Tag: Google

Business Advice From An SEO Expert

April 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 90 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with SEO expert Jeremiah Smith. He’s Founder & CEO of Simple Tiger and he’s sharing his business and entrepreneurial advice with us!

Sections

How Jeremiah Got Into SEO
Jeremiah Smith: “Living My Dream”
How Jeremiah Started His Own Business
Jeremiah’s Business Lessons Learned
Advice For Starting Your Own Business
Jeremiah’s Business Book Recommendations
What’s With The Name “Simple Tiger?”
Closing Advice
More Episodes
Show Notes

Business Advice From An SEO Expert

How Jeremiah Got Into SEO

Paul: Welcome to another edition of The Edge of Innovation. Today we’re talking with Jeremiah Smith with Simple Tiger. He’s the founder and CEO. So, you’re an SEO company.

Alright, let’s shift gears a little bit here. This is The Edge of Innovation. While we’ve been spending a lot of time talking about – and I think very useful time – talking about how to do this incredible, important aspect of our web presence in SEO. We’d like to talk to people about why did they start a business? What in the world led them to do this? I’ve likened starting and running your own business as one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. So, you told us a little bit about the mom and pop that you were working for and you learned SEO. Did you have an aha moment there and say, “I’m going to do this for the rest of my life?”

Jeremiah: Absolutely! It’s so funny that you asked me that because that’s exactly what happened actually. So, my mother was doing the book keeping for that company and she actually was the one that connected me with the company to begin with. They saw a website that she was showing them that I built, and they loved it. They wanted my web design ability, so I did that for them. Then I did the SEO thing because they asked for it.

And when I kind of got this little hunch that I’d seen the leads coming through the site ever since I built it and then did the SEO for the site and was actively working on it every day and I got really curious. I’m looking at the analytics and I see these big names that have come through. That these are guys that I’ve actually met out in our show room and shook their hands. And I generated them on my effort, playing on this little laptop in my office over there. And I was like holy cow its really cool! Something hit me that this is very, very real. This is, at the gut, at the core of a business and these guys are standing out in the showroom with a semitruck out in the loading bay area getting loaded up with twenty ATVs.

I was like, there’s so much value in what I’m doing here, and I got curious at the end of six months and I went and had my mother pull a report for me out of QuickBooks and I said, “Look. Here are the leads that we’ve generated from the SEO effort so far. I’m able to track those because again, this was about 12 years ago, so this was the early days of SEO. Google Analytics data was so wide open. You could get anything you wanted out of it. And so, I knew all these leads came in, out of all these different keywords and so I said I need to look at the books and see what kind of revenue these kinds of people gave us.

And so, she showed me. She generated a report, handed it over to me, I saw that two million dollar increase in revenue and my jaw hit the floor because I knew what they were paying me, which was peanuts compared to that but it was a good living for me at the time. I didn’t care and there’s no hate there at all. I was totally happy and blessed with it. But I saw the value. The proportion of what they paid me to what I was able to deliver through that effort and that was when I said, “I am on to something. I’m on to something that I think I can help a lot of other businesses with and this is what I want to do.”

So I put it on my resume and I said I do SEO full time and stuck my resume out there on Career Builder and it got picked up a couple weeks later by an agency in Atlanta called 360i and 360i – I didn’t know who they were at the time – but when I went in for my first interview, I walked down this long hallway with all these plaques on the wall that said MBC, MTV, E*TRADE, LG Electronics, Sports Illustrated, and I was like, oh my god, this is the big league. So those were my clients when I went on to work there and I took everything that I knew from helping that small mom and pop shop in to working at that agency and noticed that the difference was not that big between what I was doing before and what I learned there. It was just scaled up dramatically based on the budget that these clients had. So that was really the only difference.

Paul: Wow!

Jeremiah: And after that, I realized not only is this valuable but the playing field is level and it’s based on your pace – What can you do? What resources do you have at your disposal? You could leverage all those for SEO and you can see equal sized results.

Jeremiah Smith: “Living My Dream”

Paul: Interesting. So, when you were growing up, did you think you’d own your own business? What was your vision for your future?

Jeremiah: Thanks for asking that. So, it’s funny, when I was a little kid I liked to take this little kitchen set thing that I had. It was like a little kids Fisher Price thing. A little plastic stove and refrigerator, sink and everything. And I’d drag it out to the edge of the street where my parents lived, and I’d take some of my toys that I didn’t want anymore and write some prices on them and stand out there all day and wait for someone to stop and buy one of my toys. No one ever bought anything from me except Mom and Dad. They’d come through and give me a quarter for a plastic dinosaur or something. I loved that and so did my brother. He did the exact same thing. We both did that all the time. Didn’t get much for it but we loved doing it.

Traveling around with mom, she was doing bookkeeping for different clients. I’d go to all these different businesses that she worked for and I loved the variety of going into these different businesses as a kid. Just getting to see them, you know. And she would talk to me about how the business worked. I would watch her balance her checkbook and keep her gas receipts and charge those to her clients and things like that. I just learned a lot about business by kind of watching that happen. And then my father being an actor, he was the self-starter and he had to really sell himself for roles. He had to put everything he had into making his roles something that he could win. And so, I was really just kind of a self-starting, business motivated person.

When I was about to graduate high school though, I was deeply interested in robotics and I thought that I was going to go to school for robotic engineering after high school. But my math grades were terrible. All of my grades were terrible. I had a terrible time in school so my prospects looking at Georgia Tech, robotic engineering degree was just shot. They weren’t going to happen. So right after high school, I did a semester of college, maybe a semester and a half, before I discovered SEO. Then I just dropped out of college and did SEO and it wasn’t until a few years later, that I realized, wait a second, I’m doing robotic engineering on the largest robot in the world! And I didn’t even think about it at the time!

And then fairly recently, about three years ago, I got pulled into the University of South Florida to do some honorary guest lecturing on search engine optimization to senior level marketing students in the marketing program there. And so, it really hit me that I came full circle from failing school pretty much and dropping out of college, to actually teaching college at a very high level on robotic engineering and so now I’m living my dream, knowing that I’ve accomplished that.

But I have to say that I don’t look backwards and see a lot of my personal efforts that led up to that. Based on my faith, I kind of see God’s hand at work and so a whole lot of divinity in that case.

How Jeremiah Started His Own Business

Paul: Very cool. So, you made the crazy decision at some point to start your own business. You were sort of doing it as one person, but there’s a big difference when you hire your first employer, your second employer and you actually realize you’ve started a business. Tell me a little bit about that because you were working at this… you made it to the big leagues and you were working for somebody else. But now you own your own business so how did that happen?

Jeremiah: Yeah, so while I was working for the agency that I mentioned earlier. I really loved it. I gained a lot of intelligence working for that agency. A lot of corporate expertise and understanding and got to dive really deep into working with large brands and playing the corporate brand. But after a very short period of time, I knew I did not fit that corporate model. It just wasn’t for me. And this was around the time that the four hour work week came out and I read that and it totally just shattered everything that I was doing at that agency and so I decided to start trying to shift things a little bit. I approached the agency with some ideas for doing allowing remote work and some other stuff. And my ideas kept getting shot down and so I got demotivated.

I was building this consulting practice on the side, and I was helping clients on nights and weekends. And eventually just decided, “I’ve got to grow my consulting practice into my own agency.” I had Simple Tiger then, but it was still just a little consulting business. It wasn’t until I brought on my brother Shawn, and he and I really joined forces and decided to actually start hiring a team and kind of adding more clients and offering a service that included implementation and production of content, links and things like that – Beyond just the consulting that I had been doing so far. So, when we decided to do that, we opened a whole new can of worms which was building a marketing agency and that was really fun. But I never expected to be here, to be honest. I didn’t plan to be here, but I would not want to be anywhere else. I absolutely adore what we’ve been able to create together and what we’ve been handed.

Jeremiah’s Business Lessons Learned

Paul: So, what would be… Well, I’ll ask that in just a moment. But what’s your business lesson learned or unanticipated event or “Oh my gosh! I didn’t realize that part of business!” Or staring your own business?

Jeremiah: Hmmm. That’s a good question. I think that being the somewhat visionary entrepreneur that I am, where I have these little ideas in my mind of what I’d like to create, having those get shot down so many times by the harsh realities of the world, was at times, demotivating. But it has, over time, educated me to realize that the world wants a thing and will pay for it, so you build it and you win money and sometimes that may not be as enjoyable to do because it may not be as enjoyable as the big grand grandiose idea that you originally had. But in doing it and in building it, on the way to delivering it, once you start to see it work and once you start to see people happy with what you’ve created, it suddenly can become much more enjoyable, especially given that the great idea that you had was just getting shot down. It was not getting validated.

So for me, I think you know, I started Simple Tiger as an agency that did everything. It was web design, logos, business cards, it was awful. I was doing way too much. When I narrowed it down to SEO, that helped me a whole ton. Simple Tiger actually started growing. And then we narrowed it down from just SEO to just software companies, Saas companies specifically. It got super narrow and I was able to have basically almost the exact same conversation on every call with clients and deliver better results, deliver a deeper product, a more innovative solution on everything, every time, for each new client to the point now, our customer success is so high and so strong that I am just elated every time I sign on a new client because I know I’m about to have a new best friend or a new happy customer. Whereas before there was a lot of heartbreak in everything because I was kind of managing a mess that I created and not really delivering happiness to my clients as much. So, I think for me, to answer your question, the challenge and the “ah ha” moment was, for me, to develop something the world wanted versus something I wanted to develop. If that makes sense.

Advice For Starting Your Own Business

Paul: Yep. I get it. What would be your best piece of advice for somebody out there saying, “I want to do that?”

Jeremiah: If by “that” they mean start a marketing agency?

Paul: No, I mean more general than that. There are all sorts of specifics in every different vertical and people are probably listening and saying, “No, no, tell us that.” No I mean, really everybody has their own ideas for businesses or those that have them, have them. What would be your advice, warning, caution, whatever it might be?

Jeremiah: So, for me, from my angle, my last name is Smith and I often times think of myself as what you would consider kind of an old-fashioned smith. A trade person who works with their hands to create something. A technician to a degree. And so, I think of myself as a technician often times. And sometimes, if I really want to get into a groove with my agency, I just jump in at the technician level and do some technical work and I’m like, “Ahhh!” I feel like I belong. It just works for me. I think that’s just in my blood, so my recommendation is probably going to come from that angle.

If you find yourself doing some level of technical work, whether you’re with a company or you’re an employee of a company or an organization or you volunteer in some area of your life. Maybe you’re not doing some technical work for your professional trade or anything like that but you’re doing technical work in some volunteer area or you’re consistently helping family or friends or something like that. And it’s something that you actually, when you get into it, you just know that you’re good at it. I recommend crafting something around that.

It’s something like, there’s this Venn diagram but it’s made of three circles, if you can kind of envision this with me for a moment. One circle is something that you’re good at. Another circle is something that you enjoy doing and then the third circle is something that the market itself wants. Alright. Now the market wanting it doesn’t mean there’s no competition there. A lot of people hear that and think, “ohhh, no competition.” No, you want competition, trust me, because if there’s no competition there, you’ve either struck gold which is highly rare or there’s no money there. No body wants it. So that third circle has to be a good market.

In the middle of these three circles – what you’re good at, what you love doing, and what the market wants – is what I think you ought to build a business around. And if that business is just you, doing freelance consulting work for a while, do just that. And don’t build anything else out of that unless, at some point, you feel compelled to move on to the next step and grow up from a consulting company into something else. But for me, actually, I got to be honest, while I love running my agency as it is right now, my second favorite job I ever had was when I just did consulting and Simple Tiger was not producing content, not implementing things. I was just consulting companies. I really, really enjoyed doing that.

Now during those days, I was the technician and I was the only guy so if anything was wrong, it was one hundred percent my fault. Nowadays, I run my agency and I try to remain humble where I can, so if something does go wrong at my agency, I still take responsibility for it. And I’m still to blame for it but in those days there was not a system there was just me. So, it was a little stressful and if I didn’t go out and do sales, I didn’t have sales. And so that was really hard too. But yeah that’s what I would do. I would look at that tri-circle Venn diagram I came up with there and find out what’s in the middle and then build a business around that.

Jeremiah’s Business Book Recommendations

Pual: Now, good business books or books that you would recommend reading, one or two?

Jeremiah: One or two? That’s tough. Well, coming from the marketing angle, one would definitely be, “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek, which if you want to, you could just watch the Ted Talk. Its eighteen minutes. Look up “Simon Sinek Ted Talk Start With Why.” Then the second one is probably, “Tribes” by Seth Godin, where he talks about knowing your tribe and appealing to your tribe. Your audience basically is what he means. So those are my two favorite business books from a marketing perspective.

From a business perspective, I’m just going to leave “The 4-Hour Workweek” and its hall of fameness. That would be one of them, but I don’t want to recommend that one because everyone would probably say that. Something by Peter F. Drucker. “The Effective Executive” most likely would be one of my number one business books. Absolutely incredible and eye opening and some simple things about business.

And then actually some of the writings by Edward Deming as highlighted by Tony Robbins in his book “Awaken the Giant Within.” I recommend that book personally. I think it’s a fantastic book but in that book, he goes into Edward Deming and defining some business principals and Edward Deming’s business principles were just stellar and they’re so awesome and they’re still completely applicable today. I think they’re elegant. I think they’ll probably apply for the next fifty to a hundred years potentially, so I’d highly recommend people study that.

Just a quick highlight and a reason why you should study Edward Deming. He went to the big three auto manufactures in the 60s and said, “Hey, here are some things that you guys should do instead of what you’re doing right now, that are going to make you behemoths in the automotive industry forever.” And this was the 60s. The automotive industry was booming. We just came out of the 50s, where we had this kind of credit thing being created and people were buying cars on credit now and they couldn’t manufacture cars fast enough in the US. So, the three auto manufactures laughed him out of the room. So, he went to Japan, and he talked to Honda, Toyota and Nissan, who nowadays are eating our lunch. They listened to him. They paid him, and they implemented what he said. So, I think you should listen to Edward Deming. He’s incredible. He will teach you things that apply to your tiny small business all the way up to Toyota sized companies.

Paul: Excellent. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of experience with Deming and he definitely has some insight. Some amazing insight.

What’s With The Name “Simple Tiger?”

Paul: Okay, final question. Maybe. We’ll see. What’s with the name Simple Tiger?

Jeremiah: Ah. Good question and I like it. My father always used to call me “Tiger” growing up. And when I was thinking about starting a marketing agency or consultancy, I wanted a name that would stick in someone’s mind. And so, one of the key things or components you could have in marketing is something that’s not conceptual but is concrete. So, think “Apple.” Right? That sticks in your mind. You see it visually. Tiger was that for me. I wanted to carry with it a differentiator that applied to business that wasn’t so esoteric as tiger. How do you apply “tiger” to business? I wanted to take something complex, like search engine optimization, and simplify it and make it simple. And I wanted to apply the 80/20 principle, the Pareto Principle to everything. And I saw that as simplicity. And I saw simplicity as this art form where if I can master simplicity in what we do, then that would make me happy and so Simple Tiger thus was born. “Tiger” kind of carrying the effective component of our brand and “simple” kind of carrying the, I guess, the simplicity element of our brand.

Paul: Cool. Very cool.

Closing Advice

Paul: Well, we’ve been speaking with Jeremiah Smith of Simple Tiger and he’s an SEO expert and they’re an SEO agency and as you can tell there’s a lot of value here, in what he said. So, as you’ve been listening, we’ve been throwing out book names and different things you should go and look at. All of that will be in the shownotes so I encourage you to look there. You’ll find links to Simple Tiger and a way to actually contact Jeremiah. So, Jeremiah, thank you very much! Is there anything you want to close out and say as we sort of wind down here?

Jeremiah: I guess, if I could just leave everybody with one marketing maxim, it’s something I really like. I think the CMO of Ammex said this about branding specifically. So, if you’re dealing with your brand messaging right now and everything right now, this is just a really cool piece of advice. It’s really simple. “Be clear, not clever, be different, not better.”

And I love that because the idea there is that a lot of brands try to come up with some clever name or clever lingo or clever brand messaging and end up confusing people and not actually connecting. So, instead of being clever, just be clear. Be very clear about what it is that you do and who you are. And then, don’t be better, be different because better is completely subjective but different is very objective and you can speak directly to a person’s concerns if you can differentiate yourself into their category. And then, that’s how you can appeal to people. So that my favorite marketing kind of maxim.

Paul: Very cool. Well, I want to thank you. Thank you for spending the time with us. And who knows, maybe we’ll have you back soon.

Jeremiah: That would be awesome. I’d be happy to come back. Thank you so much for everything, Paul. It was an honor to be here.

Paul: Alright, thank you.

More Episodes:

This is the Part 5, the final episode of our podcast with Jeremiah Smith!

If you missed any of the previous episodes from our conversation with him, you can listen to them here:
Part 1: An Introduction to SEO With Jeremiah Smith
Part 2: SEO: Google & Artificial Intelligence
Part 3: SEO: How To Create Content For Your Business
Part 4: Is SEO Always Worth It?

Show Notes:

An Introduction to SEO With Jeremiah Smith

March 5, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 86 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Jeremiah Smith, CEO and founder of Simple Tiger, an SEO and marketing agency. He’s sharing with us an excellent introduction to Search Engine Optimization!

Sections

Introduction
What is the Promise of SEO?
Push and Pull Marketing
Is SEO like the Old Yellow Pages?
Searcher Intent
Marketing BPM Software: Why Keywords Matter
Should You Be Paying Google to Display Your Result?
Paperclip Ads
Organic SEO Versus Google Ads
SEO & Google: The Game of Cat and Mouse
Producing Content: SEO is Never Done
Writing Blog Articles: How To Get Ideas
Breaking Down Your Audience: Creating Personas
Who Is Your Target Customer?
Closing
More Episodes
Show Notes

An Introduction to SEO With Jeremiah Smith

Introduction

Paul: Welcome to another edition of The Edge of Innovation. Today we’re talking with Jeremiah Smith with Simple Tiger. He’s the founder and CEO.

So, you’re an SEO company. Are you responsible for all the emails that I get asking me about SEO in broken English?

Jeremiah: No comment

Paul: Okay, okay.

Jeremiah: No, we definitely aren’t responsible for those, but I know a lot of companies in our industry are and it’s kind of the bad side of this whole industry. I find myself kind of having to be the ambassador of the search engine optimization industry to companies and people all the time, letting them know the truth about search and things like that. So yeah. I will apologize for those offenders in my industry that send those mass spam emails.

Paul: But I think we get a lot of emails and in the past, you’ve gotten emails for all sorts of different things whether it be for certain medicines or whatever. But there must be a tremendous appetite out there out there if people are sending spam emails for it. You don’t send out spam, if you’re a spammer, on something that nobody’s going to buy. I’m trying to think of a good example of something stupid to send spam about. But just about anything is going to be something that there’s going to be a huge desire for and a need for.

So, you’re an expert in SEO and you’ve been doing this awhile. We’ll have contact information in the Show Notes so you can get in contact with Jeremiah’s company.

What is the Promise of SEO?

Paul: But I wanted to get your opinion. We’ll talk about what SEO is, in a detailed way, and your unique approach to that. Before we get into all those details, and how you’ve built your organization to help people manage that, what is the promise of SEO?

SEO for people that are listening, just to remind you, is Search Engine Optimization. If I go off the rails here, stop me, but let’s start here. So, search engine optimization. Google is a search engine, Bing… are there any others? Yes, there are a few more, excreta, but those are the ones that people primarily use. And they search. There’s an engine that goes out and helps you find things on the internet.

So, if I want to find what’s the best food for my hamster, I can type that query into a search engine and then get a response back. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of power in the people who own or run the search engine because they can bring up this pet food or this pet food or generic pet food that you can make in your own kitchen for your hamster. So, we want to optimize the experience but that doesn’t sound like it’s optimizing it for google, it doesn’t sound like it’s making it better on behalf of Google or it’s making it better on behalf of Bing but it’s making it better on what I want people to find. So, if I make the best hamster food in the world, I’d come to you and say, “Can you help me with my search engine optimization?” And I know you don’t focus on hamsters or even animals and we’ll talk about that in a minute, but really what’s sort of the core of what are we trying to do? What are we trying to optimize?

Push and Pull Marketing

Jeremiah: Sure. So, I think a really good explanation for search engine optimization and why it’s valuable is this: Years ago, I heard marketing broken down into two camps and it was really cool to see this. One camp is called Push Marketing and the other camp is called Pull Marketing. Push versus Pull. So, the idea with Push Marketing is that you’ve got to go out there and you’ve got to get into peoples’ faces. You’ve got to get in their way. You’ve got to interrupt them, so think of interruption marketing. It’s another way of saying Push Marketing is interruption. You’re interrupting the flow of something. You have billboards on the highway, commercials on television, radio announcements. Things like that. Those are all interruption type marketing. Now, that carries a negative connotation with it, interruption or push, that kind of sounds a little rough but it works. So, I’m not hating it, I just want you to understand that’s a connotation.

Now, on the same time, on the other end of things, we have Pull Marketing and with Pull Marketing, you actually have an audience that is actively seeking out something. They’re trying to find something. So, with Pull Marketing you have things like, well, search engines are probably the single, easiest example for me to make. But I would say maybe phone books are another example. People actively go into phone books to look up a plumber or something like that back in the day. And there are other types of Pull Marketing. If people are interested in receiving emails from you and want to get more content or they want to learn more from you and so they sign up to receive emails from you on your website. That’s permission-based pull marketing. Seth Godin wrote a book years ago called “Permission Marketing” and it’s all about that pull side of marketing.

So, I liked SEO right away because it falls into that second camp of Pull Marketing. I like it because it just made sense to me. If I need to go buy something or I’m really interested in something and I go Google it, I am very engaged in learning more about it and I’m a self-directed type person when it comes to making a lot of buying decisions and education and stuff like that and I’ve quickly realized that I’m not alone in that. A lot of people, and as a matter of fact, the masses at large, are moving more toward that self-directed research and buying decision mentality which is a shift from the old way of things. SEO stuck out to me because its promise, you asked earlier “What’s the promise of SEO?” Its promise is to deliver highly targeted audience directly to your door, directly to your product or your service offering or your business. And I just saw that as extremely valuable and thought every business ought to be doing something with SEO and working with Google in some way.

Now I’d love to get into the mechanics of SEO in a moment if that makes sense to you but I’m going to let you decide that.

Is SEO like the Old Yellow Pages?

Paul: Yeah, I think it does. But I do want to draw out that example you gave that 30 years ago if you needed hamster food, to beat the analogy to death, you would go to the yellow pages and look up pet food. But you wouldn’t necessarily be able to look under a category called hamster food. It might have pets or then rodents or whatever it is. So, what’s evolved with, and I’m asking this to get your confirmation here, is that now we have infinite yellow pages that can have as many sections as it wants. I remember in the yellow pages, way back in a galaxy far far away, that people would list their company under multiple headings because let’s say you were a cleaner and you do business cleaning and housecleaning, you would be in both sections of the phonebook and they would charge you for each one of those listings.

Now the world has changed. The disruption has occurred with the internet, is that now there aren’t any headings. There were directories early on but now those are gone and now I can search organically to very specific things. I want a house cleaner that cleans a certain brand of windows and they’re the experts on that and could actually ask that question. So, what is your thought on that? Is that right or is that a good analogy so that our listeners can latch onto that and say “Okay, that’s what I’m thinking about.” Is SEO is just lists on the end of the headings? Or is it like the old yellow pages? Or is it something more than that?

Searcher Intent

Jeremiah: Yeah, it’s something significantly more than that in my opinion. What we’re getting into now is what we call, in the SEO industry, Searcher Intent. As an SEO person, I try to deduce what it is that a searcher wants by what they’re searching. For example, if I look up the word “men’s suit”, you know very little about me except that maybe either:

A. I’m a man looking for a suit or B. I’m a woman looking for a suit for a man.

Paul: Or you’re a woman that wants to be a man and wants to have a men’s suit.

Jeremiah: Sure, but you can see how the lines are blurred around what my intent might be.

Paul: Sure.

Jeremiah: And then, if I’m looking up a black pinstripe Hugo Boss men’s suit, size 42 long. That’s a very specific search and at least now we have a much better idea that this person is likely in the transactional phase. Now there’s an assumption there but the assumption is strong based on the amount of data in the keyword search, that that person is looking for a very specific suit and so its likely that when they find that, they are likely going to purchase it because of how specific it is.

So, I think with Searchers Intent, what we find is that some people are online to learn. Some people are still in the awareness phase of something. Or maybe they’re not quite in the awareness phase.

Marketing BPM Software: Why Keywords Matter

For example, I didn’t know about this whole terminology around this whole business process management software until we started working with a lot of SaaS companies and we stumbled across a company that offers BPM software – Business Process Management Software. Well, I looked into that terminology and it had very low search. Very few people are actively searching for BPM or Business Process Management software. However, after many, many conversations with this particular client and trying to figure out “What is it that your software does? What is it that you’re offering? What’s the value that your end users getting?” They said, “Well ultimately we build web flows or mind maps or diagrams.” So, it’s kind of like a diagraming software to help you visualize or see business processes.

And I was like, “Wow! That actually gives me a whole lot of other keywords to play with! So, I started playing with those keywords and found massive amounts of search volume and I realized that people were looking for Business Process Management software, they just didn’t know they were looking for that. They were using other keywords and they were not quite in the awareness phase of BPM software yet. So, we had a challenge. We had to go out there and we had to actually target them with the keywords they’re using and help them bridge the gap to understanding that, “Hey, what you’re looking for is BPM software.”

And so, I think Searcher Intent is a very interesting thing. It’s fun to play around with. But I think that that comes down to how users interact with the search engine. And we have to keep an eye on that if we want to do a good job in business doing SEO because we ultimately have to follow the users and try to provide for them what they’re looking for.

Should You Be Paying Google to Display Your Result?

Paul: We could go very technical very quickly here and I want to avoid that initially, but I do think some of that would be interesting. So, the success of SEO is for you to bargain with Google that when someone types in – I’ll use the business process management example – they type in “business process management” and are you going to pay Google to display your result?

Jeremiah: Alright, so your bringing up a very good point here. I’ve got to differentiate what that is, from what SEO is. Because with SEO, we are not paying Google anything, we’re not affiliating with Google in any way. What we’re attempting to do, and I know you were setting that up for me, because a lot of people have that question, “How much does it cost to get into Google and stuff like that.” Well that’s not exactly how it works.

Paperclip Ads

The idea with paying Google, is to run ads in Google. So, whenever you do a search in Google the ads run across the top there and they say “ad” in tiny text underneath. Those are what we call PPC or Paperclip Ads. When I refer to doing that type of marketing, I call it generally “paid search.” The whole idea with paid search is that you can grab a handful of keywords, you can create some ads, you can set up some targeting like “I want to target users in the U.S.” for example. And then you have an account in Google Ads and you say “Google, here’s the deal. I’ve got three hundred bucks a week and I would like to target users in the U.S. for this handful of keywords and I want to show them these ads.”

And then Google comes back and says “Okay you’re probably going to pay about this many dollars per click or this much cents per click in order to display that ad. And every time somebody clicks on the ad you’ve going to pay a click fee. And so, ultimately what that does is that it helps you to force your website in front of your target audience that is actively searching your keywords, but in an advertising way.

So, this is kind of like at the gray zone of Push and Pull Marketing, in my opinion, because you’re still running this advertisement that is somewhat interruptive in terms of its process but at the same time, it wouldn’t be there if the person didn’t search for something through kind of a pull technique. So, I don’t know exactly how to categorize that. I’m sure somebody else out there can fix that for me. But I think it’s right in that gray area.

Organic SEO Versus Google Ads

Jeremiah: Whereas with SEO, your listing shows up organically. And we call it organic because there is an algorithm, there is a process for determining where your site ought to rank and that process is not something that we directly control. It’s something that we indirectly allow to happen. So, Google is going to crawl your website, it’s going to index it, and then it’s going to compare your website to a bunch of other domains that also say they do the same kind of thing, that use the same kind of keywords, that talk about the same kind of stuff on their sites. Google has to decide, “Well, which one of these makes the most sense for this keyword?” And Google makes the decision organically on their own and therefore you can’t completely control how you show up in Google for certain keywords organically, but you can strongly influence how you show up in Google and so that’s the idea with SEO.

The major difference in terms of the output and the outcome in terms of you, the business or the company engaging in either one of these tactics, is that users commonly understand when they’re clicking on an ad that they are clicking on an advertisement and they carry a bias that “I cant trust someone who is trying to sell me” and so that comes with clicking on an ad. Whereas users inherently trust the results that are coming up organically and Google because they don’t think about them: A. being manipulated or influenced in any way or B. definitely not being paid to be there. They trust those results a little bit more and so your conversions tend to be a lot better on those organic clicks. So that’s another attractive element in SEO.

Paul: So, you bring to light that – let me see if I summarize this right – that SEO and your job, is to influence the ranking as much as you can. So, when Google reads your website, or the website you’re working on, you want to – I’ll use the crass words – you want to trick Google, you want to manipulate them, whatever those words are, to ranking your site higher than somebody else that has the same product interest.

Jeremiah: Yes, that’s ultimately it. You can use the word “trick.” But I really like the term “influence” because influence can be negative or positive depending on what you’re doing and your intention.

SEO and Google: The Game of Cat and Mouse

Paul: But that is a constant ongoing battle. It’s not something you can do today and then tomorrow have that same influence, because it’s a cat and mouse game in a lot of ways because Google changes the way they judge things.

Jeremiah: You’re right. You’re totally right on that. It is an ongoing effort. There are some elements and some things you can do. I don’t want to say plateau because it doesn’t do Google justice to what’s happening here but once you get to a certain step – maybe think of a staircase – once you get to a certain step that was difficult to get to, sometimes you can kind of just relax and hang out on that step fairly easily with minimal input. And then in order to continue up the staircase, you’ve got to put in more effort, and you’ve got to keep climbing. But also, you have to remember the competitors are walking up that staircase at the same time and so sometimes they’re going to walk in front of you and if they’re standing in front of you, what that means is that you’re going to have to take a step back down to get out of their way.

And so, with Google, if there are ten listings on the search results page, there are only ten listings there and so if you’re number three and then some competitor moves up to number three, guess what? You’re either number two or, you know, either number four which is bad because it means you fell down, or you’re working really hard and you outpace them so you’re number two and now you’re in front of them. But there’s this shuffle that happens, that’s natural and its very competitive depending on the industry you’re in. So yeah.

Producing Content: SEO is Never Done

Paul: I agree with that and the point I want to highlight to our listeners is the fact that this is not a one and done kind of solution, ever, regardless of whether you get Jeremiah to do the work or you get one of those spam emails to do the work. I think one of the things that the spam emails on SEO make you feel like, is that it’s something I can buy. It’s not like buying a jar of peanut butter. “Okay, I got it. Now I’m done.”

Jeremiah: Right, right. Yeah that’s the thing. Companies can do SEO in-house. I run an agency, we sell this full time, but I’m very open and honest about talking to people about the fact that if you’re a small company, or even a large company, if you’re any size company, there are powerful things you can do in-house to actually impact your rankings organically. I think that producing content is probably one of the most important things.

Writing Blog Articles: How To Get Ideas

Jeremiah: Types of content that you can produce today if you run a business, is if you deal with anyone in the sales process where you’re trying to sell your product or service or offering of any type, and you deal with objections or questions in the sales process. The next time you get a good question where you think “Oh that’s a good question. I’m going to have to explain that and it’s probably going to take me longer that a sentence or a few more words to explain. It’s probably going to take me a paragraph or two to explain it.” Write that question down and go ahead and answer the question for that person. When you get off the phone write that question down and write a blog article answering that question.

Paul: That’s good advice.

Jeremiah: Just go through those kinds of questions and just write blog articles because then what happens is, believe it or not, people are actively Googling those same questions all over the place. And they’re Googling that question and then you’ve got that question answered on your blog. It’s very likely you might show up in Google and that you might be able to answer the question for someone where that was their final objection and after answering it, they’re like “Hmmm, this person has it figured out. I think I’m going to give them a shout and go ahead.” And guess what, you’ve already answered their questions so they’re going to be really easy to close.

Breaking Down Your Audience: Creating Personas

Paul: Let’s go back to the example of business process management. So, on that website, if I search for “business process management”, and that’s off target from what people are searching for, do you still rank in that for SEO?

Jeremiah: Yeah, we do still try to rank in that because it turns out that this particular client, they were trying to – and this is where we get kind of higher up into the realm of thorium marketing – they were trying to appeal, I think, to to broad of an audience. What they needed to do was actually personify their audience which means break their audience down into individual personas and say, “This type of person here, were going to call him Engineer Eric. And he’s going to be the engineer at companies like IBM or Oracle and something like that. And then we have Small Business Sam over here. He actually is just running a small business and he wants to create nice processes and replicate them.”

And so those are two good personas. Well, Small Business Sam was the one that’s using the terminology around like visual diagramming or visual web mats. The real simple kind of more board terms around what he’s trying to get. Whereas Engineer Eric was definitely the business process management type of guy even though only, maybe, fifty to a hundred people a month are searching business process management. These are total here, say numbers. I’m not giving actual numbers out here. Even though very few people were searching business process management compared to diagramming software, something like that.

The conversion value of an IBM or Oracle buying from this particular software company was worth potentially millions for one conversion. So, the volume was not as important. It is okay that there are only a hundred searches per month because if they can sell one of those, they’re going to get a huge, huge amount of revenue. Whereas on the other end, the Small Business Sam, he’s going to pay five bucks a month for some web diagramming software so you’re going to need ten thousand conversions a month from that guy in order to see the same kind of value. So, that’s the idea there.

Who Is Your Target Customer?

Paul: Okay, so let’s put a comma here and ask the question who is your target customer? Is it the ones that have a high value conversion? Or is it the ones that have many small low value conversions, dollar wise.

Jeremiah: That depends entirely on the business and the business model that you seek to secure. For example, my company, we’re an agency. We do SEO and we do it specifically for SaaS companies or Software As A Service companies. Now, there are so many different types of SaaS companies out there but we’ve found that for our target niche, we like to go after companies that typically have been established for longer than a year, typically a few years. They’ve done other types of marketing as well and they’re really just trying to broaden their scope or their horizon of marketing techniques. So, they have more faith in marketing, but they are not in that speculative phase, necessarily, of trying to find what works. They believe SEO will work, they’ve seen some value in it, but they’d like to make a focused effort on it. Typically, they’re funded with five million or above in annual revenue. Something along those lines. So, that’s our typical target audience. A conversion of that is very valuable for that.

Where, at the same time, a lot of people are starting software companies or creating startups and tech boards and trying to learn about SEO and they’re not valuable as a customer, but they have valuable concerns. They could eventually turn into the type of client that we want to work with. So, for us, those aren’t as important for us to get on the phone with, but at the same time I do still want to offer up some sort of product offering to them.

So, we’re working on an online course to help small software companies get from brand new funded, no marketing, no experience under their belt, to a year into business, with some strong marketing growth so that we can build them, through education, into the type of client that we actively want to then work with. And so that kind of gives you an idea of how to personify your target audience. And different businesses have different targets. For some industries the volume is key. You have to have a high volume of customers. For some businesses, you only need a few conversions per year in order to make your budget.

Paul: Cool!

Closing

Paul: Well, we’ve been speaking with Jeremiah Smith of Simple Tiger. He’s an SEO expert, and they’re an SEO agency. As you can tell, there’s a lot of value here in what he said. As you’ve been listening, we’ve been throwing out book names and different things you should go and look at. All of that will be in the Show Notes so I encourage you to look there. You’ll find links to Simple Tiger and a way to actually contact Jeremiah.

Well I want to thank you, thank you for spending the time with us and who knows, maybe we’ll have you back soon.

Jeremiah: That would be awesome! I’d be happy to come back! Thank you so much for everything, Paul. It was an honor to be here.

Paul: Alright, thank you!

More Episodes:

This is Part 1 of our interview with Jeremiah Smith. Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon! We’ll be talking about SEO, Google, and Artificial Intelligence!

Show Notes:

Optimizing Your Website for SEO with Ed Alexander

May 15, 2018 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 65 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Ed Alexander of fanfoundry.com about how to optimize your website for SEO.

Show Notes

Ed Alexander’s fanfoundry.com
Find Ed Alexander on Twitter
Contact Ed Alexander
Find Ed Alexander on LinkedIn
Find Ed Alexander on Facebook
Search Engine Optimization: Getting on Page One
Google Trends
Link SaviorLabs Cybersecurity Assessment

Sections

Introduction
SEO: Search Engine Optimization
What You Can Do About SEO?
What is Google Trends?
Optimizing Your Website
Location Based Optimization
Creating an Authoritative Voice: Blogging Relevant Content
How to Get Your Blog Post To Be Found
Systematic Indexing – Using the Right Words
Blog Articles Should Be Recent and Relevant – Keep It Fresh
Become An Authority on Your Topic
Using In-Bound Links
Link to Authoritative Sources in Your Blog Articles

Optimizing Your Website for SEO with Ed Alexander

Introduction

Paul: Hello, everyone. This is Paul Parisi with the Edge of Innovation. I’m here with Ed Alexander of FanFoundry.com. Hello, Ed.

Ed: Hey, Paul. It’s nice to be back again. Thanks for inviting me. Things must have gone well last time.

Paul: Well, yes. Exactly. Yes. We’ve had billions and billions of listens just of our episode, so… I don’t exaggerate — ever. So, I thought we had a great, great discussion. We had a great discussion on all things sort of marketing and the digital age. And today we have a couple of topics we’d like to touch on.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

So, today we’re going to focus on SEO, which is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. What is search engine? What is optimization? What is all that? So let’s get into that. So when you hear the word SEO, what do you think of?

Ed: That’s a great start for a question, Paul. When I think hear the word SEO, it’s often out of the mouths of the babes — right? — a client or a prospect saying, “What do you know about SEO, Ed?” or “Paul,” or whoever you happen to be that day. I typically answer that question with a question. And my question is this: When you think of SEO, what are you thinking… What are you trying to do? You’re trying to get visitors to your website? You’re trying to game the Google search engine? What do you think that involves and what’s your positioning about that?

And I get responses along the lines of, “Yeah, affirmative. That’s all they’re interested in. But we really don’t know enough about it. All we know is it works for some people, and we really haven’t explored it enough to really know what we’re doing. So can you help us there?”

Paul: I always hear SEO, and I sort of hear people saying, “I need SEO,” like a bucket of SEO or a jar of peanut butter. They want to just buy it.

Ed: That’s right. “I’ll take a side of SEO, please.”

Paul: Well is it a side, or is it a main course? I think that really gets into your point there. What do you want to accomplish with it? So it’s not the main course. It promotes the main course. Right?

Ed: Right. So I think of SEO as having three main definitions, no matter who’s approaching it or what they’re talking about. The first one of them is they want good, quality visitors to their website. Notice I said good quality, not quantity, because I don’t think any one of you wants to be inundated with interruptions from people who will never buy. So you want quality traffic. You want the right people to be knocking on your door. And the second one, closely following that is quantity of quality visitors. A large number of quality visitors. So splitting hairs, but you get their I’m going with this. And the more people hear about that, the most they shake their heads and say, “Yeah, yeah. That’s more like it. I want quality visitors, and I want lots of them.” Not just lots of visitors.

Paul: Sounds good.

Ed: And then, of course, I also want that just to happen on its own. It has to be organic and whatever effort I do, whatever levers I pull, I’d like to have some kind of a multiplier effect because we all have the same 24-hour clock. I can’t scale my attention and time and have a balanced life. So how do we scale it? How do we multiply the benefits and the effects of it? So, when I hear those things… That’s sort of my series of definitions of what SEO could possibly mean.

Now there’s another one we haven’t talked about and that has to do with the history, kind of the DNA, or the genesis, of the whole SEO discipline, if you want to call it that. Meaning, there was a time most, many people can remember where, if you did certain things on your webpage, you could cleverly, technically cause a landslide of attention to come to your website. You can be on page one of name-the-search-engine’s search results for some time. Or perhaps, you could even purchase that position if you spent enough money, which is… If you’re in the airline business, and you’re American Lines, you can afford to do that. Right? If you’re into banking, and you’re Bank of America, you can afford to do that. So money can talk.

But even so, most of that has…I won’t say it’s vanished so much as it’s become rarified. And so that’s business. If you’re selling SEO services, it’s probably not a game you want to be in because your feet will be held to the fire, and it’s a bottomless pit. You’re always going to have to spend more money next week once this week’s budget is worn out. So you’re really just spending a lot of your marketing dollars on gaming the ads to show up on a position of the search engines, or you’re really trying to attract the right quality audience, period. So, which game would you rather play? What one is more evergreen, frankly? Certainly not the budget buster where you’re buying an ad. So I don’t really include in SEO the notion of buying advertising.

Paul: It’s sort of a manipulation technique.

Ed: Exactly. It’s a related but separate topic.

What You Can Do About SEO?

Ed: So what are the things you can do if you don’t have a budget, a billion-dollar budget, that will at least generate quality leads? And over time, with tenacity and persistence, quality flow of leads into your business?

Well, there are some things you can do, and they’re basics.

Paul: Sure. What are those?

What is Google Trends?

Ed: When I think basics, I think of starting by researching your topic well enough to get an idea of how it’s regarded. There are pretty easy tools if you’re in business and you don’t have a big budget. You can do things for free. You could use Google Trends. I love Google Trends because I can research the right approximate title to use for a blog article.

Paul: Okay. You mentioned Google Trends.

Ed: Yes, thank you.

Paul: What is Google Trends?

Ed: It’s a free tool that’s available from Google. You can just search on trends.google.com, or just use Google’s search engine or Bing or whatever and search on the key phrase “Google trends” and it will pop up. It’s a website. It’s a free website.

Paul: But what do I do? What do I do with it?

Ed: Think of it as another search engine that gives you an additional layer of intelligence.

Paul: So if I’m selling shoes, I can go into Google Trends and type in “shoes”?

Ed: You can start by typing in “shoes,” but you and I know that a single word like “shoes” is a bit broad. Think long tail.

Paul: Well, let’s say snowshoes.

Ed: Yeah. Think long tail. Think phrase, and think multiple words. So let’s use shoes for an example. Maybe it’s snowshoes, and you want to look at the trends and people searching on the word snowshoes over time. For example, you can ask yourself and pause the, pose the question, “Has snowshoeing become a more or less popular pastime in the winter?” Were more people searching on snowshoes last winter than the winter before?

Paul: So it’s search traffic, you’re saying.

Ed: Sure.

Paul: So it allows me to say, “Okay, there were a thousand last year, and there’s 50 in June.”

Ed: Almost. If we look at Google Trends right now, if you close your eyelids and the graph on the back of my eyelids shows me a trend graph, not numerical, but simply a trend line that shows me, on a seasonal or calendar-wise, date-by-date, slice-in-time basis where the ebbs and flows and peaks and trend lines are.

Paul: Does it have any magnitude?

Ed: It typically uses a 100% factor, saying, “At some point in time, this was the highest amount of search that ever occurred.” Maybe it was last year, this time—

Paul: Right. But you can’t tell—

Ed: That becomes your 100% point.

Paul: And now we’re at 50% or 25%.

Ed: Exactly right. Exactly right.

Paul: But it doesn’t tell us that there was one search or a thousand searches.

Ed: Correct. It never tells you the count of searches. It tells you the trend over time, based on a base of 100, which is the highest or low of whatever it is you’re trying to search on and measure. So if you see a trend line that says, geez, two years ago, only 50% as many people were looking for snowshoes as are looking for it today during this winter season buying snowshoes. That tells me that maybe, if I’m a retailer, and I’m in the outdoor apparel business, I may want to think about stocking more snowshoes this time around than last year, and making sure people know that I have that product so that I can sell more of what people are looking to buy. You’re meeting the market based on what it’s telling you its trend is.

Likewise, on converse, if you find out that the trends in snowshoes has sort of gone down a bit, you may want to hedge the bet and say, “I’m not going to pre-order too many snowshoes this year only because that’s inventory not paying its rent on the shelves that I could rather fill with a more popular item.”

So a retailer can make some judgments about their inventory and their forecast sales based on what they see happening in the snowshoe world.

Paul: And does it go back more than a year?

Ed: You can slice it by a year, two, or up to five years.

Paul: Okay. So I could look at periodic events. So every December, snowshoe searches goes up. So now I’d say, okay. So we’re talking about search engine optimization.

Ed: Yeah, and specifically about Google Trends as a tool.

Optimizing Your Website

Paul: Right. But here’s the thing. This is where I think it gets fuzzy for people, is we’re not really optimizing the search engine. We’re optimizing our website so the search engine likes it.

Ed: Exactly right. You’re not gaming the search engine.

Paul: Well, you’re trying to.

Ed: Sure. Well, what you’re doing is making some reasonable assumptions based on historical data that you have access to—

Paul: Okay. So this is good. So let’s break this down. I have a website. I’m an attorney in a community. And I want everybody that’s going to have a personal injury lawsuit, I want them to come to my website. Now maybe it’s personal injury, not a motor vehicle, something strange. You know, so maybe it was electrocution. You specialize in electrocution cases. That’s a lot easier to, I would imagine, manipulate the search engine on than it is on personal injury.

Ed: Of course, because electrocution, along with personal injury as a pair, just might give you a greater level of intelligence. And you’ve played right in to the segue of the next thing that’s available on Google Trends, which is, if you haven’t seen it, folks, ever, is a series of similar searches performed by people looking on the same topic. You can learn approximate, fuzzy matches of other kinds of similar searches that have been done that are in the same realm of topic that you searched on. And you might even discover there are some clever or more likely suspect ways of searching that to yield either better results than you’ve got in using your search or different results that are worth knowing about because they pertain.

Paul: So let’s, for now, as one of our, sort of, proxy examples, use a law firm. For whatever you think about lawyers, let’s just figure out how they would market themselves with search engine optimization. So you have an attorney that has three attorneys in it. They all have good degrees from good colleges. They have some good referrals on there or testimonials, I guess, would be a good thing. They have a picture of their office, and their phone number, and a contact form. What’s next? What do I do? If I come to you and I’m that attorney, and I say, “Gee, I want to optimize so that I come up in the town I work in.”

Location Based Optimization

Ed: Two parts to that answer. One has to do with location base, because you can say personal injury lawyer, Beverly, Massachusetts. And if you’re address is on your website and, say, the footer, so it’s stamped on every page, it increases the likelihood that a person looking for a personal injury lawyer in Beverly will find you. So location is certainly part of it.

Creating an Authoritative Voice: Blogging Relevant Content

Your example earlier, Paul, having to do with a specialty, electrocution personal injury, that means that your content on your website can be made more relevant if you write and speak authoritatively about your expertise in handling electrocution cases. If you’ve got that kind of casework, and it’s the example you gave, the proxy example, says, I’ve had a few of those cases, and I’m gathering a body of knowledge about that, that makes me a de facto expert, something above rank amateur and approaching expert designation in that subject. So why not create that authoritative voice? And so helping people find you means having relevant content.

So guess what? We’re talking about blogging. We’re talking about case studies. We’re talking about getting content that’s relevant to that discusses that topic on your website. It could be a PDF of a case example. It could be a blog article surveying industry trends. It could be anything that’s useful for a person who’s searching for information about that, to get the impression that you know your stuff in this topic.

Paul: So is that SEO?

Ed: Sure it is. It’s organic. Yeah.

Paul: So I go and write a blog post.

Ed: It establishes domain authority. It establishes you’re an authority, and your website’s domain’s authority on that topic.

Paul: Which the search engines like.

Ed: Exactly.

How to Get Your Blog Post To Be Found

Paul: Okay. So let’s talk about the next sort of step in that. I publish, I write a blog that says, you know, “We just helped this family who their son got electrocuted doing” this and this and this. And it’s a compelling blog. If I put that up, is it just going to be magically found by everybody?

Ed: Magically, no. However, over time… And this takes, can take weeks or months because the bots or the algorithms have to crawl and so search engines are quite busy with the billions of pages that available. It will take some time for that domain authority to establish itself. You can promote it, but at least be aware that over time, people searching on that topic will begin to discover you.

How can you help matters? You can help matters by making sure your content is rich enough. I would recommend a minimum 500 to 1000 words. 30-word blurbs, they’re ads. It’s not enough to establish authority, really. So give, write long articles. Write them authoritatively, and that gives the bots a reason to live. It gives them a reason to crawl and something to feed on when they’re crawling.

Systematic Indexing – Using the Right Words

Paul: But how does the bot determine whether I am relevant or fictional?

Ed: Great question. How can you take the word “personal injury” and “electrocution” and help enrich that as an authoritative link to good content of yours? There’s a concept that’s not all that difficult to understand, but it’s got kind of a geeky phrase. It’s called latent semantic indexing. Or LSI as they say in the biz. Right? Think of latent semantic indexing as something that’s simple as metaphors or alliterative, or approximately analogous terms that refer to electrocution, like words like “zap” or “injured,” “electric socket.” Mention the words or the equipment involved in some of the cases that you’ve covered and argued so that all the approximate context of the information enriches your authority on the subject because someone could be searching on “electric socket electrocution personal injury.” All that’s valid. All that’s relevant.

So, latent semantic indexing, in summary, is nothing more than approximating this same subject matter without sounding like a robot when you type. Write in natural prose so it’s conversational and accessible for readers and enrich it in such a way so that analogous information can also bring them to you.

A simple example is if I use the word “tree.” If I’m a botanist, and I’m searching on the word “tree,” I’m going to find information about trees. And if I have interestingly, Bing or a Google search engine, also, frankly, tracks your behavior online, for better or worse. Let’s just say now it’s for the better, and here’s why. If I’m a botanist, I’m also searching about seeds. I’m also searching about plants. Use the word “tree” to do a search, my search engine, if it’s been at all tracking my progress, knows I’m searching for plant-based results.

If I’m a logistics person, and I’m thinking about data trees, and I use the word “tree” in a search, it’s probably not going to feed me information about trees and seeds and plants. Based on your search history, it’s going to say, “Tree — oh, this is a logistics person.” And they’ve used searches on logic trees and on forced ranking and other kinds of statistical methods. It’s going to start, interpret the words “tree” saying, you want more like this. Or this kind of a tree result, not a plant.

So we help ourselves along simply by making use of search engines, and they, in return, repay the favor by approximating our intentions based on what limited information we give them. So that’s latent semantic indexing.

Paul: Is that specifically when I’m preparing the blog post? Is latent semantic indexing taking into account what I’m writing in the blog post, or I do that myself?

Ed: It’s a duality sort of thing. It’s a closed-loop sort of conversation. I, the author, am having a conversation with the reader saying “I’m talking about, as the lawyer, the electrocution, personal injury case, and I’m going to use a number of things to describe the circumstances in which it happened. And those are all relevant to the electrocution and personal injury case.

If I’m a person on the other side of the looking glass who’s searching on that information, I can think of a number of different approximate but not quite the same terms to do a search. It will still bring me back to that content that you wrote because…

Paul: And that’s a function of the search engine.

Ed: Yeah. It’s a function of the search engine bot. So this is a great conversation to have because it goes back to my earlier statement about gaming the search engines. It used to be you could figure out how to use, frankly, gray or black-hat tactics to key load and stuff words onto your website to improve its search engine ranking. And that’s, of course, has been debunked and, frankly, circumvented by sophistication of search engines. So you can’t game it that way anymore. I’d like to say that we’re no longer algo-slaves. We’re no longer slaves to the algorithm. And frankly, there’s no more algo-terrorism either because you can’t terrorize people with your algorithm if rich content is the intention. And so those revisions to the way search is performed or search is executed on a search engine have improved so that we really get good quality results, because that’s, after all, what a Google or a Bing or a Yahoo really wants, is for you to be happy with the results you get.

Paul: Let me think about that. What if I put a story, a fictional story about electrocution on there? How would the search engine see that? And how would it not know… Or it may not know, and it may be to my benefit to do that. Or it may be to my detriment. So, in other words, does it… I’m wondering, because we’ve got to write good, rich content. So if I took an Edgar Allan Poe story and changed a few words to electrocution and put that on the website, let’s assume that there wasn’t duplicate content, but it was a rich story. Would that enter to my benefit or to my deficit? It would be an interesting test, I think.

Ed: I suppose it would. I don’t know that I know of anybody who’s ever performed that kind of a test.

Blog Articles Should Be Recent and Relevant – Keep It Fresh

Paul: My question is okay, so you go and you’re my SEO expert. I’ve hired you. And you say, “Paul, you’re an attorney. You do this. Write a blog post about your three main cases that you won last year.” So I write three articles. And we then post that. One this month, one next month, one the month after. And what you’re saying is, in the physics of the situation, the search engines will consume that data, see words that are similar to electrocution and etc., etc. And correlate that and say there is something relevant here when somebody searches for that. And so I think, to put it simply, that’s search engine optimization, is we have given the search engines something they can consume and then hand back to people within a certain scope of ideas. Is that fair?

Ed: That’s completely fair. Interestingly, you’ve added a dimension, Paul, which is time. You mentioned doing an article this month, an article next month, and an article the following month. So let’s say you’re that personal injury lawyer, and those are the three cases. That’s it. I’ve used up my caseload bucket. Let’s beg the next question. A year from now, I have no new personal injury law cases. I did those three two years ago. I really want to do more of this kind of business.

What’s going to happen when a person searches on my content, and they find 2012 or 2013 information, and that’s the most recent. If it’s relevant, they might still indulge someone’s curiosity enough to say, “Okay. I’m in. I’m clicking through.”

What about the skeptical person who’s looking for current information. Maybe something new has happened in the law practice or in the electrician business or anything at all new in society that might make that information, frankly, dated or irrelevant? It’s helpful in a case like that, if you’re the author, you’re the lawyer, you’ve written those articles, to refresh it from time to time, to keep it evergreen. If, in fact, it is evergreen, don’t let a date reference ding you from the outset based on someone’s superstition about that date.

Paul: Good point.

Ed: So you can refresh the content, maybe republish the same blog article and label it as an update. “By the way, I have new information that’s changed in the face of this subject, and I’m going to republish this article because…even though it was originally published in 2012.” Make all those transparent references so people know that you’re republishing. I think that’s a favor to the reader.

But that improves the evergreen-ness of your content by keeping it fresh. Once again, it gets indexed, it gets crawled, the searcher searches, they find the result. It’s a current result now, and it helps with your authority from the viewpoint of a person who is concerned about the currency of your knowledge.

Paul: Alright. I think to summarize that is you’re saying you need to have some regular cadence of output so that the search engines keep consuming it. But I don’t think you’re saying that on month four you put up a cake recipe. That’s not as valid as saying, “emerging trends in personal injury.” That would be better than putting up a cake recipe.

Ed: Of course. Relevant content. Going back to the example I mentioned earlier at the outset about the three things that really come to mind when you think about what SEO is, it is quality referrals to my website. And for following along that is the volume of quality referrals. Right? So you’re absolutely right. That plays into the first two aspects.

Paul: Okay. Well, it sounds like we’ve solved search engine optimization.

Ed: Solved?

Paul: I don’t mean to be facetious, but is that really simply what is it?

Become An Authority on Your Topic

Ed: Well, sure we’ve covered doing research. You’ve got to research your topic, find out how people are searching for that topic you’re interested in publishing about and being found as an authority on that subject. The second part is becoming an authority — not in a genuine sense, publishing authoritative content because you deserve and you have that expertise. Right? And then making it searchable by enriching it with analogous information and not write for search engine as opposed — oh, excuse me — writing for humans as opposed to search engines. So it’s authentic, it’s authoritative, and it’s human and accessible.

Over time, that helps your search engine results. Will that necessarily land you a page one Google search engine result? We talked about that a year ago when we last met, and we talked about the same subject. And my answer then is the same answer now, which is, I’m not sure page one search result is necessarily the answer for one other reason that we didn’t talk about last time, and that has more to do with a temporary situation, but it’s an anomaly. And that is, we see an awful lot of other kinds of information appearing on our search engine results.

What’s at the top of page one of a Google search now? Ads. What’s on the left side bar? Ads. What’s in the footer below the search engine results? Ads. You’re lucky to see up to five organic results that match what you’re searching on. So I hate to love search engines, and I love to hate them, 20 years ago, it was great because an Infoseek or an Excite or an AOL or a Ask Jeeves search engine, they were have dozen of them that have all been weeded out since then. But you did a search. You’re searching on a, frankly, a brute-force indexing method, where any business would have to list itself in the directory, like a Yellow Pages online, frankly. Before, the notion that a Google and Bing came along which they us an algorithm to sort the data as opposed to individuals like you and me creating an entry in a directory on our own behalf.

The algorithms changes haven’t been as great in terms of their change, in the amount of change that they’ve forced on the way we behave. What has happened is our own search engine results are getting cluttered by for-profit.

Paul: Right. Okay.

Ed: That’s the game people are competing in now. Frankly, I call it zombie search because their search engine results aren’t always going to land you on page one if you’re not one of the top three. I’m not too worried about it. Most of us now have to click through to page two or three to get a sufficient result to actually see the link we’re really looking for, the content we really want to get to.

What else plays to it?

Paul: Well, continuing on this attorney example. So they post something in November, in December, and January — three months. Is there an effective use of other blogs or getting people to reference you? That was always the Holy Grail is to get in-bound links. So, first, is that a good thing? I can’t see how it’s a bad thing, but is it the best thing? Is that what you should be investing in?

Ed: Great question. Link exchanges or in-bound links is something that can happen organically if someone discovers you and decides to link back to you because you’re their authority. Buying them or manipulating or investing a lot of effort and hoping that some other authority will link back to you can be its own full-time job. At the end of the day, you still have to make a buck running your business, applying your trade. So it’s, to me, is like having an ad budget. You’ll always spend more because of what you spent to keep up the pace, you have to spend more.

It’s a balance you need to decide to reconcile for yourself as a professional. Some amount of link exchange could happen over time just based on you being the authority as long as you have.

Link to Authoritative Sources in Your Blog Articles

I’ve give you an example. I’ll use my own business. But I’ll make it an analogy for the lawyer as well. When I write a blog article, I make a habit if… Since I’m no genius, and I’m usually referring other authoritative sources to help support whatever position I’m taking in my blog article or the advice I’m getting, I’m going to refer back to either a customer example or a white paper or a think tank, or some other kind of authoritative source or, frankly, another piece of media publication that has been fodder or food or input for the blog article I’m writing to you today. Well, I like my readers to have access to the authoritative source just…not because I don’t believe I’m worthwhile but only because if a person wants to read more about it, why not make my blog article be the jumping off spot to go find more depth on that particular topic? And I live-link to it.

But I also put the directory at the bottom of my blog, and I link outwards to the source I’m referring. So I do more outbound linking than inbound. The cool thing about that is anybody who’s worth their salt, doing SEO, does a search on who’s linked to their website. Then people discover that the FanFoundry blog has an article that’s referring to them because of the context in which it appears. So my ethical goal is, of course, to make sure that what I’m linking, whoever I’m linking back to is worth their while. I’m not milking their URL as a link to me or a way to get attention. I’m doing it because I’m helping the reader. My intention is for people to help find good information.

Paul: Sure. That’s the top level reason. But is there any hope for a quid pro quo?

Ed: There is hope because it’s happened. It’s happened for me.

Paul: And that is a legitimate hope?

Ed: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Paul: So these links might engender backlinks.

Ed: They might engender backlinks, but I’ll make you no promises. What I can say, though, however, is that I’ve been discovered, frankly, from some of my writings, by other authoritative sources who have said, “Hey, geez, wouldn’t you like to do a podcast with us?” What are the chances right now? “Maybe you would like to speak at our convention.” Or, “We have a client need that we can’t solve, but you apparently can.” It’s paid off for me in all three of those ways.

Paul: Oh, cool.

Ed: So it’s not necessarily the link building which is the end goal. The end result is are you providing a benefit and some value to people that they’ll, in turn, either compensate or recognize you for doing that. That’s the fondest hope I can have for anybody as they’re being beneficial to others. You know, it’s the old Boy Scout in me, rising to the service. I was in Boy Scouts.

Paul: Well thank you for coming. We’ve been talking with Ed Alexander of fanfoundry.com and you’ll be able to find out more information about Ed and his company in our shownotes as well as links to some of the resources we’ve talked about.

Thank you very much and we look forward to next time on the Edge Of Innovation.

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