Episodes

Mary Davies with Jason Barnard at SMX West Mary Davies talks to Jason Barnard about user experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS3gOC-Q2kI UX is all around us and it's part of everything we do from walking up the stairs to opening a car door.Figure out what makes your life hard and don't reproduce them for your clients. Mary has a notebook and writes down everything that gets in the way of a good User Experience for here, wherever she is and whatever she's doing. We quickly go semi-off-top...

Dejan Mladenovski with Jason Barnard at DMA Melbourne Dejan Mladenovski talks to Jason Barnard about affiliate marketing.... with a white hat on. Lovely conversation that gets me (back) on board with affiliate marketing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xU3rZUJD_w For his current project Dejan never even thought about using a PBN network, nor bought a link... he got hit by Penguin back in the day and he knows how much that hurts. He's found a great niche - he creates an independent overview of t...

Aleyda Solis with Jason Barnard at SMX West Aleyda Solis talks to Jason Barnard about optimising video for YouTube. There are three pillars: Relevance, Engagement and Retention. All based on understanding your audience, and creating videos that bring them value and that they want to consume. Sounds so simple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSZxcIxmSC0 Aleyda learned loads from producing her practical / how-to series : Crawling Mondays. The series has been very successful with her very niche aud...

Mordy Oberstein with Jason Barnard at SMX West Mordy Oberstain talks with Jason Barnard on when marketing and SEO collide. Mordy starts off by getting on my good side by telling me I have the best pipes in SEO… what a charmer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THvPtnGCvPY Mordy talks about why Google updates should matter to all marketers - that Google is getting closer and closer to reflecting your market, so playing the SEO game is just playing the marketing game through Google. His advice: do w...

Nathan Chalmers with Jason Barnard at The Bing Series Nathan Chalmers talks to Jason Barnard about the whole page algorithm. Nathan had done his homework by listening to previous episodes…. And he loves the song :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5kJFlMIHVU A year ago I didn't know about the bidding system in Google and Bing ranking… and 6 months ago I didn't know there was a whole page team. Now I get to learn how the latter affects the former. First up, I had called the bidding system "Darwin...

Meenaz Merchant with Jason Barnard at The Bing Series Meenaz Merchant talks to Jason Barnard about the video and image algorithms. Meenaz is team lead for multimedia - and that includes image search, video search and camera search. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyPc-NqN9uY The single most important factor for multimedia is relevance - ie fit for purpose / answers the intent. But also authority and trust (that are built over time - proving oneself) and engagement. To understand images, they use...

Ali Alvi with Jason Barnard at The Bing Series Ali Alvi talks to Jason Barnard about the search algorithm for featured snippets. First thing we learn is that this feels a lot like a soccer interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UhsQb5iAU Then Ali confirms what Gary Illyes said in 2019 - the different candidate sets use the core algo in a modular fashion. Ali is team lead for the Q&A candidate (Q&A is Bing's name for featured snippet) But also that all of the algos are end-to-end neural net...

Fabrice Canel with Jason Barnard at The Bing Series Fabrice canel talks to Jason Barnard about Bingbot. Fabrice was on the podcast last year talking about Javascript and the new indexing API. That was very interesting and he shared quite a few insights... If you would rather read than watch or listen, here is an article I wrote based on this conversation >> This Episode Takes the Conversation a BIG step Further https://youtu.be/dSSZeTYOtMk This conversation is on a whole different planet. Fabric...

Rich Goldstein, Principal Patent Attorney at Goldstein Patent Law explains patents and trademarks in simple terms so you can protect your business.

Purna Virji, the Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft spills her top secrets for researching competitors using search.

Digital Marketing Excellence Practitioner, Eric Enge shares the latest tips and trends to help you drive great SEO gains through high quality content.

Jason Barnard interviews SEO copywriting specialist, Kate Toon where she shared some ace tips to help you develop your personal brand

Jason Barnard interviews Event Photographer & Video Producer, Joyce Ong as she shares great tips to help you produce a bulletproof video shoot

Daniel Hunjas explains his analogy between traffic lights and the sales process. When selling, we often have a tendency to speed up at a yellow light, and that is the wrong thing to do - a yellow light is an objection, so you should slow down and take the time to explain to the potential customer… Daniel advises taking people to their pain points right from the start, which reduces churn and avoids wasting everyone's time. Some lovely quotes "solutions hold no value, they only derive value from ...

Jason Mun with Jason Barnard at Chiang Mai SEO Standing by the pool in a posh hotel in Chiang Mai, I start by mis-singing his name very terribly. I then insult him very rudely. And despite that, Jason remains really delightful. Building an ecommerce site from scratch is easy. Getting the foundations right is the only way to make it work long term. And that is very very difficult. It isn't just me who thinks that Prestashop is particularly tough… Shopify is the platform Jason recommends. No doubt...

People think "what do I have to do" rather than "what do I want to do"… outsourcing allows you to get to the place where you can choose what you want to do, and not be stuck in the rut of "need to do". BUT, that can lead to a midlife crisis, even at 25 years old. It's easy to outsource, but apparently, attaching your name to a project tends to make the process much more difficult, especially if you are perfectionist like Lee Louis Gung. We didn't get to the practical stuff - how do you outsource...

Nobody seems to know where that magic figure of 7 touchpoints come from… Daniel Hunjas suggests it used to be 5.4 just to dialogue with a brand. With the advent of the internet, and the explosion of information that number is quickly approaching 20. As brand we are getting drowned out by the noise. Intelligent use of remarketing is now absolutely vital so you are front of mind at time of purchase. Aiming at bottom of funnel is like asking someone to marry you on the first date. Daniel gets a who...

Why use Captions and Subtitles for your Video Firstly, accessibility. All sorts of people benefit from captioned / subtitled videos, not just deaf people says Ahmed Khalifa: non-native speakers, people watching with the sound off, when the speakers' accents aren't clear (think Glaswegian :) ... and some people just like to read along. Automatic captions need to be corrected. Machines simply cannot get everything right (especially the scene directions and ambiance descriptions). Apparently, profe...

What is Microsoft's Business Model? Gennaro Cuofano Gennaro Looks at financials. He likes numbers. Microsoft has survived almost 50 years and ridden all the innovation waves (unlike many other large corporations). Microsoft are making $110 billion - almost as much as Google. But with a more varied and balanced business model - Office, Windows, Cloud, Gaming, Search and digital platforms. They have a lot of work to do to retain their existing clients, especially in Office. Their key worry with Of...

Paul talks about the rarity of tech startups that actually survive... and the even more rare case of one that succeeds. Part of that is educating the audience for a new innovative product they didn't know they needed. In this space, the new product is often the solution a company created to a problem they had... and then open it up to the wider world. Once out to market, the product often needs to adapt. You start with your core market. But then once investors come in, many startups expand the f...

Jim explains how he identifies the patterns that link buying and PBNs create. Anyone who is selling links is creating a network that can be mapped (because they are using a Rolodex, apparently). There is no safe way to buy links, says Jim. And don't expect natural links into your product page. They will be to your content pages, so use the internal linking to benefit your product pages. When you create that linkworthy content, then spend time promoting it using the 80/20 rule. Jim is happy to st...

The father of SEO - he's been in the industry for almost a quarter of a century. He started with Infoseek. Then I say Google and my phone joins in the conversation. He then goes into the details of the 19 major search engines of the early years. And the tiny numbers we were using at the time. And how simple it was to rank, and yet complicated at the same time. Then the power of human intuition. And the glory of Macromedia Flash (that's me, not Bruce). Rumour has it that only 10% of companies hav...

AOL were very very big and were going to dominate the world. Did the CD work? Yes it did. At one point, for 2 weeks, no other CDs were produced in the world. Simon was doing SEO for TechCrunch, but the journalists didn't want to listen. So he took them out to lunch and charmed them into submission. Problem solved! Both Simon and AOL were precursors. They had a two-pronged approach - copywriting and tech. Then onto examples of extreme preciceness, then the vagueness in queries and results... and ...

We start with a chat about talking to every single person at UnGagged. Pamela suggests that we have relationships with brands... and that brand can be our friend. We need to build relationships through connections. Then I get over-excited about entities and relationships and memory. Then onto brand personality (Pamela uses the official term - brand awareness). Vanilla is not bland (have a listen and you'll know why). Then brands have personality and need to maintain that - meaning HR is really i...