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Why You Need to be on Voice Search with Chip Edwards

August 25, 2020

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Pam Aungst and SEO Process

September 4, 2018

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Transcript

Intro:
Welcome to episode 92 of How I Built It! In this episode, I’m talking to
Pam Aungst and we’re talking about SEO Process. So in the last couple of
episodes we talked to John Doherty about his product, and before that we
talked to Jeremiah Smith about how he built his agency. In this episode we
talk to Pam about process. And I really like this episode because I had
some immediately actionable advice. Essentially as soon as we hung up, I
applied some of what she taught me.

Sponsors:
Today’s episode, by the way, is brought to you by Pantheon and Traitware.
You’ll hear about them both later, so for now, on with the show.

Joe Casabona:
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast
that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Pam Aungst. She is
an SEO expert and we’re going to talk a little bit about her process. We
were introduced to each other formally by a friend of the show, Liam
Dempsey of Hallway Chats. I’ll link that in the show notes. Pam, how are
you today?

Pam Aungst:
Good. Thank you for having me.

Joe:
Thanks for being on the show. This is a little bit more nebulous. We’re not
talking about a specific product, or thing. We’re talking more about SEO
process and strategy and things like that. Why don’t you tell us, and the
listeners, a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Pam:
Sure. As you said I’m Pam Aungst, my company is Pam Ann Marketing, and we
also now have a sister company which is also an offering. Which is Stealth
Search and Analytics. Both companies offer SEO, PPC and analytics services.
Pam Ann Marketing works directly with clients and Stealth Search and
Analytics works on a private label basis through other agencies that want
to offer those services, but not hire in-house staff to provide them to
their clients.

Joe:
Gotcha. Cool. So you’ve got a little bit of the client services going, and
then some of the white label services going with agencies and folks who
might want to outsource their ability to do SEO stuff.

Pam:
Yes. We were getting requested to do that so often that I had a light bulb
moment, and I was like, “We’re getting these requests without even saying
to the world that we are capable of doing this. I wonder what would happen
if we said to the world that we were capable of doing this?” And that’s how
Stealth was born.

Joe:
That’s fantastic, and a great name for that service because you are being
stealth in who exactly is doing the work, I guess. This is not a question I
decided to ask until right now, but why would somebody or an agency, or
another company want to outsource their SEO strategy?

Pam:
It’s primarily because of the fact that SEO is so complex. And PPC, and
analytics. All three are very complex. SEO does have the most moving
pieces, though. And it’s just really hard for design focused firms and
branding agencies, or just broader scope marketing agencies. It’s really
hard for them to fully understand it, and if they did they probably would
hire in-house. But it’s hard to provide a service and hire and train people
to do something that you yourself don’t know how to do.

Obviously, they could try to hire someone that claims to already know it,
but how do they know they already know it? There’s some comfort level with
not having to go through all of that training, hiring, sourcing talent,
training them, managing them for something that they really don’t
understand. There’s just a comfort, and it’s easier to turn to a firm that
has got all that figured out, and has got a good reputation already. Then
they can just capitalize on what’s already been built.

Joe:
Absolutely. If you want to be an effective manager you should at least
understand the people you’re managing. I’m not going to go hire an
illustrator because I can’t tell an illustrator how to do their job.

Pam:
Exactly.

Joe:
I’m going to hire an independent person that I don’t need to manage. I just
say, “I want this. Go do that.”

Pam:
Yes. It’s certainly simpler. And sometimes too they don’t have a full time
need, they don’t have enough of the work. It’s only a couple clients that
are asking for it, so they couldn’t even justify hiring a full time person
or even a steady part time person. They just need it on a project basis.

Joe:
Yeah, and that’s a great point. I asked that question not skeptically, I
knew full well why. I just wanted to hear it from you because SEO is a full
time job. Just like how people scoff at social media managers. As somebody
who’s trying to do it all, including managing my social media queues, that
takes a large chunk of my week. If I want to do it right.

Pam:
Oh, absolutely.

Joe:
So you want to have the right people in place if you want to be effective
with that stuff.

Pam:
Yeah. And the process is part of what we sell, to touch upon that, because
we said we were going to talk about the process. Having the process figured
out is a whole separate thing from knowing the theory. I find in my hiring
for my company, that people who haven’t had a lot of work experience in the
field yet, they may understand the theories behind a SEO perfectly well and
thoroughly but practical application of a theory in the real world where
things are messy and there’s constraints and there is layers of red tape,
and maybe even politics within the client’s organization that are
restricting them from being able to do things a certain way.

That “In the wild” type of experience, having a process that is nailed down
that can navigate all of that real world, practical application, and know
those challenges. It’s another reason for subcontracting an agency or
company who already has that all figured, out as opposed to hiring an
individual employee.

Joe:
Absolutely. Having somebody that can navigate those waters is important.
It’s like when you’re playing baseball. It’s easy to say, “Square your
shoulders, keep your eye on the ball, swing and follow through.” That’s
great if somebody is throwing you a fastball and you’re expecting a
fastball. But if somebody throws you a curveball and you’re expecting a
fastball, then you’re going to miss no matter how well you keep your eye on
the ball. So you want somebody who can be prepared for that.

Pam:
Yes, absolutely. And have a process in place that takes into account all
the different types of balls whether they’re fast or curved, or whatever.
You’ve got plans and processes and ways of dealing with it already figured
out.

Joe:
Absolutely. Let’s get into this then. Talking about Stealth, you got this
idea because people were already asking for it. When it comes to maybe
starting that company, and then moving into your process, what kind of
research was involved in that?

Pam:
Like you said we did get asked for it. We didn’t really have to research if
there was a demand. Although I did do research on the competitive offerings
that were out there, because I needed to come up with a way to, if we’re
going to expand this, to differentiate ourselves and come up with marketing
messaging and whatnot. And what I discovered in my competitive research was
that obviously there’s a lot of other companies out there offering this.

But what seemed to me to be missing, and what I was hearing from the
prospective agencies that we had that wanted this from us, I was hearing
that they needed a custom approach. And a lot of the white label offerings
SEO re-seller programs that are out there are very cookie cutter, pre done
packages. You just sign up slap your name on it and it’s unable to be
customized. We have agencies asking us all the time to just do one piece of
our process for them or to handle a unique challenge for a client.

What’s interesting is that a very comprehensive process that we developed
for Pam Ann Marketing over the last seven years, we’re actually cherry
picking individual pieces of that come up with custom offerings through the
other agencies on the Stealth front. Because that’s what they want. Like I
said, most of it is project basis. That’s one of the reasons they’re coming
to us, they don’t have a full time need. They just have this one project at
hand.

It’s got these unique challenges. “How can you help us?” We can hand-pick
pieces of our whole process and put together a custom approach for each
agency, for each project for each agency. They really like that. So my
research helped solidify our marketing plan and our marketing messaging,
because I realized that most of what you find is this cookie cutter package
type approach. We do have a very solid process that’s repeatable but we are
willing to customize it. And that was an important piece of research and
strategy for this.

Joe:
That sounds really interesting. It almost sounds like the companies who are
doing the cookie cutter stuff are thinking, “This white label service will
just be passive income for me,” or, “Semi passive income.”

Pam:
Yeah, perhaps. And also perhaps there are agencies out there that want
that. They want something that’s incredibly predictable, the same every
time. I guess it just so happened that we attracted agencies that wanted
these unique solutions. And I don’t know, maybe because of our reputation
we got approached with more complex things that they knew weren’t a fit for
a cookie cutter program. For whatever reason it just so happened that these
were the types of inquiries we were getting. There very well may be
agencies out there that want the cookie cutter stuff, and that’s fine, but
the niche that we’re going after is those that need something unique.

Joe:
It all depends on your needs and your budget. Maybe you want something
cookie cutter until you know what you want, or until you know what you
need, maybe, is a better way to put it. Just, “Give me what most people
have.” And then you take that and you’re like, “All right. Now I understand
the process a little bit more. I don’t really need the leather seats in my
car just give me the regular seats, but I want a really good sound system
in my car. So give me that.”

Pam:
Yeah. Perhaps. Also though, one of our core values all along has been that
we don’t believe that cookie cutter approaches work. Because every single
business is different, every single website is different. They’re like
snowflakes, they’re each completely different. So although we have a
predictable, repeatable process, that process allows for and accounts for
those differences and has flexibility in it to account for those and take
those into the strategy and deal with those. So I don’t think that a truly
cookie cutter package approach gets the best results anyway.

Joe:
Again, that makes sense. That segues perfectly into, what is the research
process for maybe when you have a new client? First of all, when you’re
dealing with maybe not the agency stuff and when you’re dealing directly
with clients, who do you deal with mostly? Is it e-commerce people, or a
certain type of business that you work with?

Pam:
We work with businesses across all verticals. But the common thread is more
the situation that they’re in. They tend to be more established businesses.
Because we’re niche and we only offer a few services, two out of three of
which are focused on search engines, we’re perfectionists about our
approach to SEO and PPC and everything. We like to go in deep and cross
every “T” and dot every “I” and be thorough with our strategy.

We’re just a better fit for helping companies who have the basics in place
already, to take their strategies to the next level. As opposed to a new
mom and pop shop that just opened up and they don’t understand the role the
website’s going to play for them, and they don’t understand what a SEO is
yet. We’re just a better fit for established businesses that need to take
things to the next level. That’s the common thread as opposed to certain
industry or type.

Joe:
Gotcha. OK. If I can put you on the spot just a little bit. My podcast has
been around for over two years at this point. I get a decent amount of
downloads but I want to take it to the next level. If I were to approach
you, what would your process be for, “Am I a good fit for you, and what
should my steps be?”

Pam:
Sure. That’s a great way to discuss this, to use a real world example.
First of all, are you a fit? I can usually tell that right away just by
talking to someone about their business, and making sure that they are
already at the point where they know the role their website plays, and they
know it’s important. They know they have to invest in it. I could tell
pretty quickly that you’d be a serious prospect that would be able to work
effectively with us.

And that’s not just being picky because we don’t want to work with the
other kind, because we find it annoying or something. We can’t be as
effective unless we’re working with someone who really understands the role
their website plays in their business and understands at least at a high
level how SEO works and why we need to do what we need to do. Once that’s
all vetted out, then we’ll move into, if we’re officially kicking off and
working with someone we’ll move into what we call our Phase 1 planning
process.

That starts with a deep dive discovery conference call where we have the
client pre-fill a questionnaire and then we go over it together and flesh
it out even further. About the company, the company’s history, what makes
the company different, who their target audience is, keywords they want to
get found for, wording that they don’t want to be associated with and so
on. A deep dive on the brand and the company.

We then take that and we do our keyword research process, which is very
in-depth. We go through thousands of potential keywords that could possibly
be a fit for that site. We just hoard it all into a big spreadsheet of good
potential candidate keywords, and then we cull it down based on
supply/demand calculations. We’ve come up with a couple of our own metrics
that we use that measure the size of the difference between the search
volume, and the competitiveness of phrases.

To find good opportunities for those that are searched often enough, but
not too competitive. And we come up with a list which is still pretty long
of phrases that are really good contenders, then we zoom out and we look at
that from a 30,000 foot view and come up with some key takeaways to discuss
with the client.

Joe:
Just to stop you there for a second. When you talk about “Choosing the
keywords,” in this example I wouldn’t want “build” or “podcast” because
that’s a super common keyword. But I also wouldn’t want “podcast on how to
build super specific WordPress plugins.” Both of those are bad for
different reasons.

Pam:
Those are opposite ends of the spectrum. The single words, like “build” or
“podcast,” or sometimes even two word phrases if they’re really popular,
are too popular. But we don’t want to go to the other end of the spectrum
and pick phrases that are too long and too specific that are hardly ever
typed in but may be very easy to rank for, but they’re hardly ever typed
in. So we’re going to find that sweet spot in the middle.

We also focus on right-sizing our selections for the client’s existing
traffic. If their website was getting, let’s say 900 visits of organic
search traffic a month. We would not want to pick a key phrase for you that
was searched 90,000 times a month because, to try to explain the rationale
behind this. If Google was willing to, or any search engine, I just
reference Google a lot as an example.

But if Google is willing to rank your site for a keyword that had 90,000
searches a month, your site would probably already have more than 900 total
hits a month. So it’s not an exact science and it’s not an exact math
formula, but we use that to stay in the realm of what would be attainable
for that site. If that makes sense.

Joe:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess, to go back to baseball. It would
be like if I just decide one day I want to play for Major League Baseball.
At 32 years old if I want to play for Major League Baseball I probably
would have already been on that path to play Major League Baseball. I’d be
playing Triple A ball or something at this point. I can’t just knock on the
Yankees door and be like, “I want to play for you guys.”

Pam:
Right. That’s something that needs to be worked up to gradually. That’s the
approach that we take, so we can use higher volume keywords eventually over
time. But the way that we get there is we pick a whole bunch of right-sized
volume keywords and get traffic going for those until the point where the
site’s average is bigger and Google’s willing to trust it more. And then we
can work our way up.

Joe:
That’s very cool. And I like that you said the word “trust” there. Because
that’s what you’re trying to do with good SEO, is Google’s almost like that
friend who you’re like, “Who’s the mechanic I should go to?” Google is
trying to be more like that now.

Pam:
Absolutely. They want to show the results that are trusted resources for
the information. And there’s a lot of signals that go into showing Google
that your site is trustworthy, and one of them comes from ranking for a lot
of keywords and getting a good amount of traffic for those keywords that
are all ancillary angles of a single topic.

I describe it like building out chapters in your book. Showing Google that
you not only have a single page about this thing, but you have a whole
section on your site about this topic. Google’s indicated in the patents
they’re applying for that they’re trying to become more of a topical match
engine, showing up sites that holistically represent a whole topic as
opposed to a single simple keyword match engine. So that’s another reason
to pick a bunch of right sized smaller volume longer tail keywords, and
build up a whole portfolio of those, because then Google will eventually
trust you more for the broader or higher level higher volume general topics
that you’re trying to represent.

Joe:
Gotcha. So if I want to become an authority within Google on podcasts, I
shouldn’t just write one blog post with a keyword. Maybe it’s the perfect
podcasting keyword. But it shouldn’t be one article, it should be, “How to
interview?” And, “How to pick the music?” And, “What editing software you
should use, what’s the best microphone?” I have an entire section now
dedicated to podcasting authority.

Pam:
Exactly. To use podcasting as an example. There’s a bunch of legs about
that topic. Like you said, equipment and marketing of the podcast, getting
sponsors, etc. And some of those subtopics may even have more subtopics.
Hardware could have, the microphones versus the processing. That wouldn’t
be hardware, but the equipment could have hardware and software and other
subcategories so you can build out an outline.

You can just use Google search suggests to see what other terms come up
when you start searching a certain topic, and build out an outline to work
off of so that you fully flesh out each angle of the topic. And that’s the
next step in our process. Once we’ve gathered all those keywords, we look
at it from the perspective of, “How do we build this into an outline?” Then
we compare that to the sitemap and the existing content on the site, and
look at that from the perspective of what’s missing.

Now we know all these good keywords we want to use, all these good angles
of the topic we want to cover. What do they already have, what needs to be
built out, what’s the fit for the main part of the site to build out there
versus what are we going to do with blog content? So we really strategize
about what content we’re going to put where and how, and how to flesh that
topical outline out into a sitemap of pages and articles.

Joe:
Gotcha. So once you have the right sized keywords, you come up with content
strategy. Is that reasonable? Is that a reasonable thing to say about it?
Or is it more like, this is the type of content you should build your own
content strategy around?

Pam:
It is content strategy to a degree. We come up with at least a high level
content strategy, and we focus a lot on information architecture because
the way the content is organized and how it’s linked to each other and
whatnot very much matters for a SEO. So I would say it’s a content strategy
step but heavily focused on information architecture planning.

Joe:
Gotcha. When I blog I notice that Yoast SEO, the plugin always yells at me
for not having an internal link. Is it stuff like that? That you talk
about? Like, “You’re going to write a post about this, and you should link
to a post you wrote about this. Because it’s important to forge that
connection.” Or is that oversimplifying?

Pam:
Yes, that is a simplified version of what interlinking is and why it’s
important. We do try to look at it a little more holistically and look
ahead a bit, because we want to build out hubs and spokes of interlinks
that are very logical. Whereas on the lightest level, yeah, you can
absolutely just make sure that each of your blog posts is linked to
something else. That’s similar. But it’s even better when you really plan
it out in advance and think about what kind of content hubs do we want to
have on this site and how are we going to link them together? And that
keyword research data really helps visualize that from the get-go.

Joe:
Very cool. Very cool. So we are chugging right along in this interview. I
know that we’ve talked a bit about coming up with a keyword strategy, you
also mentioned PPC is something you focus on, right?

Pam:
Yes. SEO is not a fit for everyone. It takes a lot of time and effort and
resources and patience. So paid search and other forms of PPC are perfectly
suitable ways to get traffic quicker. Obviously, cost needs to come into
account. One of the analysis that we do there to determine if PPC is a fit,
is the estimated cost per click for the keywords they want to come up for.

And that’s important for setting a monthly budget. Because you have to cast
a wide enough net. Not every single person who clicks is going to become a
paying customer, so you have to make sure you get quite a good amount of
clicks out of your PPC effort. And if you set something like a $1,000
dollar a month budget for keywords that are averaging $30 dollars per
click, a thousand dollar a month budget boils down into approximately a $30
dollar a day budget.

So you’re allowing for one click a day. That’s not going to work. Then
you’ve got to go back to the drawing board and look for either more
longtail phrases, or just more specific aspects of the service or the
competitive angle or whatever it may be that might not cost as much if
that’s the fixed budget. Or, just use the PPC data to set a higher budget.
keyword analysis is very important in advance of deploying a paid search
strategy to make sure that it’s going to work and that you’re casting a
wide enough net.

Joe:
Gotcha. So when we talk about PPC, “pay per click.” Those are the ads that
you’ll see on top of a Google search or perhaps Google ads embedded on
other sites. Do you consider things like Facebook ads part of that
strategy, or is that something completely different?

Pam:
I do. I consider anything that you can pay for on a per click basis, or
even a per impression basis, to fall under the realm of PPC. We do other
types of PPC advertising like Facebook ads, YouTube ads, LinkedIn ads,
banner ads, retargeting, etc. But we highly encourage people to start with
paid search because even though the targeting options on those other forms
of advertising.

Particularly Facebook, the targeting options are great and you can be
pretty sure you’re going to get in front of the right type of person, but
it may not be the right time that they want or need something. There’s just
nothing like the high level of intent to buy that comes with someone who’s
sitting in front of a search engine and typing something in. They’re doing
that because they want or need it now or soon.

Joe:
I see. It’s like driving past a billboard versus actually going into a
store.

Pam:
Exactly, yes. If I drive past a billboard and I happened to be the type of
person that likes Coca-Cola, maybe that will make me think of one and make
me want to go out of my way to get one, or get one next time I’m in the
store or whatever. But there’s just nothing like the likelihood of
purchases of, “I was a paying customer with money in my hand already,
walking into a store, or searching for a store that carries Coca-Cola
because I intend to get one right now.”

Joe:
Gotcha. Wow. That is really fantastic advice. Usually people are just like,
“With Facebook ads just offer something for free and you’ll get more sign
ups.” And I don’t experiment that much with Facebook ads. I’ve been
thinking about it for one of my courses, but if people don’t care about
Gutenberg or don’t need to know about Gutenberg while they’re browsing
their Facebook profile, like you said. It’s not going to convert very well.

Pam:
Right. And it does have its role, and it can convert some of the time. You
can catch those people who happen to be thinking about Gutenberg while they
happen to be scrolling through their Facebook feed. It can work. And it is
less expensive, so that is something to take into consideration too. Less
expensive on a per person reached basis than paid search. Paid search can
be pretty pricey.

Sometimes the budget isn’t there for that and then Facebook ads can be used
as a secondary choice, or if paid search is already in place and working
well and the brand wants to just get in front of even more people,
something like Facebook ads can be layered on top of that strategy. We just
encourage people to consider paid search as one of the primary tactics
first for budget allocation.

Joe:
Very cool. We are coming up on time here. I’m going to ask you a very
nebulous question, I guess, based on how much of your process you have
described. What major part of your process, if any, are we missing? How do
we wrap up? Or is there a big piece in the middle that you’re like, “We
definitely should talk about this.”

Pam:
Yeah sure. There’s probably just two more things I want to make sure to
touch upon to round out our Phase 1 planning process. The steps that we’ve
talked about thus far, the kickoff call, the keyword research step, the
information architecture content strategy step. That’s mostly content
strategy, so to wrap up and finish out content strategy, we do one final
step which is keyword mapping.

Now that we know the keywords we want to have and the pages we’re going to
have, we do more than one to one match up of exact phrases to exact pages.
We make a spreadsheet of the sitemap, this page should use these primary
phrases, these secondary supporting phrases, and so on. And we map that out
for the most important content on the site. Then we put together a
PowerPoint and wrap up the whole content strategy for the client.

And that rounds out the content strategy. But there’s a very important
piece that I didn’t mention yet, which is the technical planning. That runs
concurrent with the content planning during our holistic Phase 1 planning
process, and there we’re doing technical auditing of the site and checking
it for about 50 different technical best practices. We like to go deep and
cross every “T” and dot every “I”.

And we truly believe that crossing every “T” and dotting every “I” is
necessary for brands to compete well in the SERPs. I definitely don’t want
to glaze over the importance of that process, because that is something
that is super important, and we believe plays a very crucial role in any
SEO strategy. So the technical planning and auditing process when we take
on a client is very much a key part of the process.

Joe:
Gotcha. I’m a developer by trade, so you’re speaking my language now. What
are maybe some of the most common things that people miss? What are the
things that you see come up in a lot of your technical planning audits?

Pam:
Sure. Actually, some of the basics are often overlooked nowadays. I guess
there’s an assumption that some of the simple stuff isn’t needed anymore,
but we do see it make a big difference. For example, XML sitemaps. Making
sure you have one that is dynamically generated and that it’s submitted to
search console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools. Those small
little basic best practices still very much matter and have an impact.

We do see those skipped, and the number one thing we’re dealing with right
now is speed. Site speed has been in the desktop algorithm for several
years, so we’ve been focusing on it for some time. And it’s going to be
included in the mobile algorithm as of July of this year, and over 50% of
searches occur on mobile on Google. So that’s going to become even more
impactful. That is something that’s like the number one thing we see
developers, designers, and everyone turn a complete blind eye to.

It never occurred to them to develop the website to load quickly. And it’s such an important thing, not only for SEO but for conversion rate
optimization, too. The falloff stats for every second of page load time in
conversion is just unbelievable. But a lot of people, clients, developers,
designers. They are guilty of not paying attention to it at all. And so we
end up having the conversation for the first time, and sometimes it’s very
far off from where it needs to be, which is three seconds or less. Google
wants that on both desktop and mobile. That is definitely a huge part of
our technical analysis now.

Joe:
Gotcha. One of my favorite stats, if you’re an e-commerce person, is 80% of
people will abandon their cart if it takes more than four or five seconds
to load. I just think about that. If you have a slow website, you could be
losing 80% of people who have already decided to purchase your product.

Pam:
Wow. That’s an impactful stat.

Joe:
Do you think that’s because people assume their content management system
handles that for them, or they’re willing to sacrifice speed because
they’ve got these big beautiful images and background videos? Or some
combination of the two?

Pam:
I think it most of the time just hasn’t occurred to them. Probably because
they just never got to the point where they were personally frustrated with
the load time of their site, which they may not realize that other people
have a different experience than they have. If you go to your own site so
much, you’ve got the content cached in your browser. It’s not taking all
that long to load. You don’t think of it as unacceptable or problematic in
any way shape or form, and they don’t realize that it can differ for other
users. So it’s just not on their radar.

Joe:
Here’s my developer tip for those of you making websites and you want to
test the speed. Go to an airport, Philadelphia Airport is great for this
because their internet is so bad, and connect to their Wi-Fi. Or go to
Starbucks on a very busy day, like Saturday afternoon, and try to load your
website and see what happens.

Pam:
That’s another great point. Because a lot of people don’t realize that most
of the world may have a slower internet connection than them, and that
Google wants you to optimize for 3G mobile speed, not necessarily the 4G or
LTE or whatever you may happen to be lucky enough to have. They want you to
optimize for 3G connection.

So they came out with a tool recently called Lighthouse and it’s in dev
tools in Chrome. You can also get it as an extension. And that emulates a
3G cellular connection. And that is what we believe they’re going to use,
that testing technology, is what we believe they’re going to use for the
way they judge mobile speed on sites with this upcoming mobile speed
algorithm change.

Joe:
Gotcha. So we today have the ability to test the exact way Google will test
our sites for speed, and determine–.

Pam:
We assume it’s the exact way. We’re inferring that they’re going to, just
to cover our own butts here. We’re inferring and assuming that that’s the
method they’re going to use. That does rely on the computer, and you can
get some differences between different computers. So take it with a grain
of salt. They have said that a plus/minus fifteen point score difference is
expected between machines. But do make sure that you’re testing incognito,
logged out of your WordPress admin, and with all browser extensions
disabled. To minimize those variances.

Joe:
Man, that is some great advice and a really good way to wrap up the show.
Except I need to ask you my favorite question. You just gave us a bunch,
but do you have any trade secrets for us?

Pam:
Yes. My trade secret is to not keep your trade secrets a secret. I’ll
explain that a little more. We have found that one of the best ways we have
succeeded in growing a reputation, growing a business, winning clients is
to be completely transparent about all the ways that we do things. All of
our expertise. How we do things. We will train, if a client doesn’t want to
pay us to do it, we’ll train them. We’ll show them how to do it themselves.
We don’t care, we’re not being protective of anything that we know.

And that’s really set us apart, especially in this space which is full of
snake oil sales people. What’s been important in setting us apart and
building trust, is that we’re willing to tell you exactly how we do what we
do and exactly what tools we use. It definitely builds trust. And we’ve
even been paid to train some of our competitor’s staff. And I’ll do it, I
don’t care.

There’s plenty of business to go around. I don’t worry about it. Obviously,
I don’t publish everything that we’ve built over the past seven years for
free on the internet completely, but we do intend to turn some of our
process into online video courses that we can make money off of and
whatnot. I guess I should just rephrase it and say, don’t be overly
secretive with your trade secrets. Obviously there has to be some degree of
secrecy.

Joe:
Absolutely. But even training your competitors. Sure, I’m a developer, and
I have a development course. I could be training my competitors, but with
development I’m sure much like SEO. Part of it is not just knowing it
today, it’s knowing how to know it three months from now, or six months
from now, or five weeks from now. You could teach a person all you want but
you can’t force them to keep their knowledge updated if they don’t want to.

Pam:
Yeah. And there’s also something to be said for that real world practical
application and experience. Teaching the theory does not give away our
competitive edge at all, because a big part of our competitive edge is how
much experience we’ve seen in the wild, applying that theory with real
world practical application in all those messy situations, and knowing how
to navigate that. I’ll teach theory all day long and I will not be worried
that we’re going to lose any business for giving away our secrets.

Joe:
And bringing it back to the baseball, the batter analogy. The Yankees in
the early to mid-2000s always hit Pedro Martinez well even though he was an
incredible pitcher, because they saw him pitch a lot, and they knew what to
expect and how to handle things. It’s a lot like that. The more pitches you
see, the better hitter you will be. So, awesome.

Pam:
You really like the baseball analogies.

Joe:
I love baseball. And at the time of this recording the Yankees are on a
tear right now, and they’re my team, so I will stick to that as long as
possible.

Pam:
Awesome. I’m not too big of a baseball fan, but I could talk football with
you someday maybe, if you like football too.

Joe:
Absolutely. I love football. Are you from Pennsylvania?

Pam:
I’m from New Jersey, so I root for both of the local teams. The Giants and
the Jets, but more so the Giants because I’m forced to. All my good friends
are Giants fans. Except my boyfriend will kill me for saying this, because
he’s from Virginia and he’s a Redskins fan, so I have to root for them too.

Joe:
Gotcha. Understandable. So you are from northern New Jersey, it sounds
like.

Pam:
Yes.

Joe:
OK, cool. I’m from New York, so I am also a Giants fan. Very cool. Pam,
where can people find you?

Pam:
I can be found at PamAnnMarketing.com. All of the social medias that go
along with that. And our Stealth site is StealthSearchandAnalytics.com.

Joe:
StealthSearchandAnalytics.com. I will link both of those in the show notes.
Pam, thanks so much for joining me today.

Pam:
Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

Outro:
What a great conversation. I really liked what she said about Pay Per Click
vs. Facebook Ads and how Facebook Ads are kind of a billboard. I also like
the tools she told us about, like light house.

And Thanks again to our sponsors Pantheon, and Traitwar. Their support is
deeply appreciated.

The question of the week for you is have you ever tried pay per click or
Facebook ads? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/92/. If you like the
show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It
helps people discover us! Thanks to those reviews, the show is currently
#22 in Apple Podcasts for Technology podcasts, so thank you so, so much.

You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I
want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the
place to do it. I ask the question of the week over there too. And until
next time, get out there and build something!

Jeremiah Smith and SimpleTiger

August 21, 2018

Show Notes

Check out my new show, Creator Toolkit and join our Facebook community. Question of the week: What’s the best piece of SEO advice you’ve ever gotten? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

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Transcript

Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 90(!!) of How I Built It. In today’s episode I get to talk to Jeremiah Smith, founder of SimpleTiger. This episode is going to kick off a miniseries about SEO and I’m happy that Jeremiah is starting it off. He offers so much incredible advice about SEO and life in general. I love his story, and I think you will too. We’ll get to all of that and more, but first…

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Joe Casabona: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Jeremiah Smith of SimpleTiger. Jeremiah, how are you today?

Jeremiah Smith: I’m doing awesome. Thanks for having me on the show.

Joe: Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. When you guys reached out, when your company reached out there were a few suggested topics. And I think we’re just going to talk about how you created a SimpleTiger today, is that right?

Jeremiah: Yes sir.

Joe: So why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do, and how you came up with the idea?

Jeremiah: Sure. My name is Jeremiah. I’ve been in the SEO industry now for about 12 years, and I pretty much discovered SimpleTiger. It was a marketing agency where I used to offer a whole bunch of different services. From building websites, to designing logos, to actually even printing business cards. I did everything. I thought I could do everything, at least. And I stumbled across Search Engine Optimization through building a website for a client. And after building their website, showing it to them, and they’re like, “This is awesome.” And then a day later they’re like, “OK. Can we get it in Google?”

And I just thought that it was filling out a web form and submitting it to Google, and then you’re done. But I didn’t even realize there’s a whole industry underneath that has so much to do with keeping your site to show up well on Google. So when I discovered that I was immediately like, “This is intriguing. I want to do this for this client. But I can’t really sell this yet.” But they agreed to have me do it as a full-time job for them so long as it worked.

That was their thing. They were just focused on results. And so I had this immediate desire to start learning SEO by doing it. But my goal was obviously to yield results for this client. So that’s when I dove in and it actually worked extremely well. Their company grew massively in a matter of six months and I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe what I had just learned. And I knew that if I’d just done all of this by learning it, imagine if I knew how to do it and was able to do it for clients.

So I parlayed that into a career in SEO, and went to work for some big ad agencies, and really learned how the big boys do what I do now. That started this side business of SimpleTiger being focused on SEO and consulting, and just got rid of all the other junk I used to do. Building websites, designing logos, printing business cards. All that had to go. I wanted to focus on a SEO. So that is where SimpleTiger was born.

In those days though it was a consulting company, where I didn’t have the personnel to do campaigns for all these huge clients. So I just spent my time consulting them. And that was pretty much how it started.

Joe: Cool. Very cool. Learning by doing is something that I preach all the time. And I’ve said to people, to make them feel better, “You never learn something as well as if you break a client’s site and then have to fix it.” I have always learned the best that way, or at least the fastest.

So what was it like, learning by doing, as far as SEO goes? Because you don’t necessarily see results right away. If I write a line of code and it breaks, I see immediately that it breaks. But with SEO it’s a little bit of a longer game, right?

Jeremiah: Yeah it is. And that was a bit of a challenge. Now what’s awesome is when I was learning SEO, 2006 through 2007, that was the very beginning for me. So when I was learning, those days SEO was much easier than it is today. The tools at your disposal were really good. The stuff that Google gave you access to in regards to keyword data, and things like that, were fantastic. In those days you could you could change a title tag on the website and immediately start ranking better.

That’s totally different nowadays. It’s much harder to rank in Google nowadays. And so I actually was blessed to have that, because it was a good teacher. It allowed me to quickly learn things in those days. But you’re right. SEO does take a little while to take effect. And sometimes that can be a challenge especially when you’re trying to learn something.

So the hard part for me in those days is probably knowing exactly what to do. I didn’t have the experience to filter out what I was reading from what might work and what might not. Nowadays I have that experience and I can quickly tell what I need to do. But that was probably the hardest part in those early days.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s really interesting. That makes a lot of sense, and it was probably easier back then. Because I know when I made my first website I would get links and I would get e-mails all the time, “I’ll trade you link for a link.” And that was the strategy in 2003.

But I mean, 2006-2007 is when Twitter started and then a few years later it started to get big. And the Google algorithm changes quarterly. And because it changes so quickly, what kind of research do you do to stay on top of SEO? I know that there are some big names out there. Matt Cutts used to be a big name, and I think Danny Sullivan. I don’t know if he’s still doing that.

Jeremiah: Yeah. He’s still around. And I definitely recommend people follow Danny Sullivan. He actually left Search Engine Land and joined Google, which is really cool. So now we’ve got somebody who is really involved in the SEO community for a very long time on the inside at Google, which is awesome. I love that. Of course he’s limited with what he can talk about, but he does throw us a bone every now and then.

So I will say following him is a great idea. But if you really understand what Google’s “Why” is, why they exist. And you understand their ethos. If you’ve built a relationship with Google over time like I have, then you can to a large degree predict what they’re going to do. You don’t really need to follow all the news and hype so much.

And that’s one of the biggest filters for me, is I look at the commercial interest that Google has and everything they’re going to take a step in. Because Google’s not going to try to quit making money. They’re going to try to make more. We have to keep that in mind as they move and as they operate. And to a large degree what I’ve learned, and this is the big secret that’s not really a secret in the SEO community, but I want everyone to know about this because I think it’s important.

Be authentic with everything that you create. And if you’re always doing that, you’re doing it creatively and you are doing it prolifically, and you’re creating large pieces of content and several of them. And you’re consistent with that. You’re going to have a fantastic future in search, insofar as Google’s concerned. Because their algorithmic updates are looking for your kind of stuff to promote, and other kind of stuff to disappear.

They want a better index. They want better content to wrap their advertising around. They make more money off of that. So keep that in mind as you build things, and then that will help you predict what Google is going to do next.

Joe: Wow, that’s fantastic. It’s almost like if you want to run a TV ad, you’re going to want to run it either during the Super Bowl or a really popular show, and not just any old thing that some smaller network is putting out. Right?

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Jeremiah: Yeah, pretty much. It’s being creative about what you’re doing. But at the same time understanding that you’ve got to provide value at some level. And being creative is interesting because you bring up a great point. Super Bowl ads are your most creative ads all year, and they’re so exciting to watch. I love it. That’s my favorite part of the Super Bowl, actually. It’s awful.

But I remember that, not this past Super Bowl but the one before that. Miller bought a one second spot because a Super Bowl ad costs a hundred thousand dollars per second. And so they bought a one second spot and it was just a guy for the miller factory wearing a Miller shirt standing in the factory with all beer behind him, and he just goes “High life.” And that was it. It was just a one second thing. And it was it went viral, it was so huge. And that was the cheapest Super Bowl commercial of all time, proportionally speaking. That’s a guerrilla technique of being very creative in capturing your audience, who are very occupied.

And I thought that was cool. I really dig that. But when it comes to SEO, there’s a common misconception. And this is another thing that I try to teach and promulgate this throughout the web. But a lot of people compare SEO to advertising. And that’s the worst mistake you can make because it’s so different. If I were to really explain what a SEO is to you, insofar as what we do in Google, it would be reverse engineering another company’s intellectual property– Google– in order to leverage it to your business’ benefit. So it’s really strange. It’s not advertising.

Joe: Right. I mean, you can throw money at advertising reasonably, and eventually do well. If you have an unlimited amount of money for Google or Facebook ads, eventually you’ll start to convert. But SEO, you need to actually understand the problem that you’re trying to solve. I mean, “optimization” is in the acronym.

Jeremiah: Absolutely. And the funny thing for us has actually been, I would say the hardest challenge for me growing this business over time, has been pricing things appropriately. And the reason being that our inputs are pretty much the same almost no matter what client we work with, because there are certain things that have to happen every single time. Content has to happen. Links have to happen. Things like that. Of course there are more difficult industries than others, but we’ve niched down over time and we figured out our target market.

Because of that, everything looks the same. Almost every campaign we get into there are the nuances and the differences there, but because of that I can build a pricing model that works for what we do. But what’s crazy is what comes out the other end for the client is vastly different in regards to scale and in their industry. So with advertising, that’s not quite the case. Advertising’s got a flat fee for pretty much flat return.

Whereas with SEO, you can scale dramatically. Of course it might be expensive in the beginning when you’re spending $5,000 bucks a month and you’re not getting a lot of results out of it. But a year from now, you might have so much business coming from search that we’ve actually had some clients tell us we have to stop working with you for a little while. Because we’ve got to re-engineer parts of our company to handle the business we’re getting. And that just shows you what kind of power is in SEO.

Joe: Wow. And again it lays credibility to the fact that it’s a long game. I think a lot of people in general believe that the internet could be a get rich quick scheme. Like, “I’ll set up a site. I’ll start a Kickstarter, I’ll start making money. I’ll just SEO my site and I’ll start making money.” But it’s a game of patience.

And I fell into that trap too, when I started my online courses I was like, “I’ll release a course and people will buy it, because people want to learn this.” No, not at all. Why would somebody buy a product from me if they don’t know me? So that’s really interesting. I also like to ask if you’re the mastermind, if you get business advice from folks. And I do want to hear the answer to that question.

But I’m also interested in the discovery process for a client, because you come up with a pricing package, but you said the results could be so different. What kind of stuff do you look for? Do your clients know what they’re looking for when they first come in? Or do they just say, “I want to be number one in Google.” what’s it like?

Jeremiah: Good question. I love that question. I can go deeper on that. It took us a long time to develop the new process that we have for client intake, but this new process is fantastic. We do something in the very beginning that I recommend, pretty much any company that’s offering a service, even down to just building a website. Highly recommend you do. And it’s basically just an intro phase to a project. We call it an opportunity assessment.

With SEO, we’re going to assess your opportunity in regards to search. A lot of SEO companies out there do something similar, but they don’t do anything quite like we do. And there are few agencies that do. And what I see them do it works so well. So we jumped on board with this. The opportunity assessment allows us to check all the different areas that are going to impact them from a SEO perspective, and see how they stack up. Where their strengths and their weaknesses are.

Because what I don’t want to do is try to take some cookie cutter approach to every client and say, “You always need technical optimization. You always need new content. You always need links.” While that may be true that they will always need some amount of those, those proportions may vary dramatically. We’ll deal with some client websites where from a technical perspective, the thing’s built on WordPress, they’ve got all the right plugins, it loads really fast, it’s very clean and smooth. Good user interface.

They don’t really need any technical optimization. Let’s not sell them that. Let’s say, “A lot of companies do need technical optimization. But you guys check off that box, so we’re not going to invoice you for that. Moving on into content. You might need a little bit of content. But where you guys really need help is in your links area.” So we’re going to do a proposal that’s heavy on the links side of things, that’s medium on content and doesn’t include technical. But that’s our full suite.

The opportunity assessment allows us to see all that ahead of time. Now what’s different for us, and we have strong business reasons for doing this. We charge for the opportunity assessment, whereas a lot of companies do it for free. We used to do those for free. But what I found, and this is a nugget that I’m giving your listeners here. What I found is you’ll get a ton of tire kickers coming through and people that want to get this assessment for free. And Our assessment carries some value in it.

When we do that technical chunk, we list the top 10 things that could go wrong from a technical perspective and whether or not they’re wrong on the client’s site. And then we dive into some content strategy and we dive into some offsite strategy. We’re actually providing value in this. So first of all, we charge for that. But second of all it limits the amount of people who are trying to get this free opportunity assessment, down to the ones who are serious and they’re ready to invest in SEO.

And what’s crazy is we charge $200 bucks for our opportunity assessment, which is super-duper cheap compared to the $10,000 dollar Phase 1 project that we’re going to do next. But what that does is that warms them up with a buying relationship with us, and then when it comes to the proposal they’re so much more ready to continue working with us. Because we already feel like we’re engaged in a business relationship. So it works really well for that.

Joe: Very cool. I love that. Because you’re right. You do get a lot of tire kickers. It’s like the people who say, “Design me something, and if I like it I’ll pay for it.” Like, OK. “Give me a meal and if I like it, I’ll pay for the meal.”

Jeremiah: Right. You got all the time in the world.

Joe: Yeah, right. And $200 bucks, to be honest, is not a very high barrier. But it definitely weeds people out. My friend Erin Flynn recently changed her membership model. She used to have this free membership area that she decided that she was going to charge $12 dollars a year for. And what that did was weed out the trolls. The people who were just there, not providing value, being jerks to the community. And she immediately saw an increase in the community, because $12 dollars a year is not a lot of money.

If people answer one question that you post, you have that value. But the people who don’t want to spend any money and get all the free advice are the ones bringing the community down. When I was at Crowd Favorite we did the same thing with that, we charged for the discovery phase because we put real resources into it. We didn’t just look at the website and go, “I think you need this.”

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Jeremiah: Right. We noticed a couple of immediate things that happened after doing that. The first thing that happened was, first of all my sales were up. I spent probably about a third of the amount of time doing opportunity assessments, because now I don’t have a ton of people signing up for these free assessments.

The second thing was our close rate from opportunity assessments increased dramatically, from 20% to 70% to 80%. And it was like, “Heck yeah. Now we’re getting somewhere.” And then the third thing was what you just said. The quality of clientele that we started getting was fantastic, and the retention rates were so much better because we put them through a strict vetting process before we ever began a serious relationship with them. Figuring out all that stuff in the beginning, because SEO is quite frankly, and I hate to say it but It’s very complex.

There’s a lot to a good search engine optimization campaign. I’m not saying smoke and mirrors, I’m just saying there are a lot of things to it that need to be figured out ahead of time. And doing that allows us to figure out a lot of that, instead of just the right campaign for them. To where when we pitch that campaign, and we walk them through the parts that we’re recommending, it all just makes sense. And then they understand, they know, they learn something in the process and they’re ready to buy.

Joe: again, that’s fantastic. I keep saying the same thing over and over again. But you’re making a lot of really good points.

Jeremiah: Oh, good.

Joe: I just thought of a random question that you probably get a lot. This is maybe not usually what I ask, but it is very complex. We talk a lot about Google. Google is always the one that you’re optimizing for. Do you optimize for other search engines? Or is it basically, “I’ve optimized for Google, so I’m pretty much optimized for everything else.”

Jeremiah: Great question. I love this. Side note here, I’m actually teaching at the University of South Florida. I’m teaching senior level marketing students. I taught a class last night, it’s a nice three hour class to give them a deep dive into search engine optimization. And in that class, I got the same question. And I said, “When I’m teaching this stuff and when I’m working with clients, 99% of the time it’s Google. They are the 600 pound gorilla.

And in regards to general commercial web search purposes. But when we really take a step back, Search Engine Optimization is agnostic from a platform perspective. It will work in Amazon. It will work in the Apple iTunes store. If you’ve got a podcast, or you’ve got an app or a song, that kind of stuff. It will actually take effect there. Heck, even an eBay SEO works. So it’s amazing.

I’ve seen eBay stores do really well by having a good SEO strategy for the eBay platform. Everything that applies to Google in regards to how you optimize for Google, does not necessarily apply to Amazon or eBay, of course. Because in Amazon we’re not talking about websites anymore, we’re talking about listings or product listings that you’ve created, and stuff like that. So different rules to the game but the same concept still exists there. But to answer your question, yeah, what we do is primarily for Google.

Joe: Gotcha. Cool. Sweet, I mean we are more than halfway through, I can’t believe how fast this interview is going. And I haven’t gotten into the title question yet. So let’s do that. We’ve talked about SimpleTiger, we’ve talked a bit about strategy and things like that. But how did you build SimpleTiger?

Jeremiah: Oh man. That’s a fun story. I mentioned at the beginning there how I did SEO for the one client and then decided that was that was it for me. I wanted to do that full time. I cut out everything else and focused in on SEO, put that on my resume. Knew that at the time I couldn’t just build an agency out of nothing, I didn’t have anything. I didn’t know how to build an agency. I didn’t know how to run an agency, I didn’t even know how to work at an agency.

So I thought, “I need to go work in an agency and really see if this is it for me.” So I got a job at a huge agency in Atlanta called 360i. And I love those guys, to this day they’re fantastic. They’re huge movers and shakers in the enterprise SEO space. And all of my clients there were Fortune 500 companies. Every single one of them. They were just massive. And I got to see how SEO works on that grand scale. And I quickly learned, that everything is exactly the same for them as it was for that little tiny mom and pop shop that I got my start with. It’s just scaled up.

If it’s content that needs to be created, they create more content. If it’s links that need to be built, they build more links. But the same rules still apply. The same techniques still happen. So I got to learn that and then do that for a lot of huge clients, and while doing that I’ve built my consulting practice on nights and weekends. Just consulting smaller businesses that would never fit 360-I’s budget, that kind of thing.

And over time I just built a bit of notoriety in the community for that. And then eventually I decided to venture off on my own. This was right around 2008-2009 when the economy got really tough, advertising was the first to go. So there was all kinds of shuffling around. I got let go from 360i because We had a lot of SEO people there and everything.

And I was so, at the moment, checked out and checked in to my entrepreneurial idea of building my own thing that it was really a good boost for me. And I’m sure they could probably sense that too, that I was ready to go do something of my own. But they are a really sharp company. They move their people up really well and have a strong tight knit team.

So I left there to go work for another smaller agency, because I still didn’t feel quite ready. And that smaller agency, I brought them an SEO department, basically by building something that they didn’t have there and getting a bunch of clients on board. And that really was where I learned how to take nothing and build an agency out of it, But for someone else. So I had the security blanket of a daily income.

And then I finally hit that that final straw. “I’m totally done working for somebody else, I want to build my own thing. I really want to take SimpleTiger and turn it into an agency.” So I left that last agency there, went off on my own, and that was a little bit terrifying for a moment. But there was actually a deeper, longer term feeling of fear that stuck with me for quite a while. That it was all on me. And so I dove straight into consulting and just picking up consulting clients left and right.

In those days I didn’t have a process put together or anything. I was taking anything I could get, in terms of SEO consulting work. And I had some awesome projects, I had some terrible projects. But after a little while I realized I made really good money doing it, but I was working myself to death. I realized, I’m going to have to build a team. I need people who can help me actually produce results and do the SEO stuff, so I can go out and sell it.

And so I brought my brother on full time. He was interested in SEO at the time, and I taught him a little bit about it. He went to work for another agency for a while just like I did. That was my rite of passage for him. I was like, “You’ve got to go through this. It’ll be good for you. You’ll learn it, and then I’ll be able to afford to pay you to work here because then you could pull some weight.”

And that’s exactly what happened. He came in all beefed up ready to go. He knew how to do it. And so we joined forces and took SimpleTiger from a consultancy to an agency, and started hiring employees and actually building a team. And that’s how we got from there to where we are today. Now our evolution as a company since we started hiring a team has been really fun and exciting. Way easier, and sometimes a little painful, but way easier than just being the consultant doing my own thing by myself. I love having a team.

Joe: There are two things I want to parse out here. Right at the beginning of this story You gave an incredible piece of advice that I want to make sure it lands with the listeners and that’s when you said, “I needed to go work at an agency. I needed to get experience in the industry.” Which is very clairvoyant for a young entrepreneurial person, because I was in that very same situation.

I got a piece of advice from a family friend who said, “When you get out of college you need to get a job at a company and learn how they do things. And then you’ll be ready to go out on your own.” And I being the stubborn New York Italian male that I am, thought, “I know everything. I’ve been doing this since I was 14. What more could I possibly learn at 21?” It was super low risk because I was living at home, I was in grad school for a time.

And it wasn’t until I actually got my first real job that I actually learned, man. I should have listened to that family friend right off the bat. I put myself back maybe two years, or three years. For people who are coming out of college that have the entrepreneurial spirit, you hear about Snapchat and Facebook who get the billion dollar IPOs and they’re college dropouts or whatever. But for most of us, get that experience and make those connections.

Jeremiah: Absolutely.

Joe: And that’s the other question I wanted to ask you, is that you went to a smaller agency after 360i and built out their SEO department. Did you bring your clients with you, or did you start from scratch there?

Jeremiah: Started from scratch there. There’s a huge thing in the agency space, and I didn’t have any real strict non-competes or anything like that in those days. But there was definitely a respectful line, where it is just like, you don’t do that. And I didn’t want to hurt my name at all. I really wanted to keep my relationships with everyone at 360i fantastic. It was purely a logistical reason that I got let go during that whole downturn, and so I wanted to keep those relationships healthy.

Because later on they ended up sending me business. Because believe it or not, 360i’s minimum budgets are massive, and sometimes they’d have some really cool companies come through and they’d refer them over to me and I was able to build my agency based on my past agency relationships. So that was awesome. But I think that’s one big part of it.

What you just said though, about getting a job in the industry, and all that. That is so huge. Because that one year that I did that, I mean it was just one year that I worked at 360i. It wasn’t a really long time. But I learned so much in that one year, I learned several things that I needed to do for my SEO agency. And then I learned a few things that I would probably never do for my agency by working there. And it’s nothing against 360i.

It was just learning my style and figuring out what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to build, versus what there already was out there. And I decided I wanted to build a boutique agency that grows very small, very slowly, very steadily. Very small amount of people that yield massive results. Whereas 360i was not lean. They were huge, we had a ton of people. But we also offered a lot of services outside of SEO.

And I really just wanted to focus on search engine optimization, and also just wanted one niche category of clientele. Because I learned that’s a fantastic way to make money. And I’ve only practiced that over the past year or so and it’s really paying off. I recommend people out there pick a niche. I saw you had a previous podcast of niching down, and I think that’s so powerful. Not enough people do that. But that was something I couldn’t do at 360i.

We had so many huge clients and so many diverse industries, it just didn’t make sense. So I learned all kinds of stuff through that experience and that relationship. And I also learned how to just deal with massive companies, and how at the end of the day, they’re all the same. The numbers might be a little bit different but don’t let that kind of stuff sway you. Continue doing your job based on what you need to do. And you can move the needle for a company as big as NBC or E-Trade. You don’t really have to get bent out of shape over the fact that they’re huge, or anything that. Don’t let that scare you.

Joe: Wow. Great advice. And I will link to the Sarah Dunn episode of niching down. I think that is more excellent advice, especially in software engineering. We call that “domain knowledge.” We want to have domain knowledge of the software system we’re building so that we can build a better system. We understand the users, and our user’s users. Understanding the industry and having that domain knowledge allows you to offer a better service, because you come in knowing a little bit, or maybe a lot, about what your clients need right off the bat. And you can ask those questions that a generalist might not know to ask.

Jeremiah: Right. And that’ll definitely help you close that business well, but that will also help you market your business well. So if we’re talking about search engine optimization again, and it’s for your company and you’ve chosen a niche. Let’s say for example, you’re a software as a service company, and you’re building a piece of software that’s maybe a piece of invoicing software. But your invoicing software just so happens to work best for maybe other software companies, and that’s the niche that you’ve decided to go after.

Now let’s just imagine for a second that you didn’t decide to go after that niche. The keywords that you would write would be things like, “invoicing software.” And you get to compete with the Intuits of the world with QuickBooks and FreshBooks and Zero and all those big names. But if you are invoicing software for software companies, the game changes a little bit. Your key word targeting is going to be software-based or “Software-focused invoicing software,” or “Invoicing software for SaaS,” or something along those lines.

And now your key word pool’s a lot smaller and your target audience is a lot smaller, but they are much more likely to do business with you because of that level of targeting and because of that domain knowledge, like you’re talking about, that you have. I don’t want to go too deep into that. I know you have a separate episode all about niching down, but I would just like to also throw my two cents in that, “Yes, it is very valuable, and it works really well.” Highly recommend it.

Joe: Fantastic. So you told your story and it was a lot of transformation. And we’re totally coming up on time here. I do want to ask you what your plans for the future are. Is it keep an eye on the pulse of SEO? Is AMP going to affect the way you do things? What are your plans for the future?

Jeremiah: Good question. There’s so much about the future of SEO, and that was my finishing statement to my class last night at USF. That was the one thing they wanted to know. “You’ve taught us everything up to now, what’s going to happen in the future?” And that’s such a fun question for me to answer. Because I love theorizing about this stuff. But I will say in regards to SEO looking forward, there’s a bunch of stuff going on that I think your listeners might be interested in hearing a little bit about from someone experienced, like myself, on the subject.

Just so they don’t get swayed by a lot of the hype. And I want to clarify this. Voice search is a big thing that’s happening right now. People are concerned about what that means. People are using the Amazon device, which I can’t say her name right now. She’s listening, and she’ll start talking to me and ruin the whole thing. But there’s that, and then we’ve got the Google’s home device and stuff like that, that are always listening. And those devices, in regards to voice search, those devices are primarily going to help you answer simple questions that just have a very clear black and white answer to them.

They don’t have as much commercial intent capability yet that’s being leveraged. As people I think assume will dominate, I personally don’t think I’m going to be buying a whole lot of products through my Amazon device. That’s just me. But I prefer to look at some things and read a little bit about it, and then click the buy button. Something about that process, actually I literally enjoy doing. So I don’t want a break from that too much, and I think a lot of people are actually a lot more like that.

We have to keep in mind that voice is just an input method, like the keyboard and mouse. It’s just another way of entering in a search query. And then the result that you get, if it’s not going to be on a screen, if it’s going to be vocal then it’s got to make sense to come through that medium. So just keep that in mind. Don’t let the news and hype about voice search throw you off, that “SEO is going to die because voice search is going to take over.” No, there’s going to be a whole new level to it there.

And that’s what that means. It’s going to filter out a lot of the garbage search from what you want, most likely. That’s one part. Another part gets into artificial intelligence, which I don’t have time to go over there. But I wouldn’t worry about that either. Just refer to my first note on SEO which is just be authentic in what you create. Create really good stuff for humans.

Artificial intelligence will learn that and will keep up and you’ll be fine. So those are a couple of things about the future of search. Insofar as my agency is concerned, and growing SimpleTiger, again my goals are just to keep it a boutique agency and focus on delivering the best results for our clients that we can. I don’t have any plans to just blow it out of the water. Of course I do want to see massive growth. I don’t want to grow so fast that it’s a flash in the frying pan experience for us and we have to shut down. That’s something that I fear. So I would rather just grow steadily and healthfully and always be around. So those are my plans for the future.

Joe: I dig that, and I appreciate and I’m sure a lot of the listeners appreciate you not saying the bigger names for the At Home Smart Devices. Awesome. And we’ll leave with this, though I think you just gave us a bunch. Do you have any trade secrets for us?

Jeremiah: I would say a lot of your listeners are probably very tech savvy, and in that regard when we do SEO we break everything down into technical, content, and off site.

And off site usually means link building. Your audience is probably going to be strong on the technical side of things and doesn’t need to do much technical optimization. I’m just going to assume that right out. So because of that I would focus on the meat and potatoes of SEO, which really are building good quality content that’s very user specific, it’s very audience specific. It answers their pain points.

So build that content on your site, and then go get links to that content from other relevant sites. Whether those are blogs or publications on the web, or friends’ websites or whatever. Get links back to that content and you will perform well on SEO. I can guarantee it. That’s the best course of action. And that’s something that you should constantly be doing. I would try my best to plan out some content in advance so that when you start working at it, you don’t have to stop.

Google likes to see fresh content and you will to see it when you start realizing that every blog article you stack up, if it’s part of a plan, brings a new chunk of visitors to your site that are keyword targeted and ready to buy from you. So every time you stack one of those up you’re just compounding the amount of traffic and business you’re ultimately going to get. I’d recommend that your audience just focus on building content, and building links to that content and They’ll do well.

Joe: Focus on building content. Awesome. Now I like to end with that question, but I can’t leave this follow up on the table. Which is, is there some magic publishing schedule? Three blog posts a week? Do I need to blog daily? Or is it just consistent, Good stuff?

Jeremiah: Tim Fair said something fantastic a while back. He said, “What is better? The strict diet that you will not adhere to, or the less strict diet that you will adhere to?” And I love that advice. So come up with a schedule that is not so strict that you won’t adhere to it, but is strict enough that you can handle it. I think that’s fantastic. Now on the opposite end of that, people like Nick Eubanks who are colleagues of mine and have been in SEO forever.

They’ll post case studies where they spent months developing lots of high quality content without publishing any of it. And then one day they’ll publish a hundred articles all at once, and they’ll publish all this stuff. And this is tests that he’s doing in the SEO industry. And he’ll show going from zero to 100,000 monthly search visitors in the span of like a month, after launching the site with all this new content on it.

So Google’s very sharp. Google can quickly determine what’s going on. A lot of crazy things can happen in Google very fast. And he was testing the edges of that. So you’re not going to publish content too quick for Google, I’ll tell you that. When in doubt, if you can publish faster, if you can publish more, do it. But not at the sake or at the cost of quality.

Because that is a big algorithmic indicator, is quality content that people are really going to digest. So longer form articles that go deeper into subjects and provide lots of steps and how to’s, and have some rich media with images, and some video links and stuff like that. That’s going to do way better than a 500 word article on a subject. So keep that in mind too.

Joe: Great advice. I think I’m going to have to change my content strategy a little bit right after we get off this call. Jeremiah, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Jeremiah: Awesome. I really enjoyed it and I appreciate the show. I love what you’re working on here, and I was just happy to be a part of it. So thank you.

Joe: Great. Thanks so much. And where can people find you?

Jeremiah: Sure. At SimpleTiger.com. You can also find me on Twitter. Twitter handles are @SimpleTiger, as well as myself, @JeremiahCSmith. So hit me up with any questions or anything, I’d be happy to answer questions for your audience anytime.

Outro: I’m so grateful that Jeremiah and I were connected because this interview helped me frame my content strategy, at a time where I needed it. His advice about needed to work in the industry first was some of the best advice I got in college, which I never took. I’m glad Jeremiah did, and I’m glad I eventually did.

And Thanks again to our sponsors Pantheon, Traitware, and GravityView. Their support is deeply appreciated.

The question of the week for you is what’s the best piece of SEO advice you’ve ever gotten? Let me know on Twitter at @jcasabona or email me, joe@howibuilt.it.

For all of the show notes, head over to howibuilt.it/90/. If you like the show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a rating and review. It helps people discover us! You can also join the Facebook community over at howibuilt.it/facebook/. I want to build a strong community for this podcast, and Facebook is the place to do it. Finally, if you’re interested in the different tools and services I use to build websites, check out my new podcast, Creator Toolkit over at creatortoolkit.com.

And until next time, get out there and build something!

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