Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Google's Big Algorithm Update is Coming. Are You Ready?
45 Plays4 years ago
Google's algorithm changes on a regular basis, which keeps marketers on their toes and SEO experts happily employed.
On this episode of the Marketing Spark podcast, Huckabuy's Geoff Atkinson talks about the impact that Google's next major update, Page Experience, will have on content marketing and SEO.
On the podcast, Geoff and I talked about how B2B companies need to look beyond keyword optimization to drive SEO. They need to focus on technical elements such as dynamic rendering, page speed, and structured data. We also talked about why many companies are wasting time and money on content marketing.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark
00:00:02
Speaker
My name is Mark Evans and I'd like to welcome you to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches.
00:00:12
Speaker
By small doses, it's conversations that are 15 minutes or less.
Introducing Jeff Atkinson and Huckabee
00:00:16
Speaker
On today's show, I'm talking with Jeff Atkinson, the founder and CEO with Huckabee and the former Senior VP of Marketing and Analytics at Overstock.com. Huckabee describes itself as a different kind of company taking a different approach to SEO. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Jeff. Thanks, Mark. Great to be here.
Huckabee's SEO Approach
00:00:35
Speaker
So I've got to ask you from the get-go, how is Huckabee a different kind of SEO company? To me, that sounds like great marketing. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what the company does. Absolutely. We are different. Typical SEO, in terms of spend and what people spend on SEO, oftentimes it's mainly through agencies, through consultants, internal things. Huckabee is solely based on performance. So it's performance-based SEO software.
00:01:03
Speaker
that really checks the boxes of technical SEO, which is often the hardest boxes to check. Fast page speed, structured data, stuff like dynamic rendering, these are things you might or might not be familiar with. But they're really the technical side in how your website is speaking to Google. And our software essentially creates the perfect conversation between your website and Google. So it's pretty unique. Our customers grow a ton. And we're coming at this from a totally different angle.
00:01:32
Speaker
Maybe you can get a little bit into a couple things, a couple questions I have. One, how do you describe performance-based? Because it sounds fairly obvious, but I need to ask you anyway. And the other thing would be what you do different from other companies, particularly around things like keywords and keyword optimization.
00:01:48
Speaker
So performance is looking for growth, right? What are the things to, it's not an analytics tool. We're not consultative. We're purely building software to help your company's organic search traffic grow. And the second question is how do we help our customers during things like keyword research and stuff like that? Yeah, yeah.
00:02:09
Speaker
That's really not what we do, actually. So your typical agency or your internal SEO hire should be doing great keyword research, planning around what keywords to go after, making sure the site's architected in a way that Google can pick up on those keywords. But it's a different ballgame for us. We're solely focused on that conversation between, the technical conversation between
00:02:32
Speaker
Google and your site, which is a really big and hard box to check. What's interesting about SEO, so it's actually about an 80 to 90 billion dollar industry here in the States with a net promoter score of zero. And that's really like the services side. So you'd rather like go to your dentist than you'd like to talk to your SEO agency.
00:02:51
Speaker
So the sort of consultative and services side of SEO has left people quite unhappy. And so we're trying to take a different perspective. We think we really recommend people have internal SEO teams and then they can layer on our software to check some of those big technical boxes that would be really, really hard.
Jeff's Background and Motivation
00:03:12
Speaker
provide some background on the journey from working with Overstock, a big e-commerce operation, and how did you go from that to Huckabee? What's your origin story? Yeah, so Overstock had a great SEO story. We went from a channel of zero to a channel of over 300 million in like four or five years. So we were right on the front lines of identifying what it took to grow. And what I found was that the market just wasn't addressing what people needed.
00:03:42
Speaker
Again, going back to the agencies and consultants, I mean, you've probably heard many war stories about people getting burned or they're just not getting their money's worth out of these agencies. And what I found really moved the needle was really on the technical side. How do you get a huge site like Overstock with millions of pages to communicate the best it possibly could to Google? And the better it communicates to Google,
00:04:04
Speaker
The more traffic, more rankings, you know, all the great things that come with it you get. And we worked tirelessly. Like we had 40 people working on SEO, 20 of which were developers. And that's a huge undertaking. Most companies just can't do that.
00:04:18
Speaker
And most of our efforts were technical. And so looking at companies where they sort of fell short, it was on this technical side that wasn't being addressed because agencies can't really address it. And so we built this lend itself to a software solution and something that would really disrupt the market. And so we came at it from a software angle and have built technology to accomplish all these things.
Impact of COVID-19 on B2B Marketing
00:04:42
Speaker
So since COVID emerged, a lot of companies, B2B companies have really changed their approach to marketing, whereas conferences used to be a go-to tool for them. That's not happening. Probably won't happen for another six months to a year. A lot of them have turned to content marketing. If they were doing it before, they're doing a lot more now. And if they weren't doing it, they're embracing it in a real big way. How has B2B SEO changed post COVID?
00:05:09
Speaker
Has it changed at all? Are you dealing with different types of customers with different challenges? Maybe provide a little context to that. Yeah, it has changed in that, you know, I always joke that in times of COVID, you want to be part of the plumbing of the internet because the plumbing of the internet is getting tested. And that's exactly what we do. We're part of the plumbing of the internet, making sure that, you know, websites are able to be understood and crawled and making sure Google gets all the information that they need.
00:05:35
Speaker
I think not only did conferences get wiped out, but also paid budgets got wiped out. Companies were really stuck, especially B2B in a bad place where they weren't getting the leads, they weren't getting the normal marketing activities that they needed. We see a lot of, especially around B2B and B2B software,
00:05:58
Speaker
The trend is towards organic. It's towards content marketing. I have a whole another sort of story around content marketing. I think the term is sort of overused. It's definitely a buzz term. There's content. People are spending a ton of money on it without clear cut goals. But when they do get it right, it results in awesome organic traffic. So we've found that the market during COVID
00:06:20
Speaker
is definitely attracted to SEO. People see it as a long-term solution that's reliable. It's not as vulnerable to whatever's happening in the world as some of these other channels. So fortunately, we feel well positioned. And if anything, we've received a bit of an uptick as a result of COVID as people sort of fall back on the tried and true marketing methods. And SEO is definitely one of those.
00:06:42
Speaker
I'm not going to let you get away with talking about content marketing because as a content marketer, it's something I'm focused on and obviously into. Maybe you can talk a little bit about elaborate on your approach to content marketing because becoming a publisher has become increasingly important. Brands are pumping out all kinds
Content Marketing Critique
00:06:59
Speaker
of content. A lot of it, it's not very good, not very focused. Maybe get into your
00:07:04
Speaker
your view on content marketing and, and talk about, you know, what is content marketing and, and, and how is it different from content marketing that really works? And I bet Mark, you see a ton of this where the buzzword is content marketing. And so these companies will allocate huge budgets to content marketing, but they're just kind of doing it for the sake of doing it. There's no clear cut goals. There's no strategy. They're not measuring it accurately to know if they're achieving what they
00:07:30
Speaker
what they need to be to be spending this type of money. And so there ends up being a lot of bad content. There ends up being a lot of content that's not, doesn't have sort of a goal or a strategy behind it. And so I think it's probably, you could argue a while back that people were way overspending on paid search. Content marketing kind of feels like that right now. Like good content marketing is worth its weight in gold. It's amazing. But the amount of bad content marketing
00:07:59
Speaker
and misdirected content marketing that's happening out there, I find kind of overwhelming. We have a lot of big B2B SaaS brands as customers, and they have enormous budgets for content marketing. But when I ask them, what's the goal? What are you trying to achieve? You kind of start getting these really fuzzy answers back, and you can quickly realize, well, they're participating in this because their other channels are going flat. They know it's the hot thing right now.
00:08:24
Speaker
Companies, though, need to have a really good strategy, good goals, be able to measure it. That's when we see it go well, but we see it not going well a lot of the time. So I guess that's my issue with it right now. I have full appreciation for what it can do. I just find that most companies aren't doing it correctly.
00:08:43
Speaker
Do you have any examples of companies that are doing it well?
Successful SEO Examples
00:08:45
Speaker
I mean, it'd be companies that create high quality content that is customer centric, that answers questions, that embraces thought leadership and offers tons of insight. I mean, you look at a company like HubSpot, for example, and what they do. And do you have other examples of companies you can point to and go from a content marketing perspective aligned with goals, aligned with SEO? These guys stand out from the crowd.
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah, Salesforce is great at it. HubSpot's a great example. They're not a customer, but they're a great example. Salesforce is a customer. They do it very well. Probably the shining jewel, though, of our customers is Concur. Concur, their organic search is something like 85% of their leads, and that's funneling into an enormous sales team. They just kill it when it comes to content marketing and SEO. And it's really well architected. It's really well executed.
00:09:36
Speaker
They have very smart internal SEOs. They just know their stuff and they go out and crush it. There's no sort of guessing game there. Like they know the keywords that they're going after. They know the content strategy that they're going after and they just execute on it. Great. So those are two sort of name brands that come to mind in the B2B space for Hukbi that we're very impressed with and we're lucky to have his customers and support them from a technical perspective.
Technical SEO Essentials for Google
00:10:00
Speaker
So if we can get a little bit into the technical weeds when it comes to Google. Obviously Google dominates the SEO landscape. How good of a job does Google do when it comes to quality content? So you're looking at brands like Concur or Salesforce that are doing a great job of creating content that engages prospects and customers. So what's the relationship between that activity and what Google indexes? And how can B2B brands marry the two?
00:10:29
Speaker
The biggest issue is the indexation. So when I say that there's content out there that's not good or oftentimes a bigger problem is it's just not properly getting indexed correctly. So you'll find companies and that is a technical problem. So once you start introducing JavaScript on your website, which almost every single website has some form of JavaScript,
00:10:54
Speaker
Google is now having a hard time indexing it. Their regular bot, called their HTML bot, that's what they've used for years and years and years. And it can't crawl JavaScript-based content. So once they hit this JavaScript, they have to kick it to what they call a rendering queue. And a rendering queue for them takes way more processing time than if they were to crawl it with their HTML crawler.
00:11:18
Speaker
And once it's in that rendering queue, you know, you could be talking to for six weeks before that content's actually getting indexed at all if the site doesn't have a great domain authority, which is a huge problem. And there's not a lot of tools to give you visibility into whether your site's being crawled properly, whether all these content investments are actually paying off.
00:11:37
Speaker
And that's what i was like built to solve so we make sure that the content is flat HTML we make sure the sites really fast we add all the structure data you do have to have sort of a foundation a technical SEO foundation for these content efforts really to achieve what they're supposed to achieve if google can't crawl it can index it.
00:11:57
Speaker
your views are going to, you know, you're just not going to get the, the boost out of that content that you'd like. And then Google's also still, you know, really good at identifying what is great content. You know, is it getting a lot of backlinks? Is it trending on social media? They're excellent at picking up on those cues, but it's a, if there isn't the technical fundamentals, they just can't rank this important content like they, like they could if the site was set up correctly. So that's sort of what I'm seeing.
00:12:25
Speaker
Maybe we can take another step further as much as I don't have a lot of technical expertise when it comes to SEO. Can you talk about the other ways that B2B brands can leverage Google? Things like dynamic rendering, page speed, structured data, all the nitty gritty stuff that sits apart from content creation. Do they need to use a company like you? Can they use internal people? Like how can they optimize their SEO technical foundation?
Page Speed and Google's Update
00:12:50
Speaker
The easiest way without spending a bunch of money is just to simplify the site, but marketers tend to not do that. We like the shiny things. We like the chat boxes. We like to buy JavaScript-based products. That is when you need to start looking at these technical options. Dynamic rendering basically means
00:13:11
Speaker
You can now give Google a version of your site that's different than what users interact with. So it needs to look the same and act the same, but you know, you can strip out all the content. Dynamic rendering, basically like if you have a mobile version, then you have a desktop version and now you can actually have a Google version that they opened the door to this because of this JavaScript problem. That's a really big change for them, for them to be saying, okay, give us a version that's just easier for us to crawl.
00:13:36
Speaker
There are other dynamic rendering providers out there. Huckabee does it based on SEO. Structured data is actually a pretty lightweight, relatively easy thing. If you put a developer on it, structured data is a language that allows you to communicate authoritatively to Google. It's also what powers all the what they call rich enhancements around search results. You're no longer getting back 10 blue links. You get a very
00:13:59
Speaker
enhanced search experience, and that's all powered by this language. So simplification of the site, structured data. If you do have a very complicated site, dynamic rendering is an excellent way around that, so you can still have marketers being creative and implementing all these random things.
00:14:16
Speaker
But probably the biggest one is page speed. Page speed is a huge problem. Google has an update coming in 2021 that they've been talking for for almost a year now about. They've delayed it because of COVID because they think it's going to impact the economy. And it's called the Page Experience Update, and it's all about page speed.
00:14:32
Speaker
and that's a huge issue that everybody has and no one has really addressed and they've been screaming about it for years and they're making this big update in 2021 that's going to really drive it home. So PageSpeed is the one that I'd really recommend taking a look at and trying to get better.
00:14:48
Speaker
So as a marketer, if this page experience comes to fruition in 2021, what should they be doing right now? Is this something they should be worrying about? Is it kind of like, what is it? Y2K? You know when all the, we thought that the world was going to end and everything was going to blow up. Companies spend billions of dollars preparing for that. Is it the same kind of scenario as a marketer right now when it comes to my website and organic traffic? What should I do right now?
00:15:14
Speaker
It's sort of like Y2K, but it's more like imagine the last big algorithm update that affected you in some way, shape or form, and then multiply that times like four or five. It is going to be a big ripple effect throughout the internet. The best way to go
00:15:29
Speaker
about it is to start reading about it. Google's very open and honest about what they're doing, what's changing. Page speed, you'll see, is probably the biggest factor in how quick the site loads. How's the user interaction? Does it load quickly on mobile? Preparation really starts with doing research and then coming up with a game plan on, you know, because with every algorithm update, there's not just losers, there's also winners. And so this is a great chance to jump ahead of your competition
00:15:54
Speaker
if chances are everybody has a slow site. So if you get in a position that they have a quick site going into 2021, you have a great chance to jump ahead of a bunch of competitors.
00:16:06
Speaker
One final question and we'll dial it back a little bit in terms of in terms of SEO. If you're a B2B brand and you are you recognize that you're you have to improve your SEO, improve organic search, make sure that Google is has a good relationship with your website.
Foundational SEO Advice
00:16:23
Speaker
Where do you start? Can you give me like three or four things you should focus on to start to establish that foundation?
00:16:29
Speaker
A great place to start is getting someone knowledgeable in-house. If you're feeling like your brand and your company is sort of weak on SEO knowledge, internal teams just always sort of win when it comes to SEO. There's obviously technology out there that's great.
00:16:46
Speaker
Having someone in-house that you trust, that is up on things, that knows what's going on, that'll be a great win. Otherwise, just figuring out the fundamentals of backlinks are still incredibly important, making sure your domain authority is high. I'd say with B2B brands focusing on SEO earlier in your life cycle, because it does take time. It takes 12 months. It takes a long time before you really get the kick of those efforts.
00:17:12
Speaker
So starting them earlier, I know we're doing this as a B2B brand, just the earlier you start and start investing in SEO, because at some point in your life cycle, you're going to really be kicking yourself if you haven't started investing in SEO early, and you're going to be playing catch up. And for some brands like Concur, they're built on SEO. That's what grew them to the size that they are. Early investment, domain authority through backlinking and getting someone that's knowledgeable in-house would be sort of the three things I'd recommend.
00:17:40
Speaker
Well, Jeff, this was a great conversation as much. I think I've learned a ton about SEO and certainly page experience and page speed is something that I'm going to focus on on my own website and when I'm talking to clients. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app.
00:17:59
Speaker
If you like what you heard, please rate it for show notes of today's conversation and information about Jeff. Visit marketing spark.co slash blog. If you have questions, feedback, we'd like to suggest a guess or want to learn more how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO consultant and advisor. Send an email to mark at marketing spark.co. Talk to you next time.