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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:

SEO: Google & Artificial Intelligence

March 19, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 87 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with Jeremiah Smith, CEO & founder of Simple Tiger, about SEO, Google, and Artificial Intelligence.

Sections

SEO Recap
Creating Personas: Gathering Demographics
Collecting Data: Asking Customers Questions
Understanding Your Customers
The Holy Grail of SEO
How Does Google Find Content?
Google and Artificial Intelligence
What Exactly is Artificial Intelligence?
Understanding How Google Searches for You
Closing
More Episodes
Show Notes

SEO: Google & Artificial Intelligence

SEO Recap

Paul: Welcome to another edition of The Edge of Innovation. Today we’re talking with Jeremiah Smith of Simple Tiger.

Alright so, we’re talking about SEO with Jeremiah Smith from Simple Tiger. And you’re located in Florida?

Jeremiah: That’s correct. I’m located in Sarasota, Florida.

Paul: So, we’re talking with lots of different aspects of SEO. Everybody comes to SEO and what they think is that it’s the Rosetta Stone or the Holy Grail of the internet in that I can manipulate or strongly influence the ranking on Google so that my hamster food company is going to be the first link after the ads for people that have bought ads. And hopefully, when people see that, they will click on that link and come to my site and buy my hamster food. That’s the scenario. Or engage in the way that I want them to engage. So, there’s a lot to that. I’ve got to have a good page that they come and land on, I’ve got to make sure that its easy to buy. I’ve got to make sure that I communicate easily about my site.

And you advised us to say, when we get a phone call from one of our hamster aficionados, and they say “My hamster likes this food and this food. What should I do?” And I write a blog post that basically talks about what I taught that person on the phone or in that experience. Or the expertise.

Creating Personas: Gathering Demographics

Paul: You had mentioned about developing personas. We have the cat lady who has multiple hamsters or the one hamster family. Do you actually write these personas down or are they just sort of, hey we just flipped them off the top of our head and that is it? What does a persona look like?

Jeremiah. So, the whole idea with personas is we actually do want to write them down because I do think it is important that over time we’re going to come back to these, and typically we’re going to come back to them so frequently for such a long period of time, that you’re going to want to make sure you’re paying attention to them. They’re going to be kind of like goals written on a board that you’re going to want to refer to over time. So, it is important that we come back to them and write them down ahead of time.

But typically, what they’re going to look like is, we want to get some demographic information together. So, who is the type of person you’re talking to? Say that I took your business friends on QuickBooks, for example, and you’ve got a hundred sales and that’s valuable for you guys. So, I look at your Books and I find out “Alright, what portion of your audience is male versus female. The buyers.” Maybe sixty-seven percent of your sales came from females. Alright cool. I’m going to look into that really quick because that’s a majority. So, I’m going to look into it.

Now, out of the females, what are some patterns? Maybe we have half of the females are CMOs, so they are the chief marketing officers at fortune five hundred corporations. And they tend to be, we’ll just say thirty-seven years old. So that’s your average. So, we’re going to go ahead and create a persona around that demographic.

But we need to know a little bit more. Now, why did that CMO purchase from you? Maybe you are a marketing automation platform company like HubSpot or something like that and your language really appealed to the female CMO at a fortune five hundred corporation. And the reason is her concerns were about some of the cutting-edge innovations in the marketing automation space. Marketers tend to be really attracted to that innovative stuff and so she was just really drawn to that and that’s why she tended to make that conversion on to your platform. So, we’re going to write that down and we’re going to call her CMO Mindy. Alright? And that’s just a pretend name that we made up to help us quickly imagine who CMO Mindy is in our minds. Now we’re going to write down “CMO Mindy,” we’re going to say she tends to be thirty-seven years old, works for a fortune five hundred corporation and makes purchasing decisions based on innovative language around your product and innovative features around your product. Now we know what to say to her.

Now the other half of the equation, other females that purchased from you might largely be in the, we could say, in the CFOs base. So, Chief Financial Officers of an organization. And these people tended to be a little bit older so probably in their fifties but at the same time they weren’t as attracted to the innovative language. They were more drawn to the ROI that we said we could generate.

Paul: How do you know that? How do you guess that?

Collecting Data: Asking Customers Questions

Jeremiah: So, a good thing to do is to actually, when you start pulling this data together and you get your demographics together, go out there and ask them. Have good conversations with them. And if you do this early on, when you’re selling to customers and they’re closing on your platform or they’re closing into your business, early on, asking them ahead of time “What made you decide to move forward with us?” That one single question can do worlds of wonders for you collecting data for you over the long haul, because imagine if those one hundred people, let’s say fifteen of those one hundred people actually answer that question, you can still use that data. And if you’re CMO Mindy typically said we like the innovative features you guys offer. If you get that answer two or three times from CMO Mindy then we’re going to say “Okay, here’s the deal, CMO Mindy wants innovative features. We know that.

If CFO Francis, we’ll call her Francis, I’m just making up names here, she’s in finance so she was more concerned about the ROI, return on investment, because she’s got to answer according to numbers. She’s more concerned about the ROI figures. So now we walk away from having done that internal analysis of our existing clientele knowing that there are two things we need to talk about when we talk about stuff on our website.

One thing is the innovative features that we offer. And we need to have a whole section of the site dedicated to how innovative our features are and our labs and things we’re testing and how if you want to be a beta tester you can sign up here for free and you can beta test our newest most cutting-edge technology. And boy, CMO Mindy is going to be all over that. And then you could take another section of the site and talk more about ROI, return on investments, and case studies showing the numbers we were able to yield for our companies or our clients. And then CFO Francis can be attracted to that.

If you have that same kind of personification segmented in your email lists, this is where it gets really juicy, and you know that you’re emailing CFO Mindy, then you can email her the innovative language and you can email CFO Francis the numbers language. And you’re actively pursuing them using their own languages and really helping communicate your brand promise to them in their own language. And that really helps you drive better conversions and things like that.

Understanding Your Customers

Paul: Okay, so, you’ve brought up, I think, a very insightful point here that I think a lot of people look at SEO and think “Okay, I’ve got to write a headline that’s catchy and I’ve got to write some content that’s relevant to that.” And that’s possibly one aspect, but what you did was sort of stepped back before that to say, “Who have we successfully sold to?” Where’ is that message that has been identified as valuable by the people that we already know. So, you did some really in-depth analysis that you don’t hear a lot of people in SEO, and certainly not in the spam emails, but when you talk about SEO its really understand you customer.

Jeremiah: Correct. Right. Yeah. It’s probably the single best thing you can do, I think in SEO because within SEO we’re actually dealing with live pain points. And what I mean by that is we’re going back to keywords here. When I search for something, Google, at that moment, that is my number one pain point. If I don’t Google that, I’m going to sit there a little frustrated, a little irritated. I don’t know if any of you or your listeners have ever sat there in the car and then thought “Aww man, I need to Google that but I’m driving and I can’t.” And it’s just like this little nagging scratch at the back of your mind, whenever you get where you’re going. “Oh, I needed to Google that thing. What was it?”

You’re addressing those pain points for people through SEO so you’re actively helping the community by producing content that answers their questions and answers those pain points. But doing some deeper analysis and looking into those pain points and where the pattern starts to emerge and who tends to ask those questions and things like that, that’s what makes you a really smart marketer. Marketing is all about intelligence and data so if you’re intelligent and intuitive about the data you’re receiving and collecting and you’re actively collecting data, then you’re going to be able to make some very smart decisions on who to appeal to.

The Holy Grail of SEO

Paul: Right. So, let me ask you this. There’s an adage, you have only one chance to make a first impression.

Jeremiah: Right.

Paul: So, we have Francis sitting at Google and she types in whatever she types in and she sees the link to your company that we’re developing SEO for. And she clicks on it, but that link clipped to the g-wiz features as opposed to the ROI features, benefits I guess, is what we would say. So, she sees this thing about g-wiz features, beta testing, all that different stuff and she’s like I don’t want to deal with that. I’m not interested in that. How do we make sure in the SEO worldview and model structure that get the right people to the right place?

Jeremiah: So that’s where I think website design is actually very critical. And not enough people are actually talking about just website design and user interface, user experience. But they should be because Google has already made a play towards that. Now this is really a gold nugget for your audience who may know a little bit about SEO but want to know more. For the longest time in SEO, the Holy Grail of SEO has been links. And what I mean by links is wherever you have links pointing back to your website, that’s what kind of offsets Google’s trust algorithm to where they don’t to trust what you say about yourself as much anymore because other people are saying the same thing about you. And now they trust everything that’s being said about you and you’re able to rank well. And what I mean by being said about you is that links are pointing back to your website from other reputable domains. So that was the Holy Grail in SEO for twenty years.

Well recently, the one thing that has usurped that in Google has been user engagement metrics, so how users actively engaging with your website. Now, that’s a huge deal because what that means is if users are coming on to your website like CFO Francis sitting at a coffee shop and she looks up some stuff about marketing automation platforms. She comes to my site, but she comes to the innovative sections of the site, she sees all the crazy, edgy language that actually scares her a little bit because she’s more about control and wanting the ROI and things like that. Then she’s likely to bounce and what that means is just back out of the website, hit the back button or go back to the search results and look for a different one that speaks more her language. So, what that’s going to do, Google sees that she bounced and that’s actually going to hurt you in the rankings. Google says “Wait, maybe the site isn’t relevant to what she just searched and so we’re going to demote that in the rankings.”

However, let’s say she looks up marketing automation platform with good ROI or best results from marketing automation. Those might be keywords that she looks up. And now we’re pulling up our case studies section that highlights some of the results and some of the ROI and she sees that instead of all the flashy stuff. That will actually help us because she sees it, she gets more engaged with it, she scrolls a little farther, she clicks on a couple case study links. Google sees her actively interacting with that page, engaging with that page, so Google says “You know what, maybe this page is actually relevant to what she just searched.”

And so, the more we have that segmentation automatically playing out, through the keyword, again the keyword is the bridge between your content and your ideal customer and your ideal persona. Their pinpoints or their keywords are the bridge. If you can meet them where they are which is currently in pain, and address that pain, that keyword, with some answers, you can really win their hearts and win them over. So, Google is trying to monitor that because they want to ease that interaction. They want to provide value where people are able to find content and information online. So, that’s the idea there, really trying to design your site and structure it in a way where you can speak to those different audiences as needed and then Google is going to see that, they’re going to find that and they’re going to help your users connect with your brand.

Paul: I think, just to reiterate, is it’s very clear once you say it, but you’ve gotta remember that you have got to have those personas and see how the keywords that you’re targeting match up to those personas. That drives the people in.

How Does Google Find Content?

Paul: Is it fair to say that Google is driving that relationship between what the person engaged with? So, they type in some keywords whatever they are, and Google presents it and then they click on this link and then they engage with that site. So, Google has now tied those keywords to that content. I know they’re also parsing now, but is that a fair correlation?

Jeremiah. Yeah. That is a fair correlation. And Google is getting more and more intelligent about that too. It’s actually kind of shocking how good they’ve gotten at it. And a lot of people say that Google has probably gotten worse because they’re finding bad content out there all the time. But I would not blame Google for that. Google is doing their best to organize the content that we as a people are producing. So, if you keep finding bad content out there, guess what? It’s because people are producing bad content. But the idea there is that Google is getting more intelligent with trying to deduce what your intent is in your search and what you mean by what you say and then returning a good result.

One that I love to kind of play with, if I tell you for a moment, if I say, “Remember that video game from the 80s with the plumbers that go through the pipes?” You know right away what I’m talking about. You could even say the name, right? Well now if you go type that same query in Google, “video game from the 80s with plumbers.” You’re going to be shocked what comes up. Google knows exactly what you’re talking about. And you’re not using keywords that relate directly to the brand name or the name of the game that we’re even talking about. So that’s what’s interesting is that google is trying to figure that out.

Google and Artificial Intelligence

Paul: Does that come in to artificial intelligence or is that just Google being really good at what it does?

Jeremiah: The two are the same really. So yeah, you’re getting into fun territory for me. That is exactly what it is. We’re moving into artificial intelligence now. Google has made a huge move in the past year or so to acquire more, or utilize more machine learning technology and artificial intelligence. They’ve got the largest data set probably known to man that they can work with and so they’re able to really quickly deduce and make some interesting decisions and conclusions based on what people have searched in the past.

And so, we see a lot more happening due to artificial intelligence now and that’s exactly what’s going on there when we type that search in. They’re actively deducing what we mean when we say all of these different things and all the pieces of content around the web that talk about the Mario Brothers being plumbers and it being a cool game from the 80s and it being retro and stuff like that. And so, they’re tying all that language together and saying you probably mean this one subject that people actively click on and look at when they search things around what you just searched. So, there’s a lot of decision making that Google is actually doing to serve up a result like that.

What Exactly is Artificial Intelligence?

Paul: So, let’s talk a little bit about artificial intelligence. It’s a little bit off the topic of SEO but the SEO police aren’t here so we can. The podcast police aren’t here at least. So how would you define artificial intelligence? Because science fiction has defined it for us and most of us don’t live in a complete vacuum. You have the example of sentients. Is artificial intelligence sentient or is it a step on the way to that? How do you define artificial intelligence?

Jeremiah: Sure. When I talk specifically about search, artificial intelligence is semi limited to a degree because we’re talking about artificial intelligence in the scope of a purpose or a very clear goal that it needs to do which is to help me retrieve some information. So that’s not a broad enough example to talk about, maybe, sentient where we want to create a being that’s able to perceive or feel something. That’s not exactly what we’re getting into. There’s an element of perception going on there within Google’s artificial intelligence that is critical for it to work the way it does, but it’s limited in terms of its scope and what it can do. It’s really going out there and grabbing the whole of all information. It was able to index, and it was able to calculate the term in relevance and then take our keyword query and find the best match between the two and hand that back. And so that’s really what’s happening there.

The idea with artificial intelligence insofar as Google is using it though, is that they are now looking at such a large amount of ranking factors and elements to decide what is actually going to help this page versus that page rank for a given keyword. Whereas many years ago, when I first got into SEO, it seemed like Google was looking at like a handful of factors. And then over time, it seemed like another factor would show up, and another factor would show up and before you know it there were two hundred, three hundred, four hundred things it is considering. And now, I don’t think there’s a good hard number. I actually think that it evolves so much, that it actually shifts even based on the keyword query.

For example, if we search for a pizza shop near me, here in town, the way that Google intuits that and interprets that is different than if I’m looking for how to make pizza because they understand that “What a second. On this first query, he’s looking for a local thing so I’m going to show a certain type of result here. Whereas on the other thing, he’s looking for a more of a how-to so recipes might be more up his alley.” So, they do have to make some of that, sort of, intuitive decision. But other than that, I think that it still is fairly limited in the grand scope of how artificial intelligence, as a term, really works.

Paul: Right. So, I guess, to allay anybody’s fears, I think we’re quite a ways from sentients but we are at the precipice of artificially being able to correlate information in infinitely useful ways that we hadn’t anticipated before.

Jeremiah: Yeah. I would agree with that.

Understanding How Google Searches for You

Paul: That’s sort of my definition of artificial intelligence, what it is right now. It’s not like it’s going to think of something, but it will present facts to us in a way we hadn’t anticipated before and we’ll be able to see and observe new things. But now, having said that, and you touched on the local search. Earlier you mentioned the idea of a men’s suit. So, if you go into Google and type “men’s suit,” you had mentioned a specific brand, Hugo Boss. Even if I did “men’s suit Hugo Boss,” am I looking for where can buy one? Am I looking for what are the current styles? Am I looking for what’s the store closest to me? And It’s not an interview with the person. What’s interesting is, as I use Google, as I am – and this is an interesting question. I don’t know if they’re doing this. I type in “Hugo Boss” and I get an overwhelming amount of information. Then I go “Hugo Boss store.” Is Google correlating – I would imagine they would be – is correlating those two queries as me refining my question?

Jeremiah: Yeah. And they are actively watching that. It could be a little creepy to some people but at the same time it can be very useful to the point where people are willing to give up a little bit of security for convenience. Those are always at odds with each other, right?

I think that when we do something like we’re searching for a product online, like your example, and then we search for that same brand near us kind of thing. Certain information starts to really play into their algorithms and the results are going to generate. We’ve actually seen some patterns, especially in the beta realm of Google where they haven’t fully rolled out any feature yet but they’re testing something. One of those features would be to show “Hey, here are some stores near you that have this product in stock because we can tell that what you’re trying to do is find a place to buy this product because apparently just looking at our results online wasn’t good enough. But we’re getting you in the right direction because now you’re looking for a store that has it and we’ve got to tell you, here is a store that has it and it’s in stock. If you click this link, then we’ll take you right to the right page.” And it just so happens that that link may be either a paid ad through Google Shopping or that Nordstrom puts together, or Hugo Boss puts together, or something like that.

So, there’s obviously relationship there and then that builds trust between you, myself, and Google. We start liking Google more because they’ve really made our job easier. So, we’re more likely, the next time we have an issue where we are looking up something like that, that we’re more likely to just resort to Google so it builds in this kind of utility effect in our lives.

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 2 of our podcast with Jeremiah Smith. Stay tuned for Part 3, coming soon! We’ll be talking about SEO & how to create good content for your business!
If you missed Part 1, you can listen to it a href=”http://www.paulparisi.com/2019/03/05/an-introduction-to-seo-with-jeremiah-smith/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>here!

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