Sure Oak

How to reach out to Clark:

How will visual image search change marketing?

We sit down with Clark Boyd, digital marketing expert, to dig into Pinterest marketing. We also dig into UX as a ranking factor, site restructuring and repurposing as SEO wins, and not falling into the pun trap of ‘pinteresting’.

SEO and Business Strategy Alignment

A crucial aspect of SEO is really understanding what consumers want and what they’re thinking.

There is no buying audience, success can only be gained from market knowledge. This knowledge is so well-aligned with overall business strategy, it’s being recognized within companies.

“We’re starting to notice that people with SEO backgrounds are starting rise through the hierarchy.” SEO experts are landing CMO and similar positions. Where SEO was in the corner five or ten years ago, now it’s in the spotlight.

Top Ranking Factor

Seeing SEO’s rise in importance, we asked Clark to divulge his top ranking factor.

He cautions: “A lot of things work in tandem. No one expects a silver bullet.” However, he shares his one key factor:

Site experience.

Look at user experience factors such as speed, content, crawlability, indexability, etc. These factors give the audience a better experience and give other sites something to link to.

Speed is a crucial UX factor. It’s easy to identify as an issue, but not easy to fix. However, “sites that improve site speed see a phenomenal growth rate very, very, very quickly.”

The Future of Landing Pages

Clark shares the upcoming technology he’s most excited about:

Dynamic Landing Pages

Close attention to statistics and feedback will improve your site and conversion funnel. The data indicates how to tailor your site’s message to the audience.

Yet, the page itself is static. But a big evolution is coming. “We could arrive at a stage where the whole experience of a website is changed based on how I interact with each page.”

In the future, the CMS itself will be dynamic instead of tailoring over it. Individual and demographic statistics will work with machine learning to develop an exact site experience.

Marketing on Pinterest

Recently, Pinterest has opened up a new form of direct response marketing on their platform. It’s based on the Google Ads model but uses their new visual search technology.

They’ve invested a lot into developing this technology so that it understands the image and related products.

“Google is still at the stage of recognizing images and telling you what it is. Pinterest straight-away knows what it is, and now it’s trying to understand: ‘ok, what else might you like?’.”

Clark gives the example of searching the image of a mug that someone owns. Pinterest will recognize the mug as well as its aesthetic. The Pinterest business account can then offer coasters or utensils that will match well with the mug.

The tools it uses are similar to those in Google Ads, which should help the transition for certain marketers learning how to use Pinterest for Business. While It’s still a new tool, it can open up new revenue streams.

If you're looking to use paid search on Pinterest or Google Ads, we can help.

How to reach out to Cyrus Shepard:

The rules of the SEO game seem to be always changing.

To understand how to rank higher, no matter the algorithm, we sat down with Cyrus Shepard. He has seen SEO evolve over nearly a decade and ran in-house SEO for the industry leader, Moz.

He shares with us his strategies to understand Google’s black-box algorithms, do more with existing backlinks, manage client expectations and more.

Guiding SEO Principles

SEO can be thought of as full of tricks and algorithms, but Cyrus’s main principles are straightforward:

* Long-term value over short-term gain

* Create quality content

“Think of your audience first, always,” says Cyrus Shepard. “Google is getting better and better at looking at audience signals and engagement signals”

Therefore, if you are writing consistently creating valuable, quality content, you will at least earn back a little bit of success in SEO. For whatever content you create, do the best that you can do.

“When we’re creating content, I like to create things that people can steal, and want to steal.” If people are stealing it, you are creating value and therefore will naturally earn backlinks and improve your ranking.

Is SEO Valuable?

Yet, those algorithms are important. “You can build the most perfect piece of content but Google won’t find it because they aren’t perfect,” states Cyrus Shepard.

He hates when people say SEOs aren’t necessary. The algorithm mimics user signals, but SEOs ensure that content and websites are algorithm-ready.

There are basic back-end tasks such as data structure and ensuring it's crawlable. There is also a lot of experimentation involved in SEOs expertise.

“The Crushing Inadequacy of Best Practices”

Cyrus reflects on the early days of SEO. In 2009, everyone followed the same “Web Developer's SEO cheat sheet”. That was enough to win lots of clients.

But SEO has evolved.

“A lot of people have this perception today that SEO is a scam because best practices are easy.” But those best practices are now out of date and not enough to rank.

SEOs are continuously experimenting to determine which strategies and techniques provide results. These results depend on the latest algorithm and the vertical. See how your site is ranking today with Sure Oak's free SEO Analysis Tool.

Test, Test, And Test Some More

“Some people think of SEO as one and done. But it never ends, you can always make improvements.”

More and more, Google is a black box. Ranking factors are developed through machine learning, leaving less direct information for marketers. The only way to really discover how to rank higher is through experimentation.

Given testing is an essential part of SEO success, Cyrus advises to get a better understanding of:

* Statistics

* Significance

Learn more about Mike Kawula

How to reach out to Mike:

How do you get over 100,000 Twitter followers?

Mike Kawula sat down with us to tell us how. Check out his Twitter profile here with 100k+ followers.

As CEO of Social Quant, Mike understands how to use Twitter’s features to grow a following. While it’s a number game, relevancy and strategy are still crucial.

Social Listening And ROI

Mike first found success on Twitter by simply doing social listening. In 2008, big companies were not paying attention to customer’s feedback and complaints online. This gap created a huge opportunity.

Mike and his growing office supply store would listen to potential customer’s complaints. By responding at the right time, they won big business. One quick response to a frustrated customer’s tweet at a competitor resulted in a $27,000 contract.

Social listening provides big ROI to small businesses. Twitter offers a free platform to engage and connect with potential customers. Growing your followers is not just a numbers game, but needs a strategy to ensure that you’re connecting with your target audience.

Four Tasks To Build Your Followers

Mike explains there are four key tasks to grow your followers:

* Optimize your profile

* Have a follow strategy

* Share quality content

* Engaging with people

During the episode, Mike breaks down each of these tasks into manageable, action-oriented items.

Optimizing Your Twitter Profile

Your profile will determine whether or not someone follows you back, so it has to be great. Mike advises it takes less an hour to implement these 5 profile improvements:

1. Have a great Twitter cover:

Think of it like a highway billboard. Within a second, the viewer should understand what you do. This information allows them to make an informed decision to follow you or not.

2. Very good profile picture

“We don’t do business with logos.” Have a current, personal photo as your profile picture rather than a logo.

3. Create a compelling bio

Perhaps it’s counter-intuitive, but Mike says, “never put a hashtag in your bio.” Your bio is searchable and can rank on Google, so it’s important to have keywords, not hashtags. Keep it engaging and educational, but with keywords in mind.

4. Link to your website

Obviously.

5. Pinned tweet

Your Pinned Tweet should speak to the potential follower’s pain point. Offer them something that is relevant to your business and will solve their problem.

Have A Follow Strategy

“If you want to grow your Twitter account, that’s the fastest way to get followers and the fastest way to get ROI.”

A Follow Strategy is essential to gaining the right followers to your brand. Many people don’t like to admit they do it, but Mike explains that all successful brands use one.

It is essentially composed of following relevant accounts, and if they don’t follow back, unfollow them. If you’re following people truly relevant to your industry, a minimum of 10% will follow you back.

Not sure where to look?

Mike offers a quick, repeatable tactic using the Live tweets feature.

Ask Amanda About Marketing:

When companies want to start doing content marketing, they often make one big mistake:

Companies want one piece of content to do way too much.

This expert advice comes from Amanda Milligan, Branded Content Manager at Fractl. In this episode, she sits down with Tom to dig into the most important emotion, common mistakes and we have real talk about the actual amount of work needed to produce successful content.

The Biggest Mistake

Amanda cautions that each piece of content needs a role. One content piece cannot speak to your current customers and appeal to everyone else and get you links. However, many companies will create content that tries to do everything while actually doing none of it well.

The content idea needs to be communicated in a compelling and easy to understand. Content can get too complicated, killing online performance. If the viewer can’t figure out what’s going on immediately, they’ll click out.

Amanda finds the root cause of this mistake is the starting point:

“When you decide to start doing content marketing, you don’t just start making content.”

She advises that companies have to put in the time investment upfront. Determining content goals and priorities is a crucial first step in producing good content. Once these goals are established, Amanda notes that you need to assign tactics to them.

Emotional Research: The Surprising Result

Everyone knows emotion is a huge component of marketing. Amanda shared the results of a fascinating promotional viability study which Fractl completed. Using the top 50 Imgur images, they surveyed people on their emotional experience when looking at each photo.

Positive images ranked higher than negative ones. This result surprised Amanda as she was expecting negative images to provoke a stronger emotional reaction.

And the most common positive reaction?

“Surprise was the number one emotion that people identified while looking at these photos.”

The result makes a lot of sense to Amanda. Successful content needs to be newsworthy. And surprising content provides something unexpected.

This newsworthiness means that viewers will want to consume and share the content. This emotion is found in any piece of viral content.

“Leaving [surprise] out of your content is a huge mistake.”

Learn from Failures

There will be failures; however, Amanda cautions that you can’t consider pieces that didn’t work as failures. You need to analyze what happened. Sometimes there’s a creative issue, and sometimes you just get scooped.

Reflecting is also a crucial part of the creative process. So much of content marketing is risk-taking and testing. Even with the push to ‘produce, produce, produce’, it’s crucial to take time to understand and improve your work.

Key questions:

* This idea worked really well. Why?

* This idea did not work well. Why?

To succeed in content marketing:

“You have to be a student of what has worked.

Does Content Really Pay Off?

Then, we got real about the work. Given how much work goes into content creation (research, design, outreach, etc.), why is it worth it? What’s the value compared to other marketing forms?

Amanda notes that it’s all about the long-term strategy. “We tell our clients: it’s never going to be an amazing campaign over and over and over.” This work is a long-term investment.

How to reach out to Derric:

How can you grow your business with social media?

In this episode, Derric Haynie tells us the answer, plus we get to meet his dog, Dexter.

Derric is the CEO and founder of Vulpine Interactive, a social media marketing agency, and he is very passionate about growth marketing. Derric lays out his team’s workflow.

Leverage Your Social Media Accounts

“Success starts with a cohesive growth strategy,” says Derric. How are you going to use social media to grow your company? You can use social media for customer support and to build a tribe of brand advocates.

Before you start executing on social, you should ask yourself 2 questions:

* Is this an action worth pursuing?

* Do I have the budget?

Ultimately, your ROI, which comes in different “flavors” according to Derric, will be a direct result of what you put into your social media budget: time, research, and money.

To find what works for your business, you want to start by testing organic social media posts to see which posts get the most engagement. Start coming up with ideas and testing a lot of posts.

Facebook will then show you how your posts are performing and you can use this feedback to choose which organic posts to put paid promotion behind.

Derric encourages you to try out different styles of post to see what your customer responds to. What gets you the most engagement?

Going Viral

What about viral video marketing?

You can get your video in front of thousands or millions of people, but how?

For any video to have even a chance of going viral, it needs an attention-grabbing intro within the first few seconds. Facebook users scroll through their newsfeed at lightening speed, so if you don’t grab their attention in the first few seconds, your video will never get watched in the first place. No fade in intros, no branding. Grab attention and hook them.

Once you have a great intro, what is going to drive people to share it and tell others to watch it? Target a niche group and share it with them.

Derric says, “Every individual is an influencer.” What can you add to your video that will lead to someone sharing your video and ultimately making themselves look better?

Contagious brands = Passionate fans

Derric’s motto “Building contagious brands and passionate fans” is about being customer-centric, much like Jeff Bezos preaches. Put the customer first, and you will keep and acquire new customers.

By investing in your social media, email copy, packaging, and app, you will lower your cost of customer acquisition and increase your revenue. Word of mouth is the best way to advertise and a huge opportunity for most companies.

And, according to Derric, social media is word of mouth on steroids.

How Derric Audits Social Strategy

* Vulpine Interactive begins their social media marketing focus on their client’s customer engagement and interaction. They create quality content for the customers to share and repost (and possibly make viral).

* Social media customer service and chatbots are next on their list.

How to reach out to Tom:

That’s our mission for the Sure Oak Podcast.

If you’re a CMO, a digital marketer or someone with a keen interest in the field, this show is for you. We want to help grow your revenue based on where you are today and where you want to go.

Each episode investigates the current trends in digital marketing. Whether it's SEO, PPC, UX, Video, content marketing or other areas, we hand-pick experts in their field. Our interviews dig into what’s new, what’s changing and how do these online areas relate to each other.

Our goal is to bring as much value in as short a podcast as possible.

Maybe it’s my New York speed, but I don’t have the patience for a one-hour episode. I want to dive right into the good stuff. I cut down on fluff by minimizing the intro and by having no sponsors or advertising. Each episode is simply 20 minutes of high-value content.

The podcast will focus on three key guest questions:

* What is their high-level strategy?

* What are the actionable tactics that listeners can apply?

* What are their past success stories and case studies?

Who’s the Host?

I’m Tom Casano, a digital marketer and SEO expert. I live in Manhattan with my wife and our adorable one-and-a-half year old daughter. I studied philosophy in college and then day-traded on the stock market. I got my feet wet in digital marketing at LifeCoachSpotter.com in 2013. There, I listened to experts and tried all the online advice but I still struggled. I learned plenty of things that do not work for digital marketing and SEO.

The moment when I “finally figured it out”, I realized that there are only a few primary ranking factors for SEO:

* Backlinks from trustworthy, authoritative and relevant domains

* High-quality and high-value content

* Optimizing that content so that it’s targeting multiple keywords

* Great user experience

I used this knowledge to establish Sure Oak, a digital marketing agency based in the US. Our team mostly focuses on SEO, using it to grow businesses. We are always learning, and this podcast will share the most valuable lessons with our listeners.

Question, Comment or Idea?

If you have a suggestion or improvement for the podcast, a question about digital marketing, or an idea to collaborate on a blog or podcast, let’s chat about it. If you’re looking for help with your business’s SEO, drop me a line because I’d love to help you rank higher.

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