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#50 - Elaine Walsh McGrath - I’m not Sarah Connor, BUT focusing on human nature not bots = Content that Converts Feb 18, 2024

The guest to this episode is Elaine Walsh McGrath, you can find her on Linkedin and she has a gift for you - A Linkedin to leads checklist you can find here.

Based in Ireland, Elaine is marketing maven who helps her clients gain more leads on platforms like LinkedIn. With a career that includes working with agencies and large clientele, she has witnessed and navigated the ever-evolving communication landscape on professional platforms.

Here is the presentation:

Here is the video from the conference:

I'm not Sarah Connor, BUT focusing on human nature not bots = Content that Converts - Elaine Walsh McGrath, Elaine Walsh-McGr from DigiMarCon on Vimeo.

During this episode, Elaine shares her wisdom on making the most out of social media, emphasising the need to humanize your business's approach and content. She discusses the significance of personal branding, the increasing growth of LinkedIn, and the necessity of having human nature compel your content conversion.

She provides practical guidance on content creation, focusing mainly on how to empathize with your audience, understand their needs, and respond to these effectively. Elaine advises businesses to be more symptom-focused rather than solution-focused while communicating with cold traffic, for example, in a DM on social media.

Elaine underscores the paramount importance of standing out in an ever-growing sea of LinkedIn users. To do this, she advocates for clear messaging filled with personality and using the right language that would resonate with your ideal clients for businesses of every size.

Finally, Elaine addresses the latest developments in social media platforms, like the rising popularity of TikTok for B2B sales, and clarifies that it is not the platform that matters, but rather how successfully businesses can engage and connect with their audience using the appropriate platform's algorithm.

To connect with Elaine and tap into more insights, visit her website at www.elainewalshmcgraw.com or find her on LinkedIn. She also has some excellent resources available for download on her website.

Get ready to take notes on how to humanize your online marketing strategy significantly in our enriching podcast conversation with Elaine Walsh McGrath.

Here is the transcript:

You've got to act like a kind human. So throw any element of narcissism away
and really work on that human part of your content.
Music.
This is Time for Marketing, the marketing podcast that will tell you everything
you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference.
Hello and welcome to the time for marketing the podcast
that brings you the best marketing conference speakers and
allows them to sum up their presentation in five minutes
my name is peter and i'll be your host today this is
episode number five zero so the big
50 we're finally here and i'm very
glad that we have an excellent guest joining us
from the island that moved
away from from the eu the whole thingy elaine walsh
mcgrath hello and welcome to the podcast oh thank
you so much but don't worry i'm still in the eu as i'm in
ireland you're still there you're right oh my
goodness 50 i'm so excited because
it was meant to be because it's my
50th year in june so how cool is that see that was really something that made
this podcast happen thank you for being here how are you doing how is Ireland
oh good a bit rainy but your friend isn't so you know that's why we have so
much greenery around us you know.
Yeah you need that to you know do all of the all of the agriculture that you
do up there right yeah for sure for sure Peter that is so true Elaine you are
helping people to get more leads on LinkedIn and other places.
Tell me, what do you do and what is your favorite part about that?
Well, I help my clients to land more clients. That's what I say to them.
It keeps it simple, doesn't it? I work with service-based businesses and businesses
who really do work with clients and need to understand what their needs are.
So generally speaking, they might have a muddy message before they meet me and they need more.
They need more clients or they need to adjust maybe the pricing and the quality
communication of their offer.
Because I work with really, really talented people and organizations to just
make sure that their marketing reflects how amazing they are.
Okay. You have a big history in working.
Big history. You worked a lot in agencies and with big clients.
And how is the LinkedIn communication or the communication between people that
would like to start working together?
How has that changed in the last 10, 15 years?
Well, LinkedIn has had massive growth, but aside from the tech,
let's come back to what I always think is important.
There's more humanity there than there was before.
In my opinion, it's important to show up in a more, let's use some marketing speak, 360 way.
These days, personal branding has really
grown and it's so important
whether you're there for professional reasons representing
your company or looking for clients.
In terms of you're a coach or a service based business
it's so important to stand out because
guess what there are a billion users on
LinkedIn now which is flipping flopping
mad that's where it's seen massive growth
but it's still important to have
that human side to you and I think that that has
is made the main for me
is the main difference you know because quite often
like you still do get some of that
nonsense about like why is this on linkedin but
but increasingly there are more people
who wouldn't have you know seemed linkedin
appropriate 10 years ago and thankfully we
have a more a more diversified and
inclusive view of humanity professionalism
these days which is great you know and that
allows us to really communicate with people even on linkedin
as you know people to people i invited
you to the podcast because you were a speaker at the digimark
on 2023 in ireland this is a conference that tells everything in its name right
digital marketing conference 2023 how was the conference how did you enjoy your
time there it was a great conference conference lovely people great speakers
well i would say that that was amazing no i'm kidding.
But there were really inspiring companies other than my lovely self there and
you know there was a great networking opportunity and it was in a lovely location
in the center of dublin so it was it was great and i certainly would check it
out if they're back visiting next year all right All right. Excellent.
Well, we talked about you, about the conference.
Now there's nothing else to let you
take your five minutes to sum up your presentations. Here you go, Elaine.
Well, it had an interesting title, which is that it was called I'm Not Sarah Connors.
If you remember, she was lead strong female in the Terminator.
And she really had an issue with AI, okay?
So the title was I'm Not Sarah Connors, but like human nature,
not bots will really make your content convert. verse.
So my whole thing, no matter how big your business is,
is that you need to lean into feelings and emotional cues in your content if you want it to converse.
So in actual fact, what I spoke to everybody about was that,
you know, if you want your organic content to build your visibility of your business with ease,
then in actual fact, you have to act like a human in social media and not just any old human.
You've got to act like a kind human. So throw your any element of narcissism
away and really work on that human part of your content.
In actual fact, if you really want to be successful, you need to make sure that's
about 60% of your content and that 20% of your content should just be the transactional aspect.
Okay. So, and then 20% should be the value, the, you know, and I'm not talking
about like transactional value.
I'm talking about your organization or your personal brand's values.
Okay. Your value sets, you know?
So for example, in my business, I have a lot, I am a carer, my daughter has
additional needs, and that does come across in my content, okay?
So what about your business's value?
So just think about it, think about your people and how you want for others
who want to work with you, perceive you.
Then the second part was how to sell on social, right?
Because quite often, Often we get to LinkedIn and LinkedIn is so,
you know, connection friendly, but never mind LinkedIn, any social media,
you know, there is potential to sell and there's, there's pretty much DMs on all social media.
And there is a potential to have that strategy in place.
And I don't mind if you use bots, I don't mind because like I say,
I'm not Sarah Connors, But what I do want you to do is in your content or your
ads to make sure that you're symptom focused and not solution focused when you're
talking to cold traffic.
OK, so make sure that you're talking to the symptoms, that you're talking to
the desires, the dreams of your clients and not like the solution,
because otherwise they may say no, because sure, they don't know necessarily that they need you.
Okay and then the third thing was if you want to be successful on social media
if you want your content to convert then please just you know you don't have
to drain your resource to do it okay.
But you need to just make sure your messaging is
clear that you've got lots of personality in your
content so that you know you stand out
and that it is aligned with you and your business no
matter what size your business and then systemize
it like I'm all about using tech but just
make sure that there's heart and soul in your
messaging that there is enough personality and that you're using enough of the
right language that your ideal client will hear and then yeah absolutely after
that systemize everything and that was basically the crux of my my 45-minute
presentation in five, right?
The big message is, my big message is, forget B2B.
It's human to human. And it doesn't matter what size your business is.
It's still got to be human to human, particularly now with the growth of AI.
You've got to make sure that you come back to basics.
Yeah, it's probably, you know,
in the last year, the messaging on LinkedIn has probably changed a lot.
But I like how you speak about, we should be talking about, we should be symptom
focused and not solutions focused.
Can we give an example of how that would be done right and how that would be done wrong? wrong?
Sure, of course. Now, listen, I'm going to take it from like a smaller business
perspective because that's, you know, I work predominantly these days,
even though I used to work with
like big, you know, million dollar clients when I was working in media.
These days I work with smaller businesses, coaches, consultants,
and yeah, find small organizations and mainly the social entrepreneur space.
So I will, I will absolutely give you an idea. So
let's say someone has a a
program okay and offer a framework and
they know that this is really going to help their clients
here's the thing quite often your
ideal client doesn't identify what the actual crux of their problem is but they
have symptoms so they might say let's just take social media as an example they
might think they need more followers to make more sales but like we all know
that you can you You can sell high ticket,
like you can sell like big solutions.
Costly solutions with a small amount of followers if they're the right followers. Okay.
So the key is to make sure that your content delivers to the symptoms.
So, you know, because they may not know that they may think,
oh, I need loads of followers, but actually what's the issue? They don't have sales.
So you need to talk to the symptoms. Like, do you need to sell more?
You know, are you overwhelmed?
Is your sales department under pressure? To figure out like where the actual
pain point is and just tease the symptoms for them so that they put their hands up.
And when they put their hands up and they're on a call with you or they get
to know you better, they're in your list, then you can ask them more questions and get to the issue.
You and that's then where the solution comes in not
not out of the cold traffic side of the
equation you know all right excellent that was
a nice example that shows how we should change our thinking in our messaging
there are new of course there are new social medias popping up all the time
around i see a lot of b2b sales starting to happen on tiktok working with.
When should we start thinking about TikTok and moving away from LinkedIn?
Or when should we start adding TikTok to LinkedIn as a channel for our communication?
Listen, here's the thing.
It actually doesn't matter what channel you're on. That is the truth of the
matter. There is enough traffic. There are enough eyeballs.
There is enough demographics on every single solitary platform.
Platform so what I say to my clients is
there's no silver bullet sometimes my
clients arrive and go oh what do you mean there's no silver bullet
but honestly you need an algorithmic um
platform and you need an algorithmic platform and that's
what I recommend so make sure you've got an algorithmic algorithmic
platforms so instagram facebook linkedin
in your and to an extent tiktok
but tiktok also kind of comes across into evergreen
because it is increasingly searchable and
we're seeing with the evolution of tiktok in in
terms of their change to landscape that they're putting it
up to youtube they're moving to a slightly longer
format and they just moved to
vertical will they be successful in that i
don't know they're trying to do a lot at the same time at the moment
but basically my big message peter is
you've got to do what's right for you so if
it's a podcast and something that's on
the algorithm do that if it's a blog and something that's
on the algorithm do that but just be strategic come back to why are you doing
it you know that's that's what i always advise my clients all right excellent
i think that's it elaine where can people find you if they want to talk to you
more and do you have other conferences set up to where people can listen to you?
So come on over to my website, which is elainewalshmcgraw.com.
Drop me a line to hello at elainewalshmcgraw.com.
I am pretty much everywhere at elainewalshmcgraw.
So Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook.
I even think I'm on YouTube, but mainly I hang out on LinkedIn.
So come and connect with me. I'd love to meet you.
All right. I'll add all these links into the description so that people can find you easily.
And yeah, there's some great resources on your website.
I've seen that stuff that you can download that people can start using.
So I would really encourage people to go and check that out.
Elaine, thank you very much for being on the podcast and bringing us the idea
that bots are great, but of course we should be human while using them.
Thank you for being here and have a great weekend.
Thank you so much, Peter. My pleasure. Bye.
Music.

#49 - Helene Jelenc - Showing SEO Value Through Meaningful Reporting Oct 10, 2023

Helene spoke at Brighton SEO with her presentation Showing SEO Value Through Meaningful Reporting. You can find her on Linkedin and X, she works at Wallflower studios and blogs at Wandering Helene.

Check out her presentation.

#48 - Chris Simmance - Critical thinking in marketing agencies Jun 11, 2023

Chris is the founder of the OMG center, a place where Marketing agency leaders can gather and exchange information for free. You can join too at https://omgcenter.org/digital-agency-community/

You can find Chris on Twitter and Linkedin.

#47 - Jason Barnard - Knowledge panels for Brands Aug 14, 2022

Jason is also known as the Brand SERP guy, the one that helps individuals and companies work on their Brands in Search Results. He is the CEO at Kalicube, a great tool that helps you manage your SERPS.

We talked about how you as a company with a known brand, or you as an individual, that is a brand, need to work on how you are represented in the Google Knowledge Graph.

#46 - Barry Adams - Key Technical SEO trends for 2022 and beyond Jul 25, 2022

Barry is one of the most known SEOs out there and listening to his presentations is always a good idea, if you want to do SEO the right way.

You can find him on Twitter or visit his company Polemic Digital.

And if you are interested in SEO for news companies check out his News & Editorial SEO summit.

You can check out his whole presentation here.

#45 - Lazarina Stoy - Implement Machine Learning in your internal linking Audit Jun 11, 2022

This is one of those podcasts, where I touch on a subject I have no idea about, and learn so much. This is why I do this podcast.

If you wanna talk to Lazarina, you can find here on Linkedin or Twitter, or just at her company.

Here is her presentation from the Brighton SEO 2022 conference

If you would like to read her great guide on internal linking, click here

And if you would like to start with machine learning, here is Lazarina's Beginner's guide to Machine Learning.

#44 - Christopher Gutknecht - Build your own SEO and SEM tools with BigQuery May 27, 2022

Christopher is the Team Lead of Analytics and Performance at https://www.bergzeit.de/. You can find him on Linkedin.

Here are the things that we talked about

https://www.getdbt.com/
https://smxadvanced.eu/
https://coalesce.getdbt.com/

And if you would like to check out his whole presentation, you can find it here

Building Data Products with BigQuery for PPC and SEO (SMX 2022) from Bergzeit Gmbh

#43 - Jono Alderson - We can do better than this - a strategic view on website quality May 12, 2022

Yono is the man at Yoast, one of the biggest WordPress plugins, that help you make your website a bit better in SEO. I know I use Yoast for all my WordPress websites.

You can find Yono on Linkedin or on his website.

You can subscribe to this podcast and rate it in your podcast app.

Here is the presentation that Jono used on stage.

#42 - Despina Fronimaki - Content Creation - Beyond the Checklist Apr 11, 2022

Despina (Linkedin) is the Senior Online Marketing Manager at The Boutique Agency and has a lot of experience in creating SEO that goes to the top of Search Engine Results.

Here is her presentation from SMX Munich and the Giveaway that we talked about link.

Announcing: SEO roast Feb 28, 2022

Join me on the YouTube live https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkets7b1zOmTYI2qa6rLGlw or if you would like to get a free SEO Audit of your website, submit your website at https://seos.si/en/seo-roast

#41 - Vix Reitano - Vix Reitano - Proven methods for targeting, attracting & capturing new leads Feb 25, 2022

Vix is the founder of Agency 6B and knows how to talk leads. Her talk at the 2021 Keap conference got me inspired to talk about leads more and more.

#40 - Lisa S. Jones - Video in Email Feb 11, 2022

Another great presentation from MailCon in Las Vegas, I feel that every year when MailCon comes around, we get a great set of new guests to the podcast.

Lisa is the founder and CEO of EyeMail, you can find her on Linkedin and Twitter.

Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast and rate the episode on your podcast app.

#39 - Lucy Dodds - How to Create a Comprehensive Guide Hub That Your Audience Cares About Jun 13, 2021

Lucy is a content marketer and SEO and works at the great UK agency https://www.evolvedsearch.co.uk/. Lucy talked at Brighton SEO, the Best SEO and marketing conference around. (seriously guys, I can't make his more obvious, you need to invite me as a speaker to Brighton :D)

Content hubs are something that a lot of companies try to do, but also something that is somehow easy to fail at. Lucy has experience in building them and tells that in detail on how you can do it too. Done correctly, content hubs can be a great addition to your content and a big SEO asset.

lucy.mp3

Lucy: And then we try to see how we can categorize those in a way that makes sense because you'll result in hundreds, if not thousands, of question based keywords, which is really confused.

Peter: This is time for marketing the marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend

The marketing conference.

Peter: But before we go to the podcast, my name is Peter and I'm your host. I'm an NCO myself. I help internal and external teams and companies, start ups and agencies move their CEOs step forward. If you're looking for an SEO audit or help with your SEO strategy, find me at SEO as SY. Hello and welcome to the Time for Marketing podcast, the marketing podcast that brings you the best marketing conference speakers and makes them sum up their presentation in five minutes. My name is Peter, and I'll be your host today. This is episode number 39, and we're slowly approaching the 40 second episode. Well, you will get all the answers to all of your marketing questions, and then I'll probably stop. If you can get people that are interested into marketing. To listen to this podcast, send them the URL. Time for marketing dotcom. This is time and then the number four marketing dotcom. Or just tell them to Google. Time for marketing. We are having a great episode tonight with me on the podcast recording is Lucy Dodds. Lucy, how are you?

Lucy: I'm great, thanks. How are you?

Peter: I'm all right. How is life on the Big Island next to Europe that used to be Europe, but isn't anymore?

Lucy: It's OK. Lockdown is hopefully ending for us. Soon everyone's getting vaccinated. It's hopefully going to be a much better summer than it was last year.

Peter: All right. And of course, working on a marketing agency, everything is crazier. There is more money that is more work and everyone is buying online. Is that right?

Lucy: That is definitely right. I think we've felt the busyness. Very much so, especially in the last few months. But it's really good to see clients are able to grow up because of unfortunately, a lot of businesses have had some bad times because of COVID. So I'm really excited that people can take this opportunity to start growing their businesses and now things are getting going again. So it's a really good thing now.

Peter: You work at the evolved search, you're the senior content marketing consultant. What is what do we do?

Lucy: Yes. And so evolve. Search is based in Newcastle, upon Tyne, and we are a search agency that specialise in automotive, retail and finance clients. And my role as a content consultant is a mixture between creating the onsite side of content and doing consultancy for my clients on that, as well as creating content marketing campaigns for digital PR link building things like that. But it's mostly the onsite side that like.

Peter: Newcastle, is that a different Newcastle next to the Newcastle upon Tyne,

Lucy: As a Newcastle upon Tyne and further down the country as Newcastle under Lyme? I think there's a bit of a confusion on that, but we're not

Peter: Good, but you ought to do big city Newcastle. Ok. Yeah. What's your favourite at work when you do content marketing consulting?

Lucy: I think it's a bit of a cop out because this is what I did my talk on, but it's probably going to be guides just because I've been able to learn a lot about them in my time across a national career, and it's been just really good to see how they can get better, how they perform, learning a lot as I go and just getting them working for our clients.

Peter: Hmm. How much is your work as CEO and how much is content marketing and how much are those two the same?

Lucy: So I think that the most of the time I'd probably say 50 50 across clients in general. And just because I think all sites need a degree of link building to get some high quality, topical and relevant links. But you also need to see the on page content is working well for Google and users, and so it kind of depends on what the client really needs at the time. Well, I'd probably say half and half for the majority of my.

Peter: All right. Excellent. I've invited you to the podcast because of your presentation that you had at Brighton SEO, and the presentation was called How to create a Comprehensive Guide Hub that your audience cares about. How was Brighton SEO online conferences? It's getting boring, right?

Lucy: I don't want to say a bore, but yeah, I've been to the in-person one in September 2019 and it was just so, so good. And I did love the virtual ones still, because I did learn a lot from other people. It was great to do my first talk there, ever, but I am very, very excited for the future ones. I think summer one is in person and just fingers, fingers crossed that it's going to be on.

Peter: Would you say that you listened to more speeches when the conference in online than in the offline world because, you know, you only really can only listen to only one track and Brighton is now really already multiple track. And you know, there's a lot of other things that you can do during the speeches. How would you say, how does that work out?

Lucy: Yeah. So the past that I had for the virtual conference meant I could access everything, and I did watch a lot more just because it wouldn't be possible at the in-person conference. So I guess it would be great if in future things were all recorded. I think probably the way that COVID has happened, there probably will be. And just in general across any conference, just because it makes it a lot more accessible, I could learn a lot more. So, yeah, I think I did definitely see a lot more. But it'd be nice to just have access to both sides.

Peter: Hmm. Hmm. Or a podcast that has everything submitted in a short time. Very good idea. All right, Lizzy, let's not beat around the bush. Let's go into your presentation. Here are your five minutes.

Lucy: Bob, thanks. Ok, so when I first started my career in SEO, I was in house doing on site only when I moved my first agency, it was the same. Anything on page was for me. I didn't even think about link building until like two years ago when I started involved. And just because I'd worked with separate teams and I had no involvement. So when I joined involved, I felt like I had a lot of untapped knowledge, and I really want to share that with the team and build on what we already had. So I think my first job to do what evolved for a client was building a guy to help. And I was like, Cool, this is what I know. And I think all the time, I've just learned so much more about them. I've got so much advice and inspiration from all our SEO experts in the Evolve team instead of just me doing the research. And now I've been able to create really great guide hooks for all my automotive retail clients and finance as well. And now that I've been able to see how those perform in a. Great setting with all of our expert team members. That's kind of why it made me want to do this talk. So that's why I chose this guide content as my topic for right now. It's a I think it will be very successful, but I see a lot of sites don't have this, so they have a gap in their content, which is going to be off putting for a lot of users.

Lucy: So because like any service or product buying online, I'm going to be researching it in some way. And I think that every site needs these guides to some degree, as user research is going to be behind every decision. So there's more obvious decisions like getting a credit card or choosing a car online. They need a lot of research. But even things like how to grow my cactus in my home office or say there's like a new style of dress that's on trend. I'm quite tall, so maybe I need advice on how to wear it. Will it suit at all person and so on? So no matter what your site or your product your service is, I think everyone could do with having some kind of level of guide content in an easy, accessible hub. Just because then you're helping users with that research. And while I found the guides that don't result in direct conversions, but that makes sense because users are still doing that research, they're not going to be buying right now. But I found that these guides do convert two times more than blocks and for one client, made up to 200 200k in assisted revenue. So they are just a step basically in the users buying process, but you really want to be part of that before your competitor does. And I think because so many sites don't do this or don't do it well, it's such an opportunity because like you can say, if I just pick a question and I'm going to look at it in the search and what's displayed already, sometimes it can be really rubbish.

Lucy: So you can you can really take that opportunity for your own site and do really well. So the first part of my talk was just explaining that part of why I think everyone should have them. And then I started into some keyword research to look for all of those questions that users are asking about the product or the service that my client's site will provide. So any implied questions I was looking at like pros and cons, for example, of, say, a credit card, that's still a question because someone's asking what was the benefit of a credit card? We have any user research like customer inquiry date, if people are constantly calling and emailing with questions like we should fulfill that online and then we try see how we can categorize those in a way that makes sense because you'll result in hundreds, if not thousands, of question based keywords, which is really confusing to look at just a giant list. So one way I think I gave in the talk was you would organize them by your product offering. I think my example was a website called Wix, who have their guides categorized by kitchens, gardens and bathrooms. And that's how you'd sell your keywords as well. In the same way, because, you know, users are going to be either looking to redo their kitchen or they're looking to get some new things for the garden. So you consult your guides in a way that users would want to see them on your site.

Lucy: Although I guess it would be kind of different depending on whoever the client is, but in general, that's a way that's worked for me or any e-commerce client. And then after I went into some practical tips on how to create guides, so best of all, I was looking at title text and descriptions. Often, if you just type in that keyword question, you will see that the title tags are always the same, so we need to make sure they stand out. I also check competitors formats. That's another thing that you must do when you're creating your guides. So if someone's doing a listicle or someone's got a really long form guide that's really detailed and then make sure that you should be replicating that as well, but not copying. You should also forget word count. I think that people get really hung up on word count, but I just never copy this. Just make sure that you provide the information that's the most relevant and accurate to whatever you're trying to tell your user. You don't need to have loads and loads of words to explain some things. And even that will be dependent on what they're asking in the first place. Maybe something on credit cards will need a lot of detail, but perhaps styling address might not need so much. My next part is unique, a show of some unique expertise. The guide content that does do well, sometimes if you read to the surface and competitors will have content that is kind of saying the same answer. So if you want to be the best, you show your original expertise that your client would have or you will have if you are the site owner.

Lucy: And so that's kind of things like having all the bills with good descriptions to show who you are or that you really have the credentials to see what being said. And even if you aren't talking out about like a really serious way and while your money or your life topic, then that's OK because your personal interest is going to be still more important than, like the average person would have the next part. I look for featured snippets. Now, otherwise, I don't copy. But in this case, I do have a look at what the current featured snippet is. So these kind of things, when I type a question into Google, I'm going to see the snippets either a paragraph, a bullet point list, the numbered list, whatever it is, and I replicate the past by looking at the source code of the current snippet. So I'm going to look at it, see if they've got see H2S and then bullet points that I'm going to do the same. So my question will be in the H2 and then I'll have the bullet point as well. My next part was for internal link opportunities. It's only really unsophisticated, but a lot of people don't have access to tools like refs to find internal link opportunities. So I just do like I Google my brand and I'm working on and say a word that is related to the guide that I'm talking about, or you can do a site search for the same thing.

Lucy: So say, if I was doing a mattress cleaning guide, I could just type say my kindness mattress online, do a site, search for mattress online and then type clean after. And I say all the articles that I might be able to link to. And then my final tip was just to take time with guides. And so in my SEO talk, I did have a site and I had sorry. I had two sisters who are in a similar space and have very similar guide hooks and one has. Great backlinks. It's a more of a trusted brand, and people know who they are, the website's more technically sound, but the sessions are very low on their guide hope. And then another site that I work on that isn't very trusted doesn't have many links. People don't know about that brand yet. Their guide hook is. It has a lot more sessions, and I think it was something like five times more sessions as what I said in my talk, I'm pretty sure that's still right here. And the problem is, is the first site kind of a rush, their content, they've been like, they've been hastily produced. There's a lot of different writers and it's not very original content. Well, the other site is put like a lot of effort and a lot of detail into them. So I think just take your time with guides and eventually the results will pay off. If you can get them right. And I think that's it. Yeah, I think that's everything.

Peter: Yeah, that was very in-depth. A couple of questions for those people who are not. What is going to happen, what exactly. When you say a guide, what how do you see them? What is it?

Lucy: Yes, a couple of clients, I'll ask this as well just about like what the difference is between guides and blogs and is it not just the content yet? So I'll say the best way to describe guides is for users who are at an awareness stage. So they are aware of your product or service and they're thinking about getting it. Well, they need a little bit more information before making that decision. So say, if my client was selling credit cards and then I might need, you know, like what is interest? What is a credit card, how do they work? All those kind of questions that I find through keyword research. I need to be answering to give the user that kind of trust in me, that I'm not just trying to sell them this serious financial product. I'm actually going to help them make a decision that will benefit them.

Peter: Okay. Ok. Yeah, that sounds a great definition. When I see the guide hubs, I see that often companies think about going to a different CMS or a different system to show the content on the web page. Sometimes I don't know if nothing else they'll use like their support system like Zendesk has something to show up to show guide. Do you think that's a good idea? Should they should? Should people use a specific system that is very good for the hubs or should they just use what they have and make the best of it?

Lucy: I would honestly say whatever's easiest and best for that client. I do have clients that have separate hubs just on WordPress and separate to the main CMS. And it does make it easier, I think, just for organizing and finding content and creating it, especially if you have a large company with a lot of content writers and if they're in various parts of the website, then it makes it easier for them. So it's better for scaling. It's also better for like if you've got a smaller team and say there's only one developer, but only this one developer can offload content or something, then it makes it easy if you don't have to kind of get them to use that time, because I think that WordPress get really easy to use after a while. So, yeah, so I guess just whatever's going to be easiest for you. But yeah, it just depends on the site, I guess.

Peter: Ok. Ok. And one more thing you mentioned. People should look at their competition and see what kind of style does the competition have? When do you think we should replicate the style and when should we go in a different direction? I know it depends on how good the competition is, but still, sometimes I think that CEOs and content marketers now are just, you know, re republishing or making stuff to look as good as similar to the competition as possible. But I feel that that's not a good guide on how to do it. What's your opinion on that?

Lucy: No, no. I definitely agree that we shouldn't just copy what's out there. I think the best way for me is I see what's in the top 10 results in the search and see what they kind of have and just try to understand why that might be performing if it is a certain format or not. So I think say if I'm going to use credit card again, like I know that that's an important topic that's going to need a lot of detail. So I already would expect there to be some pretty long guides about this topic. Well, if it's going to be something which like I don't expect people to be doing some really deep research into, then I might go what I think was what I think instead and make it like less so. And because I agree that my that's more digestible than really big wall of text. So I guess it depends on what your product or service is. You could always test it. And if it doesn't work out, then you might have to go back to what other people are doing. But I guess Google has chosen those results for a reason. And if we think that, yeah, actually it needs to be a bit longer and more detailed, it's probably for a reason. So I would just always test it and see what happens.

Peter: Hmm. Hmm. All right. Excellent. I think we gave people a very good idea on how their content hubs should be structured, prepared keyword research and how the content should be published. Lucy, if people want to talk to you about market or content marketing, where can they find you?

Lucy: I would absolutely love people to do that so they can find me on Twitter. It's just my name, which is Lucy, Alice Dodds, and you can email me as well, if you like, which is Lucy at Evolved Search scored at UK.

Peter: All right. Excellent. Lucy, thank you very much for being on the podcast and taking the time out to sum up your presentation, I hope that we can go and have conferences in real life very soon.

Lucy: Most definitely, and thank you very much for having me. This is my first podcast, so it's great to be here. Thank you very much.

Peter: I'm very glad that you were here. Thank you and have a great day.

Lucy: You too.

Bye bye. I know.

#38 Lars Maat - How Messengerbots will make you more money May 31, 2021

This time with Lars, the CEO of the advertising agency Maatwerk Online about how you should be using Chat or Messenger Bots to get more traffic and more sales on your website, or even more leads if this is what you aim for. You can find Lars on Twitter.

Don't forget to subscribe and rate this podcast on your favorite podcast app.

Here is the transcript of the podcast:

My name is Peter, and this is podcast episode number 38. If you can, go and comment, go and rate this podcast on the podcast app wherever you listen to us, and tell your friends that this is the place where they can get the best info on what is going on in marketing conferences, even if people are not able to go to the conference, every presentation in five minutes. Today, we are going to the Netherlands, where I'm very glad to welcome Lars.

Lars: Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Peter: Lars Maat, thank you for being here. You are the rising star in PPC. At least a PPC Hero said that. You are the owner of the Maatwerk agency. What do you do in the agency, and what are your things? What's your favorite thing on the internet?

Lars: To be honest, the rising star was back in 2020. It already feels like a light year ago.

[laughter]

Lars: Yes, that's true. PPC Hero made me a rising star in the PPC business. I think mainly because that year I spoke at PPC Hero Conf in London. I was announced best speaker of the conference. I think that gave it a boost, but, yes, my name is Lars. I'm currently owning online marketing AC. My background is really purely PPC. Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Microsoft ads, stuff like that. At the moment, at the AC we are with 30 people. We are doing online marketing from A to Z. Basically, the only thing we don't do is build apps.

We build websites, webshops, we do SEO and PPC, of course. I'm focusing on developing the business at the moment, try to implement new things. Innovations in our industry are a weekly thing as you might know. [chuckles] We try to keep up and then make sure that everything is set in place for our clients.

Peter: You are one of those people who likes a lot of stress every day because advertising campaigns fail all the time and the algorithms change, and the number is going the wrong way. Do you enjoy that?

Lars: Let's just say there's never a dull moment in an online marketing agency.

Peter: [chuckles] See, this is why I like to do SEO. It's everything a bit more-- We have a couple of months to do stuff. In advertising, it's hours.

Lars: To be honest, sometimes I'm really jealous of my SEO colleagues because, let's say, we are having a call with a client and a client is a little bit stressed about something, for example. We know if something goes wrong in a PPC account, you have to fix it right away. If something goes wrong on the SEO stuff, you just pick it up in one week or two weeks. It doesn't matter because you got the time. Yes, sometimes I'm a little bit jealous about the fact that I started to learn the wrong business.

Peter: [chuckles] I know, but on the other hand, your business is the sexy thing in marketing, I think, for the last 10 years. SEO is somewhere not really the public favorite.

Lars: Yes. I can understand. To be honest, we went to New York, we went to San Jose, California, on an invitation from Google, and my SEO colleagues are all jealous of me, so--

Peter: [chuckles] My wife is actually an advertiser. We've met in an agency where I was the SEO. She was the advertiser. It's very obvious in our personalities and things, how we see the world and everything, how we are very different. Lars, I've invited you to the podcast because you spoke at BrightonSEO. It was a bit different Brighton as we know it from the past, how did you enjoy the online version of Brighton this year?

Lars: To be honest, this was my first BrightonSEO conference. I've spoken to a lot of speakers and colleagues who went to previous versions. I was invited for this one. I was really excited because, from what I've heard,Brighton is really a nice environment to be at, let's just say to go to the tops. Yes, it was an online version, of course. My presentation was about Messenger bots, so not really an SEO thing. I was really curious about how that presentation would be received by the audience, but yes, it was pretty nice, actually. It was a good first experience with BrightonSEO.

Peter: Brighton, a couple of years ago, started to move away from- it still has, from my opinion, the best technical in-depth SEO presentations, but the other advertising and other tracks are also being very developed, better and better, and BrightonSEO is now a Brighton conference, not an SEO conference, but yes, departs from the pier, the best.

Lars: Yes, so I've heard. [chuckles]

Peter: All right. Let's not beat around the bush. Let's go and check out your five minutes with your presentation on how Messenger bots will make you more money.

Lars: Yes. I'm going to try to do this in five minutes.

[chuckling]

The presentation in Brighton was in 20 minutes and I had to rush that as well, but let me just start with telling you how Messenger bots work, what they are, and stuff like that. Messenger bots are basically a way to automate your Facebook Messenger chats. Normally, when you are advertising on Facebook, people will see an ad. They can click on it and then a lead form will pop up, or you will be redirected to the website, to a landing page, where you can leave your telephone number and stuff like that, in order to get some information from the advertiser. With Facebook Messenger, it's possible to send people to the business page and to start chatting with those people.

Of course, that's fully automated. You can use it to generate leads or you can make appointments right away in a Messenger chat, and the beauty of this is that it works really well. It's fast. People have the feeling that they are texting with somebody, or a company, but because of the fact that it's texting, it sounds like texting, people feel the need to react immediately. It's a really quick way to get in touch with your audience. The reason why I started to use Messenger is because of the fact that I think it's a really good platform, but also Facebook is really pushing Messenger. They are integrating Messenger with WhatsApp and Instagram as we speak.

I really think that Messenger bots will be bigger and bigger. At the moment, they are releasing it as well on WhatsApp and Instagram. Yes, it's a pretty good thing at the moment. At BrightonSEO, I talked about small step-by-step guides for building Messenger bots. I think it's a good idea to name that here as well. The first step is, obviously, you decide what you want to accomplish with your Messenger bot. You don't need to make a bot just because I'm telling you. [chuckles] You really need a good idea or you need a problem that you think you can solve with Messenger bots. The second step is to draw your, let's say, dream conversation on a paper.

We called it a flow. Let's say you have to write down, "Okay. What do I want the bot to say to the audience, and what are the answers that I need from the audience in order to get all the information that you need?" As soon you have drawn that on a paper, you can start building that flow in a Messenger bot tool. There are numerous tools you could use. I'm a fan of ManyChat. ManyChat is one of the biggest tools out there for Messenger bots. MobileMonkey, Chatfuel are also some big names. Then I think the most important step. Once you have decided what you want to use in your flow, and you've built a flow, you really need to test it.

I see a lot of Messenger bots not working very well. I think mainly because people forget to test it. Testing the bot is really important. Once you've tested, you can start to promote your Messenger bot and start getting those results. Two ways in order to promote the bot. There are more ways obviously, but the two I think are the most popular. Advertise with it. Let the audience see an ad, and once they click on it, the chat will open. Another one, and this is also one of my favorites, it's keyword-based. You can put a post on your Facebook page, it could be an ad. It could be an organic post. As soon as somebody reacts to that, so with the Facebook comment, a chat will open and you can continue to conversate with those people in the chat. That's also a really good way to promote your Messenger bots. I think that is what Messenger bots are in a nutshell. Of course, I talked a lot about some rules which apply to Messenger bot, like the 24-hour messaging rule. I really advise to look into that. I gave some tips how to be successful with Messenger bots. I could name them pretty quick right now.

You need to be conversational. You need to make sure to interact with the audience. You need to automate as much as possible. I really love the tool- how to pronounce it right, still not sure whether it's Zapier or Zapier or Zapier, but I think the majority of the marketing audience will note it too. It's a really nice tool to automate. Feed your CRM system. Get those telephone numbers. Get those email addresses from your target audience. Get those sales, basically. Was that in five minutes or--?

Peter: Tell us a bit less, but that's great. I have questions. Can you give us an example of what is the best thing that you can set up if you have e-commerce shop? People should be able to check out where their packages, so tracking, or should that be selling, or--?

Lars: It could be both. There are some possibilities in which you, let's say, do the track and trace for your package. There's also a thing called "one-time notification." For example, you visit a website and you see a product that you like, but it's out of stock at the moment. You could tell the Facebook Messenger page, "Hey, send me a notification once this product gets online again." As soon as that's the case the, the page could send a message to you saying, "Hey, Peter, as requested, the product you were looking for is back online. Do you want to purchase it right away with a call to action, to go through website and a product page right away?

There are some possibilities. You could also work with abandoned carts. I know that, for example, we work with ManyChat, and I know that ManyChat has an integration with Shopify, for example. There are some numerous possibilities. The only thing that's really bugging me at the moment and a lot of Messenger bot builders are the rules on Facebook.

Peter: Yes, that you are only able to send a message if, in the last 24 hours, the person gave you the okay to send messages.

Lars: Yes, that's correct. Also, I think it was in December, 2020, yes, December, 2020, they announced some new rules. According to Facebook, it was about privacy rules, but it really didn't make much sense. We had to rebuild all our bots, and then, I think it was in the end of January or February 2021, they pushed back the rules, so we could rebuild, rebuilding our bots again. That's the power of the big company.

Peter: When talking about selling on the Facebook Messenger, how important is it that you have your webshop connected with the Messenger bot? You already mentioned that ManyChat connects to Shopify, but if I have my own CMS, I know that's generally not the best idea, but should I look into Messenger bots if I know that I cannot able to connect my webshop with them or not?

Lars: I think it's tricky. If you have your own CMS system, it's really difficult to degenerate sales in an automated way with Messenger bots. I think Messenger bots could work as well for you, but probably in a different way. Let's say, use it to get some traffic to your shop, use it to generate email addresses, which you could use for email automation, stuff like that. Otherwise, I think it's really difficult to connect a Messenger bot with your own CMS system.

Peter: Okay. On the other hand, when we talk about bots, there are others next to the Facebook Messenger. For example, HubSpot is very big with pushing their own. Do you have any experience with them, and comparing them with Facebook Messenger, which one's better? Why?

Lars: Yes, there are a lot of chat possibilities, of course. The big e-commerce sites are building their own chatbots as well. I think it's not new, but it's not that embraced by the audience at the moment. I think there will be a lot of developments ongoing for the next months and even years on chatbots. I haven't had some experience with the HubSpot bots, for example. The reason that we are purely focusing on Messenger bots at the moment is because of the integration with Facebook. When we are using the Messenger bots on Facebook, we could get all the name, the profile location, and stuff like that, the telephone number, email address, through the Facebook API, which basically means that, as soon as you send a message to my page, my page could reply with, "Hi, Peter. Is it true that this is your email address?" You basically just have to tap the email address that the Messenger bot is showing because it pulled it out of your Facebook profile in the Facebook API.

That's really good benefit for using Facebook Messenger, but it makes sense. Let's say that the popularity of Facebook will decline even more, I could say. That would have some impact on Messenger bots, of course.

Peter: We'll see that in the future what happens with that. I think that's it. We're on our 15-minute mark. Lars, where can people find you if they would like to talk about Facebook Messengers or any other marketing on the internet?

Lars: I think Twitter is the best way to go forward. My Twitter [unintelligible 00:16:25] my name, Lars Maat. I think it will be also available in the comments and stuff like that on [unintelligible 00:16:33] will be shown.

Peter: True. Lars, thank you very much for being on the podcast and talking about Facebook Messenger.

Lars: Yes, thanks for having me.

Peter: Have a great day and go enjoy-

Lars: The bad weather? [laughs]

Peter: -the bad weather. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Lars: Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.

#37 Lea Scudamore - Digital Accessibility and Compliance Essential for users, good 4 SEO May 17, 2021

Another presentation from the Brighton SEO conference on a topic that is really new, but important for every website owner. Website accessibility is a hot topic because lawmakers all around the world are writing laws that require you to make your website accessible to people with different disabilities. Luckily, a lot of the things that you have to do will have a positive impact on your SEO.

Lea is an SEO expert and understands the link between those two. You can find her on Linkedin, Twitter or on the company website.

Here is the transcript of the recording:

Hello, and welcome to the Time for Marketing podcast, the podcast that brings you the best marketing conference speakers and makes them sum up their presentation in five minutes. My name is Peter, and I'll be your podcast's host. This is episode number 37, and if this is your first time you're listening, please go back in the library and find the excellent guests that we had in the past, that I had in the past. There's some gold in there, because I try to find people who have evergreen content. There are excellent episodes back there. If you have other people that you can promote the podcast to, I'll be glad if you do that. I'm very glad that I have today's guest on the podcast. Lea, hello, and welcome to the podcast.

Lea: Hi, thanks for having me.

Peter: How is Lake Superior?

Lea: It's gorgeous, as always, deep blue and angry. [laughs]

Peter: Me and Lea, we talked before, and I'm very intrigued by the name of the lake at which she has the office. She was kind enough to show the lake view from her office. Lea, you are the SEO analyst at Aimclear in Minnesota US. What are you as a company, and what do you do there?

Lea: We are a digital agency company, award-winning. We love our US search awards. We do everything from web development to paid and, of course, SEO, like I do. Then also with SEO, we roll in accessibility and work between the teams to make sure that we're checking things like contrast and all text and all the things from the ad side to the web dev side.

Peter: For you personally, why SEO?

Lea: SEO I fell in love with almost 20 years ago. I worked for a company that built websites for dealerships that sold power sports. I just really fell in love with the idea of helping those small business owners get found and sell product. When I figured out how to move the needle, it was really exciting. Then I started leading a team, and that's what we did. Then after that Aimclear was the next big challenge because I wanted to see what else I could do, so applied it and here I am.

Peter: What do you do in Aimclear? What are the things that you do daily, and what are your favorite things to do?

Lea: I do SEO. SEO. [laughs] I also work with accessibility to make sure that the stuff we put out is accessible to as many people as we can. That's what I spend most of my day doing. I really love it when we have a site that is not performing come in, and I get to take it by the reins and make it show up and help meet goals, sell stuff, find dealers, or find leads, and that sort of thing.

Peter: Excellent. I invited you to the podcast because you had a presentation at Brighton SEO, probably my favorite marketing conference. The presentation was called Digital Accessibility and Compliance: Essential for Users and Good for SEO. Why accessibility?

Lea: Why have I chosen to go down the accessibility route?

Peter: Yes.

Lea: Oh. Short story is, I had a really good friend that was diagnosed with ALS which is a neurodegenerative disorder that takes your ability to speak and use your arms and things like that. It's horrible. While we were helping her sell her house and move her mom into assisted living and then help her find a place to live, she'd stopped communicating with us. It was because things like Facebook's Messenger doesn't rotate, and things like, Twitter doesn't rotate. She couldn't communicate back and forth in the text messages the way we used to do it.

I was really frustrated when I wasn't being communicated back to, and I was trying to help her with things, and then realize that it wasn't her, it was the software, or it was the phone, or whatever. For whatever reason, once it was mounted on her wheelchair and it was mounted at horizontal so that the fonts were big enough to read, literally things wouldn't rotate. That was the starting point. Then, from there, I realized how important SEO actually is to accessibility and how they are siblings. They're brother and sister, and you need one for the other, and vice versa.

Peter: A lot of basics SEO stuff is actually also a lot of basic accessibility stuff, right?

Lea: Yes. If you actually look at core web vitals, it's accessibility. If you go through the pieces of core web vitals and what they're asking us to do and how search console is notifying us, "Hey, this is too close together." These are accessibility elements right at their core. Google might call it something different, but that's what it is, and you can see it.

Peter: Lea's presentation is going to get you to be in line with your local laws. It's going to help more people see you. It's going to help you be in line with Google. It's going to help you with web vitals and all of the updates that come. Whatever Lea says, has to be gold for you.

Lea: I just want to open everybody's eyes because a lot SEOs thinks the elements aren't as important as they really, really are.

Peter: With no further ado, here are your five minutes.

Lea: My main goal is to change the perception so that SEOs and developers and designers and content creators start thinking that accessibility is about people, because a lot of times we get hung up on- they're not our customers, and that's not the truth, they have wallets, so they're your customers. We need to make sure that we're thinking about accessibility because if we're States side, we're talking about one in five people need accessibility when they're using the web. If you talking about the UK side, we're talking about 22%, which is a little bit more. There's one in five people need your site or need your app to be accessible, so that they can use it easily.

Accessibility is really important because it bridges the gaps between physical disability like location, but also socioeconomic status, education, language, gender, and so many more things they can-- The list is endless. Accessibility, it focuses on people with disabilities or that have a disability, but it greatly benefits everybody around us, including our aging parents. It's really important that everybody thinks about accessibility as empowering users to use your stuff. Use your app, use your website.

When we go through, and we talk about accessibility, and everybody's working to get their website to revolve around core web vitals and getting your site up to speed and making it fast and nimble, without considering accessibility, you're ignoring 10% to 15% of the global population, and in an age when we're all responsible for making money or hitting that bottom line, why would you just automatically cut off that many people? It doesn't make any sense. Since we're all in the process of meeting the core web vitals, and making sure that we don't miss any of those potential sales, because we're not ranking well, it's the same thing as working accessibility into your websites.

There's basically five things to look at. If you haven't started a web accessibility site or information on your site, start by making yourself an accessibility statement and just owning up to the fact that you haven't gotten there. Make sure that you do some tests. Just try tabbing through your website and make sure you can do all the things on your website, like make a purchase, contact fuzz form, things like that. Whatever the main goals of your site or app are, see if you can do it with just having. Then, when you get down into that stuff, go use your site on your mobile.

A lot of people test, test, test on their desktop, but they don't actually take their site outside and see if it's really easy to see during a sunny day, or make sure that everything's easy to click on and nothing's too small, or nothing like a pop-up as the X isn't off the screen. There's little things like that you can do. Probably the biggest thing is having people with disabilities at your table when you're making the plan. That is the biggest thing I need to advocate for because we as a group, SEOs, we don't know all the things that actually need to be done, and having people that need the assistive technology or need these elements put in place, having them at the table during the planning stage is imperative.

Peter: That's it. Excellent.

Lea: That's it. That's the big one. Those are the big things.

Peter: How do we get people to our table, people that can tell us how they practically are using our website? I get the idea. You've done this a couple of times. What's the most practical way to do it?

Lea: It literally depends on what your budget is. [laughs] As everything, right? You can hire within, hire people within to do testing and to work on your dev team, or work in your SEO team, you can do that. There are resources out there, there are companies out there that they have testing available, and it's beyond the computer. Anything that gives you a badge just because a computer tested it, said you're good to go, even the WAVE tool, which is created by the W3C, which is leading the charge and accessibility.

Even if you have that, those badges really don't do anything if they don't have individual people testing in the background. Look into companies that offer accessibility testing with live humans that are going to go through your site. That'd be beautiful.

Peter: When should we involve them? Should that be when we start thinking about new web page, when we start developing it, or graphics, wireframes? What is the best time to do that?

Lea: Right at the beginning, because they're going to have tips for you to help you get started on the right foot, because you can go through the whole website and build it all out, and every website goes over timeline. It just does. There's always something like, "Oh, we forgot to tell you we needed a whole blog system," or, "Oh, we forgot this," or, "Oh, you know what? We really, really want it." We get those comments after things are already built, right? I can see you. Every SEO or dev person right now is calm faced, right? They all have had that experience.

Having them at the beginning is really important because retrofitting rarely works. It gets really expensive, and at the end of the day, you most of the time end up scrapping the whole thing and starting over. Yes, start planning from the beginning and test, test, test all the way through.

Peter: I feel that if I want to have a very accessible web page, I have to put aside all of the great ideas that my developer had, how we're going to have a unique website. I have to have the F structure and everything has to be squared, and colors have to be four different. How do you answer that?

Lea: I'm not a dev, I'm definitely an SEO. I can read enough code to be dangerous and a lot of times be like, "It's broken somewhere right here." Our designers, they think about accessibility and color right from the beginning. When I see a design idea or the first mock-up, that's the first thing out of my mouth is, "Is it accessible, are all the contrasts?" Then I'll look at the colors and we'll test them because the math.

A really good tip right off the bat is go look at your website. If you have gray font on a white background, people that have glasses have a hard time reading that on their mobile phone. Skipping gray font, gray font is font spam, and it isn't a good experience for anybody. Black is best. If you're doing a black background, white font is best. Make sure that that contrast is there so that it's very easy to read. From the beginning onward, you can still do really beautiful sites. Our designers and developers are doing really beautiful sites that are accessible, because we're starting at the beginning.

Peter: Okay. Yes, probably start at the beginning is the same way. Linking accessibility to SEO. How does that work?

Lea: Okay. Accessibility when you go through the W3's website. The W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, right? They have the w3.org/wai. WAI, it stands for Web Accessibility Initiative. That part of the website takes you through everything. Accessibility is related to alt text, because if you have really great alt text that actually explains the image or the reason for the image, that also helps with search. We know that. We know that if you do alt text that images help. We know that Google is moving more and more and more towards image in the SERPs.

Because we're doing more and more images in the SERPs, we need to make sure that those images are relevant to the content. You can do beautiful design elements, but then we just mark them as an alt. The things that would rank it would be make sense and ask yourself, "Are my users searching an image search for this content or for this information?" Then make sure that your alt text is relevant to what they were likely searching. That's one.

Accessibility relates to SEO through headlines. A lot of people, there's a lot of websites out there, where they think that H1 is just to make big, pretty font, and so there's multiple H1s on the homepage. abc.go, the ABC News station's website, that entire homepage is nothing but H1s because it's just--

Peter: It's good for SEO.

Lea: It's not. [laughs] It's not. It's really horrible for people that are going through and doing the use kit. My computer, I have set up to go headline to headline. People using their keyboard to navigate versus a mouse, because, say, they have low vision or no vision, then they will do Ctrl and H for next headline and they will pop through and listen to the headlines to get to the story they want to listen to or read. Those headlines, if they're in improper order, they're sending people all over. It doesn't make any sense and they're going to bounce off your site.

Again, remember, it's one in five, need accessibility. You're really limiting the number of people to your site. Those are just a couple of the ways that it is related, but they're pretty big ways.

Peter: Very important. I'm really happy when I get people talk about things that I haven't really thought about, talked about.

Lea: Thought about? Yes.

Peter: Yes, that word. Getting something new to the podcast is great. Lea, thank you very much for that. If people want to talk to you about accessibility or SEO, where can they find you?

Lea: You can hop onto aimclear.com and reach out through the Contact Us form and they'll connect us. That's probably the easiest way. Otherwise, you can find me on Twitter, Lea Scudamore. Just no H on Lea, it's just L-E-A. Three letters, really easy.

Peter: I'll add that into the show notes so people can find you there.

Lea: Yes, so you can find me there, too.

Peter: All right, excellent. Lea, thank you very much. Do you ever go and swim in the Lake Superior, and does that make you superior?

Lea: It doesn't make me superior, but it is a great time.

Peter: I'll do that once.

Lea: Yes, please. Please come. Please come to Duluth and come hang out at the lake with us. Come in mid-to-late June, beginning of July, because we're still talking snow here right now.

Peter: See, this is why I was yesterday at the Croatian seaside where we had 20 degrees Celsius. We were almost able to go to the sea, but in shorts and stuff. This is why we go to Croatia. Croatia is great. We're just rambling, I'm rambling. Lea, thank you very much to be in the podcast. Have a great Monday.

Lea: You, too. Thank you so much.

Peter: Bye-bye.

Lea: Bye.

#36 - Max Woelfle - The Truth is in the Logs May 04, 2021

This episode talks about how you analyze your website logs, which tools to use, and what to look at. Max is an expert in them and tells you how he uses logs to better understand how to get your webpage crawled and indexed.

Max is the Marketing Lead at https://www.comparis.ch/ a website that helps people in Switzerland manage their money better and brings excellent practical examples from his work to the podcast.

#35 - Deasy Natalia Mulaniari - Prove your SEO ROI Apr 20, 2021

Deasy Natalia Mulaniari spoke at the SEO CON 2021 on the topic on how to prove ROI for an SEO campaign from an SEO agency point of view.

Natalia (her LinkedIn) is the General Manager at BLUWave.ID, an SEO agency in Jakarta and has extensive experience in SEO.

Here is her presentation:

Deasy Natalia Mulaniari - SEOCON 2021 Proving ROI at SEO from Peter Mesarec

#34 - Michał Suski - Data driven content strategy for any business that Google will love Mar 15, 2021

We are back and with a bang. Conferences are back, even if they are online only. I've chosen Michal to talk to because the topic is extremely important in SEO and SEO is extremely important for your business.

Michal will speak at the SEOCON 2021 that will take place in March 2021. Listen to the 4 key points that he prepared and check out his presentation at the conference!

Michał is the co-founder of https://surferseo.com/, you can find him on LinkedIn.

Here is the transcript of the podcast recording:

Hello, and welcome to the Time4Marketing podcast, the podcast that brings you the best marketing conference speakers sum up their presentations at the podcast and gives them to you in a short time slot. My name is Peter, and we are back. It's been almost a day, almost exactly to the day of the recording of this podcast since we've stopped doing the podcast in 2020 March, while it was the time where all the conferences were more or less canceled and there was nothing for us to report on.

I've waited. The pause was a bit longer than I anticipated. I thought they we're going to wait for a couple of months, but this is something that we can say for the whole Corona time that's a bit longer than we anticipated. We are back and coming back with a big bang. I'm very glad that we have Michal Suski here with us today, Michal from Surfer SEO or Surfer SEO tool that Michal is going to tell us all about. Michal, hello, and welcome to the podcast.

Michal: Hello, everyone. Thanks for having me. That's a big pleasure for me to be on the restart of the podcast, the first guest interview. That's a huge thing for me. I'm happy to be here.

Peter: You're very, very welcome. It's great that conferences have come back. I know that in the last year, we had conferences but we had to unlearn on how to be physically at conferences and learn to how to be online on conferences. You spoke in a couple of conferences in the last year. How is your feeling about how did going to the conference change? Is it better? Is it different? What do you feel?

Michal: It is definitely different. Well, I like it but I also don't like that we cannot meet in person and do those long hours of discussions after the stage is empty. I miss that part a lot. However, regarding the online conferences, there is this big impact on presentations quality, I think, because everyone goes to the conference now, I mean goes to the conference to get the best information out of the stage. Speakers have to push their limits to deliver the best piece of information they can. I feel like it's beneficial to the whole industry that now, everyone concentrates 100% on the presentation itself. The bar is raised a little bit. That's cool about it.

Peter: That is less fluff. The audio should be the most important part and because of that, the message must be clearer. Of course, as we used to say, after 10:00 PM at the bars, the best Lynx were sold. Probably, this is what we're missing on.

Michal: That's true. The networking part of the conferences, in the past, it was the biggest incentive for me to go for the conference to do the networking, to meet people and make those deals you mentioned. Right now, I'm missing it a lot.

Peter: I would agree. You're located in Poland. How is Poland? Are you allowed to go out? Are you allowed to able to go for a beer outside?

Michal: Yes. It's not that bad. We can go out. We can walk to the park, do hiking, and so on. However, we cannot go to the bar and have a beer. The bars are closed, and it's only delivery. You got to have a meal but you have to have it at home, which well, that's fine but better than nothing.

Peter: That's how most of the Europe or most of the world is working right now. Michal, you are the co-founder at Surfer. Tell us a bit about what Surfer is, what it does.

Michal: Sure. Surfer is a content intelligence tool. It takes you from execution and ideation. It streamlines the whole process of content creation and stretching your domain in the right direction so Google can really treat you as an expert in specific industry. The combination of tools that we have is made just for that. You can do the ideation process and then execute the content creation with the SEO-friendly approach in place. That's what we do.

Peter: It seems that there was a shift in the way how SEO is done in the last couple of years from the backlinking, to the on-site, to the specific on-site. How do you see that and how Surfer fits into that?

Michal: During the last couple of years, it turned out that Google really pays attention to putting the best answer to the query they can. This way, they have to evaluate the content much better than they used to do in the past. This is probably why on-page optimization has bigger impact than it used to have 10 years ago. That's definitely a major change and especially because Google invested tons of money into, for example, NLP with the BERT update and so on.

They just keep on learning how to understand the content much better, and this is why the content just has to be pinpoint when you want to really not only rank, but maintain rankings. This is pretty, pretty important these days. I feel like Surfer hit the nail in the head regarding the date of premiere of the tool, and the early stage drove and so on. I'm really happy about the timing of releasing the tool and everything around it, really.

Peter: Before we go to the conference, to your presentation, we are nearing the time where the web vitals are going to become an important factor in SEO. How do you think that that is going to influence a factor in SEO? How do you think that is going to influence what we're doing?

Michal: First of all, we have to know that Google cannot shuffle the search results entirely. Even though it may be important ranking factor, they can't afford on completely reversing the search results. Right now, they present the best answer they can, and if the core web vitals will become 80% of their algorithm, most likely, we will end up with totally messed search results, which they cannot afford. My opinion on this is that they will be doing this shift in a period of time. Its impact may be growing over time. However, we cannot expect in May or whenever they will release it. For real, we cannot expect a massive change in the search results. It can be significant, but it won't be overhauled.

Peter: Similar to the previous announced changes where we were waiting for doomsday but it never came, right?

Michal: Yes.

Peter: I've invited you to the podcast because you spoke at the SEOCON 2021 with a presentation called Data-driven content strategy for any business that Google will love. That's a big title, especially for the "any business that Google will love". Usually, I would ask you how the conference was and how it's being at the conference, but because the conference is online, there's just nothing to say. I'll just let you directly go into your presentations. Michal here are your five minutes.

Michal: Sure. I tried to record the presentation in the way like I'm not sitting in front of the microphone, but I actually arranged a stage and had the projector putting the slides on the wall. At least it feels a little bit more like on the real presentation. I think that's cool. Regarding the presentation itself, I created a four take-aways from that presentation. The first one is growing topical relevance based on data. It's all about not throwing topics on your page from your gut feeling so you decide, "Okay, I will write about this, and I will write about that." Instead, you should list your top-ranking competitors and export their visibility to find out which topics bring them a lot of traffic.

You can find this way look-alike topics. Stretching your content by covering those most common topics first will take you to the stage where you can start the snowball effect that I will explain in a few moments. Regarding how to actually make it happen is that you have to leverage the keywords clustering, which is all about that. The whole presentation is about creating the right keywords cluster for your domain. You are an expert in the niche that you want to be performing the best. Of course, there are many ways of keywords clustering. I have four prepared, and two of them are rather gut feeling-based and the other two are based on the Google algorithms itself.

I will just quickly mention that you can do a clustering manually or semantically to find out the semantic commonness. These two types are rather manual for the small projects that you know the industry well, so you can connect those clusters together, I mean those keywords. Regarding those two more advanced methods that incorporates Google algorithm into the equation is that you can use either search results of two keywords to compare whether they have the same URLs ranked for both, and this way you can decide if Google presents the same content, you can write for both keywords together. That's one way.

The other way is comparing sets of keywords that pages rank for. If there is a big overlap between two sets of keywords that Google ranked the same content, you can decide, "Definitely, these keywords are related and I can tackle them within the same article, even the same URL in general." What is important in that is that Google creates clusters, too. How Google creates clusters, basically by ranking pages on a multiple keywords. As you know from your experience, page can be ranking on dozens or even hundreds of keywords.

According to AA Trust case study, there is this case study somewhere on the web, you can find it out, but basically, the clusters can be big and Google cluster keywords as well. It is a great opportunity for us SEOs that you can use that knowledge, that Google creates clusters, and you can compare these clusters that Google created already. With comparing them to each other, you can base your decision on data, which keywords should be ranked together and which keywords should be separated into separate articles or shouldn't be place on your website at all.

Basing your content strategy that takes into account these clusters that Google already created makes this a bulletproof strategy, and you basically know what to write about next from the perspective of the topic that you analyzed. The last takeaway I mentioned at the beginning is the snowball effect, and this is real, really. You can definitely win a small niche with the small domain with just the content. This is a live case study that I presented on the SEOCON that even fighting with big players like Etsy, Amazon, like big e-commerce source, you can build this topical relevance through these clusters and win the serves with content, because you become an expert in specific niche.

What is crucial to achieve that is that you have to publish with regular cadence, you have to stay within your clusters and not trying to write about every single topic from IT. Focus on specific element. If you are about gardening, focus on like organic gardening. Don't try to be an expert in rakes, seeds, and pots, and everything. Keep the pace right, optimize content, and you will get there. That's it, that's the best summary of the presentation.

Peter: I fully agree with what you were saying. The keyword research, and looking for keywords, and organizing those keywords is probably one of the things that should be done a lot, but it's always underdone, if that is a word. How should we get people to do that more? How should we get clients to understand how that is important? How often should people do that? How often should they come back to the research and do the analysis?

Michal: Underdone is definitely a good word, because keywords clustering is extremely time-consuming if you don't have the right tools for that. Imagine semantic clustering when you have 10,000 keywords to group together, and the only way you can join them is that based on their semantic commonness. You include all of the keywords that contain shoes, t-shirts, I don't know, trousers and so on, the other apparel stuff into buckets, and these buckets, you can divide by the color, by the type, by the model.

The keywords clustering is not so common yet, because there are not so many tools that can help you automate that process. Actually, you can build a tool on your own. It is not that expensive, and it is not that time-consuming. I explained that as well in the presentation, that you can use some Python algorithms borrowed from science, and even basic Python skills will be enough to build such a cluster that will compare sets of keywords to each other and decide whether this set is similar to the other so we can join, or this set is definitely different, so it's a separate topic and you have to treat it separately. Results speaks for themselves when it comes to convincing clients.

You had another question about time frame and reviewing it. I would say that you can create a content strategy for three to six months, and it will be a good idea to redo the clusters again based on real-time data. It is important, because your competition won't sleep during that six months. It will be a good idea to revise your priorities and decide whether you have to redo the clustering and, well, change the order of executing articles based on how common they are, because your competitors may start covering a topic about like- I don't know, new headphones, and you want to be up to date with what they publish. Three to six months is a good timing.

Peter: The clustering should mean that we should always cover the group of the keywords for the specific niche, do everything in there, and then move to a separate niche or to a common [unintelligible 00:16:48] or similar niche. Would that be whatever needed, maybe five, maybe 50 articles or landing pages on that topic, and then move to the next one. Is that going to allow us to a better rank, not only for that niche but for the whole together?

Michal: It is important to mention that we have two levels of clusters. The first level of clusters is like cluster of clusters. Cluster of topics for the domain. Regarding the specific URL, you have a cluster of keywords. If you are considering cluster of the domain, you should cover as many topics that were found during the clustering process as possible. Regarding covering keywords within the specific URL, you have to provide this comprehensive information to the end user.

If Google created the cluster, including like 5, 10, maybe 15 topics and they should be joined together, you have to make sure that your article is comprehensive enough to provide information for all of these topics, all of these questions in that manner so the content will be complete, and you won't get those negative behavioral signals from your visitors because they aren't fully satisfied with the result.

Peter: People who are not a Python programmers like myself can use tools like-

Michal: Surfer.

Peter: -or others. I just wanted to check on that. All right. I think that's it. I think we got a very good idea on how to approach the clustering keywords here. Michal, where can people find you? Do you have any future conference plans? Where can people find you on the internet?

Michal: The best place to connect with me is LinkedIn. You'll find me there by searching my name. Regarding the future plans for the conferences, well, not really, unfortunately. Looking forward to the changes in the market.

Peter: Let's see what's going to happen. Once summer comes, I'm very eager to go to the creation seaside and see what's happening. I think that's it. The podcast, for everyone who's listening, go and subscribe. We will be back every 14 days, every two weeks, with new per speakers from all the different conferences. We started with SEO because SEO is close to my heart. Of course, we started with Michal because the topicality is extremely important and extremely timely in SEO. Michal, thank you very much for being a guest. Everyone else, have a great day and see you.

Michal: Thanks for having me.

Peter: Bye-bye.

#33 - Peter Mesarec - We are on a break Apr 04, 2020

Hey, this time we don't have a conference marketing speaker, because all the conferences are canceled because of the New Corona Virus. I'm taking a break from the podcast, probably till the fall when the conferences pick up again. You can listen to all the previous 32 episodes that are in the archive for free.

Here are my favorites:

#29 Rebecca Hugo - 6 Findings from Testing the World’s Leading Checkout Flows
#10 - JP Sherman - Delivering better on-site search results
#9 - Prabhat Shah - Amazon SEO Tools I Wouldn’t Avoid
Episode 1 - Tyler Lessard - The Art of Creating Customer Experiences with Site, Sound and Motion

I would love to hear from you, what did you like on the podcast, or what is your favorite episode. Check in at info@time4marketing.com or on Facebook or Twitter.

#32 - Jente De Ridder - A Vision for Sustainable Analytics Implementations Mar 02, 2020

Superweek is a Hungarian conference hosted on the top of a hill, you can't run away, you can't hide. But Jente sais, he liked that, because everyone has to talk to everyone. To each his own :D Jente is on Linkedin here and if you would like to talk shop, chat him up on the business website.

Here are the links to the things we talked about on the podcast:

Generic Digital Data Layer framework opensource code: https://bitbucket.org/xploregroup/xploregroup-webanalytics-demo/src/master/
Measure Slack for the digital analytics community: https://www.measure.chat/

And here is the full presentation from his talk on Superweek so that you can follow along with the podcast.

A vision for sustainable analytics implementations - Superweek 2020 from Jente De Ridder Here is the transcript of the talk we had:

Jente: The framework has been implemented. What we've done is we've decided to make the framework open-source. It's available for everyone who wants to use it, it can be shared in the notes afterwards.

Peter: This is time for marketing. The marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference. Hello. Welcome to the time for marketing podcast, the podcast that brings you the best marketing conference speakers directly to your podcast listening app. My name is Peter and this episode number 32. Well, we will be going to a conference in Hungary. Before we do that, as you know, podcasts are usually things that people should listen to. You, yes you, can help me to get more people to listen to this podcast. If you like the speakers that I had in the past, and I know you will love today's speaker, just tell anyone. Just people that you've heard that are using podcast. Tell them time4marketing.com is a great website where you can get an interesting podcast. Now, we go directly to Belgium. With me today is Jente De Ridder. Jente, hello and welcome to the podcast.

Jente: Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me here.

Peter: How are you doing? How is Belgium? I've always imagined Belgium as one of the European cold countries, is this so?

Jente: Well, we have global warming also here so it's getting better. [chuckles] It's true, we have a lot of rain but we do have our nice days as well.

Peter: And loads of chocolates, everything is better in Belgium. Do you also have a lot of fries or is that only a Dutch thing? The fires [inaudible 00:02:06]?

Jente: It's definitely a Belgium thing. We have the best fries in the world, the best chocolates, and also over 100 very good beers so for all those things, you should come to Belgium.

Peter: All right. You should be paid by your tourist community to help promote Belgium. Jente, you are the managing partner and a digital analyst at a company called Stitched. Tell us a bit about the company, and more interesting tell us a bit more about what you do. What is your everyday work like?

Jente: I'll start with Stitched. Stitched is a digital analytics boutique consultancy firm active in Belgium and in the Netherlands. What we do is we help enterprise clients to get more value out of their data. We are mostly focused on their digital data so our mission is actually to help those companies make use of the data they're gathering in tools like web analytics. Because what we often see is that those companies that have BI team or data scientists in-house that those teams are used to working with CRM data, point of sale data, but they don't really understand how the digital data is gathered.

Because digital data it's imperfect data, of course, and this can be quite hard for them to get their minds around. What we do with Stitched is, from our experience in the digital data, we team up with those internal BI teams or the data scientists and we integrate the digital data in the entire data sets, the entire data warehouse of the company. We mainly focus on challenges like how do you cope with identification in a digital environment and those kinds of things.

Peter: How did you get into analytics?

Jente: I started analytics over eight years ago now by working in a online marketing agency. I learnt everything involved in online marketing there, the advertising part, social, content creation, search optimization, and also analytics. It was really that data part that motivate me the most. After a year, I decided to switch to another company I could pick up a full-time web analyst role and I've been building a team within that company since then.

Mainly, everything that I know about digital analytics I learned it myself by reaching out to the measure community, reaching out to other people, reading blog posts. It's hard to start in digital analytics as there's not really an education course preparing you for it. It's really your own motivation and your drive to really understand things and go look them up yourself.

Peter: I've invited you to the podcast because you had a very interesting presentation at the Superweek conference in Hungary. That's a conference at top of a hill, how was that?

Jente: Well, it was a really nice experience. I've been to Superweek before also as a participant and I really love that conference. It's one of the leading conferences within web analytics or digital analytics in the world at the moment mainly because many of the thought leaders are there for the entire week and you have, of course, great presentations being given. The most valuable part is that everyone is there in the hotel for an entire week. There's nothing in the neighborhood around, so it's indeed on top of a hill, more than an hour drive away from Budapest.

It's in the middle of nowhere and all you have is the hotel, the lobby bar, there is a big campfire every night outside, you have a hot tub, a swimming pool. There's a lot of room for exchanging ideas with your peers, really going into discussions about analytics and that's what makes the experience really nice. I would recommend it to everyone active in the digital analytics sphere.

Peter: I've seen the pictures of bonfires at night at front of the hotel, that looks really, really interesting. Your presentation was called a vision for sustainable analytics implementation. We've chatted enoughI hink, let's go directly to your presentation. Jente, here are your five minutes.

Jente: What we've done with the team of Stitched with one of our clients [unintelligible 00:06:43] in the Netherlands. It's energy supplier, they're a market leader in the Netherlands and over two years ago we were asked by them to implement a new data layer because they were switching from hardcoded [unintelligible 00:06:54] implementation to a Tag Manager implementation and they also [unintelligible 00:06:59] a new data layer. They have a really complex landscape, they have different departments, multiple brands, so many platforms. There were like eight different platforms with all different CMSs being managed by different development teams, different marketing teams.

It's your typical enterprise environment where there's a lot of complex things and not everything is aligned. As a business they require to have numbers across those brands, across those platforms, and they want to compare those numbers only one dashboard, those kinds of things. We start thinking from there what is the best approach to implement a data layer here so one unified data layer across all those platforms.

Also taking into account the challenges within the web analytics that we saw, where one of the biggest challenges was, of course, that's normal, the original web analytics is page-based, so you track every time your route changes. That is not really sufficient anymore because more and more development frameworks are modular, like Angular, for instance, you have single-page applications. It's not enough anymore to know that the page has changed but you want to know what was on the page at the moment.

Same when you look at different devices being used, the screen size of people coming into your website is always different. What do they see actually, instead of which page has been loaded? Same when you look at personalization, we show different things to different people on our homepage, so just having a report where you know that your homepage has been seen 10,000 times doesn't tell you what was on that page at the moment people visited. Those challenges we also try to solve them with our approach that we're looking for. There was also the fact that the implementation of this new data layer would be really quite a heavy investment from the organization because of the scale of the platform.

This was also something that they were willing to do, but of course they don't want to do this every two years for instance. What is the case in many companies that you see today is that there are new implementations happening every two or three years because all too often development implementation is based on the specific vision of one person. The person that's in charge of the implementation at the moment [unintelligible 00:09:13] for instance. Once that person switches roles or goes to another company, someone else comes in and he has his own vision and they must go through an entire implementation again.

We want to prevent those kinds of situations and just make sure that the investment was worth it for doing it once and you don't have to do it every couple of years again. That's when we came up with a framework that we've called the Generic Digital Data Layer Framework, where we changed the vision of [unintelligible 00:09:40] starting from page-based tracking to event-based. Everything that happens on our webpage can be considered as an event because already it's all the user interactions happening that are already seen as browser events. For people who are familiar with a bit of customization policies they already work with those events probably.

Again, we want to track things like someone clicks on a button, someone submits a form, a specific piece of content has been seen by the user, those are all events happening in the browser. What we've done is we've made those events abstract as possible. We start thinking, "Don't think on a specific page level." Don't look at what is on that page and what do we want to track now, just think on the component level of a CMS. Within your CMS, your developers, they build components which can then be used to create pages by Content Manager. It's based on those components, that level that you will start thinking about your tracking.

Every time a button component, for instance, is being used we want to know if that button has been within the view of the visitor. Has the user seen that button, and we want to know if someone has clicked on it? Those are two events that you want to know for every button. We'll tell the developer start implementing those events on the component of the button and once [unintelligible 00:11:01] on the page, the track is already included and we don't need to edit them.

This has some advantages. That one, it's clear where the responsibility is for implementing tracking, it cannot be forgotten because it's already present in the CMS. Also, as an analyst, you know that that tracking is available and you don't need to create specific briefings every time a new page is created by someone. There's a lot of time saved there for the web [unintelligible 00:11:27] that you would normally be spending on creating briefings you can now spend on analyzing data. That's how we start our vision, really abstract events happening on the page.

We ended up with a list of I believe 15 components that are typically used within CMSs to build pages and on those 15 components, we had 20 or 25 different events happening. That's our entire list. We have a [unintelligible 00:11:54] with 25 events and then for every of those events, we just add in the variables that you need to know because as an analyst it's great to understand when something's happening, when is an event occurring. To make sense of it, to really be able to give advice based on those events you need to understand the context of events, that's when the variables come in.

For every event, you define a couple of variables that need to be present to be able to make your analysis. For instance, again, back to the example of our button, for every button component we want to know the name and the placements for where is the button placed on the page and maybe also the text of the button. This can be different variables being used for every button that is in place on the page. That's the idea of the framework.

The other challenge is you want to make it sustainable, you want to be able to be sure that you only do implement it once and not again every time someone comes in again, new people enter organization or when new tools are being used by the organization the organization switches from Adobe Analytics to Google Analytics. Those situations also would need [unintelligible 00:13:00]. What we've done, we want to make our framework completely [unintelligible 00:13:04] agnostic and we started there with not building a real data layer because the data layer is always agnostic, it uses specific syntax based on the tag manager you're using.

Google tag manager has their own syntax, Adobe doesn't even really have a syntax that they prescribe, they refer to the W3C guidelines created almost three years ago, Tealium have their own syntax for data layer. All those vendors have their own syntax. What we've done is we decided to just all the implementation stuff, the implication of the event itself, we decide to stick with simple vanilla JavaScript and HTML data attributes for the variables. We've created these JavaScript that just listens to those events happening on the page. It puts them in an array, just like an event queue.

We have an invent queue that builds up when those events happen on the page while the user goes through the websites and then we have a translator script that translates the entire event queue to the syntax that is expected by your tag manager. When you use Google Tag Manager, those events will be translated to a data layer low push syntax, if you have a Tealium the data layer will be translated in another way.

What we have is JavaScript in HTML data attributes being implemented on the platform. That's the responsibility of your developer and he does that on the CMS template level, not on the page level. Next to that, you have one script that runs on the website which will listen to those events, which are our event subscriber and then you have a translator script that translates those events to the syntax as expected by your marketing tools. From then on, it's the responsibility of your web analyst that's in charge of the tag manager to decides what events need to be sent to where.

He can decide we need the tag manager, I want these events to be sent to Google Analytics, to Adobe Analytics, to our marketing platforms, to our Facebook pixels, those kind of things. That's all in the tag manager. Again, you don't implement different codes for Facebook for Google, it's just one implementation, one event, and it can be sent to multiple tools but not by implementing the two specific code on your platform itself.

The benefits are, of course, the mutation is much clearer hence all the vendor-specific or the tool-specific things those are-- you expect that the web analyst [unintelligible 00:15:23] people work with those tools, that they understand how those tools expect the data coming in. That's a bit the framework that we implemented and what we've done is-- [unintelligible 00:15:33] I present this framework I got a lot of nice feedback on it from the people present. We decide to make the framework open source so it's available for everyone who wants to use it. It's not something that we claim so the open-source codes can be shared in the notes of the podcast afterwards for those interested.

Peter: We'll do that. That's excellent and good to opening your code up to people. Your framework sounds great, the question here is how big of a company should it be for it to be a good idea for them to switch to your framework and not go specific to one of the tools that they can implement themselves?

Jente: Some of the ideas of the framework in there just best practices which I would recommend to everyone. Using event-driven approach is something that everyone should start using. It's also what you've seen with Google Analytics switching to the new prescribed measurements protocol, they are switching to more event-driven approach. Data analytics is something very specific so for the size of the company to make this useful, the benefits are larger for large corporations. To give you an idea, some of our clients that are using it at the moment is actually in the Netherlands with over 3,000 employees, multiple brands.

We have Bose from the sounds systems, they have implemented it on their platforms worldwide, we have an insurance company in Belgium who has implemented also 2000 employees. It's the large corporations who are using it at the moment. The framework enables on any platform the thing is you need to do an entire new implementation of your data layer.

What we mostly recommend to our customers is when you will do a new implementation anyway do it in this way. You know it's future proof, it doesn't matter if you will be changing tools somewhere in the future or not but if there's no need at the moment to redo your implementation or existing platform then just stick with what you have and you can continue building on that. Because it's still quite an investment to just implement your entire data layer over again. That's really useful when you go to a new platform or are switching tools at the moment or something like that. That's a good situation to implement this one.

Peter: Will be a good idea when you're redoing your web page to also redo your whole data layer or would you first say that first to do all of the technical stuff for your new web page and then go do the analytics?

Jente: No. If you would redo your website just take the data and the analytics part with it from the start, just make it one of the requirements that needs to be included. Because also in the organization we work with, within the definition of done for an organization working in a [unintelligible 00:18:28] way, the definition of done includes analytics components as well. Tracking needs to be present and needs to be verified by an analyst before something can be released.

Peter: If people would like to talk to you about analytics implementation, where can they find you?

Jente: They can always reach out to me via my LinkedIn profile or on the Measure Slack community. For people active professionally in analytics it's called Measure Slack, go look it up if you're not part of it yet.

Peter: Add the link to the show notes to that?

Jente: All right. We go into MeasureCamp Bratislava within a month, at the end of March. Probably I'm also at MeasureCamp Amsterdam but I don't have a ticket yet, I'm on

the waiting list there, and also MeasureCamp Brussels later this year. I'm quite a fan of MeasureCamp.

Peter: [chuckles] I wanted to ask you what conferences would you recommend to people to go to but it seems that Superweek and MeasureCamps are the places for analysts to go?

Jente: Yes. Those are really community-driven events and I myself get the most value out of those events where you have a lot of time for networking and discussing with your peers. I often value those more than just really good keynotes but that's my point of view.

Peter: All right, Jente, thank you very much for being the guest on the podcast number 32. It was great pleasure hearing about the framework for analytics that you've

developed. I think that's it, you can say goodbye now.

Jente: All right. Bye, and thanks for having me, Peter.

Peter: Bye-bye.

[music]

[00:20:30] [END OF AUDIO]

#31 - Mark Colgan - Building a lean, mean, lead generating machine with outbound prospecting Jan 20, 2020

Mark (here on LinkedIn) talked at the DMSS 2019 and he is a professional outreacher. His presentation was called Building a lean, mean, lead generating machine with outbound prospecting. And he knows how to help others do it. He is the CRO at TaskDrive.

We have his whole presentation here:

Building a lean, mean, lead generating machine with outbound prospecting from Mark Colgan Here is the transcript of the talk we had:

Mark Colgan: HubSpot is the biggest advocate of inbound marketing, yet they spent over 60% of their budget in the first few years on outbound. Really, the answer is that inbound alone doesn't work, and you need to support it with outbound prospecting or outbound marketing.

Intro: This is Time For Marketing. The marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference.

Peter: Hello, and welcome to the Time For Marketing podcast. The podcast that brings you marketing conference speakers from all around the world, and takes their presentations, smoosh it up into five minutes, and you have a small package of knowledge. My name is Peter, and I'll be your podcast host.

If you would like to check out the previous episodes, timeformarketing.com, or you can also subscribe to our newsletter, and of course find all the links to the iTunes Google podcast, Stitcher, and every else places where you can listen, and review, and rate, and do all of the great things that you do with podcasts. Today with me is Mark Colgan. Mark is the chief revenue officer at TaskDrive. Mark, hello, and welcome to the podcast.

Mark: Hey, Peter. Thank you very much for having me. I'm really looking forward to sharing the presentation.

Peter: Thank you for being here. Mark, you are a chief revenue officer. What does that mean?

Mark: Yes, that's a great question to start with. A chief revenue officer has a few different definitions, but in my understanding and interpretation, it's somebody who aligns the different departments within a business in order to achieve revenue. Those departments I look after at TaskDrive are marketing, sales, customer success, and product. I make sure there's no silos, and I make sure that our customer is first in terms of our priority. We do everything we can to increase the quality that the customer has with us, which helps us reduce churn, and also helps us increase new customers through the sales and marketing activities too.

Peter: What is TaskDrive? What are you doing?

Mark: Good question. TaskDrive is a service-based business. Our mission is to help b2b sales and marketing teams focus on high-value activities. We do that by offering an outsourced lead generation and data enrichment service. We help companies build new lists of prospects. We also help them enrich existing datas, then we also help companies that sell into enterprise with their account-based insights to helping them expand their reach and increasing their sales velocity by giving them a detailed view of the stakeholders within the decision making process.

Peter: This was a complicated way to say you help companies with their prospects, with their leads, is that right?

Mark: Yes, but it's not just leads because we help them-- A lot of companies are faced with the fact that they have a lot of data that they've amassed over the last few years which has gone fairly out of date, so we also help them with data enrichment. Yes, one of the use cases is lead generation for prospecting.

Peter: Your presentation comes from the Digital Marketing Skillshare Conference that is organized every year in Bali. You were there this year. How was the conference?

Mark: Yes, it was fantastic. A really great conference. They originally started out with an SEO focus but over the last few years, have broadened that out to other tracks. There's people talking about marketing, pay-per-click advertising, as well as email marketing. I covered the outbound sales and prospecting through the presentation there.

Peter: What was your favorite presentation at Bali? Is there one?

Mark: I personally really enjoyed Mark Webster's presentation. He's from Authority Hacker, and he spoke about building and selling online courses, or online IP, basically, your knowledge as a personal interest of mine. I really enjoyed that talk and got a chance to speak with Mark after the event as well.

Peter: Of course, Mark is a big podcaster in the marketing world. I think we should go directly to the presentation. Mark, you spoke on building a lean mean lead generating machine with outbound prospecting. Here are your five minutes. Tell us what your presentation was about?

Mark: Thank you for having open mic, Peter. This presentation was actually around 50 minutes, so I'm going to do my best to bring everything into 5 minutes. I spoke about outbound prospecting, and throughout the presentation, I covered a number of different sections. I started out with what outbound prospecting is, what the four stages of building a lead generating machine is, how you can then scale that outbound prospecting. Then I gave some bonus tips and additional reading, which are all in the slides for those who are listening.

I'll start with outbound prospecting. It really it's a direct channel where you can identify and target customers and directly reach out to them, and introduce them to your company its products and services. The goal of this is to start a conversation, and it's also to position yourself as a trusted adviser. You're not going to sell- especially in the b2b space, you're not going to sell directly to consumers in a cold email, so you need to remember that.

Also, you need to remember that it's just one lead generation strategy, so you've got search engine optimization, social media events, webinars, side projects. Outbound prospecting just fits into your lead gen strategy. It's not the be-all and end-all. It's part of the sales process. It's the beginning part because once you generate leads, you then need to convert those leads by sales calls, or from demos, or free trials, and close them into paying customers, and then you need to fulfill those needs.

Fulfill those customers and deliver the value that you promised, nurture those customers, and ensure they're successful, and hopefully, they become advocates of your business. Outbound prospecting works for most companies who have achieved product-market fit. They have an average order value of over a thousand dollars per year, and you can also scale the delivery of your service or product. It's really important to distinguish those.

Also, as we approach 2020, there's a couple of things that I believe personally you need to do in order to succeed with the outbound prospecting. These are, you have to come from a attitude of offering value and giving without expecting anything in return. You need to understand the buyer's journey of awareness consideration of the decision, and people within your prospects are going to be at different levels of that journey. Also, only 3% of your market are actively buying at any one time, so that means 97% of people aren't looking to buy right now.

If you're selling and pitching to a hundred people, only 3 are actively looking and 97 aren't. You need to make sure that what you're sending in your messaging is building value, and position yourself as a trusted advisor, and not just sending a sales pitch. For the sake of time, I broke down the lead generation machine into four different steps. I'll just go through those in a bit more detail.

The four steps are planning, research, message, and launch. Planning really comes down to understanding who you're trying to target with your ideal customer profile, as well as the individuals within those companies. Those are your buyer personas. The best way to create these is to look at your existing customers and any sales or prospects in the funnel and just identify what they have in common. What pain points do they share, what characteristic characteristics they share as a company?

You then need to move on to understanding what their pain points are, what problems are they trying to achieve or overcome from a account level as well as a personal level. In their role, what are they trying to overcome? Then you want to split out your ideal customer profiles and buyer personas into different campaigns. That might be via location, by industry, by job titles or seniority. Then you also need to prepare your email for outreach.

One of the most important things to do is not use your main domain to send out these emails because you run the risk of hitting the spam traps, and then blocking your email deliverability in the future. You also need to research, spend a lot of time personalizing the outreach, so you can research on an individual persona. On an account level, make sure that your outreach is personalized, and you can use merge tags for the outreach. You put those things that you find in your research into the emails which builds relevance with the individual, and also it encourages them to reply.

You then need to find those leads. There's a number of places you can look at. LinkedIn, you can go to directories, you got to the podcast, you could use paid databases like-- discover. There are hundreds of different sources for the data, but you'll only be able to know where they are when you've done your ideal customer profile and buyer persona research.

Again, skipping through quite a lot here [chuckles] to try and get it into five minutes. Then we're onto your messaging. Here, you need to understand what your strategy for cadence is. That is, how many touchpoints, how many times are you going to try and attempt to contact people, over which media or channels, what the duration of the outreach is going to be, how much time in-between each of the messages, and what that content is.

There's a number of ways to select media channels. The easiest way is the cheaper or smaller. The shorter the cell cycle is, the less effort you want to put in. The more longer the cell cycle is, and the more expensive your product is. You'll want to use channels such as Direct Mail, personalized video, and personalized experiences because the effort is worth the reward.

Then the final element after you've got the messaging is to-- Sorry, then the messaging comes on to these four elements of the cold email. The subject line whose job it is to get the email opened. An opening sentence, which shows that you've done your research and it's a relevant email or message for the person who's received it to read. The main body, which connects your opening sentence to the value proposition that you offer. Then a call to action. The simplest call to action can be, "Would you be interested in finding out more?"

The last thing you need to think about is the launch. This is where you select the right technology that you can use to send out these emails. The most simple technologies for email outreach where it's just email, you could use outreach.io, Lemlist, Amplemarket, or Reply.io. If you're combining your outreach with other channels, like direct mail, phone calls, and voicemails, you might want to use a tool like SalesLoft or outreach.io.

Once you have that technology in place, you just need to set up your outbound sequence. All of the tools out there will help you do this. What you can typically expect is if you're doing this right, you can get an open rate of 60%. A reply rate of 45%, a conversion rate of 20%. If you're good at closing those deals, you want to be aiming for 50% close one.

Obviously, you want to aim for 100%, but it won't always happen. That really is the key to building a lean mean lead generating machine and how you scale this is that you learn, you iterate, and you repeat. Once you've effectively done this for one fiscal or one campaign, you can launch multiple campaigns at a time and add more leads to the top of the funnel.

Peter: All right. Thank you, Mark. A couple of questions. Outbound versus inbound prospecting. I feel that we're mostly, in the last couple of years talking about inbound. What is the difference and even more important, how should people decide which of those two channels should be more important for them?

Mark: Great question and one that I like to usually back up with a fact which is escaping me right now. HubSpot is the biggest advocate of inbound marketing, yet they spent over 60% of their budget in the first few years on outbound. Really, the answer is that inbound alone doesn't work and you need to support it with outbound prospecting or outbound marketing. That's really key.

I think when it comes to inbound, you're relying on the fact that your content is going to be picked up. You've got the right keywords and you've got the right audience segmentation that they're going to read your content and then convert or contact you. `Whereas what you can do with outbound prospecting is because you know who an ideal customer is, and you know the particular triggers and signals that you look for or you can see when somebody is right for you.

Say for example, one of your buyer personas has started a new role and you offer a product or service that would help that person in their new role. You could actually reach out to them at the time where they're starting a new role with a bit of content or with some value that you can share with them to start the conversation. That you can't really do with inbound because you're not controlling the process, whereas with outbound, you can control the start and the initiation of a conversation.

Peter: All right, you said that outbound is for companies whose customer value per year is around $1,000. How did you come to that number? Why?

Mark: It's a rough rule of thumb. I'm not saying it wouldn't work for customers who have a smaller lifetime value, but the more the better. The reason being is that there's often costs associated from a tools and technology process. Some of these tools can cost 70 or even hundreds of dollars per month, and that's to send the emails out. You need to spend time doing the research. You also need to verify the research and you probably want somebody doing it for you because it may not be the best use of your time as a founder or even as a marketing or sales director.

You've also got to be prepared to play the long game because not everybody converts on the first message. Often you see that sequences have over 30 touchpoints. In addition, because email alone may not work, you might need to include phone calls and voicemails, videos and direct mail. There's just a lot more labor costs in it. If your unit economics don't work out, it may cost you more to acquire a customer than it does if your average order value is low.

Peter: Do you have any tricks to write email subjects?

Mark: Yes. I would say the best subjects are short. They invoke curiosity, you could potentially use humor, definitely personalize with an account name, the company name or the person's first name. Those would be my main tips. Also, I shared in the presentation on the day that the best performing subject line for open rates is, I've got your wife. That will always get a lot of opens,-

[laughter]

Mark: -but you will have a lot of angry and annoyed people because you've tricked them. Never trick, be honest, be sincere. Use humor only if it's right with you and your audience. Some audiences you'll be able to get away with more humor than others.

Peter: I like that idea of not using the main domain for the email outreach, could you briefly speak about that, why and how that works?

Mark: Yes, sure. The best practice really is to pick a domain which isn't your main one. Let's say that your domain is companyname.com. Try and find a domain which is very similar, but it's .io or .co or whatever variation it may be or you might want to say getcompanyname.com. What you want to do is, even if you're doing everything right, you're taking time to research your ideal customer profiles and understand your buyer personas, you really understand their pain point and you have a fantastic product or service that can solve their problem and you're not spamming people and you're sending small volumes out at a time. You've warmed up your domain, you can still get triggered as spam.

You can do everything right, but send the message to somebody on the wrong day and they mark you as spam. Also, if you're not personalizing your outreach and you're taking a very template shotgun approach, you will also be sending the same message out over and over again. That's what the spam filters are looking out for and it reduces your chances of delivering emails in the future.

The main reason why we say to use a spare domain is because whilst you be able to do the right things, you still might be marked as spam on your cold email outreach domain which means that it can affect the deliverability of your main domain if you're not using a separate one. That means that your internal emails to each other, to your team members, may not even be delivered because you've been marked as spam so much. I've seen personally, companies who have really struggled with this in the past.

Peter: All right. One last question, everyone who is from the European Union and you being from the UK, still count. They would ask, of course, how does that work with the privacy laws with GDPR and others?

Mark: What I'd always, first of all, is to say get professional legal advice. This isn't legal advice, but if you can find the email address and it's publicly available and you have legitimate interest to message them, then you should be okay in using their email address to send. Also, you could do the research on LinkedIn and connect with individuals on LinkedIn and not even have to do email for the outbound prospecting. That's what I see some of our European clients doing with the data that they're using. However, the majority of our customers are in the US and not affected with the same privacy laws.

Peter: All right. That was very very interesting and a lot of great info. We will be able to attach your presentation to the podcast notes so that everyone can go into to check out for the whole presentation. Is that right?

Mark: Excellent, yes, that's perfectly fine.

Peter: Excellent. All right, Mark. What are your future conference plans and where can people find you on conferences or where can people contact you online if they would like to talk about everything that you do?

Mark: Great question. We're planning our 2020 conference plans at the moment. There's still a bit TBC. I'll certainly be speaking on more podcasts and online summits, but if you'd like to speak to me in the meantime, the best place to find me is on LinkedIn, where you can search for Mark Colgan, that's C-O-L-G-A-N or you can email me at mark@taskdrive.com.

Peter: All right, and I will, of course, add all of those links to the show notes so if you're listening to just open your podcast app and find all of the links to Mark. Mark, thank you again for being on the podcast. Have a great day enjoying the sun and hope to see you around.

Mark: Thank you very much, Peter. It's been great. Thank you.

Peter: Bye-bye.

#30 - Alexandra Tachalova - Smart Link Building how to stop following best practices and start getting links Jan 05, 2020

Alexandra Tachalova (Linkedin or Twitter) is the organizer of the Digital Olympus conference and she does one thing in life. Generates backlinks. So if you want more backlinks, you should listen to what she has to say. This is her presentation from the DMSS 2019 in Bali, check out her presentation below.

Smart link building how to stop following best practices and start getting links from Alexandra Tachalova Podcast transcript

Alexandra Tachalova: So when I was the very first time doing link building, I spent the first three or four months painting those features and well, I believe I did notice one or two links.

Peter: This is Time4Marketing, the marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference.

Hello, and welcome to the Time4Marketing marketing podcast, the podcast that invites the best marketing conference speakers to come and sum up their presentations in five minutes. It's 2020 Happy New Year to everyone. My name is still Peter and I'll still be your host for this podcast episode. If you would like to know more what is going on on the podcast, you could visit the time4marketing.com website when you have forum where you could subscribe to our email newsletter or just subscribe to this podcast.

If you want to talk to me, you can find me on my web page, seos.si. Enough about me. I hope you're having a wonderful new year. With me today is Alexandra Tachalova. Alex, hello and welcome.

Alexandra: Hello, Peter. Thanks for having me. Such a pleasure and honor being here today.

Peter: Alex, I'm very glad that you are here with us. Where are you located?

Alexandra: I'm based in Saint Petersburg, which is not in Florida, but in Russia. Well, we are based on the same continent with you, not really far away from you.

Peter: True, true. But Russia sounds very cold. Is it unbelievably cold right now?

Alexandra: No, it's not unbelievably cold. We are going to have a Christmas and New Year without snow. Right now it’s +3 +4 five. Yes, just rainy.

Peter: Alex, you are the founder of the Digital Olympus Conference. Tell us a bit more about the conference and tell us a bit more what you do in your everyday job life.

Alexandra: Well, first of all, let's chat a little bit about the Digital Olympus Conference. That's going to happen on the sixth of April in Kraków, which is based in Poland. We have very, I think inspiring lineup. We have Aleyda Solis, Michal speakers, Lukasz Zelezny, Fernando Angulo, Leonardo Saroni from Booking, Judith 'deCabbit' and many, many other quite well-known experts. We are a very affordable conference because the cost, our POS is less than 100 that.

That's more or less about this Olympus Conference and hope to see you guys maybe-- by the way, you don't even need to go to our conference. You could also join us online because we do a free live stream. Even if you can't come personally, then you have an option to join us just online. When talking about what I do besides Digital Olympus, I do link building. I have a quite small agency and it's just under the same brand, under Digital Olympus. Well, actually we built links mostly for B2B clients. That's what I think I know very well and that's my areas of expertise.

That's the reason why I'm talking about link building quite a lot and write about link building covers intellectually. Did write a post for the MOZ Blog about the economics of link building. I highly recommend checking it out. Get tons of positive feedback. People were writing to me across different channels and they really love this stuff because not a lot of experts sharing it, the real cost of link building and why like different options cost different- costs differently. Yes, that's a good one, I think. Let me add one more thing about my personal life.

If you go to any of my social media channels, you'll find me and my horse. I'm really into horse-riding, in particular dressage. That may be my second fashion after digital marketing.

Peter: To go to your presentation, you spoke-- Well, you speak at a lot of different events. But I contacted you because you spoke at the DMSS in Bali in 2019 with--

Alexandra: That was my excuse to go to Bali.

[laughter]

Peter: That is a lot of people's excuse to go to Bali. It’s business. I can write it off on business expenses. Your presentation title was How to Stop Following the Best Practices and Start Getting Links. Alex, here are your five minutes for your presentation.

Alexandra: I was talking about how exactly we built links here at Digital Olympus, what we do. First of all, we don’t follow any best practices. If you go to, just you know, to Google on quite well-known digital marketing blog, you'll find tons of- they're sharing how to do link building like 66 best link building strategy that you need to do today or tomorrow. Don't do that because they are quite useless being honest. The reason behind it that they're overused. Also, well, I have something more to share here besides like, they are useless because we've already tried them and they don't work but besides me there are some data.

For instance, some time ago, Brian Dean teamed up with Pitchbox, which is an outreach tool and they analyzed thousands of email outreach pitches. Well, they found out that their average response rate is quite low, in fact, below 9%. That's the reason why I think doing link building by following those strategies is not the right way to go because, let's imagine if you sent 100 emails, you might get only one or two links because the response rates while any link builder know that response rate doesn't equal to getting a link. What I suggest doing-- First of all, what we don't do, definitely we don't send mass emails because they have a quite poor response rate.

Instead of these, I would recommend going to people that are already aware about your brands, so with whom you've already established a relationship. The reason behind it that they're much more responsive and eager to communicate with you, so your emails won’t be ignored. Plus they know you, they trust you so you could try to get a link from them.

But for sure it's not just because you are so good and your content is so good, you need to give them something back or visit it because people understand the value of links. My recommendations will be, well, if you want to work with though then do it like really do link building.

That's actually the most beneficial way of doing it because if you partner up with a company that doing link building on a scale, so they’re also investing in this process, then you could build much more links because they know more people, they write to more blogs. But you need to return them links back. That's where we are coming to an indirect link exchange. You need to contribute to other blogs but not to build links because it's very expensive. Well, for sure you could do this, but it's much more like, it makes much more sense to do it, to return things back to people that could also generate links, so you are doing indirect links exchange.

Well, for sure not only links can be cured as something available for people, someone or connection the rest of others with hype or like, for instance, your clients. If you are checking your circles. What you do, you check your clients, your social media followers, your partners as well. Anyone who basically knows your brand and their whereabouts, your existence. Well, if you talk about liners, they might want to, something like your specs, they might want to, so you send them your secs and get a link. Well, for sure don't do like the majority of people do like sending here is what like-- send an email, how does it look like?

For instance, I deliver this awesome blog post and I've been following you for ages and then the reason why you need to give me a link back, well, quite stupid. They don't owe you a thing so don't do that. Instead of these, what I would recommend doing, first of all, connect with them and do something valuable for them. For instance, like link back to them, sending soundtracks. Only after these, ask whether there is any chance to link back to your awesome, insightful blog posts. That's very much it. The last tip will be, if you want to find people that write across various blogs within your niche, most probably they're doing link building because that's the reason why they write to different blogs.

On a regular basis go to BuzzSumo experts, the list of contributors because at BuzzSumo allows you on the most popular blogs and then search via those author names inside BuzzSumo. Going back to BuzzSumo and see whether they write across different blogs or only write on this one article. Your goal is to find those that write across a quite big number of blogs like me. For instance, I write on different blogs like Moz, Search Engine Journal, co-marketing [unintelligible 00:10:50] excel, and et cetera. That's very much it.

Peter: Okay, excellent. Alex, how important do you feel are links still in SEO and even more, are they getting more important or less in the last years?

Alexandra: I think they're like, there should be one more guy here that-- there will be a very interesting conversation because I'm sure, yes, for sure I say links, the main reason why sites are ranking at the top of Google results and then we need an opponent here, someone who is really- truly believe that technical SEO on-site is so then the reason why sites are ranking. The thing here that I know how to build links and I see that when we build links to our clients' websites, the clients pager they grow. I see how it works. Then the reason why I believe that links are really important. However, I don't really do technical SEO so I don't see any correlations between technical SEO. I'm not observing them because I don't do that.

Each time I just meet people that do technical SEO they are like sharing, "No, you don't need links, you only need to just to nail your calls or whatever it is." There are one more very important thing that everyone should remember.

If you have a small website, I mean it's not a big e-commerce brand, you don't have tons of pages. I don't think nailing your technical off-site SEO would help you like really change your situation, especially if we are talking about highly competitive niches like IT, well, digital marketing or something like that. You could do whatever you want with your website. Make it very fast, make it very, very beautiful in terms of your course but unless you have links, it's not going to work.

Peter: Especially business to business websites are usually in such a way that it's small content.

Alexandra: Yes, just because your competitors are doing this. The problem with all those things that related to links, if people around you within your niche heavily invest in link building, then Google sees it and reacts on those additional forces that are impacting the SERPs. Then the problem is, well, imagine no one would be doing link building and then I could imagine that links won't be so important because Google will be looking at other factors. Since we have links and links are the core of Google [unintelligible 00:13:56] still because they are recommendations.

We are recommending something like in real life. When I recommend something and I'm a trustworthy source because, for instance, I recommend something because I really know I think the digital marketing, I am a trustworthy-- people believe me. That's the same with links. When you are a trustworthy website and do you say like, "Okay, I linked to this website," you basically say that the website that you're linking to is also trustworthy and that's how Google overlays things.

Peter: Probably links are going to be important for always. Another question--

Alexandra: I think so. yes.

Peter: If I'm a company and now what is the distinction, when should I decide to find someone from the outside to help me with my link building and when should I do it by myself inhouse? Is the size of the website, the criteria or-- When should I look for someone to help me with my link building?

Alexandra: When it comes to digital marketing, well, I'm a big believer that you need to try it on own. When I have a potential client that tell me, "Look we might hire you or might not because we are right now considering doing it on our own." I say like, "Look do it on your own because you see how it's hard, first of all then if you see how it's hard, then you might see a value in my services." You just try it, you see that it's very hard because it's very hard, you barely-- Even if you do guest blogging, it's very expensive so you would just spend the very few months just trying to pitch something to someone and receive a lot of no most probably.

The thing with link building or when I think you need to outsource these types of things, well first of all, when you want to do it faster. You hire an agency. Because the main reason why people hire an agency like us or agencies like another like other guys because they've already established those relationships so they want it just to capitalize on what we've already done. Starting from the very first month, we could build up to 30 links per client. We've already know people so we just simply sent emails and they said, "Okay, we'll do this." They need to do everything from scratch.

When I was the very first time during link building, I spend the first three or four-month painting those features. I believe I do notice one or two links so if you linked that was all I was very frustrated and I was like why? Because you need to spend around two, three years establishing those relationships and then everything is easy. The second situation when you need an agency when you need very specific links. You've already a well-known company-- well, you don't need average links, you need very specific links to very specific pages. For instance, category or it might be even commercial pages.

Then you could try to go to a link building agency and ask them whether they could help you. Because you have such clients from an enterprise sector, They are very well known company but they want to run better by some of their category pages because that's their commercial pages, that's where all the revenue stream is coming. Yes, in some cases, you could do this. The best thing about email, personalized email outreach is that you could even build links to those pages as well. Not for each and every company but if you are talking about well-known and if you know, people, you could do this. Actually, we have a few clients for whom we are building links to commercial pages.

Peter: Excellent. All right, I think that's it. Alex, if people would like to contact you or talk to you more about link building, where can people find you?

Alexandra: That might be LinkedIn but please, if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, write down a short message. I have already 200 connections that are pending. I just want to be sure that I'm not going to skip your connection request. Just write down something like, "I heard you on podcast something like this and then the reason I'd love to connect, I just greatly appreciate it." Or you can just go straight to Twitter which allows you to connect with me directly by following me and asking me question there without sending any super tracklist to connect. [chuckles]

Peter: All right. Thank you for being on the podcast. I'll add all of the links about the stuff that-

Alexandra: Thank you,

Peter: -talked about in the show. I will also add your presentation into the show notes so if people want to go deeper into the content, they can-

Alexandra: Awesome.

Peter: -do that. One more thing, do you have future conferences lined up? Where can people find you if they want to see you speaking live?

Alex: I think the biggest one that I have in my calendar is BrightonSEO in April, so if you'll be around- If you plan to come to BrightonSEO hope to see you there and for sure I'll be speaking about link building, which is a quite hot topic right now. It's on the rise. If you are based closer to me in Eastern Europe then SEO zraz in Bratislava, right? I think so in Bratislava, will be in February and so well, our own conference. I won't be speaking there, but I'll be there and so well, I'll be just taking care of technical things at Digital Olympus and if you're based somewhere in Poland, hope to see you at our own event.

Peter: All right. There's a lot of opportunities. Okay. Alex, thank you very much for being on the podcast. It was great talking to you and hope to see you around.

Alex: Hope to see you, Peter. Thank you very much for having me. And have a lovely Christmas.

#29 Rebecca Hugo - 6 Findings from Testing the World's Leading Checkout Flows Dec 16, 2019

I've met Rebecca (Linkedin) at the smind conference in Ljubljana Slovenia and I really enjoyed her presentation. She and the company she works for, look at e-commerce websites and learn from what works and what does not work (if nothing else, go and check out the FREE blog). The presentation has a couple of great ideas on how to minimize checkout abandonment.

Here is the link for the mobile cheat sheet.

The transcript of the podcast:

Rebecca: 23% of users in one of our studies cited that a too long or complicated checkout process was a reason for abandoning the site.

[music]

Peter Mesarec: This is Time4Marketing, the marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference. Hello, and welcome to the Time4Marketing Podcast, the podcast that brings you the best speakers from marketing conferences all around the world. My name is Peter and I'll be your host today for the episode number 29 as we're slowly ending the 2019 year, the second year of this podcast.

Before I introduce you to an excellent guest that we have tonight, please go and subscribe to the podcast if you like it, and of course, rate the podcast in your favorite podcast listening app. We now have a website, it's called time4marketing.com. The number four is a number. That sounds very logical. On the web page, you can also subscribe to the newsletter so we'd send you interesting information about the podcast and marketing conference. Now, we go to our today's guests. We have with us-, I'm very glad to have Rebecca Hugo. Hello.

Rebecca Hugo: Hello. Thank you for having me, Peter.

Peter: Very glad that you are here today. I saw you speaking at the Slovenian Conference e-Commerce Day sMind conference. You are the UX auditor at Baymard Institute. What is it, what do you do and what do you do there?

Rebecca: Baymard Institute are an independent usability research company. We specialize in helping other sites improve their e-commerce givings to their users. We do all of independent research. From there, we distill a lot of our findings. We found, I think it's 11,000 I think is our current number of individual issues that all users have come across when they're testing various sites across all industries. From there, we distill those down into-- We're over 750 guidelines at the moment. The number's still growing because we have a couple of research studies on at the moment. Those guidelines look to the design patterns that either positively or negatively are reacted to by the user. That is anything from a product detail page layout, to how filtering options are presented to the user, to how the checkout is or is not optimized, depending on the site.

From there, my role as a UX auditor, our clients will come to us and say, "Could you look at our site?" Basically orders us, "Let us know what we are or are not doing well." I suppose it's almost like taking your car in for a service. It's, "Your oil is a little bit low, your windscreen wipers need tightening up, but the leather in your seats are fantastic." We'll do a similar thing with the order. It can be anything from just looking at a single section, doing the entire site, or even doing prototypes. It gets really quite exciting in an odd way, looking at how different industries present essentially the exact same information to their users and also the nuances thereof in those instances to really create a great experience for that user.

Peter: I do a lot of SEO audits. When I begin my SEO audit, there's always the one thing that I'm going to go and check if it's done right, that's the canonicals and the language alternates. When you start such an audit, you probably have a workflow that you have to go through, but what is the one thing that you think that companies are forgetting about and shouldn't be forgetting about?

Rebecca: That is a ridiculously hard question, Peter. [chuckles] It's so specific. Because depending on the industry for a start, so if you're looking at a gifting website, one of the core aspects of that is going to be wildly different from a heavy text-back website or anything. For example, selling a laptop or even a fridge, mass merchants and so on.

One thing we can fairly consistently find that is still an issue with all the sites that we look at is their search. Their search is predominantly quite poor. That's anything from the varying types of search, your exact search, your feature search, you have slang, you have abbreviation, you've got thematic. All of these aspects across the board, the search for majority of e-commerce sites is still surprisingly weak. There are a great deal of users who just prefer to use search. Knowing that if your search is particularly weak, then not having a particularly good category taxonomy to back that up, it can cause just so many issues for that user. It's still consistently interesting to find and look at what the search landscape looks across the majority of sites regardless of industry.

Peter: One of the SEOs on my LinkedIn feed was showing a couple of examples of, I believe UK e-commerce retailers who had no results when he searched for Black Friday on Friday. It seems that search is something that people are forgetting about or just using the default settings over whatever their search is. This is something that we often see. Very right. I've mentioned that I've invited you for this podcast because you had a very interesting presentation at the Slovenian sMind Conference. That was called the 6 Findings from Testing the World’s Leading Checkout Flows. Before we go to your presentation, how is-- That's a weird question because I live in Ljubljana. How was Ljubljana and how was the conference for you?

Rebecca: Ljubljana was-- It was beautiful. I sadly didn't get as much an opportunity as probably deserving of such a beautiful city to really look around it. One of the representatives from e-commerce sMind was so-- Sorry. e-commerce-- I can't even say it now. Shopper's Mind e-Commerce Day was kind enough to actually take myself and another speaker around a little bit one of the evenings, so we did get to see some parts of it. It's such a beautiful city. I would really like to visit again.

The day itself was great. The atmosphere was fantastic. Everyone was so kind. It was wonderful having just people being comfortable enough to come to you for feedback for a start. You never know how these go unless someone actually tells you exactly what they have or have not been able to take away, any improvements and so on. It was a lovely crowd. It was really well put together. It's a real testament to what Ljubljana, Slovenia, and obviously the Croatia side of things as well and what the company has been putting together. I felt very touched to be able to have the opportunity to come and speak.

Peter: Excellent. All right. Let's go to your presentation. 6 Findings from Testing the World’s Leading Checkout Flows. Rebecca, here are your five minutes.

Rebecca: Okay. Obviously, the checkout is such an integral part of any e-commerce store. If you can't purchase online, it's not really e-commerce. Having a robust checkout that's really going to perform well for a user is so important. What we really found over a lot of our data studies was that 70% of users who put something in their cart would end up abandoning it. That's two-thirds of users we're going through all the trouble of finding a product that they liked, added it to their cart, but they'd still ultimately not purchase it.

If you took away all of those users who were simply not ready to purchase, which is completely fair, there's only so much that a site can do about that, but when you look at the reasons that were left, so many of them could be improved with relatively simple checkout optimization. Some of the core things that we were particularly interested in, one of which is checkout length. 23% of users in one of our studies cited that a too long or complicated checkout process was a reason for abandoning the site during a checkout process during their checkout flow.

Our most recent 2019 checkout UX benchmark, which is something that Baymard does, we look at 60 top-grossing US and European sites and use those to take a look at what the landscape looks like for e-commerce UX, we found that the average e-commerce site in 2019 has 12.8 form fields within their checkout flow. This may not seem like a lot, but considering you could actually essentially half that number, sites could get that number down to six to eight form fields for a guest checkout. 12.8 is actually quite a lot. There's such a disproportionate amount of time that users will spend with any open-text form field. Increasing time, causing issues, causing errors, that being able to minimize the amount of form fields, essentially the amount of tasks a user has to do can really create an improved performance and improve experience for the user.

The other thing that we found really quite fascinating, at least I know that I did, was the perception of site security. Because the perception of site security can be just as, if not even more impactful than the actual site security that is present. 17% of users in the same survey, they abandon the checkout process because they just didn't trust the site with their card information. Users, we found we're believing that part of a page, so if you feel the box and area in [unintelligible 00:10:46] were more secure than other parts. Even though from a technical standpoint this doesn't make sense, the page is either encrypted or not, the fact that we were aware of this fact from our users, we can then leverage this misconception.

Creating a visual robustness, leveraging the importance of site seals, and also what sites seals are more beneficial. A fascinating thing, we've found that some large companies were not given the same weight as just a simple padlock because that's something that users recognize. Knowing about these particular instances and how users react to that information can be so powerful in how we're able to create a comforting and a secure experience, as well as a good experience for our users.

Finally, just a simple factor of mobile keyboard optimization. There are still issues across so many sites that are simply just not optimizing the mobile keyboard for their users during the checkout, and with the occasional even dire consequence. In fact, granted that dire is quite a drastic term, but that is exactly what it feels like for a user who doesn't receive their package. Anything from it needing to be for a big event or a wedding or a birthday, not receiving something that you're so looking forward to can be really quite detrimental. We're finding that even something as simple as not disabling the autocorrect feature for fields that don't benefit from it, name or address fields, that can result in the dire consequence of not receiving a package. It's something essentially simple. Our data is showing that 79% of mobile sites are not disabling autocorrect for those fields.

On top of that, it's just needless friction from not finding or utilizing the optimized keyboards for email addresses, telephone numbers, credit cards and so on, the alphanumeric, numberic, the @ symbol and so on. Even on top of that, doing it consistently. 25% of mobile sites weren't consistently evoking optimized keyboard. For example, credit card came out with numeric, fine. As soon as you entered security code, it'd go back to alpha. Again, it just really comes down to this needless friction. When the companies really pay attention to that and how you can alleviate it, it can just make such a difference to the site.

Peter: Thank you. I have a couple of questions coming here. I've listened to your presentation and the idea of thinking about the number of fields and the checkout compared to the idea of the number of steps for the checkout was something that was enlightening for me. I was like, "How did I ever not think about that?" Of course, I went home and started minimizing the number of fields on my website. I came down to, I think what was six fields.

The question that I had then while watching the data coming in was, "Did I go too far?" I would like to hear your thoughts about that. I feel that customers are a bit used to having a bit bigger number of fields where the post number and the city are two different fields, and maybe name and surname are two different fields. I somehow felt that people are now misunderstanding my checkout fields. Is this something that you also see in your tests?

Rebecca: Things like it will come up occasionally. It's part of the reason for a good placeholder text, good tooltips. Whenever a user does encounter something, not unusual, but something they're not necessarily used to, it can immediately be a little bit jarring. Microcopy is such an important aspect, especially within the checkout. I think a lot of sites don't necessarily pay attention to their microcopy the way that they should. There's a reason why UX copywriters are becoming such a big career choice within our industry. I think it's so important and something that's just not paid attention to the way that it should.

There are multiple reasons for anything, [chuckles] sadly. If users are used to seeing 12, suddenly seeing 6, it can be jarring. That's not to say that it's a bad experience because it's jarring, it's just a new experience. There will always be a little bit of habituation time, but it's knowing that what you're able to actually offer the user is that improved experience. Bolstering the microcopy, bolstering the placeholder text, bolstering the tooltips if appropriate.

It's also just determining what is actually useful for your particular site. If your site is niche in any way, six to eight is the average for "a typical e-commerce site". It's ensuring that you don't overly assume anything to be typical. If you're a gift predominant site, then changing your address fields or matching your billing to shipping address by default isn't immediately beneficial. If you've got something very important for an industrial site, then yes, you might need company details over just having a standard address. That is the nature of heuristics, heuristics are a rule of thumb. We are finding that, more often than not, these are the best situations to be and these are the best patterns to follow. However, never ignore the niche that you're in if you happen to be in a niche.

Peter: The workflow is go and check out the expert findings that you have on your website, then change it on your website, but still measure the impact and see if it can be directly used on your website or not.

Rebecca: Yes, in a great deal. Not only look at we're suggesting but why we're suggesting it. With all of our data, we try and back up with what the issue is, why it is an issue, so what we're seeing during all of our research to lead us to the conclusion that X is happening, therefore implement Y should alleviate. Because the other side of it, and it's something that we will do during auditing is mark something as issue resolved. The site may not necessarily be doing what we have specifically recommended, but they are circumventing the issue through another implementation.

It's bearing that level in mind as well, whether what we're suggesting of the 774, 767? We'll eventually keep track of that number. There will be a great deal of these that just simply won't be applicable to your industry or to your site. There's always going to be a little bit of a pinch of salt because that's the nature of heuristics, but that's not to say don't pay attention to what we have found.

Peter: Especially in e-commerce sites that feel that search engine optimization is important for them, we can usually see people starting to add category descriptions to their category landing pages. Whenever people start adding that to their e-commerce sites, the question comes up, should we have content above the products or should we have the content below the product? Should we have the content hidden and "read more" button or should we not? Do have any data on how that content can influence people coming to the category pages?

Rebecca: Our data at the moment and our research findings, we don't have anything specific with category descriptions. What we do find is what that page looks like. For example, the filters on the actual main list are out of line, or if something looks too much like an advertisement or a promotion rather than actual benefit or actual product, it can mislead or distract users the same way that banner blindness will just mean that they pay absolutely no attention to it.

With a lot of the information, and UX can often stand not in the way of SEO, but they're not always aligned with their needs quite often, that it's very important to essentially just understand what is the user needing to get from that page. Anything that a site therefore needs to do from a company perspective, is it stopping that user being able to do the fundamental task that they're looking for? If that is needing to filter and needing to understand the amount of products on a page, needing to create a visual comparison against products. Whatever the size or company needs to add from, again, a company perspective, as long as it doesn't stop the user being able to complete their task, then it really is a design preference.

Anything too large that pushes down the content of the page-- Because many users, they're are not adverse to scrolling when they've determined a purpose, so going through, say 100 products on a visual push site like apparel, that's fine. Users are quite accustomed to that. If it's taking them a disproportionate amount of time to understand what the page is actually doing or selling them, then that could be off-putting. If that category description is particularly long and showing that above the fold, then that could possibly-- Again, we don't have any hardcore data to say it will, but that could pause the user or hinder the user from being able to understand exactly what it is and what is the page they've landed on.

Peter: All right. You spoke briefly about the mobile keyword optimization. I'll just add the link to you. If I remember correctly, you have a page where you gave examples of how mobile fields should be optimized on your Baymard website, is that right?

Rebecca: Yes, we do. It's on our little cheat sheet. You can just find all of the code snippets and the attributes to establish and actually implement the best way to optimize these keywords. Some of them like card filled for example, they don't have a direct code phrase as it were to trigger numeric, you have to do it slightly more manually.

Peter: All right. Excellent. Rebecca, I think that's it. Where can people find you? Do you have conference plans? What are the social networks where people can find you and your company?

Rebecca: You can find us on LinkedIn. You can search for Baymard Institute and you can search for myself, Rebecca Hugo on LinkedIn if that's your prerogative. At the moment, we don't have any specific conference plans for Europe, but if you are interested in getting any of us in the company to speak, please don't hesitate to be in contact. If not, we've also got Twitter. Baymard Institute, we're also on Twitter. We love a bit of a chat. You're more than welcome to contact us there and we look forward to speaking with anyone.

Peter: All right. Excellent. Rebecca, thank you very much for being on the podcast and talking about the UX of e-shops. Next time you're in Ljubljana, we definitely can meet and [inaudible 00:22:31].

Rebecca: Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me today, Peter.

Peter: Have a great day.

Rebecca: You, too.

Peter: Bye.

#28 - Shayne Brian - 9 ways to monetise your message with podcasts Dec 02, 2019

Shayne Brian (linkedin) is the Director of Voice at Elevate Radio & Podcasts, a company that helps other companies start, run and scale podcasts. And they are good at it :D Shayne was invited to the DMSS 2019 where he talked about how to use podcasts to elevate your message.

If you are interested in to podcasting, here is the FREE offer that he talked about on the podcast, you can join the Podcast Essentials Program for FREE (valued at $197).

And, check out his presentation, a video recorded at one of his previous conferences.

Here the transcription of the talk we had:

Shayne: Think about some of the big podcasts isn't what they're known for. In fact, the reports just come out this week. The number one podcast for 2019 in every single country is Joe Rogan, then there's also GaryVee, and John Lee Dumas. They all have massive followings because they have shows that's consumed almost daily.

Peter: Hello and welcome to the Time for Marketing podcast. The podcast that brings you the best marketing conference presentations in five minutes directly to your podcast. Every 14 days on Mondays in your-- whatever podcast that you like to use. My name is Peter, and I'll be the host for this show today, and the same way as I've done the previous 27 episodes as this is episode number 28. Of course subscribing, and viewing, and subscribing to the newsletter and everything else that you have to do so that you get the next episodes that we already have lined up. It will be very interesting. Today with me from the other part of the continent, not continent. The other part of the world, is Shayne Brian. Shayne, hello and welcome to the podcast.

Shayne: Hi Peter, and thanks for having me on the podcast. Yes, I'm sitting here in the heat in Australia getting ready for another hot Christmas.

Peter: I envy that so much. I love the snow that we're getting, but on the other hand, I love being able to sit on the-- I imagine you sitting on the beach drinking cocktail and [crosstalk]

Shayne: I'm sitting on a beach drinking beer while I'm talking to you.

Peter: All right, excellent.

Shayne: No, I'm not really, but that would be lovely.

[laughter]

Peter: Shayne, you are the director of voice at the Elevate Radio and podcast company. Tell us a bit what you do, what your company does.

Shayne: We actually help people create podcast, so we help people produce podcast, distribute podcast. I actually started out in radio of being in radio for many many years, and I just love the whole environment of radio. I love music, and that was one of the things that really attracted me to creating Elevate Radio. It originally started as a radio station called Soul Traveler Radio, and we changed the name just last year to Elevate Radio. Over the last three years, we've seen podcast just come out of the woodwork. In fact, five years ago I was trying to convince businesses that they needed a podcast and they're like, "What's a podcast? You're crazy. No one's going to listen to a podcast." And here we are talking about podcast.

Peter: Yes, this is the position where I feel that in your Europe, a lot of companies still sit. I feel that podcast in the United States have blown up immensely, but in Europe it's still going why. This is why I was interested in having you to the podcast to try to talk to companies and all, and why they should do that.

Shayne: Yes. I just want to say, 95% of the podcast at the moment reside in the US, so the US have really embraced it. The other countries are really picking it up Europe and Australia. Don't be surprised if you start to see the podcast really start to become bigger and bigger in Europe.

Peter: If you are one of the podcast, you are one of the hundred thousands. If you're one of the vlogs, you're one of the hundred million vlogs, so the option to get there it's still much better actually, right?

Shayne: It is. Yes, it is. I'll actually present some of those figures in the talk.

Peter: That's good for the podcast because you had a presentation at the Digital Marketing Skillshare, of course 2019, in Bali. How was the conference?

Shayne: Fantastic. Actually, one of the best conferences I've been to. It was pretty funny, because it's very much SEO social media marketing conference. I contacted the lady that organizes it, Lisa, and the gentleman that runs it, Bree, and I said, "You need a podcast, or you need to be talking about podcast at your conference." They're like, "Why? Why are we talking about podcast? It's digital marketing."

Then when I actually spoke, they realized that it's very much a massive part of digital marketing these days, and it can be something that a business-- Well, it's something the business should be thinking about as part of their digital marketing strategy. The conference itself, fantastic. Met a lot of amazing people, a lot of amazing guys. Actually, met the guys from Authority Hacker who are based in Germany. Their whole business that they run is based around a podcast, because the podcast works.

Peter: Yes, and for whenever who is interested in doing any SEO, the Authority Hacker podcast is one of my favorite podcast. That means a lot. Dave elevated their business well once they've started doing a weekly podcast, and really sticking to the schedule of once a week immensely. I've been trying to get them to this podcast, but wasn't really able to get through any of those two guys, but I will get them. I will. All right, your presentation was nine ways to monetize your message using the power of podcast. I think that this is the time and place where we should go to your presentation, so Shayne here are your five minutes.

Shayne: Thank you. I'm actually going to not go too much into the nine ways, and I'll give you a link to the full podcast for the full presentation at the end of the podcast. What I really want to talk about is stories, and I want to talk about the reason why we love podcast so much. Pretty simply, the world love stories. Since the beginning of time, we've actually thrived on hearing stories. What started as stories told around campfires of Gods and monsters. Developed overtime, and yet even with all of the advances in technology at the start of the last century, there we were again telling stories on radio players like the famous War of the Worlds that cause mass hysteria.

Stories can motivate, thrill, scare, or simply portray a snapshot of our lives. A moment in time that our message, our greatest truth hits the ears of our audience for the very first time. The moment when you can hear a pin drop, a heart beating. Out of the silence, comes our story, your story, the story that you've been dying to tell. Now, when I first started in radio. I was told that I didn't have a voice that was good enough. Then for the next 20 years, I hid my voice. I did everything in radio except go on air. It was easier for me to become invisible than to suffer the embarrassment of having a voice that wasn't good enough.

Now years later, I met my wife for the very first time. During that very first coffee date, she said, "Wow, you must be an announcer because your voice is perfect for radio." It took 20 years of hiding, and in one moment everything became crystal clear to me. Something triggered in my brain, and I knew that I had to let the old story that I actually let that old story become my reality, and that I had to now let it go. Now, when I mention it to people, they can't believe that I allowed that thinking to beat me, but that's why I love doing what I do because you can never ever underestimate the power of a story, and the effect it can have on you, and on others.

The question remains why podcast? Well, because it's the fastest moving media on the planet right now. Now we know that everybody loves to hear a story. We can understand that it's surpassing growth rates of social media, and that there's no chance of slowing it down. In fact, 2020 is being heralded as the golden year for podcast. In the last 12 months, podcast consumption growth rate has become so big that the Spotify CEO Daniel Ek set aside 500 million dollars at the start of 2019 to acquire a podcast start-up companies. Now, it begs the question, why would a streaming music services spend that much on podcast?

Here's the truth. The average age of podcast listeners is 25 to 34 with 35 to 44 coming in next. I have to say it's actually becoming an even greater area with 45's to 54's now listening as well. Podcast ad revenue has grown as a result of the increase in the market, has grown 1,000% in five years. Now, if you just think about that for a minute, it's actually staggering.

According to recent reports by iHeartMedia, their digital revenue which includes podcasting increased by 33% in the third quarter in 2019. Traditional revenue decreased by 0.6%, so what does that tell us? Advertisers are placing more faith in the emerging podcast scene. To back this up, Forrester Research has predicted that podcasting will be a 1 billion dollar market by the end of 2020. If you are incorporating podcasting into your marketing plan then that is a massive chunk of income and potential business that you're letting sit by. It's time that your business jumped on board the bandwagon.

According to Statistics, musicsgoomf.com, and also the companies, Nelson and Edison. In 2019, there were 700,000 active podcasts, 29 million podcast episode and the average listener consumed seven different shows per week. To top that off, 45% of the listeners are well-educated and have a high income. Now, think about this for a minute. Not only are they smart, they're spoiled for choice and they listen to a lot of shows. You have a lot of competition and it will only increase in the next couple of years. I didn't mention these statistics to depress you, instead just to help you see that if you really plan out your podcast well it can bring in well-paying clients that are dedicated to devouring your shows every week.

What does that mean? That means that podcasts become a source of trust for many people. Think about some of the big podcasters and what they're known for. In fact, the reports just came out this week. The number one podcast for 2019 in every single country is Joe Rogan. There's also Gary Vee and John Lee Dumas. They all have massive followings because their shows are consumed almost daily. They also have a call to action on their shows. Joe Rogan has special sponsor offers. John Lee Dumas has affiliated links and Gary Vee has calls to action to work with his media agency.

What actually happens is, their listeners become intimately involved with the podcaster not in a creepy stalkers way but in a way that means that they will look up to you as an authority and will trust what you have to say over others. That's what's happening in the podcast arena and what we actually do is we teach you how you can as a business cash in by telling your story and actually ride the Tsunami that's actually heading our way.

We will actually show you how you can leverage both your message and your story to bring in a cash flow for you and it's really important that over the next few years or actually even the next 12 months that you consider podcast as part of your marketing strategy. I think that was five minutes [laughs].

Peter: All right. That was somewhere around there. I will add the links to your presentation to these show notes but If I am a CEO or marketing director of the company and you've just convinced me, I want to do podcasting, just thinking, how do I? What is the first step that should be done?

Shayne: It's really simple. There's a three-step process that we operate with. The first one is to know your story. Everybody in business knows their product really intimately and can build a story around their product, to make it sound interesting. The second thing is record. Get your phone out, buy yourself a Blue Yeti that can plug into your laptop or your computer and just record yourself speaking or record yourself chatting with somebody else about your topic then send the file to us and we edit it. We create the podcast for you and it's as simple as that.

Peter: The podcasting Gimlet Media is the podcasting company that everyone speaks about because they were acquired this year. When I check out their podcast that they are doing for others, it seems that doing interviews with smart people is the solution that they are going with for other companies. Would you agree that this is probably the best way of how to do podcast?

Shayne: There's a couple of different ways and it really depends on your budget. Let's be honest, if you want to do a simple podcast, the easiest way is to interview someone. Why would you interview someone to promote your business? The simple thing is this, if you have aligned yourself with someone who has a similar message to you and who can speak about what your business is about then what's actually happening is you're aligning with their audience as well.

If you're doing an interview with someone, make sure it's someone that has got a lot of following, bringing some good following then they will actually share your podcast. Because they're in a similar business to you, you know that the people that are listening to them are going to be wanting to know more about you as well. That's the first thing that they do and the reason why they do interviews but the other thing that Gimlet is really big on and this is becoming a much bigger. In fact, we're actually in the middle of doing two of these podcasts at the moment.

Gimlet are doing curated podcasts. What a curated podcast is as a large corporation, you could turn around to us, for example, and say we've got a budget of $100,000, we want to put together like a 26-episode podcast series. We don't know where to start. We don't even want to talk on the podcast. What can you do? What we would do is we would actually sit down with them and create a podcast, bring on a host, bring on journalists, bring on whatever it is that we want to go down, whatever path we want to go down.

We're actually doing this with one of the survivors of the Waco tragedy that happened in America and he was actually there on the ground when the place got burnt to the ground and everybody died, David Koresh and his followers. We're actually curating a podcast and getting interviews and putting it together and it's called Waco: The inside story. I think this is becoming even bigger, the curated podcast than just the interviews and that's what Gimlet are really focusing on as well now.

Peter: We are still at the time where it's pretty hard to measure the success of a podcast, right? Different platforms have their different metrics. Is there a modern new way of how we are better able to handle that?

Shayne: I actually have a process that I follow that was taught to me by one of the big podcasters in America called Steve OSHA. I call it the thousand dollar funnel and basically what it is, is this, if you've done a podcast and it's been a successful podcast and people really love listening to you, they've actually started to trust what you have to say. After listening to you for an hour, they are going to want to know more about you so by providing them with the link for a free giveaway or a free offer, you're actually going to be making sure that the listener that has begun to trust you will connect with you.

Now, at that point of that free offer, once they've clicked that button, what he actually does is he has another link that pops up and it might be a $5 offer then he'll have a third link that pops up and it might be a $45 offer. By doing that you're actually creating this flow for people to go through, this funnel for people to go through. Because they've trusted you in listening to that podcast and they've come on and they've downloaded that free ebook or whatever it is that you're offering them, the next step of them pulling out their wallet and actually doing business with you is a lot easier.

That's how we can actually measure the process and the reason he calls that the thousand dollar funnel is because every time he appears on a podcast, he makes a thousand dollars. It's really simple [chuckles]. I think it changes every time but obviously it's something-- that's what he calls it but the concept is really simple and it's a really easy way to measure the success of not just people listening to the podcast but the success of what you're saying, how successful are you at conveying your message to the public.

Peter: Don't use vanity metrics, use metrics that really impact.

Shayne: Don't use vanity metrics.

Peter: That's very good idea.

Shayne: That's for sure. You want to look at the hard figures. I'm going to say that I'm actually going to give everybody that's listening to this podcast free access to one of our programs that will teach you how to prepare yourself for podcasting. It's called podcasts essential. I'm more than happy to offer that to all of your listeners.

Peter: Okay. I think that's it. Shayne, where can people find you do you have any future conferences planned already?

Shayne: Look I actually have quite a few things that are coming up next year. You can find me on Facebook. Just look up Shayne Brian and connect with me on Facebook, on LinkedIn. If you go to elevate podcast.com, that will take you through to our podcast power program. I'm actually going to give you a link, Peter, that you can actually share with everyone that will give people access to our special offer which is the podcast essentials. This is something that we normally sell for $97 and I'm happy to give that away to everyone that's listening here.

Peter: Excellent. I'll put that to the show notes and in the show notes you'll also find the whole presentation. That means that there's a lot of value for you to open up the time for marketing.com website and find the show notes for the podcast. Shayne, it was great. Go and enjoy your beer on your Australian beach that you are enjoying.

Shayne: [laughs] I will. I'll have a prawn as well.

Peter: Excellent. Very good and thank you for being on a podcast and have a great day.

Shayne: Thank you, Peter, it's being pleasure.

Peter: All right, bye-bye.

#27 - Emre Güney - Why retention matters? Nov 04, 2019

Emre is Global Senior Lifecycle Manager at Skyscanner. We talked about how to get your website visitors to come back, as this is one of the most important tasks that Skyscanner has to do.

If you would like to chat up Emre, you can find him here https://www.linkedin.com/in/emreguney/ https://twitter.com/emrreguney

Here is the presentation he presented at the Digital Zone 2019 conference in Istanbul, Turkey.

Emre Güney - Why retention matters - Digital Zone 2019 from Peter Mesarec

#26 - Greg Gifford - The Secret of Local Search Success in 2019 Oct 07, 2019

You can find Greg on Twitter or on Linkedin, here is his agency. Greg is the dude that knows about local SEO and if you have questions about it, you should talk to him.

One of the best sources for local SEO knowledge, as mentioned by Greg is 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors.

The Dude's Guide to The Secret of Local Search Success in 2019 and Beyond from Greg Gifford Here is the transcript of the podcast: Greg: Google uses multiple algorithms so SEO is not equal across the board.
[music]
Peter: This is Time for Marketing. The marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference.
[music]
Peter: Hello and welcome to the Time for Marketing podcast. The podcast that tells you everything that you have missed when you didn't go to your best and favorite marketing conference. My name is Peter and I'll be your host for today. This is episode number 26 that is airing on the 7th of October 2019. Before I introduce you to our today's guest, I have something to ask you.
Could you take the time and open your slack, your Trello, whatever communication channel you have for your agency or for your company. The place where you send all of the interesting links that you read and could you just paste the link to this podcast and say, "I've learned something here." That'll be great. People should know about this podcast.
Now, today, with us the big, the great, Greg Gifford. Greg, hello and welcome to the podcast.
Greg: Hey, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Peter: How are you doing up there in the hot state of Texas?
Greg: Still hot, unfortunately. We're hoping that now that we're getting down into the 80s, maybe we'll start to get colder but you never know in Texas. It could be up in the hundreds again next week but we're good.
Peter: All right. When you look outside your window, do you see cactuses? That's how I figure--
Greg: And tumbleweeds and we all ride horses to work. [laughs] Texas is massive. That's one of the funny things when talking to people from Europe about how big Texas is. We've got mountains, we've got deserts. Other than the fact that when I was in Sylvania it was a nicer part of the year and so everything was green but very similar looked with things. Texas is fairly flat compared to most of Europe. At least most of Texas is but the crazy thing is just the scale. I could get my car right now and drive 80 to 85 miles an hour and go west and it would take me 14 hours to get out of Texas.
Peter: It's a completely different scale because if I would do that I'll be changing five different countries probably.
Greg: Yes, it's pretty crazy.
Peter: Greg, you are the vice president of Search at the Wikimotive Agency. Tell us a bit about your agency and more what do you do as the vice president of Search?
Greg: I came on earlier this year with this agency. It's a small boutique agency and I came on because for the last, Jeez, years and years and years, I've been doing SEO exclusively for car dealers for probably 12 years and the place that I worked last time was approved by all of the car manufacturers. Not that that was a bad thing, but we had a very set SEO package that we had to offer which was great.
We still got results and did well but I wanted to branch out and expand my reach and do some other things so I came to Wikimotive. They do have a lot of automotive clients but they've got clients outside of automotive and we're making some big pushes into some other verticals. I'm able to stretch my wings here and do some fun things outside of automotives.
Peter: All right. What does that mean that the agency was approved by car manufacturers?
Greg: It's a weird thing in the US that if you were a car dealer you-- Let's use Ford or BMW as an example. You have a set number of website providers that you're allowed to use that are manufacturer-approved. BMW will say, "You can use one of these four companies to do your website, you can use one of these four or five companies to do your PPC and you can use one of these four or five companies to do your SEO."
For most of the manufacturers, you can choose to use a different company if you want but if you use the company that is approved by the manufacturer then the manufacturer will pay for it. There's a lot of benefit. The manufacturer will send all this co-op money out to dealers to use for various marketing things that they do. It works well for the dealerships because then they don't have to spend money on it. That's what the whole vendor-approved thing is. We were on the approved list for all of the major automotive [unintelligible 00:05:04].
Peter: You are doing weekly video on your website, tell us a bit about that.
Greg: We do a weekly video series called Tactical Tuesdays With Wiki where every Tuesday we do a short video. Most of the time there are three to five-minute videos on some digital marketing tactic. Every once in a while, though we will share a longer video. I just spoke at the Advanced Search Summit in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago and so this week's video basically I did a re-recording of my presentation and did it with the slide. Now, we've shared that entire presentation but most the time it's short, quick, easy to digest tips about current things going on in Search or specific tips that will help you show up better.
Peter: All right. If you've done a lot of SEO for automotive companies, that means local SEO was always a big part of what you do. Is that still a thing?
Greg: Yes, very much so. That's what I'm known for. I speak at conferences all over the world about local SEO and teaching people here's what to do to show up better in local searches.
Peter: This is also the presentation that I wanted to talk to you about. You spoke at the Advanced Search Summit in Washington, D.C. a couple of weeks ago. What the title of the presentation it's pretty long. The Dude's Guides to The Secret of Local Search Success in 2019 and Beyond. We will attach the presentation to the podcast show notes. I've checked the presentation, you like movies don't you?
Greg: I do. I'm a movie man. I was actually a movie major in college so I wanted to go to Hollywood and make movies but clearly that didn't end up happening. I ended up getting into computers instead but I have a full sleeve on my right arm of movie portrait tattoos from various movies and then I'm almost finished getting a sleeve on my right leg of all stuff from the Goonies. I really, really love movies and every time I do presentations I always have a movie theme.
Peter: Because as you say in one of the first slides bullet points are killing you, right?
Greg: Yes, because I think this year I'll end up speaking at 27 or 28 conferences by the end of the year and I see a lot of presenters. A lot of times you see presenters at conferences that may have really great information but they're just incredibly boring to watch. The background of their slides is just white background and black text and they just have a whole bunch of bullet points on their slides and they're just standing there on the stage and read their bullet points. It's just not a very entertaining presentation to watch.
Not that they have to be entertaining but it's just painful to sit there and watch somebody read their slides. I believe that bullet points kill kittens and I don't ever use bullet points in my presentations.
Peter: All right. We had enough of chitchat. Greg, here are your five minutes to sum up your marketing conference presentation.
Greg: One of the important things that people need to realize that I always like to talk about is that Google uses multiple algorithms. SEO is not equal across the board. It's important to understand with the business that you work with or the website that you're working with which algorithm is going to apply. If it's a business that has a physical location where customers come to that place of business to do business with the business or if it's a business that serves people in a particular area like a plumber or an electrician, then that website needs to be using the local SEO tactic so that you're including all of the additional things that matter to that local algorithm.
There's overlap between Google's traditional algorithm and the local algorithm so doing traditional SEO will still give you some benefit but if you've got that physical location or you're serving in a particular area then local is what's going to provide the best results to what you're doing. It's really important to pay attention to various experts in local so that you can stay up to date especially in the UK and Europe where you guys are just starting to catch on and really have people talk at conferences about local SEO where I've been talking about conferences about local SEO for like 10 years in the States.
It's just because I think people are really just now starting to understand, "My gosh, this can make a massive difference." You want to follow the right people on Twitter, you want to test your own stuff to make sure that you're doing things that actually work. There's a study that's conducted by a company called White Spark and then published on the Moz Blog. They're called The Local Search Ranking Factors.
That's important to pay attention to because it gives a playbook of, "These are the signals that matter the most for showing up in these local searches." You can see from year to year, what's changed, what's become more important, what's become less important and really the things that matter the most are links and content and then your Google my business listing.
Sure, links are important in regular SEO but the important thing with local SEO is you want to get local links. You want links from other businesses and other web sites that are in your particular geographic area because those are the links that Google's local algorithm is going to provide more weight to. The good thing about these local links, it doesn't matter if they're no-follow links, it doesn't matter if they don't have a lot of authority if you're using Moz, you're looking at the main authority or Majestic with Trust Flow.
It doesn't matter what those authority metrics are because they're still going to count and provide value. Then definitely check through the slides that are going to be attached to the podcast here because there's a lot of different ideas that I run through of things that you can use to get these local links. With local content, it's really important that it's conversational content. Everything that's on your website should sound like something that you would say face to face to a customer that just walked through your front door.
It's really helpful to read everything out loud because then you'll catch things that don't really sound conversational. Then with local SEO, you've probably heard about citations, that's basically directory listings where it's name, address, phone number listed on other websites. That used to be much more important so you can discount all the stuff that you'll read that says you have to get hundreds and hundreds of citations.
Really, the only ones that matter now are the ones that potential customers might see so you want to do a google search for the name of your business and run through the first three pages of Google search results. Those are the only citation sites that you need to worry about. Then the final thing that I always want to make sure to push the point across is that Google My Business is absolutely important now. Your Google My Business listing is basically your new homepage so if someone's wanting to get your phone number they don't have to go to your website anymore.
If someone wants to get your address they don't have to go to your website. If someone wants to see pictures or read reviews, they can get all of that right there in Google My Business. It's really important that you optimize your listing. Obviously, make sure you've claimed it, have the right categories chosen. The category that you choose and put in the primary slot actually carries a little bit more ranking value so you want to make sure you're strategic in which one you're putting there.
Make sure you've got a local phone number listed and then make sure you're using the new features that have been released. We've got Google posts which is basically--we call it just free advertising. It's an image and some text that show up as a thumbnail in your profile that people can then click and it blows up bigger and they can see more text and a bigger image, that really helps you stand out from competitors. Lots of businesses aren't using them yet, it's a way to drive pre-site conversions.
Then the most important thing is the new feature called Questions and Answers that shows up in the Google My Business profile. It's a community discussion feature where anyone in the community can ask a question and anyone in the community can answer the question for the business which is pretty scary because you don't really want other people answering questions that customers are intending for your business. It's important to monitor that and make sure that you're keeping an eye on when new questions pop in so that you can go and answer them.
Then each question can get multiple answers, so the answer that shows as the primary answer to the question is the one that has the most upvotes. You've got to make sure that you're not just answering questions but making sure that your answers have the most upvotes so that you can control that first impression. I know I went through that really quickly, that was a whole lot to try to squeeze into just a few minutes but definitely check out the slides, there's tons and tons of really helpful information in there.
Peter: This feels like we got another social network that we need to take care of, is that true?
Greg: I wouldn't really call it a social network but a lot of people already pay attention to Google My Business because of the customer reviews. They know, "Hey, this is where people are going to leave us reviews, we need to go pay attention to the reviews, we need to ask for reviews, we need to answer those reviews." Now, it's almost like a new review section. Technically, you're not supposed to put reviews there but a lot of people do.
Something else that we see really often is people think it's a messaging system and that it goes directly to the business because the general public doesn't realize that it's just a community discussion feature. We'll see questions all the time where people will say, "Hey, what's your phone number? I've got something I want to buy from you. I need to call you or I need your service, what's your phone number?"
If you're not paying attention to that then you miss that sales opportunity or that service opportunity and even though the button that you have to click to ask that question is right next to the phone number in the Google My Business profile, it doesn't matter, people expect that it's messaging and you're paying attention. They're not going to take that extra step to go to your website and see your phone number because they think that if they put that in that's a message that pops up at the business somewhere.
We see that a ton. We've now seen too that Google is starting to autosuggest answers. If you go into a Question and Answer section and say that you want to ask a question and you start typing in a question, if it's similar to another question that's been asked in the past then Google will auto-suggest the answer to that question so you don't even actually have to submit the question anymore. It's really important to go in and preload your questions. You could actually ask questions as the business. You want to go in and ask those questions. We call it setting up a pre-site FAQ page.
Peter: Google My Business used to have a lot of spam and people using black hat tactics. Is 3 still this way? Do we still have to be careful what all the competition is going to do to us or is Google [inaudible 00:16:07] helping with that?
Greg: Very much so. It's awful and you guys are lucky over there and your app it's nowhere near as bad as what it is here in the States, it is just spamtastic. There are just all kinds of people faking listings and creating lead-gen opportunities with fake businesses to try to sell leads to businesses and it's just awful. There is a form that you can go report fake listings on but they pop up just as quickly as you cancel them.
I would expect that over in Europe, it's just going to continue to get worse and as everyone over there that's in the kind of shady or gray areas of business and they're trying to figure out ways to work, they're going start watching what we're doing here in the States and seeing how easy it is to fake stuff. I have friends that have local SEO agencies and most of what they do is just fight spam instead of-- You don't have to necessarily spend as much time optimizing your client site if you can get them to rank better by taking down all the cheaters that are spamming things.
Peter: You said in your presentation that the local listings are not really as important, on the other hand, I've just saw weeks ago that SEMrush, the SEO tool, added the listings tool into their tool. Is it still going to be important? Should people use such tools or you think not?
Greg: I think it's really going to become less and less important as far as the ranking algorithm goes. We won't have to worry so much about nap consistency in the future. I think what it really becomes and we're kind of moving in that direction already, it really just becomes what customers might see. You don't want to just concentrate on Google and say, "Hey, I'm on Google and it's correct." Let's say you have a business and that business moves and so you are now at a new address but you don't update any of your listing sites, then you may have all of these other listing sites that have your old address.
Even though that might not matter for the ranking algorithm, it matters for your customer experience because someone may do a Google search and not pay attention to Google My Business and they may pull you up on another device. I was actually talking to a friend of mine the other day that had a guy coming to install something in his house and the guy said that it wasn't showing up on MapQuest and he said, "Just use Google because it's on Google." The guy said, "I don't even have Google on my phone."
There are people out there that don't rely on Google and they may use MapQuest or they may use Yelp or they may use Apple maps or something else. It is important to pay attention to the citational location listing sites that are publicly visible which is why I said earlier, go through the top two or three pages of Google search results. Those ones that show up to the general public are probably always going to be important from a customer-facing standpoint even though they may not matter for the ranking algorithm.
Peter: All right. All in all, if you are in Europe, there's Google My Business that you should start using and if you are in the US, start using it more and stop the spam that is out there.
Greg: Definitely.
Peter: Something or somewhere like that. All right Greg, thank you very much for your presentation, your summation of the presentation. What are your future plans for the conferences? Where can people see you and if not on the conferences, where can people find you?
Greg: I am heading to PubCon in Las Vegas next week and the week after that I will be in London doing SearchLove London and then the first week of November I'm speaking at a conference called State of Search in Dallas. Later that week, I'm heading to Los Angeles to speak at UnGagged. The week after that I will be at SMX East in New York City.
Those five or six conferences are the last of my conference schedule for the year. Also, if you're out in Europe and not able to pop over here, pop over to London to see me there. I have a Fundamentals of SEO training video on SEMrush on their academy section. If you go to the SEMrush Academy pages, there is an entire training course that's about, I think, three and a half, four hours long on SEO basics.
If you're just getting started, or if you want a refresher on the basics, it's that SEO fundamentals course. Just last week, we released a new course that I did for them on keyword research. It's about an hour long. Over the next few months, I've got three other new courses coming out. The keyword research one just came out then we'll be doing one on link building, one on mobile SEO, and one on local SEO.
Peter: A lot of you everywhere. Well, you're an important guy, so you should be there. Thank you very much for being on the podcast and sharing your local search knowledge. I'll see you around. Have a great day.
[music].

#25 - Matthew Woodward - Case study: 14 x Organic traffic in just 8 months Sep 23, 2019

Matthew publishes blog content and case studies on his personal website and on his company website. The case study that we talked about is published here with much more information and all the tiny details.

You can also find Matthew on Linkedin or Twitter.

You can also watch the whole presentation on YouTube

Here is the transcript of the podcast:

Matthew: One of the biggest wins we had was with the homepage where we deploy I think around 10,000 words of content.

Peter: This is the time for marketing. The marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference.

Peter: Hello welcome to the time for marketing podcast the podcast that gives you all of the information that you have missed when you didn't attend your marketing conferences. Welcome to episode number 25 my name is Peter and I'll be your host for today before we go to our guests. I'm not going to tell you to subscribe to the podcast I'm going to tell you and ask you something else tomorrow when you go to work. Yes, I know you work with a lot of marketing people when they leave their cell phones on the table take them open their podcast app and subscribe them to my podcast, that's probably the easiest way to tell people to subscribe to the podcast thank you. All right and now let's go to the guests that we have this time hello Matthew Woodward how are you doing?

Matthew: [laughs] Hey, thanks for having me on. I love your little tip there a very blackhat approach so to speak I think I might steal that one for myself of next conference [laughs]

Peter: Well, people don't randomly talk about podcast and mention podcasts to other people that doesn't happen. We have to give them specific advice this is always a marketing thing be very specific on what people should do click here, subscribe other people to my podcast. Nice to have you here on the podcast, Matthew.

Matthew: Thank you very much.

Peter: Matthew people know you. You have a very known blog that is matthewwoodworth.codit.uk and you are also the director of search logistics. Tell me what are the fun things that you do in your line of work?

Matthew: Well, my line of work all of it is fun from top to bottom. I've been doing SEO since before link-building existed and I've been following my passion ever since. The fun things I get to do every day is just nerd out on what I love doing and that is SEO and digital business and everything like that. Honestly, it doesn't matter if I'm doing like some like boring data entry tasks or planning a new promotion [laughs] I love it all.

Peter: All right. I invited you to this podcast because you were in Barcelona, how is Barcelona?

Matthew: Yes Barcelona a beautiful city. I don't usually like cities, but Barcelona was pretty cool. The Affiliate Summit Conference is one of my favorite conferences because it attracts such a wide variety of people rather than just SEO or just the ECOMAS guys and so forth. It's a great conference and I put together a great presentation for them which I'm hoping to boil down and share with you guys today.

Peter: I feel that affiliate marketing is, similar to SEO, it has been pronounced dead a couple of times in the past.

Matthew: Yes.[laughs]

Peter: It's still there and it still works very well right?

Matthew: Yes, as long as there are things to buy there'll be affiliates and as long as there are search engines to search they'll be SEOs. [laughs]

Peter: All right let's not beat around the bush that's what we do. Let's go directly to your presentation, your presentation was a case study on how to increase your search traffic for 14 times?

Matthew: Yes, we took search traffic from 2,700 a month to 38,000 in just eight months with an affiliate site in the health niche.

Peter: All right. I think we have to take our five minutes so that you can explain to us how you did that so that we can repeat that for our own websites here you go.

Matthew: Look SEO doesn't have to be complicated. One of the things I know as popular SEO blog owner is that people always like looking for the secret ingredient or the supersecret to SEO. The truth of the matter is it just doesn't exist. There isn't a super-secret to find, there isn't a super ingredient, there isn't that one thing that's going to push you over the edge. It just doesn't work like that. It's a combination of factors that will help to elevate your search traffic. The problem is most people are only focused on one of those factors which is building links.

It's very easy to get lost in the technicalities and complications of SEO, but look it boils down really to a very, very simple three-step process. That is, first of all, take a look at technical SEO. You've got to build the structure of a solid and healthy website structure that not only Google loves, but people love as well. The second step is you've got to create content that actually helps people. It's actually, got to be relevant people actually want to engage with it. It's got to be the content that when people read it they want to share it. No one wants to link to a lemon and many people don't produce good enough content that's worthy of attracting links naturally it's a common mistake.

The third step is link building and that just acquiring links from relevant websites. That is 10 times easy to do when you've taken care of content creation and your technical SEO and on-site experience. Those three pillars the healthy site structure, the content and the link building those three pillars if you pay attention to them and work them together have absolutely incredible effects. You don't need SEO to be complicated just take care of the basics and Google will reward you. The problem is many people don't want to take care of the basics.

Honestly, that's all we did in this case study we 14 times search traffic in a highly competitive health niche and we only built 76 links. Over that period the site actually attracted around 350 links. Now the reason it was able to attract 280 links was that because we paid attention to site structure and content before we went out to do the link building. now if you had to budget for those additional 250 links in the health niche you'd probably have had to spend around a hundred to 150 dollars per link. Not only from an ROI perspective is taking care of your technical SEO and quality of content important.

It's important for your users, it's important for Google your rankings your traffic and conversion everything relies on getting those three pillars right, but so many people are blindly obsessed with link building they can't see the woods for the trees and then they use all of their effort and all of their resources building links which they're not getting the maximum value from those links because they haven't taken care of the other core pillars and when you take care of all of them they all work together and it's the most cost-effective way of increasing your search traffic.

Now the case study site and I've got a very detailed case study that drills down into all of the technical differences that we could simply not cover in five or ten minutes. If you want to check that out there's a full post on my blog along with a video that goes through all of the real nitty-gritty technical bits it leaves no stone unturned. We faced a common problem with this site that many people might face and when we were trying to rank it the search results were dominated by huge brands huge, huge, huge brands and that's quite scary when you're looking at it.

What we noticed is the brands that were ranking specifically the pages that were ranking were only ranking out of the strength of the domains Authority. They were not ranking because of individual page level metrics like backlinks that men that if we focused on page-level metrics we had an opportunity. For example where a site like Holland and Barrett might be ranking number three, but with zero links to the page. Yes, if we build a page it's got 15 links to it we've beaten them on page-level metrics and that gives us an opportunity to compete in the search results.

That was the common theme of this case study we were looking for search results where sites were purely ranking out on the main level metrics rather than page level and then we optimized all of the page level metrics in order to compete. Now the health niche is seriously, seriously competitive, but that approach allowed us to find lots of opportunities that

once we approached it with that mindset and that's how we got the competitive advantage with the entire strategy that was really the foothold that allowed us to take control. Once we identified the opportunity, it was in just a case of looking at our competitors seeing what they were doing why they were doing it how they were doing it.

We were looking at what they did that we liked, what we didn't like where they're using trust signals on the page was the content aligning to intent we really just did a very manual observation of the search results to see what we felt. Now, manual observation, the power of observation is one of the most underutilized skills you can have as a human being, like in general life. Not only in SEO but we can learn so much as by observing and in the SEO world, we're often distracted by big data and tools and analytics and all these other things that actually stops us from just using the computer between our ears.

Quite often you can just look at a search result and just ask yourself questions, why is this ranking and look through the data and come up with your own observations rather than just looking at what a tool says. That's important to do because you really start to get a feel not just for the SEO of the niche, because every niche is different, but also who your competitors are. Why are they your competitors, what they do good, what they do bad? It becomes more of a business exercise and it's something that's lost on many SEOs and people skip over.

Once we decided on our strategy, we observe the search results and we found our opportunities, then it was just a case of going and making sure we had build a solid site structure that Google loves and humans love. I drilled down more into that in the post be`cause it gets very technical and the issues this site had is unique to this site. We have issues with page speeds, site structure, duplicate content, had some issues with trust signals and a few other areas. Have a look at the full case study and see if your site suffers from any of those problems as well. If it does, you need to fix them.

Once we've taken care of there was like seven or eight key issues that was preventing us from building a solid foundation that Google loves. Once we built that, it was then just a case of creating content. Now, we created the content of the back of the manual observation we've done in the search results. We've made a note of what was ranking, what we liked about it, what we didn't like about it and so forth. We went out and created content that matched that specifications. One of the biggest wins we had was with the home page where we deployed I think around 10,000 words of content.

Sorry, the home page originally had 1,500 words of content on it. We increased that to nearly 11,000 words just by answering 20 of the most popular questions in the niche. The impact on that was the home page went from ranking for like a handful or keywords to over 11,000 different keywords just by adding about 10,000 words of content to the home page. We went out and we made sure all of the content we were creating for our target keywords is at least equal to or slightly better than our competitors. There's literally no reason to be ten-timesing your content, you've just got to match or better your competitors.

Once that was in place, it was just a case of acquiring links from relevant sites and trust me, many, many people struggle link building, but link building is really, really, really easy when you've created content that people actually want to link to. It's a much easier sell when you picture, hey, look at this awesome post when it is actually awesome and that's a big part that many people will miss when they're so focused on link building. They can't see the woods for the trees and then they miss out on much bigger opportunities and end up spending a bunch more money than they need to, to acquire the same amount of links.

Once we have taken care of on-site structure, technical SEO, the content and then the link building, those three basic pillars of SEO. We saw traffic grow from 2,700 per month to 38,000. That's a 14 time increase in 8 months in one of the most competitive niches on the planet. We did it solely by taking care of the every basic pillars of SEO, wasn't complicated and that's the biggest advantage that you often have in it in SEO. Just by using the power of manual observation and seeing where you can fit in with things rather than relying on tools and analysis and this and that and the other.

Just look for those opportunities with your eyes and then make sure you do the basics right, because if you do the very basics right of any business whether it's SEO or offline business, whatever it is, if you do the very basics right, you always see success and that is very much the case with SEO.

Peter: All right, thank you. A couple of very interesting things were mentioned, home page started ranking for giant number of keywords. Usually I would say that the home page, because it has to look nice and it doesn't really have as much content, it would usually rank for the brand keywords and more or less nothing else, but you switched that and wanted to get the home page ranked. How can be a home page competitive to 1,000 worded article from the competition?

Matthew: The home page usually has the most weight in terms of SEO. It usually has the most authority and you're right, most people only use a home page to try and rank for brand terms. What we did was we just made a list of the most popular questions in the niche and answered them. In you know, when you clicked to expand the question and it reveals the answer? That on it's own attracted a bunch of long tail keywords that were all relevant to our niche and then also reinforce all of our topical relevance. That was just something that tried on that site and we have great, great, great success with that.

Peter: All right, so it should be tried at other places too.

Matthew: Yes, and I've just have to point it out, beyond just finding out what the top questions where and answering to them, there was no keyword research that went into it. There wasn't any like strategy or planning that went into it. It was just, okay, let's answer all of these super relevant questions on the home page and see what happens, and that's what we did.

Peter: Very interesting, the tools got to compare yourself to the competition, Pop or Quora or others are really, really popular right now in SEO in the last couple of months. You're saying, use your brain and just see for yourself and you're going to understand your competition much better than using the tools.

Matthew: Yes, I'm not saying don't use the tools, but the tools shouldn't be the first thing that you use. The first thing that you should do is use the computer between your ears, do the search yourself, look at the search results, manually review them both on a desktop and a mobile phone and get a feel for it. Often just by looking, you see opportunities and while everyone else is distracted with automation and tools, you can just observe. It's how I see most of my success in life, I just sit back and observe. Observe the people that are winning, observe the people that are losing. Why are they winning? Why are they losing? Why is this person doing that?

Why do they making it? Just sit back and observe and if you apply that to the search results, I learn more just observing search results and doing random searches like best gaming laptop. I like watching how that search result has changed over the years. Two years ago you would've found a bunch of amazon affiliate sites there. Right now, there's not a single affiliate site there. Just that kind of observations tells you the direction that things are moving in. If you're building Amazon affiliate sites and you're not building businesses right now, well the search results are already telling you you're making the wrong decision. That's the power of observation, it's underutilized not just in SEO but in general life as well.

Peter: Yes, and I had a boss once who every morning he wanted to type all of the costs and income for the different marketing channels into the spreadsheet himself. He went through the numbers every day himself with his own brain and understood and of course, now the company has grown to up 300 people.

Matthew: Yes. That's-

Peter: There is an idea of understanding, getting the deep understanding of the field is the additional benefit.

Matthew: Yes, that's a very intelligent decision by him because he could just have someone else enter the numbers him read the data, but when you read the data you're not analyzing it in the same way as when you're actually in the got to doing it. Very smart move by your boss and I think there's a lesson there for all of the SEO community to take [laughs] Including myself actually.

Peter: All right Matthew. I think we had a very nice summation of your presentation at the Affiliate World in Barcelona. As mentioned, we'll add links to your blog post with your video and to your short presentation to the show notes. Where can people find you, contact you and of course read stuff that you write on your blog?

Matthew: Yes, the best way to read anything by me is to hit matthewwood.co.uk. There's a ton of content there that answers pretty much every SEO question you can ever think of. You'll also find a case study section and you'll find this case study, How We 14 Times Search Traffic. The case study includes all of the technical details that I wasn't able to include on the talk along with a video that steps you through the entire thing. I'm hoping that it's one of the best SEO videos you've ever seen, so leave me a comment and let me know if that's the case.

Peter: All right, let everyone go and check that. Do you have any future conference plans already set up?

Matthew: I'm going to be talking at Chiang Mai SEO in November and I got a couple of a potential bookings next year that we're just ironing out the details of [laugh] but Chiang Mai SEO will be next one, yes

Peter: One more thing, when I went through our communication in Gmail, I searched for your name and then I found out when was the first time when I really met you but contact with you. It was probably last year. I think it was last year when you were having SEO Black Friday deals.

Matthew: Oh yes. Yes.

Peter: Black Friday is coming slowly. Are you having something similar this year too?

Matthew: Yes. For the last five or six years, I've published a site, internetmarketing.blackfriday, which covers all of the Black Friday deals across the SEO and blogging niche. I think last year we had like a whole 120 different deals loaded and I think 11 of them were exclusive to us as well. That's something that I've been doing for quite a long time and we'll be doing it this year as well.

Peter: All right. Excellent. I think that's it. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. It was extremely informational.

Matthew: Yes. Perfect.

Peter: Glad for having you here and have a great day.

Matthew: Thank you very much. It's been great to be here.

#24 - Joelle Irvine - Image & Visual Browse Optimization Opportunities Sep 09, 2019

Joelle is the Director of Marketing & Growth at Bookmark (her on Linkedin) and she spoke at the MozCon 2019 with a presentation on Image & Visual Browse optimization opportunities. The official title of her presentation was Get The Look: Improve the Shopper Experience with Visual Search Optimization. In a time where everyone talks about voice optimization, she thinks about the new channels that visual browse and purchase will bring.

You can check out the slides from her presentation here:

Get The Look: Improve the Shopper Experience with Visual Search Optimization from Joelle Irvine Here is the transcript of the podcast:

Joelle Irvine: This is something that's not widely used by many researchers, but the interest is really growing. There are some studies done, ViSenze actually did a study where they found that 62% of Millennials would really like to be able to search by image and 58% of them would like to be able to click to purchase directly from content.

Peter Mesarec: This is Time for Marketing. The marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference. Hello and welcome to the Time for Marketing podcast, the podcast that brings you information from the conference's that you were not able to attend in a short time span because we know you are all busy enjoying the last days of summer.

This is the episode number 24. My name is still Peter and we will go directly with our guests joining us today from beautiful Canada up there and to the left very far away from me is sitting Joelle Irvine.

Joelle: Hi Petter. How are you?

Peter: I'm very well, how are you doing? Today is Tuesday. You're slowly starting your workweek.

Joelle: Yes.

Peter: Did you already start after the summer? For agencies stuff usually dies down a bit or declines back are they sending emails and trying to do everything for Black Friday and everything in the fall that they have planned.

Joelle: We actually don't really have any slow periods here at Bookmark. Not only do we do digital but we also do magazines so we gear up for the fall during the summer and then the fun continues throughout the fall until the holidays at the end of the year.

Peter: All right. The #agencylive will always work hard.

Joelle: Yes, exactly.

[chuckles]

Peter: Joelle, you are the director of marketing and growth at the agency called Bookmark Content and Communications. Can you briefly tell us what do you do either as the agency and more importantly, what are the things that you do? What are the nice things that allow you that you are happy at your work every day?

Joelle: At Bookmark, we're a global content and communications agency and we have offices all around the world. We work mostly primarily with luxury and lifestyle brands and we create content for them to bring their brand and audiences together. What I do is actually create content for our content marketing company, it's very meta. I wear many hats, I do a little SEO, I do in marketing social media. I also work on some new business, I do really a little bit of everything, I love it.

Peter: Yes, you're the director of stuff there, you'll have to do everything. If you're doing stuff for high-end brands, I've invited you to the podcast because you spoke at the Moscone conference. How is SEO and high-end brands coming together?

Joelle: Well, I was looking for new and innovative things to bring to our clients. Not only do we focus on-page SEO we're also looking at technical SEO as well as new things we can bring to them. How can we integrate voice? How could we integrate visual search? How can we make sure that when their audience looks for them in search that they're getting visually pleasing results, not only text-based results.

Peter: Yes. This is why I was very interested in your presentation, in a time when everyone speaks about voice search you speak about image search or visual search. Your presentation was called Get To Look, Improve the Shopper Experience with Visual Search Optimization. We'll get to the presentation in a minute. How was Moscone?

Joelle: I really enjoyed it. It was actually my third year at Moscone, this is my first time on stage. What I really love about Moscone is the community. I love the people that attend. I love the presentations and the other presenters that spoke, they all cover really interesting things that are current, that are relevant, that are trending.

They also bring something I think a little bit different than other conferences be because it is a one-track conference and I really love that approach. I also really appreciate the way that it's very much human first even though it's a tech company. They really accommodate everybody. Even if you look at the speakers it's very much a 50/50 split between men and women which I really appreciate.

Peter: Yes. I've had two speakers for a Moscone on the podcast in the previous episodes just because the presentations that I saw were so good. All right, let's go directly to your presentation. Without further ado, I just give you your five minutes to sum up your presentation.

Joelle: Perfect. When I talk about visual search, I'm really talking about searching for images with other images not searching for images with text queries. This is something that's not widely used by many searchers but the interest is really growing. There are some studies done, ViSenze actually did a study where they found that 62% of Millennials would really like to be able to search by image and 58% of them would like to be able to click to purchase directly from content. That's very telling showing that young people are really interested in this type of technology and I find also people are in tune with looking for things with their eyes versus typing them out.

There's another stat that I'd like to share and it's that 85% of consumers place more importance on visuals when shopping online for clothing and furniture. I'd like to share why I chose Google lens and Pinterest lens as examples. I find that they're both leading the way in terms of technology and ways to use visual search to appeal to their customers and also drive revenue for brands.

Google lens is really focusing more on practical applications where Pinterest lens showing more success in discovery engagement and conversion for fashion and home decor brands. I find those two things are really interesting to look at because not doing the same things, they're investing in different ways to use image recognition technology to appeal to their audience.

If we look back at the past few months, Pinterest lens has actually started integrating some cool new features. They integrated hybrid search which is a way of integrating a visual search with a text-based query. Right now it's not something that you can use where you can actually type in a query but you can actually take an existing pin and text provided by Pinterest to come together and provide search results based on those two things. They're working on something called to Complete the Look which I think is going to be really amazing and I feel like other companies and tech companies and social media companies will follow suit once this is released.

What it does, is it allows you to actually type in a text query and combine it with an image to find a handbag to go with an outfit or curtains to go with your living room. What's interesting about Pinterest lens is that right now there's about 600 million visual searches that are happening every month and 300 million people around the world are using it. That's small potatoes compared to let's say Google or Amazon's audience but there is a large group of people who are actually using visual search. If that's something the brands are interested in, they should leverage that. Mostly because proportionately Pinterest drives more referral traffic to e-commerce sites than other social platforms.

Something else that I'd like to share is that Google lens, it can recognize over one billion items. That's quite something. At the recent Google I/O conference last May, they also introduced two new filters further Google lens. One is dining where you can actually scan menu items and it'll pick up some images and recommendations from their Maps app to get people to choose items that other people have liked. Also, the translate feature where you can scan a printed document or a screen with text in another language and it'll translate it for you in a matter of seconds. That in itself is very cool when you're traveling, it just makes things way more accessible. They also announced the addition of augmented reality into a Google search which could have huge possibilities for shopping if that will also get integrated into the lens features. All of this leads to opportunities for retail brands, e-commerce brands. Some of these opportunities include increased visibility for lesser-known brands. Right now, if you think about shopping online a lot of the time it's hard for some smaller brands to get found in search results but through Pinterest lens what pinners end up doing is they end up being exposed to this smaller brands and they get to see things based on what they're looking for in terms of style rather than doing branded searches .

97% of Pinterest searches are currently unbranded and 70% of their audience is open to finding about brands they've never heard of before. That's pretty cool. Also, something that's interesting that people should be looking at is leveraging existing platforms and partnerships. What I would say is either optimize where your audience is already like on Google, Pinterest, Instagram or Amazon or partner with an image recognition tech provider to integrate it into your own platform.

If you're just starting out I would say go where your audience is already but if you're ready to take that next leap there are different providers such as the ViSenze, slice that can help with that integration. Also, capitalize on impulse buying this is something that-- I think it's a funny thing to say but there are some studies that 72% of pinners say that the platform inspires them to shop when they aren't actually looking for anything. That's pretty huge and I think people or brands should take advantage of that.

The other thing that I'd like to share ist hat visual search can also be used in real life. If you can integrate it into your in-store experience it could also create other opportunities to increase in-store visits. For example, Alibaba and Amazon both brought this type of tech into their change rooms to help people shop more easily. Alibaba brought in these fashion AI mirrors into the guest change rooms to suggest other accessories and different color options for what they tried on to help them find what they're looking for and Amazon created this cool tech-enabled mirror that projects clothing onto customers so that they can see what they look like without actually trying it on I mean that's pretty cool stuff.

Last but not least, increasing revenue Gartner predicts that at 2021 e-commerce brands who optimized for voice and visual search will increase profits by up to 30%. That's huge. Obviously this is a prediction but I think it's worth thinking about how you can integrate this type of technology into your strategy and into your content and into your search practices because it's coming, younger people are using it, younger people are thinking about it. If you miss the boat now you'd just be catching up later all this to say that visual search is a cool new feature but you also have to think about how to optimize for it because it's not yet perfect. It is a technology it is constantly evolving. In my conference, I shared some tactics and techniques to optimize for visual search and some of those things included everything that you do currently for image search can also be applied for visual search. Make sure to think about your image size and keywords and all tags and all that good stuff.

You also want to think on the technical side, making sure to submit image site maps and sync basic product data with the Google Merchant Center. Enabling rich pins for Pinterest, implementing structured data especially for product and offer and image gallery. Also, think about how you search for what you want to-- Like do your research for what you want to focus on. Don't only think about keywords, also think about finding trends there's Google trends, there's a monthly Pinterest trend report, there's all kinds of cool stuff that you can use to make your content super cool.

My last point is to think about what's next. Visual sentiment analysis to understand the emotion of users when they're on your social media channels for example. How you can integrate visual search into your strategy even if it's not for fashion or home decor brands. Think about real estate think about food and beverage, think about hotels, for example. Also think about all the new integrations that you could do with a visual search like the augmented reality example I gave earlier, machine learning. There's so much that's coming we don't even know what the possibilities will be. This is basically, think about what's coming and see how it fits with your brand and if it does then test it. Try it out. Try and integrate a few things and see if it helps you out.

Peter: I must say very extensive and not sure if extensive is the right word but all-encompassing would probably be the right word. You went from the theory to far-fetched examples and went back to the examples of what people should be doing right now. What I see is, with e-commerce stores they still have, especially e-commerce is that they have a big number of products. They still have problems with generating quality and interesting images for products. How can we get them to not only show two boring pictures but get them to show pictures with people or maybe even create a video, how do you push e-commerces to do that?

Joelle: I would say that it's always best to use authentic type images but in terms of product images, you really want to show your product as it is, your product on a person you want to show the different angles. You also want to show dimensions, if something is a certain size you want to show it compared to something or like in a real-life type situation.

Peter: Have a banana for scale.

Joelle: Yes, to scale exactly. You also want to provide context. I really love the example of when you're looking at a handbag for example, when I'm actually shopping online for a handbag I like to see how many pockets are inside. I like to see what it looks like underneath. There's things that you may not think about what your audience is looking for but you can actually look in the data for images that you do currently have, what they're actually looking for and what helps them when they're making those decisions to optimize them properly.

Peter: What we see very often is companies having or creating their own photo studios within their own company so that they are able to be fast and create images when they need them. Do you think this is a good strategy or are you more of a fan of going for a big photoshoot that will deliver the best images ever?

Joelle: I think that authenticity is super important. I think that you don't have to spend a lot of money to take good photos, it really depends on your budget and who you're trying to appeal to make that decision.

Peter: All right. I was really wanting to ask you what should be the next steps for people that would like to go into the image or visual optimization but as you mentioned before just have good images and do good image SEO and that should be the first step, I'm I right?

Joelle: Yes, definitely that's right and you also want to optimize on the back-end in terms of connecting it with the Merchant Center and if for Pinterest it'd be Pinterest catalogs so that the data is connected with those images and they're indexed properly.

Peter: All right excellent. We're at the 21-minute mark and I think we are good with the presentation. Joelle thank you very much for summing up your presentation from Moscone. Where can people find you who? Who would like to talk to you what are your next things you have something with the whiteboard Friday planned, is that right?

Joelle: Yes. I'll be doing a whiteboard Friday. It's coming up soon and it's on the same topic. Check it out, I'll give some tips there on visual search as well.

Peter: All right and of course I will add your presentation, the slides into the show notes so there's people and of course links to your LinkedIn and your company and everything else so that people can see and follow your presentation when they listen to the podcast.

Joelle: Perfect, thank you.

Peter: I think that's it. Thank you very much for being the guest in the podcast. Thank you for-- it's probably very early in the morning for you.

Joelle: It's actually close to lunchtime [laughs].

Peter: Wow, all right. I'm not that good with different time zones. Okay, that's it. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. I'll see you around.

Joelle: Thanks, Peter.

23 - Paul Shapiro - Redefining technical SEO Aug 19, 2019

Another speaker from the Mozon conference, Paul Shapiro is the person behind one of the most important SO subreddits, /r/bigSEO, he has a very unique blog on Search Wilderness and runs a Technical SEO conference.

Here are his slides from the presentation, and you should go and check out his blog post, where you can find all the code that he talks about in the presentation.

Redefining Technical SEO, #MozCon 2019 by Paul Shapiro from Paul Shapiro Here is the transcript of the podcast:

Paul Shapiro: There are four types of technical SEO.

[music]

Peter Mesarec: This is Time for Marketing, the marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference.

[music]

Peter: Hello and welcome to the Time for Marketing, the podcast that brings you all of the information from the marketing conferences that you have missed or were not able to attend. This is episode number 23. We are big into our second year of podcasting. My name is still, from the beginning to the end, Peter and I'm your host for the podcast. If you love the podcast, of course, go and subscribe. If you would like to be on our newsletter or mailing list, you can find it on our website timeformarketing.com. All of that just to start off because we have to go directly into our content. We have a great guest here with us today. Paul Shapiro, hello and welcome to the podcast.

Paul: Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me.

Peter: Paul, you live in or around New York. How is living in one of the best, biggest, and other great things, cities in the world?

Paul: It is the best. It's the best to be living in the best city. [chuckles] Actually, I just moved from Boston although I'm from the area originally. It's nice to be home.

Peter: Do you people from New York regularly take a stroll down the-- I just forgot the name of the giant park that you have down there.

Paul: Central Park.

Peter: Do you just daily go there or is that another thing and we just only feel that Hollywood movies show that to us?

Paul: It's not that close to where I am currently. Growing up as a child, I used to always go to Central Park. It was definitely a place where I spent a lot of time. New Yorkers certainly go to Central Park and it's been fine there.

Peter: One of the best things that I've thought about New York is that you are in probably the greatest metropolitan area, but you can take the subway, Paul, where you call the local train directly to the beach and you can go swimming. It's very close and this is a really great thing. Not a lot of big cities have things like that.

Paul: That's true. I think I probably take enough for granted, but it is nice.

Peter: Paul, right now, people probably know you. You've done a lot of great things on the internet, especially people that like to work on and about SEO. There is a nice quote they found about you on the internet. It says, "In a world filled with shitty blog posts that rehash the same info in different ways, Paul's articles are always a treat to read." You are the partner and head of SEO of the catalyst agency and you are the founder of the big SEO subreddit. Tell us a bit more about how you got into SEO and why do you think that SEO is if you do think that SEO is the best channel in the world.

Paul: I got into SEO by no spectacular means. I think a lot of people in the industry have much more impressive stories than I do. It was the job that I got into right after university. I'd graduated, had a mild interest in marketing, and actually was looking to get into social media marketing and couldn't find any jobs. At least no companies were willing to hire me for such a role.

It just so happened that in my formative years in high school and earlier, instead of working a typical retail job or McDonald's, I did freelance web design and development. I didn't even know what SEO was when I graduated, but I applied to one SEO job and I got that one. I was educated afterwards why it was such a great fit for me. I've been working in the industry ever since.

Peter: All right. You are known for a separated big SEO. It has become one of the important parts of where people go to find SEO-related questions. Do you think that reddit as a community has an added value compared to other maybe Slack communities or Telegram communities or even just websites?

Paul: Yes. It fills an interesting need. I'm on a lot of Slack communities and private chat rooms. They're great because you're only talking to certain people. It's completely private. That information is not going to be shared around. It serves its purpose and then there's much more public channels and there is reddit, which is in between. It is both a public platform. People can see what you're saying.

A lot of people tend to anonymize themselves. They don't use their real names. They use pseudonyms. They create new accounts just to ask a certain question. There's a level of privacy. People could be a little bit more real in a way while still making a public statement or asking a question in public. I think we've done a good job and we still try to make big SEO a place where we can have someone to facilitate that communication in the industry.

Peter: Yes, that is all true. Let's go to the topic at hand. You spoke at MozCon 2019. You're actually the second speaker for MozCon in row. I just spoke actually a couple of hours ago with Luke Carthy. He is the episode before you, the episode number 22. How was your experience of MozCon? Was this your first time at--

Paul: Yes. MozCon is a fantastic conference. It's one of the few in the industry that I would recommend. The other being in the conference that I founded TechSEO Boost. It's a conference dedicated to technical SEO. It was my second MozCon. I've been to MozCon once before back in 2015. I always had this yearning to come back. It was a pleasure for me to be actually asked to speak and present on technical SEO at a conference that I truly respect in the industry.

Peter: Okay. Your presentation was really finding technical SEO. Here are your five minutes so that you sum up your presentation and then we'll talk about it.

Paul: The presentation was redefining technical SEO. Started out painting the picture of the SEO, but we've been taught of having three different pillars, being we're catering to relevance, which is content strategy catering to authority, which is link building, link development, digital PR. There's this third one, which is "technical SEO." That traditional definition of that technical SEO is things that pertain to basically crawling and indexing, which in some ways is a limited definition and a definition that sometimes creates a schism in the industry.

You have people that gravitate toward a creative content side of things and your people that gravitate towards the technical side of things. This results in some fighting. You have articles. One of the bigger ones that came out was this technical SEO is makeup by Clayburn Griffin on Search Engine Land, which was quite inflammatory. It was making the point that it's not too hard to get technical SEO to a point that is good enough, but content is in some ways more difficult to achieve.

I don't disregard that. I don't think it's wrong. I think the reason why people come to that conclusion is because they are defining technical SEO wrong. In my conference, we had speaker the first year, Russ Jones from Moz. He had a definition for what technical SEO is. I don't have the quote right in front of me, but I'll summarize it as, "The application of a technical skill set to other facets of SEO."

Clearly, this definition encapsulates a whole lot more. I posit even further that there are four types of technical SEO within that. The first one is what I called checklist technical SEO. This is things that pertain to crawling and indexing but are automatable. There are tools that can help get you there. In some ways, you can completely automate the task. There's general technical SEO which, again, are things that pertain to crawling and indexing, but they're little higher skill, less automatable.

For instance, finding a bug in the CNS that is hindering crawling. That would be an example of a general technical SEO versus checklist technical SEO, which would be checking the box. Does this web page have a canonical peg that's properly formatted? The third bucket is what I call blurry lines, technical SEO. There are series of jobs that often fall to us as SEO practitioners. They're somewhat technical, but they're not necessarily meant to be the job of the SEO.

I could easily fall to someone who works in content web development. I'm talking about things like page speed optimization, web performance optimization, advanced analytics implementation. Again, things that fall with a SEO practitioner but aren't necessarily a SEO and they're quite technical in nature sometimes. The last bucket, which I focused most of my presentation on, which was what I call advanced applied technical SEO.

This is really the application of those technical skill sets to all areas of SEO. I went through a series of examples of how you could write a computer program to do a natural language processing analysis to enhance on-page copy. Doing on-page SEO is not inherently a technical SEO task. When you start applying concepts like data science and other areas of engineering and these technical skill sets, it could be a technical SEO task.

I went through the gamut. I went through link building, how you can automate things with Wayback Machine and the Moz API and pull insights for content variation and apply machine learning, and when you start to look at technical SEO this way as being a source of talent and skills applied to all areas of technical SEO that it becomes much more important and certainly as a makeup.

Peter: All right. That was excellent, especially the last point of the three I think is very important for people. Every SEO should obviously, from what we had in your presentations. be a bit of a programmer. The main question usually is how much of a programmer should I be? Where should I go and how much should I learn to be a great SEO?

Paul: I would say this. There are some clear advantages to knowing some programming. By all means, I don't think it's necessary to be an expert programmer. Working an SEO, I do think it will help you if you are. What I do advocate for is understanding computer programming a little bit, understanding the underlying logic, being able to write very, very simple programs. There's clear advantages to having that as a skill. One is that you'll understand how all the puzzle pieces fit together.

When you're working with an engineering team or a developer on a website, you understand where they're coming from. You could communicate to them better. They'll have more respect for you. They're more likely to take you seriously. You'll make better suggestions and you'll be able to do some more of these more sophisticated things. Furthermore, getting these very, very basic skill sets is not that challenging. There's a million in one places to learn this online and, honestly, get the basics done in probably a 30-minute YouTube video. That's my position.

Peter: Of course. A lot of the things, you can just program with Google Docs and Google Sheets with a bit more of a technical knowledge that you need to go and check all the boxes in [unintelligible 00:14:46] to do your technical audit. Technical SEO is usually seen as something that is really important with big websites, especially e-commerce websites that have millions of URLs where crawl budget is important, et cetera. How important do you see a technical SEO for companies that have smaller websites, especially for B2B companies?

Paul: Well, I think it's quite logical when you look at it from a larger website perspective. You have all sorts of crawling and indexing issues that can emerge due to scale. When you look at that broader definition that I presented in my MozCon presentation of being the application of technical things in other ways, I think it's quite applicable to small pages. If you're writing a better web page, whether you have five pages on your site or a hundred or 10,000 or a million, being able to enhance what you're doing there, for instance, it doesn't matter how many pages you have. You're doing better work.

Peter: All right. Can you give us a couple of places where people can go and learn technical SEO? Of course, one of them is your website Search Wilderness. The subreddit, big SEO. What are the other places?

Paul: You can check out my MozCon presentation on SlideShare. My blog searchwilderness.com is littered with examples. There is an upcoming Whiteboard Friday on Moz where I talk a little bit about this topic. Lastly, I've mentioned my conference. My conference is free. We only have a limited space in person, but we make everything available online to these streams and all past recordings are also available. Check out that.

Peter: All right. This is our 17-minute mark and we should be wrapping it up. Paul, tell us where can people find you and what are your future conference plans so that people can come and listen to your presentations.

Paul: Yes. My personal blog is searchwilderness.com. The agency I work for is Catalyst. It's catalystdigital.com. My twitter account is by fighto, F-I-G-H-T-O. I'm posting there all the time. In terms of conferences, I am speaking at UnGagged in Los Angeles in November. In Europe, I am speaking at SMX Advanced Europe in Berlin and We Love SEO in Paris. They're both end of September and beginning of October.

Peter: All right. A couple of times, you're coming to Europe. Well, my next task is to go and check out all of the presentations or recordings that you have from your conference. I must say I haven't really heard about your conference in the past. I'm from Europe, you're from up there, so it's a big place. That's it. Thank you very much for being on the podcast and I hope to see you around.

Paul: Yes, it's my pleasure.

#22 - Luke Carthy - Using SEO crawlers for CRO and UX wins Jul 29, 2019

Luke Carthy was one of the speakers at the MozCon 2019 and he uses his SEO tools in a weird way. This is why I wanted to talk to him, and he gave some great ideas on how to use your ScreamingFrog or your SiteBulb.

You can find Luke on Linkedin, he is the Digital Lead at Mayflex and you can find him on twitter.

Here are the slides from his presentation:

Luke Carthy MozCon 2019 - Killler cro tips with a seo web crawler from Peter Mesarec

#21 - Steven Van Vessum - SEO Disasters: why they happen and how to prevent them Jul 15, 2019

SEO is tricky, if you mess it up once, you can have long term problems with your website and your rankings. This is why I invited Steven from ContentKing, an app that allows you to track the changes on your website. We had a wonderful talk with Steven about all the important things in SEO that people forget about, and should not. His presentation from the Digital Olympus conference is also attached so you can swipe through while you listen.

If you want to check out Steven, here is his website, Twitter and Linkedin.

ContentKing - Digital Olympus - SEO Disasters from Steven van Vessum

# 20 - Josh Steimle - How to Become a Contributor to Forbes, Mashable, TechCrunch & More Jul 01, 2019

Josh is a business influencer and of course, a contributor to the best and most important magazines around the world, as you can hear in the podcast, he also wrote for a trail running magazine. In the podcast, he gives out 5 steps that you have to follow to become a contributor in magazines in your field.

Check out Josh on his website at https://www.joshsteimle.com/ or find him on LinkedIn.

Here you can follow the presentation

How to Become a Contributor to Forbes, Mashable, TechCrunch & More from Josh Steimle

# 19 - Mike Roberts - Amazon's $10B Growth Hack That Nobody Knows About Jun 17, 2019

Looking at the competition for ideas is always a good thing, and our guest this time helps us do that. The guy that brought us SpyFu just brought us another tool, https://www.nachoanalytics.com/. Mike Roberts or @mrspy talks about one single hack that he found in the Amazon analytics that helps them get additional $10B and how you can use it on your website.

Here is the blog that Mike mentions in the podcast and if you are interested to explore this topic further, we had JP Sherman on the podcast talking about the optimization of the Red Hat websites internal search engine here.

#18 - Daniel Russell - The secret sauce - harvesting content ideas from Reddit Jun 03, 2019

This time we talk about the website that is my (and millions of people) favorite waste of time, Reddit, and how you can make it a source of inspiration for your content marketing. Daniel has a proven track record of how to make it to the top of Reddit and is ready to share.

You can find Daniel here and his agency Go Fish Digital here.

Check out his presentation while you listen to the podcast.

Secret Sauce: Harvesting Content Ideas From Reddit from Daniel Russell

# 17 - Dana DiTomaso - Understanding your local search presence May 20, 2019

Dana is one of the best SEO speakers, and we caught here after her SearchLove presentation, where she spoke about measuring and generally understanding the local search presence.

She mentioned LocalFalcon as the best tool to measure your local presence and this blog post.

You can find Dana here and her agency here.

This are the slides from her presentation.

Understanding Your Local Search Presence from Dana DiTomaso

#16 - Lindsay Dayton LaShell - Don’t Let Facebook Get You Down: Strategies for Results, Regardless of Your Ad Budget Mar 18, 2019

Facebook advertising can be complicated and tricky, this is why I was looking for speakers that can help you with that. Search Love is always a great conference, and Lindsay Dayton LaShell had a presentation that will help you a lot and, if you look at the slides, you will enjoy all the dogs in the presentations. The topic was Don’t Let Facebook Get You Down: Strategies for Results, Regardless of Your Ad Budget.

You can find Lindsay on Twitter.

The presentation from Search Love 2019

SearchLove San Diego 2019 - Lindsay Dayton LaShell - Don’t Let Facebook Get You Down: Strategies for Results, Regardless of Your Ad Budget from Distilled

#15 - Scott Shou - Diagnosing dedicated IP e-mail deliverability Feb 11, 2019

Scott is an expert on e-mail deliverability, the important metric that influences your e-mail marketing and he had a presentation at the MailCon 2019 with the title Diagnosing dedicated IP deliverability. He goes into details talking about how emails between servers are exchanged and what are all the different reasons that an email will be denied by the servers that deliver the e-mails to the recipients.

So, if you are concerned about your e-mail marketing, check out the episode and browse through the presentation that is embedded here.

Scott and I talked about the IBCoalition, check out their website that is still under construction, but you can subscribe to their e-mail and get all the news, I know I did.

Scott Shou on e-mail deliverability at the MailCon 2019 from Peter Mesarec

#14 - Dmitriy Kruglyak - 4 Phases of Successful Facebook Advertising Project Feb 04, 2019

Dmitriy spoke at the Affiliate Summit West 2019 on how to build workflows and checklists to make your Facebook advertising more profitable.
Go and check out Dmitriy's blog at https://targetchoice.com/blog/ or contact him on LinkedIn.

Dmitriy Kruglyak - How to start a facebook ads project - 4 must have phases (1) from Peter Mesarec

#13 - Bob Tripathi - Digital marketing trends in 2019 Jan 21, 2019

We open the 2019 podcast with trends, new things, old things and new ideas that you should do in 2019. Bob is the owner of www.bobtripathi.com and introduces 5 marketing trends for 2019 in the podcast. Visit his website to download an e-book with additional 5 trends.

You can find Bob also on Linkedin.

Check out Bob's presentation from the conference:

Bob Tripathi - 10 ways to Drive Digital Marketing in 2019 from Peter Mesarec

#12 - Wes Schaeffer - Once you befriend this 100 years old trend, all your marketing woes will end Dec 18, 2018

A title that promises, Wes was a speaker at the SEMPL 2018 conference in Portorož, and we had a great talk about what are the really important things in marketing.

Check out his video presentation from SEMPL

Wes Schaeffer Keynote SEMPL Conference from Wes Schaeffer on Vimeo.

#11 - Matthew Kay - Beyond Keywords Nov 26, 2018

Digitalzone 18 is a marketing conference that takes place in Istanbul, Turkey. I've talked to Matthew Kay (@matthewkay87/) from Aira. He had a presentation called Beyond Keywords: How To Create Content That Matches Your Buyer’s Journey. He is an SEO at hearth and approached content and content strategy from an SEO perspective.

Here is his presentation

Beyond Keywords: How To Create Content That Matches Your Buyer’s Journey from Matthew Kay

#10 - JP Sherman - Delivering better on-site search results Nov 13, 2018

JP Sherman is the Enterprise Search & Findability Manager at Red Hat and we talked about the on-site search, how they are using it at Red Hat and how e-commerce websites are (not) using it. You can find JP on twitter and you can check out slides from the presentation.

Delivering Better Onsite Search Results - Brighton SEO Sep 2018 from JP Sherman

#9 - Prabhat Shah - Amazon SEO Tools I Wouldn't Avoid Oct 28, 2018

Another talk from the Brighton SEO conference, this time on Amazon SEO. Amazon can be one of the most important sales channels that your company uses. Prabhat is an expert on Amazon and eBay sales at OnlineSellerUK, and you can check out his presentation at the end of this post.

Here is the list of all the tools that Prabhat showed in his presentation

sonar-tool.com/us
sellics.com
xsellco.com
amzscout.net
splitly.com
helium10.com
keywordtool.io/amazon
amzdatastudio.com
Amazon KW Index and Rank Checker
junglescout.com/the-web-app
members.helium10.com/misspellinator/

Amazon SEO Tools I wound't Avoid from Daytodayebay

#8 - Rob Walch - If you are not podcasting, you are a fracking moron Oct 15, 2018

Rob is the VP of podcast relations at Libsyn and had a presentation at the Content Marketing World 2018. One of the things that I liked in his presentation is his comparison of blogs vs. podcast and how we can stand out with a podcast more.

You can find Rob on Linkedin, or at his podcasts today in IOs or podcast411.

#7 - Rand Fishkin - Why Nine out of Ten Marketing Launches Suck (and How to Be the One that Doesn't) Sep 10, 2018

He is the guy that created moz.com, he is that guy that publicly talks about all the problems that he had while he was the boss, and he is now the guy that has a new company that we all can't wait to see what is doing. Rand Fishkin spoke at the 2018 MozCon, with the presentation title Why Nine out of Ten Marketing Launches Suck (and How to Be the One that Doesn't). We also talked about the Gmail launch and how that was a good launch, about his book and of course about his new company.

#6 - Purna Virji - Intelligent search and intelligent assistants: Exploring the AI-era of search Aug 27, 2018

Purna Virji is the Senior Manager, Global engagement at Microsoft and was a speaker at the Search Leeds conference 2018. Her presentation was titled Intelligent search and intelligent assistants: Exploring the AI-era of search and she generally spoke about how Bing and Google are using AI in search, and how SEOs and website owners can use Artificial Intelligence in search marketing. There was an interesting view on voice search that you don't really hear all the time.

If you would like to see the whole presentation, here are the slides:

SearchLeeds 2018 - Purna Virji - Microsoft - Intelligent search and intelligent assistants: Exploring the AI-era of search from Branded3

Here is the full video of the Search Leeds presentation.

#5 - Lukasz Zelezny - SEO and content optimization in 2018 - How to win the game Aug 13, 2018

Lukasz Zelezny is the Director of Organic Acquisition at ZPG and he spoke at the Ungagged conference 2018 with a presentation SEO and content optimization in 2018 - How to win the game. You can also check out the presentation at the bottom.

Here are the links to the tools we mention in the podcast:

https://brand24.com/
https://www.accuranker.com/

Lukasz Zelezny - Ungaged 2018 - SEO and Content Optimization in 2018 – How to Win the Game! from Peter Mesarec

#4 - Oliver Brett - Why SEO wizards need user testing hobbits Jul 30, 2018

Oliver Brett - Screaming Frog spoke at Search Leeds 2018 conference with a presentation titled Why SEO wizards need user testing hobbits. Oliver is an SEO working at ScreamingFrog, a company that is first an SEO agency and they sell the tool Screaming Frog, probably the best SEO tool.

Here are the links to the things we talked about:

Lord of the SERPS Twitter account

User testing tools that Oliver mentioned:
https://www.whatusersdo.com/
https://www.usertesting.com

Here is the presentation:

SearchLeeds 2018 - Oliver Brett - Screaming Frog from Branded3

Episode 3 - Hannah Smith - What happens when a werewolf bites a goldfish? Jul 16, 2018

Episode 3 features Hannah Smith who works at Verve Search and talks about Werewolves and goldfish, interesting things in SEO and we talked a bit about the SEO community in the UK.

Here are links to the things we spoke about:

Search Leeds Conference
Brighton SEO Conference
Article by Neil Gaiman Where do you get your Ideas

You can also check out the full video and the slides from Hannas presentation

What Happens when a Werewolf Bites a Goldfish - SearchLeeds - April 2018 from Hannah Smith

Episode 2 - Niki Vecsei Harrold - Case Study Transamerica Jul 02, 2018

Niki is the Director of Communities Strategy and Social Media at Transamerica. She presented at the Content marketing conference on how the company Transamerica used online Facebook testing with dark advertising to test all the changes in the companies brand. She tells us what they learned and how.

Episode 1 - Tyler Lessard - The Art of Creating Customer Experiences with Site, Sound and Motion Jun 22, 2018

The first episode talks about how we should be creating video content for all the parts of the sales funnel. We invited Tyler Lessard, the VP of Marketing at Vidyard.

Here are the links to some of the things we spoke about on the podcast.

Chalk Talks
Inbound marketing conference
Brian Hallingan, CEO of Hubspot

Transcript of the podcast episode

Tyler Lessard: 50% of your content should be video.

Peter: This is Time for Marketing. The marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference.

Peter: Hi, my name is Peter, and I welcome you to the very first episode of the Time for Marketing podcast. I'm a marketing person myself. I have worked in SEO, I've worked in content marketing, I've worked in email marketing, and because of that, I've been to a lot of marketing conferences. I've learned a lot there, but sadly, I was never able to go to all of the conferences I wanted to go to. That means, of course, I've missed a lot of interesting talks, and probably, so have you. The idea of what we're doing here is, we want to change that. We don't want to miss any interesting talks on any conference anymore.

So, what I do in this podcast is I look for interesting people who speak at marketing conferences, I invite them and allow them to sum up their presentations in five minutes. I give them questions about what they told us, and release all that in a podcast. This is the very first episode. We have a lot of excellent guests lined up. We have a really nice guest for the first episode, and because I don't want you to miss any of the future guests, I will ask you to subscribe. You can, of course, go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like the podcast, of course after you finish listening to it, go to iTunes and rate and comment on the podcast. All right, our first guest is--

Tyler: Tyler Lessard.

Peter: He works at--

Tyler: I'm the VP marketing here at Vidyard. The company is a video platform for businesses.

Peter: We found him as a speaker at the content marketing conference. The title of his presentation was, "The art of creating customer experiences with sight, sound, and motion." I would like to ask you to sum up your speech in the next five minutes, and give us the most important points that you gave at the conference.

Tyler: Yes, absolutely. I think tied to what I said with regards to video being a more and more important part of the customer life cycle, I think most of us will agree that today's audiences expect richer or more personalized, more interesting communications. Whether it's your top of funnel marketing activities, whether it's how they're learning about your products and your company, how they're interacting with sales representatives, or even existing customers, how they're being educated on how to use your products or services, or how they're being communicated with by their account reps.

Gone are the days of long text-based emails, and white papers, and things like that, and more and more it's about short-form blog content, short-form infographics, and of course, rich media and video content. One of the things that I'm really passionate about is this notion of, in this new world, as we're changing the ways we communicate with prospects and with customers, video becomes a very important part to how we build relationships and how we create really, what I call remarkable experiences with individuals.

Again, as they more and more go into self-service mode, right? If you think back 10, 15 years, most B2B companies were about, there was more a direct sales process. You would have that face time with clients, and you'd build relationships as you go through that buyer's journey, but these days, that's getting less and less. People are more expecting to consume content on their own time and in their own digital worlds. As marketing and sales leaders, we need to be providing them with the kind of content that still builds relationships, that still wows them, that still builds an emotional connection to our brand.

As I hinted at earlier, I don't think that text-based emails and white papers are enough to do that. Really, the impetus here is to challenge us as marketers to think about, how do we build relationships with prospects throughout the buyer's journey? How do we use things like video to connect in more emotional and engaging ways? As we look at, some of the big takeaways are, as you think about your top of funnel marketing. We've all thought about, we have some brand videos and things like that, but how does video become even a more important part of storytelling at that top of the funnel?

Storytelling is really important to engage people, again, in a more emotional and personal conversation. How do we use visual content to relate to our potential buyers, to show them that we understand the pains that they're feeling, maybe to make them laugh, maybe to inspire them? Video is an incredible medium to do those kinds of things at the top of the funnel. Then as we move through the buyer's journey, again, video, I think is, this is where video is really an unsung hero, is how we educate and nurture our potential buyers.

Again, I think this is really takeaway number two is, we need to be more prescriptive in how we think about using video during those education phases. When somebody is on our website, how are we showcasing our products or services to them? Are we forcing them to read big long documents? Or are we giving them a great two-minute explainer that shows them exactly what it is we do? As they're learning about different topics, we use a lot of video content now on our blogs to, again, showcase different ideas or to have real people explaining solutions or problems or ideas as opposed to just having the written word.

It's not to say it should be all video, but it's a very important thing to start complimenting your other forms of content with video. I'll give you one really specific example that we do. We have a series called Chalk Talks. If you search for Vidyard and Chalk Talks, you'll find it. We have about 20 different Chalk Talk episodes, which are each about five to eight minutes in length. They go very specific on a certain topic in the world of video. For our customers, we have Chalk Talk episodes on how to build a video strategy, or how to use video in sales, or how to use video for SEO purposes.

Each one is a very specific topic that gives you a lot of great detailed information, but it's delivered in a way that's very visual, very personal. It's usually myself on camera, and I find that people, we often get great feedback where they love that kind of content because they can relate to it. Again, because we're presenting it in a visual and audible way, it's more memorable, it's easier to learn than them reading long-form content.

I think the big thing there, again, is just thinking about, how do we educate our buyers through rich media content, through video? As it can be a much more engaging and memorable content format. I think you've got those two things to think about. Video as top of funnel to really engage and build an emotional connection, video in mid-funnel to educate buyers and be more memorable in how you're doing that.

Finally, the last takeaway is, how are our sales teams engaging these potential buyers? Are they doing it in a way that's really going to stand out and make people want to do business with the company? That's where empowering our sales teams with some of these great video content or, and this might seem frightening to some of you, but empowering our sales reps to record and send their own custom videos. Whether they're webcam videos where they're talking directly to a prospect, screen capture videos where they're, again, walking through a topic or showcasing what your products or services can do.

I think these are things that we need to think a lot more about and, again, making sure our sales reps are also set up to be able to deliver the kinds of experiences that people expect today. I think those are really the main emphasis points that we're talking about, and it's this idea of creating a more immersive customer experience throughout that buyer's journey, using a rich range of on-demand video content, or one-to-one video messages.

Peter: All right. These were very, very specific takeaways to how to use video in marketing. It seems that what you're saying is making companies open up a bit more. You said that salespeople should be able to generate video, and then use that video in their sales process when they feel that that should be positive for the sales process. This sort of sounds scary on one side, but on the other side, we've learned that the Internet makes companies open up, allows different channels and different people within the companies to start sending out the messages. This is yet another step that sounds really interesting, right?

Tyler: I think you're absolutely right. You nailed it that there's a big trend here towards transparency, and towards rehumanizing the marketing and sales of businesses. I think honestly, over the last five to 10 years, a lot of the market, I think, went too far the other way. We over digitized and we started hiding behind our websites and our keyboards and our emails and things like that. I think a lot of businesses lost that personal and human touch out to their base. I think the younger generation, and the millennials, are really forcing that back because they're growing up on these social networks, and they're expecting more authentic, genuine human-to-human communication.

They're recording and sending videos every day. The number of videos, there's over 10 billion videos played every single day on Snapchat, and over 100 million hours of video played back every day on Facebook. It's shaping this generation to be expecting authentic, simple video content as part of how they communicate. I think for some companies, it's a bit of a challenge because you need to think about, how am I going to create this content as a marketing organization? Or am I comfortable allowing my sales reps to record short videos and send them out?

I think on the flip side, you have to think about the opportunity that exists there, and the ability for your people to tell better stories, to be more open and transparent, and to focus on, again, building human relationships. I think that's what will help a lot of companies stand out from the competition.

Peter: As we probably prepare workflows and rules on how everyone within the company can be a voice on social media, if we prepare stuff like that for video creation, then probably we can create video that would be okay with everyone, or if everyone within the company creates that, we just need to have rules and ideas on how to do that. Right?

Tyler: Yes. I absolutely, I think so. For more and more companies, what we're seeing, whether they're small 10-person companies, or large enterprises, is that more and more, they're building in some kind of video production capabilities or expertise in-house within the company. We heard this not long ago from-- actually, I recall a great quote from the CEO of HubSpot, Brian Halligan. HubSpot is a company that they were really the godfathers of inbound marketing, if you will, and they really built an industry around the idea of the blog. About a year and a half ago, at inbound, Brian Halligan got on stage and said, "50% of your content should be video."

He said very directly, "Stop hiring bloggers, start hiring producers." This really struck me because this was an audience of 15,000 people who for the past five years had been told, "Hire bloggers, be great writers." Now, they're being told, "You need to hire producers." It wasn't to say get rid of the bloggers, and I think more and more, it's about, you need people with those skill sets who are comfortable and are able to create quick video content, and can help people in the organization. I think even if it's somebody in your company who, maybe that's not their primary role, but there's somebody who's adept at creating and editing video, a lot of people can do it now. Especially the younger generation.

It amazes me even what my children and what my younger relatives can do. You just got to ask around. I think that's important to helping this sort of thing. Because if your CEO may not be comfortable recording something and putting it on social, but if there's somebody within the organization who can quickly get them on camera, do some really quick edits, and post it as a thought leadership video, do it. Get out there. Get those messages out, and find people in your company who can help with basic capture and editing.

As long as the content is valuable, if it's authentic, and if it has pretty good audio, it could work, and you don't need to worry about high production value and spending $10,000 on an agency, just to record a quick two-minute educational piece of content.

Peter: Yes. What's interesting with using video on different channels, or maybe let's call it using video content on different channels is what I've seen from Moz doing-- a lot of people know their Whiteboard Fridays, their weekly videos. Of course, the transcriptions of those videos for a long time. We started right now is also producing a podcast or having audio recordings, and then posting them on SoundCloud, I believe.

Directly from video, what they do is they create one message, but then they are able to send that message out on three different channels. Video, text, and audio. Of course, that then helps on social media, that can help on organic traffic with a lot of text. Of course, podcasts have, especially in the US, a big number of listeners. Probably, video as a starting point for content is very good, and then you should spread it out.

Tyler: Yes, I love that. We actually took some of the inspiration for our own Chalk Talks video series from Whiteboard Fridays. We said, "Well, let's take a chalkboard approach instead of a whiteboard approach for a different visual style." We took a great cue from Rand Fishkin and the Moz folks that I think showed you can create that kind of content on high frequency, on a weekly basis, without having to put a ton of additional effort into it. If you come up with a repeatable format, and exactly to your point, Peter, when we create those Chalk Talk videos, every one of those goes out as a blog post, and we transcribe the audio, and the transcription becomes a part of that.

They go into our main resource center on our website, where again, the transcriptions are a part of the page, so people searching for it can find them, and then our sales team uses those a ton. When they're out there engaging with customers or prospects, they'll use those videos as a way to answer commonly asked questions or to help educate or nurture them through the buyer's journey. There's lots of different ways in which that-- and then as well as you mentioned, the audio can be repurposed as podcasts.

It really is a great way to create a hub and spoke model of content. Let's start with a video, and then you can branch off and turn it into a variety of different related assets. It's a great approach.

Peter: All right. Video cannot only be used as a top of funnel channel, but should be used as the middle and the bottom of the funnel channel, and video should probably use-- the content that is produced for video should probably be used in different channels, and this will make the production not cheaper, but because the content that is made once will be used on different channels, the production will be--

Tyler: Generate more return and more value from those pieces of content. You nailed it. Absolutely, Peter, you nailed it.

Peter: Yes. Are those the four takeaways that we can leave our listeners with?

Tyler: I think you've got it. I think that was a great summary, and yes. All of that comes down to, just do it. Don't be afraid to start thinking about how to create more video content. A big underpinning idea to make all those things happen is, try to do more content in-house. Don't think that every time you want to create a video, you need to go out to an expensive agency. Yes, just do it on top of those big four ideas. I think we got it, Peter.

Peter: All right. Thank you very much, Tyler. This was an excellent recap of why and how to use video. This was a very nice first episode of the podcast. You were an excellent guest, and I'm really glad we did that. Have a great day in Canada, nice wishes from Slovenia. This is it.

Tyler: Thank you very much, and thank you for having me. Happy marketing, everyone. All the best.

Peter: This was episode number one. Nothing else to add at the end of the podcast than go and subscribe, go and rate, go and vote, go and listen. Have a great day.

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