People think "what do I have to do" rather than "what do I want to do"… outsourcing allows you to get to the place where you can choose what you want to do, and not be stuck in the rut of "need to do". BUT, that can lead to a midlife crisis, even at 25 years old.

It's easy to outsource, but apparently, attaching your name to a project tends to make the process much more difficult, especially if you are perfectionist like Lee Louis Gung. We didn't get to the practical stuff - how do you outsource successfully… so we recorded a follow up episode that is a must-listen if you listened all the way to the end of this one :).

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

Daniel gets a whole football team of touch points... and the Brand SERP is the striker who scores the goal. Luckily for me.

We also discuss the rebranding for the podcast, but didn't figure out the new name :(

Daniel on LinkedIn

Ahmed Khalifa with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO September 2019

Ahmed Khalifa talks with Jason Barnard about why you would use captions and subtitles for your video.

 

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

Apparently, professionals can write captions almost in real time, including descriptions about background noise. I personally hadn’t thought about how important that can be for context. It’s not just what we say, but the context in which we say it.

Ahmed is deaf, and relies on captions. But all sorts of people benefit from captioned videos… Of course, we get onto Glaswegian accents. Heads up Craig Campbell. Auto captioning is far from perfect. It needs to be corrected. Then we get onto pushing that to transcripts and adapted transcripts. Apparently, professionals can write captions almost in real time, including descriptions about background noise. Guess who hadn’t thought about how important that can be for context. It’s not just what we say, but the context in which we say it. I speak too much without engaging my brain. Ahmed saves the day and makes me sound intelligent. Phew !

Jason Barnard

I’m going to reread your name to make sure I get it right. #SEOisAEO, welcome to the show. Ahmed Khalifa.

Ahmed Khalifa

Actually, yeah, that's quite like intro. People should do that more often.

Jason Barnard

Yeah, but the shame was I actually had to read it.

Ahmed Khalifa

I don't blame you for that.

Jason Barnard

Thank you. Lovely to meet you. I believe you started your career in Brighton.

Ahmed Khalifa

Kind of. I did have an agency experience in Worthing. So I lived there for like a year and I did agency work. I did a few things building up to it, then from then on, I just kept up the momentum.

Jason Barnard

And you worked for a company called Fresh Egg? My first thought when I saw fresh egg was rotten egg.

Ahmed Khalifa

My first thought was some kind of farm or something And that was about seven or eight years ago now. So it's been a while.

Jason Barnard

Okay. Right. Brilliant stuff.

 

Video Captions

Jason Barnard

You were talking about that earlier on, and shamefully I didn't see your talk… but you gave me a quick idea of what it was all about. Captions on videos and how rubbish they can be when they're auto generated on YouTube and people leave them idiotically.

Ahmed Khalifa

Pretty much. And they don't give it a second thought.

Jason Barnard

Yeah. And, and you were telling me why that's particularly interesting for you?

Ahmed Khalifa

Well, I mean, if I'm going to go from my personal experience, I depend on captions because I'm deaf and I depend on captions just to access videos. But then even if it's not for me, it can be for all for people for whom English is not their first language. They're learning the language. Or it could be some kind of learning disability and they need captions to keep up. It could be attention deficit disorder. It could be even be, for all of us, because you may be an urban transport or maybe you're in a library or whatever, and you just want to watch the video in silence.

Jason Barnard

Or it could be that the person speaking has a really, really thick Glaswegian accent like Craig Campbell.

Ahmed Khalifa

That is one thing that I mentioned in the talk. I had the example of Kevin Bridges, the comedian. He’s from Glasgow, and the auto captions struggled. to get it right - and it was interesting what they come up with. So, of course, a strong Glaswegian accent can affect things (smiles).

Jason Barnard

That leads us really neatly onto the idea that if you make a video, do the transcript. Stick it on your site, then you get both the text - remember, people people prefer reading to watching videos. People talking about this more and more in this industry. Is that a great strategy moving forward?

 

Transcripts and Video

Jason Barnard

Put a transcript on your site, then you get both the text - remember, people people prefer reading to watching videos. People talking about this more and more in this industry. Is that a great strategy moving forward?

Ahmed Khalifa

It is. I mean, it's a way for you to target both YouTube search and web search. They're two separate things. If you have captions and you've done it correctly, you've done all the editing and it is clean and accurate and correct, then great - YouTube will be able to understand better what the video is about. Then you can use the captions and turn them into a transcript and that can be your blog post where you can embed the same video. So then you target the web search as well. So with one video. You can target both web search and YouTube search.

Jason Barnard

I suppose if somebody exported the auto-thingy - sorry, I can’t remember what it’s called - (captions) and put it on a page and they would read it and they would think, yes, I do look stupid.

Ahmed Khalifa

You’d be surprised. I think more often than not, if you export auto-generated captions, it is not possible to read it.

Jason Barnard

Yeah. I tried doing auto texts for the podcast using Google's language analysis thing, and it was just rubbish.

Ahmed Khalifa

It’s not there for a complete transcript. You're not replacing people who do it manually. It gives you a head start and then you can edit manually. So it will save some time. Doing it word by word - manually stop and type in, play. Listen. Stop it. Play it. - That’s gonna take forever. Although there are experts out there, who can do it quite quickly. They can do it in real time, more or less.

Jason Barnard

I've got a mate who does English subtitles for French films. And he says he more or less types it in real time.

Ahmed Khalifa

People can can do that. It's quite impressive.

Jason Barnard

But you must be typing something slightly after you've heard it and still trying to listen to the current words.

Ahmed Khalifa

And not only that… you may have to put in for example, an explosion in the background, a car crash or whatever. So it’s not just about what the person said, it’s about the sound effects. So that person will also have to think about that. - the sentence ends, new line, then car crash or explosion or whatever.

Jason Barnard

And of course YouTube auto-captioning doesn’t do that.

 

Captions and Context

Ahmed Khalifa

No, it doesn't. So you've got no idea if there's been a crush in the background. Not at all. And that was one of the arguments I gave in the talk I did today. For example, if you are in a room and there's a background noise of some wind… that could mean anything. It could be the wind outside. A very windy day. It could be the wind noise coming from a TV. It could be wind noise coming down the chimney coming out of the fireplace.

Jason Barnard

Oooh ! Context.

Ahmed Khalifa

Yeah, that’s what I talk about a lot. It's about context. You have to provide context - we communicate not just by content, but with context as well. And that's the whole point of re-touching, rewriting. It's not just the words, you need to really understand the emotion, the story, the context of that video.

Jason Barnard

Oh, that's brilliant. So it's not just the words we're saying, it's the context. And when you watch subtitles films - I live in France and we’ve got quite a lot of subtitled films - you see all these stage directions and descriptions of what's going on.

Ahmed Khalifa

It's one of the most common things people say like “Oh, I hate that channel, I don't really watch it”, but for some reason it's okay for them when it's a foreign film. Okay. Well, it's kind of a similar concept because if you can accept it in a foreign film, then why can’t you accept in your spoken language.

Jason Barnard

And I would imagine that one of the things that stops brands during the subtitles themselves is cost.

Ahmed Khalifa

Yep. And that's a false economy. It's very false, because the are very cheap ways of doing it. First of all, you can do it for free. You can upload your video on YouTube, have them auto-generated and then edit them .

Jason Barnard

Yup. That's free.

Ahmed Khalifa

And there are AI machine that do it for you for 10 cent a minute.

Jason Barnard

Can I just ask a quick question? The services with AI machines doing it for 10 cents a minute… are they better than YouTube?

Ahmed Khalifa

Very similar. I couldn't tell the difference.

Jason Barnard

So YouTube are pretty good within their field, but just not good enough for humans.

Ahmed Khalifa

I just can't see robots replacing human in terms of being able to interpret emotions and context, you know, how can you, how can you expect him to do all the sound effect correctly? I just can't see that.

Jason Barnard

I like the idea of emotions because as well as the words you're using or the… Oh no, that's completely the wrong idea. I was thinking about translations. I was getting very confused.

Ahmed Khalifa

The idea of interpretation IS there. There is some overlap.

Jason Barnard

Oh good! Help me sound intelligent.

Ahmed Khalifa

I can’t do that :)

Jason Barnard

So that the idea that there's overlap between translations and interpreting and sub subtitles.

 

Interpretation and Accuracy

Ahmed Khalifa

Yeah. People interpret what one person said to another…

Jason Barnard

That was my point. When you're doing the the subtitles, you can simplify it. For example, when I did do the transcripts for this podcast, first thing I did was cut out stuff because it was redundant and change the sentences slightly so that they read better. Is that a bad idea?

Ahmed Khalifa

Gennaro Cuofano with Jason Barnard at ColosSEO

Gennaro Cuofano talks to Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about Microsoft's business model.

Gennaro looks at financials. He likes numbers. Microsoft has survived almost 50 years and ridden all the innovation waves (unlike many other large corporations). Microsoft are making $110 billion – almost as much as Google. But with a more varied and balanced business model – Office, Windows, Cloud, Gaming, Search and digital platforms. They have a lot of work to do to retain their existing clients, especially in Office. Their key worry with Office and Windows is how to stop their client-base shrinking. Investments such as LinkedIn are part of a strategy to expand their customer base. In both cases, they are dealing with very different demographics. And looking to the future… LinkedIn is making almost as much money as Bing advertising, but it still hasn’t paid for itself… but is key to their future because it hooks into so many other of their products.

Contact Gennaro Cuofano

Paul Bongers with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO September 2019

Paul Bongers talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about the wonderful world of SaaS startups.

Paul talks about the rarity of tech startups that actually survive… and the even more rare case of one that succeeds.

Part of that is educating the audience for a new innovative product they didn’t know they needed. In this space, the new product is often the solution a company created to a problem they had… and then open it up to the wider world. Once out to market, the product often needs to adapt. You start with your core market. But then once investors come in, many startups expand the functionality of the product to try to reach a wider client base in order to please the investors. Not always a good idea. Knowing how to pivot is vital. Paul Bongers talks Jason Barnard through how SEPO tools have pivoted. And points out the irony that we are amazed that people are talking to their phones, given that Alexander Graham Bell invented it for exactly that purpose.

Helpful Resources About The Wonderful World of SaaS Startups

Getting a Seat at the Table: How SEOs can Appeal to the C-LevelSales Code Leadership Podcast by Kevin Thiele

Jim Boykin with Jason Barnard at Ungagged Los Angeles

Jim Boykin talks to Jason Barnard about private blog networks.

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

Jim is a content creator who happens to get links rather than a linkbuilder who happens to create content.

Helpful Resources About Identifying Link Buying and PBNs

Does DA Matter When Disavowing Links?Google Penalties Backlog and Mapping Your Backlinks to Known Link Sellers

Bruce Clay, the father of SEO – he’s been in the industry for almost a quarter of a century. He started with Infoseek. Then I say Google and my phone joins in the conversation. He then goes into the details of the 19 major search engines of the early years. And the tiny numbers we were using at the time. And how simple it was to rank, and yet complicated at the same time. Then the power of human intuition. And the glory of Macromedia Flash (that’s me, not Bruce). Rumour has it that only 10% of companies have even done any active SEO. Bruce suggests that there is an 80/20 half life of evolving SEO strategies. Lastly onto E-A-T – expertise is your onpage content, authority is that peers agree with you and trust is a reflection of the sentiment / praise of your users. Ends with a delightful Einstein SEO quote.

Simon Heseltine with Jason Barnard at Ungagged Los Angeles 2019

Simon Heseltine talks with Jason Barnard about SEO for Publishing with AOL.

AOL were very very big and were going to dominate the world. Did the CD work? Yes it did. At one point, for 2 weeks, no other CDs were produced in the world. Simon Heseltine was doing SEO for TechCrunch, but the journalists didn’t want to listen. So he took them out to lunch and charmed them into submission. Problem solved! Both Simon and AOL were precursors. They had a two-pronged approach – copywriting and tech. Then onto examples of extreme preciceness, then the vagueness in queries and results… and how queries change with story evolution (and articles must change too). Play on people’s vanity to get them to do what you want. Sounds very creepy, but is less so than it sounds.

Pamela Lund with Jason Barnard at Ungagged Los Angeles 2019

Pamela Lund talks with Jason Barnard on why brand awareness is important.

We start with a chat about talking to every single person at UnGagged. Pamela Lund suggests that we have relationships with brands… and that brand can be our friend. We need to build relationships through connections. Then I get over-excited about entities and relationships and memory. Then onto brand personality (Pamela uses the official term – brand awareness). Vanilla is not bland (have a listen and you’ll know why). Then brands have personality and need to maintain that – meaning HR is really important. ALso, please DO have a branded Google Ads campaign. Finally, use the 7 points of contact to get rid of the churners (Kate Toon !), and don’t waste your ad budget on them. Finally, one of the more delightful out-takes with Pamela, Dexter (the videographer) and Hal (the photographer). Ace.

Hamlet Batista with Jason Barnard at Ungagged Los Angeles 2019

Hamlet Batista talks with Jason Barnard about what tricks can be played when working with Google Colaboratory.

Google Colaboratory is like Google Sheets on steroids. Use it to save bucketloads of time and be terribly productive. Gerry White got very excited about the 6 use-cases Hamlet Batista gave in his talk. For example automating duplication, writing meta titles automatically, Andrea Volpini’s dance with machines, mapping redirects, writing alt tags, finding content gaps.