SaaS SEO with Alexander Rehnborg from Get Response

SaaS SEO with Alexander Rehnborg from Get Response

SaaS SEO with Alexander Rehnborg from Get Response

Episode 046

This week we’re talking SaaS SEO with Alexander Rehnborg who is the Head of SEO at email marketing & automation platform Get Response.

The world of SaaS (software as a service) has a few little nuances to be aware of outside of your regular SEO campaigns, and we touched on some of that in today’s chat.

Our chat delved into the topics of content creation, audience intent, getting SEO buy in from stakeholders in the business and, of course, links.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Michael 0:00
Hi guys, Michael here before we get into the show, if you’re a Twitter user head to at service scaling, I’m tweeting a bunch of stuff. I’ve learned scaling our digital marketing agency, and I think you’ll find it pretty interesting. All right, let’s get into the show.

Unknown Speaker 0:15
It’s time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization, so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here’s your hosts, Michael and Arthur. Hello,

Michael 0:37
I’m Michael Causton. And I am back for another episode of the SEO show sands my partner in crime Arthur fabic. Partner in crime, I wouldn’t I don’t know if he’s xat. Exactly. I’m going to call him my trusty co host, potentially my assistant, or junior assistant, whatever the case may be, he’s not here. But the good news is, we have a guest this week, we are joined by Alexander Wren Borg from get response. Get Response is a SaaS tool. They operate in the email marketing and marketing automation space. So it was only fitting that when Alex came on the show, we had him to talk about SAS SEO. So for those of you that don’t know what SAS is, stands for software as a service. Basically, when you’re doing SEO in this space, you’re looking to generate free signups for the software or maybe leads for a sales team to close, we have a chat on the show about, I guess the the overall SAS picture in SEO, along with some tactical stuff around content creation and links that might be a little bit different in the SAS world. So I’m going to stop talking about it now. And I’m going to cut over to our chat with Alexander Ren Borg, the head of SEO at get response. Hi, Alex, welcome to the show. For people who may not have heard of you. If you could please give us a quick intro to yourself and what you do. That’d be great.

Unknown Speaker 1:56
Absolutely. Hi, Michael, pleasure to be with you. My name is Alexander I’m head of SEO and get response. Where SAS company selling marketing automation software, headquartered in Gdansk, Poland. Short my background started off as a journalist very shortly, I should say very briefly, and then I discovered content marketing, in the SAS industry. And once you stumble upon the content marketing, the road to SEO is inevitable. And I did that for a number of years as a specialist, and then had a chance to lead a team within affiliate marketing, where SEO was the main driver of their traffic. And right now, I’m also leading an international team in get response.

Michael 2:44
Awesome. Well, you’ve touched on a few things there that we love talking about on the show, you know, content marketing, SEO, affiliate marketing. But one thing you mentioned that we haven’t really covered much on the show is SAS software as a service. And I wanted to keep the chat today about that, you know, within the world of SEO, a lot of the tactics and stuff are the same no matter what you’re trying to do. But then within any sort of industry or market, there are sort of nuances or things that might work in that space that don’t work in others. So when it comes to SAS, you know, you work at quite a well known SAS tool, you’ve got experience running SEO campaigns through it. So it’s gonna be great to pick your mind on all things SAS SEO, maybe we can start with where things are at and 2022 from a SAS SEO point of view, what are you sort of seeing out there in terms of what works but also maybe what the challenges are?

Unknown Speaker 3:33
Yeah, I think SEO has been important for a number of years in the SAS industry. But I think, especially this year, it’s going to continue to be a big investment area, we’re seeing, I should say, hyperinflation right now, not just in Europe, but in the US and other parts of the world. Which means that the cost of paid marketing such as paid search is going to continue to go up. A lot of people can spend their money on campaigns, and for a lot of companies, I think that then they will continue to see SEO as a, as a place for long term investments. You invest resources in in time, and hiring people rather than just spending on campaigns when it comes to the organic channel. So I think, considering the current climate in 2022, it’s always going to be even more important, and also for companies to position themselves. Customer retention is typically important because the cost of sales is going up. And SEO is a really good channel for also, I think, returning customers, something we can touch on later, especially for SAS.

Michael 4:37
Awesome. Okay. And are you seeing any challenges with SEO, from that point of view at the moment to sort of offset those opportunities?

Unknown Speaker 4:46
Yeah, for sure. I mean, raising costs is one thing. I think also post pandemic if we dare to use that word at all. But people talk about the great resignation and it is a reality and has been for some time, and it means right now that we have the flu workforce truly, companies have become accustomed to hiring globally. And it is good in one sense because you can find the right person, regardless of where he or she lives. But there’s also a challenge, because who is going to get access to the top talent? Most likely the companies that have great work culture, for sure the compensation and the benefits will be important, but also flexibility, good management, good company, governance culture, basically. And that means that a lot of companies will be left in the back corner when it comes to hiring. And I think you can see that already, then a lot of HR people are struggling, find the right people. I mean, SEO is no exception. So I think that top talent will continue to go to the top companies. And then there will be a big chunk of companies that will struggle to find the right people, they may even have to hire people below the roles they’re looking for, and try to train them. But that assumes that you have somebody already at the company who’s Senior. So I think it’s going to be a struggle with resources, honestly. And if you don’t have the right people, you can’t get the right the CEO done, especially in SAS. So that is that’s one huge challenge,

Michael 6:08
I think. Yeah, absolutely. A thing that across a lot of our clients, and even in our own world kind of recruited is very tough at the moment. But let’s say your assess tool, and you either do have a good person on staff, SEO person, or maybe you’re working with an agency and you’re trying to drive traffic, you’re trying to drive free trial, signups that sort of stuff. At the moment, you know, what would you recommend as a starting point for SAS tool in terms of trying to put together an SEO strategy?

Unknown Speaker 6:36
In SAS, it’s extremely important. I mean, this is always true for SEO, but especially in SAS, that you need to anchor your SEO strategy with the company strategy. So you need to figure out what is the company? What’s the company’s direction and vision right now. And, and that need that needs to to tailor the SEO strategy. But I think, typically, in SAS, you need to have a versatile strategy. Typically, if we if we go from from the affiliate marketing world, we usually talks about worst money. And then for SAS, it’s going to be usually at the bottom of the funnel content. So transactional content, the Drudge sales, and a lot of sass companies need to have this money here. And time in order to be present. The challenge there is that the type of transactional careers you have in the SAS industry in search SAS search market, they don’t always lead to product concepts. So that is, that is one area that SAS companies need to tackle. How do we get visibility for queries that don’t necessarily lead to press X or product contents? What are the alternatives? Well, blood guides, help content actually, a lot of times, areas that typically then go off into other teams, so customers successful dimensioning, the Help Contents, and they may not even realise that that content is converting. So the SAS industry really needs to cut through multiple teams. And again, that’s always true, we always talk about that. No siloing. But it’s especially true in SAS, you have to work with the marketing teams with customer success, in order to be able to be successful, because you need some different types of contents. In order to be present for a symbolic concert, we’ll use the affiliate marketing world. So I think that’s one strong key.

Michael 8:25
I can say you mentioned you know, the cannon will be bottom of funnel, you gotta go higher up the funnel, Help Contents a big one there. You touched on earlier about SEO being good at driving retention in the SAS world. So I guess that’s where that comes in. Right? Like, if you’re creating good help content, then your customers are getting what they need, perhaps without having to talk to people, then they might refer people and that leads to more sales that you would never have even tractor attributed to SEO, but it is driving that right? So yes. Yeah, what would you say? Like? Let’s say let’s, let’s go with that, that help topic? How do you come up with your strategy for that? Is it a matter of looking at live chats talking to your team? Or do you sort of do research try and decide what topics to write about?

Unknown Speaker 9:10
This good one. I think talking to the customer success colleagues is definitely one source of information, live chat, but you can do traditional keyword research. And you’ll find that a lot of the help content actually qualifies to rank for things like how to, which is a really important type of content sauce industry. For instance, were selling, among other features, web push notifications, how to do web push notifications. Typically, we would think that that’s a blog guy. Maybe there will be can also be a hub content. So conducting keyword research and matching that and seeing also making sure that you have content resources within the customer success to actually write effective Help Contents, bringing out the data, showing them the numbers. A lot of people who produce health contents, believe that they’re only writing for customers, which ties into customer retention. But many of them forget, it’s also about customer acquisition. Jumping to I mean, you could do that right now, for any of you, for anybody who’s listening or watching jump into analytics or whatever tool you have, check the help content, see the proportion of new users from organic for instance. And you’ll be surprised that a lot of people coming in to help Condon have never visited the website before. And the land typically for the first time on the helicopter, how come that is? Is all those customers? Definitely not? Right? You can actually acquire customers to help content. But on the retention part, I like to use the internal search. Also, if that’s presence on the website, if you’re tracking the the internal searches, which you should do, if you have internal search engine, check the keywords, check what people are searching for. And at least in Google Analytics, you can check the balances. So what is called Search Refinement, analytics, how many times are people refining their searches? Before they find what they need? And check those topics? Why are they not satisfied? That can be one source of frustration, that can definitely affect customer retention? And what are the queries? Are people looking for pricing? Do they understand the pricing? Unfortunately, one common search query, many companies will be held to cancel my accounts? Well, actually, that is an important one. Because even if you have a person who wants to leave, they might be able to come back. If you serve them the right information, and you’re helpful. If you’re not you’re going to strengthen their bias, Have you have you being a company that they don’t want to have a relationship to relationship to anymore? So there’s so many facets really to to help content and, and retention there. It’s just giving people the information that they need, hold their hand while they work, and that’s really important.

Michael 11:45
Yeah, absolutely. And with SAS, you know, something that comes to my mind when I think of SAS, SEO, is comparison pages in particular. So it might be, you know, your tool versus someone else and the types of features and benefits that it has in your world. You know, I haven’t done much SAS SEO myself, is that an area that you see a lot of traffic or opportunity on? And, you know, SAS tools, should they be investing the time in that even if it’s maybe not saying that there’s a lot of traffic volume there, perhaps the intent, the conversion potential is really strong with them? What are you seeing on that side of things?

Unknown Speaker 12:22
Oh, yeah, I mean, that’s been true for many years. And this shift maybe happened seven or 10 years ago, Google decided that when people search for product queries, especially the big tail queries, with a specific software topic, they will to come to compare before they convert, which makes total sense, because that’s how it works in many other industries, and the affiliate world began to take us seriously. And therefore have flooded the search market for most SAS businesses with that type of content. And they do that successfully, to be honest. So yeah, it is it is a fundamental part of the bottom of the funnel content strategy for SAS company if you’re doing SEO. And the challenge is, of course, how to rival affiliate constants, how to write something that actually is better, deeper. customers understand and know that if you’re a brand, you’re going to show the best side of yourself. But that is also the point. And I think some companies will still struggle, I think today, by getting the the allowance or the clearance to write that content in the first place. It is still controversial. Actually, when I speak to some colleagues, the top management will say you don’t want to have versus contents that’s, that’s a bit too shady and look terrible. So I think one way to counter that is to say we need to tell our story. And if we’re not out there telling our story of why somebody should choose us over our competitor, the competitor is going to tell the story, even about us and also affiliates. And that usually gets a lot of people taken because they realise that we don’t want the competitors to describe our pricing plan. Because it’s not going to be truthfully, honestly impartially? Of course not. So I think approaching these kinds of nowadays is going to be a lot about the angle, finding something that’s unique. There’s so many websites and companies that do exactly the same approach this type of content, like the top 1020 Put a to SAS software for what have you market? Yeah. How can you bring it break into that space? And differentiate yourself? How can you bring something new to the top 10 results? That’s going to require some creativity on the part of the CEOs. But yeah, it’s fundamental.

Michael 14:31
And you’ve you’ve mentioned affiliate a couple of times, I would imagine in the SAS world, if you’re running an affiliate programme, the competition is fierce with your own affiliates trying to you know, go for that traffic and in the SAS tools point of view, ideally not be paying your affiliate because they’ve come through your own SEO, you know, content or strategy. What are some maybe, I guess things to be aware of, or areas that assess SEO can focus on or little implementations they can do to try and compete with those affiliates who quite often, you know, can have really sophisticated SEO behind them big budgets on link building that sort of stuff of their stuff you’re seeing out in the wild that works at the moment.

Unknown Speaker 15:10
Yes, you mentioned compete. And I wouldn’t say that one strategy is the old saying that if you can fight them, then join them. There will be some pairs, that will be super tough. And you need to decide budget wise, resource wise, are we going after this term? Seriously? Do we want to be tapped out here? Or will we try actually to make sure that some of these sites are our affiliate affiliates in the first place? That’s one thing, doing outreach, communicating with people building relations? I think that actually, that’s really important, also for the SEO team, to support the affiliate team. And secondly, looking at the content that is ranking today, among affiliate sites are you mentioned there, and if you are, what’s the accuracy of the content, if you release a new plan, or you have the pricing of new feature, or all those things being mentioned, and if not, you will need to notch so the site’s billing relations with webmasters and helping them supporting them to make sure that they publish up to date content, because people are going to read it every day. And that’s something that sometimes it’s overlooked by the SEO team, because they believe that we’re just going to put out our own in house content. And the rest is on the table for the affiliate team. But I think that’s a mistake, you need to collaborate with the affiliate team on this one. And when it comes to producing content, that can rival the affiliate content. I think one thing is that, uh, typically, affiliate websites sometimes are spread thin, they have a lot of different markets that they want to target. And I think the quality is usually pretty good, but the depth of it, that’s, that’s for sure, have, they really covered all the angles, and when you were working in SAS company, you become an expert of what you’re selling. So a lot of times, we think that there are great knowledgeable people inside inside the SAS company, maybe outside of the SEO team, that would do a good job running a call to peace type of content that could rival the affiliate team. I’m thinking about people in customer success. For instance, I think about the product marketing team, who typically produces private contents, however, will define that. But they may not always be into versus constant comparison content. Well, why not? If they’re experts at the tool, they will also know exactly how to test the competitors tool, and an interesting way, and also getting the personal edge to it. So I think, yeah, using resources outside of the marketing team can sometimes produce interesting results here.

Michael 17:32
And I would imagine, you know, you’re talking about dealing with the affiliate team, the customer success team, they’re those people have stuff on their plate, you know, their own sort of day job, so to speak, what do you do to try and get buy in this sort of little purchase your use to get people to understand the importance of that and commit their time to it, whether it’s using data, or, I guess, Making Your Case internally to get that support?

Unknown Speaker 17:58
Yeah, that’s one of the let’s say, hidden tasks of an SEO team in SAS company, I believe, organisational communication, but I find a lot of times, and that’s just my personal opinion, but data can probably persuade people who are already leaning towards your angle. But it may not be the key, the key point to communicate. So I think data can prove a lot of things. But you need the emotional level also. And I think one way to do it is to approach people underground, like people who write help cons of, they care about what they’re doing, confirm that by telling them, not only are you writing for your existing customers, which you care about, but you’re also writing about for new customers, new potential customers who are coming in, if you show them that through data, for instance, you will open up their eyes, and they will realise that they have a larger mission to play. And people are usually responsive to that. Same with impact marketing, they love being in charge of product content. But if you can show them that, hey, this type of content here that’s versus content, it’s also a form of product content. And actually, here, you have a real chance to tell your story of why we in some parts are better or outperform our competitors, you can tell that story. And that’s something that they wouldn’t be able to do in a pure feature page or pure homepage, pure solution page. So you’re offering them something new, that anchors you to what they care about. And it’s always about seeing the other person’s interest and and what truly drives them. And in that sense, then you can build those relations and maybe get some help.

Michael 19:29
Yeah, love it. Love it. Alright, well, we’ve touched on, you know, versus pages. We’ve touched on our comparison pages with the competition. When it comes to SAS SEO, are there any must have other features or sort of content types that you’re creating or that you think SAS tools that might be listening to this out there? Or SEOs that work at a SaaS company should be implementing in their strategies.

Unknown Speaker 19:54
We need to mention more top of the funnel content as well because branding is really really important too. sauce. This is I think a lot of times, being an SEO and sauce company, it’s quite different from let’s say affiliate marketing, because you spend heavily resources and time into branded content. And building the brand is super important because it has to do with conversion rates. It connects in your into your PR strategy. If you want to do some type of link building or outreach, typically you do that through non branded content if you want to be truly successful, so discovering top of the funnel queries and a new angles on that a lot of sass companies, for instance, sit on top of customer data. So using that data to produce top of the funnel content. In our case, we have a lot of email marketing, for instance, we have an email, annual email marketing benchmark report. So what are the conversion rates with people in Singapore, Malaysia, United States and so forth? How do they differ? When do people wake up in the morning and read their emails, and this is type of stuff that generates a lot of potential, you can get a lot of traffic for it. And also, it makes it much easier to build editorial relations to newspapers, magazines, blogs, and thereby get links. So well, a lot of affiliate marketing websites, for instance, they will spend a lot of money on maybe paid links, and going all in on the call the money content in sales, you need to cover all of the funnel. And at the top of the funnel, you need to figure out what are the topics that can help us to build brand awareness and build engagement with the brand. Because at the end of the day, even if you rank number three to one featured snippet with the bottom of the funnel content, such as a comparison page, people will also click not just to pick a position, but also what brand they they recognise and that recognition, that is something that you as an SEO need to be part of the process and build that. So finding out the topics, and also taking the company’s strategy to how do we build brand engagement? How do we want to stand out, that also has to do with tone of voice, the approach to the cartoons? How to write it, how to present it, sometimes that will be a differentiator between you and a competitor that does slightly the same things? Yeah. So I think that’s really important.

Michael 22:13
Cool, and I guess says, again, that there’s so many different moving parts to that and people internally involve, you talked about tone of voice, for example, as an SEO, I guess, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got in terms of the people in the business and how their marketing manager might say, tone of voice kept going to keep it really corporate and above the line, and you want to go with a more fun angle for I guess that can make things difficult, right. From a pure SEO point of view, if you’re just trying to drive traffic and conversions. How do you find internally talking about SEO and your strategy to people that may not necessarily understand the channel or the technical side of things or what you’re trying to achieve? Is there any sort of learnings you can give on that side of things?

Unknown Speaker 22:56
That’s a tough one is that the internal struggle, but I guess for all SEOs, but yeah, definitely. Sometimes I think that SEO teams were so focused on the on the core KPIs, we see ourselves almost as a sales team, that we forget that we have another mission, which is an internal one. And that is, since you’re an inbound channel type team. You see information directly from competitors, in the SERPs. So communicating information from what you see among competitors. And in the organic search results into back into the organisation. You mentioned the tone of voice. So you should be part of the process. You should be part of the discussions. And who’s better actually equipped to do that than the SEO person who sets the spring their days being obsessed by competitors? And what are their what is the tone of voice? What’s that they should have the the fiercest competitors that you have? Yeah, sure, UX team will also do that type of comparison. But I think SEO team has a role to play there. So one advice is to simply gather a lot of the information that you have in your templates in your research documents, and share that with the rest of the team translate that into information. Some people would call that competitor research, competitive intelligence. Why should that remain within the SEO team, or even the marketing team for that matter, when there’s a shift in a big competitor in the market, the SEO team will be one of the first ones to do it, because they’re monitoring the websites. So being able to drive change in organisation internally, I think the SEO team is has a big role to play. But you practically need to take that part and prove to them that SEO is not just wizard magic. It’s something that everybody can understand. And we spend a lot of time in our team also to educate others. We have different standing processes for that. One Friday of the month, we hold a 30 minute talk on an SEO topic such as what are critical links, how do they work, generating some interest among technical SEO cool Bibles, how does that work, and encode vital signs We look at it. It’s a very practical topic, how fast does a page render when you enter it on a mobile phone? That’s something that everybody can relate to. But if you’re only discussing core metrics that people you will, they will get lost, right? So the SEO team needs to use a simplified jargon, speaking and stuff the SEO team to make them understand why it’s practically important and also driving change within an organisation. I think by gathering resources and sharing those resources on a regular basis.

Michael 25:29
Yeah, love it. Love it. Well, um, earlier, you touch very briefly on the topic of length, everyone’s favourite topic in the SEO world. I like what you were saying about, you know, at depth response, you know, when emails are being opened in different countries, and putting that data out, is going to be clickbait, you know, you can put it out to the journalists who might want to do an article on something related to that, which is awesome. When it comes to links. Are you sort of going purely for that PR angle? Or are you doing, you know, paid guest post outreach? Are you avoiding paid links and doing everything free? what’s your what’s your take when it comes to link building?

Unknown Speaker 26:08
And well, coming from the affiliate world, that’s usually the book is open, everything is everything is on the table, let’s say that’s usually my approach. I’m agnostic. It’s really more about where you see the best success. And of course, what risks are you willing to take. And here, there’s a clear difference that within the SAS world, you typically have one domain, or a few domains, and they are super important. And if something would happen to those domains, you’re going to end up stealing yours doing something else the next day, I think, for work, so you really need to think about what you’re doing the long term. And I think that when it comes to link building, we like to look at that more in terms of relation building, we tried different methods in the past, or platforms where you can buy links, usually not a good idea. Sorry to say, and also a lot of guest posting today, probably Michael years, I received tonnes of guest posting requests every day. And it’s, there’s such an inflation on this market. And, and just like with much else, when you see that big demand, you got to know that a lot of it will be crap, essentially, the quality is terrible. And a lot of sites are being put up there. They’re bolstered by so called PB ns, or networks, or sites that that buildings and then they send us links over to the main sites with Excel guest posting, they discuss cryptic metrics, I would say still, such as Domain Authority, which we still have no, I mean, Google is not using it, could they be using a version of it? Maybe nobody knows. But companies that sells seo software to us, they make us of course, like to believe that these these metrics are very important. But you got to do your own math and see the correlation there. So I think looking at link building, we tried to focus a lot on building relations to people and being visible being present on websites that we believe that our customers are reading. And we want to put up content that people like to read. So if you would take a guest post, for instance, yeah, we’ll try that also. But it needs to be something that adds value. And usually, the simple question is, would I like to read this piece of content? And if not, we should publish it in the first place. It’s just not something that we should be doing. And it’s just not good value for money. And we can also see that sometimes links move the needle depends on the query and the competitiveness, but sometimes it doesn’t. So I think just for starters, a lot of that CEOs automatically go to I need a LinkedIn strategy. Probably yes. But to what degree? So for which concept, do we actually need links coming in relations? If you prefer to use that word? When should we bolster the content or when is content when it’s gone? Content is going to be the decisive factor to rank. A lot of times for a lot of sass companies. They’re competing among queries, where content will be the main differentiator, as sometimes links can move the needle within the top 10. But you will see that a lot of sites ranking within top three to five, some of them have pretty poor domain profiles, and yet they’re there and then begs the question why. So it’s the SERP research and competitive research. It’s extremely important before we even begin to collect budget for link building. But typically, we try to build relations to websites that we think are have authority, that operate within the same space, and can also be that we appear on their blog, they appear on our blog, for instance. And then we also make sure that if you want to do branded content, then we keep the any links, clean branded anchors. I think that also is a good long term strategy. And Google went from penalising sites that push the non branded part of LinkedIn too much to now more or less ignoring it. And that’s why a lot of companies today, they have big LinkedIn budgets, but I wonder what the performance is actually in return. So I think long term, especially SAS companies, you really need to think about we need to be thinking With people stay in touch with websites over a longer period of time, and then actually will see also that the budget that you will spend, also for links, it will go down because relations they matter more in the end.

Michael 30:12
I can you’ve mentioned Google updates or penalties or sort of mentioned it, then how do you sort of find it these days with these, you know, core updates that happen, they don’t really give much away about what’s changed? And why. And are you guys coming through that unscathed? Or have you seen dips here and there? And if so, what are you doing to sort of come out the other side of it, you know, hopefully better off than where you were before?

Unknown Speaker 30:37
Yeah, everybody’s worried about that. But we haven’t been really been affected by any of the latest core algorithm updates. And, in general, I have the perspective that I think, at some point, we’re going to get tired of listening to these updates, because we simply don’t know what they mean anymore. If you go a few years back, a core update or an update at all, from Google was a big thing. And they would usually name what it would be about, such as targeting local affiliate sites or something like that. Today, it’s highly cryptic. It’s usually tied into somehow the search rates or quality guidelines. And I mean, that’s 100 Plus page document. So at the at the end of it, it’s become more of a philosophical question, are we doing the right things overall? Are we putting out content? That’s good, technical SEO? Are we making sure that we blocked content that shouldn’t be crawled and indexed by Google? And that’s also something that’s struggle for that SAS companies? If you do the right things, overall, on the direction and strategy? I think I’m really not following these updates. I see them popping up in newsletters and LinkedIn and other places. But am I going to draw any conclusions from it? That’s for sure. If I was website, where I saw the big fluctuations in traffic, and some of them will do, and I guess many of these sites will be in the Your Money Your Life area that absolutely like medic, for instance, crypto cryptocurrency and other areas, these very sensitive areas. Gambling wouldn’t would be another, probably they are they’re seeing much bigger fluctuations, because because Google is kind of homing in on bills, because it wants to see authority, truthfulness in very sensitive areas. But if you’re selling some type of SAS software, I’m at some I haven’t seen many big correlation, actually, with core updates. And I just don’t get much out of reading this updates. It’s becoming almost a force to be honest. And then everyone starts in the newsletters with here’s a core update, and nobody knows what it’s about. Well, okay. Thanks for the information.

Michael 32:33
It seems like it’s a that’s a deliberate case by Google, you know, they did us to give it all away, like we’re targeting links, Penguin, Panda, like content, whereas now it’s just we’ve changed some stuff. Could be this could be that, but just keep doing what you’re doing. And you should be okay. They’re generally

Unknown Speaker 32:49
very helpful, of course. Yeah, of course, of course. Well,

Michael 32:53
look, this has been a great chat. I always like to wrap things up by asking the same three questions of everyone, just to see what I give to different takes are the very simple The first one is, what do you think is the biggest myth in SEO?

Unknown Speaker 33:12
For me, right now, I think the biggest myth is, if you invest in SEO software, not going to name any names, because we will know them. But if you purchase a SEO software, and you see the visibility there, you will get to know exactly the visibility of their website. That’s a big myth. If you actually dig into how a lot of the software are tracking rankings, what type of keywords actually follow, you’re going to see a lot of garbage data that you don’t need a lot of STRS looking at these corporate metrics that we don’t really know how they how they work, they estimate disability links, but they’re never transparent. And still, we use them in reports up to top management. And if the top management would ask us, what’s domain rating mean? What does mean that you have increased domain authority by five percentage points? We don’t have an answer. That’s, that’s a problem in our industry. So let’s get back to the basics. Let’s talk about the data that we do understand. That’s that’s the thing with a problem, I think.

Michael 34:06
Yep. Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Okay. Well, on the other side of that coin, what do you think the most underrated tactic in SEO of tactic things sort of focus areas?

Unknown Speaker 34:16
And I think doing the research really thoroughly competitive research and the creative part of figuring out, how are you going to be any difference? Still, we let people have the approach that whatever I’ve seen the top 10 results, I just need to do the same thing. And that’s my job in SNS to do. That’s how we define search intent. What are the top 10 people doing? I’m going to do the same. Hopefully, I’m going to be there. But the next question, if you’re not doing anything different, why would you be there in the first place? So how do we figure out how to be different? That’s the creative parts of SEO. That’s what makes it really, really difficult, I think. And it’s so easy to skip it. But I think is fundamental today as Google gets really smart about showing different types of content. So creative comm Get the research, do it thoroughly and be informed before you write the piece of content.

Michael 35:05
Okay, cool. And, um, the last question, I sort of get the feeling or I get a sense for your take on SEO tools from this chat so far. But you know, when it comes to getting the job done, what would be the top three tools that you use or that you sort of you think are indispensable in your day to day life as an SEO?

Unknown Speaker 35:25
Right, I would pick a trips there, I think, because they have a great UI. And that’s a lot of people using it. But for competitive research, indispensable, and there are lots of good competitors such as SEMrush. But I think, looking at, honestly budgets versus what you get out of it. So the value for money, I think a trip still is pretty good place to be very versatile, I would say on crawl, or any of their competitors, but I think uncle do a great job. And in modernising technical SEO, automatic crawls, being able to export it to BigQuery. And there are lots of creative things that you can do either on a small budget to create automatic notifications to email to Slack, to inform yourselves to practically fix issues. I’m really impressed by on crawl and their customer support there. And I think the third tool for me actually, I would say, advanced with ranking cloud there on just to looking at keyword rankings, honestly getting accurate data on where we stand disability wise, disability numbers in all the glory, but I want to see the core data. And I want to be able to create customised reports based on that. And that’s typically what somebody in the upper management would like to care about that like that 510 keywords or topics that they believe is important to the to the business, and you need to report on that. And I think that that tool does a really good job helping us do that and cater our reports. So you have three tools that work for us.

Michael 36:56
Great. All right. Well, Alex, it’s been great chatting to you and learning a little bit more about your approach to fat SEO today. If people want to go check you out after the show, where can they had to find out a bit more about you.

Unknown Speaker 37:10
It’s just thing would be to hit me up on LinkedIn for sure. I’d be happy to connect.

Michael 37:13
Awesome. Okay. Well, it’s been great chatting. Have a great day.

Unknown Speaker 37:18
Have a great day, Michael. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 37:21
Thanks for listening to the SEO show. If you like what you heard, don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We’ll see you in the next episode.

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