Interview with Jeff Romero Co Founder at Octiv Digital

Steve Wetmore – Jeff Romero, good afternoon and welcome to the InstaVIP Podcast. Jeff, I see that you’re a digital marketing professional with a lot of background and history managing local and Enterprise SEO campaigns. you’ve enjoyed a successful career so far in large enterprise business. And I’d love to hear more about that. And you’re now proud co founder of Octiv Digital.

Jeff Romero

Jeff Romero – Thanks so much for having me. So yeah, my name is Jeff Romero. I’ve been in digital marketing for about 10 to 12 years now. Got my start in SEO really working on local campaigns, looking at attorney sites with the real estate agency. It’s kind of that smaller still scale stuff, just trying to help people get started with web marketing, a lot of people that just didn’t have an idea what they were doing. And then I sort of transitioned my career into the enterprise level and started Working for a couple of different companies that worked in the home goods section, Home Goods sector, excuse me, working in lighting, furniture, really anything in that kind of space competing against folks like wayfair, Home Depot, Lowes, some of those much bigger companies. And that was a lot of fun required a lot of advanced SEO strategy. A lot of just advanced digital marketing in general, just to try to get it right and right from customers get it right, Google kind of just had to deploy a lot of creative thinking there to get things right and to be able to compete with some of those bigger, bigger box companies.

Steve Wetmore – Very good. So can you talk about anything that you’ve been doing relative, to the SEO community like speaking engagements or ?

Jeff Romero – Sure, I’ve had the opportunity to speak at SMS, East and East, as well as smaller independent conferences for a company called rich. They are a big enterprise tool that a lot of companies use to improve They’re internal linking on a site. And they’re a company that is implemented with my last company, three different websites that we use them on. And I had the ability to really stand out from some of the different clients that they worked with. And they had me come out and speak at the conferences, talk about the technology. And I with that, I really kind of figured out how to push the boundaries with it. It’s really neat technology, but it was really cool to see actually work and drive traffic and ultimately.

Steve Wetmore – Interesting thank you for that. Jeff can you share with us what you see trending in SEO going into 2020?

Jeff Romero – I think one of the biggest things that that saw growth and 2019 is going to continue to grow in 2020 is the use of voice search. So this is something that everyone knows about. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to tune into it, how to make things work. And there’s there’s not a lot of documentation work on what drives Amazon Alexa or Google Home, or results in Google specifically. But what one thing that is actually working that I tested, and I’m actually seeing some good results with, is using structured data for Voice Search. And this is just making sure that you’re you’re marking up your content in ways that are easy for Google to understand. When Googlebot comes to the site. They see your content with read through the content. You’re using that kind of extra layer of meta data. We all we all know what metadata is with title tags, descriptions, all tabs, that kind of stuff. This is kind of going that next step to really inform Google. What are your pages about what is content about? You know, you’re trying to answer different queries that people are asking. I saw this work at my last company where someone was looking For like, what are the best 10 Ceiling Fans of 2019? What are what are different designs that have come out? What are different technologies that have come out whether it’s led or like a Bluetooth ceiling fan, things like that. And so I was able to mark up the content with structured data and then actually get into some of those voice searches. And I’m seeing a strong correlation there. It’s not a perfect science, but there is a really good correlation there. And for a lot of the companies that I work with, now, they’re smaller business plans, but we’re still trying to use that structured data to to get into some of those voice searches. So, for example, right now, I’ve got a client in Florida, that she’s a real estate agent. So we’re marking up our content with that real estate structured data. So now someone searches like Sarasota show me results for Sarasota real estate agents over their voices over their device. We’re like we’re looking to get through those results.

Steve Wetmore – Ok what app do you use to create the structure data?

Jeff Romero – I mostly hand code, whatever we’re doing, I stick to the the JSON data that seems to be preferred by Google. So I’m sticking to that. But I really just look through schema.org at the instruction that they have, they’re abiding by the different rules, and then checking everything through the structured data testing tool from Google, make sure everything validates, looking at stuff in the Search Console as well. Just to make sure all the market validates.

Steve Wetmore – It’s certainly not novice activity. I’ve looked at the structure data coding, and I go, Okay, well, I’m not gonna try this.

Jeff Romero – Yeah it’s definitely advanced. There are I will say, there are a few plugins for WordPress users. But even that out, I found that they’re, they’re kind of tough to manage. And so it’s honestly just easier to figure out how to write up the code, figure out the language, write up exactly what you’re trying to do. And then you insert it into the pages.

Steve Wetmore – Within the Gutenberg editor on WordPress, there’s two block elements you can use and insert one for FAQs and one for lists. And it creates the code for structure data for you. You just have to fill in the blanks. For me, that is perfect. It’s really great that people we’ve been interviewing are consistently mentioning structured data as a must do, you can’t ignore it. And especially for mobile search, I’m glad you reinforce that.

Jeff Romero – I think just even taking a step back from structured data and voice search is just getting ready for mobile. There are several tools out there now to make sure that your mobile site is credible. It’s responsive, it makes sense for your users. And so I see a lot of clients that come across a lot of sites that they’re just not doing that. And it’s like, we’re headed in the 2020. Everyone has a smartphone, everyone’s looking up content from their phone, make sure that you you tune your site to that. And there’s like I said, there’s a lot of tools out there now. In addition to like, making sure the content looks good, you want to make sure that it loads fast, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to make sure the content is loading quickly. I just do not sleep on my way. I can’t tell people that enough. It seems like the rankings are different. Google now has the mobile first index, but people still have kind of a sluggish mobile site and not the same experience and it’s just something that’s going to continue to grow.

Steve Wetmore – That’s great advice. Well, Jeff, that’s, you know what? That’s meat and potatoes. Great advice. And you know, sometimes you can’t stop emphasizing what you know, you’ve tried it, you’ve learned it, you proved it, you’ve got to do it, or you’re just not going to get the rankings that you need or want.

Jeff Romero – You’ve got to do it. And you have to keep continuing with it because mobile sites what what we had for mobile sites in 2015 aren’t what we have now, of course, so you have to keep advancing your technology, making things faster and just just don’t sleep on it. It’s all I can say.

Jeff Romero – Strategies; what I’ve seen working for clients, we just we talked a bit about the on page but the off page piece of growing links in 2018, this has become something that’s difficult. A lot of people are still trying to go the guest post route. That’s kind of tricky. One thing that I’ve found that actually works well for my business, and for Clients is using Harro or HelpAReporter.com. And this is something that a lot of people don’t use. And it’s such a great way to get your content in front of people in the right niche, get in front of some big publications. And it’s a tool that it’s really easy to sign up, it’s actually free. And you’re just you’re helping out journalists get more content, but then you’re also getting a link back to your site from it. So it’s been just a great tool that, like I said, a lot of people don’t use it. And it’s kind of shocking to me that here’s a way that you can get content in front of the right reader and from the right audience and a lot of people don’t use it.

Steve Wetmore – That’s that’s great information. Do you have any advice with respect to getting getting reporters to reach out to you?

Jeff Romero – I think you can sign up with her you can sign up for all the different industries that you want to try to get your content from are going to mention from and I honestly I get those emails, I get an email in the morning, I get one in the afternoon and one in the evening that just shows different blogs, different sources that are looking for content. And I I will try in a given day, I’ll probably reach out to at least four of those different sources. And sometimes I don’t hear back sometimes they do it just it really depends. And really what it comes down to is you want to have a quick response have the right answer for what they’re looking for. And don’t try to jumble it up with different text speak or marketing speak. Just make it clear to understand.

Steve Wetmore – So we also discussed earlier in our in our conversation mainstream tools that most agencies use. Are you using anything off the beaten path? Anything that you found that works better for you?

Jeff Romero – Aside from the mainstream tools that we’ve talked about, I know we mentioned AHRef’s, Moz, and SEMrush, those are just every SEO, is going to use those tools. Aside from that, it’s really important to consider a crawling tool. There’s basic tools like Screaming Frog, I’m sure a lot of people familiar that there’s a new tool on the marketplace now called chat octopus, that’s also really well are also really, really great for crawling sites. And then if you’re operating an enterprise site, something in the e commerce based, like a university kind of site, you’re going to want to use a tool like Spotify found here seotoolsforexcel.com/spotify/ that’s going to crawl a lot of pages. There’s another tool called Deep Crawl found at deepcrawl.com, just something that’s going to evaluate all of your contents, look at it from a technical perspective and then give you any sort of recommendations, things that you can fix and make better.

Steve Wetmore – Thank you Jeff for this valuable information.

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How to find the best provider of Instagram account for sale

How to find the best provider of Instagram account for sale

The trend of buying and selling Instagram accounts

Establishing and developing an Instagram account with a healthy following can take a lot of time. People generally dedicate hours, days and weeks to develop the content and interact with the followers to create a following. With Instagram, followers likes and comments are all that matter. Interacting with the followers and potential followers can spike up the popularity quotient of the account holders and is, therefore, an integral part of managing the accounts professionally. Interacting with the fan base will also enable you to understand the type of content that is appreciated by the followers, which can ultimately help you generate more following.

However, once you have reached the stage where fame is imperative, you can do away with the interactions without affecting your account traffic. The buying and selling of Instagram accounts have been a booming business where you can literally buy fame with money. You can choose your following and popularity without having to do any hard work. It is a quick and easy way to start your Instagram career. On the other hand, putting up a thriving Instagram account for sale means that it will get a good market value, hence acting as a catalyst for their business.

How does the buying of Instagram accounts boost your career?

Although people may hesitate in admitting, many have bought Instagram accounts and followers, even the popular Instagrammers do it at times. So there may arise questions like – is the buying of an Instagram account really necessary? Will it result in increased traffic over the time? And the answer is the obvious yes. Even if an Instagram account has a reasonable following, adding more followers means that it receives more attention and is more likely to be taken seriously. The followers tend to get less critical and readily like and comment on your posts.

How to find an Instagram account for sale?

There are a number of companies that deal in the buying and selling of Instagram accounts. Each company uses its own techniques to transfer the likes and followers from one account to the other. You can either buy the entire account or just go for the followers. If you are looking to start an Instagram account, buying the entire account may be helpful. However, if you already have a good account, you may just go for the numbers. These companies will ask for your username or the link to your profile. After you have made the payments, the likes and followers will start increasing and will continue for hours or even days.

How to find the best Instagram account for sale?

Don’t make a wild jump just because you see an Instagram account for sale. Instead, find out the reputation and reliability of the companies that you are dealing with. Cheap companies may sell you followers with short term following who will sooner or later opt out of the following. You would rather like to have long term followers who have a good Instagram activity. The niches of content posted on the accounts and the company you are dealing with are usually responsible for helping you find the most appropriate Instagram account for sale.

Originally posted 2017-02-25 10:20:59.

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How to use the Shoutout Instagram feature

New to Instagram? Learn how to give a Shoutout Instagram?

How to use the Shoutout Instagram feature. Everyone is is using social media these days – all age groups participate.

From a kid of 10 years old to an elderly person, Millions have an account on one or more social media platforms.

Apart from allowing people to connect and communicate social, these platforms are a good way to express opinions, have fun, play games, and much more.

And so, every day, thousands of people join social media, but not everyone is the geek of the age.

Naturally, though they register themselves up at one or more social media platforms, they aren’t able to use them easily to their full potential.

They are not aware of all the features that the particular platform offers or do not know how should they exactly use the given features for their own benefit.

 

 

What is a Shoutout Instagram?

If you have recently signed up to Instagram, then you may be having a good time posting images and messages that are close to your heart.

You must have gained quite a few followers and likes and comments as well. But that’s not the entire thing.

Successful Instagrammers have thousands of followers on their account who appreciate and applaud what the person has to say or show.

And if you are willing to reach the same height of popularity or even more, you need to acquire followers for yourself and an efficient way to do so is Shoutouts Instagram.

A Shoutout refers to sharing someone’s post, sometimes their handle as well, to your audience.

You can do this when you find a post that is close to your heart or you think may be liked or enjoyed by your followers.

When you give Shoutouts to others, users will help you, provided your posts are meaningful and worth sharing.

Though you cannot expect everyone to do you the favor, some users will work with you.

 

How to use the Shoutout Instagram feature

Creating or giving a Shoutout is a very simple process with only a few steps involved:

Quality Photo or Video

You want a good quality photo, with the subject centered and focused.

The video can be as short as a few seconds up to 60 seconds long.

Make sure the sound is on!

Adding a Photo or Video

Add the photo to your post by clicking on the “Add photo” symbol on your Instagram account.

This will take you to your camera roll and you can add the image that you want to share.

Tagging the account

Tag the user in the Shoutout Instagram.

Use @ followed by the user handle to ensure that proper account is tagged or mentioned in the post.

Add a personal note

Add a small note for your followers about why you are sharing the account or message and share the same.

The Shoutout has has been published. Finaly you are done!

Originally posted 2017-01-08 07:38:15.

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Interview with Steve Toth SEO at FreshBooks and Freelance SEO Consultant with SEONoteBook.com

Steve Wetmore – Good morning, Steve Toth. Welcome to the InstaVIP podcast. Steve is a self described SEO obsessive consultant with SEO notebook.com. And I’m really looking forward to understanding who you are and what you do.

Steve Toth

Steve Toth – Thanks a lot, Steve. I’m happy to be here.

Steve Wetmore – So can you describe a little bit about, you know, who you are and what you do relative to SEO?

Steve Toth – I got started in SEO around 2010. So I’ve been doing it for almost 10 years now. I’m extremely not just passionate, but like you said, a bit obsessed with SEO. It’s really something that is always in the forefront of my mind, because I really feel like if you’re going to be competing with some of the most difficult SERPs you know I’m talking like 90,100 50,000 200,000 searches per month. Those are extremely competitive and you really got to be on the ball. I work with FreshBooks for my day job and do a lot of freelance consulting as well and just starting to get into some affiliate marketing with some partners as well. In my very little spare time beyond that, I manage and run an email list at SEONotebook.com where basically share page from my notes every week with my audience and have grown to around 1500 subscribers within about four months.

Steve Wetmore – Very interesting. I’m going to sign up for that Newsletter right now while we’re talking. Looking at your your website, Steve, I’ve noticed you’ve worked with some fortune 500 / 1000 companies. Could you talk a little bit about some of your work history and credentials? If you’ve done any public speaking, that kind of thing?

Steve Toth – Yeah, for sure. I’ve got a pretty wide breadth of experience. I think that makes me a little bit different from a lot of SEOs. I’ve worked with large companies like Porter Airlines and to to Canada. And then also, more of lead generation type businesses like lawyers and plastic plastic surgeons and plumbers early on in my career. So it gives me a pretty wide range of strategies, both for national SEO and local SEO. At one point, I was a co director for a company that had about 180 accounts at one time. So that’s a of relationships to manage. The client relationship aspect of things comes very naturally to me. Now that I’m just freelancing, working with more medium sized to large sized companies, I have much fewer relationships to manage. And I really enjoy working closely with those types of clients.

Steve Wetmore – So what we’re trying to accomplish here; we’re looking for some real, good meaty information relative to SEO trends going into 2020. And what you see the future looking like what are the hot topics.

Steve Toth – I think that SEO is leaning more towards authority sites winning out. And that translates both into, you know, regular companies and also like people who are working in the affiliate space. Because it’s, you know, I watch a few SERPs. So search engine results pages like very closely over the last like year and a half, two years, especially working with fresh books. And you know, the trends that I’ve noticed are that, you know, sites with a lot of domain authority, domain rating, whatever you want to call it, are winning out and even, you know, they’re not like, even the sites that don’t have like direct backlinks to the pages, more or less like just the backlinks to the overall domain are able to publish content and get that content ranked fairly highly. Google’s really, you know, rewarding and trusting those websites and if we look at that from an affiliate standpoint, You know, I was just in Chiang Mai for the Chiang Mai SEO conference, which is about 800 people congregating in Thailand to talk about SEO. One of the main takeaways from that conference was, instead of creating a niche site about best hair clippers or something like that, like people are really going towards authority sites by making sites about your entire home or raising a family and having that as a two year project to really build up that domain authority and then get into that mode where you’re able to just publish content and have it rank alone without without, you know, necessarily beating to build backlinks directly to the content.

Steve Wetmore – What is a, what is a good domain authority number for affiliate marketing?

Steve Toth – Well, it all depends on the niche that you’re in. If you’re competing in something like finance or casinos and stuff like that you need strong domain authority like 80 for example. But if you’re in a less competitive niche you might get away with a lower DA; it all depends on what the other sites in those search engine results pages are. So if you’re in finance you’re probably going to need to be up in the 80s in the 90s, to really compete. If you’re in something that’s a large niche like lifestyle, or travel you’d have to be like super high. But if you’re in something that’s a little bit less competitive – not so much, it just all depends on what the sites in your SERP’s are going to be relative to you.

Steve Wetmore – So you believe that being able to create authority, get a high domain authority ranking is is really The future of being successful in SEO going forward?

Steve Toth – Yeah, it’s just a product of how much content is published on the web per day. I remember WordPress releasing statistics that blog posts are published to the tune of to 2 million blog posts per day. So that’s just going to be a lot of content competing everything under the sun already written about. So it’s just a matter of the SERPs that you’re competing in, we’re starting to see large companies like CNET and Forbes start to write on things like best vacuums. Going back a few years that was just dominated by smaller affiliate sites. Now, these larger sites are starting to write about it. So that just means they’re creeping in on territory that was once exclusive to niche SEO.

Steve Wetmore – Do you have anything controversial? Talk about any trending problems, anything that you see as an issue?

Steve Toth – Well, I think that there are two classes of SEOs right now. And I don’t mean to sound arrogant about it at all but you have people who don’t base their decisions on testing and science, right? I can go into a little bit more about what that means. And then you have the SEO camp that are, all about SEO best practices. These SEO’s are falling on a lot of common knowledge. The science and testing SEO’s have test sites that they test strategies on, before they actually implement new ideas on their main websites. Testing idea’s like single variable testing, where you have a bunch of dummy pages and you start firing signals at the middle result and then you see whether that goes up or down or you have things like On Page tools that take hundreds of measurements based on your website and the competing websites and that guides you in terms of random or not random changes. They’re just basically testing all the potential factors that could help you rank and then telling you which of those factors correlate highly with search page one results and guiding you in terms of how you structure your content based on those findings.

Steve Wetmore – And what tools do you use to get that info?

Steve Toth – I believe the most comprehensive tool is a tool called Cora SEO Software found at https://seotoollab.com/ . And that tool will measure over 500 potential ranking factors for the keywords first 100 results are and then it will tell you which of those factors correlate highly with page one results. So if something like has a spike on page eight, but nothing on page two, and then sort of Matt on page one, like that’s going to be a factor that you’re not going to want to pay attention to. But if there is a steady trend of very low correlation on page 10, and high correlation on page one, those are likely facts At Google is considering and you know, things that you want to basically bring your own website in line. Now, core is very detailed its output is onto a spreadsheet that is just like really insanely large. And it’s kind of unmanageable for a lot of people. So there are a couple other tools that I would recommend if you don’t want to go to that length. And one of them is called Page Optimizer Pro. And the other one’s called Surfer SEO, which do similar things but not quite to the extent of what Cora SEO does.

Steve Wetmore – Steve that’s really interesting because you’re the first person to mention all three of those tools. So, Cora SEO, I’ve talked to 12 different SEOs and all those SEOs are using AHRef’s, Moz and SEMrush, why wouldn’t they be aware of and talking about Cora SEO?

Steve Toth – I think it’s just starting to surface into knowledge of mainstream SEOs. If you are familiar at all with the contest that was run last year for the keyword Rhinoplasty Plano, there was a contest in the Facebook group SEO Signals, which I highly recommend joining. I’m a moderator there. There was a contest between SEO’s to see who could rank for that keyword Rhinoplasty Plano, and the person who won there actually, he didn’t win, but five days after the contest, closed, site surface does the number one result and the interesting thing about that website was that it was almost entirely written in Lorem Ipsum (pseudo-Latin).

Steve Wetmore – I did see that and it was interesting.

Steve Toth – It was amazing and it was perhaps the most significant and interesting experiment done in SEO in my estimation. Kyle Roof who created that website, used Cora SEO and his own tool called Page Optimizer Pro to tweak the settings of that page and eventually got it to rank number one, which just proved that, Google cannot read and Google is looking for cues. And it proved, it’s just math at the end of the day.

Steve Toth – I saw Kyle speaking in Chiang Mai and I do talk to him every now and then he gave me a nice testimonial on my newsletter. He got the site de-indexed as a pure spam penalty in Google Search Console. And then Google went so far as to contact GoDaddy who had registered all his test domains, and got those de-indexed as well. So Google was obviously not happy about the egg on their face after that contest. And I think, to be Google in 2018, and have that happen is quite an embarrassing thing.

Steve Wetmore – Do you have any anything else any any other snippets of info you want to leave us with?

Steve Toth – You mentioned snippets and featured snippets, something that I’ve been writing a lot about lately on SEO notebook. Obviously, those are the position zero results that I really eat up a lot of the clicks on the SERP’s. And we know it’s extremely valuable for people to gain those featured snippets. So I came up with a technique that I created based on a Chrome extension called SEO Ruler, by my friend Pablo and what one of the functionalities of that extension is that it will take the first set your results to 100, and you Google the keyword that you want to get that featured snippet for it will basically export all of the keywords that are bolded in that search result. So bolded keywords are basically the synonyms and the relevant words that Google believes are indicative of what the searcher is actually typing in with the query. To clarify, the golden words are the synonyms that relate to the query that was being searched. And this SEO Ruler, Chrome extension allows you to export all of those old keywords. And if you use those bolded keywords in your featured snippet on your page, you have a much higher chance of gaining that featured snippet. So that’s something that I talked about on SEO notebook, and a strategy that I think could help a lot of people.

Steve Wetmore – Can you explain the functionality in more detail?

Steve Toth – Sure, if you google the keyword, Google is going to highlight the different synonyms in the meta descriptions of the results. Basically, Google is trying to say, look how relevant our search results are to your query. They’re not exactly the words that were searched for. The keywords searched for are going to be highlighted or bolded, and there will be other useful words that are also going to be bolded. So the more that you’re able to use those synonyms or additional keywords that you’re targeting, the higher your chances of gaining that featured snippet are going to be.

Steve Wetmore – Very useful information Steve Toth – Thank you!

Steve Toth – No problem. And I do really recommend people downloading SEO Ruler if you just search for SEO Ruler, Chrome extension. It does a whole bunch of cool things. cool things.

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Interview with Franco Valentino Founder at Narrative SEO, LLC

Steve Wetmore – Good morning, Franco Valentino. How are you this morning, Franco?

Franco Valentino

Franco Valentino – I’m doing great. Thank you, Steve.

Steve Wetmore – That’s awesome. So, Franco, you are the founder of Narrative SEO, and you like to describe your organization as a collective of experts pulled together to, to solve problems for your client.

Franco Valentino – That’s right. Thank you for that. And we are, yeah, we sort of describe ourselves as a technical SEO consultancy. We’re based in Nashville and we serve clients, the United States and Europe. And we have subject matter experts in varying fields that have a lot to do with growth hacking.

Steve Wetmore – So that covers a lot of relevant information; we’re looking to understand what your collective provides for your clients, what makes you unique and we’d like to hear some success stories that provide background to your credibility in SEO?

Franco Valentino – Since we work in a very technical field, we like to explain it like this; what we do is we remove digital sludge from the foundation of websites. And we typically work with either digital marketing agencies or the CMO staff, right, somebody on the digital marketing staff within a larger organization that’s in charge of making sure their website doesn’t leak leads, conversions and sales.

Franco Valentino – From the service standpoint, what we do is we start with a technical SEO audit, not only the on page portions of the websites, but we look at the digital connections between the greater internet, the search engines and users platform to see where there are opportunities for improvements. And those improvements can be speed. It could be security and keyword growth or conversion optimization.

Steve Wetmore – Can you give us some insights into where you see short term and long term challenges in SEO and how SEO is going to trend into 2020 and beyond?

Franco Valentino – So interestingly enough, we actually published an article this year that was titled “Is Seo dead in 2019“. And that topic is sort of a playground for technical SEOs. And, you know, we’ve been flirting with first or second slot of Google for a long time, we did it with a partner agency of ours. And in that article, we forecasted the growth of something called Entity Fee Based Search. And what that means is search engines are trying to understand nouns, their things, not strings anymore, where you typically, historically you would have a keyword and then you would try to rank that keyword and take the traffic position that way. Search engines have become much smarter, their AI are trying to understand entities meaning they know who Steve Wetmore is, they know who Bill Gates is. And subsequently they know the relevancy of that search terms. So what we forecasted was that it was going to grow and the way that it’s growing is all of the search engines got together, Google, Bing, Yahoo index, and they came up with something called schema.org. And it’s almost like a it’s a language, It’s a programming language. But it’s a reverse API, meaning instead of them trying to crawl your site and understand what you’re about. They gave us the opportunity to set up some structure and feed them that data. And there are item types for just about any nouns that we can think of right? These people, places or things. Now the opportunity there is that they have taken this entity information, and they’ve come up with certain features. You know, when you search for an event like a concert, you get this really rich data on your phone where you can save the event you can forward it, you know what time the event happens. And you can even buy tickets to the event. That is a SERP feature that is fed by schema markup. And right now, it’s sort of the Wild West, only 7% of websites globally are using it at this point. So there’s a massive early adopter advantage as this technology matures.

Steve Wetmore – I have been using it within Gutenberg editor. They’ve got formatted blocks that allow you to work with frequently asked questions or lists.

Franco Valentino – And that’s wonderful and everyone should be taking advantage of that. Now schema.org is a lot repository, let’s think about the medical industry got hit very recently with a lot of Google updates because they’re in a space called YMYL, which means Your Money Your Life. these are these are highly emotionally charged things that people, you know, tend to convert easily on, like your health, right? If someone God forbid, has a massive illness, and you put up a website saying I can cure this illness, well, and you’re not a doctor, you should not be ranking number one for that particular term. So search engines got much smarter over the past year or two on this, and the medical space. There’s a lot of schema code. So you’ll see Web MD, for example, if you look at their platform, you’ll see massive amounts of schema that have to do with medical diagnosis, medical industry, medical treatments, and clinical information. And that really is a differentiator for the industry, as long as those people are authoritative, you know, actual doctors that have, you know, degrees and pedigrees in the fields that they do. Similarly, a lot of other or You know, lawyers, people in the debt relief space. That’s where we’re seeing the biggest opportunity for for people that are shysters, for example, right? Because the search engines have gotten smart enough to, to throttle down the ones that aren’t actually trustworthy.

Steve Wetmore – As a website owner, that that finds himself in the, your life, your money part of the world, how would you structure your website to help create authority and make it easier for Google to find the chain of your history and credentials?

Franco Valentino – That’s a great question. By the way, this is a very large argument on the web in our technical SEO circles, how do we boost something called EAT? So that’s Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. It’s, it’s not necessarily a rank factor. It’s made up of many multi smaller algorithms that are part of the larger Google algorithm. And what it does is it looks for trustworthiness on a page. So let’s say that you are a Physician, or you are a finance, you know, a financial guru that actually has a Degree in finance, it’ll look on the about page and see, for example, try to match up your University and your Degree to that particular University. So some of the things that you can do are on your about page, make sure that you link out to where you got your degree. So because these are relevant signals, Google does crawl the web and its spiders all the content right. So it can find these small signals between Between relevant websites to say, Yes, we were going to give him a little bit of a boost because he did graduate from and he has the appropriate degree to be talking about this particular subject. Same thing with it. So that’s one another one is getting links from your university or from a clinic that you worked at, or a bank that you work for, on to your about page. So this takes time, this is not something that you’re going to do overnight. But as a whole over time, that will get you better positioned in better search visibility, because you are authoritative and you are trustworthy. And those signals can be sent not only in the regular HTML, but between those between linking across those platforms. Oh, another thing is schema markup, if you can send those signals in the metadata that really helps Google understand it faster. So it’s not that one thing alone is going to get you more search visibility, but it will build your entity relationship in search and then subsequently, again, help it understand who you are and what you do.

Franco Valentino – The biggest winners, by the way, in our estimation are going to be the eCommerce shops. Because eCommerce shops that take advantage of metadata and schema.org. They get enhanced search features. And let me define search for folks that may not know what that is, Search Engine Result Position or SERP’s. So when you Google something, those 10 entries that show up on your page, that’s called the search engine results position. And on mobile, there are more features because we live now in a primarily mobile world. So in eCommerce, there are things like a Google Merchant Center, right you can sign up for an account, you can send it product feed information, and if you do that, and your competitors don’t well, you have first mover advantage. So if you have a healthy site with decent traffic, first of all, the technical basics never change, your site has to be secure. It has to be fast. that’s critically important for every second of slow down in your website, that’s somewhere between a 7% and 20% loss of conversion. So we always look at the basics first, but then early adopter advantage is going to be the schema markup specially for Ecommerce.

Steve Wetmore – As we all start to experiment with schema markup, and we actually use it on our websites, and at the same time you are using Google Search Console; and Google console identifies problems that you’re having. It shows you very clearly that you’ve got a Schema related error. But when I look at the error, I have no idea how to solve the problem. I just can’t figure it out. The resources that Google provides is highly technical and well beyond my level of understanding. So where do you go? Who would you go to, to solve that problem for you?

Franco Valentino – So as a novice, and you know, if someone doesn’t necessarily know a technical SEO background, it is a very specialized field. Google’s not very helpful in the help file, either because they tend to write, you know, very technically as well. So when they say, you’re missing a parent within this part of schema markup in the code, where do you go? Alright, so the first place I would go if I didn’t know anything about this industry would be YouTube. And literally just google the error that you got, and somebody will have explained that issue in a fairly non technical way. So as a small business owner that’s probably the shortest path to success. For a larger website things tend to get much more complicated and the error that they’re seeing could be the result of some other cause. So in that case, if you’re having that problem in your larger entity, you you need to reach out to some type of technical SEO to say, hey, look, can you at least give me an hour and tell me if this really is something wrong? Or if this is just the tool, alerting on something that really isn’t a problem? Because that will happen as well. I’m not saying that Google Search Console, or any one of the other technical SEO tools like Screaming Frog or SEMrush or something like that are not precise, because they are, but sometimes they alert on things that aren’t quite as a priority as some other things. And one of those things, for example, is if you’re a large eCommerce shop, and you’re getting, let’s say, you’re getting flagged for duplicate content errors, because you have mirrored pages or something like that. We wouldn’t even start looking at that we would actually look at the protocol versions, as we mentioned, right? So HTTP one versus HTTP two, you know, our is your website as fat from from a server standpoint. As fast as it can be, because that will give you that’s the 80/20 there, right? That that’s the parade, oh, I can if I fix this 20% of the problem, I’ll get 80% better results. So, again, take it with a grain of salt understand it, don’t go crazy over it, but as somebody that can guide you along that along the path to correcting it.

Steve Wetmore – It strikes me that as this new SEO technology develops that there’s tremendous opportunity for SEOs to specialize and just tackle schema errors and how to structure websites so that as you, you add more information, more blog posts, more product on an eCommerce site, that you know that as the data is added, it’s added correctly, you’re giving Google what they need to crawl and serve answers?

Franco Valentino – Yeah, absolutely. There’s there’s a lot of specialization within this field. It’s almost like the medical field, you know, someone is a, you know, a brain surgeon, the other one is a bone doctor. So, it’s very similar to that. And, you know, as technical SEOs, you know, we try to have a big network where, you know, I sometimes rely on developers that are technical SEO developers was for just schema markup, because even you know, that in itself is a is an art form. And then, you know, from from my network engineering background, it’s more of the server side, right? So it’s, you know, you can pick the wonderful thing about this field as you pick something that you really enjoy and then dive deep into it. And, and you actually can help people you know, this, these things do matter quite a bit, versus just adding content, you know, if the platform in the server right, or there’s enhanced data that you’re not seeing, it could be the difference between you winning online versus your competitor.

Steve Wetmore – Well, that’s amazing information, Franco. That’s really really good.

Franco Valentino – I’m honored to help.

Steve Wetmore – Do you have any other massive snippet that you can share?

Franco Valentino – Sure. Let’s think about something here. Alright, so the two biggest things that we see, number one, there are still websites out there and large ones that have decent traffic that don’t have a security certificate. If you don’t have SSL installed, it was time years ago to add it, it is a clear ranking factor. And it will give you more keywords and potentially more traffic by having a secure certificate, number one, number two, if your website isn’t loading in two seconds or less, at least the above the fold, you know the things that people see initially, then you’re losing about 64% of your visitors by the time you hit three seconds, is the single most critical factor for anything you’re doing online right now. So I would say before you get too advanced in things, let’s let’s go back to the SEO one on one stuff and focus deeply on Speed security and then subsequently you’ll get more traffic just by looking at those two things.

Steve Wetmore – Great information, Franco. So, when we talk about SEO tools, people’s eyes start to glaze over and because it’s all the same, so most people are using AHRefs, Moz, and SEMrush. What I’m looking for here is if you’ve got anything unique that you can share, and talk about that.

Franco Valentino – Yes, those are the typical SEO tools. Now Google Search Console has actually added a lot of new features over the past six months to a year. One of the most important ones that they have added is something called the crux report the spate page insights. So it’s a speed report, whereas normally we would rely on Page Speed insights, which is a tool that Google publishes, it’s just a website, Google Page Speed insights, and you’ll see it, it crawls your site and gives you a lot of technical information. Some of it will make your eyes glaze over. But it, but it will give you a 02 hundred marker on on some things that you can fix relatively quickly. And if you can’t fix them, you know, hand them to your web developer. And they’ll know how they’ll know what to do. Page Speed insights is a wonderful tool. And again, it’s free. And it’s just a website that Google publishes for you.

Steve Wetmore – I’m on Google Search Console right now. And so there’s overview index and enhancements, see speed Experimental.

Franco Valentino – Yeah, the speed experimental report is the one that you want to look at now, you will not get any data unless your website has had enough visits where Chrome browser can send enough enough we can analyze on an average how fast your pages are. So you may not see data in there yet, but if you’re if you do have traffic and you have a decent amount of traffic, you’ll see the Speed reporting there. And it’ll give you a you know, sort of a poor average and good metric, the metric that they that they measured off of his first contemptible paint. So some The, the first meaningful thing that a user sees on the screen and how fast that loads. So again, the it’s not gospel, it’s a it’s an average of things that can help contribute to making your website fast. There’s also a natural, the best thing you can do is navigate to your website and count in your head, how many seconds it takes to load if you don’t feel like it’s loading fast enough, think like a user, right? And you want to get it down to about a second or two that really it’s very difficult to do, but that’s the world we live in right now. You know, we are we’re we’re non patient people.

Steve Wetmore – Okay, so let’s touch on the the practicality of how to execute. So I’ve got a website that’s approaching six years old. I’ve been told by my developer that I have had too many plugins that have been used, we decided to change, so we disabled or removed some. And it has been explained to me that there’s a lot of scrap data left behind that contributes to slowing the website down a whole lot of reasons maybe maybe my host isn’t fast enough. What to to execute? I know there’s a lot of resource info online, you can go to, like you said, Go to YouTube. But how would you execute on next steps? Do you have a checklist or an approach to solve that problem in terms of speed?

Franco Valentino – Sure. Speed is is made up of many different factors, as you mentioned, right? So the quality of the server that you’re that you’re sitting on is critically important. That’s where the HTTP one versus HTTP two protocol is actually gets turned on. Right? You don’t have control over that unless you have, you know, access to your server. So picking a quality host is really important companies. WP Engine, liquid web flywheel who I think just got bought by WP Engine, but those are going to be qualified hosting qualified. I mean, they they they mark all of those checkboxes you just mentioned off, which will they’re too expensive from a technical standpoint to kind of rattle off on the call. But so having a good quality host one that costs more than $3 a month, your website, right, you want to pay somewhere on the $20 to $30 mark is about where you need to be. That that goes a long way. The next step immediate next step is your point, don’t have a lot of plugins use only the ones that you really need. And if you have plugins that are disabled, strip them out of the website right away, because the code still gets injected on every page. So there’s something called page bloat or the weight of a page. We typically budget before we create a piece of content, like a pillar page for a client will say, look, this page can be no more than 500 kilobytes in size. So you have to really think about the size of images that you’re putting on there. And by the way, images are the parade Oh, You typically everyone, every website I hit we audit has images that are much, much larger than than they need to be. So that is a really good first step. And that will contribute to a much faster website, if you can. As an example, if you’re using a PNG that doesn’t need a transparency, if the image doesn’t need a transparent background, you shouldn’t use a PNG it’s much bigger than a JPEG. So use a JPEG where you can so file formats are very important. And if you’re using a JPEG, where a web p format would work a web P is you know, maybe 20% the size of a JPEG and without losing quality. So it’s just thinking deliberately about images will get you a lot farther than you are today.

Steve Wetmore – Fantastic. Franco that was awesome that you just pushed the envelope.

Franco Valentino – Wonderful now I’m glad it’s a hopefully it provides value to someone.

Steve Wetmore – Well, it really did. And I’m I’m going to rush to get this published soon as possible and again, I will share it with you as soon as I get it completed. And again, Franco really enjoyed our conversation.

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Interview with Alberto Blanco Perez Founder and Head of SEO and AB+ Marketing Digital

Steve Wetmore – Good morning, Alberto. Today we’ve got Alberto Blanco from AB+ Marketing. And Alberto are in Valladolid, Spain. Now Alberto, if you could give us some information on who you are and what you do at AB+ Marketing.

Alberto Blanco Perez

Alberto Blanco – Good morning, Steve. Thanks for inviting me. I’m a digital marketing manager with a master’s degree in digital marketing and about eight years of experience between agencies and In-House. In my career, I have worked with all size companies, from hundreds of local small businesses to big multinationals, like airlines, Top Spanish telecommunication companies, or first division football clubs for example. At AB+Marketing, I’m the Founder and Head of SEO of the company and we provide mainly SEO, Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing Services, usually for medium size companies.

Steve Wetmore – Perfect. Well, here’s where we move on to the meaty part of our conversation. I’d like to get your insights on SEO trends that you find challenging, disrupting or as opportunities?

Alberto Blanco – In my opinion, we have to begin to stop thinking about a Google as a lone company, if we want to know where it’s going the future of the SEO, and start begin to look more to Alphabet as a company. I mean, Alphabet, that we all know is the mother company of Google, have been working more and more on the develop of mobile, and positioning themselves in the mobile sector as well as they develop more mobile related products, Android, Ok Google, Google My Business as its designed for mobile searches,… Its decisions are based in data… They work for simplify the searches, and satisfy their users. For example, we all know now that more of the 50 percent of searches are from mobile its not new, but Google developed the snippets and My Business and recent studies says now that more of the 50% of the searches doesn’t give a clic on the organic result…  If you want to take a look right now, and you do a search on PC for example for “Real Madrid”, in the results there are info about the company on the right, Ads, maps, info about the upcoming matches they are gonna play, rich snippets everywhere above the fold. If you are lucky, only one organic result, even where you can buy the tickets. So in the end with Google developing more and more snippets, and with taking consideration about all the things they have been working on for a while, for Android for Ok Google or local search, the feeling is that they try to satisfy the customer without organic results, so they can make more useful their assistant, and for us the SEOs, take us more and more effort to get organic visibility. Cool for their customers. Not so cool for SEOs. In the future, we could see that every year, there are more products, or more snippets, trying to satisfy a virtual Assistant, so they are more useful. My my two cents about the future in 2020 about SEO is that in surely, we are going to have more new snippets and less organic visibility, at least for the long tail searches. BERT, the last Google update published, goes directly on this way, improving the way the algorithm understand natural language. A step forward to understand better the long tail searches, and at the end of the day, almost every vocal search, is long tail. My advice, would be to check if you have to use other ways to keep your traffic at the top of the conversion funnel.

Alberto Blanco –  In my opinion, Google My Business are gonna be boosted next year. Google are trying to make it a must have for business based on physical stores. The addition of integrated chat on My Business with potential customers is just another example. So maybe you should check your My Business profile, update it, and begin to publish content to keep it alive, it’s gonna be worth it. But in my opinion, the biggest changes for 2020 are gonna be about content quality. Alphabet have seen that Facebook has been called to the US Congress, about fake news and political interferences in the US elections. In my opinion, they knows that the next could be them, as the algorithm offers information, and there is no way to check if this info is true or manipulated. Even right now, there are troubles as some people aren’t able to identify a fake new from a real one. But what about the children? What about the children that now are learning how to use a search engine, they are learning to use computers, and in the end, without any tool or knowledge about how to identify fake news from inaccurate info, or partial info, or real quality info. In that way, I think Google is working, and we have for example the algorithm update from August 2019 called Medic Update, pointed to the content quality for related sectors to personal financial or medical information.

Steve Wetmore – I think they have an acronym, Your Money Your Life.

Alberto Blanco –  Yeah, but the point it’s that I think that this sectors are just a training ground for the search engine. If you take a closer look, not only they are basic to people life, they are two sectors with plenty of community expertise, and with lots of papers and its more easy to check the info someone publish on their blog or website. Other sectors, like history for example, could be more controversial, and difficult to check the facts from the manipulated info. So If they can teach the algorithm with this two vertical sectors like they are self-care and money, they will be able to translate it to other ones in the future. So in in the next year, I think that we need to prepare, because sooner or later, could suffer a hit to your sector, and check if the content that you publish, or you have on your site, would need to be more clear, more useful and more worthy. The quality of this texts must be more accurate than a SEOs, a newbie to the sector, or scammer will be able to write. So I suggest to check your content marketing strategies, and take a spin to your quality content. Maybe could not be in 2020, but will be worthy sooner or later, and of course, it’s a must if you are on financial or medical sectors to do it as soon as possible.

The quality and accuracy of a text that a medic could write, its gonna be always more valuable than the quality of a text that a SEO can write about medical issues.

Steve Wetmore –  And I agree with that i I’ve done a little reading on how Google establishes authority. And they they will actually they’re looking for links from the blog article. that support the author of the article and Is this our author really an authority? And, and they say that, you know, part of that medic update is, you know being able to or Google is looking for links that will support the author’s expertise or authority.

Alberto Blanco –  Sure. Right. Sooner than we think, that links are gonna be more valuable. A few years ago, Google published a patent about checking the link quality based of the clics  a link get on the article they are embed, and if they publish it, could give lesser importance to links located on a footer, on the sidebar or in the header. They could be implemented soon, if you take into the equation that Google have published a few months ago two new kinds of tagging outbound links in your website than only follow and no-follow; they are the Sponsored and the User generated content, that means they are working on this areas.

Steve Wetmore – Okay, excellent. So thank you for that. Alberto. Can you also talk about what, what tools you’re using? And I think we discussed earlier that that Moz, AHRefs and SEMrush tend to be a very common collection of tools used by SEOs. Do you use anything different or unique?

Alberto Blanco – Well, It’s normal, they are the best in the market. In my opinion, a tool is a tool, and you have to use the best tool for the task you have to do. But one of the most I personally use, its Screaming Frog. In my opinion, when you have to do OnSite tasks, its one of my favourites. It’s a great tool and it gives you a quick sneak peek of info about almost every technical SEO Issue. Its very handy, very fast, and It saves you a lot of time in doing technical SEO.

Steve Wetmore -Well, Alberto I’m going to thank you very much for this great info and spending time with me explaining your perspectives.

Alberto Blanco – Thank you for inviting me.

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Interview with Noah Battle Co Founder at Sproutbox Media

Good afternoon, Noah Battle from Sproutbox Media, really looking forward to learning about you and your agency. And at this moment, I’d love to hear about who you are and what you do at Sproutbox Media.

Noah Battle II

Noah Battle – Thanks, Steve. I appreciate the introduction. I appreciate the opportunity to sit down with you for a few minutes. Sproutbox Media is is located in Portland, Oregon. We’re an integrated digital marketing agency that’s
focused on a variety of channels and bringing integration. We’re focused on conversion optimization, building traffic that’s targeted for our individual client business needs. We work with a variety of clients, really everything from startups where will help them to just get off the ground.
Everything from their branding to the website development, helping them with focus groups. As far as understanding their product and how, how it should be message messaging should come along with, with, with their brand, how to how to get something that resonates within the marketplace, I think all the way through a variety of small business industries we’ve we’ve targeted over the years and large businesses we’ve, we’ve worked with companies as large as Pepsi as large as my tail, etc. So kind of kind of a variety. But, but always through through all of it. Integration of services is really key for us, helping to come alongside of our our clients and be somewhat business partners with them not not in the sense that we’re taking equity or in Such things but but we want to understand their business. So that’s a little bit of a difference from traditional digital agencies, we actually want to understand the business. And as we learn our business, we actually are tailoring all of our solutions from a business perspective, right? growth of their businesses is what we’re all about. So I’m branding as I mentioned, web development, messaging, and then of course, all of the digital marketing channels and video so video is also something that’s not always integrated within the digital agency. Oftentimes, that’s that’s something that that’s hired out or contracted out or some such, but it’s completely integrated within our services. So we’re able to leverage it from a lot of different ways regarding messaging, and, and even even marketing marketing, both on social as well as within YouTube marketing, ranking videos and such. But But all of that place into the larger picture of what’s going to be best for our clients business from a business perspective.

Steve Wetmore – So when you talk about video Are you also creating video for your clients?

Noah Battle – Great question yes we do we have all those capabilities in house we’re able to from start to finish do produce the video right? So everything from meeting with a client doing the initial discovery, understanding what what kind of video and there are a number of different types of videos we may be doing, you know, from, from customer interviews to testimonials to walking through the company, helping people to understand products and so forth and positioning, all those kinds of things. But yes, we can script things out. We can shoot it all and and produce it and get it launched.

Steve Wetmore – So does Sproutbox Media have any interesting credentials. Do you have event Speaking history?

Noah Battle – We’ve done some speaking, yes. It’s not our primary way of building business and getting out into the world, if you will, but but we definitely have done that. I’m more more of that was done earlier in our business history. But some of it still continues. We’ve we’ve done industry events for for financial services, we’ve done accounting services, we’ve done some technologies, conventions, and we’ve done a lot more work with local SEO kinds of meetings and events is talking about local SEO with versus national SEO versus e commerce SEO.

Steve Wetmore – Well, here’s the here’s where we move into the the meaty part of the conversation and what we’re looking for is your perspective or your views on the future of SEO, going into 2020?

Noah Battle – Well, I guess there are a number of things that are going to be really, very important. I believe that zero click search and voice search
will profoundly disrupt the market. For those that have not prepared themselves for it, it will profoundly disrupt traditional SEO because so much SEO is more than half of all searches are currently voice initiated, right? And more than half of searches are a zero click result. Which means that a featured snippet has been triggered. Google has a feature called feature snippets where they’re at trying to answer questions. So users are asking questions on the net. You know, how old is someone How to meditate. What, what was what’s a good recipe for, for, for apple pie, right? So they, they will post those kind of questions and Google has has evolved to the point where they’re able to answer those questions above the normal search results. And so this is resulting in zero clicks. So if the user is actually getting the answer that they’re looking for, immediately presented to them in the search engine results, there’s no need for them to go down further and the results and click on a web page. So that’s going to come that will be a very large disruptor within the marketplace because most most businesses, especially most small businesses, and local businesses, we work a lot with with local business. They do not they are not prepared for for feature snippets, they haven’t optimized for that, that that that’s not a play for them. And then the other side of that is that This the whole voice piece. And more than 50% of searches are now for most industries, at least, are now over their, their their phones, along with being voice. So you have that kind of trifecta happening, right? Mobile optimization, and then his voice and feature snippet stuff. So as that all comes together, and it is coming together, we don’t have to wait for 2020 it’s actually coming together now. But over the next couple of years that will profoundly change how search engine and SEO optimization works.

Steve Wetmore – So what kind of advice would you give someone to prepare for the zero click search results? How what would you What would you tell someone to do?

Noah Battle – Well, there are a couple things. First of all, change the way that you are doing keyword research or least broaden or expand it. Often, most businesses will look at bottom of the funnel search phrases, search phrases that have a lot of buying intentionality behind them. And, and as they optimize for those, they’re going to have a live more and more limited result pattern. The featured snippets, as I mentioned earlier, is all about trying to answer questions and trying to read into the intention of the searcher, and provide the answer as quickly and as seamlessly as possible from Google’s perspective, giving that Google’s objective is to provide a great user experience, right so they’re getting answered quickly. So what you have to do is expand your keyword research into looking at more longtail searches, but looking at longtail searches that are structured in questions. So being able to answer questions as part of your research process, looking for what kinds of questions your intended, buyer or user might be asking related to your industry, like FAQ kind of things, about services, about comparisons of products, a compartment comparisons and services, those kinds of things. And as you identify those keywords, then going back and optimizing for keyword .

Noah Battle – There are tools out there available like AHRefs, and there are a variety of other ones that will help you and your keyword research to be able to identify what keywords will actually produce a snippet. And then once you understood what those those keywords are they’re a variety of different types of snippets. Go back to your website, do the On Page technical SEO to make sure that you position yourself well for those results. The majority of the featured snippets are coming from Google’s first page results. So that also means you must be on the first page of Google for whatever phrases you’re gone after to have a real strong chance of actually ending up in as a featured snippet. Carrying this thought a little bit further, you have to do mobile optimization for speed of course, that’s become standardized for the UX Of course, but also making sure that feature snippets are going to look proper on the mobile device that’s going to be helpful, along with the speed and the UX.

Steve Wetmore – How do you how do you ensure your your featured snippet looks proper on mobile?

Noah Battle – Testing! lots of lots of testing. That’s one of the bedrocks of marketing in general. And certainly, web development, in particular, as it relates to SEO. So it’s kind of gone by the days of, of not really paying a lot of attention to how something looks on on the mobile device. Again, because the majority of searches are mobile. We optimized for mobile first versus
a few years back where we would optimize for desktop first, right now we optimized for mobile, because it has to look good. Through all the testing patterns that you would go through all the various device types that you would you would look at, it has to operate properly there that’s even more important in our eyes then then how it operates on the desktop.

Steve Wetmore – So does that. Does that mean you’re using more structured data like our schema markup? And how do you do it the hard way? Or do you use the Gutenberg editor blocks that format it for you?

Noah Battle – We’ve done it both ways. We actually there are a couple of tools that were automatically that will automatically generate this, the schema data for you and we tend to you utilize those tools but you know, different people do it slightly different. And kind of also depends on on the size of the project. For smaller you know, quick things we might just do it in line with with within the code but other times we’ll use the generator.

Steve Wetmore – Well, what that’s a perfect segue into what tools you’re using? Your day to day SEO journey.

Noah Battle – Probably some of the same tools that most agencies use, I mentioned. We use Longtail Pro, for some of that long tail keyword research that I mentioned. Majestic SEO. So, Majestic is not a tool that everyone uses, but it’s but it’s definitely a tool that we’ve found to be very, very, helpful to identify industry so when we’re looking at links and when we’re looking at things of that nature, understanding when we want to get a link from a
guest post or some other comments source, understanding how they have looked at online as far as their industry, right. That’s more and more of a big lift in rankings is relevancy. So relevance to the industry, getting backlinks, not just because they’re high powered, you know, if you’re looking at Moz or some other or even AHReh’s at the power of the link, but also looking at the relevancy of the Linke. So that’s the kind of information we get from Majestic.

Steve Wetmore – So just to stay on on topic again. So talking about schema markup, what tool would you use to create that code? Is there a tool that helps you structure it properly?

Noah Battle – Sure. So the the JSON generator is a good tool that we can use as that damn JSONLD.com they have a schema generator there. And that’s, that’s been very helpful. It’s pretty easy to use.

Steve Wetmore – That’s, that is the first time I’ve heard that and all these interviews, good, good info. Sure. Great. So any other interesting tools you’re using.

Noah Battle – I mentioned Longtail Pro, I think that a lot of a lot of businesses don’t utilize that. And, and it’s useful for helping to understand not only generating tons and tons of keywords, but you’re also able to get competitive data. So here’s what I mean. So it’s one thing to have a keyword when you’re doing a keyword research is, it’s important to make sure that you’ve you’ve already understood the business goals. You already understand what they’re trying to try to accomplish. As I mentioned, we want to partner with business. And so selecting keywords that are very, very relevant somewhere in the funnel, and that’s part of your strategic plan. Are you going to target top of the funnel, middle, mid or lower. And though there are implications for all of that, if we just take the example of lower in the funnel, something that has very high buyer intention, if you plug that into a Longtail Pro, and and generate a massive list of keywords that are in that level, that’s one thing, and that’s where a lot of SEOs will go, and then they’ll start looking at the amount of traffic for those particular keywords. And a lot of folks will actually stop right there. We have some good keywords that look good and they have good search volume. It’s important to actually take that a step further, and then look at the competitiveness of those keywords. So, good keyword, great searches. But can you rank for within a reasonable amount of time? Are you able to rank for it within three to six months? So some of those kind of keywords, especially when you’re looking at blog, articles are around pages within sub pages within your site, you really want to be able to focus in on keywords that actually have rank ability, short term rank ability, and this is where Long Tail Pro is very helpful. It will give you the competitiveness of a particular keyword. And you’re able to do it based off of the authority of your website. So you are able to put a plug in your website, we want to rank for these particular keywords for this particular website. It will look at the the authority of the website and then look at the competitive of the keywords. It’ll give you a report back on these particular keywords so you can if you can rank pretty quickly for this particular website. That’s huge. You whittle down your long list into a much more manageable list. And now you can go in and look at those individually. Look at that particular keyword, what search engine results does it produce? Let me look at the results and see how competitive they really are. So Longtail pro does a lot of work for you. But you still need to manually look at those keywords and just verify everything because the tool is not perfect. But that brings you a long ways forward being able to select the list that’s highly relevant and has the search volume and you can actually rank for within a reasonable amount of time. And that’s, that’s golden for our clients.

Steve Wetmore – Some valuable information here, particularly, that little nugget on the schema markup tool that. That’s new information for the audience. So, thank you very much for spending this time with us Noah!

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Interview with Marc Brookland CEO with SEOLocale

Steve Wetmore – Good morning Marc. We’re welcoming Mark Brookland from SEOLocale in in the Philadelphia area. Today we’re going to talk about SEO and first Marc I’d like you to introduce yourself and talk about who you are and what you do.

Marc Brookland

Marc Brookland – Thanks for having me again. I appreciate it. I’m Marc Brookland and I’m the CEO of SEO locale. We’re a full service digital marketing agency located in Jenkintown right outside Philadelphia. I’ve been doing SEO for about 10 years. Got to start from the bottom of SEO if you will, with link building and link removal. Kind of picked up everything as I went on. One big thing that really got me to push me to start my own my own business. My dad has a small family owned pharmacy. He was with a big agency who didn’t do anything for him. He was paying a whole bunch of money. And I told them, you know, I’ll do this for you. It’s no problem. I’ll handle your SEO. So he cancelled services with them. And a week later, his website was gone. His rankings were gone. His SEO was gone. So that was an interesting conversation I had with his former agency. Wow.

Steve Wetmore – How did they justify that? That’s an amazing story.

Marc Bookland – Yeah, well, so a lot of times with these big agencies people don’t realize that they are renting their website essentially. So part of their monthly package is they charge for, I believe they call it web hosting and maintenance. Which essentially means that you’re renting your website from them, they build you the website, and you’re renting it from them for life. So it’s their way of holding you hostage. Because if you leave, then you lose your website and you’re gonna have to pay to have a website built. So yep, that’s that’s what happened. To be honest, I’m not a developer or designer. That’s my partner side. And thank God for him. I built the worst website you would have ever seen. And thank God for him. He was kind enough to swoop in and you know, fix up my garbage.

Steve Wetmore – That’s a great story. And so how is your father’s pharmacy website ranking locally now?

Marc Brookland – It took a while. It probably took about Six weeks before we got his rankings back to where they were, and were able to improve on it. His website was down for probably two or three weeks. So obviously, when your website is down, you’re going to lose those rankings. But once you build it back up, and you put the proper things in place, and you update some of the content, Google picks that up pretty quickly. And especially being a local pharmacy, you know, we’re targeting hyper local, so it’s much easier to compete at that level. So, I mean, I was happy to be able to get to get those results back. Yeah, I mean, it certainly helps being so hyper local.

Steve Wetmore – That’s great. So is your main focus for your agency local SEO?

Marc Brookland – Our bread and butter is local SEO, web design and development. We have clients who are on a national level for SEO. We have clients that we offer paid search and clients that we offer blogging, press releases and content optimizations we offer email marketing, photo, video services, so we do try to provide that full service agency for any of our clients, but again our bread and butter is local SEO website development.

Steve Wetmore – Can you tell any stories relative to any memorable work experiences in terms of credibility in the industry. Have you spoken at any conferences? Or are you a member in an industry group or something like that?

Marc Brookland – I do attend several, SEO local SEO meetups, if you will. There’s one thing it’s called Beers and SEO. And we meet locally in Philadelphia. That’s where I live. And you know, it’s just a bunch of people who get together and just spitball different ideas and different things we are experiencing. Um, I have gone to speak at my college a couple times about digital marketing and what I do and how I sort of got here where I want to go. Number College it’s in Allentown, Pennsylvania right next to Johnny Park. Okay. And I try to do as many different radio shows similar to this as I can.

Steve Wetmore – Well, it makes sense. I mean, you’re a local SEO guy and all your relationships are local. So what I’d like to do is try to get your head into what you’re experiencing right now and where you see future trends going either short term into 2020 or long term and beyond.

Marc Brookland – Yeah, I think that local search is going to be more important than ever. Google My Business, for example, has made a lot of adjustments with how they manage Google My Business; they changed it so that you can only target 20 local areas right now. So they really want you to only target the most local areas to you. They really want you to get reviews or sponsor reviews, use post offerings, they want you to be active on Google My Business. If you’re familiar with Google Local Service Ads, I think that that is going to be a huge player moving forward. It’s still rolling out. It’s only available to some verticals as of now, but they’re constantly adding different verticals and expanding that platform. And it’s very cheap right now and affordable.

Steve Wetmore – Can you can you back up and just give us some more detail on Google Local Service Ads. So what is different with this service then is with the regular Google Ads?

Marc Brookland – Google Local Service ads is a Google guaranteed service. So if you’re familiar with the Google guarantee, when you’re searching, and it’s right up at the top, you know, before you get to the ads, the local pack and the rest of the organic results. And like I said, it’s only available to certain verticals and certain industries. You go through a fairly extensive process to get approved. Google has to go through a background check, build out this profile, you know, the whole nine yards. And what they’re saying is that they are guaranteeing that this business will provide you a good service. And if a customer calls and says that they didn’t get the service that they expected, and it was a horrible experience, Google will refund that person their money.

Marc Brookland – Similarly, if a business who was on the Google Local Service ads and they get a phone call that isn’t a qualified lead, maybe they misunderstood what their services were, or whatever the case was. That business can call Google and say this was not a good lead for me. And Google will refund them that money. Wow. It is literally what you call; pay for acquisition, which makes it significantly different than Google AdWords where you’re paying for a click. And I have seen, I’ve witnessed, I manage, several Google local service accounts for my clients and I have literally seen Google reimbursing my clients for leads that were not qualified leads. I’ve witnessed that, I have not experienced Google refunding but that’s my understanding of the Google guarantee. They also have a separate reviews platform within the Google Local Service platform where you can get different reviews. And that’s a way of showcasing that you are Google verified, Google guaranteed service provider within that local area.

Steve Wetmore – That’s very interesting. So what verticals are, they allowing to join this?

Marc Brookland – I can remember there’s HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, Air Conditioning) carpet cleaning, upholstery cleaning, plumbing. Um, I want to say real estate.

Steve Wetmore – What about your services, for example?

Marc Brookland – They don’t offer digital services listing. Otherwise, I would absolutely be doing it. I personally don’t run Google AdWords for for myself just because of how expensive it is and how competitive it is. Yeah. But I would absolutely be running Google local services.

Steve Wetmore – So essentially it sounds like they’re just looking for local “brick and mortar” businesses.

Marc Brookland – Yeah, absolutely. And they’ve they’ve been constantly making, you know, different algorithm updates and changes to sort of to help out the little guys and help out those local businesses. In my opinion to Google local services is one of the best products that Google has come up with in a long time.

Steve Wetmore – Well, that’s, that’s good information. No one’s talked about that Marc. So that’ll be a useful snippet. And it certainly feeds into your theme.

Marc Brookland – Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a newer product. Not a lot of people know about it. I just think it’s going to it’s going to explode in popularity. And unfortunately, it’s probably going to get more expensive to pay for the leads.

Steve Wetmore – Have you written a blog article on that yet?

Marc Brookland – No, we have not as a matter of fact.

Steve Wetmore – Your blog articles are good. You’ve got some really good information. And its current, you know, you’ve published one yesterday and the day before. I mean, it’s you’re busy.

Marc Brookland – I we try to write a lot. I used to. I personally used to write a lot more. Um, I don’t have as much time as I used to. Sure. So I haven’t I haven’t written a blog in in probably, I’d say about six weeks or so. You know, we have a lot of staff here. And we always encourage them to write blogs, if they want about different things. So we try to stay on top of it. I mean, for us, the biggest thing is you got to practice what you preach. So if we’re telling, we’re telling our clients, you know, blogs are important, because you can use it for internal linking, it’s great information for your users. It’s answering some questions that your users might have. It’s a great way to, you know, build yourself up as an authority in your industry, then we should be doing that as well.

Steve Wetmore – Right on. Well, it’s good. So do you have anything else any other juicy snippets you can offer?

Marc Brookland – One thing that is being talked about more and more, is ADA compliance, which is ensuring that your your website is easily accessible and digestible for people with disabilities. It is much more prevalent in certain industries than other than others. But I think that Google is going to start to make a much bigger push in a much bigger deal. And I think it’ll end up being a ranking factor if your website is ADA compliant or not.

Steve Wetmore – Interesting. So what what could you do? Or what should you be doing regularly regularly? To make sure it is ADA compliant?

Marc Brookland – You know, it’s actually not as difficult as you would think. I mean, you can literally Google ADA compliance, Google and they will, they will tell you how to make your website ADA compliant. So you know, it’s a little bit of coding involved. So you know, any developer could certainly help you certainly help you out with that I even I’m pretty sure I read an article on Search Engine Journal then they have like a guide on how to make your website ADA compliant. So very it’s it’s, it’s, it’s easy to do, everyone should do it because why not? And I again, I think it’s going to end up being a ranking factor and moving forward.

Steve Wetmore – That’d be that’d be an interesting topic to touch on and right on. So I guess look details like on your photography include the, make sure you include the text and really describe the image. Yeah, with keywords, you know, I guess that’s that’s the two things right keyword plus image description equals a good alt text.

Marc Brookland – Yeah, definitely, definitely. Just want to make sure that it’s all you know, clearly laid out and detailed. Google knows what what you’re what that picture is. Google knows what the video is and knows what everything is. And anyone with a disability can easily understand what it is.

Steve Wetmore – Very interesting. So those are two original topics. Congratulations, Mark. That’s great. That’s really good information. SEO tools that you’re using in your agency. And what in particular, are you using for local SEO? If there’s any difference?

Marc Brookland – Yeah, we rely pretty heavily on SEMrush, as most people probably should, and a lot of great tools in SEMrush outside of doing keyword research and competitor analysis they have writing tools as co writing tools that help you measure the keyword density of your website, they give you tools on different keywords that you might want to include throughout your content. It’s really helpful beneficial for for any level of SEO. We use Majestic, a lot; Majestic SEO more so for backlink analysis, making sure that we are keeping our clients backlink profile as localized as possible. I believe that if you’re a local business and if you have more local links, then that goes a much longer way and having links from all over the place, right. We of course have a keyword keyword ranking system that we that we’ve built and also links to your Google Analytics, Google My Business and other social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, your Google AdWords, your Google Search Console. And that sort of just gives us a more holistic view. All of our clients have access to this dashboard, by the way, so they’re able to take a look anytime they want, how their keywords are ranking, how their traffic is growing. They have access to the SEMrush dashboard, not the SEMrush dashboard, we have our own dashboard that we built internally that it that is accessible to all of our clients.

Steve Wetmore – Very good. So you use a service to provide that for your or did you code that yourself?

Marc Brookland – It’s a combination of the two. So what we’ve done was we created this dashboard, where we we’ve organized everything so it’s you know organic search Google AdWords, Google Search Console social media.
We have a WebSite Auditor in there. And I mean, it’s really just pulling a bunch of different API’s in. So you know, it wasn’t that complex. But it’s still just a centralized location that’s easy for our clients to access and just review what we’re doing what’s going on how everything’s progressing.

Steve Wetmore – Very good. Haven’t heard that as a service offered by an agency, so very good. Anything else to offer Marc?

Marc Brookland – I think one of the most important things that I try to preach toward my clients is that you you really shouldn’t just focus on one piece of digital marketing. You know, I don’t it’s not good enough to solely focus on social media or so we focus on SEO or solely focused on paid everything works together and as Everything will affect how well your website performs overall. So it’s really important that you have a well rounded digital marketing strategy in place, and that you follow that strategy and everything is working together feeding off of each other. And ultimately, if you’re doing that and doing all the right things, and you know, not trying to do anything by gaming the system or you know, black hat SEO,
you’re you’re going to do great, and you’re going to run a very, very well run campaign.

Steve Wetmore – Excellent. Well, Mark, thank you very much. This is great information. I was really looking for some some real insightful info on local SEO and you delivered. Thank you.

Marc Brookland – Yeah, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And again, thanks for having me, Steve.

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