Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard: Personal Branding, AI Strategies, and SEO Insights for Visionary CEOs

Latest Episodes:

A Wider View of Technical SEO (Paul Shapiro with Jason Barnard) Nov 03, 2019

Show notes

We start with an idiotic James Bond analogy. Paul pulls me back to the serious business of 'what is technical SEO'? And the definition is wider than I thought. 4 types of tech SEO. Paul has a plan to tell me the 4 types. Like a child, I keep trying to jump ahead. Paul then looks at skillsets and venn diagrams. And that we should look at (and accept and appreciate) these crossovers. SEO is one giant Venn diagram of skillsets. Then onto the fact that in SEO we are (and need to be) multi-skilled. We end with 'it's important to get into the weeds'. Who knows what that means (ask Paul)

(Groovy) Music and Digital Marketing (Marty Weintraub with Jason Barnard) Nov 03, 2019

Show notes

Marty starts with his musical career and the segues very neatly into why that initial career path helps with digital marketing. And, as we all know, there are a lot of musicians in this space. Mentions for Robert Smith, AC/DC, The Monkees... And we also learn to love our lard pack... and it becomes yet another spur of the moment silly ditty

Growing a Digital Agency (James Norquay with Jason Barnard) Oct 27, 2019

Show notes

Once again I get the pronunciation of someone's name wrong. How does James find clients: referrals, conferences, content promotion... and a little SEO :) Keep a good customer base. Never have one single client who represents more than 10% of your income. Next how to hire great staff. Conferences, job sites, Facebook groups... Enthusiasm, a personality that fits in to the team, motivation... I decide we are talking about ranking factors for getting jobs. The first year is always going to be really tough. Surviving the first 3 years is key. Then you are rolling. After 8 years, 80% of Jame's job is networking. Great clients are hard to find and bad clients and easy to find.

The Google Shaped Web (Barry Adams with Jason Barnard) Oct 19, 2019

Show notes

In the pub, just before the second day of the Takeitoffline unconference. Barry hates AMP and is an attempt by Google to force the web to conform to their vision of the web. Now they are getting involved in Wordpress, and we should be very worried (especially when we get words like PWAMP). A commercial company should not be the organisation that decides how the web works - because they will do what is best for their bottom line, not what is best for the web. Google is an advertising company with 90% dominance and should be regulated. They started wanting to make the web a better place, but are now a company looking to make money. We dig into how the European Directive may pan out for news sites. Although they are playing hardball on the EU directive, and the recent updates have impacted the publishers enormously (and cost them dearly), Google are trying to be more political with the publishers. Then onto what business models might work for news publishers - not a one-size-fits-all. I vaguely float the idea of calling him Happy Barry. Then onto Google breaking the Social Contract, and the ins-and-outs of permission to scrape. Conclusion - Barry chirpily says that Google don't feel they owe anyone anything.

Getting Great Reviews for Your Brand (Thomas Ballantyne with Jason Barnard) Oct 15, 2019

Show notes

We discuss pest control, cartoons, and eventually get onto how to get great online reviews for an offline business. It's all about relationships. Oh, and asking nicely. Bribing people doesn't work. Top 3 platforms are Google, Yelp and Facebook

Looking After Your Brand SERPs (John Morabito with Jason Barnard) Oct 15, 2019

Show notes

For once someone gets all over excited about brand SERPs. I manage to keep reasonably quiet and let him talk, despite the fact I am over excited about it too. He actually does proper audits on all terms that contain the brand name, and gives some super duper insights we should all be taking note of. So go out and manage your branded searches. Easy win, and vitally important.

3 Common Misconceptions about E-A-T (Kristine Schachinger with Jason Barnard) Oct 15, 2019

Show notes

Google don't look at author. They look at entities. Google don't look at accuracy of facts. Kristine uses Omegas as an example as to why. Then why linking out is so important. I expound my topic layer theory. They don't use NLP, they use NLU. Which is why we need Schema.org... and we end up with a sulky robot on crutches

Findability and Discoverability (John Paul Sherman with Jason Barnard) Oct 15, 2019

Show notes

Both findability and discoverability = matching user intent with information or content that they want. Quickly. On and offline. Grocery stores, for example. We end up trying (and succeed) to shoehorn the idea into punk music and Dada movement.

Human Centered Data Driven Content (Elmer Boutin with Jason Barnard) Oct 15, 2019

Show notes

Google, Bing and Amazon have a user-centric design perspective, and we tend to forget that. We should pull and analyse the data to discover the real pain points of our potential clients rather than use our instincts since we are all biased, and our content will therefore be biased.

Bing’s Crawling API and Solving Javascript (Fabrice Canel with Jason Barnard) Oct 15, 2019

Show notes

Fabrice us downloading the whole worldwide web every day (even my site). Bing have launched a crawling API, and that is putting Fabrice out of a job (and he wants to be out of a job) - simply ping Bing to have an URl crawled immediately. They also have solved Javascript.