Labcast: Simple Tips for Content Titles that WORK

When it comes to ranking high in search and attracting more inbound traffic and leads, it’s critical to create titles for your content that both search engines and customers will respond to. But as “The Sales Lion” Marcus Sheridan explains in our latest podcast, it doesn’t have to be as hard as some content marketers make it out to be.

Labcast 58: Marcus Sheridan on Creating Titles with SEO in Mind

Marcus is the owner of River Pools and Spas based in Virgina. For more from Marcus, visit his blog, The Sales Lion, and follow him on Twitter @TheSalesLion.

Podcast Transcript

Brendan Cournoyer: Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of Labcast. I am Brendan Cournoyer, and today we’re joined by Marcus Sheridan, founder of River Pools and Spas, based in Virginia. He also runs the Sales Lion blog at www.thesaleslion.com. Marcus, how are you doing today?

Marcus Sheridan: Brendan, I’m doing great. Monday, I don’t know what it is about Monday that gets me. I’m looking ahead to the week, feeling good. I’ve got all these plans like every Monday. So I feel great I’m glad to be here, man.

Brendan: You have the exact opposite outlook of Mondays that I do. So, that’s refreshing. But I’m glad you took the time to talk to us today. I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the concepts that you blog about and also some of the things you talked about at this past Content Marketing World, where you write a lot about content marketing, inbound marketing and present some really refreshing ideas, I thought, as far as creating content and how marketers can really approach search engine optimization.

So, the first thing I wanted to ask you about is actually a post you wrote, recently, that had to do with lousy blog titles and lousy content titles. I thought that would be a great place to start. You said that this is, pretty much, one of the biggest mistakes that you see time and again when it comes to people just doing content, general, but, specifically, for the content marketers. Is that right?

Marcus: Oh man. I literally had this happen last week, 28 companies contacted me saying, “There’s something about my blog. It’s not getting a lot of action,” or, “Take a look at my blog. What do you think about it?” And, with everyone, it’s the same thing, over, and over, and over, again. The problem is this, we’re used to looking at newspaper headlines and we’re used to looking at hooks that they do in radio and things like that, hearing that, and it doesn’t work like that online, when were making titles for blog posts. Here’s the thing, a lot of people think that they want to have witty and catchy titles to blog posts that make people say “Ooh, I need to read that, right away.” Well, Google really doesn’t care how witty and how catchy you are, at all. They just don’t.

Brendan: Right.

Marcus: Google doesn’t have emotions. They’re, ultimately, that’s who we want to please when it comes to blogging, I mean, in most cases. I don’t want to say there’s a blanket rule here, but this is the deal, if you had the opportunity to write a blog post title that is SEO-driven, you need to do that every time. You say to me right now, “Okay.” Marcus, please take a look at my blog and tell me what I’m doing. The first thing I’m going to do is look at your last 10 blog post titles, because usually that’s where the mistake lies. Because I can’t look at it and say, “Okay. I can see he’s going with this keyword phrase, and I can see that keyword phrase.” You’ve got to have a goal with every one, and if you don’t know what that goal is, you’re wasting your time, in almost every case.

Your second goal is to make the title catchy to other readers. I’m not saying the content itself is SEO-driven. My suggestion to everybody is the same, “You need to write your blog post titles for search engines. You need to write the blog, itself, for people.”

Brendan: Sure.

Marcus: If you do those things, you’ll be successful, because people, when they’re typing in their problems and their needs into Google and looking for answers, they’re not typing in catchy and witty and silly phrases. This is the greatest secret there is to online marketing. Nobody types that in, right? Nobody cares about that. They don’t type that in.

Now, you say, “Well, when it comes to our Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that, that stuff really matters.” Well, yeah, maybe, it does. But really, you have to look at it in terms of, you might have this awesome title that is so witty and that makes everybody open their eyes and you could share for a couple of days, and you get 10,000 hits on your website, and you’re thinking, “Man, this is awesome.” Now what does Google think? They don’t think a dang thing. You don’t get no love from Google. You don’t show up on the first page because your title, your post title wasn’t keyword-driven.

Or you can take the “boring” approach, and I put that in quotes because what’s boring to us, often, is not at all boring to the actual consumer. You take the boring approach, and you put a very standard, nice keyword, especially long tail, longer words, longer phrases, you know, three words or longer. The longer phrase is in there. Also Google picks it, up and you don’t get 10,000 views in a couple of days you get 100,000 views over the next year. I’ll tell you what. I’ll take 100,000 any day of the week.

You know what’s funny? And I’m going to write another post about this person. You take, River Pools, for example, and it’s different in every industry, because this Industry is more socially motivated, and that’s how it works., but I find that the majority, far and away above 95% are SEO-friendly. In other words, that needs to be your focus almost every time.

But you take my top two blog articles I’ve ever written on River Pools, which is a site about in-ground swimming pools, and it’s the number-one site on in-ground pool construction, in the world. Turning thousands of visitors every day. One of them is titled “Fiberglass Pool Problems,” “The Top Five Fiberglass Pool Problems and Their Solutions.” That’s the title of the article.

Obviously, for online sales, the keywords I was going for were “fiberglass pool problems,” and of course, that’s why it’s number-one on Google, but, here’s the thing, guess how many times, Brendan, that article’s been “liked” on Facebook or “shared” on twitter?

Brendan: I’m guessing, a lot.

Marcus: Yep. About two times

Brendan: Oh really?

Marcus: Two.

Brendan: That’s it?

Marcus: And it’s been read over 100,000 times. Here’s the thing, people think that “like” and tweets and all that other stuff equates to reaching customers. That’s totally baloney for most industries. In the pool industry, in the roofing industry, landscaping industry, in all these other industries, you don’t have people going crazy over social media. You just don’t have it in terms of “likes” and “shares.” What you have in the case of that one article, you have people thinking about fiberglass pool. They want to buy it, but the concrete pool guy told them something that was scary about fiberglass. “Oh you don’t want a fiberglass pool because it has all these problems.”

So what are they naturally going to do? They go to Google, they type in “fiberglass pool problems,” because they need to find out which I was right, the fiberglass pool guy or the concrete pool guy, right? So they find my article and I tell them, “Okay, so here are the issues of fiberglass pools. Let’s be realistic. Here’s who it’s for. Here’s who it’s not for. Here are some of the problems, but here are some of the solutions to those problems, as well.”

So immediately, everyone looks at that article and says, “Wow, this is it. I found my answers.” That article is the voice of the consumer. It’s the trust agent. It gets read tons, tons, and yet, nobody “likes” and “shares” it. That doesn’t mean the article’s not a success. So that’s a whole other topic. I don’t mean to digress.

Brendan: No. No, no, no, no, no. I mean it’s interesting because a social media aspect has got a lot play recently especially with the Panda updates, and all that stuff. It’s, like, “you need to have all this stuff.” So that’s why, when you said, “How often do you think it’s been shared,” I figured, a lot. But really, the traditional SEO tactics and strategies, they’re not gone. You still have to make sure you optimize your content, properly.

I thought it was interesting when you talked about titles because I just remembered I work for a publishing company before it came to OpenView, with a lot of journalists and traditional reporters and stuff like that, and I remember people complaining about SEO, saying, “Oh, our titles are so boring now.” They were just so aggravated about having to learn this new way of writing titles.

It really is a different type of skill, to be able to write content that is not writing for robots. I always use that term, writing for robots. You don’t want to do that. Like you said, the article should be for the customers by creating titles that are, actually, going to make it easier for those customers to find you. That’s a new skill set that people actually have to learn and practice at.

Marcus: Yes, you’re right. Regarding the skill set, I teach. All the people that I’ve trained, know this stuff now. I try to teach them to think like both. Because, if you look at it, you’ve got really, mainly three, in terms of the SEO robotics side. You’ve got h title or the first title, same thing. You’ve got the URL of the post, right, and you’ve got the native description itself, all three of which come up in search results. And that’s the first thing somebody sees in search results.

So you want them to see a title that makes them think but you’ve also have got to have a keyword phrase in there sometimes, not every time, and you’ve got to have it mixed up just right, in there. It is not this skill that can’t be learned. I usually show three or four examples to somebody. I say, “Okay, so, with your native description here, how can you get somebody, how can you use the keyword phrase in your native description, to make Google happy but also make this appealing to the readers.

So they go, “Oh-ho, this is interesting.” So like for fiberglass pool problems, I would always say, for something like that, and it’s usually a question that I use in the native description of the blog post, “Are you worried that a fiberglass pool might have problems? Many people are. If so, this article will help you,” and then it’s dot, dot, dot.

Brendan: Right.

Marcus: And so what have you done? Well, you’re less than 150 characters, what a native has to be, and in the same way, you’ve included the keyword phrase right up front, “fiberglass pool problem,” but you’ve also talked to a real person. Everybody’s happy, right? And it is possible to make everybody happy. But bottom line is, if you don’t have a keyword goal, actually keyword could be one or it could be five words, depending on how you set it up, but if you don’t have a keyword goal for every blog post title you write, you’re missing the boat, and you’ve got to fix it.

If you’re not getting organic traffic to your site, it’s probably because you’re stinking it up when it comes to those post titles and to your native description and then to your URL, and then to your content itself. You can have killer content, but the search engines don’t pick up because you’ve just blown it on the front end. I hate it when I see that, man. I’m like, “This is a great article, but the person just blew it on the front end.” And so, Google says, “Oh well, I’m sorry, moving on.”

Brendan: What I like about that is that it really makes sense for, especially the marketing community. A lot of the SEO tips and sites out there are, really, for SEO consultants and really technical things and they’re not really applying that human factor to the people that you actually want to read it for, if they’re talking about algorithms and things like that. And I just thought that your presentation was great because, people who are doing content marketing, inbound marketing don’t necessarily have time for all that.

They just want to know where the best practices for us, as far as creating content people are going to find and potential customers are going to get value out of. And it’s this very simple stuff. It’s like, let’s strip it down and look, this is what you should do as far as getting the best value on search, but also don’t forget there are things you have to do to make sure that the actual people who are finding it hard going to be enticed to read it.

Marcus: You know, Brendan, we make this out to be so much more than it is, I can’t stand it. I see a whole industry talking about it. It’s like we’re studying this new found element from the planet Mars and that’s not the case. Really, it’s just common sense marketing. I’m not trying to belittle it. That’s really what it is.

A person has a question, “How much does a fiberglass in-ground pool cost?” That’s the question. Therefore, that’s the blog title. That’s the title of the post. Right? That’s the title of the post. The search engine is like, “Wow, somebody actually answered this question. Yee-haw.” It addressed a question that so many people are asking out there, “What Are the Problems with a Fiberglass Pool.” I am just using that as an example. The principles apply to every industry.

Brendan: Yeah.

Marcus: Every industry, man. And that’s stuff that I talked to the content marketing world, every industry has competitors. Are you doing versus articles that are comparing this brand with that brand. If you’re not somebody is, or somebody should be, because you can be sure the guaranteed the consumer is typing this stuff in, because they have the questions. It’s the question that has never been asked by a consumer, it’s worthy of writing the answer to that question. It’s worthy of it. Google is just looking for people that are great teachers, man.

Brendan: That concludes part one of our two-part program with Marcus Sheridan. Stay tuned next week for part two, where Marcus and I discuss why lots of great content ideas are probably staring you in the face. I’m Brendan Cournoyer and thanks for listening.