Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeremy Rivera, your host of the Unscripted SEO podcast, and I'm here with Jesse MacDonald. Why don't you give yourself an introduction and we'll find out where you've been and what's your view on SEO right now.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Sounds good. My name is Jesse MacDonald. I'm the senior SEO director over at Siege Media. So I basically run the SEO Forward team over there. I've been in the SEO industry for 11 years as of February 12, I believe. So I'm. I think I'm finally hitting that veteran status. Finally.
But, yeah, I mean, we can get into it a little bit more kind of going into my background, but I started out as a graphic designer and then found my way in SEO, and here I've been 11 years later.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: So moving from pictures to words.
Obviously. I think there is anytime you have a background, like if you came from writing and you move into SEO, you move from graphic design into SEO. There's kind of something in that background that moved you into it. What was that experience? Was it a particular job? Was it a challenge that you ran into and had to start learning or just kind of came across the right tweet and just got interested?
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Definitely job forward would be the, the, the most specific of answers. In the, the, the, the school that I went to, it was mostly print focused design, which is what I always said I wanted to do. My, my running joke has always been that by the time I graduated and got my bachelor's, because I got a bachelor's in fine arts, it wasn't even like a technical graphic design. It was just an emphasis in graphic design. It was very fine art forward. I always said, oh, I'll never work in web. My God, that sounds like a nightmare. I just want work in print. My, my big idea was, oh, I want to. Want to work with musicians and I want to do, like, album layouts and, you know, magazine layouts and things like that.
And then about a year after graduating, I moved to Austin to be closer to some family and just a better job market. Yeah. So my wife and I moved out here and I applied for some jobs. One of them being at the first agency I worked at.
They. They were hiring a designer. I didn't quite get the gig, but they, they, I guess saw some potential in me because I did have some web design experience and some coding experience from high school. Was definitely initially planning to go into, like, the computer science field, but then realized how much math is involved and it's like, nope, no, guys. That's not happening.
So interviewing with them, they saw some potential. Like, would you like to know, come on and learn SEO and PPC and, you know, do some design work and then in the near future, as we grow, you could move into a design dedicated role. I was like, yeah, absolutely. So I joined them, started learning SEO, had a client list that I did SEO, PPC and design work for for about three, four months, something like that. Maybe even shorter than that, honestly. And then we saw some really big growth. I was employee number nine on the books, but at that time I was like, Employee 5. Yeah, we were getting some, like, really big clients. So we, we started to grow and departmentalize. And in that time, the CEO founder pulled me aside. He was like, hey, man, what. What do you want to do? Do you want to go over into the design team? Do you want to stay here? Do you want to do ppc? What do you want to do? Like, well, money handling isn't my thing, so definitely not paid.
And I like design, but also I want to be able to go home and keep making art.
My background is more fine art, so I want to go home and hate painting or something like that. So let's stick with SEO. I think this could be cool. It scratches an itch because there's that usability side of things. We were doing a lot of AB testing and heat mapping and just kind of user observation analysis. So it scratched that thing in my brain that needed to be creative and do that type of work, but at the same time do it in another way and not kind of hate the thing that I went into as kind of my passion in my education background. So from there started really hammering home the SEO focus and that team of two, myself and the guy that was teaching me and led the department. He became the SEO director, I became the assistant director. We started hiring more people, teaching them SEO, and then the team eventually grew to about six people. I eventually took the SEO director spot. He moved up to more of like the VP of the company and did that for about four and a half years. So long winded way to say. That's where I kind of cut my teeth. It was very local, SEO focused.
Getting out of. Out of. Out of school. Yeah.
[00:04:51] Speaker A: Interesting. You mentioned using heat mapping as a tool, which makes sense from a graphic design standpoint that you would be looking at that type of tool. Why don't you lay out some of the ways that you leverage that from an SEO perspective? Because, you know, obviously. Oh, hey, they clicked on this part of the page more. Seems like a UX decision. But I'm laying this down as bait because I know that there's some definite SEO value.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: So lay it out for sure, for sure. So back in the day, so back in like the 2014ish area, that was very much from a.
This is just the place where design and SEO kind of focus with each other. So that's how we, we kind of played it. But it was really helpful for us because we were working with these kind of like mom and pop smaller sites local to like the Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio area. So it was very important that we made sure that there was no level of user friction on the, on the site for, for those users. We wanted to get them there and then give them the best possible experience to convert or read our content, etc. So we put a big focus on the UX side of things and we kind of came up with this talking point of SEO being a two algorithm world. You have the crawler algorithm and the user algorithm. If you're just satisfying the crawler, people will get to the site, but they can't do what they want to do. So there's literally no point in getting there. If you're only satisfying the user, the crawler can't get to it, so no one will be able to find it anyway. So you have to kind of toe that line and meet in the middle and figure out what's the best way to meet the needs of the crawler, the needs of the user, but not alienate either one of them. So that was kind of our philosophy for a long time and I found that to be really helpful. And it also kind of going back to coming from a design background kind of eased me into that SEO side of things where I felt like I was still doing some level of design work, but realistically it was more like usability SEO forward. So it was really cool. And then I think it kind of set me up for where we're at now in, in this kind of helpful content, incredibly smart AI forward algorithm sort of space. Because there's a lot of studies going around now post helpful content that are showing that usability is really kind of a key factor. It's not just the words on the page that are, are being looked at when that algorithm is making its kind of assessment and ranking analysis, but it's how usable the site is.
Are you delivering related posts in a way that are logical and make sense and actually adding value? Are you adding graphics and imagery that kind of keep the user engaged and also kind of explain the point of the piece itself, not just as a linking tactic or a shareable tactic. So things like that, I think even more so now the roles of SEO and UX are almost becoming a bit blurred, which is, is really cool. And that helps me in my current role because at Siege, while I lead the SEO team, our UX web team is separate from our design team.
So if you get a piece of content from us and it has graphics, imagery, things like that, that comes from our design team. But if you get like a layout or we're working on your blog hub, things like that, that's coming from ux. UX actually reports into me. So the SEO and UX team are in sync with each other and really focusing to make sure that the user experience and the SEO on page elements, off page elements, et cetera, are complementing each other in a way that everything is boosted up. So I would say that kind of that work was a long play, unintentional long play into kind of the world that we're at now where SEO needs to be really honing in on the usability side of things to keep things moving in a smooth way.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: Absolutely. I'm reminded of the Japanese SEO blogger Kenichi Suzuki was at Austin's pubcon when I went and his session was all about. He gave some rapid examples of where they had looked at the flow of like one of their popular articles and realized that they just stopped at that point in the article and it was this ridiculous image and they changed it and they, they, then they, the next month they saw a huge increase in the people finishing the article and that corresponded. That was the only change that that page made, but it corresponded with a big ranking shift. And so he then tried it again and he was able to duplicate that. Hey, on these articles there is an impact of looking at the flow and understanding, am I doing something if I'm making long form content?
A lot of the SEOs I know don't even think about it after they post it of like, what do we do with this? Maybe, you know, it's that last piece of like, hey, we need to, you know, consider optimization for the user. Like, are they actually reading this whole thing? Like, how can we draw them further down and not just think of it as an exercise of how thorough can I be in my H2S to check off this box and this box and this box? But actually, like, is this an a well written, engaging article? Is there like something logically that doesn't connect here?
I think there's a lot of value that SEOs are leaving on the table, maybe in their haste or in their myopic focus on keyword research tools.
I love that mentality of combining UX and ui.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. It's interesting too, because if you think about it, let's say that you're looking at a page and maybe you're looking like heat maps or click data and you're seeing someone right here in this body of text. They keep clicking this word because they think logically it should be an anchor. So you're causing a level of friction there. And if it's not an anchor, they can't move forward. So maybe they leave entirely. If you fix that and make it an anchor because you have the data for it to be an internal link to something incredibly logical within the topic silo, not only are you satisfying the user needs, but you're creating another opportunity for page equity flow to be more efficient and build that silo a little bit more in depth. So, I mean, there's, there's multiple values to it. So I think if people would just kind of expand their line of thinking around how they involve their work from a UX perspective, I think they'll do nothing but benefit.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: I think it's also an evolution in the data that we have available as far as what Google is actually calculating, because they swore up and down through the mid-2012 to 2018, oh, we're not using click data for rankings. And they're technically, you know, it's the classic Google, they tell it say one thing and it's so technically correct that they're right. It's not about ranking, it's about re ranking or it's about, you know, how they are indexing and using it as a secondary signal in a ranking system. So it doesn't impact rankings, it's a factor in a ranking system. But now we know because they got their pants sued off and we got a presentation of their slide deck that exposed, yes, we do use click data, we do use behavior metrics in force in a large way.
So I think that scratches that itch.
It feels like a little bit of justice. Like, ah, yeah, I told you, I knew it. But also, you know, like, you have to put it into action now. Like you have to actually consider it in your SEO strategy, you know. Yeah, you can pump out 100 articles now through AI, but are they, is the experience for the user actually going through that actually good? You know, like in that transition, in that pivot, a lot of companies I know, a lot of people I know are jumping whole hog into that process. But maybe they're going to miss a mark of some layers of optimization that aren't as obvious. It's not like, oh, make sure that you write an H2 for the header. It's more like, okay, let's actually see how people behave when they read this article and how can we improve that? And that's a subjective, you know, there's as much art to. To science of that. There's probably more art, you know.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think, I think intuition and that gut instinct is something that we kind of devalue because it's hard to quantify, especially in our positions. It's, you know, you got to be data driven, which is absolutely correct. I mean, the more data you have, the better, at least, as I've always said. But at the same time, too, sometimes there's something kind of magical about, you know, I just have the feeling if we try this, it'll work, and then giving it a shot, because I think there's. There's another kind of trend in SEO in that, you know, back in the day, we used to test everything under the sun, like, does this work? Does this work? But as things have gotten more sophisticated, people are just kind of just following it and saying, you know, well, this is the exact guidance, which, I mean, sure, there is that, but you got to kind of try some things out. Because at this point, the level of sophistication in the ranking algorithm not only just goes website, it ranks because it has these signals. It looks at what's the brand of the website, how trusted is that, what is the vertical? What do we actually think makes the most sense in terms of what is valuable for this type of site within the vertical itself, and then even granular within the vertical, the site itself, Maybe something isn't super important to the site's ranking algorithm and that shifts over time. So, I mean, there's, there's ways to test things and say, okay, this is what I learned, you know, at whatever conference that I went to, or someone said this on Twitter. This isn't necessarily the law of the land, but let me give it a shot. Let me see if that works for the site or sites that I'm working on. And if it does, fantastic, Then I have an idea. And if it doesn't, then I can pivot it, I can pull it backwards, and we'll move forward. Because if you're trying to optimize it, theoretically, it's not performing well anyway, so you might as well give it a shot because you're not going to necessarily hurt it realistically. So yeah, I'm all for bring the testing side of things. Let's not be afraid to fail and try things and share those things with each other so that we can all keep trying things.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: I agree. I was interviewing Gus Pelogia from. He's the senior product manager at Indeed. And they obviously have a very big spend, they've got a big product, they're moving forward. And he's very much centered now on creating these efforts as tests not just to see the impact, but also to get buy in.
Whether you're at an agency or at in house, you got to unite the team and you got to get buy in either from your manager or from your client or your client's manager and. Or your client's manager sometimes, sometimes at agency. It's actually almost entirely about just convincing somebody's boss to give them more money to do what they need to do.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: Pretty much. I was talking to someone yesterday, a potential client, about an eight truck laying strategy and I threw something out and they were like, oh yeah, that's totally kind of what I was thinking about. I was like, fantastic. That means it's going to be a lot easier to talk to you about this if we start working together because you're kind of on board already because this one's kind of a weird sell for certain types of people. So yeah, it's definitely really challenging. Getting that buy in. Buy in is tough. Then when you move into the in house big world, like me being over at IBM, that just became lots of like politics and red tape and stuff and it's like, oh man, getting this buy in is crazy.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that in that case it is often learning how to ditch a lot of the SEO talk and learning how to ditch a lot of the keyword focus links. Like if you walk into, you know, an in house meeting trying to talk about, hey, we want to get this anchor text, you are bringing a water pistol to a gunfight.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. 100%. Well, and that's kind of another interesting thing too. And this kind of goes in the agency world and this perspective comes to me from being at IBM for five years. Understanding what we can and can't do is huge. So if you're an agency working with a big company, one thing that I always recommend doing is try to get their business conduct guidelines, as tough as that is to like sit through a couple of hours of that sort of module training, you can kind of understand what you can and can't do. Because for Example, at IBM, we weren't allowed to do any level of link building or outreach whatsoever. So links were 100% off the table, which made sense. IBM, they're gaining them naturally, 100%. So outreach isn't really a thing outside of the PR side. But it makes sense because there was a big legal liability potentially. So if you're kind of in that kind of agency space, but you're working with someone big, understand what you can and can't talk to them about because that might clear up a path for you to say, okay, well I can never bring that up, so don't even worry about it. And then you freed up your time and then you have a more efficient way of communicating with them.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. I think there's that clarity of vision.
How does that translate? Because you came from a local SEO background too, so I assume that that also means you figure out how to speak to your southern asphalt guy about digital marketing and what you want to do and maybe reining in some of your enthusiasm of describing your overly complicated link building methodology and outreach and distilling it down to maybe just those meaty things of like, where they need to be involved.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I think luckily in that, that role, it surprisingly, now that I kind of can step back from it, it's been, it's been quite a while, five, six years since I've been in that job. Looking at it, wow, our clients really trusted us. Like, we did have like strategy conversations and like how things are going. But realistically it was lots of just how are things going and what do you have going on that we can help supplement and support you with?
So I mean, they rarely cared about like the link building strategy, which now that I'm thinking about that, like, wow, that's rare to have like 60, 70 clients that are just like, yeah, go do your thing. As long as we're getting the links, that's cool. Like, wow, that's really odd.
But you do have to learn to like kind of communicate and talk to them about the things that they do care about, which great skill to have. Regardless, even at in house, the different stakeholders that you have, it becomes crucial to know what they care about. So like your executive, they care about the dollar at the end of the day and what you're bringing into the business through your channel. So being able to communicate that to get, you know, budget buy in for the project that you're working on or, you know, I think this task would increase things by this much. Hugely important. But then there are the other people that are A little bit closer to where you're at. They're just kind of like a stakeholder of the product. All they really care about is are we ranking, is it driving traffic? The conversion piece of the puzzle comes from another group of people. So it's, it's, it's, it's good to like kind of hop in and figure out like you're a stakeholder of this, this is what you care about. Noted for the future as we have conversations. So that's something that I really always encourage people to do, especially if they're hopping into that in house space because that can be a little, kind of tricky and different, a little bit shocking honestly. So yeah, but I mean even from a client perspective, when we at Siege start a new client, one of the first things we ask them is like what do you care about? What are you trying to drive here? And then that's always our North Star. So we're always reporting on that. The other things as well because they're supplement to that, that goal more than likely. But we know, you know, that's really what you care about. So that's what we're going to make sure that we highlight for you and are working towards always.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: How do you, how do you thrive when you got like a client that's like super boring? You know, like they do medical affairs insights and you're not exactly sure it's some sort of like esoteric B2B play, like deep down fair.
You know, they sell waste oil heater recyclers that they can then, you know, those motor shops can then turn used motor oil into a heating product for their own shop when it's super boring. Where do you, where do you go?
[00:22:14] Speaker B: I mean for me, and this comes from having a grandfather early on in my life, which he passed when I was young. So I don't remember much of him. But I do know this. That man would just read the encyclopedia all the time. He just found the world interesting and wanted to know more about it. Like he read the entire encyclopedia.
Okay, so. And like him and I would hang out on Ms. Dos when I was like 5, 4 or 5 and like we would code fire engines together and stuff.
But that mentality of just like just learn, just hop in and learn, dive into the, the interesting part of it, there's always going to be something interesting about even the most boring topic in the world.
So in this example, figure out what makes that, that product different than its competitors and then from there you can kind of start building your own enthusiasm for the kind of relatively boring things thing.
And then that'll give you kind of that pep in your step to move forward with it and find, you know, a unique way to position it and market it through your, your efforts and initiatives. But I mean, you know, it can be super challenging and even on the other side of things, something could be super interesting but so highly technical that it's out of your kind of wheelhouse. You just kind of have to dive into it and go, you know, what does this mean? Let me figure it out. I had to do that a lot at IBM when I started there. I was the focal from the CHQ SEO team within the cloud business unit for SEO. So basically acted like an internal consultant to that business unit's team. But going into that other than cloud is a computer that you access through the Internet. That's all that I really knew about it at a very broad level. So I had to do a lot of sitting down into our internal trainings and stuff about our cloud system and figure out what does it mean, what do all of these other things mean that are connected within it? Then what does that actually mean outside of the marketing jargon? And let me set up some time with the sales team to just go, what in the hell is this talking about? And then from there I've built a knowledge of it to where, you know, I couldn't go in and like program anything with a cloud or anything like that because that's just not my skill set. Could be if I really wanted it to be. But that's not where I'm trying to go. But I know enough now to where it's. It's helped me moving forward because we work with a lot of SaaS companies at Siege, so I can say, hey, I at least have some level of experience in this. When you talk about containerization, I know what you mean, at least at the most broad perspective, so I can help provide that information. So realistically, at the end of the day, a thirst for knowledge will help you regardless in your current situation and in the long term.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: Is there anything else that you have found a specialization for SaaS? I know I've worked at Raven Tools as a SaaS, Tapclicks as a SaaS, as an in house employee and consulting for other SaaS entities.
I started a conversation interviewing SaaS owners like an anonymous chat guy, he started his platform, Jeremy Cohen.
So what is it that you guys do differently for SaaS that's interesting at Suge?
[00:25:40] Speaker B: I think that's kind of where you kind of come full circle and Our approach is very product led, so we're always looking at, okay, this is going to drive the most value for the business and the product itself. So let's prioritize there because it's really easy to get stuck in the weeds and say, here's your laundry list of technical things that are going wrong on your website. Let's fix them. But without a level of prioritization, that's not really helping anything. You're just kind of checking a box.
And granted, at the end of the day, having a perfectly technical website is really ideal, but it's not necessary. So like page speed is a good example. If you're faster than your competitors, you can backburn that for a little bit because you're already doing better. You have your edge that you need on the competitive side of things, but don't ignore it. Still kind of strive to make it better in the future when you have those resources. But going down into what actually matters in that moment to make things better, that's where I think we really thrive.
And what's really great is the situations where it's not just we have a content client or an SEO client, but we have one that has both services involved and then it taps into like our design resources as well. That's when things really, really work well because we're putting out really good high value content. It has those design assets that we really think is valuable from not only a user engagement side of things, but really the shareability which then kind of allows more people talking about the site, it builds up more authority, you can, you know, acquire more links through that sort of strategy. But you know, you have that element and then you have the technical side of things and the more strategic side of things that's less top of funnel and more in that like super bottom funnel and all of those things working together at one time. That's when the results really, really kick into gear.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: I think there's a lot there that sounds like it is that definition of at the bottom of the funnel, which I think is a big advantage in the age of SEO where the top of funnel is getting more and more eaten up by AI overviews. Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude, they're eating more and more of that question space. It's not completely replacing direct search behavior, but I've seen a lot of studies showing that it's augmentation in a different type of search to get to it. And so you know, Mike Buckbee of Noah Toa, like he's trying to quantify and he's saying, you know, it's about biscuit. You need to understand your branding, you know, make sure you're indexed and like taking some of those steps. Is there a process that you guys internally have specific, specifically adopted while my cat goes crazy and knocks stuff over in the other room.
When it comes to your approach to a market where Google's no longer 100% top dog and you know, it used to be the joke of like, what do you do for Bing SEO? Like the same as Google. Yeah, I think there is genuinely a different play. I'm just curious. Curious how you see that playing out.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Yeah. So I mean it's kind of, it's still such an in the early days and it shifts so often that it's hard to completely give a definitive answer. But it's definitely something that we consider. So we're, you know, we might have been a little more top funnel in our recommendations and strategy earlier.
You know, even last year, we're less so now. But at the same time, I really encourage everyone to not necessarily give that up. Look at your resources and see what you have. If you're putting out something that's very like high value forward and it's, you know, it's a little more bottom funnel, it's directing towards the product specifically and less on that. Like what is kind of side that early learn, as I like to call it, side of SEO, that's great. But maybe throw in one of those early learn every now and then because it has a couple of different levels of value. Even if it's not traffic one, you do have the potential to have that citation within AIO or any of the various AI search engines now, which is great. I mean, even if it doesn't get a click, you're a little bit there. That gives you an opportunity to build your brand within that a little bit more and then expanding on that further. Feeding that type of information into the LLM itself itself gives them a better understanding of your branding, which then gives you more opportunity to rank for relevant searches within their system itself. So it's almost like a feeding the machine sort of play. Right.
Will Reynolds had a really interesting article that ran shared very recently regarding how we may be seeing traffic down now, but the actual like revenue is up. I think Rand said traffic down, revenue up, which, that's great. That's a T shirt in itself. So anyone listening makes T shirts. Make T shirts, please.
But I think that's really key. That's telling us that the content that we're building, if we're Building it for the brand in mind as well as rankings and traffic, et cetera. But really the brand is kind of the focus. We can then build that brand authority so that when someone is in that mid funnel where they're trying to figure out how to solve a problem, or that like bottom funnel where they know how to solve a problem and they're just ready to make a purchase, we're top of mind. It's almost like a subconscious remarketing ad.
So that's kind of how I'm seeing it now. So I'm definitely not personally discouraging people from making that type of content because I think it's valuable and also just general rankings perspective itself. As things like eat have become more valuable and more of a forward thinking thing in the industry, topic silos continue to be incredibly important. So if you only have content towards the bottom or mid funnel of that topic, you're going to miss out. If you still create stuff that's at the top of funnel that explains things a little bit more and kind of adds that authority and trust building to your site for that topic, it's going to lift the other things. It might not drive traffic, but it has that secondary value of other things are going to perform better within that topic silo itself.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: And I think it's also perhaps a step back of us being so bloody mindedly myopic that not everything that you produce every single time is going to be the home run hitter and rank for everything and bring all of the traffic.
You know, there's many cases where I've gone in and done an audit and like I'm looking at the landing page and it's a handful of articles. But then once you, if you look at the organic overall of behavior on the site, it's much broader. And that's usually because you've taken the time to build that repository and offer additional branching paths for your users. So I think only being focused on SEO solely as a acquisition channel misses part of the, part of the optimization because it's not just you're optimizing for search, but that's also internal search. Can people who like there's so many blogs, so many clients I've gone to, I'm like, I can't find anything because you've got just three articles per page on your blog and you don't have a search function like how am I supposed to find what you say is really important that I know if it's, you know, five clicks down on your paginated table or five scrolls down on your, God help us, your infinite scroll list. Like, good luck making sure that that surfaces.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Like, yeah.
[00:33:44] Speaker A: That you're just shooting yourself in the foot. So I think there's a layer of optimization of thinking of how to structure sites for content, this content, content at scale even possible, you know, not fully divorced from, but not exclusively for the purpose of ranking. Now I would make the argument that well structured systems of, you know, segmenting is this, are these tutorials, are these guides, are these white papers? And then secondarily, like, are these video based, are these articles? And then matching those with the topical silos too? Like there's so much more that you can do if you're approaching it from a curation standpoint as much as, you know, throwing fish, throwing bread in the water to attract the ducks.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And I think it kind of, it goes into the conversation that at least in the 11 years I've been in the industry of SEO being dead, so 11 years deep. No, it's not.
I think it kind of harkens back to some things that some of our peers are saying.
People like Duane Forester and you know, some other folks are often talking about like, SEO is not dying, it's changing and we have to change with it. I think one of the interesting things that I've heard a couple people say, including Duane, are that it's not search engine optimization anymore. It's more like search engine experience optimization.
Because there's so many different things now that we're optimizing for. Like you were saying, it's not necessarily just driving traffic constantly, it's. It's making sure that the experience coming from the organic channel itself is optimized in every possible facet.
So it's almost like we're losing the search side of things, sort of. I don't think that'll ever go away. People are always searching, they're always need help getting to the things that they need. But I think it's that understanding that you're not just looking at those key SEO things anymore. Now you're looking at other stuff like UX or, you know, crawl depth, but also user depth. Like, are people having an issue getting through your site? So like information architecture, things like that, we just have to expand our skill set and our kind of approach to how we perform our daily tasks.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: I think I agree because like I was working with Flourish software and you know, they're another SaaS and we needed to direct them because they had no comparison pages on their software to other software. And you know, there wasn't very much depth to what they were doing. They were just, they didn't actually say what their type of software that they were just that they were really good. And you're like, no, you have to specify like you're an erp. Okay. You know, you actually have to say it. Not just oh, you know, we'll save you time, we'll save you money, we're really efficient.
What would you say you do here?
[00:36:48] Speaker B: Kind of the meeting with the Bobs from Office Space.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's totally like that. And I think that was kind of the initial jumping off point for the helpful content update, kind of in that pre Covid space. I would even say maybe a little into it, but I remember hearing talks about it and talking to some folks from the Google side of things where they were talking about like no, it's, it's. There's more to it than just marketing jargon, which is, you know, a lot of big companies have issues with. We're going to throw out a bunch of marketing jargon to everybody and that's what they're trying to tackle. You need to actually address the problem itself, like how people are getting to you. They're getting to you because they're trying to solve a problem and they probably don't know you unless there's that, that brand recognition. So give them the info and then throw your marketing jargon down somewhere else. But not necessarily in those key components because that's not going to resonate with folks.
[00:37:52] Speaker A: Absolutely love it. So, wrapping up, I'd like to ask for one super duper actionable SOP or thing that you do at siege every single time. That's always a big winner.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: One thing that we do which is really, really interesting and we have some content on our site around it that gives a full walkthrough of the process. But we do a keyword to opposition and benefit analysis which when you first pop it up, the document itself and the template that we use, it looks like kind of a standard keyword research with a lot of extra data sets. But when you dive deeper into it, it's really, really interesting. So it takes the term and you get your general metrics of like keyword difficulty, CPC volume, et cetera. But then it starts showing you other things of like what's the trend of the volume over the last X amount of time. I believe we do it at 12, maybe even 18 months. So we're seeing, you know, is the, the content that we're about to start focusing on is it actually in a positive trend or is it, you know, more of that? We should think about it later because it's still good to have, but not necessarily high value early on. How often are images involved within the actual SERP itself, which tells us that we need to be very design forward and bring that team in earlier than just after giving them direction. What kind of actual SERP features are there? The video? If so, let's consider making some video as well. So using that at a very top level gives you that idea of, okay, this is what we need for all of these terms that we're starting with, with whatever client that addresses their content gaps, but we can prioritize them and address them in a way that it's going to be really beneficial. Another really cool one that's in there is how often is the page that's in top position, how frequently is it updated? Which gives us an idea of how often we need to revisit it. So little things like that highly recommend everyone check that out because it's really cool. And one of those things that after I started at Siege last April was like, oh, wow, this is super cool. I've never really considered it this way. Had those data points in various places, but I've never thought to think. Think of it as a prioritization element.
[00:40:09] Speaker A: No, that's definitely helpful because, I mean, you, you can do keyword research and do keyword research and do keyword research and kind of miss the boat, you know, like, yeah, it's always the first step, but it's also like, you, you got to go. You got to go work a little harder, work a little deeper, you know, like, thanks so much for your time. That's been really insightful.
What's new at Siege? Is there any killer guides that you want us to go check out? Any downloadables?
Are you guys going into any conferences where we can meet up with you? What's.
What's under Siege?
[00:40:51] Speaker B: What do we have going on right now?
I would say the one I just mentioned, that's, that's a really good one. We're always publishing new stuff. Ross has started to hit on our podcast even more. So he just did a really cool interview with Will Reynolds the other day where they kind of talk about just kind of methodologies of how to run an agency, what AI looks like for agencies in the future, how to utilize it, things like that. So our podcast is definitely a really good place to check out, but definitely our blog, we've got new stuff coming out constantly which has insights from our entire team on, you know, trends that we're seeing within the. The spaces that we work in or, you know, resources like that kob that I mentioned. So lots more stuff like that coming in the near future. So, yeah, highly recommend that. In terms of conferences, I'm not really sure. I'm kind of in that pitching phase at the moment, hoping to. To get in with pubcon again this year and kind of see what's happening kind of later in that summer fall territory. So, yeah, we'll. We'll definitely see. I haven't really heard too terribly much about, like, what Ross or anyone else on the team's got going on, but he's. He's always speaking everywhere, so I'm sure he's got a ton in the books at the moment.
[00:42:02] Speaker A: Fantastic. And last question is, which social channel, if people actually want to interact with you, is it LinkedIn? Is it blue Sky? Is it Twitter?
[00:42:14] Speaker B: You can find me everywhere, like literally every social platform as Jesse Seogeek. That being said, I am kind of a part of the group that's pulling back a little bit just for mental health reasons, moral reasons, and since my daughter was born, I just. I don't really hang on social too terribly much. So Facebook and Blue sky are probably your best bet. LinkedIn, I'm still pretty. Pretty active on as well. I don't post a lot, but I kind of browse around there. But you can find me literally everywhere at that exact same handle.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: The true benefit of having A billion Jesse McDonald's in this world is you have to lean into a brand name.
[00:42:51] Speaker A: That's true. I only have to compete with one major league ballplayer and a pastor, so there's only two other famous Jeremy Riveras I have to compete with. So I'm lucky on that side.
[00:43:05] Speaker B: Got comedians, Civil War generals and Archer in Australia. Some new rapper that's just come up, some dude that's done horrific things over in the UK that was dominating the SERP for a while. It's like, no dice. That's not good.
[00:43:18] Speaker A: All right, thanks so much for your time, Jesse. See you later.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: Thank you. Much appreciated.
