How to out-Google Google to broaden your marketing reach

Great photo by Grok.

​We recently had a client assignment that went something like this (don’t worry; we’ll tell you how you can profit from this story in just a moment): 
 
We’d helped them write a huge long-form article for their website, touting their experience with a given industry, in a given U.S. state.
 
Thing is, this client of ours—a B2B consultancy—also had similar experience with other industries. And—you guessed it—in other states, too. 
 
On the surface, this is a very simple assignment. You want to broaden your reach, and your SEO rankings, for more than one industry, in more than one state. 
 
Sound familiar? Read on. 
 
Thinking outside the algorithm
 
Granted, the original article was an SEO play. In other words, it went after very specific long-tail keywords that our client knew were attainable, in terms of search domination. They’d called us in to do the writing. 
 
The original article—as you’ll recall, for one industry, in one state—was quite specific and detailed. But now there were two challenges, in terms of making “spin-off” articles: 
 
1. Talking about the other industries. 
2. Talking about the other states. 
 
Oh. And there was a third challenge, which was arguably bigger than the first two: 
 
3. Convincing Google that none of the spin-off articles were, in fact, spin-off articles. 
 
So Challenges 1 and 2 were fairly straightforward. To wit: 

• As far as talking about our client’s expertise serving other, specific industries, we were well-versed on those topics, and had plenty of material to draw from. This is good, because it already makes the first spin-off article substantially different from the original, in Google’s eyes. Of course, that won’t help with the subsequent spin-off articles targeting the same industry. 

 

• For serving the other states, a little research was required. This was admittedly a fun assignment: We found quick high-school-level fact-sheets on each state, and also visited the website of each state’s visitor’s bureau, to learn fun facts, nicknames of different areas, and so on, so we could pen these with a better level of local familiarity. 

 
(Did we do this 49 times? No. We didn’t. Our client had us rank all 50 U.S. states by population, and we went after the biggest 25. Smart, and cost-effective.) 
 
So now, armed with these different buckets of data, it came time to write all of the spin-off articles. 
 
Sure, we could’ve commanded Word to do a search-and-replace, on the original article, to plug in “Industry B” for “Industry A,” and even “State No. 2” for “State No. 1.” And even though the resulting article would be totally fine in the eyes of an Industry B prospect living in State No. 2, Google would not be amused. 
 
So it was time to get more creative. We had to re-order ideas and arguments, move paragraphs, re-title headlines and subheads, and change the phrasing within most sentences… to the point where the spin-off article was materially different from the original, yet still sold, potently, to the proper audience, toiling in the proper industry, while living in the targeted state. 
 
To AI or not to AI
 
We know what you’ve been thinking all this time: Why not hand off a basic assignment like this to ChatGPT? Isn’t that, after all, what it excels at? 
 
Yes and no. As we’ve discovered, ChatGPT can really help non-writers look better. For actual writers, the opposite is true. And that was the case here. We actually let ChatGPT take the first stab at this assignment. And its results worked in letter, but not in spirit. There were just too many flubs, none of which would be acceptable to this demanding client of ours. 
 
Could we fix those flubs ourselves? Absolutely. And we, at first, tried. But we quickly realized that it was actually less work to follow the process we’d described above than to babysit ChatGPT for this. 
 
Fast-forward a few weeks, and all the articles were written and illustrated (with the graphic team taking an analogous approach to ours) and posted online. The client was happy, and most important, the effort paid off in the SEO results. 
 
So it was a lot of effort, but certainly worth it. 
 
Need help with a tricky assignment like this? While we do a lot of big-picture marketing and creative strategy, we’re not afraid to roll up our sleeves and get into the weeds. Contact us and let’s talk. 

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