Website Content That Generates Leads And Revenue, Not Just Traffic

  📍 When it comes to getting your website to the top of Google, creating content that’s relevant and helpful for the searcher’s query is absolutely critical. But with infinite options for content that you could create, how can marketers prioritize content that’s going to drive leads and revenue and not just traffic?

in this episode, I’m joined by freelance SEO consultant Francesco Baldini to find out. Francesco, great to see you again. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, David. Thanks for inviting me. Great to have you on. look, just for everyone’s benefit, could you provide a bit of background to you, your career, and how you’ve ended up working as a freelancer?

yes. I’ve been working in digital environments for, All my life, essentially, in Italy before then they moved a few countries, Ireland, Canada, and then I’m in the UK now, for a long time, probably. and, I started, I started in Italy with freelance, generic freelance, digital marketing, then moved to Ireland, more focused on the e commerce sites.

And, then SEO specifically on, yes, SEO specifically. then, I always wanted to be, to be my own boss, let’s say that, and, then a few months ago, I decided to, to go 100 percent freelance because I’ve been freelancing for a pretty long For a while now on the side, but now is a, what’s the moment to change and to go on the percent.

I think as part of your time freelancing, you have worked, or been employed by agencies, to bolster some of their skills and their capacity as well. Is that right? yes. I also work with, some agencies to, when they don’t have the staff or, when they have too much work, I can help them, from my side.

Yes. And how have you found working with agencies? working with agencies depends, there are many different, ways, the good, practice is essentially agencies that actually want to help their clients. They want the, they want to achieve their clients. And there, I found that there are the smallest agency agencies from this point of view, because there are from the other side, there’s a, there are many agencies that, their main goal is not, helping.

helping their clients, but, scaling their, operations and, and not, being, to make so helpful, to the clients, but, there’s a balance between them. And so again, I found that, the smaller and older agencies that they don’t want to, to be seen or to scale or, and to sell.

That seems to be a real trend in agency land is that people are just trying to grow their agency as quickly as possible over the course of, I don’t know, maybe five years and then exit as quickly as they can. Yeah, I found myself in a discovery call a few months ago with this guy who was starting an agency with no staff, essentially.

And every time we were talking about that, yes, I can do that. He was saying, yes, I can do that. Yes, why don’t. You do something you want. Essentially, he wanted employees with a less headache. So freelancers, but, he didn’t have any stuff. Just he was starting out with a different business that can be scalable.

And this is the kind of project. environment that I don’t fully like, because it’s like, it’s about yourself, it’s not about helping, actually helping. Great, thank you. there’s a piece of content that I saw on your social media feed, recently, which is, it was a very top level overview of a case study for a website that you have worked on, where, the traffic actually remained very similar.

but the value of the leads that you were generating for them increased significantly, more than 30 fold each month. it’d be great if you could just talk a bit about that. yes, this was, a very interesting case study. essentially the website was quite old, like 10 years or something, with a very limited traffic.

They were, well known in their, in their industry. but the traffic was no, we’re just, they don’t have, they didn’t have traffic and they were generating two, three leads per month. then we started, to work together and, from two, two, three leads per month, they, we got to two, three leads per day.

The reason, the main reason for that mean work we, did with them was essentially by, working on their, product pages to identify, to make sure that they were, Clear and, a couple of, UX, UX elements, which were implementing, I’m sorry, a contact form on the, same page as the product, was a training, a training company.

And to, to simplify, let’s let, I’d like to say simplify the contact form that are removing most of the fields, because, they had 15 fields, mandatory fields, that people need needed to feel every time they would get in touch with them. So essentially people were not getting in touch with them.

And this in a few months, they went from more or less 800 pounds, to 25, 35, 000, which was pretty good. It was good because they were closing around, 70, 80 percent of the, leads that they were getting. So it was, the company is a very legitimate company and very good. The only problem was that they were not able, to, to use a website as a lead generation site.

Yeah. And I know from the, we’re not, I’m not working, with, it is a client anymore, but I know that for a period of time, they could have, they had some problems, because they had to hire new stuff because they were not able to cover all the other leads that they had. Great. And from the sounds of it then, that particular case study wasn’t so much about, or the results achieved weren’t so much about search engine optimization, but actually improving the experience and how focused the content was on the page, which probably does affect how it ranks on Google as well.

But it was more about making that process for the user. Slicker, so that they are more likely to complete the steps that your client wants them to take. Yes, the point there was essentially the, we tried to start a content project. The company was not ready to create content. We created like one content, which by the way is the most visited page on the site.

in the last like couple of years, but yes, they were not, helping their users to, to get in touch with them. Yeah. And I think it’s a really nice point to recognize that in digital marketing, whether it’s about search engine optimization or conversion rate optimization or whatever it is that you’re doing on the website, unless you’re a magazine that’s selling advertising space, it really isn’t about just increasing traffic for the sake of increasing traffic.

There should be an end goal in sight of. More leads, more revenue. And I saw something that you posted, about you’ve, developed a process for finding content that helps you to develop ideas. For content that is going to be generating commercially relevant traffic and not just traffic. Yes. Okay.

This, process is based on, on the book. of the absolutely awesome, that I’ll, share with you the, book and the, notes. Essentially, it’s a way to identify, there are a few steps. Step one is to identify your best customers. So essentially you want to know which customers you want more.

The ones that they support you, the ones that buy more products. The ones that share your, product or your service and so on. then you want to find which alternative they can see. No, not you. They consider alternative what they would do or use if you were not on the market. So you need to understand why, essentially why they, buy from you.

with their own language, based on that, you find, you need to look for the unique features that you have and your competitors don’t. So you identify which are the features that, your, your customers, consider that are, the reason why they buy, from you.

and from this, agglomerate, this bucket of information, you can identify the, what is the goal, the actual goal that your customer, your customers, are interested in, in, and then, based on the, of the goal, you can identify, what is your actual, best fit customer. With all this information, it’s quite a long process.

with this information, you can create content around one specific area of your business. You can create one category and then explain everything about one specific element, other than being too generic or too, Put your efforts somewhere else. So this way you can attract people that are trying to solve an actual problem and that problem can attract your best fit customers.

So once you’ve gathered all of the information that you’ve described, how do you use that bucket of information to then come up with content ideas? you, the first, the best tool, it’s actually Google. you need to, look for what, what are the main topic to, to identify what are the seed, seed keywords, seed topics, and, and to look around what kind of a content is out, there, what kind of, information forums, or blog posts and so on.

And then with a, tool like Ahrefs, or, SEMrush, keyword tool, you can identify, which keywords you can target. So you, you can, start from one specific kind of topic and then, going, broad or, narrow, down. Another tool that I would use when there is a, it’s probably one of the most important tool is, your email address, your email, your mailbox.

So you know that what people are asking for, are on this topic, your sales your sales persons or, phone calls that you receive. this, these are information that you can’t find with tools, but are your own are unique to you, to yourself. So my, my advice is always look around your own data before, using tools because these, the tools are useful to, double check, but your own data is, is a reason why People, actual people come to you, but yes, essentially, Ahrefs, SEMrush, also asked.

com, which it’s useful to find, new questions for new content ideas. And, yes, these are the three main tools that in this case, I would suggest. And once you’ve gone through that process, you’ve created a bunch of ideas for content that you could create. How do you prioritize which ones you should be creating first?

And maybe which ones you, you perhaps hold on for later? there are probably, there are, okay, depends of course, Being an SEO, it always depends. Yes. my advice is to start prioritize, prioritizing, the ones that can, there are more commercial oriented, If you are a software, for example, reviews or, comparison with other, products, or also service pages could be, what you can find.

So the one that can actually, attract, customers that are interested to, to buy a product that they are looking around and so on. the other, the other. Prioritization, is, because they, is the one that are slightly more difficult, so they need more time to, to be on an option to, get, to get traction.

And then everything else. the, but the, yes, the most, the biggest priority is the one that can attract actual, customers. . Yeah. Your, point there about, perhaps prioritizing the ones that are going to take longer ti longer time to gain some traction perhaps ’cause they’re more competitive.

that’s something that I’m not familiar with. So is, it in your opinion or is it just known to be the case that in SEO terms, there, there is some benefit of just having content that’s existed for a long time? yes. Okay. There are many, many depends, many opinions, around, around this. the point is, one page, one page to be, to start ranking to, to make Google to understand that the page is actually live.

It’s makes sense. It doesn’t, doesn’t Be deleted or just, it’s relevant, takes time. So it takes time to acquire backlinks. It takes time to, to improve the page to, to see if the page is the right target. So the sooner you publish a page, the better it is because you can analyze, you can improve the page.

You can, build backlinks on the page. you can, and Google again can digest the page, more and then, compared to that page, with, your competitors and eventually, rank you in numbers of position, even if in the last few months, we will always be a bit of a scatty, let’s say that.

Yeah, Reddit’s featuring a lot more than it used to. yeah, yes, Reddit and forums and areas and websites that they don’t, fully deserve it. even there’s a kind of fight, between them, the actual businesses and the content businesses. my experience so far is I saw that, actual businesses, not content, oriented, not just blogs.

they have, they had much, less, pain. blogs. I have a couple of tests that I did one with a, with a cheap writer, one with a, with an AI that went. It’s actually down with almost no traffic, but there were tests, so it was pretty fine. But I, accidentally know the, I didn’t put much effort in, in that while I have, another website, another, yes, another website that weren’t, but this didn’t, see any change.

And the one website that I sold a few months ago, that is. Getting quite a bit traffic. I didn’t like the topic. I didn’t, like that. I didn’t enjoy working with that, but it’s growing, quite well. And the new owner didn’t update the account and didn’t create new content and everything.

So it’s a bit of a, random, at the moment. So it’s, not random, but it’s a bit difficult to identify what is good according to Google, apart from Reddit, because Reddit is a, good, By definition, let’s say that user generated content. yes. they also had to deal with us without we read it.

So they, they are more likely to Frank credit because they want data from the users. Yeah, makes sense. And I just want to go back to a point that you made actually about one of the experiments you mentioned. so just to help me understand, there was a website where you had created some content using AI and some by using just a cheat code.

But human writer, what was the result of that outcome? The chip writer, was, has been live for a year and a half now. And, in the last few months, like in March with a, March update went down, Oh, really? Yes. the same with, with, AI content, I didn’t put, I didn’t put any effort in that essentially.

and that, that website didn’t rank. Initially for almost nothing because again, I just wanted to use this, this software and created like 150 articles, one or two were decent, but everything went down with, with this update, but, but they are not that dissimilar, that very in terms of quality because anyone.

Anyone can create the same content with a bit of research, the human with cheap, cheaper content was not created, was not that great. You didn’t get any better results than the AI. and, the website that I created, that I didn’t enjoy it, the one that I sold, I, I employed from that.

I created, I asked, to yes, to experts, that were also, writers to create the content and that, that, that content is still going on quite well. It’s growing. It’s actually growing in the last three, four months. It’s growing. So really the lesson to take away there is that it is, it genuinely is about the quality of the content, regardless of how it’s produced.

It’s about providing useful, interesting content that matches the searcher’s query. yes, You, my, my take is that you should add something else. Yeah. Something else that your compilers don’t have, that an expert can have. This is the Yeah, that makes sense. Thank you. just want to go back to the point we were talking about around prioritization, because I did see another post by you on LinkedIn, around picking on, search competitors of yours who have weaker, off page signals than you do and effectively harvesting and researching their data for what they’re ranking for.

Because if their off page signals are weaker than yours, then actually it should be quite easy for your website to outrank them if you produce useful content. Yes, essentially this is a way to find some, lower competition topics. so we can, you can. Create something around that is a, is a common, is a common practice, to look for compilers to see, the, smallest, the better sometimes, because, if you have a sort of, experience, if you have history on for your website, it’s more likely to rank for that.

I created, a few days ago, by the way, I created this, this content, which was actually. Started with AI and then heavily edited, from a website that is a client that is, doesn’t have any, blog posts that ranks well, this, this content ranked, very well in the last, in the next, but this was the reason was we found the content that was decent was, low competitor competitive as well.

As, relevant to them. So you need to find a few elements that match together. It’s not just having a competitor that low competition that helps you. yeah. Is there any value in creating content that maybe isn’t commercially relevant? So it’s not going to be the stuff that’s generating. leads and revenue directly, it might indicate some more topical relevance to your site for the pages that really do matter.

is that a factor? yeah, yes. generally speaking, the more, there are two, two, two main reasons. One is, Google can identify your website with a, around one specific topic, topical relevance. And, the second is, Users tend, ourselves as well, we don’t tend to buy straight away from a website that we found once, if the website, if you find the same website multiple times, you can entrust towards them.

So the more content you find around specific. A specific topic, the better until you, are, you create different touch points, from, for your website. And then people are more likely to convert. If they know, essentially, if they know you, they trust more you. I think that’s probably quite a good point to finish on because it, it feels like we’ve gone full circle from the initial point about, the example.

There was a website that was generating the same amount of traffic as it was before you started working with them. But actually you were helping them to convert more of that traffic. Into valuable sales opportunities for their business to the point you’ve just made. I think that, that, completes the circle really nicely.

I know we’ve only just scratched the surface of many of these different topics that you’ve mentioned on, search engine optimization and, and user optimization as well. Before I let you go, Francesco, could you give a book recommendation that you think everyone in marketing should read?

yes. It’s actually a book that I’m reading again after 15 years, something. It’s called Influence by Robert Cialdini and is about how you can influence people around you, online, offline and so on. it’s a quite good book and when the first time I read it, I loved it. but I was not probably ready to, to use that advice now is, I’m a completely different, space mindset and sound.

And I feel that I can actually use that book much, much more profitable way. Are you using it websites to increase the conversion rates? yes, this is, that is the intention. I tried, my, my wife, writes books and I’m trying to use some tricks to make people to buy more of the books, for her. So it’s, I’m testing that a few, a couple of, tips.

Brilliant. Thank you. Now I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. It’s been packed full of really useful insights. Thank you so much, Francesco. How can people contact you after the show? Yeah. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, with my name, Francesco Baldini. and, I registered my own company, a few days ago, withdirection.Com. simple, simple, and then you can write an email to me like, hello and, with direction. com. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Francesco. Great to see you. Thank you. Cheers. Bye everyone.