Episodes

I start singing lower than ever before (you can almost hear the hangover in my voice). Anton then tells me 'you could do the song better' (which I could). He also tells me he worked more than he drunk at SEMrushLive. I didn't. He tells me how he got where he is today. Then onto webinars... first off, ask yourself why you are doing it. Just because you can? Or you have a good reason? Jo Pulitzer suggests not trying to sell anything. Building your audience in three stages : people get used to you,...

A lovely companion to my conversation with Gianluca Fiorelli's International SEO podcast appearance, since this looks at international expansion in digital from a business strategy perspective (beyond the website). She starts by wonderfully singing thank you (turns out Sarah is Welsh and therefore can sing like a bird). She admits that talking is her favourite hobby. Onto the business at hand, she tells me that the six steps: Get Aware, Get Ready, Get Started, Get Strategic, Get Building, Get P...

We start off discussing SEOcamp Paris, then move onto the heart of the matter. Bartosz is a super Javascript SEO expert, but doesn't see a long-term future for his skillset. Javascript is too difficult and expensive to process. And Russian Dolls somehow come into it. Google has been struggling with JS for years, but will nail it soon, which is great from a geeky point of view, but bad for Bartosz's business…. maybe in 2 years, maybe in 5, depending on when Google figure out how to digest the cos...

This episode is full of half remembered quotes, which makes for some fun listening. In between mis-quoting people (and cartoon cats), we have a lovely discussion about ways of automating SEO tasks. Laziness pays... but Michael got into this not because he is lazy, you understand, he just doesn't like doing unnecessary work :) Specifically keeping store data up-to-date in GMB. A chat about our role as digital marketers in this world. Facts are a marketing tool and SEO is about communicating facts...

We start with a discussion about sunglasses, then quickly move onto InOrbit2019 in Slovenia and some great advice from Ian Anderson Gray and Dennis Wu - create a one minute video. now. Going into people's houses to do their paperwork in France (sounds creepy to me, but isn't … and is a 'thing', apparently). Administrative Phobia is a thing too, and ZenCafé is going to help people with that problem. Interestingly, InOrbit2019 and ZenCafé is the (strange) combination that pushed Anders into DIY ma...

Brad starts by telling me why Microsoft won't stop Bing anytime soon even if the they stay on a low market share. He also gives a breakdown of the MAG cloud businesses, and moves onto the voice assistants. Microsoft are a great number 2 player who bide their time and step in when the number 1 makes a mistake. Microsoft were 'the borg' and are now a nice, cute puppy. They are the slowly slowly gets the monkey company. Google have messed up on search, apparently with entity based search, specifica...

Jef gets us started with a nice Elvis impersonation. And we agree he has an admirable business card. On a more serious topic, AI is science fiction, Machine Learning is what we mean. And will we ever allow AI to get to the stage where it can truly emulate a human. In Digital Marketing, ML has allowed us to move to become more marketers that tech. What we are doing in marketing, but just using modern tools. And that means we should be thinking in terms of strategy rather than focussing on tactics...

Quick fun discussion about Scottish accents (he says that he sounds like Mrs Doubtfire on Helium). Then onto Brand, Brand, Brand. Ross loves brand :) A great approach to linkbuilding / PR is to help make their life easier... and to make YOUR life easier, scrape their articles and use NLP to write the perfect pitch to each journalist - Ross calls this programmatic PR (and it is brilliant). We manage to get onto Justin Bieber who doesn't have two babies (and Ross makes a brilliant groan-worthy jok...

Why should we respect web standards when Google doesn't even respect those who DO respect them? There are more invalid sites on the web than valid. I suggest 98% with absolutely no supporting evidence. Simon wants a reward system for well-built sites. I suggest that there maybe an indirect ranking benefit. Simon refutes rather deftly. He then moves on to getting inaccessible US results on Google UK. More and more US sites are blocking EU visitors due to GDPR, money-saving and copycatting. The bu...

Nagu Rangan with Jason Barnard at SMX London 2019 Nagu Rangan talks with Jason Barnard about how Bing ranking works. First question. Very obvious “What are the ranking factors”. He tells me that ranking factors are just a means to an end. Then Nagu tells me that relevancy is Bing’s North Star. There is no point in distinguishing between ranking factors and ranking signals. I ask what the ranking factors are (again) and Nagu politely that he gets leery when answering on the details. Tells me that...

Stewart starts by stealing my job as host. He quickly gets back on track as the guest. And proceeds to look at why we should be taking image search more seriously. Where and when voice is not appropriate. That voice search will lose out to image search. Clue: images are good for public use, voice for private. I shamefully get Lukasz's name wrong by calling him Kaspar. Use Google lens to translate a menu or to find out what cocktail your neighbour is drinking or a live band we should go and see. ...

I start badly by getting his name totally wrong. But Razvan is kind and (I think) he forgives me once I call him a genius. Razvan then kindly goes through the three types of keyword - know, go, do / informational, navigational, transactional... and helps me make better sense of them, how to include them more intelligently in your content - in short what to do, what not to do and how to best exploit the three types. He also agrees with Kate Toon - getting rid of churners is a good plan. Razvan ma...

An episode that is fresh news - ironically about evergreen Googlebot :) Its implications for crawling, Javascript rendering. A bit of a chat about what the User Agent is likely to be. Martin Splitt gets a mention for his mythbusting videos. Then onto Google Discover and content / ads on their homepage taking Google away from 'the do-no-evil Google way'. And a bit of a chat about the 'disappearing spam team'. Barry beautifully catches me out with my own comment about being careful not to generali...

She starts with the quote 'You shall know a word by the company it keeps', which is really cool. She uses seashore as an example, which is perfect because we are sitting on the beach in Brighton with the seagulls in the background (but that isn't the reason she chooses the example, surprisingly). Dawn is a super interested in academic papers and their importance to industry, so we end up talking a great deal about that… I assume that academic papers come from university, and Dawn gently corrects...

Really great conversation about how often we underestimate Amazon as a marketing / advertising channel. Amazons business model is diverse and better balanced than Facebook and Google. Amazon are sales focussed which makes it a big opportunity for sales and there is still time to jump on the train. In that he and Dan Saunders appear to agree. Eugene gives me tips on buying razors, then segues neatly into fake reviews on Amazon and Google. SEMrush are now offering Amazon tools alongside their more...

Greg has a lot of tattoos. And a great beard. nd a cup of tea. And he tells me that the weight of GMB and proximity have increased immensely. We discuss the differences in that proximity weighting for car dealerships and coffee shops. As local search becomes more and more no-click, GMB has become your digital showroom - replacing your website. GMB reviews are the be-all-and-end all in local search. I ask a rather naive question about brand searches. Greg puts me straight (despite not watching mu...

Felipe came out of the sewers to do SEO. We then get off to a bad start by disagreeing about the role of answers in SEO. But then he convinces me he has a great point of view. For a converting strategy, you will need to create different content for different countries and different cultures. We swap stories about the specifics of Spanish and French countries. Felipe tells me that 'basic is advanced' and I tell him that 'getting to simple is a complex process'. Mention of French SEO Olivier Andri...

Chris explains about the size of the first chunk of data on 3G and that leads Chris and I invent and perfect what we call 'the mobile gold standard for speed - 14K trick', and it takes us less than 20 minutes :) Like it was back in the 90s. And that is an advantage for me and Chris over the youngsters who were probably playing on my website back then. Like Bill Slawski is the patent reader, Gennaro Cuofano is the 'financial statements reader', Chris Liversidge is the 'Google documentation reader...

Amy comes from the offline marketing world - having started back in advertising in the 90s, we have a great conversation about how relevant traditional marketing is to SEO/AEO. We get interrupted by the (very tuneful) Federation Bells in Birrarung Marr park, but quickly get back on track (well, Amy does). In the old days it was all very simple. And it still is, when you dig down to the root of what we are trying to do - connect to customers. Many companies looking to market online today are quic...

John Bonham, Keith Moon … Lily Ray. Rock drummer icons all :) Lily sets herself apart because a) she is alive and b) she knows boatloads about E-A-T. We discuss August and March updates. I suggest that Google has a slap-and-reward system. Lily politely ignores that, and gives some very encouraging information about E-A-T. Much of it is an easy fix. She then identifies what the constituent parts of building E-A-T really are. I ask for a lot of free advice. And Lily very kindly gives it to me - sh...

At CopyCon, Robert gave an amazing talk based on the book by Dr Valery Young "the secret thoughts of successful women, why capable people suffer from imposter syndrome and how to thrive in spite of it". Over 70% of people struggle from imposter syndrome at some point in their working life. And, of course this happens to men and women in any industry. The five types of people who suffer from imposter syndrome (according to Valery Young): perfectionist, superwoman, natural genius, soloist, expert....

Why not use Content Delivery Networks to manage some of our tech SEO? And not just the simple static stuff. CDN nodes allow us to intercept the request and adapt the content on the Edge without even going back to the original host. Several use cases: speed, overcoming restrictions of your host platform, A/B testing. Most importantly, it frees the SEO practitioner from some of the shackles that the tech imposes, which is brill. But not without its dangers… it is easy for an SEO changing content o...

This conversation packs in a phenomenal amount of fascinating information about linked data, knowledge graphs, AI, machines… Andrea started working on semantic web technologies back in 2000 - so Andrea has been expecting the web to transition from being page based to being entity based for 20 years (see also Bill Slawski and Sergey Brin). All three have waited patiently for a long time and were starting to get impatient :) I then get unreasonably excited at the mention of Tim Berners Lee and his...

Milosz and I debate the merits of different social media platforms, then how that plays into linkbuilding. Find the right people, the right angle, the right introductions... then adapt your personality to the type of person you are interacting with. There are only three types: salesman (Milosz), maeven (Omi Sido), connector (Anton). Navah Hopkins mentioned dividing people into 3 groups: geeks, nerds and a dork. I overstep the reasonable and suggest that three is the magic number ... But then Mil...