In this live podcast, we explored the essential steps to producing expert content that resonates with readers, ranks well on search engines, and positions you as a go-to authority in your field.
Joining host David Bain to share How To Produce Great Expert Content was Kate Shropshall, Jeroen Veenhoven, Mellisa Hutchins, James Brockbank, and Alexandra Tachalova.
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Transcript
David Bain
How to produce great expert content. Hello and welcome to the March 2025, edition of the Majestic SEO panel, where we’re discussing how to produce great expert content and how that impacts SEO. I’m your host, David Bain, and joining me today are five great guests, so let’s find out who they are. Starting off with Jeroen.
Jeroen Veenhoven
Hi all, I’m Jeroen Veenhoven and I’m pleased to be here. I’m a freelance B2B marketing consultant. I’m just shy of 17 years now in primarily B2B Tech and content has been a recurring theme throughout my career to date, both for product marketing and branding purposes as well as demand generation.
David Bain
Also with us today is Kate.
Kate Shropshall
Hi I’m very pleased to be here as well. I’m Kate Shropshall, I’ve got about 13 years of experience in marketing now, and for the past sort of five years, I’ve been focusing primarily on content marketing, and so my most recent role, I’m a content marketing manager. I’ve worked in lots of different industries, so it’s great to see you know how different industries are utilizing content and bringing those skills from different industries into other industries as well. So yeah, really excited about today’s discussion. Thanks for having me, David.
David Bain
Thank you, Kate. Also with us today is Alexandra.
Alexandra Tachalova
Hi David. Hi everyone. It’s a real pleasure being here today. So my name is Alex Tachalova, and I’m based in the Netherlands, so you know the English Channel is only between us and probably the majority of the guests on this show, and so it’s a very, very beautiful sunny day here, which is very nice actually.
I’ve been focused on the link building side for the biggest part of my career, but now I made quite a big shift to Digital PR, and we don’t really create any content, but we kind of help journalists creating their stories, so we kind of throw our ideas and use expertise of our clients right to help others create content.
David Bain
Sounds good, Alexandra, and also with us today is James.
James Brockbank
Hello everybody. My name is James Brockbank. I’m managing director and founder of an agency called Digitalloft over in the UK, specializing in SEO, content marketing and digital PR. I’ve been in SEO now for coming up 16 years, and throughout my career in SEO, I’ve spent time across really all three key areas of tech, SEO, content and link building.
I still think of myself as very much a full stack SEO, but over the past six, seven years, have very similar to Alex, actually spent a lot of time pivoting to building authority for brands both on page and off page, so creating and promoting great content. I’m really excited to be here and chat with you all today.
David Bain
Great to have you here, James and last but not least we have Melissa.
Mellisa Hutchins
Hi everybody. I’m Melissa Hutchins. I’ve been working in SEO and content marketing for nearly a decade now, specializing in data driven strategies that help brands grow their organic presence. My background has been agency side, so I’ve worked across a lot of industries like e-commerce, finance, B2B, leading SEO and content strategies for global brands.
David Bain
A very experienced panel we have with us today and I look forward to hearing their thoughts on different topics in relation to how to produce great expert content. In fact, that’s where we’ll begin. Let’s ask everyone that broad question. So shall we start with you. Jeroen? How should you produce great expert content?
Jeroen Veenhoven
Great content serves a purpose, right? And I think half of the battle is going to be the basics and understanding what that purpose is. I would summarize it as making sure you understand the goals, the context to your audience, and then the actual audience itself.
So from a context perspective, I mean the understanding that the wider plan that this content publication fits in, whether that’s the marketing plan, any external events or topics that are associated to this piece of content, and appreciating and understanding the bias journey that’s very important from a B2B marketing point of view, specifically, and also, when we’re talking about web, you know what’s what the user journey looks like, and how this piece of content fits in within that?
Obviously that starts from an organic perspective, from an SEO point of view, all the way through to what you’re ultimately trying to achieve with your with your content. So getting the basics right, I think, is half the battle, and that gives you the foundation you need.
David Bain
The one word that I would take from that is context, the absolutely key requirement for that content to actually fit within the broader marketing mix and make sure that it aligns with everything else that you’re trying to do within the business. Kate, shall we try to get your perspective on that? How would you go about answering the question, how should you produce great expert content?
Kate Shropshall
Yeah, sure. So I think the like Jeroen just said, the basics is the most important, and the one thing for me that stands out more than anything is knowing your audience and putting your audience first and what they want to see.
I think there’s so many times that I’ve come across businesses that are producing content because it’s messages that they want to communicate and it’s messages that they want to put across, and they’re not actually putting their audience first, and what their audience want to see, and what is going to be helpful to their audience that they’re focusing on? Well, we’ve got this to say. We want to say it, so we’re going to produce content around it, and then not honing in on the needs of their audience.
So I think understanding your audience is absolutely vital, and one of the biggest basics and understanding their pain points and how you’re solving those pain points with your services or your products.
David Bain
Wonderful. Okay, so it’s audience first for you. Alexandra, what’s your perspective?
Alexandra Tachalova
Well, I will be talking from most probably from a reader perspective, right? And I think what I’m personally looking for whenever I look at the professional content and the content around, for instance, my hobbies, then I would love to see a strong persona that I really trust. That’s not really like the ones that you see on Instagrams, or on LinkedIn. I just want to really quickly understand that this person really has the right experience.
And then the next thing that I want to see is the answers to my questions. So I don’t really want to see a wall of text. If you are looking for something specific, I want to get the answer straight away. So I think these two things, being very straightforward and really giving enough context.
The problem with AI-generated content, it’s not really concrete enough, right? It doesn’t really show you the numbers, it doesn’t include enough level of details. I think that is the main problem that we really need to solve nowadays if we want to address AI-generated content or something like that.
David Bain
Okay, well, we’ll certainly be talking about ChatGPT later on this discussion as well. So that’s a great introduction to that as well. James, how should you produce great expert content?
James Brockbank
For me, it’s actually having content produced that leverages real experts. I think that as marketers, we’re all too often expected to do everything and know everything about everything, especially in the agency world. But I think understanding how you can collaborate with get product experts and product specialists on board to, I guess, add value to content, is the key for me.
Coming at this more from an SEO angle, SEOs for the last few years have been talking about this concept of information gain something of value beyond what is in consensus. And I think as we sort of come through this AI world where any of us can go and create content on any topic using ChatGPT or other AI tools in minutes, we have to be thinking, what value can we add for a reader? Beyond that, what can we do that AI can’t do that isn’t consensus. The stuff that, in many cases, is in the heads of product experts, things that come from having experience expertise, really bringing that unique perspective and bringing that own voice to content.
David Bain
Thanks so much, James. And we’ll come back to that point as well in terms of actually how to select the right experts and how to, I guess, go about having conversations with them, ensuring that the right information is selected to appear in the content that you actually end up publishing your web pages. But just before we do that. Melissa, what’s your perspective on how to produce great expert content?
Mellisa Hutchins
I think for me it’s going to have to be audience first. Again, it’s not just about what they’re searching for, but what they actually need. Good content doesn’t just answer a question. It needs to provide real value, insight and clarity, and just lately with clients, I’m finding that a lot of them are writing for the Google algorithm, which of course, isn’t going to serve exactly what the audience is looking for. So I think it’s about staying true to the audience and writing less to get in the Google rankings.
David Bain
Okay, so we had Jeroen sharing all about context, Alexandra talking about building a strong persona and trying to actually get immediate answers for that target persona, James talking about how to involve experts and add more value, and both Kate and Melissa talking about audience first.
Let’s go back to what James is talking about there as well, in terms of how to involve experts, and ask you, James, how do you go about selecting the expert that you need to use in the producer and the piece of content that you want to produce?
James Brockbank
Firstly, I think that getting experts involved is a challenge that both in house marketers and agency marketers often face but it’s something that we have to work really, really hard to educate internally on. Why? Because actually having experts involved in content helps us come up with better ideas. It helps us come up with fresh, unique points of view. It helps us to demonstrate that expertise, that experience, and often they are the people whose names the content is being published under.
I think one of the most effective things that we can do as marketers is actually build up the authority of people within a business. Now, I’ve talked a lot over the past few years about EEAT and I think one of the things that I’ve often spoken about this is that EEAT can be broken down to three levels. There’s EEAT at the brand or site level, at the author level, and at the content and the page level.
We need to be looking at how can we build the authority, the reputation of the individuals, the authors behind content. Now this is something that comes straight from Google’s quality rater guidelines, and I think there is no questions about Google using the output of quality ratings by Google’s quality raters to feed their machine learning algorithms. So Google is training their systems are great content, content that ticks the EEAT box, as it were.
One of the challenges that we all still have is: how do we get these experts involved? They are often not in the marketing function. They are often they often don’t really care too much about marketing. So the best way I found to do this is try and pin them down for half an hour, an hour a quarter a month, if you can, and have a conversation. Record that conversation and just ask them to talk at you about key topics, things of interest, pieces of content you’re planning to create. Get their take on this and record it, you will get so much insight there that you can then use to form the basis of your own content. You can pull quotes out of it. You can pull their opinions out of it.
That is something that LLMs and AI platforms, they can’t do. They can’t give that unique take yet. So we have to find we have to find ways to convince the right people, which is the product, experts and specialists to come on board and demonstrate why it is of value.
David Bain
In relation to what you’re saying there James, obviously Google, talk about EEAT a lot, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. But I was interested in what you said there about educating Google on the authoritativeness of the expert or the piece of content, but not necessarily having authority as a prerequisite before producing the piece of content.
So I guess my question is, are the key elements that you look to include or search for experience and expertise, and then once you get that, you can build authority over time?
James Brockbank
When we understand EEAT, I often position EEAT as a brand, as digital reputation, and I think the reality is that everybody has to start somewhere, and reputation isn’t something that you just have. You have to build that reputation over time. So authority and trustworthiness are things that take time to build, but if you are bringing expertise and experience, you can start to build that up.
Looking at it at the at the personal level, at the entity level, we can build up an understanding in Google’s Knowledge Graph as an example of who this person is, what they are experts in. So while authority and trustworthiness may take time to build, the foundation of them, in my opinion, is expertise and or experience.
David Bain
I’d like to bring other people in, if possible here to this point, so Kate or anyone else at all, what’s your perspective on what metrics we use, perhaps, to actually determine whether someone or someone may or may not be an expert in the particular industry that we want to write about?
Kate Shropshall
I think for me, within a business, I’ve definitely met this problem where you’re trying to get experts involved, and they’re just too busy and like you said, James, they don’t necessarily care that much about marketing or they don’t see the importance of it and they don’t see it as part of their role or it’s not high on their priority list. So you can completely understand that, and you and you still have respect for this person that’s got this really busy day job, but you’re kind of asking them for a favor. So it’s like, how do you get them on board these experts within your business?
How I’ve kind of sort of try to mitigate this situation in the past, is to clearly communicate with them the goals of the content that you’re creating from this expert advice that they’re giving you, and how they’re contributing to this general goal of the company. And by doing that, they can start to see the importance of it, the process you’re going through, and where they come into that process as well.
With all of that in mind, the main thing for me is give your expert credit. If you’re sharing this content, make sure that they’re getting credit for it, and if they’re happy to have it shared on platforms like LinkedIn and say something along like we caught up with our expert on this topic, and here’s what they had to say. This then showcases your brand as well as an expert, and that you’ve got that authority there and that you’re showcasing your expert knowledge.
Sometimes if you’re just publishing content and publishing it online, people questions where you are getting this information from? So showing that you have these experts in your business gives your brand more authority. So that’s my point on it.
James Brockbank
It’s really, really hard. We’ve worked over the years with some brands, and we’ve gone through this sort of transformation project, and it’s making marketing everybody’s problem. I think you know that the reality is that as companies need to grow. Marketing keeps everybody in jobs. Marketing contributes to bettering everybody. And I think the ideal scenario is where you are working with senior leadership teams, who get it, who are so bought in that make contributing to marketing part of these product experts, roles from day one.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it attempted. I’ve seen it attempted and completely ignored. But I think it’s about making friends with the right people. I’ve had these conversations over lunch. I’ve had them over a coffee. I’ve had them over, you know, a 30 minute hangouts chat.
I think that once you’ve got those experts on board and they understand why it’s so important positioning this as a business that we have a responsibility to put out expert content, especially those sectors where there is compliance, it’s almost going you are the expert, we have a responsibility as a brand to put that out. how can I get 10 or 15 minutes of your time and making sure that they understand why.
If you go in with “SEO”, then they don’t care if you go in with content for the website. They don’t see it as part of their role. But when you go this all feeds into our reputation, our perception, it’s different. It’s not playing mind games, but I think it’s understanding the psychology side of it, and going here is why it is so incredibly important for us as a business to be using the info that comes from the people who do this day in, day out.
David Bain
Great. Okay, let’s move on to your run for a second there. I love what you’re saying there, James, about this is all about reputation and perception in terms of selling the opportunity to experts. So Jeroen, what are your thoughts?
Jeroen Veenhoven
Obviously it depends on the individual, but I would also position it as a value exchange. Ultimately, as a marketing team, you can give an individual a platform for them to build their own credibility and exposure and profile externally, which obviously is beneficial for them and their career. In addition to written content, obviously as the form of a webinar or podcast or speaking at an event, as a marketing team, you’re obviously quite powerful in that sense. So I very much see it as a value exchange as well. And obviously certain people have more time than others or certain people see the value more than others, but there’s definitely a little bit of leverage that you can bring into the mixture.
David Bain
Melissa, do you have thoughts on this as well?
Mellisa Hutchins
I think it’s taking time out of peoples’ day, so you need to ask and you need to see what benefit they can get from it as well. I think it’s just about making it casual and comfortable and showing that there’s two sides to the coin, that you’re actually helping the business and you’re helping yourself, but I do think it’s very, very valuable. I think more people should be seen to become thought leaders in the industry, because it benefits the business and it benefits everyone.
David Bain
So I’d like to move on just a moment to what we do with the content. What kind of content is produced? And obviously, James, you mentioned there, you might just get 10-15 minutes of an expert’s time. So what do you do with those minutes? How do you go about recording them? Do you produce different forms of content, audio, video? Do you just focus on written content? I guess it depends on the industry as well.
But just before we do that, Alex, how do you go about selecting, finding experts and persuading them to participate in your content?
Alexandra Tachalova
I just wanted to add something I was trying, but it’s probably failed anyway, but we kind of work on a bit Other Side of the Moon, which means we kind of use our client’s personas that they have to land them publication features in top media.
But sometimes we come to them and we know their background, and we can come up with the answers. We recently got our clients featured on HuffPost (Huffington Post) and now they are super excited. So I think the emotional element that you can bring to the table means a lot, it’s about making them excited about what you do.
Going back to experts, that is very hard to be honest. I know this from the side of a journalist, because we are normally competing with 30-40, other PR and they are all kind of providing, most probably, the same value. Then a journalist will end up featuring only two or three in the best case scenario.
For me, I think it’s all comes down to if you want to cover anything, or if you are looking for any expert. You really need to be laser targeted when looking at their persona and their background and their areas of expertise.
Let me provide just, you know, a generic example so you can better understand what I’m talking about. Let’s say we want to write something around health, right? And the topic might be about our lower body, about our knees. So ideally, a general practitioner is not really the best source, right? To put in this is we need someone like, you know, person that does either surgeries or something very specified on that type of area.
Or let’s say I write about the topic we’re talking about today, Digital PR, and I write about how to communicate with journalists and win pitches. So almost each and every digital PR specialists does this work. So you need to look for the specific one that is really winning the pitches, communicating with journalists rather than doing maybe some more creative stuff. There are tons of different verticals inside one discipline. So I would always think about the persona.
Then the next thing is what kind of questions to ask, because the more generic you are, the more fluff you get. It’s always like that. So ask for examples, ask for case studies, depending on what you want to create, because that is your job. If you have a wrong question, you get the wrong answers. You might be disappointed, but that’s just because you made a mistake. It’s not just because you know the people that you know were answering your question, they are stupid, or something like that. That is your mistake, but it’s quite hard to learn this. You really need to do it over and over again, gain the first hand experience, and then you can do something
David Bain
So the more generic your content is, the more fluffy it is. Let’s go back to James, because I’d like to pick up from that point about maybe just having 10 – 15 minutes with an expert, and in relation to the type of content that’s produced as well. So how do you maximize the use of that time, and what kind of content do you want to produce out of there?
James Brockbank
Yeah, so I mean, for context here, as an agency, we’re primarily doing one of two things: either we’re producing content to go on a client site, or we are producing content to pitch out to the press, which are both predominantly written content.
So what we’re looking to do with a client’s product expert within 15 minutes, which is not ideal by the way, we’d always try for 30 minutes to an hour if possible. But let’s say we’ve got 15 minutes. Typically, what we’re doing is we’re sharing in advance, some example, bullets, some topics that we want to talk about which will usually mean that we’re working to a content strategy and we know what we’re going to be publishing or pitching content out on, and we want them to add insights. We want that expert to go through and cover with us the key things that they would expect to be seen.
I think the best format that I found to do this is to almost have it as a session where that product expert is talking at us, and we’re recording that, either with Google Meet, Zoom, or if it’s done in person then you can do it on your phone, or even the more traditional note taking. We need to get as much out of that expert in as short a time frame as we can. And then we are then going and chopping that up and figuring out how to use that. So we’re essentially getting that the raw content. We’re getting them to talk at us, to tell us as much as they can in the time frame about the key things around topics that we’re prompting them on. And we’re briefing them in advance that we will be chopping this up to get quotes from to use as points in content.
So it’s important to remind them that we’re not producing video content, but we’re creating written or to pitch out to the press. So in that on that basis, where we’re predominantly extracting information that we can then, as I say, turn into quotes, turn into comments that we can use, either in the press or within your team.
David Bain
So it’s a fairly open format where you’ll just get them to share as much as possible, and take advantage of their time by doing that. But you also talked about topics that you’re prompting them on. So how much do you prompt them? How do you decide them the topics? And do you actually ask them any specific questions, or just give them topics as areas to talk about?
James Brockbank
I’ll give the stock SEO response to that – it depends. I think it depends on what we’re producing and how much content we are producing. Look, when we’re starting to work with a business we’re going to be creating, probably, a 12-month content strategy, or at least the framework of it quite early on. So we’re then going to break that down into quarterly sprints, and then break that down into monthly activity so we know at any one time roughly what’s coming up that we’re going to be producing content on.
That doesn’t mean that won’t change though, because things can change very quickly, but a framework will typically have come from keyword research, audience analysis, or one of the many different ways we go into creating a content strategy, but we’ll share that in advance, and then we will essentially break that down into individual pieces of content.
Another thing that we have effectively done in the past is certainly when we’ve worked with a client for a long time you get to the point where we’ve exhausted the usual keyword research methods that as SEOs and marketers we use to come up with content ideas.
So getting time with the product expert and saying, just talk to us about what’s hot in the industry right now, what’s coming up. What are the big what’s a big deal? What do people care about? Is one of the best ways you can get inspired on the sorts of content that the audience wants, and getting it straight from the experts. Asking them what do you know? What do people on the other end of the product or the end of the service? What do they care about right now?
The same can be done with other teams, for instance, getting sales teams involved, customer service teams involved, the people who are there in the thick of it, getting their input, their insights, and they are the best people to tell you what the audience cares about.
David Bain
Jeroen, what type of content would you say works best now, from an expert driven content perspective?
Jeroen Veenhoven
It kind of depends as well, doesn’t it? It depends on the channel, so where you’re going to be communicating it and what the buyers do, how invested your audience is already with you a brand, or even with your product category? Are they remotely aware, or are they actually exploring solutions, vendors, and depending on how far they are within the buyer journey, the more they would be willing to digest longer pieces of content.
I also think the length of the content would also partly dictate the type. But from my perspective, I would always say, especially when we’re talking to experts, just give us a substance, and we don’t care about how long or how short this piece of content will be to begin with. We’re certainly not going to be looking at concerning ourselves with that for the moment. We’re just concerned with the substance and what, what’s the key information that we want to get across to our audience? And then we’ll see how we best slice that up.
We see people like digestible content. We’re in an age of X or Twitter and headlines, and anything that’s short and digestible seems to be winning, but there’s also time and place for a longer piece of content.
Ultimately it’s about making sure that you get the audience, where they are on their journey, the information they need for their discovery and for their evaluation. So I appreciate that’s not a straight up answer, but yeah, it depends on the medium, depends on the audience, depends on the audience, depends on the state of the journey.
David Bain
Melissa, how do we go about ensuring that the content that is produced is both highly searchable and also genuinely valuable for the audience?
Mellisa Hutchins
I think a lot of brands still think that there’s a trade-off to having SEO optimized content and creating valuable content, which is an issue. But if you create really great content, it does both. It ranks because it’s genuinely useful, it’s well-structured and it’s aligned with your audience’s needs and their pain points.
I guess going back to what we were saying at the beginning, it always starts with understanding your audience. First, use the data to see what people are searching for, and consider why they’re searching in the first place, and what is going to be their next step. If you’re not doing that, then your content isn’t going to be valuable to them, and it’s not going to be searchable. I think you need to make sure it’s goes very in depth. I think there needs to be originality to it, and especially with AI Overviews in Google at the moment, I think heavily SEO optimized content. It’s just not going to make the cut anymore because it’s going to AI generated search, I think conversational content that really gets to the answer quickly and doesn’t dilly dally. I think that is what’s going to really get your content discoverable and make it searchable in this time.
David Bain
Melissa, talked about AI overviews there as well. Kate, should AI have any other involvement in the production of this content?
Kate Shropshall
I think for me, it’s all about how you use AI. I’m going to talk about ChatGPT here, because it’s one of the biggest ones at the moment and it’s one that I use the most, but it depends on how you use it. So I think if you’re using it for efficiency rather than creativity, you’re going to win with it. And I completely agree with the whole AI cannot replace human content. It can’t. It’s just not sophisticated enough yet. It might be in the future, let’s hope not, but to me at the minute, it’s just not there.
I’ve tested many times with different prompts, creating sort of long form articles, and it’s very repetitive, it doesn’t quite get the tone right, and it doesn’t really matter how you input your prompt, it’s just not there. So I would always advise to use ChatGPT for efficiency rather than creativity to make your processes easier and to make your life easier as well.
I kind of like to think of it as a second brain. So at the end of your week and your ideas, all your ideas have been squeezed out of you, and you’ve got nothing left in you, then use ChatGPT to make your life a bit easier. As I said, the certain tasks I like to use it for, if I have repetitive tasks that we all do as marketers and content marketers like you’re producing weekly blogs, daily blogs, use it for outlines so you’ve done your SEO keyword research, you know what you want to rank for you, you know your audience then you can use it to brainstorm blog topics. You can then take one of those blog topics and say, can you please create an outline for me, but covering these specific points? So then that gives you a base to work from, and you then input your expertise, so you’re using it to make your life easier and to make your processes a lot more efficient.
Another example is if you’ve got a piece of content and you’re wondering how to repurpose this for a certain channel, then you can put in your prompts things like ‘we found that this kind of content works well for our LinkedIn page, so how can I repurpose this piece of content so that it will do well on our LinkedIn page’, and you can use ChatGPT for ideas that you wouldn’t necessarily think of yourself, especially after a long working week, or if you’re not quite at the top of your game.
Another thing I would say is the more you use ChatGPT and AI, the more you learn, and the feedback you get ChatGPT, means you can tweak your prompts. You can get it to sound a little bit more fun, a little bit more friendly, etc.
For repetitive tasks like I have weekly or daily, I like to use templates so I can create a prompt and just insert different words, for example, I want to create a blog on this topic, and then you insert your topic, and you’ve got your rest of your prompt as a template, so that it’s ready to use for future tasks. I find that it works really well with stuff like that.
Another thing is editing as well. So not quite full on articles, but if you just want to take a snippet and say, can you reword this to sound a little bit more so and so then, then it’s really good for things like that as well.
David Bain
We’re going to finish off with everyone giving their opinion on their biggest pet hate when it comes to content. But just before we do that, Alexandra, you’ve done a lot of sourcing of experts that you didn’t know beforehand, not internal experts, just finding experts online, encouraging people to actually participate in your piece of content. You mentioned making a bit of a game of it, competitions, things like that. Are there any software resources out there that you can recommend for the finding of these external experts?
Alexandra Tachalova
We do quite a lot of newsworthy type of pieces, like experts revealed, or sometimes we do a story and then add some quotes. So, for instance, we did a story about the most overrun European tourist destination based on some data, and we wanted to include a quote from a professor or something like that. And so, a lot of people might say that a quote is not the best case scenario.
We work a lot with Qwoted, and we decided that it works for us. I know a few things about Qwoted, so if you don’t know this, it’s good to take it into consideration, but Qwoted belongs to another PR agency, so they are actually sometimes stealing the best opportunities. So you’re kind of trying to win them and they’re just kind taking them – the competition is not fair there. That is true, but not across all opportunities. There are several niches that this agency doesn’t work extensively with, so you still have plenty of opportunities you can proceed with and win.
And the other thing is that they have the best range of experts right, that are either represented by other PR agencies or they are kind of there as themselves. So what you can do, basically, is you act as a journalist there and leave what you need. So let’s say we created this PR piece and you need to promote it, right? You need to explain there what your main goal is, where you plan to pitch this and so on. And normally you get quite decent quotes.
There are other ways you can do it too if you have enough time. You can go through the expert profiles on there, choose the one that you like, and you can message them saying, like, Hey, I have an opportunity for you. They’re quite response. Another good thing is that you can review their background straight away, because they write down what kind of area where their expertise lies.
David Bain
Let’s finish off by going around everyone, asking everyone their biggest pet hate when it comes to content, and then just get everyone to remind the viewer, the listener, who they are and where people can find them online. So Jeroen, would you like to start off, what’s your biggest pet hate when it comes to content?
Jeroen Veenhoven
My pet hate is that content that gives the impression of being objective and providing expert information by its headline and the opener, only to then really just jump straight into pitching products. It happens way too often where you just can’t seem to get a balance right. It’s a bit of an internal battle sometimes to steer people away from that. It’s detrimental to credibility.
And you can find me on LinkedIn.
David Bain
Kate. What is your biggest pet hate when it comes to content?
Kate Shropshall
My biggest pet peeve is probably people wanting to fill content calendars rather than knowledge gaps. I think that when you’re working with a client and they say, well, our goal is to post four times on social media this week. And I’m like, that’s not a goal, you know? That’s a means to an end. That’s not a goal. So that is part of your strategy, but it’s not a goal. So trying to sort of like work against that can be quite difficult sometimes. Quality over quantity, always.
And you can also find me on LinkedIn.
David Bain
Alex, what is your biggest pet hate or pet peeve when it comes to content?
Alexandra Tachalova
I think it’s just maybe the accessibility part, because there are tons of great content that I just don’t really have access to. What I mean is I read what I read, but there are more great content creators and just brands that do content that I’m genuinely interested in consuming, but I don’t really have access to their content. I think the distribution part sometimes is way more important than the parts. Whenever we think about that, I think 20% should go to production and 80% distribution.
I know from my agency background and just by observing the current trend that I see across different companies verticals that there is still a quite big, I would say misconception, when everyone putting all their efforts and best bets on content production and then hoping for the best. What if I’ve never heard about this content, or had a chance to engage with this content?
So for me it’s very important to be really precise and to have a plan around your distribution, rather than the content production.
David Bain
20% production, 80% distribution, is an incredible thought, because I guess a lot of this discussion was about production, and maybe we need another episodes on distribution. Alex, where can people find you online?
Alexandra Tachalova
You can find me on LinkedIn just by searching my name.
David Bain
James, what is your biggest pet hate when it comes to content?
James Brockbank
My pet hate is not taking the time to consider what we call content design, so that’s poorly formatted content, those massive blocks of text that are really hard to read. I think it’s really important that as content marketers consider the usability of content. Still to this day, I will land on content and you think nobody’s sitting there reading through really long, dense paragraphs, taking the time to understand how to split content up. Not just with headings, but with images, with other formats. It goes a long way to keeping people engaged, keeping people on the page, and actually making sure people consume that content properly.
And we all do it. When we land on the page of content and it’s just a wall of text, we just jump straight off there. It can be the best piece of content out there, or at least in terms of the best information. But when we talk about things like helpful content, it goes beyond the words, and we have to consider how easy it is for people to consume that content. So when content producers ignore that or don’t fully understand how to lay out content for the best engagement, that is my pet hate.
David Bain
Where can people find you?
James Brockbank
You can find me on LinkedIn or on X.
David Bain
Nina Payne has also shared her pet peeve on LinkedIn saying “My biggest peeve with content writing is for a client who only cleans carpets, and there’s only so much so many semantic phrases I can use for carpet cleaning. This means cannibalization is an ongoing battle. After a decade of dedicated SEO content strategy, 10 years is a long time.”
Melissa, what is your pet peeve?
Mellisa Hutchins
I think mine would have to be content that exists just for the sake of having content. If there’s no strategy behind it, if there’s no purpose, if there’s no value to the audience, then I’m afraid it’s just dead weight. Get rid of it. It’s not helpful.
David Bain
And where can people find you Melissa?
Mellisa Hutchins
You guys can find me on LinkedIn.
David Bain
I’ve been your host David Bain and you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO panel. If you want to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars and of course, check out our other series over at SEOin2025.com or majestic.com/podcasts.
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