Podcast Summary

Skyler Reeves, founder and CEO of Ardent Growth, discusses the importance of a strategic approach to content marketing, with a specific focus on the concept of topic clustering. He argued that content should be created with the long-term goal of occupying "mind share" within a market. Reeves explained how to understand an audience by directly asking them where they consume information and what their problems are. He then detailed the practice of topic clustering, a method of organising website content around a central hub page with links to more specific sub-topics. This strategy, he explained, helps establish topical authority with search engines like Google and improves user experience by "concluding the searcher's journey."

 

Key Points

  • Content marketing should be a strategic activity aimed at establishing a brand as the preferred vendor, rather than just a series of tactical actions.
  • The foundation of a good content strategy was understanding the target audience by directly asking customers where they get information and what problems they face.
  • Content ideas could be generated by observing what resonates with the audience's preferred channels, engaging with influencers' content, and using SEO tools to find popular search queries.
  • Topic clustering was introduced as a method for structuring website content to build topical authority for SEO purposes.
  • The structure involved a central, broad "hub" topic that linked out to more in-depth, specific "spoke" articles, creating an interconnected web of content.
  • This approach signalled expertise to Google and improved the user experience by guiding them to related information, with the goal of "concluding the searcher's journey."
  • Reeves provided a method for determining how to group topics by analysing the overlap in Google search results for different keywords.

 

Podcast Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated. 

Announcer (00:01):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and apprenticeships at marketingcollege.com.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:13):
So my topic today is content marketing and particularly topic clustering. And I'm joined by Skyler Reeves, founder and CEO of Ardent Growth. Skyler, welcome. Could we start about why creating content is something more strategic? I tend to think it's just something that we do as a tactic, but you have a very strategic view of content.

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (00:37):
Yeah. So I think in the long run, we don't just do things to do them, right? I mean, that's not how you win a game, whether that's chess, a sport, it's not how you in war, that's not how you win in business either or really in life. And so from the business perspective of things, in the long run, you want to be the preferred vendor within your market. You want to be the business, the solution that occupies mind share. Whenever people are in market to buy, who do they think of? When you think of shoes, what brands do you think of? And when you just create content and put it out there without aligning it to what's the vision for the brand, who are they trying to carve themselves out to be? It just doesn't end up as successful. So don't me wrong. I mean, tactics are great as a fundamental base to get started and learn something, but you or someone within an organisation needs to have a plan, needs to have a strategy in order to actually achieve whatever you want your outcome to be.

(01:44):
You can learn how to, all the tactics you want in chess. And then if you get to the endgame and you don't know how to checkmate a king, it becomes much more difficult.

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:55):
That's a lovely analogy. So can you give me some example of the sort of strategies that you're thinking about here?

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (02:03):
Yeah. So you often want to think about ... Okay. The first thing I think about is where are your buyers? I think a lot of times when people go to just create content, they don't actually think about where their buyers are. Where do they get information? How do they consume that information? Who do they go to or who do they trust for advice, recommendations, et cetera? You want to start there. And I see a lot of times companies will just pick a channel and start producing content on it, or think that they have to produce content on every channel, and they don't. You need to find one channel where your market is, right? Where they actually consume information and deliver it to them where they are. Don't try to take them off to another channel. So from a strategic perspective, you want to know, where are my buyers?

(02:50):
What are their problems? How are we uniquely positioned to solve their problems in the market? And how do I get this information to them in a way that they want to consume it?

Kiran Kapur, Host (03:06):
Okay. So how do I know where their channels are that they go to and what they're looking to consume?

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (03:16):
You ask them. It's as simple as that. I mean, I think a lot of people, they try to come up with this. They try to pull in data or look at this, and I'm like, "Just go talk to them." They're people. Get them on a call and just ask them like, "Hey, where do you go to get your information?" Think about it whenever you're ... Let's say you're trying to buy something not from a business-to-business standpoint. If you're looking to figure out maybe you need a new doctor or you want someone new to cut your hair or something like that, right? You can go ask people for recommendations. So just ask people when they're coming in, ask your existing customers, "Hey, how'd you hear about us? Where do you go for information? Where do you like to spend your time online or offline as well?" That's useful for non-digital channels.

(04:06):
Just ask them and, or if you want to do something more large-scale, you can poll a large audience of people to find out where people who aren't your customers, where they are as well, that can help you find untapped opportunities. But I think the easiest and best place is just go ask your current customers, just talk to them.

Kiran Kapur, Host (04:26):
And should I be concerned about just where my current customers are or where I think my future customers are? I mean, just how strategic should I be looking at this point?

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (04:37):
Yeah. So like I said, you want to start where your current customers are because if you already know this, if the business already knows this, they're not really worried about it. So typically, the businesses that are thinking about this are trying to figure out, do they have what's called product market fit, right? Or can they actually scale this? And so they want to start with who their current customers are so they can actually begin to grow and not fail as a business. After that though, yeah, that's when you would begin to look at other channels, just go talk to people who hang out on those channels. You can explore each one. Let's say it's Reddit, let's say it's Facebook, it's Instagram, it's a forum online, it's a private community. Go join those channels, observe what people are talking about, engage with the community, don't try to be transactional, just be there to learn and just talk to people.

(05:33):
And once you kind of develop some relationships with people, then you can just ask them like, "Hey, is there anywhere else you get information from as well?" If you're talking to your current customers, you find out where they get their information from and then ask them where other people like them get information from. Because they'll tell you that there are other channels out there that they get info from, but maybe it just doesn't fit their particular taste. There are plenty of marketers who get their information from Googling things or from engaging with people on LinkedIn. I join a lot of private Slack communities. Some people, maybe they don't want to do that. They don't want to pay to join a community, or they don't want to have to have Slack on all day and track them. So you just got to ask them and then ask them where other people, because they know other people in their network, because people know people like themselves and ask them where they get info as well.

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:27):
Okay. So that gives me an audience in a market and maybe a place to talk to them. So, how do I now get ideas about what type of content they might want to consume?

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (06:41):
So it really depends on the channel. So we'll break this down. Let's say you already know where they are and where they get their information. So from there you want to go look at those channels. Let's say it's LinkedIn. You want to find people on LinkedIn who already have captured the attention of your target buyers. So there's some tools out there that can make this a little bit more useful for you. I don't think they're specifically geared towards LinkedIn because LinkedIn doesn't allow all of its data through its API, but there's a tool called SparkToro that you can input certain topics or accounts that you know you're looking for influencers within your industry on that channel. And then you want to go, not just observe what they're doing, but observe who is engaging with them and how they're engaging with them. Read the comments, look at the conversations that are occurring within the comments, use that to figure out, okay, what particular topics are people finding engagement with?

(07:50):
I also like to find those people and then comment on their stuff, especially when you have a contrarian opinion. Those are really, really useful because it does contrarian opinions and not to create controversy just to be controversial, but to spur conversation, to actually engage in the dialectic. Whenever you get those conversations going, based on the engagement that you get back from people, you can learn a lot about what's going to resonate with people on that platform. That's usually a pretty good indicator that maybe you need to go create your own content around this as well. So a way to ... And the reason why you want to do this on say an influencer's platform is because they already have your audience's attention and it helps you get amplification and get that data and feedback much faster than what it would if you were just posting your own content and trying to get the engagement organically through your own profile, just because of the way that LinkedIn's algorithm works.

(08:48):
And the same thing sort of applies on other platforms as well, but you have to kind of cater it to the medium, right? So TikTok is going to be different than Facebook, which is going to be different from Instagram, which is going to be different from the web. Now, if you're looking to come up with topic ideas for the web or for YouTube or something like that, what we usually do is there's lots of tools out there. We prefer HRFs for it. There's local HRFs where you can begin to explore what are all the various questions that people search for or the various terms that they search for on Google about around my industry. And you'll get data back of all the various questions, how often they're searched for per month. And you can use that as kind of like a heuristic to say, okay, the more popular questions to get searched for a lot, that's what people care about.

(09:44):
And from there you can kind of dig in. There's a lot of data there to process, but you can find those topics. And then I like to take that and overlap it with the qualitative feedback that I get from interviews with customers or potential customers to see what are the pain points. So at a broad level, you really want to try to ask yourself is, what are the problems that the people that I would sell to or serve, what are problems they have? What are the jobs that they're trying to get done? And then figure out, okay, now how do I help them solve this through content? And that's a pretty good approach and it works very well. It's much better than just thinking about it from a persona level. You want to think about, people have problems, people want solutions, so you just go solve them for them.

Kiran Kapur, Host (10:40):
Okay. So we said that we would talk about topic clustering. So can you explain that as a concept to me? So we've got some ideas, which I presume is giving me the topics, but how am I clustering those? What am I doing with those?

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (10:55):
Yeah. So topic clustering it's a difficult concept to explain audibly as opposed to visually. But a way to think about it is, let's say you have a ... It's primarily applied to website content for search engine purposes for ranking on search engines. But you would take this set of content that covers a variety of topics on your website and you would begin to group them together topically where there's one central topic that tends to be a very broad topic that acts as a overview or an introduction to this category. And then it links out to these more specific articles that cover an angle of that in more depth. So here's an example. Let's say we're just looking at marketing. So let's say you want to rank for all things marketing.

(11:53):
Marketing would be your hub. That's your central core broad topic, but within marketing, you have content marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, right? And then even within each of those, you have additional specific topics, right? You have, let's say it's content marketing. You have developing buyer personas, the buyer's journey, developing content strategy, building editorial calendars, blogging, like distribution, all these different subtopics that form around it. And you can dive into each one of them even deeper. So let's say it's editorial calendars. You've got not only how to build them, but how to plan them, how to actually manage the operations process of developing content. But what this ends up doing is it creates this almost like a table of contents, right? Or almost like a ... If you've been on Wikipedia before, right and you start reading about its obvious, you can dive very deep into it and go in a lot of different directions.

(12:58):
But the key thing to think about here though, is that it's not taxonomical in the same way that biology is. Hubs can have hubs within them. So you can have a topic cluster within a topic cluster, and they overlap quite a bit as well. So it's not purely hierarchical the way taxonomy is.

Kiran Kapur, Host (13:17):
So it's feeling a bit like a mind map. So I start with ... Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. In my mind, I think of studying and then the problems that you have, and it goes in different directions, and then each one of those feeds off from that. So you would end up each part of your mind map and then disappear off into extra branches. So is it a bit like that?

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (13:37):
Yes. And except that you would have ... So it's like a mind map in the sense that you have this central node with these spokes that come out from it. But the way for this to really work, and you want to think about this both for people who are exploring the content, but also for search engines, is that as you begin to branch off deeper and deeper, it becomes much harder to find your way back or to the other side of the mind map, right? And so you have to think strategically about how do you connect all of these ideas together so that people and search engines can still traverse it very easily or get back to the key starting point that access the kind of directory as well.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:15):
Oh, I see. So the most important part about a topic cluster is it's not a rabbit hole, you've got to be able to come back. So how do you do that practically?

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (14:28):
So I think the first place you want to start is which topics actually go together. So there's the way most people approach it or the way people have done it for years. So HubSpot kind of coined this model back in 2017. It's been around long before that, but they're the ones that really kind of put it on the map. People built these and grouped them together based on qualitative data or like gut instinct. They would ask themselves, how do I think these topics go together? And that's fine. That works. It's better than not doing it all. But the way to really understand how you need to interlink things is to, if you want to rank on Google, is to look at the way Google's doing it themselves. And so the manual approach to this is to ... Let me take a step back here. There's two fundamental questions you have to answer is one, let's say you have these two topics, you have to answer the question, do I need to cover these two topics within a single page of content or do they need to be separate pages of content?

(15:32):
And historically, people would ask themselves, how in depth would I need to go within this topic? And if it's more in-depth, then you would split it out into two pages. Or if it's a light summary, then you would keep it together. And that's fine. Again, that's better than nothing, but we didn't really like that. So we took a mathematical approach to it to where we would look at the way Google would rank pages for different topics. And so let's say you take two topics together, you search for them on Google, side by side, ring up two Chrome Windows or something. And what you want to look for is, are the pages that Google is ranking on the first page, like the top 10 pages, are they the same ones that are ranking on that other results page for that second topic? And when we say the same ones, we mean the exact same URLs, right?

(16:27):
And you want to see how much overlap is there between them. And if there's a high degree of overlap, say three or four more of the URLs are the exact same between each of those topics that you search for, then they need to go together. They're grouped into one page. Google's seeing it as being the same thing. If there's not a high degree of overlap, then that's an indicator that you would split them out into two separate pages. From there, to really graph it out, like when you create your content, all you would really want to do is say, you want to throughout your content say, "What else have I covered elsewhere and how can I internally link it to this other concept?" That's the basic approach to it. But the problem when you do it the manual way too is that it can be very, very time-consuming depending on how much data that you're looking at.

(17:18):
And so that's what we worked on solving to create an algorithm that would do it for us and process all that data and kind of just map it out for us, which shows us how things get structured, how they should be linked together, et cetera.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:34):
And you're doing this predominantly for SEO purposes, so that your content is more easily found?

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (17:44):
Yeah. So the way Google's algorithm works is there's a lot of different factors, but if your goal is to rank higher on Google, let's say your business model depends upon people searching for things on Google and finding your content and trusting you and deciding to contact you or something or buy something from you. The idea is that Google's algorithm is predominantly based off of links historically. So how do other websites link to you? It's a way of thinking of it like an endorsement, like a vote of confidence for you. But over the past five to five to eight years, really, it's shifted away from that and become ... Google's gotten a lot smarter at understanding content and understanding it from a natural language perspective. And in order to help Google understand what your website is about, you need to cover it in depth. And there's this concept called topical authority.

(18:45):
So Google wants to rank the best websites at the top of the pages so that people continue use their search engine instead of using a different one like Bing or DuckDuckGo or something like that. And so in order to do that, it wants to ... The best content is not only does it answer your question the way that you want it to be answered, but it's also how trusted of a source of information are you? And whenever you create these topic clusters, it sends these very strong signals to Google that you know what you're talking about, that your website isn't just this, this isn't just some one off page and that if a person's going to have additional questions after that, they're probably going to be able to find them through your website. So Google's goal is that when you search for something, that you're able to find an answer and do what we call concluding the searcher's journey.

(19:31):
So if someone searches for something on Google, clicks on a website, hits the back button, and then goes to another one, then that first website did not conclude their journey. But if they search something, come to your website, get the answer to their question, but then they have the next natural ... It's a progressive question they have next, and you happen to have your content structured in such a way that helps guide people along that path, well, then they stay on your website, they go to the next page. And so Google looks at these signals and uses them to understand how authoritative, how well do you know this topic and would you be a good destination for us to send people to? That's the primary one. And then the second is really the quality of your ability to answer that question. So if someone asks a very specific question, but you've lightly covered that question within a broad page when it really needed to be two separate pages, then it leaves the reader, the searcher wanting, right?

(20:27):
Maybe they want more, and so they end up going back and they're trying to find a more in depth resource. So by creating these topic listers, knowing how to structure things, both consolidation and breaking them out, and then how to group them together, it really helps you rank a lot faster and a lot more consistently on Google and kind of become known as like a trusted source of information on a topic.

Kiran Kapur, Host (20:51):
Gosh, I've never heard of concluding the search's journey, but yes, I mean, you can see yourself as a consumer of Google wanting to get the answers so you can then very quickly see how that would work from a customer's perspective.

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (21:06):
Exactly. And ultimately, it's better for Google in the long run too, because people trust it more. And every time you serve to something, it uses resources from Google, on a processing end. And so that's why if your website can continue to answer the next question, they don't have to go back to Google, use additional resources to find the next natural progression. That's why Google also includes those. I'm sure you've seen them, the people also ask Box where you can kind of drop down because Google's trying to save you time and save themselves resources and give you more of what you're probably looking for, more something that aligns with the intent behind your actual search, especially whenever you search for something broad and don't get specific.

Kiran Kapur, Host (21:48):
Skyler, you've made topic clustering sound both something really important, but also really interesting. Are there any sort of final tips you would give people if they're thinking, wow, this is something like me, who's thinking, wow, I want to go and do this now?

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (22:04):
I mean, I would say like approach it manually at first and just test it and see how it works for you. Also look at your existing content if you don't have it linked together that way. Just ask yourself, how could you take what you already have right now and group it together and maybe create a central table of contents type page that acts as a hub, a directory, so to speak, that would allow people to branch into the different sections. So do that with your existing content. If you want to kind of build on beyond that, then there's, if you want to do it algorithmically, I would say learn Python, get into programming, things like that, or you can do it manually. That's fine too. It can be very time-consuming, but it's better than not doing it at all.

Kiran Kapur, Host (22:50):
Skyler Reeves, thank you very much indeed for your time. But before you go, I do have to ask where in the world you are.

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (22:56):
So I'm in the middle of nowhere in the States. I'm over here in Kentucky. It's just woods and fields here.

Kiran Kapur, Host (23:03):
Sounds idyllic. Skyler Reeves, thank you very much indeed for your time.

Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth (23:07):
Thank you very much.

Announcer (23:08):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College, training marketing and PR professionals across the globe.