How Entity-Based SEO is Redefining Content Creation and Strategy

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay. Today, we have Kristina, the Director of Operations at Digitally Savvy with us. Hey, Kristina.

Hi, Ranmay.

Hey, Kristina. How is it going?

I’m good. As I mentioned, it’s the end of the week, so I’m feeling good. Looking forward to the weekend.

Gearing up for the weekend. Perfect. Kristina, before we move forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Talk us through your journey and how you ended up in the digital marketing space, SEO space for that matter, and what Digitally Savvy is all about. What is your core competency as an agency? And we’ll take it forward from there on.

The story, I would say, isn’t the most exciting one. It’s pretty basic, I would say. I started in digital marketing as just a content creator at first. I used to work in the fintech space, writing articles about Forex, foreign exchange, things like that. Then I moved to Canada. That’s when I started freelancing a bit on the content side, creating some content for blockchain as well. A lot regarding fintech and all the financial markets. That was interesting. But then, I was looking for a job and got introduced to the person who happened to be my mentor and teacher going forward. One of the best bosses I’ve ever had, Vlad Rascano. He’s the one who noticed me on Upwork where I used to freelance. Then he just started running his SEO agency in Toronto, Canada, Digitally Savvy. I was his first hire with almost no SEO background. I just knew how to create good content from the users’ perspectives. Then he introduced me to all the SEO concepts, link building. I started basically from scratch as an SEO specialist, took on some clients at first, worked a lot on fundamentals, and then we slowly grew into a bigger agency, onboarded some more people.

Then we had an SEO department. Then slowly, I progressed into SEO lead, then manager, and now I’m running the operations at Digitally Savvy. I’m pretty happy about it because we have a pretty tight, lean team. Unfortunately, Vlad is no longer with the agency, but he’s still very much helping in the background, sometimes giving us some referrals because he has a lot of knowledge also in the industry. It’s been, I would say, a natural progression with SEO, and it’s definitely, I think, a natural progression also in a way that I started in the content space and that progressed into SEO because this is what I’m seeing more and more happening. A lot of people that are working in the content space eventually are interested in how the content is then ranked and perceived by people and also by the search engine. It was the case for me as well.

Perfect. A brilliant story. Being a content person at heart, you started with content. In our industry, like they say, content remains the king, but the landscape constantly keeps evolving. A couple of, around one and a half years ago, ChatGPT hit us, and the content space was taken up by storm. In this ever-evolving landscape, what are your top three tips for creating content that not only ranks well because businesses would obviously want to have the phones ringing but also resonates with the target audience? Where do you find that balance?

I think lately at Digitally Savvy, what we’ve been doing is we’re moving away from focusing specifically on keywords towards a more topic or entity focus. We’re shifting away from targeting the crawlers and producing the content for the users. Because at the very start, when I went into SEO, I know there were a lot of techniques where you could just use a couple of great keywords for the content. It worked well before. Right now, unfortunately, that does not work as well. I would say, unfortunately, because then it’s content not for a person, it’s content for a web crawler. This is something that we want to stay away from because at the end of the day, it’s not sustainable or evergreen. I would say one of the first things that we keep with our content is making sure that it’s first user-facing and user-friendly versus web crawler-friendly. So entities are something that we’ve started looking into maybe a year ago or so. We do use keywords as our main navigators when we create content. But at the same time, we approach it from a way of empathy or topic clustering to make sure that it is more a holistic approach towards creating content versus just putting out content that is written for search engine algorithms, right?

Exactly.

That’s probably the biggest shift that we’ve made lately because it’s very useful. It’s also speaking to the audience that we work with. That’s actually, I would say, the second part of it. Whenever we approach content, I think it starts at the very beginning with the topic that you want to cover and considering the nature of the client that we work with. We work with home services clients or, for example, some construction tech clients. We put a lot of emphasis into studying the pain points, the problems of our client’s clientele, to be able to speak their language. For example, the content team we have at this point is extremely talented. They know so much about all the technical concepts about construction tech businesses, different features, and everything. I think one of the things that I would keep in mind whenever creating great content is to make sure that whatever you are putting out is useful, not just creating content for the sake of creating content, getting the rankings, but actually being useful for people because that’s the basis for the content then being shared, being useful, being linked to, which is really what we want, the content that is then distributed across social media and the internet like that.

That would be the second one. The third one is, I would say, using proper links inside, whether it’s external links or internal links. Obviously, we want to be using links that are authoritative, making sure not to use any external links in there. Also, whenever we approach relating within our content, we try to make it useful. For example, if it’s content on a client’s website and we want to add some value, we would add some additional support that they can study later on. Or if it’s an internal link, we would then link to a different internal page within the website that we can actually push them towards, let’s say, a next sales cycle, maybe convert on some more transactional page versus informational. So yeah, all these things, there’s obviously so many things to think about, but I would say these are the first great things that I would think about creating content.

Absolutely. Very well said. I love your point wherein you mentioned that you should not only focus on what Google is looking at. You should not write content just for the search algorithms. Because even if you end up ranking well, the content has to relate to the audience who are making the decision to buy your product or service. If that does not get triggered, then even if you’re ranking, it’s not going to make a lot of sense. You have to find the balance to also rank, but at the same time, ensure that the content is relevant to your audience and relating to that content and not only be so much focused just on writing content for the search algorithms. I love that point. Very valid one there, Kristina. You have been in the industry for quite some time now and have witnessed significant changes in the recent past, especially. How have these transformations, Kristina, impacted your approach to SEO and overall marketing strategies per se?

I think, again, in line with what I’ve said before in a previous question that you had, I think Google is becoming more targeted towards user satisfaction, user experience, And Google is becoming smarter. So we’re trying, I think before it was easier. I wouldn’t say outsmart Google, but it was easier to use some techniques that would bring really quick results, but then they’re not sustainable. I would say it’s been challenging, but at the same time, I think this is great that it’s happening that whatever marketing techniques that we’re using right now, marketing strategies, they are harder to implement. They require a lot of research, knowledge, and actual manual work, but then they’re more sustainable because then you put a lot of effort into actually thinking about content or about user experience, how the user is, what is his experience on your website, how fast is your website, and things like that. But before, I would say definitely it didn’t matter as much, but the big thing that everybody’s been saying is to set it up for a user always. This is something that we’ve been trying to achieve with either it be link building, content creation.

Obviously, we work a lot on the website as well to make sure that whenever a person lands on the website, that’s also a very great experience in terms of they are not confused where to click next, bouncing back again, and things like that. Yeah, the first experience. It’s something that’s always in the back of our minds, so we’re proud of marketing.

Lovely. Moving on, Kristina, let’s talk about operations, which in an agency life, we all know how demanding it can get at times. You have graduated from starting from content to being an SEO overall and then heading the operations at Digitally Savvy. In your current role, what are some of the most common challenges that you encounter, let’s say, day in, day out. When it comes to optimizing clients’ online visibility and also taking a step beyond handling the campaigns and everything, how do you handle clients? We all know how clients can be, right? Nothing against them, but how do you handle the entire scenario there?

I love this question, honestly, because this is what I learned along the journey is doing a good job and actually performing well on a campaign for your clients is one part of the puzzle. Another biggest part of the puzzle is actually being able to educate a client about what we do and about the value that we bring because I think that’s one of the biggest challenges that we face. But especially with the clients that are in the home services space. More often than not, they have very basic websites or they don’t have a website. So we have to start from scratch there, and they don’t really understand because it’s not their interest or their job to understand SEO. So whenever you start the conversation about SEO, it’s hard to communicate to them in the proper manner because at the end of the day, what home services clients care about is not traffic, not their rankings. They care about the leads and the phone ringing and the technician being busy. We’re working very hard on making sure that not only do we bring relevant traffic, but the traffic is also local because what I learned as well, it can be a very great experience in terms of there’s a lot of traffic, lots of good ranking.

But if it’s not local for the client, nobody’s going to book their HVAC repair or nobody’s going to go with them for a sureness or something like that. We’re always trying to educate a client on the whole funnel of how SEO then translates into website visits and then how traffic going all the way to the CRM. I will also actually work with the CSR on their end, make sure that whoever is picking up the call knows which channel the lead came from. That’s where we’re going from the very beginning until the very end. It’s been quite a learning process in that scenario, but it’s definitely interesting to uncover and help all clients because some of the CRM tools that they work with, for example, Service Titan, are slowly and steadily adjusting to work more with some integrations, some marketing tools that we use, GA4, and Google Ads and things like that. It’s great to see that they are also developing in that way. I see more and more clients in the home services space being open to listen about not only the amount of leads, but also about why we need to rank, for example, organically and also GVP, and also, for example, on Google Guaranteed because putting all three together, getting that first above the fold, above the scroll space, is something that matters a lot for them because I would say just ranking in organic traffic is good.

But then for local services, it’s also very important to be able to pop up in that local pack or Google Guaranteed because that’s where people’s eyes go first. There’s a lot of local-based challenges, but that’s only with home services. But with that client, it’s a bit different as well because they’re very savvy technically. They understand the value of SEO. They understand some concepts as well, very well. But then with them, I think one of the biggest challenges is to actually nail down their offering and the offering in the way of how we translate it to a proper, let’s say, blog post because a lot of those construction tech companies that we work with, they’re very technical, and there are lots of details that our content team particularly needs to learn. That’s a big focus for us as well.

Absolutely. Then, picking up from something which you mentioned during one of our earlier conversations, right, about backlinks. How crucial do you feel it is for any particular campaign? What is your take on guest posts versus niche edits? Which one do you feel is something that one should opt for or brings more value to the table?

Right. Backlinking is definitely one of the most important things that I feel like should go into any campaign alongside other things that we do, on-page and everything like that. I like the way you approached it in a way that what the quality means versus quantity because obviously, you can get a lot of quantity backlinks, then they might not hold as much weight as very good quality backlinks. I’m definitely on the lookout for very niche and industry-related backlinks because then it actually ties up back to the thing that I was talking about, the entity, because also getting the backlink from an entity-related publication also signals to Google that your business is about, let’s say, HVAC. If we’re getting HVAC backlinks, that just strengthens our case for Google. That’s definitely something that we’re going after.

It does impact your overall domain authority a big time.

Niche edit versus guest post. Niche edit, you mean those whenever you’re just inserting a link?

Link insertions, yeah.

Exactly. Okay. Personally, You’re the expert here, so you might be having a different take on it. But I feel like in my mind, It depends. It depends on what a backlink from which guest. Then often, I like niche edits in a way that you can inject your link into an already Article, yeah. That has been already seen by Google. Maybe that published article already accumulated a lot of backlinks going to that article. If it’s going to link to us, it’s a tier backlink, which is also very strong in the long July.

Absolutely. Great, Kristina. Before we let you go, one final question. You have seen the industry for quite some time now, and you’ve graduated up the ladder now, and I hope you keep on growing. What is that one piece of advice you’d want to give to aspiring SEO professionals who want to stay ahead of the curve and thrive in this dynamic field that we all are in?

I would say it might sound very basic, but I would say just stay curious and keep on learning every day because I think even professionals that are 10, 20 years in space, there’s just so much more to learn, especially considering the latest developments with AI. This is extremely interesting, whatever is happening. There’s definitely Google is always, like I said, getting smarter. They’re trying to please the user. They stay curious.

Maybe what I do on a daily basis, I try to read at least one or two articles on some of the publications that are related. To keep the information present in my mind. Because what I felt at some point in my career is that I just stuck to the fundamentals that I’ve been taught, and I didn’t want to change because I felt like this is what I know, this is what I know is efficient. I don’t want to do anything new, but then I understood that no longer is going to be working. Always need to learn something new and apply. Always experiment with different approaches to SEO because this is what clients also like to be.

Lovely. Thanks for those words, Kristina. Let’s play a quick rapid fire. I hope you’re game for it. All right, your last Google search.

Good question.

SEO was easy for you.

Well, I have still go search. I don’t remember. Probably something about… I’m a big foodie.

All right. Moving on, your celebrity crush.

That would be Henry Cavill.

What did you do with your first paycheck, Kristina?

I bought some skincare.

Which day of the week, work-wise, you love the most from Monday to Sunday?

Hands down, Friday.

Where do we find you on Friday evenings after office or after work?

It’s usually a pizza dinner at home and watching my favorite shows or reading a book at home. I’m a homebody, always at home.

All right, lovely, Kristina. Thank you so much for taking the time and doing this with us. If our audience wants to reach out to you, how would they do that?

I’m best approachable on LinkedIn or at kristina@digitallysavvy.ca. Always happy to answer anything.

Thank you so much, Kristina. It has been a pleasure.