Abby Reimer's guest appearances

Abby Reimer

WTSPodcast

Agency Ahead by Traject

Rand Fishkin

Kristina Azarenko

Aleyda Solis

Claire Carlile

Luke Carthy

Azeem Ahmad

Emily Brady

Levi Williams-Clucas

Gisele Navarro

Michael Brenner

Duane Brown

Marcel Petitpas

Keith Perhac

James Rose

Lee Odden

OwlTail

We are back for Season 3 and this week we have Abby Reimer on the podcast to talk about the importance of creating content that both search engines (eg Google) and humans love.Resources from the episode:Hemingway App - https://hemingwayapp.com/Thruuu - https://app.samuelschmitt.com/Article - https://searchengineland.com/creative-ways-to-source-content-ideas-from-ugc-for-seo-350277Where to find Abby:Twitter: https://twitter.com/abbyreimermplsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abby-reimer/---Episode SponsorThis season is sponsored by Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog develop crawling and log file analysis software for the SEO industry, and wanted to support the WTSPodcast as listeners to the show. They’ve just released version 16 of their SEO Spider software, which includes - improved JavaScript crawling to help you identify dependencies, such as JavaScript content and links, automated crawl reports for Data Studio integration, advanced search and filtering, and the app is now available in Spanish, French, German and Italian. You can check out the latest version at Screaming Frog's website (screamingfrog.co.uk).Where to find Screaming Frog:Website - https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/screaming-frog/Twitter - https://twitter.com/screamingfrogYouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/ScreamingFrogSEOFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/screamingfrog/---Episode TranscriptSarah McDowell: Hello, and welcome to the Women in Tech SEO podcast. I am very excited that we are back for season three. I am Sarah McDowell, an SEO content executive and your host for today. Joining me, I have Abby Reimer, SEO manager at Uproer, to talk about creating content that humans and search engines love. Hello, Abby.Abby Reimer: Hi, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.Sarah: Thank you very much for joining. How are you doing?Abby: I'm fabulous. I'm ready for fall, crazy enough. I have my fall candles and a sweater on. I'm ready to go.Sarah: Ready for the autumnal? Is that the word? Is that the right word?Abby: Yes. I am very ready especially being from the Midwest. That's wild. Usually, summers are too short. No one wants them to end. This year, I'm ready for the smell of fall, ready for the seasons to switch.Sarah: To kick things off, I think a good place to start is if you can give our audience a brief overview of yourself and how you got into this wonderful world of SEO.Abby: Yes, absolutely. I am an SEO manager at Uproer, which is a search marketing agency in Minneapolis. We focus on e-commerce and tech companies. How I got here is a little interesting. As you probably know, if you're in SEO, it's something you stumble into. There's no degree for it. It's just interesting how many different paths there are. I graduated with a PR and writing degree and got a general marketing role.It was through that that I was working a lot on a blog. I'd worked a lot with email and social and promoting it on different channels. I noticed one week that one of our blogs was doing really r traffic. I was like, "I didn't promote this. What is happening here?" I was so confused. I looked at analytics. I saw that Google organic was the top channel that week. That question that I typed into Google, it's very meta, but I googled, "How do you show up in Google? How do you get traffic?"I was so fascinated with what I found. I had no idea that it was how you structure web pages and the actual queries that you target. That's how people get found among many other reasons. I went down that rabbit hole. I started following Moz and Brian Dean's Backlinko, followed a lot of those types of sites. I fell in love with it. Six months into my role or eight months or whatever it was, I was like, "I want to work on SEO and content full time."I ended up going to a content marketing conference where I met my boss, Griffin. He was speaking about SEO and mentioned casually after the presentation, he was like, "I have an agency. I'm one person. If anyone is interested in freelancing or joining, let me know." I think I joked that I blacked out but all I remember is walking up to him. My hand must have been shaking, but I had my business card. I was like, "I want to quit my job and come work for you. Could I buy you a coffee?" Two months later, I was working with Griffin at Uproer and we've gone from two people to ten people over the last few years. I've just really deep-dived into SEO and content. I love it.Sarah: That is such a lovely story of how you got into SEO. Thank you for sharing that with us. How do you feel about doing a quickfire round of questions?Abby: Yes. Hit me with it.[Quickfire Round]Sarah: What one bit of advice would you give women starting in this industry?Abby: Oh my goodness. Build your network. Join Women in Tech SEO. I'm not just saying that because I'm on the podcast. This was one of the best things I did for myself and my career. Introduce yourself. I would say go on LinkedIn. Look up people who are doing the dream job that you have if you're not currently in it or you just know what you want to work towards. Just connect with people. Tell them you admire their journey and want to get to know them a bit more. See if you can do a 15-minute chat with them.The things I've learned from doing this and the confidence I've grown, made me realize that I can talk to anyone. No one's better than anyone else. It's grown my opportunities tenfold and you never feel alone when you have that network. What’s so important for women in this industry is to feel like they have support.Sarah: Yes, definitely. There are loads of places like the Women in Tech SEO, but there are loads of ways that you can go out and look for communities to be part of. It's so important, isn't it, because you never want to feel like you're alone. If you just got that back in it, it can help you, can't it?Abby: Oh, absolutely.Sarah: We are here today to talk about creating content that humans and search engines love. When I saw your topic suggestion, I loved this because I think this is so, so important. I was very excited when you pitched this talk. I suppose the first question that I have to ask is, why is it important? Why?Abby: I think this is so important because I know our roles as SEO, at a base level, there are many goals, rank first page, help your client or your business drive traffic and conversions from search. However, what I think, I wouldn't say people forget, but something that even me-- The goals sometimes surpass what is happening which is people are searching. People are on the other end of this query. It's so much more important than just ranking.The other side of that is people, when they're searching for something on Google, Bing, whatever search engine, they're asking you for help whether it's a more question like, "How do I style a romper," to looking to buy something, someone is asking you for that advice. It's a real person on the other end. You want to make sure that you're providing advice that is not only accurate, which is very important, but also helpful.Ideally, you're creating something that people take off the internet. If you're looking to style an outfit, you want to influence or inspire someone with that question. That's, I think, what keeps me inspired with this job is how you can change the world one query at a time or help one person with their question.Sarah: SEOs, I think we can run into the trap of because we want to understand Google, we think search engines first, don't we? Do you think we tend to forget about humans? Do you think that's an issue?Abby: Yes. A lot of what I'm saying here comes from firsthand experience. I am by no means saying, "Yes, I always do this." This came about because I found myself doing this. Yes. How could you not think of search engines first when your goal is to rank and, say, Google gives you guidelines on how to do that? I think it's sometimes your first instinct like, "Oh, what are other people doing?" Maybe I can try and do that a little bit better, copy that structure or curate some of that similar content.I think that is a very natural and normal first response. I think that kind of content is fine. I think this is just about challenging yourself to be more than fine because I think just the literacy of searchers is just so far increased. People know when they're getting a copycat piece of content. That's just not going to be good enough anymore. Even though I do see Google still rank that content, over time I think if humans don't like it, Google's going to hopefully start-- Their algorithm will start picking up on that and start rewarding the content that does hit that emotional mark?Sarah: Yes, definitely. We know that Google takes into lots of different things when it's looking at pages that are performing well and how to rank pages, but one of the things that it's got to be looking into is user experience because they care about that at the end of the day, don't they? They're a product in themselves, and they have customers, so they're going to be looking at things like bounce rate, or where people aren't sticking around and things like that, so it is important.Abby: I agree, and they're kind of dicey on that topic. It's unclear how much they use bounce rate, or dwell time, time on page, things like that but how could they not.Sarah: Yes.Abby: I operate off the assumption, though they haven't said straightforward, like, "Yes, we do, or yes, we don't do this," you have to go with your gut a little bit and know that that's important.Sarah: You talk briefly there about copycat content. What other issues are there around only thinking about search engines first?Abby: I think the main issue is, at the end of the day, if people don't like your content, even if it does rank, you're not going to ultimately meet your goals. I have an interesting story about this. One of our clients is in the health care support space, so we write a lot about topics like things cancer, and things like that, so very emotional topics. For one of our keywords, we owned the featured snippet for a very high volume term, so we're in the best position. We've got the featured snippet. Why bother improving it? I was looking at the comments on this page because we like to do that every few months just to see what other ideas people have, and a lot of people were writing that they had an issue with a couple of the things we were suggesting, which showed up in the snippet, as well.We took note of that, and we actually changed them to be more inclusive, and just better content all around, so maintained the first position. Nothing changed with the snippet. Click-through rate doubled overnight. We went from about, I don't want to get it wrong, it was about 14% to 28% the next day, and clicks were up more than 20% across all keywords. It was one of those cases that shocked me. It was like, "You can have the best position in search results, but if your audience isn't happy with the content, one, they might not even click. If you see that and they're like, "Oh, no, those answers aren't really good.", they're not even going to click into it, despite you may be having the best "SEO result."That was two or three years ago, and that trained my brain to think like, "You know what, it is so much more than ranking because at the end of the day, that's your audience and if they don't like it, they're not going to refer you, they're not going to share the page, they're not going to sign up for your service or buy your product."Abby: What's the point of ranking in the first place if you're not going to end up with people on your content, right? The results that you just shared there, that's incredible and that just goes to show you the power of listening to your audiences and thinking about humans. How do we get a balance because obviously, we still have to about search engines and Google, but how do we get a balance? Is it 50/50 or I don't know? How would you tackle it?Sarah: Yes, absolutely, this great question. I think, first of all, just wanting to state that, fortunately for us, most of the best practices that you see in the quality raters guidelines, most of those things that Google suggests to improve your position and search and optimize your site, those things are also good for users. Just thinking about site structure, having things in a heading format, and having the keywords in there, and just having a very logical site structure. One, yes, that's very good for Google because Google can understand the weight of the important keywords and headings, but guess what, that's amazing for readers as well. It breaks things up. People can scan the page. If you have things like jump links, yes, Google likes that but so do humans.I think, for the most part, if you look through most of the Quality Rater Guidelines, there's not going to be anything suggested in there that's like, "Wow, humans really hate when the keyword is used in headings." It's like, "No." I think where things start to go awry is when we almost take that too seriously, where it's like, "No, we need to have the keyword in every single heading or every single paragraph."That's where I think things start to go from like, "Okay, this is not natural anymore. This feels like it was written for Google." and I think that's where things start to diverge with the copycat content which is, instead of people thinking-- Again, this is where I've caught myself doing this. Instead of thinking, "Oh, hey, how can we as a business or my clients, how can my clients use their expertise or use their audience to answer this in the best most original way?"It's really, really easy to think, "Well, what are competitors doing? Can we do the same thing they're doing and just maybe rank amongst them and it'll be fine?" Guess what, I've been there, and it has worked, it's worked fine. I think it's just about challenging yourself to think beyond results for your client, which, of course, that's important, but also like, "If I was seeing the person who was reading this, would I feel proud of this" That is a big mindset shift and it does take more effort. Going back to your question which is, "How can we do both?"I think it's keeping the best practices that you know search engines like. Talking about things like formatting, obviously using the target keyword in your page title, things like that. Those are all obvious and they work for readers, but where I think the biggest opportunity is and it's in the actual content and the way we write making things more empathetic and just listening to your audience's feedback. That was a broad answer.Abby: That was a wonderful answer, so much from that. I just want to go back to where you said where sometimes people think, "Okay, what our competitors are doing? Why is this piece of content ranking above us on positions one or two?" You've said it so many times about standing out and being different because there are so many times where I've been doing some research and on page one, there's similar content about, I don't know, the benefits of a certain product or service, and they all have the same structure. They all talk about the same things, but then the ones that stand out to me are the ones that takes a completely different angle, and whilst sometimes those pieces of content could be further down on page one, it still gets my eye because it's completely different, so I think it's about just readjusting, and thinking about things a bit differently, isn't it?Sarah: Yes, and I completely agree. I think one of the best first steps in figuring out how you can do that is simply taking an objective standpoint, and for your target keyword, go through the first page of results. You don't need to read every single word, but just take 20 minutes, and go through every page, just taking a couple of minutes on each one. Right away, you'll start to see opportunities, whether it's like, "Okay the format, the readability is poor, or there's a lot of stock images." things like that. Those are what I first notice, but then also reading like, "How does the content read? Is this empathetic? Does this have an angle or is this just spitting out what everyone else says?" and I take mental notes, so you can just have a pen and paper and jot down ideas.I think some of the biggest opportunities is, I don't know, I feel like a big trend in the last few years has been the best way to beat your competitors is just write more content, like the super page of, "Well, if all your competitors have 1,000 words, if you write 3,000, and include every single question that could ever be on this topic, you will rank." I have seen Google sometimes reward those pages. I've been seeing that less.Sometimes, when I'm looking through the competitors, what I'll notice, and we did this for one of my clients, I noticed that all the top results buried the answer in a bunch of text, so sometimes being competitive is actually ss and being like, "Okay, let's make a 600-word page instead of 2,000 and answer the question immediately.", so it's just about determining what our competitors missing, whether it's they're using too much content too little, or their titles are boring like just looking where those gaps are. I think I'm starting-- This is something I'm trying to switch my brain with is if I look at the top 10 results, and I truly believe every single one of these pages I cannot get, then I'd like to look at a different keyword. This is pretty rare where there's like not one opportunity to do better.Sarah: There are always opportunities to better content. You've just said it, to better content. Doesn't always mean more, does it? You don't always have to up the word count or it's just about being a better answer. As you said, if you can give a better answer in fewer words, then surely that's better for Google and better for the user.Abby: Exactly.Sarah: How do we know that our content is engaging for humans? I'm saying humans like I'm not one.Abby: I know. We aren't a robot.Sarah: [chuckles] How do we know? What sort of metrics should we be looking at and measuring?Abby: I love this question. I think one really good one is that we, and this won't work for every single site, but for the site, I was telling you about the health care site, we asked for comments. We end every article with a simple call to action, which is just a heading that says, "What are your thoughts on this topic? We'd love to see them in the comments below, so we can keep improving and sharing your ideas with more people." Even if...

The One Where We Discuss Creating Content For Both Search Engines & Humans With Abby Reimer

Abby Reimer is a Senior SEO Analyst and Strategist at Uproer. You may remember her agency from our recent episode with her colleague, Senior Search Strategist, Jess Girardi.Abby's very passionate about bringing humanity back to SEO and about creating content that doesn't mimic the same old, same old stuff out there. Tune in today if you're ready to do something fresh. The highlights: [1:27] Moving past boilerplate content. [3:37] Balancing humanity with performance. [5:52] Using keyword research the human way. [8:37] Addressing attribution issues with UGC. [11:17] Tying content strategy to business goals. [14:14] Abby's dream clients. [20:52] Abby's go-to resources. [24:05] Balancing risk and reward. [25:53] Abby's causes. The insights:Moving Past Boiler Plate ContentWe've all seen it. The same content. Over and over again."Ten Best Marketing Tips! Ten Simple Marketing Tips!"Abby encourages SEOs and content managers to think about their audience. "More often than not, our audience are the last people we think about when creating this content. I just did a Twitter poll. It finished yesterday. Had 50 responses. Asked: when you're creating a new piece of content, where do you start researching the material?" As you can see from the results, a lot of people go straight to online resources first."That's very normal. It makes sense. You're doing keyword research. You're looking at the SERPs to see what's ranking. But that first step is where we lose the humanity aspect. We see, oh, well, everyone's doing ten tips. Maybe I'll just mimic those and add two more."So she recommends reaching out to her audience to learn about their experiences, their tips, what they think about the topic. Balancing Humanity With PerformanceHuman content doesn't always rank as well as we might like. Abby says that Uproer's award-winning campaign for CaringBridge was born out of this very pain point."Their pain point was lack of budget, time, and resources, but they still needed to create a lot of new blog content, especially content that would rank on search and keep working for them as opposed to content that just performed on social and email."They also wanted to keep their content in line with CaringBridge's human approach as a health journal nonprofit."Our idea: hey, they have 300,000 Facebook followers. So we had these ideas that we did keyword research on. New people were looking in search results. We thought: who better to kind of be the experts on these topics than CaringBridge's own audience?"This led to meatier, more useful content."What to say to a friend who has just been diagnosed with cancer. How to support a friend in the hospital. What to do when there's a health crisis. Things like that. Instead of just looking at what was already ranking, we realized we could create more unique content by featuring the CaringBridge audience. We get dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments on these prompts that we send out on Facebook. We use the direct quotes and ideas in the article. We were able to really quickly scale content creation, write more than two dozen posts a year, and we've seen some really fantastic results."Of course, it doesn't always feel comfortable, doing things this way."It does feel sort of risky to break from the mold. When you're looking at the Top 10 results you're basically seeing: this is what Google is saying they like. This is what Google is saying will rank. That's where it's a risk of blending more of that traditional keyword research, making sure you've got the right terms."You can't go wrong by aligning your content creation strategy with what Google wants, though."Google wants relevant content. We've seen our work surpass some things that maybe have a way higher domain authority. Their content isn't as relevant. People aren't looking for the same 5 tips in some cases. They're looking for: so-and-so who understands their experience, sharing what they're going through. I know it's not a direct ranking factor, but I think the engagement we get from that (hundreds of comments on these posts of people sharing their story as well) gives them more traction. They resonate with more people and that's how we've seen the performance." Abby admits, though, that every now and then?She still uses a listicle or two! Using Keyword Research the Human WaySo how much preparation went into these campaigns? How can others duplicate Uproer's success in this area?"First, I want to address the keyword research portion," Abby says. "It is still very much based on the tools."Abby urges listeners not to skip keyword research."It's a good step. You still need to get validation that these things are being searched for. It doesn't need to be traditional keyword research tools. I think if the pandemic has taught us anything it's that a lot of things people are looking up haven't caught up in the tools because they're new queries. That's where we use tools like Google Trends, Google's New Question Hub, or Exploding Topics by Backlinko." Some "exploding topics" in marketing. "These things are a great place to get an idea of: okay. I have validation that these topics people are looking for. I think that's the best place to start for any client is getting that validation. From there? There's a lot of different ways you can source this content. A common question is, okay, I don't have 1000+ followers on social. What then?"Turns out there are still a lot of different ways to source the content."One workaround I found was a deep dive into forums. This is something I don't think a ton of people are doing. If you just Google your target keyword plus Reddit, Quora, whatever the forum is? You can source such amazing ideas."Abby did this for CaringBridge very recently."With a harder topic. A child that's very ill. What tips do parents have? Reddit had hundreds of comments. Ideas you don't even think of. Contact Ronald McDonald House. Bring an extension cord to the hospital. It's not in the top ten listicles. People want to feel validated. They want the nitty-gritty stuff." Addressing Attribution Issues with UGCAttribution issues can arise when tapping into user-generated content, but Abby has solutions."On social we make it pretty clear that we're using people's comments for the articles. What we do is we include people's first name and end initial for some anonymity. People commenting know their comment may be in a post. And we've gotten a lot of good feedback. We've never had an issue with that. The consent is there."When sourcing from forums you need a slightly different strategy."You can't pull a quote directly from Reddit and put it in there. People's user names are like Skull47 and I'm not trying to put that in an article. But people are knowingly putting these opinions out in the open. They're public. It's a public forum. So when someone says something like: bring an extension cord, here's my story? I'm going to take that idea and say: hey, people who have gone through this highly suggest bringing an extension cord. I personally don't think that goes into the mode of taking people's content or stealing ideas. They're putting that out there to help people. We're just scaling that idea out there to help more people." Tying Content Strategy to Business GoalsKeyword volume isn't a big part of Abby's strategy."I think we're past that. It's really about topics. Creating hubs and spokes. We have a client who does eCommerce for raw dog food. There are a lot of questions around that. So instead of just doing all the questions at once, our rapid content creation is basically around topics. What vegetables dogs can eat is a big one that we're doing. There's volume there, but not the highest volume opportunities."Instead, they look at where they want to capture people, what the goal is, and then the different topics they can create content around. "We try not to focus only on just one bucket. We're looking at a lot of people to capture different areas of the funnel." Abby also talks about the way Spotify uses its own user data to create content."They didn't have to spend all this time doing user research. It's just literally: they've got the data there, and now they're playing with it. Spotify uses more numbers, but I think that's something that can be replicated, whether it's your user's data, or your user's ideas, comments, hopes, or dreams." Career Advice for New SEOs or SEOs With Imposter Syndrome"The way I got started in SEO was being open-minded and having curiosity. It was my first job out of school. The question came up: I didn't promote this post. Why is it driving so much traffic? How does something get traffic from search engines?" She Googled the question and went down the rabbit hole."So I always start by saying: keep an open mind. Be curious. Chase things that interest you. I also tell students the biggest thing I hear is school gave them a very broad sense of marketing, but they don't really know what area they want to go into. I suggest doing some LinkedIn stalking. I researched so many people, looking at their job descriptions. If the job description sounds like: what, you get paid to do that? That's someone's job? That sounds like fun! Make a note of that. Look at what those job titles are. Look at the kind of companies they work for. You start to get this profile of what you want to do. I found content and discovered that SEO was for me." She also points out that this is one of the most supportive industries you can work in."Everyone is willing to help. Everyone is kind and lifts each other up and evangelizes each other. Of course, no industry is perfect, but as a whole? Everyone wants to see each other succeed. You just have to reach out and grab those opportunities, cause they're there." She says when she first got into the industry she was afraid that other people were better than her because they had certain job titles or more experience. "But we're all equals. We're all people who sometimes forget to floss at night and don't drink enough water. When you think about things like that, everyone becomes accessible. I've just been trying to approach SEO that way, explore as many avenues as I can. Don't be afraid to talk to anyone." She also points out that nobody really knows everything."[SEO] changes. So often. Every three months there's a new update. Google releases a new hint. Or whatever. So I feel like we're all kind of on the same learning pace. We're all learning together." Abby's Go-To ResourcesAbby had shout-outs for quite a few people and resources on this episode. Taylor Berg, SEO Lead at TalkSpace Areej AbuAli of Women in Tech SEO The Shine Speaker Boot Camp Aleyda Solis' LearningSEO.io SEO for Lunch  Uproer's own Searchlite Newsletter Search Engine Land Check them out! What's your right now cause?Abby's cause is helping students and young professionals navigate the post-Covid job landscape. "To figure out how to get a job in this very strange time. They can't go to agency tours or happy hours, things they could have used to breakthrough. I'm doing whatever I can to connect with them and give them tips."She gives a shoutout to the Boundaryless Agency Simulation program. "Dozens of students signed up, got experience. I know at least six or seven people who got jobs as a result, including someone we hired at Uproer."She's very passionate about participating and being a mentor. "How to use LinkedIn to make human connections. I'm spreading the word, speaking with my alma mater, talking with people within my old organization, PRSSA. I think there's a lot of things professionals can do to interact with students and help them along the way. I think it's about speaking with them, letting them know what you're doing, giving them the tips you wish you had known five, ten, fifteen years ago."  Connect with Abby ReimerYou heard it here first, Abby will totally answer if you ask her for help! Here's where to find her.  Twitter LinkedIn Uproer 

Abby Reimer is a Senior SEO Analyst and Strategist at <a href="https://uproer.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Uproer</a>. You may remember her agency from <a href="https://bytraject.com/blog/rapid-content-generation-seo-jess-girardi/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">our recent episode with her colleague, Senior Search Strategist, Jess Girardi</a>. Abby's very passionate about bringing humanity back to SEO and about creating content that doesn't mimic the same old, same old stuff out there. Tune in today if you're ready to do something fresh. The highlights:<ul> <li>[1:27] Moving past boilerplate content.</li> <li>[3:37] Balancing humanity with performance.</li> <li>[5:52] Using keyword research the human way.</li> <li>[8:37] Addressing attribution issues with UGC.</li> <li>[11:17] Tying content strategy to business goals.</li> <li>[14:14] Abby's dream clients.</li> <li>[20:52] Abby's go-to resources.</li> <li>[24:05] Balancing risk and reward.</li> <li>[25:53] Abby's causes.</li> </ul> The insights: Moving Past Boiler Plate Content We've all seen it. The same content. Over and over again. "Ten Best Marketing Tips! Ten Simple Marketing Tips!" Abby encourages SEOs and content managers to think about their audience.  "More often than not, our audience are the last people we think about when creating this content. I just did a Twitter poll. It finished yesterday. Had 50 responses. Asked: when you're creating a new piece of content, where do you start researching the material?"  As you can see from the results, a lot of people go straight to online resources first. "That's very normal. It makes sense. You're doing keyword research. You're looking at the SERPs to see what's ranking. But that first step is where we lose the humanity aspect.  We see, oh, well, everyone's doing ten tips. Maybe I'll just mimic those and add two more." So she recommends reaching out to her audience to learn about their experiences, their tips, what they think about the topic.  Balancing Humanity With Performance Human content doesn't always rank as well as we might like. Abby says that Uproer's award-winning campaign for CaringBridge was born out of this very pain point. "Their pain point was lack of budget, time, and resources, but they still needed to create a lot of new blog content, especially content that would rank on search and keep working for them as opposed to content that just performed on social and email." They also wanted to keep their content in line with CaringBridge's human approach as a health journal nonprofit. "Our idea: hey, they have 300,000 Facebook followers. So we had these ideas that we did keyword research on. New people were looking in search results. We thought: who better to kind of be the experts on these topics than CaringBridge's own audience?" This led to meatier, more useful content. "What to say to a friend who has just been diagnosed with cancer. How to support a friend in the hospital. What to do when there's a health crisis. Things like that. Instead of just looking at what was already ranking, we realized we could create more unique content by featuring the CaringBridge audience. We get dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments on these prompts that we send out on Facebook. We use the direct quotes and ideas in the article. We were able to really quickly scale content creation, write more than two dozen posts a year, and we've seen some really fantastic results." Of course, it doesn't always feel comfortable, doing things this way. "It does feel sort of risky to break from the mold. When you're looking at the Top 10 results you're basically seeing: this is what Google is saying they like. This is what Google is saying will rank. That's where it's a risk of blending more of that traditional keyword research, making sure you've got the right terms." You can't go wrong by aligning your content creation strategy with what Google wants, though. "Google wants relevant content. We've seen our work surpass some things that maybe have a way higher domain authority. Their content isn't as relevant. People aren't looking for the same 5 tips in some cases. They're looking for: so-and-so who understands their experience, sharing what they're going through. I know it's not a direct ranking factor, but I think the engagement we get from that (hundreds of comments on these posts of people sharing their story as well) gives them more traction. They resonate with more people and that's how we've seen the performance."  Abby admits, though, that every now and then? She still uses a listicle or two!  Using Keyword Research the Human Way So how much preparation went into these campaigns? How can others duplicate Uproer's success in this area? "First, I want to address the keyword research portion," Abby says. "It is still very much based on the tools." Abby urges listeners not to skip keyword research. "It's a good step. You still need to get validation that these things are being searched for. It doesn't need to be traditional keyword research tools. I think if the pandemic has taught us anything it's that a lot of things people are looking up haven't caught up in the tools because they're new queries. That's where we use tools like <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google Trends</a>, <a href="https://questionhub.withgoogle.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google's New Question Hub</a>, or <a href="https://explodingtopics.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Exploding Topics</a> by Backlinko."  Some "exploding topics" in marketing.  "These things are a great place to get an idea of: okay. I have validation that these topics people are looking for. I think that's the best place to start for any client is getting that validation. From there? There's a lot of different ways you can source this content. A common question is, okay, I don't have 1000+ followers on social. What then?" Turns out there are still a lot of different ways to source the content. "One workaround I found was a deep dive into forums. This is something I don't think a ton of people are doing. If you just Google your target keyword plus Reddit, Quora, whatever the forum is? You can source such amazing ideas." Abby did this for CaringBridge very recently. "With a harder topic. A child that's very ill. What tips do parents have? Reddit had hundreds of comments. Ideas you don't even think of. Contact Ronald McDonald House. Bring an extension cord to the hospital. It's not in the top ten listicles. People want to feel validated. They want the nitty-gritty stuff."  Addressing Attribution Issues with UGC Attribution issues can arise when tapping into user-generated content, but Abby has solutions. "On social we make it pretty clear that we're using people's comments for the articles. What we do is we include people's first name and end initial for some anonymity. People commenting know their comment may be in a post. And we've gotten a lot of good feedback. We've never had an issue with that. The consent is there." When sourcing from forums you need a slightly different strategy. "You can't pull a quote directly from Reddit and put it in there. People's user names are like Skull47 and I'm not trying to put that in an article. But people are knowingly putting these opinions out in the open. They're public. It's a public forum. So when someone says something like: bring an extension cord, here's my story? I'm going to take that idea and say: hey, people who have gone through this highly suggest bringing an extension cord. I personally don't think that goes into the mode of taking people's content or stealing ideas. They're putting that out there to help people. We're just scaling that idea out there to help more people."  Tying Content Strategy to Business Goals Keyword volume isn't a big part of Abby's strategy. "I think we're past that. It's really about topics. Creating hubs and spokes. We have a client who does eCommerce for raw dog food. There are a lot of questions around that. So instead of just doing all the questions at once, our rapid content creation is basically around topics. What vegetables dogs can eat is a big one that we're doing. There's volume there, but not the highest volume opportunities." Instead, they look at where they want to capture people, what the goal is, and then the different topics they can create content around. "We try not to focus only on just one bucket. We're looking at a lot of people to capture different areas of the funnel."  Abby also talks about the way Spotify uses its own user data to create content. "They didn't have to spend all this time doing user research. It's just literally: they've got the data there, and now they're playing with it. Spotify uses more numbers, but I think that's something that can be replicated, whether it's your user's data, or your user's ideas, comments, hopes, or dreams."  Career Advice for New SEOs or SEOs With Imposter Syndrome "The way I got started in SEO was being open-minded and having curiosity. It was my first job out of school. The question came up: I didn't promote this post. Why is it driving so much traffic? How does something get traffic from search engines?"  She Googled the question and went down the rabbit hole. "So I always start by saying: keep an open mind. Be curious. Chase things that interest you. I also tell students the biggest thing I hear is school gave them a very broad sense of marketing, but they don't really know what area they want to go into. I suggest doing some LinkedIn stalking. I researched so many people, looking at their job descriptions. If the job description sounds like: what, you get paid to do that? That's someone's job? That sounds like fun! Make a note of that. Look at what those job titles are. Look at the kind of companies they work for. You start to get this profile of what you want to do. I found content and discovered that SEO was for me."  She also points out that this is one of the most supportive industries you can work in. "Everyone is willing to help. Everyone is kind and lifts each other up and evangelizes each other. Of course, no industry is perfect, but as a whole? Everyone wants to see each other succeed. You just have to reach out and grab those opportunities, cause they're there."  She says when she first got into the industry she was afraid that other people were better than her because they had certain job titles or more experience.  "But we're all equals. We're all people who sometimes forget to floss at night and don't drink enough water. When you think about things like that, everyone becomes accessible. I've just been trying to approach SEO that way, explore as many avenues as I can. Don't be afraid to talk to anyone."  She also points out that nobody really knows everything. "[SEO] changes. So often. Every three months there's a new update. Google releases a new hint. Or whatever. So I feel like we're all kind of on the same learning pace. We're all learning together."  Abby's Go-To Resources Abby had shout-outs for quite a few people and resources on this episode.<ul> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/taylorannberg?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Taylor Berg, SEO Lead at TalkSpace</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.areejabuali.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Areej AbuAli of Women in Tech SEO</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.shinebootcamp.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Shine Speaker Boot Camp</a></li> <li><a href="https://learningseo.io/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Aleyda Solis' LearningSEO.io</a></li> <li><a href="https://nickleroy.com/newsletter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">SEO for Lunch</a></li> <li> <a href="https://uproer.com/newsletter/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Uproer's own Searchlite</a> Newsletter</li> <li><a href="https://searchengineland.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Search Engine Land</a></li> </ul>Check them out!  What's your right now cause? Abby's cause is helping students and young professionals navigate the post-Covid job landscape.  "To figure out how to get a job in this very strange time. They can't go to agency tours or happy hours, things they could have used to breakthrough. I'm doing whatever I can to connect with them and give them tips." She gives a shoutout to the <a href="https://www.boundarylessmn.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Boundaryless Agency Simulation</a> program.  "Dozens of students signed up, got experience. I know at least six or seven people who got jobs as a result, including someone we hired at Uproer." She's very passionate about participating and being a mentor.  "How to use LinkedIn to make human connections. I'm spreading the word, speaking with my alma mater, talking with people within my old organization, PRSSA. I think there's a lot of things professionals can do to interact with students and help them along the way. I think it's about speaking with them, letting them know what you're doing, giving them the tips you wish you had known five, ten, fifteen years ago."   Connect with Abby Reimer You heard it here first, Abby will totally answer if you ask her for help! Here's where to find her. <ul> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/abbyreimermpls/with_replies?lang=en" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Twitter</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/abby-reimer" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a></li> <li><a href="https://uproer.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Uproer</a></li> </ul>

Bringing Humanity Back to SEO with Abby Reimer