Content Strategy for Small Business Websites

Brett Johnson [: 00:00:10

Welcome to the Circle Sessions featuring the Circle of Experts. The Circle of Experts are Yasmine Robles, Robles Designs, Tonnisha English Amamoo of TJE Communications, and Don The Idea Guy. I'm Brett Johnson from Circle 270 Media Podcast Consultants. Each week, one of the Circle of Experts joins me to talk about critical aspects of growing your podcast. We focus on marketing, social media, monetization, and website design to help you implement all of these together. This week, Yasmine is here from the Circle of Experts. Yasmine works alongside clients does to design a website that's driven by strategy, looks amazing, and that you can actually use to grow your podcast and then then in turn, your business as as well, or the reverse business and then the podcast. Either way, you're going to feel and see growth.

Brett Johnson [: 00:00:54

Yasmine, thanks for joining me today.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:00:56

Yeah. Thanks for having me back.

Brett Johnson [: 00:00:58

Let's take a look at content strategy. I, it's been bantered around a lot. I I I I I think it's it's it's talked about so much. Maybe people don't quite get it or understand what it is too, but let and let's talk specifically for small business websites. So what's a content strategy? Why do small businesses need 1?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:01:18

Yeah. I thought this was a great topic just because podcasting is content.

Brett Johnson [: 00:01:22

Mhmm.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:01:23

So a content strategy is basically your game plan for creating, publishing, and managing content that really attracts your true audience. For small businesses, it's really essential because it helps you stand out, build trust, and drive conversions. As an example, if you're a small business lawyer and you are writing about something that just came out, what whatever law or issue that is, then you're likely providing value and an answer to a a business owner who could then hire you.

Brett Johnson [: 00:01:54

Correct. Yeah. Breaking down something that's complicated And and and you're and and that's I I love that stuff that it's one of those, wow. They they they they get it. I need to work with them. You know, even if it's, like like your example, a a case that's been decided a year ago, whatever, but you're reading the blog for the first time going, wow. They nailed it. They knew exactly what was going on.

Brett Johnson [: 00:02:13

But, yeah, that's those are important. Exactly. How should a small business start planning their content strategy then?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:02:20

Yeah. So I would suggest that you start by understanding your target audience, who they are, what are they interested in, what problems do they have that you are wanting to solve, and then really setting clear goals for your content. And whether it's driving traffic or generating leads or boosting sales, what is your goal for that content? And then finally, map out that content calendar to plan and schedule your post. I will admit my nerdy self loves a great Google Sheet of that planning process, But the first part is really understanding your audience and what they want and how how they describe that problem because you, let's say, as a website designer, if I started saying things like CMS and all of these other jargony things or ab abbreviations, If I'm right about that, you will have no idea what I'm talking about, and you'll say, I just want a business, website for my business or for my podcast.

Brett Johnson [: 00:03:14

Right. So what about creating the content itself? You have any tips that, you know, working with small businesses that, like, you do, that, you know, the the the best way, the easy way I I don't know if there's really an easy way, but it's but it's getting started, I know. But, you know, about creating that content.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:03:31

Yeah. If you don't get anything else out of this, just remember to write something that is of value to your target audience. So if it is a small business owner looking for legal advice on something that he heard about, write something that they will understand that is answering their questions. If you wanna stop now well, I hope you keep listening, but if you wanna stop now, that's that's the goal. Otherwise, you can focus on creating content that's relevant, engaging, valuable. It could be through blog posts. If you have an ecommerce site, it can be your product descriptions. It can be customer stories or case studies, videos, infographics.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:04:08

You make sure that that content is well researched, well written, and visually appealing, and keep a consistent tone that really reflects your brand. For us, our brand is a little quirky, funny. We make weird dad jokes. Sometime, oh, I go. So for Roblox designs, that's our tone, but if you're going to be, for example, a small business lawyer and you, for some reason, wanna maintain a very more buttoned down kind of kind of, tone on the blog blog post, you can do that. So just make sure it's consistent.

Brett Johnson [: 00:04:39

How does, SEO fit into this? I I I see articles all the time about, writing to SEO. Right? You know? It's just that, okay, you know that you wanted to show up. So you have to you have to include all these terms, you know, SEO terms and such. But how does that fit in, though? I mean, that that sounds like it's it doing that sounds like it's not gonna be a very interesting article or podcast if you're just popping in terms. I mean, to me at least, but maybe that's the way to do. I I don't know. I so how does it fit in?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:05:12

Yeah. So, again, back to my very first comment, make sure it's valuable and make sure it's just engaging. When it comes to SEO, I would say that the on the front end, you're gonna do a lot more research. And let's say you are a coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio, and you have a couple of locations. Your SEO is likely going to be around location based as well as the terms that people are using to look up your coffee shop. Now let's say you also feature artists on your podcast for that coffee shop, then you you can take a slightly different angle on how you can pull people in. So just doing that upfront research, knowing yourself what your goal is, and, again, back to knowing your target market, you wanna make sure that you know them better than they know themselves. And now you can then go into tools like Semrush.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:06:04

There's a lot of them out there. Semrush is what we use. Free ones include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google, Google Ads. You can use a Google Ads keyword planner, and then you can just start typing things in. We have a love of chat, GPT for brainstorming. I'm not gonna say do not ask chat GPT to tell you what keywords you should go after because it's not a keyword tool, but it can help prompt a lot of that brainstorming. And now you can take what it told you and then actually back it up with, the keyword planner on Google Ads or SEMrush if you're paying for it. Then once you have that, I would suggest making sure that you don't have more than, like, 2 to 3 keywords or key phrases.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:06:49

Make sure that they're long enough. So you don't wanna just rank for websites. You probably wanna rank for websites in Columbus, Ohio or Squarespace websites in Columbus, Ohio. Make sure that they're long enough, and then just give 2 to 3 to each page, and now you have your home page, about page, services page. Now they have their own target key phrases, and you can write the content based on that. When it comes to blogging, take that research, and let's say you have a, you're you're trying to reach to college students who are figuring out how to really hone in on their interview skills, then what you can do is take that research you did with with keywords and create what I I call it, like, a trunk. Basically, we think of a trunk of a tree and then branches. The trunk is your you can think of it as a summary article.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:07:40

It's gonna be 2,000 words based on your research, but it's 2,000 words summarized, summaries of, let's say, 6 other articles that are about a 1000 words each. Mhmm. So it's like a hit list. Right? Like, top 6 ways of of getting nailing that job, if that's the keyword, and it's basically linking back to these 1,000 word articles and just summarizing them in a little bit. So, basically, you have 61,000 word articles. If anybody wants a a visual graphic, I will send it over to them. 6, 1,000 word articles and then, like, one branch article, and that's a lot. That feels like horrible, horrible flashbacks of AP history class and essays.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:08:23

But if you spread it out, depending on your bandwidth, if you spread that out, let's say, you can spread it on to 2, 3 months, that's just going to get the ball rolling, rolling. And it's slow. I would say if you do that, it'll take 6 months, maybe 9 months to get to really see an uptick, but at least you're laying that proper foundation for the s for SEO, and you're getting organic traffic, which is different from paid traffic.

Brett Johnson [: 00:08:46

Right. And it sounds as though too from from you've mentioned this before, and I've heard other people talk about it too, is that SEO has changed a little bit spec specifically to blogs. But I think it's the websites as though too, of course, is that Google really likes our search engines in general, really likes you speaking as yourself. So, I mean, so maybe that helps break break it down to do it easier. I mean, you know, to to encourage you to do it, but you don't have to write for Google. You're writing it's like, just talk. Use your use your voice, but then know that you've gotta include some terms and that sort of thing just to help it a little bit. But be yourself, and is that a good piece of advice maybe to help out? Just to get it get it accomplished.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:09:29

Yeah. Yeah. Be yourself. It's kinda like if I give you a topic and I say kind of take these three key phrases and write around them. Yeah. Write value around these key phrases. Just write what will come out naturally, Like, say, I'm writing about Squarespace websites or the best platforms for a website, for example, then my top ones are Squarespace, WordPress, and Shopify. So those are the ones I know, and I'll do a little bit of research, but it just naturally do write it the way you would speak it.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:09:58

You can even do, like, the talk to text, and then, what we do, we don't we don't I suggest you don't use Chat gpt to actually write the article, but you can ask it to make things more concise. You can ask it to, make suggestions to improve it. You can also give it a blog post that you've already written and say, does this match the tone? What would make the my new article match the tone of this other article? But, again, just be wary of AI just because Google Google doesn't want you to just be kind telling Chat gbt or any of the other millions of, millions of websites they can go to nowadays. It doesn't want you to just say, hey. Write me a blog post about which platform to use. It's it doesn't want that. It wants it to be genuine, and it wants it to be well thought out. So just keep that in mind.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:10:48

But, yeah, you can use AI tools to help that process along. A few other things that you'll want to think about are things like, no. It's gonna get jargony, but meta tags, or meta descriptions, which is the description of what that page is about, the title of the page. So you can for example, if you have a Columbus based location for that coffee shop and you have dedicated a page to that location, you can make the title of the page include Columbus, Ohio or New Albany or wherever it's located. So just keep those things in mind. Just and and when it comes to content, don't worry about it. Yeah. You you might wanna hit a 1,000 words and maybe 2 or 3 different keywords, but write value, write answer a question, and that's going to get you a lot further than just trying to keyword stuff.

Brett Johnson [: 00:11:37

And maybe it's that reevaluate articles that you've read or seen websites that you've seen that have really hit you and kinda go, well, why is this? Why do I like it? And you might get you're gonna look at things differently, I would think. Yeah. Yeah. So how should small businesses distribute that content then?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:11:54

Yeah. So, what I love about content planning is that you can then let's say you have a podcast. Podcasting is great. You can have that transcript. You can rewrite that transcript into an article, and then if it doesn't hit a 1,000 words, that's fine. You can include more information so that it does hit those 1,000 words. You might have recorded the podcast episode with some keywords in mind already, so maybe they're already in there. If not, just kind of rearrange it so it does include some of those keywords you were trying to hit.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:12:25

From there, here's that's the hard part. From there, you can take snippets, like quotes from the article, and then use them on social media. If you're recording video, take snippets of that video and post it on your social media. You can send snippets of it to your email list. Snippets of the recording of the video or, quotes from the from the transcript, you can reuse all of this content. So, really, once you have this podcast episode and a transcript, you create it into a blog article. Now all you do is basically cut it into chunks, and you could if you if you said, I only have time for 2 1,000 word articles per month to hit my goal of the keywords, that can still give you a month's worth of content for all the other platforms that you're trying to hit. So that is that's my exciting piece of news that you don't have to recreate everything.

Brett Johnson [: 00:13:22

Right. Yeah. And and insightful. I mean and yet but, okay, you've done all this work. You do wanna measure it. So, I mean, how should businesses measure the success of the content? And and and I'm sure every business is different. I mean, that they have their own measurables and ROI. But overall, you know, how do we measure that performance? Mhmm.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:13:41

It depends on the goals that you set in the beginning. So if it was we want to increase our leads via our contact form by 5%, 20%. That can be some a a way to track it. The other goals could be something like the key metrics, page views, engagement, so how engaged are people with your content, and then, again, conversion depending how many products were sold, etcetera. There are some free tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Hotjar can help you see how engaged people are with the page because it'll record people on the page and see what they were doing.

Brett Johnson [: 00:14:21

Mhmm.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:14:22

It'll also give you a heat map, which is pretty snazzy. So you can take a look at those. There are some paid versions of to get reporting, but if you just use Google Analytics, you can then start seeing what people did on your website. For social media, you can then take a look they all have their own little platform, but you can look at the metrics that they're providing. So how many people interacted with your post, how many people clicked on the link, or went to your profile and then clicked on the link. So you can start seeing that user journey of how does the website and email marketing and social media all fit together, especially if you have a blog sorry, a podcast. How do these all fit together and play in the same area and ultimately help you make money? Because we all we all have hobbies, but if you're putting this much effort into it, you I really hope that you get to be to the point of, like, screech my duck and diving into a a vault of a pool of, like, gold coins because Yeah. We're all putting in so much effort.

Brett Johnson [: 00:15:21

Exactly. So you mentioned a lot of different areas to watch, to increase, to feel that you're doing something, something sticking, you know, that sort of thing. Should you just focus on 1, or can you maybe pick 2 or 3 that work together really well depending on your goals that they kinda work in concert? If you know what if if you understand what I'm talking about.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:15:45

So for your content, I would say if you are flying solo or you're a very small team and not guys don't really have a marketing person on staff, I would say think about your you might wanna do a a marketing audit, which I know we're gonna we're gonna have or have had an episode on that. Mhmm. But think about your goals. Where are you currently? Are you utilizing are you trying to be on all the social media platforms, and and how's that going for you? Kind of do a gut check of how everything is feeling. Check if you don't have analytics installed onto your site, at least get Google Analytics and Google Search Console installed to start tracking. And once you are tracking information, take a look, and see, are people engaging? How when I put something on social media, are they coming to the site? If I get featured somewhere, are people actually going to the website? From there, you can start seeing where the gaps are. So if you're like, wow. I'm getting I have 10,000 followers on my social media, but nobody is coming to my website, or when they do, they immediately leave.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:16:47

So that could be a sign that the content that they're seeing does not align with what they're seeing on social media Mhmm. And that they're looking for something different, so then you can focus on the website. If you see that you're getting a ton of organic search, you're being found on a with just organically on your website, but nobody's buying, again, there might be a disconnect with the content that they're seeing, and, and and how do you pivot that? So now now the question is, okay. We we know we see the gap. How can we set up goals? And then just break it down into small obtainable chunks. So if you said, you know what? We're doing pretty well social on the website, but we really wanna focus in on SEO and our content and blogging, then and you're kind of overwhelmed about what I just said about the 2,000 words and the 1,000 words, then do a little bit of research about you can even poll your audience and see what they wanna hear about and start your, your goal should be about a 1000 words, maybe once a month, and then pick it up to twice a month next quarter, and then kind of continue on. And then every so often, do a summer one of those summary articles that basically summarizes the past 5 different blog posts that you've done and links back to them because Google loves it when you interweave links throughout your website. And just kind of space it out.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:18:05

I would say if you're really a solopreneur or a small, team, this might take you a year to just kind of get used to the rhythm of content strategy and how you can disseminate. Once you've got something creative, you can really break it down and send it through many channels.

Brett Johnson [: 00:18:22

Yeah. I was going to mention and ask about a timetable, but I think you're right. It it it's gonna take months. But over those months, and I've seen it too, that once I just kind of get my head down and do something, whatever it is, you do start to see it build up. It's like a domino effect almost. So I I think if you're consistent with whatever you're doing, you're going to see you're gonna read the results. It's going to happen. It's just it's it's kinda hard not to.

Brett Johnson [: 00:18:50

If you're doing it properly and you've got everything set up and you've worked with the right people to to do the right things, I think you're you're gonna see the results.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:18:58

Mhmm. Yeah. We've seen people, you know, if they who we gave them an audit and they followed the plan. And it's hard because at first, you're not seeing any progress. But around I would say, if you're really doing what what were they doing? They were doing a 1,000 word articles per month. They weren't hitting their 2,000, but they're like, you know what? This is our goal. We're just gonna keep it going. They increased it.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:19:21

Finally, they were doing about 4 so from the 4 articles per month. From the time that they started to about 6 months, that's when you could see in Google Analytics, it started to kind of grow a little bit, their traffic, their organic traffic, and they were starting to rank on keywords. And there were some keywords that they were on page maybe 2, and then they were pushing up towards the bottom of page 1, and then they kept going up and up. So I would say, months 6 through 9, almost to a year, that's when that curve got steeper and went up. So that's when Google was like, oh, you're legitimate. You didn't just do this for 3 months. You're actually going all in. And but that's where organic is great because then, let's say something happens, somebody, let's say one of your employees goes on maternity leave, and they they don't write as many articles.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:20:09

It's still growing. You still have those articles. It's not like paid media where as soon as you stop it, everything stops. Right? Which I love paid media, but it really it's to help you increase fast, where whereas organic helps you increase slowly, but then helps you stay afloat.

Brett Johnson [: 00:20:26

Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Which I I like, and I've heard that. And you've said it about that. The organic is really a great base to build on because of even it slows down a little bit. It doesn't fall apart like pay does.

Brett Johnson [: 00:20:39

That it's it's just it's just different. So you built that that street cred of organic, that it can survive a little bit of a down, then and build right back up, which is great. So, you know, thanks for sharing all this. Before we wrap up, where can our listeners find more about you and and Robles Designs as well?

Yasmine Robles [: 00:20:59

Yeah. So if you just realized that you had no idea what the jargon I or I used too much jargon, or if you were kind of overwhelmed, you can reach out to me at roblesdesigns.com. You can also download our free checklist, roblesdesigns.com/checklist. I'm always open to being bribed, in if you wanna chat my brain at like, just if you just wanna chat through all of these things and scratch some stuff on on paper, always coffee, margaritas depending on time of day, or tacos. I am not against the bribe.

Brett Johnson [: 00:21:32

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And and, we at Circle 270 Media podcast do podcast audits as well. I think, you know, we've we've touched upon this on many episodes that audits are They they seem like a heavy lift, but they're actually very, very effective in regards to taking having an outsider look at what you're doing and giving you, what they they see has been, a problem with someone like you or somebody that's, in general, these are the issues, but also specific to you too. And and not really pulling any punches going, this is what you're doing really well, and this is what you're doing really poorly. And here but here's how you can fix it. It's not unfixable.

Brett Johnson [: 00:22:07

And we do that with podcasts as well. It may include the podcast specifically or may include content that's outside of the podcast that's supposed to help the podcast that maybe is living on your website or a podcast or a, you know, a podcast website audit completely or a business website audit, we bring in Yasmine and and and Robles Designs team to take a look at it because they all work in concert. So, you know, nothing stands alone. As long as everybody's everything you're doing is working together, then success will happen. It it it will get you where you want to go. But it's that really working with somebody to help you pull out your clarity as well too. And and looking at why are you doing this, what do you wanna do with it, and here here are the things we see that are going wrong and but are going right as well too. So you can get hold of me at mypodcastguy.com.

Brett Johnson [: 00:22:53

Hop on the calendar. I'm the same as Yasmine. I love talking about this stuff. So it's one of those, coffee, whatever it might be. It's it's hard for me to shut up about it, but it's always fun. But it's one of those but those conversations are always fun. They are really, really fun. So thanks, Yasmine.

Brett Johnson [: 00:23:09

I appreciate you joining me.

Yasmine Robles [: 00:23:10

Brett, I just wanna clarify. Are you also open to bribes with margaritas?

Brett Johnson [: 00:23:13

Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, come on. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You know? Not a true big margarita fan, but, you know, I've gotta find the the one that I love. I haven't I'm I'm still in search of it, I guess.

Brett Johnson [: 00:23:22

You know, it's that find the right bourbon, find the right dish, you know, that sort of thing. So I guess I'm on the margarita track. Right. You need to do that. So yeah. Thanks.