How To Increase Search Engine Visibility For Your Products

How To Increase Search Engine Visibility For Your Products

 

Mark Fidelman  02:19

Hello everyone. Welcome to the digital brand builder podcast where we interview experts on a single subject. And today, we have Chris Dickey from visibly, and he’s going to talk about how you can bring more visibility to your brand, especially on search engines. So, you know, Chris, I want to welcome to the show and please give us a little bit of background on yourself and, and where you come from.

02:53 Chris Dickey

Thanks for having me

02:55 Chris Dickey

yeah you know I’ve been in marketing professional for the last 17 years, I’ve been in house. I’ve worked with startups I’ve worked with national companies. I’ve worked as a marketing director I’ve worked in publishing. For the last 13 years I’ve worked in primarily PR agencies, which is kind of an interesting place to come from when you’re talking about search, you don’t see that often but more recently in the last 10 years I’ve actually operated my own agency it’s called purple, orange brand communications. And then several years ago. While we were at war he started kind of exploring some of the intersection between PR and search, and that gateway to a new idea that we call this that I call visibly visibly is a brand new software solution that can check out and will help identify how well your brand is doing for any given keyword search.

Mark Fidelman  03:52

Okay, wonderful so why don’t we talk about why search engine visibility is so important today.

03:59 Chris Dickey

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, if you think about it from a marketing perspective. There’s a lot of marketers are kind of stuck with the conundrum how do we get in front of more people, how do we at top of funnel marketing How do you even know that we exist as an option for everything that they need. And, you know, historically PR advertising those have kind of been the primary vehicles for that but increasingly, if you think about our own behavior when it comes to product discovery how we learn about new stuff. It all happens through search, I’ll happen two thirds in search engines. There’s around 70,000 searches every single second mark, it’s it’s pretty incredible and every single one of those searches you can assume as a question, and are finding an answer that search somewhere in the first five organic links on a page. Perhaps further down but his you know you know looking. Statistically speaking it’s about 70 or 70% of all the clicks I’m all about, you know, for a keyword will land within the first five organic listings which makes it a really competitive piece of real estate.

Mark Fidelman  05:10

Yeah. And, you know, besides the obvious which is revenue is, you know, is there any other benefits to being on the first couple of pages of Google’s Google search result.

05:24

I think that I think the most important thing that we’re interested in and it’s something that all of our clients are purple or interest or interested in is just getting on people’s aware, you know, just when you go on people’s radar. And that sense of, Hey, we exist and we only offer a solution to the thing that you need is what we call it on top of funnel marketing, and it’s it’s a really, really tough thing I think once people are in the proverbial funnel you can kind of get them to come back to your website through emails or retargeting or whatever it might be, but search offers this like incredibly unique platform where people who are looking for your thing, type in a question to Google, and you can get right in front of them and you also know as a marketer, how many people every single month are searching for that term what’s their average, click through rate all these different things like that. So getting more intelligence on how to build brand visibility. At the top of search is a really really important subject. I mean,

Mark Fidelman  06:27

I’m sure that if you look at the revenue of companies that are on the first page versus the 30th it’s it’s a huge discrepancy. And I can’t, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to strive whether it’s longtail keywords or, you know, the shorter keywords to get to page one or two.

06:47

Yeah, and I can just give you a little anecdote from my from my experience in PR,

06:52

the valuable PR heads

06:55

that we’ve ever landed for clients are the PR IDs that ended up bubbling up to the top of search for really popular keyword, and that stuff is that’s kind of essentially how we ended up hitting as an agency’s early years ago was recognizing, you know, we were we were winning major PR wins across the board. You know, we’ve actually you know, working with you too. In the past, as a writer at Forbes. But aside from all that and you recognize that if an article didn’t live beyond the flicker of the moment that it was published it had really limited value for our clients.

07:31

And given the digital noise that there is

07:37

the digital landscape is for attention. Search really provides SEO and search really provides the primary vehicle for anything being sticky when people are looking for something over time. So we would we you know sometimes it’s not you expect ends up getting rewarded with a ton of search, but those when you kind of look back at all the stats and all that, how things are performing, time and time again, at least from our perspective, those PR hits were by far the most productive for our clients.

Mark Fidelman  08:13

And so what’s changed from even five years ago or three years ago, in terms of SEO, what what are the big changes that have occurred if if someone from three years ago did an SEO exercise until now.

08:27

I think that

08:28

yeah so the biggest thing that I’ve identified is this idea that search engines are no longer just doing straight up keyword matching you know you used to be out and you did all the right things with your website, and you got a bunch of backlinks from high quality websites. And then you just played the clean the SEO game and you did the keywords and in search engines would would kind of recognize that you’re an authoritative site and then they elevate you. It’s not that simple anymore. What search engines are trying to do now is determine the intent of the person who is submitting the query. And what I mean by that is that people look or the search engine tries to determine say I’m looking for a pair of scissors.

09:16

And that’s an extra keywords like shoes. And this description has to make a

09:22

has to make a determination is that somebody’s trying to buy a pair of running shoes or are they trying to learn about your running shoes Yeah, whereas there’s nothing else going on. And, and so what SEO is called that is like the idea of transactional intent, versus informational intent. And so, you know, if, if you’re not focused on the intent of a search engine results. You might you’re, you’re, you really need to pivot your strategy around the understanding of how a search engine is elevating certain content, depending on how it interprets the attempt of a keyword.

Mark Fidelman  10:00

Okay. And are you able to influence that a as a potential company that’s trying to become more SEO friendly is that is

10:12

that you can’t you can’t implement, Google will do, but you can respond to it. Right. And you can collect better intelligence, so you can understand what your keywords are transactional and what your keywords are informational. And that’s something that we recognize as efficiency it’s like okay like well we have a tremendous opportunity to win top of page visibility or recommendations for our clients. But we only have opportunity, if that keyword is informational in a, you know, in intent. If the keyword is interpreted as transactional and that it’s populating a bunch of e commerce heads as a PR agency we had zero clay on that page there’s nothing we can do there. But if it you know if the if the search engine is interpreting the intended for it as informational. It’s all PR. And so being able to kind of like bucket your keywords as transactional or informational then kind of what you want to do is you want to share those visits to different teams, it becomes a very multi channel approach to search. And, you know, SEO traditional SEO is typically defined as how do you do ranking of your own website and search. But I think what marketers should recognize and should raise is the idea that doesn’t matter how somebody finds your brand and so long as they find you. And there’s so many potential touch points on the first page of search, as I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation. A lot of those touch points are there are all competing for the same real estate in the same clicks. So it makes sense as a digital marketer to pursue all the potential touch points, all the potential places where a customer may discover your product or service. And then saturated right second thing your favorite.

Mark Fidelman  12:06

Though you would said, if it’s informational, you could influence it and that’s all PR No. Isn’t it more than just public relations in terms of how you can influence it can’t you just do your own blog posts or videos or other types of content.

12:22

And that would be, you know, honestly that’s the gold standard, is if you can get your own content to show up at the top of search. I think the problem that we see quite often as an agency. Is that a lot of our clients. Simply in most in most brands and, in fact, do not have the domain authority to burst onto that top tier of search results. They’re literally displacing companies like a New York Times or something you know, in order to do in recognizing that that that that click behavior is so narrowly focused very page. It really does. spend a lot of money to get on to page two, or even at the bottom of page one. It does if you can get out the page one. Fantastic. Great. You guys

13:14

are you’re in the top.

13:17

1% or more, but for the rest that 99.9%. It’s worth looking at the multi channel approach about how you reach your customer. Why not

Mark Fidelman  13:27

just for go up your budget, or a content production budget and just pay, pay to be on page one.

13:34

Yeah, absolutely, super expensive. It can be more expensive than TPR and creating content. Yeah, for sure,

13:43

our, our clients are demanding

13:46

upwards of, anywhere from 10 to $100,000 a month in a pay per click.

13:53

And it’s, it’s still an adding on. Yeah, this is paying it goes away.

14:01

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the fact is, there’s always somebody, you know, kind of nipping at your heels because it’s because the whole thing is a bidding process. So, the second that you draw out how much you willing to pay someone else comes up in

14:16

a bid or competition for that.

Mark Fidelman  14:18

Right, but then you got to worry about Google changing their algorithms again which we’ll get into in just a second yeah

14:23

i mean i think i don’t think it says, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying, Do I want to do an ad play or do I want to optimize for gameplay. Figuring out like what’s the right balance for your company there. And that’s, I think, a really critical piece for marketers is to say is I think something that doesn’t happen enough, especially with search engines, marketing, is that getting all together in one place, putting forward a unified strategy to say okay. These are the keywords we’re going to optimize for organically here PR here’s your purchase orders, e commerce here’s your marching orders, sem, we use these keywords to create this ability and these, these other kind of results. Otherwise, pick it get organic penetration. That kind of coordination. I think is pretty rare, but with companies that do it well it’s incredibly effective,

15:17

and how important is.

15:20

Oh it’s super important.

15:24

You know, things are created equal, you know i think

15:26

i think most your audience know that it’s important to say though that there are two types of links there’s there’s regular links, which are known as follow links are follow links. There’s a nofollow stuff, and the nofollow that just means that you’re not getting any recognition to search engine for that link in knowing that it exists, and knowing how to avoid them, or just really not necessarily avoid them. Knowing how to spend your efforts more wisely. So, you go through this like rabbit hole and trying to get some backlinks that you actually get credit for them. Okay,

16:04

now let’s get to.

Mark Fidelman  16:06

So we’ve talked about burdens we’ve talked about a few changes in SEO now. I somebody works with you or your soon to be released tool called Blakely, what is it that they need to do walk us through that in order to create their search engine visibility.

16:25

Yeah, totally. So, first thing you need to do is get your key words organized, identify words are drawn, or, you know, relevant to your customers, what are they using to find your product or service online, not in position they don’t know you exist as a non branded keywords. Search volumes like the rates. You know, you can okay compete, you know,

16:56

competitive they are but it’s a strategy.

16:59

It’s kind of nice to go after keywords because you can use other channels to this brand visibility strategies are grant dominance across those keywords as well. So first, get your keywords organized. Second thing is, you know, plug them in. You can do this kind of naturally just google search or you can use the clipboard that we created visibly it’ll be free, by the way, so it’s. We’re not trying to show you what you went to a shameless.

17:25

Check out what what it visibly allows

17:27

you to do is to basically cross analyze against. So, we look at his age age we don’t just look at the link, we look at the content within

17:38

sweets we look at the content as well. grappling with somebody see a big clue

17:45

about your brand yesterday now step further and we segment. So tell you right away. It’s just an e commerce site as a PR is this is a brand new segmentation, new lines the whole process. I have an idea of the intent of these various keywords for their their transactional over information you have an idea of what your brain does instead. Well, it also points out your blind spots. And then lastly you can quickly segment, you can say okay, I just want to pull out ecommerce stuff. I don’t have that list handed over to my ecommerce team. I want to pull all of the money out of this list, I’m hammering my PR team. So once you’ve got that stands What do you need to do they talk to you with their marching orders are so they speak, and then you benchmark your success and because you check it a month or two later. See if you didn’t get better see if you could have improved overall footprint on that.

Mark Fidelman  18:53

So let’s talk about this visibly just review that information for you, it makes it really really simple. Is that what happens,

19:02

we’re basically doing.

19:05

We are listening. We’re listening.

19:09

We identify with, showing up across all different channels, not just subscribe today like me to review on your

19:18

third, you know, organic search results.

19:23

Or we can tell you that your commerce sites. Is there any page is actually featuring your brand or it’s not your brand.

19:32

I think all that stuff is really important managing these channels in your

19:37

funnel

19:38

visibility. And then, I was a second.

Mark Fidelman  19:44

Just for tools to help people understand

19:50

where they’re at, so right so the first thing is listening.

19:54

The second thing is building, and that’s

19:58

what I think is really important. You have all this information, extracting it and organizing the way that your teams know what to do next is really important for you as well. Okay.

Mark Fidelman  20:12

Now, once you find out what’s going on, what then do you recommend people do in order to take the next step forward.

20:23

Well, it’s kind of trying to figure out internally,

20:26

how do you how do you understand the makeup of these different search engine pages to try to get in front of users. And, you know, some pages, you’re not going to be too competitive to deal with

20:44

no basis, meaning they have

20:47

a ton of e commerce in a relationship was e commerce players but whatever merchant pays. That’s something that you need to press on your ecommerce, where it’s a PR thing and maybe there’s a bunch of humans who just weren’t even identifying it those are that goes outwards. The traders word. So, it’s very much cleaner to get better job and your, your collective marketing. Okay. And are you essentially home at least some of them.

Mark Fidelman  21:23

I’ve just been trying

21:26

until I noticed visibly and so I need to enter

21:31

into a separate company. I don’t want to intermix it too much.

21:37

As you know, he have

21:41

come in from the agency side where

21:43

she said, you know, if we will actually do this work on behalf of our clients. Don’t just work for us or for clients and physically. It was

21:54

a realization for us, meaningful the work was we’d be able to get off with really basic like running shoes

22:06

would never be able to actually break for as a, as a brand

22:11

to reinforce it written, and you could

22:16

go in there and one.

22:19

Flip over the organic results, almost anywhere you learn stuff. That is super powerful strategy for an easy tangible way to measure PR.

22:35

But there’s really tough, energy, which is why

22:41

we develop visibly visibly is. It’s kind of funny like if we were to step back, ask the question, and existence are simple questions.

22:54

No single solution that answers that question, big tech out there that tells you what you’re asking. Wait,

23:05

out there that tells you where you’re, you’re upset. Show me up. Just

23:10

start listening.

23:13

Vertical Box. No idea.

23:17

So, so there was nobody didn’t do a full

23:23

brain flip printer

23:25

presence across any word or phrase in TV. Oh my god this is such a productive energy for our agency, why not doing it so there’s a ton of different ways you could legally. We use it as an agency.

23:44

Yeah. Okay. All right.

Mark Fidelman  23:48

You know, as you’re. Let’s say they’ve hired to work with you. Are you then using the tool yourself in order to see how you’re doing in terms of page one, two, is it’s a part of your, your passion.

24:04

So, so I call it search engine visibility.

24:08

It’s different from search engine.

24:12

Sem it’s

24:15

typically related to your own websites like

24:20

TCP or social. So really, the idea of just how do you increase stronger visibility in search PR as a huge piece of that. And all of it is is sizable. When you look at key words content.

24:40

But yeah, you know,

24:42

it’s not I don’t think the PR, you know PR

24:47

purposes. To make announcements sometimes it’s

24:52

a recall, that’s not, you know,

24:57

I think there comes a viable strategy for you, is when you’re trying to use PR to create

25:07

brand awareness, sit on top of a phone call customer acquisition.

25:12

And when you look at that guy.

25:15

Yeah, like

25:17

huge huge

25:20

playground where you should be doing some work.

Mark Fidelman  25:23

Okay. Excellent. So, what else do you run, and people you do.

25:31

Besides,

Mark Fidelman  25:34

working on the like your prints or else is coming. They know and take away from,

25:43

You know, that’s

25:47

course. Yeah, I mean,

25:51

you know, for us,

25:54

visibly content.

25:56

Content and doing good content and that’s what you do I know you do a fantastic job of that. So, not only understanding. The, the keywords and the kind of the trends happening in your space but then we just really interesting editorial work that picks up that not only kind of maximizes your opportunity for your own SEO. But also, you know, has that virality kind of acts that aspect to it that people want to share and talk about engage with. So I’m a huge fan of content. Otherwise, you know, just make sure that you’re, you know, checking all the boxes for your website like, make sure that you’re optimized for mobile make sure that you’re looking at that your PageSpeed is amazing. There’s a ton of free tools out there. Yeah, just kind of Google for free SEO tool, you know, you’ll get up, you’ll get a bucket load. Okay.

Mark Fidelman  26:52

Yeah, I mean the mobile thing has become big with what was the panda release where if you didn’t have a mobile optimized page, you would be penalised.

27:02

It’s kind of wild if you think about it, Google has 9090 plus percent of the world’s market share. Search and effectively they put out this this this this this rulebook that says, hey, if it unless you can form the way that we want you to create a website and like presenting materials, we’re not going to rank you up. Yeah, so they are an asset as a single company rebuilding the entire web. The entire internet and the image that they want to see what you know, for better or worse,

Mark Fidelman  27:32

probably worse, but we’ll see. We’ll see if there’s an emerging not gonna comment version competitor coming out. Okay, so I’m vague, thank you for all of that strategies and tactics. There’s a whole lot more and I know there is one of the things I would like the audience to take away is, you know, Chris has got a, a white paper on the subject called The Ultimate Guide to search engine visibility. And he’s also got that search tool that he talked about called visibly which is free, so you should be going to each of those places where would they find them Chris.

28:10

Yes, visibly is the is Abo why people who are wondering, and it’s just, yeah, B is ebay.com to visibly calm.

Mark Fidelman  28:22

Okay, wonderful and then the white papers on your website. It is,

28:25

yeah, easy to find.

Mark Fidelman  28:27

Alright. Good, now I have two final questions before we wrap things up. One, and the first one is about what’s the hottest digital marketing technology that you recommend people do, or download or use right now.

28:40

That’s good. That’s a great question. Man, there’s a lot of good ones, one that I use, which just keeps my head in the game I feel like is this chrome plug in called keywords everywhere. And it’s, it’s pretty brilliant it’s just it’s just kind of poppy it kind of just fits on the side of your browser and anytime you’re doing any search, it just tells you the actual volume of that keyword search, as well as a bunch of related keywords to it and it happens so quickly and it gives you all this kind of data on the page. And even if you’re not thinking or doing something tactical at the moment. It just becomes like a kind of a fun thing to see on the side of the, you know, of your view browser in a kind of keeps you thinking constantly about how to do a better job in SEO.

Mark Fidelman  29:33

Okay, yeah, fantastic. I haven’t downloaded but I’m going to because it looks very interesting words everywhere. Yeah. All right. And then last question is in your space, who’s the most influential person in marketing today.

29:47

Man,

29:49

I,

29:50

I you know I really admire this guy named Rand Fishkin. Probably a lot of your audience knows who he is. He’s the founder of Moz he’s no longer involved in the SEO space, but, boy. He’s. I don’t know the whole story i i think he was unceremoniously removed at Moz. I think there’s a non compete involved with his with his relationship with that company. But, you know, regardless of all that like he’s just he’s just been such a great educator and thought leader in the space, and has been there for really since I think the beginning and people are really starting to realize that they needed to be more tactical when it came to search. So yeah, I really enjoy following what he has to say, you know, on the subject.

Mark Fidelman  30:42

Okay yeah and he’s got a lot of videos online I wonder since he probably hasn’t produced on or two in a while. What’s changed. I think the basics are great what he does and he did it in such a fun way. But I’m curious as to

30:56

how some of that stuff is he’s like a newscaster that ended up in search, you know, he’s so good in front of the camera, he’s so smooth and he’s just he’s, he’s a really smart person.

Mark Fidelman  31:09

Okay. Yeah, I agree. And to me, there’s a lot of smart people but the way he delivered the information was clever. I really liked the I mean he really got into that character. I’m sure that character was him. Yeah, I mean, I mean with the mustache and all the props and costumes just the way the guy is right. Yeah. Okay. Well, Chris, we’re gonna wrap things up I really appreciate you being on the show, and I look forward to her next chat. In the next coming months.

31:41

Awesome. Well thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

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