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Jason Berkowitz is the CEO of Break The Web (https://www.breaktheweb.agency), the inbound marketing agency based out of New York City. With a specialty in Search Engine Optimization, under the label, SEO Services New York (https://seoservicesnewyork.org), Jason has personally advised on marketing campaigns ranging from small local businesses to enterprise brands we all know. Jason and his agencies carry a unique philosophy when it comes to strategy development but the end result is always awareness & positioning.

Welcome to the podcast Jason. Hey, thank you so much for having me. You have me really excited to talk to you about, you know, the topic of today, of course. Be talking about content marketing specifically content Gap analysis and topic creation for Content marketing. But you know before we get into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself your background and how you got into what you’re doing today.

Absolutely. So I am a self-proclaimed SEO nerd in the fact that even at late nights. My girlfriend hates it. I’m just sitting here reading about SEO news what people are saying all the controversy and the stigmas behind it. I’m an SEO weirdo. So the way I got into it was actually from the need to Market my own business.

I had a personal training company here in New York City and obviously as you can imagine personal trainers also need to be salesmen of sorts and the hustle was really hard trying to get new clientele try to. Raise my own income. I looked into ways to just mark it online and try to get people to come to me via inbound versus me going out to them right is of course outbound and read it but SEO started learning networking speaking with people trying it out for myself failing trying again failing collecting data on what really works for me that also provide longevity and tangible results for the long run.

And then from there it actually turned out to be a weird Paradigm Shift where. Loved SEO more than I did personal training. Okay started freelancing doing both and told my freelance business, you know did well enough where I was able to actually sell the PT company to a friend of mine and then start doing SEO full-time and then as more clients came in freelance became agency.

Okay, great. Great. That’s awesome. Yeah, I love to hear stories like that. I’ve talked to a number of different guests and have a number of different guest on the podcast that they told me, you know a similar story where how they got. To Ecommerce and e-commerce marketing and just kind of the world of of you know online things like SEO is because of necessity and like you said you started off as a personal trainer and you’re like, all right, you know, how can I get how can I get people to come to me I can.

Get people to find me so you started digging in and did research on SEO and what you would need to do. Yeah, prove that business. And so yeah, a lot of people tell me that that you know, their current career or what they’re currently doing is based on, you know, just a need that they had. Yeah, that is awesome.

But that’s quite a shift personal training tessio. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t say when I get older. I want to be an SEO guy, right? Yeah, it was interesting. But you know, I was always a tech worked at guy, you know as even as a young age. I felt a website at 12 years old was. Like an old-school form.

I don’t really know. I don’t think people really use forms anymore. But looks like a men’s format 12 or 13 years old and did pretty decent and it was kind of like Destiny in a way. Okay? Okay. That’s awesome. Yeah these days Monica SEO nerd isn’t actually a bad thing, you know it because it you know, it allows the cool thing to be tech-savvy it is.

Yeah, if you know how to bring traffic to a website that you’re you’re the big man around town for shit Middle School your computer geek. Yeah. You’re not really yeah, like you said the big man. Yeah, definitely for sure. Well, you know today one of the things we’re going to be talking about which is an area that I don’t think I really have covered much on the podcast at least while I’ve been hosting and so I was excited to have you on and it’s specific content Gap analysis and topic creation for Content marketing.

So why don’t you tell us a little bit about exactly what that is. So, you know, those are on. Premiere with that absolutely. So content Gap analysis is pretty much finding the gaps that you have in your current content things that could use Improvement on to ultimately essentially of course with SEO to improve the rankings and of course the clicks and then ultimately conversions once people actually get there and conversion could be just moving to the next stage of the funnel.

So just locating your content doing a nice big scrape you could use third-party tools. You can do it manually if your blog isn’t that big or your resource Pages, aren’t that big and. D things up a little bit see where there’s with the gaps lie and see what areas can use Improvement. See if you need some trimming is this page just a basic page that I just created for the purpose of adding more pages to my Google index count, or is it a page that genuinely provides value?

Is it a page that has potential to provide value then you can go in and optimize it and modify it. And then yeah, that’s the primary concepts of content Gap analysis. Again. This is something that’s over the last year. My agency has been focusing a bit more on so we’re always still trying to learn and improve the systems.

But that’s how we Define contact Gap analysis. Okay, great. Great and how exactly does that tie into once you’ve kind of gone through that and Analysis and kind of fill the gaps. How does that really tie into content marketing efforts? Of course, if you’re going to be doing marketing in general, whether it’s face any outbound marketing whether it’s Facebook ads or just a regular Outreach campaign just to market the content get more links to it or just get more visibility within all the different advertising platforms making sure that the information is most up-to-date obviously is key as well as just being better than your competitors, you know, there’s a lot of free information out there on the web and there’s many different places to get this type of information.

You know, I have a medical symptom. There’s a million. That you can go to learn if your symptoms are from a disease, right? So aiming to have the best type of quality content will definitely help carry people through your funnel, you know, there’s obviously many different ways people can get to your content but also having the best content will help improve your funnel, you know, if someone come into the top of the Funnel Mill funnel bottom of the funnel moving them to the next stage will be a lot easier.

Once you install that trust right that makes total sense. What’s the difference between content Gap analysis and content auditing? Where’s. The same thing because I hear a lot about content auditing and kind of going through and doing an assessment of your Kanye to determine, you know, do you need to delete stuff?

Do you need to improve it? And you consolidate things is it the same thing they could be, you know, again, these are technical terms that anyone can just throw around. I think that they definitely have a lot of similarities kind of time Gap analysis and content audit as you mentioned. Yeah just auditing your content, but also you can do a further audit and this can be classified as a keyword Gap analysis see what other opportunities.

Is your content has to rank for on Google from an SEO standpoint? Right? So if your content, you know talks about one topic that’s the medically relevant to another topic can that be worked in right? So, okay got yeah. I figured as much that it was you know, really similar. It’s just depends on you know, kind of how I use terminology and Margaret.

Yeah, exactly marketers can can can switch things a number different ways, but it really is really doing the same thing for sure. Now a lot of the listeners to this podcast. Star are young entrepreneurs young and e-commerce businesses that are either getting started maybe into admitting for a couple of years or so and are looking for ways in which to, you know, improve their marketing, but I know these businesses May a lot of businesses may not.

You know like a dedicated SEO person on board. Of course, they may just be you know, maybe they got a web developer. He may know some basic SEO Point him in the right direction and you know that and that’s it. So for these types of businesses that really can’t afford, you know full-time or to consult with an SEO person.

What are some things that they can do as far as improving their content and you know kind of do this on their own and what is or what are some affordable options? Yeah. So even at its most. Level first again. SEO can be broken down into on page SEO and off page SEO on page. Everything taking place on the website itself.

First thing is just making sure that you have a piece of content that answers a question that people are searching for if that’s met and you do your damn best job to answer that question provide insane amounts of value make it the easiest post whatever then you’re good with on-page SEO and then you have to Market that content and again at its simplest form.

You can a reverse engineer your competitors see. They have content pieces that are trying to match the same Search terms that you are and see what links or see what other Publications might be linking or referencing their post and then reaching out saying hey, you know again, this is all in its simplest form would you know say hey, I know you pup you linked out to this resource.

Here’s another resource that I think might be valuable to your readers. Feel free to add it to your post. You know, again, there’s so many different creative ways. You can take with that again even not reaching out to the competitors are reaching out to relevant Publications that you know at its simplest form just saying, hey, here’s a great piece of content that I think your readers will enjoy on this post of yours, you know, right?

Yeah. Those are definitely things that you can do and it’s specifically like you said for. You know link building like reaching out to these other sites where and it’s free. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah exactly. You can kind of do this on your own and another thing that can be done because I know business owners that may be hearing this or wondering okay, you know this the timely process my going to have to do this one by one and do the follow-up the the great thing these days is that there are a number of tools that can assist you with cold Outreach and I we actually used the tool internally here that’s been great.

We’ve used a lot number of different tools and oh, yeah, we got to shuffle them around but we. One right now that we’ve been sticking with for a little while. It’s called limb list and it basically healthy food with that. Yeah, so, you know it helps you with cold Outreach. And so what I’m what limbless will allow a business owner to do is when you’re going out there, you know approaching these businesses, you know saying okay.

I got this great piece of content you want to link to you know, instead of manually just you know going to your your Gmail or whatever and sending out one by one what limbless will allow you to do is create an Outreach campaign where you put the message there. You can even put some personalization.

In tags in it. So if you want to reference their company or their name or whatever else you can do that, but you can set a whole sequence of follow up. So it’ll basically run itself. Once you put the sequence emails in there and set a schedule like you want to send it out. Let’s say every four days if they don’t respond, you know, it’s a basically automatic follow-ups and then you all you need to do is just feed it with the emails.

Once you do your prospecting. All you do is feed it with emails and it just suggests run. So, you know, there’s a number of. Tools out there like that that can that can kind of ease the pain so you’re not manually individually, even young people one by one and let us call also because you can insert those personalization tags within images.

Also write how we use actually Loveless for our outbound marketing to get new clientele. Okay. Let me do some funky images but their names and the company names and stuff. So yeah, I’m this is awesome. Yeah, definitely. Definitely a we’ve been excited about it ever since we found it. Yes, really helped us out with our with our Outreach efforts now businesses.

That you know, listen to marketers and here podcast and everything. A lot of marketers are going to say with regards to SEO. You’ve got to keep your content fresh. We talked a lot about updating the content and you know things that you need to do on page and things like that. But is there a specific schedule that an e-commerce company needs to follow with regards to updating content or it’s a specific frequency as far as adding new content.

Yeah, I wouldn’t say there’s a specific schedule. The biggest indicator we look at is. Search results now if that search term has Google search results that have the date of the last time it was modified being recent then that will be a what some of the Publications called qdf where the query deserves freshness.

So if it’s something like a hot topic. Politics just for example on a broader term. That’s something that’s usually a queries that deserve freshness. And Google is looking for newer updated content as much as possible to fill up the page one results. If you have a search term for a Content piece that you notice has maybe seven out of ten listings have a date.

It might be a query deserves freshness. So to speak and keep updating. You know, if you check back again in a couple of weeks and to start showing some more newer relevant results update again and make sure that the date last modified our date last updated is clearly visible on that page just of the Bots can can detect it.

Gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. So it’s not necessarily like you said it’s schedule but it really is going to be based on the query your you know, the niche that you’re in or the you know, what people are searching for and it’s just going to depend on how frequently you may need to update it.

So that’s that’s definitely good. No, yeah, some content pieces might not necessarily need updating if it’s you know an answer to a simple question and you’re absolutely killing it with marketing and you’ve literally done the best thing you can and it’s positioned very highly and maybe some other people will come in a little bit maybe some small optimizations, but it’s really depends on it if newer information is valuable to the user.

Right? Right, right for sure, you know, there’s one thing that I you know, I hear a lot about I don’t have a whole lot of experience with what you can probably should some light on is, you know, I know there’s a number of different. For services that are out there that will say that they basically will kind of handle your your content marketing or they’re affiliated with like a Content Network.

I guess that’s where I’m looking for Content Network where they’ll they’ll put your content out there on a variety of blogs or network of blogs. What is your take on that? Is that something that’s worthwhile, or do you got to be you need to be careful with with approaching those types of companies?

It’s decent you just have to be careful. That’s the biggest thing, you know, because we’re all aware of the stigma with seo seo is dead. SEO penalize your website yada yada yada. The thing is that SEO is very very effective. You just have to make sure that it appears natural and it looks clean and everything is realistic.

That’s the biggest thing is that if there are syndicating your well, I don’t know syndicating your content is probably the best term don’t Syndicate your content. That’s not of a little that’s really old school, right if they’re gonna. Market your content for you and get you links within content pieces on other third-party thematically relevant Publications, then yeah a hundred percent just make sure that the company has a proven track record for getting some really good Publications.

They have case studies that can prove what they’re trying to achieve is good for the long-term. Right? Right. That is so true. And I think one thing that business need to be careful is you’ve got to be careful with because of course Google is looking at everything as far as the links that you’re getting and you know, the.

Keywords in the things that are all pointing back to your site. So you have you got to be careful because if let’s say you start off where you only have I’m just using this as an example. You’ve got ten links coming back to your site, but then overnight, you know, all of a sudden you’ve got, you know thousands of Link’s coming back to you.

That’s gonna send Google a signal that says, okay some things out of me funny about this. I mean there are cases where you know, we’ve all heard of the, you know, kind of the overnight successes and the. All types of things viral videos that can kind of Drive traffic overnight to a particular site or two particular piece.

So it is possible but it’s not that common so you have to be careful because Google will see something like that and say, you know, wait a minute. Do you know is this legitimate and you know, you run the risk of getting flagged and that’s the last thing that you want to have happened Agreed 100% Yeah, so it’s definitely a fine line that you have to walk for.

Sure. Now, of course there’s. It’s like we just mentioned that can help you out with the content marketing and get you out there and different blogs and things that are relevant to what you’re doing. But what are some other tools or other resources that can help with content marketing again? I think one of the tools there’s definitely a lot out there one of the things that you mentioned was a mailing tool kind of like what you mentioned limbless.

There’s a bunch of other ones some of the big ones in the industry are lemon list male Shake pitch box Buzz screamed as a whole. Potter of different tools I can help with the entire Outreach campaigns, but also just the initial market research, you know, I wear a huge fan at least in my agency of a chops.com.

Right? And there’s Suite of tools is just absolutely amazing from just constant exploration to keyword research. So we’re a fan of them and we use them as well as some brush as the M Ru sh.com to on some really good topic ideas as well and also Jen estimate traffic potential gotcha, but they would they’re both essentially the same thing.

We’re just. Money on two of the same tool right? I hear you. Yeah, we use we use both internally here as well eight drafts us some rush and you know, we’ve kind of used a variety of them. One thing that I will say because when I first this was a while ago several years ago, probably when a transfer.

Kind of kick things off when you get in there, especially if you’re kind of I guess you could say a quote-unquote newbie and you’re not that familiar with SEO and you’re just really trying to do some basic analysis. It can be a little overwhelming because there’s a lot there’s a lot of features a lot of different functions a lot of data that you can pull so it can be a little overwhelming one thing that I would recommend with with HRS if two people out there going to try it out maybe take the trial and see if it makes sense is they have a they put out some pretty good YouTube.

Rose Tim, I think is his name again Tim. Yeah Sam. Yeah. There Tim is one of the founders he puts up some pretty good YouTube videos there that break down some of the features of a traps which are really good. So I would definitely recommend that if you give you get in there and you’re kind of overwhelmed take a look at that.

So yeah, that’s one thing that I would say and one of the things also with these tools you don’t have to use all of the features, you know, you want to maybe just focus on pulling a certain set of data and doing that consistently. And you know, you don’t have to just kind of go through that whole sweet because nobody does that mean most of these tools businesses are only just using you know, kind of a handful of their other functions.

So you don’t have to feel like you’ve got to go through the whole thing to get your money’s worth. So that’s that’s not. Yummy took the words right out my mouth the eight drops blog and the content they produce is not only just how to use your tools. But also some really good SEO value in there.

It’s one of our top favorite blogs that as something nice and interesting comes out. We share it around our slack channels in our agency. Okay? Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, they’re definitely wants to follow for sure with regards to to SEO. So, you know with everything we talked about the content marketing, you know these tools and what you need to do to manage and optimize your site.

What do you really? Is the main takeaway with regard to content marketing for a company that’s you know, this really just looking to get started for the for the first time. I would say probably manage your expectations. I’ll give you realistic of what’s going to happen. So there’s a lot of people and we know this because we speak with a lot of the future clients of ours and they say yeah, somebody told us we have to just keep updating content content content content and that’s only 50% of the equation when it comes to an SEO campaign, you know, the content will help with on-page SEO but.

You know unless you’re going for a really-really non-competitive search term, for example, it’s very unlikely that you’ll just ranked off the bat. Mmm or unless your website is just a huge Powerhouse Authority in your market. So be realistic what’s gonna happen? Yes, you’re going to spend that time you might invest time and money into a Content piece for what’s going to happen from it.

If I just do the content-based. Well, I take the time as well to Market it try to acquire backlinks make it look as natural as possible. Share it with Facebook groups. Share it on social media and share it on. That you know, there’s so many different opportunities out there. So be realistic and what’s going to happen and don’t expect that just creating content will magically improve the overall performance of your website.

Right? Right. Definitely. I think a lot of people have that assumption that you know, he’s got add all of this content, you know, I got to do ten ball coaching in a week and you do that consistently, but it’s just a marketer’s yeah, you know the good and bad, you know, they put a lot of information out there, but unless you kind of have some guidance you.

Kind of lost in and really not know what to do. So yeah that makes total sense. I will make a point that it is possible to create content also that might not necessarily have search intent behind it content can also be used to take people down the funnel right. Now. Let’s say somebody comes in through your website through maybe inbound organic search and then you have a the next piece in your funnel which will help them move to the bottom of the funnel that peace can be created.

It doesn’t necessarily need to have all this inbound marketing intent. But if it’s again if it’s part of your. Internally calm funnel that’s golden as well. Yeah, that’s like us the caveat. Yeah. Yeah for sure and then also to add to that, you know content and coming up with specific content for particular demographic is also necessary with regards to social media marketing.

If you’re doing Facebook ads you’re doing ads on Twitter and all of that. It’s very important to come up with specific content that’s going to attract the right the right demographic and one of the things that I always tell people when. Are you know they’re concerned about coming up with the right messaging for these types of ads or content in general is a lot of times you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel because you can just take a look at what some of your competitors are doing or people other people in your space and I’m not saying in any way use the same messaging but you can at least see where they’re going and kind of what types of.

Topics that they’re talking about how what are they saying? And what messaging are they using to drive people into their site so you can definitely do that one cool thing with Facebook and I think I guess they started this probably earlier this year with their Facebook ads. They now make it available between companies add.

Yeah, you can go into their page and then there’s an ads and info section where you can see an entire history of all their ads, which is awesome. Yes. Yeah, good and bad. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s good and bad. Is it kind of opens you up to to having your competitors get a quick glance at everything you’re doing but you know the same time it definitely helps market research.

Yeah for sure definitely helps out. So that’s yeah, that’s just one other thing. I’d like to I wanted to just add to that but great Jason. Well, we definitely appreciate you having you on like I said, I hadn’t talked too much about content marketing on the podcast before so I think you’re this episode is going to be timely for our listeners.

No, they’re going to get a lot out of it. But I always like to close things down now with a final question. And what’s one thing that our audience would be surprised to know about you. I’m going skydiving tomorrow. Oh really? Wow, that’s awesome where we’re exit. It’s a bit Northern Upstate New York.

I Skydive a lot actually. Oh, okay. It’s not just tomorrow my acquired the odd hobby of jumping out of planes for fun like a madman. So yeah, I guess and people see me. I was actually on the subway earlier. Morning, and I was reading the parachutist magazine and I saw somebody at this lady looking at me.

Like there’s a picture of a guy falling from the sky and I’m sitting there and jeans and a nice shirt and just reading those things. Yeah, I’m a skydiver. Okay. Well, that’s that is that’s awesome. That’s one thing. I don’t know if I could do I you know, I’ve seen two people as kind of joked around friends that I know.

I always just go skydiving. I don’t know, you know, maybe I’ll do it. I need I don’t have a fear of a flight to her or of Heights or being in Planes. I’m a bigot. Isshin enthusiasts, I love flying and all that but I don’t know just something about jumping out of a plane. It’s just it was just gonna take a little bit for me to get to that point.

But if there’s one key takeaway, you’ve got from this podcast interview. So it’s that skydiving is the greatest thing ever. I really that’s the only thing that matters. Wow, so it’s just an incredible Rush the whole experience. Yeah, that was a joke. But yeah, it definitely is absolutely incredible and I highly recommend everyone do it at least once because gotcha.

Well, maybe I will do it. We’re definitely appreciate you sharing that and you know, if any of our listeners, you know want to get in touch with you and kind of pick your brain anymore. How would they do it? Yeah, you can just simply Google Jason Berkowitz where I break the web got agency. I think if I’m Ellington Jason birk was okay.

That sounds awesome. Well, thanks again Jason for joining us here on the e-commerce marketing podcasts. You have a great day. I appreciate our own. Thank you so much. You too.  Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast. You need to get more feedback and reviews from your customers and improve your customer retention.

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Podcast Guest Info

Jason Berkowitz
CEO of Break The Web