Tag: #writingblogarticles

Is SEO Always Worth It?

April 16, 2019 / Hannah / 0 Comments

On Episode 89 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with SEO expert Jeremiah Smith. He’s answering the question “Is SEO always worth it?”

Sections

How Fresh Should Your Content Be?
Accuracy of Content to Searcher Intent
Commercial Intent
When SEO Fails Expectations
Three Parts of SEO: Technical, Content, and Link Building
Developing a Content Calendar
SEO Doesn’t Have To Take a Long Time
Go At Your Own Pace With SEO
Is SEO Always Worth it?
Call To Action
How To Call Customers To Action
Tools For Marketing Automation
Closing
More Episodes
Show Notes

Is SEO Always Worth It?

How Fresh Should Your Content Be?

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.

Okay. So, you talked about this content as being key. So, an SEO plan – is this fair to say? – an SEO plan without content is not an SEO plan?

Jeremiah: Yes. Insofar as Google is concerned, that’s correct. I would say that that could be a broad descriptor of SEO as well because of Amazon clearly needing content, iTunes search needing some content. But yeah. Generally speaking, you’re absolutely right. If you don’t have content in your SEO plan, then you just don’t have an SEO plan.

Paul: Okay, then how fresh does that content have to be?

Jeremiah: That really depends actually. Freshness is a powerful tool where the content needs to be fresh. But if we think about who has dominated Google search results for the longest time, that’s Wikipedia. And a lot of the content in Wikipedia, though it is user generated and created and optimized and it gets updated frequently and stuff like that, there are pages of content in Wikipedia that have kind of sat there for a long period of time and consistently dominate.

Paul: Good point.

Jeremiah: So, we need to keep that in mind. I’m sure if we searched for The Declaration of Independence in Google, and we read it now – its’s probably on Wikipedia – it’s probably not much different than it was five to ten years ago. It may have changed a little bit but the freshness of that does not corelate to how well it ranks.

Paul: Sure.

Jeremiah: So, freshness is important but it’s a system of factors. It is almost kind of like saying something like, “Why do you like vanilla ice cream?” or, “Why do you like jazz?” That’s hard to answer, right?

Paul: Right. Yeah.

Jeremiah: It’s a system of feelings. It’s a system of things in you that cause you to make that decision. With Google, it’s not so much feeling but there are a lot of factors that are influencing it, and in varying degrees, that aren’t outwardly published by Google. They don’t give their full science away. They give an idea of their science away, so we have an idea. But we’re constantly reverse engineering to kind of nail that down.

Accuracy of Content to Searcher Intent

Jeremiah: If I were to give you my list of top-ranking factors, kind of reverse engineered, from what I’ve discovered through doing this, the first one on that list would probably be Accuracy of Content to Searcher Intent. So, accuracy of the piece of content that you have to the searcher’s intent to the keyword that they searched. So that’s really hard to determine. If you don’t have Google to use right away, but if you do have Google to use, which you do, then you can go ahead and search the keyword that you want to target and see what does come up. And you’re going to find that the searcher intent for content, at the top of Google, is kind of clear.

If you’re looking for best pizza shop near me for example, then Trip Advisor is probably going to give you the top fifteen pizza shops, but that’s going to be the organic listing. Google Maps is probably going to give you a few pizza shops that are highly rated and stuff like that. So, Google is ultimately going to do their best to figure out what you want based on what you’ve asked.

Paul: Yeah. Interesting. It’s a different way to think in some ways. You have to sort of think about how the organization happens. I liked your analogy of organizing the spice cabinet because you would organize it so that you could find it. And that’s very cool.

Commercial Intent

Paul: So now we talked about fresh content and that not being super critical. Because if we’re writing a story about Lincoln, the facts about Lincoln haven’t changed all that much. He was a certain height and he was the certain president and excreta, excreta.

Jeremiah: Right.

Paul: I can see that. Does the content have to have a churn to it, or does it have to have more? So, we’re not talking about Lincoln. We’re talking about the headphones we sell or the semiconductors that we sell, and so does that need to have an ever fresh look or feel really from a content point of view?

Jeremiah: It’s so frustrating to try to understand SEO sometimes or to, in my position, try to explain it because I hate when I get these answers, but it depends.

Paul: Okay. That’s fair.

Jeremiah: But I’m going to go into why that depends. So, if we are talking about Lincoln, everyone is pretty much going to say the same kind of stuff and very rarely is new information going to come out. However, if we are talking about headphones, that’s in the technology, retail space where things actually change pretty quickly. A new product comes on the market by Sony, another one comes on the market by Bose, another one by Sennheiser. It happens a few times a year, every year and everyone goes crazy about all of it. So, there’s a lot of new stuff happening in that industry and so there’s a lot of frogs leaping over each other there. So, if you’re going to play that game, you have just got to get used to being a frog playing leap frog there.

Whereas if you are a historian and you’ve written some really good stuff about Lincoln and you’ve published it, and it took you a while to get it out there. Well, guess what? You’re playing a game where a lot of people are not leap frogging each other. It’s just kind of sitting there. So, you’re in a lucky space if you’re a great historian and have written a long piece of content about that because you’re probably going to rank well, and you don’t have much competition to worry about. But then again, what is your commercial intent? What kind of money are you expecting to get for it? I hate to say that but at the end of the day, that’s where Google really starts playing commercial value, especially for me, a marketing agency.

Paul: Right.

Jeremiah: My clients all have a commercial intent with what they’re doing. In my client spaces we have a lot of competition. We have a lot of people playing leapfrog and we just have to help our client be a good racehorse, or I should say a good leapfrog in the game of it and grow some strong legs which comes down to building content, building links, ensuring user engagement is there, and that that searcher intent is accurate to the piece of content. So, it really depends on the space that you’re in, is the sort answer.

When SEO Fails Expectations

Paul: How do you see both good examples and poor examples of companies that sell the SEO magic, if you will, and then don’t fulfill the expectations? Because I would imagine, that an uneducated SEO buyer has unrealistic expectations.

Jeremiah: One hundred percent! And I see it way more than I’d like to. Unfortunately, it’s a situation in my industry where I’m kind of acting and serving as really an ambassador of my industry, to a world of businesses who have been burned by or have a bad taste in their mouth around SEO and working with an agency or someone who says they know anything about SEO. I liken it much to snake oil which sells the magic cure two hundred years ago, where some people probably do have the cure but their reputation and the likelihood that people buying from them, have been ruined by so many other people claiming they had the cure and being completely wrong about it.

And so, I think the same thing is true with SEO. I really work to try to take people into that new line of thinking and make that paradigm shift that I’ve watched you follow me through with the spice cabinet and Amazon and iTunes and showing that search engine optimization applies to a lot of things.

My favorite example of search engine optimization is using a library. Any one of us can go into any library in the United States that we have never been to and in a matter of a couple of minutes, find a single word, on a single page, in a single book, in a single section because of the way the library is structured, and books are structured with tables of contents and indexes.

So, I think really, we as a people in SEO, we owe it to the community at large to first be clear with everyone with what all SEO includes and is and requires to do properly. And then if you are a practitioner in the SEO realm in some way, pick an angle of what you want to specialize in and do it well. If you do want to be a generalist that’s fine. You’re most likely going to fall into the camp of doing a lot of consulting in a bunch of random tactics and tasks that add up to a SEO effort but ultimately, it’s a good idea to kind of pick a specialty like we have and zero in on it.

So, within the SEO space, we focus a lot on keyword research, content strategy, and link building. With that, we then produce content and build links and we find that according to our strategies if we do that properly, our clients just see really good results. And so that’s our specialty within SEO. But I only get to that after kind of laying everything out for my clients and showing them first and foremost what SEO is made up of so that they can feel comfortable and confident analyzing us and other agencies. It’s funny how many agencies go straight in, assuming that people know what SEO includes and then sell them on an aspect of it, and then the client buys it thinking that they’re getting the full part. The most common thing that we find is that a lot of companies out there claiming they know SEO, are just doing the technical portion.

Three Parts of SEO: Technical, Content, and Link Building

Jeremiah: If I break SEO down, I break it into three major categories – Technical, Content, and Link Building. The technical portion is, to me, as good as grading the property you’re about to build your house on and maybe laying the foundation. But that’s as far as it gets with technical. All the technical in the world is still not going to help you compete with really good content out there. It’s just going to help you have a platform to publish your content on and do it effectively. But you still have to publish the content and build links to the content. A lot of companies out there sell SEO and then just deliver the technical portion and the clients are scratching their heads because nothing is happening to their content, nothing is happening to their links. They don’t know anything about needing either one of those anyway but regardless, they’re upset anyway because rankings, traffic, and conversions haven’t improved. So, they fire the SEO agency and say SEO doesn’t work.

Paul: Right.

Jeremiah: So that’s the most frustrating scenario that I hear about all the time. And I have to take them and say, “Look, that’s just the beginning. You’ve taken the first step in a thousand step journey of building content and of building links.” So, that’s really what it is going to take to see the results you want.

Paul: The technical thing is like carpentry. It’s not terribly difficult but a good carpenter is worth his weight in gold.

Developing a Content Calendar

Paul: So, do you develop a content calendar? Or how deliberate is that? Or is it just, “I’ll write an article about this.”

Jeremiah: Oh, it’s very deliberate. So, we don’t espouse the idea of producing content for the sake of producing content or because somebody told you that you need to. Content ought to be produced to answer questions and problems within your industry that people are already asking. And if you do a good job of answering every single keyword with a solid piece of content, and maybe even a few different pieces of content attacking that keyword from different angles, then you’re doing a fantastic job.

I think one of my favorite examples of a content production powerhouse in the world is HubSpot. Of course, in my space, they’re very dominate. They’re a marketing automation platform. But if you look up anything about marketing, odds are you’re going to come across a HubSpot article at some point, that’s going to attack that very subject very well. Because they just do a good job of producing content. So, it needs to fall under a content strategy and that content strategy can begin in one place.

When we do SEO for a client, we will start a content strategy. We will deliver that content strategy, but that strategy document is just the beginning. We have what we call the content road map which comes after the strategy and the road map includes some of the things you referred to. A content calendar, where we say, “Okay, we have a calendar.” For us, it’s not like a schedule of two articles per month, every month. It’s more of we need to cover this list of keywords with content. Here’s how many pieces of content at the minimum we’re going to have to produce. Now let’s try to fit that into a calendar because a client only has so much budget. They can’t afford to have a hundred pieces of content written this month and neither can we scale up quickly and do that as effectively.

SEO Doesn’t Have To Take a Long Time

Paul: Let me interrupt. Even if we could scale and they did have the money, would it be wise to? Would it overwhelm?

Jeremiah: Actually, it can be. It can be wise to. So, there are some case studies in our industry of a few companies that have done that and we actually have a case study of a client who did that. On our site we have a case study for Segment where we did an SEO project and they had about a hundred and fifty pages that we did some massive optimization on very quickly. And we leveraged their internal content team, broke it out into sections, and we gave them a whole bunch of recommendations for those pages. They edited those pages. Then we built some links to those pages and then in the span of a couple of months, we improved their organic search traffic very fast, very effectively, to the order of about a hundred and twenty eight percent increase in organic search traffic. So, you can dump a flood of content on Google and if it’s well done and it’s according to a strategy, you’re going to reap the rewards and you’re going to reap them fast.

Paul: Well, that’s cool.

Jeremiah: The problem there is mainly too full. Number one, budget. It’s all manual. So, producing that content is not something that happens automated. I do not recommend any kind of automated content for SEO purposes. It might work in other capacities but from an SEO perspective, I don’t recommend it. So manual handwritten, hand edited, human content is key. And that takes time which costs money. If you pay someone to do it, and then scale, usually to get a hundred and twenty pieces of content quickly, usually one person can’t do that so we have to scale that out across a team of five, ten, fifteen people. Break it up into five, ten pieces each, something like that. And then we’ve got a scalable system to quickly build it. But that’s only if we have the resources in place. Where Segment already had a team of people that could handle that.

Paul: Sure.

Jeremiah: So, that’s a great example. I’ve seen examples where a guy named SEO Nick – He goes by SEO Nick, Nick Eubanks. He’s huge in the SEO community – He published a case study where he took a site and he built the site and built all the content, did all the keyword research, did all the content strategy and everything before launching the site. He had had the domain name but nothing on it. And he built all this and then launched on the domain name, and within like a month or two months’ time, had something on the order of a hundred thousand hits a month flowing in. Within a month to two months. 30 to 60 days. That is insane! And that required a massive effort, but I think he did the whole thing just to see first and foremost, how quickly you can actually show results from zero to one hundred with SEO and kind of break this theory that SEO has to take a long time. Of course, it took a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of money internally to produce all that content structure and everything, but once he hit publish, it just worked.

Paul: Okay, so now that’s great. I would not have believed it if you had not taken me through it. But if Nick had not done that in one big turn it on and it’s all there, if he had done the same thing but metered it out month by month, do you think he would have gotten to the same number of hits, or page views?

Jeremiah: Yes, I think he would have. I think he would have gotten the same number of page views. It would have just taken the total amount of time that it took him to hit publish on each one of those pages metered out and then the time for Google to actually index, simulate, and determine the value of all that content allowed to rank. So, Google can move very fast especially if Google sees a hundred and fifty thousand view urls on a site that is a huge site like eBay. Guess what? All of those urls can show up on Google within an hour or two. So, Google can move exceptionally quick. And all those pages, by the way, can rank because Google has a relationship with eBay that is like chocolate and peanut butter. So, we have to keep that in mind that that can happen. But then, the alternative scenario of spreading it out over a long period of time is why most people say SEO takes a long time. Well, because it took you a long time to do everything necessary for SEO to work.

Go At Your Own Pace With SEO

Paul: Right. Okay. Good insight. But that’s also somewhat of a comfort because it means if you go at your own pace, you’re not doomed to failure.

Jeremiah: Exactly. And that was one of the most exciting things that got me into SEO twelve years ago, or over twelve years ago. I was working for a small mom and pop shop who hired me to build their site and then after their site was built, they were happy with it and they wanted it to show up in Google. And I said, “Well, look. I don’t know anything about this new SEO thing. I’m going to teach myself here. I just discovered it. But if you guys don’t mind, I will spend every day practicing what I’ve learned, to try and get it to show up in Google well and we’ll see what happens.”

And I was very lucky and blessed that they agreed and said, “You know what? Yeah. Do it. But it has got to show results and if it doesn’t show results, we’re going to stop doing it.” So, I was like alright cool! So, I got to work on it and I spent eight hours a day inside a small mom and pop shop that sold ATVs and dirt bikes to retailers throughout the country, trying to get them to show up for the keywords they needed. And with a six-month effort, we added two million dollars onto their four million dollar revenue, just from organic search.

Paul: Wow!

Jeremiah: So, that dedicated effort internally, allowed me to work – and by the way, that was me teaching myself by doing this. That wasn’t even me knowing how to do it yet. – So, yes. You can work at your own pace with SEO and that’s probably my favorite thing about it is, whatever your pace is, you’re going to have proportional, directly proportional results to that.

Paul: Interesting! So, we’re going to shift gears here in just a moment, but do you think that we fundamentally interact with the world differently now that we have Google? I mean, I think the answer is implicitly yes, because if I’m doing anything…. That’s really a stunning fact. Adding two million dollars, adding fifty percent more revenue to a dirt bike company.

Jeremiah: Right, yeah.

Is SEO Always Worth it?

Paul: So, it’s like, wait a minute. What excuse can I use that I can’t do that in my company. I am a semiconductor manufacturer, or I’m a bicycle shop or I’m this or I’m that. So, I guess, if you’re trying to talk yourself out of SEO and you say well nobody that wants my products – let’s talk about the semiconductor stuff – is searching on Google. That seems like a silly thing to say.

Jeremiah: It’s a very rare scenario but it does happen from time to time. But it is rare.

Paul: So, can you think of a business that you would be able to call out that you would be able to say, “No it’s probably not worth doing.”

Jeremiah: And even with those, there’s an angle where you could show up because people are searching CFO headhunter, CIO head hunter, so there is still an SEO angle. You really – Aw man, I hate to give this answer – Again, it depends. It depends on the potential value or ROI that you’re going to get in return from doing SEO as to whether or not it’s worth it to do.

Now the general question of, “Are there industries where there is just no search volume?” That’s so extremely rare that I can’t think of one. I can’t really come up with a good example of one of where it wouldn’t make sense to do SEO because of search volume. But I think in places where ROI is key – small local realtors, small local interest sales people – that both work under agencies… So, like a real estate agent or an insurance agent that works under a major insurance firm. Those are examples where there is definitely search volume and it is cut through. And you want to talk about leap frog? Those frogs are killing each other to try and outrank each other.

So the value there in my opinion, for the small independent realtor or insurance agent, is not there from an SEO perspective. I would recommend going to networking events and talking to people face to face and stuff like that before investing in SEO for those types. So, I don’t serve those business models mainly because of that, because it just doesn’t work as well. So, that’s the most common scenario I think, is the cost to benefit analysis and breaking that down.

Call To Action

Paul: So, now, you get the people there, they’re viewing the content. It’s good content, but don’t you have to have a call to action.

Jeremiah: Right, yeah. The call to action needs to take people down the path also of becoming a customer so in some cases – I mean, you always need to have the option of becoming a customer quickly, kind of like the fast lane in self-checkout – But I think that there does need to be this slower option as well, where we’re carefully, steadily building relationship and nurturing our leads along into having a relationship with us.

And then, if you do it right, you have this staggered approach of different scenarios of where there is the long sell person, there’s the medium sell person and there’s the quick sell person. The quick sell clicks “Schedule Demo” or just hits “Contact Us” and calls a phone number and says, “I want to buy it. Here’s my credit card.” The medium sell says, “Put me on a demo. I’d like to look at it and then after the demo you’re probably going to have to send me stuff and I’m probably going to have to have some phone calls and answer a few questions.” And the long sell person wants to read blog articles and collect used letters and consider five different companies over the course of six months and things like that.

So, I think if you’re offering all those different scenarios then your SEO efforts are going to be best suited by already having those assets and opportunities in place. Because no matter where someone is at, in the buying cycle, if you’re bringing them in to that SEO topical source then you’re feeding them through a large funnel that you’ve set up, that takes in to consideration where they might be in their buying cycle.

How To Call Customers To Action

Paul: How do you, as an agency, help a customer deal with that? So, we’ve got the person to the site, we’ve got a “Buy Now” button somewhere there, but how do you actually, technically help them fulfill the call to action because that’s outside of SEO?

Jeremiah: Yeah, so helping them fulfill the call to action that I forgot to, I guess, mention. What I meant by taking them through that process of going through the funnel is the call to action can be a diverse set of calls to action. The most obvious call to action is buy from us. The medium term is going to be schedule a demo and that kind of thing where we’re maybe advertising the demo a little bit more on our site with content talking about what the demo is going to include and what you’re going to get out of it. So, we’re kind of selling that demo really well.

And then other calls to action, like on a blog such as when a person gets to the end of a blog article. HubSpot highly recommends putting a call to action at the end of a blog article that suggests another piece of content that’s larger on that same subject, that goes deeper into it, because if a person read all the way to end of that piece of content, they’re so heavily devoted and they’re right at the point where they’re probably going to be more open to reading more about that same thing. It’s kind of like a movie that ended too quickly and people are sitting there watching the credits, waiting for the last moments, the after credits scene to roll. They could have used more movie. You know?

Whereas, these people could use more content, so suggest an eBook or a white paper or a pdf download or another longer article, but in order to capture that longer article, I’m going to capture your email in order to give that to you. And I’ll just send that to you really quick. Also, you’re going to get a follow up email from me a couple days later with another piece on the same subject and kind of take you through the process of guiding you deeper into the funnel. So those are some calls to actions that we recommend at the very least. At the very least, capture emails on your site somewhere.

Tools For Marketing Automation

Paul: Do you implement that for customers? That actual conversion funnel? What tools do you use for that? What tools do you recommend?

Jeremiah: So, we don’t implement that for our clients. There are so many good tools out there and we try to kind of remain a little platform agnostic so we can work with whatever client platform they’re on. But we inevitably run into scenarios where we just don’t like the platforms they are on sometimes. And so, we do steer them towards something a little better. I always recommend HubSpot because they’re just a great tool. I’m not a HubSpot partner agency by the way, so I’m not getting paid to say that, just so you know. But regardless they’re a great platform.

However, they are very expensive, so we do like to look at some other platforms as well. I think Marketo is also great. Also, expensive but less than HubSpot. Sharpspring is the one we just signed up for and that we’re getting on to and I’m really liking it so far. It’s pretty interesting.

So, we will recommend, based on our clients’ needs, a platform. A lot of people don’t need, for example, a CRM. So, a lot of our clients have the nine dollar a month software product that you need to sign up for. And they’re not going to waste time putting somebody on a sales call. Also, nobody’s going to get on a sales call to buy that product. It’s nine dollars a month. That’s a quick credit card decision. You swipe and move along. So, for them, their marketing automation platform and the tools they need for marketing, are just going to be different than that of maybe an enterprise supply change management software. So, that is probably going to require a lot more of a sales effort. So, the calls to action are going to be dramatically different. And then the implementation of those calls to action, those conversion items, the lead caption on that is just going to be different as well.

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 4 of our podcast with Jeremiah Smith. Stay tuned for Part 5, coming soon! Jeremiah Smith will be sharing his business advice with us!

If you missed any of the previous episodes from our conversation with Jeremiah Smith, 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

Show Notes:

SEO: How To Create Content For Your Business

April 2, 2019 / Hannah / 0 Comments

On Episode 88 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with SEO expert Jeremiah Smith, about SEO and how to create good content for your business!

SEO: Google & Artificial Intelligence

March 19, 2019 / Hannah / 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

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!

Show Notes:

An Introduction to SEO With Jeremiah Smith

March 5, 2019 / Hannah / 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

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!