Start With Why structure is modeled after a brain. We can link to his TED Talk, or you can Google it. It’s pretty famous at this point. But he has this nice little chart where he has three concentric circles. On the outer circle is what, the second circle is how, and the center, the ooey-gooey center, is why.

He pairs this to your brain with, like, your limbic brain, I believe, and some cortex—I’m not a neuroscientist. I’m surprised he dabbles in it himself. But the way we process stuff is like that: we can see what things are, we can understand how they work, but we do have a hard time with feelings and describing why they are.

But this structure is actually a really good structure to please humans if you’re coming up with a site outline of what you need to put on your site. You need to put on your site what you do, which is all your services; how you do it, so your unique selling propositions and things that go beyond; and why you do it, like your About page, stories, missions—these kinds of things that tell that greater story.

If you follow this format, it’s logical for people. They can get it if you show what you do, how you do it, and why you do it. People are going to get it really quick. But also, it actually helps you with SEO in a lot of ways, because what you do is the way that people search.

People don’t look for how you do it very much. Very rarely do people look for, like, “I want shoes made in America.”

Jeff: 

Sure. They just want shoes.

Jacob: 

They mostly want shoes. But people do sometimes search for “made in America shoes.”

Jeff: 

That’s like a secondary consideration for some people.

Jacob: 

Right. And that is where you can structure things.

When I work with B2B clients, we’ll go through each one of these things. We’ll determine everything that they do—so, the services that they provide, whether that be engineering services, photography services, or construction services. And then we get into a little bit of how they do it, because that is the stuff that pleases humans. What you do is how people search. How you do it is how you sell it when they’re there. And why you do it is the stuff that kind of takes it to the next level.

Jeff: 

Yeah. Sort of like it makes a cohesive story around it, which, as everyone knows, can be a very powerful selling thing—if you have a story around it and can tie all that stuff together.

Jacob: 

As Simon Sinek would say, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”

Jeff: 

Is that why it says Start With Why? Because I was like, you didn’t start with why. You started with what.

Jacob: 

I know. Well, this is how people process things, though. It is good if you start with why and you can say it. But it is hard to actually start with why for most people because sometimes you just do something because—

Jeff: 

That’s what you do.

Jacob: 

—it makes money. And it works out well.

Jeff: 

But the what’s and the how’s are really more about being found on an SEO level. And then, yeah, the why is maybe how you turn SEO into CRO.

Jacob: 

Yeah.

Jeff: 

The actual sales.

Jacob: 

Look at you using an acronym correctly!

Jeff: 

I did. I’m learning.

Jacob: 

CRO, for people that don’t know, is Conversion Rate Optimization.

So, yes. Essentially, you’re totally on the right track. What you need to do—and this is what I recommend—is maybe start with a text list. Just pencil and paper, a plain Google Doc—I don’t care. List out everything that you offer to the world as a service.

From the biggest things to the smallest things. Just get it all listed out. These are your core keywords of what your site should be about.

If you have three types of service offerings that can get broken out separately, that would be great. If you only have one type of service offering, this becomes the backbone of your site outline. When you look at a site navigation (nav), a really good site nav goes right down what, how, and why. You’ll see that they have “Services”, they’ll say “Our Work”, then they’ll say “Contact Us” or “About Us”, and there we—

Jeff: 

—”Our Story”.

Jacob: 

“Our Story” that kind of stuff. Their services is what they do; “Our Work” is how we do it. You can see the stories of how it’s done. This is how you want to structure it. So, if I was working with a photography and video studio, right, and their three main pillars of selling stuff are they do photos, they do videos, and they have photographers, plus retouchers that edit it.

If you go to their website, guess what you see in their nav? You see Photo, Video, Photographers, Retouchers. Pretty straightforward. 

But yeah, that’s how they structured it. So getting into that, further than just the top level, that’s where keyword research really comes into play.

Jeff: 

Right. So that’s like when we use SEMrush or whatever. You’d start with those keywords—the list of stuff that you do or that you feel like you want to show up for.

Jacob: 

Yeah.

Jeff: 

Bring it to SEMrush, and then see how it scores, how it breaks down. Or do you use SEMrush to just, like, find organic terms that you haven’t even thought of yet?

Jacob: 

That does happen from time to time. A good example of that: I was working for a whiskey website, and they were basically restructuring some things, getting ready for an updated campaign. We were looking around, and they did have whiskey barrels on their site as a thing, like as a footnote, right? So I’m doing normal stuff like getting “whiskeys,” “rye whiskeys,” all these different kinds of things—other alcohols that they do—looking at their competitors and structuring it.

But I remember doing “whiskey barrels for sale” when I was just—

Jeff: 

Oh, that’s a big thing.

Jacob:

Oh, yeah. And it was like, oh, 4,000 people a month look for “whiskey barrels for sale.”

Jeff: 

People love that. The Bourbon Bros, as I call them—just as a collective noun—love whiskey barrels. They love them. I don’t even know why. It’s not like they use them for any… Actually, some of them do. But, you know, it’s mostly just like, “Yeah, I’ve got this Blanton’s bourbon barrel in my house. Isn’t that cool? Look at the 70 whiskeys I have that cost me 50 grand.”

Jacob: 

Would you like to name the individual?

Jeff: 

No, this is me collective-nouning them. I know many of them, and they all kind of act like this.

Jacob: 

I know. Actually, there was a person on our street not that long ago who had this weird bourbon-barrel-art whiskey stand that was really—

Jeff: 

Strange. They do it all the time. They love that stuff.

Jacob:

—really strange. They got rid of it. But I was like, how could you use this in your house if you don’t like whiskey? Because it was designed specifically for that. Anyway—

Jeff: 

Yeah, no, no, no.

Jacob: 

I digress. The point of it was it was a new discovery for them to know that not only did they have whiskey barrels for sale—they just kind of did it on word of mouth at that time—that if they made a real landing page, they could open up a new revenue stream for their business.

Jeff: 

Sure. Up beyond just, like, the word of mouth Whiskey Bro underground network.

Jacob: 

Yeah, if they did some time with it. And so sometimes that will happen with SEO, but in most cases it really doesn’t. Because a lot of times, if you discover a new idea or a new niche with a company, then it’s up to that company to decide: Do I really want to go after that? And in a lot of cases, they don’t.

But, yes, what you’ll do is you’ll take everything that you do, and you go to an SEO keyword research tool like SEMrush, and you look at things on a local and national level. For example, with photography, right? You type in “commercial photography.” If you want to narrow that down a little bit, what about “food photography”? What about “cocktail photography”? What about “lifestyle photography”? “Portrait photography”? You can keep going. These are all the services that you might want to do or you have a portfolio to share about.

Jeff: 

Based on what the scores come back as from SEM, like if it scores high for cocktail photography searches, you might want to highlight that.

Jacob: 

Yeah. And so scoring, I want to say, is more about volume. You have three main factors when you use a keyword research tool: volume, cost-per-click data, and then runs its magic to give you keyword difficulty score. I like SEMrush because it gives me all three. I think those three are the most beneficial to have.

Jeff: 

Cost-per-click is if you were going to run an ad campaign on that term.

Jacob: 

And that’s gotten really expensive over time. I remember I was just working on a client not that long ago, and they had some words that were literally, like, $35, $50 a click. And I was just like, “Whoa, there’s some money there”. But that’s a keyword that clearly has high value, and it had a low keyword difficulty score. So I would want to rank organically for that, even if the volume wasn’t that high.

So you kind of base it on that. You’ll find that your primary overall word—like “advertising photographer” or “commercial photographer”—will have the highest search volume. Then all your subsections will probably have lesser search volume than the main one.

Not always the case. I would say, particularly in photography, certain sectors people look for a food photographer before they look for a commercial photographer: they’ll go deep right away. But that is what you need to do. Do your keyword research. See which ones make sense for your business that you want to go after and which ones don’t.This is where you begin creating a structure. You can probably tell right now: I have my services, I have my sub-services that I want to offer.

And then this is where it gets really difficult for people—deciding what pages to make now.

Jeff: 

Right, yeah. I was gonna say, like, bring it home. How do we—like, we talked about talking to humans and robots, and then how to identify what keywords are things you should be featuring on your website, whether or not those are your actual pages. Like, you’re not necessarily going to use your keywords as page titles, but you want to feature them.

So yeah, bring it back to that. And I want you to talk about cornerstone content and then sales pages versus non-sales pages.

Jacob: 

Yes. So, cornerstone content is actually a good place to start thinking about this. The way SEO structure works really well is if you imagine it like a website dropdown. For the photography company example, if I hover over “Photography,” you can see the list of all the services that fall under photography.

And then the page path—the URL path—is actually structured like photo/food, photo/cocktails, photo/this, your-service/that, that creates the structure. So that first page in that folder structure for that URL—that’s a cornerstone.

Jeff: 

Okay.

Jacob: 

So your cornerstone pages need to be optimized really well. But how do you pick all the little pages that go under your cornerstone? The cornerstone is usually the easiest thing to pick because they know. Like, I was working with a landscaping company. They do landscaping, and they do hardscaping. Those are two different things but they overlap quite a bit.

Jeff: 

Those would both be cornerstone things.

Jacob: 

Yes. Hardscaping is its own cornerstone because people look for paving, pergolas, and outdoor construction things versus general landscaping services.

Usually, when there are categories of your service offering—like in the photography business, they have video stuff—so that would be a cornerstone. Then you have to do subpages under each one to really make it a true cornerstone of your site.

Jeff: 

It’s not enough just to have a photography page. It has to be “Photography, plus,” and then underneath that—

Jacob:  

Things. Yes, otherwise, it’s not really a Cornerstone page; it’s just a page. If you use a search engine plugin like Yoast, there’s a little schema option where you can mark a page as Cornerstone content. Google understands this structure. Without a plugin like that, it’s a little more code-heavy. I’m not going to get into it right now with schema and stuff. 

But essentially, you can tell Google, this is a Cornerstone. The subpages under it—this is where it gets difficult for people to choose are which keywords I should make pages for and which pages I shouldn’t. And this actually ties into the latest Google update. I don’t know if you’ve been listening to the Google news, Jeff.

Jeff: 

I think we talked about it, but I don’t think we talked about it on the pod. Like, I think you and I talked about it at one point.

Jacob: 

Yeah. So Google has released a ton of core updates to combat junk content being created by AI tools. Because you can have ChatGPT write you 1,000 words in a half-second, and if you don’t look at it and just go copy-paste—

Jeff: 

Yes. ChatGPT is also writing garbage books that people sell on Amazon for like $3. But it costs them no dollars to make, and it’s just a digital book. It’s a whole thing because they’ll base it off a bestselling title.

There’s this book by Kara Swisher? Fisher? Swisher. I don’t know. 

Jacob:

Carrie Fisher is from Star Wars. 

Jeff:

I think I’m mixing those up… Yeah Kara Swisher came out with a book recently and then if you searched it, and weren’t super-duper paying attention to what book you were trying to buy, there’d be like, 50 AI generated copies that maybe a page or two in sound reasonable but then you’re just like “this doesn’t make any sense”.

Jacob: 

Oh my God, some people are the worst. Some people are the worst.

Jeff: 

I’m jealous of people like that.

Jacob: 

Well, Google has released some core updates to combat people making a bunch of junk content. I’ve always told people not to make junky pages just to put a page out there for SEO, because what happens is, let’s say you’re working with a healthcare service provider. They provide medical transportation for people, and they provide senior transportation for people. This is where I had them take a think because how much difference is there between this type of transportation and that type of transportation for their people?

And that is where SEO can get a little weird. Because if you just wanted to please a robot, you’d go out there and make a page for each thing. Google is now penalizing that because you’d end up making junk, repetitive content on your site.

Jeff: 

Right. Are these two things distinct enough to warrant a page each? Or should it just be “Transportation” with different H2’s under that?

Jacob: 

Exactly. Or you can combine it into medical and senior transportation on a single H1. That’s fine.

That’s the question you ask yourself: Is the content distinct enough to stand on its own two legs? If you can write a paragraph about it, that should go on your Cornerstone content page. If you can write a page about it—like 750+ words, even 1,000 words—that deserves its own page.

In the photography example, it was tricky in some cases. What do you talk about for dinner photography versus breakfast food photography versus packaging page for food?

So when I was working with them, we didn’t have any content on the photography page: it was just a gallery basically. But the food page talked about all sorts of different things for that type. There was one sub-page that could stand on its own that we left under “food” which was chocolate. Chocolate could stand on its own because photographing chocolate is a hot mess: it’s so difficult.

Jeff: 

Oh, just like working with chocolate?

Jacob: 

Yeah. I am not envious of any food photographer that works with chocolate. Because, you know, like a Hershey’s candy, it’s really small in your hand. 

Jeff:

And there’s a lot of defects on it…

Jacob:

Well put a hundred megapixel camera on that and blow those defects up. Really what you’re paying for is a ton of photo retouching mixed in with really high end people with the glasses on, sculpting little pieces of chocolate

Jeff: 

Oh my gosh, plus they’re under lights.

Jacob: 

Oh yeah, and they’re under the lights and you’ve got to keep the place cold, depending on the food. I’m not an expert on this, but I’ve been around it enough to know.

So chocolate got its own page with real content because you know what? 

Jeff:

If you can pull this off, that’s something people will value and look for.

Jacob:

And candy photography is its own subset of the food photography world. But other things like dinner or breakfast or menus or stuff like that, they’re not different from general food photography, so they didn’t get any content they were just a gallery page of the site. So they got some SEO availability, but they’re not really going after it because we’re going to make junk. But that’s the thing: can it stand on its own two legs? Can you write some content? And that is where the cultivation of what are your final pages that you’re going to put on your site.

I will say at this point, in the age of the internet, most businesses have a really well-structured website, and they’ve gone through this once before. They understand what they’re doing. So you’re not usually starting with a blank slate. I mean, they just had, like, a services page with one page and a bullet point list of their services—that doesn’t happen very much anymore. But that is the classic case where you need to now expand out the keywords that are there.

So you asked about something else…

Jeff: 

Sales-focused pages.

Jacob: 

Right, sales-focused pages. 

Jeff:

Because those are not necessarily SEO pages.

Jacob: 

No, actually they’re not SEO pages at all. No, not typically. They can be in some rare cases. So let’s say I’m working with a construction company, right? You want ADUs, you want—

Jeff: 

I don’t know what ADU is.

Jacob: 

Accessory Dwelling Units, Jeff.

Jeff: 

Got it.

Jacob: 

The one thing I do like about our job is we do get to learn a lot of random stuff.

Jeff: 

Yeah, we get to dip our toes in, like, many different fields that I’m like, “This is kind of interesting.”

Jacob: 

Yeah. We get to learn it from, like, a layman’s perspective.

Jeff: 

Surface level.

Jacob: 

It’s almost like we read a Wikipedia page on it.

Jeff: 

Which I do every morning.

Jacob: 

So anyways, say you’re a construction company. You’ve got ADUs, you’ve got renovations, you’ve got commercial projects—all this stuff. You probably want a page that talks about how you calculate budgets. You want a page about your process: how the workflow happens from beginning to end to sell it. And this is where you want to put in testimonials, your process, how you do what you do. Because what you’ll want to do is, on your what pages—what you do—you’ll have links to your how pages to learn more.

So like, in the photography one, a lot of times we ended up linking to two pages: Retouching, because it was an upsell—it was part of the process—or we have a production page that talked about the production of how everything gets done on the photoshoot.

Or, with our own website, we have programs on there now, and basically how you do what you do, and what’s the process to get there. So you have those how pages. Terrible for SEO. They do not help your SEO efforts. I shouldn’t say terrible for SEO—they don’t hurt you.

Jeff: 

Yeah, they’re not going to hurt your SEO efforts, but you don’t want to highlight them in your SEO strategy.

Jacob: 

Exactly. Or track them for rankings or stuff like that because, you know, they’ll never rank for weird words that you might be trying to optimize for…. 

Jeff:

And then you’ll just feel bad about them and be like, “Why do I have these pages? They never rank.”

Jacob: 

Right. So, yeah, that’s basically the biggest problem with those pages from an SEO perspective. But from a human perspective, from a sales perspective, that’s the secret stuff that moves people along in the sales process.

Jeff: 

Um, just as the final point, just to bring it full circle, case study: How would you build a recipe website both for humans and for SEO? 

Jacob: 

A recipe website?

Jeff: 

Yeah, both for humans and for SEO. Just, like, really briefly.

Jacob: 

Well, the problem is competition is the major issue.

Jeff: 

Yeah, competition is super high in that space.

Jacob: 

Yeah. So, even though I would probably recommend something that was a little more healthy and holistic and a little more structured, like we talked about today, in the food spaceSEO—and I joke about this a lot, I say this analogy a lot—it’s a lot like a horse race: if you want to show up for any word, like you want to show up for the best borscht recipe—

Jeff: 

That’s a super common one, I’m sure. Yeah. That’s a weird one, Jacob. Okay, but continue.

Jacob: 

I love borscht. That’s honestly my favorite soup. Hands down, best soup in the world is borscht, especially if you got a little smoked paprika to put on it..

Jeff: 

You’re not even Russian. You’re not Eastern European.

Jacob: 

I can enjoy the flavors of the world, Jeff.

Jeff: 

That’s fine. It’s just surprising that you would even come across it in your life. I’ve never had borscht, ever. 

Jacob:

Oh, we make it here. Beth makes the best borscht.

Jeff:

Okay, next time you make borscht, invite me over.

Jacob: 

Anyways. But if you wanted to show up for “borscht,” you’re going to have to compete with everybody that’s showing up for borscht right now. So, what they are doing—and a lot of the ways food blogs and other industries do things—they have all gamed the system so much that breaking through that is going to be really hard unless you play the game.

Jeff: 

Play the game that they’re already playing. Now, is Google’s updates to the way their stuff ranks up going to penalize stuff like that?

Jacob: 

I would hope so, but the Google update is mostly focused on AI. And the more generic and professional the content sounds, that is not going to be weighted as positively as genuine-voiced content. And I have to say, the food blog people—they have a lot of genuine voice content. I mean, they repeat the same things over and over again, and they’re super long, and they’re crazy. But if I was going to be them, it would be more about trying to find a niche within the industry and hone a niche. And this is a good thing to talk about in SEO in general: Big fish, small pond. That’s a mentality you want to maintain in every SEO effort that you’re doing. How do I become a big fish in a small pond?

Jeff: 

By being the best borscht recipe blog on the internet.

Jacob: 

There you go. That would be a niche. It would be like getting your angle right.

So, like, a good blog that came—that was there for a long time, but then really got to some prominence in the food industry was like Budget Bytes.

Jeff: 

I remember that, yeah.

Jacob: 

But they have a niche. They have an angle. They have a thing. And I think their website design and structure is pretty good. I mean, they do a nice job, and they don’t do terrible SEO practices. And they rank okay. They rank pretty well.

Content is really important for SEO in general, but niching is super important for SEO as well. A lot of the easiest way most companies can niche is local first. Focus locally first. Most companies can do that pretty well. 

When you try to go for a national term—so, like, in food, like “I want to be borscht”—okay, that’s going to be really hard just in general because it’s a national topic, and anything can show up for that.

Jeff:

But if you’re targeting the local Eastern European community in Cincinnati with borscht, maybe you can rank well.

Jacob:

Jeff: Yeah, I don’t know who’s going to be—that’s like a search of one.

Jeff:

Yeah, maybe in Chicago or Cleveland.

Jacob: 

I mean, my problem, too, is that I’m mostly a B2B person or a professional service person. I don’t really have to deal with SEO for a consumerism—um, highly consumeristic—What’s the right word?

Jeff: 

Yeah, no, not usually your wheelhouse.

Jacob: 

Right. So I’m a little—I’m not 100%. I feel like I’m not doing a good job answering your question. But if it was a more typical question, like let’s say you’re a guitar repair service—because I have a guitar in this room—or you do something with a professional service that you provide to people—

Jeff: 

Right. Focus local.

Jacob: 

Focusing local is going to be the best way to niche first, and then you grow and expand. You should think of it like—before the internet, how did McDonald’s grow? Did they show up on a national stage and spread themselves really thin?

Jeff: 

Right, right, right, right.

Jacob: 

No. They started in this little place, and then they got really popular, and then they made another place, and then they made another place, and then they got a billion burgers.

But that’s the old-school business method.

Jeff: 

Yeah, think about it in those same lights.

Jacob: 

—is actually the better way to go. If you can prove yourself in a small niche of the internet—whether that’s a very highly focused service, like let’s say you’re a marketing agency and you want to focus only on SaaS (software as a service) companies—that’s things like Dropbox or Uber Eats, where they’re selling a virtual product, not a physical thing. That’s software as a service versus a product, which would be like Netflix as a product. But if you wanted to niche in, like “I’m going to be the best there,” that’s a great way to go.

I mean, to talk about my own personal game plan for Human Friend Digital: naturally, I’m starting to pick up nonprofit gigs. Now, I don’t mean—I’m not going to make a million dollars working for nonprofits forever. But I do think that if I naturally can hone in and become a nonprofit SEO website design and developer company, there’s a niche for me on the wider internet. But until I can get that niche settled, I’m going to focus on my Cincinnati market.

Jeff: 

Right. Because it’s also just like you build personal relationships.

Jacob: 

That’s a big part of it, too. So I would say that SEO—it is trying to show up on search engines, but it does need to be a good website. In the end, it needs to be a reflection of your business and a reflection of your personality in the business as well. That’s really what it’s all about. Because you can put anything you want on a website.

Jeff: 

Is that going to help you out? Right. And, or at least in the SEO world, because there’s obviously different angles we can approach these things with. But today’s episode was about SEO and site outlines.

Jacob: 

Exactly.

Jeff: 

So then, Jacob, my final question is: How do you go about doing all of this? All the stuff we talked about?

Jacob: 

Right. So, I like spreadsheets. They’re really good. But I would say getting everything in a list is super important and using your columns well.

So in your first column—and your first couple columns—make an outline like you would a school paper. This is not for the content that goes on the pages. This happens a lot with people where they’ll be like, “Home page, and then I want my About, what we do,” and they’ll list all that out. Don’t do that. We’re talking page by page only. I don’t want any content on your list—that’s going to muddy your work. You can do that in a separate list.

You want just page by page. List out page by page, and then start finding that Cornerstone content of services: What you do, How you do it, Why you do it. Make sure it’s there. Then indent—make indents for your subpages. Then what you do is you get your keyword research. Go out there and get your keyword research and find—however you want to do this in your spreadsheet—but find a way to assign each keyword that you want to show up for to a page.

Every page on your website that’s a service—like what you do, where people can find you—needs to have a keyword that it is targeting that you clearly know.

So if you want to show up for “food photography,” you have a food photography page. You’re going to take your “food photography” keyword, and you’re going to put it right there next to it and put the data next to it too, like your volume and cost-per-click. And if you have secondary keywords, put those below there. Make sure there’s a space for that. You want to be able to see all of it at once.

If it doesn’t have a keyword, maybe that shouldn’t be a page. Maybe that should just be a subsection on another page about a service.

Jeff: 

Yeah. If it’s not showing up really high when you do your research.  Or if it’s not showing up at all, because that happens.

Jacob: 

Yeah, that does happen. And that is where you have to decide: Is it going to be a subsection of page content? Like you’re just going to write it on the Cornerstone page? Or are you going to put this as part of your process? And as part of your How pages about what you do—your work, your portfolio—are you going to bake it into content overall?

But if it doesn’t have a keyword, even if the volume for the keyword is 20 or 50—that’s really low—that’s really low versus your other keywords. It might be 10,000 or 2,000 or 50,000. Even if it has 20 people looking for it, if it’s what you do, I would say make a page for it.

Because you know what? You can service those 20 people. And if one of those people turns into a sales lead, it was worth the effort. It was worth the one hour it took you to write the text content for it and the two hours it took you to put it on your website. Three hours of work. And if you get one lead a year from that—heck, that’s great. But if there is no volume for a word, maybe that shouldn’t be a service page.

So anyways, get in a spreadsheet, give every page an assignment. And that will help you structure your keywords and your site structure, because then you’ll start seeing it all laid out pretty clearly. Like, “Oh, okay, these pages belong to this section. Here’s the keywords that I’m going after. It makes sense. This page made a keyword. This page didn’t make a keyword.”

And then your how and your why—that’s really up to you. Like, what sells your product? How do you sell your product? Those pages are there because you cannot be a salesperson in the room when your website visitors come to your website.

Jeff: 

Yeah. We’ve talked about that too, where it’s just like, you need to be able to answer any question that they could have right there on your website before they even will think about, like, signing up for something. Yeah, while they’re on your site.

Jacob: 

So it’s a lot of anticipatory needs. Like, you have to really get inside their head. But, like, you’re a salesperson. You probably have a pitch deck in your head of, like, I want to go through this. I want to hit on this. I want to hit these points. Put that on your website.

But that’s the main structure. So: What you do has to get paired with keywords. How you do it needs to be a reflection of your true sales process and your unique selling stuff. And then why—what you do—you can just put as much extra stuff on there as you want. And maybe a blog would be good, right?

But that’s, like, the main SEO architecture of a site.

Jeff: 

Very good. Well, that wraps up today’s episode.

Jacob: 

Great.

Jeff: 

Unless you had final thoughts.

Jacob: 

No. Good luck. Oh, I have a final thought. If you are overwhelmed by this, you can hire us.

Jeff: 

Yes. This is what we do.

Jacob: 

I actually work with a lot of agencies—and, um, I shouldn’t say a lot of agencies. I work with some agencies. I sound like I have such a big fat head. I do work with some agencies, and that is all I do for them for their website jobs. I just come in there and pave the architecture.

Jeff: 

And then it’s just like, plan the architecture, and then just like, Here, there’s your drawing. Have fun with it.

Jacob: 

Yeah. They have their whole strategy. I do a lot more than just that part of it with them, but it does give them the whole game plan to actually go make a website. And so no one has to be like, What do we put on this thing? Yeah. It’s just like, Here you go.

Jeff: 

Cool. This was a good talk, Jacob. We will see you guys in two weeks with something, but we don’t know what yet. But, yeah, we’re going to biweekly. Just a reminder.

Jacob: 

Awesome. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff: 

Thanks for listening.

Jacob: 

All right. Bye.