Transcription
****Please forgive any and all transcription errors as this was transcribed by Otter.ai.****

[intro music]
Shark 0:16
Welcome back and thank you for joining A Shark's Perspective. I am Kenneth "Shark" Kinney, keynote speaker, strategist and your Chief Shark Officer.

If you watch or follow much of the news, then you often hear about businesses growing coming out of the pandemic. But a lot of those had immense challenges. Not every brand was big enough to be known or strong enough to coast on their marketing. Think of all the small businesses and entrepreneurs, for example, who had conservative wallets, or couldn't invest in ads, and only relied on SEO content and some social. So where should we invest our war chest, even if we still have one in order to maximize our marketing dollars, especially with all the changes that keep coming with search engine optimization.

We're welcoming the legendary Bruce Clay, who's known as the father of SEO, and is the founder and president of the global digital marketing optimization firm, Bruce Clay Inc. He's the author of search engine optimization all in one for Dummies series of books, and the author of content marketing strategies for professionals. In On this episode, we'll discuss being the father of SEO doing SEO before Google was Google, where the dollar should be invested when the war chest is gone. Digital Location, Location Location, being number nine in a race, investing in SEO and content versus the convenience of PPC having better content in a sea of sameness. mentoring the next group of marketers the future of SEO and wiziwig sites, cold California waters, those dummy books, and obvious favorite shark and a lot lot more.

So let's tune in to the legendary Bruce Clay with a legendary shark on this episode of A Shark's Perspective.

Bruce, welcome to A Shark's Perspective. It's an honor to have you here on the show. If you don't mind, tell us a little bit about your background, your career to date.

Bruce Clay 2:00
Happy to do it. For those of you that don't know, I started doing SEO really in 1996, which is three years before Google. And I've been given credit for actually coining the term. Although nobody was really writing that down back then. If you do a search for who is the father of SEO, I show up for quite a few pages. So a lot of colleagues had given me credit. I operate a business out of Southern California predominantly doing SEO, PPC and content, not doing a lot of everything digital, but doing search marketing. Over the years, I've spoken in about 300 conference sessions, I've written three books, I have offices around the world. We are we sponsor conferences. I mean, we're pretty much in the mainstream here. So yeah, that's what we do.

Shark 3:02
Well, obviously, you're a legend. And so there's so much I want to dive into here. Bruce, I don't know if you knew about this, but we had a little bit of a pandemic over last few years. And I'm not sure if any of the nuttiness on the news, it may be news to you. But not every business grew. And a lot of marketing dollars got smaller marketing budgets were already challenged under best of times. But where do you see brands and where they should invest? You know, especially when the war chest is gone. And that also applies really to startups as well, who don't start out with deep pockets anyway.

Bruce Clay 3:34
Right, the you're right, the we were in in the midst of raising demand for search and online digital marketing programs. But then it really got set back. When COVID head we lost 38% of our clients, not because of disaster caused by COVID directly where they had gotten ill, but rather supply chain problems and things like that. We had some businesses that really prospered for about three months, and then they ran out of supplies and they all but shut down. So it was kind of a trauma for a lot of businesses and even in our case it was there was a hit. However, the flipside was also true that a lot of brands who did have a war chest, and fortunately for brands, they have a tendency to have some money put away. They saw it as an opportunity to become more aggressive in marketing. So even though I lost 38% I made up 40% With people becoming more aggressive, digital And that has really worked out for a lot of them. To the point where I think brands have, if they had to work chest, the brands have succeeded. Now, don't get me wrong brands, many brands are not big companies. They're, they're just known. And I think a lot of them have suffered. They, they had to conserve their war chest because it was bigger than zero but not big enough. And they cut back. You know, there was a joke I saw where it was the picture of one of those, like emergency units on the wall with the fire extinguishers, typically. And it said in case of emergency, reduce marketing. Yeah, he said, I think I think a lot of companies view, we got to maintain sales, we can coast on our marketing or in SEOs case, SEOs is slower to get but slower to lose. And so we'll coast on SEO, and will, okay, pay per click is pretty expensive, we'll get rid of the non performing terms and cut back on our pay per click. And that impacts agencies, obviously. And so at the beginning, a lot of the smaller agencies got crushed. And I think that we've seen that. Now, last year 2021. Our business grew about 45% over prior years. And that's, that's a pure bottom recognition that everything is now really centered on digital. Digital is the new location, location, location of the world. And you're either online and visible and performing well, or you don't exist. I mean, think about the following. I mean, New York, the mayor of New York is telling everybody please go back to the office. And I think it's because they realize that all the restaurants and the 45,000 Starbucks are are starving, because nobody's walking down the street anymore. And, you know, there's a there's an economy built around supporting people who are in offices. Now that were remote now everything is digital. I think this Christmas this past holiday season, I don't even think I was in a store I take I ordered everything for everybody online. And given that world, I take what we're saying is that if I were fortunate to be a brand, and if I had a war chest, and I could withstand that hit and plan my budgets, and determine I had enough to be aggressive. Those are the people that really excelled. They, they went in, they took their position. They own it, and their hat.

Bruce Clay 8:36
I wrote a blog post and it was you're in a race and you're number nine, and you're running, and everybody in front of you suddenly comes to a standstill. They all stop. What do you do? Do you stop because they stop? Or do you pass them. And the more aggressive people that recognize that it was an opportunity. They sunk some money into it. And maybe they cut back on staff and maybe they had a hit where they're consuming. You know, the consumers weren't really driving their business as much. But if they could take the time to seize positions digitally. I think those were the big winners that are brand level. And fortunately, if you had a workouts that work where you

Shark 9:37
bought those purchases, were they all Amazon or were they a bunch of local brands because I think about what you said with location, location, location and agree. And it's there's such a 800 pound gorilla is not heavy enough to really describe Amazon and they have such a well crafted marketplace for people to go to and I see people throwing some dollars, especially at PPC trying to compete against that, and then they just get a lot of times just money wasted. But how do they really carve out themselves from a search engine perspective, to where they're able to pull some of that traffic over? What's the advice you would give so that they don't necessarily have to fall into Amazon and either lose a percentage of the spin to pay Amazon direct, you know, directly, or they find somebody else's product or service online within that marketplace?

Bruce Clay 10:30
Well, I think in our prior conversation, I mentioned that my garage is where Amazon boxes go to die. Yeah. Right. So like the elephant graveyard, I mean, I have almost half of the boxes that I have compressed down in my garage have this smiley face on it. So we know, we know, I'm big on Amazon. But this year, I found that what I did was I searched for like unique gifts for wives, or daughters, or sons or family or I did those kinds of queries. Because, you know, if you go to Amazon, you're not really going to get suggestions, you're not really going to have a lengthy list to choose from. That's just the way it is. So I found that I did a lot more searches that were generic non Amazon searches. But I would only buy from somebody where I could order it online, and get it fast enough. Now one of the phenomenon, I think I fell into is I was so used to I can order it from Amazon and get it in a day or two. I'm so used to that, that in some of my gift buying, I couldn't buy from the store because their delivery was 10 days. Right? They they weren't, they weren't geared to be as rapid. And I think that, you know, what I've learned from it myself is that you have to plan ahead a little bit more. You can't just assume everything's going to show up if you order it a week before Christmas, right. But everything showed up on time. So I was I was able to make it work. Because I did have a little bit more planning in there. But yeah, little stores, as long as you can order it and get it. And they when they say the delivery is going to be about this day, as long as you can tolerate that. I'm okay with non Amazon. Amazon is where you go to for commodity, but not necessarily ideas. And I think that works.

Shark 12:57
Good point, as you said something about SEO being a little bit slower. I'm curious whether you think this needs to even out as somebody who also offers both SEO services. And PPC, when you're talking to a business, they're looking at it within a three month window, then obviously they're going to look at where they're spending their money from a PPC type level. They want to trim down that spend, they can a lot with better content with better SEO efforts geared towards that over a six month to a year once Google's crawled it. But how do we go about sort of narrowing that down or understanding that better from a timeline perspective, then rather just thinking, here's what I can do in short term versus what I could do long term.

Bruce Clay 13:39
But the general belief in the industry is between three and 4x. The costs are higher and pay per click. So you're paying for that convenience. Right? Just like in a if you use a credit card, there's a three and a half percent fee, five and a half percent. If there's two 2% cashback. I mean, it depends on how the merchant wants to do it. But operationally, I think that you're right. It isn't going to be three months typically. Now there are some SEO companies that will say it's not going to be five, six months. Well, they're talking about either exceptionally strong brand, or local business, or longtail keywords that are obviously you're going to win a seven, seven word query, right? But the normal middle of the road, head or closer to the head terms, the two word phrases, things like that. Those take longer, and that's an investment. In a financial world that would be considered something like a house or art It takes longer to acquire the traffic, but it is an investment. And SEO is an investment that generates brand awareness and top of mind recall. Whereas an ad is hand to mouth more so. So in my case where we run into people who say I absolutely need the traffic, I'm a startup, I gotta have it, I gotta have it, I gotta have it. Usually, we recommend that they start a pay per click campaign, but that the operational implementation is it phases out except for high return. Now, SEO, if that same account can pick up long tail, some low hanging fruit, then SEO makes sense right away. But understand, if you're going to be in it for the long run, you kind of playing in both in the Pay Per Click space, you're always going to have a couple of keywords that are always going to convert, right, it gets to the point where if every time you put in $1, you get 100 out, you go to the bank and put in a stack of dollars, right, because the return is so high, but that isn't every keyword. And the cost is high. Because for that dollar you're putting in, you could be putting in 10 cents in SEO to get it. I have a lot of clients that have 20 to 100k monthly pay per click spends that are spending, you know, five to 10k on SEO and at 100k. A 10k. SEO is almost a rounding error. Right? So you got to do the SEO? The question is, what how do you do it? Now? I think your question also gets into a little bit of business strategy, like are you going to bootstrap this? Or do I have a war chest Am I funded? If I'm funded, I do it both. I do both. If I'm bootstrapping my way in, I need to make some sales. But I can't wait five, six months for SEO to kick in, I got to do this, the pay per click. Our strategy on pay per click is to get it to the point where pay per click is only to things to constantly make money and to maneuver SEO to be the rest. Now I think we've discussed this before, you get into the point where Google keeps inserting things at the top of the web result page. Right? Organic keeps moving down 10 pixels at a time farther down the page. And in many cases, it looks like Google is putting nine organic results on the page instead of 10 or sometimes as low as four based on how crowded they make the page. So in some scenarios, you may very well need to be doing pay per click just for first page visibility.

Shark 18:19
Yeah, I always think it's interesting because there's so many businesses, like you just said, during the pandemic, you lost roughly 40% of your business. So if you can afford to weather that storm, it's great. But then you start thinking about what can I do immediately to repair this for obvious reasons. And then you may end up skipping out on some stuff. And I think unfortunately, a lot of businesses fall into this trap. And over and over again, they start investing too much. I'm again, I'm a fan of advertising, that they started investing too much in advertising and not enough in SEO and knowing that how well they can work together, it's imperative that you understand how to make certain that they are working together, and not one making up for the other. So, you know, we've talked I know before about this a few weeks ago, and that is the subject of vanilla. And by vanilla, I mean the huge amount of content that's being produced out there by a lot of people that's looks like everybody else's vanilla. And as I've heard you say before it's lost its personality. How do you see the problems existing with content marketing today, especially with how brands should go about providing a remedy for it, considering how much of this is outsourced to third party agencies and consultants who, let's say, want to play it very safe, because I constantly get frustrated when I read content, not even as a marketer, but just as a consumer, and I can almost take the logo off and I have no idea. What's the differentiator for any of them.

Bruce Clay 19:51
Right? You're right, you're using the word vanilla. I I've used the word sterile and We've had that conversation. And I think that both works. Well to describe it the, in the beginning, the people that wrote the content and became brands in digital, were the people that expressed opinions. And they, you know, they spoke from the heart and they said, No, the way you want to do this is, well, over time. I think pages became too. Vanilla, they aren't expressing a personality. They're not saying, Hey, folks don't do that. They're just factual. They're becoming encyclopedias. Instead of becoming storytellers, or, or, you know, expressing a personal opinion that we could, we could take to the bank and count on and we, we know, they're an authority, and we know they're an expert, we can trust them. If it's sterile, as you said, if it's vanilla, if you took the brand name off, and it looks just like everybody else's, why would I trust? How do you differentiate yourself from everybody else? And I think that's been somewhat of a crisis on websites. You know, and it's something that happens over time, like the frog in the water, right? It's, it, it's, it happened. And it took forever 10 years for it to happen, the websites, and a lot of websites now, including my own, I'll admit a weakness, including my own, over time, became less opinionated. And more regurgitated fact. This is how you do it. fact fact? Fact? Not. Folks, if you do that it's done. I mean, you know, people listen to that. And so I've started campaigns within my own company to rewrite my content, to be sure that if it is something that is important to the reader to say it as a, you know, a personality trait, a voice for your company, but your writing, if it is to canola, if it is that you get to be a problem. Now, I think that part of where that there's two levels to that we've had this discussion, the two levels are I write it once, and I never change it. They become stale after a while. That is a problem. Or, and when I when I say that there's a burden on everybody to maintain content. Right? If I write content, I cannot assume for five years that it's absolutely still the case. And a lot of cases, content, is it ages. Right? If I wrote about the American Civil War, that probably doesn't age. But if I wrote about, you know, what? Cities, various sports teams are in a move around. I mean, you can't, you can't just do that. So the, there's a burden of maintaining your content. But then you have to have new content, and many people have gone out. And I've hired people to write their content that don't understand really your business and they don't understand your corporate voice. And they don't write with personality, because they're not you and they, you lose all of it.

Shark 23:52
Or to think about how much turnover there is in any good marketing department listed. They haven't farmed it out. The person writing the content today, it's a pretty good chance, they're not going to be there more than two years. You know, unless they're locked in with that company, the C level management, that's a whole other conversation, but the people that are in the basic content marketing roles that are on a brand, if there are those, they're probably going to move and change into different roles. And it's somebody else assumes it takes your content, and they don't tweak much more than some minor phrases.

Bruce Clay 24:25
Right. So we have found that clients hire us the right content. And we actually have to, we're not the cheapest game, but we're one of the better ones, I think, because we spend the time to figure out how do we write for the client? Right? If I were that person, if I had that voice? How would I write for that voice? And how would I express it and who are they selling to and what is the expectation of that person wrote of the personality? You don't run into that. People may have personas, but they don't really write for the voice of the user, they just write. And then the user may have to change it or, you know, but you, you're, you're getting content that says the same thing over and over and over and over again, for different people. And as you said, if you took the brand off, what is this site saying? It's different from that site, from that site? And I think that's one of the problems the search engines have, they can't, you know, how do they know

Shark 25:37
that it's 95%, filler, and maybe 5% solution. And that's why, and I noticed this when working with an agency who had a person that was good on their team at writing some content for a brand I was working with. Some time passed, switched agencies. That same person that was at the original agency had changed jobs and went to work for the new agency. Just so happens, they were involved with writing the content. And I started thinking about what is the voice of the brand that I'm specifically talking about here? Is it the person that's transitory in their job with when the brand has no idea what their voice really is? Is it Johnny or Susie, who works at the agency? Or is it what the logo actually, you know, the what the DNA of the company actually meant, and this gets lost, because you have a lot of vanilla writers, that doesn't mean it has to be a Mark Twain original, it just means you really need to know your voice. And, you know, every persona doesn't have to look the exact same as well. That's another thing I've noticed with a lot of personas is they look so similar to every other companies personas, when they aren't even when the companies aren't even in the same industry. And they generically portray people without really diving deep into how to solve their problem. And it's just, it's an issue. So I know you invest a lot of time in mentoring and what and it's a real concern for you, with SEO, in particular, and going through these radical changes that we've seen all over search engine marketing, as well. How do you go about mentoring the next group of marketers, what do you think they need to understand and not do with this generation of SEO or state? I mean, obviously, this path has been carved out over the last 20 something years, you know, we don't know what how Google's algorithms gonna look like, next Tuesday, let alone two years or 20 years from now. But what would be your advice on on how to mentor this next group of SEO ORs.

Bruce Clay 27:40
So mentoring has a lot of places in our business, all of our clients, every time we have a call, we're going over things, we're totally transparent. We mentor our clients, for every monthly sprint. So the clients perform well, and they learn. But one of the things that we have always done when I say always over 20 years, we've provided a course material for our people. So we're a big believer in training, just like SEO is never a once and done. Neither is training. And the people who go out and they take a course. And yay, I finished the course. And they don't take a course or pay attention for the next five years. They're out of date. So it's constant. As long as MIT is SEO is changing every Monday. You know, it's a new industry every Monday, right? As long as that is changing. There's a burden on all of us, as SEOs as marketers to stay current on that. So that is a good thing. Now, the hard part, what and by the way, we have SEO training. com, it's a membership. It's not a once and done and we cover a lot of things training, everybody should be in it. That has been our approach. And I have as a business. Maybe this is good or bad as well. I have hired experts, everybody in my business, we average 15 years experience per person, per person. I mean, that's a lot. I have nobody in my SEO team with less than 10 years. So we've been hiring at that level. And I really miss developing people, which is why we have created SEO training because that is how I get to help the industry stay alive. Now, what's my burden? As an SEO I probably read two hours a day. At least I follow all the important players and I listen, you know I get my feeds from Twitter and I sit on LinkedIn. and I follow this and I read the newsletters there, and I go to those websites, and I'm involved. You know, it's my role. And I think if I got too far from doing the hardcore SEO, my fingers would itch, right one of those. But I'm in it. And I think that what we need to do is bring that to the evolving, folks in industry that are, you know, a few years and that have to learn. My business model doesn't say, go out and hire a whole bunch of college students right out of school and spend the rest of your life training them. But my business model is to develop a program that will. And so that's our SEO training program, I think it's going to be critical to train people. I think one of the roles of an SEO is to train their boss on SEO, you don't just go into a company and do the job. You hit yours, the ombudsman for the industry within your company, you're the one that gets to say, Hey, this is why this is important. And have people take courses, I built a one hour course just for people to have their bosses take the course it's free, it's up on YouTube. Right? You find it on our site, you know, the executive, SEO course, Bruce Clay, you'll find it. And when you do this, I think that it isn't just that you have a burden of training the next generation of SEOs, but you have a burden of training your boss, people who may have come from Merchandising or scores that are now in the digital world, and are fumbling around. You know, a lot of us in SEO started out maybe as programmers, maybe even web, you know, web guys all along. That's all we ever did, maybe. But a lot of your bosses, you know, they're not that school. And I think the burden of training is up and down. But I think it's constant. And we developed a program that is constant. You know, it includes webinars and ask us anything, q&a sessions and courses and all sorts of stuff. That is what is going to cause the new generation to understand how to do SEO. And I think that's an important contribute.

Shark 32:41
Oh, absolutely. So you're an OG in SEO? Where do you see SEO, SEO going in the future? Kind of look at your crystal ball and tell us what you think about the future of SEO?

Bruce Clay 32:52
Well, I'm a big believer in what I refer to as futures research, which is really crystal ball, if you want to be technical about it. For the time being Google is trying, I believe, trying to raise your hand, if you believe se that Google is in the business of making money. Right? Everybody raised their hands. So Google isn't really caring so much about SEO. I think that as SEOs. And we've had this discussion as well, that there's sort of a separation now in SEO, it's less mainstream marketing and more programming ish or technical ish. It's becoming more technical. And that future, I think, is always going to be there, there's going to be a need for somebody to help websites be more visible.

Shark 33:54
Well, and I know you work, you know, primarily with medium to large sized businesses. Right. So I think one of the things that obviously the pandemic has seen open up is so many people becoming entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, what would you like to see in a lot of the, the BI tools, if you will, from website design, in particular, with with SEO, because so many people have got Squarespace sites or similar type site sites like that, that don't have the most robust SEO available right now. But if there was, if you could sort of pick one thing that people could do more often, to really optimize their own sites right now, when they're on a self published quick design, drag and drop type wiziwig site, what would your recommendation be to how they improve SEO efforts?

Bruce Clay 34:45
Have they have the resources I would put it on a non wiziwig site, but the problem with a lot of the sites that are hosted for you or that are are emerging sites is they design it for minimal maintenance. The company that built the software doesn't want to have to do a lot of maintenance work on it and see all sorts of unique bugs and things. So they restrict what you can do. And if it's hosted, you don't have access to the server to change some of the server files. So you are pretty much you know, hogtied, you're, you're tied to a platform that was not designed for SEO, and in fact precludes a lot of the capabilities of SEO. For the sake of convenience, yeah,

Shark 35:47
yes. But because we're shopping on Amazon here, and not ordering what we really want that would take three weeks to get there. I agree with all of that. And I coded sites for almost two decades. But the ease of drag and drop is ridiculous for what I would need to spend to do a much better site. From an SEO perspective. Yeah, it frustrates me that I don't have more SEO capabilities. But I know so many people that don't know SEO, or, or how to code a page. So the last thing you're thinking of, they're thinking of, I just go to some tool that sells websites that host some throw up something quickly. And then they don't they ignore SEO completely?

Bruce Clay 36:35
Well, there's all sorts of things here, like, the cheaper you want it, the cheaper you get it, right. So if you're looking for easy pay a little bit, you know, monthly hosting, that isn't necessarily going to help you. Right? Think about what SEO is, it's a opportunity to express yourself as an expert to a search engine, and the search engine then can send you free traffic. Folks, the free traffic isn't free. Because the search engine expects you to pay your dues. Now you're not paying them for the organic dues. But if you can't get them to appreciate you, and see that you have made the investment in this accurate information in an accurate way there that can appreciate you know, if somebody has spent $100,000 on a website, and you have spent 1000. And they have depth of content, and you just made it quick and easy. They're not the same I

Shark 37:51
agree completely. Well, Bruce asked this of all the guests on my show. You're an LA guy not that far from the coast. I just did a dive of California coast. What is your favorite kind of shark and why?

Bruce Clay 38:05
You are? I don't think the rest of the sharks are very, very good. The

Shark 38:09
best content answer that will make SEOs happy as well. Alright, well, Bruce, it's a special time in the show. Are you ready for the five most interesting and important questions that you're going to be asked today? Okay, I'm ready. These are not too bad. All right. Here we go. So you are the author of The Best Selling search engine optimization, all in one for Dummies books. Which one do you prefer? The first edition, that feeling when you it's really not about just the information in it. But the feeling you got when you finish the first edition, or each new edition that you write?

Bruce Clay 38:47 The the first edition was more feeling of relief, because that was a monumental effort. It's 700 page. So

Shark 38:58
like 765 or something like that. I remember looking it up.

Bruce Clay 39:01
Yeah, it's it's a pretty healthy book. It's really nine books and one and it covers SEO, and servers and core web vitals and all this stuff. Right? Well, anyhow, back then a first edition was a relief to have it done. The second and third editions. By the way, if you get the fourth edition, which is just came out this month, last month. You're your book has been pretty popular. And so I think the last edition, the edition we just did was really as satisfying as the first because we got to go back through the book and really critique it. So The last edition. I have a very good friend Christopher Jones. He's been around in the industry as long as I have. And Chris and I decided to go through the book with different eyeballs. And we really tweaked it up. And I think the fourth edition when it just came out is really I think it's great. And I'm really happy to have that. Maybe there'll be a fifth edition down the road, but for right now, I don't see a need to do that. I think the first was great. The fourth was great.

Shark 40:41
All right, number two, the beaches of California or the mountains.

Bruce Clay 40:50
All right, so I think the mountains and the reason isn't because I don't like the beaches, but the ocean here is cold. It's ice cold. It's 62 to 64 degrees, something like that. And in the summer, it goes all the way up to 65. I mean to me, I'm a warm guy. I prefer to be pretty warm. So I prefer the mountains.

Shark 41:18
Yeah, the beaches are always gonna win for me, but I just got back from a dive in Florida at a time land. The water should be would probably the water temperature in Florida, in winter is considered at coldest what would the warmest in in LA waters would be I remember the first time I went out. And I ran into the water and I didn't know. And that. I mean, you learn once that it's like a polar plunge. Alright, so number three, you got friends or family coming into town. Although the the seasons roughly overlap, you have a choice of taking them to a game or you taking them to an LA Dodgers game or an LA Lakers game, either. Yeah, better experience baseball experience. Alright, number,

Bruce Clay 42:12 you know, it's easier to get the food. Yes, that is true.

Shark 42:17
All right, number four, PPC, or content marketing,

Bruce Clay 42:24
content marketing. I actually wrote a book on content marketing. So I'm a little bit inclined to do that. I think that to win the heart of your site visitor. As you heard, I was talking about personality, but it's also the story. It's, you know, you can't express your brand. your vision, your mission, with pay per click. Yeah. And you just can't. And I think that while people who are on a mission, I gotta buy this, I gotta buy it right now. Deep down in the funnel, they will click on your ad, but you're gonna pay for it, but they'll click on your ad. I think that winning the hearts of your consumer can only be done with content marketing.

Shark 43:18
Yeah, definitely. We're checking up content marketing strategies for professionals. So I remember Alright, number five, in the most important question that you're gonna be asked today is biscuits or cornbread.

Bruce Clay 43:29 Biscuits, if they have graded,

Shark 43:34
even better choice. Alright, so Bruce, where can people find out more about you? Read the books keep up with what your thoughts are in the SEO and marketing space and more?

Bruce Clay 43:44
Well, I have only I have three websites, SEO training.com, Seo tools.com. And Bruce clay.com. And Bruce clays where I do my services. Obviously, it was my first website. So that's important. And you really want to try it. You know, for instance, it's super fast. And it's complex. And it's sort of a hybrid of the two. So you know, it's kind of a showcase thing for our company. Find me at Bruce play.com my emails B play at Bruce glade calm. So it's pretty easy to find me. I do engage. So I'm happy to answer questions.

Shark 44:25
All right. Well, Bruce, thank you again very much for being with us today on a shark's perspective.

Bruce Clay 44:29
Thank you very much. Yannick I love being here. I'd love to come back.

Shark 44:39
So there was my conversation with Bruce Clay, known as the father of SEO and the founder and president of the global digital marketing optimization firm, Bruce Clay, Inc.; he's the author of the "Search Engine Optimization All in One for Dummies" series of books and the author of "Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals." Let's take a look at three key takeaways from a conversation with him.

First, so where to invest that war chest. If you're considering more content SEO versus running PPC ads, for example, don't get caught in the prison of two ideas that so many do. It's one versus the other in most arguments and content SEO often gets looked at as David versus the Google Goliath. And we know who wins that story. But what is not the sacrifice of the other despite what some pundits view, when you still have to give proper focus to other factors like next quarter sales numbers, customer experience and other forms of marketing as well. You want me to evaluate your performance in a three to six month period with a tactics and levers you pulled or didn't pull? Well, those insightful blog posts likely won't drive traffic to your site when the CFO needs a return immediately with a new offering. And adds only should never be the end all be all anyway, because they have a diminishing return as well. It simply requires you to have a thoughtful approach to how they all work together, measure what you can and measure what you can pull back from one spin. Sounds easy, but most don't farewell. And then they're caught in that prison. Invest your war chest wisely, so that the C suite is happy, but never forget to invest in the most important C word title, the customer and what they need.

Second, so many of the buy sites, the WYSIWYG drag and drop sites are great, but their SEO capabilities are limited. But you see companies like Squarespace doing Superbowl ads, because the explosion in entrepreneurs and solopreneurs is growing at such a fast pace. Convenience is great, but invest any time you can into optimizing your own site. With whatever SEO capabilities you can use, you'll definitely see the results in time.

Third, most content it seems, is lost its personality. This is where I yell about bloggers at agencies and brands a lot, especially take the low golf anything you do, especially your content marketing, and your blog posts. And if there is not much difference between you and your competition, then something is wrong. And trust me it's worth the look. You may feel like it's safe, but I have no idea what the differentiator is in your sea of sameness. Why should I choose you if you're just another flavor of the same vanilla that I can get from a cheaper brand. The way brands and agencies are structured with moving pieces CMOs and agencies add to this problem as well. Most content sucks. I have no idea as a customer as to why should pick you because your competition doesn't have your voice, your personality or your differentiator. Voice your difference show some personality don't mimic the competition just because they wrote a blog post a certain way. Be a better writer and content marketer. Consumers will reward you for it.

Got a question? Send me an email to Kenneth at asharksperspective.com.

Thank you again for the privilege of your time. I am so thankful to everyone who listens.

Please consider writing a review and letting me know your thoughts on the show. Time is a war chest too.

And I hope that you'll continue to invest that here and join us on the next episode of A Shark's Perspective.
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