Pankil Shah | Outranking.io
What’s the best way to leverage the content you already have to drive more revenue?
Outranking.io founder Pankil Shah specializes in doing just that for his clients, and in this episode, he shares how he does it.
From how to identify existing content that needs to be optimized, to matching the way your content is written to buyer intent, improving internal linking structures, and adding strong calls to action or popups, Pankil explains, step-by-step, how to get more mileage out of your content.
Check out the full episode to hear what Pankil had to say.
Resources from this episode:
Connect with Pankil on LinkedIn
Visit the Outranking.io website
Join Outranking’s Content Creation Process Facebook group
Pankil and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Pankil Shah, who is the CEO and founder of Outranking.io. Welcome to the podcast Pankil.
Pankil (00:26):
Thank you so much, Kathleen, for having me on the podcast.
Kathleen (00:29):
I'm excited to have you here and I love the topic we're gonna talk about, which is how to get immediate ROI from the content that you have published. It's close to my heart because I am a very content first marketer, but you don't produce content just to, you produce it to actually get revenue. And so I can't wait to talk about this but before we dig into it, can you just tell my listeners a little bit about who you are, your background and what Outranking is?
Pankil (00:58):
Yes, absolutely. My name is Pankil Shah and my background, so my background's quite diverse. I have an aerospace engineering degree and an MBA, but never really practiced aerospace. So I have experience with bringing products to market and essentially growing them well growing growing revenue for the products using organic or search engine optimization or content, right? Like really producing content that brings in traffic and conversion. So you kind of bring in the right kind of audience by creating the right kind of content. And I have done this as a growth marketer in some into enterprise database companies which led me to create our own product Outranking, which is inspired by the tactics and the methods that we were using to create content that really outperforms every single time. And we just sort of automated that process and came up without tracking. So Outranking, what we really is is helped you create and optimize your content for higher organic traffic whether it's new content or whether it's an existing content, you can plug it into out tracking and it can help you optimize it. So you can have a sure fire way of following all the best practices in creating content. And that essentially gets you on that first page of Google.
Kathleen (02:28):
Awesome. All right. Now I wanna talk a lot about this stuff, but before we do, I, you have to tell me the story of how you went from aerospace engineering to, to what you're doing now. Cause that's a really interesting shift.
Pankil (02:42):
Yes, it is actually. I was going to school for aerospace engineering and we were about to graduate. We had an idea of creating this learning management system that sort of includes learning outcomes of student so founded that company and never really got to practicing aerospace engineering. So right after that, we, I founded that company and was running that company for 10 years before changing continents and joining enterprise database company. So by that time I just had enough experience with marketing. So you lead marketing rather than going back to aerospace.
Kathleen (03:21):
Nice. Nice. All right. So you landed in marketing and you, you have been a growth marketer. I think a lot of the listeners on this podcast are gonna be familiar with creating, you know, basic SEO content and the notion behind that. But I think the devil is in the detail, like really turning it into something that can generate revenue. And so I I'd love, this is kind of a broad place to start, but like, how do you think about that? Like if you meet with a, a business and they, and their objective is to create a content strategy that will contribute to pipeline, like, what's your thought process us behind how you structure that.
Pankil (04:01):
So first thing first, right? Like before you, like, when you start crafting the strategy, where do you start? The first place is where, what you have already done, right? Like whether that's working, whether it's not working and nine outta 10 times, what really happens is that you have great content. If you like, if, if you, if you have a great product, you team that advocates for it and writes about it, that's fine. You have great product, you have great content that's landing on the web, but they're not often optimized. So one such example that I'd give is in the enterprise database company. So many great engineers, writing so much great content on how tos on how you can really work with certain, you know, softwares and, and technologies. But they never land on the eyes of someone who's looking for it. And it's because it's not grossly aligned with how certain things work.
Pankil (04:49):
Right. so I would start there. I would look at the existing data or existing content that I already have and see what, well out of that content, what can I improve really quickly? What can I do to those content? So I'm not, I don't have a week of cycle of getting my content approved and you know, that lines up on my website that takes another two months to rank. Right. I don't want to go through that entire cycle just yet. Yeah, sure. Everyone's gonna have to go through that. But the home run is looking into our existing content and finding opportunities, how you can get more eyes on it and then whatever eyes are on it, how can you convert them into an inbound opportunity, right? Like how can you convert them into a lead? So that's what I really focused on throughout my career. And yeah, happy to share some tips on how you can do that.
Kathleen (05:40):
Yeah, I love that. I love that because you're not starting from scratch and I feel like that makes so much sense. So break that down for me a little bit, because I imagine you come in and you see kind of common issues is my guess, and maybe I'm wrong here, but I, I would guess that you see common issues with how companies have gone about creating content that feed into why it is not producing better results. So like, what are some of those common issues that you've seen?
Pankil (06:06):
The first common issue is it's not aligned with the intent, so you've written great stuff, but the title says something else while you're trying to rank for something else. That's the first is the mistake that we made, and this is the easiest to rectify if you have the right tools and the easy, I mean, because it's the easiest to rectify, it's also the most low hanging fruit that you can ever have.
Kathleen (06:26):
Like, gimme an example of what you mean by that.
Pankil (06:28):
So let's say you are looking for, you are selling, you're selling a safari tour to Africa, right? And you are writing. So you're writing about 10 best places to go in Africa for a safari, but you're like, you wanna rank for 10 best places to go in Africa. But what it really talks about is why you should go to safari, right. And not the places that you want to go to. So someone would, might want for that particular term, but their content is really talking about information on why should they really go to safari, right? Like those are misalignment. And this is what often happens. And this is a very simple example, but you can you know, get very specific related to a tech product and understand, like, there can be so much nuances to this and people don't know this because they don't do the research you know, search engine pages, research, like looking at the ranking data and understanding what sort of input that they align with that you should be aligning with.
Pankil (07:30):
This is the first, most common mistake that we have seen in content and the content producers, both, right? Like they try to rank for terms by writing something, which is misalignment to the search intent. That's the very first thing, and it's very easy to fix. Right? You just change the intent of your title and now you rank for the right thing. This is what, the first thing where we look at, the second thing we'll look at is see if we can improve the authority of those pages is by giving internal links, right? Like, so finding out what would really elevate a page rank or a page value so that it get, gets recognized by Google faster. That's the second, right? So let's say now you have, like your content is ranking and you are getting enough people to your website.
Pankil (08:19):
Then you need to use different tactics to get them into you know, becoming a lead, which is either showing them a popup that says to value edition or having the right appropriate CTAs whether they are missing or not, right. Like you have the right headers and right. Footers and all that right information. Right. So going about this entire process, the first thing first is to get enough eyes on your content. So start there, how do you get more eyes on your content? And if there is eyes on your content, then how do you get them to convert to customers? So the strategy should really evolve in looking at whether there is a problem. And if there is a problem, how can we go ahead and fix it? You know, based on the, the milestones that I've suggested.
Kathleen (08:59):
Okay. You said a couple things that I wanna dig deeper into the first was around the first common issue you see has to do with like, writing content that isn't linked with, what actual search intent is. And you alluded to a process around that you use to determine what intent is in terms of like looking within different tools. Can you, can you explain that a little bit more? Like if you're working with a new company, how do you begin to understand, and what does that research process look like where you're identifying what search intent actually is,
Pankil (09:29):
Right. Absolutely. So let's say for example, you are creating content around softwares for automating sales in LinkedIn. Okay. It's a classic example. You plug that query in, into Google. What you'll find is the top six or seven results talking about the best software for LinkedIn automation now. Well, yeah, sure. You will wanna talk about your software, right. But if you don't talk about a comparison on this particular keyword with your tool, with some others, right. It's not going to rank because audience is looking for a comparison. They, you see the intent already aligned as best, right? Like they're talking about this at the top 5, 6, 7, think that you should be looking at when you, when you're doing your LinkedIn automation. So an easy thing to fix this, throw in a comparison if you're ranking on page two, page three, right? Like you can change those small things in your headings, which now save that, Hey, you have comparison. You're comparing your product with others and it will start improving in ranking.
Kathleen (10:37):
Okay.
Pankil (10:38):
So the missing key was best here, right? Like you might want to add best word to your heading. Well, obviously the content needs to align to it, but you need that best. Right. Otherwise it clearly says Google clearly telling you that the, that, that they've already established the intent, which is best softwares and you need to have a comparison for it.
Kathleen (10:58):
Okay. So, so you identify that search intent, you get a sense of like, what are the things we need to be optimizing for? And then you talked about, okay, so then, so then it sounds like the next step is to go back, look at the content you have and see is, are there things in here that are close to, to what I should have been writing about and how can I make them match? So is that a process stuff like historical optimization?
Pankil (11:20):
Yes, absolutely. Right. So that's where SEO analysis comes in place, which is search engine ranking paid analysis. And that's what precisely Outranking does too. Right? Like you plug it in the URL and it'll give you all the gaps in your content for the keyword that you're trying to rank. So you can go through those gaps one by one, address those as best as your possibility. And because you have taken the data driven approach, looking at all the pages who are doing the right thing and taking inspiration from them and doing even better, your chances or probability of ranking now becomes higher than ever before.
Kathleen (11:55):
So. Okay. And, and then you talked about internal linking. So walk me through your process around that. Like, how do you kind of audit what's there now, and then what's, how do you go about making sure that internal linking structure is correct?
Pankil (12:10):
So this is like really insane stuff, but this is the dirtiest trick that we've used even in enterprises and our existing product is towing, dirty internal ranks. That really means that, that let's say you I'll give you an example, right? Like we're trying to rank for SERP analysis in Google. And the page, well, the page we are competing with, ranking pages we're competing with are like Moz, Ahrefs and all this really authority website that it's really hard to compete with. Right. How do you get your page authority to the level? What you do is essentially give out importa lengths from important pages to this page which tells Google that there is higher importance for you in your, to be connected to this page and it elevates the page rank to it. So what essentially we look at is when we are giving links out from the blog post that we've already done, we look at linking to lower page rank pages on our website, so we can help improve their authority.
Pankil (13:12):
And if we are getting links in, we tend to get links from higher page rank pages. So we can elevate the page value of our existing page. And you can do this in a repeatable way, if you have the right tools to just kind of plug in the URL and it'll give you what inbound and outbound links you want to give one such a, I mean, we do this as well in Outranking as there are some other really great products out there that do a phenomenal job for WordPress.
Kathleen (13:38):
Okay, great. Now, the next thing you talked about was getting more eyeballs on your content easier said than done. So talk me through that.
Pankil (13:48):
So getting more eyeballs on your content first, like there's a few things that you can do. You can certainly optimize your content. You can produce more content. You can scale, like you can scale your content production. You can need tons of content whether it's a form of text that you are trying to rank in Google, whether it's repurposed to a video on the YouTube, but in order for you to be in front of more people, you are going to have to build this asset that can be in front of these people, right? And one page is not fit all. You need tons of how-tos. You need tons of information that can guide the users into what you are really doing, right. Whether your product is really doing so you need this asset and you need this asset to be ranking well.
Pankil (14:31):
So you need to create an approach or you, your content marketing strategy should be aligned around doing everything that you do for SEO as well as the value, right? So SEO can, is a long term gain, right? So it's gonna still take a few weeks or few months, depending on your website to rank and show you that value. But if you have taken that practice of creating content, which is, as you optimize from the very first it'll eventually rank, and it will give you ROI every month. And we're not just talking about once, right? Like where you spend money on ads and it's gone, right. This is gonna consistently bring you eyeballs. So tho I mean, yeah, focus on content strategy is going to be the paramount importance to get more eyes on your content and get them to be as you optimized.
Kathleen (15:17):
So when you make these changes in the background are you like, are you doing anything else beyond just updating the content in order to sort of give it that bump? Like, are you resubmitting the page to be crawled by search engines? Are you promoting it at all?
Pankil (15:34):
Yes, absolutely. Right. So we do a few things. There's a couple of tactics, so now we not only optimize a page to be on search engine first page that you see, like everyone searches for something and you rank for it. But we also look at what are the peripherals symmetrically of related terms that you can rank for that your competition is doing a poor job at ranking for, so that's something that we do yes, you need to share your content. If your content shares, then it gets the social signals. It tend to get index faster and just rank better have tons of media on your, like, what do we notice is Google increasingly paying attention to the media on the page? Right? So if you have videos, you have rich images those kind of pages tend to also rank better.
Pankil (16:21):
So we tend to add this rich media then something new which is ranking for either featured snippets or people also. So there are different features of Google where your content can be placed, right? So we tend to help or our software also tends to guide you in creating content that can help you for this different types of ethics on Google and not just the first page of Google, bringing in additional sets of traffic and eyeballs to your content. So you're really going after, you know, the whole nine yards, you wanna do everything possible with the content. If you spend your heart and your time and building this content, you wanna make sure that it does, you know, a phenomenal job. So go ahead and optimize for all of these things. Not just one.
Kathleen (17:04):
So obviously the ultimate goal of all of this is, is revenue. And it's one thing for people to come and find your content on your website and to consume it and to have traffic be increasing. But I mean, I talk to a lot of marketers who have tons of traffic, but they struggle to be able to demonstrate how their content really translates into pipeline. And so I would love to get your perspective on what, what works well for that, you know, to, to get that person who see your content to become an active pipeline opportunity.
Pankil (17:38):
Absolutely. guidance in terms of, well, there's a necessary guidance in terms of when the user is reading the content, how you are guiding them to the right next place, right? So someone is looking at how to now you want to show them well, how your product really does this in 10 minutes, right? Like if you don't have a CTA, nobody's ever gonna care about it, so you need to have CTAs at the right place. If your product is more sort of handholding where you need to give or nudge the users and give them training before they can convert, right, you need to funnel them into your training programs, right? So you need to have an objective as to what you really want the users to do when they land on that content. Right. Like, so if it's an informative piece, you want them to maybe dig deeper a little bit into what your solution is, and that could be on a different blog post, or it could be provided on your service or product page.
Pankil (18:32):
Right? You want to take those users there. And you know, you wanna place those CTAs at the right place on your page. That's one thing second thing, and probably not that well thought out, but it pretty much works for everyone that we've seen is throwing over a popup. Right? So what we do is like we have some pages which rank for people also ask and people consistently come there to get value on what does people also ask how to go about creating content around people also ask and stuff like that. So what we do is now we show them a popup with a video on how our trying helps them create content for people also ask. Right? And Hey, like now that, that gets you in, you know, interested and what you are doing, this is in a repeatable way. So you have this pop up on lingering around on all the key terms around people also ask, right?
Pankil (19:20):
So now you have something more personalized to the user as to what they were looking for, and you can now funnel them into your product or sign up or whatever that next maybe right. So you need to carefully like really carefully think out you know, think about what's the objective. Why did you create the content in the first place? And you'd have an answer to where you want the users to, you know, go after reading that content, find that magic, magic place on your page where you can show the CTA and funnel them into your programs or your inbound lead.
Kathleen (19:59):
So what, what do you see as like, in terms of having that CTA or that pop up and I'm trying to think of how to phrase this appropriately. Like, what do you see work well, because I have observed that a lot of people will have good content, but then put very bottom of funnel CTAs in and expect that somebody's gonna go right from like, the first article they see on their site to like asking for a free trial or a demo. And while I'm, you know, certain that that happens sometimes I, I would venture to guess that it's not the most common thing. And so I'm wondering, like what you've seen anecdotally works well in terms of the type of CTA that generally does get good conversions
Pankil (20:41):
One that highlights the benefits of going to the next day for next step, right? Like what many people do is that, Hey, we have this great product, you know, why don't you go check it out a set up that, what if you had said that C how you can rank for people also ask in the shortest time possible, or, you know, without having to worry about whether you have fall in the right practices or not. Right. So not the users in the right direction by using the words that really would matter to the users is the, the best possible way, whether that's the end of the content or it's the middle of it, or it's the beginning of it. It really depends on the length of your content and how long the user is ticking on the page, you know, all those other factors.
Pankil (21:21):
So what we essentially tend to do is find those two or three touch points where you can place those CTAs. So you're maximizing your effort from one page. And we intend to throw in those popups on exit intent. So when the users tend like trying to leave, you either offer them alternative value or an alternative place that they need to go to, to find more information, if this was not the place that they found it at this often where I'm not saying it's gonna work a hundred percent. Right. But it just has to work five or 6% for a great conversion.
Kathleen (21:53):
Yeah. can you gimme some examples of like, where you've companies that you've undertaken this process for, and you don't have to name them if like, you can, you can use generic things like this pet care company or that, but I'd love to, I think it's easier to understand process through concrete examples then yes. Then esoterically. So I'd love to talk through that a little bit.
Pankil (22:13):
Absolutely. Right. So in, just in my past company, I was working for a database company, which really builds a database called posts, widely known database. And I created a page called very, very strong comparison between PostreSQL and MySQL, right. It's a very basic thing that users are looking for. And we rank for the first page right now, what we did with we, well, it's a very introductory page, right? Like there's many developers looking for this information who are working with either PostgreSQL or MySQL. Sure. It's not gonna relate into a lead or qualified lead right away. But what we tend to do is funnel this users into our training program out of which 20% becomes customers eventually. Right. and what you do is what we did with essential training program. Like, Hey, we have a webinar on Wednesday. Why don't you come join? As simple as that, a page gets like 8,000 to 10,000 clicks like, like visits every month, right? Like if we were to convert five, 6% out of those users on a consistent basis into our training programs, which we have that eventually turn to leads. Right.
Kathleen (23:32):
And how, what systems are you using to track the connection between your content and your pipeline?
Pankil (23:40):
So it's many things you can track. Like we, we were using Marketo, Salesforce to funnel those users back in, but we are also using other mechanisms to capture users like tools like optimum where you can create like this nice popups, which can be triggered at the various instances of a user journey. And then you can funnel those users into going to those market or pages where you capture their lead and then pass it on to Salesforce. And then the entire lead nurture begins from there.
Kathleen (24:13):
Nice. alright. So if somebody's not cleaning up an old mess, but they're starting from scratch, what advice do you have for them
Pankil (24:21):
Create the content that is really, really, really the best out there. If you look at existing data and you're constantly, well, it's important to look at existing data and see what they're doing, so you can do it even better, but do better. This is what the most underestimated the thing I've seen currently is that people tend to go and research to, you know, top 30 top 20 page is the intent to build out their content with, with minimal added value. I think that's where your content really stands out is added value. Google loves examples. Google loves rich media, but loves things that really teaches users into becoming successful at whatever they're reading at. So really try to do that and align your content with the intent you're trying to rank for from the very first, and you should be just fine. But my advice would be make the content the most powerful is like, you should be going to sleep at night saying that, Hey, I just did, you know, the most amazing job by creating this content nobody's ever created it better than this. And those are the kind of content that really tend to rank really fast.
Kathleen (25:26):
Is there a minimum amount of content that these days you're you see, like companies need to be creating? Cuz it used to be like years ago. I, I always heard people say like you have to publish at least one thing a a week or something like that. So like obviously quality is important, but where does quantity come in?
Pankil (25:42):
Quantity comes in. Absolutely. Right. The amount of content that you publish is directly related to your DA and your, like your authority and domain authority. The more content you publish, the more frequent your site's being updated, that's definitely a positive factor for Google. So the more content you publish is definitely gonna help you, the more quality content you publish is gonna help you even better. So both are important. And it's up to really you, right? Like what is the right balance? If you just have the bandwidth to publish two topics a week do that. If you have bandwidth to publish two topics a day, do that, but you know, use your limit when it comes to content in terms of quality and in terms of speed in getting it out there.
Kathleen (26:28):
Got it. All right. So shifting gears I always like to ask my guests a couple questions at the end of the interview and I wanna make sure I, I get this in with you. The first is just about learning. I think a lot of marketers struggle with the pace at which digital marketing and particularly is changing and evolving the number of new channels that are happening, the algorithm changes. How do you personally stay up to date with all of that?
Pankil (26:57):
Staying up to date with Google algorithm is what I am mostly interested in because it's related to, you know, strongly to what we do here. And always taken a practice of what, what you'd call a data driven approach to everything. So you're not thinking with your heart, you're thinking with minds and numbers is what I recommend every time you go to any page that well, you know social channel that you are trying to really make an impact on looking at historical trends and seeing how they were successful or how they feel either, or right. Like looking at those and optimizing around that is definitely going to increase your probability of having success on those channels. So I would say whatever a channel that is, right, like follow the best practices, don't worry about the algorithm. If you're doing shady things, then shady things are gonna happen to you, right? Like, don't look at that, right? Like just follow all the best practices make sure you're not trying to take shorts or trying to scam any of the search engines or Facebook or YouTube into you know, like I found a hack, like, you know, kind of thing. It's not there, no thing like this, right? Like if you put in the work you put in the quality, then it's going to outperform.
Kathleen (28:19):
Nice. All right. Second question is this podcast is all about inbound marketing, which I really describe as anything that naturally attracts the right audience or the right customer, I should say to your, to your business. And I think you've sort of described that process right here. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer today?
Pankil (28:44):
Yes, absolutely. HubSpot is doing a phenomenal job, right? Like they it's like all about inbound marketing for them, right? Like the leads come in and everything is about inbound marketing. So they're doing a phenomenal job at talking about even SEO and all sorts of channels that users can funnel the users back into into your product or, you know, turn them into leads. Right. And they've done a phenomenal job at educating everyone that is searching out there, whether they're entrepreneurs, whether they are, whether they're working for bigger companies or smaller companies they have content that aligns with any of this user's journey towards finding those inbound leads. I that's why they doing a phenomenal job?
Kathleen (29:28):
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, they're obviously the, the pioneer in the space, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna challenge you and say, if you had to pick somebody who's not HubSpot, who would you pick?
Pankil (29:39):
I recently looked at, I said this was a while back, but we looked at Acquia. And it's a sort of headless oh, it it's, it's a, it's a tech product that lives on a CMS called Drupal and they have personalization for users. I, I think they've done a phenomenal job at educating users on what challenges could bring with running really large scale websites and how you can resolve them as well. So they have a great model as well in educating their users.
Kathleen (30:13):
Nice. All right. Well, if somebody is interested in learning more about what you talked about, wants to connect with you online, et cetera, what is the best way for them to do that?
Pankil (30:23):
So the best way to connect with me is to reach me out on LinkedIn, my profile, linkedin.com/in/pankilshah9 or you can connect with us in the Facebook group Content Creation Process or just land up on the website and send a message to support. But these are the, some, some of the ways that you can reach out to me. Our website is Outranking.io. If you're trying to create content that really makes impact feel free to join the free trial on our website and kind of go through that guided process of creating content that makes impact.
Kathleen (30:59):
Great. All right. Well, as always, I will put those links in the show notes, which are available kathleen-booth.com. So head there, if you wanna connect with Pankil and in the interim, if you listen to this episode and you enjoyed it, or you learn something new, I would love it if you would head to Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. And if you know someone else who's doing great inbound marketing work, send me a tweet at @KathleenLBooth, and I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, Pankil.
Pankil (31:34):
Thank you so much, Kathleen, for having me on the show.
Kathleen (31:37):
That was a lot of fun. Thanks.
