#115: SEO in 2021

Episode: 115

Title: Norman Farar Introduces Rand Fishkin, CEO And Co Founder Of SparkToro, Founder Of Moz And An Author.

Subtitle: “Build A Brand That People Seek Out.”

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episode-115-rand-fishkin-explains-seo-in-2021/

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Rand Fishkin, CEO And Co Founder Of SparkToro, Founder Of Moz And An Author.

Rand is a frequent keynote speaker on marketing and entrepreneurship and was named among the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30 by BusinessWeek. In this episode, he talks about the world of SEO and Digital Marketing.

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 5:03 : Rand’s Background
• 7:35 : Market Research Through SparkToro 
• 11:15 : How To Improve SEO Organically
• 15:56 : Building A Brand That People Seek
• 18:05 : Getting Indexed On Google
• 21:16 : Getting Started In Digital Marketing
• 24:46 : The Importance Of Building Relationships
• 28:27 : Social Media In Today’s Marketing
• 36:53 : Top 3 SEO Actionable Items In Your Niche
• 40:44 : Common Brand Building Mistakes
• 44:05 : Link Building Strategies For 2021
• 48:49 : Find The Tactics And Strategies That Works For You

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/randfishkin/
• Brit Treats
• https://sparktoro.com/blog/why-you-should-hire-agencies-consultants-for-everything-you-can/
• https://twitter.com/randfish
• https://sparktoro.com/
• https://moz.com/
• Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin

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normanfarrar.com

Norman  0:02  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Micro Brands.

Norman  0:20  

I was telling everybody on Friday that you can’t miss this episode, it’s going to be a great one. We’re going to be talking to the founder of Moz, or co founder of Moz and a new startup called SparkToro and we’re going to be getting into that just touching on what SparkToro is. It’s a really cool app. I’ve just had a bit of time to play around with it, but wakey guys see what we can do. But first of all, where’s Kelsey?

Kelsey 0:46  

Hello. 

Norman 0:48

Well, hello. How are you? 

Kelsey 0:51

Good. It’s a little different starting at two today. 

Norman 0:54

It’s a very special day, isn’t it? 

Kelsey 0:56

Yes, it is. I guess I should have my little hat.

Norman 1:01

Oh my gosh. You know what? I don’t even have my hat. It’s over there and nobody’s got it for me and I can’t leave where I’m sitting right now. So Happy birthday. 

Kelsey 1:10

Thank you. Thank you.

Norman  1:13  

Geez, 21. 

Kelsey 1:14

I know.

Norman  1:18  

All right. Well, I don’t know where it’s going to happen. But I think we’ve got your brother here with something. 

Kelsey 1:25

I think he is. Yeah. 

Norman 1:27

Where are you? Where’s Kels or where’s Hayden? So Hayden is gonna join us for a quick second. That’s Hayden, Kelsey’s brother.

Kelsey 1:35  

All right. Okay, I got my cupcake too.

Norman  1:40  

A cupcake? Oh my God. How much greater can this get?

Kelsey 1:43

Yeah. Alright. So go ahead Hayden.

Norman 1:47

Out of tune.

Kelsey 1:50  

Thank you guys.

Norman  1:56  

Is he playing?

Kelsey 1:57

Can you hear it?

Norman  1:58  

I can’t hear nothing. 

Kelsey 2:02

It might be too loud.

Norman  2:04  

We can’t hear it. Oh my gosh. Okay Kelsey, in that case, you’re gonna have to sing happy birthday to yourself.

Kelsey 2:11  

There was a keyboard being played right now. But I think I have a background music.

Norman 2:18

Oh, did you blow the candle?

Kelsey 2:20  

I sure did. Thank you everyone. Thank you for all the birthday wishes.

Norman 2:24

That didn’t work out the way I wanted it to work out. 

Kelsey 2:27

Oh yeah, I’ve got that sound thing crisp. 

Norman 2:31

So turn it off. Just click it and turn off the background and you could get it. 

Kelsey 2:37

Maybe at the end of the podcast. 

Norman 2:38

All right. Let’s give it there. So let’s give this a whirl. Anyways, I can’t wait to get into it. We’re going to have another special little thing at the end of the podcast and by the way, everybody, we’ve got a special giveaway from Alan. Alan Moore. He’s going to be giving away Well, why don’t you say Kelsey, it’s your birthday. 

Kelsey 2:59

All right. So our little sponsor, Brit Treats, they’re going to be giving us a tub of quality sweet chocolate. It’s 650 grams and then there’s another Easter 20 Bar Selection box as well. So their giant box of chocolates.

Norman 3:18

It’s not like a little box, those things are monstrous. 

Kelsey 3:22

Yeah. So to enter that just put #Brit Treats and you do have to be in the US or Canada for the prize today and that’s pretty much it. So #Brit Treats to get entered into the chocolate giveaway today and thank you, everyone for the birthday wishes. 

Norman 3:39

Well, we got to get Hayden or figure out your mic. We worked on it all night to get a song out to you. All right, everybody. So on this special episode, if you have any questions, throw them over in the comment box. We’ll make sure we get back to them. Or try to answer them on the show. But for now, sit back, relax and enjoy the podcast.

Norman  4:01  

There’s the man. How are you, sir?

Rand 4:04  

Very well. Thanks for having me, Norm.

Norman 4:08

I’ve been looking forward to this when Kelsey said that he got you hooked on to the podcast. I couldn’t believe it. First of all, because I’m a huge fan of Moz. But being able to sit here and be able to talk to you about SEO. I mean, that just doesn’t happen. So this is really cool.

Rand 4:24  

Well, I also would love to wish Kelsey a very happy birthday and I don’t have a song prepared. But I might be able to run in and grab my ukulele and play a little something.

Norman  4:43  

Yeah, well, we’ve created an out of tune birthday song for Kelsey. So feel free to join in at the end. 

Rand 4:50

Oh, yeah. I can sing terribly. 

Norman 4:55

Yeah, me too. So we’re in the same club. There we go. So let’s start by just letting everybody know who you are and what you do. 

Rand  5:03

Sure, sure. So you mentioned I started a company called Moz back in 2003 with my mom, it was originally a blog, and then it became a consulting company and finally, a software business that I ran for many years as the CEO. It grew to $30-40 million in revenue and then I stepped down as the CEO in 2014, and left the company a few years ago, started this new one the next day, it’s called SparkToro. SparkToro is not in the SEO space. So it’s been a few years since I’ve been in SEO formally, although I obviously still pay attention to that world a little bit and SparkToro is in market research and audience intelligence. So being able to immediately find the sources that your audience pays attention to online, what do they read? What do they watch? What do they listen to? What do they follow? Engaged with? How do they describe themselves? All sorts of characteristics and attributes of an online audience and at the same time, I left Moz I also published a book called oops, Lost and Founder, which a lot of folks have have read in the sort of tech startup and marketing worlds and that’s been sort of my professional career and then personally, I’m married to a wonderful partner, the author, Geraldine DeRuiter, and we live in Seattle, Washington. So out on the west coast, I appreciate you sliding your time zones for me a little bit today. 

Norman 6:40

Hey, no problem at all. I used to live in Hawaii. So anybody asked about a nine o’clock slot on the East Coast, that was crazy.

Rand 6:50  

I guess that’s 3am.

Norman  6:53  

Six hours difference. Well I did have a chance like, I know Moz. I think anybody in the SEO game knows Moz. However, I didn’t know this other app. So I whipped over and I took a look at it. I’m in the influencer and brand builder game. We have our own apps that we have in that side of things and they’re targeted towards Amazon sellers or eCom sellers and I’m sitting here gone. Did you just create like almost instant personas like I can go over and see exactly who my demographic is just like that in seconds? Is that what it is? 

Rand  7:35

In a way, yeah. So Norm basically, behind the scenes, what happens is SparkToro, it’s relatively simple in terms of how it works. We crawl 10s of millions of social and web profiles and connect them up. So we’ll be like, Oh Norm, here’s your Twitter account and from that, we found your about page on your website, and that link to your LinkedIn page and your Facebook page and I don’t know, your Reddit account, your YouTube account, we sort of connect up all these different social profiles across 10 different networks right now, and then aggregate them into a single profile. Right? So those profiles are what you can search across, and then you can sort of get aggregated data. So if you were to say, Oh, I want to search for podcast hosts in Canada, right? Okay, well, we have whatever 790 podcast hosts, people who in their profile describe themselves as a podcast host, and say they’re located in Canada and then we can tell you, Oh well, here are hashtags that they used in their posts and social updates, and their bio, and all that kind of stuff. Here are podcasts that they engaged with. Here are accounts that they follow on whatever, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, whatever social accounts there might be out there. These are websites that they engage with and share content from. These are YouTube channels that they engage with all that type of data, sort of at your fingertips in a snap in just a few seconds. So it’s not quite a persona in the classic sense of I don’t know, a lot of personas, which you might have read in my piece where I complained bitterly about personas last week. A lot of them contain information that I don’t find necessarily particularly relevant to product or marketing use cases, but you will find a lot of data that can be very useful in marketing campaigns, or designing product strategy or doing market research, or building a hypothesis about a market or going in, optimizing your Facebook and Google Display Network ads and figuring out where to run targeted advertising or figuring out which podcasts to sponsor and pitch and all that kind of stuff as well. So influencer stuff, we touch on a little bit. Market Research, we do a lot of. We help a lot of agencies and consultants as well as in house marketers sort of do better targeted marketing of all kinds. 

Norman 10:10

So what we’ll do, at the end of the podcast will, or even Kelsey, if you can throw that up, just the link to it. Guys, you’ve got to take a look at this app. As you know, I don’t take affiliates at all, but I was looking at it and I really think it is something for anybody that’s online, anybody needs to build an audience. If you’re an Amazon seller, and you’re trying to build a brand, find those pet owners, find those large dog owners, those Schnauzer owners, and it’ll be so much easier for you and there’s a tool that I didn’t know existed, so kind of excited about that. The other thing that the main reason I thought we would talk today is most of the people listening to this podcast are either on Amazon selling private label brands, or they’re online. They’re either in a Shopify store or WooCommerce. What can we do now, to help organically do some SEO? What can we do as an individual and then we’ll talk about what we should be looking at agency wise? 

Rand  11:15

Yeah, so one of the reasons Norm that I became so passionate about sort of market research and audience intelligence and these other forms of marketing beyond SEO is that I kept observing a trend in the SEO world that made me question a little bit of the sanity of focusing on what I call like, unbranded keywords, right? I want to rank for, I don’t know, pet food. I want to rank for pet leashes. I want to rank for computer supplies, or whatever it is. My observation was time and time again, when you looked at the distribution of search volume, what you would see is the brands, the brand names in a space, in any given space, were getting 10, 100, 1000 times more search volume than all of the non branded keywords combined. So essentially, a good example of this might be in children’s toys, right? So you’d look at searches, like construction toys, toys for young kids, toys for five year olds, toys for 10 year olds, toys for girls, toys for boys, whatever. Every search you could possibly imagine in that category and then you compared it to a search for Lego and what do you know, Lego is 1000 times bigger than all these other keywords combined and that made me reflect on this idea that SEO is the best, or the only way to build a brand. I think SEO is a great way to when you are starting out, continue leveraging the content that you’re creating, earn some traffic from it, probably earn some business and some conversions. But to be frank, if you want to build something that can stand out from the crowd, something that is protected from Google changing their ranking systems, that’s protected from Facebook dropping your pages reach from Instagram, eliminating your ability to reach people organically and having to pay for every click and every visit and compete against everybody else who’s paying for those clicks and visits. If you want to try and win against all of these big tech monopolies, who are incentivized to either take traffic from you, or to force you to pay them in order to receive traffic. The way to fight that is to build a brand, a brand people seek out. It’s really difficult for Google to take traffic away from Lego when people have searched for Lego and even if they do, Lego probably still benefits from that. Because that search no matter where it lands, almost always is going to result in them being exposed to Lego’s product. So if you are building a private label product on Amazon, or Shopify or WooCommerce, the best advice I have for you is don’t try and compete in generics. Build a brand that people will seek out specifically and there are lots of ways to do that and SEO can absolutely help. But I think that has to be your strategy. Because frankly on Amazon, especially on Amazon, my God. Amazon said we saw in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, right they literally have algorithms that look for high performing products, and then Amazon creates their own cheap version of the same thing and promotes that above yours. They’re stealing your ish. Like, don’t let them, right? Build a brand that people seek out.

Norman  15:08  

Right. I mean, sorry about that. I’m not used to having the microphone here. It’s usually here. So I’ll probably walk it a few times. But, what about building your brand? So you’re not just saying build your brand outside of Amazon, but building a brand, establishing a brand on Amazon, while you have your eCommerce store building the brand. If I understand you correctly, it’s just look it, forget the browsing keywords or forget the generic brand keywords, go out, make sure that you’re targeting those brand keywords. So XYZ soap, or instead of just natural soap, is that correct and while you’re doing it on Amazon?

Rand 15:56

I mean, tactically speaking, I think there’s a lot of options here, right? I’m gonna go one level up from that and say strategically, the best thing you can possibly do is build a brand that people seek out rather than trying to compete in the unbranded keyword. So if soap is your field, right? I would say what differentiates us? What makes us unique from all other soap? Who are we for? Who’s the right target customer and how do we tell those customers that we’re the right soap for them? Is it Oh, you have whatever dry skin, and you live in northern climates, and you’re having issues X, Y, and Z with your skin, we are the perfect product for exactly you and so we’re going to target that and we’re going to build a unique brand around it and perhaps we’re going to have unique identifiers. It is, the soap is organic and environmentally friendly. The soap is unscented, so it doesn’t bother people who have sensitivities. These are sort of features and benefits that speak to a particular audience and then you’re building the brand around that and the brand itself is what you want to concentrate a significant portion of your effort on. So rather than saying, Oh yeah, I need to find which keywords people are searching for and rank for all of those. I think that’s secondary. To me, that is a, Hey, let’s go look for what those keywords are and on the pages that sell our products that are relevant, we’ll employ those keywords because we might get some benefit from them and over time as the brand grows, our SEO traffic benefits as well, because we are getting organic referrals, both from our brand and because people prefer us in the search results. So the tactics flow from the strategy.

Norman  17:49  

Getting that traffic. So you’ve got your website, or you’ve got your Amazon site, building content, is that still an effective way to get Google interested or get it indexed?

Rand 18:05

Yeah, absolutely. I’m not saying that SEO doesn’t work anymore, that it’s not still valuable. Search traffic is still the largest portion of referral traffic on the web. I think last time, I looked at the data from jump shot, which was 2019, search traffic was still 10x the volume of all social referral traffic together. So you combine all the traffic that Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Reddit and Pinterest and all the rest of them send out to websites against Google. Google is 10 times larger. So Google is sending a tremendous amount of traffic. The problem is when you look inside of Google, in any given category, it’s 10x Lego and 1x children’s toys, right? So my suggestion is that you focus on building those brands and I think content is a way to back that up. Content is a way to get some value from it. But personally, like one of the biggest things that I invest in is finding the sources of influence for my audience. So my audience tends to be market researchers and brand builders and consultants and agencies and I find podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they watch and email newsletters that they subscribe to, conferences and events that they go to webinars, they attend websites that they visit, social accounts that they follow, and then I try to be present in those places. Right, I try to make sure that the folks who reach them talk about SparkToro, they’re aware of it. When someone mentions, Hey, I’m trying to build a great marketing persona, someone in the room, I want someone in that room to say, Hey, we should try SparkToro. Right and I think you want that same thing going on. Like Hey, I need to buy a toy for my nephew’s birthday, you want someone in the room to think, I bet he likes Lego. Right? It’s that same memory nudge that you are trying to achieve and brand building through essentially digital PR is one of the primary ways that I encourage folks to do that, because I think that’s very effective and content in SEO can be a great addition to that flywheel, that marketing flywheel you’re building too.

Norman  20:31  

One of the things that we try to do is we’ll put out a press release about a newsworthy item, and then have that press release linked over to a blog article, talking about the five main reasons why, whatever it is, and then also have a video in it and really try to put as much content into it as possible. For people that are trying like action step one or two, what is the easiest way to get started? You just mentioned you just whipped off the top of your head about five or six different things. What can we do as either an Amazon or an eCommerce seller? What is the first one or two things that we can do to get the ball started? 

Rand 21:16  

So I love the idea of using two things. One is you should have a great idea of who your customer and your target audience are. Right? So in the pet world, it might be they own big dogs, or maybe they are folks who love to go hiking and camping and so they’re outdoors folks, and they’re in a particular region, maybe they’re in the western United States or Western Canada and so you’ve got a very particular target. Now go survey and interview some of them. Right? Just ask them, Hey, tell me a little bit about your media consumption habits and who you follow and watch in this space and what you pay attention to and like where you get your information. What websites do you go to when you’re trying to figure out your next hike? Who do you pay attention to or tell you about information for your dog? Oh yeah, well, it turns out I do this or that. As an example, this is a silly one. But I personally got sort of obsessed with cooking Japanese food while I was in quarantine lockdown, which we still are here in Seattle and so I found this website, justonecookbook.com. It ranks moderately well, sometimes in the recipe results. Now because I click it all the time, it ranks really well for me, my personalized results, which is also a benefit. But so I’ve been going to this just one cookbook website and learning how to make great Japanese dishes. I cooked a lot of Yaki Udon and Katsu and I love it. It’s great, it’s really fun. But the reality is that if you go and look at all the people who are online talking about whatever Japanese food and cooking Japanese recipes, the list of places where they get their information is long and that’s not particularly surprising. That’s great. That’s fine. Those places in my opinion are where you want to be with your brand. Right? So if I am selling a Japanese donabe which is like a traditional clay rice cooker, they cost like $200. I did end up buying one and they’re great to cook with, they’re really unique and super different from, I don’t know, at least a lot of the Western cooking dishes that I use. But it makes great rice in particular, and a whole bunch of other dishes and if you are selling those donabes, you want to be in all the places, you want to be talked about by the chefs and the recipe shares and the bloggers and the writers and the journalists and the YouTube cooking folks and the people who put together animated GIFs on Reddit and on imager and all these places for 30 second cooking videos or whatever it is. You want to be present in all those places. That is my top tip. That’s my top recommendation. Go figure out who your audience is, find what they pay attention to, be in those places. I think it’s hard to beat that strategy.

Norman  24:34  

That’s great advice. So start with your top guys and then sort of work yourself down, right? You don’t have to go after everybody at one time. 

Rand 24:46

Yeah, if you have a pre existing relationship with someone, so you find some let’s say someone hosts a YouTube channel that reaches a good percentage of your audience or a bunch of people have mentioned this radio program or they’ve talked about a blog that they read, or maybe there’s a section of a traditional newspaper that’s online, that they’re all paying attention, whatever it is and you go to LinkedIn, and you see that you Oh yeah, I’m connected to Norm and Norm’s connected to that person. Hey Norm, can you make me an intro? Intro like a personal intro that says, Oh Hey, we had Rand on our show. He’s a really nice guy, his fashion’s a little strange, but you should talk to him. That sort of connection means that you have a lot of opportunity to build up rapport, brand memory, a positive association, and get a pitch that’s much more likely to be accepted, than Hey, so and so at the Globe and Mail, like, please write about my startup. No, that’s not gonna work particularly well. But if you connect me with someone over there and say, Hey, I know you’ve been writing some pieces about whatever, Amazon’s practices around stealing from their eCommerce folks, you should have a conversation with Rand, because he has some really interesting thoughts on that and he’s got some cool data about other ways to go. Oh, yeah. Now we’re talking, right? Like that intro is likely to result in a conversation, which is likely to result in the journalist at the Globe and Mail picking us up talking about us, whatever. 

Norman 26:31

So it sounds like a lot of what you’re talking about is all influencer based. You’re building relationships. You’re getting people to engage, right and then you can leverage these relationships through their network. 

Rand  26:46

Yeah. I mean, so Norm, I have this weird thing and I don’t know if you’ve observed this. But when I say you should do more influencer marketing, there’s a whole bunch of people in whatever the marketing world, the business world who think that means go find half naked people on Instagram and pay them $500 to pose with your product and they can’t break out of that mindset and so I’ve had to find other ways to say influencer marketing, because the branding for that practice has become so associated with that one, frankly, silly and not applicable to everyone tactic. So yeah I tend to call it, it’s digital PR, it’s outreach, it is sources of influence. But I agree with you. Seven years ago, if we were having this conversation, and we said influencer marketing, everyone would know that it meant all those things. It’s just weird that today, it’s like, let me find someone with poses in their underwear on beaches, and blah, blah, blah. I obviously don’t have the physical fitness to be doing that. I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if you are one of those Instagram models.

Norman 28:00

Oh, yeah, of course. 

Rand  28:02

Yeah. You can kinda tell from talking to someone.

Norman  28:07  

Yeah, it’s the beard. Right? 

Rand 28:10

It’s the beard. It really is just the beard that makes that man. 

Norman 28:14

There we go.

Norman  28:15  

Now, where does social media come in with today’s marketing? 

Rand 28:27

Yeah. I mean, just like we talked about content and SEO, I like these kinds of other pillars of marketing, all supporting the brand that you’re building. Right? So online, I think that’s your website and your email list. Like those sit at the center of everything you do and all these other channels, SEO and content marketing, and digital PR, and whatever advertising and your Amazon store, all of these things support your website, your website, and your email list and social is no different. So essentially, on social, you’re trying to kind of build up an audience that cares about what you do, that cares about what you talk about, you might be doing a lot of content marketing on social, there’s a lot of similarities between social sharing, which for a lot of brands is just micro content marketing. Now, it’s small posts that are whatever visual and engaging and emotionally resonant and attract people to your brand and your social voice and then you’re using that over time to drive people back. You’re like, Oh gosh, I really love when that random guy talks about whatever marketing issues he’s talking about on Twitter or LinkedIn or I don’t do as much Facebook, I do a little bit of Instagram with my stuff. Whenever he talks about this stuff, I really like it. Let me go click his profile. Oh, what’s the SparkToro site that he’s doing? Then every few posts on all these networks, I am more likely to call it more blatantly sharing my, my actual business, right? So I might have 5, 10, 15, even 20 posts that have nothing to do with what SparkToro does in particular and then one or two that mentioned the brand, have a link to the website and the idea is that I’m kind of building up engagement and algorithmic reputation with the network so that they show my posts to more people, and they’re more engaging and more people follow my account and then every few posts I am drawing that traffic back to my website and my email list and I think that’s the way I would play the social game today for most eCommerce brands, right? I would be sharing things that are gonna be likely to earn you high engagement. You can if you want, play the controversy game, right? Social is very, very resonant with controversial issues, you can see everyone from like Patagonia to Penzeys Spices to what’s called Rei does this on occasion, the O’Reilly Media does this in the business book space, right? Where they’re essentially using some combination of their own business overlapping into social or even political issues and then using that engagement to drive people to their brand to signify who they are and what they stand for and then if you love what they stand for, you’re going to follow them and pay attention and now they’re going to draw people back to your website and that, I think that can be an effective strategy to you have to decide whether you’re willing to play that game, or if you want to do others, but social can be one of these pillars, right? Just like content and SEO. 

Norman 21:51

Right? I’ve heard the term lately. I don’t know if it’s been around forever, but give to get.  

Rand  32:03

Yeah, and I think social is a great place to do that. 

Noman 32:05

Yeah and I heard that a lot with Clubhouse. So all these people going out Clubhouse is the buzzword of the day, of course, right? But, man oh man, there’s a lot of people that give but there’s a whole bunch of, one of the things I’m finding when I go on to that network now is I have to sit through a whole bunch of ego.

Rand 32:30  

This is what I’ve heard that Clubhouse has attracted a very particular crowd, as its early adopters and it’s like being in the popular kids locker room in high school, which was not my favorite place to hang out. So I really, I think I’m gonna stick to the other pathways. I’m also suspicious of Clubhouses long term appeal. I think it might be a short term popular network that goes away or gets acquired, or Facebook and Twitter replicate its functionality and then one of those is more successful with the format. That wouldn’t surprise me either. 

Norman 33:23

I’m watching it a lot. We’re trying to try to get on there. We have a club, but it’s interesting to see where it’s gonna go, because you spend a lot of time, a lot of time. You can spend, I know people who spend eight hours a day on Clubhouse and wow, I got 8000 followers, I got 50,000 followers. But I don’t know where that’s gonna go and who knows, there’s a lot of people risking a lot of time, a lot of time and money being in those rooms. But anyways, the advantage is it does allow engagement, it does allow somebody to come up, ask a question, and get that answer right away, which I think is really cool. I know we can do something similar here. But people might make a comment, but actually having somebody come on and talk. If you’re live, you might have that.

Rand 34:18  

It does encourage, I don’t know. Obviously, when we were all allowed to go to events, right? I go to conferences and events and do a lot of speaking and I did a book tour for Lost and Founder and there’s something among sort of authors and speakers where they say, Oh, every room that you’re in, has someone whose name is that guy and that guy will always be one of the first people to put up his hand. It’s almost always a man. Put up his hand and ask a question, right and at whatever kind of event and say, yeah, this is really a little bit more of a comment than a question. I run business XYZ and before that I did all these other things and I have this opinion that I need to express and get off my chest and yeah, that’s really what I’m thinking about these days. 

Norman 35:16

Do you know that guy too?

Rand  35:17  

I know that guy. That guy has been in almost every room I’ve ever talked in?

Norman  35:23  

I thought it was just me.

Rand  35:24  

My sense is a little bit that Clubhouse is like Hey, are you that guy? We got a network for you.

Norman  35:33  

Who knows? Who knows? But before I forget, Kelsey, where are you?

Kelsey 35:39  

Yes.

Norman  35:41  

Look at that hat. That’s perfect. 

Kelsey 35:45

It’s cute, right?

Norman  35:46  

Now, I wanted to just remind people, because I know that with all the excitement, you forgot to do your job earlier. But like them smashes, you want to do that?

Kelsey 35:56  

That’s right. So first of all, thank you, everyone for the birthday wishes again. I really appreciate it. It’s been an awesome day so far. So thank you. But yes, if you haven’t already, please like this episode, share it to your friends. If you have someone who needs a little help with your like branding, SEO, maybe tag them in the comment section and of course, like, feel free to leave any questions for Rand and Norm too. This is a two way street. So they do have great conversation and everything. But this is your opportunity to ask a great question. So yeah, thank you everyone and Norm, there was one question from Dr. Koz. But I think you guys kind of answered it already. Okay, assuming niches are strategy for SEO, what are your top three actionable items today that we can execute on?

Rand 36:53  

Let’s see. First off, thank you, Kelsey. If you’re going niche, and you’re focused on SEO, I would do a little bit of a competitive comparison analysis. I think that’s the first item I would start with. So essentially say, Hey, in our niche, who else are we competing against? What are they doing? How are they doing it? Why are they having more success than we are potentially and how do we want to try and drive value from this? Is it through primarily building up our brand like we want to be present in all the places that our competitors in this niche are present in so that we can drive more branded search and branded traffic and brand loyalty and brand building? Is it that we want to directly rank for some of these niche keywords and how do we do that? What are we missing? Is it content that’s the problem? Are we not solving the searchers problem more effectively than our competitors? Do we have a link building problem where they’ve essentially amassed more links and references and brand mentions than we have? Are they winning on something else? Maybe site fundamentals, speed and accessibility and those kinds of things, right and so I do a little bit of that audit process. You can also hire a consultant. I don’t know about you, Norm but I’m a talented SEO, I’m a talented marketer. I can tell you right now, like, we as SparkToro, there’s two of us. We have hired agencies and consultants for everything. That is because I believe those people who specialize in that field are vastly more experienced and less costly than a full time employee. 

Norman 38:37

You are so bang on the money.

Rand 38:40  

So I wrote a blog post, which I’m happy to share with folks, it’s not self promotional or anything called Why I Prefer to Use Consulting Agencies for Everything and everything that’s not sort of core to our product, I use them for it and that includes SEO and content and we use them for our beta testing. We use folks for design and UX, all this stuff. I would highly recommend almost anyone who’s in eCommerce who’s got the margins to do it. I would hire an agency to help you with SEO, especially in those niches. If you’re going to do it yourself, I would do that audit and then I would determine my next actions from that audit to decide what else I wanted to do.

Norman  39:24  

Great answer. What about mistakes? What are the typical mistakes of a lot of people well, other than not hiring experts, and when we say that, don’t do that right off the bat. One of the keywords if you have the money to do it, if you’ve established a bit of your brand, I mean if you’re going to jump in with two feet and you do have cash flow, so you’re properly capitalized and you want to grow a bat brand right off the bat, that’s a whole different story. But a lot of people are brand new, they’re testing the waters, they’re gonna pay their Amazon tax by making mistakes and getting to know your first product out there, what not to do and what to do, where to spend your money, where not to spend your money. But when you want to get to the next level, you probably do want to look at spending it either in SEO or a proper email campaign. Like we were talking the other day. Our last episode was about email marketing. There’s all sorts of things that you can do that you might not be good at. I know I suck at a bunch of things and I know a bit about it. But I’m not going to hire myself to do it. First of all, it’s going to take me forever, it’s a weakness, I’m going to get stressed out. So why not let somebody else just do it? But what about mistakes? Where do people make mistakes?

Rand 40:44  

To be honest, I think one of the worst mistakes that a lot of folks make is building their home on rented land and Amazon is a prime example of this, right, where no pun intended. But the idea that my Amazon storefront is where I make most of my money, I would really leverage Amazon as a place where you get first time customers once, and then after that you are connecting with them in as much detail as you possibly can. So trying to nudge them toward your website, trying to nudge them toward your email list, trying to nudge them, anyone who’s a customer of yours through Amazon, you want to try and build that brand back to your website and that can be through specials and discounts and in the search results having your website say you’ll always find the lowest prices with us, you’ll always get the best, whatever selection with us. I’ve seen stores run campaigns where they essentially have a lot of their Amazon product line. That is sort of the base level product and then for the more I don’t know what you want to call it, like fancy advanced stuff for people who are more into their world of whatever kind that is, you have to go to their website to get it. I experienced this recently, I was looking at some bar equipment, because I’ve been doing some cocktail at home program. There’s a great brand that makes really cool equipment called Viski. If you go to Amazon, they sell some of their stuff like a little bit here and there. But because most of the stuffs not available, or it’s all through third parties, when you really want to do is go to their website, and it nudged me to go to Viski’s website because the availability was spotty and sparse on Amazon and then I was like, Oh, we’ve got all the stuff here and it’s better and better selection, and the prices are just as good or sometimes better. I’m going to come to this nice website. Now Viski has my email address and now they can send me promotional emails and I think email is a phenomenal strategy, you should try to capture those email addresses anytime you can. So that’s the first mistake I think people make is assuming that whatever Amazon or Google storefront or whoever it is, has your best interests at heart and is going to help you build your brand. No. Amazon’s goal is we want you to give us data about consumers so that we can compete with you and put you out of business and continue to be the monopoly in eCommerce. That is Amazon’s goal. They are your absolute enemy and you’re sort of waging this little guerrilla warfare against them, trying any tactic that you can to get people back to your site, your email list. 

Norman 43:47

Alright, I got to thank Dr. Koz, because I had it at the top and I buried the question and that’s linking, link building strategies. Link building strategies for 2021. Can you give us a couple? 

Rand 44:05

Yeah, I mean, the ones that I like best are twofold. I love digital PR stuff. So having a great pitch story, maybe it’s data analysis, maybe it’s a bunch of research, maybe you did a big large scale survey, you did an analysis breakdown of all the products in a space, something that is of interest to people in the not who are your audience, but who are their influencers? Right? So journalists, papers, reporters, bloggers, writers, people who cover a space that could be industry specialists, whatever it is. That’s the group that you’re going after, not your actual customers when you are creating that type of content and that content is designed to earn you references back. I’ll give an example. I got an email last night from someone in Japan who writes for Gosh, I think it’s a Nikkei Publication, right? The Nikkei is the Japanese index, sort of like our Dow Jones or New York Stock Exchange and so they write for this business publication and they asked if they could reference an article that I’ve written on SparkToro about changes that Google had made last year to their search click through rates and some research that I’d done with a company. Fantastic, right? That’s exactly the kind of thing you want to publish content that will attract the interest of those folks, because they are likely to link back to you and once you get one or a few, that is a phenomenal way to earn those links and not have to do, I know a bunch of link builders who still send out whatever 100 emails asking if they can guest post or 100 emails asking if they can fix this broken link or 100 emails. Yeah, we all get them all day long. The success rate is a 10th of a percent. So for every 1000 emails, legitimate emails that actually get delivered, maybe one is turning into some value for you. Rather than spend all that time gathering those 1000 emails and blowing your email deliverability rate and getting on everyone’s, they all click report spam in Gmail, or Yahoo Mail, or MSN or whatever it is and so now all those mail providers know to treat your domain as a spam domain. So that’s harming your deliverability long term and your reputation. Instead, I would focus all that attention on energy on the top five or 10 sources, I don’t think we’re in a world anymore. When I got into SEO in 2003, you get 1000 links, doesn’t matter who you are, like, you’re gonna beat the guy with 20 links. That’s not true anymore. There’s a lot of websites with 20, 50, 100 links that are beating out pages with 1000 or 5000. Because Google cares much less about numbers, and much more about quality.

Norman  47:15  

Right. Yeah, big difference. Big difference. 

Rand 47:21

Yeah, total sea change from even 10 years ago, pre sort of Panda and Penguin those big updates that Google did for people or deep in the nerdy SEO world. The reality is that today, Google is far more sophisticated. They look at things like searcher satisfaction rate. What percent of people who clicked on your results over time, we’re satisfied with their search versus what percent bounced back to the search results, chose one of your competitors in the search, clicked them, and we’re satisfied by someone else. That is really how Google’s machine learning system is determining who should we keep ranking and who should we push down. Who’s going to go to the top, who’s going to go to the bottom. Links matter, they still have impact, they’re still part of that equation. But searcher satisfaction is much, much higher and so if you are Viski, you might be able to outrank Amazon and CAG Works and Cocktail Kingdom and all those kinds of things. If over time, your brand satisfies more cocktail home bartending equipment searches. I would play that game. 

Norman 48;33

Well, I know we’re winding down here. Is there anything else that you would add that our audience needs to know about right now? I’m putting you on the spot.

Rand 48:49  

Just a little bit. I think one of the greatest things that you can do for your own marketing for your eCommerce shop is to find tactics and strategies that work for you rather than the ones that are popular and well known. So I am very opposed to sort of the be everywhere marketing. There’s a lot of advice out there I think Gary Vaynerchuk is like one of the prime proponents of this right? This idea that like, what are you doing, you have to be on TikTok and Snapchat and Facebook and YouTube and Reddit and you better have your podcast you better have your Clubhouse, you better have your Twitter. I think A, that’s overwhelming. I think B, that is not pragmatic, or an efficient use of your time and energy. I would pick one or two tactics and channels that are that fit three criteria. Number one, your audience has to be there. So maybe you think Clubhouse is great and fun. Is your audience on Clubhouse? Like, are you selling to that guy? If you’re not a clubhouse, I don’t know. Number two, you have to be able to provide unique value in that space, meaning value that’s differentiated from any of your competitors and anybody else who’s trying to attract the same audience, you’ve got to have some reason why people are gonna pay attention to you and then the third thing is, you’ve got to like it. You have to personally feel passionate and excited about it. I have never in all my career Norm, I’ve never heard this statement. I really hate Twitter but I’m super good at it. Nope, doesn’t happen, right? What I hear is, Oh this new whatever it is, TikTok like, I love doing little short videos that kind of go viral and earn me attention, and then build my brand. I love that stuff and so I’m also very good at terrific, perfect. If you’re a great blogger, great writer, wonderful. Blogging, content marketing, that’s probably for you. If you love doing SEO, doing link building. Terrific, that’s probably a great channel for you. If you’re super into podcasting, great. Start one. If you love in person events and conferences and meeting people in real life event marketing, wonderful. That’s an awesome tactic. If you are great at building those relationships and creating things that influential sources love to share and publish, PR, fantastic, go do that. Right? The content PR game. There are dozens of channels, 1000s of tactics, you have to find the one that you’re passionate about that works for you, that reaches your audience and where you can provide unique value. You do that, you’re set. 

Norman 51:53

It’s great timing. Kelsey, and I were talking about that the other day about how many channels that we’re targeting and the time it takes. You don’t have to go on everyone, you can go on one or two and you’re so right, the ones that are fun are the ones you want to do, because why do something that sucks?

Rand 52:17  

The reason we got into business for ourselves is so that we can do the things that we love and not do the things that we don’t. Right? I don’t want to have a boss because I want to be able to govern my day and do the things that I’m passionate about and yeah, we all have to do some slog work sometimes. Fine, that’s fine. But please, by all means, go and choose tactics and channels that resonate with you that you’re going to enjoy, especially on the marketing side. I think there’s nothing better.

Norman  52:53  

Now I just noticed, well, first of all, I should just mention anybody who’s listening who hasn’t heard. Our sponsor, Brit Treats chocolates are going to be giving away two prizes today. So it’s #Brit chocolate, and you’ll be entered. Is that correct Kelsey? 

Kelsey 53:10

Yes. I also want to say, Rand, I know you have to go at the top of the hour. So we’re 10 minutes away. So if you need to get going? 

Rand 53:17

Unfortunately, I will have to run but I really appreciate you folks having me on it has been an absolute pleasure. Norm, Kelsey, anything I can do for you. Please just let me know and Kelsey, very happy birthday. 

Kelsey 53:31

Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.

Norman  53:33  

Rand, thank you so much. You have a good one. 

Rand 53:37

You too. 

Norman 53:38

Alright. See you later and everybody before we get into the Brit chocolates, I know that there’s a couple of things happening here. But yeah, checkout like for information about SEO go to Moz, go to SparkToro and just see it out checkout Rand’s blog, just a ton of information talk about like, give, give, give give. You’ll learn a lot of information there. 

Kelsey 54:05

Yeah. I was just going through his blog and there is just tons of info there. 

Norman 54:08

Tons of great information there. So anyways, Kelsey, we have another big surprise today.

Kelsey 54:14  

Are you talking about the Wheel of Kelsey? 

Norman 54:17

Yeah. Is it about that time? 

Kelsey 54:19

I think so. Okay. 

Norman 54:21

Just one sec. This is our other great big surprise that we were working on last night. 

Kelsey 54:29

Yes. So I should give credit to my brother Hayden. He’s put this together. But we have a new little song for the Wheel of Kelsey. You’ll have to let us know what you think about it. Cuz I’m very curious. But here we go.

Norman  55:00  

There we go. It was pretty good.

Kelsey 55:06  

Okay. Also some of the people that have entered. I know a couple people won, like literally the last time we’re a couple of times a go, so I removed some people’s names just so everyone has a chance. Okay, if you won the chocolate again, from last week or previous times, just to make it fair and give everyone a chance. So if you see your name’s not out there, that’s the reason why.

Norman  55:32  

Kelsey does take $20 at a time to get your name back on. 

Kelsey 55:38

Yes, that’s right. Okay. All right. So the first one we’ll do is the Quality Street chocolate. That’s a tub of chocolate. It’s 650 grams from our sponsor Brit Treats. 321

Norman  56:01  

Melanie.

Kelsey 56:03  

Melanie is number one, and 321. This is for the big 20 bar Easter chocolates, 321. 

Norman 56:15

Is my name on there?

Kelsey 56:19  

Okay. Mero.

Norman 56:20

All right. Congratulations and a big thanks to Alan Moore, for providing those boxes of chocolates. That’s fantastic Alan and again, that’s Brit Chocolates. So alright, I think that is it for the end of the podcast.

Kelsey 56:41  

I think so and people are loving the song. Good. All right. So that’s gonna be staying. 

Norman 56:47

That’ll be the official Wheel of Kelsey Song. 

Kelsey 56:50

Yes. Okay, so I think that’s it. So, if you missed out on the episode, you can always find all the episodes on their YouTube channel, Lunch with Norm. Just search Lunch with Norm. The channel name is Norman Farrar, but that’s where all of this good stuff happens. Yeah, let me see. We don’t have the Clubhouse today, obviously, the time. But we’ll resume next week and I’ll make a post about that. But of course, join our Beer Nation. Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and eCommerce Collective on Facebook and yeah, thank you guys. Thank you for all the birthday wishes. That’s amazing. Thanks, everyone. You guys made my day.

Norman  57:32  

If anybody wants to send in a video singing Kelsey a Happy birthday, we’ll post that in the group as well. All right. Who do we got coming out on Wednesday, Kels?

Kelsey 57;44

We have Ashley Armstrong. So she has some hidden secrets of Amazon. As well as she’s going to talk a bit more about a woman in eCommerce too and her entrepreneurial journey and yeah, it’s gonna be a great episode and we also have Afolabi on Friday. 

Norman 58:04

Yes, great. So that’ll be fun. 

Kelsey 58:0

A little sourcing episode too. So it’s gonna be a good week. Yes and thank you, everyone. Awesome. 

Norman 58:12

Hey, and by the way, if you didn’t check it out, I don’t know if this will be easier for everybody. We were sourcing Amazon, searching Amazon the other day and we noticed their podcasts there. So under Audible. So I don’t know how, we didn’t apply. I guess it just got picked up. But we’re if you have an audio or Audible account, search Lunch with Norm and it’ll be there as well now. So tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Eastern Standard Time at noon and thank you everybody for joining. Thanks for joining the community. Remember, you can always go over to Beard Nation, or whatever Kelsey has called that group of ours and become a member. It’s a great group, lots of engagement and hey everybody, enjoy the rest of your day.