The Simple and Smart SEO Show

Combining PR and SEO Strategy w/ Alisa Meredith of SEMrush

November 16, 2022 Alisa Meredith, Brittany Herzberg, Crystal Waddell Season 1 Episode 25
The Simple and Smart SEO Show
Combining PR and SEO Strategy w/ Alisa Meredith of SEMrush
Show Notes Transcript

What's in our 25th Episode? Alisa Meredith is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Semrush.  Today she is sharing about their SEO products Surround Sound.

Welcome to the Simple and Smart SEO Show!
👉🏽 Share us with a friend!


1.  Surround Sound is an SEO tool that helps with outreach.

  • Surround Sound SEO is different from traditional SEO because the goal is not to rank your website or content, but rather to get mentioned on high-ranking websites.
  •  Brand visibility is how often your brand appears in search results, and share of search is what percentage of those results are yours.

2.  It is important to understand where your business stands in the market.

  • There are three types of keywords to consider: content marketing, commercial intent, and transactional intent.
  • Using high intent keywords (keywords with commercial intent) will help you.

3. Surround Sound SEO is a way to leverage other sites that already rank for  keywords to get your own site mentioned.

  • Try to build a relationship with the publication by offering something in return.
  • Understanding a customer's unique buyer's journey is important to align marketing.

5. Connect with Alisa:


Connect w/ B: YouTube, Website, LinkedIn, Instagram

If you're looking for a unique, handcrafted way to spruce up your home or office, then Collage and Wood is the perfect place for you!

We offer a range of beautiful wooden signs that are perfect for any occasion. Our talented team of artists will work with you to create a sign that perfectly suits your needs. So why wait? Visit Collage and Wood today!

Support the show

Want to search the Simple and Smart SEO Show podcast for something you heard? Now you can!!! It's free!

JOIN the 3-Day Supercharge Your SEO Challenge!

Apply to be my podcast guest! 🎙️ Don't forget to Put your pitch topic in the subject line!

AFFILIATE LINKS:
Start your Shopify Store!
Quit guessing with your content! GET SURFER SEO!!!
10,000 Jasper words FREE!
Get Carry (formerly Ocho): the best retirement resources for entrepreneurs!
Get my Ultimate SEO Task List (Plus Google Calendar!)


Note: If you make a purchase using some of my links, I make a little money. But I only ever share products, people, & offers I trust & use myself!

This transcript has been machine-generated and has not been edited for errors.

So this is the concept of Surround Sound SEO in that, yes, ranking your site is good. 

We all wanna do that for our keywords, but if you stop there, the rest of the SERPs are gonna go to somebody else. 

Hello and welcome to the Semple and Smart SEO show Where we provide tips and advice to improve your website's search engine ranking.

I'm Brittany Herzberg, SEO copywriter for Holistic Health and Wellness Pros who want to show up as the answer to a Googled question. 

And I'm Crystal Waddell, an e-commerce seller and content creator. I help business owners communicate the value of their products and services through content so you can make more sales and grow your sales. 

We are business besties who love learning and sharing what we've learned.

So what are we waiting for? Let's jump in. 

Today we are here with Alisa Meredith. 

She is a senior product marketing manager at Semrush. 

And not only am I excited that Alisa’s here, but I'm also excited that you pronounce Semrush SemRUSH.

So anyway, thank you for being here. 

Yeah, welcome to this show, Alisa! How are you today? 

I'm thrilled to be here. Yes, you were. You were right. It's Sem. Thank you. 

I've actually been corrected on this podcast,  I think a couple times. 

Yeah. 

And anytime somebody corrects me, I just assume I'm wrong. I'm like, whatever. 

It's me too. That's fine. This is why we need the pros here. 

Yeah. 

But this is like complete validation in my ability to pronounce things, so I just wanna say thank you for that. 

Yeah. 

And you'll never stand idly by and be corrected again, ever.

 Oh, I will. I don't care. It's like humble mode I guess, but, okay. 

So Alisa, tell us about what you do for Semrush and what that's like. 

Yeah, so I work on a couple of products that are in beta right now. 

It's all standard GTM (Go-To-Market) stuff, figuring out messaging, positioning, content marketing, promotion. 

And these products were kind of intended to help marketing agencies to offer new services to their clients.


So one of them allows you to make simple SEO optimizations right from your browser, which is something I know a lot of SEOs struggle with. 

They have all these great optimizations and then the developers are like, I'll get to that in four months. 

So that's one…. The other one, though, is the one we're gonna talk about today, which is called Surround Sound.

So just trying to kind of educate about that. 

And that one's a little trickier, right? Because people don't know, what is that? 

So it's not, but it's got a cool name.

 It does have a cool name. Yeah. 

So that had to start with kind of educating about the concept and why it's important before we ever got to, Hey, we have this great tool. 

So I know when I mentioned it to you Crystal, you're  Ooh, ….

Cause she, her ears perked up. She says, say what? 

Yeah, when you told me about it, I then went to Semrush’s website and started reading all about it cuz she sent me some links to the blogs or whatever.

And so like I'm reading all about it, I've got my list of questions and so yeah. 

So B, if you don't mind, I'll just jump in with my first question. 

No, go for it. I might pull on a thread and if I do that I'll just interrupt you. 

Like I can already tell you that the thread that I wanna pull on next time is the product that we have not yet mentioned.

So that first one that you were talking about, I was like,  Oh, that also sounds interesting. 

So I feel listening is gonna be like, I'm happy for you that you're keeping wraps, but also what is it? 

What's gonna pop out? Right? Oh, it's a secret. 

Yes. That's the key. Great marketing is, don't tell anyone what you're selling. 

Yeah. Don't give us anything. 

But It's a teaser.


Okay, so what is Surround Sound marketing and how did it even come into existence? 

Mm. Okay. So Surround Sound marketing. When you think of Surround Sound, what comes to mind first? 

Just like being surrounded. Being my living giant circle. 

Yeah. 

Speakers everywhere. 

Speakers, Right? It creates that kind of immersive experience where you just, it's around all the time. 


So the idea of Surround Sound SEO is, where do people go when they wanna buy something? 

They might ask their friends, they might ask their family, but they're definitely gonna ask Google too, right? 

So when you ask Google what's the best smartphone in 2022, you're gonna see results from all the big carriers, right?

And all the big manufacturers. But do you really trust what they say? Not really.

Cause we talk about ourselves, right? 

Right. 

So you might be more likely to go to an article, I don't know, TechCrunch or something that is “the 10 best smartphones for 2022.”

Or you might get more specific and like the 10 best smartphones for business owners in 2022. 

But those are the kind of articles that you want because you want that kind of impartial-ish third party opinion and review. 

You wanna hear from other people what they're saying about it. 

So if you do that, search the best smartphones for 2022 and you see, you see Samsung mentioned in every single article, you see a specific model mentioned it's gonna make you have to check it out, right? 


So this is a concept of Surround Sound SEO in that yes, ranking your site is good, we all wanna do that for our keywords, but if you stop there, the rest of the SERPs are gonna go to somebody else, right? 

And you also won't be able to compete with those big publication sites,right? 

So if you're in home decor, you're not gonna compete with Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living and all that. But you may be able to get them to mention you. 

So that's the idea. Just kind of be there where all the conversations are happening so that you just cannot be ignored. 

Yeah, you gotta show up everywhere. I love it.

And I really like the idea of showing up in those lists because it is, like you said, impartial-ish. 

And this is something that I try to do even with the case studies that I write because I could tell you I'm an awesome SEO copywriter, probably won't, but I could see that.

But you hear it from- I don't do the bragging thing, but having somebody else tell you that, it makes you believe it more. 

Oh, of course. Yeah. 


So, okay, so how does Surround Sound help you be everywhere?  

Especially if you can't compete for those top rankings in search, right? 

So you're probably not gonna get the number one spot. Maybe you will eventually, that's a good goal to go for. 

But can you get one of those publications to mention you, four of those publications to mention you and then you're building your brand visibility. 

Your share of search might even show up in the little preview in the SERPs where it might have you as number one or number two.

So even if people don't click into the article, they're still seeing you right? 

In the SERPs results.

So the way that the tool helps is that you put in your keywords, you put in your competitors and that will show you all the pages that mention your competitors and don't mention you, the pages that rank for those keywords. 

So then that's what we call our opportunities, right? 

Because not only are they ranking for your keywords, which is great, but they’ve also shown that they're willing to mention your competitors, which means they may be very willing to mention you as well. 

So this is where we kind of blur the line between link building and pr. 

So it's not traditional link building where it's maybe you have a quota you have to build every month and you just go get 'em where you can.

Right? 

It takes a little bit more cultivation, creating relationships, in order to get into some of those higher ranking publications. 

Yeah. 


This is what I love so much about Semrush,  because there's so many tools out there for SEO, but I just feel like Semrush and content marketing, you guys are so forward thinking!

It's like there's tools that measure like right now and there's tools that show you what has happened.

 But I feel like if you wanna know how to move forward in the future, Semrush is hands down the best because you guys are always creating these tools that are just, Hey, what's happening right now? 

It's not what's gonna be happening tomorrow.


You've got to be thinking about new ways all the time to do those old things, like SEO. 

So that's what I've really enjoyed about all of the products that you have, but especially the idea of Surround Sound. 

So you mentioned two terms that I, I don't wanna skip over because I think they're really important to define. The first one is brand visibility.

What does that mean? Yeah, yeah. 

So it's tied to brand awareness, right?


If it is the same concept about Surround Sound, where if your name pops up everywhere, that's gonna build your brand, that's building your brand visibility. 

So when you go into Surround Sound, you'll be able to see what your current visibility is and how is that calculated? 

Yeah. 

So it's, it's calculating where you're showing up in the SERPs. 

So if you're showing up in three results in the first 10 and you're only looking at the first 10, then your visibility would be 30%. Gotcha. Right? 

And we also have a weighted visibility by the page that you're on. How high does that rank?

So, there are different ways you can look at it as opposed to just the numbers. 

I do wanna say though, that this concept actually came from HubSpot. Yeah. 

So a couple years ago they kind of came up with this idea, they did it internally quietly in order to promote their free CMS because they were going up against Salesforce, which is a giant, right? 

You're never gonna beat them right out of the gate. 

So this really helped them to get a foothold in that marketplace. 

So they created the concept, they also built a tool themselves, but it has never been anything that's been released. 

So it was just there. And the Semrush tool, from what I'm told, goes a lot deeper. 

We have a webinar that I did with Alex Burquette, who is the one who kind of came up with it and kind of piloted it. 

It's interesting to hear how that went and how it's worked for them. 

That's so interesting. We'll definitely make sure we link to that cuz I know you shared that with us. 

Okay.


Yeah, so the other term that you mentioned was share of search and I'd like to hear you expand on that. 

But one thing that also stood out and what you just said is that you could show up in multiple spots in the SERPs, you know what I mean? 

So many times you hear SEOs talking about getting to position one, two, or three or just get to page one or whatever.

But it's always about the one, and you're talking about multiple. 

So this, it's so innovative, you know?

 So can you talk to us a little bit about share of search? 

Yeah. The share of search is very similar to visibility. Like how much are you showing up?

Like you just explained it perfectly, right? 

Oh? 

So yeah, you did, you did. 

So if you're looking at the first 10 results and you're showing up for four of them, I mean, your share of search is pretty, pretty good. Yeah. You know? 

Yeah.


 And, like you said, that that number one spot is, that would be great if we can get that, but even if we can't, we can still increase our share of search. 

It's something that is attainable for pretty much everybody. Yeah. And  I've seen this for my own business in one particular situation. I was chosen for one of those “people also ask” questions-

Nice. 

About senior night.

And so I show up there as a response to a question and then I also rank in the top three. 

So I'm that 20%! 

Yep. Yeah. That's super exciting.

Yeah. 


The thing too about Surround Sound SEO, we recommend that people use those really high intent keywords. 

So rather than,let's see, what would it be? 

Rather than looking for an informational term, you're looking for a commercial intent term. So that's another tool we have in Semrush that will help you kind of identify those commercial intent keywords related to what you do. 

So it would be those listicles, right? 

What are people searching for when they're just about to pull the trigger and actually buy something?

Those are the words that work best for your Surround Sound SEO.

We looked at, as an example, a Whirlpool campaign that we created ourselves. 

And if you look for French door refrigerators, you're gonna see like Lowe's and Home Depot and all that - you're already mentioned there, right? 

As a manufacturer, that's taken care of. 

Plus you're never gonna beat the Home Depot.

But if you search for something like the best French door refrigerators, yeah. 

Home Depot and all that, they might show up somewhere along there, but you're also gonna see publications that you could get to mention you. 

That is such an interesting distinction, and that by just adding that, that word best can make such a big difference. 


So I guess my next question then would be, we've kind of touched on it, but how is Surround Sound different from traditional SEO? 

Yeah.  

The biggest difference is the goal, right? 

So traditional SEO, you're trying to rank your website, your content. 

With Surround Sound SEO, you're taking advantage of other sites that already rank for your keywords and you're kind of getting in there as well.

Yeah.  There's a person I follow on social media and she talked about this with Instagram and  borrowing other people's audiences. 

So shout out to Ellen Yin,  because she was talking about how you could sell with a small audience by going to borrow someone else's audience. 

And the illustration she gave was, let's say you’re neighbors with someone who has a large audience,  let's just use Amy Porterfield for an example or whatever. 

And so you're, you've got your house,  and you can invite your two or three friends who know who you are and say, Hey, I've got this thing, you know? 

And they're like, okay, we're not buying it. 🤣

But then you could go across the street to the party Amy's having and tell all those people, and guess what? 

There's a lot more people there, there's a lot more opportunity for people to find you and kind of engage with what you've got going on. 

So I thought that's kind of a similar concept.

I like that a lot. 

And then with Surround Sound, it's more like Amy is telling everybody about you, right? 

So it's not you going in there, it's them telling people about you, which tends to work better. 

So what I'm hearing is, this is the perfect opportunity for introverts because it's everybody else doing the work and all you're doing is finding the opportunities and you're like, “Hey, how about this?” 

Yeah, exactly. 

I mean, if you're selling meal kits for example, you're Hello Fresh and you're seeing that, oh, this article mentioned my competitors, but not me, that's a perfect opportunity to reach out and say, hey, I saw this article, notice you didn't include us.

I would love to send you some sample meals so you can consider adding us to the list.

And of course then they have to disclose, right?

That they got free samples, all that good FTC [Federal Trade Commision] stuff. 

But that's the way to kind of start to break the ice and get in there. 

So how do you go about, we've talked about the opportunities and I'm sure Crystal had this question on our list, but how do you then go about trying to take advantage of those opportunities and reaching out to these sites that have these Lists? 


Yeah, so if you are already doing link building, you likely already have an outreach program in place, this is gonna take advantage of the same sort of thing. 

Then we're gonna assume that everything's personalized when you're doing your link outreach anyway. 

But you even probably wanna spend more time on it with a Surround Sound outreach because the value is so much higher.

So you might wanna be looking at rather than just a one-off link, like, how can I build this relationship with this publication, with this blogger? 

What can I give them in return? So maybe it's, would you consider having us on your podcast, we'll have you on our podcast, whatever it is that you can give to add value.

Even if it's writing your own article, or especially, offering to write the copy yourself that whatever you want in their article. 

Like, make it clear that they won't have to do anything but copy paste, right? Yes. 

Yeah. That's a big selling point for a lot of people is if you can just go ahead and say, here's the thing, would you be willing to put this in there? 

Yeah. Yeah. 

And then,  if you have an affiliate program or something that also always sweetens the deal. 

Yeah. Amazing. That is so cool. 

Okay, so you did talk a little bit about this, but  just going back to search, cuz I've just stuck in the SERPs right now!


How do you identify the potential gaps in search coverage? 

Yeah, so you do have to know your keywords, right? That's gonna be your first step. 

So what you'll be able to do, not only looking at opportunities, but also you can look by keyword, so how am I doing by keyword? 

And then looking at who's ranking for that keyword and are they mentioning me?

Are they mentioning my competition? 

Are they linking to me, linking to my competition? 


That's when you can start to see, alright, for this keyword here, I only have this much visibility and it does break it down at keyword level. 

So you can see where, where you might really need to focus if it's an important, really important keyword for you and say,

Oh, I have 0% coverage. Oh, that's not good. 

Let me check and see who's ranking and where I need to start. Yeah. 

And I'm hearing words like collaboration in my head. 

It seems like the future is collaborative, more than just that siloed businesses.  

There's everybody out there, every man for themselves!  

But no, we have to start building those connections on the internet just like we would in real life. 


Real life networking has now moved to the internet. That's what it sounds like to me. 

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. 

And I feel like that means that you and I are really well primed for this, Crystal, because both of us kinda do this. 

B does this.

Okay. I definitely do this. I think it's in my DNA, so I'm getting really excited just hearing about this stuff because even just like how you were talking about asking, the give and take, I can do this. 

If you would do this for me, I do that. So I have ended up showing up on some people's provider lists or trusted copywriter lists or whatever it might be.

And even if it's only on their website and they're not these big giant websites with a well known list, that's okay, I'm starting somewhere. 

Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. 

Okay, so, one of the things that I also love about Semrush is the educational stuff that you guys provide, and I've learned a lot about buyer's journeys and  just really trying to align marketing with the buyer's journey.


And so I was just wondering if you had any tips for understanding or building out a customer's unique buyer's journey and if Surround Sound fits into that in any way. 

Yeah. 

Surround Sound definitely fits in and it fits in near the bottom right. 

Okay. Again, it's those … think about the keywords that people use when they're about ready to purchase, because that's where the recommendations are the most important. 

So you, you'll have your informational keywords, great, rank for those too, but where the most value comes in is closest to the sale. 

So, that's why you can kind of justify that little more effort to get that kind of relationship building. 

Getting that link, because it is so close to the sale. 

You know what this reminds me of? 

Remember when Steph was on? 

Yes. 

Yeah. 

Stephanie Long was talking about this and she was talking about her… she's an SEO strategist or yeah, consultant. 

She's got a title, all the words. Throw all the words. Yeah, she's out there on the west coast.


But she said that one of her techniques as an SEO person is to target those middle of funnel keywords,  and to,  kind of lead into what you're talking about. 

And so I love the fact that we're getting more specific and we're getting closer to that actual purchase point because, with content,  you're trying to bring people in. 

We've talked about retargeting with ads, but it's like everybody wants to know: how do you close the deal?  

How do you get them all the way down and, really spend the most time, get really productive towards the bottom of the funnel, you know? 

So I think that's a really cool thing that Surround Sound does well.

And another one of the, one of the quotes from Ashleigh Chanel that sticks in my head is when she was talking about return on energy, return on effort. 


So, this is a really big return on effort. If you're focusing closer to the end of the funnel, that's where you're gonna have more of those conversions. 

That's a brilliant place to spend your time. 

I love this. I'm super excited. 

Oh, good, good. 

Okay. So what if you're not Whirlpool?  What if you're starting from zero, how do you implement Surround Sound from the starting point?

It's the same way, and that's the beauty of it, right? 

You don't have to be ranking or well known for this to work. 

You're probably gonna have to be a little stronger on your relationship building and your outreach, but it can work for anybody. 

I love hearing that. 

And is there training available for using Surround Sound or,  how does that work if somebody wants to get started?

Yeah, so you can definitely go in and try it. 

It's under the “extra tools” menu and in the Semrush menu, when you go to the dashboard. 


It’s just recently been updated, so it's really easy to see where your strengths are and where your weaknesses are. and then you can just click through and find out, figure out what to do. 

There is also that webinar with Alex Briquette where he walks through exactly what he does to set up a campaign and then even all the way through doing outreach.

And there's a series of templates of outreach emails that you can get. 

So that's what I would recommend doing.

But if you go in there and you just try it, I think you'll see the possibilities.

I think that my favorite pages are the pages report, and that's where you'll see your opportunities, right? 


So you'll see every page that ranks for your important keywords and whether they're mentioning you or not, and which competitors they're mentioning. 

The other one is that keywords report we talked about, where you can see, at an individual keyword level, what is your visibility like? 

Yeah, I love that. 

And have you guys ever heard of a SWOT analysis? Yes, I'm sure you, yeah. 

Well, this to me just seems like the ultimate SWOT, you know? 

Yes.

It's, and and for those of you who are listening, and you may not have ever heard of it, SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

And so I love it over here, B's my star student. 

No, I'm just kidding. I’m like, mouthing the words that she's saying. 

Yeah. But  

I mean, but it's so important.  

It's so important to understand where you're strong and how you can  maintain and grow that strength where your weaknesses are. 

So like you said, you can turn 'em into opportunities, identify your opportunities so that you don't just wake up one day and realize, oh gosh, I never planned for the future.  

I think that is, that's a huge issue for so many businesses. 

They get so stuck in what they're doing day to day that they fail to notice that things are changing around them, you know? 

And so that's why I think a tool like this is so important. So go ahead, if you have something to add to that, I'm just, I Love …

I wanna take it all the way through to the T, right? 

The threat part, right? 


Where are your competitors that you are not? 

And beyond that, we have seen people discover competitors they didn't even think of as competitors. 

Yes.

 When they realize that they're showing up in those high ranking pages for their keywords as well. 

Yeah, Yeah.

That's one thing I was thinking about is  you don't know what you don't know until you look at the report and then you're  like, oh, that's over there. 

Okay. Yeah, Exactly. 


I feel like that's been one of the biggest ahas of SEO is just understanding what else is going on around you. 

Here's an example I think I might have talked about, but a few weeks ago I was studying one of my number one keywords, which is senior photo props.

And so I had written an article about senior photo props and I was checking my visibility,  my share of search and going through… am I showing up in photos?

Am I showing up in videos? 

Am I showing up in just those regular search results?

And it turns out somebody else lifted my entire blog with the images and everything that I created for Pinterest that had my brand name on it, collageandwood.com, at the bottom of, I mean, every single image! 

I'm like, what in the world? You know?

And so, they were ranking in the photo section for my blog. 

Oh No. 

So it's one of those things where I would never have thought that something like that could happen. And I reached out to 'em and said, Hey, I don't know what this is, but y'all need to take it down, and they did right away, which is great, but probably what I should have done, which would've been smarter, just say, Hey, make sure you add the right link in there, not yours. 

Point it back to my page. 

That's, yeah, that's what I was thinking. 

Hey, will you make sure this is linked over here? Yeah. 

As I hear what you're saying, I'm like, oh man, I could have really had my share of search over there, but, okay. 


So does Surround Sound help you target those high difficulty keywords? 

Is there an element there to help you rank for the harder ones? 

Well, it won't help you rank, but it will help you see who is ranking so that you know where you might be able to get a link and a mention.

Okay. So that's right. 

That's where you try to build those partnerships.

I'd love that too because sometimes when you're thinking about getting started in SEO, you feel like you're so behind and you see, oh, these guys are ranking, 

I could never catch up. 

Yep. 


Yeah. If you go into Surround Sound as the tool, I think the first inclination is to dump all of your keywords into one campaign. 

But that's not always the best idea, right? 

So if you, let's say you're Nike and you're doing a Surround Sound campaign, you might wanna have different campaigns, one for women's running shoes, right? 

You put them all in one campaign, and then you can see in general, what is your brand visibility, what's your share of search overall for all of your keywords? 

But you also wanna know with individual product lines or focuses, how are we doing in youth soccer shoes, right? 

These different initiatives that you might have.

 It's definitely worth splitting it out into a different campaign. Wow.

It's so deep. We're really quiet. It's like, what else? 

Break it down some more, you know? 

But it's really simple.

I mean you could, you could do this without the tool, right? 

You just have to open 80 tabs or more, and then look and see am I mentioned, here are my competitors mentioned here. 

But the tool itself just makes it super easy. It's practically instant when you put it in there. 

That is so cool. 

And I hope you haven't already said this, but when I was reading through some of the information you sent me, you were talking about…. 


Three types of keywords to consider when you're trying to figure out what types of words to target. 

And so, having that massive list and then breaking it down into different lists, is that related to the types of words that you wanna target? 

It could be, right? 

So, if content marketing itself is a really big focus for you, maybe you wanna do a campaign that's all your informational keywords so you can see how you're doing in informing the internet about you and giving them that kind of top of a funnel. 


But where you're probably gonna wanna spend more of your time is with those commercial intent, transactional intent kind of keywords that we talked about. 

Like whatever you search when you're about to do a thing, right? 

So on Pinterest we know, cuz you know we have to mention Pinterest! 

Yes! 

A lot of times because almost all the searches are unbranded and people are very open to new ideas and Pinterest really wants to share new ideas that they think people will like. 

That's where your really top of the funnel keywords can do very well.

Right? 

The bottom of the funnel ones can work too, but things like running routines for beginners, right? 

That would be great on Pinterest, people would love it, they'll save it like crazy. 

But when you do that in a Surround Sound campaign, it's just a very different effect. 


So I wouldn't mix in those informational keywords with your commercial intent.

That is really good to know. 

Okay. I have a couple, Go ahead. No, no, no, you go ahead. 

I'll hold it. I'll hold my thoughts. 

No, no, no, it's because I was gonna run into another question so you go. 

Well I was just thinking,  as someone trying to build a marketing strategy from scratch, it's just so interesting to hear how these different tools work together.  


Because I'm all about trying to align the different terms that people use, like top of funnel or  solution aware or whatever, just trying to align all of those terms with keywords and  informational and transactional. 

So it's interesting,

I love Pinterest. Pinterest is there at the top and then I like Surround Sound. Now we've got that at the bottom. 

And so it's just, mixing and matching all of these different tools to build the strategy that makes sense for your business, you know? 

And so I just really appreciate the breakdown because it really helps to draw a picture of how all of these things on the internet work together.

You need to make an image. 

I was just thinking that is calling my name and just to make sure that I'm going to make that image correctly, the three types of keywords you kind of wanna consider would be informational, which is kind of at the top, commercial in the middle, and transactional at the bottom.


In Semrush, the commercial and transactional are very similar. 

So I would lump those together. 

Okay. 

And then informational, I feel like isn't, that's not where we tend to focus.

 But if that is your focus, if you're all about the content and you wanna see how, how far your content is getting, where you're being mentioned for these keywords, is there a thought leadership push that you wanna see? 

Is it being, are you being mentioned? 

You could do that, but really the more value is gonna come from those lists,  top 10 this or the best that or the adjective here, right? 

So the easiest, whatever it is that is your focus, those are the keywords I would concentrate on. 

Got it. I really like it.

It's like how Ashley was talking about because Ashley Chanel came in and talked about ads with us and retargeting and building out your funnel with ads.

If somebody watched 20 to 30% of this video, then we're gonna retarget 'em with this video and that type of thing.


So I think what you're talking about B is that, like Alisa said, content comes at the beginning and then your retargeting strategy is what falls in the middle, whatever that looks like. 

And then that commercial, commercial/transactional is at the bottom. 

So if we're building out a graphic, that's the flow, I guess.

 Totally. 

We're gonna collaborate on that. 

See, collaboration is happening already. 

Yeah, we'll send it to you. You’ll take a look at it, see if we've got all our-

Oh no, I just wanna see- 

I'm sure it'll be like labels in the right place. Everything looks pretty. Yeah. Yeah. 

So I have a client, I do a lot of healthcare copywriting, so health and wellness providers and I have a client who really wants to get a link in like a webmd article.  

Let's say that there's a listicle and we want to,  just kind of knock on their door and say, Hey, would you feature us? 

Would you link to us? 


I know you walked us through kind of like a high level of what to do, but let's say we don't have Semrush and we don't have Surround Sound. 

What would you recommend someone do in that case? 

As far as the outreach or-

Yeah. 

Okay. 

She's-  

The outreach is gonna be-

I'm sorry. Well, sorry, I was just saying she would, she would recommend, get Surround Sound! But go ahead. 

Well yeah, of course. I'm sure. I wanna show people the time and effort that it could save them. 


So,  if we don't have Surround Sound, where Surround Sound comes in is to identify the opportunities and then it is up to you to go do the outreach. 

Got it. So, really in that scenario, what it could help with is figuring out which article- 

Yeah.

You could, exactly. 

Where's your-

Yeah, where's your time best spent, right? 

Right. 

Instead of just blindly saying, Hey, would you link to me?

 Exactly right.

 So your customer might, it might be kind of a bucket list item, right? 

I wanna be on WebMD, but is that page or is that site really ranking for the keywords that are important to them?

Right? 

Oh, so Surround Sound could help you figure that out. 

That's a good, very good point. 

Thank you. 

Cause a lot of times clients are-

Yeah, they have ideas, of course we all have our ideas, but you would be able to go in and say, we looked at all of your keywords and so you don't have to open your incognito browser and open 40 tabs to check every keyword.

You just do it once and then you can say, look, this is where you really wanna be.

This would be a better opportunity. This would get you seen as more of an authority. 

Yeah. Yeah. 


And it even has like an estimated traffic amount to, so you can see which pages would be best for that. 

Yeah.

So how many keywords can you add in at a time to check on? 

Yeah, so to try it out you can do 50. 

If you want more, you would just write in and ask for more. 

Right now it's in beta, so I would suggest trying it now.

 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was my question. 

I was gonna ask, let's say that someone has a Semrush account, this is something they could just in theory, go check that. 

What did you say? Extra tools tab. The extra tools menu at the top will be there. Yep. Okay. 

At once we do this, Go Ahead. You're the guest! 

I'm so sorry! Okay.

And so with all beta products, we want to know how this could be better for you? 


What would make it clearer for you? What would add more value? 

So,  if you go in and try it and there's something that's confusing to you or something you wish it did that it doesn't, we wanna know about that. 

Going in there today, well, not today, I'm going in tomorrow cuz we have client work today. 

I'll get distracted for the next five hours. 

So everybody, we have our marching orders, so if you're listening right now, you need to go to Semrush, you need to go to the tools menu- 

Extra Tools menu- 

And check out Surround Sound and get started with that.

And then we definitely wanna hear your feedback, too. 

So we have a link down in the show notes, the galas.fm link.

If you have any questions or you want to make a comment, give some feedback, just join the conversation about this, please click that link. 

If we can pass anything along to Alisa, we definitely will. 

But Alisa, how could people reach out to you directly if you know they have any additional questions? 

Yeah, they could reach me at my Semrush email, which is alisa.meredith@semrush.com or you can find me on Twitter and Instagram. Alisa m Meredith. Okay. She's everywhere. She's everywhere.

She's using Surround Sound in real life! 

Yes, I was gonna say it's Surround Sound, Alisa! 

Right. 

That's the thing, like Surround Sound can be everything, right? 


It can be your social media, it can be all that. What this, the tool that we have really helped with is the Surround Sound as SEO focused, which is why I thought you might wanna hear about it. 

Of course. 

Plus, Crystal - 

Yes, Please. 

Well,  I dove into it, I'm already on it. 

And I think outreach is, that's a tough part about SEO, you know what I mean? 

It's very time consuming and it's a little bit deflating sometimes because it almost seems like a numbers game. 

Where you're gonna get a lot more no’s than yes’s, but when you do it with a strategy like Surround Sound, you're actually reaching out in a meaningful way, you know? 

So I think it's easier to identify those relationships that could be mutually beneficial. 

And so it just makes it a better use of your time. 


So I really appreciate that from the perspective of a link builder because it's like this, this makes more sense. 

And then you're, like you said, building those relationships that aren't just for that one link,  It's not just that one time, it's hey, maybe this could actually be a relationship and a give and take thing that will go on into the future.

 So. Yes, absolutely. 

And you brought up something too that as you were talking, I got to thinking about it, Imposter syndrome, when we're doing the outreach, imposter syndrome is such a big thing.

So if you're able to take this tool,  Surround Sound and look for the opportunities that exist, they probably have a higher likelihood of being able to get a yes because they're linking to other people. 

So I feel like maybe I'll have to live this out and try it, but maybe they are a little bit more open to linking to you and to having more people to add to something like that.

Yep, yep. That's exactly the idea. Yeah. 

And that, that example that you gave with the dentist and then Alisa said, Hey look,  you may have an idea that you think is gonna be great for your business. 

Yeah. 


But come to find out SEO related, it actually is not gonna move the needle for you. 

It's not gonna do what you thought, it's not, that's not the right fit for your business. 

That also is a time saver, you know?

 Right. 

And it's, it's also like that's not where you wanna focus. This is where you want to focus. Yes. 

And I wouldn't say it's not necessarily the best fit, but it's not the best opportunity. Yeah. So I love that.

Awesome. Great. Thank you so much, Alisa. Oh, this is fun. Thank you. 

I can already see part two, because that thing you were talking about in the beginning. 

I haven't forgotten about it. I haven't forgotten about it. Oh no, it's out.

You can try it. 


It's called Page Improve and it's also in the Extra Tools menu. 

Page Improve in case you weren't listening. Yep. 

So maybe in the future maybe we could have a conversation about Page Improve, do my research. 

Yeah. 

We're very subtle over here. Yeah. 


Check out Surround Sound. 

And Alisa, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today.

Thank you. Yeah. It's such a joy for us. So thank you.

 Thank you. 

Thanks. 

All right everybody, we'll see you next time. 

Have a great day. 

Bye bye. 

Thanks for joining us today. If you like this info, subscribe before you go so you never miss out on something related to SEO.

See you next time.