Skinnymixers Brand Building
Hey! Welcome back, Rankers. Boy, what a week. We did this speaking gig in Melbourne for The Advisor and hi to everybody I met there. And then yesterday just got back from Queensland where I spoke … Queensland? Queenstown in New Zealand where I spoke for the self-storage association. Hi to everyone there as that was really interesting.
Oh my God, if you have never been to Queenstown, put it on your list. It is one of the most spectacularly, ridiculously beautiful places in the world. So thank you Queenstown.
Content Marketing
I want to talk to you this week about content marketing because come November, I’ll be speaking at Pubcon Conference in Vegas. Yes, that’s right, performing live in Vegas and talking about content marketing. And it’s not what you might think. I asked a question on Facebook today, “What does content marketing mean to you, are you doing it?” And it’s sort of gone off the boil and on the boil and it’s been a buzzword and a bit of jargon. But for me, content marketing simply meant marketing. And I said that a couple of weeks ago.
Basically, it’s publishing, getting the brand out there, and being aware of the brand. I want to talk to you a little bit about someone who’s done it really well. Now the last time I spoke about this site, I got heavily trolled. My family was threatened. Not by anyone to do with this site. But because I said stop buying backlinks! This brand is not buying backlinks and they’re doing awesomely well. So this is of course Skinnymixers, you may remember them from a couple of years ago. I first worked on this site back in 2015 for the bloggersSEO course. So those of you who don’t know there’s a group on Facebook called bloggersSEO Support. Where we just help bloggers with their SEO, as you might guess. And what I learned from Niky’s site I put into a course for bloggers. So go and look for bloggersSEO on Facebook, you’ll find it there.
Now, her site was amazing in that she was already at the time getting a lot of traffic from Facebook, and you can see here we’ve got Google organic traffic back in the day when I first started…around August 2015. I began working on the site in July 2015. And it already had a bit of an uptick.
But you can see there, Google organics, she was already getting 40,000 a month from Google organics. And you can see now she’s getting 120,000 a month. At one point she was getting about 10,000 unique’s a day from Google, but I haven’t worked on the site for a couple years, so I don’t know why that’s dropped off. Except to say that you know when I go and have a look at the site, you can see we’ve got the logo in a H1, we’ve got a H4 up here. It’s lost a little bit of that initial SEO I did.
But back in the day, what got it ranked really, really highly was not doing any backlinking or working for any strategic backlinking, it was simply doing what we call ‘take the handbrake off’. It was basically cleaning up the index, fixing up all of the errors. Getting the words in the site in the right spot. And I think we also did a URL restructure where we took out all the dates out of the URLs and that basically took it to number two for some of their top phrases. Now she’s gone from strength to strength.
And one of the reasons why, just for comparison, is she’s going to have a big announcement this week. No one knows what it is. But she’s in New York right now, just quietly there’s something big going on. Anyway, I don’t know. But Niky basically publishes cookbooks, or thermo-cookbooks, well if you’re in the cult you know what I mean. So if I just put it in Facebook, they’re basically recipe books. So what I’m showing you is the Facebook traffic. And you can see here back in 2015, we had one click from desktop traffic from Facebook.
But 53,000 today from Facebook and 36,000, plus these two because I display mobile and desktop separately now.
And when you’re in Google Analytics it’s a good idea to do so because you can, as here we can see a real pattern. Desktop is down, whereas mobile is right up. Now, the interesting thing here is the Facebook traffic has not grown at the same rate, nowhere near the same rate. So you know, Google organic is up; I think it was 206%, something like that. Facebook’s up 44%, let’s have a look. Yeah, 206% on mobile, 100% on desktop.
So, all we really did was the SEO basics. She already had the backlinks. I know at the time I did a video saying this site’s got 35 back links. And I just had a look at how many she’s got now. Majestic SEO says the most recent one she’s had, which I think is last ninety days, I’m not too sure about the recent index with Majestic. But she’s had nine back links that Majestic knows about in the last ninety days or whatever it’s been. So I should, I mean some of them are great back links. You know, The 4 Blades is relatable, universal to things.
Brand Related Phrases
But here’s the really interesting thing. When you go and have a look at keywords now. About, say about 10% of the impressions that she’s getting are from brand related phrases. I mean when I first started on this, she did not have that many brand-related phrases inside search console like she has today. And this is the killer for me. This is what you should do if you are thinking about building a brand. Here’s a great way to track how it’s going out there in the world of search.
Simply go to Google Trends and put in your brand. And I’ve said show us worldwide searches for Skinnymixers in the last five years. And so I started on the site about here. So the brand was already established. She already had a lot of people Googling her brand. They knew who she was. I started here, did some work, and you can see that this is the big uptick that I was talking about when she was getting 10 or 12 thousand a day. Some of these spikes relate to release of her cookbooks as well, right? So that’s another indication that your brand is strong.
But here’s the killer. When you scroll down, you have a look at related queries. Look at the topics that Google says that this brand is related to, or this keyword I should say. Because Google doesn’t say this is a brand, but it is. These are the related topics for that keyword. Now when you start to see things like this that are specifically related to what it is that you are doing, that aren’t really including your keywords, like Thermomix. They’re saying that a related query to Skinnymixers is Thermomix. Well that’s her main thing, right?
Chicken meat, poultry, butter, these are all recipes, right? So this is an indication that the brand’s on the right track. And she can do a lot of things wrong, like we can see with just the home page, I haven’t even crawled it. But Google will still send her buckets of traffic because Google knows that people are looking for her when it comes to chicken, meat, poultry, butter chicken, when it comes to soup. All of these things Google knows that they are looking for that brand.
So, come to Pubcon, and if you are coming to Pubcon, we’ll talk more about this. Get this code: rc-7549115. That’ll give you a 15% discount off your tickets for Pubcon. Hopefully that’s helpful, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much, bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
