Episode 461: A Post Update Strategy that Will Double Your Google Traffic with Brandon Gaille

EBT461 – Brandon Gaille

Intro  00:00

Food bloggers, hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth and ultimately help you achieve your freedom, whether that’s financial, personal, or professional.

I’m Megan Porta and I’ve been a food blogger for over 13 years. I understand how isolating food blogging can be at times. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

Megan Porta  00:38

No matter where you’re at in your blogging journey, whether you have, I don’t know 50 posts or 1000 posts or more, you definitely want to consider adding updating old content into your strategies so that you don’t lose that cherished traffic that you worked so hard to get by creating the new post to begin with. Brandon Gaille from RankIQ and The Blogging Millionaire podcast joins me in this episode to talk about why updating your old content is so important and he gives so many recommendations about how to find the content that you’re updating and what to think through when you’re updating a recipe post as well as a roundup style post, what you should do with your titles when you’re updating, how long to wait after you publish a post before you consider updating and so many other great things inside the episode. This is number 461 and sponsored by the amazing RankIQ. 

Sponsor  01:33

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Megan Porta  02:54

Brandon Gaille is an entrepreneur who founded multiple-figure businesses in his 20s before becoming disabled by a rare disorder for nearly a decade. He eventually regained his health and started a blog. He grew his blog to over 1 million visitors in just 18 months after his first blog post. Today, he gets 5 million monthly visitors from over 100,000 first-page Google rankings. Brandon has taught his SEO growth hacks to over 20,000 bloggers through his podcast (The Blogging Millionaire). This past year he launched RankIQ, an AI-powered SEO toolset tailored for bloggers and small businesses that have a blog. This year RankIQ was ranked #1 out of all 333 SEO tools by G2 for customer satisfaction and ease of use.

Megan Porta  02:55

Hello, Brandon. So happy to have you back on Eat BlogTalk. How are you doing today?

Brandon Gaille  03:00

I’m doing great. I’m glad to be back. 

Brandon Gaille  03:45

Yes. Good to have you. And we’re going to talk about updating old content today. I know you’re a huge proponent of this, and having a blog with a ton of old content myself, I am kind of in the throes of this. So I’m really excited to learn from you today. So I guess to start with you just want to explain why you feel this is such an important part of each blogger strategy?

Brandon Gaille  04:10

Absolutely. Well to start off with, it takes less time to do an update than it does to create a new blog post. Multiple studies have shown that creating a new blog post takes anywhere from three to six hours. And when you’re using a tool like RankIQ takes as little as 30 minutes to complete an update. The second thing is that an update on average produces more traffic than a new blog post. And let me explain this a little bit further. A new blog post as it’s released there, the hit rate for new blog posts is going to be anywhere between 25 to 75% of the post that actually gets significant traffic and that will that range will depend upon your domain authority, how good of a writer you are and how disciplined you are going after low competition keywords. Now when it comes to updates, the only posts that you’re going to be updating are the ones that have existing traffic and rankings. So you’re going to have a much higher hit rate, because Google already loves those posts. The third thing is that an update is typically going to move up the rankings faster than a new post, a brand new post takes anywhere from three to six months to move up to high enough in the rankings to where it starts to get some traffic. Whereas with an update takes as little as four weeks for you to see that first traffic spike. And finally, when you are doing an update, you’re going to see an immediate increase in your ad income for that specific post. And that’s going to happen because first, we’re going to be going in there and you’re going to be adding new content and the more content you have, the more ad impressions you’re going to have for that post. In addition, when you’re adding that new content, you’re going to look through your existing content, and identify if you’ve got any large paragraphs that you can break up into smaller ones. And if there’s any opportunities to add more images, to make the overall post better, and to just have more opportunities, once again for ads. So with the new content, the more paragraphs and more images. As I said, as soon as you hit Publish for that update, you’re going to start seeing more ad income for that specific post.

Megan Porta  06:29

How do you recommend balancing this? Because for me, it’s quite a balancing act trying to decide how much new content to put out versus how much content to update. So what are your recommendations there?

Brandon Gaille  06:42

Well, in the 10 years that I’ve been blogging, having a podcast running a course and and now running a Facebook group for RankIQ. I’ve come across two groups of bloggers that actually share their analytics and statistics with me, the first group of bloggers are ones that are struggling and that have reached a plateau. Now, this isn’t going to include whether you lose traffic from an algorithm, this is just throughout the year, they’ve reached a point to where their traffic is no longer growing, they’re frustrated, they’re reaching out to the Facebook group, or to me asking for advice. And what happens is, collectively, when I take a look at all their analytics, these bloggers are doing about four new blog posts per month, and two of them are in low competition keywords. And the other two are mid-level keywords. But they’re not doing any updates throughout the year. And when I look at their their post in their analytics, their new posts are performing like they’re supposed to be. So they’re having a decent hit rate, their traffic is gradually going up. But what’s happening is after two or three years, these posts are being outranked by better content that are covering that topic a little bit better. And so what’s happening here is what I call the leaky bucket syndrome. So they have a traffic bucket. And they’re filling up that traffic bucket as fast as they can with new blog posts. But they’re neglecting their older blog posts and never doing updates. And those old blog posts are starting to have leaks. So as fast as they fill in the traffic from the new blog posts, they’re losing just as much traffic from old blog posts that need to be updated. 

Brandon Gaille  08:21

Now the second group of bloggers are the ones that are having success. And they’re doing a success share with the group are sending an email to me thanking me for RankIQ or something that I taught them in my podcast. Now this group of bloggers, on average is doing about eight new blog posts per month. And seven of them are on low competition keywords. And the big difference is that they are consistently doing eight updates every single month. So they’re not losing traffic with a leaky bucket. So as they’re adding new blog posts, their traffic is continuing to creep up month after month, year after year. Now for people that are just getting started with updates, I recommend spending about 60% of your time on updates and 40% of your time on new blog posts. This is gonna allow you to get some momentum, and most importantly, work through all the posts that are currently losing traffic and losing rankings over the last year. And then as you get caught up, then you can shift to the eight new blog posts and eight updates per month, which is more 70% of your time on new blog posts and 30% on updates since updates only take 30 minutes to an hour whereas the new blog blog posts are going to take three to six hours.

Megan Porta  09:42

Do you have any thoughts about how to identify the posts that need to be updated? How do we know where to start with it?

Brandon Gaille  09:49

When it comes to identifying posts, I take all my posts and I put them into three groups: level one, level two and level three. The level one posts are the ones that are actively losing traffic or have lost rankings, year over year. And if you’re a Google Search Console expert, then you can go in there and work your filters, and create a list of your blog posts that are losing traffic. Now, when you go into Google Search Console, you’ll want to remember to compare the last three months versus the three that same three month period a year before, so you can include all of your seasonal posts in there. Now, for the ones that are not experts in Google Search Console, you can use RankIQ’s Rankings Audit Tool, it’s going to connect a Google Search Console. And it’s going to generate a report that shows you all of your level one and level two post. So we’ll list out your level one posts in order of the ones who are losing the most traffic. And you’re going to start with those first and work your way through the level one list. When you’re finished with the level one list, then you’ll move on to the level two list, the level two list is going to be made of made up of all the posts that are currently getting traffic and that traffic is stable, or the traffic is going up. Now, the reason why you all update these posts is because Google already loves them and they have existing rankings. And the majority of the time when I’m updating posts or see other people updating, these posts have lots of room to grow. Whether it’s making it more comprehensive, or covering longtails, that you might rank eight or nine for where you just have a sentence that you’re covering it and then turn it into a paragraph with with a heading, all of these type of updates while I have to go up the rankings pretty fast. 

Brandon Gaille  11:42

Now in regards to question that gets asked a lot with updating these posts that have existing traffic, and the traffic’s going up, should I update something with a top three ranking? Now when I refer to a top three ranking, I’m not referring to a post having any top three ranking, I’m talking about the top keyword that gets the most traffic is that average ranking one through three. Now there’s two mindsets with regards to this, the first mindset is to go ahead and update everything, regardless of whether the top keyword has a top three ranking. And the philosophy here is that by updating everything, even if you lose a couple of the top three rankings, that collectively you’re going to get more traffic than as if you skipped all the posts with the top three rankings. And then the other mindset is more conservative. And that’s to skip the top three rankings. And that’s usually deals when someone is most of their blog income is vital to paying their bills, for example, and they don’t want to take any chances. Now when people ask me, Where do I stand on these two mindsets, I always tell them, It’s a judgment call based upon what you’re most comfortable with. The one thing that I do recommend is not to update any post that has a top three ranking and makes up more than 5% of your traffic. Because this is too risky. A lot of times there are people that may have just been blogging for a couple of years, and they have one or two posts that make up 25% of their traffic. You don’t want to mess with those, if they have a top three ranking, you’re better off just focusing on on all the other posts and trying to diversify your traffic. So you’re not too heavily weighted on just a couple of posts. 

Brandon Gaille  13:30

Then the final level is level three, and level three are the post that are not getting traffic. And this is just a basic business principle, that you don’t want to be spending a lot of time on an asset that isn’t giving you anything. And most of the time with these posts, they’re not ranking because the keyword is just too competitive, and there’s no chance they’re going to rank for it. Or the the intent is not often there’s a commercial intent for the word and they’re not Google’s not wanting informational blog posts to show up. Now, the exception to this rule is if you have an old blog post from two or three years ago, that gets no traffic today. But two or three years ago, it used to get a lot of traffic and have rankings. In that scenario, you would want to take time to update it. And one other option would be if you’ve invested a lot of money or time and a couple of pillar blog posts. For example, let’s say someone has an SEO Tips post it was 5000 words long, and it wasn’t ranking and they weren’t going to have a chance of ever getting a ranking for SEO tips based upon their topical or domain authority of their site. They could identify a longer tail word that has less competition and shift the content. So for example, they would find out that SEO tips for photographers is 25 times easier to rank for than SEO tips. And they would take that 5000 words of content and those tips that are there and they would translate each of those tips and to how photography website would apply them. And then they’d shift the title to be instead of just SEO tips to be SEO tips for photographers, but that’s how I go about identifying the content that you need to go after first, level one is the most important. And you’ve always got to stay on top of your level one posts and identify the ones that are that have the leaks so that you can make the updates and outrank the people that have pushed down to the rankings.

Megan Porta  15:29

So this is detailed on your podcast correct? Do you have a series on this, the updating old blog posts is this the same process?

Brandon Gaille  15:38

The same processes, it’s about the same process. The first process, I broke it into four quadrants, now I just have three levels, the simplify a little bit better, the first process was a little bit more complicated. And the feedback was that some some people that weren’t really good at analytics had a hard time understanding it. So I simplified it into into three levels as opposed to four quadrants.

Megan Porta  16:01

So I’ve gone through your that whole series a handful of times, and I’ve had some pretty big successes because of it. There are a handful of URLs that came up that I just thought, why would I, why would I update this? But it showed, you know, there was like significant decay, I think you call it. So I did it anyway. And those posts are doing really well right now. So I updated them in like February of this year. And it’s really paying off. So I think it’s so worthwhile to go through it if you can. And I was gonna say, I have one question about this, because I have almost 1000 posts. So I mean, there’s just no way I can go through all of my decayed posts. So do you have a recommendation for how far to go? Because I mean, I could literally wake up in the morning and do this all day, every day, and never be done. So at what point do I stop?

Brandon Gaille  16:52

Well, number one, you need to be consistent, just like with as I said before, the ideal scenario is eight new blog posts, eight updates per month, whatever your your target is going to be for your updates, you want to consistently do that month in month and year round. Obviously, if you’re doing eight updates per year, per month per year, you’re going to be knocking out 100 or so posts. And it may take you a while to get to all the level one and level two posts. But that’s why your focus is always on level one first. So take care of the level one posts, and on a on a yearly basis. And if you get through all the level ones, then you can move into the level two post, when whenever you have a large blog with over 1000 posts, but as you said, you just that’s why it’s so important to dedicate that much of your time to updates, especially once you’ve been doing it for a long time. Because with that many post number one, if you just were randomly choosing which ones to update or the ones that you thought were important, you might not be going after the right ones. And you’re not really as you said, there’s no way you’re going to cover them all. And by having using your Google Search Console or using the rankings audit to get you that list of your level one, level two so that you know which ones are a priority that will allow you to invest whatever time you have each year into the ones that are going to make the biggest impact on your traffic.

Megan Porta  18:18

And then how often do you recommend redoing the list from Google Search Console? So I’m pretty comfortable in GSC, so if I have this long list, do I update it, like redo the sheet every quarter? Or do I just do it yearly?

Brandon Gaille  18:33

quarterly or yearly or those are the two paths to go. And you definitely don’t want to do it monthly, there’s just doesn’t make much sense because a lot of things aren’t going to change because you’re when you do the review, it’s a it’s a year versus year for a three month period. And so I think the for people that are getting started and they don’t they don’t want to be overwhelmed and having to redo identifying which ones are doing whatever they’re doing. The simplest way is to do it once a year, create your report, create your list of what you’re going to target go through the list. Now if you get through your your list of your of your all your level ones before the end of the year, you may want to run it again for another quarter to see if there’s any other level ones that have shown up that are losing rankings that you need to attend.

Sponsor  19:20

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Megan Porta  20:16

And then would you mind talking through updating a recipe post? So kind of like, what do we focus on from top to bottom?

Brandon Gaille  20:24

Well, if it were five years ago, I would have anybody asking me how to complete an update, I would have referred them to the four modules in my online course, that was four hours of video, going through all the different things you have to do. The good news today is that you don’t have to worry about that with most of the content optimization tools. For example, like with RankIQ, it has a Content Optimizer. So all you have to do is take your existing old post, plug it into the Content Optimizer. And that’s going to show you all the content gaps based upon what Google’s currently ranking and what it deems as most helpful that that you should be covering. And from there, you’re just going to strategically fill those content gaps. And some people will, will work it into their posts, others will, we’ll try to put it towards the end of their posts so that they leave their existing posts intact. It makes it easier to do the update. And it also decreases the chances of changing something towards the front, the front end of the posts for the first 25 to 50%, which might change the existing flow that got you the rankings. And people will have a section for frequently asked questions. And they’ll take the content gaps, and they will turn each content gap into a Q&A. And that Q&A will will also be optimized for featured snippets. So the question would be an H3, H4, followed by the answer which is 40 to 50 words in one paragraph, which is what Google consistently pulls for featured snippets, just make it simple. Don’t make your updates too complex. Just use a content optimization tool, fill the content gaps and knock it out and just move on to the next one, though, it’s not as complicated as it used to be.

Megan Porta  22:17

I’m all for simplifying it sounds good. I used that optimizer for that very thing all the time. It’s so good for that. Okay, what about roundup-style posts? I have a lot of these that came up in my content decay that have been slipping just a little bit. So what exactly do I need to update with those?

Brandon Gaille  22:37

When it comes to roundup posts, that’s a little bit different, you’ll want to start by focusing on looking at the first 10 results in the first titles in Google. And specifically, you’re going to look at that leading number and try to identify the biggest leading number and then always go 10 further. So it’s with a roundup post, it’s yes, you would be the one to fill content gaps if if, if there’s certain types of recipes that Google wants your roundup posts to cover. But you have to start with making sure that you are going above and beyond what everyone else is doing. And the reason for that is because people tend to click on the ones with the highest number. And that’s because of a psychological principle called the the left digit bias. And is the same thing, if you go to buy a car, in the last 3040 years, you always see them advertising $29,999 as opposed to 30,000. Because psychologically, it makes a big difference with that first left digit. If it’s lower than that. And when it comes to your titles, when they left digit being the highest left digit, they are having a psychological perception that your post is the best post. And that’s why they get more clicks, and they tend to move up higher in the rankings. Now, when you were adding more to it, let’s say you have a post that has 24 recipes in it, and you’re trying to get it to 15. So you’re adding on another 26. The best practice is to add those 26 to the tail end, keep the front end the same, that’s going to make it quicker for you to complete your update. But also, as I said earlier, it keeps that that existing posts intact, because a lot of these posts when you’re updating it, they’re already going to have lots of rankings and lots of traffic. And by leaving your existing posts as much intact as possible, it decreases the chance that you could do something wrong to cause people to back out more which could push it down in the rankings. And then those 26 recipes that you add. You’ll just want to make sure that you do a content optimizer report so that you can identify any specific recipe types or foods that Google is wanting you to to put in that post so that it’s the most helpful content for that recipe roundup. 

Megan Porta  25:00

And then for those roundups, is it okay to change the name of the title. So if I have like, “What the Serve with Sweet Potatoes: 50 Great Ideas” and then I change it to 60 ideas to change the actual title of that?

Brandon Gaille  25:14

Well the best practice for changing titles when you’re doing updates, is to you can adjust your front end and tail end modifiers, but leave the core the same. So if you’re… for example you’ve got a carrot cake recipe posts, carrot cake is going to be the core part of your title. Now the front end modifiers might be best homemade carrot cake recipe, and then your tail and modifier might be in parentheses and then you put in between the parentheses, “with video”. Now what I’ve seen is that a lot of sometimes there’s courses out there for for food bloggers, and experts that will say you don’t need to do modifiers just just put carrot cake or carrot cake recipe, and you’ll be fine. But what happens is that the person that has the better front end, modifiers and tail end modifiers, it increases the overall click-through rate. And if everything’s the same, and then you’ve got one DA 40 site, doing the same posts, and another DA 40 site, the one with the better front end and tail end modifiers almost always outranks it in those cases. And I’ve seen plenty of 800 pound gorillas just with high DA 80 plus, be very lazy with their titles. And then you have the lower DA and will not just compete but outrank them for that. 

Brandon Gaille  26:41

So it’s really important not just on the click-through rate, but because there are going to be people that are are searching, homemade carrot cake recipe, not just carrot cake recipe. And when you do a search for homemade carrot cake recipe, your eyes are going to be looking for homemade carrot cake, carrot cake recipe, and the click-through rate is even higher. So it’s always important that you’re trying to make sure the front end and tail end modifiers are maximized for click-through rate. And whenever you are doing a post update, the best practice is to look at that title and see where it is. Now obviously, if you’ve got a leading number, we’ve talked about that, but at the same time, if you see that you’re you don’t have any front end modifiers or not having a tail end modifier and you see other people in that are competing for that ranking using those, then it would make sense to make some adjustments. But as I said, leave your core keyword that you’re you’re you’re targeting or your core topic the same, and then make the adjustments in the front and the back end.

Megan Porta  27:51

And then are there any other changes that you would recommend doing to the post overall, when doing an update?

Brandon Gaille  27:59

Well, the only other thing is, there’s not as many food blog posts that that have the year in the tail end. But there are some not as not as much as other niches. If you have posts that have the current year like 2023, in parentheses, at the end of your titles, starting in November 1 through December 15, you will want to change that to 2024. And by doing that by being the first to change, a lot of times that’s going to allow you to push up an easy three or four making the first page, and then you’ll be able to maintain that the rest of the year. Because what happens is, when people see 2024, and you’re the only one that has it in November and December, they’re gonna be like, Wow, this is this is the new stuff for 2024. And that people naturally will click on that you will move up in the rankings right away, because Google will be like, All right, all of a sudden, people are clicking on this post more than the other ones. This is more relevant, we’re moving it up. And then the other ones won’t be able to catch up when they change it in January or February. So always stay on top of those posts have a have a sheet, I mean, the last thing you want is to have a post up that says 2021 Because you just forgot about it. So anything that you’re going to put the year in the title, just have a running sheet that that you can stay on top of so that every November 1st through December 15th. Those are all on the sheet and you can strategically knock those out so that you don’t have something fall through the cracks and have it be the same year for four or five years.

Megan Porta  29:35

Yeah, that would be awful. Do you know of food bloggers who do this and in what situations I’ve never personally put a year in a title but when do you think this might happen for a food blogger?

Brandon Gaille  29:46

Anything diet related, so if a food blogger is covering diets, those are typically things where they put the the year so that they can see the most current trends with certain diets.

Megan Porta  29:58

Okay, that makes sense. And then the something I struggle with personally writing a new post and setting it free. When do I check back in on it and consider updating it?

Brandon Gaille  30:08

The best practice is always to wait 12 months after you publish a post before you consider updating it. And that has to do with just allowing that post to work through the two stages that it goes through to reach its top ranking in Google. The first stage is in the first three to six months. And that’s when Google is looking at signals like people clicking on your title, how long they’re staying on their page. If when they get to your page, if they’re not pogo sticking, pogo sticking means they go from your page back to the Google results and click on something else for that same search. Now, once that three to six months periods up, you’re going to have kind of a peak for that. And then you’ll have a another six months, where Google is going to be looking at how many backlinks are coming in, which will have another push towards the top. And there was a study by Ahrefs a couple years ago that said just by having a top 10 ranking, that these sites with a top 10 ranking will get anywhere from eight to 15 passive backlinks year round. And that happens a lot with single post recipes. And because the people that are looking for roundup posts, the link to they a lot of them will just do Google searches, looking for different recipes to feature in the roundup. And then once they and they’re not going to go past the firsthand, once they see something they like they’ll reach out to that, that blogger and get them in the round up. And so it’s important that everyone understands that.

Megan Porta  31:35

Do you have any recommendations for keeping track of this? Because it can be a lot, especially if you’re pumping out a lot of new content? Do you recommend like a sheet or some sort of system for not letting things fall through the cracks?

Brandon Gaille  31:49

For updating posts that have been 12 months old?

Megan Porta  31:53

Yeah.

Brandon Gaille  31:54

Just would just keep an eye on your when you’re using a planner, whether you’re using a planner through RankIQ, or, or through a Google sheet or some other source, just be able to identify when that 12 month period is over by because everything’s gonna be ranked in order in that planner. And that’s an easy way to see the posts that are coming in and out.

Megan Porta  32:16

Yeah, okay. And then with everything that we’re talking about, I know that RankIQ is a really good solution for all of this, can you talk about how updating your old content and RankIQ kind of played together?

Brandon Gaille  32:30

Well, before I talk about that, since we just launched a new feature on RankIQ for the goal-setting, and a gold goals dashboard, I want to point out the importance of, of making sure that you everyone holds himself accountable for their updates. Because if you don’t hold yourself accountable, then nothing’s going to change. And those updates are going to fall through the cracks. And from everything that I’ve learned from blogging and from studying goal-setting, having a what’s called a three month moving content goal as the biggest impact on the production of bloggers, not just for updates, but for new blog posts too. And a three month moving content goal is essentially looking at your monthly new post goal and your monthly update goal. And you’re looking at this month, where you’re at what you did last month, and where you’re at so far for next month. And that allows you every month you’re looking at this three month goals so you can see exactly where you are and what you need to do to be able to hit your your your new post goal and your update goal. Now, especially with times like with the Helpful Content Update, for example, if you’re if your goals are are focused entirely on how much money you make, and how much traffic you get, and not on content production, when an update happens and you lose traffic, it’s going to make you want to quit if your focus on your goals is on what you have control of, which is how many new posts you make and how many updates you make. Even when updates happen and you lose a little bit, you’re not going to be impacted psychologically by those type of hits. 

Brandon Gaille  34:17

Now for anyone that is not sold on the importance of goals, I always point them to the Harvard MBA Goal Study, which was between 1979 and 1989. In 1979, researchers asked all the graduates that were graduating Harvard with an MBA, if they had written down their goals, and they had a plan to achieve them. Out of all the ones they asked there were just 3% that had written down their goals with a plan to achieve them. And 97% did not. 10 years later, the researchers went back to the same people and found out how much they were earning the 3% that had written down their goals with a plan were out-earning the 97% by 10 times. So it’s really important that you your your goals are front and center, specifically, that three month moving content goal. And five months ago, I sat down with my development team at RankIQ, and work with them to create a content planner that worked with the goals dashboard. So now when someone logs into RankIQ, the first thing they see is their goal scoreboard showing them where they what they did last month, where they are this month, where they are so far for next month. And everything’s tied with their content planner. So when they update their content planner that they’ve completed an update or a new blog post their scoreboard for their goals change. And if you’re not using RankIQ, then what I recommend is that every day before you sit down to start blogging, you pull out your three month moving content goals, and you look at them to see where you’re at. And then at the end of every day, when you’re done with your blog, you’re going to update that and and celebrate when you are or have had a day of doing two updates or one blog post. Because this is going to allow you to stay consistent year round. And not not just have said your your vision board or your traffic goals pinned away somewhere on your wall that you’ll eventually just stop looking at. So always be very intentional of looking at it every single day before you start your blogging process.

Megan Porta  34:17

I love that you guys have built that in to the tool. I’ve seen that. But I haven’t utilized it yet. But I’m definitely going to now.

Brandon Gaille  36:44

Yeah, it’s it’s powerful. I was really impressed with how many… I know you you’re not using it, but there’s a high percentage of out of all the tools we released that was one of the ones that had just kind of immediate usage, people getting involved with it right away. 

Megan Porta  37:00

That’s great. Good. 

Brandon Gaille  37:01

And then to answer your question about RankIQ and how it’s, I guess, kind of the easy button for everything. The main reason why it’s easy button is because it’s the only tool set tailored for bloggers where most of the other SEO tool sets are designed for SEO experts and marketing professionals of fortune 5000 companies. Now a lot of the people that initially come to RankIQ and join, join because of the keyword library. And the fact that here that we’ve got, we’ve already done the research. And we’ve identified the lowest competition, highest traffic phrases for all the different blogging niches. For example, with the food blogging niche, there’s over 120,000, low competition words in our library, and then it’s broken down by all the sub niches of the foods that people can just go into their sub niche that they’re writing about, identify what keywords they’re going to target, put it in their planner and go. 

Brandon Gaille  37:57

Now, the big powerful thing about RankIQ is even though they may come here for the keywords, once they get there, they realize that everything is in one space. And before becoming a RankIQ member, a lot of people would have, they’d be using a keyword tool with one company a content optimization tool with another company, they’d have a Google sheet, or their planner, they’d have their goals written down somewhere on their on their desk. And they check Google Search Console once or twice a month to see what their rankings is. And everything’s just kind of displaced. And you’ll end up forgetting about things. But now with RankIQ, everything’s under one spot so they’re able to log in, see everything and then also everything communicates with with each other. Now I could go on talking about all of our tools and how great they are and how much I love them and all the benefits. But I think what tells a story most are the statistics. And this summer, we just finished a one year study of 2300 food bloggers that use Mediavine. And we found that the Mediavine food bloggers using RankIQ increased their traffic 4.68 times more than the Mediaevine bloggers not using RankIQ. And this was big, because it was Mediavine bloggers. And we also did another one on on Adthrive and we saw the same results. And these type of bloggers, they if they’re not using RankIQ, they’re always using some other type of keyword research tool, content optimization tool. So it’s not just bloggers as a whole, then you’re just looking at RankIQ bloggers and of course, they’re going to have better results than your average blogger that may not be using any tool. But having these statistics just show that how much more traffic that they’re they’re getting, I think tells the whole story and anyone that wants to see the results of this study that go to rankiq.com It’s on the homepage.

Megan Porta  40:00

Rank IQ, it literally changed the trajectory of my blog. I was stale, stagnant for many years. And since starting it a couple of years ago, I mean, it’s just been going up, up up. So I can attest to everything that you’re saying to Brandon, and thank you for putting out such a great tool for us. I talked to so many bloggers who love it and use it regularly. And it’s just, yeah, it’s an amazing game changer for us.

Brandon Gaille  40:27

Well, thanks so much for your feedback and and for being a user.

Megan Porta  40:30

Yeah. Is there anything you feel like we should touch on before we say goodbye about updating old content? 

Megan Porta  40:36

No, I think we’ve covered it all today. 

Megan Porta  40:38

Great. Well, thank you for joining me. It’s always a pleasure to chat with you. And I love the topic, of course. You’re welcome. Thanks for having me. Yeah. And we’ll put together show notes for you, Brandon, if you want to go look at those you can head to eatblogtalk.com/rankIQ2. Tell everyone where they can find you. Mention your podcast and anything else you want to direct people to?

Brandon Gaille  41:00

Oh, rankiq.com is where the software is. And if you’re a RankIQ member, you will be involved with the Facebook group. I’m always very active there. And in addition to that, I have The Blogging Millionaire podcast and that’s pretty much it.

Megan Porta  41:17

Awesome. Thanks, Brandon. And thank you so much for listening food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

Outro  41:25

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you posted it to your social media feed and stories. I will see you next time.