Sure Oak

Josh Steimle became a contributor on Forbes and grew his business 1400% in one year. On this week’s podcast, Josh explains how to pitch editors, how to maximize publications for content marketing, and his two key questions to contributor success.

How to reach out to Lexi Mills:

Is your PR making you uncomfortable?

It should.

Lexi Mills is a public relations specialist who combines PR and SEO to maximize promotion. She knows how to grab journalists' attention, how to hunt stories for backlinks and how to use Twitter in unexpected ways to support a campaign.

THE BEST PR CAMPAIGNS MAKE YOU UNCOMFORTABLE

The best campaigns present a story that is unique and interesting. Yet, many campaigns focus on something comfortable to the company. But, comfortable doesn’t get great take-up.

In order to find the most interesting angle, dig through the company story and data for ideas. Then rank them according to how uncomfortable they make you (or your client) feel. The more uncomfortable, the more likely it is to garner interest and land great placements.

But, it can't be so uncomfortable that the story gets stalled internally. Lexi advises, “You’ve got to find that sweet spot between what a journalist finds interesting and where someone is comfortable.”

PUBLIC RELATIONS AND SEO FOR CONTENT CREATION

It’s more important for SEO and PR to work together than ever before.

A few years ago, link building could happen on sites that weren’t really relevant to the content. Today, SEO backlinks need to come from related sources and are best to come from authoritative sites.

PRs can hunt out the stories that will bring backlinks. They’re great at finding stories that align with brand identity.

For example, someone creates a piece of content. A PR will ask for a 600-word story on the content. Most people will say, “What? Why?” But PRs know that building the story about the content makes promotion way easier.

In order to write that story, a PR will consider:

* On which site or publication do I want the story to place?

* What’s the average word length on that site?

* How many publications have a targeted section on the topic?

FIND OUT WHAT’S THE MOST INTERESTING ABOUT YOUR COMPANY

Still unsure of what’s the most interesting angle?

“Ask a journalist.”

Lexi started out with an informal network of journalist friends that she ran ideas or potential stories by. Their feedback is a great indicator of what will be picked up well in the media.

She’s formalized the conversations into her own journalist consulting board. She recognizes the huge value it adds to her campaigns. This pre-launch confirmation boosts her success rate and campaign confidence.

And it’s not that hard to do: “It’s not that hard to find a couple of journalists who will want to have a chat with you.”

You can also simply have a conversation with a journalist. It’s not pitching a story, but discussing a client or concept. Then, they’ll ask you questions. Their questions will identify what’s unique or unusual from the media perspective.

2 KEY FACTORS FOR PR CLICKBAIT

Quality clickbait titles have two elements:

* The human factor

* The trending factor

To get clicks, the title needs to work on an emotional, human level. Ask: What would make me interested? What would make my grandmother interested?

Matching titles with trends is a natural way to grab attention. Watch Google Trends or any major news site to find the latest topics.

How to reach out to Rand Fishkin:

The Wizard of Moz is here!

The man who founded SEO industry leader Moz and built it to revenues of $29.3M. The man who began the blog on SEO. The host of Whiteboard Fridays. Yes, Rand Fishkin joins us on this week’s podcast.

As he gets ready to depart from Moz, he gives us a sneak peek at his new venture (we can’t wait!), his new book, and, of course, his SEO strategies. He shares stories of SEO success and failures, his preferred marketing techniques, and how to make it easier to build links.

SILICON VALLEY ‘WISDOM’

Rand digs into Silicon Valley wisdom in his new book due out this year. Lost and Founder divulges his journey of building Moz, being CEO, stepping down, and, as of later this month, departing the company, and those major learnings.

Each chapter analyzes startup world wisdom: from pivoting to products from services, SaaS metrics, funding, and more. Rand dissects the benefits and drawbacks of the accepted wisdom and dismantles the common perceptions.

LAUNCHING AN MVP

He shared a preview of his chapter on the minimum viable product (MVP).

MVPs are great, if:

* You’re launching internally

* Nobody knows who you are

He warns that MVPs are terrible if you are building on your reputation in a crowded marketplace. People remember the first view of the MVP, and that association is very, very difficult to change.

No one gives Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, a second chance. Even though it could be better than Google by now, “none of us know that because [Microsoft] launched an MVP.”

In crowded marketplaces, you have to be considerably better than the competition to even be considered.

RAND FISHKIN’S SEO STRATEGY

Rand takes a high-level approach to SEO strategy. He moves SEO link building to the tactical level. Instead, his top-level strategy is to “get a large group of trustworthy, authoritative folks to know about what I’m doing, care about, pay attention and want to amplify it.”

To accomplish this, you need to ask 2 key questions:

* Who will care enough to amplify your company/product/project?

* Why?

To find your answer, your company should:

* Have unique positioning,

* have your product/service in a space that it can get attention (“the air isn’t all sucked out of the room already”), and

* have solid knowledge of the people who cover this space (whether journalists, bloggers, industry groups or otherwise).

Building out the answers usually gives you your best link builders now and for the next few years.

SEO AND INFLUENCER MARKETING

Rand identifies this SEO strategy as influencer marketing in the broad definition. Influencer marketing has narrowed to mean reaching out to someone with lots of Instagram followers and pay them to amplify your product.

That’s not influencer marketing.

How to reach out to Marie:

Has your site ever experienced a drop in Google rankings, and you had no idea why?

Search engine marketing consultant, Dr. Marie Haynes specializes in Google algorithm updates and Google’s recently released, Quality Rater’s Guidelines. She’s been featured on the Moz blog, she writes on Search Engine Watch, and this week she shares her industry expertise on the Sure Oak Podcast.

For anyone who’s worried about the impact of Google algorithm changes or who has experienced a drop, Marie offers insight into Google’s 160-page Quality Guidelines, the three most important factors, how to future-proof your site, and more.

Quality Rater’s Guidelines

Google has clear guidelines for website quality. And only in the last couple of years has the public had access to the 160-page book.

Google provides these guidelines to contractors who rate websites for their quality. There are an estimated 10,000 contractors who complete a careful review of websites through an interface.

Many people confuse the role of these raters, thinking that the rater’s assessment impacts website ranking directly. However, these ratings actually feed into Google’s algorithm and machine learning. The raters improve the algorithm’s ability to identify quality in websites and rank them appropriately.

Content Optimization: EAT

So, what does Google consider to be high quality?

“We’ve noticed a lot of attention being paid to is EAT,” explains Marie.

EAT stands for Experience, Authoritativeness and Trust. Sites with these qualities rank higher. Marie noticed Google’s implementation of EAT in February 2017.

While important for all sites, it’s especially important in “your money or your life” sites where people seek information for a financial or medical decision.

For example, if a user is seeking financial information and they have a choice between a site written by:

* a journalist who’s a really good writer or

* a financial advisor who’s been practicing what they’re writing about for years.

Google will put more emphasis on the site from the financial expert.

Google will use on-site information and off-site reputation about the authors to evaluate their level of expertise. To rank higher, Marie advises: “Anything you can do to show to Google that you are the expert is a good thing.”

Find an Expert

If you are not the expert in your industry, you should bring one (or more!) on-board.

Marie shares the story of a client with a medical site whose ranking “dropped like crazy” with the February 2017 update. The sites that were ranking #1 instead had medical expertise on staff on their site. These positions showed they had “tons of medical EAT.”

The client engaged with physicians to review their articles to increase their site EAT. Sure enough, their site ranking increased again.

Future-proofing for Google Updates

Every day, Google’s algorithm has 3 or 4 updates.

How to reach out to Andres:

Andres Aguero is a high-level SEO with deep on-page knowledge. Coming from web development, he understands the technical details and combines them with broad strategies for successful keyword research here at Sure Oak. On this week’s episode, he breaks down the (sometimes overwhelming) process. From keyword discovery to keyword filtering to keyword clustering to site optimization, Andres guides listeners to the right keyword.

Starting Keyword Research

Andres says it straight: “If you don’t have keyword research done before a campaign or before starting a business, you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

Even niche markets can have 1000 keywords.

Using the right keywords is crucial to be found by your market amongst the noise. But, how do you find the right keywords for your website?

The first step is to prepare your research with these 3 questions:

* Where are you targeting?

* Who is your audience?

* Who are your competitors?

With thoughtful answers to these questions, you will have a clear starting point for your keyword research.

Competitors are Key

Andres very wisely takes the Tony Robbins school of thought to marketing:

Find the people who are successful in your area and replicate their success.

Specifically, he advises selecting three high-performing competitors for three stages of your business:

* A model for where you would like to be in the future

* One for the medium term

* A close competitor for near-term comparison

Your marketing budget may not be near your future model competitor, but their tactics and keywords may be useful models.

Keywords Discovery

Competitor landing pages are the first review point for keywords. Enter competitor sites into Google Keyword Planner. This tool produces helpful ideas that are very relevant to your business.

Then, pull your keyword impression data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics.  This is real impression data and is more reliable (especially from Search Console and not Google Analytics).

With all sets of keyword data:

* Remove brand names

* Remove unrelated or irrelevant keywords to your business

Then, with this smaller list, find search volume for each keyword. These tools are a “lifesaver for all SEOs.”

Keyword Analysis

Then, the real work begins. Keyword analysis and filtering take the longest in the keyword research process. Move your data to a spreadsheet to analyze easier.

Find the keywords with a high occurrence - these are your hot words. Frequently-occurring keywords indicate they are important in your niche.

Look for and flag variations of keywords, such as synonyms or similar stems. For example, note the variations in:

* Sourcing

* Source

* HR sourcing

* Recruiting

* How to do sourcing

Also, note the long-tail keywords that are targeted to your business.

Keyword Clustering

How to reach out to Eric:

How do you grow content from 9 downloads a day to 100,000 downloads a month?

Digital Marketing thought leader Eric Siu knows how. He has worked with major brands like Amazon. As the host of two seriously successful podcasts (Growth Everywhere and Marketing School) with a combined 700,000+ monthly downloads, he understands the work and the value of content marketing for business growth.

He joins us on this week’s podcast to explain how to be successful when starting out in content marketing, his creation-to-promotion ratio, the future of digital marketing, and more.

The Top Marketing Mistake

Eric found that every client makes one major mistake:

Their marketing funnel.

Some clients have a bad funnel, others don’t have one at all. Marketing requires that a great funnel to be in place and drive people to the point of sale.

The funnel is broken when email automation isn’t really set up, the marketing plan is one-dimensional, and the client relies entirely on paid advertising to make up the difference. “[It] generally doesn’t work that well,” Eric remarks.

Think Big: Digital Marketing Strategy

To solve the problem, Eric gives us some insight into how his company successfully markets itself.

The key is to be holistic.

Single Grain clients arrive looking for one specific service. But, one service can’t make a complete digital marketing strategy.

The Single Grain strategy includes a strong sales funnel, paid ads, content marketing, website chatbot, and a range of (growing!) social media accounts. There’s no one answer. The mix of digital marketing strategies ensures “it all rises together.”

Starting Out in Digital Content Marketing

When you start building branded content, no one knows who you are. And that’s ok. “Everyone likes to compare themselves to a chapter 25 when they’re starting at chapter 1 and that’s not fair.”

At chapter 1, you need to build your audience by serious content promotion.

Eric recommends a 10/90 time ratio. Use 10% of your time creating the content and 90% promoting it.

For your initial content promotion budget, he finds an 80/20 ratio works well. Spend 80% of your budget on content promotion. Only 20% is spent dragging them further down the digital marketing funnel. Growing your audience is the primary focus.

SEO is still a strong tool in 2018. Video content marketing also offers huge value because video combined with large social media platforms build relationships at scale. You can even target customer views: those that watch just the first 10 seconds or first 25% of the video. Reaching these views is cost effective for the scale.

How to Measure Marketing ROI

Clients (and colleagues!) want to see short-term results. What is the ROI on content marketing this quarter? This year?

Eric takes the opposite approach.

How to reach out to Scott:

One hour can keep you ahead of marketing technology trends.

Scott Brinker explains how digital marketers can take an hour to stay relevant to your market in a changing landscape. As a martech thought leader and VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot, Scott imparts his genius on this week’s podcast.

Immersed in this rapidly evolving industry, Scott has a deep understanding (and enthusiasm!) for martech. He took a step back to survey what is happening in marketing technology, not just in 2018 but in the next 3 to 5 years. His analysis produced five major trends that are changing the way digital marketing and technology interact in the marketplace:

 1. Digital Transformation

This transformation goes beyond digital marketing. Customers are having a digital connection directly with the products and services themselves. Now, marketing, sales, and customer services must be connected, and this connection is smooth and digital.

‘Traditional’ digital marketing tactics, like email newsletters, may no longer be relevant to an audience who prefers their information from an Alexa skill.

2. Microservices And APIs

Marketers are no longer dealing with one or two pieces of software. In the cloud, there are dozens of software programs in play and interacting with one another. And each department has their own group of programs.

Microservices and APIs are solutions that allow open services and deeper connectivity. Businesses are starting to change the way we build interconnections between them, which will impact the way businesses operate in marketing and company-wide.

3. Vertical Competition

Traditionally, competitors are businesses that offer the same product or service.

Today, vertical competition exists with any business which has influence or power on how you reach your audience.

In the channel from the marketer to the consumer, there is now a developing series of competitors. For example, in martech and advertising technology, internet services like Google and Facebook have their own rules and mediation on your interactions. On the client side, home conversation-bots like Alexa allow businesses like Amazon to control what you’re allowed to do on their platform.

 4. Digital Everything

Every part of our lives is becoming digital. Far beyond mobile apps, the Internet of Things, AR/VR, and the explosion of conversational interfaces is changing how people interact with their devices. It’s changing the way that people interact with the world.

“There are so many digital touchpoints that we as marketers have to think about.” These touchpoints each present an opportunity and challenge. You can’t just put an advertisement on a refrigerator. Digital everything changes the way we market.

 5. Artificial Intelligence

“One of the best uses of AI that we’re seeing in marketing is natural language processing.” In these interactions, AI creates a friendly experience. And that example is just one of the forerunners of AI marketing tools.

Machine learning and AI capabilities are changing the possibilities for marketers. We are capable of executing at a much larger scale in the digital en...

How to reach out to Rich:

With 20 years of digital marketing success with small- and medium-sized businesses and a successful podcast, Rich Brooks, of flyte new media, is concise. He has condensed his deep knowledge into the BARE Essentials: Build, Attract, Retain and Evaluate.

Rich shares the best ways to promote your company in 2018, tactics for website visitor conversion, his favorite tools for measuring marketing success, and more on this week’s episode.

Build

You need to build a platform that converts visitors into customers. For the vast majority of companies, this vehicle is your website.

Of course, you already have a website (if not, get on it!). However, it can be tweaked to better cater to your audience. Rich advises using the tools of psychology to trigger an action from the user.

Increasing site speed, utilizing color consistency in calls to action, and even having the website photographs look where you want your audience to look are tactics to better build your platform.

Attract

“Looking into 2018, SEO continues to be a critical piece.” Rich notes that the majority of his client’s traffic comes from search engines and, of course, mostly from Google.

Digital marketing and advertising, both paid search and paid social, have become increasingly important as an attraction tool. These are better bets for lead generation as they do not rely on organic social traffic.

Rich reminds us that these tools are specific to the client. He works with a company looking to attract teachers. A social media marketing combination of Facebook ads and promoted Pinterest pins was successful. However, that same strategy would fail for a client looking to target entrepreneurs. Here, SEO and Linkedin prospecting is actually the right choice.

Looking for a fail-safe approach?

SEO.

“Blogging and SEO are the cornerstone of our marketing.” Investing significant time in quality content followed by even more time on content promotion is a valuable, long-term strategy for the majority of businesses.

Retain

Once someone has visited your website, you need to retain their interest.

Rich’s preferred tool?

Email.

Aim to capture their email address during their website visit. You can use a signup, a blog action, or even a pop-up offer (annoying but work well when done right).

“When they’ve given you that email address, they’ve given you access to the most valuable piece of real estate on the internet, which is their inbox.” It’s a commitment from the visitor’s end. Email allows you to send them new information, advice, even an autoresponder mini-course. This access allows you to retain communication and better be able to convert.

What happens if you can’t get their email?

Then launch a retargeting campaign.

How to reach out to Dan Shure:

How do you rank a keyword with 10 searches a month and get thousands of monthly page views?

Dan Shure, from Evolving SEO podcast and blog, lays out how use an SEO content strategy to rank a keyword in 10 searches a month and more in this week’s podcast. Rank higher and get more page views by implementing Dan’s commonly missed on-page factors, discover how Google is changing off-page SEO factors, and learn surprising SEO link building tricks.

On Page SEO Ranking Factors

With the 200+ ranking factors, it’s difficult to determine the crucial ones. Dan Shure highlighted four commonly missed but top ranking factors.

1. Keyword Alignment

First things first:

Understand your SEO keywords and know what you want the page to rank for.

Seems obvious, right? But, Dan often finds clients who want to rank for a keyword, but don’t actually have content to support it.

Find your target keyword and create content with ranking in mind. You’ll need to understand your business’ audience, their searches, research on current ranking sites, and more to properly align your keyword and your content. If you'd like expert help in your keyword alignment, we offer advanced keyword research services.

2. Keyword Placement

Once you have the content, you need to ensure the keyword is included in a few key spots. It doesn’t need to be plastered in every possible location.

Dan Shure recommends these places:

Title tag

URL

Top heading (H1)

(A little bit) in the content

Don’t need to obsess over alt-tags and other headers. Focus on getting your keyword in the places that matter.

3. User Experience

“2017 was the year that Google cleaned house on web pages designed to get users to do what you wanted, not what the user wanted to do,” Dan shares.

A lot of successful websites were penalized for being focused on the site’s goal. Sites with distracting sidebars, sites designed to get emails, mobile sites with pop-ups all ranked lower because they were not user-focused.

Design (or redesign) your site with a strong focus on supporting the user to avoid these penalties.

4. Comments

While a number of major websites have removed the comments tool, Dan warns against following their lead.

“Google has confirmed on a few occasions comments are indeed a ranking factor.” They are a sign of community and engagement, which Google values in their algorithms.

He recommends maintaining the comments section and creating content that is comment-worthy to build genuine engagement.

On-page optimization is a critical part of your SEO strategy - check our our SEO optimization services to see how we can help.

Link Building Strategies

On the episode, we also dug into off-site ranking factors. Dan highlighted user search behavior and site speed.

How to reach out to Dmitry:

The PR strategy that grew a startup from 0 to 40 Million pageviews.

PR and SEO expert, Dmitry Dragilev, shared his strategies that led to those pageviews, two acquisitions, $150,000 in blog revenue, and more on this week’s podcast.

With all these impressive numbers, Dmitry still offers practical SEO and PR tactics that you can start today.

Look Long-Term

Working with startups and small businesses on PR and SEO, Dmitry discovered a common trend:

People want results. Right. Now.

However, you need to think long-term as you do your short-term marketing.

Dmitry asks: “How can I do something that in a month from now will keep giving me traffic? In 2 months from now?” It’s a rinse and repeat practice, not a one-off.

“We use a combination of PR and SEO together where we create content that essentially would take a portion of someone else’s audience and move it back into our little corner of the internet.”

4 Steps to Create Content for Growth

How are you going to bring people to your corner of the internet? And keep ‘em coming?

Content.

It’s all about strategically creating content that’s driving traffic. PR and SEO working together propels good content. But it’s gotta be good.

Dmitry has four distinct steps to create content for SEO Growth:

* Find the keyword search on Google that has the right user intent for buyer behavior on your site.

* Look at the content that is currently ranking on that keyword. Ask:

a. Can you do it justice? Or do it better?

b. Is your site’s domain authority similar? If yes, you can outrank them.

* Create superior content.

* Once published, use PR. Guest post on other publications (ensuring a correct link!), plus organic social strategies.

Do PR Like a Human

After publishing 1,400+ articles and having two companies acquired, Dmitry knows a thing or two about PR.

His key question: “How can I connect with [journalists] on a genuine level and build a relationship with them?”

PR is not just getting a list of contacts and sending a ton of emails.

Each email should be written as if you would talk to the journalist in person. It should not be a quick line about the journalist’s writing followed by four paragraphs about your startup. “Start talking to them as if you actually wanted to become friends.”

4 Strategies to Build Relationships with Journalists

Dmitry offered a sneak peek into his upcoming talk on PR best practices.

1. Respond to their request

Lots of journalists, influencers and bloggers already want to talk to you. Specifically, they want to speak to an expert in your field.

You can use Dmitry’s Just Reach Out SEO PR service or sites like HelpAReporter.com, ProfNet, Radio Guest List, and more. “Type in keywords and magically these opportunities show up from journalists who want to talk to you.