The event was not just about absorbing expert knowledge but also experiencing the synergy between SEO and paid search, thanks to the concurrent HeroConf. This crossover provided the opportunity for additional insights, especially in the realms of reporting and data analysis.

Networking is more than exchanging business cards; it’s about building impactful relationships. We delve into the immense value of engaging with speakers and vendors, leading to potential collaborations and deep dives into trends like topical authority. Reflecting on the event’s accessibility and supportive environment for newcomers, we highlight the opportunities it offers for both seasoned professionals and first-time speakers. Our gratitude extends to Venkata and Zak for their contribution, as we look forward to future conferences and additional episodes discussing more in depth discussions on topics that stood out.


Guest Bios:

Venkata Pagadala:
Venkata Pagadala is a seasoned SEO and Growth Strategist, driving businesses from startups to enterprises generating over $1 billion annually to online success. With data-driven strategies, he has led campaigns achieving 40+ million monthly organic visits and worked with industry leaders like Apartments.com and Recovery.org.

Specializing in AI-driven content creation, site migrations, and technical SEO, Venkata excels at simplifying complex challenges to deliver measurable results. Featured on platforms like Spotify and SEOFOMO, he’s dedicated to building impactful online presences, sustainable growth, and revenue optimization in the digital landscape

https://www.venkatapagadala.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/venkata-pagadala

Zak Perez:
With over thirteen years of expertise, Zak Perez is dedicated to optimizing LoopNet.com, the largest online marketplace for commercial real estate, with over 20 million indexed URLs.

His background spans SEO, front-end development, UX/UI design, conversion rate optimization, accessibility and AI. He brings a holistic and data-driven approach, aimed at maximizing online visibility, improving user experience, and driving results.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakperez

The Rise of AI Chats

So, what’s behind this potential shift in search behavior? Well, it’s all about AI chats. You’ve probably heard of them, or even used them yourself. They’re these conversational interfaces that can understand natural language and respond with helpful answers.
Now, AI chats are becoming increasingly popular, and it’s not hard to see why. They offer a more personalized and interactive experience compared to traditional search engines. You can ask follow-up questions, get more detailed explanations, and even have a conversation that feels more human-like.
But what really sets AI chats apart is their ability to be trained on specific data sets. This means you can have a highly tailored discussion that’s focused on a particular topic or industry. And the best part is, you can refine your questions and get more precise answers without having to sift through a ton of irrelevant search results. It’s like having a personal expert or researcher at your fingertips, providing exactly the information you need.
For example, I saw a great example of a chat that was trained on a camera’s manual, and the person was asking questions to the chat bot that didn’t quite align with the right terminology. The chat bot understood the similarity with the topic and knew the information they were looking for. It’s like having a personal assistant that can help you find exactly what you’re looking for, without having to dig through a bunch of irrelevant search results.
And that’s what’s so exciting about AI chats. They have the potential to revolutionize the way we search for information online. Instead of relying on broad search queries, we can have more focused and targeted conversations that get us exactly what we need.
So, with the rise of these powerful AI chat interfaces, it got me thinking – what does this mean for the future of traditional search engines like Google? Well, one platform that’s trying to blend the best of both worlds is Perplexity.ai.
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine designed to provide a more conversational and interactive search experience. Unlike a typical Google search, Perplexity aims to understand the context and nuance behind your queries, and deliver tailored responses that feel more akin to talking to a knowledgeable expert.
Let’s take a closer look at what Perplexity.ai has to offer, and how it compares to the search experience we’re all familiar with on Google.

Perplexity.ai – Overview

As I mentioned, Perplexity.ai is an AI-powered search engine that aims to provide a more conversational and interactive search experience. But what does that actually look like in practice?
One of Perplexity’s key strengths is its ability to excel at in-depth research and analysis. Unlike a traditional search engine that may just return a list of links, Perplexity can provide answers by synthesizing information from multiple sources in real-time.
For example, let’s say you need to do some thorough research on a complex topic like the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining. With Perplexity, you could ask a detailed question, and it would respond with a well-structured summary, citing relevant data and studies to give you a holistic understanding of the issue. It can then help you understand it better by teaching you what certain terms are as well as giving you the information in different ways.
This is how the tool shines in these types of conversational queries. Its natural language processing abilities allow you to ask follow-up questions and engage in a back-and-forth dialog to fully explore a topic. This is great for those times when you have a lot of nuanced questions on your mind and want a more guided research experience, or don’t quite understand the topic and need additional guidance to truly understand.
So, to give an idea of how a search might be performed that ends up tailoring to your specific needs – let’s say you have an upcoming job interview for a senior marketing manager role at a tech company. You could ask Perplexity something like: ” What are the most important things I should know and prepare for in a job interview for a senior marketing manager position at a tech company? I’m currently a senior manager and looking at moving to a different company.”
Rather than just returning a generic list of interview tips, Perplexity would try to understand the specific context of your situation – the seniority level, the industry, and your own background. The content is much different based on the context of your question, and it allows for follow ups that continue to adhere to that context.
However, Perplexity is not without its limitations. As an AI-powered system, it can sometimes exhibit biases or blindspots in its knowledge base. And while it pulls from a wide range of sources, there may be certain niche or specialized topics where its coverage is not as comprehensive as a traditional search engine.
So while Perplexity represents an interesting evolution in search, it’s important to be aware of both its strengths and weaknesses, and when it might be the optimal tool compared to a more traditional approach like Google Search. You are also getting, mostly, summarized data from 3rd party sources, and you have to fact check with the citations given. In many cases, this isn’t an issue, but in more critical areas, it may be better to just go straight to the source.
For example, if you’re looking to do a quick factual lookup – like finding business hours, addresses, or weather forecasts – Google’s search results may be more straightforward and immediately useful. Perplexity excels at providing nuanced, synthesized information, but sometimes you just need a simple, direct answer found on a website.
Google’s search also tends to be better suited for localized searches, like finding nearby restaurants, shops, or services. Its deep integration with maps, reviews, and other local data makes it the go-to for those kinds of location-based queries.
And for certain tasks like online shopping or travel planning, Google’s search results are often more directly actionable. Its tight connections to e-commerce platforms and travel booking sites can make it more convenient for those types of use cases.
If you’re trying to access a specific website or online resource, Google can usually get you there more efficiently than an AI chat interface like Perplexity. The direct search results and website links are often the quickest path. Don’t know the right domain for a brand or restaurant, Google may be the fastest solution.
Perplexity shines for in-depth research, analysis, and conversational queries where you need a more tailored, nuanced response. But Google Search remains the optimal choice for quick factual lookups, localized searches, e-commerce, and directly accessing websites. Understanding the strengths and limitations of each approach will help you determine the right tool for the job.

Comparison to Google Search and General Knowledge AI Chats

So while Perplexity.ai and Google Search each have their own strengths and weaknesses, there’s another category of AI-powered interfaces that are worth exploring – the rise of general knowledge chatbots.
Platforms like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude have captured a lot of attention for their ability to engage in free-flowing conversations on a wide range of topics. Unlike search engines that return lists of results, or more specialized AI assistants like Perplexity which works to summarize those results, these general knowledge chatbots are designed to be knowledgeable companions that can help you explore ideas, answer questions, and even tackle complex tasks.
The key differentiator is the breadth of their knowledge base. Rather than being trained on a specific domain or data set, these chatbots have been exposed to a massive amount of information spanning science, history, current events, creative writing, and more. This allows them to converse on just about any subject, drawing insights and making connections that a traditional search might miss.
However, it’s important to note that while these general chatbots have impressive depths of knowledge, that information is not necessarily as up-to-date as Perplexity’s real-time data pulled directly from the web. The free versions of these chatbots, in particular, may have knowledge bases that can become stale over time, especially when it comes to rapidly evolving current events or time-sensitive information.
That said, these general knowledge chatbots aren’t without their own strengths. Their ability to converse on a vast array of subjects, making connections and providing nuanced insights, can be incredibly valuable for open-ended, exploratory queries where you’re looking to dive deep into a topic.
So when weighing the different AI-powered search and conversational options, it’s important to understand the unique strengths and tradeoffs of each approach. Perplexity, Google Search, and general chatbots all have their place in the evolving landscape of how we find and engage with information online.

RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) Custom Chats

So far, we’ve explored the capabilities of Perplexity.ai, which provides a more specialized, data-driven search experience, as well as the broad knowledge and conversational abilities of general AI chatbots. But there’s another interesting category of AI-powered interfaces worth discussing – RAG custom chats.
RAG stands for “Retrieval Augmented Generation”, and it refers to a type of AI system that can take a specific piece of knowledge or information, and then engage in a customized, question-and-answer dialogue around that content.
For example, let’s say there’s a detailed industry report on the impact of artificial intelligence on business strategy and operations. With a RAG custom chat interface, you could upload that report and then ask the AI a series of follow-up questions – everything from high-level summaries to drilling down into specific data points, emerging trends, and recommended approaches.
The AI would leverage the information in the report to provide answers, clarifications, and even suggest additional areas for exploration. It could walk you through key findings, help you interpret the data, and even brainstorm how the insights from the report could be applied to your own business challenges.
[Provide a specific example of a RAG custom chat in action, demonstrating how it could engage with a user around a business/technology-focused knowledge base]
The key strength of RAG custom chats is their ability to provide a truly personalized, interactive experience. Unlike a general search engine or chatbot, which may struggle to give comprehensive, contextual responses, these AI assistants are laser-focused on a specific knowledge domain. This allows them to have more nuanced, back-and-forth discussions and really help users get the most out of the available information.
However, RAG custom chats are not without their limitations. For one, they require the upfront work of curating and formatting the knowledge base that the AI will draw from. This can be time-consuming and may limit the breadth of topics available compared to a more open-ended chatbot.
Additionally, the quality of the responses is still dependent on the depth and accuracy of the underlying data. While RAG systems can provide more tailored insights, they are not immune to potential biases or gaps in the knowledge base.
So when comparing RAG custom chats to the other AI-powered tools we’ve discussed, the key distinction is the level of focus and customization. Perplexity.ai excels at providing wide-ranging, up-to-date information, while general chatbots thrive on open-ended exploration. RAG custom chats, on the other hand, aim to deliver a highly curated, interactive experience centered around a specific knowledge domain.
Ultimately, each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the optimal choice will depend on the user’s specific needs and the type of information they’re seeking. Understanding the unique capabilities of RAG, Perplexity, and general chatbots can help you determine the right tool for the job.
Section 5: The Future of Search and Blending Approaches (10-12 minutes)
So, we’ve covered a lot of ground – from the rise of AI chatbots like Perplexity and ChatGPT, to the specialized capabilities of RAG custom interfaces. It’s been a deep dive into the evolving world of information discovery and search. But the big question is, what does all of this mean for the future?
I mean, let’s be real – traditional search engines like Google have pretty much dominated the game for the past couple of decades. And they’ve certainly tried to stay ahead of the curve, rolling out their own AI-powered search features like SGE and AI Overviews. But the reception to these efforts has been lukewarm at best.
A big part of the challenge is that these AI-infused search results don’t quite capture the nuance and conversational flow of a true chatbot experience. The responses can still feel a bit stilted and disconnected, lacking the fluidity and contextual understanding that makes platforms like Perplexity or RAG custom chats so compelling.
There’s also the issue of trust and credibility. Google’s search results have long been seen as the gold standard for authoritative, up-to-date information. But when you start injecting more AI-generated content into that mix, users may start to question the reliability and accuracy of what they’re seeing.
After all, the AI powering these search features, while impressive, can still exhibit biases, gaps in knowledge, or a lack of nuance that traditional search engines have largely avoided. And users may be wary of relying on AI-curated results, especially for important decisions or high-stakes queries.
So while the idea of blending the best of traditional search and conversational AI is an enticing one, the execution so far has left something to be desired. The user experience just doesn’t feel as seamless or trustworthy as a truly dedicated AI chat interface or a well-established search engine.
At the end of the day, I think the key is having a diverse ecosystem of search and discovery tools, each catering to different needs and preferences. AI chatbots may never fully replace traditional search, but they could become powerful companions – enhancing our ability to find, understand, and apply information in more personalized, efficient ways.
The search landscape is evolving, and it’s going to be fascinating to see how Google and other players adapt. But for now, the melding of these two approaches doesn’t quite seem to be resonating with users in the way that the tech giants had likely hoped. It’s a challenge they’ll need to continue refining and perfecting.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it – a deep dive into the evolving world of AI-powered search and discovery. From the rise of conversational chatbots to the specialized capabilities of tools like Perplexity and RAG custom interfaces, it’s clear that the way we find information online is going through some big changes.
The key takeaway is that while traditional search engines like Google still have their place, these new AI-powered tools are offering compelling alternatives that could start chipping away at their market share. The ability to have natural, back-and-forth dialogues, get tailored insights, and explore knowledge in more interactive ways is really exciting.
But of course, each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses. Understanding the nuances between platforms like Perplexity, general chatbots, and RAG custom interfaces will be crucial in determining the right tool for the job. The future of search is likely to involve a blend of these different capabilities.
Personally, I think it would be a mistake for Google to double down on AI overviews in their search results. The data they’re pulling from isn’t always vetted, and anyone can post their opinion or even satirical content. That kind of unfiltered information can be downright dangerous, especially for queries around important, time-sensitive topics.
Generalized chatbots, on the other hand, are great for getting custom information on less time-critical subjects. And specialized AI search engines like Perplexity have a real place where you want more nuanced responses that leverage real-time data.
In the end, I believe Google is going to lose double-digit market share as people migrate away from them for many types of queries. The appeal of having a conversational, contextual search experience is just too strong. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more users creating their own custom chatbots, trained on their emails, company wikis, or other personal knowledge bases.
The future of search is exciting, but it’s also a bit unnerving. We need to be vigilant about the quality and integrity of the information we’re relying on. But the potential of these AI-powered tools to revolutionize how we find, understand, and apply knowledge is undeniable.
So what do you think? Are you as bullish as I am on the rise of AI chats and custom search experiences? Or do you think the old-school search engine will remain king? I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions. Be sure to reach out and let me know.
In the meantime, stay tuned for future episodes where we’ll dive even deeper into the evolving search landscape, explore more AI-powered innovations, and unpack what it all means for digital marketing and SEO.

I’ve been using:

• Google Bard
• Open AI GPT4 & GPT3.5
• Anthropic Claude2
• Llama 2
• Jasper API

I’ll go into a little about each one and what is exciting about them:

My overall task:

I’m working on creating some overview content for specific pages that takes into account a unique location for a product or service. This means combining location information with product/service content to create something useful in the way of content for the end user.

Google Bard: 

Google had a major release update on July 13th, 2023. There’s a lot more available, and I thought I would give it a try again.

Prompt Strategy:

After a lot of testing, the prompt seemed to work best when I utilized long form paragraphs, numbered tasks, and used refining techniques using multiple prompt iterations.

Response Quality:

I was not able to get a production ready response that I would feel comfortable putting on a website without serious editing. Bard could not follow instructions and I found that it needed me to remind it of about 4 requirements that it kept missing. “You’re right, I apologize for the mistake.” was very common when I asked it to verify the instruction was carried out.

Bard does not do a good job of giving good prompt advice, so it’s a lot of experimentation.

Open AI GPT4:

Prompt Strategy:

My original prompt was for GPT3.5, and I’ve since adapted it for 4. GPT4(Chat), especially since mid June, works very well when I give it a conversational request, almost as if a conversation with a content writer was transcribed. I am able to get away with no shot prompting and it follows all the directions I give it.

Response Quality:

I can get a production ready piece of content in a response. I can run a list of commands that ensure it has followed my request exactly.

Open AI GPT3.5:

Prompt Strategy:

I can use my revised GPT4 prompt, and once it finishes, I have a follow up prompt which forces specific requests that the response typically lacks. This includes specific formatting, and not replacing some text with variables that my CMS will use to pull real time data.

Response Quality:
My response is production quality after running my secondary prompt to clean up and reinforce specific rules and formatting. Quality of content is very close to GPT4 as I provide it with a large amount of background data and content that it utilizes.

Anthropic Claude 2:

I don’t have access to the API, so I’m using the text interface. This is one of my favorite conversational large language models, and they have some good documentation on ways to present data in the prompt to help with context and giving it data to utilize.

Prompt Strategy:

Claude 2 had me completely revise my existing prompt. Even though it can handle 100k tokens, I found that it required much more strict structuring of the prompt compared to OpenAI.

Following their documentation, I utilized XML tagging of data types and surrounded contextual and additional data in specific XML tags that I was able to reference in other parts of the prompt.

I also found that including an example (one-shot) proved to help solidify the format and it didn’t overly utilize the phrasing. Often GPT4 will use such a similar sentence structure that the two pieces of content feel too similar.

Claude 2 has the best prompt diagnosis and suggestion built into the LLM. I was able to fine tune the prompt using the system itself allowing me to get it to a single prompt / response.

Response Quality:

I was able to get a production ready response with a single prompt. The quality of the output was as good or better than GPT4, however I do not have API access so it’s not as easy to test across more content types.

Llama 2:

It’s free. It’s legal to use commercially. Did I mention it’s free? Well, it’s free if you have the hardware to run it. My system, though very capable, doesn’t quite meet that requirement. However, I was able to spin up an AWS endpoint with 4 Nvidia Tesla T4 GPUs able to run the 13b model. 

I’m most excited about this model as it would allow for completely local text generation with complete control of the model, hardware, and privacy.

Prompt Strategy:

I never worked with the Llama v1 as it was a research only version, or you could pull leaked or derivative versions. I went into it expecting it to work similar to GPT3.5, and it does. I am limited to in tokens due to hardware limitations, but I found that my GPT4 prompt worked very well with the Llama 2 LLM.

Response Quality:

I would put the quality closer to GPT 3.5, but with the positive privacy aspects, I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to do prompt chaining to get the response refined. It had some issues following the instructions as it tended to exaggerate what I wanted done. For example, I wanted it to put p tags around each paragraph, but it also decided to create headings and heading tags. Overall, I liked the way it worded the content though it felt a bit too salesy and positive compared to the same tone types I asked in other models. I tested the “chat” version of the LLM, and had less success with the non-chat versions, however I think that the model with some minor refinements could make this as good as GPT4, and at a much lower overall cost in the long run.

Jasper API:

Having access to this has been really great as I’ve been building out AI tools that need multiple models. Their command endpoint allows for about 6k characters, which lets me really push the size of the prompt.

Prompt Strategy:

This prompt’s focus has been nearly identical to that of GPT4, and I suspect it’s actually using GPT4 or a variation of it as part of the API. Sections of content with context and instructions along with format requests make up this prompt. I found that zero shot worked as well as GPT4.

Response Quality:

I was able to get production quality responses without needing to make any adjustments.

So far it looks like Jasper and GPT4 are fairly easy to get quality results from. I was pleasantly surprised by Anthropic’s Claude 2, and I like the formatting they’ve trained their LLM on. I’m hoping to get access to their API so I can put it really to the test. Llama 2 wasn’t bad, but it couldn’t quite get me production quality content so I’ll have to look into training the model to align closer to what I’m looking to get as a response.

I’m curious how many of you have been creating a prompt library aligned with different LLMs, and if you have found a prompt style that works between all of them.

This was 100% written by hand, no AI wrote any portion of this content. Does that make this a better article? Love to hear your thoughts on that too!

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

Website: https://hassanuddeen.com/
Blog: https://hassanuddeen.com/blog/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hassan-uddeen/

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

Here are some key takeaways:
1. Plausible is a simple and intuitive alternative to the complex interface of Google Analytics.
2. With Plausible, you own 100% of your website data, and there is no need for cookie prompts.
3. Plausible’s script is more than 17 times smaller than Google Analytics, making it a faster and more efficient option.
4. Plausible is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, and does not share data with third-party advertisers.
5. Plausible offers real-time data and custom goals and events, making it a great alternative for those with small to medium-sized websites or personal blogs.

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

I believe that GPT offers great potential as a tool, but should never be trusted to replace human content writers, especially for investigative reporting.

Main Topics Covered:

• Overview of Chat GPT
• What Chat GPT Is Good At
• What Chat GPT Is Bad At
• How To Craft Requests
• Avoiding Detection from Search Engines
• Implications for Content Writing & SEO
• The Key to Ensuring AI Content is Unique and Not Detectable

Run over to open AI, take a look at ChatGPT.
It’s free right now, and unless it’s under heavy load, you can pretty much use it just like their OpenAI tool like their playground site. Right now, the quality is really good, and this is making people consider AI as a replacement for a content writer.

Overview of Chat GPT

So what is ChatGPT? ChatGPT is an interface to open AI’s model DaVinci 3.5. 3.5 was just released recently. It was version 3.0, which was really good. This is even better, but then they’ve trained this model using this chat GPT interface to work much more conversationally, much more like a dialogue, allowing it to answer follow-up questions, chatGPT can remember some of the things that you’ve asked. So there’s some train of thought to it. It also can challenge you if you have some incorrect premises and it can admit mistakes. Because of that, it works really great in a question and answer format. In a chat type format.

What Chat GPT Is Good and Bad At

It’s not good for factual data. If I wanted it to tell me what the hours were for a restaurant. That’s not the kind of data it has. It’s still trained on the same data that goes to June of 2021. So we’re talking 18 months old, so it doesn’t have anything in the last about year and a half.

What can it do well though, things like fixing code. So if you have code and it has an error, you can actually paste that code in and say, what is going wrong with my code and help debug it. It can actually help tell you what areas you need to fix. And so it’s turning into this very different almost search engine replacement or forum replacement. Now you’ve got places like stack overflow. Which are saying, you cannot use it to answer questions. You have to come up with your own original answers, because what people started doing is they were taking people’s questions, copying and pasting it into chatGPT, and getting those answers and pasting them back in and trying to get points for it.

And as great as that is, it’s using an AI tool for that, and they want it to be original content.

What’s different with ChatGPT and Other AI Content Tools?

Really what’s different with chatGPT, is that the model has really been tweaked so that the phrasing and the conversation feel very realistic, but there are limitations. They don’t allow certain things like you can’t say, how do I bully someone? How do I make a bomb? These kinds of things, it’ll come back and say, we’re sorry, you can’t do that. There are some ways around it. , and some people are trying all kinds of things in the end. If you really need that kind of information, you’re going to have to go directly to the API, but it’s not going to be trained in the same way as chat GPT is.

And this is what I think the biggest differentiator, the training model that they used. The language model that they’ve developed for dialogue is really just that much better. OpenAI is calling chat GPT, a sibling model to instruct GPT, which is trained on following instructions in a prompt to provide detail responses. So it’s really interesting. It takes a lot of their learnings that they have, and builds on it.

Implications for Content Writing, Marketing, & SEO

But people are now starting to get a little bit worried. If this were to replace a writer, what does that mean for marketing and for SEO and actually search engine journal did a whole piece on it and they tried to answer a few things and they said, you know, what can chat GBT do.

What can’t it do? Really what they’re saying is. It’s AI generated content when it comes down to it, they’re not designed to do specific tasks, but they’re tried to have general knowledge. And so if you have a very kind of niche, Thing or there’s something that only a few people have answers. There’s not a lot of data on the internet about it. It’s not going to be able to give you those kinds of answers. A couple of things that you do need to know is that it is not a reliable source of information. You have to still fact check it. It doesn’t know everything perfectly, and sometimes it makes things up.

So an example that someone had given was, you asked a question about a person, where did this person get their first job. Now, this person may not have their first job posted online anywhere, but chat GPT kind of made up what it thought would be the type of first job that they would have. And that person said, you know what that sounds about like my first job, but it wasn’t with that company.

And so it, it almost creates like a story out of it, the other thing is it doesn’t know about things really after that June, 2021. So anything in the last about 18 months right now, we’re at the end of 2022. It does not have that information. So anything that happened recently, It gets kind of interesting when you start asking you about things that maybe happened 12, 18 months ago or even 24 months ago. Because it doesn’t have a lot of data on it.

ChatGPT also does have some unique biases. It’s not perfectly neutral by design, so you have to just kind of accept that it tends to be a little bit more positive and removes a lot of the negativity in its responses, which may make it less factual. It may make thing sound better or more positive than they were.

How To Craft Requests to Get the Best AI Content?

The other thing is it does need detailed instructions. The more specific you get, the better the answer is going to be. So you really have to spend some time crafting it.

And this is what we’ll probably start seeing more and more in content writers and copy editors. It is going to be an art form on how you craft these requests to the AI tool. You ask it to do things in a certain voice, in a certain tone, in a certain way. You see that with Jasper as an example, they have these different, kind of recipes, so to speak and it’s all of these different variables that go into it to create a certain type of response. And once you start creating those, you end up getting some really great results and you can start getting similar type results over and over for different areas that you’re trying to do.

Can AI Content be Detected by Google, and Avoiding Detection from Search Engines

Can chatGPT content be identified by Google? I went into this a little bit into detailed on the GPT 3 Article Can AI Content Rank, can it not be identified now? GPT2 can be, It’s pretty easy to identify it. GPT3 what I have found is that you can usually recognize AI written content because it uses similar types of phrasing.

Now that’s it’s default, and if you really spend time crafting your request, you can end up tweaking it to sound a very specific way that doesn’t sound like AI. And that’s really important. What ends up happening is the default settings are probably something that a person could identify.

If a person can identify it, Google or, a machine learning is going to be able to identify it. That’s why it’s so important that you don’t just copy and paste. I’ve always found that AI content is a great starting point, but it can never replace a journalist, someone who has to do investigative reporting.

There’s never going to be an AI that can complete replace something like a newspaper, because it’s never been trained on, doesn’t have the information, and can’t pull it in without you providing it in some way.

Now, if you feed AI a bunch of content, ask it to summarize and put that content together into something cohesive, that’s where it can do a really great job.

Comparison to Low Cost Writing Websites

One of the things that I did recently is I looked at some content that I had requested about two years ago through an online writing website. I took the exact same prompt that I gave the content writer, and I put that into one of the GPT 3.5 tools.

The content that I got back was just as good, and passed all the same tests. So it was just as good as someone costing 10 cent, a word, which is definitely not a super expensive. This wasn’t a highly researched article or anything like that, no interviews. It was just some information about a topic because on the website, we wanted to make sure that the users were informed and understood what that service was. We didn’t need anything really original in thought, as it was more to help a user understand what the service was than anything else. That content was just as good.

I timed myself, it took about six minutes to create that content. Two years ago, I spent something like $15 – $20 on it for 250 words. This gave me about 550 words in comparison. My cost was pennies.

So what would make the most sense in this use case? The AI based content, likely couldn’t be identified as AI content, as I went through and copy edited it, cleaned it up, changed some of the phrasing to phrasing that I preferred. And that was probably the bulk of the four or five minutes of the six minutes was just doing those little tweaks to kind of customize it to how I would write.

The Key to Ensuring AI Content is Unique and Not Detectable

And that’s the big key here is that I made it my own. The content was adjusted, phrasing adjusted, and using a very unique prompt that has a very low likelihood of anyone else ever asking the same thing.

The last point that search engine journal had mentioned is they had a interview with Scott Aaronson who talks AI safety. And one of the things that he talked about from the open AI research is that there may be ways that they can watermark the content and they would do this by, things like how many punctuation marks are, where they are.

Number of words, in a sentence, things like that, where. it can be understood through machine learning that if it’s a sentence is structured in a certain way than it was generated by AI, that’s pretty much all they can do. The AI tools that Google is using to determine if they’re spam, they can likely look for certain words, certain errors and punctuation. I see that a lot where it uses dashes, where most people don’t write with dashes. there’s extra spaces after a comma, things like that. Those little telltales are something that a copywriter should be able to fix and probably adjust. And so when you’re talking about creating a long form piece of content, if you don’t have someone copy editing AI content, then it’s probably going to be something that can be found.

But realistically on watermarking, if someone does a good job with their copy editing and goes through the content, it’s probably not going to be possible.

So in the end, ChatGPT, I highly recommend taking a look at it. It’s a really cool tool. It’s a free for now interface into DaVinci 3.5 from open AI with a really solid conversation model, and I think that what you’ll find is that the content is really solid. In some cases it can save you a ton of time when you’re trying to just come up with some responses, get some ideas on maybe top things you want to talk about.

Give it a shot, write a blog post with it, ask it some questions. Use that to generate something, see how long it takes. See how creative you end up getting from just using the tool because in the end, that’s what it is. It’s a tool, and I think that it can be used really well.

My opinion is ChatGPT is just the tip of the iceberg that we’re going to see in AI content. When we see GPT 4, or when GPT 5 comes out in the next couple years, it’s going to be really hard for you to be able to distinguish that kind of content from someone who is writing regular piece of content again, without that kind of original research interviews.

I hope you guys all have a great holiday and we’ll see you next year.

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

We cover the following topics:

• What kind of marketing he has done in his 13 years of real estate profession?
• What’s changed in the last few years
• What is working for him now
• How he measures success in his marketing
• What his favorite marketing story is
• What should someone do if they are just starting out in their business and they don’t have a reputation to use, or a referral network?
• What he says has contributed most to his success

This is a great episode to listen to if you are a small business owner, or are doing marketing for a small business owner, and especially if you are in the real estate space.

Raj’s Contact Info:
Email: Raj@legacyhomesrealty.com
Phone: (951) 314-4251
Website: LegacyHomesRealty.com

Transcript

Phil: 0:00
Welcome to the Opinionated SEO, where we talk about recent news and updates in the digital marketing world of SEO, paid advertising, and social media that impact you as a marketer also throw some of my opinion into the mix. Today we’re gonna talk to Ross Sharma, who is a real estate agent and brokerage owner in Southern California DRE # 01886334, and we’re gonna chat about some of the marketing efforts he’s done and how they’ve evolved over the last few years with a bit of emphasis on his offline efforts. Raj, welcome to the.

Raj: 0:38
Hi, Phil. Thanks for having me on the show.

Phil: 0:40
So, as my listeners know, I like to start a lot of these with just some random questions to help get to know our guests outside of the marketing realm. All right. Here’s the first one. What is the main thing that influences your decisions?

Raj: 0:54
Consulting with the wife

Phil: 0:55
Oh, okay. Happy wife, happy life. Right. What’s the most memorable class you’ve ever taken?

Raj: 1:01
That’s a recent one I took out, , in. Local city here for, uh, learning how to work with the VA buyers and how the VA loan works

Phil: 1:09
okay. VA max loans,

Raj: 1:10
VA

Phil: 1:11
right? right

Raj: 1:11
VA Max loan. That was a good class to go to and educate.

Phil: 1:14
I heard a lot of great feedback. Now i want to talk about some of the marketing that you’ve done and you’re in real estate and you’ve been in real estate for how long is it now about 15 years

Raj: 1:24
Combined with my wife, 15 years, myself going into 13 years.

Phil: 1:29
What kind of marketing did you guys start out with?

Raj: 1:33
So going back in time, I have done many types of marketing. When we started, if someone said they’re doing this new thing just to test it out, I will listen to them and follow. In the beginning, I have dropped off flyers to local business in my neighborhood to get my name out. I have done door hangers, I mailed out postcards. I’ve also done door knocking, believe it or not.

Phil: 1:56
and for those that aren’t as familiar with the real estate side of things, door knocking is literally like your door to door salesman where you’re knocking on doors, introducing yourself. Oftentimes in your neighborhood or general area, they call it a farm, right?

Raj: 2:11
Right farming area. Basically you’re staying hyper local.

Phil: 2:15
I know you and I have talked a lot about SEO and things like that five, six years ago. I know you were doing a lot of work. How has that kind of come into play with your business?

Raj: 2:25
So the seo, I’m not a guru in it, but I know the basic stuff about it. Um, the key is staying consistent and learning the changes that come with, Google so catching onto the changes they make in adopting to it is the key, I will say. And it’s difficult for an average person like me to be on top of it. That’s where having a professional like yourself will be, uh, good to be on a team and keep up to date.

Phil: 2:52
and I think one of the things that you did, , and this isn’t by accident, but you are very much about reputation management. So really going out there and getting reviews, and I know six, seven years ago we talked about this and you really made it easy for everyone to be able to leave reviews for you, and that has really helped your Google My Business profile and your number one in your city, right?

Raj: 3:15
Yes. So I do have lot of reviews on Google, and that is the key to the success for online right now for local Google Map three pack.

Phil: 3:25
and I think that that ties into some of the offline marketing, and we’ll get into that. But when someone gets a flyer or something like that, what’s the next thing they’re doing? Are they calling you right away or are they searching for your name?

Raj: 3:36
most of the time when people get a flyer, either one or two things happen. They hang onto it, and when time comes, they. Bring it back on the table and contact you, or they’re just shuffling through their mail and goes to the trash can right away. most of my flyers that go out, they definitely hang onto ’em because tomorrow they’re gonna need a real estate agent and they reach out to me. Believe it or not, one of the calls I received was a year later, this woman had kept a postcard that I had mailed. and she reached out to me saying, Raj, I need your service now.

Phil: 4:10
Now, what are your thoughts on, I’ll call them kind of Useful offline marketing, like you’ll have notepads or calendars or magnets, or pens with your name on it. What do you think about those verse, like straight flyers or postcards?

Raj: 4:24
So those are good, but to be honest with you, , magnets are a thing of the past, in my opinion. I have gone to many appointments, at the homeowner’s. , kitchen, And seeing other realtors, magnets on their refrigerator, and they’re not calling them, they’re calling me. so being active in the neighborhood and providing service and uh, knowledge is the key. So having content online and reviews are the main key for getting calls from the clients. Yes, you’re right. Having those, uh, freebees out there like the magnets or the calendars, a lot of agents do that. It’s getting your name out there and branding is everything.

Phil: 5:04
Now, what have you seen change in the last few years?

Raj: 5:08
Lot has changed in last two years. As you know, we are just coming out of the pandemic. So two years of lockdown, or almost two years of lockdown changed every business, marketing strategy. So going door knocking was out of the picture. Sending flyers or dropping off flyers was not an option. So I had to change my strategy to be more on a online platform where everybody is nowadays and were back when the lockdown happened. So that was the key. Getting your name out there to the social media and doing, , advertisement online.

Phil: 5:41
So what specifically is working for you now?

Raj: 5:43
basically our business is a repeat business, so we have a client from the past are reaching back to us as well as getting a referral from a client, um, friends and. And also being out in the field and, uh, doing a lot of open houses and meeting new faces when we are at the open house is also a opportunity for us.

Phil: 6:05
When people talk about referrals, they often forget that really what that is is customer service.

Raj: 6:11
Yes, that’s true. Just the other day I had a, person call me and said, Hey, uh, you had helped my sister and she has given me your number to reach out because I’m in the market to look to purchase a house for next month or two. And that was a perfect referral and a perfect client. I remember her very well because they were blessed and thankful to be in a home that we got them.

Phil: 6:33
and when we’re talking about referrals or even reviews, I think sometimes people forget that maybe you can help someone out, even if they’re not gonna end up using your product or service. It doesn’t hurt to ask them for review just to say, Hey, if I really helped you put you at ease, maybe I gave you information where you realized selling your house or buying a house wasn’t right. That review still can reflect that to say that you really went the extra mile to help them out, and that’s gonna go ahead and help you with all of those reviews and just that positive sentiment.

Raj: 7:05
That’s true. and my philosophy is if you don’t ask, you don’t get it. So doesn’t mean only reviews anything in life, so you gotta be open minded and, asking doesn’t hurt is free. And all they can say is no. So asking for review, even one person comes back and says, Oh yeah, I’ll do u favor because thanks for your knowledge and expertise, and here Google numbers are increasing and Google’s all about recent post and recent reviews where they’re tracking this business is alive still and making things happen.

Phil: 7:36
Exactly. So now how are you measuring success in your marketing?

Raj: 7:41
We are actually, you know, keeping track of how our business is running. So success would be, you know, results. Uh, anything that we do in life has to have results. So we are having, transactions closing. Our repeat business is there, and as well as our team is growing.

Phil: 7:59
are you doing anything when you are talking to people who maybe call you for the first time? Are you asking them how they found you?

Raj: 8:06
I do that sometime. I do forget, , but my main thing is when we start the conversation, I want to know where the call came from or how they found me. So most of the time they tell me, or sometime they just say, Well, I don’t know, because it’s been a while. I just got your number here and thought to call you. knowing where the call came from is the key. That way you know what’s working and what’s not.

Phil: 8:27
Yep. Exactly. You’re running a small business, you can usually attribute certain things because, you know, they came from that flyer, they came from your Google My Business, things like that. So maybe a little bit easier than like, enterprise, e-commerce system where it’s a little harder to tell where things came in from since you’re one on one with most of your clients. So now what is your favorite marketing story?

Raj: 8:53
Oh, this is a good one. . I will say my favorite marketing story would have to be getting a call from an older couple last year who found my ad on back of a magazine that I did that time and reaching out to help them sell their property here in Canyon Lake, California and help them move and buy a home in Gilbert, Arizona. And I also helped them connect with the local expert, real estate agent there. And believe me, they, this couple did not own a smartphone or have computer or internet at home. So everything was doing manually and old school, meeting them in person, signing wet signature on all the dotted lines, and that would be my favorite story to share.

Phil: 9:36
And that’s multimillion dollars in transaction.

Raj: 9:38
Absolutely.

Phil: 9:39
Wow. So what should someone do if they’re just starting out in their business, and of course it doesn’t have to be real estate, They don’t maybe have that reputation or referral network. What do you think the best first steps are?

Raj: 9:52
Starting a new business takes a lot of guts. And to run a business, you should start with local marketing where their business is located. It doesn’t have to be entire city. You can start marketing half a mile radius from your local business. And focus only in this area, then go to one mile radius and grow from there. Don’t try to make it difficult on yourself where you will find it hard and give up and fail. I will say promote local, then go bigger as your budget allows.

Phil: 10:22
What would you say has contributed most to your success?

Raj: 10:27
So that’s very difficult to sum it up in one or two lines. There are a lot of things that has contributed to my success, making changes as time changes and adopting to new marketing strategy. For one, my lovely wife Josephine, support from day one and never giving up on me is that number two, and our lovely, hardworking team of agents who are go-getter and very hardworking. From day start to finish. So that would be our lovely small contribution and success.

Phil: 10:59
And you started in 2008 during the like crash, the real estate crash recession, the whole thing. How did you manage to start off at such a difficult time?

Raj: 11:14
So that time was obviously a life changing event for both of us. things were difficult, not easy. It was a new era we were going through or new changes at that time. I used to work for a bank doing loans, and then when the industry bottomed, The company shut down and laid off every entire staff they had. I joined, my wife and got into real estate and ever since then they say one door shuts and the other one opens. And the real estate was my another door and never looked back and love what we do now.

Phil: 11:48
and I think the lesson here is even in a difficult economy, you can still be success.

Raj: 11:53
Yes. It’s just dedication and, uh, passion about what you do and, and you love what you do. It’s, it’s never going to be putting you down. It’s always gonna take you up. So do the thing that you love from bottom of your heart. You will never fail.

Phil: 12:08
Well, appreciate you coming on here, and for any of my listeners, if you have questions about real estate or are in the market to buy or sell, Raj, how can they get ahold of you?

Raj: 12:18
They can reach me on my cell phone direct. My number is (951) 314-4251, or they can email me their question anytime. Raj raj@legacyhomesrealty.com.

Phil: 12:31
Well, I really appreciate you coming on and thank you for making the time.

Raj: 12:34
Thank you, Phil.

Phil: 12:36
Have a good one.

Raj: 12:36
You too.

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

We dive into topics such as:

• SERP features
• New features coming out for SimilarWeb
• Alternative search engines like TikTok
• The evolution of SEO as a role
• How we saw COVID and Google’s real time reaction to the SERPs
• User Behaviors and how you can leverage this as a marketer specifically the user journey and not just looking at keyword ranks
• Creating original content, and how much does Google care about that
• AI content – OPINIONS!
• Gerald’s advice for people just getting into the industry

Transcript

Philip: 0:00
Today on the show, we have Gerald Murphy who I’m really excited to talk about everything. SEO, marketing. Ai content and also his work that he does at similar web as a senior solution business manager Gerald. , welcome to the show.

Gerald: 0:22
Thank you very much, indeed. For having me, Phil.

Philip: 0:24
I always like starting with some of these, these are called PodDecks. It’s a deck of cards and it’s just got a bunch of random questions on it. See if I get to know you a little bit better and then we’ll jump into the marketing side of things.

Gerald: 0:36
Sounds good.

Philip: 0:37
This one looks fun. First question. What’s the most annoying bill you have to pay.

. Gerald: 0:43
actually I, since canceled it, a sky TV, it was called. I never really watched a lot of it. I actually found it’s all available on catch up. So the most annoying bill is definitely, uh, TV broadcasting.

Philip: 0:55
Yeah,

Gerald: 0:55
is now subsequently canceled.

Philip: 0:57
that’s used to spend so much money on cable and all of these different channels. And now it’s, well now it’s Netflix and Disney and Amazon, and I mean, it costs more now than it did before.

Gerald: 1:10
Exactly. But it was very annoying at the time when it was, it was just a normal thing to do, I guess. And I, I just didn’t look at it any differently. And then I kind of think everything’s on demand for the most part. So what am I.

Philip: 1:21
If you could hire any wedding singer, who would you choose and what would be the

Gerald: 1:25
be the song? Very good question. I’m trying to think. , I would definitely something a bit more upbeat having said that I do like actually a range of music, like from something as slow as Coldplay, right up to, actually even the classics. So like seventies and eighties in particular, I would personally love Fleetwood Mac. Obviously it’s impossible to do, but something by fleet, a nice classic.

Philip: 1:48
Yeah, I think you could go in a lot of directions with that

Gerald: 1:51
that one a hundred percent and also just modernizing it too in the background, trying to have little dance beats and just remix it if it was obviously doable.

Philip: 1:59
oh yeah. Well, you know, it’s a podcast, so everything’s doable.

Gerald: 2:03
Everything’s possible.

Philip: 2:04
yep.

Gerald: 2:04
yeah.

Philip: 2:06
What’s the last thing that you’ve done, that you are really proud of.

Gerald: 2:09
good question. Actually, it probably comes back to something quite personal. I love cooking. , so cooking a biryani, which is an Indian dish, , it’s basically a rice dish. That’s mixed with a range of different spice. One thing in life I love particularly at the weekend is proper good home cooked food and a nice ice cold beer.

Philip: 2:26
What kind of beer is, , your

Gerald: 2:27
your style? , Thai beer. So, um, Singha, it’s called it’s pro I think it’s the most popular Thai beer. I quit like a, a Thai beer at the start. I’m not really into like IPAs and, and so on, but I really do like, uh, I actually even don’t mind the Budweiser, which you believe here and there, it’s quite nice to, to just have long as it’s really cold.

Philip: 2:47
What’s something that’s on your to-do list that never gets done.

Gerald: 2:51
I do keep a notepad on my computer and I always try and add to it. So there’s all sorts of random stuff there, but I do have a rule and the rule is if it takes less than five minutes to do do it now. , and that’s kind of what I’ve been doing to try and reduce that down, but it still is just random tasks, like, improve the visualizations of a presentation, for example, or continue to try and write another article or, or whatever the case may be. But, uh, I think it really just unfortunately gets deprioritized.

Philip: 3:19
Yep. I hear you.

Gerald: 3:20
you.

Philip: 3:21
So you’re at similar web right now. Can you tell me a little bit about what

Gerald: 3:24
about what you’re doing there? Yeah, so I work in the business department specifically within the solutions team. , it’s probably quite similar Webby in the sense of, it’s not really like industry standard, like for example, an, SEO manager. Essentially, what I do is I come from an SEO background, but I’m here to help drive the business strategy. So right down to, , just a few months ago, we had an acquisition with rank ranger. So we actually bought them. We’re now integrating their technology into the similar web product. but crucially for me, because I come from the SEO background, I’m also just finding out what the users are interested in so that we can actually do things differently. So an answer to your question, what do I do is help our product and data teams and all of the amazing people behind the scenes to create better functionality for end users.

Philip: 4:08
what do you think the biggest challenge people are seeing right now?

Gerald: 4:11
right now, then? I think a lot of people have, there’s a lot of noise out there. There’s a lot of like, what, what am I using for what also in their own jobs. There’s a lot of, asking for requests. So for example, reports in essence and SEO manager very much, even in, in house, working for a brand is almost very much like an agency. So they’ve got loads of different stakeholders. and I think the biggest problem is the SEO itself. Due to actually COVID and digital acceleration, which are two very closely connected things. I think the biggest problem is the rise of digital, but also just the inability of actually quickly gaining access as to what digital channels do, what people within companies can do to support those digital channels. So speeds. The insights I do think is one of the biggest issues.

Philip: 4:55
I use similar web A So love it, uh, used to use rank ranker a lot. So I’m really curious to see what kind of integrations you guys are gonna be working on. So any, info that you could tell me that

Gerald: 5:07
that we’ll be able to see? Yeah. So, it’ll be integrated into the platform in the, in the course of a few months, we’re gonna offer it, A platform for an I. One of the things that we are doing though, is, , really helping brands to find out what’s actually going on at SERP level. So we’re actually looking at the latest SERP features as, and when they’ve been tested. So for example, at the end of may, the latest SERP feature was a thing called things to know that’s now been tested. From the end of may. So one of the things we’re doing is constantly analyzing the SERPs, the landscape, um, and adding those to your index, to really help marketers, to develop their content strategies, even based on Google’s own tests that they’re doing.

Philip: 5:44
we got a lot of people on here and they range from, beginning SEOs and marketers to, veterans, of the industry, a tool like similar web. Do you think that can be used for. Anyone in any kind of area

Gerald: 5:58
area of their career? A hundred percent, one of the big pluses of similar web actually, and I know I’m biased when I say this, cause I work for the company, but when you do see the interface, it’s actually very intuitive. the platform itself I is, is catered for all different, people from different experiences, but critically you can get really deep quickly. So there’s loads of different filters, for example, There’s loads of different metrics, , on this platform itself. So yes, it can be used by.

Philip: 6:25
Where do you think there’s that distinction between an enterprise tool and maybe just a

Gerald: 6:31
just a small business tool? Well, this is actually what I think is different on the market. I think brands are now as, and web, I guess, and in many ways, because it’s about digital acceleration brands are also now starting to scan the market a lot. I think now more than ever actually this year where there’s a looming recession, arguably in most places of the world. I actually am based here in London, the United Kingdom, and our own. Then by the end of the year, the UK will be in recession. It’s in the GT seven. I do think as well that, , a lot of other countries , will be in the same boat. So I think a lot of budget scrutiny are going occur quite significantly. Also, when you look at some of the big brands, like even Shopify, which arguably supports a lot of small businesses, there’s been 10% layoff of staff and there’s huge big waves coming. So where enterprise I do think is gonna differ is there’s gonna be a lot more scrutiny on what those enterprise solutions are actually doing to business performance. I don’t really think a lot of them , can justify really high prices, without actually starting to think about the return on investment, the ROI of that deal. Yes. It’s nice to have lots of calls with customers, but the reality is if we’re not evolving, Campaigns, we’re not evolving our performance as a result of doing better in the campaigns. I think people are gonna start now looking at actually, what are we gaining from this partnership and brands are gonna be now looking for more actions and to get more actions it’s looking at actually. Better data. , but also better data at scale, which is, , very interesting because typically when you look at the enterprise customers, they’re set up by website, they’re very limited and restricted in the amount of things you can see. , they don’t give you free access, , to everything, , as well. So I think that’s gonna be a big shift in the market over the coming years.

Philip: 8:11
and as far as how the SES are changing, Google is changing how you interact with websites. Any

Gerald: 8:18
Any thoughts on that? Yeah, so, you know, ultimately at the end of the day, SERP features themselves exist to try and help us get information as quickly as possible. And that that’s literally the aim of search, you know, search to find information. But basically we’ve obviously got really complex behaviors. You’ve got different devices involved in some parts of the world. You’ve got different connectivity speeds. and actually what they’re trying to do now is quickly and easily present to us different things that are going on. But interesting. I think there’s a lot of different engines involved now. So it sounds weird initially, but you know, when you start thinking about different engines ranking on different engines. So one of the easiest examples is like, Bing use is a keyword and you see Bing on Google, um, for example, but actually YouTube is its own engine. TikTok is its own engine. , in fact, when you even look at TikTok as a, as an actual website and entity, it’s actually growing at a much faster rate than Google. Yes. It’s years behind them. Um, in the sense of it’s it’s a newer. Technology it’s your domain app, but actually it’s growth rate is huge. So where SERP Features and stuff really do come into play is really helping people to find information, including from, for example, TikTok on Google, which is one of those, SERP features that are available on mobile

Philip: 9:32
now to pivot a little bit, you’ve been doing this for, for a few years and seeing both sides of it. What do you see as the future of an SEO or

Gerald: 9:42
or marketing in general? More integrated, more broad. I think SEOs are still very much, heads down within companies. I don’t think SEOs do a very good job at evangelization by that. I mean, Promoting the results they’re getting within companies and organizations. they’re not also actually training various stakeholders and getting them on board to actually support the SEO channel, you know, arguably in digital marketing, it’s the broadest channel out there, you know, SEO touch on technical, which can. Be very related to web developer conversations. They also touch very heavily on content, which actually in some companies, depending on their size can be its own function department. And then also they have their own teams themselves, but actually they have direct communication lines again, into. Public relations around, off page backlink type of influencing. Um, so it’s a really, really broad channel. So I think the future of it is to become broader, but outside of the Google sphere. And by that, I mean, it’s not just looking and thinking about what keywords do I rank on Google. It’s actually having a, an integrated search approach where brands are actually now trying to find out howwell am I doing on YouTube? Howwell is YouTube ranking on Google? Um, What other way can I use that, that same asset for another engine? So for example, how can I trim down a 20 minute YouTube video into a TikTok 30 second video? What are the key moments that I need to get across? And essentially once you do that, you’re fragmented out your search strategy into an engine specific strategy with the same underlying goal. That is a belief of future of search.

Philip: 11:17
Yeah, and I think it’s interesting historically, you would’ve seen a lot of social media managers who are now finding themselves doing a lot of SEO type tasks. How do you put your TikTok video or your Instagram reel or Facebook reel or whichever? How do you put the title tag on there? What kind of hashtags? All of these optimizations, because people are searching for it. It’s a, it’s not Google, but it’s still search.

Gerald: 11:44
search this. Is it. And like, you know, also when you think about, you know, essentially clients, if they have, um, search console, their in essence have onsite search data for that engine. So for example, if you’ve got Bing webmaster tools, you then can actually see which keywords people are using on Bing to drive traffic to your site. Also, if you just marry that up and match it with your own onsite search of your website, you’ll actually see that the keywords are vastly different. Our behavior is directly connected to the interface that we’re actually looking at and engaging with. And actually, as a result, going back to your point, why on TikTok are we’re searching for these other terms is purely on the basis that it’s a very different engine and therefore our interaction and behaviors are different too.

Philip: 12:27
Do you think we’re gonna find an SEO that focuses only on YouTube or TikTok or

Gerald: 12:34
or something like that down the. road. Nope. I think we’re gonna become more disciplined. So someone’s gonna own, for example, video. So you’re gonna have video SEO and they’re gonna own the talks, the YouTubes, the Vemo, um, and become really specialists in that, but also. Thinking about it now we’re still quite immature. But when you start thinking about things like, um, TikTok analytics, YouTube analytics, how do you connect those up? What’s working on what engine that actually becomes its own field. and critically, really starting to think about. The digital asset within a company, cuz ultimately going back to my point there of return on investment, you know, at the end of the day, any companies that are produced videos are putting a lot of resource. They’ve got digital media budgets. They’ve got video editors in there. They’re maybe working with third party partners. They in essence, wanna find out if I’m spending X on videos as a digital asset. What, and how can I maximize traffic from that and what was my return on investment? So I do believe going into the future, it’s gonna become a lot more channeled specific within SEO and that actually does exist today. Like remarkably, one of the industries globally, I believe is quite, has always been separate is the news medium publications. You know, you’ve got specialists in there who you’ve been doing that for years. One of the most respective guys, I think personally is, um, Barry Adams and he’s a specialist in news publish him. But, you know, I think that’s kind of where we’re going as, as, rather than kind of been a hat or a Jack of all trades, so to speak. It’s more about actually I’m laser focused. I can drive this particular thing within the business because I know all of the things

Philip: 14:07
Yeah, I think Twitter kind of revolutionized the short text. Vine was a start or almost a precursor to TikTok And I think we’re, we’re not gonna see video go away anytime soon. I was looking at rank ranger and they’ve got a lot of social analytics. They’ve got a lot of on page, social signals and things like that, that, you can see is that something that you think any SEO should really get into

Gerald: 14:33
into and really understand? completely, I think, to be prepared for the future SEOs today, need to, to do things differently. So they all have strategies. You’ve all got these certain things that you want to achieve. Usually it’s orientated around the website and the website performing really well, but they don’t look at other assets like for. A playlist on YouTube performing incredibly well. so it’s really just trying to think about how can I look at the same things through a different lens and that’ll help them prepare them for the future. And that actually then goes into your points. There are things like social media analytics, how can I become more integrated, more broad with other digital teams? , and that will really, really help us use to truly understand how their digital footprint is performing online.

Philip: 15:15
I couldn’t have said it better myself. from an SEO standpoint, what’s changed since you were last

Gerald: 15:20
last doing it. Wow, good. Uh, question, I guess a lot has changed, you know, when, I think like, you know, the other thing we often forget is this has actually been along about for years. Yes. Archie was the first engine from 1990. Um, but actually when you start looking at things. , information retrieval that’s been going on from 1945. certainly a long time since, uh, I was on this planet. Um, and that’s basically computerized search, you know, so looking at things like, um, encyclopedia searching, um, all of those good things. And I guess one of the things you can see quite clearly when you look over the years, Just algorithm updates across all of the engines. You can see, they were really basic before, but now they’re, they’re becoming a lot more advanced, but also a lot more real time. so by that, I mean, we’re actually starting to see, like, our data showed a lot during COVID. We actually overlaid the three lockdowns, the legal lockdowns that occurred. To stop COVID happen with Google maps specifically on Google UK. And what we saw is it took Google about two months to reduce the number of Google maps. After the first lockdown on the second and third lockdown, it took them like a few weeks. So actually they started to realize that us as entities couldn’t physically go to for the most part, a lot of store. Therefore as a SERP feature reduce that particular thing. So they’re starting to understand us more. So that’s what I mean by real time. And actually naturally that brings us into being a lot more advanced. So rather than just think about this keyword as ideal for these SERP features in this particular example, it’s more about actually look at other factors. And that, again goes back to your point earlier on about how broad we are gonna become as a discipline.

Philip: 17:02
so talking about some of those updated algorithms, have you seen any in the past few years that you think have been the most

Gerald: 17:09
effective or impactful? No, not really specifically. I think overall they’re trying to achieve, um, a goal. Like when you look at the most recent one, it’s about product reviews. , I think it’s the second core one, certainly from Google. Um, the first one was probably December of, um, last year and now it’s come out again almost six months after, and. You can see is again, it’s just like another little enhancement, but what’s interesting about that is going back to that real time comment, you know, ultimately reviews are all user generated content. Ultimately they they’re created all the time. Google is now really trying to understand what people are saying literally now and the better understand what is actually a good product to rank, for example, um, what are actually. Good characteristics that you know, people are talking about, and that can really help them to understand and, and present us really good, reliable authoritative results.

Philip: 18:00
I think Google’s been doing a pretty good job with really cleaning up the spam. I mean, a few years back, it was pretty obvious. Some of the people that were doing things that those sites shouldn’t have ranked. And I feel like page one is pretty solid now

Gerald: 18:13
now completely.

Philip: 18:15
So I wanted to just ask you a couple other questions just in general. What other parts of SEO are

Gerald: 18:20
are really interesting to you? So cer features, as you can probably tell. I love them. Purely on the basis. It’s just how we interact and find information. I think they’re the most underrated thing within the SEO space. I think we’re still too obsessed with classic ranks, on scale and actually the things that can move the needle are actually getting into the nitty gritty details. What critically for me, , is all around behaviors. and that’s how ultimately is course why search features them exist as well. But like, we’re very complex people, you know, you and I can do a search ultimately and find the same page, but we use very different terms. We need to think a lot more about the buyer’s journey. I always go on about that alongside integrated search, wherever I can. Cuz I do think when you get those two things locked down and you have a good understanding of what they are. Your actual overall strategy improves enormously. So you’re going away from let’s change a title. Let’s change a heading and so on. It’s more about actually. What is the search? You’re searching Forny. If they were to find this particular post, what are they gonna search for next? Therefore, what other types of content you, I need to create and optimize for so that I can start thinking about the user journey and flow on my website and critically for me to become an authoritative source, and an expert E a T eat in this particular thing.

Philip: 19:35
What do you think most marketers are

Gerald: 19:37
are missing on that journey? I think again, you’ve got, immaturity. So when we say like SEO managers, I feel like a lot of, um, SEOs are reading different things. Some SEOs are even testing things. Other ones are just. Still in the same lane, if you like that they have been in for a few years, they’re just doing the same thing in a different company. And I think really that the big test for us going forward as a whole community is for things like this to continue, which is podcasts, it’s community conversations. It’s really sharing knowledge, but for us really to be thinking about. We’re not sure of what the next big thing is. Like, we don’t even know what the next tech talk is gonna be. So for us really to start sharing best practices, and really starting to sharing top tips of, of even what we’re discussing today around, like, what things should we be talking about? and more about the future.

Philip: 20:27
Yeah, I’ve always felt like Google rewards you for anything that you have to put time into. So quality content, original.

Gerald: 20:34
original image.

Philip: 20:35
Video podcast, things like that. Google’s gonna reward you for that

Gerald: 20:40
that because it’s not just auto generated. Absolutely. And that, that’s the thing again, it’s it’s user centric, but interestingly, you know, yes. The engine set guidelines, as in essence for the SEO community, I think, , I actually just read today this morning coming in. , I am actually gonna probably tweet about it. It’s basically where someone of ’em was looking at medical doctors were looking at YouTube results, , for cataracts, which is like when you’re got an visual impairment. And then what they actually found was in their analysis grant that it’s of one study. They found there was no information for parents of children who actually had cataracts or needed to get a surgical operation done. So goes back to another point of what I love about search and going , and moving away from the user is actually around biases towards the results. So engines have got really good at ranking good website. But one thing they haven’t really figured out yet is hard. I have good diverse results for a range of different users. And I think one of the things we often hear in the SEO space is, you know, always focus on the user. That’s why you’ve got updates, like core web vitals. That’s all around page speed. it’s good for the user, but actually when you start looking at some of the results. The results actually, aren’t good for all users themselves. So actually there’s an, I come back to that point around immaturity. There’s a lot of stuff that we done on both the practitioner and the engine side to really help us to see how we can truly create strategies for users.

Philip: 22:06
Yeah. I think the most that, searches doing is geographic based and that’s about it.

Gerald: 22:11
it. Yep. indeed. So.

Philip: 22:13
As we talk about creating original content, I’ve been seeing this as a theme in a lot of the talks I’ve been doing. what is your thought on some of the new AI

Gerald: 22:23
tools that are helping generate content? Yeah, no, I don’t like them at all. And I think as well, this actually goes back to the point around search engine bias, you know, arguably a lot of that, a certain proportion of it is based on AI to a certain extent. And I think, you know, Years ago. It wasn’t very good inputs, but it’s still running off those old school things, which is why, in this example, there was no information for parents, , who had kids who needed to get, cataract operations. Um, essentially if you don’t feed the machine correctly, You’re gonna get garbage in, garbage out, but I think really content goes back to that point earlier of thinking about what’s next, you know, it’s not just about writing that blog post today, just because a brand or one of your competitors is writing a blog post once a week. Stop doing that. That’s creating more noise out there. I think these AI content generators are. On a massive scale. You’re in essence, not doing anything it’s unique. And going back to your point, um, Philip, which is all around, like, you know, Google rewards, you, when you have your own video, your own images, your own text, your own content that actually still can only be done by a human, you know, on the flip side, I don’t think you and I would go to a surgeon that was a hundred percent computerized. There are tasks today that need to be done by humans. and content writing is a hundred percent. One of them.

Philip: 23:38
There’s almost an obvious difference when you read between the two and it’s fine. If it’s just a general overview of this is what something is, and it’s more like a regurgitation of a wikipedia page. It’s different. When you get that personalized information. That’s about this particular company that’s unique to them. The last thing I wanted to close on here, I just wanted to ask you, what was some of the, your favorite things that you’ve done in SEO marketing, and also being on the.

Gerald: 24:09
Software side of things.

, Philip: 24:10
what do you

Gerald: 24:10
what do you enjoy most about that? Oh, I absolutely love working in the software again, accidentally I get into the world of SEO actually through academia. I actually studied, um, information science. So like, that was kind of what, what I fell into. Um, I actually accidentally. Joined a search engine class and thought it would just be okay to do, but I wanted to become a teacher. And then I kind of found out more about engines. So for me, the exact same thing happened actually with software. Um, I now love it. I love getting involved with things like what else can you do with this same data set? , the product team will wanna come. Back and, and get validation from users. Like what are users looking for? What else would they be doing as a practitioner? So that bit, I absolutely love when it comes to client facing interactions. , one of my biggest probably. Big things that I’ve done is worked with a huge big multinational brand and really helped them to develop its scale, how they’re, how they were performing. So what we did is a lot of standardization of keyword groups. Every single market in this particular company was tracking the same localized translated keywords so that they could properly understand how big is my brand, whereas which countries have the most search volume for those branded and non-branded keywords. And that really helps in the map. At a country and global level, where are the opportunities? And I think all of these things are, um, going back to that point again, um, earlier on are really challenging us as a community and industry really seeing what else we can do differently.

Philip: 25:40
The sheer amount of data that some of these enterprise companies have, and just trying to. Understand, it can be such a challenge.

Gerald: 25:48
Absolutely.

Philip: 25:49
we’ve got a few people here that are just starting to break into the industry. Any kind

Gerald: 25:54
kind of advice for someone who’s just getting into marketing. Yeah, I would definitely think look at marketing because the way SEO’s going is it’s got that integrated. It’s got a lot of fragmentation involved. Um, a lot of old school things, , are still really useful to know. So, you know, even the basic things, they just understand good Ling. Within the market in place, for example, above the line and below the line, what’s the difference? Like that’s still really important. , for anyone specifically it’s getting into SEO, I would definitely be encouraging them. To read websites like SEO round table, which has all the latest things that are actually occurring, , run by primarily Barry Schwartz. And then also you’ve got other websites like search engine, land search engine watch within those websites. You’ve got SEO 101s, definitely to check those out and really help, you know, really understand what this whole new world is.

Philip: 26:43
I think, um, educating yourself, there’s so much information out there. No excuses to

Gerald: 26:51
about it. Hundred percent and a little personal plug, actually that we’re doing. Um, I actually recorded a, uh, SEO series of YouTube clips that will be going live in a few weeks. So it’s gonna break down and hit short videos. What SEO is right through to all the main parts of it, including actually, um, integrated search.

Philip: 27:09
Wonderful. I’ll go ahead and make sure make that’s added onto the show notes when that goes live.

Gerald: 27:13
a hundred percent, I’ll paying it your away.

Philip: 27:15
Appreciate it. Well, Gerald, I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Gerald: 27:18
the show. Thanks very much for having me. Thanks for your,

Philip: 27:20
yeah. Thank you for your insights. And I

Gerald: 27:22
And I think a lot of people are gonna get a lot out of this. a hundred percent. I hopefully hope they do. And let me know if we could do anything else.

Philip: 27:29
Thank you.

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

Ashwin Balakrishnan:
Writer, marketer, strategist. Head of marketing @Optmyzr and contributor @sejournal. Proud husband to a breast cancer survivor.

Twitter: @TheCopyTrail – https://twitter.com/thecopytrail
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashwin-balakrishnan/
Optmyzr: PPC Management Software

Transcript:

Phil: 0:00
Today, I’m excited to interview Ashwin who is a full life cycle content marketer, currently working as the head of marketing at Optmyzr. We’ll dive into topics like diversification of your content strategy, branded search, how to break into the industry, AI content and it’s future with marketers, and a bonus question that Ashwin has never been asked in an interview before I always like to start with some random questions. It’s always fun to kind of get to know you, maybe a little less marketing talk, but, um, maybe it does apply.

Ashwin: 0:36
Yeah, let’s go for it.

Phil: 0:37
All right. So this one’s interesting. I just, I pulled like five of them out of this thing. It’s called poddecks and anyone who does a podcast or just if you interview people or talk to people, it’s a fun, just kind of random way of connecting with people. So here’s the first one. What is the most important thing you carry with you? All the time..

Ashwin: 1:01
Dog treats? So I live in India where there are a lot of stray dogs and I’m a huge animal lover. So if you go into my car, you’ll see a pack of dog treats in my trunk. You’ll see another pack on my front door. You’ll see another one in the passenger side door, and one more in the glove box. So I always have dog treats on hand.

Phil: 1:21
And now do you have a dog?

Ashwin: 1:23
I have three

Phil: 1:24
You have three dogs. Okay. What kind of dogs do you have?

Ashwin: 1:27
So they’re all muts they were all adopted. they’re all foster fails, actually. They came home to recover from illness, injury, that kind of thing. And my wife and I just said, yeah, we’re not, we’re not giving them back.

Phil: 1:40
That’s awesome. Yeah, muts are the best dogs.

Ashwin: 1:43
They really are.

Phil: 1:44
All right, next one. What website would you want to be on the front page of?

Ashwin: 1:49
Oh yeah. That’s a good one. I wouldn’t mind being on the front page of HubSpot. Just because I’ve admired their work for so long. If we’re looking outside of marketing, anything to do with technology. So IGN, especially gaming, tech insider, any of those, big name tech publications. I would love to be featured on, on those.

Phil: 2:16
And what would you be featured for? What would be like the ultimate?

Ashwin: 2:19
I would talk about why console gaming is superior to PC gaming, and I would be lambasted around the world for it.

Phil: 2:27
We may need to have a whole another podcast just about that. I was more into the VR gaming and, we had the Nintendo, we have a switch, but, yeah, never really had like the Xbox or PlayStation,

Ashwin: 2:39
My dad is the reason I’m a console gamer. So I was born in India and I moved to the us when I was a little kid, like a year and a half. So before I started school, I needed something to do at home, while my parents worked. So my dad bought me the original NES and that was it. Like I’d be in front of that thing. Three, four hours a day, little, three year old kid playing super Mario brother.

Phil: 3:03
That’s my wife’s story too. When she was growing up, that’s all they had, they had a TV, a VHS player with three tapes and Mario brothers. I’ve watched her play. She could just beat the thing in like a half hour, she knows where every single thing is on every single level.

Ashwin: 3:19
If you played super Mario on the original NES, you know where everything is exactly, like you said, the hidden secrets, the warps, all of it.

Phil: 3:27
That’s awesome. maybe just like one more here. So if you could be a personal assistant to anyone who would it be?

Ashwin: 3:34
football coach, José Mourinho. So he’s, he’s currently the coach of Roma., but I support Chelsea and he’s the first coach that, turned us into a winning club after Roman Abramovich bought us back in 2003. , I have tremendous admiration for everything Mourinho has achieved in his career. I know a lot of people don’t like him because of his controversy. And, and I understand some of that, but I think as a man manager and as, not necessarily a tactician, but somebody who can get the best out of a group of players, I don’t know that there’s been a coach in football in the last 20 years that can rival him.

Phil: 4:15
And what would you ask him? What would be like the first thing when you got like a, just a face to face sitdown.

Ashwin: 4:20
I would honestly wanna ask him what he sees in a player that makes him say I wanna sign that person, , and bring them into my team because I know it’s not just the ability, there’s something about a Mourinho player , that just screams, dedication and drive and energy. And I want to know how he identifies that in a person, somebody who’s willing to run through a brick wall for the team.

Phil: 4:41
Well, I mean, you’ve done some pretty amazing stuff over at Optmyzr. You’ve what tripled traffic, with a lot of the content marketing that you’ve been heading up, do you wanna just let people know some of your accomplishments you’ve done over there so far?

Ashwin: 4:52
Yeah. So I can’t take credit for all of it. , I am the head of marketing for Optmyzr. , it’s a role that I’ve had for the last two years. I actually joined them just before. COVID became a thing. we were at a really strange place as a business. There was no organized marketing, so to speak of. So all the things that we know fall under the remit of a marketing team were being looked after by sales, by customer success, by the founders themselves, it was really haphazard. There was really no strategy to it. So when I came in, the first thing I did was step back, look at things, audit, look at what was working well, what wasn’t working well, what strengths did we have as a business? What could we leverage? And then go back and make recommendations. So over the last two years, we’ve largely been working as an organic marketing team. it’s kind of ironic because we make software for PPC professionals, but most of our marketing is organic and community driven. So in that way, it’s a bit strange, it’s working for us. It’s worked for the last two years and it’s continuing to work. One of the most interesting things that I see because we don’t rely on ads to go out and create demand. When we actually run a paid marketing campaign, the results are pretty good. People already know about us. They’ve been engaging with our content. It’s not like our ads are hitting them for the first time where they’re even hearing about Optmyzr. So we have a pretty clear segmentation between organic efforts for demand generation and paid efforts for demand capture. Which is ideally how everybody would like it to be, but somehow we’ve managed to achieve that. Now we don’t have any funding. We’re fully bootstrapped. We are being pretty reasonable with the pace of our growth. So we don’t have an enormous marketing team. It’s just about the five or six of us, my CEO, who I report to, he writes articles. He gives presentations, he’s actively involved in marketing. He’s a marketer himself. we’re pretty scrappy with what we choose to do pretty judicious with the efforts that we focus on. And that’s, what’s really helped us, , get to this point, organic strategy, largely built on three components. The first is education. So everything about the content that we put out on social, through our blog, the videos that we create, the idea is for it to be free and accessible for it to be helpful. And for it to be relevant. And when we tick these three boxes, we see that the content tends to perform well because it’s something that people actually wanna see or read or watch. And the second part of it is community. Community is very important for us. And we look at community a little differently. It’s not a slack group necessarily, and it’s not, you know, a Facebook group for us community means taking ourselves out of the equation and putting other people up on a pedestal. Right? So we’re not the hero. We’re not the main characters. Sometimes you won’t even see us. You won’t even know that we’re responsible for something, but we like to work behind the scenes. put other people in front and. We’ve seen that. Impact in terms of traffic to the website, in some cases directly attributable to revenue. and then the third component would be the product. We have an excellent product. And as any marketer knows, , your marketing is only as good as your product. So our product team is brilliant. They’re innovative. They stay up to date with everything that Google is doing. So people get tools that are actually relevant. it’s not like some other, capabilities where, the things that the tool enables are things that Google used to do a year ago, but it hasn’t changed. So our product and development team, they work really, really hard keep things relevant. And the biggest thing is the promises that we make in marketing are promises that you’ll continue to see and hear. When you talk to somebody on our sales team, once you start using the product, we have a free trial. and then if you convert to a paying customer, our customer success and onboarding team, , all the things that you’ve been hearing about the product will actually come to life as you use it.

Phil: 8:51
So something you touched on there that was kind of interesting. And you talked about one of the first pillars was educational content. I was actually just talking to someone that has a Facebook group with just shy of 500,000 users. We’re looking some of the analytics, they’ve got 8 million views to their posts every month. And she was saying, you know what, it’s time to monetize. And. She was talking about the fact that the reason why she’s been able to grow it when there’s so many different types of similar groups, is that all of her content is only educational. Anytime someone goes in and they do a sell instead of educational, it gets removed. And so people feel really good about going onto this group, not feeling like they’re getting sold to. And yet she was saying that the people that are doing the educational content are getting a ton of leads from it, but nobody wants to go there to get sold to they wanna learn. So how have you been able to take that same mentality with your content without shoehorning in the sales side? I think people have a really hard time just creating pure educational content because it’s a lot harder to prove ROI on something like that.

Ashwin: 10:00
Yeah, I agree. Completely. The. Biggest asset that I have as the head of marketing to achieve. This is a CEO who understands that you’re not gonna be able to put a fixed ROI to this approach or this type of effort. When I started working for Optmyzr, one of the first things that Fred said to me was your job is not to sell subscriptions. Your job is not to, get more free trials. That’s a byproduct of your task. Your task is to help people, help PPC, marketers, understand what’s happening, make sense of what’s going on and find the solutions that they need. Whether that solution comes from our product, or it occurs without us is irrelevant. If we help enough people, then when a portion of them need something that our tool can help them with, they will think of us. it’s been proven true over the last two and a half years that I’ve been here every single quarter. We see more revenue. We see more people talking about us. There’s a bunch of things that we can’t track, but we know are happening because people talk to our onboarding team and they’re like, oh, so we watched PPC town hall, which is our YouTube webcast. Like we heard about you on PPC town hall. So, and so used to use your, , product at a previous agency. And now they work for us. And the first thing they did was recommend you guys. , that’s a big way that we’ve grown. Now, the, the coming back to what you asked specifically, the way that we approach content is to make sure that the problem or the solution that we’re talking about takes center stage. So in a blog post, if we’re addressing a problem, we’ll talk about that problem. And we’ll talk about potential solution step problem. And if there’s something that Optmyzr can help with, we’ll mention it at the end. So you don’t have to be slapped in the face with a pitch, every two paragraphs, we don’t have CTA banners on our, blog posts for, , subscriptions or starting a free trial. It might be mentioned in a few of them at the end that, Hey, if you want to test this out, it’s available to you, but we do keep the focus largely on what people have come to our site for. , we also do this through our educational event. It’s called unlevel. it’s a virtual event. We did it last year. We’ll be doing it again this year in September. And the idea there is that it’s a completely educational approach. So even with our lead gen, for that, we’re not asking people for anything other than their email IDs. You won’t get any emails from us about buying the software. You’re only gonna get emails related to the event and possibly some content in the future. All we expect from this is. People to engage and we want people to engage because it’s gonna be beneficial to them. We’re not looking to bump up engagement numbers to appease VCs and get more funding. We’re not looking for engagement numbers to sell sponsorships. We’ve actually, a couple of people have reached out to me, this year and asked, is there an opportunity for us to sponsor on level? And I said, there is an opportunity, but we’re not looking to monetize this because the moment I monetize it, I start working for you instead of, for the people who could actually benefit from this.

Phil: 13:03
that makes a lot of sense. Now you said, you’ve got a live virtual event. You’ve got YouTube video, you’ve got blog posts, so lots of different types of content. Do you wanna talk a little bit about the diversification of content, how you guys have done that and maybe just overall, how that’s a strategy for you.

Ashwin: 13:19
So when we think about diversification, when you look at typical advice from, Investment professionals. You hear a lot of diversify diversify , your portfolio. But when, when they say diversify, they’re not saying pay and spray, it’s not like invest in stocks and bonds and real estate and five other channels. You, you want to place calculated bets in concentrated areas. So you might pick one or two areas where you’re gonna invest and your diversification is not in the different channels of investment, but in the number of bets that you make. So if you have, for example, a million dollars to invest, you don’t buy a million dollars of one stock. You’d buy like a hundred thousand in 10 different stocks and you hedge your bets. And that’s the same approach that we take. So the biggest advantage when you do that with content, but you pick one or two channels that you really want to dive deep into and become, an expert in is you learn them inside out. You learn those little tricks that everybody else who’s doing it at a baseline level, they don’t understand, you know, how do I. It might be the wrong word, but how do I manipulate this in my favor? How do I twist the algorithm? Or how do I twist the way that people perceive , this content on this channel in a way that’s more favorable to me. So when you do that, what ends up happening is you start getting critical mass on one particular channel, and then using the traffic on that channel, you can then push people to other places like your blog, your YouTube channel. , if you have a private community, whatever the case might be, and what ends up happening is you get more traffic across all your channels that way then you would, if you were to put, say like 50% into five different approaches,

Phil: 14:56
I think one of the things that people often forget is from a content side, it’s not just the written word and scripts. Even your social media post, , the content that’s in the graphic, the text that’s behind it. , that same group , that I was talking with yesterday, we were looking at some of their most popular posts and a lot of them were two sentences. And a really engaging graphic that had information in it. And they were shared and posted. Some of them had over a million views. They had tens of thousands of shares and it was straight to the point. And I think a really great copywriter can take what would normally take on maybe a paragraph and put it in a sentence or two and it makes it much more powerful.

Ashwin: 15:44
I agree, 100%. One of the things that we do with our blog especially is we don’t have word counts. So somebody’s writing an article, for Optmyzr, we don’t say, alright it has to be 2000 words. You have to have 10 images in there. You have to use the key word 50 times. We don’t have any of that. There’s a question. Do you answer the question? If you can answer that question in 500 words and one graphic, that’s all you need. You don’t need to add more just to increase time on page. We love time on page as marketers, but I don’t necessarily see somebody spending 12 minutes on my website or on a particular page. , as more beneficial than if they spent a minute and a half, the idea is that they get the answer that they came, to that page for. If you answer the question and you answer it better than everybody else, your job is done. That’s how we approach it with the blog. And then I love what you said. Like it, it is much more than the written word content is. I mean, it’s your, your employees, Social media accounts talking about what it’s like to work for the company it’s video it’s events, it’s conferences, it’s presentations, it’s education. Like anything that you put your company’s name to in some way, or your product is associated with is content notifications in your product, content, , emails to your customers, content, , the emails that you send to somebody, if you have a free trial, we think of that as content, the emails that we send somebody, when they start a free trial of Optmyzr, the emails that we send to somebody, when we think that they might be at risk of canceling their subscription, anything where we communicate with the outside world is content. And I think one of the things that people really don’t get right, is they try to go into the channels that everybody’s on. So Brendan Hufford at SEO for the rest of us, he always says that. When he works with a client, he will sometimes tell them that SEO is not, the best channel for you. So before he actually, starts working with them, if he feels it’s not the right channel for them, he’ll tell them that. And he, he advocates that for everybody else. And I agree with him 100%, sometimes your segment, your category is so saturated on search that you’re not gonna break through. So what I like to do, when I try to determine if a channel is gonna be beneficial, is I like to draw a Venn diagram on one side is where my customers are. And on the other side is where my competitors are not. And everything that overlaps is an opportunity.

Phil: 18:17
Yeah. I used to say let’s, let’s look at where your marketing now, and let’s look at where your opportunity is to market. Just because you have this segment that you say, that’s our client, That doesn’t mean that the other segment shouldn’t be, and it’s just your marketing just doesn’t speak to them. And a lot of times there’s this divide with what’s been done and what could be done. And I think that’s a great thing. Look at what your competitors, why is your competitor hitting the older demographic when you’re only hitting the younger demographic, there’s a huge opportunity. And I think there’s always this mindset of, well, this is who our audience is, and there’s always room to move into a different area.

Ashwin: 18:58
I agree a hundred percent. And I think one other thing that this ties back to is a lot of times marketing metrics and KPIs and targets. Aren’t exactly rigged to be beneficial to the marketing team, or sometimes they’re set up. So that they make the marketing team look good, but they’re not actually creating value for the business. And I’ve been told it’s an old school opinion. I don’t think that there’s really any difference between marketing goals and sales goals and customer success goals and product goals. Ultimately, all we’re trying to do is make more money for the company and, create more value for our customers. That’s basically it. So if there’s something the sales is doing really well, I wanna build on that. I wanna see how I can take that messaging and apply it to marketing, or, if they’re trying new stuff in a channel that’s working, I want to get into that channel. And I wanna do marketing work in that channel. It’s paying off for them. It should pay off for us too.

Phil: 19:49
Sales is always the biggest untapped resource, I think in any marketer’s arsenal. And so many people are afraid to talk to sales, but , they’re talking to the customers every single day. They know every single objection and their sales manager is putting things together to help them that frankly, the marketing team could probably jump in and help a lot with, or to create content for them. They’ve got battle cards saying, why are we better than this competitor? If that’s not somewhere out there, then , you’re making them have to bring that up. It’s one less objection you could remove.

Ashwin: 20:24
Exactly. , one of the cool things that I like to share about Optmyzr is we don’t really have a sales team until about a year ago. So when I started working at Optmyzr, we had one sales. and he does not have a background in sales. He used to be a PPC account manager. , I think that’s probably like the best sales rep you could get is somebody who used to use the product. He used to be an Optmyzr customer. , and then he came over and he started helping people who started free trials, get the most out of the product. And that was our approach to sales is creating value for the person using the product. And that was really great for our conversion rate, but it wasn’t, wasn’t bringing us to where we exactly wanted to be. It’s about a year ago, maybe more, maybe less. I don’t remember the exact timeline. We actually brought in a couple of people with the sales background, just to create, , structure and process to the whole approach. What we also did, , around the same time was change to a proper CRM in HubSpot. And what ended up happening is we didn’t have somebody who could leverage the sales part of that. So once we created the structure and the process. It was very easy for marketing and sales to work together. But one thing that happens even today is we’re largely led by the customer success team. Customer success comes to the rest of the company and says, this is what customers love. This is what customers don’t love. This is what they’re asking for. This is what they don’t use. And that’s what informs our product roadmap. That’s what informs our marketing messaging. And therefore it’s what inspires, , sales talking points on discovery calls and demos. Everything comes from our customers. And one of the things I love about Optmyzr is, we have dozens if not hundreds of customers, who’ve been with us for more than a year, two years, we have some of our customers who have been with us for about seven years since the company almost began. And I absolutely love that we have customers like that. And I love that we use them as a resource to inform good content, great engaging sales conversations. And it’s just one beautiful experience from start to finish.

Phil: 22:34
Now, if you were in a marketing company that didn’t have that integration, like you’ve got a CEO that’s willing to be on camera and, and is knowledgeable, marketing teams and customer success , all of that. That’s able to work with you. What would be your advice for someone who doesn’t have that integration? How do you get that started?

Ashwin: 22:54
It’s really tough. I’ve been in that position before. I haven’t been the department lead, but I have been a team lead. So I used to work for a company that made HR tech software for interview scheduling and candidate experience. And it was really difficult because sales was siloed. Marketing was siloed. customer success barely existed, and everybody was running their own messaging. Everybody had different talking points. What really worked for us to start unifying things was we had a, a VP of marketing came in, who is still one of my mentors to this day. And he, he said, we just have to accept that this is a sales led organization. We can’t say that marketing dictates the positioning. We can’t say marketing runs things. I honestly think the biggest obstacle to integration between these three teams in many companies is pride and ego. Sometimes you just have to step back and say, this is not a marketing led organization. And if that’s not for you, then you should find a marketing led organization. But if you’re gonna make it work over there, you have to step back and say, all right. So if sales is the leader in this, in this organization, then we need to take. Pages out of their book, what’s working for them. What’s going really well. And then sales is gonna come to you and say, these are the priorities. And then you’re gonna use that to build your marketing strategy. If it’s customer success, you’re gonna do the same thing. If you actually have an opportunity to integrate where everybody really wants it to work, the easiest thing, start out with breakout sessions. Get people from all three teams in the same room. Talk, just, just put it all on the table. What are you seeing and hearing from people as individual teams and then what ends up happening is those differences and discrepancies start to show themselves. So I might think based on marketing responses, based on, , campaign performance, I might think this is actually the case, but sales might be talking to customers. CS might be talking to customers who are telling them something completely different. You won’t know what it is until you actually talk. And I think communication and a lack of pride can solve a lot of things.

Phil: 25:05
I’ve been in my fair share of, uh, sales led organizations. And it’s tough because it’s so easy to measure that and when you have a selling CEO, that’s what I like to call them. When the CEO likes to be part of the selling process, or they were sales at a previous company and they came in, , that sales team always gets the priority. And that’s okay. As long as, like you said, , you know that and you capitalize on it and you make sure that what they need gets taken care of. Every company’s different, not every company’s marketing plan will work for a different one. And, and like you said, with Brendan, , going and saying, SEO’s not gonna work for you. And I’ve seen that plenty of times, need ads, you need this, you need video. You need to go after in social. That’s where everyone is, whatever your strategy is to start with at least. It’s gonna be different for everyone , and looking at the company structure and understanding where the buy-ins are gonna be. I think removes so many headaches of what you’re gonna try to create and just get shut down.

Ashwin: 26:07
I agree.

Phil: 26:08
I know you had mentioned talking about lifting traffic and revenue with branded search terms. Is that something you might be able to expand a little bit more on, what kind of strategies you’ve done?

Ashwin: 26:19
I know a lot of marketers don’t really put a lot of store into branded search traffic, , or even bid on branded terms when it comes to PPC. I actually think if you use it the right way, it could be really beneficial and I’ve, I’ve been able to get some mileage out of that. the first thing that worked for us is, I mean, if you just want people to Google your company name, you’re probably not gonna get a lot of progress out of just that what you actually want them to do is Google your company name and then something else associated with that. Some of the search terms that we see in search console that are really popular for us is Optmyzr blog, Optmyzr town hall, , which ends up taking them to our YouTube channel Optmyzr pricing, which shows really good search intent that they’re interested in the product. we also see, search terms like Optmyzr employees or optimyzer careers, which shows us that there are people who are interested in not just buying from us, but helping us build the company into something even better. So what ends up happening is if you look at revenue, you can consider it two ways. There’s indirect revenue, and then there’s direct revenue. When it comes to direct revenue. One piece of advice I have is invest in activities that are gonna get your company name in front of new audiences. A lot of times you end up running campaigns to the same group of people, or , you have a community of, a few hundred, a few thousand and you market to them, but they already know you. And many of them are probably customers of yours. They already pay you money. And that’s great. I, I love revenue retention, but I also love revenue acquisition. So if I can get Optmyzr name in front of a bunch of people, who’ve never heard of us before. I love that because what I’ve done is I’ve started a relationship where I can continue to get them, back to my website, back to the blog. Eventually they’ll end up giving me their email. I start sending them emails about content that we produce our newsletter. I might mention, Hey, if you’re interested, we’ve released this new feature that a lot of our customers really love. You might want to try it too. , if you want to, give it a shot, here’s the link, otherwise, all good. We typically invest in sponsorships and what we’ll do is we’ll sponsor, not just the drink section at an award ceremony or something like that, we’ll even sponsor a couple of things that are actually in the works where we’re looking to take a page out of podium’s book and do a PPC fellowship where we’re actually gonna pay for somebody who’s just getting started in, in paid search or paid media to do courses with some of the big guns who’ve been doing this for like 10 or 15 years. So what we want to do is kind of like bridge that gap between branding and sponsorships and community, right? So if we build marketers to the point where they’re smarter, more intelligent, more creative, they’re eventually gonna need us at some point, some of them, at least, right? So that’s, that’s creating revenue for the future. another thing we like to do is be present at conferences, , our CEO, Fred, he gives incredible talks and presentations. that’s another way for people who’ve never heard of us, to know that there’s a solution like Optmyzr. And again, the key approach is you’re not selling the product, you’re selling the solution, , an answer to a problem. And then that’s the approach that we take. So all of this branding effort, , creates indirect revenue. And then with direct revenue, what we do is we bid on branded terms. And when you bid on branded terms, a lot of PPC, marketers say, it’s, it’s not the best investment, but number one is cheap. Number two, you get to claim space that your competitors now can’t when somebody searches for your company. And the third thing it does is based on that, that little phrase that appears after your company name, you can even tailor the offer accordingly. So if somebody’s looking for Optmyzr pricing, maybe you have a special discount, or an incentive, you can actually advertise that if somebody’s looking for the blog, maybe you have a really high value piece that you wanna drive traffic to that landing page. You could do that. There’s opportunities with almost every search term that includes your company. , if somebody’s looking for careers, it can advertise jobs. Like there’s so many things that you can do and, and who knows you end up hiring the next super genius and they end up developing something that, makes you another couple million dollars the next year. That’s another form of indirect revenue. I don’t think we should close ourselves off to any potential, you know, hiring somebody good is, is great for the company. And it’s also great for the, financial prospects of the company.

Phil: 30:56
I think the branded gets such a bad rap and it’s unfortunate because when you really look at things and someone’s searching your brand, it’s just, I use the restaurant example all the time. A friend can recommend a restaurant to me, and what’s the first thing I’m gonna do. I’m gonna Google the name of the restaurant. If a competitor is bidding against that term, I may not know. Is there a similar one? , there’s always a reason to be able to say, Hey, I know they know my name, but if they’re just searching my name, I don’t know their intent yet. I’d rather be in front of them than let it just be open and not only that, but if they’re on mobile, I’ve now taken up the entire real estate with my ad because I’m number one, I’m branded. It’s probably too expensive for someone else to bid against my name. If I’m bidding and it’s relatively cheap,

Ashwin: 31:42
I love what you said about a competitor potentially taking that attention away from you. If they have a name that’s similar to yours, that’s an even bigger risk. One thing that we see is, the number of people who misspell Optmyzr and I totally get it. but the number of people who misspelled the company’s name it’s it’s staggering. And if we had a competitor in the same space with a very similar name, it would be lost opportunity.

Phil: 32:08
especially if it’s word of mouth and what are you gonna type in? You don’t maybe know the spelling of it. And so it’s not necessarily an intentional thing. It’s just, they don’t know if there’s a Y and a Z. Is it an S is it called Google Optmyzr? Was it a Google tool? I think there’s a lot of, open area there why not capture it.

Ashwin: 32:28
exactly. Um, I’m a hog for traffic.

Phil: 32:32
What’s great, because it’s so easy to track, you can really start segmenting it and saying, okay, well, a third of the people who are typing in our name and searching are just logging in. Maybe what we can do is segment those people because we have them listed out or there’s, there’s a way to ensure that it’s easier for them to log in and not click our ad. But then if we’ve got two thirds of people that are actually actively engaging with our content, it’s definitely worth it.

Ashwin: 32:58
Yeah, a hundred percent. Oh, and, and while we’re on the topic of engaging with content, another great way to bump up branded search is to get the people who work for you to talk about your product and your company and all the stuff that you’re doing, the educational piece of it. You get that personal branding integrated into the, the company branding and you’ll grow faster than, than most people who are just using the same channels over and over.

Phil: 33:28
Yeah. I’ve seen examples of that, especially in social media where a blog post or an article has been created and someone maybe was working on that team and they share it and it gets just a ton of traffic. It gets a ton of engagement because it’s with the right people, it’s with the right group. And it’s maybe an area that the marketing team had never really pushed that content to before. But an employee happened to beyond that network and those kinds of areas are great, leverage the, the employees in your company to see where things work.

Ashwin: 33:59
we’ve actually had multiple customers, convert from a free trial to paid subscription because I happened to find them through a conversation on LinkedIn. And I said. Oh, Hey, so you’re having this problem. This is how you fix it. And if you want to do it even faster, you could actually go sign up for an Optmyzr free trial. And they’re like, well, we already did. I didn’t know that you had this capability in there. I’m gonna go check it out. And I get a message a week later. Hey, I tried that thing you said, and it worked exactly the same way you said it would. So you know, who do I talk to about signing a check?

Phil: 34:30
that’s great. And, and those are those natural conversations and that makes all the difference that’s as marketers. Our goal is to be able to have that and then be able to show that this works just telling people about the product and showing them how it’ll save them time or money. I mean, that’s the key.

Ashwin: 34:47
Yep. And caveat to anybody listening. If you do wanna try this, make sure you let your CEO or whoever , is not clued in to how this stuff works. Let them know that this is not scalable. you’re not gonna be able to easily track this in the dashboard. You’re not gonna be able to replicate this a thousand times over, but it is the kind of stuff where you put in the effort it will pay off at some point.

Phil: 35:10
I always think this is that like N of one where you go, this content worked because I shared it with someone in a conversation. They gave me feedback on it. They signed up. That means that this content works. I’m not just looking at, oh, we sent 10,000 people there. We don’t know what keywords they came in from. They may have been current customers. What this is , I can say this worked. And if this worked with that person in this kind of role, then I want to continue doing this.

Ashwin: 35:39
Absolutely.

Phil: 35:40
I have a Podcast episode from about four or five months ago. it’s actually one of my most popular ones and it was talking about AI content. I would love to get some of your thoughts on some of these new AI content generators in the industry and how that’s affecting some of the content that marketers are creating now.

Ashwin: 36:01
So I love that you brought this up. one of the things that we’re dealing with as a company right now is Google’s automating so much of their platform and PPC marketers are really frustrated with that, but our position on it is number one, you can’t stop it from happening. And number two, a lot of the stuff that they’re doing while the way that they’re doing it is less than optimal. It’s ultimately beneficial. And a lot of the things are better. Then the old way of running ads. it’s really cool to see that happening in a lot of different domains where AI and automation are starting to become part of everyday conversation. I think when it comes to AI and content, there’s absolutely value in it. Like no question about it. And anyone who says otherwise is either scared for their job or in denial. there’s no way around it. AI is gonna be writing content way faster than any person could with fewer errors with, little downtime between projects and if what you need is consistency and you have a lot of thinkers on your team, but not enough doers. AI is a, is a blessing. It really is. But , what it’s not gonna do is it’s not gonna fix everything on its own. So one thing that we. Advocate. When we talk to PPC marketers about PPC automation is the philosophy of garbage and garbage out. If you feed bad inputs to the system, to the AI, you’re gonna get bad outputs. You’re not gonna get progress if you don’t have the right starting point. So a couple of things to keep in mind with AI and content while it’s definitely gonna become a more mainstream part of marketing teams is. It’s gonna make it even tougher for teams to rank for high volume search terms or popular content, because everyone’s gonna have an AI writer publishing, two or three pieces a week on the subject. It’s it’s gonna become even more competitive and saturated. So that’s the knock on effect of that is maybe a few more niches or a few more categories are not gonna find themselves benefiting from organic search unless they have a legacy site or unless they have something that that’s gonna make it easy for them to win lanes and traffic and, and rank high for content. The second thing is, and I think this is probably the biggest change that it’s gonna impact is the job of the content marketer today in many, , B2B SaaS companies at least is largely strategic, right? So you’re, you’re coming up with content calendars. You’re talking to customers, you’re planning ideas and videos and all of this other stuff, but there’s a skill that, AI content writing is gonna force you to adopt and that’s editing. If you’re not a good editor today, you’re gonna have to become a good editor. And if you’re a good editor today, you’re gonna have to become even better at it in the future. Cause one thing that an AI content writer is not gonna be able to do is add all those little things that make an article or a video script, uniquely yours, those little, quirks and characteristics, the, speaking your customer’s language, contextualizing things, adopting, colloquialisms for your local market. If that’s the case, all of those things are something that only a human can do. And you have to decide is the output from the AI good as it is, or do I need to change something? The third thing that is gonna happen, and this is at a much higher marketing level and almost at a business level is gonna really highlight companies that have really weak positioning that have really bad customer research that have a poor understanding of what their customers need or what their industry needs, or who don’t have product market fit.

Phil: 39:46
Yeah. One of the things that I found when I was doing a lot of content is we were most successful when we used our own stats, our own data that nobody else had access to. And you can feed that into an AI and have it generate content but it still doesn’t add that extra level. What does that actually mean? I found that AI does a great job of taking data, translating it into human terms and maybe taking a table of data and breaking it down into something that’s readable. But then there’s this added little level that an editor’s gonna go in and add a few sentences, change, a few words, shorten things, lengthen things, dive a little bit deeper into certain areas. And I think that’s one thing I like about AI is I can have it generate something from a set of data. And then I can go in and ask it elaborate on this, or talk more about this specific area. And in a sense, it’s almost like I’m talking to another copywriter, but I’m sort of editing it and asking it to generate a lot of the content and then making some tweaks to it.

Ashwin: 40:55
Yeah. Yeah. It’s gonna give you, I mean, as long as your input is good, it’s gonna give you the who, what, when, where, why, but like you said, it’s the, so what, that only a human editor is gonna be able to impart.

Phil: 41:08
Yeah, it’s gonna be a long time until you can just say here’s the title of the article and make something that is truly unique and interesting because in the end, if it’s just one of the general, , based off GPT3 or something like that, these AI, they’re all using the same data set. They’ve all scoured the same internet sites, unless you’re feeding it something unique or giving it something unique, which is like what a copywriter would do and do their own original research. They’re not interviewing a subject matter expert on this. And so you can’t get that in depth detailed information that only comes from that person. Who’s never been asked that question before.

Ashwin: 41:48
Yeah. And what it is actually gonna do is, is essentially it’s gonna shorten the window that a human copywriter or a content marketer needs to turn something around. So you’re gonna be able to start from a much higher position instead of looking at a blank, Google. You’ll be able to start with the thing completely full and what’s gonna end up happening is if you’re good at editing, instead of taking a week and a half to scrub the internet and go through pages and pages of SERPS and find that one link, that’s actually gonna add value, all of that’s gonna be done for you. And what you can then do is go in and add, like you said, the contextualization, the unique data that only your product has, all of those little things. And instead of taking a week or more, you’ll be able to do it in a day or two.

Phil: 42:38
Okay, we’re gonna try a quick experiment here. I just asked an AI tool, and this was Jasper, which is formerly Jarvis, which is formerly conversion.ai. It’s based on GPT3. So I asked it what interview questions should I ask Ashwin a content marketer and here’s the five that it came up with. The first one is what do you, think’s the most important aspect of content marketing? The second? What do you think are the best ways to create and promote content? Third? What do you think makes a successful content marketing campaign? Four? What do you think is the most important thing to keep in mind when planning a content marketing strategy? Fifth here. What do you think are the best ways to measure the success of a content marketing campaign? Pretty good questions. They’re not personal. , but if I were interviewing you for a job, those might be some good questions to start us off.

Ashwin: 43:27
Yeah, exactly. So now you have that jumping off point

Phil: 43:30
I could even say, give me five examples of, content marketing campaigns, and it’s gonna spit out five examples. And from there I could say elaborate on them. , and now all of a sudden I went from a single question that I was trying to answer in my content. Now I’ve got five starting points. I can elaborate further. It’s gonna lead me down a path. It’s almost like I’m researching with an AI. And it’s just giving me instant answers. Instead of me having to search it really removes Google from the equation, which I found is very interesting.

Ashwin: 44:03
Exactly. You don’t have to go scour the internet for the stuff I’ve written before. , try to get an idea of like allright, what are the industries that he’s worked in? You have this list of questions, you jump over to my LinkedIn and you’re like, all right, let me look at what he’s actually done in his career. And how can I take this question and level it up based on something he’s done or, you know, is currently doing,

Phil: 44:24
I used this AI a couple weeks ago and I was like, well, let’s see what happens. I, I wanted to see how personal it could get how from a personal recommendation standpoint. So I told, Hey, here are three or four books that I’ve read recently. Recommend me another one. And it gave me a name and I’d never heard of it before. And I said, okay, what’s the plot? And it gave me the plot for it. I said, okay, gave it a shot. And it’s actually, it was a great book. It’s really weird because how else would I have found that if not for talking to someone in maybe a, I don’t know, a, a Facebook group or a, a Reddit subreddit, like, Hey guys, I’ve read these books. What do you recommend? Literally , it did cross referencing found other ones. What’s a popular one. I mean, it was amazing that it was able to pull that and it was a, a two minutes it took.

Ashwin: 45:12
Yeah, exactly. I mean, when it comes to using AI for, for blogs, particularly, which is one place I’m seeing it applied a lot that and landing pages, , most people aren’t gonna read , your blog start to finish. Doesn’t matter if it’s 500 words or 5,000 words, very few people are gonna read the whole thing there gonna skim. And when they see something interesting, they’ll read a few sentences or if you have it formatted well in bullets, they’ll go through that. So what I see. AI really helping out with is if you have a couple of codes with subject matter experts, you can highlight those and you can use AI to kind of build the rest of the article

Phil: 45:49
I think from a time saving standpoint, you cut down, one to two week down to two or three days That’s all we want. We want time back. Right. So that we could do things that are more effective.

Ashwin: 46:01
That’s pretty much all it boils down to every piece of software out there, whether it’s enterprise or, B2C, it doesn’t make a difference. All the benefits, all the value propositions come down to, are you gonna be able to spend less time doing this right? And every single pain point, hassle confusion, , too many databases, it all comes down to needing more time to get, things done.

Phil: 46:25
Exactly. Exactly. I had a couple other questions, I was kind of curious what is actually your favorite type of content to work on?

Ashwin: 46:33
That’s a really good question. I got my start, not as a content marketer, but as a copywriter in an ad agency, an integrated agency ad agency specifically. So a lot of the stuff I worked on early in my career were things like TVCs, digital spots, that kind of thing. So I’ve really gravitate towards video and I love narrative story driven video, but I think. I’ve at this point, I’ve niche down that B2B SaaS is, where I contribute the most. And I have the most experience in B2B SaaS there there’s a time and a place for it. But what really works are those interviews with subject matter experts where you talk about the human side. I don’t like videos where if I’m, if I’m interviewing you right, for my YouTube channel, I don’t want to talk to Philip about, you know, what are the ins and outs of SEO that everybody else has explained. What I wanna do is I want to learn about you, the person, what has SEO been for you in your career? What are the things that you’ve achieved? What are your stories? And that’s what people gravitate to. I really love human interest marketing, in video format, that’s one and landing pages are my other, Favorite type of content to write because it’s good old fashioned old school copywriting. Good headline. Good. promise. Good offer. Strong CTA. And I think, I think the landing page is arguably more important than the, the ad itself. Cuz you get the click on the ad and the click is nice, but the landing page is where you make the money.

Phil: 48:16
And the landing page is more fun to experiment with. You can experiment with everything, colors, photos, types of photos, layout, headings. You name it and then you can track so much more. I love watching heat maps on landing pages and just seeing, wow. we did not anticipate that and making changes to it and seeing improvements.

Ashwin: 48:39
yep. We actually ran an AB test a while back where my CEO and I wrote two versions of the same landing page. And he went in a very technical direction and mine was built solely on the premise of, what would you do with all the time you’d save, if you weren’t doing A B, C and D. And his was like this beautiful in depth piece of pros that would’ve taken me weeks of research to come up with. And mine was just really simple and straightforward, but my landing page outperformed his by almost 25 to one. And it’s just because people didn’t have the time. , I’m sure , they would’ve found value in what he was reading, but they just didn’t have the time, , to sit and digest it. So it’s like you present things super directly and people gravitate towards that. I think a lot of times copywriters and marketers. we forget that we’re writing for somebody who’s looking at an ad or a landing page in between meetings or, while working on 10 different things, your one tab of many, right? It’s not like you have their undivided attention, you gotta be quick with it. I think I’ve been guilty of this in the past is sometimes as writers, we end up writing for ourselves or , our peers on our teams instead of the customer. So with a landing page, I really love that I can go back when I’m editing my work, I can go back and look at it from the lens of somebody who might be clicking on the ad. Am I fulfilling the promise that I made in the ad? Number one, am I being as direct and as straightforward as I can be, and is this something that anybody could understand. Right? The fact of the matter is that there are people who are gonna click on your ad, who haven’t been to college, who might not have an advanced reading level, but they still have a problem that several other people have. You can’t assume that everybody has, half a dozen doctorates and, can understand these complicated words you put together. So as simple as you can make it as direct as you can make it, , it’s gotta be universally accessible.

Phil: 50:36
I like to, whenever I have the opportunity to say here, hand it over to my wife and say, what does this mean to you? Like what feeling does it evoke to you? And a lot of times she’ll be like, I don’t get what you’re saying here. I skipped over that and I’m like, you’re supposed to read that first. She’s like, well I didn’t okay. Let me, put myself into someone else’s shoes And especially someone who’s not a marketer, someone who’s maybe more into the sales side or someone who’s maybe more like you said, technical maybe, but they’re not necessarily looking for the technical answers. They’re looking for a solution to their problem.

Ashwin: 51:12
exactly. I do the same thing with my mom and dad.

Phil: 51:15
Yeah.

Ashwin: 51:16
And sometimes you just hear feedback that , it wouldn’t have occurred to you in a thousand years. And , we take for granted that everybody who clicks on the ad is technically savvy and knows what we’re talking about. Sometimes you just gotta get out of your own head. I consider it a blessing to be in a job where I have market to marketers, because I know that there’s a certain threshold that I can get away with. and when I do work with my freelance clients who aren’t always, in the same space, I have to force myself to remember. you’re not talking to other people who, speak your language, it’s time for you to learn their language.

Phil: 51:54
The audience here I think is a pretty big mix between people who are just getting started, , just starting in their first marketing job, maybe even interning, maybe still in college. And then we’ve got people that, you know, 10, 20 years in the business, but I always like anytime I have someone on to talk about what do you, think’s the best way to break into the industry? How can you get started in marketing?

Ashwin: 52:14
Yeah, it’s really different these days when I started working in, 2010? the way that I cracked in was I actually didn’t start in marketing. I started in publishing. , I used to work for a magazine, a lifestyle magazine, and I would interview, athletes. I would interview, captains of industry diplomats, politicians. I’d write features about interiors or, human interest stories. what that gave me was this really good ability to number one extract information from people. As an interviewer, you kind of pick up that skill and then spin that into a story that readers will actually wanna sit down with. When I wanted to make the jump into advertising at the time specifically, I found it really difficult because I didn’t have a body of work that people could judge me on. So I actually built out a spec portfolio for myself, and it was a very strong time and financial investment because I wanted it to be high quality. So I was paying a designer out of pocket. I was working on, briefs that I found online, trying to work with those. So there was a lot of hours spent searching for stuff, compiling things together, finding people that could work with me. It took me, I think about seven, eight weeks just to get everything in place and then another month and a half to build the portfolio out, including design, , but it was totally worth it. So those two and a half, three months that I spent putting this together, before that I had about seven interviews and I never got a, a second call back. After I built out the spec portfolio, I applied to one job, two interviews, and I had an offer. so I think if you want to break into marketing, if there’s something that you can create to show that you’re starting to understand the way the, the business works, the way, , that particular domain of marketing works, that’s the best thing you can do, right? Make something that proves that you’re capable of at least getting there. When I look to hire somebody who has no experience in marketing whatsoever, I don’t look for. Marketing knowledge. I don’t look for terminology. I look for, are you willing to step up and learn? Are you willing to adapt? Are you, going to come to me and say, I don’t wanna do this. I don’t wanna do that. Are you gonna try as many things as possible? Are you gonna be willing to, , I don’t wanna say jump through hoops, but are you willing to take on challenges that, , other people might flinch at or, or shy away from? And so that courage, that willingness to take on new stuff. If you take the time to build out a spec portfolio, the first thing that says to me is you’re not afraid to break out of your comfort zone and you’re not afraid to put yourself out there. And that’s enough to get you an interview. I promise you build yourself a spec portfolio, you’ll get interviews for sure. And once you have those interviews, what you do with it is up to you.

Phil: 55:12
I’ve always said attitude and aptitude. Those are the most important things for any new hire. And if you’ve got those, you’re gonna do well and you just have to learn the ropes. That’s really what it comes down to because I think anyone can learn almost any job. You don’t need a four year degree. They don’t make four year degrees in SEO. I feel like you’ve gotta jump in there and either have tried something, whether you succeeded or failed or been working with a group that is doing something, so you have that experience.

Ashwin: 55:43
yeah. And the other piece of advice I would have is because marketing is in the state of flux all the time. The stuff that you learn as part of a four year degree on marketing will be irrelevant by the time you actually graduate and try to enter the workforce. I would say brush up on the skills that are universal and perpetual. So psychology, I think marketing at its core is basically behavioral, psychology and biases. So if you can learn that, you’ll be able to apply that whether you work in partnerships or content or product marketing or SEO, wherever you are. Pick up psychology. And the other thing I would pick up is, is business acumen, right? Understand how businesses work top line bottom line EBIDTA if you, if you learn all of these, business terms, you’ll get an idea of how marketing fits into the bigger picture, what the priorities for a VP of marketing would be. And you have that context and understanding it’s very easy at any level to, to fit in and do your role to further the, the ultimate goal of making more money for a business.

Phil: 56:44
When doing my bachelors, I think the most influential classes I ever took on my entire career were a business management, a business communication, and a critical thinking and a public speaking class. I think those for, , being able to articulate what I wanted to say was huge. Being able to be comfortable in front of a board of directors. Was something that helped me in my career a lot, because I was given accounts where I had very high level, points of contact where some other account executives or other marketers, were not prepared for. And they weren’t able to get up there and be confident in their presentation.

Ashwin: 57:30
Yeah. Now that is beautiful advice. And to add on to that, I would say, be ready to fail. It’s gonna happen, but the sooner you get it out of the way, the sooner you can learn from it. I had a really tough challenge early in my advertising career. It was my first opportunity to work on a pitch and I bombed it completely. I had a great brief, I had a great design partner and I just screwed it up from a copy perspective. And my creative director pulled me into a room and she’s like, I’m not gonna, you know, sit here and paint a nice picture. You completely messed this up. And you cost this company a lot of money. , we had that in the box. All we had to do was go in and present something, not groundbreaking, , but creative. And you just let down your entire team. And I think for a day I let myself wallow, but then I look back at it. I’m like she’s 100%, right. I didn’t put in the effort. I got distracted by too many things. I went out partying and I just didn’t put in the time and effort that it required. Next pitch. I got, I remembered the pain of that conversation and I put everything I had into that pitch. We won it and it was just water under the bridge. Nobody even talked about it after that.

Phil: 58:40
You prove yourself and that’s, that’s the key and you learn from your failures and you learn from other people’s failures on your team. You ask them what was the feedback? What could we have done differently and go from there.

Ashwin: 58:53
Yeah,

Phil: 58:53
All So last question I’ve got for you. I’ve watched a few interviews you’ve been in, . what’s one question that you haven’t been asked that you would love to answer.

Ashwin: 59:05
nobody’s really asked me what I think the ultimate goal of marketing really is. It’s, I know a lot of people are gonna gravitate right towards revenue. That’s the easy answer, but the truth is the goal of marketing is to sell. That’s it you’re sales at the end of the day. The only difference between a sales team and a marketing team is how many people they’re speaking to at a given time. Sales is a one-on-one conversation. Marketing is one to many, but when you do have that one to many conversation, good marketing is making that one to many, feel like one-to-one for every single person who’s reading or watching. If you can make somebody feel like they see themselves in your message in your landing page, in your video, whatever it is they’re consuming at that point, you create affinity. And when you create that affinity, it’s much stronger than any value proposition that you could put on paper. If you make your prospects, your potential customers feel understood. If you make them feel like you have their back, if you feel, make them feel like they can count on you, you don’t have to put in as much work with your other efforts. In revenue generation. A lot of that, that hard work gets done when you build that affinity. So I think ultimately the goal of marketing is to create that affinity it’s to sell. but the trick in marketing is to be able to sell the one to many and make it feel like one to one.

Phil: 1:00:32
That’s great. and I think for anyone listening, this entire conversation, I think the big takeaways , there’s more to it than meets the eye, rely on the people around you. Talk to them, get feedback from them, learn from your mistakes. And in the end you gotta just go for it.

Ashwin: 1:00:51
The only way you learn is by doing in marketing and sales and anything else in life in general, theory will only get you so far.

Phil: 1:00:59
Exactly. Well, Ashwin I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and I look forward to talking to you again at some time in the future.

Ashwin: 1:01:06
I would love that. Thank you so much for having me.

Jonny has opened for the likes of Ice Cube, and his latest single just dropped yesterday. Listen to learn about how the industry has changed in the last 10 years and the types of marketing you can do in the music industry.

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

Transcipt

0:00
Welcome to the opinionated SEO today. I’ve got Johnny Polanco, Johnny rockz. Who’s going to talk to us a little bit about marketing in the music industry.

Phil: 0:15
I got Johnny Polanco. All right. Now this guy he’s always got something going on. I mean, from music to what he is doing in sales to his side, hustles, I mean, you don’t stop.

Jonny: 0:28
No, no, there’s just no filter. You know, you gotta just keep going. There’s no, no need to stop. I mean, if, once you have your tracks in motion, you might as well just continue up that ladder. Right? I mean, cuz if not, then you’re at a sit still. And if you’re at a sit still. if you’re not as interesting as it, you know, as all the other people

Phil: 0:48
Now I like starting every interview off with just a couple of these like fun little questions, it’s really fun to get to know someone a little bit that way. You ready for this?

Jonny: 0:56
let’s go.

Phil: 0:57
Johnny has not heard any of these. So we’re gonna start here. If you were a captain of a ship, what would you call it?

Jonny: 1:05
Ooh, hold on. I would call it my Bella star. I would definitely name it after my daughter. Yeah, that would be the Bella Starship.

Phil: 1:15
Love it. Love it.

Jonny: 1:16
I’m like we’re cruise at nighttime and look at the stars. Oh,

Phil: 1:19
we, we, now we both have kids named Bella, , so we’ll have like the Bella star I’ll have like the Bella moon or something like that. And the stars and the moons will meet up in the bay and we’ll go fishing. How’s that sound

Jonny: 1:30
I’m good with that.

Phil: 1:32
okay. I like it. All right. What’s one thing you wish you’d spent more time doing when you were younger.

Jonny: 1:39
being outside hands down. I mean, it was so hard. I came in, you know, I, I was living in the era of the, uh, super Nintendo Sega Genesises. So, you know, it was real hard to get away from those electronics, but I mean, look where we’re at today, right? I mean, just, you literally have a business on the go, wherever you go in a cell phone. It’s amazing. What about you?

Phil: 2:04
Man music, I didn’t really get into music till I was in my teens and like almost mid to late teens. And I think I missed out on a lot of that. Um, I just. For whatever reason, it just, wasn’t a big part of my life. And I think I missed out on, on a lot of the connections that you make with people. I didn’t really play an instrument so much and I feel like, like music, would’ve been a really fun part of my life there that I really missed out on.

Jonny: 2:29
Yeah. That’s what, one of the main reasons why I keep trying to bring you over to Santa Cruz, man, there’s so much. You know, next to the beach. , I had the opportunity to, perform at one of the biggest stages in Santa Cruz, which is the catalyst, you know, got to open up for ice cube, got to open up for E 40, you know, a lot of bay area rap, , rappers who, who loved my sound, but not only did they love the sound, they love the person who was creating it. You know, they. Pulled me aside. And they, each of them had told me like, Hey, you need to continue doing this. And when the time is right, it’ll happen. And obviously I have a few singles now on iTunes and all platforms, basically. Right. Even TikTok. And that took a lot, you know, out of me to, to, to do that. And I’ve just been withholding cuz I’ve been establishing this whole family, you know, making sure that my family’s good. Obviously you. Unpredicted, you know, deaths in the family. So it’s hard to, you know, have it’s hard to bounce back from those things immediate.

Phil: 3:27
so, how does that happen? How did you get back into the scene? How did you get into such kind of a limelight kind of situation?

Jonny: 3:35
Oh, well, Having this recent death in the family, my wife was just mentioning, like, we shouldn’t live with no regrets. If you come at the end of your life, are you gonna regret the fact that you never pursued music the way that you passionately feel about it? And I mean, yeah, you know, I, I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t pursue. Because it’s a part of me. It’s, it’s a part of the DNA that connects people. You know, they want to hear the energy, they want to hear the sound. Right. And a lot of the stuff I’m putting out right now. It’s older stuff. It’s not the newer stuff because obviously I don’t have my studio yet, but, , next year, I’ll be building my studio. So I’ll, I’ll be more frequent right now. I’m at like maybe one to two singles a week for the next week, you know, for the next three weeks, I’ll be putting out at least one to two singles. So far, you know, based on it, I’ve been. , I already DMed from hot 97 in New York, you know, KM, E L in the bay area they’ve already, , contacted me a few, a andrs from like Interscope sending me messages. Like we’re, we’re loving your music. So I’m like, that’s great. But you know, I, I took an opportunity, a leap of faith, and I think. You know, Phil, the, the main priority for this whole music thing for me is that I don’t get sidetracked from my family. Just have to steer the waters pretty close.

Phil: 4:55
We did a no regret situation. About three, four years ago. We started an agency with a couple partners. So my wife was real instrumental in that. The company’s wildly successful. I sold my, my share in it a couple years ago, but, um, it was definitely something that we both decided was something I needed to do. And I’m glad I did. Would I do it again? I’m not. , probably do it differently, but that experience needed to happen. Definitely needed to happen. All right. I was curious how much has changed in the last like five, 10 years? in like studio equipment. I mean, I’m podcasting right now on stuff like this, Mike, I would’ve had to have spent, you know, a thousand dollars and all this mixer and all this stuff that I would’ve been five, $10,000 deep, where right now I’m maybe five, $600 deep, what’s changed in the equipment that makes it easier for someone. And then. I gotta know, from a marketing standpoint, is it something that you can do solo? Is it something that you can get your name out there where, you know, 10 years ago you were paying DJs on the radio to get play?

Jonny: 5:57
Yeah. So, uh, to answer the first part, obviously there’s competitors, okay. People launch softwares, they launch equipment. They’re like, you know, we’re the best in this field. We’re the best in this field. Eventually you’re gonna get that one person who differentiates themselves by saying. We do it all. You could use it for podcasting. You could use it for recording. You can use it for your mobile. Right. And, and like I had mentioned from before you have technology, they’re constantly upgrading phones. You know, you could YouTube right now, whoever’s watching this or listening to it. You could YouTube right now, you know, um, uh, DSR camera versus an iPhone 13. They’ll show you the comparison. You would probably not even realize which one was the phone, which is amazing to me,

Phil: 6:47
Yeah. The photo quality is, is almost indistinguishable when it’s the same, like fo length. So I think that’s, that’s a great thing. Like softwares come such a long way in five, 10 years, you know, your computers are ridiculous. What you have, whether it’s your, your iPad, your iPhone, or just , the laptop that’s sitting in front of you. But I think the software’s made such a difference where now you can, you can create your own backing tracks. You can record basically studio quality audio into your system for a few hundred bucks. Right.

Jonny: 7:19
Yep. What I was telling my wife, you

Phil: 7:21
That’s that’s even the playing field. Now you don’t need to spend, how much would you spend back in the day for a couple hours studio time.

Jonny: 7:29
so they’ll charge about a hundred an hour,

Phil: 7:31
so for a day’s worth of studio time, you could have your own home studio basically.

Jonny: 7:35
Yeah.

Phil: 7:36
I mean, at least the start to it. Good enough to get Spotify and, you know, whatever music platforms, the, the quality’s.

Jonny: 7:45
Yeah. In fact I’m like, just like I had mentioned, right. I, I used the distributor, , to put the music out there, which was distro. Uh, a lot of, a lot of, you know, independent artists will, will utilize a distributor. Um, but it just, it doesn’t limit me to one distributor though. I can, I can go multiple different routes with different distributors just to see how things play out. I think it’s great because there’s a whole network of people that have experienced. What it is to give up money, right. And you know what it is to give up creative rights. And, you know, I’m only getting a percentage of the song play right? Every time that it’s streamed. And you know, the reason why these known artists get so much play is because of the connections they have. And just like yourself, right? I’m really, I’m really outspoken. I can speak to somebody. I can come down to their level. I can understand where they’re coming from, you know, and I can get on their level. So it’s, it’s great to do that. Uh, I just don’t wanna. Separate myself from some of the greatest MCs out there. Since a young age, I’ve always known soon as I step into the room, people know that guy’s different. There’s something about that guy. I’m I wanna see what that guy has, you know, and then they hear it and then it’s like, okay, I’m sold. Like let’s, uh, let’s let’s work.

Phil: 9:04
So it’s interesting. You bring this up because, you know, I, I used to do some promotions and stuff like that for bands. I mean, we’re talking like 15, 20 years ago, uh, building like the most basic of a website, but, there was no distribution, medium. They, they literally had to be listened to by someone you had to send demos to labels or, or if you’re independent, maybe some of the independent stations would pick you up and then a label would hear you from there, , or a friend of a friend or open for someone. I mean, there, there, it was all like hard grunt work, nothing you could do sitting down. , it sounds like, , things have changed. You can use the digital landscape to do your marketing.

Jonny: 9:45
Yep.

Phil: 9:46
What’s important. Nowadays, if someone wants to be an artist, they want to get their voice out there. What do they need?

Jonny: 9:53
The first thing is I an identity, , that is very important, right? Because you may wanna do music, but who are you looking up to? Right? Who, who are your inspirations? What do you portray to be like? And how are you gonna carry yourself? So identity is definitely the number one. I’ve stuck with Johnny rocks. I got it tattooed for a reason. Right. It was a part of who I was, it was the DNA, right. Almost like a split personality because I’m at home. I’m a dad. I’m a, you know, I’m a husband when I’m at work. I’m like rockstar with it. And then I, outside of all of that, I, you know, I’m a hip hop and reggae, tho artists, you know, from Dominican Republic, like there’s so many D. Um, backgrounds to everything, but you know, most importantly, , identity, establishing a budget for yourself and not jumping into it too fast, creating an LLC and worrying about all these other, like, just put the music out there is all I say, because you never know the response you’re gonna. I didn’t know. I posted it, last night and woke up to like maybe 30 messages and I’m like, what in the world is happening? Like, you know, I had one of my favorite DJs, uh, DJ battle cap. He was responsible for a lot of the big hits down south with Snoop, you know, PAC, uh, you know, all the ice cube, like all the biggest, like rap artists out there. And he messaged me with. Let’s connect. What’s your email info, right? Like I’m, I’m rocking with your music. So I’m like, obviously, you know, there’s not, he’s running his own page and he has credibility. I mean, he’s doing movies for goodness sake, doing soundtracks to like Wakanda forever, for the fact that he just listened to what I had to offer and was like, Hey, I think your stuff is hot. Like That alone has the respect hands down.

Phil: 11:52
So how does he hear this? How did he get in front of that?

Jonny: 11:55
through Instagram, through TikTok, through iTunes.

Phil: 12:00
It’s every platform, right. You no longer can just be on.

Jonny: 12:03
Yep. I’m on every platform. And the reason I can make that possible, obviously creating my own social media accounts, investing into a web designer so they can start putting out some content. So even if it’s something basic or you’re grabbing just photos of memories where, you know, it resonates with you, but to someone else, it’s like, oh, who’s this person, you know, you end up listening to the song and you’ll thumbs it up or you’ll purchase it, or you’ll hear it enough times that you’re just like, I want to hear more from this guy, I’m willing to support, it could start with 50 people purchasing it, then it could be a. There could be a hundred thousand, 200,000. And next thing you know, people are knocking at your door. We wanna offer you a deal because they know it’s gonna pop.

Phil: 12:47
That’s awesome. So what’s the next steps. You started getting, you know, the ground running. I know, like over the last, what, couple months. . I know you’ve been laying some groundwork. We chatted about a month ago and you said, Hey, some big stuff’s coming up and. I mean, it came up today, so, what do you doing to capitalize on that?

Jonny: 13:06
Like I had mentioned, I, I gotta be a, a preacher of my own words. , I’m waiting to see what happens. I’m getting a lot of, you know, people that want to network, obviously, you know, paid clear channel advertisement, like. Things of this such, I’m not putting any money into it. I need to see what the record does on its own without an actual budget behind it. Right. People are listening, you know, and if they’re searching and, and listening to the post that I’m doing and using the sounds, you give it a good 30 to 60 rolling days, but, , My plan is, is Q1 2023. Building a nonprofit organization. That’ll actually help, kids that can’t afford 30, $40, , an hour at a studio, , to be able to come over and record for. You know, pennies to the dollar and, , produce something for them, whether that’s like spoken word, you know, hiphop, uh, country, R and B, it doesn’t matter, you know, just have an area where you can do that. So I’ve, uh, actually teamed up with a few people and. You know, that also leads into some other great aspects of it because as money starts to trickle in from music and the donations from the nonprofit organization next year, I’m able to invest into other companies and startup softwares

Phil: 14:19
your nonprofit, how would that affected you if at 18 someone approached you and said, I can give you studio time at no cost or pennies on the dollar.

Jonny: 14:28
I I’d probably be in a different situation right now. I’d be in an entirely different situation. I’d probably be, you know, in Italy, somewhere on a vineyard own property, you know, a lot of land have someone maintain. Travel the world, maybe go to Spain, I had this whole concept of just jumping into the meta world and doing concerts from the meta world. I mean, every day it’s a digital landscape. You know, how many people show up to those kind of things, especially with COVID happening, it impacted everyone’s life. Why should you waste your time? You know, not doing what you, what you don’t love. Like, come on now. You, you should do what you love to do.

Phil: 15:11
Empowering people, giving them the tools at a younger age , where. Money was maybe the, the biggest factor, the barrier to entry. that’s always the saddest thing. When you see someone with some talent and they just don’t have the money to apply it. So music’s really interesting because I think someone could have like an amazing product, awesome song, album, whatever it is. And it just doesn’t get out there. , why doesn’t that happen?

Jonny: 15:38
people not knowing the business, you know, the formality , of finding a distributor. Someone that you can trust someone that’s gonna do all the uploading to these major platforms, , like Spotify, right? Like, , Shazam, like title. , there’s so many different platforms that you can go to and, and people offering to do it just as good as these other big carriers out there. But distro kid has been at the top of my mind because if they’re intuitive, offsite promotions that they can offer, right? Like they can actually, , start to upload your stuff to world star, hip hop and things of the such, you know, TikTok where you’re, , sound is being used. I had a guy the other day tell me that, , that’s all he does now is he creates music. For TikTok. he’s like as long as it’s catchy, long as it has a good beat, people will start to use it and you make a fortune off of it. for me, if I could have that type of capital, I would just do it every day. There’s no reason that if I’m gonna go take a vacation or do a show, I’m gonna have it all documented, you know? . Phil: Now that’s, That leads into something else. This podcast talks a lot about marketing and, and I try to talk a lot about looking at other verticals to really come up with new ideas. You know, you don’t ever think of TikTok as a place where I can. Create music for tos. And I think that’s amazing, there’s always going to be a, a niche or there’s always something where you can just do a ton of work and see it perform. And you don’t have a whole lot of competition. Any ideas, for people out there who are maybe just getting started, what do they need to do to get started in the industry? Identity is huge. Every record exec a and R decision maker. Even if you’re just trying to approach this as an independent label yourself. find your identity first, when you have that, it’s gonna be an easier, topic to digest, right? When you’re trying to market yourself, , build a roadmap, you know, what does the next six months look like? Are you gonna just be focusing on creating the music once the music’s created? Are you gonna put artwork to it? Are you gonna release it on all platforms? Are you just doing a few singles for now until you establish an EP? and then if you do the EP, then you launch it and then you have a good six to eight months. Of financial backing to put those into places where it’s gonna shine the best, right? If you can gather enough money, , to shoot a video, that helps out tremendously. Everyone has a different path and you can find a lot of local resources, like all the local resources here know about. You know, either we’ve done a song, we’ve done a show. We’ve come in contact somehow some way, but you know, I could go to app toss. I could go to Santa Cruz. I can go to Salinas. I could go to Monterey like San Jose. I know people in the industry that are there and we can obviously network and put something together. So I would just. Before you start thinking huge and you know, thinking about all the big major labels, like all of those things, you don’t want to think about that until you source locally, until you do a performance locally, until you start to experience more and more and more, and, and then make the decision, I’m gonna be fully committed to doing this until I achieve my goal.

Phil: 19:03
I think that’s true about anything, right? Anything in life. So you’ve got a couple of these people reaching out what’s the persona when you’re interacting with them. I mean, you’re business, Johnny you’re musician, Johnny, your salesman, Johnny.

Jonny: 19:19
Let’s not waste no time. Let’s not waste no time. My response is let’s work. that’s it because I’m like, Hey, if you think that it’s hot, you’re in, you’re in power right now. So don’t approach me with, Hey, for this quantity of money, I could do this for you. No, if you have authority, take my stuff to the person who makes the decision. Let’s talk to that person. What will it take to get to that person right before we even start talking about money? Right? Cause if there’s any exchange of money, I, I need to establish my LLC. So I have a way to protect myself.

Phil: 19:54
I think that’s a really important thing for people to understand as timeliness is huge. Whether you’re working a lead. From a sales standpoint, an inquiry, someone just reaching out, , you don’t wanna let that sit, get on that, show them there’s a priority to it. Make it happen because if you wait a week because you’re trying to formulate the perfect response and they’ve already forgotten about you.

Jonny: 20:16
Yeah, I just think about the possibilities. You know, I think about the possibilities of what you can accomplish. Just putting something out there. I it’s weird. It’s kind of like the algorithm on social media as just like, why are you waiting to put something out? Hey, no one will ever know how great your song is. Is it if you don’t ever upload it,

Phil: 20:37
I wanna hear a little bit more about this concert, who you opened for, and then tell me, man, how did you take advantage of that to get your music out?

Jonny: 20:48
Yeah, well, I, it was actually one of the last major concerts that I did. And it was for ice cube. I was actually in Hawaii for my brother’s bachelor party and I get the phone call at 40 once you hear, can you make it, and it’s literally 48 hours notice, so I’m like, oh, okay. I gotta open and slot. They, they loved my music. They loved the performance I did in Stockton. Now they want me to do it in my hometown. And I’m getting paid, so I literally had a book, two flights, landed, hopped in a limo, drove to the venue and I had shirts already. Pre-ordered as soon as I got the call, I made the next call, same day 48 hour notice. Had some shirts pressed up, you know, that said hall of fame, because that was like the brand at the time when I was younger, came up on stage, rocked the stage and then E 40 came out and was like, ah, you know, I rock with Johnny rocks in the hall of fame game, you know? All my merch was sold at that point. , so that was beautiful. I actually got this opportunity off of social media, promoting. Finding out who the manager was, which venues are they throwing right now? Hey, , can I DM this person? Do you have a number? Let me talk to you. I, you know, yo, you, you want to gimme an opportunity? You think the music’s good? Have I ever done performances? Yes. You know, I, I have it. I have it on video. Look at this. Oh, you know, I think you’d be a great fit. And then you finally get that. you just drop everything and just go do that show, you know, like, just give it your all and. I think that was one of the first times I realized, you know, I was gonna do this for life no matter what, no matter where I was in life, eventually it was just all gonna come together. I just remember putting my hand up in the air and I could see everybody in the first five, six rows raise their hands up, like yeah. You know? Um, so that, that was a great. That was a great feeling and I have it documented. . Which is even better. So I think that also gives you a lot of recognition, cuz it’s not just talk about it. You can actually see I was doing it.

Phil: 22:53
Not only did you have things ready to go, if they called you had merch, but you had put the effort in to reach out and then you made it happen. You didn’t use the excuse. Wow, man, I gotta fly. I gotta do this. It’s kind of tight schedule. If you’re gonna do it, do it,

Jonny: 23:09
Yeah.

Phil: 23:10
make it happen.

Jonny: 23:11
Yep.

Phil: 23:12
That’s a lesson for anyone who wants to make it big in anything. I wish you the best of luck. , I’m excited. I listened to the single I’ll, , put a link here in the show notes for anyone, and then, uh, any other links will have available, , your website’s being built. Is that right?

Jonny: 23:28
Yeah. So we’re still working on the website right now. You could just find it off basically all the platforms, but, uh, I’m gonna have it all, all decked out right now. It’s just the social media. You’ll be able to find it on the platform, just Johnny rockz and instead of an S it’s a Z at the end. So for sure, man. Thank you. Huge pleasure. We definitely should do this again. Thanks Phil.

Phil: 23:50
for sure. We definitely, you know what, we’re gonna do a check in with you in like three, six months. I wanna see how things are going.

Jonny: 23:57
Well, let’s talk numbers, baby.

Phil: 23:59
Hopefully you’ll be able to make some time for, for this little lowly podcast.

Jonny: 24:04
Oh, nah, man, this is, I’m telling you, this is you start something, you start somewhere and you started, this is the platform to do it. People are listening, even if it’s 50 to a hundred people, it doesn’t matter. You know, you have someone listening. So hopefully this helps someone else out that’s inspiring and you know, really wants to achieve their goal in the music in.

Phil: 24:23
Pleasure having you on. And we’ll check in with you in a few months.

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

Transcript:

Philip: 0:00
Today we’ve got Wade Carlson on and we’re going to chat about S E O and Marketing.

Phil: 0:11
Wade, how you doing.

Wade: 0:12
I’m doing excellent, man. I’m I’m ready. I’m ready to go. I’ve been looking forward to this. Thanks for having me. How are you,

Phil: 0:17
I’m doing great. I like opening these up with some non SEO non-marketing things. I got a couple of these. They’re called, , interview deck cards and they’re just like random questions. Good little icebreaker. Sometimes the little get to know you , Wade: That’s a great idea. I like that. All right. Here’s my first question. You ready?

Wade: 0:34
yeah, let’s go.

Phil: 0:36
If you could try out a job for a day, just to see if you like it, what job would it be?

Wade: 0:42
Oh, anesthesiologist.

Phil: 0:44
Oh, really? Why is that?

Wade: 0:48
I don’t know. It just sounds like I heard they make a lot of money and it’s just like, not involvement, but it, it’s kind of a precious job, you know what I mean? If you think about it, like, someone’s like, you’re really in a lot of control, which is kind of cool, but we won’t get into that too much.

Phil: 1:00
It’s like the opposite of SEO where you have like no control and you’re just hoping that what you do works. Hopefully an anesthesiologist is not like that. All right. Maybe this might end up being marketing related, but , what’s the oddest job you ever took to earn a buck?

Wade: 1:18
yeah, so I decided to, , go back and start a second career, which maybe will get into another time or whatever. And so I was kind of going to, , a JC junior college and, um, do an Uber on the side. So one day I like pulled out of my driveway and then I got this ding for Uber and it was like, go pick up this box. It was just down the road. So I pick up this box and it’s like, drive it all the way down, you know, south county. And I’m like, that was a good, fair. And I gave it to this lady. He was like, but there was no human being, it was just a box. You know what I mean? So I’m like, what’s in the box. It was nothing exciting. It was just, labels for t-shirts, you

Phil: 1:57
I was gonna say it feels very cast away. Like what’s in the box.

Wade: 2:00
Exactly. So in the boxes, t-shirts or whatever, nothing, you know, incredibly exciting. But I was like asking her, I’m like, Hey, this place is right by my house. You know, how often do you do this trip? She goes like every day, you know, so, I’m like, well, Hey, let’s make a deal. So I kind of struck up a deal to make it a little bit cheaper for her and a little bit more for me. So I kind of did some quick, um, algebra in my head and

Phil: 2:23
there you

Wade: 2:24
to try to figure out. And so I started working for this, , big shot south county t-shirt graphics girl, total superpower influential in south county. So that, that, that was probably the strangest things and, and that turned into driving a lawyer around.

Phil: 2:39
That’s, what’s funny is that it’s all about the network and, um, that’s where you, you get jobs, you know, especially in this industry, it’s not about who, you know, it’s about, who knows you and striking up those conversations and making those connections, I think is huge. And that could be a, a point where you move into a totally different field and it’s because you talk to the person instead of just drop the box off.

Wade: 3:05
yeah, exactly. Exactly. There you go. Hey man, I like that. I like that. Very good.

Phil: 3:10
So this one’s kind of neat. So, so this actually, I think ties into a lot of the stuff I talk about with marketing and, , how you present yourself, but the question’s this what’s the first impression you want to give to people

Wade: 3:24
Like kind, I guess, like, you know, I want people, I wanna come across as kind. I always give, like, I don’t know, I’m a sick person. I kind of give her everyone no matter what, like I give everyone like, you know, a hundred percent points like who you’re cool until. I kind of give people the benefit of the doubt all the time and like treat everyone like a hundred percent and, you know, go from there. so,

Phil: 3:43
And I think this is a big part of what I love about this show is that I can talk to anyone and my original , idea for what I wanted to do with this show was actually to interview what I called the behind the scenes heroes. You never hear about these people, I’ve got a couple friends that work at an agency that basically handles all the SEO for Expedia, but you’re never gonna see them on Twitter or LinkedIn or anything like that. They’re not tweeting out. Look at this case study, look at all this stuff I they’re just working. And these are like the unsung heroes. And I think there’s some merit to talking to the people behind the scenes that aren’t. As visible, but man, they make a huge impact. I know we’ve talked a bit, we used to work together years ago and I thought it would be really interesting to have you on here and talk about some of the things that you had done, what you’re doing now and kind of what you’re seeing with some of the stuff you’re working on. Now. I know you, you were doing man back in the day, right? You were doing E email marketing and today you’re, you’re one of like the lead coordinators with like several agencies where you’re at in an in-house job in telecom. So, , I thought maybe it’d be kind of neat to just hear, , where did you kind of start and how did, how did you even get into marketing?

Wade: 4:59
I started, uh, 2005. I started a, , website, , called band chemistry. And basically it was, I partnered with someone that graduated from a local college that I lived. I found him, he was a techy person. I had an idea to, to match up musicians with each other. And so, um, that was kind of how I got start. I, I figured, you know, started, had to kind of look at it what audiences were and what people want want. Right. I found a, , basically, , a gap in the, the market with that kind of a service because definitely websites are hot. And this is back when Facebook was, you had to have a college email address to, you know, if you can remember that you had

Phil: 5:36
You were still doing my space, especially if you were music related. It was, it was my space, man.

Wade: 5:41
So now, now we’re dating ourselves here talking about my space and

Phil: 5:44
I’ve been doing this. I’ve been doing this way too long

Wade: 5:47
I like it. I like it. Yeah.

Phil: 5:49
but, but that actually brings me to a point and I get this question a lot as people asking, you know, where do I start? And I think you hit it on the head. It’s just start create a website, just do it. And you’re gonna learn along the way you’re gonna go, how do I build a website? And now you’re gonna learn all the intricacies of what goes into a website. How do I get people here? And that’s SEO where it’s paid search or it’s marketing online forums, whatever interjecting in social. It sounds like that’s kind of how you got your, your feet in the door, right?

Wade: 6:21
Yeah. Yeah. It just, um, so, well specifically for that, that project, um, that was more of a, just a passion. I was, I was in the military at the time I was in the coast guard and it was just kind of just something I just wanted to do because I wanted to try to get rich and get out to try to buy my, you know, I was, I was, I was at, up in, uh, stationed up in Northern Michigan and, you know, it was very dark all the time and a lot of snow, which I appreciate that in the Midwest, I’m from the Midwest and stuff, but, you know, I wanted to, to try to fig figure out the next best thing and it just kind of, and I, I did what you just said. I just went, I didn’t think too much about it. I I’d got going. And then I thought as I was going you, can’t just one thing that I’ve learned when you’re starting your own thing is, is you kind of have to. Don’t have everything planned out from like, you know, like a, to Z right off the bat. I mean, know what your goal is, right. Number one. And there’s different roads to get there. So just know where you wanna end up. Right. I wanted to end up with this, and of course in the long run, it didn’t happen, but you know, it was a learning experience. And so therefore that’s valuable. So did I get rich? Well, I got rich of knowledge.

Phil: 7:26
If you are trying to start out at that stage, you can’t plan everything. You don’t know

Wade: 7:32
right.

Phil: 7:33
But if you do as much as you can and you learn along the way and you try this, you try that, try to understand from experts, that’s gonna help you out. And then when you get to the point where you’ve done this enough times, you’ve done it, maybe in agencies, you’ve done it in house. You’re gonna be able to say, well, here’s how I could get someone from start to finish because you’ve been there and you’ve done it. And you know, the most efficient way. And you know what works.

Wade: 7:56
Exactly, exactly. A lot of trial and error. I decided I wanna kind of get out of the electronics and do something different because, , I just like to have energy and be around people and stuff. I thought, what about being a recruiter? So I got stationed out here in, in Los Angeles, around, uh, 2006. That was my first kind of introduction to real marketing. Cause I kind of take courses through the coast guard that was put on, , and to learn how to do sales and sales and marketing strategies and creating a marketing plan. So I continued my military career and then, , I made a pivot, , into, , aerospace. I worked at space X a while, again, doing the techy stuff. But, um, from there I, I decided to leave aerospace. I went to school full time.

Phil: 8:35
One of my last interviews, one of our big discussion points was talking about transitioning between verticals. So going from real estate to telecom, what have you seen as something that you absolutely was able to bring over and anything that you said , Hey, this just doesn’t work for telecom, maybe worked in real estate.

Wade: 8:56
Yeah, that’s a super good question, Phil. Because I, I was just actually kind of thinking about that too, I would say that one thing that’s similar that you can kind of carry with marketing in general and, you know, to include a course SEO, is that the, it doesn’t matter what for SEO specifically, it doesn’t matter what the site is to start with. Like Google friendly site is for anything. Right. And so that it doesn’t matter if it’s ma a green tea or some, you know, boutique, fitness, mom and pop, whatever, you know, um, but start with just the overall optimization, right? Where it gets a little bit, a little bit unique, but it’s still the same keyword research is all done the same, whether we’re whatever we’re research you’re in. So those things, keyword research and structuring and stuff, but there’s. You know, other things nuances and so forth with, between different businesses, different as you say the verticals. For instance, , eCommerce, right? That’s a whole different game. So you’re, you’re updating pages regularly, right? In an eCommerce, you’re selling a physical product on a website and you’re dealing with a high website volume, uh, for a major telecom telecommunications company and have a, a pretty wide, uh, Product line in depth takes a lot more communication. I think when, when you have those website updates and someone knowing who your key players are to get the messaging through the brand people and through the, the leadership, whoever the leadership of product is, or whatever that may be, and try to, portray that message out there that, you know, give your, best advice for SEO for this new page that has to be published in three days. So you have to stand your toes a lot more for sure. You know what I mean? Uh, other other ones it’s more heavier on the blogs, so it’s more like researching blogs now. , I’ve had, , some companies where that was a, like the primary source of organic lead generation was strictly just informational,

Phil: 10:46
I think you touched on this and, and maybe we could dive a little more into that, but , what about the measurement side of things, from a real estate standpoint, we’re talking long transaction timeframe, lower volume for a specific, let’s call it product because you’re not getting, you know, 10,000 people looking for the same one item from a telecom perspective, know? so how are you having to look at things a little bit differently? The way you’re measuring things are different.

Wade: 11:17
The bottom line is it’s gotta be changed constantly. Again, they, the management will in leadership, no matter what industry you’re in, really, but they’ll always just change kind of like the goal from like, oh, we’re gonna, you know, oh, scratch that project. You know, we’re not gonna do that anymore. You know what I mean? So you gotta be like so adaptable and, as far as like measuring things, it’s more frequent.

Phil: 11:39
Oh, yeah.

Wade: 11:40
you know what I mean?

Phil: 11:41
daily. Hourly. Yeah.

Wade: 11:42
a daily hourly if you’re, you know, definitely I haven’t, I haven’t been that, you know, not definitely not hourly for me yet. Think God, but, I haven’t, it’s not that intense for me because , I’m working with different agencies are kind of in the SEO mix a little bit too, as I got kind of some people keeping the, keeping the Google watch and the Adobe watch for me too. So

Phil: 11:59
you talked earlier about, a passion project, musicians, connecting them, things like that. What do you got going on now? What’s what’s your latest passion project you’re working on? , Wade: Yeah, a couple I’m helping, uh, somebody write a blog for a, a spiritual rehabilitation sort of. So I’m actually kind of doing, uh, just some interesting work, just researching, um, anything from like the, you know, uh, how, how, how to get better, like mentally and so forth all the way from that to some working with some boutiques, some fitness boutiques, , I’ve done, some, design labels for, , uh, pomade company for a barber. So I helped this, , local barber. He made out a killer Pade it’s called player’s choice. And, He did a great job with it. You know what I mean? So we’re just keeping our price points pretty low. I think it’s just like 12 bucks right now. So I’ve been in like, like the cosmetic beauty industry. If we’re talking about work, well, I do have that sound cheesy, but like the, the work projects are kind of passion products because I found , some projects that could definitely, , definitely help out. And it’s, it’s really helping, , some of our retail stores but definitely there’s a retail stores that sell our product and, some issues with their breaking in the three pack. Actually, it’s kind of a good segue if I can kind of get into like the local SEO, um, because that’s actually kind of, kind of part of, you know, what I’ve been working on the most. I would say most of my clients it’s somewhat on the local side, for sure. So, you know, like 46%, I just found this out 46% searches are for local businesses. That’s a big chunk. Okay. And 88% of those people, guess what? 88% of those people will visit the business or call within 24 hours. All right. I got some good stat. I spent, uh, yeah, I spent probably up until kind of the recent gig. I spent the last 5, 6, 7 years mostly focused on local and usually a business. That’s got a 10 mile radius of customers and it’s an ever changing field. And Google is doing a lot of changes from the way they handle the Google profiles, formerly Google my business to how they handle ads to adding ads where there weren’t ads before to map searches to how they handle reviews. I mean, you name it. They’ve made probably the most changes that I’ve seen within algorithms have been based on local. What are you seeing? That’s the biggest impacts or biggest changes with Google right now? When it comes to local?

Wade: 14:37
Yeah. So definitely. There’s usually like a stack of about four or five things that I kind of look at. Uh, number one thing is on your business page, on your, you know, so-called Google my business page GMB page for short, um, is all the information accurate. So if you’re open from eight to five and it’s on Monday through Friday and it’s on your Google business page, you have to be manned. Means that someone has to be on the phone or able to answer or phone call or someone has to be inside the store, basically providing a good or service or whatever that may

Phil: 15:09
yeah. Google started calling.

Wade: 15:11
Yes.

Phil: 15:11
call to quote, verify hours and they’ll call during those hours just to make sure that someone picks up. And if someone doesn’t, they may remove that day as a day that you’re open. And then when people are searching, you don’t get shown because why would you show a place that’s not open when you’re gonna be visiting that day or the next day

Wade: 15:30
exactly. Exactly. So big brothers watching. We know that is so

Phil: 15:34
calling and listening.

Wade: 15:36
and calling and listening and all the above, for sure. So I would say, with accuracy too, I think that’s a good kind of segue into, um, the actual listing of your address. Okay. So if you’re at 1 23 main street and you abbreviate street, S T right. And you’re in suite 1 0 1, right. Suite S U I T E. Right. Okay. So it has to be spelled the same on every other place that you have your business listed. Why would you have your business listed? On other websites or for other locations, other directories, well, local citations as these are called , these listings, , will give credibility to your site and help you rise in the three pack. Okay. And the three pack is, you just wanna be in the top three, cuz when you Google for a local business near you like cell phones, , electric bicycles or whatever it may be. Um, you know, the, the, the best ones will show up in the top three, but because yours does not show up in the top three does not mean you’re not the best. You know what it means. It means that you might be further away. So because distance is factored and so Google will attempt to. Do it by distance. So as you’re close, closer, you should rank higher. So if you’re a three star business and you are five minutes away and some other business is an hour away. Right. A competing business is an hour away. The one that’s hour away, even though it has better, let’s say if it had better reviews, it shouldn’t be showing. It’s like most people don’t go to page two on Google, right? So on a regular, uh, Google SERP, but, um, So with the off page citations, um, you know, you having the address, the same is very, um, important and then on top of that, you have Google reviews, right. And these things are all on, you know, like the reviews, the address, everything is on this, your Google business page. The reviews do wave very heavily on the local pack. , and sometimes reviews are outta control, but there are some things that you can’t control.

Phil: 17:40
Google wants you to respond too as a business owner. That’s another thing that’s really important is to take the time to reply. And I think what most people appreciate is seeing replies to negative reviews and getting that other side of the story. Sometimes those are the best reviews I was doing , some research when I was doing a lot more local SEO. And one of the things we were trying to understand was why some of our Google, my business pages were actually coming up with specific keywords. When we had never put that on the site, we had never put it in the description, things like that. And what we found was that if that content was in the review and especially if it’s in several reviews that Google would pick up on it. The example I was using was. Restaurants that were pet friendly. And we had a few of them that were nearby that were pet friendly, but they never once mentioned it on their site. When you Googled for pet friendly restaurants near me, those would show up because people in the review said, and it was great that we were able to bring our pets because it was a pet friendly, something like that. And because they’d used that phrasing in the review there not only did their Google, my business page rank, but their website was also ranking. And so they got the benefit of that. They tied them together because of course you’re linking to it. And so these restaurants were ranking for words, that when you go to their site and you know, there are five pages on some of these sites. They never once said pet, dog friendly, anything like that. And yet they were ranking for it.

Wade: 19:18
That’s incredible. I mean, uh, it doesn’t surprise me, but I think that’s like the next thing is people are listening.

Phil: 19:24
So I think local SEO has changed a lot in the last few years, and I continue to expect Google to focus on that. Especially as more and more people shift to mobile. I mean, what was it four or five years ago? When not everything was mobile friendly and Google basically put their foot down and said, everything’s gotta be mobile friendly. Everything’s gotta be on a secure site. Everything’s got to X, Y, Z. Now we’ve gotten to the point where everyone has location services turned on. Most people are logged into a Google account. What is it? Something like 80% of people at any point are logged into a Google account. So Google knows where you’re at. They know what you’re doing, and these searches, so many of them are just local based. And I think we’re just gonna continue to see that as an area of optimization that Google pushes. Google’s got so many phones connected and logged in with location services on, they know what store you’re in and for how long you’ve been there. They know average wait times how long you sat, how long it took you to eat and those, those graphs that you see when you search for a restaurant they’re surprisingly accurate.

Wade: 20:33
It’s definitely useful, especially like getting a haircut, you know what I mean? Um, you know, there’s certain, definitely avoiding Fridays payday before holidays and stuff. So definitely all that data on Google is extremely having that up to date, , and everything and accurate. and with the reviews and you get those bad ones really important. I really wanna drive this one. Home is, uh, is the way you. Bond to the review actually matters. Okay. Because they’re also looking at people reading the reviews. Right. Okay. Because most of those people that read the reviews are gonna take some sort of action. Okay. , but most people do read the reviews, when you’re addressing a review, that’s negative, you want to address specifically in the text, what the issue is. Okay. So what you’re hoping to do is reconnect with that person that you lost. Right. And try to get them broke back in somehow.

Phil: 21:19
Those replies will make or break a negative review and people, people wanna see that what’s interesting is, , people will seek out the negative reviews too, because they don’t trust all the positive reviews and they wanna see what are these negatives? Are they legitimate negatives or is it just someone who’s got a bad attitude and what was the response?

Wade: 21:41
That’s where it will be revealed. You know what I mean is how, how are the business Handl? There’s sometimes there’s just something like, I like those businesses, those local businesses that actually put, like, it’s gonna be a weight, it’s worth the weight. I love those things,

Phil: 21:52
you know, and that could piss a lot of people off, but if they’re gonna stand by quality, I’m always for that.

Wade: 21:58
Yeah. Yeah. I hear that. I mean, qu definitely that’s, um, you know, value and quality and, you know, there’s certain things I’m willing to, uh, to pay for and deal with and certain things I’m not, and that’s what makes individuals unique. And that’s that business’s job to determine who’s willing to wait or pay for this kind of stuff. You know what I mean? My e-bike, I waited eight weeks for my e-bike.

Phil: 22:19
couple months.

Wade: 22:20
and I didn’t hose them with the review and they said it was gonna be three weeks, but it took a lot longer. But, but then I got, I got up a bike and I rode. And it’s like the best thing ever. I wrote ’em an email and I was so enthusiastic about it. And they’re like, so Stok and they want me, so I’ve been working on speaking of passion projects, like, you know, working on a review video, just me and my, bicycle and stuff. So I’m kind of gathering some footage and different stuff on, on that. Cause I wanna send them something they really Tru, like, I really love the bicycle, you know, when I get passionate about something like I’m like all I’m all, all for it. So

Phil: 22:49
And from a marketing standpoint, I’ve got a little story here about something similar. So I, I was doing some work with real estate photography, and I was working with this company that had this little piece of hardware and some software, and it was just beautiful, just completely well done. Well thought out great price point better than the competitors, you know, small in the market. Didn’t quite have the market share. I connected with the CEO on LinkedIn and basically said, Hey, you have a great product. I love it. Just wanted to let you know, want to be connected and feel free to reach out if you’ve got any questions on how I’m using it. Fast forward, I ended up doing multiple projects for them. Video testimonials ended up actually being basically a brand ambassador for them and it was money. I mean, it was a job. It was paid. Consulting work because they wanted to know how people in the field were using it. And then the network that I have of other people using their product. And it was a real great win-win, but it also was something great for me because it got me some new connections. It also opened my eyes to the other side of the business. And overall, I could have walked into working for that company down the road if I wanted to, it opens doors. And so the same kind of thing that you’re doing, you never know down the road where they go, you know, we actually loved what you did with that testimonial. Is that something we could hire you to do for other people who bought them? Because we wanna create something bigger and that’s just a whole new avenue. So I always say, you know, make sure if you’re gonna do something, like go for it, do it right. If you’re gonna get wet, go swimming. I wanna talk a little bit about what you’re doing now and how you’ve actually transitioned a bit from going client side, working with everyone in house to then client side, but working with agencies as partners I’ve talked to a couple people in, in similar type situations what about on the other side, you’re managing agencies right now. What are your biggest pain points, but what are also the positives.

Wade: 24:56
Yeah, so, well, I think it’s, it’s good to have, like, you know, second sets of eyes. It’s good to have people around that to do the things that you don’t wanna do. especially, you know, I hate to say it, but it is like, you know, so for things like, , I like to have, agencies that I work with, do things like, , analytics and, , recreate dashboards for me make, PowerPoint presentations, , the stuff, because I’m, I’m not really having most of them that I’m working with two different agencies because we have a big migration going on and that’s a very, , very intense process. And of all, there’s a lot of moving parts and with anything else, but this is a big company and stuff. And so we got two different agencies saying different things, so communication challenge, um, and that’s where you gotta rope ’em up and, you know, have a weekly, you know, meeting with mine. And, you know, we sit down and. Talking is funny. It’s like sometimes they’re, you know, they have some good points and sometimes I, like, I know we’re right on our side because we’re, we live in house and we see this stuff and we, we got the latest information. Right. So that’s the benefit of being an in-house SEO is you have a quick, you have more channels than they do, and they’re working on other projects. So yeah, they’re working on telecom company, like Bob’s telecom company. Right. But you know, they’re doing like, Barbara’s gym, you know what I mean? And then, and then, so is their head in the, in the Bob’s, you know what I mean, all the time is there is, is, are they always focused on us now? So I would say those are definitely the, you know, the, the pros and the pros and cons,

Phil: 26:26
what I think’s neat about agencies. And, and I think you kind of touched on it though, is yeah, they’re working on, you know, this site and that site, they can be all over the place, but that also can add something that you miss out when your client site, and you’re so focused on your one vertical that you potentially miss out on this whole other thing, going on with Google, where they’re, you know, focusing on all of this extra stuff that maybe no one else in your industry is doing and they can bring into it. And so it makes you now a leader because you’re doing something totally different than anyone else was simply because it wasn’t being done in the vertical.

Wade: 27:06
Yeah, exactly. again, here’s another positive, you know, what I mean is, with the second set of eyes, you got people that have worked in other industries and things seen things work and not work, and they might have a good eye for competitive. As well. So you have to Harbor that too. So you can’t like go in like, you know what I learned for like, you know, leader, like where things are different, where they is the same. I mean, it goes for everything, right? again, you gotta take, you gotta take the things that, that people know and the people that are good at, and they got those, one girl from one agency. I mean, she’s, she’s been in, um, I think the automobile industry, the, and a few other ones and stuff. And so we’re not the auto industry, but she’s told us a few things, you know, about what attracts people. Right. And about segmenting the audience. Okay. Segmentation is the same practice, no matter where you go, right. But, so segmentation’s gonna be the same, you’re grouping up people and figure out what they’re asking for and what their problems are. Not only just what they need, but what they like about something. And you gotta kind of keep that momentum, that retention going. Right. So.

Phil: 28:11
Yeah. And, and the neat thing with agencies is like you had just said, you know, you find someone that’s been in a different vertical, but they know some specific fundamentals that you can apply, but what’s great is when you find someone and they’ve got a different vertical, but it has a similar like sales cycle or a similar type of audience, you know, maybe it’s that, , someone in the 18 to 35 with, you know, expendable income and, you’re selling not a luxury product, but it’s a high end product. And , you know, this is how we were able to market. This is how we were able to find that person. And it’s probably the same,

Wade: 28:50
exactly, exactly.

Phil: 28:52
So at the beginning, we were talking a little bit about how to get started. You talked about how you got started. I wanna hear what kind of advice do you have for people who wanna get into this industry into marketing, maybe SEO, specifically.

Wade: 29:06
Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. Um, because you know, marketing again, I explained is like, you know, a lot of different things, you know what I mean? So, you know, wanting to go to, into marketing, that’s gonna be the step one. Okay. That’s fine. So I would say, if you’re someone that’s in college or, um, or someone shifting careers or whatever, transitioning from the military or whatever that may be, , you know, when you get an internship or that first entry level job, it’s always good to choose one. I think that kind of gets you exposed to the full marketing suite. And that way you can kinda get a taste of, oh, this is what HTML is. This is what, how to write a blog. This is, um, how we do lead generation. This is what a form is. This is how the form works. This is how we a UTM, you know, all that stuff is important language to learn in marketing. Once you have experience with all the little different things, you can figure out like what you’re good at and what you like, and hopefully do both, right? Because I’ve done things in marketing that I didn’t like so much. And then I’ve done things that I really, really love. And sometimes they’re vastly different. I like SEO because , , it’s on the technical side and it’s facing technology and bridging that gap in between, , brand marketers and messaging and, and working with the engineers to get that implemented, to make a Google friendly site. And so I would say if you find that one thing that you’d love to do triple down on thing, don’t spend too much time trying to be good at something you’re not, but if you’re a person with decent technical ability and, uh, someone for an I for what you, if you can imagine yourself in a customer journey and imagine yourself being that consumer asking question and wanna find the answer, I think you’d be a terrific SEO. That’d be my, my advice.

Phil: 30:41
That’s awesome. Yeah. I think one of the things that you can do is look really carefully at where you’re interning or where your first job. And remember it’s about getting your foot in the door. If you can get into an agency and I, I advocate the hell out of this, get into an agency that’s across a bunch of different verticals that does everything, and you are gonna be exposed to some of the best people in the industry. They’re gonna let you work on stuff, help create reports, help do analytics, help do research, use some of the most cutting edge tools and have access to data. What I think I got most out of, one of the first agencies I worked at was that I had access to so much information that I was able to learn more. I was looking in Google analytics accounts that were already built out that had all the events, all the funnels, everything already built out where I could jump in there and do analysis and really actually look at something it’s one thing to have a site that gets a couple hundred visits a month, and, you know, a couple people can completely throw off your stats to one where you’re getting a million visits a month and you can really start looking at how things affect each other. What kinds of SEO impacts happen? Your paid impacts all of that and really understanding what happens when you change things and how, uh, users interact with the site.

Wade: 32:05
Yeah, exactly. So, um, you know, so having your SEO, um, you know, experience your first couple years, hopefully you have like a well rounded idea of like both like the technical side and, , you know, on the, like the, you know, keyword research side pretty much have like the whole puzzle piece figured out because some companies will, um, want to hire SEOs that know how to code a landing page or something like that. You see what I’m saying? So learning as much as you can about SEO will get you where you wanna be financially. I’m sure of it. You know what I mean? Um, I think the most dangerous SEO out there is the SEO with literally HTML powers. And not only that someone that can fight the good fight in the company. And, um, and then that takes someone that’s diplomatic. So if you are all those things and, and knowledgeable and have maybe some certifications and stuff, and if you have those things and you can do code. Which I wouldn’t say I’m a coder. Definitely not. But, um, but if you can code, oh man, you’d be unstoppable because then you get people in the tech world, in the product team and stuff and the, and so forth. And they’re looking for an SEO just to look at your technical stuff, to actually do the redirects, or actually put the canonical tags on there. So I think there’s a good opportunity for visibility being an SEO, because you’re talking to those, the people within your company that are very important and, and that, and you get recognized, for that sort of thing.

Phil: 33:34
I think a lot of people are, are maybe, maybe newer, maybe been in a few years, we’ve got some seasoned people that listen to this. And so I always like to give that kind of advice because I think it’s pertinent for anybody when they’re looking in their career and saying, you know, what is it that I can do to level up my career? And I think you touched on some great points. You really, you end up talking to some really influential and important people and don’t be afraid to talk to other people and other teams and not just. The developers, you could talk to the team leads and talk about high level ideas and ask them, you know, what kinds of things would that take? Let’s set some meetings, let’s have some discussions and don’t forget that a lot of these guys that do development work don’t know SEO at all. And so if you know, SEO take that time to do some trainings. And now all of a sudden you’re a subject matter expert. And when they’re looking for someone that they wanna bring into maybe a higher level role in that, or in other companies, you’ve got recommendations. Cuz they’re like that guy knows what he’s talking about.

Wade: 34:33
Oh, absolutely. Uh, yeah, some other advice too, is like, as you’re applying for SEO jobs, I mean, before your interview, you best believe you better have done an audit, you know, or something, you know what I mean? So figure out what you can do to try to, you know, I don’t necessarily have to go and audit, you know, a hundred pages or anything that, what I’m saying is, is like, you know, have a good idea of where their opportunities are and by opportunities, I mean is where they’re effing it up or whatever. So, um, you. Yeah. So look beyond the lookout, um, you know, check ’em out, find, and then make recommendations. Right. So have specific recommendations and, but don’t shoot yourself in a foot because I’ve known people that have, um, that have, you know, given too much advice in an interview and not getting the job because they felt they had enough to sail away with, you know what I mean? Uh, without, so they were probably actually interviewing SEOs just to try to get information. They were getting free consulting

Phil: 35:24
If you’re going through to like a fortune 500 company, there may be a reason why that’s not working the way you would expect it to you go, why don’t you have your X, Y, Z canonicals or ATF Langs, or the way your robots text is set up. You might go, you guys are doing it wrong. It may not be because they’re doing it wrong. There may be a business decision for that. and those automated audits as great as they are. And you pull that information, you go look, your site maps, aren’t in your robots text. It’s like, yeah. That’s because we don’t want our competitors to know a list of every single one of our pages. And that’s how they’re gonna scrape all the content from our site. And so you might say, well, you guys are doing it wrong. They go, actually, we’re doing that on purpose. So you wanna be really careful about how you position and say, well, best practices would say to do this. And I noticed that you guys aren’t doing that. That’s a better way to approach it than you guys are doing your SEO wrong. And I would come in and fix it and you know what? They may go, no, you can’t. Our system can’t accommodate that and it’ll never get done.

Wade: 36:31
I always say, I always start off by what they’re doing. Right. You know what I mean? I say, oh, I see you do this and do that. You know, be you gotta beetic you gotta, in a way you gotta kind of be like, well, you know, you did this good and stuff and I get it, but you know, think about this way. This is what you gotta, you gotta look at is they’re hiring something for a reason, be flattered. So if they do select you, if you get hired, if you went through and you did your homework on, ’em do your homework and they hire you, even though there might be like, oh, they didn’t do this. And don’t that take it as a compliment to you. Don’t look at it like, oh my God, these people are, are messing everything up, just look at it. Like they did a business case. They need help because they recognize they had a problem, good on them. Another thing too, is like, you’re gonna get larger companies. You’re gonna get some vice president of let’s just say product and then a vice president of brand. And they’re disagreeing with SEO, vice president of marketing. Doesn’t think that we need SEO. Vice president of brand thinks they need SEO. Right. And then, so there’s conflict and then you gotta be able to be like, well, you, everyone does need SEO. The website does, besides that. Right. The website needs to be optimized for Google. We need a Google friendly site. And then do we wanna start thinking about what the intention is? Like, what kind of organic traffic do we in our drive? Do we wanna retain, do we wanna, have reoccurring customers, and that people that can work in an account and, and pay their bill or whatever it may be, or do we wanna get new organic traffic? And what page should we optimize for first? It shouldn’t be the page. That necessarily has the most traffic, but it should be the page that you want people to land on. You know what I mean? And, it’s so much more, you get these people that say like, oh, I know SEO is, you know, like, and you can’t watch a YouTube video and no, you gotta do things like listen to your podcast, Phil. , , that’s, I think that’s step number one, listen to a good podcast, watch some YouTube videos, take some co course work, be a good diplomat, be nice to your clients. And you definitely know more than them so remember that, remember that, but be humble about it because you wanna get more customers, right? You don’t want them to feel stupid, and then if you’re in the corporate setting or whatever, you don’t want your marketing director to feel stupid either

Phil: 38:34
I was thinking of an example that, that you get yourself into, and if you’re doing keyword research and you see one of the most search terms is company X versus company, Y in your company X and maybe it’s or it’s product. , if you’re thinking phones, it’s Android first iPhone, or, or, you know, X, Y, and Z. You’re gonna have a fight because you wanna create that page and you wanna say, here’s our pros and cons. Here’s why we’re better. you’re gonna have a battle between your VPs, your product, your marketing, , your brand, because they’re all gonna have different opinions on even having a competitor’s name on your site. And so those are the kinds of things that you start learning to navigate as you just progress in the industry and in your career more. And also when you start being able to pull that data and saying, this is why we need it, because every single one of those, , VPs is going to say, if the data supports it, then I can get behind it, but the data’s gotta support it. And you’ve gotta be able to show a return on it.

Wade: 39:40
So data doesn’t always, okay, so that’s a source of truth, right.

Phil: 39:47
Hopefully

Wade: 39:48
looking at, data’s not really a person. So when you are a consumer and you’re, I wanna give an example, you know, who did marketing well? Is that Dr. Squa? You know, talking about that soap, it’s like this bar soap and it’s fancy soap and it’s expensive and it’s a subscription because we know we need more subscriptions. Yeah. So they’re so basically they’re, um, creating a problem, right. Is people smell. And , and basically they just did such a good job overall, like all together, you know, with, with everything, you know, in their marketing, from like how they executed, like the video and they’re, they’re looking like, well, why, what attracts me about this product? And what can we do to get people and stuff? You know what I mean? So you can’t just look at like the number. I mean, you can look at like how well a video is doing or something like that, but you know, when you’re a consumer or something, and you’re looking at a product and especially watching, like, you know, I’ve ever seen a focus group before, but watching people’s reactions and stuff, that stuff. But, but, so, okay. So, so it is, is a, is a focus group giving data. I mean, they are right. Um, you know, they write what they write is

Phil: 40:56
Yeah. I mean, it depends on how many you’ve got, you got an end of five and it’s like two or three of ’em can completely change a direction of a company to me. That’s crazy.

, Wade: 41:05
I guess what I’m trying to, what I’m trying to unpack this into is basically there’s qualitative data and quantitative data.

Phil: 41:14
Yep.

Wade: 41:15
So the managers want quantitative data, right? Think about quantity or count. Right. And then you’ll remember this in statistics clause. and then you got qualitative data. It’s like, is it pink? Is it red? Is it blue? Right. Okay. Well, I wanna know if these people are happy, said, or angry. Okay. Now this is something that you need your boots on the ground for people. So your manager wants the numbers, but you know, your boots on the ground, your SEO, people listening for the social noise, your social media people, your Google ads, people, your

Phil: 41:42
You’re sales

Wade: 41:43
gen, your sales people. That’s okay. That that’s the best one, right? There is. They’re the ones that are listening. Right. So that’s a good, and that leads me to another thing too, is, is that’s a great stakeholder to go in and to meet as your, when you’re an SEO your first day, you know, but when you’re done with all your HR stuff or whatever you gotta do is like, I wanna talk to the sales director, the marketing director, the, you know, I like all the, like the it director, product director, like, you know, you get, get to know these people and because I’ll think about you next time, you know what I mean? They’re having SEO, they’re gonna think about you.

Phil: 42:16
When we’re talking about, let’s say a focus group or who you think you are, you know how to market to someone, you know, you go back to something like Dos Equis and you’ve got the most interesting man in the world, right?

Wade: 42:30
this example.

Phil: 42:31
Okay. So is he even close to the demographic? No. Does he push the beer? He says, what, what is his catch phrase? Do you remember? I

Wade: 42:42
Uh, so I don’t always fear, but when I

Phil: 42:44
when I do

Wade: 42:45
it’s but when I do so yeah.

Phil: 42:48
how interesting is that? So it’s a commercial for beer and the guy’s like, I don’t always drink beer and he’s not even near the demographic. He’s probably 30, 40 years older than who they’re going after. And yet that was like one of the most successful beer campaigns and it lasted for years and it’s still like one of the most quoted one. Think about that, that was out of the box. And there’s no way that anyone could have come in with data and said, Hey, if we get a guy that’s in his sixties and says, I don’t really drink beer a lot, but I do like Dos Equis that that would be successful. You wouldn’t have been able to find data on that, but they went for it because they were being very creative. And then the data showed that that worked

Wade: 43:34
That works. When you’re done, it’s just like, you gotta repeat, you can’t like optimize something to do your research or whatever, and then call it good and move on to the next thing you have to reevaluate. Right. So you have to like, look back and then look at that quantitative data. Right. So we got the qualitative stuff and yeah, I like that a lot, um, in, and I’m glad you brought him up too,

Phil: 43:53
His name’s Jonathan Goldsmith started in 2006 and went through 2016. He retired.

Wade: 44:03
Hmm. Wow. So this is fairly recently,

Phil: 44:07
This is the sales strategy. Okay. So I’m pulling this from Wikipedia and this is what they’re saying, the sales strategy and the results. The agency’s rationale for the brand strategy was defined as he is a man rich in stories and experiences much the way the audience hopes to be in the future rather than embodiment of the brand. The most interesting man is a voluntary brand spokesperson. He and Dos Equis share a point of view on life that it should be lived. Interestingly, according to the company, us sales increased each year between 2006 and 2010 tripled in Canada in 2008. Sales of Dos Equis are said to have increased by 22% at a time when other imported beers fell by 4% Goldsmith said in an interview that he realized how successful the campaign had been. When a man came up to an, a restaurant telling Goldsmith that the man had asked his young son what he wanted to be when he grew up and the son replied, I wanna be the most interesting man in the world. Okay. How is that? How’s that?

Wade: 45:09
Yeah, you got a reaction. You got a reaction

Phil: 45:12
so think about that. So this is, this is an advertisement and like they said, this is not the guy that that’s drinking this, , but they really went for that aspirational aspect and they always end with stay thirsty of my friends He doesn’t drink beer all the time. He doesn’t drink beer all the time. So he is not even like a beer drinker. He’s not your buddy’s drinking beer and that’s what he’s always going for. But he’ll drink Dos Equis.

Wade: 45:35
That’s I, I know I love it. And I was starting to think about what this really means and like, okay. So it’s kind of a slice of life, right? And he’s not really the buyer persona

Phil: 45:46
all right. So Goldsmith landed the Dos Equis gig by auditioning for the role. Okay. Auditioners were given the ending line and that’s how I arm wrestled Fidel Castro and then asked to improvise. Goldsmith began as auditioned by removing one sock and then improvised for 30 minutes before reaching the concluding line. The character was inspired by his deceased sailing partner and friend Fernando Lamas. , and from what I heard, this guy’s lived such a crazy life. That part of his improv was actually just telling stories and they just bought into it and said, this is the guy. And they decided we’re gonna put this guy in all these crazy situations. And at the end. It’s basically he’s drinking a beer, stay thirsty, my friends, totally out of the box, but let’s be honest. It, it makes sense because it’s aspirational, but it’s not the demo. And when we’re talking about SEO and things like that and marketing, like you said, we have to really think about what the data is we’re getting. And are we just doing the same damn thing over and over? Cuz we’re just looking at the same data or is there something else? Can we look at things in just a totally different way and try something completely different and see how the results are? Because 22% increase in sales when everyone else had a 4% decline and that was over something like four or five years.

Wade: 47:10
Yeah, that was a very adventurous and bold move, yeah. Again, there was listening involved there, right? I mean, there was a lesson to be learned there and it was about, about listening and, and seeing and looking, you know what I mean? And using your senses rather

Phil: 47:26
standing out from the crowd

Wade: 47:29
there you go,

Phil: 47:30
everyone else was doing the sex sells.

Wade: 47:33
thing. Oh

Phil: 47:33
it was, and this was different and this was, this was storytelling. That was the thing I liked most is it was storytelling. You got engaged in that 30 second ad. And you wanted to know, like, what was this guy doing? And at the end, he’s just drinking a beer. That

Wade: 47:50
yeah, yeah. It’s it. The, I just love the simplicity of that. You know, or whatever, but yeah, this is a lot of interesting things to talk about, but again, you know what I mean, go out there and listen, I like to look at, um, you know, other than everyone looks at, you know, social media and TikTok, if that applies, if you’re in the TikTok kind of audience, crowd or whatever, but I like to look at, uh, Google trends, um, you know, definitely, and to get some kind of regional data and find out what people kind of wear and stuff with my current company, I was checking it out and, you know, I was finding like, uh, potential for new markets in like Chicago and, uh, new markets in Louisiana I’m seeing more people asking the question that we’re trying to answer,

Phil: 48:27
So we talked a lot about how you got started, how you moved around all of that. And I think there’s some great advice for someone who’s really interested in SEO, especially some of the things that are going on with local and just what you can do with your career and how things are changing. What kinds of things can give you that technical edge. So really appreciate you coming on any parting words that you’ve got for the audience out there.

Wade: 48:51
Always be looking for the next best thing. Definitely. Um, and, and don’t forget to read a book , you know what I mean? There’s still power to that, so,

Phil: 49:00
Always, always, and stay thirsty. My

Wade: 49:03
yeah. Thanks for having me, Phil. Appreciate it.

Phil: 49:05
you got it.

On today’s show, I wanted to talk briefly about a free tool called ahrefs. Many of you have probably already heard of them, but I’m not sure if everyone knows they have a free version you can use by connecting your Google Search Console data. It allows those specific sites to have access to some features in ahrefs.

Go to https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools and you can sign up there.
Let me know what you think!

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

Contact Ryan 
Website: https://slickettsdigital.com/ or on 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Slicketts

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

I’ll start off by saying you can rank any site with any domain name. Within reason. Names should be memorable and easy to remember, and that isn’t an SEO thing.

Listen on to get an idea of why you don’t need an exact match domain, and why it is better to consider the branding aspect than a descriptive aspect of your domain.

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

What I found is that on its own, many times AI content can rank, however it typically does need some human intervention in order to rank well. It also needs manual human copy editing in order to sound right.
In my testing, for best results, a piece of content that is anywhere from 75%-80% AI generated will still rank well.

This podcast was recorded before the “helpful content” update from Google, but my opinions have not changed. AI content can create good content, though much of it isn’t going to be groundbreaking or new, it can pull ideas and concepts together into a single article that is useful for a user.

On this podcast article, I wanted to talk about AI content and my tests on its success as a viable option for creating content that ranks on search engines.

I’ll start with some background on the latest publicly available AI system, an example output that I pick apart, some additional example outputs, and then my opinion on how to utilize an AI system to write content.

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

Background on the latest publicly available AI system:

First, a little background on where most of the AI content is coming from:

GPT-3 is the model that Open AI allows access to. It is the latest publicly available AI tool that you can use for content. Go ahead to their site @ openai.com – I’ve used several 3rd party tools that interface with GPT-3, as well as working directly within their API.

So, what is GPT-3?

GPT-3 is a text completion endpoint that allows users to input text prompts and receive generated text completions. The API is powered by a set of models with different capabilities and price points. In a nutshell, GPT-3 takes an input text and gives you output text. This can be in many forms depending on your input instructions.

• You can provide the tool several paragraphs and ask it to summarize.
• You can provide sample sentences and ask it to continue the content.
• You can provide a single sentence and ask it to write a paragraph or more.
• You can provide it a sentence with a sentiment label, and ask it to label additional sentences.
• You can provide the tool a topic and ask it to create a list of ideas or requirements.
• Use it to generate REGEX code even
• You can have it write a poem or creative story based on a single prompt.

It’s all based on what you want it to output, you put it in an instruction set.

There are 4 main engines for GPT-3, which have different characteristics and costs associated.

Starting from the most capable, but also the most expensive:

1. Davinci – Davinci is the most capable engine and can perform any task the other models can perform. This includes tasks such as summarization for a specific audience and creative content generation. However, Davinci requires more compute resources, so it costs more per API call and is not as fast as the other engines.
2. Curie – The Curie model is best used for tasks that require complex classification, text sentiment, summarization, and answering questions. The Curie model is powerful and fast, making it a good choice for tasks that require these capabilities. It’s often used for chatbots and generated Q&A.
3. Babbage – The Babbage model is best used for tasks such as moderate classification and semantic search classification.
4. Ada – The Ada model is best used for tasks that don’t require too much nuance, such as parsing text, address correction, and simple classification tasks.

Here’s a very simple example use case: I’ve downloaded reviews from yelp and put them in the test set directory. I run the AI as a sentiment analyzer where it will classify each post based on language used. The sentiment analyzer would know which words in the review indicate positive or negative sentiment. From there, we can then use the tool to create responses based on sentiment. For positive, we can feel confident that it can thank and praise. For negative sentiment we may want to have a customer service rep actually step in and look into the issue further.

You can build this into your own toolset with API integration to nearly automate positive feedback, while delegating negative feedback responses to a human. You can even enlist the AI to help write the feedback to the negative feedback, however these cases tend to be better handled by a human as you may need to research or follow up with the reviewer.

Most of you probably want to know how can you use GPT-3 to help write blogs?

• Help come up with ideas for blogs
• Research for blogs
• Draft and revise blogs
• Write catchy headlines for your blog posts.
• Write engaging introductions to your blog posts.
• Write thought-provoking conclusions to your blog posts.
• Help simplify or summarize ideas into easier to read sentences.

You can use GPT-3 for many uses, such as topic ideation, which is what I tend to use it for the most. If you have a certain subject or topic that you want to cover, but don’t know how many angles or ideas there are to talk about, GPT-3 can assist in this area creating lists from main topics based on it’s knowledge or data that you provide.

Let’s try a quick example:

What are 5 things I can buy my dog for Valentine’s day?

1. A new toy

2. A new bed

3. A new blanket

4. A new collar

5. A new leash

Again, this is a quick easy example of a great starting point. I asked them to expand on the above:

1. A new toy – Dogs love getting new toys, especially if they’re interactive. There are a ton of great options out there, so find one that your pup will love.

2. A new bed – A comfortable bed is a must-have for any dog. If your pup’s current bed is looking a little worse for wear, consider buying them a new one for Valentine’s Day.

3. A new blanket – Not only do dogs love to curl up on soft blankets, they can also help keep them warm in the winter months. Give your furry friend a snuggly blanket to keep them comfy all winter long.

4. A new collar – Even if your dog’s collar is in good condition, it never hurts to have a spare around. Plus, collars can be a great way to show off your pup’s personality!

5. A new leash – Like collars, leashes come in many different styles and colors, making it easy to find one that suits your pup’s personality perfectly. Plus, a new leash is always a great way to celebrate any special occasion!

You’ll quickly see just how capable the AI is, and I hope your gears are turning. It’s taking all the ideation phase that takes so much time and generating it in seconds. The list above is exact, unedited. 

AI Content Examples:

Other AI tools help model the interface and allow you to run commands. An example being requesting a list of ideas from a general topic. I’ll go ahead and do an actual marketing example. This particular example was run using the Jasper.ai 3rd party tool:

What are the top 5 SEO ranking factors?

The top 5 “most important” ranking factors for SEO are:

#5. The # of backlinks pointing to your site.

#4. The amount of time spent on your page by visitors 

#3. Social media shares & likes, especially from Google+ 

#2. Site speed (how fast the pages download)

#1. The # of people who visit your site daily

Let’s dive into what we see here. Note – these 5 are unedited and actual outputs.

Let’s start from the top 

#5 – “The # of backlinks pointing to your site.” 

I think we can all agree backlinks are a major component to ranking a site. I’ll give that an A. It doesn’t go into the types of backlinks, but this would be acceptable for anyone to give as an answer.

#4. The amount of time spent on your page by visitors 

So, time on site. Even though Google doesn’t use any Google Analytics data, I think we can all agree that if people spend no time on your site, we’re doing something wrong. Though time on site isn’t exactly a ranking factor, I think it’s a byproduct of doing all the other things right. I’ll give it a pass since this is a pretty common thing to say. This is often confused with dwell time, which is time spent on the site after coming back to the result page and trying a different result. This is something that Google has somewhat confirmed, though it may be more tied to rankbrain as Google tries to understand if the result actually aligns with the particular sentiment of that searcher.

#3. Social media shares & likes, especially from Google+ 

Here is where we start seeing the issues with using a tool like GPT-3. GPT-3 was trained with data from CommonCrawl, WebText, Wikipedia, and a corpus of books.

The base training was completed at the end of 2019. That means it doesn’t know about current events from January 2020 and beyond.

It also thinks that Google+ still exists. It’s an area where you have to pay careful attention when talking about recent events or things that have shifted including trends. The AI tools might have what we would think would be outdated information.

#2. Site speed (how fast the pages download)

This is really a good one, but similar to the previous one, it won’t have any understanding of core web vitals as a ranking factor as this wasn’t really a thing in 2019. When I asked the AI what are core web vitals, it said “There is no one definitive answer to this question. However, some of the most important web vitals that should be considered include website speed, website security, and website uptime.” It gets the general idea, but it doesn’t know the defined core web vitals according to Google as they didn’t exist in that form in 2019.

#1. The # of people who visit your site daily

This isn’t really a ranking factor, but more a byproduct of good rank. You can see how it uses data from the web, and so it can think that things that are myths or common misconceptions might be fact, and can’t always tell the difference between them.

Overall it came up with some good ideas and some that showed its age. It also wasn’t especially accurate which is something that you’ll find with the AI, it will just make up facts and figures. You need to fact check everything that is writes.

Now this data was generated using the Jasper AI tool.

I ran this same query directly on the OpenAI playground API getting the raw results with no modeling from 3rd parties. Here is how it responded:

My prompt: “What are the top 5 ranking factors for seo?”

The top 5 ranking factors for SEO are:  

1. Content 

2. Links 

3. RankBrain 

4. Technical SEO 

5. User experience

I would say if I asked that to someone in an interview and that’s what they came back with, I’d be pretty happy.

That was 100% direct from the API with no copy editing.

You can see that even how you interface with the API and adjust your way of asking questions, you can get a much different type of response.

So, the big question is, can Google detect AI content?

In general for content, in a study recently done, judges barely achieved above-chance accuracy (52%) at correctly classifying GPT-3 texts as human or AI written. This basically means that people had as good a chance of just guessing or flipping a coin than correctly guessing.

There has been some work that researchers have done to identify AI written content, and most specifically in scientific journals. They’re mostly looking for oddly phrased sentences or content that seems out of place. This can definitely happen, and why you can’t just drop a topic and let the AI build an entire article.

Now, on to what you probably care most about – does the content perform?

My answer is yes, very much so. But also realize that I’m not using 100% content from the AI, it’s definitely been edited and at the least, it has been nudged into a direction that I’m looking for. I act much more like and editor and the AI is my copywriter.

In my tests, I utilized AI content to write a few short story type blog posts. I published three of these short stories, and saw visibility within the index within a week, and impression data has continued to hold steady. One of the stories is currently ranked position 4, and has been in that spot for several months. The search volume is about 30 searches per month, but the page has stayed consistent.

I also used AI content to augment other pages with much higher volume. The AI content had about 75% original content, with about 25% of it being copy edited. Those pages currently rank in the top 4 spots across about 25 pages, garnering about 10k unique visits per month with an average increase in traffic in the double digits.

My tests of completely AI generated content did show the ability to rank for long tail keywords, while my 75% generated content showed the ability to rank #1 for competitive terms.

Does Google care if you use AI generated content?

Here’s a link to their advanced SEO page on automatically generated content, which is about the closest documentation I’ve seen on AI content. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/auto-gen-content

Let’s look at each of their cases that can cause manual actions on your content:

• Text that makes no sense to the reader but which may contain search keywords.
  • This is often from spin sites or where the content doesn’t flow naturally at all, but contains a lot of the target keywords. When you come across nonsensical content, this is typically this form.
• Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing.
  • Large blocks of automatic language translations just don’t quite work. “All your base are belong to us” is now a meme, but this was a 1989 translation from Japanese to English which for any native speaker it would be very jarring to read or say. It should have been something along the lines of  “The enemy has taken all of your bases.” 
• Text generated through automated processes, such as Markov chains.
  • This is a bit closer to what we have going on with GPT-3, but it does differ. I’m not going to get into the technicalities, but I’ll try to explain as simply as possible what a Markov chain is, and what types of outputs we see. First, a Markov chain is trained with a corpus, which can be as little as a sentence, or as much as wikipedia. It then uses modeling to determine the most common next word after a previous word, and has variables allowing for more randomness. You can also set the how many words should use the prediction versus if they were already modeled. It’s very similar to how GPT-3 works, with the main difference being the neural network used in GPT-3 better understands the content and context instead of using only predictive models.

While I was at it, I asked GPT-3 if they were a Markov chain – and here’s the prompt and response from the AI tool:

Is GPT-3 or GPT-2 a Markov chain?

GPT-3 is not a Markov chain. GPT-2 is a Markov chain.

Why?

GPT-3 is not a Markov chain because the states are not independent of each other. GPT-2 is a Markov chain because the states are independent of each other.

• Text generated using automated synonymizing or obfuscation techniques.
  • This is your standard spinning, where your script takes certain words and uses a dictionary or thesaurus to lookup similar meanings to change the sentence enough to be unique. Often used to duplicate another high ranking piece of content but make it seem unique. 
• Text generated from scraping Atom/RSS feeds or search results.
  • This is a straight copy paste, but is effective to pull content from sites like WordPress which have full blog posts in their feeds. This is exact copy content and should be pretty obvious that Google would not see this as different or better content. Consider however, that a proper combination of pulling or scraping content and getting it indexed first is a kind of indexing arbitrage, where your stolen content may look newer to Google only because you submitted it to them first.
• Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value.
  • This is probably the most common form, where content is taken from multiple sources. You see this often on sites like a medical or dental site, where content from webmd, wikipedia, and other local sites are copied and pasted to act as if they are their own with little actual content changes. Plagiarizing from multiple sources is not looked at favorably according to Google.

https://youtu.be/kPVNl7btFHQ?t=3186 – Google’s Office hours where it’s discussed. Summarize what is said, if the content is well written and provides value, does it really matter how it was written? There’s a point at which you can’t distinguish between well written content sources, so the ability to differentiate and whether they would is still a little ways out.

So in summary, I feel that AI generated content has the ability to create quality content, but you need to fact check, and help direct the output. The content itself also needs copy editing, so don’t expect to use it 100% straight from the tools if you want the best results.

If you aren’t thinking about using some AI content generation in your workflow, then go ahead and listen to the following pieces of content that were generated, 

I’ll be giving the prompt I used into GPT-3, and its exact, unedited output. Let me know what you think – is the API based content good enough to be used? 

If you are listening, you may want to go to opinionatedseo.com/s2/e21 and read them for yourself. I’ll have a few more examples on there that I won’t read aloud here.

Okay, here we go:

Can an AI write really good content?

It is difficult to say for certain, as there is no one definitive answer to this question. Some believe that artificial intelligence can be used to generate high-quality content, while others are not so sure. Ultimately, it depends on the specific AI and the type of content that is being created.

Is AI generated content safe for use in ranking on Google?

There is no definitive answer to this question as it largely depends on the specific nature of the AI-generated content. However, in general, content that is generated by AI is likely to be safe for use in ranking on Google if it is high quality and provides value to users.

Can Google detect AI written content?

Google is not able to currently detect AI content because the technology is not yet sophisticated enough. However, as AI technology continues to develop, it is likely that Google will be able to detect AI content more accurately.

What is the best seo tool out there?

There is no single “best” SEO tool, as the most effective tools depends on the individual’s goals and needs. Some popular SEO tools include Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMrush.

What is the most important thing a website needs to rank well in Google?

The most important thing a website needs to rank well in Google is high-quality content.

I then wanted more content, so I updated the prompt:

Write a paragraph about the most important thing a website needs to rank well in Google?

The most important thing a website needs to rank well in Google is high-quality content. This means the website needs to have well-written, informative, and interesting articles that people will want to read. Additionally, the website needs to be updated regularly with new content to keep people coming back.

How can I convince my boss to increase our SEO budget?

The first step is to make a strong business case for SEO. You can do this by demonstrating how SEO can help the company achieve its goals. You can also show how much traffic and revenue the company can expect to gain from SEO.

If your boss is still not convinced, you can offer to do some of the work yourself. This will help prove that SEO is worth the investment.

Can you tell me 5 things I need to create great SEO content?

1. A catchy headline

2. Engaging introduction

3. Well-researched content

4. Concise and well-organized content

5. Useful and relevant images

Can you expand on each of the above items?

1. A catchy headline – The headline is one of the most important aspects of your content, as it is the first thing that readers will see. Make sure that your headline is catchy and enticing, and accurately represents the content of your article.

2. Engaging introduction – The introduction is also important, as it sets the tone for the rest of the article. Make sure that your introduction is engaging and draws the reader in.

3. Well-researched content – Good SEO content is well-researched and provides accurate information. Make sure that your content is well-researched and fact-checked.

4. Concise and well-organized content – SEO content should be concise and well-organized. Make sure that your points are easy to follow and that your article is easy to read.

5. Useful and relevant images – Images are an important part of SEO content, as they help to break up the text and make the article more visually appealing. Make sure that your images are relevant to the topic of your article and that they add value to your content.

What are the best resources to learn about writing good SEO content?

There are a number of great resources available for learning about SEO content. Some of the best resources include:

-SEOmoz: This is a great resource for learning all about SEO. They have an extensive guide to writing good SEO content, as well as a wealth of other information on SEO.

-Search Engine Journal: This website is dedicated to helping people learn about SEO. They have a number of articles on writing good SEO content, as well as other helpful information.

-Copyblogger: Copyblogger is a website dedicated to helping people create effective content. They have a number of articles on writing good SEO content, as well as other helpful information.

Can you write a few sentences on what a marketer should be good at?

A marketer should be good at creating effective campaigns, building relationships with customers, and analyzing data. They should also be able to think creatively and be able to understand and communicate with customers.

Can you give me a list of the top 10 attributes of a good marketer?

1. Good marketers are creative and innovative.

2. They are good at developing relationships with customers.

3. They are good at analyzing data.

4. They are good at thinking critically.

5. They are good at problem solving.

6. They are good at communicating with customers.

7. They have a good understanding of the market.

8. They are good at marketing research.

9. They are good at branding.

10. They are good at digital marketing.

Can you expand on each of these?

1. Creative and innovative – Good marketers are creative and innovative, and they are always looking for new and better ways to reach their customers.

2. Relationship builders – Good marketers are good at developing relationships with customers. They understand the importance of customer loyalty and they work hard to build lasting relationships.

3. Analytical – Good marketers are good at analyzing data. They understand the importance of data-driven decisions and they use data to make informed decisions about their campaigns.

4. Critical thinkers – Good marketers are good at thinking critically. They are able to see the big picture and they are not afraid to question the status quo.

5. Problem solvers – Good marketers are good at problem solving. They understand that every campaign has its own set of challenges and they are able to find creative solutions to any problem.

6. Good communicators – Good marketers are good at communicating with customers. They understand the importance of clear and concise communication and they are able to communicate with customers in a way that is meaningful and relevant.

7. Knowledgeable – Good marketers are knowledgeable about the market. They understand the trends and they are aware of the changes that are happening in the industry.

8. Research oriented – Good marketers are research oriented. They understand the importance of research and they are willing to put in the time and effort to conduct accurate and reliable research.

9. Brand builders – Good marketers are good at branding. They understand the importance of a strong brand and they know how to build and maintain a strong brand.

10. Digital marketers – Good marketers are good at digital marketing. They understand the importance of a strong digital presence and they know how to use digital channels to reach customers.

Now let’s say I wanted to continue to expand on each of these, I did a follow up prompt:

How can I become more Creative and innovative as a marketer?

One way to become more creative and innovative as a marketer is to read more. Reading helps to expand your knowledge and it helps you to come up with new and innovative ideas. You can also attend workshops and seminars to learn more about creativity and innovation. Additionally, you can try to be more open-minded and you can challenge yourself to come up with new and different ideas.

And then tried a different way: How does one become more creative?

Some ways to become more creative include: being open-minded, challenging yourself, being curious, and practicing mindfulness. Additionally, you can read books and articles about creativity, attend workshops and seminars, and try to be more innovative in your thinking.

How can I build better relationships with my customers? Name 5 ways:

1. Be responsive – Be responsive to customer inquiries and be willing to help them with whatever they need.

2. Be helpful – Be helpful and provide valuable information to your customers.

3. Be social – Be social and engage with your customers on social media.

4. Listen to them – Listen to your customers and understand their needs.

5. Treat them well – Treat your customers well and make them feel valued.

Name three reasons why AI content is a good way to build your blogs.

1. It can help you generate more content ideas.

2. It can help you automate your content creation process.

3. It can help you improve your blog’s overall quality and consistency.

Please expand on each of these points

1. AI content can help you generate more content ideas.

There are a number of AI-powered content generators out there that can help you come up with new content ideas. For example, the AI-powered content platform XYZ can help you come up with topic ideas, headlines, and even full articles.

2. AI content can help you automate your content creation process.

Many AI-powered content creation tools allow you to automate the creation process, which can save you a lot of time and effort. For example, the AI-powered content creation tool XYZ can help you automatically create summaries of articles, which you can then use as the basis for your own blog posts.

3. AI content can help you improve your blog’s overall quality and consistency.

AI-powered content creation tools can help you improve the quality and consistency of your blog content. For example, the AI-powered content creation tool XYZ can help you automatically review and improve your blog posts for grammar, spelling, and style.

Note – actual company names replaced with XYZ as they weren’t accurate.

This is an important detail, maybe at the time of the training, those companies existed and provided those services, but I couldn’t find them or they had changed names to the point where they were no longer able to be found.

And I thought this would be a great way to end this Podcast:

Is SEO dead?

No, SEO is not dead.

Can you tell me why?

There are many reasons why SEO is not dead. Firstly, search engine algorithms are constantly changing, so SEO techniques that may have worked in the past may not work today. However, if you are able to keep up with the latest changes and adapt your SEO strategy accordingly, you can still achieve good results. Secondly, SEO is becoming increasingly more competitive, so it takes more effort and dedication to achieve good rankings. However, with the right tools and knowledge, it is still possible to rank your website high in the search engines. Lastly, search engines are still one of the most popular sources of online traffic, so investing in SEO is still a good way to reach your target audience.

I wrote a blog post and podcast about using AI generated content for SEO. It’s full of examples and some reasons why it can be helpful in a content marketer’s workflow. Can you write a few sentences to summarize the article and end the post?

Including AI generated content as part of your SEO strategy can help you to achieve your desired results. By automating the content creation process, you can save time and resources while still delivering high-quality content that is relevant to your audience. Additionally, AI-generated content can help to improve your website’s ranking on search engines.

And can you say goodbye to our listeners?

Thanks for listening!

About 75% of the content on today’s podcast was generated with AI. The opinion portions were my own, but much of the definitions, summaries and even the opening and closing portions were generated from AI.

I hope this gives you something to think about, and feel free to check out some of the resources that I’ll link on the website.

Listen to the Opinionated SEO on Your Favorite App

Let’s jump right in, what is screaming frog and what can you do with it?

Let’s start at the beginning, it’s free but limited, and you don’t run it online. The paid version is 149 pounds / year, or about $200 US dollars. So you are talking about $16 a month if you wanted to break it down that way.Buy it, write it off, and call it a day, it will save you that money in the first hour you use it.

So what can it do?

Screaming frog is an SEO spider, think GoogleBot but you get to save the data it captures.

Here’s a list of the top features for it:

• Find broken links, errors, and redirects
• Page title and meta data analysis
• Met robots and directives review
• Audit hreflang
• Discover exact duplicate pages
• Generate xml sitemaps
• Create site visualizations.
• You can do up to 500 URLs in the free version, unlimited to your computer’s capacity on the paid version.

But the real power comes in when you use the paid version, and I’m going to just touch on a few of the features.

• Javascript rendering: Actually being able to view the page as a fully rendered version. This includes a screenshot as well as being able to review source code for the rendered version.
  • We’re using this to better understand how the rendering affects crawlability, as well as what’s on the site and what isn’t depending on JS.
  • If you do any kind of client side rendering, using react, or just not seeing Google crawling your site like you think it should, this is a great way to better understand.
• URL Inspection API Integration – I was going to save this for last, but it’s just too good to not put at the top of the list. There are a few integrations you get with screaming frog out of the box. 
  • 1 – Google Analytics (Get actual data during crawls) – User and session metrics, goal conversions, and ecommerce transactions and revenue data for landing pages, so you can view your top performing pages when performing a technical or content audit. Even things like bounce rate by page.
  • 2 – Google Search Console – this includes the inspection API integration. Get Clicks, Impressions, CTR, & Position. Now you also get inspection data including last crawl, coverage, mobile usability, indexing status, canonical info, and rich snippet info
  • 3 – Page speed insights – think core web vitals and the associated speed related data by page.
  • And non Google related companies like Majestic for backlinks, ahrefs for things like backlinks and URL rating, and Moz for data like page authority and backlink info from their open site explorer metrics.
• Site Visualizations – See the structure of your site in a visualized way, this can help you better understand your structure and how Google likely interprets it. Is your site too flat, or are key pages too far from your homepage?
• Custom Extraction – One of the most amazing components of Screaming frog is being able to pull content from your site. It doesn’t have to be visible, and it can even be code (html / css). An example I use is on our pages that are search result pages on the site. I use the custom extraction to pull the number of results and it gets put into a field. I cross reference that against other fields, especially indexing fields, and see how the number of results impact things like ranking, traffic, and index status.
• Meta Tags – Titles, descriptions, etc – with character counts. It helps understand duplicates, too short, too long, etc. 
• You can even generate XML sitemaps, this is helpful if your system won’t allow you to generate a sitemap or you want to create a static one.
• Find out all pages that have broken links both internally and externally. Use this to make sure that you aren’t linking to non-existent pages. This is really helpful for external links that maybe don’t exist anymore and would be a bad user experience.
• 301s – Find out what pages are redirecting and see if that’s an internal link that you can link directly to instead.

Overall screaming frog does some amazing things, and it’s great for up to about 50k pages. I find once you get past that, it isn’t as usable as there’s almost too much data. You can go way beyond that and pull data into excel, or even export just segments of data, but realize that you have a million row limit in excel, but pulling a million rows of data using screaming frog is typically beyond most desktop systems. That’s where you’ll want to look into hosted solutions that run for days on end and have more tolerances for issues that may arise.

Integration with the new Search Console URL Inspection API which was officially launched on January 31st, 2022 by Google – and it allows you to see indexation status of your URLs via an API. This was integrated in the latest release in the last few weeks and you’ll see a good share of tutorials out there. 

If you don’t know what an API is, it’s a way to send a simple request to a server and it responds with an answer. Think asking Google “What’s the weather in my city” and it responds with the current temperature. You’ll send a weather request to a weather API with a city name, and the API may return current weather high and low, tomorrow’s weather, and more. The API may give you a lot or a little data depending on how you ask, but it’s really just a way to access a services database without actual database access. 

For this API, I was working on a PHP version as that’s the language I have any real familiarity with, but did not get too far once Screaming Frog announced their integration.

You probably want to know – what am I doing with this new data, and what data do we get that we can use?

First, the data is used to understand indexation status in Google, errors that are coming up, and last crawl date.

And what am I doing with that data? Let’s start with indexation status – you have a few variations of the summary of indexation, things like index and submitted, indexed not submitted in sitemap, crawled not indexed, discovered but not crawled, soft 404, error, and probably a few more I’m forgetting. By pulling this data on pages, you can get a better understanding of how Google sees your site.

I’ve been doing a lot of focusing on discovered not crawled as these pages are just simply known to Google, but they haven’t even pulled the html yet. Getting these into the process is key, and then the next is getting the ones that have been crawled but not indexed. I’m working to identify any reasons why that might be.

For items like soft 404, or errors, I’m identifying what about those pages cause these errors, are they server related, page related, code, messaging, or something else. All of these give me clues to further dive down and allow for some A/B testing to further come up with large scale solutions.

You can pull a sitemap from your website, and run it in screaming frog to cross reference indexation status to get an idea of what’s going on with all the pages on your site. Search console has a 1000 row limit on exports, while this allows you to pull up to 2000 each day. So you can get twice the data than is allowed in the interface, plus you can have multiple users to pull more data. In all, I’ve found that the data seems to be a bit more granular than the coverage reports in the graphic interface and so I’m preferring to use the API with excel to get coverage info.

In summary, this API allows you to better understand how Google is taking the pages of your site and indexing them, how long ago it visited, and any issues encountered.

Good luck, and we’ll see you real soon!

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How does Google recognize paid links?

They have a lot of factors that they look into, not just did someone report this as a paid link.

Does Google care where the internal link is located in the site, header / content / footer?

Internal links help understand the context, with regards to anchor text, but links in any area are fine, whether header, sidebar, footer, so long as Google can crawl the site. Google does care about placement of content, the center part of the page that does change is where Google focuses.

Running a blog type site without any actual products, but more information about products, they want to know if Google will treat it as a classic product review site?

Google doesn’t really classify sites in that way, but if you fall into one of those categories, they do have documentation that should help you out.

Local Directories:

Does Google really care if you are listed on local directories and the information is correct?

Different directories may be better than others, but John didn’t want to go on record saying that you need directory links.

For name address phone number consistency, finding the same information on multiple places on the web does help ensure the information is accurate. This usually plays into the knowledge graph, or knowledge panel. But for things like hours, having the information accurate across the board does ensure that Google trusts the data and is more likely to show it.

Links:

Are there any issues with linking to a site that is also linking to you?

That’s fine, as long as what you are doing is reasonable. The example John gave was a new article about you that you would link back to.

Myths:

Are there any myths or inaccuracies that you see out there that you can just debunk right now?

It’s something they may consider doing some segments on, but really, he said a lot of the old myths have been dying out and most of the new ones have some root in facts, but maybe they were trying to help and went a bit too far. In the end, do what you think makes sense.

Malware:

Malware is still being shown in the search results.

Check to make sure they really are removed, some make it look like they aren’t when you visit directly, but it still shows up from a google search. Use the removal tool for the top 100 or so pages that you want removed that have the most visibility.

Expect a couple months for lots of urls to be crawled to make changes to the indexed pages.

A tool to help index sites faster:

Use the submit to indexing tool. Remember, Google doesn’t index everything.

Emojis in titles and descriptions:

Google doesn’t show all emojis in search results, especially if it disrupts the search results. Google does interpret the emoji for the equivalent word, but it doesn’t help because your title has more color in it.

Search Console API Data Accuracy:

Is the data from the API more accurate than the web interface? 

They both come from the same source.

You can get more rows in the APi vs the web interface.

The web interface overall numbers do include some numbers that have been filtered for privacy reasons, so that number may be a bit more accurate, but only when you look at totals.

FAQ Schema:

Our schema looks good from a technical perspective, but isn’t showing on Google.

1 – Need to be technically correct

2 – Need to be compliant with policies

3 – The site needs to be trustworthy

Seasonal content:

What should we do with content that’s seasonal like Black Friday?

Try to keep the URLs the same, don’t have Black Friday 2021, then Black Friday 2022. Just have a page called Black Friday. 

CWV Impact?

Of the 3 metrics, my CLS isn’t passing, how much of an impact will that have?

There isn’t a fixed number with how strong these scores work. The factors for page experience will change year after year. This will keep all the signals from over the years that will work in your favor. Delete and bring back, or just keep alive, both are fine. The desktop factor is still coming into play later this year.

Will CWV impact crawling?

No, this will factor into the page experience ranking factor, and not indexing or a qualifier.

Page speed may impact just because the time to crawl will be slow.

Migrating from a subdomain:

The subdomain is old, like 20 years, and we’re looking to migrate to the main domain.

What’s important is that Google will look at the new website overall, they have to re-evaluate the whole thing. But it’s hard to know what will happen. You are merging different parts of your website. Make sure everything is moved properly, and crawl the new site to ensure the structure is working properly. It will probably take a couple weeks to settle down.

New Local Site Starting out:

What signals should we look out for or pay attention to.

Google My Business (Business Profiles)

Local Directories (for your niche)

The tld doesn’t matter.

Geo redirects on site:

Should you geo-redirect on a new site?

It makes it hard for Google to find content. They follow that redirect, they typically crawl from California. Google may not be able to see your webpage.

Googlebot may not be redirected on some of the examples.

Be careful of duplicate content on your site.

The last question had to do with branded search – I don’t think it was relevant as it seemed they may have other issues, but feel free to watch that part if you are having any issues with your branded search being visible.

Three things – 

1: Acronyms and abbreviations

2: Link Juice

3: Domain Authority

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Acronyms and abbreviations. One of the few things that I don’t use an acronym for is SEO and URL as they are pretty much common knowledge amongst even non-marketers.

Everything else I do my best to say the full wording. 

Some acronyms in marketing that I talk about that not everyone may be 100% familiar with that I’ll give a hint of background on as well:

B2B: Business to Business

B2C: business to Consumer

ccTLD: Country Code Top Level Domain (mydomain.co.uk instead of mydomain.com)

CTR: Click Through Rate (Click over Impressions ratio usually on search result pages)

DA Domain Authority (A metric created by the SEO company Moz)

GA: Google Analytics

GSC: Google Search Console.

GTM: Google Tag Manager

H1, H2, H3, etc: Heading tags on a webpage, built in HTML

HTML Hypertext Markup Language – Pretty much the most basic code for a webpage

MQL Marketing Qualified Lead

MVP Minimum Viable Product
NAP Name Address Phone Number

PPC Pay Per Click – Think Google Ads

PSA Public Service Announcement

QA Quality assurance

ROI    Return on Investment / ROAS – return on ad spend

SaaS Software as a service

SEM    Search Engine Marketing

SEO Search Engine Optimization

SERP: Search Engine Results Page

SMB    Small and Medium Businesses

TLD Top level domain

UI User interface

URL    Uniform Resource Locator

USP Unique Selling Point / Unique selling proposition

UTM Urchin Tracking Module

VR: virtual reality

UX User experience

XML    Extensible Markup Language

Y2K    Year Two Thousand

Numbers:

301 Resource Moved Permanently (A permanent redirect code to a new domain or location)

302 Resource Moved Temporarily (A temporary redirect code to a new domain or location)

404 Resource (page) not found

500 Server Error

503 The server is unavailable (usually a temporary response due to overloading or maintenance)

So with that said, I do my best to not use acronyms or abbreviations as much as possible, however I don’t catch them all.

Now a phrase that’s been around for a while, but I just never really liked:

Link Juice – it is a slang for “Link Equity”, which is really just a fancy way of saying authority derived from links. You can just say authority, link equity, or link authority. 

The term is often confused with PageRank, which was the basis of Google’s algorithm. Now PageRank sounds like just a nice term, but did you know that the name “PageRank” plays on the name of developer Larry Page. Anyways – the term link juice seemed to reach an all time high around 2006,and has slowly been winding down since about 2014. I’m glad to see it being phased out more and more. 

The term itself has merit, just not the actual phrasing, especially as someone who is a big proponent of internal linking structures as well as earning backlinks. But I think we’ve outgrown the slang terms in the industry and we can adopt more professional terms.

The last part of my opinionated rant is domain authority – 

This is a term that was coined at Moz by Rand Fishkin about ten years ago around 2012. I don’t have the exact date, but that’s when it first shows up in Google Trends. Domain Authority was used to help approximate where a site should rank based on a 0-100 score. Ten years ago, this aligned pretty well with search engine result pages, you would often see higher DA (domain authority) sites ranking at the top, while the number would slowly go down as you went down the result page.

Getting a link from a high “DA” site would be better than a low “DA” site, and you still see this today. Google used to have a PageRank toolbar which would tell you your rank from 0-10. This was heavily based on backlinks and over time was easily gamed. Google discontinued the toolbar and any public indication of a sites PageRank metric in 2016. The power of the metric Domain Authority really came into its own as the toolbar went away and SEOs were looking for an overall metric that they could use.

There is the issue. This is a metric that approximates Google’s algorithm. It uses about a dozen factors as well as the backlink data from Moz’s link explorer. I hope you are catching what I’m saying here, Google uses something like 200 factors (which is kind of unconfirmed) and has what I’d say is the largest index of sites, so the largest database of backlinks. Moz’s version 2.0 of DA came out in 2019, and uses machine learning to help model the number to what they actually see on Google, but this isn’t Google’s data.

DA is not a ranking factor, and though it’s an approximation, it has value only in seeing best guess on how your site is doing against others.

I’ll give you an example of the main site I work on. We have a Domain Authority of 69, while our next competitor is about 60. We have a 59% visibility, while they have a 2.4% visibility.

So this is often called a vanity metric. That is any metric that look good on paper, but doesn’t really do anything for your business goals. 

Stick to things that matter to your business, leads, conversions, engaged traffic, are all things that are measurable that tell you how you are doing. Make sure to always measure year over year so seasonality doesn’t affect you.

And so, when someone mentions a “high DA” site, remember, that’s just a flashy number that’s based on guesses and really doesn’t mean anything.

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Last Friday, January 21st, 2022, Google Search Central released a new tag.

This tag called indexifembedded, you can tell Google you’d still like your content indexed when it’s embedded through iframes and similar HTML tags in other pages, even when the content page has the noindex tag.There are a few use cases which Malcom Slade over at Creative Race outlined in their blog post. I’ll give a few here and a link to the full blog:

1- Embedding sharable content

2 – Embedding comments – like Disqus where it’s an iframe and the comments are not indexed

3 – Embedding video where you want the video to be indexed on the page

4 – Reviews from 3rd party embeds

5 – They asked for other ideas. One that we’re talking about is a widget that we’ve had around for a while that other companies embed and they can display specific content. Think being able to embed stock tickers. Now, with each of these being indexed, and having links coming back to us, this could really change our link profile.

Overall I like the idea that we can have more control of our content in the wild, but also to allow others to have that content indexed.

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/01/robots-meta-tag-indexifembedded

And it’s been a week or two since I mentioned the metaverse, but it looks like Walmart is the next big name to file patents associated with the metaverse.

One trademark application was for “Financial services, namely, providing a digital currency and a digital token of value for use by members of an online community via a global computer network.” In another filing they mention an on-line retail store featuring virtual merchandise.

If you remember I mentioned other big names like Nike and Disney with similar type filings, but also Under Armor, Urban Outfitters, Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie & Fitch have also filed similar trademarks with intent on virtualization of retail stores.

Right now, Meta (the King formerly known as Facebook) seems to be pushing both the software and the hardware to the masses. With their Oculus headsets and requirements for a Facebook account, we’re seeing virtual connections that are coming right from existing web 2.0.

So Meta has Oculus, Microsoft has HaloLens, Apple is rumored to be working on hardware, and Google just ramped up their AR hardware with plans to ship in the next 2 years. Remember Google glass came out in 2012, so they have a lot of previous hardware experience in this field, and I know they don’t want to lose out to Meta in the coming MetaVerse wars.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/16/walmart-is-quietly-preparing-to-enter-the-metaverse.html

My personal belief is we are going to see a huge transformation in the next 2-4 years with how we work and interact in business. Right now we are seeing that you don’t necessarily have to be in an office together, though there are some advantages to having access to people right away. Middle and upper management like to have a visual that people are focusing on their work, whether you agree with that or not, it’s something that may never go away.

I remember a discussion in a management class about a factory that brought in a consultant to increase productivity. They tried several different things on the floor, from changing music to lighting, to changing break times. What they found was that those always seemed to work, when the executive team came out to observe. Productivity always increases. The consultant concluded that the environment wasn’t the contributing factor, it was the involvement of the executive team and their presence. 

I’m not saying you can’t be productive without oversight, but not everyone is self-motivated and can keep from being distracted.

I envision the metaverse to be a somewhat happy medium, where you can be anywhere, but still be connected to the company network, see your coworkers sitting just a few feet away from you. Need to ask someone a question, a virtual “poke” (remember those from facebook) and it gives the users headset a little vibration to alert them that you are stopping by to chat.

Virtual screens, and completely integrated meeting rooms that you don’t have to worry about booking.

This is really the future of where things will go, it’s a great equalizer in that you can be anywhere and look any way, and everyone can still feel like they are part of something.

So how are you planning on the metaverse and the potential for your company to make moves? Do you sell products that could be virtualized or “tried on” virtually to help with the sale? I would think enterprise sales would love this, really immerse your potential customers into the product to give them a real experience.

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Questions seemed to focus a bit on internationalization, and internal linking. Hope you enjoy:

The value of internal links in header, footer, or in content?

It’s pretty similar. Content matters based on where it is in the page, but not links.

Seeing links – they are paid, and the sites are ranking #1, why is that contradiction from what Google says?

John: Really, they’re probably doing a lot of things right, and they’re not going to get removed for just one thing wrong, the algorithm also can usually tell those kinds of links and they’ll just ignore them.

There are so many factors, you can make mistakes on a few areas and it won’t remove you from the index, if you follow bad advice.

Some links are not crawling according to Google Search Console.

John: 1 – Maybe a technical issue

2 – We just don’t crawl everything

How much resources should we spend based on the value of the website. Improve the quality of the website and you should see Google crawl the site more.

25% of the pages have dropped being indexed, quite dramatically a few months ago. Submitted pages dropped by 50%. They thought it might be structured data that’s not valid.

John: Issues with structured data would not mean that we would drop it from indexing.

It’s likely that it’s a quality issue.

Seeing images in organic search results, not the image tab. There isn’t documentation in google Search Central. 

John: These are essentially a kind of snippet. It’s not based on markup.The algorithm recognized the images are on these pages and showing some images would help them to decide which of the results to click on. There really isn’t anything you can do on the site to enable that, just things to keep them images from showing.

Multiple websites for each location but just a different phone number and address.

John: Address and phone number is not enough to be considered not a duplicate. 

1 – Pick one domain and have individual landing pages for location – best for more locations if you can’t separate them out.

2 – Make the content different. Doesn’t make sense with like 100 locations

3 – Google My Business – profiles for each location.

Allright, then it was my turn. 

We have a strong US presence and moving into international. Should we go with ccTLDs or a single domain with subfolder country / language. Technology isn’t an issue, and I think being able to target Google Search Console to each unique domain by country may be the most advantageous option.

John: There are multiple things that come into play – multiple sites vs a single strong site. ccTLD is super obvious for targeting, so it’s a good approach. 

Part of what John said was about being able to market as the “website for Canada” then having its own domain would be better.

Is there a way to capture a folder without a trailing slash in Google Search Console adding a new property?

No, a page without a slash is just a page. If it has a slash it’s a folder.

Site downtime, and how that affects indexing.

A short downtime, like 12-18 hours, some pages might drop from the index. It should be back fairly quickly, the pages most often crawled will get picked back up first. They would likely have been noticed during the technical issue and dropped at that time. They’ll get recrawled fairly frequently so should pop back in quickly.

If you have this issue, have something that can server a 503 page when things go wrong. That tells Google to come back later to double-check. You have about a day or two to run a 503 for Google to consider it a temporary glitch, and they won’t be dropped.

If you server an error page, 404, or an empty page, Google might assume the page has actually gone.

Splitting the domain, what should we do in search console?

John: Splitting or merging sites, you can’t use the change of address tool in search console.

That only works on 1:1 moves.

This is kind of a reverse internationalization, removing the countries from the site and just focusing on one. But all the countries were already in subfolders, so would moving the main language to the root have a big impact on ranking?

John: you are restructuring the site, and so you should expect some fluctuations in search. Make sure the everything is cleanly moved to the new location. Keeping the UK subdirectory might make it easier if you do end up moving to other countries again. Any move where you are making significant changes to the URL structure of the site, you will see fluctuations in ranking because Google has to recrawl the whole site and understand the new structure. This fluctuation can take a month or two.

This person really asked, can we trust the answers given. John had a great response which boiled down to, these are all based on documented items and each answer typically is tailored to the person asking and their unique situation. It doesn’t apply broadly across the board and so you have to understand the context of each question.

Internal Linking, more important than URL structure?

Doing things like nofollow to terms of service pages doesn’t change anything and it’s a waste of time. Really what you want is to create a kind of graph of how things are linked, and see if it is a clean or messy structure. This helps ensure Google knows which pages are more important.

The recording ended after one more question about multiple languages on a single page, if that’s something you have issues with, go ahead and take a look, but it seemed fairly edge case.

I then had a chance to talk to John again and ask about client side rendering issues a client was having, this particular client was having trouble replicating the issue as GoogleBot sees it. John discussed how you can use lighthouse to emulate the crawler, which is really just a chrome browser.

I hope this was useful for you – each of these are posted on the blog @ opinionatedseo.com and you can easily watch the videos from the start of the question along with the synopsis.