Interview with Alex Blaisdell Founder of Sixth Media SEO Agency and Digital Marketing

Alex Blaisdell

Steve Wetmore – Welcome to the InstaVIP podcast. Alex is founder of Six Media specializing in SEO and Digital Marketing. And their forte is execution. So, Alex, welcome. How are you?

Alex Blaisdell – Doing fantastic today. Thanks for asking.

Steve Wetmore – Alex, could you take us down the road of describing who you are and what you do and touch a little bit on your credibility, your experiences in the industry, if you’re part of any association, or if you’ve done any public speaking, that kind of thing?

Alex Blaisdell – So, personally, I’m a husband and a father. I have a family with three kids. I always like to joke we have three goats, three dogs, and 20 chickens as well and it sets me apart on the professional side so I’ve been in SEO for for over 10 years obviously dabbled in other digital marketing areas as well. And as far as speaking go I do a lot of different little local engagements where I work in groups and where I talk with business owners, and help them understand the value of and why they need a website, why they needed to produce leads and how they build their own credibility. So I focus a lot on a lot of personal branding for local business owners. And then he had just recently left a Director of SEO position, turned down a six figure salary to start my own Agency – Six Media so that’s kind of how it came about.

Alex Blaisdell – And just Some context on Six Media, we really focus on SEO, like you said, and execution. There’s a lot of knowledge out there in the industry and there’s a lot of really smart people out there in the industry. Where I feel like a lot of people failed and where a lot of people struggle is taking that knowledge and being able to actually scale that with their team, and execute and get the results. And so that’s my mission; trying to bridge that gap and make that focus work. And what I have done at Sixth Media is assembled a Power Team, we really have that knowledge, but then also have that system that can execute at a high level. And so far, it’s been been going really, really well.

Steve Wetmore – That’s excellent. So how large is your team?

Alex Blaisdell – Right now we have five people that works with me on a daily basis. We also have a team of freelancers that I’ve worked with for 5 to 10 years in certain aspects. We leverage our team well on a case by case project.

Steve Wetmore – I am really looking forward to you talking about the future of SEO as you see it and the near future. With all the changes that Google implements we don’t walk around with a crystal ball but I would like to hear where you see SEO evolving relative to your niche focused on local small businesses, branding, execution like search engine marketing.

Alex Blaisdell – I at it in two parts, especially like you said, nobody has a magic ball, nobody can see into the future. And so one of the things that I think people throw out there a lot is voice search and those types of things, right, which I definitely think is important, and we need to focus on before I get into future casting. I really think SEO in 2020 will be back to the basics. So things like technical SEO and having a really solid website. Critical to any type of its success, especially within your mobile first indexing coming out a few years ago and those types of things. Going back to the basics of having a technically sound website, having a website that’s fast on desktop, but also more importantly on mobile, having a solid foundation keyword research and making sure that the efforts that you are Doing or going towards those keywords that are actually going to drive traffic to your website and drive leads and sales. A lot of a lot of business owners, you know, ones that are trying to DIY or even when you get into really large e commerce businesses, they might be gaining in traffic they might be getting keywords but against that the right keywords that are actually driving clicks to their website. So where I feel like a lot of people are kind of overlooking is, again, the fundamentals of what we need that you know, foundation that we need. And I will specifically focus on like the technical side of things, so how your website’s functioning, how fast it loads, those types of things. And then you can start getting into the other basics of relevance with keyword research and on page optimization, video markup, all those types of things. But again, I would say that first part for 2020 is back to the basics and if you focus on That, if your site is well oiled and running successfully there, you’re set up to win. If you don’t do that, all this new stuff that’s coming on, you won’t even really have a really good chance for. So that’s part one. Part Two, I would say for 2020 is some of the stuff that I mentioned earlier. So voice search is huge, but instead of just saying voice search, and what that actually means. I think that’s still playing out how people utilize that and take advantage of that. But number one, because of voice search, I think featured snippets is becoming even more important. I’ve worked on large websites where if we didn’t have that featured snippet for three weeks, you lost over $100,000 in revenue. And featured snippets get a lot less clicks coming from Google also known as zero click searches. But featured snippets will drive clicks to your website. Also, another hot topic the last few years is is EAT, which is Expertise, Authority, and Trust which is about establishing yourself as an industry expert. If your niche is SEO or digital marketing, or food blogging, or selling something online or a local business. If you’re a tradesman, like an HVAC, or a profession like a Dentist or Doctor, it’s important to establish yourself as the expert. The objective is to build your own authorship and credibility through quality content blog posts. I had a lot of successful businesses that focused on EAT. Blog with credibility, not authorship and eventually your content gets picked up and helps the rest of the site perform. So again, going back to the basics, once those basics are covered, you can start expanding into featured snippets route and ranking for relevant keywords to drive traffic and drive revenue.

Steve Wetmore – Continuing our discussion on “Basics”; when you’re working to correct On Page issues, do you have in house people that can fix errors?

Alex Blaisdell – So we do a full on technical audit when somebody comes through the door and we dive deep into all the different areas. And then from there, we take that audit and then we prioritize a custom package on what’s best for that business. So whether, it’s an e commerce business, it’s doing hundred’s of thousands of dollars a month in revenue or rather a local business that is getting no traffic to the website; each approach is going to be different. And we diagnose the foundation and make sure that it’s set up, and then go in and fix on page issues. And so the three areas that we’re focusing on, they’re not as obviously technical. The technical part of it the relevance, which is keyword research with the on page optimization, and also the trust. Trust gets into EAT like I talked about authorship, but also how healthy your backlink profile is, your anchor text, all that. So those are the things that we’re looking into, and then we prioritize our work based on what’s going to make the most impact first.

Steve Wetmore – Did you get involved in backlink outreach in a significant way?

Alex Blaisdell – Yes It’s something that I’ve done throughout my career. And also something that we focus on here. Again, it depends on each individual partners website or their strategy, what they have going on. And so we’ll scale it depending on the business model. For example, for local business, HQ backlinks might be the key thing that they need so we will focus 50% of our time on an outreach effort on acquiring high quality backlinks to their site with specific anchor text to specific pages. Sometimes for bigger sites. They don’t need more backlinks, but they might need a better internal linking structure. So again, we’ll focus our efforts on cleaning up their site, so that trust flow can pass through it instead of gain more trust.

Steve Wetmore – Alex you have been very consistent with respect to don’t forget the basics, the basics will always be there. But can you cast a forward looking eye at work where you think even the basics might take us?

Alex Blaisdell – If we if we look at it from that lens, I would say in the past, you could still have a very successful online strategy while not doing the basics very well. For example, you could have a lot of different efforts on where your ranking for a lot of keywords and it’s driving a lot of traffic in your site, could have been loading in 10 or 20 seconds. But, now if you have a site loading in 10 to 20 seconds, or even longer, trying to rank for those keywords and trying to stay on top of your competition just doesn’t happen anymore. So again, if you’re looking at it from the basics in a forecasting lens, there’s a lot of different things that you may have been successful for. And that’s why I say going back to basics in 2020 is very important. Because if you’re not, you’re going to be penalized and damaged for not being able to execute and have those basic SEO fundamentals established.

Steve Wetmore – Alex, let’s talk a little bit about what tools you’re using. We discussed earlier, what most agencies use. So I’m really looking for some insights on something that you might use that’s off the beaten trail.

Alex Blaisdell – We talked about Moz, AHREF’s and SEMrush, which I definitely do leverage as well. One that I really like that I think is still commonly used, is Screaming Frog. It’s a crawler that goes in and crawls the entire site and gives you a lot of useful data. Another crawler that I really do like, is Deep Crawl. I like to cross reference those between all of the tools. So I like to use Screaming Frog or SEMrush or AHREF’s and cross reference what each crawler is finding. The thing specifically that I do like about Deep Crawl is how they organize the data and how you can see it from the front end, I find myself spending a lot less time just trying to interpret the data and understand what the data is telling me to be able to formulate a quality strategy. And so I really do well with Deep Crawl in how that data is presented to me. They also have some really cool functionalities in there, where you can actually take it and share that dashboard that you’re looking at with a partner. When you’re working with high level partners, high level marketing understanding, you’re able to discuss what I’m seeing. Here’s why we’re going to be knocking out these over the next two weeks or four weeks and here’s why our strategies are created because you can show them that technical data. As with Screaming Frog, it gives you a lot of valuable data but you have to take that data manipulate it. It’s not necessarily partner facing tools or that I use are outside SEMrush or AHREF’s.

Steve Wetmore – Do you use any page optimization tools?

Alex Blaisdell – I have like our own internal processes on what we’re looking for. Create a lot of custom content and wireframes, that will actually scope out the entire page of what we’re looking for. One tool that we have been able to leverage in that process a little bit is from SEMrush with their on site tool that you can actually plug in the content and get the score out of 10 and get kind of what the overall content is doing. And you can then compare it with your competitors. So I like doing that because historically, before they evolved into a tool that I was using on a daily basis, I would have to do that manually. So if I’m trying to rank for a certain keyword or query or even group type, I used to have to go and manually and look at the top 10 competitors, grab their content, get their word count, and do all those types of things manually. Now SEMrush allows you to have a little bit more automation, but it’s still very much a manual process of making sure that how we want the content to appear on the site is going to be successful from a user experience, which is sometimes where I feel like a lot of SEOs, they might be just doing it to optimize for the search engine. I think it’s even more important optimize for the end user. And so with our custom content wireframes we’re actually going in there and specifying what we specifically want and what we want to flow and going anyway with Epic keys or something like that. That really allows us to be successful on page and then that also allows us to either have, for example, a very technical industry sometimes it doesn’t make sense for me or my writers to create content and actually makes more sense for the partner to write because they’re the expert. And so that allows us to still get the result we want. But have the expert be the one actually creating a copy.

Steve Wetmore – That makes really good sense. I’m probably on interview Number 25 now, and you know, what you’re saying is increasingly consistent with what other people are saying and that you can over focus on the technical aspects of SEO, and then all of a sudden your written content just doesn’t sound natural. Google is getting increasingly wise when it comes to detecting intent. You need to work for quality over keyword placement. We all get it that you’ve gotta use keywords and, and related keywords and, and all that technical stuff, but if that article doesn’t add value and people don’t finish the article, and you get people bouncing away. It’s just not going to work.

Alex Blaisdell – Like you said, it’s really about focusing on the topic, there’s a lot of software out there, that’s really helpful. And it’s helped automate a lot of processes. So if you’re an SEO and saying that you don’t need software, I think you’re probably spinning your wheels on certain areas where you don’t need to. But at the same time, it requires that personal touch, and really understanding what that end user is looking for. And then to be able to solve for that. So again, when you’re creating your keyword strategy, you’re building a website strategy, understanding what that specific users looking for and what you’re trying to accomplish on that page. If you’re trying to convert someone to a lead, or if it’s just more of an informational type of query, having that personal touch that human element where you can evaluate what’s coming in and what are they looking for, really isn’t something that me and my team do really well and something that I don’t think anyone should lose focus of ever with any piece of content.

Steve Wetmore – Alex, I really appreciate your down to earth, practical knowledge and guidance here. It’s refreshing and consistent with what a number of other experts have been saying. So thank you very much for this.

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Interview with Ryo Chiba Co Founder at Topic

Ryo Chiba

Steve Wetmore – Good afternoon Ryo Chiba Co Founder at Topic. Ryo would you please talk a little bit about who you are, what you do and give us some insight into your credentials

Ryo Chiba – Yeah, so my name is Rio. I’m the co founder of Topic. Previously, I founded a marketing technology company called Tint grew that to about 5 million in annual recurring revenue with about 40 employees. Last year, we sold the company and yeah, Topic is my new project, the previous company Tint, actually 90% of our business was through SEO. And throughout the six years that I was there, I was the co founder who was in charge of all of the SEO, marketing, and really organizing and executing on the strategy they put together that really drove the business forward. So, yeah, that’s, how I got involved with SEO. Because that company was the company that they started out of college and it grew – Thanks to search.

Steve Wetmore – There’s one thing to offer SEO services as an agency, it’s another to execute and create a startup and then sell it. That’s quite a success story. So with that, if you could talk a little bit about how you grew Tint through SEO, and what you think are some of the emerging trends going into 2020 and beyond?

Ryo Chiba – We grew Tint through SEO in the beginning, I was inexperienced with the subject, I didn’t really know a whole lot about SEO like SEO people do. And really, we were fortunate because our product was an embeddable product. So websites would embed our social media widget into their site. And so as being one of the developers who actually put together the product, in addition to marketing it, I built it in a way where our product would actually generate backlinks for us and the backlinks would be strategically targeted to landing pages that I put together around important keywords that we wanted to rank for, “Instagram widget” or “Twitter widget”. So we were actually number two right underneath the official widgets for those keywords for quite a long time, which, you know, drove the majority of our business so that was the main tactic to get our initial Domain Authority. And once we did that, Google recognized us as an authority in social media and social media marketing. And that allowed us to then expand from there in terms of our content marketing efforts and put together some pretty compelling content when it came to social media marketing. So that was that was sort of the the path that we grew.

Steve Wetmore – Can you give us a timeline; you started with a strategy, you wanted to drive backlinks to landing pages and, and you had an objective, obviously, you went to high authority websites to create those backlinks for you. Can you describe a little bit more in detail and how you did that?

Ryo Chiba – To give a little bit of background, our product at Tint was a social media widget that enabled websites to display their social media on their website in a nice format, so that they could keep their websites up to date without having to continuously produce new content. Our widget had a “powered by Tint” message at the bottom of the display that allowed us to create a link. So for some of the links “get your free Instagram widget from Tint”. And that link would go to Instagram widget landing page which was designed to rank high and convert for that keyword. So people who are looking for an Instagram widget would first click on the official link. Users would find out that because Instagram or Twitter really doesn’t care about having people embed their content on websites, they didn’t make their widgets very customizable. It was just a side project for them. Users would go to the second link, which would be ours. And we would offer this very customizable widget, which would add a lot of value for people who wanted to keep content on the website fresh. And so in terms of timeline that took us, over the course of a month, I put together those landing pages and updated our product to point back to those landing pages. And within about three months, we started to see actual meaningful results in terms of growth and organic traffic, and a positive flywheel effect. More and more people would get our better widget which would increase the ranking of our site that resulted in a strong SEO engine.

Steve Wetmore – So as Essentially, your your backlinks were created by users embedding the widget on their websites. Is that correct?

Ryo Chiba – Exactly.

Steve Wetmore – So obviously, you had to do some promotion to get people to find it and and embed it. So how did you approach that?

Ryo Chiba – The initial promotion involved some manual labor. We had to reach out to webmasters. Actually it’s funny, at the time we were working out of Los Angeles. So we would cold call or cold email, entertainment agencies who are interested in embedding content for celebrities, for example, or we would create widgets for famous people and say, Hey, do you want to keep your website Fresh? Embed this content. A lot of it was, you know, people within our own business network. And and showing them, hey, we’ve built this widget for you, all you need to do is include it on your site, and then you’ll get more engagement. And so the initial, the initial amount of embedding was organic, but I think it didn’t take it because there was a gap in the market. There weren’t a lot of people competing for those keywords. It didn’t take us very long to start getting on the, you know, third or fourth page, which is all we really need to get that flywheel going.

Steve Wetmore – You make it sound really easy.

Ryo Chiba – Well, I think the timing was good, because a lot of people at the time were looking for a way to include social on their websites. And there’s a gap there and we just happened to be there at the right time.

Steve Wetmore – And I believe you are being modest. Can you say who you sold Tint to?

Ryo Chiba – Yeah, we sold it to a company called file sec. They’re based in San Antonio. And they make popular file picking software that enables developers to let their users upload files.

Steve Wetmore – So, you sold that widget and you’ve learned a lot about real grassroots in the trenches, SEO how to get how to get backlinks. are you applying what you’ve learned? Or have you been able to apply what you’ve learned to your new venture, Topic?

Ryo Chiba – Actually, that’s a great question. And the answer is no, because with Topic, we’re taking a totally different approach in terms of both the problem that we’re solving, and the way that we’re marketing it. Because Topic isn’t an embeddable product, we’re not focusing on generating backlinks to our product approach. Instead we’re doing more of a consultative approach where we’ll go and help companies who are consulting and then promote the product that way. Okay, that’s a little bit with the trends, too, but I can go more into that later.

Steve Wetmore – Why don’t we take a step back? Can you talk a little bit about Topic and what the business model is all about and, and what you’re doing to promote it?

Ryo Chiba – So with topic story behind that is that, you know, over six years, I’m doing SEO, building content now that we have a good authority. And one of the biggest problems that I saw at Tint while we were creating content, was that it was really hard to get to produce high quality content. As an editor, you’re working with writers who might not be subject matter experts. But in order to rank, you need to be producing expert level, high level content or high quality content that is adding significant value to users. And you know, it’s hard to get subject expert freelancers or even finding somebody in house. So after we sold Tint, I decided to focus my energy on creating a product that solved that problem. And so what Topic does is it uses AI to basically help the writer get up to speed on a topic and quickly create an outline that satisfies as many search intents as possible, and also uses the language that is relevant for that topic so that they can create an expert level piece without having to do expert level research. The tool helps them do that.

Steve Wetmore – Based on everything I’ve learned over the last couple of months the entire marketplace needs a tool like that.

Ryo Chiba – It’s surprising the level of sophistication that’s required to get to the top of the rankings. And also the lack of depth of the existing tools that are the standard for content marketers. For example, many early tools are great for what they do. But it’s also very simple in terms of how they evaluate content. So we’re trying to take those simple tools and help content marketers upgrade their tool set to take them to the next level.

Steve Wetmore – And there’s similar tools and they may not be similar at all, but in terms of what you’re doing is sort of a highly advanced page optimization. Because you start at the very beginning, instead of taking something that’s already been written, you create an outline. and does it actually populate with content? Or do you have to fill in those paragraphs with content? Can you describe a little bit about how the content is created?

Ryo Chiba – The writer is responsible for writing the content itself. But we allow the writer to plug in a draft. But before they write the draft, the writer types in a focus keyword, which is the most important keyword that they want to rank for. And then what we do is we pull in the top 30 results in Google, run that through machine learning, analyze it, and then give the writer a Content brief. And this brief gives the writer a really good idea of some of the different ways other articles are breaking down that topic and the sub topics, and then extract the key important phrases to make sure to talk about. And so in this way, the writer can figure out what to talk about and how to talk about it. And then after they have their draft, they plug it in, and then create it against the content brief so that it creates a benchmark that they need to hit in order to feel more confident that the article is going to rank.

Steve Wetmore – So okay, let’s say that they finished the article will your app, then grade it or compare it against the competition like for example, Page Optimizer Pro is a tool that will compare your page to your competitors pages. Does your tool do that?

Ryo Chiba – Our grading system uses competitor content to grade again. So when we give it say an “A”, it means that it’s good as what’s already out there. And the idea is that it will help you get up to speed faster with your competitors. So you can take it even further and add your own unique take on the topic, for example.

Steve Wetmore – Is this available to the public now?

Ryo Chiba – Yes it is and you can find it here UseTopic.com

Ryo Chiba – We have trial accounts available for anybody who wants to test it out and see how it was.

Steve Wetmore – In the marketplace, when you look at this tool it sort of turns the page optimization approach on its ear, because you’re got a system in place or an app in place that suggests you start from scratch. Is that paraphrasing correctly?

Ryo Chiba – I guess the thing that’s turning on its ear that I think is changing in terms of trends, and the SEO landscape is more along the lines of less of a focus on technical SEO. Google is getting better Reading pages and understanding them, actually making sure that you have a meta description which is still important. But a lot of times Google is generating that description on the fly to match the user’s intent. For example, you know, even in the people also asked box that you see in Google, the snippets that pulls out there, those aren’t being written by editors. Those are actually being extracted using machine learning by Google. And so technical optimization is a feature that’s integrated and a focus of so many tools in the SEO landscape right now. But in the future, I see a greater emphasis on content quality, and just satisfying the users intent. Tools like Topic and other content focused tools are going to take more of a forefront for SEO experts and content marketers.

Steve Wetmore – I have talked to some SEOs that agree 100% with you, that there should be less focus on technical SEO and more effort focused on having the most complete answer to any question. And I think that’s the direction you’re going in. But, I just want to step back and talk about one of the comments you made the people also asked box that comes up in the SERPs. You said that they are mostly answers that are not structured by a writer. So are you suggesting that structured data is not something to emphasize?

Ryo Chiba – Yeah, that’s an interesting question, I think that it is a little bit unclear. The structured data is definitely a step in the right direction for something you do that needs structured data, just because AI and the state of computing things are still pretty far off from Google, for example, being able to extract a standardized rating for products. You know, that’s just something that you can’t do without structured data. But yeah, in a lot of situations, you know, structured data is becoming less important. for things that Google can extract automatically.

Steve Wetmore – Can your tool be used as a content optimizer for existing content?

Ryo Chiba – Yes, it can. So previously, I mentioned, instead of taking a more backlink focused approach. What we’re doing for our SEO consulting customers is we usually lead with is, for a reasonable rate, we will rework your content library and optimize it, and use our tool to optimize it to actually very clearly demonstrate its business value. So that purchasing it for long term use for your new content becomes a no brainer. And so that’s totally a valid use case.

Steve Wetmore – You will do that for a particular prospective customer. You do that to one piece of content or how many pieces?

Ryo Chiba – We will usually do it to three or four pieces of content just so that they know that it’s not just a one off thing, and we’re not just cherry picking. But yeah, usually that’s enough that we have one very clear result.

Steve Wetmore – Can you tell us how many subscribers you have so far?

Ryo Chiba – Currently we have five pilots going on. We actually just launched the product three weeks ago. So with the holidays, my co founder and I have been traveling a bit. But we’ve had an existing SEO consultancy that we were using as a testbed for ideas. We’ve been using those clients as our pilot customers.

Steve Wetmore – Can people go to use topic calm now and sign up?

Ryo Chiba – Yes, they can.

Steve Wetmore – I may just do that! What are your subscription rates in terms of pricing?

Ryo Chiba – We start at $200 a month. And that gives you 50 content briefs, which are basically tied to the focus keyword, which is usually plenty for any organization that’s doing two or three pieces a week.

Steve Wetmore – That price does put you in a different snack bracket than other tools.

Ryo Chiba – It’s definitely not. And that’s why we try to make sure that our customers or prospective customers see the business value.

Steve Wetmore – Do you have you been able to establish or create any case studies that show ranking improvements from, say, page four to page one or anything like that?

Ryo Chiba – Yes we’ve put together a case study, and I can send you a link to that as well. But yeah, we’ve seen some pretty solid results with our consulting client. And that’s why we’ve decided to put all of our effort behind this product and productize it and take it to market.

Steve Wetmore – I’m just trying to pull some, some more detail from you real if, if you could, could you elaborate a little bit more on on a particular case study?

Ryo Chiba – So One of the case study clients is a quality. They make a popular, and that allows people to put forms to collect user experience data on their website. And we recently optimized a marketing guide for them. They had a guide that targeted the keyword marketing surveys, and a bunch of other keywords related to marketing surveys. And so what we did was we use topics optimize a number of chapters of their guide, and, over time, measured the results. And what we saw was that after three or four months, we saw that the increase in traffic was equivalent to about $1,500 and monthly AdWords spend so they would have to spend $1,500 a month To achieve the level of boosts that we did, and that was just for one optimization that we did, you know, so even if not every optimization results in something like that even having, you know, a 10 to 1510 to 20% success rate totally justifies the cost of our product, makes it a no brainer to integrate it into the content workflow. And so, you know, that that’s one example.

Steve Wetmore – That’s a great example. So given that your starter price is, probably enterprise level or agency level pricing to start you’re looking for agencies and or businesses that have their own in house SEO. Do you have a criteria for your ideal model customer, for them to immediately see the value?

Ryo Chiba – One of the most important things for our ideal customer is that they currently have a content engine going, you know whether that means that they have freelancers that they regularly work with to produce content or an in house team, they need to be currently investing in it. You know, we’ve been talking to a lot of companies that are just starting their content engine. And the difficult thing about that is that one, we’re not able to prove our business value because they don’t have any content to optimize, and to content marketing takes time to get started. And, you know, it’s challenging to work with a client that you know, doesn’t have the resources to be able to invest in the long term. And so the new be investing in content currently producing it least a piece a week for us to be able to add significant value. And ideally, they have an existing content library that we can go into and optimize to add value, as well. So those are main things that we’re looking for.

Steve Wetmore – Let’s say it’s an existing business that has published content is there a yearly revenue? That would be an ideal fit or traffic or is are there other metrics that you’re looking for?

Ryo Chiba – For that, we’re, we’re mainly looking at the month they’re investing in content. There are a lot of big companies out there who are making a ton of revenue but a very small percentage of that is reinvested into their content marketing and, and vice versa. small companies that rely entirely on SEO and content marketing. So, you know, for our tool to make sense. You need to be investing at least $2,000 a month into content so that our tool doesn’t make up more than 10% of your spend. You know, if it does, then it starts looking like oh, to starting a little too expensive compared to the amount that I’m investing in producing.

Steve Wetmore – Do you have anything else? Any other, you know, snippets of juicy data that you’d like to leave us with?

Ryo Chiba – I don’t have any juicy data. But I will say one thing that I think is really interesting that I don’t think is taken advantage of enough is the people also asked box I think that that is a real window into how Google thinks about a topic and what people want to learn about something. There are there are a couple tools out there that are there are a couple of blog posts out there that detail like how to extract the questions out of the people also have spots in us that but I feel like that’s really underutilized data source somewhere. So that actually put together a free tool that allows people to put in a query and get a ton of questions out of that box. If you go to use topic calm, and then click on free tool, you’ll be able to see it, but I think that can be a unique, a free tool that would be useful to marketers that we recently released last week.

Steve Wetmore – Ryo thank you so much for sharing the development of the Tint app relative to SEO and you new content optimization tool, Topic. We wish you great success in the future.

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Interview with Kyle Roof Co Founder and SEO Lead at High Voltage SEO, Co Creator of Page Optimizer Pro

Kyle Roof

Steve Wetmore – Kyle roof. Welcome to the InstaVIP podcast. Kyle is Co Founder and Co Lead at High Voltage SEO, Co Creator of Page Optimizer Pro, and Co Founder of Internet Marketing Gold.

Kyle Roof – Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure.

Steve Wetmore – Glad you’re here. So Kyle, could you take a few minutes and talk about who you are? What you do, and don’t be shy about your credentials?

Kyle Roof – Sure thing. So as you said, I co founded High Voltage SEO, we’re an SEO agency with offices in Phoenix, Arizona. That’s where I am currently, we have an office in Berlin. We have an office in Melbourne. About 16 employees. We have about 80 clients. We do local SEO to national international ECAM. Just about everything in between. I am the CO Creator of Page Optimizer Pro, which is an on page evaluation tool. The basic concept is you put your page And your competitors and the tool tells you what Google likes. And then recently co founded internet marketing goal. That’s a an online community with a kind of a data driven focus. In the last three years I’ve conducted over 350 scientific tests on Google’s algorithm. Most of them are single variable test and my tests are now being published in an IMG and internet marketing gold.

Steve Wetmore – Well, then talk a little bit about you know, some of your credentials now – like speaking engagements.

Kyle Roof – Sure, so I just finished full World tour. I spoke at a conference in Bali, one in Thailand, and then finished up in Milan, which was a five week trip, which is a lot of travel, it was pretty crazy, too. So I live in Phoenix. I had to fly to LA and the first flight then goes across the Pacific to Bali, but then on the way back going through Europe, then went across the Atlantic actually went around the world, which I had never done before. And it occurred to me as like, wait, I think I’m actually going around the world on this. And that’s what happened was actually pretty crazy. Things I was talking about was some follow up to the Rhinoplasty Plano experiment. I think you’re familiar with that.

Kyle Roof – The for those that are unfamiliar, I entered a competition and the winner would be who could rank the highest after 30 days. And I didn’t actually win the official competition but reached fifth place. But about two weeks later, my site went to number one in maps and number one, organic and the joke and the punchline is that I did the site in Latin Lorem ipsum and got it to rank for the term and it really came down to the idea of giving Google the math that it wants, you know the exact keyword Rhinoplasty Plano, its variations and then the contextual terms are the LSI, if you will, and then what I did is very crassly copied and paste them into signal areas, you know one’s your body content, meta title, etc, the amount of times that Google want to see it and then that got the site to number one.

Kyle Roof – On this talking circuit on the last time I’ve actually been talking about the follow up to that or the aftermath. One is Google D-indexed my site and then Google took down 20 of my test sites, which I thought was pretty uncool. But then I realized I was actually kind of fun because it validated everything that I did. You know, if I wasn’t exposing how the algorithm was working, I think Google would have rolled their eyes and moved on. But instead they came after me personally. And the joke is that I might be the first person that Google was gone after just for doing good on page!

Kyle Roof – The following was not just annoying Google, but a lot of SEO’s had their ruffled a lot of feathers. And what was interesting to me is everybody saying you can’t do it again, it’s not possible to do it again, that was a fluke, you got lucky. And then it lists the reasons that I got lucky. And so what I did is I have spoken at events in four different cities. And what I did on this talking tour is that I ranked a new site in lorem ipsum for each of those cities, and most of which are on page one. Like the first one was rhinoplasty, Garden Grove, Garden Grove is in LA, right outside Anaheim, where Disneyland is, and that’s sitting at number one and number two right now, for rhinoplasty.

Steve Wetmore – In fairness to you, Kyle, I mean, you’re doing Google a huge favor. identifying these holes.

Kyle Roof – Yeah, but they’re not fixing them. That’s the thing. You know, that actually though, that goes to what I think about SEO is that Google is so powerful. It’s one of the most amazing things ever created. And then there’s no denying that but you can’t give it godlike qualities. You can’t even give it human like qualities because it’s not human. It’s an algorithm. And the idea is that if you approach it from that way that this is a piece of code. Now, this is math. It’s very smart math, and it has abilities to learn, but you can’t attribute human learning to it. You know, you have to understand how a computer can learn or how an algorithm can learn. And then that’s its limitations. And if you stay within that, then I think you’re always going to be ahead of Google, and it doesn’t matter. You know, as I know that this talk is kind of like what’s coming up in 2020. But I think, maybe just stay with the mindset of that it is an algorithm. And then what can an algorithm do in 2020? Well, that’s about what Google can probably do.

Steve Wetmore – So, here’s your chance Kyle, you’ve talked to a lot of people on this last worldwide circumnavigation around the around the globe. And I’d love to hear what your perspectives are on the near future.

Kyle Roof – So the talk that I gave was specially highlighting that people talked about that the updates in 2018, and the updates in 2019. And how much Google has changed and evolved and gotten bigger and better. And the point of the talk was, that’s not really true. You know, it’s still an algorithm. That’s all that it can be. And so while you know, Google might have the ability to do certain things that they simply aren’t doing. And I think you could probably do it from a cost perspective, that a certain place cost so much money to do. The types of things that they probably do have the computing power to do but because the results on the surface are so good, I don’t know whether it’s been the money. My bigger thought was really funny as I’m still in Milan, which was the final speaking spot. So I just ran through about how this stuff still works. And then the very first question was, well, what do you think about Bert? Will this still work anymore? And I was like, Yes, you know, just because there’s a new update, it doesn’t mean that it has radically changed how any of this works, most of the updates, affect the 10% on either side of the bell curve, or 15%. But I think that 70 to 80% what’s in the middle is not going to change very much, if at all, because it can’t change. It’s the core way of how Google works. And they’re not going to tinker with that, because it’s quite successful, it’s very profitable. It’s that stuff on the end that they really try to tinker with. And that’s where people are usually trying to game the system anyway. So the people that get get wrapped up in or get hit by a lot of algorithm, updates are usually doing something that they probably shouldn’t be doing. You know, or they’re, they’re in an area where they could have improved it or they could have done something better and decided not to, for whatever reason, and then they get hit. So I think maybe the most controversial thing that I can think about as to what’s coming up in 2020 is it’s going to stay the same. And if you’re staying within that 70 to 80%, if you’re just doing the things that you’re supposed to do, and if you’re thinking about it is to satisfy this is what the algorithm wants, you’re going to be just fine. You’re not gonna have you don’t have to work in our agency, but I don’t sweat updates. I like updates. Because usually what happens is competitors fall out and we go up, because we’re not playing in that fringe area, where you are susceptible to volatility. I don’t know why you’d want to be there to be honest, when you could get steady gains steady growth, and even impressive growth just by staying within the bounds of what we know works and what is successful. I mean, it’s in that far area where I think you’re looking at trouble. And also, in that far you were inside of the assigned abilities that Google really doesn’t have.

Steve Wetmore – Well, that’s that’s refreshing. I’ve heard, some directions that could be worrisome. Like, trying to optimize for voice and what you should be doing to do that and working with schema. Structured Data is certainly beyond me in terms of writing, writing the code. I’m not a code writer. And you know, the average guy certainly isn’t. So that’s actually refreshing to hear you say that. If you play within the lines, you’re going to be relatively safe.

Kyle Roof – Yeah, and let me point out the plane inside the lines doesn’t mean not doing SEO Like worrying about your site or thinking about your site isn’t doing SEO. And I think a lot of people think that that is, like they stressed about their site a lot, and, and then they feel that they “did everything”. And you can’t see the quotes that I’m putting up. And then they wonder why they’re not ranking. So I mean, you still have to do SEO.

Kyle Roof – You have to be proactive about things, you have to put content up, it does need to be optimized, etc, etc. Right? But there’s no reason to, like, with your voice search example, I have a Google Home and I use it, I asked it for the weather, and I asked it to play songs. You know, I don’t know how to monetize either of those things. Anyway, were like, what’s the weather today and it says, it’s going to be sunny and nice. I don’t know what website was going after that. You know, that’s the stuff that I think it’s used for right now. Currently is not monetizable. Anyway, they asked for the time. I guess if you had a time website, maybe then you’re a bit in trouble. But otherwise, it’s it’s I’m you can’t ask it with You know, for all the daily searches that you might do for services and products, you know that it’s not showing you anything, it’s just kind of spitting words back at you. And it’s not very effective for a lot of E-commerce type things or selling a service or a product such that people that do that, I don’t know that they really need to stress about Voice Search too much. Right.

Steve Wetmore – Agreed that that makes sense. makes good sense. Any, any anything else you want to touch on? in terms of trending?

Kyle Roof – No, just take a deep breath. Okay. People want to be like, Oh, my God, this AI is coming. And it’s gonna be this deep learning, whatever. And I don’t know. I don’t think so. It costs so much money. And the results are so good at Google anyway. I don’t know if it ain’t broke. don’t fix it. Right. Yeah. But I mean, I think they’ve got the technology. I’m sure they got the technology. I’m sure that’s there. It’s just it’s it doesn’t make any sense to apply it to something that’s already working. effectively.

Kyle Roof – Good? Well, that’s great. The only other thing I would add to is that you can’t have enough content. You know, when in doubt, write some more content. That if anything, like, when people are really freaking out about the most recent update Bert, what I think what I could see from from my own sites, the evaluation that we did in our agency was that, um, and maybe you’re not familiar with this concept. But if you optimize for a primary keyword, you win secondary keywords, even if they’re not on the page, you can see this in Search Console, how a page will rank for hundreds of or thousands of keywords, many which don’t exist there. That’s because Google has associated those terms with that primary keyword. So you have a page about a particular thing. And you’ve optimized for that. You win hundreds or thousands of keywords just automatically, obviously, over time, it’s not an instant thing, but that as the page grows, that you accumulate all those secondaries, that’s how it works. What it looks like is Google maybe got a little more nuanced, realizing that a particular secondary, especially the long tail, one, maybe not was not associated with that primary and shifted it over somewhere else or made it its own primary. Certainly at the end of the day, the thing to do is just make more content, you know, continue to build out an authority site and authority sites up, answer a lot of questions about what’s going on in that particular industry or that service. And that’s all you need to worry about. So I mean, the grand update this freaking people out is really just changes. Right. Some more, some more pages. Right.

Steve Wetmore – Great advice, which is an excellent segue into talking about tools, and particularly the your Page Optimizer Pro, and how that helps you optimize your content?

Kyle Roof – At the end of day it comes down to counting. I mean, SEO is counting you need to see the secret to ranking is hiding in plain sight. Google shows you the sites that it likes, and it likes those sites because of their on page their off page or a combination of And at the end of day, it’s counting the things that Google likes, you know how many times you’ve used your keyword in certain places, certain signal areas, variations of that keyword contextual terms, you can count those things based on what Google is rewarding, and you can then give Google page that it really wants to read. It really wants to index they really wants to rank links to accountable obviously, there. You know, dirty things you can do to hide what you’re, what you’re doing. I’m not really talking about that. But you can see Generally, the amount of signals where the signals are coming from those are countable things, really about off page is that, you know, there are a lot of variables is Google going to crawl this link isn’t gonna like this link is this that or the other. But the thing that you have 100% control over is your own site. And as such, you can give Google the page that it wants to see this is actually also the intersection of good content versus SEO content because Most people when they when they’re doing a search, that’s not the first time they have done that particular search. If you give Google the page that it wants, based on that Nisha that keyword, you’re probably also giving humans the page they want as well. You don’t want to try to to teach Google what is a better page, nor do you want to try to teach your your potential visitors or the users of your site, what is a good page, you want to give them the page that they’re expecting to see. So by simply looking at what Google is rewarding, you can then satisfy both the algorithm and then also your potential visitors. And what page optimizer pro does is it gives you that information, it goes through the competitors that are winning your particular term, and then it spits back out. This is how many times they’re using this here and that they’re such that the median gives you the range, if you will, of what looks to be acceptable for that keyword. And then you can create that page and you can also go through the structure of your competitor pages. This is what they’re building out this What’s your, what your visitors want to see and they can provide A functional page that will satisfy your visitors as well.

Steve Wetmore – Amazing. So, there, there’s a piece of software that I have a little bit of knowledge of SEO power suite. They have a WebSite Auditor module, and they go into content analysis. Are you familiar with that?

Kyle Roof – A little bit. In our agency, we use website editor but we use like the structure part of things looking for like broken links and four fours and that sort of thing. So you do use in our agency.

Steve Wetmore – Okay. So from in terms of optimizing content, how would you compare SEO power suite and their content? analysis to to page optimizer Pro.

Kyle Roof – I think they do like a team. idea of score? Is that what they give you?

Steve Wetmore – They do. That’s one of the one of the modules that they offer. Yes.

Kyle Roof – So that’s one very small part of what pop does, we do give a waiting score for for variations and LSI is based off of some TF IDF principles. But the idea of this term appears to be more important to the text than say another term. Okay, and so that’s one part of the analysis. But what pop does is that we will specifically say, do this here, put your executive or two times in the body. Now, you know, the variations of your keyword, so maybe partial praises of it or single words, put that four or five times in h2, h3 and that sort of thing. So it’s actually very specific on the recommendations of this is the range that Google wants for this particular term. This is where you need to put it.

Steve Wetmore – So you also had mentioned a couple of other tools.
Care to talk about those?

Kyle Roof – Sure. In our agency we use Cora SEO, I know you’re familiar with them. But that’s a correlational analysis tool. Pop is not a correlational analysis. We like to call it like edge analysis, where, in our algorithm, what we’re doing is we’re looking at what your competitors are doing them. We’re giving you analysis on how to do better and sometimes it’s parody. Sometimes it’s doing a little bit more, but sometimes doing a little less as well. And so that’s what pop gives you Cora does correlational analysis, it looks at the top hundred sites on the web, and then it uses two different methods. Pearsons experiments if you’re a real math nerd, and then it spits out what across almost 1000 potential factors what appears to be moving the needle. Now, this is not for the faint of heart, it is a very technical tool, you get a spreadsheet, if you’re having trouble sleeping at night, you can just pull one of those out your eyes glaze, no problem. But if you can get past the head hands in the learning curve, it’s it’s actually pretty cool. But what we do in our agencies, we start with pop because we know the it’s a much smaller factor set, we know that these things move the needle. So that’s what we do first. And then we fill in the gaps or fill in the holes with core core, you know, things that pop will look at or other tools won’t look at you like, Well, hey, you know, this appears to be moving rank, and it’s going to take five minutes to do let’s just do it. And so you kind of pick out the low hanging fruit and things that you might not normally even think about, you know, you’ll find some things like okay, that’s interesting, that appears to be moving the needle. Let’s do it.

Steve Wetmore – Just what, which is what the stakeholders want to see anyways, right? They want to see results quickly.

Kyle Roof – Exactly. So, you know, you can kind of identify things like you know what we can do these 10 Right now it’s going to take two days where the work but has the potential to move the needle then why not do that? Yeah, so that’s that’s what we do. So we start with pop, we write a page, we get it going and then we fill in the gaps with Cora on what Cora can see what appears to be moving the needle for that particular keyword. That’s kind of our one two punch for SEO early for the on page and technical stuff.

Steve Wetmore – And any other tools you want to mention? We probably have every other tool.

Kyle Roof – we have but we use AHREF’s and Majestic when we have some mods to as well, like we look at all those links. Different tools look at it from a slightly different perspective. And they all have slightly different backlink data databases. So we kind of spread across just to see who’s picking up what to try to get a feel. I’ve been a proponent for a while of using two different backlink tools and I don’t really know that it matters which ones you choose, as the other ones the most complicated It’s good to see two things because every once in a while one tools they like the site’s amazing. And then under the age of like, I don’t think so, and then allows you then to kind of gauge and compare what what two different perspectives are seeing. So when it comes to off page stuff, that’s how we like to approach it, kind of a two tool approach for perspective. And then for the on page and technical us, obviously our own tool because we’re bias.

Steve Wetmore – So earlier on in our interview series, we spoke with Michael Cottam. And he’s he spoke about negative SEO and the fact that there’s some, very nasty people out there that can create a lot of damage, because they’ve they’ve figured out how to cloak the backlinks so that Google bot can read them but you can’t find them with your own tools. Is that is that is that something that you’ve familiar with?

Kyle Roof – Negative SEO certainly still exists and make other people that say that Google knows better now, and maybe Google’s doing a better job with it, but it’s certainly still something that can definitely harm your site. Yeah, and then finding hidden links can be near impossible. The thing that helps fight off negative SEO and in a lot of cases, is building out a larger site, a larger site can absorb more negativity. You know, that’s why you can fire you fire 3 billion horrible backlinks at Yelp and it’s not going to drop, you know, it’s a massive site, it can absorb toxicity. So the bigger your site is, the less susceptible you are to those types of things. But there are even nastier things that the man where you can people can canonical Dirty pages to your site and then Google might start thinking that your site is a porn site or are not so pleasant site rather than, your mother’s recipes on how to make pies, right? You know the zz those are some really nasty things you can do. But I think one of the biggest things that you can do is build out the authority of your site. So make yourself an entity, make yourself a known thing in Google. Make yourself real. And then the other thing that you can do is make your site an authority site, which is generally speaking, is a larger site, a site that is more comprehensive, because the more you have, I think, the more that you can withstand.

Steve Wetmore – Interesting. Yeah, good advice. Well, Kyle, wow, that was that’s, that’s awesome. Very fresh perspective. This is going to be a great article. Excellent.

Kyle Roof – So thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it Hey,

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Interview with Sarah McIntyre Founder and Chief Strategist at BRIGHT Inbound Marketing

Sarah McIntyre

Steve Wetmore – Good morning Sarah McIntyre calling out of Sydney, Australia area. Sarah is Founder and Chief Strategist at BRIGHT Inbound Marketing. Sarah, could you take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do and talk also about your experience within the industry from a credibility perspective?

Sarah McIntyre – I’ve been a marketer for over 20 years, I started my career in tech companies and startups, move to a few big global multinationals and then started BRIGHT Inbound Marketing in 2009. Mainly because I wanted to execute some really great campaigns and put best practices in place. I think when you work for big companies, that doesn’t necessarily happen. And I was excited about the growth of content marketing and the growth of and the technology platforms that were available to really get much more personalized with your marketing and, and deliver a good customer experience. So, for the last nine years, I’ve been working with organizations to help them build some momentum with their marketing. I think there’s for a lot of business owners with a lot of confusion and frustration about marketing. There’s so many different tactics and shiny and new things to try that it’s just overwhelmingly confusing for a lot of people. So I help them to really define their strategy by focusing on delivering great customer experience.

Steve Wetmore – Excellent. That’s something that everyone needs.

Sarah McIntyre – There’s so much noise in the marketing world, it’s so hard to know what to do and what to do next. And it’s easy to get distracted. And there’s, you know, lots of different organizations pitching different things like, you need to do Facebook ads, or you need to do video, well, you need to do this or that. And so it’s very hard to for for people to filter through that noise.

Steve Wetmore – I agree with that. So talk a little bit about what you’ve been able to accomplish in the industry, if you if you speak at any events, or if you sit on any committees or boards.

Sarah McIntyre – This year, I was a judge for the Stevie awards, which was really great. I got to see heaps of great different content ideas coming out of the Asia Pacific region. So that was really fun. And then I’ve been I’ve been a HubSpot partner for about nine years. And I think even more importantly, I’ve helped my clients really grow their businesses, one client in particular, we grew a whole million dollar revenue stream for them in under a year with no paid advertising, just by leveraging the content that they already had. I mean, they were they were very unique. They’re not like, Is there an outlier, that they’re a very unique client, that they had an incredible amount of traffic and incredible, valuable content that people kept coming back for that they just hadn’t figured out how to monetize it.

Steve Wetmore – That is an excellent segue into what we’re going to talk about next. So I’d really love to hear the story of how you leveraged some some great content and helped organization convert that content into cash. And and if you can try to relate it to SEO.

Sarah McIntyre – Well, this particular client had portals that they would produce really great content so that people would be accessing it all the time without actually giving them any data in exchange using it. So it was quite obvious that they needed to put some forms in place, do some basic profiling forms for people to provide info before they get access to the content that they were already producing and publishing. So we put some forms in place and credits of content around those great assets to lead people to the form and then we had we had their information. And it was quite a simple process of saying to people, “did you find what you were looking for?” I feel that before we’d say, “did you find what you’re looking for?” You know, and it was a very personal, very simple follow up. And people would reply back to that email and say, Oh, actually, no, I was looking for this, or that and didn’t quite find that. And so then the consultant had great data to start having a conversation and see what there is opportunity there. It was really, that simple. It wasn’t rocket science. It was just they hadn’t connected the dots on how to capture all this great traffic that they’re getting.

Steve Wetmore – So essentially, you created a content locker. The people provided there. Yeah, exactly. And then and then you by asking some questions, you created conversation.

Sarah McIntyre – And then on top of that, we created some summary ebooks at different segments of the content. So we could create a summary ebook about a particular demographic region that was really topical and interesting, promote that on social or just organic social, and then an email because they had a great email database, and then that would that would drive more traffic and conversions.

Steve – Wetmore – Very good. So do you have any other examples that you could share with us? That again, would how you how you’re using content marketing to improve or change SEO?

Sarah McIntyre – Content and SEO go hand in hand. You need the technology infrastructure, platform and any conversion strategy. I think they’re all interlinked. So you know, I’m even podcasting, you know, it’s all interlinked with with the strategy if you just do a podcast on its own and not thinking about how you can convert those visitors into subscribers, or should you be emailing that content out then it’s just a wasted opportunity. And I worry that people sometimes do content in silos and don’t hook it up to a broader strategy, their board and lead gen strategy. So in terms of content SEO, you 100% need to be specific about the keywords that you’ve got that you’re going after. And making sure that you know, that you’re doing all the right technical things from an SEO health perspective, you’re linking internally and linking externally, you’re using your h1 tags and page titles and all that good stuff. But I think also what I’m seeing a lot of is people collaborating with content And that’s great for SEO, and great for social sharing and great for building a community and a good experience is that you collaborate and introduce people and then you link to them and then they often link back to you. They share your content, they’ll featured in on their website and link back to you. So it’s all a very collaborative way of link building and a collaborative way of growing your community.

Steve Wetmore – Agreed. We are heavily involved in social media marketing and in our onboarding conversation with new clients we’re very transparent in that we say, “Don’t rely on any one platform or any one thing to drive traffic. If you’re driving traffic from social followers don’t rely on any one thing to get that done. And it’s also the same message that we’ve been getting across the board from almost every single one of these SEO interviews. All SEOs agree that, when I asked them, “what’s the one thing that that you would want to leave with us today? What’s the one statement?” Almost everyone wraps up with it’s that the whole thing about SEO is it it’s not . What you said is accurate and it’s really important that we continue to internalize this message and not forget.

Sarah McIntyre – Yeah, don’t build your house on rented ground right?
Which is is social platforms, right? You don’t have control of Instagram, you don’t have control of Facebook, you don’t have control of anything that Google does. Google last year changed the algorithm over 3000 times. So it’s like, you are never going to win. You really need to think about ways you can build your own community. And essentially, that’s your own email database. And that’s, That’s the asset that you need to be thinking about building. After all these tactics in social media and SEO; building your own list in your own email database is where you’re going to get the best conversions, and where you are going to create the best revenue opportunities for yourself and ultimately where you have the most control.

Steve Wetmore – Right, I agree. That’s good advice. So do you see anything controversial out there in terms of content marketing and inbound marketing. You’re looking to maximize the inbound traffic, the number of qualified leads you get, the close rate and increase the customer lifetime value. So what what do you see as the challenges right now to get that done?

Sarah McIntyre – I think there is definitely challenges focusing on channels where you’re going to get the best bang for your buck because you can’t be everywhere. So many different there’s so many different things you could you could be doing. The challenge is to pick one and and do it consistently for say 6 months, not just for a month and then get all “that didn’t work”, You really do need to put the put a consistent effort and I’m talking yearly effort, not not a couple of months and then scrap it and start again. So yeah, consistent focus on a particular channel will deliver the results but it’s not sexy, you know?

Steve Wetmore – Since your activities or your business is not centered around SEO as any agency, you are practicing certain certain best practices to improve your SEO get traffic, you know, do all do all the right things. I’m going to ask this question a little differently than instead of what tools you use, what would you say your top three channels would be to, to reach your inbound marketing objective?

Sarah McIntyre – Okay, so we’ve been using SEMrush and hooking up Google Search Console to HubSpot. HubSpot provides a consolidated platform for all of our integrated efforts; landing pages, forms and your contact database. And you can hook it up to Google Search Console to see the keywords that are being used that are coming into your blog. It’s a blogging platform, it’s a social publishing platform, it’s an emailing platform, all in one, which is fantastic. But otherwise, you just have to kind of stick it all together with duct tape and different systems and bit of WordPress, a bit of MailChimp a bit of you know, Hootsuite, whatever, pull stuff together, which just creates a big technical nightmare, that businesses struggle to maintain. So we use HubSpot a lot, as a as a as a sort of base platform. And then I’ve been doing a lot of work with LinkedIn and both organically and an empire. on LinkedIn, okay, and it’s a real, it’s still, if particularly for b2b customers still a really great as continues to be a great platform to use as it still got legs organically, particularly with video. You know, it’s not as competitive as a face and Facebook situation, I think. Also on LinkedIn, people are expecting to have business conversations. Whereas I know when I’m on Facebook, you know, I’m not really, you know, in a business friend of mine, or an Instagram Live, and I’m not really in a business where I’m on I’m on scrolling, looking at people’s beautiful holidays, or their lovely houses or stuff like that. I’m not really picky about my work when I’m on Instagram. But on LinkedIn, I am and I’m more open to having business conversations, which is why we focus a lot of our efforts on that social channel.

Steve Wetmore – Excellent. So when you advertise You can geo target.

Sarah McIntyre – Yes, LinkedIn is great for targeting, you can do you can geo target, you can target by a person’s job title, you can target by the skills, the skills that they’ve self selected. So you know how you know he can self select skills in, in LinkedIn, you can target people that by that. You can also target their seniority in an organization or tenure. You can create custom audiences, targeted accounts. you can load up a list of companies that you want to target and only show your content to those companies. It’s incredibly rich from a business marketing perspective.

Steve Wetmore – Interesting! And you manage that yourself? You don’t have a consultant doing that for you.

Sarah McIntyre – No I do it myself.

Steve Wetmore – Well, very good. So is I’m changing gears here quickly. HubSpot; it’s an app that consolidates a lot of activities. Is it integrated with your website?

Sarah McIntyre – HubSpot Is my website.

Steve Wetmore – I’m looking at your website now. And that platform is HubSpot basically. The tool the “inbound marketing ROI calculator” is that part of the HubSpot platform?

Sarah McIntyre – I got someone to build for me. But still using HubSpot infrastructure. So yeah, it’s all it’s all in one which is the genius of HubSpot. Is it as a platform is that it is an all in one platform you can I run everything on HubSpot. I’ve got videos in it, you can host videos there and get tracking, on how long someone has watched the video. I can integrate Eventbrite if I’m going to do a live event. It takes care of all the event registration then it goes into HubSpot again to integrate my webinars with zoom webinars, and integrate those with HubSpot. You’ve immediately got a list of people who attended and who didn’t attend, so you can send your follow ups. It’s just a really flexible, powerful platform. And it’s a CRM as well. So my deal today and contact today and it is also a customer support that’s got chat. It’s got some haka, such as the whole 360.

Sarah McIntyre – So getting back to you, I think we were talking earlier about customer experience. HubSpot was a great platform for building a full 360 picture of your customer experience. So whenever you’re looking at the content record you can see the marketing content that they’re consumed. Whether they’ve downloaded the latest piece or open demanders email, you can see if they’re a prospect or if there’s work happening from a sales perspective, and they can also see if they’ve got open tickets so that if it is it is going to support issues, you can see that at a glance that this is what’s going on with this customer. That’s really hard to do. Oh, yeah, that’s gonna enterprise grade level visibility of the customer experience, which a lot of small businesses just don’t have.

Steve Wetmore – I’m not aware of any system for small businesses that provides this level of functionality.

Sarah McIntyre – Yeah, I mean HubSpot continues to grow, great synergy not so much for smaller business because you’re looking at a grand a month for the full suite. So it’s pretty much for the mid market businesses, we’ve got 20-30 employees generating at least 5 million revenue. This size business group is still massively underserved with marketing technology. They’ve got the enterprise level players you know, the Salesforce isn’t on marketing automation, Oracle Eloqua marketing automation tools, and then there’s nothing that’s as fully integrated as HubSpot.

Steve Wetmore – Thank you very much for talking with me today. Very useful insights, a little off the SEO path, but it’s all relevant because you’re trying to create those social signals and links and get your customers visibility.

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Promote your products with a Shoutout on Instagram

Promote your products with a Shoutout on Instagram

Instagram offers enough opportunities to build and promote your own brand, but these tend to be effective only as long as long as you are getting enough traffic to your pages. More the visibility, more the popularity. You may spend hours creating your posts, but if you do not work on ways to promote your visibility, the efforts are not going to be worth it. Here are ways which can help you attract more followers.

1. Create Interesting Content

The content of a blog has lots to do with the popularity. Do not post materials that are too mainstream. People love unique and out of the box ideas. You can create a niche around something that will allow you to come up with something interesting every time you post a content. Also, it is important if you stay away from sensitive topics if you want mass following.

Whenever you are starting, upload enough contents to keep the visitors engaged for some time. This way, the audiences will have a better chance of understanding your blogs and you will have higher chances of getting revisits from the audiences.

2. Choose an interesting username

This may sound cliché but it is worthy of mention. Your username has a huge role in deciding your popularity. It helps to have a username that is catchy and easy to read and remember.

3. Team up with fellow Instagrammers

This is one of the most effective strategies to increase your visibility. Working like a lone wolf is not quite the thing when it comes to social networking. You will have to resort to as many options as possible. The smallest of things can sometimes act as game changers.

Find out if there are people posting similar contents as yourself. Connect with them and ask for promotions. Even if you succeed in directing 20% of the traffic from his account to yours, it would increase your visibility by a great deal.

Shoutout on Instagram

Many popular Instagrammers promote other budding bloggers in return for money. This way, you can have a network of links redirected to your account. This is exactly what is known as a shoutout on Instagram. This strategy can guarantee you instant fame and higher chances of attracting more followers. However, there are a few key things to keep in mind when you are starting a network of shoutout on Instagram.

1. Two is always better than one

Try to advertise your links in as many shoutouts as possible. The more traffic you receive, the better it is for you. The most important thing is to have followers. After that, you can use the fame to your advantage.

2. Choose your promoters carefully

If you are creating contents for fashion, then it is no good to have your brand advertised on blogs dedicated to gaming. You have to make sure that the audiences visiting your shoutout on Instagram will be interested in yours too. You should also be careful that you do not connect with the accounts that may harm your reputation. For e.g., If your sites are very similar but not as interesting as your shout out on Instagram, the audiences will definitely give a higher preference to the promoter. Therefore, it counts to plan your strategies carefully.

Originally posted 2017-03-19 16:23:48.

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source https://www.buysellshoutouts.com/blog/promote-products-shoutout-on-instagram