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Dave Gerhardt is an expert's expert.He's the author of Conversational Marketing: How the World's Fastest Growing Companies Use Chatbots to Generate Leads 24/7/365. He's the CMO at Privy, a leader in eCommerce marketing for small businesses and entrepreneurs. He's the former VP of Marketing at Drift, a Conversational Marketing platform that combines chat, email, video, and automation to make it easier for customers to buy by helping them start the conversations they want to start on their terms.Dave even has his own marketing community, DGMG, a place where you can "get the marketing education you never got in school," a podcast, and a community where B2B marketers join forces to learn from one another.He's the guy who genuinely loves everything marketing, and so has found multiple ways to have fun doing it.He's also focused on the metrics that matter most to CEOs, namely, the amount of revenue that a marketer can generate for a company. If you're ready for some down-to-earth, no-nonsense insights on how you can improve your performance, you won't want to miss this one. The highlights: [2:07] Dealing with imposter syndrome. [5:46] Getting it all done. [7:52] Evolutions in Dave's marketing philosophy. [13:08] Why you don't have to prove the ROI of every last marketing activity. [19:41] Branding strategies. [21:17] Branding an individual vs. branding the agency. [26:44] Dave's cause. The insights:Dealing with imposter syndromeIf there's one thing you learn while interviewing some of the smartest marketers in the world – very few of them are immune to imposter syndrome. Some only face it at the beginning of their journeys. Some continue to grapple with it even while they're standing in front of live audiences at some of the biggest events in the world. Dave's no exception. "It's exhausting, at times, worrying about or thinking about whether someone's going to react the wrong way or be mad about what you've posted. I don't like that headspace sometimes."Dave admits that imposter syndrome has plagued him from the beginning."I remember being at Constant Contact. I was 24 years old. It was when I really got into startups and being part of the startup community. I graduated college with no clue about real marketing, or what to do. I just got a degree because I needed to graduate. I got into internet marketing and social media. I saw a lot of people in that industry had blogs about: hey, here's what I'm doing. I wanted that. I wanted a public forum to share what I was doing."He scratched his initial itch with a podcast called Tech in Boston in 2014."I wasn't even working in marketing. I was an account manager at the time. I started this podcast where I interviewed local CEOs in Boston. That's where I started to build my brand." Dave stresses that he doesn't feel like he did anything special."I was literally the only person who had a podcast about startups in Boston. That got me meetings with top CEOs and top VCs, and you know, once you get in that loop a little bit you can say: wow, that was a great interview, who else do you know that I should talk to, and all the sudden you're connected to someone else." From there, he went on to Hubspot, where he created The Growth Show. He wasn't even a full-time marketing person until he went to Drift."When I got to Drift they said: we're going to see how this goes, Unknown Guy, go ahead and do your thing."No pressure, Dave."So I got to get our website out for the first time. Launch the blog. Launch the podcast, do paid advertising, do SEO, do AdWords, do events. I literally got to do all those things for the first time, myself. I think that was a great benefit to the company to have an earlier person, early in their career to grow, and that kind of built from there. At Drift, I got to do marketing to marketing people, as a result of that I didn't have a personal thing because I was sharing to the world through Drift."Bottom line? If you're grappling with imposter syndrome? Keep putting yourself out there. It will pay off. It's just a feeling! If Dave, of all people, still feels it, it's not going away, so you might as well get out there and rock the world. Getting it all doneLet's take a moment to marvel at Dave's prolific productivity. How does he get it all done?Dave successfully adjusted to the Covid-19 crisis."Right now I can use my time how I need. I can run down to my office on Saturday at 1:00 AM because I had an idea. I do not think this would have been at all possible before being unchained from the whole cubical life."He contrasts it by noting that he used to spend up to 10 hours a day at the office."You're just there. You gotta do whatever's there. You're asking me how I'm able to do DGMG now? Well, I'm also able to pick up and drop off my kids now. Not that I do that every day. Go for a walk every day outside. Work out every day. This is one of many benefits I'm seeing from being fortunate enough to be able to work from home." Evolutions in Dave's marketing philosophy Garrett asked Dave how his philosophy has evolved between working for Drift and working for Privy."Drift is more of a mid-market enterprise type of sales motion. That requires a different type of marketing and demand gen. Privy is really focused on small eCommerce businesses. It's more of a channel distribution strategy. We get over 10,000 trials every month from the Shopify app store. That is the #1 source for lead gen. We gotta do things on top of that but it's a little bit of a different strategy. It's almost like eCommerce in that sense where it's very high-volume. Sales reps at Privy are closing 20-50 deals in a good month because the price is much lower."He says there are things you have to figure out within each company. "Even a company similar to Privy doing a very similar thing might have a completely unique motion."He says nevertheless, his broader marketing philosophy has changed over the years.He compares his evolution to becoming a parent."When you're growing up you don't understand why your parents make you do certain things. Now that I have two kids, I wanna call my Mom and say: sorry. I totally get it."He says that he's now had to be responsible for managing teams. Hiring. Firing. "I've had to do challenging things at work. I've had no budget and everyone's burnt out on the team. You learn. You start to have some guardrails around marketing."His biggest guardrails?"Marketing exists to generate revenue, period."He says he often wants to go back and talk to himself 5 years ago. "When I was a holier-than-thou marketer saying just do the things customers love! That is bullshit. That is not how it works. You can do some of that. You've got to do things customers love. 100%. But talk to any CEO, any founder, any board, any shareholder. The number one goal of marketing is to drive revenue. You can do that in a way that also builds brand, builds your reputation, creates raving, loyal fans. That's the rub. That's why it's the fun job. I'm not saying go buy a list and blast everyone and that's how you're going to generate the revenue. I think you need to build a revenue function and a brand function at the same time." Do you have to prove the ROI of every last marketing step you take?ROI and proving the value of various marketing strategies is something marketers talk about a lot. Often, we get focused on proving the ROI of everything we do. Dave questions whether this is necessary."You have to be able to articulate the why, and the story. Why do we have...? Well, I believe your brand is your reputation and the way you build your reputation through brand is through content. That's how we figure out who's trustworthy. So we're going to invest in our blog for that reason. In a year from now, we have 50,000 visitors to our blog. That's going to mean X." Dave admits this isn't the "What's the direct ROI of the content marketer you just hired for $75,000."He says it's more about the goal."You have to be able to articulate: how is that time being used as a percentage of the overall time in marketing? If the only thing you're doing is blogging, and the goal of blogging is not generating revenue, and you're spending 100% of your time there, my question would be: how are we going to get to our revenue goal. The only other answer is we don't care about revenue. It's less about the ROI and more about the running. Get to the core. Why are we doing this? That's important." He offers an example in the form of: Ross, the Agency Owner."He should be creating content. But you'd also better believe he's on LinkedIn, reaching out to people. Hey, here's my business. We work with XYZ companies. We think we could be a really good fit for you. They're not competing channels. They work together. They compound. Now that Ross has a machine going, he's stepping his game up, he's stepping videos up, he's stepping production up, he's stepping output up. What's going to happen? He's going to generate more awareness and more inbound. Over time it's going to be easy for him to measure the volume of that." What would Dave's strategy for getting first customers, then?"Get a whiteboard. Write down the names of ten good-fit customers. Email them. What you're going to learn from that is which type of customer is going to be interested in you. What in your message resonates with them? What to actually say on a discovery call, on a sales call, that's all going to inform what you're going to do. You've got to be able to do both of those things." Branding strategiesDave says there are two ways to approach branding."It doesn't have to be bald-headed Dave with a camera in his face walking down the street. For me? That's what I'm comfortable doing. That's a preferred format. Therefore, I can do it."He says you can become just as successful if you become the curator brand."You position your brand to be the expert. They might not know the specific name of a person. They might know that's Dave from Privy. But they might say, oh, Privy, they are experts on eCommerce. That's why I listen to their podcast and follow their founder on Twitter."Dave says you have to think about who is going to publish from what channels."I think it's a little bit easier when you have the founder that wants to share some of the stuff that's in their head. I think regardless, it's more important to set a more intentional strategy. We're going to position ourselves as a marketing expert. Okay. When you set that as a key objective for your brand and your marketing team, that's basically a set of guardrails."The guardrails help you adjust as you refine your strategy."We're going to have a podcast with our founder. The founder doesn't wanna do it. What else do we want to do? Well, let's create the Modern SEO podcast. I think it's more important you get it set as the guardrail you can align around." When Dave joined Privy, his CEO gave him guardrails."We need to build this brand as the leader for small eCommerce businesses. There's nobody that really focuses on them. That was great. Once I had that nugget, before we talked about revenue goals, before we talked about trial goals, I now had a philosophy for: how do we need to go do marketing? I see so many marketers get in the weeds on the day-to-day when they haven't clearly articulated the strategy." And the best marketing strategy?"Be perceived as the expert in your niche. Let's go build a marketing strategy around that." What's your right now cause?Dave is concerned about bringing more equality and diversity to marketing teams."I have a hiring bias right now. I am trying to hire more Black people, period. If you really want to make a change you can hire people to work within your company, or you can fund investments. So I'm hiring Black people in marketing. I could probably be trying harder, 100%, but I think 1 in 20 guests in my podcast are Black marketing leaders. I think how can I use my platform and my network to build the marketing team of the future?" He also likes an initiative he's seen to move money to Black-owned banks."I'm running the whole business in a black Bank, One United. Who knows what that can do in the future?" Connect with Dave Gerhardt Check out all of the great communities and social networks that Dave has started or participates in. Dave on LinkedIn Privy Dave on Twitter DGMG DGMG on Twitter

Sales, sales prospecting, and outreach. They’re always tricky. Agencies and consultancies rely on them, especially in the early stages of their business, but trying to figure out how to make these activities effective is a constant uphill battle. In addition, it's difficult to get it right without coming across as too salesy, and in a way that gets the right value in front of the right people at the right time.Meet Brooklin Nash, the Head of Content at Sales Hacker.  Sales Hacker is a website that offers discussions, articles, podcasts, videos, and sales training. It's a community that is "100% geared to helping salespeople gain new skills or improve their game." If you're running an agency, are a freelancer, or are part of an agency sales team, that means you. So don't miss today's podcast. Sales are integral to agency success and Brooklin has some great insights from his experience and community.The highlights: [1:35] The importance of researching your prospects, and what you're looking for. [4:46] The right amount of time to spend on research. [8:20] Where a cold email strategy starts to go off the rails.  [10:30] Good strategy for cold emails. [12:06] How Sales Hacker approaches content. [14:01] The most successful pieces at Sales Hacker. [15:28] Traffic sources. [17:56] Favorite sales outreach tools. [21:07] Brooklin's causes. The insights:The importance of researching prospects, and how to do itBrooklin stresses that anyone engaging in the sales process should spend a lot more time on research than they probably would otherwise think to."Don't just do a light search on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, pull up a list, and then reach out to blast the whole list. Taking time to really qualify who you're reaching out to and why will be time well-spent before you ever send your first email." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIf3xD0mlQQAs for what you're looking for when you do all this research?"One, you're looking for a company matching your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). If most of your clients are of a certain size and in a specific niche, start there."The other thing you're looking for is a signal that they might be ready for help with their marketing."They have a new Director of Marketing or a VP, and the new executive came from a place where they ran a strong content marketing presence the new company doesn't have, for example." Brooklin says hiring can be another signal."If they're hiring for their marketing team, there's a good chance they're going to be looking for external help too. They might not just be hiring those content marketing managers. They may be looking for contractors and agencies to actually execute on the work. You can look for those signals pretty easily with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and build your list from there."Finally, Brooklin says you're looking for information that can help you with your outreach efforts."A podcast they just did. An article they just published. A question they asked. Something that puts the value first and the content first. Instead of: hey, you're in marketing. We're a marketing agency. Can we help you out? Start with where they're at, first."The right amount of time to spend on researchWhen we already have so many demands on our time, all this research can feel like a lot of wasted effort. So how much time is optimum for making the process work?Brooklin admits it’s hard to quantify."It's going to depend on how much you're reaching out. But unless you're a giant agency, you're going to be better served reaching out to ten dream clients than even a few hundred clients that maybe don't fit your ICP or who might be harder to work with or might be past your niche a little bit. So take the time to focus on the right prospective clients and I think you're going to have better conversations down the line."Brooklin has spent up to 30 minutes on an email in the past. "Quite a bit of time from a cold outreach perspective, but it paid off. We were only looking for a handful of new clients, so it didn't matter that it didn't scale well." He has also tried other strategies where he sent out hundreds of emails and tried to automate the process."I spent a couple of hours and only used intent data. When I sent hundreds I got a 15% reply rate. Only one of them became a client."Where a cold email strategy starts to go off the rails"The number one place a cold email strategy goes off the rails is when you make it about you vs. them. And that's something you can scale. Not as well as those hyper-personalized emails that take 20-30 minutes. You can take the time to make it about what their problem is, and then as the footnote what your potential solution is."Brooklin stresses that you really can't make it about what an amazing agency you are."It's: hey. I noticed you were working on this. Or you started this campaign. Or you just started this new job. How's that going? Make it about them first. This is essentially Sales 101, but I think content marketers often forget that, whether they're reaching out for new clients as a freelancer or as a small agency, or even reaching out for backlinks and earned media spots."Good strategy for cold emails"I think mentioning a specific piece of content will always work well. Saying: I checked out this article and really loved this piece of it. Or: I heard your podcast interview on this. Or even from a brand perspective: I saw your LinkedIn ads for your brand and they look great, I like this about them. Anything that makes it legit I think will at least get you an open and probably a response."And if you do send cold emails like this to thirty people?"I think you will at least get an open and probably a response, vs. a generic: ‘I checked out your blog and I loved the quality of your articles’ line to 300 people. You might not even get 30 replies. It's not the number of people you reach out to. It's taking the time to engage with what they're putting out and taking the time to ask how you can help them."How Sales Hacker approaches contentSales Hacker is a content-heavy site. Here's how they approach building out their content."We run almost entirely off contributors. Our webinars are from panelists. Most of our articles are from contributing authors. We have our podcast guests. We have a lot of opportunities to work with partners. Sometimes paid partners. Most of the time, just organic, relationship-based partnerships."He says there's a lot in common with accepting content for his site and the kind of cold outreach salespeople might need to do."If you're taking the time to really look through what our guidelines are and you have a specific question or a specific point or a specific topic that meets those guidelines, then you're going to get a reply. I'm never not going to reply to you, even if the specific topic isn't a great fit. If you're putting in the thought that shows me we can go back and forth and land on something, great. If you're reaching out, it's very obviously cut and pasted, that's not personalization. That hurts your case. You're not getting a reply because I know they're going to 300 other people. I'm not going to put in the work to reply to you if you're not going to put in the work to start this partnership off on the right foot." The most successful pieces at Sales HackerBrooklin says the most successful pieces of content on his site are detailed, action-oriented, and offer either a template or a visual framework, things people can apply directly and right away.Here's a list of the most successful pieces on his site. How to Become a VP of Sales by the Time You’re 30 A Guide to Building Better Sales Decks Why You Should Throw Your Sales Playbook in the Trash (And What to Use Instead) The Scientific Approach To Setting Sales Goals For Your SDR Team How to Stay Motivated in Sales  What Not to Do in B2B Sales — 7 Signs You’re About to Kill the Deal 8 Critical Questions to Ask Yourself as You Build a Sales Incentives Program for 2019 As a result of pieces like these, a large percentage of Sales Hacker's traffic is purely organic. They also see a lot of engaged traffic from social. Brooklin's Favorite Outreach Tools"You can spend less than a couple of hundred bucks a month on cold outreach and see a really big return. You don't have to use best-in-class tools meant for a large sales team. You can use self-service, less expensive ones."His recommendations: LinkedIn Site Navigator Outreach - If you're a larger agency/have a sales team in place, you're going to want something advanced like Outreach to support your team and improve over time. Phantom Buster - Automate data scraping from LinkedIn. Wiza - Quickly create lists from hundreds of leads.  MailShake - A tool to help you send personalized cold emails at scale. Lavender - Grades your sales emails. A Gmail add-on. What's your right now cause?"It's actually a tool instead of a specific cause."The tool is Let's Go Give, a B2B platform for charitable giving.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMzS8DsfLMMInstead of sending mousepads, pens, t-shirts, bottles of wine, and Starbucks gift cards, you can offer your prospects the ability to make a donation to a charity that they care about. The donation is paid for. They just choose the charity.It's proven to be a lot more effective and valued by prospects than all that other stuff, and allows you to change the world a little bit at a time, while you're at it!Connect with Brooklin NashWant to learn more about Brooklin and find him online?  Sales Hacker Brooklin's email: brooklin@saleshacker.com  Brooklin on Twitter Brooklin on LinkedIn

Ever wondered how your agency can start working with franchises? For many agencies, they're practically a "holy grail" client. Want the insider take on what it would require to impress someone who runs one?Well, listen to today's podcast and you'll get your wish. Today we're talking with Neel Parekh, Founder and CEO of MaidThis, a residential and Airbnb cleaning franchise that is rapidly expanding across the U.S.MaidThis is a tech-savvy up-and-comer that leverages every available digital technique to win and to help their franchisees win. That means Neel is also well-versed in the digital marketing world and has plenty of insights for agency owners and consultants. Check it out now:The highlights: [1:02] The business model. [2:15] Why franchise? [3:52] How MaidThis approaches digital marketing. [6:11] Educating franchisees. [10:46] The best way to get your foot in the door. [16:20] The best franchises to target. [19:05] Growing a remote culture. [20:46] Neel's cause. The insights:The MaidThis business modelThe MaidThis business model is fairly straightforward. It's a cleaning company that allows customers to schedule weekly, biweekly, or monthly cleanings through their website. Everything is automated.The other niche is Airbnb cleaning for vacation rentals, which brings its own unique challenges."One guest checks in at 11, the next guest checks in at 3. There's a bunch of stuff which has to happen between them, like checking for damages, replacing supplies, things like that. So we just link up with the host's calendar and automatically schedule cleaning after the turn-around."Neel says he really likes approaching this business in what he calls a "new age way.""As opposed to the old-school cleaning model where you get an estimate, you don't really know if they're going to show up or not, and you have no phone notifications." Why franchise?Neel says franchising was a really big decision for his company.He offers some background."I started the company in 2013. I did a couple of years part-time when I was working in finance. Eventually, I wanted to travel. So I left for five years before Covid, just traveling the world. That's why I made the business remote. Because I had to."At MaidThis, the only people who don't work remotely are the cleaners."In 2020, we decided we wanted to expand. The question was: how do we do that? Do we do it ourselves, or do we do it with a franchise model? A franchise model can expand more rapidly because you can multiply your efforts. We had the system set up in such a way because I was working remotely. We had to be highly, highly systemized to make it work. So it was very conducive to the franchise model."He says this approach is giving him a huge boost over other cleaning companies."I love that a lot of other cleaning companies in the franchise space are from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, so their digital marketing is not the best. The way they're targeting customer interaction with the crowd they're targeting is not the best. That was the reason we decided franchising was the way to expand. And so we launched in late 2020, at the height of the pandemic. We awarded our first franchise in Denver in late 2020 and are just going to keep  going from there." How MaidThis approaches digital marketingNeel says he really loves local marketing, and that love is helping him dominate the competition. "I think cleaning companies are two years behind the curve in terms of marketing and digital marketing. They're late with everything. As long as you're on pace with the way digital marketing is going, you're already ahead of the competition. It's not that hard in my opinion to beat most of the competition just by doing base, foundational stuff. A lot of local companies don't know what they're doing. If you're a marketer and you know what you're doing, you're ahead of the competition." Neel says it's critical for the success of his franchisees."Having an optimized website. Doing email capture. Actually doing email marketing. You'd be surprised. Most local companies don't do it. 45% of local companies don't even have a website."This is one area where Neel offers his franchisees a great deal of support."We provide the actual playbook of what can work. Here's how you set up a profile. Here's the ad copy you can use for your AdWords. It would be on the franchisee and maybe an approved vendor of ours to actually get that done. A lot of stuff is proven out."He says that there are a lot of changes from market to market that are good to be aware of."For example in Los Angeles, Yelp is huge. Yelp is huge in California. In the midwest, it's not that big. They like Angi. We don't want to force what's happening in their local market." Educating FranchiseesNeel educates each of his franchisees from day one and focuses on two key areas of digital marketing.The first is filling the funnel through SEO and email marketing."Afterwards, the number one key for us is Google reviews. I don't care where in the country you are, Google is key. We have a lot of tools to help the franchisee get reviews, and we provide them like, hey, here's the copy you can use, here's the system you can use to follow up with customers." Neel's franchisees do manage themselves in terms of replying to reviews, but they've systemized them in a way that automatically gets them notified to leave a review on Google."I don't think a lot of local companies realize how important Google reviews are. It's a highly competitive market. Local companies don't know what they're doing though, so if you have good Google reviews you're just going to dominate." Neel says he does a ton of handholding."We marry our success with how well franchisees are doing. So digital marketing evolves rapidly. There's stuff we do for them. There's stuff we're in charge of doing. The cool part is I still run our corporate locations in California. So we're testing new marketing tactics always. We want to be the most high-tech new-age marketing tactic company in the cleaning industry. Because we're able to test that out we can then roll it out to the franchisees. And the cool part is, after a while, when you have enough franchisees, one location where it's working really well, we can say: here's the playbook, and we can distribute that to everyone. It's a hivemind."Neel offers an example from the Denver location."They started using Bark, a quoting engine. For them, it's working very well. They figured out how to systemize it. So now, I can say great. I can bring that to Los Angeles. At the same time, we just rolled out a new reputation management system. Now we're going to roll that out to Denver. We know that works and how to systemize it. You don't have to spend two budgets on tweaking. One company could just test things out and then just share the knowledge and the resources with other companies. That hivemind mentality is going to allow us to leapfrog our competition, because it's unfair, right? You just have 50 cleaning companies in theory in the future, working on marketing. They can all test out different tactics and roll it out instantly to anyone else." The best way to get your foot in the doorAfter giving this background, Neel and Garrett pivoted to talking about how agencies who are seeking to do business with franchises can win."Think about it this way. I am like the Mama Bear for our franchisees. I'm not going to give them something which is not proven out because that makes me look bad. If you said: hey, I'd be willing to test this out on your operations, and then if you like it you can add me as a preferred vendor so your franchisees can use them? I'd say: great, as long as I'm not forcing my franchisees to use you because I'm not sure how you're going to be doing. We can test this out. If you're trying to approach a franchise, you go to the corporation and say: let me prove myself first. If you like it, just add me as a preferred vendor."Franchisors can dictate who their franchisees are allowed to work with."So if they say hey, I want to do Facebook ads, I'd say okay you have to go to one of our approved vendors because they know brand standards already. I would not let them just go with any Facebook ads vendor. Franchisees are not allowed to do that for most brands because it might ruin the brand." Thus, the goal for most agencies is going to be to get listed on the approved vendor list.If you want to try, though, you're going to need to come in with some proof that you're the right company for that franchise to work with."I want to see you've done it for someone in my industry. Realize we get pitched by people all the time. Unless you've done it for a cleaning company and you can tell me what your ROI stats are, I'm not going to listen. It's too much time to invest if you do not know how this is going to work out. I don't want to educate myself on what you're doing before you do it." Neel has an example, a company that offers marketing through NextDoor.Their pitch?"Hey, we've done this for other cleaning companies. I'm going to charge you a small amount on a per-lead basis."There was no commitment, no set-up, and no need to "hop on a call."It was a no-brainer. "Cool. Set this up. You look reputable. Let me test it up."Six months later, they're still working together, and he's given franchisees permission to work with this vendor."The only reason I signed on with them is they didn't take up too much of my time. I'm not going to hop on a call with anyone who says: hey, can I have a minute of your time? I don't know what you're doing. The easier you can make it, the less I need to think about it, the higher the chances I'm going to say less." He says the specific technique may not be charging per lead, but a low-ask to get started."Once you're in the door, I honestly just want to make things easy for my franchisees. If I know you're good, if I've tested it out, it would be so easy to say: go talk to my Denver franchisee, go talk to the Kansas franchisee, let's get them going." He admits some industries might have a harder time proving their worth upfront."SEO is a tough one."Not just because SEO is a long game, but because in his company's case they already have an SEO vendor. You'd be displacing someone and that's a tougher sale.Yet if Neel didn't already have an SEO vendor?"I'd say great. That's awesome. Prove it out to me first, and I would absolutely sign up with you." The best franchises to target Do you think you have that low-ask offer ready to go? Here's who you target."Emerging franchises."Neel explains the lay of the land."There's lots of franchisors which are coming up. New brands. Maybe they're not great at digital marketing. They just have a great local service. They know they need to provide their franchisees with SEO at some point. That's what everyone does."You might win though because there are many large agencies that won't target smaller franchisees. Instead, they're going after companies that have a minimum of 20 units."At the lower end, there are people who say, yeah we work with one franchise here and there. But there's not really anyone in the middle, I would say. I would say if you're going for emerging franchisors, you would be able to find people who don't have an existing vendor if they're not too marketing-forward."Neel stresses that this is an ideal time to target these companies."You're getting them while they're growing. They're willing to talk to you. They might not have someone already. You can pitch them: hey, we work with franchisors to proof it out and then with their franchisees. We specifically work with emerging brands to help you grow. We want to grow as you grow. Those are words an emerging franchisor would love to hear." Growing a remote cultureSince so many teams are remote and are unlikely to return to in-office work, Garrett asked Neel about processes and communications for remote teams. "Slack is huge for us. We try to make as much of a Slack culture as we can."He says he works hard to build a corporate culture. "We do something called DJ a Day every month. Everyone has a Spotify. We link it into a room and everyone shares their Spotify playlists."They also systemize everything."We run a system called the Entrepreneur Operating System from the book Traction." "Think about an operating system for your meetings and your organization where you have a set agenda. Work off that. Every department has set meetings and set agendas. You set quarterly rocks, which are goals, at annual meetings. That kind of keeps things on pace and allows people who work in remote places to just be aligned on the same goal. Having some sort of operating and meeting system has been huge for us." What's your right now cause?Neel would like to call the listener’s attention to the Covid situation in India."I think they had over 300,000 people get infected in one day."By contrast, California is seeing 10,000 infections a day.Neel is Indian-American, born and raised here by parents who are from India. "They can't social distance. It's not a privilege they have. Some people can't get access to masks. Some things we take for granted over here are just not possible over there." He says that he loves the fact that Covid is getting better here, but that it's in danger of desensitizing us to the fact that most of the world doesn't have access to the vaccine. He says that donating to any charity that offers Covid relief in India would be huge.Right now, WorldVision is working on that very cause. You can donate here.Learn More About Neel MaidThisFranchise.com - To learn more about starting your own MaidThis franchise. Neel does mention that people with a digital marketing background do very well with their franchises. NeelParekh.co - Neel's personal website. He invites listeners to send him a message, saying, "I see everything and answer everything."  Neel on LinkedIn

Do you hate meetings? Are you frustrated by how much time they seem to waste? If so, then this is one of the most important episodes you'll listen to this year. We're about to fix your meetings for you.Or rather, Hiba Amin is. She's the Sr. Marketing Manager at Soapbox. Soapbox is an "app built for managers," designed to "streamline objectives, meetings, and morale into one workflow that gets you results." Meetings are hard to get right but so essential to making the most of your day-to-day, because they’re necessary. Hiba shares concrete steps you can take to transform the nature of your meetings moving forward. Take the steps she suggests, and you'll master your meetings, ending frustration, saving time, and getting critical time back every week. The highlights: [1:38] Hiba's philosophy on meetings. [2:48] Crafting meetings that are worth having. [6:16] The efficient way to plan and prep for meetings. [8:25] The power of ten reclaimed minutes. [10:38] The place where most internal meetings go wrong. [13:37] The most effective way to organize an agency-client meeting. [16:08] Etiquette for meeting follow-up. [17:50] Iterating on your company's meeting structure. [19:55] Creating meeting management templates. [22:27] Hiba's cause. The insights:A meeting philosophy to live byHiba's meeting philosophy is pretty straightforward."If there's no point or goal to the meeting, don't have it!" Hiba doesn't have more than 4 internal meetings per week, because she doesn't need more. That number can vary by company or team size, of course, but the point here is to be lean with your meeting planning. "If it's a status update, add it in Slack. Add it in email. Or just add an item to your agenda and tackle it asynchronously. But don't have a meeting for the sake of having a meeting."Crafting meetings that are worth havingHiba notes there are four types of internal meetings to address here. 1:1 meetings. Team meetings. Company meetings. One-off meetings. Crafting a meeting worth having means matching the activity of the meeting to the meeting type."For one-on-ones, the whole point is for managers and employees to continuously exchange feedback, to talk about their growth, to find different levers to engage their team, to talk about blockers, to use it as a coaching session."She says you can really accomplish a great deal in a one-on-one."The baseline is just to build trust, to exchange feedback, and continue to build so much rapport that the feedback exchange becomes easy and natural, which I think is really important between managers and employees." Next, Hiba addresses team meetings."Team meetings are to keep your team in sync. Let's talk about the blockers, but I also want to make sure you're not just waiting until a team meeting to talk about a blocker, either."A blocker is anything that keeps someone from achieving a goal or completing a project. "Don't wait two weeks, if that's the [meeting] cadence, to say: I'm actually stuck on this one project. You could have solved that two weeks ago. The team meetings just really keep the team in sync.Talk about goals. Make sure you're aligned. Make sure that you know you have all the steps in place to be able to hit your goals and not wait until the end of the quarter to say: oh crap. Didn't hit that goal. Don't do a retrospective of the past three months. Do the retro for two weeks. Fix your problems."What about company-wide meetings?"At least at Soapbox, they're really short. We have a 15-minute company-wide meeting every Monday. That's ultimately walking through our goals, giving everyone visibility into things like our MRR, weekly sign-ups, all those things that are the core metrics we measure and track. We do this every week because it gives us 52 chances to correct the ship. If we release a payment modal and our sign-up numbers from free-to-paid go down, we know so we can revert that change and not wait 3 weeks to say: holy crap, we lost 20 potential customers as a result of this change. We can do that immediately in the following week." Finally, one-off meetings."Things are going to happen. You're going to have to meet about making specific decisions. Maybe you want to launch a campaign and you need to have all the stakeholders in there. I think the important thing there is, again, what's your goal? What do you want to accomplish? Go in with an agenda, give everyone access to that agenda. Then they can just come in prepared to talk about all the items that matter. And that will help you not stray off."She even suggests appointing someone to keep each meeting on track, a role she calls the Accountability Officer."Someone to say: hey ya’ll. Let's get back to the meat of the conversation. This is straying really far off.This prevents the types of meetings we all hate, the ones where everyone spends 20 minutes talking about nothing." The efficient way to plan and prep for meetingsSo how much time should you spend planning and preparing for meetings?"I think I'm biased because I'm at Soapbox. But I think having a template to work off of really helps with the pre-work."Part of Hiba's job is building an agenda templates library to make sure that her company and its customers have the tools it needs to handle meeting prep in an efficient fashion."To have something to start off. To be able to see: these are the things great teams cover in a project kickoff meeting. Let's alter it to fit our teams the best." Putting it together in advance, and giving everyone access to the agenda, really enables people to potentially make some decisions asynchronously, just by adding comments to things you want to touch. "I think the prep should fall under the person who ultimately owns the meeting, but at the same time making that agenda collaborative and accessible really helps specific people say: hey, I've got all I need from this. Just send me the notes for whatever you decide. I don't need to be part of this."That allows someone on the team to save maybe a half-hour, or an hour, or whatever the meeting length is, but there are other benefits."You can tackle things asynchronously together. That way, when you meet, what would have been a 30-minute meeting, maybe half that agenda you don't need to talk about anymore.  It's resolved. At the heart of all of this is collaboration. And not feeling like you have to meet for the allotted time."At Soapbox, many meetings never go over the allotted time."We all end up getting that sweet ten minutes back, which is incredible." The power of ten reclaimed minutesGarrett asked Hiba what she generally does with her sweet ten minutes."Typically, grab a coffee, collect my thoughts. Get a 5-minute task done."She says the return of that ten minutes really started keeping her productive."There are so many little tasks you commit to that are maybe worth five or ten minutes of time commitment. And you just fire them off. By the end of the week, you're like: I have so much done." That's a really cool feeling. It's almost Inbox Zero. (Almost)." The place where most internal meetings go wrongHiba stresses that meetings start to go wrong when they do not have an agenda. Even for one-on-one meetings."You want to be friends with your co-workers and have great relationships, so it's really easy to take what someone is saying and then turn it into a side conversation. That just continues to grow with everyone. But you have time to do that. You can set up a coffee chat or whatever, just to get to know people better, build those relationships, and maintain them."But when you're meeting for a specific purpose, a meeting agenda really helps. "It holds people accountable within those meetings."She points out it's a profitability issue as well."We have 5 people here? That's a really expensive use of company time. That's a lot of people's salary, especially for senior leaders. Let's make sure we're using this time wisely, and be as productive as we can. We have a lot to get done, especially in the start-up world, even in the agency world. Let's make sure we're using each other's time well." Hiba says it's easy to stray off-topic, but having the agenda front and center just continues to remind you: "Oh, crap, we have three more items to get through. Let's just get this done." The most effective way to organize an agency-client meetingAgency owners and consultants, of course, have to have a great many external meetings too, so Garrett asked what some of the most effective tools were for organizing an agency-client meeting.Hiba stresses that clients care most about how the agency is doing with the goals they've set. Speaking as a client herself:"If we're not doing great, I'd love an explanation. If we're doing great, also an explanation. I want to know what's going well because I think that information is equally valuable. I want to know what we have planned and what's coming up. Are there any blockers we should address? Because if something goes haywire, which things will, I just want to know. That will help me figure out my timelines on my end."She also encourages agencies to use these meetings as a time to ask for feedback and to provide it."You know, you came up with this idea and given the way we work, here's what we feel is the best way for us to get the information we need to be successful for you." She again stresses that you should send some of these questions in advance, because the "asynchronous method" of working on meetings can work for clients, too.Etiquette for meeting follow-upMeeting follow-up is really key if you want your meetings to translate into concrete action."I send people notes. Within those notes, I break them up into what the item was, what was the decision or resolution that we had, and basically write the summary of the conversation."This method ensures that the entire team remains on the same page. "If there's any communication, handle it right at the moment, vs. two weeks later. To have that documented keeps all parties accountable. If the client is like hey, (a month later), we didn't talk about this, it's like: we did. Here are the notes. Here's the thought process we both had. Then the next steps. What each person is committing to doing by the next time we meet, or by a certain date."Hiba also stresses that this follow-up should be accessible to everyone. "Does every stakeholder have access to the notes, regardless of whether they were in the meeting or not? That's incredibly important." Iterating on your company's meeting structureGarrett notes that agencies, at least, always want to iterate on processes and improve them. He asks how often they should be trying to iterate on meeting structure. "After every meeting."Soapbox has a tool for instant meeting feedback. "Was this a useful way to use your time? Everyone can anonymously answer: yes, no, or kind of. Being able to get that feedback every single week lets us start to see: we were doing really well. We were running these meetings really efficiently. Something went wrong between January and February. So let's address that with the team. What can we do better? I think that keeps whoever owns that meeting accountable to either scrap the meeting altogether because there's no longer a purpose for it or to fix it."Creating meeting management templatesHiba began the project of creating meeting management templates during her first week at the company."We've been slowly building it ever since."These templates serve several purposes. For one thing, they help her snag high-intent search keywords for her audience because these are people looking to address a problem."Maybe they're a first-time manager and they have no clue what they're doing. They want some inspiration. Here's a great template to get you started. Maybe you're running really ineffective meetings. Something needs to change. Here's a really great template to get you started.""We're able to capture a lot of different keywords within the template library, we're adding value within the product, but we're also capturing really high-search intent users. These people are really great at coming in. They convert at a high rate from visitors on the website, to free users, to paid users."Helpful LinksNeed some guides or templates to get you started? Hiba’s got some excellent resources for you to tap into: 9 One-on-one meeting templates The 45-minute team meeting agenda What's your right now cause?Hiba would like to draw our listener's attention to animal shelters. "My dog is a rescue. I've fostered dogs in the past. It's been really tough, specifically in Canada, for dogs to be rescued during the pandemic because a lot of the borders have been closed. I'm seeing a lot of them pop up. We brought 2000 dogs from the Caribbean. We're bringing in all these animals that have no homes. The foster piece of the pie there is really important because it alleviates a lot of the resources for these people. Foster a dog before you commit."Hiba is very worried about a lot of the dogs adopted during the pandemic. "I'm bored, I'm home all the time. What happens a year from now? People realize dog ownership is a lot of work. Which it is. It's not a baby by any means, but it's just as dependent on you and it stays dependent on you for 13-to-17 years. If you have the means, just go and foster a dog. Give it a test run until they find the right home. Reach out to a local shelter and see how you can be of assistance. Alleviate stress and prevent future dog owners from making a bad decision and sending an adopted dog back into the foster system." Learn More About Hiba Soapbox Hiba Amin on Twitter Hiba Amin on LinkedIn

It's not uncommon for agencies to overlook a potential source of clients: other agencies.Yet Dani Owens has cracked this code. She's the founder and owner of Pigzilla, and some of her biggest clients are fellow marketers: people who use her white label local SEO services to get the job done.She also offers a variety of consulting and training services to SMBs, which offers them a more affordable local SEO option than simply paying a consultancy many hundreds of dollars per month.It's a model that shows all of us that there's more than one way to, uh, bring home the bacon!So tune into today's podcast and learn about a different way to structure your agency.The highlights: [1:43] What local SEO training looks like. [3:39] Businesses more likely to DIY vs. businesses more likely to hire a consultant. [5:53] Cautions for DIYers. [7:56] A great way to warn clients that Google's a fickle beast. [8:43] What white labeling SEO services look like. [9:57] Setting up a business arrangement with another agency. [12:35] Trends, and predictions for the rest of 2021. [15:06] Creating white label reports. [18:00] Shout-outs. [20:18] Dani's cause. The insights:What does Local SEO training look like?Dani admits that Local SEO training is a challenge."There are so many different tools and methods for completing certain SEO tasks. So trying to get that documentation together can be challenging. Local SEO training could include videos, walkthroughs, and of course, SOPs."She has put together a local SEO training database that stores all of her training documents in one place."It comes with a timeline so you can work through the tasks that need to be worked on. It's not super simple."Of course, the big challenge for many local business owners is they have to focus on actually running the business. "For them to start trying to become an SEO is a totally different discipline. It's similar to learning another trade. For them, I think it's challenging because they have to decide. Do I want to become an SEO expert? Or do I want to hire someone to take care of that?"In spite of the fact that training is a major part of Dani's business model, she nevertheless believes it makes more sense for most SMBs to hire an SEO  to take care of the work unless they are someone who is very interested in learning SEO for its own sake. Which businesses are more likely to DIY?The SMBs who take the most advantage of Dani's training services tend to be smaller businesses. "They want to get the work done, but they don't have the budget for it. Local SEO is expensive."She says there are a few things that can help SMBs keep their costs down."Clients can start collecting their own reviews. Sending out emails or asking people they've serviced to go ahead and leave them reviews using tools like GatherUp or Grade.us. They can write their own blog posts because they're experts in what they do. If they just created one blog post a month about a topic they get questions on, that helps."Dani notes that SMBs can often even do their own basic link building."Maybe they have a partnership with a company. They could simply ask: hey, would you mind linking to my website, or putting a badge on your site saying we're partners? Those are practical things that the small businesses can do that don't require a bunch of SEO knowledge." Of course, there are pitfalls."With GMB, you know the categories that are assigned to the listing are super important. Just shuffling those around could have large impacts. Somebody could go into a GMB listing just to optimize it and maybe they destroy the rankings it has, or they're thinking they're going to put a keyword into the business name, which could get them suspended. They can definitely damage their SEO efforts by not knowing the full story before they start working on things." A great way to warn clients: Google's a fickle beast!One challenge local SEOs often face is that when Google starts suspending listings or changing their algorithms, clients get impacted, and they get upset. This was especially prevalent during the pandemic where Google limited its support staff, ensuring it takes longer than ever to get help."It also seems like listings are getting suspended much more easily just for making simple edits to the listings. It takes a little while to get reinstated."Instead of trying to crack the code on turning Google into a helpful entity, Dani worked on finding a way to help her clients understand that this is all part of the process."I love to set the expectations. I want people to have realistic ideas of what's going to happen. Because otherwise, it just leads them to disappointment and frustration. I do like to tell them that SEO is optimizing the best we can for the search engine. The search engine is in control of everything. They're going to be deciding where and when to show your website. The expectations are super important to me."What white labeling SEO services look likeDani offers several options to agencies that would like to partner with her."It's either a full white label program where I've mapped out all the processes and have checklists or I just sometimes subcontract if there are more customizations that are needed. Some SEO companies will already have their processes in place, and they just need some kind of support staff."Why did Dani choose to white label?"I started Pigzilla in 2014. After some time, I started realizing my natural fit is more on the implementation side than on the client-side. It was about finding a natural fit for me, with low stress. For me, this has been really good. I really enjoy it. The agencies I white label for, they do a good job of managing the clients, and I do a good job managing the work." Setting up a business arrangement with another agencyMost agencies find Dani through referrals, though she is starting to get leads from people who are Googling "white label SEO services." Others find her by coming across one of her SEO training articles.As for setting up the contract?"The subcontracting is just an hourly rate. [I work] wherever they need me. Whatever I can do, I hop in there. It comes down to keyword research, full website audits, technical audits, on-page implementation, keyword research, GMB management, content requirements, link building, citations. All of it."She also gets some clients who need help with every aspect of SEO."Then it's a specific outline program. We're going to do all these audits, we're going to have these conversations, we're going to schedule the work, we're going to double-check the work, we're going to have monthly reports with some analysis or insights, and then the agency I'm sending the information to can now go to the client with that and give an update on what's going on." Trends and predictions for the rest of 2021Dani says that she feels like the pandemic has really helped most businesses understand that they really do need to have an online presence. After the initial panic period from SMBs in March of 2020, Dani started to see an uptick in people saying: "We need to get this SEO stuff under control, because we need to be able to sell online, or have people contact us, and alter the way we do our business."In Dani's eyes, the future of SEO is looking bright:"I see the future of SEO as being probably something we've all wanted: people (the general population) caring about it!"Creating white label reportsDani's principle for creating any report for any client is the KISS principle."The client's going to care about their conversions. Overall, their organic traffic. So I try to keep the reports simple so they don't distract the clients reading them or cause panic for no reason."She gives an example of what might cause one of those panics."We've all had this happen. Keyword XYZ has dropped to this position. It's not anything to be concerned about." Clients get concerned anyway if they see it.So she focuses clients on conversion data like phone calls and contact forms."I don't include a list of keywords and their rankings. I just include the trend chart of their rankings so they can see if it's getting better or worse. And the specifics on conversion. Maybe the channels they came from. And how many were completed during the time period? I will include an analysis saying the organic traffic is up this much compared to last year during the same time period. And keep it simple."She also includes a section on what Google is up to lately."Each month there are multiple things that could be impacting the clients. They could be nervous or scared."For example?"GMB suspensions are happening for editing listings. I might say something like: don't worry, I won't be making edits to your listings at this time. I'm taking care of it. It gives them that security so they feel confident.They're happy they're paying you. Besides doing the work, once you get to the SEO maintenance phase where you maybe have most of the work done, that's when they're going to really appreciate that type of analysis, where you're still keeping an eye on everything, monitoring and protecting their investment." Shout-outsSome of the experts Dani follows are: Mike Blumenthal Phil Rozek Joy Hawkins Jordan Choo What's your right now cause?Dani encourages other marketers to pay a bit of attention to their work-life balance. "I know Covid's been really hard for a lot of people, and some people are desperate for work. Sometimes work-life balance takes a hit. I get that. But it's really important for mental health as well as the family unit. I love working in SEO, I feel very blessed, but it's not the only part of my life."She points out that in the marketing industry, it can be really easy to get hooked into work and to focus on that too much. "That's each person's decision. I just think it's super important because you can burn yourself out. It's just something to be conscious of and cognizant of."Connect with Dani OwensWant to get into some Local SEO training with Dani? Find her on her site or Twitter. Pigzilla Dani Owens on Twitter Bring Home the Bacon Slack Community

Want insights from someone who is crushing it in the Local SEO game? Meet Levi Williams-Clucas, SEO specialist at StrategiQ, an award-winning full-service agency in Suffolk. This agency works with a huge variety of both local and national businesses and has produced some incredible results. Levi has excellent insights to share. If you love everything local and are ready to nerd out a little bit, tune in to today's episode! New Local SEOs, in particular, might really love the insight at 13:44, where Levi shares the amount of time it takes to get results for clients.The highlights: [1:34] Levi's biggest GMB challenges. [3:48] Review recommendations. [5:55] Getting reviews in industries that face review-generation challenges. [9:04] Local keyword research and strategy. [13:44] The amount of time it takes to make an impact with local SEO. [17:00] Insider tricks that can generate excellent results. [20:23] The one feature GMB is lacking. [23:11] Levi's opinion on whether pay-to-play is in Google's future. [26:18] Levi's cause. The insights:Levi's Biggest Google My Business Challenges"Support."Levi says that the support Google has been offering is pretty non-existent."It's not their priority because it's a free service. They've had all their staff working from home. There are reasons behind it, but it's been frustrating."She says the other major challenge is client-based."Getting clients to really embrace reviews. I think a lot of people really underestimate the value of reviews. It's something I'm really passionate about. I talk about it all the time. I tell my clients: please, get more reviews. You have to push. You have to ask for them."Recommendations for Review Generation StrategyGarrett asked what Levi's recommendations to her clients were in regards to generating reviews."The first thing I always say is: are you actually doing a job that's worth the review? Assess what you're doing. Are you doing a 5-star job? If you're not, make sure you are before asking for nice reviews. If you're asking for reviews, people are going to be honest."As for generating more reviews?"We find the most success in email campaigns, in general: emailing existing customers, generally loyal customers, people who tend to come back a lot. Just after the purchase, right after they've got that really nice serotonin boost from making a purchase. Automated, if you can." Levi says they use a script that sends people to all the different review platforms so they get a nice spread against all the different ones the client uses. She again stresses the need to ask."Just say to people, look, if you had a good time today, if you think we did a good job, please leave a review. The number of people who will do it, just because you ask nicely!" Getting Reviews in Industries that Face Review-Generation ChallengesThe industry that Levi has seen struggle the most with review generation is the medical and pharmaceutical industry. "Obviously there's a lot of sensitive stuff that goes on in that industry, a lot of stuff you can't just talk about."She says that finance tends to have the same sort of problem. "Some people don't want to talk about the companies they work with, even if they've done a fantastic job."B2B also struggles, but Levi has solutions."Don't go to the business owner. Don't go to the company as a whole and ask for a review. Go to the individuals. The actual people that are either in the company you've serviced, the individuals that have experienced the service, perhaps one step down, not directly dealt with you, felt the benefit of the company they've worked with. That's the sort of person you want to target for reviews."She also has solutions, in general, for all industries that struggle to get reviews. She tells them to stress the fact that customers don't have to get into the gory details of the service or product they received."All they need to say is the company is worth contacting or worth working with. Sometimes you don't have to say that, you can just leave a star rating, do it under a pseudonym, whatever works."Certainly in other industries, we've spent some time going over how one might get meatier, more useful reviews. But if you're working with an industry where you're struggling to get them at all? The focus is probably going to have to be on getting a good star rating and a few words in the review text, rather than getting an in-depth review. Take a look at competitor reviews and see what might be reasonable for you to expect. Local Keyword Research and StrategyLevi warns that Local SEO in particular may need to approach keyword research a little differently, thanks to regional differences in how people might say different terms. Here in the United States, for example, we might say "cat door." In the UK, they say "cat flap." We might say we want someone to install it, they would say "fit me a." She urges Local SEOs to layer keyword research with actually performing the searches in the local areas. "It's one of the things that makes local underestimated. You don't understand how much manual work goes into local, especially keyword research. Getting it right you can see those map pack listings come up. It's such a buzz when you get it right and it works."The Amount of Time it Takes to Make an Impact with Local SEOOne thing that's nice about Local SEO? It can take less time to generate results."Usually we start to see it in a couple of weeks. Thankfully that's normally the case. It's taken 3 or 4 months in the past, but it has [also] taken two or three days in the past. There's so much variation."This is even true for clients who didn't already have a great deal of local visibility! Insider Tricks that Can Generate Excellent ResultsWhen asked about insider tricks, Levi spoke about trust signals. "You would not believe how much reputation makes a difference. People really think all SEO is, is pushing things in a specific way for an algorithm. But it's really not like that anymore, especially in local."In local, Levi says: "It almost is like Google literally is a person and is looking for the thing. It can tell if your reputation is rubbish and you're making it up. Not having any reviews is a tell-tale sign of that. And they just won't trust you. It's all about trust."She also stresses that Local SEO is about a lot more than GMB."It's not. We know well enough now it's about pages on-site. It's about reviews. It's about consistency. It's about creating an online entity."The One Feature Google My Business is LackingLevi says she'd really like Google My Business (GMB) to update some of their features regarding open hours."I know a lot of people who can't display what times their classes are, or what times their opening hours are, if you've got more then two sets of opening hours. For example independent fitness classes or training courses that might differ to office hours. There's no good way to do it aside from putting it in posts or putting them in the description." A lot of businesses do offer classes and variable hours, so it would be a useful feature.Levi's Opinion on Whether Pay-to-Play is In Google's FutureIt's probably one of the great anxieties of the local SEO world, that Google will transform GMB into a pay-to-play platform.Levi doesn't think it will be an issue."It defeats the point of Google in general. If you're doing it so that the more people pay, the higher up they go, then it just doesn't function the way Google should. People will notice that and move elsewhere and use something else."She also worries the move would kill lots of small, local businesses. "I think there would be too much uproar over it."Which led to a mention of competitors showing up in the GMB listing.Levi admitted this move made her uneasy."I get it. I understand it from Google's point of view. Trying to provide everything to the users. But at the same time, it's a little bit of a stab in the back to people that have trusted those features and started using those features. It's a little bit backhanded."What's your right now cause?Levi is concerned about empowering and supporting other women. "That might be donating to women's shelters, it might be helping to boost women-owned businesses, especially minority women."She adds: "Protect women, support them, empower them, and allow them to feel like they don't have to protect themselves all the time."Levi’s Industry Shout-Outs Areej Abu-Ali Miracle Inameti Hannah Butler Connect with Levi Williams-ClucasWant to learn more about Levi? StratgiQ Levi on Twitter Levi on LinkedIn

Amanda Milligan is the Marketing Director at Fractl. She writes tons of guest posts and tackles the "meta" job of marketing the marketing agency. Fractl itself is a content marketing and growth marketing agency. In 2019, it was named one of the Top Content Marketing agencies by Clutch. Amanda also hosts a podcast, called Cashing in on Content Marketing. Its tagline is "Get the buy-in and budget you deserve." It's all about proving the ROI of your content marketing work, a skill every content marketer needs to get and keep clients, or to get what they need to create the kinds of content that perform. Today, though, she and Garrett get into the nuts and bolts of her daily job, which is marketing the marketing agency. Often, marketing agencies let their own marketing fall by the wayside while spending all their time servicing clients. Fractl is a rare agency that has a dedicated person devoted to making sure their name continues to get out there.So tune in! You'll walk away with some insights about how to keep your own agency in the spotlight.The highlights: [1:15] Amanda's role at Fractl.  [3:06] Amanda's approach to content marketing for her agency. [5:25] Where to focus agency marketing efforts. [6:31] Prioritizing and scheduling tasks. [10:03] Integrating marketing with sales. [14:42] Maturing content to appeal to the right leads. [16:33] How Covid impacted client relationships at Fractl. [18:47] Predictions about the future of content. [21:28] Amanda's cause. The insights:Amanda's Role at FractlAmanda's career path offers new marketers some tantalizing glimpses of what a marketing career on an upward trajectory might look like."I've been with Fractl for six and a half years. I've done a lot of different things there. I was hired initially to do copywriting and copyediting. Then I was doing the projects themselves. We call that creative strategy at Fractl, which are basically the people putting these content packages together. They oversee the creative direction. I was doing that, mixed with a little project management. Then I was doing account strategy. I was basically the point of contact for our clients managing overall engagements."Now?"Now I have the meta job of marketing a marketing agency, which is just as fun. It's separate from the client work, but it's actually getting to talk about all the other stuff at Fractl I know so well and explain how it can be valuable to businesses. I've been in this role for two years, all those guest posts are part of that, and it's been a blast."Amanda's Approach to Content Marketing for Her AgencyAs mentioned (and as known, sheepishly, by agencies everywhere), agencies in general struggle to market themselves. Amanda has an approach that works, however.One part of that approach is to avoid over-planning."Sometimes we have these grand plans like: we're going to plan out the year! It never goes that way." Amanda says you should expect to have to recalibrate every few months. Other than that, you have to do the same things for your agency that you do for your clients."We create, for our clients, these data journalism and content projects, then pitching those through digital PR to the media. We do the same thing for Fractl. I've been involved with initiatives like that while dabbling in these authoritative ways to continue. That's an authoritative play as well, link building projects, the podcasting, the guest posting on Moz and TechCrunch. People just see your brand being mentioned. We dabble in a lot of different things, and then over time, we measure. You have to have different goals for everything, and not expect conversions every time an episode goes live." Where to Focus Agency Marketing EffortsAmanda says she really focuses on the top of the funnel."We really focus on inbound. We're really just honing: okay, what is really helpful for people, what's working, what's getting them engaged, what's the next thing we can provide to help them?"She says this year she's been focusing on on-site content."We hadn't put a lot of time on it in the past. We've had some great things in the past, but it's not as optimized as it could be, it's not as updated as it could be. That's been really fun to focus on."Amanda says she enjoys watching the leads come in. She likes seeing what kinds of questions the clients are asking so she can create new content pieces that answer those questions. Prioritizing and Scheduling TasksDay-to-day prioritization is another challenge most marketers are familiar with. Here's what Amanda's been doing with her days."I'm getting a little more involved in sales. I'm really excited about that because I think we're all aware of how tied [sales and marketing] are. Now that I'm taking these initial calls and vetting leads, I'm hearing people explain why they reached out and what their problems are."This lets her know more about their ideal clients, how sales help them through those initial conversations, and how those conversations can continue to align, as well as the ways they can continue to use them in more of their marketing."Then there's maintenance things, like the podcast, which goes live once a week. We have to have guests on our roster, do the interviews, and have all that lined up. That's always a slot of my week. Then guest posting for Moz I tend to do once a month. TechCrunch I've slowed down on, I was able to do that once or twice a month."She says she often tries to work with her creative flows, rather than against them."I'm in a writing mood, so today I'm going to sit down. I'm going to write a blog post. I'm going to write a guest post. That's just what I'm going to do today. I haven't been as strict with my scheduling. Some days, I write just because I don't have the capacity to sit down and do something I scheduled for myself a week ago."Amanda also spends time pitching to speak at conferences, or building the decks to speak in conferences."It's definitely a job that involves a lot of juggling things and very quickly being able to bump something up in priority that maybe wasn't even on your radar the week before." Integrating Marketing with SalesGarrett asked Amanda to talk a little bit more out of what she's getting out of the sales conversations."It's interesting to see how people come to us. Maybe they've gotten 3/4ths of the whole picture, but they need the rest filled in. It's hard to know exactly. You have this vision of marketing: I'm hoping they read this, then they read this and check out that case study and get all of it."But, Amanda asks, how often does everything go according to plan with anyone who is a lead or who is on their site?"Then you get into the sales call. Now let's talk about how that fits into your general marketing plan and our philosophy of how all that works to see if we're a good fit for each other. That's always the big question with sales when you're in a good enough position where you're not just taking all the work you can get. You're thinking: am I actually going to be the best agency for this person, for this brand, are we going to be able to help in a way that will make both sides happy. You understand what we do and the value of what we do, and you're excited about. That's what we want to work with: long-term partners."She says the gap between what the client thinks they want and what they need can be very interesting."Maybe in our case, they'll say: we really want to do link building content. We need links. They talk to us and we're like: well, cool, but your website doesn't have a lot of content on it, so you probably need that before building a ton of links to your site." Amanda says she hopes that hearing all of these conversations continues to inform her marketing so she can communicate effectively. She says one thing that is tough is she gets people from different positions that reach out to her company for different reasons. "An SEO will come to us for very specific reasons, whereas a PR person might come to us with a different lens."She says they've planned for that, but:"Even the way that every company is structured is different. I think that's where a lot of the nuance is. Even just these initial conversations."Sometimes their initial contact will put their boss on the phone, which will be good for even more enlightening. "I could have suspected some of what comes up, kind of guessed that's what was happening, but now I'm literally hearing straight from their manager: this is what I'm thinking, these are my questions. The nuances of how every brand, their marketing, SEO, content, teams, social teams, all interact differently." Maturing Content to Appeal to the Right LeadsAgencies don't just need leads. They need the right leads. How can marketers ensure their content is reaching those ideal clients? What process can a marketer put together to make this content a better fit for the readers they want?"I think it always has to be maturing," says Amanda. "I don't think you ever know. The industry changes."Re-examining, periodically, means having a lot of conversations."We talk with our services team. Where have the great fits been? Who is our perfect ideal partner? We are a long-term type of agency. If someone wants one month's worth of content, we're like: ehn, we're not a content vendor, that's not really what we're here for.I think it's constantly iterative to find out who the best fits are for you based on how things are going in services. It's something we continuously try to improve, but it's so important. You don't want to set yourself up to fail as an agency because you're just taking any work that comes at you. That's not ideal for anyone, really." How Covid Impacted Client Relationships at FractlInitially many of Fractl's clients paused when Covid hit, just like clients did at so many other agencies."Over time, that rebounded."Amanda said she thinks that many clients started to recognize the value of the downtime for long-term SEO plays. "Paid's not doing anything for you, nobody's buying anything, so let's focus on these other marketing initiatives."Amanda says Fractl has had its best Q1 ever this quarter. She attributes this, in part, to people coming to understand that content is an investment, not a commodity. Predictions About the Future of Content "I still want entertaining stuff, because my god, I have enough of everything else. And authoritative. Whomever you are, whether it's a personal brand, an agency, or an internal brand, you need to be proving you know what you're talking about as soon as possible."Amanda predicts it will continue to get harder to get people to trust you, with what's out there."It's not even the quality. It's the sheer volume. You just get inundated with stuff. How do you stand above them? It's not just the flashiness, the growth hacking, and all that. It's just proving you know what you're saying. You build these relationships with different marketing, and publications who trust you, and therefore their audiences trust you. Everybody should be doing that type of work." What's your right now cause?Amanda cares deeply about mental health."There's so much that needs to be done for mental health in the US and other countries because whether you're thinking of the stigma of it or the infrastructure of needing help, there are so many layers that need improvement."Amanda herself tries to be open about having Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Anxiety. She also points out that the pandemic has created mental health challenges for everyone."It's not something people are very comfortable talking about."She then gives a shout-out to an organization called Mental Health First Aid, which is a nonprofit mental health training program that teaches participants how to notice and support co-workers who may be experiencing a mental health crisis. "We've never been taught this stuff. We're never taught how to have these conversations."Amanda has been an instructor for this organization in the past.She would also like listeners to consider donating to NAMI, the National Alliance of Mental Illness.Connect with Amanda MilliganWant to get in touch with Amanda? Find her on Twitter and check out her podcast for Fractl! Fractl's website. Cashing in On Content Marketing Podcast. Amanda's profile on Moz. Amanda on Twitter. Amanda Milligan on LinkedIn.

Whatever you do, don't call Snippet Digital an agency.Suganthan and Andy will be the first to tell you they are SEO Consultants, not an SEO agency – and that many SEO agencies are among their client base.Right now, though, it's not their consultancy that's getting all the buzz and attention. It's their new SaaS product: Keyword Insights.While Keyword Insights is still in beta and actively courting testers, this product can supercharge your SEO strategy by helping you research over 100,000 keywords at a time. You can then group them by intent and rank them, allowing you to create a more efficient, modern approach to SEO and content creation.Want to learn more about this awesome tool and all the problems it solves? Tune in! The highlights: [1:32] Why Suganthan and Andy are so adamant that Snippet Digital is no agency. [5:15] Why they built Keyword Insights. [10:26] Solving the problems of keyword intent. [16:16] Using the tool to generate a content strategy. [19:06] Beta test feedback. [25:41] Keyword Insights: the main value prop. [27:52] Andy's cause. [30:01] Suganthan's cause.  The insights: Snippet Digital: We're No AgencyWhy are Andy and Suganthan so adamant that Snippet Digital is not an agency, and never will be?Andy says that in part it's because they do a lot of work with agencies. "We'll work with agencies just as much as we'll work with our own clients."Andy also ran a 17 to 20 employee business in the past and didn’t like being responsible for so many people. Now Snippet Digital uses freelancers, but Suganthan and Andy remain hands-on.Suganthan adds: "We like to stay small. I personally feel we can add a lot more value to customers. When customers come to us personally, we work on the project. It's not like we onboard a client and have ten other people deal with the client. We deal with the client. We actually look at the nitty-gritty of that client's SEO." They get in there and do most of the work themselves. This has resulted in them having to spend zero dollars on marketing, as they've been bringing in clients through word-of-mouth and referrals only. Cracking the Code to Categorizing Queries for Search Intent with Keyword DecipherAndy explains how he had begun to approach the problem of taking a large number of search queries and using machine learning to filter them into different buckets. Suganthan was excited to work with Andy to build on some of those initial strategies."I came from a global agency. We were doing keyword research on 50K to 60K keywords at a time. Keyword categorization would be done manually by someone with some clever Excel logic. It still took weeks, 50-60 hours maybe."While he was still at this agency, Andy programmed a PHP tool to do the job a lot quicker, cutting the time down to about 20-30 hours. "When Suganthan and I got together I showed him what I was doing he got excited and we started bringing machine learning into it, which was the next stage."Andy admits currently the tool still is not as automated as he might like, but 60 hours of work have now been cut down to 7 or 8 hours.  This collaboration resulted in Suganthan and Andy creating a tool that hasn't been released to the public yet called Keyword Decipher (and might not necessarily go public). "We categorize and load all that data in. It's built on Panda's framework. It's a really nice UI. It's not Google Sheets. It allows us to do keyword research that's massive and works a lot better than Google Sheets, and you can pivot the data any way you want."Suganthan notes that they also practice over time."For our Keyword Decipher platform clients can choose their keywords, and can go back 6 months. 6 months ago, this intent was fragmented, but now after 6 months, Google has changed the Top 10 results. It's widely considered that they use behavior analysis to figure out how people use the search results. It seems like after 6 months Google has decided to show the product page over the blog post. They find more users engaging with that better. That's an actionable insight for the client."  Leveling Up Keyword Intent Categorization and Actionable SEO Strategy at Scale with Keyword InsightsSuganthan explained how they could take the power of Keyword Decipher and add a complementary layer of actionable context with Keyword Insights."We realized when we looked online at the way everyone is trying to solve the intent problem, everyone is pretty much using the same sort of formula. A basic formula to say: hey, if the keyword asks why or how it's informational. This is a very rudimentary way at looking at intent."Suganthan says they realized quickly that what they thought the term implied would often generate unexpected results when one actually plugged those terms into Google."Often Google's understanding of a keyword is very different from what we think it is. Most people are doing guesswork. We went and said: we're going to just look at what Google is thinking, and we're going to literally copy that idea, what Google is saying."Andy explains how intent can go wrong with the basic method."There are actually two ways people classify intent. The first is what Suganthan said, looking at the root word and if it had certain modifiers. If it said buy iPhone, they put it as transactional. If it was what is iPhone they put it as informational. The tricky part came if the keyword was just iPhone. Most people put it as transactional thinking there's not a modifier."They get a mix of transactional and informational results on page one:Given the huge variety of results and result types, it becomes hard, for certain keywords, to figure out what type of page you might be able to create that might actually help your client."We basically wanted to know just three things. Do I need a blog post, do I need an informational page, or do I need a transactional page? Or is it some other type?"Keyword Insights is designed to deliver this simplicity, to help people decide what kind of page to create for their clients.Andy also adds this is a way to confidently ensure that opportunities don't end up getting wasted."You can pull through a page by rank and by URL rather than by keyword. You start to see what should be broken out into multiple topics. If there are two massive clusters a page is ranking for this content needs to be broken out in two."Suganthan agrees. "I've got a good use case. Cluster Volume. Instead of just going for search volume, here's the keyword, x keyword, here's the cluster volume. For this page, there's this much potential of cluster volume you can rank for, but you can rank for all those terms on the same page.Instead of looking at the same volume, we can have the cluster volume that gives users, even clients, a bit more than they have on a single keyword." Using Keyword Insights to Generate a Content StrategyAndy uses Keyword Insights to generate content strategies."I use it two ways. Sometimes when I'm struggling for content ideas, I've got 50K keywords, rather than going and looking at other people's content, I filter by the clusters with the most volume."He doesn't focus on the keyword with the most volume. He focuses on the cluster with the most volume. "Clusters are all the keywords you can realistically target on one page. Sometimes you'll see a cluster with three keywords with a volume of 2,000. You're thinking: I'm going to go for them. Then you see a cluster of 2000 keywords, each with a volume of 100. That one is a lot easier to go for. You get a lot more."He says when he clusters he gets left with all the pages that can be content, and often with many ideas he would not have thought about on his own.Beta Test FeedbackAndy and Suganthan are getting a ton of feedback about their tool. They're still nailing down the finer points of user intent by the industry or site type that's attempting to use the tool.Suganthan says: "We'll hopefully soon be able to say it's an eCommerce site or a lead gen site and be able to train different models for different industries like automotive. We can already do insurance. We have a specific set of scraped data that we can train and label for our machine learning model. Then it would offer a better prediction on those keywords."Andy adds: "For transactional pages, we want to be able to tell you the category level or product level pages that rank."What's your right now cause?Andy's right now cause Be the Match.His aunt has leukemia and had a 13% chance to live, but is now in remission."Some random bone donor in Germany is giving his bone marrow. Never met the kid. He's doing this during Covid as well."Be the Match takes a little bit of your DNA via a cheek swab and uses it to match bone marrow and stem cell donors to patients. "He was a 100% match. My aunt's from Scotland, he's from Germany, but somewhere down the line they share genes."He says it's a great thing to do. "Not asking for money. Sign up if you're happy to give bone marrow. It could save someone's life." Suganthan says he doesn't really have a cause other than trying to help SEO newcomers. "You've probably often seen newcomers ask a question, and they get shut down really quickly by people saying, look, this is a basic question, you shouldn't be asking. I think every question is a valid question. One thing I do a lot, actually, is help newcomers. I've spent hours and hours. I'm more than happy to get a call with anyone on any part of the world. Just contact me, say you want to talk for an hour. I'm more than happy to take some time."Andy says he's evidence of that. "When I met Suganthan, no joke, it was a year and a half ago. I had 50 followers a year and a half ago. I met Suganthan, and everything that's happened to me has been through his help." Connect with Suganthan Mohanadasan and Andy ChadwickWant to learn more about Andy and Suganthan and connect with them online?  Suganthan on Twitter Suganthan on LinkedIn Andy on Twitter Andy on LinkedIn Traffic Think Tank - Slack Channel Suganthan's Email Andy's Email 

Bill Slawski is the Director of SEO Research at Go Fish Digital, and he's made a name for himself by reading, interpreting, and blogging about Google patents. With a background as a lawyer, he has a history of dissecting complex technical documents and surfacing key insights. He has been writing about these types of insights for years on his personal blog, SEO by the Sea.Go to his site and you'll often see intense diagrams, like this one. He's certainly adept at translating this sometimes-esoteric information into content strategies that bring real results. He shares some of those stories on today's podcast.The highlights: [1:15] The Searchable Index patent. [5:44] On semantic SEO. [8:02] Using entities to enhance SEO. [16:08] The local search evolution. [20:55] Bill's cause. The insights:The Searchable Index PatentRight now, Bill is studying a patent called Searchable Index."One machine learning model Google is using right now is one that one of the inventors worked on: Sibyl.  Sibyl was used on sites like YouTube to give them a better grasp of it. YouTube gets indexed by looking at text on a video page: the title, the description, and so on. So it made sense for them to start watching the videos and learning what they're about. They're using machine learning to do that."Bill gives the example of a quote from the movie Apocalypse Now. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."He says that when someone searches that quote, they aren't looking for information about who said the quote, or information about the quote. "They want to display the video."This patent helps Google find and display the video. He points out that Google used to have a very rudimentary algorithm and in part trained us, the searching public, how to search in very simple ways. These days Google is far more complex and is able to draw relationships between different entities in ways that it didn't in the past. Thus search can be a little less precise. On Semantic SEO"Imagine the web as a huge scattered database of information, and some of that information is hard to get at. It's stuck in a PDF file. It's not easily transferable because we can only read the information on some PDFs. We can't necessarily extract the data from them. We can't do extensive queries like: how many people in the US today are addicted to painkillers?" The web's not going to know the answer to that."But there may be some sources on the web like the Bureau of Justice statistics that may come close to knowing some information about it."He says that semantic SEO addresses this problem by using schema to providing key-value pairs on pages."We're using it in local search to provide address information, to provide geographic coordinates for places, to tell us what's nearby and what's far away. Which companies are owned by other companies, who the CEOs might be, and so on."Schema, Bill says, helps SEOs describe what the data is, allowing us to play a role in making the web more searchable.Using Entities to Enhance SEOBill uses an example of these value pairs and how targeted related entities can improve a page's ability to rank.For example, once Bill worked for the Baltimore Visitor and Convention Center. They wanted to optimize a page for Baltimore Black History."We wrote a page. We included the phrase Baltimore Black history on it three or four times. We tried to rank the page and after 3 or 4 months we were ranked about 114." Time for a new strategy: writing a walking tour of Baltimore, with all of the sites which relate to Baltimore's black history, like the 9-foot statue of Billie Holiday, or Frederick Douglass' six townhomes. The page ranked for all kinds of long-tail keywords, but ranks for Baltimore black history, too! All because each of the entities described is relevant to the subject matter they were initially trying to rank for. This worked way back in 2005, and Google has only become more sophisticated since then. He later used a similar tactic to help an Arlington, VA apartment complex rank. The Evolution of the Local Search AlgorithmsBill says that local search was "sort of a proof of concept of how entity search worked."He describes some of the ways that local SEO evolved."The guy who worked on supervising engineers at Google for entity search was Andrew Hogue. He was in charge of what he referred to in his resume which he had online, as the annotation framework. The annotation framework included people like Daniel Eggner, who worked for Google Local Search. His idea was to build a business directory. Instead of a Yellow Pages, you can turn to Google, look a place up, see how close it is, what else is available, look at reviews." He gets a little more granular with this."Google contains things like data wrappers. They were a template full of fields. An address, street address 1, street address 2, city, state, and a zip code in a certain format. Google was able to identify the format. You're doing a key-value pair type thing where Google was saying: this is a business address."What’s your right now cause?Bill is especially concerned about how information flows to people; that is, accessibility to important information such as assessing the number of damages from natural resources or being able to find informational sources."Helping people develop a type of technology and learn about it. That's why I like to see more of a semantic web." Connect with Bill SlawksiWant to see what Bill’s working on or thinking about in the SEO world? He’s incredibly active on Twitter. Twitter LinkedIn Website Go Fish Digital

If technical SEO is your jam, then you're going to love today's podcast. Kristina Azarenko is the owner of Marketing Syrup. She teaches an intensive technical SEO course that she's definitely earned the expertise to be offering, given she's helped clients like Carfax and the London School of Business and Finance grow their businesses through SEO.She specializes in eCommerce SEO, website migrations, technical SEO, and Google analytics.If you've ever felt just a little lost when things get technical, or if you just love hearing all about it, then this is a podcast you'll want to catch.The highlights: [1:25] About Kristina's course. [4:55] Common issues with Javascript SEO. [8:35] Why custom-built websites? [9:45] Technical audits.  [12:09] Kristina's favorite tools. [15:05] Core Web Vitals. [21:04] Kristina's favorite parts of the job. [24:48] Kristina's favorite project management tools. [25:34] Kristina's cause. The insights:About Kristina's CourseKristina says she was first educated as a teacher and a translator, so even though she's never worked inside a classroom, she nevertheless has a real passion for education. "I thought it would make sense for me to put everything together, to create a structure. Versus pieces of a puzzle here and there."She originally put the course together to help people that she was mentoring."We are all self-learners, but when you learn some piece from here, some piece from there, sometimes they just don't come together as you'd love them to. Basically what I hear most from my students is that the course helps them to fill in the gaps, feel comfortable and confident in their knowledge, so they can then lead teams, lead in general SEO in their company, or the agency they work for, or with clients."She says the framework of the course is very organized."It starts from the beginning and goes deeper and deeper, especially the technical part. I'm hugely technical. Many people join the course specifically because of this technical specialization. So this part is the hugest of the course. I started from the beginning just because I wanted to make sure everyone was on the same...landing page! So to speak."She says her course doesn't just attract SEO beginners."I have people who have many years of experience inside the course."One thing that helps, she says, is to hear different explanations on the same topics from different people. This information and those explanations can then be used in conversations with bosses, peers, and clients. "It helps a lot."Common Issues with Javascript SEOThe conversation then turned naturally to what has proven to be the bane of many a technical SEO: Javascript."Sometimes clients will come to me and say: oh, we created a Javascript platform and our traffic tanked. What happened? The answer is already in their question!"She had a client come to her and when she looked up their old site on Archive.org she was able to explain that their old site was way better, because it was static. "I feel that people have this misperception that if they use Javascript their website will be cool." There are specific actions that must be taken for Google to be able to interact with a Javascript website. "Developers don't usually think about SEO. You need to have different people on your team to advise different parts of a configuration." She says this issue usually doesn't come up on common CMS platforms like Spotify or WordPress. Instead?"These are usually not publicly known CMSes. These are custom build CMSes."If you're going to custom-build a CMS, the right time to come to someone like Kristina is prior to building the website at all. "I recently had a client who is migrating from their current custom system to a new custom system that's going to be heavily Javascript based. I give them all the things they need to have in place in order to do this transition. This includes server-side rendering. You should make sure all the titles are right. All of these things."Why Custom-Built Websites?Garrett asked a perfectly logical question. If these custom, Javascript-based sites cause so many problems, why use them at all? Turns out there are some excellent reasons for some companies to move forward with this type of website."They don't want all the code load that comes with WordPress or Shopify. [These platforms] are configured to serve a really wide public. Sometimes, especially with Shopify, you can't make all the customizations that would make your website faster or perform better."She says sometimes clients don't really need all the features either of these platforms come with, either."So you want to start from scratch, so you will be able to easily change it. You don't need to create some features you don't need." Technical AuditsLast month, Kristina wrote a post on The Search Engine Journal called "Javascript SEO: Best Practices and Debugging Tools."In the post, she discussed several of the reasons why JavaScript can be dangerous to SEO. She provided several examples that provide some insights into what she's looking for when she gets "under the hood" of a website during an audit."First of all, I see performance in general. Traffic gets really high and then goes down to zero. I look for patterns to see the overall picture. Did it happen to some particular part of the website? Did it happen to the whole website in general? It's about understanding the issues behind the drops."For example, she had a client whose overall website was fine, but whose blog traffic tanked."They actually migrated from WordPress to Shopify because their shop is on Shopify. They wanted to have everything under one umbrella but didn't think that transitioning templates would cause problems. They didn't redirect the images, and no longer had traffic from images."In other words, Javascript isn't the only thing that can go wrong with a website. There can be all sorts of technical issues, especially after any kind of migration from one CMS platform to the other. Kristina's Favorite ToolsSome of Kristina's favorite tools include: The Web Developer Chrome Extension The Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool The Rich Results Test Tool The URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console The View Rendered Source Chrome Extension JavaScript Rendering Check SEO Pro Extension For project management: Teamwork. She uses a combination of all of these tools to catch issues with technical SEO and Javascript. Core Web VitalsGarrett asked if Kristina expected core web vitals to become important to rankings."What are core web vitals? They're about speed and performance. Google has been talking about speed and performance for the past four or five years." She then proposes a theory."Every time Google wants to push something on people, for example, go to the secure https://, they say it's a ranking factor." She says she doesn't think this is necessarily to push SEOs but to push business adoption.Despite agreeing that Google would like people to work on their core web vitals, she does not expect it to become a huge ranking factor."This is just part of the signals, right? Also, it's in comparison with all the other players in the search results. So if, for example, your website doesn't pass core web vitals, but the speed is still good enough, you might still rank higher. And if you have Javascript problems and Google can't read your website, core vitals are not the thing you need to concentrate on right now."She says while you definitely need to think about site performance, it's not the main thing that Google cares about."If that were the case, you could rank with an empty page."She also points out that switching to https:// was a quick fix for most web developers, whereas addressing core vitals is a much more challenging process that will be much harder for webmasters to adopt. She says it's not a huge thing."It's like writing title tags. It's just one of the things."Kristina's Favorite Parts of the JobKristina says that her favorite parts of the job are working with eCommerce websites and migrations.When it comes to eCommerce sites? "Specifically, helping them to create more granular categories and subcategories, to target more longtail keywords. In general, driving growth through creating the right pages and managing the right user intents."And migrations?"I think about structures all the time. For me, a migration is a structural thing. It follows basically the same steps. The steps can be different for different types of websites, different types of migrations." She says the structure puts her in an almost Zen-like state!What's your right now cause?Kristina is originally from Belarus, and she thinks about her homeland all the time."I moved to Canada three years ago. The political situation was one of the reasons why. Since the elections in August of last year, people are being oppressed, killed, and jailed." Amnesty International has prepared a report on human rights violations in Belarus. You can read it here.Her passion for her home country is her right now cause. Support them here.Connect with Kristina Azarenko JavaScript SEO: Best Practices and Debugging Tools Marketing Syrup Twitter LinkedIn Kristina's YouTube Channel

Referral marketing is often a bit underrated, especially when agencies are thinking about growing their client's businesses. In part, this is because it feels difficult to control and impossible to automate.Enter ReferralCandy, which has cracked the code on referral marketing automation, at least, for eCommerce brands who fulfill a few simple criteria.Here's how it works: current customers receive a promotion that gives them the ability to share an eCommerce store with their friends. Their friends get a reward, like a discount. They get a reward too, such as cashback, an even bigger discount, or a custom gift. The platform can be connected to quite a few commonly used marketing apps and offers analytics on how well the program is working.Raul Galera is the Chief Advocate at ReferralCandy, and he joins us today on the Agency Ahead podcast to talk about the power of referral marketing and what it takes to launch a referral marketing campaign on behalf of your clients.The highlights: [1:27] The ReferralCandy elevator pitch. [2:59] What ReferralCandy learned about working with agencies. [6:42] How agencies are positioning and selling referral marketing. [8:15] Setting up the service. [10:26] How ReferralCandy helps marketers learn about referral marketing. [11:54] Typical questions agencies have about the program and process. [13:25] Places to talk about referral marketing. [15:08] How explicit should agencies be about selling referral marketing? [17:53] How 2020 changed referral marketing. [20:31] Raul's cause. The insights:What ReferralCandy Learned About Working with AgenciesIn 2019, ReferralCandy started interviewing agencies to find out where the gaps were in their referral marketing strategies, and to learn how they could help. They learned a lot about how they could help agencies do more with referral marketing."We learned how they see it, how they approach it when referral marketing comes up in a client conversation. We were looking to build our referral program, and we wanted to know what was going to make ReferralCandy attractive for agencies. We wanted to know how we could create this program so that agencies could see themselves reflected in it."On day 1 of these interviews, ReferralCandy learned that referral marketing only works for certain types of clients."The first thing they look at is whether [clients] have a good product. Your product must be good. Otherwise [referral marketing] is just out of the question."Customers won't recommend a product if it's no good, no matter how attractive the commission or how valuable the free product they might get in return might be.In addition to a good product, Raul learned that the stores that use this type of marketing must have excellent customer satisfaction at the end of the day. "You need your customers to be happy with the purchase they made, or a referral program won't help."Agencies won't start looking at referral marketing, therefore, until their clients have passed the initial growth phase."They need a large customer base they can leverage. Then they can turn these customers into their marketing team."Referral marketing just won't have the same impact for a start-up with very few clients as it would if you had a large base of followers, a large email list, and plenty of people to market to. How Agencies are Positioning and Selling Referral MarketingRaul says most agencies position referral services as a bundle with their other services."It's typically because an agency is handling the client's post-purchase flows, or it's an agency that's doing email marketing for them and so referral marketing comes up because it's something you can add to email marketing."He says it typically works much better as an add-on service than as a stand-alone service.He says some agencies are very structured about choosing when to offer referral marketing services."They make their customers go into these different levels. If you're level 1 and 2, you're focused on-site optimization, email marketing, etc.; once you move to level 3, that's where they're going to start getting into referrals, customer retention, or going even deeper."Setting up the ReferralCandy ServicePart of the appeal of ReferralCandy is, of course, just how automated it is.It's also easy to use.Raul says:"ReferralCandy is set up so even small brands that don't have a designer or a developer can use it and set it up. Setting up ReferralCandy can be as easy as selecting the rewards, uploading a logo and a banner, and… we literally do the rest."For those who like to be a little more hands-on?"We can go into full customization. You can edit templates directly with HTML or CSS. You can make it look like the rest of your marketing assets. You can connect it with several tools like Klaviyo and MailChimp. It really depends on the agency, and how they want to set it up."He says agencies tend to stay really involved in the formation of the initial strategies."How much are we going to offer customers for referring their friends? What are we going to give to those friends when they purchase from the site for the first time? Are we going to offer more to the friends than to the customer?"The marketing agency also has to test and fine-tune these campaigns, once launched.He says that businesses absolutely tend to do better when agencies get involved with the design of referral programs."Down the line, the results are typically better." How ReferralCandy Helps Marketers Learn About Referral MarketingReferralCandy has posted a lot of resources to help agencies learn more about how to make the best use of their platform."We have an amazing support team who steps in and makes recommendations. We also put a lot of content out there in terms of how to improve a referral program, how to launch it."Raul also works directly with agencies to make sure they're able to make full use of the program."My job is to look at their accounts, look at their customers, and maybe reach out to them like: hey, this particular client got this promotion so it might improve the referral program. It's basically another set of eyes looking at their clients."Raul says there are some common questions that come up. Functionality, but also best practices."What types of rewards should we offer? Should we offer a commission on a future purchase? A fixed amount or a cash reward instead of a discount? Should we offer a gift? All of that typically comes into play. They also want to know what other brands are doing to get some ideas." They also want to know how they line it up with other campaigns they might be running at the same time.For example:"We're running a weekend offer. How can we make sure that's not going to affect the referral program or the other way around? How can we incentivize customers to refer while we have this other campaign running? How do we avoid diverting customer attention?"Raul stresses that every client is different, but that they're usually trying to fit it all into the marketing mix they have for that client at that moment. Places To Chat With Other Marketers About Referral MarketingIf you want to talk to other marketers about referral marketing, Raul suggests some of the Facebook groups that exist for eCommerce groups, especially those for Shopify. "We're active in those groups, and we try to respond. We're also active on Slack communities. Whenever anything comes up there, we try to participate in the conversation. Especially these days, if you're in the eCommerce world, there are tons of communities you can join with people who are willing to help."Raul adds that he finds this communication to be an incredibly special thing."Entrepreneurs and agencies are sharing experiences in their own world. They see eCommerce from their own perspective. It's a rich read, to see what Merchant Groups and agencies are discussing. It's fascinating for me."How explicit should agencies be about selling referral marketing? Raul thinks that selling these services works best when agencies bring it up to clients as a natural move for that company at that moment."Timing is really important."When recommendations are happening organically, then it's the right time to explore referral marketing. "The goal for all programs is to incentivize those referrals, getting people to refer even more. You can run a Net Promoter Score survey on your site and ask customers: will you be willing to refer? You can get 90% of those saying yes, but not even half of those are going to end up referring."Raul stresses this doesn't mean customers don't like you or your products."They're just busy. There's a lot of things happening in their daily lives. It's all about having those things in place but also having a promotion going on, making sure the customers are reminded about the program and having a clear path for them, actually making a purchase, and signing them up for the referral program. It's a cycle. If you get a customer to refer a friend and that friend joins the referral program, the cycle starts again." How 2020 Changed Referral Marketing2020 is still shaping...pretty much everything, so Garrett asked how last year impacted the referral marketing industry."The referral marketing industry has grown with the eCommerce industry in general," says Raul. "I think everybody had a little bit of a hiccup for a couple of weeks in March. We just didn't know what was going on, and we didn't know what was going to happen to the rest of the year. After that, we saw eCommerce absolutely exploding. I think I read that we reached the level of penetration that was expected for 2025. We literally fast-forwarded 5 years in a matter of weeks. Shopify was having Black Friday traffic every single day in April."He says one interesting thing that happened was that businesses and agencies started seeing referral marketing not just as a lead generation machine, but as a customer retention tool as well."There's a lot of competition out there. We need to create a community of customers. We need to make sure our customers are happy to be our customers and have a reason to come back for more, at least a reason to stick around, to stay top of mind and make sure they're talking about us."Customers might not buy in the next six months...but you can keep them talking."I think that was the biggest shift. Brands needed to keep their customers around, and referral marketing was one of the tools to do that."In other words, it comes back to the buyer's journey...and the unique ability referral marketing has to touch customers at every point on that journey.What's your right now cause?From the moment ReferralCandy opened its doors, its company mission has been to help SMBs. "We have another product called CandyBar mostly dedicated to brick-and-mortar stores. We've seen the pain from merchants firsthand, so we've put them in the spotlight, put them out there, highlighted their voices. We've tried to make it easy for them to get online." "At the company level, we've tried to maintain the base of brick and mortar stores and keep small businesses alive. Without small businesses, there's really no world as we know it in my opinion."Raul lives in Spain, where the pandemic has hit especially hard. He feels lucky to work in the eCommerce world, an industry that's still alive when everything is going so crazy."On my own personal level, I've just been trying to help anyone around me that's needed help. I've helped with job introductions, applications, reviewing resumes, figuring out ways to find jobs, donating to charity."He says he doesn't have one particular cause. He's just trying to give back in any way he can.Connect with Raul GaleraYou can get in touch with Raul by email. Email: raulg@referralcandy.com LinkedIn @referralcandy on Twitter

If you're not sight-or-hearing impaired, you might not think very much about how accessible your web and social media content is. It doesn't make you a bad person...just someone who needed to have some attention called to the issue. Alexa Heinrich is one of the people who are 100% out there calling attention to the issue.She's the Social Media Manager at St. Petersburg College, and is an advocate for digital accessibility on social media. Today she joins us on the Agency Ahead podcast to talk about making your social media content more accessible. This is a don't miss that can help you get more customers for your clients while simultaneously helping them to avoid lawsuits. The highlights: [1:38] Defining accessibility for social media. [2:29] The state of accessibility. [6:05] YouTube auto-captions. [7:03] Baking accessibility into your process. [10:16] The business case for improving accessibility. [12:34] The accessibility of different platforms. [19:42] How Twitter is doing accessibility right. [23:04] Biggest accessibility pet peeves. [25:05] Alexa's cause. The insights:The State of AccessibilityWhen Alexa is speaking of accessibility she is focusing on hearing-impaired and vision-impaired users who need captions, alt text, and screen readers to access content. She focuses on social media because it's often overlooked."Most brands and organizations are predominantly focused on making their websites accessible as that's the more commonplace digital asset we focus on." Yet Twitter is working hard to catch up, beefing up different features. Even though social media is catching up, accessibility is still off-radar for a lot of marketers. "It's still so new that the people who manage the digital marketing for brands don't really know about it, which is kind of where I come in. There are other individuals out there, but I focus primarily on social media content from a marketing standpoint."As it happens, there are easy ways to do that. "I love to remind people every week that you should be putting your hashtags in camel case. It means if you have a hashtag like #SocialMediaRocks, you'd be capitalizing the first letter in each word. This will tell an assistive device, like a screen reader, that these are 3 separate words, not just one long word."She also stresses that alt text is very important. "A short physical description of an image that a screen reader picks up on, and either says aloud to a user or transcribes it into Braille. So it's super important and is kind of the invisible accessibility feature. You need to caption your videos so that deaf and hard-of-hearing users can actually access the content. I would say that's equally important."Sometimes platforms offer tools, but you can't rely on them 100%. One example is YouTube's auto-captions."Go back in and edit the captions. They're pretty decent, but they're not going to have punctuation. They're not going to know about proper nouns and names. You can let YouTube do the heavy lift, but go in and make the captions accurate before you make your video public." Baking Accessibility into Your ProcessAlexa says she does not have to set aside any time to make her content more accessible, because she's baked it right into her process. "For example, if I get sent an event flier, I'm very polite about it. I tell people: thank you for the flyer. I'll use it to pull information from, but I'm not just going to post the flyer because it's not accessible." She says most people she works with are understanding."It's about setting those boundaries and understandings with people who do supply you content."She's taught the video team at her college to send videos captioned, right out the gate. "They're either going to bake them into the video with open captions, or they're going to send me the .SRT files, or it'll already be on YouTube with the .SRT file. Having that as part of my process really cuts down on the amount of time that I need to add in order to make my content accessible." Alexa says there are basically three components to making content 100% accessible. They are: A visual component for people who rely on sight. An audio component for people who rely on their hearing. Readable text that a screen reader can pick up on for people who need an assistive device to access that information.  Alexa stresses that you can't just think about someone who is blind or someone who is deaf. "There are people who are deaf-blind. What do they do? They need an assistive device and they need readable text for that device." The Business Case for Improving AccessibilityAlexa says she has a 3-pronged argument when she's trying to make the case for accessibility."The first argument I'm going to reach for is you should care about other people and the experience they have when they engage with your brand online. If that doesn't work, I go for the marketing approach." 2.2 billion people have a vision impairment or experience blindness. 466 million people have a serious hearing impairment. "That's a lot of people you could possibly be not connecting with because you're not creating accessible content. There's also the very well-known statistic that 85% of Internet users watch videos with the sound off. I do that. That's me. That's a lot of people. When you create accessible content, you're probably reaching those people." She says if that argument doesn't work, she goes for the scary one."You could get sued. It's not unrealistic to imagine that eventually brands and organizations are going to be facing lawsuits for not creating accessible social media content. Dominos was just sued in 2019 because their website wasn't accessible for blind customers. It's not unrealistic to think social media is soon going to enter the legal realm of: we need to be digitally compliant with accessibility standards." The Accessibility of Different PlatformsAlexa says that Twitter is doing the most for accessibility."Facebook is okay. They're one of the first platforms that really introduced auto-captions. Their auto-captions are designed to learn, so it's AI-backed auto-captions. They're okayish. They have live auto-captioning for their live videos which is more impressive."She says Facebook is confusing her though because they recently did a big update that took away features that made things more accessible."I can't do alt text to event images anymore."On the other hand, Instagram, owned by Facebook, is adding more captioning features. "They have a captioning sticker coming out for stories. IGTV already has auto-captions which are okay. I think Facebook is so large at this point that it's hard for them to really focus in on this specific issue, which is a problem."She says LinkedIn is nice because you can upload an SRT file if you upload a video directly to their platform. "You can do alt text super easy with them, and it appears as a button as soon as you upload an image. My only real complaint with LinkedIn and their alt text is they have a 120 character limit with spaces. That's exceptionally short. I'm not really sure why they decided to do it that short, but if it could be longer that would be great. That's a complaint I hear most often from people." Pinterest, meanwhile, did offer some alt text features. You just click right on the "alt text" button and add it. Time to pin a delightful unicorn made entirely out of rainbows and sass, and to write some alt text to that effect. "I do know they just had their Pinterest Presents business webinar. I had people tagging me in their tweets because there were not only captions. They had someone doing ASL interpretation for their presentation. They apparently did their whole section on accessibility and Pinterest. I'm pleasantly surprised that Pinterest was like: yeah, we need to talk about this."The platforms that aren't doing so well? TikTok and Snapchat. Some content creators on these platforms have found workarounds, but there are plenty of complaints.How Twitter is Doing Accessibility RightTwitter learned how to get better about accessibility by facing a lot of backlash."They launched a beta test of audio tweets in the United States. There was no transcription option. There were no captioning options. Is this feature just not for deaf and hard of hearing users? Do we just ignore this? They came out the next day, apologized, said: we're sorry, we completely messed up, we're going to do better."Alexa didn't really believe they would, but...they did."They've been very transparent about their efforts to be more accessible. They've built full teams around accessibility. They've hired new people. They've done town halls, virtual town halls with people to weigh in." Alexa says Twitter has gotten better, exponentially, in the past two months. Biggest Accessibility Pet PeevesAlexa hates fancy Unicode characters from external websites."You see it a lot on Instagram, it's made its way onto Twitter, it's all over Clubhouse. Basically, people go over to external websites, type in a sentence or a couple of words, and the website will generate different Unicode characters and different fonts, so you can make your fonts in script and bold and italics."Not all assistive devices can translate those, so they don't identify those as characters."They're also just plain ugly. Why would you subject your brand to that?"She has an alternative to using those fonts and scripts."Be a better writer. Then you won't have to rely on fancy fonts to jazz up your content." What's your right now cause?"I would definitely say supporting the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. There is a huge GoFundMe campaign right now. I have a lot of friends in the Asian American Pacific Island Community. Seeing the violence in that community is devastating to me."You can join Alexa in condemning Asian American hate and creating lasting social change by donating here.Want to learn more about Alexa? Learn more about Alexa, or accessibility, by visiting: Website Twitter Instagram LinkedIn YouTube

Client communication is the key to client retention. It's about more than reporting. It's about building relationships and fostering understanding.Emily Brady is the Senior Manager of Local SEO at Milestone, Inc., an analytical local SEO-expert who has had to learn how to get good at the client relations part of the job. The company offers both SaaS services and SEO services and has served brands like the Marriott, Wyndham Hotel Group, Best Western, and more. If you struggle with client retention or just feel like you and your clients aren't connecting very well, this is the podcast to catch.The highlights: [1:38] Emily's role at Milestone. [3:06] Helping clients understand the omnichannel nature of Local SEO. [4:35] Helping clients understand you're helping them. [6:56] Educating clients. [10:37] Learning your client's "SEO love language." [17:15] Ensuring you remember and use your client's SEO love language. [21:21] Emily's causes. The insights:Helping Clients Understand the Omnichannel Nature of Local SEOEmily stresses that we need to be thinking beyond listings management or Google My Business alone. "That's only one slice of it. It's also your location landing pages. It's also going to be your site performance. No one cares about your content if it doesn't load on time for them. All that good stuff."She also mentions content, listings, offsite and onsite technical SEO, link building, and more."A big part of my day is working with these local listings, but having a holistic mindset makes local exciting." Helping Clients Understand You're Helping Them"This is the age-old conundrum. SEO is so many things. There are so many facets. Every client you work with is going to have a different perception of what SEO is. The first thing you want to nail down, at the sales level, is what their goals are, and how we can help them with those goals."She brings up an example:"If we have a prospect or a client who is like: my goal is to rank #1 in the ten blue links for this one specific keyword and that's all I care about, well at that point maybe it's time to realign about how there are other valuable things that SEO or Local SEO can be doing for them."Starting with the question, though, says Emily, raises a foundation and sets a precedent for better communication moving forward. "At the end of the day, we're SEOs. We geek about all of this every single day. We geek out about those success metrics, but on the client-side, if you're working with an internal marketing person or even an internal SEO, their KPIs may be defined on their bosses' perception of SEO. You may have to ask how they measure SEO and see if something needs to be realigned."If you're not on the same page from the get-go, she says, then communication becomes almost impossible. Educating ClientsEmily speaks of a favorite client she had in the past."A medium-to-large HVAC company in a large Southern California city. They were really awesome. Woman-owned. Provided this career opportunity that is not typically something women are known to be successful in: technicians for plumbing and HVAC. I just love working around that company."But when they came to Emily?"They had one keyword in mind and that was what they wanted to rank for as their primary goal. It wasn't even unmerited because the search volume was really good. So yes, that was a great way to get visibility but it was also really challenging because the road for ranking for that keyword was going to take a lot of time."They still needed lots of consistent calls to stay afloat."We understand this is our aspirational goal, to outrank everyone for this. How about in the interim, we look at the surrounding geographic areas where you serve clients but don't currently have content on your site to accommodate, let's see if we can get ranking where the competition is really low. The aggregate search volume for all these keywords was actually higher than the one they were wanting to get."Emily did get them to rank for the keyword they wanted too."But along the way, we were able to educate them and say: hey, from the data perspective we have all this traffic and visibility coming from these smaller keywords, that, combined, give you the same amount of visibility. We saw that reflected in their ROI, in their organic leads, in all that great stuff."She explains that she aligned to the client's goals, but also helped them realign and expand their understanding of what organic SEO can actually do."It's not just about the most important keyword. Sometimes you gotta take a step back and say: okay, but how can we fill the gap for you getting phone calls in the interim before we achieve that primary ranking goal?"Learning Your Client's SEO Love LanguageEmily speaks of training she took at a former agency called Scorpion."One of the things they emphasized was a framework for understanding how to communicate with clients, a sales training framework."She's speaking of the Merrill-Reid method, which classifies communication styles.Analytical people want data and facts. Drivers want to hear about results. Amiable people are focused on relationship-building. Expressive people are enthusiastic, emotional communicators."When you start to think about client communication: is this person more data-driven or are they more relationship-driven? Are they the type of client who asks me what I did this weekend? Is interesting to talk about their kids? Whatever it might be. Those are clues for earning their trust and having a positive relationship with them."She points out that a person who is analytical like herself would have an "SEO love language" that revolves around getting all those minute details from the data. So the first step is to look for clues, but the second is to ask how they best receive the data you need to give them. She said when she first started working with her HVAC client she made some mistakes."I would give them every possible piece of information that I could about their success. Your overall visibility increased by 5%. This is amazing. This is good. This is paying off. We're going in the right direction."To her clients, this information made it seem as though she was making excuses."All this information was unrelated to what was important to them. They were like: look, don't send us updates until it's results. And it really clicked for me at that point. I was approaching them as an Analytical person would. They were Drivers. Give me results, send me a short email, cut to the chase. Both are valid. But because I was communicating in the way I want to be communicated to, it just didn't translate as well."She said once she came to that realization and adjusted her communication style, it got a lot easier to work with and communicate with that client. Ensuring You Remember and Use Your Client's SEO Love LanguageEmily says to pay attention to how they respond to emails. "If they respond positively to a really long email with granular info people otherwise might not read. If they are not responding to those types of emails, or just sending: thanks, :), but didn't read it? You can put a mental pin in that moving forward."At the beginning of the quarterly meeting, you can also check-in and say: "Here's my understanding of your goals, is this still true?" She says sometimes there might be a slight realignment, but most of the time? "The client is like, yeah, we're still on the same page."If you've solved the problem:"Here's what we see as being the next problem we want to solve? Here's the next best goal. Do we agree? Let's talk?"What's your right now cause?Like many on the show, Emily gives a shout-out to the Women in Tech SEO group."I think the SEO community has made progress on amplifying voices that didn't have any space in the spotlight or in the SEO world. Conferences, webinars, general visibility."She says the group has been very supportive of her. "That group is THE best interaction that I have had. It took me a while to get involved with the SEO community. I've been doing SEO for a long time, I've been nervous about engaging with people on Twitter because Twitter is the way it is." Women in Tech SEO inspired her to put herself out there more.She says while the industry has made progress, it still doesn't look as diverse as it is."Be loud and rattle cages. If you ever notice something. Hey, that doesn't actually reflect the spirit of the community we know it to be in its best form." Accounts to Follow, From Emily Areej AbuAli Izzy Smith Jamie Indigo Krystal Taing Joy Hawkins Connect with Emily BradyWant to geek out with Emily on Local SEO? Find her on Twitter. Twitter LinkedIn Milestone

Claire Carlile is a Local SEO expert with over 20 years in marketing. She has been managing her own solo practice for over 12 years, and recently released a course on BrightLocal on setting up a Local SEO agency and positioning it for success. As a LocalU instructor and speaker, she's already got a solid track record for helping other marketers succeed in all of their endeavors.Today she joins us on The Agency Ahead podcast to talk a little about her course and to share a few Local SEO success tips. The course, by the way, is absolutely free. You just have to register on Bright Local. The highlights: [1:49] Why Local SEO is more important to small businesses than ever. [3:59] Adapting to the pandemic. [6:47] Google products posts. [8:07] The importance of UTM tracking. [12:17] Is it a good time to start a Local SEO business?  [15:18] Honing your pitch. [17:31] Positioning your Local SEO service. [21:46] Pricing your services. [26:09] Claire's causes. The insights: Why Local SEO is More Important to Small Business Than EverClaire pointed out that the pandemic forced many business owners to understand, perhaps for the first time, that the Google My Business profile is the thing most people see first when searching for companies like theirs. "Suddenly small and medium-size businesses were like: oh no, how do I mark my special hours? How do I deliver a message right here in the search results?" SMBs began to understand they needed to move very quickly.Claire also notes that the need for SMBs to pivot in terms of product and service delivery created exciting opportunities for Local SEOs. "There was a lot of talking being done about how they were going to communicate the message and how they were going to deliver the primary products or services." Claire admits it's been a long year."Businesses needed to learn to very quickly influence the information in the business profile. There's been a lot of changes in the last year in terms of what we can do and the information we can put in there now." Google Products PostsClaire recently participated in a Fanbooster Webinar on using Google My Business as a Social Media channel, covering what works and what doesn't. One of the things Claire recommends is avoiding Covid-type business posts."At first it was useful to start off with because businesses were thinking: we'll ride this for a couple of months and then we'll be open again. People already had tickets for some of the businesses that I worked with. They had holidays booked, so the biggest things in those cases were: wow, use this Covid post, it's going to be right at the top of the business profile. We don't need a photo, we just need to say what is happening and we need to link through to the Covid statement on the website." As businesses slowly opened and pivoted?"We still need to deliver something in some way. We started thinking: we want products."If a business was marked as closed? Products no longer showed up in the profile."There are all these little things that were happening behind the scenes that weren't serving the best interest of the business." Claire recommends that when you're working with any business, you should test and track how things work for your client before dismissing any tool out of hand. "Have a go. Tag it up. See if it delivers value. If it doesn't deliver value, [find out] whether it's because of the content, rather than just saying well I did a blog post once and it didn't work."She stresses you have to use your best content in terms of what you know about where a person is in the funnel."If there's no return for your business then maybe don't continue to invest in it."The Importance of UTM TrackingOne of Claire's most useful posts is Claire's Guide to UTM Tagging for Google My Business. All Local SEOs should read it! It's an excellent guide that will help you prove the value you bring to your clients.Claire stresses you don't need a background in data analysis to make use of tools like UTM tagging. She doesn't!"I'm a normal generalist marketer working for small businesses. So I just set about trying to understand a little bit about attribution and how it worked."She says we know GMB insights are useful."I'm not saying ignore everything else. There are a lot of really important business-critical actions that take place away from the website."Claire says she really likes tracking what people do when they get to the website. "I set up quite a granular process from the UTM tracking from the business profile, which takes into account sort of the normal links. You've got an appointment link, menu, primary website link, and then we start looking at okay, let's tag up our products, let's tag up our posts, let's tag all the things so we can work out when that traffic comes to the website. What does it do? Does it sign up for a newsletter? Does it click to call? Does it click to email? Is there eCommerce revenue attributable to this as a channel?"She says it's important to tag consistently. "Find out if there's already a reporting framework in place to make sure it won't rob the business of some of its success metrics. Just make sure it works within the tracking and reporting and attribution that's already set up." Is it a good idea to start a Local SEO business right now?After the almost-mandatory "it depends," Claire opined that SEO is a growth industry right now."People need to reach their target market. They need to reach them online." She says there's a lot of talk about moving from in-house to freelance right now. "There are more opportunities to be supported while making that journey."She says it's also important to remember that Local SEO isn't just Local SEO. "It doesn't just sit there on its own. It's part of SEO. Unless you're just going to offer GMB services in the absence of anything else if you're doing Local SEO you also need to b ea technical SEO. I'm not saying you have to do everything. I'm saying if you're serving a small business client and you're working on your own, you do end up doing a lot of stuff for them. You're working on their website with them, their information architecture, search query research, you're working on their content, the measurement framework. You've gotta become familiar with whatever CMS you're working with. There's a lot of stuff. It's not just Local SEO. SEO is SEO. You have to do a lot of different things." Honing Your PitchTo get clients, Local SEOs have to pitch. Claire admits she's been reticent to pitch all her life. "Yet one of the things I do talk about in the course is getting yourself out there. It's not necessarily pitching. Especially when you're a solopreneur or you're just starting out, you're not putting together these huge elaborate pitches." She says that sometimes you want to cherry-pick certain clients. "You pit in a little more time and effort to maybe do some sort of mini-freemium audit for them to see or put together some sort of content for them that they might be interested to hear or see. You can talk about how you would help them improve." She says that's usually the most time and effort she's put into getting a client. "That freemium audit. Not in a cheesy, dodgy way how some people think of SEO agencies type of way." Positioning Your Local SEO Services"The first lesson in the course has to do with services."She says that you need to think about services and finding your niche in basically the same breath. "Niching down or not niching down as the case may be." She points out that not all companies need the same services. "There are different things you may be offering. You need to think about what you're good at. What you really enjoy. And what people need. You need to find a sweet spot. What do people need? What do you want to offer? Do you want to find a niche to offer that to?"Here's her example."Say you know in your services that you love spam fighting. Thinking you're going to use it in an industry that doesn't need it isn't going to work, is it? I love writing content and I love really elaborate very design-led pieces that earn loads of links. You're not really going to be doing that for a greengrocer." Is it a geographic niche? Is it an industry niche? What is it? "You're using all these things and working with your idea of services and whether or not you need to choose a niche. And also what's going to make you the money as well. Of course, we all need money, but if that's one of your big success metrics then you need to think about where the cash is going to come from. It's probably not going to come from teeny tiny businesses. Do you want to focus on multi-location, enterprise, service area businesses?"She says you can take a very simplistic approach to positioning."What the product does and who it's for. Using that, you can put together a solid positioning statement. These are all the things you do before you do any marketing. Don't write copy for your website, don't start going to events and networking without this really solid understanding of what you do, who you do it for, and why you're better than the competitor set that your potential might be entertaining." This doesn't have to take a long time to do. It's more like a thought exercise.Pricing Your ServicesPricing can be a real challenge. Claire recommends doing a little "low-key competitor research."She says that many Local SEOs publish pricing. "That gives you a ballpark figure, but you need to think about whether they're targeting a similar type of client."She says sometimes other Local SEOs will just tell you. Or a client with experience with other agencies who will give you an idea. "It's not industrial espionage. It's a fact-finding mission."She says you should also be thinking about what you need to earn. "You don't need to price by daily rate or hourly rate. You've got that idea of working on retainer, working on a project basis. You could also look at some sort of revenue profit share. There are all different models. Obviously, that might come a little later based on the value you're delivering to clients."She says as you get better and become very KPI-driven you always have a framework for a client to understand the value you're delivering. "You become that much more confident in your pricing. I'm going to deliver this much. You're going to have this much sales uplift. You're going to have this many new leads. Convert so much better once we've done this work. You become a little more confident to charge what you're worth."Claire says you should also think about what kind of agency you want to be."Do you want to stay on your own? Do you want to partner up with other people? Do you want to employ people? There are lots of different options. Not everyone wants to grow a small team. Some people are really happy to stay with their solopreneur model, they just know you can only service a certain amount of clients. It all depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking to have long-term authentic relationships with all your clients, personally, that's what I've found is working." What's your right now cause?Claire gives her shout-out to the Pembrokeshire Action to Combat Hardship (PATCH)."They work with local families: food parcels, clothing, household items for anyone experiencing financial hardship. That might be because they had a problem with their benefits, suffered a fire, are escaping abuse, so that's what they do. They're a long-standing charity here in Pembrokeshire."This month Claire is running a coastal half-marathon to raise money for them! If you don't want to support families in Pembrokeshire, think about finding similar initiatives in your own local communities.  Connect with Claire Carlile Want to find Claire online and join her conversations? Website Twitter LinkedIn Claire's Recent Fanbooster Webinar Claire's Complete Guide to UTM Tagging

Diversity and inclusion have been the hot topics of conversation in the digital marketing industry since George Flloyd's murder last summer. The industry has traditionally been very male and very white, at least in terms of which voices are amplified, celebrated, and listened to.Meet two women who are working hard to change that. Rejoice Ojiaku is the Global SEO Account Manager at Neo Media World, an agency that has worked with brands like HSBC, Nestle Waters, and more.  Wilhemina Gilbertson is an SEO SpecialistTogether, they are both the founders of B-DigitalUK, a digital marketing platform designed to inspire and showcase Black talent in the digital marketplace. They celebrate Black people in the marketing community, offer workshops on various marketing skills, highlight job opportunities, and share profiles of Black digital marketers that are crushing it.If you're hoping to be part of a movement to make our industry better, this is the podcast to catch.The highlights: [2:05] About B-DigitalUK. [7:29] Common challenges faced by Black people in the digital marketing industry. [15:02] Recommendations for Black marketers who want to get into leadership positions. [21:00] Advice for executives who want to build more diverse companies. [25:14] The "right now" cause is a lifelong cause. The insights:About B-DigitalUKRejoice introduces B-DigitalUK by telling us the idea was born at a Women in Tech SEO conference."We do love that there's a platform for women in SEO in general, but when we're there, we're noticing, as a lot of Black people do, that we were the only Black people in the room."This led them to start thinking about a forum to promote Black people, a place where Black industry leaders could talk about marketing and advertising. "We didn't want to make it exclusive to just SEO. We wanted to branch out to many channels. We wanted a space for other Black people to be educated, inspired, and to showcase other Black talent. It sort of morphed into this amazing thing that is now part of this diversity and inclusion conversation."Wilhemina agrees. "We had no idea where it was going to reach. All our platforms have been growing. Every time we've been presented with a new place we're like: yes. Let us present this message. Let us show what we're trying to do. Let us let people know we want to create this space for Black people."She wants Black listeners to be aware this space has tools to help foster growth."People like you exist. They are there." Wilhemina said when she started in digital Rejoice was the only Black marketers she knew. "I want people who are starting, just like me, to have confidence for that new job." Common Challenges Faced by Black People in the Digital Marketing IndustryRejoice says the main challenge for her was figuring out how much of her authentic self to bring into the corporate environment."Do I be me? Or to be accepted do I have to limit myself for the fear of not being marked as aggressive? Around my friends, I'm this loud person, this over-the-top person. Of course, you have to be professional, but I didn't know how to warm up to colleagues because I was afraid they'd tag me as having too much sass in my voice."She mentions other challenges that Black people face when it comes to managing perceptions."What hairstyle are you going to go in? Do I go in with braids? Do I go with my natural hair? Do I go with a wig? I had to learn to say: forget all that. I just have to be me. I don't know who else to be. If that's an issue then this place isn't right for me."Rejoice does stress that it's never been an issue at Neo. Wilhemina agrees. "Even before you get into situations, always beforehand it's a question of: what am I going to expect? A Black person will never bring 100% of themselves to the office. Before you encounter that it's the fear of encountering that. How can I stop it from happening? It quote-unquote cripples us in our spaces."She says many Black people do not want to give energy to microaggressions."My advice would be, you have to understand that for yourself. You have to come to that realization that if being who you truly are is something you want, you really have to show it in this company without the fear of being labeled or experiencing microaggressions. You have to look at the company structure. You have to ask if they're truly diverse, not just in a few teams having one Black person, but in leadership down."She says the English have probation periods for new employees and really urges employees to take advantage of it. "The probation period is not only for companies to see whether you're a fit for the role. It's if they're going to be a good fit for you. If you're experiencing things in a few months, there's something going on. Maybe consider looking for another company. But if you're the kind of person who doesn't care about all those things, is just happy to face it, you can absolutely stay and tough it out." She points out that not every Black person wants to be an activist in their spaces."Some just want to get in and do their jobs." Recommendations for Black Marketers Who Want to Get into Leadership PositionsRejoice says if you want to enter a leadership position you really have to work hard at positioning yourself."Use people within the company that you're working with. Look at people who are where you want to be. What are they doing at that level? Don't be afraid to ask for similar work. Ask: can I shadow you? Can I do this? Can I do that? A good company will absolutely encourage you to get those extra skills, to get those qualifications, to increase yourself."Rejoice says if a company is hindering you in doing that then you shouldn't hesitate to find a new company."If it's a position you want and you want to be in that position, make your voice heard. It's not being handed to us. Know that you've got the ability. I want to be in this position, I know I've done the work, I'm on that path, and if I don't have that ability what training can I get? What support can I get? Who can mentor me?"Advice for Executives Who Want to Build More Diverse CompaniesRejoice also encourages companies to dig a little deeper."See you're hiring the same people all the time. Why? Once you challenge the why you can find practical solutions. If you like diversity why is it you're only liking white people for leadership? Let's look elsewhere." She suggests that companies should have a growth plan for people. "Train them up, especially if they show an interest. That's a bonus. Definitely, voices need to be heard and they need to be listened to." Rejoice says she feels like a lot of organizations continue to operate in their comfort zone. "No change comes from comfort." She also challenges the SEO industry to stop making excuses for not giving POCs a seat at the table. "You can't tell me as an organization you're finding it difficult to find these people. We're not here for excuses, we're here for solutions. There is Black talent." What's your right now cause?Both Rejoice and Wilhemina say that Black Lives Matter isn't a right now cause for them. It's their lifelong cause."Being Black is always my identity," says Rejoice. "The pandemic, the protests that are happening really heightened everything. It was such a unified movement. Black people in a lot of countries were standing together, saying enough is enough, saying how we're facing the same issues manifesting in different places. In the US, the UK, other parts of the world."Wilhemina agrees. "I'm seen as Black before I'm seen as anything else. As long as we're striving to be recognized as people." Wilhemina encourages our listeners to donate to Black Lives Matter UK. Rejoice also says that women's rights are very important to her as well. "For me, being a woman is another barrier to getting where I need to get to. Being Black and being a woman play so much in my identity." Connect with Rejoice Ojiaku and Wilhemina GilbertsonRejoice Ojiaku: LinkedIn Twitter Wilhemina Gilbertson: LinkedIn Twitter B-Digital UK Main Site Instagram Facebook Twitter LinkedIn #BLM in Digital Marketing Clubhouse

Impression has run Digital PR campaigns and conducted thought leadership services for some of the UK's biggest companies and organizations, including Sass & Belle, Harvey Water Softeners, and Clarins.They're a full-service marketing agency that is especially known for its digital PR services. They've also won the 2020 UK Agency Awards PPC Agency of the Year Award, the 2020 Best Large PPC Agency in Europe award from the European Search Awards, and the 2020 UK Biddable Media Award. That's not even everything they've won.Now let's talk about Saffron herself. She's a Digital PR Executive, which means she does plenty of thought leadership and link-building campaigns for all of these clients, all of which contribute directly to her agency's success.She also wrote her dissertation on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and is heavily involved in the program at Impression.Want to get some insights into how to launch some stellar thought leadership PR campaigns for your clients while getting some ideas on how to bring the spirit of CSR to your agency? Be sure to catch today's podcast.The highlights: [1:48] The thought leadership service. [3:19] Communicating the value of thought leadership campaigns. [5:28] Pitching topics that work. [6:57] An example of a successful campaign. [8:17] Upcoming opportunities in thought leadership. [9:37] Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) [15:46] Tips for launching a CSR initiative at your own workplace. [17:49] Promoting diversity in the industry. [22:20] Saffron's cause. The insights:The Essence of the Thought Leadership Service"We focus on a layered approach to digital PR," says Saffron. "We love doing really big, creative campaigns, and data-led campaigns. But we also really understand the value of displaying our clients as thought leaders within their own industry."This requires a thoughtful process and communication with the clients themselves."What we often do is discuss what kinds of topics our clients would be interested in talking about. Anything that's really relevant to the current news agenda. Then we'll reach out to publications and sectors of interest to them, offering thought leadership articles from our clients." Communicating the Value of Thought Leadership CampaignsSaffron goes back to her SEO roots to help clients understand the value of the campaigns that she's crafting for them. "When we take on a client, we really conduct a thorough audit to understand what the client needs. Is it a really high quantity of quality links? Do we just want to focus on quality? What keywords are we targeting? Where are we trying to move the needle? What other KPIs are we looking at? Are we measuring traffic? That's how we will come up with a strategy for our clients. They're really bespoke to what their objectives are and what they're looking to achieve with us."That investigation helps the clients understand the value of the campaigns, their relevance to their industry, and to really demonstrate that they are a spokesperson and a person of authority.Pitching Topics that WorkHot takes sometimes have a negative connotation, but when it comes to earning press, Saffron says a client’s hot take on a relevant topic is essential to thought leadership success."It's so competitive. Journalists really aren't going to fall for us repackaging the same thing they've seen before a million times. Chances are, there's also going to be other PRs who are going up with similar thought leadership angles for their clients. That's why we're really making sure every pitch that we're putting out there is tied into what's happening right now."She says that while they can lean on things that have worked well in the past, everything has to be really relevant. "Especially in the pandemic. It all has to have that edge to it."One topic she anticipates being hot?"This ongoing narrative we've had for a while: I'm going back to the work, I'm going back to the office." It's been an ongoing narrative, of course, because everyone thinks they're going back and then don't, but eventually, that should change."I'm expecting to see more of it over the next few months as employees grow more comfortable going back to the office. We're seeing the hospitality industry in the UK start to open up. We've got gyms and beer gardens opening up on the 12th of April. I think there will be many opportunities for hospitality clients to really explore that narrative."An Example of a Successful CampaignThese campaigns can even work for local clients. When asked about a successful recent campaign, Saffron brought up a national law firm she works with, as an example."One reactive campaign I did recently, for one of my law clients, was to take furlough data and look how this has changed for each industry. We looked at the rise we've seen in firms in each sector, furloughing their workers. The client then applies their expertise on this subject as an employment lawyer. We take this data, and we come up with something a little different."Corporate Social Responsibility (An Overview)Corporate Social Responsibility is the idea that corporations have the power and the ability to affect real social change, and the obligation to do so. In fact, there are real business reasons to embrace the practice."We engage in CSR from two different angles. We look at the charity side, donating and fundraising, and we do some pro bono work as well. So we might partner with a charity and give them some SEO training or digital PR, or put together a campaign for them. The other side of this is really giving back to our community."Impression does much of this by focusing on education and schools within Nottingham, where they're based."It's something that's really important to both of our directors. They're so keen for us to make sure that we're giving back. We're really keen to make sure we're retaining talent in Nottingham and helping our talent thrive." She says the leadership team at Impression really does a good job of supporting CSR initiatives when she comes up with them. "I have some ideas, I put them forward, and then we'll have a call where we talk about how we can feasibly make this happen. What's the timeline going to be? What are the objectives? How are we going to make sure we really see it through to the end?"Every month the company allocates time to these initiatives, so using the time is never a problem.Tips for Launching a CSR Initiative at Your WorkplaceIf you want to start a CSR initiative at your workplace, Saffron suggests first identifying the area you want to focus on. "Sometimes we can try and spread ourselves too thin. What that ends up meaning is we don't actually make any physical change, and we don't end up getting anywhere with our ideas because there's just too much there."She also recommends that you look at what other agencies are doing."Is there a charity you want to partner with? Is there a school you can get involved with? What resources are you feasibly going to be able to invest in this? My advice would also be to really set out a roadmap and to put together a plan, so that when you are presenting it to your directors, or to your managers, that you have something concrete so they can see what your plans are, and where they're going to end up." Promoting Diversity in the IndustrySaffron says that achieving better diversity and inclusion within the digital marketing industry are issues that are really close to her heart. "It's something which a lot of people are aware is an issue, and I think that what often happens is that we have this spike in interest and enthusiasm, and a lot of [initial] positive change. Then it trickles off."She says it's still a problem."I really don't want this for the next generation."She recently put together a blog post about International Women's Day to express some of this passion. It listed some concrete steps that Impression is taking to improve equality such as acknowledging the gender pay gap, committing to equal pay for equal roles, using transparent salary brandings and progressions, recruiting better, and more."We're not saying we're there yet. We're not saying we don't have work to do. But what I hope is that by outlining what we've done thus far, we can share this with other agencies in the hope that they might adopt some of these methods. Maybe people will give us other recommendations from what they've seen on our website. It's really about working together to make positive change." She says that Impression has a layered strategy she would personally recommend to any business.What's your right now cause?Right now, Saffron is focused on training the next generation of digital marketers. "Really making sure that every single agency within digital marketing, every single business, is focusing on inspiring that next generation and really ensuring that the next candidate pool, the next new students that come through are diverse and that everyone understands there's a role waiting for them."   Connect with Saffron Shergill Want to chat with Saffron about thought leadership, PR, or starting your own CSR initiative? Find her online here: LinkedIn Twitter Impression The International Women's Day post

Don't call Duane Brown if you're not willing to try some new marketing or advertising strategies. He won't be able to help you (well, he can still help you).Duane is the Founder and Head of Strategy at Take Some Risk, a marketing strategy and advertising agency. The basic mission of the agency is named right there on the tin. Then again, those risks do pay off: they work for some 8 figure eCommerce, DTC, and SaaS brands to create and scale profitable growth.Today on the Agency Ahead Podcast, Duane shares the kinds of strategic thinking that people normally pay big bucks to receive from him. If you touch any of these business types, you won't want to miss this.The highlights: [1:08] About Take Some Risk [4:32] 2020's impact on DTC. [8:12] Best practices for maintaining client relationships. [12:35] Approaching strategy with a new client. [14:31] Having hard conversations with clients. [17:40] The unique challenges faced by DTC businesses. [21:06] Experimenting with new channels.  [26:39] Duane's cause. The insights: About Take Some RiskDuane says brands generally come to Take Some Risk for one of two reasons:"Either, a) they struggle to crack a channel, whether it's Google, Snapchat, Facebook, or whatever it is. Or b), they've cracked the channel but they struggle to scale as they spend more money on advertising and trying to maintain their KPI, which might be CPA or maybe return on ad spend."They work with all sorts of brands: clothes, toys, high-tech water bottles, mountain bikes – you name it.Duane says he chose the name because it reflected his own life journey."I moved to Australia, not knowing anyone, and got a job. I moved to the UK, didn't know anyone, got a job, lived there for two years. I've smorgasboarded all through Asia. To get to each stage of my career and life I've taken some gambles. There are different degrees of risk. There are big risks and small risks, and I try to take calculated risks where the payoff is big but I can afford to lose whatever the loss would be. I wanted to attract clients willing to take multiple risks to grow."Duane gives an example."I was talking to a prospect yesterday. They made about 500K last year. I told them, well, to get to a million, or two, or three, you're going to fundamentally have to be a different business. Your cost of goods is going to have to be different, you're going to have to pull the levers to grow from half a million to a million to two million, you're just going to need to do more of everything. More product, more ads, more marketing. We try to get clients who will get out of their own way, to be honest. You've hired a person to do something? Let them do what you've hired them to do so you can focus on other areas of your business." 2020's Impact on DTCDuane says he spent 2020 working harder than he'd ever worked."I didn't want our clients to go out of business. If that meant I had to work 7 days a week and be available 24/7, then that's what I'm going to do."All of Duane's clients survived.He says this wasn't all altruism."I can't necessarily afford to lose a client. If you don't survive, I lose a client." Best Practices for Maintaining Client RelationshipsDuane stresses that it's very important to try to get to know clients on a personal level."Talking to clients like the human beings we are, and that they are, figuring out what they want, and trying to balance that with what we can give them."For example, Take Some Risk doesn't do weekly meetings anymore."Often we got knee-jerk reactions of, oh, things were bad last week, let's change everything. Well, you're going to have a bad week at some point in the year!"Instead, they try to do monthly or biweekly meetings. "Some clients will say they want more, some want less. We'll ebb-and-flow it as much as we can. We always tell the team, even myself: if you think about emailing a client or talking to a client you should probably just do it. It's better to overcommunicate than under-communicate."Clients, Duane says, will tell you if you're emailing them too much, or telling them too many things."Few ever tell you not to email them about stuff, because they want to know what's going on. Most agencies don't email enough or call enough or talk to their clients enough." Duane even, prior to COVID, flown out to visit with clients in person. "I flew to Toronto just to spend a day with a client at a crafts show. Just to talk to people and find out why they bought the product. It was mostly women and I'm a gay guy, so I didn't know. I talked to everyone from people who were 60 or 70 to women in their 20s and 30s. I learned what they liked about the products and why they used them. They'll tell you things you don't know. That informs your ad copy and your landing page copy and the keywords we're going to bid for on Google and stuff like that." Approaching Strategy with a New ClientDuane says the main thing that they're trying to figure out is who their clients are as a business, and what they want to achieve."Often with clients they want to achieve some kind of revenue goal. We figure out how to get there."As an example?"We had a client who used to do what you'd call lots of Limited Edition products. They grew a lot last year. They got to a low 7 figures a year from six figures the year before, but we're talking to them and we're saying if you want to maintain your 2, 3, 4 million dollars a year, and grow next year, you're going to fundamentally have to change how you think about your business. In this case, you can't only do Limited Edition products. You have to have some bread and butter products that are there 365, 7 days a week that someone can come buy because you need that consistent revenue to come in. You can't wait for a product to get made, ship to you, and launch and then wait for the next one. That's not how a business grows."In other words, what Duane does isn't only about marketing. Sometimes it's zeroing in on serious issues within the business itself. Having Hard Conversations with ClientsThe way that Duane works means sometimes he has to tell clients things they don't want to hear. It's why he works so hard to grow these long-term personal relationships.He speaks of one client who he'd worked with since 2018 who started panicking during 2020. They started considering sales, promos, and discounts.But Duane knew they historically hated those, so he said, "Can we not?" He points out they have enough respect for each other to make recommendations.For most clients though? "I try to understand their business really well. What sells. What doesn't sell. Why they make a certain product. I bring it down to numbers. We did these things. They had that outcome. We should try this thing and see what happens." He does admit some clients are more apprehensive about trying things than others."One told me he was afraid of change. Well, you hired me for change. If you want to make money this year, you're going to have to make this change. I'm not going to ask you to make all 12 of the changes. Make one of these changes for this call next month. What you're literally doing is the opposite of what I recommended. It just means you're paying me more money for the next six months because you're not going to get where you want to go." The Unique Challenges Faced by DTC BusinessesDuane said just about every DTC client had the same problem last year. "Inventory. Getting enough inventory. Having enough inventory in stock." It was harder because COVID kept shutting down manufactories and warehouses. He also says both big brands and small brands don't always have their ducks in a row. "Maybe they've never done much email marketing in the past, or they haven't updated it in four years, or they've never done SMS messaging or other things like that. It's like all the stress is on you and trying to figure out how to keep your business alive because you see people all dropping all around you and losing jobs. But then also trying to figure out which of these five things do I implement? Do I spend money on it? Is it going to pay off? I only have so much cash and I can't afford to make the wrong call."He says last year was mostly about making those recommendations to figure all of that out. Sometimes this required businesses to do some serious pivots.Duane cited General Assembly Pizza in Toronto as an example: a sit-down pizza restaurant that now sells and ships frozen pizzas."They're trying to disrupt the frozen food business!" Experimenting with New ChannelsTake Some Risk is one of the only agencies out there that will help clients advertise on Snapchat, TikTok, or other newer social media sites.Is it worth it?Here's how Duane explains it."Think about when Facebook bought Instagram in April 2012. They only had half a million users. People are always asking: why would I be on Snapchat or TikTok? They're only 800 million or 300 million or whatever the numbers are."Duane points out that Facebook didn't always have 4 billion people."It was 100,000. 200,000. They've grown literally over the last 16 years or so to where they are today. So if you won't advertise on Snapchat or TikTok today you wouldn't have advertised on Facebook 10 years ago."He also points out that a lot of people have maxed out their effective ad budget on larger channels. "If you've maxed out Google, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and Quora Ads are all valuable platforms to at least try and see if you can deliver sales for your business or your clients. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. Facebook has only gotten worse in the past 8 months, not better. If you only put money in Facebook you're shooting yourself in the foot in the long run."He says some of his clients have really seen a lot of success on these alternative channels. "We found it good for remarketing, retargeting, and prospecting." He says Snapchat works best for clients with a higher average order value. What's your right now cause? Duane feels like the nation is starting to forget what happened with George Flloyd last summer. "If your organization said it was going to change? You're on notice. Put pen to paper and make that happen."Duane has other suggestions as well."Reach out to your POC friends and see how they're doing emotionally. Do it whether they run a business or not."He also asks our listeners to ask themselves if they did the things they said they'd do to support racial justice last year. If that's not the case, he urges each listener to change that as soon as possible. At the very least? "Open your wallet and support a Black business."For that matter?"Small businesses are probably not going to survive if we continue to just shop at Costco and Amazon. Yes, I get they have better ship times, but a world that's just Amazon and Costco is not a world I want to live in." Learn More About Duane Brown Duane says he spends a whole lot of time on the PPC subreddit, so chat with him there or reach out to him via email or Twitter.  Take Some Risk Twitter LinkedIn

Abby Reimer is a Senior SEO Analyst and Strategist at Uproer. You may remember her agency from our recent episode with her colleague, Senior Search Strategist, Jess Girardi.Abby's very passionate about bringing humanity back to SEO and about creating content that doesn't mimic the same old, same old stuff out there. Tune in today if you're ready to do something fresh. The highlights: [1:27] Moving past boilerplate content. [3:37] Balancing humanity with performance. [5:52] Using keyword research the human way. [8:37] Addressing attribution issues with UGC. [11:17] Tying content strategy to business goals. [14:14] Abby's dream clients. [20:52] Abby's go-to resources. [24:05] Balancing risk and reward. [25:53] Abby's causes. The insights:Moving Past Boiler Plate ContentWe've all seen it. The same content. Over and over again."Ten Best Marketing Tips! Ten Simple Marketing Tips!"Abby encourages SEOs and content managers to think about their audience. "More often than not, our audience are the last people we think about when creating this content. I just did a Twitter poll. It finished yesterday. Had 50 responses. Asked: when you're creating a new piece of content, where do you start researching the material?" As you can see from the results, a lot of people go straight to online resources first."That's very normal. It makes sense. You're doing keyword research. You're looking at the SERPs to see what's ranking. But that first step is where we lose the humanity aspect. We see, oh, well, everyone's doing ten tips. Maybe I'll just mimic those and add two more."So she recommends reaching out to her audience to learn about their experiences, their tips, what they think about the topic. Balancing Humanity With PerformanceHuman content doesn't always rank as well as we might like. Abby says that Uproer's award-winning campaign for CaringBridge was born out of this very pain point."Their pain point was lack of budget, time, and resources, but they still needed to create a lot of new blog content, especially content that would rank on search and keep working for them as opposed to content that just performed on social and email."They also wanted to keep their content in line with CaringBridge's human approach as a health journal nonprofit."Our idea: hey, they have 300,000 Facebook followers. So we had these ideas that we did keyword research on. New people were looking in search results. We thought: who better to kind of be the experts on these topics than CaringBridge's own audience?"This led to meatier, more useful content."What to say to a friend who has just been diagnosed with cancer. How to support a friend in the hospital. What to do when there's a health crisis. Things like that. Instead of just looking at what was already ranking, we realized we could create more unique content by featuring the CaringBridge audience. We get dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments on these prompts that we send out on Facebook. We use the direct quotes and ideas in the article. We were able to really quickly scale content creation, write more than two dozen posts a year, and we've seen some really fantastic results."Of course, it doesn't always feel comfortable, doing things this way."It does feel sort of risky to break from the mold. When you're looking at the Top 10 results you're basically seeing: this is what Google is saying they like. This is what Google is saying will rank. That's where it's a risk of blending more of that traditional keyword research, making sure you've got the right terms."You can't go wrong by aligning your content creation strategy with what Google wants, though."Google wants relevant content. We've seen our work surpass some things that maybe have a way higher domain authority. Their content isn't as relevant. People aren't looking for the same 5 tips in some cases. They're looking for: so-and-so who understands their experience, sharing what they're going through. I know it's not a direct ranking factor, but I think the engagement we get from that (hundreds of comments on these posts of people sharing their story as well) gives them more traction. They resonate with more people and that's how we've seen the performance." Abby admits, though, that every now and then?She still uses a listicle or two! Using Keyword Research the Human WaySo how much preparation went into these campaigns? How can others duplicate Uproer's success in this area?"First, I want to address the keyword research portion," Abby says. "It is still very much based on the tools."Abby urges listeners not to skip keyword research."It's a good step. You still need to get validation that these things are being searched for. It doesn't need to be traditional keyword research tools. I think if the pandemic has taught us anything it's that a lot of things people are looking up haven't caught up in the tools because they're new queries. That's where we use tools like Google Trends, Google's New Question Hub, or Exploding Topics by Backlinko." Some "exploding topics" in marketing. "These things are a great place to get an idea of: okay. I have validation that these topics people are looking for. I think that's the best place to start for any client is getting that validation. From there? There's a lot of different ways you can source this content. A common question is, okay, I don't have 1000+ followers on social. What then?"Turns out there are still a lot of different ways to source the content."One workaround I found was a deep dive into forums. This is something I don't think a ton of people are doing. If you just Google your target keyword plus Reddit, Quora, whatever the forum is? You can source such amazing ideas."Abby did this for CaringBridge very recently."With a harder topic. A child that's very ill. What tips do parents have? Reddit had hundreds of comments. Ideas you don't even think of. Contact Ronald McDonald House. Bring an extension cord to the hospital. It's not in the top ten listicles. People want to feel validated. They want the nitty-gritty stuff." Addressing Attribution Issues with UGCAttribution issues can arise when tapping into user-generated content, but Abby has solutions."On social we make it pretty clear that we're using people's comments for the articles. What we do is we include people's first name and end initial for some anonymity. People commenting know their comment may be in a post. And we've gotten a lot of good feedback. We've never had an issue with that. The consent is there."When sourcing from forums you need a slightly different strategy."You can't pull a quote directly from Reddit and put it in there. People's user names are like Skull47 and I'm not trying to put that in an article. But people are knowingly putting these opinions out in the open. They're public. It's a public forum. So when someone says something like: bring an extension cord, here's my story? I'm going to take that idea and say: hey, people who have gone through this highly suggest bringing an extension cord. I personally don't think that goes into the mode of taking people's content or stealing ideas. They're putting that out there to help people. We're just scaling that idea out there to help more people." Tying Content Strategy to Business GoalsKeyword volume isn't a big part of Abby's strategy."I think we're past that. It's really about topics. Creating hubs and spokes. We have a client who does eCommerce for raw dog food. There are a lot of questions around that. So instead of just doing all the questions at once, our rapid content creation is basically around topics. What vegetables dogs can eat is a big one that we're doing. There's volume there, but not the highest volume opportunities."Instead, they look at where they want to capture people, what the goal is, and then the different topics they can create content around. "We try not to focus only on just one bucket. We're looking at a lot of people to capture different areas of the funnel." Abby also talks about the way Spotify uses its own user data to create content."They didn't have to spend all this time doing user research. It's just literally: they've got the data there, and now they're playing with it. Spotify uses more numbers, but I think that's something that can be replicated, whether it's your user's data, or your user's ideas, comments, hopes, or dreams." Career Advice for New SEOs or SEOs With Imposter Syndrome"The way I got started in SEO was being open-minded and having curiosity. It was my first job out of school. The question came up: I didn't promote this post. Why is it driving so much traffic? How does something get traffic from search engines?" She Googled the question and went down the rabbit hole."So I always start by saying: keep an open mind. Be curious. Chase things that interest you. I also tell students the biggest thing I hear is school gave them a very broad sense of marketing, but they don't really know what area they want to go into. I suggest doing some LinkedIn stalking. I researched so many people, looking at their job descriptions. If the job description sounds like: what, you get paid to do that? That's someone's job? That sounds like fun! Make a note of that. Look at what those job titles are. Look at the kind of companies they work for. You start to get this profile of what you want to do. I found content and discovered that SEO was for me." She also points out that this is one of the most supportive industries you can work in."Everyone is willing to help. Everyone is kind and lifts each other up and evangelizes each other. Of course, no industry is perfect, but as a whole? Everyone wants to see each other succeed. You just have to reach out and grab those opportunities, cause they're there." She says when she first got into the industry she was afraid that other people were better than her because they had certain job titles or more experience. "But we're all equals. We're all people who sometimes forget to floss at night and don't drink enough water. When you think about things like that, everyone becomes accessible. I've just been trying to approach SEO that way, explore as many avenues as I can. Don't be afraid to talk to anyone." She also points out that nobody really knows everything."[SEO] changes. So often. Every three months there's a new update. Google releases a new hint. Or whatever. So I feel like we're all kind of on the same learning pace. We're all learning together." Abby's Go-To ResourcesAbby had shout-outs for quite a few people and resources on this episode. Taylor Berg, SEO Lead at TalkSpace Areej AbuAli of Women in Tech SEO The Shine Speaker Boot Camp Aleyda Solis' LearningSEO.io SEO for Lunch Uproer's own Searchlite Newsletter Search Engine Land Check them out! What's your right now cause?Abby's cause is helping students and young professionals navigate the post-Covid job landscape. "To figure out how to get a job in this very strange time. They can't go to agency tours or happy hours, things they could have used to breakthrough. I'm doing whatever I can to connect with them and give them tips."She gives a shoutout to the Boundaryless Agency Simulation program. "Dozens of students signed up, got experience. I know at least six or seven people who got jobs as a result, including someone we hired at Uproer."She's very passionate about participating and being a mentor. "How to use LinkedIn to make human connections. I'm spreading the word, speaking with my alma mater, talking with people within my old organization, PRSSA. I think there's a lot of things professionals can do to interact with students and help them along the way. I think it's about speaking with them, letting them know what you're doing, giving them the tips you wish you had known five, ten, fifteen years ago."  Connect with Abby ReimerYou heard it here first, Abby will totally answer if you ask her for help! Here's where to find her.  Twitter LinkedIn Uproer

SEO and content were always intertwined, but as algorithms have continued to become more sophisticated and more in line with Google's goals, they've almost all but merged. That's created a lot of opportunities for freelance content writers, once treated almost like the "red-headed step-children" of the digital marketing industry.The career is full of so many opportunities that many former journalists are flocking to our industry.One such journalist is Surena Chande, who has taken her journalism expertise and applied it to her work in the digital marketing field. She's got tons of insights on the differences between the careers, on building a content writing career, and on making connections within the industry. If you're a content creator who wants some insights into how to uplevel your career or are thinking about making the shift, this is the episode for you.The highlights: [1:19] Surena's backstory. [4:40] How journalism has changed over the years. [8:18] Moving to digital PR. [10:46] Advice for writers who are tackling new topics. [12:04] Choosing new clients. [13:27] Dealing with impostor syndrome.  [19:44] Surena's causes. The insights:Surena's BackstorySurena decided to be a journalist at 14, after a positive experience with a 2-week internship at Ahlan Live, Dubai's premier lifestyle publication.  "From Day 1, they had me sitting down and writing stories. I remember the first story I wrote was about Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton. I think they had some feud. I had no idea what I was doing."The editor at that publication gave her a reference letter for her school, noting that she'd make an excellent journalist or writer in the future. She grabbed onto that direction with both hands. From there she went on to work for a variety of incredible publications, including Cosmopolitan Middle East, BBC Good Food Middle East, and OK Magazine. She did go to University for journalism but found her hands-on experience at these publications taught her just as much as any classroom time ever did. How Journalism Has Changed Over the YearsIt is of course not news that journalism has undergone seismic shifts over the years."It was quite heartbreaking, to be honest. Whilst I was in journalism I had a few dream publications I wanted to write for. I remember saying when I was about 22 or 23 that I wanted to be the editor of Glamour magazine one day. By the time I got to 27, Glamour had shut down. They have a biannual issue now and it's a beauty issue. All the features and stuff I love is all online now."She watched magazine after magazine shut down or contract."A news desk that once had 15 people now had four. That obviously meant the pressure was immense. When I was working for OK Magazine we had to write a minimum of 8 stories a day. And that was in a 7-hour shift."And the writing wasn't all there was to the job."It included sourcing the images, whether that's from Instagram or wherever, writing the social media copy, Tweeting all that out, and making sure it got views. We had a minimum view target. Mine was 1.2 million, initially, and for someone who's new to it, that's quite daunting. There were exclusives and stuff you had to get as well. Those really juicy celeb stories. You've got these numbers hanging over your head."The environment was tough, too."The thing in journalism I've encountered a fair bit is you aren't always working with lovely people who have patience. Everyone's stressed out. There are all these deadlines, all this pressure, and you don't get treated the best, really. And it was really wearing me down. My confidence was massively knocked multiple times. It's not rare to be told if you write one bad story, you're a shit writer." The hours were tough as well."When I was working on magazines I would often be finishing at midnight, 1 AM. I didn't mind, I was young and I loved the craft and seeing your name in print, but it really did start wearing me down, along with pressure from editors and the way you're spoken to. From my online news shift, I was working one week of earlies from 7 AM to 3 PM, and the next week I was on lates from 3 PM to 11 PM. Sometimes it was weekends. You just couldn't have a routine. That was getting really tough as well."Moving to Digital PRSurena didn't move into freelance content writing right away. She moved into digital PR first."I did that for 3 years. I had a great time. [But] once I was in it and I'd been doing it for a while, there was always this niggling voice in the back of my head. I miss writing. I really want to go back to writing, should I go back to journalism?" Surena stresses that PR, too, is a totally different type of creative space."I took a lot of great things out of it, but one of the best things I took was my confidence was built up again. I was lucky enough to work at really supportive agencies. I worked for Verve Search in the UK and they were just so supportive. I was slowly starting to believe, okay, you know, you're a writer, you're a smart cookie, you can do all this. It really built me back up again, which is amazing."She just couldn't shake the feeling that she wanted to return to writing."They tried accommodating me. You can write content for the campaigns and stuff. It wasn't enough. I wasn't loving what I was doing every day." Advice for Writers Tackling New Topics"In journalism, I worked on a range of sectors in all the publications I worked on. So, while I started with lifestyle content, fashion, beauty, I then was asked to take on the interior section. And then on the other magazine I worked on I was asked to write about luxury fashion and luxury lifestyle. Then I worked on BBC Good Food. That's food lifestyle content. From there I ended up on a hospitality business publication. A B2B publication. So I had to pick up that sector, learn it completely, and adapt."Surena points out you're not just gathering information about an industry here. You're learning to adapt your tone of voice from publication to publication."You're going to have to get into another mindset. Put that hat on where you're talking about business, and you're writing about finance. One week I'm writing about finance in my current life, now, the next week I'm writing about how to make your home look nice. The variety keeps things fresh but do your research. Immerse yourself in the content as much as possible."Surena says there are specific things to look for when you get a new client."Go and read through all of their content as much as you can. Obviously don't sit there and read every blog post. Read the different sections. Try and understand: are they informal? Are they jokey to the point where they use exclamation marks? Do they say things like 'friend,' or 'pal?' Try and understand and grasp the tone of voice. Obviously, ask the client for that. Just try and do as much research as possible. You've got to really use your own initiative and be ready to adapt. If you want to go into content writing you have to have the ability to have more than one voice you can write in." Choosing New ClientsTry to align your client base with your own interests."I've learned this the hard way. I have to write about topics I'm passionate about, things I care about. As soon as I'm not interested in the topic, an article that can take a day will end up taking several days and I will drag it out. I'll be miserable the whole time I'm writing it. I'm lucky enough to have the luxury that people are coming to me. I'm not having to really freak out about where my next client is going to come from."Sometimes, freelance content writers have to learn to say no."If I don't want to write about a topic, I'm going to turn it down. Money does need to come in, but at the end of the day, you're going to drive yourself into a miserable hole where you're potentially not even completing projects because you're so fed up. Definitely think about what you're passionate about. Writing requires passion, basically." Dealing with Impostor SyndromeThis is probably not news to anyone who is a writer, but most of us deal with impostor syndrome. Surena is no exception."Every time something good happens to me I literally will run downstairs to my Mom or my brother. You won't believe it, but these people said they really wanted to work with me! I've been writing since 2012, and it surprises me every time."She said she wasn't even intentional about her social presence, just live-tweeting webinars she was interested in or saying whatever came on her mind. "Somehow that's ended up with some really lovely people following me. They put me forward for things like this podcast. They're coming to me with: we'd love to work with you, do you have availability?" Surena doesn't try to hide her impostor syndrome."I remember after I did my first talk in 2019. I was absolutely terrified. I did the talk, I felt horrific after. Some people were like: oh, it's amazing you did this talk, oh, it looks so great. I was nearly in tears afterward, I was so stressed. I share these things. Oh, this is my first talk, please be nice, here you go, I hope it helps."Here's Surena at Cardiff SEO.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nAR-WkMkCY&feature=emb_logo She says that you have to realize that most people are genuine and kind. She also recommends forgetting about your audience on social media. "Try to think of it as talking to yourself, not, okay there are 3,000 people who are going to see this. That's going to freak you right out. I know it's easier said than done." Fortunately, this is a very supportive industry, especially on social media!"There are really lovely people out there. Just carry on being you. The people who aren't nice, that's fine. You're not everyone's cup of tea, the same way you don't like everyone you scroll past on your timeline. So, yeah."What's your right now cause?Surena wants to call people's attention to Mind Charity. Mind is a mental health charity that is dedicated to helping everyone with mental health issues get the support they need.She especially wants to call attention to it due to the mental health crisis spurred on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Connect with Surena ChandeWant to learn more about Surena? Surena's all over the Internet! Here's how to find her.  Twitter LinkedIn Instagram

Jess Girardi is the Senior Search Strategist at Uproer, an SEM and SEO agency serving eCommerce, technology companies, and nonprofits. They've worked with organizations like When I Work, Branch Basics, and Stitch Fix. They've been able to achieve up to 200% increases in organic traffic for clients and won the 2020 Search Engine Land "Best Overall SEO Initiative - Small Business" award. Today Garrett picks Jess' brain on two topics: rapid content generation and non-profit SEO. If you're looking for a solid inroads into some good content strategy or want to know more about how to serve your local non-profits, this is the podcast to check out. The highlights: [1:14] Rapid content generation. [4:30] Crazy questions people are actually searching for. [6:29] Meet the Minnesota Brain Trust. [7:45] SEO challenges for nonprofits. [9:13] What's unique about working with nonprofit SEO? [10:04] How to volunteer with a local nonprofit. [11:10] Why it's important to clarify your brand mission. [13:29] Meet a nonprofit at the top of its SEO game. [14:39] Tapping into user-generated content. [16:11] Women in the SEO industry. [18:33] Jess' cause. Rapid Content GenerationJess first caught Garrett's eye by talking about "rapid content generation," or "wild card content," on Twitter, and so Garrett dove right in by asking her to explain that to our audience."It's all about using Google's Also Ask features, making sure we're collecting all the relevant long-tail keywords for top-of-funnel content generation." Jess says the ideal type of business for this strategy would be a B2C company that has no blog, or which has minimal top-of-funnel content.And the benefits of really narrowing in on the also-asked tools?"Essentially? It's more time doing, less time planning. It's a great way to expand your content calendar for months on end. You have a seemingly endless amount of content and a great way to recycle outlines that you're using, and a great way to get to the heart of what people really want to know." Jess does stress that this is a top-of-funnel strategy and doesn't work as well for conversion content. She also recommends evaluating the content strategy on a quarterly basis."Go back and check on what else is ranking." Crazy Questions That People Are SearchingGarrett asked if Jess has ever been surprised with the questions that come up when Jess is doing work for clients.The answer is, "All the time!"One of Jess' clients is a dog food client."Their concept around the wild card strategy is can dogs eat...or best things to feed my dogs. It's so interesting. Can dogs eat blueberries? I've...never thought about whether dogs can eat blueberries." Obviously, it can be easy to fall down rabbit holes this way. When do you stop?"It really depends on how deep you want to build your content strategy. I think that we generally spend six to seven hours grabbing all of these ideas and then putting them in a spreadsheet as presentable. At the end of the day, we just need to make it as quick and as efficient as possible." This strategy is built out by branching off different topics, like the spokes of a wheel."We're hoping for a cumulative effect." Meet the Minnesota Brain TrustThe Minnesota Brain Trust is a project that Jess recently started with John Smith, the Paid Search Analyst at Uproer. "We are helping agencies connect with nonprofits in the Twin Cities. The reasoning is that we're both heavily involved with nonprofit work. We both volunteer for different types, and we know how hard it is to get search professionals to volunteer. The result is that a lot of these nonprofits don't have good websites, a good search presence, or a good local presence. That's just because there's so much work to be done. Search professionals look at it and they're like: I don't know. Not for me. We're trying to mediate that to bring value to both parties."Most of these nonprofits don't have money to put into their web presence. And there are plenty of SEOs who want to help out, "but just can't spare 20 hours a week volunteering."SEO Challenges for NonprofitsOne challenge for nonprofits is that SEO is almost never on their radar. "They kind of think of it like icing on a cake. They know it exists, they think it's a thing that needs to be done, but it doesn't really have to be done."Jess has gotten adept at helping nonprofits understand they need SEO."The way that we try to pitch it is to highlight the advantages of increasing local presence. For a lot of these Minnesota-based nonprofits, it's all about getting local visibility. We also appeal to the sense of ease and demonstrate, yes, there is an industry out here that's super active and does want to help in some capacity." What's Unique About Working with Nonprofit SEOJess says working with nonprofits isn't quite like working with businesses, as one might expect."It's not focusing on a petite technical element type SEO like sitemaps, or even page speed. The focus is clearly articulating a message. Building a site that doesn't have cannibalization, that focuses around great content strategy, that really helps describe their authority through their events, through their content, all with a huge focus on local." How to Volunteer with a Local NonprofitDon't want to hook up with the Minnesota Brain Trust? Want to think a little more locally?"I would reach out to as many nonprofits as you are interested in. The key to helping nonprofits is to have a deep empathy for the mission they're trying to get across. There's no point in saying: Okay, I don't really care about climate justice (I do), but I'm going to volunteer for this climate thing. I feel like you really need to empathize and find one that resonates with you because that's where your motivation is going to come from."You can often just contact these organizations."Generally everyone is super happy to have volunteers to help." Why It's Important to Clarify Your Brand MissionMission-focused work is important in general, and getting brands to clarify their mission can make a huge impact on marketing strategies. It's something that Uproer works hard on."A brand's mission should be the foundation of all its goals, and how it establishes authority in an industry."She says it's okay to be a little cheesy, even!She points to Patagonia as a good example."They have a really deep mission, and it comes across all of their social, on their website, even offline. All their marketing activities."She says she likes working for Uproer because they, too, have really worked to clarify their brand mission."At Uproer, the biggest draw for me was transparency. The main mission is keeping things simple and transparent for our clients. It's something that affects all of our slideware, all of our meetings, even our meeting agendas. They are detailed but very clear."Many clients don't start out with a brand mission, and sometimes they really have to put in some work to help companies develop one."Smaller companies don't really have a brand mission thought out yet, so there's a bit more pulling. The big companies have very nebulous ideas about missions. The sweet spot is right in the middle, where they want to revolutionize women's health or fight for climate justice. There's a very specific goal that they're working towards, and most of the time it comes out in our first or second meeting where we're just chatting." Meet a Nonprofit at the Top of its SEO GameWhile Jess admits she's a bit biased because they're her clients, she gives a shout-out to CaringBridge.org for the work it's done with SEO, web development, and user-generated content. "My colleague Abby was the front-runner for this. She took ideas from Facebook, she took ideas from Twitter, everywhere they had a social presence...and built that into a content strategy. That is: focusing around their mission of providing better information for families and individuals going through medical issues and harder times in their lives."Tapping Into User-Generated ContentThis led Garrett and Jess to start talking a little bit more about user-generated content."I think UGC is the way of the SEO future," says Jess. "I think nonprofits utilizing UGC are really getting to the heart of the communities they're servicing. I always recommend it to nonprofits, and to smaller companies too." Jess recommends a couple of frameworks for UGC."I suggest starting on social and then moving to the comments section. Once your blog is big enough, ask people for comments. You don't ask? You don't receive. I've always found that to be true, especially with blogs, so making sure you're asking people: hey, what do you think of this content? Can it be better? Another way you can move is through surveys and online question forms. It's a great way to bring in a UX element as well."Women in the SEO IndustryGarrett asked Jess to name some of her inspirations. She named Areej AbuAli of Women in Tech Seo, and Lily Ray.So Garrett asked her: What do you want to see happen over the next few years in terms of the development of our industry and the role women take on in our space? Here's how she answered."I'm going to take Minnesota as a microcosm because I know the most about it. I don't know any women who are leading their SEO teams. I want to see a huge shift in that, and I think the best way to do that is to put women on programs like this, to elevate their voices, and to make sure they're being accounted for. And being an ally, standing up for what is equitable and what is fair." What's your right now cause?Jess would like to call attention to Reclaim the Block, a Minnesota-specific organization that is looking to move funds away from the police department in the area after George Flloyd's murder in the summer of 2020. Want to learn more about Jess Girardi?  Uproer.com Minnesota Brain Trust Twitter LinkedIn