#seoisaeo Podcast - Expert Interviews At Major Digital Marketing Conferences

Mordy Oberstein with Jason Barnard at SMX West Mordy Oberstain talks with Jason Barnard on when marketing and SEO collide. Mordy starts off by getting on my good side by telling me I have the best pipes in SEO… what a charmer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THvPtnGCvPY Mordy talks about why Google updates should matter to all marketers - that Google is getting closer and closer to reflecting your market, so playing the SEO game is just playing the marketing game through Google. His advice: do what you do, address your audience and Google will figure it out. Google is trying to think like a person - looking at tone and format, so it is all coming together. Understanding tone backhandedly is an interesting concept… and a lovely put down of the trick of using 5 tips to… 10 ways to… which are pretty annoying and not good for authority. Brilliant ! If you want to know how Mordy gets this sentence into a conversation (and it sounds logical) "are you sick or do you want to buy car insurance?" yo

Nathan Chalmers with Jason Barnard at The Bing Series Nathan Chalmers talks to Jason Barnard about the whole page algorithm. Nathan had done his homework by listening to previous episodes…. And he loves the song :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5kJFlMIHVU A year ago I didn’t know about the bidding system in Google and Bing ranking... and 6 months ago I didn’t know there was a whole page team. Now I get to learn how the latter affects the former.  First up, I had called the bidding system “Darwinism in Search”. Turns out Darwin is the name of their algorithm that allocates the positions on the SERP to different rich elements. He tells me my initial analysis was good, but I made it all sound more mechanical than it truly is. Next reveal - there are 6 teams that work together to build the whole page, each with their own Darwinistic system, with the aim of creating the best user experience. The blue links are the base and they are NOT dying out, even if I thought they were. Then on

Meenaz Merchant with Jason Barnard at The Bing Series Meenaz Merchant talks to Jason Barnard about the video and image algorithms. Meenaz is team lead for multimedia - and that includes image search, video search and camera search. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyPc-NqN9uY The single most important factor for multimedia is relevance - ie fit for purpose / answers the intent. But also authority and trust (that are built over time - proving oneself) and engagement. To understand images, they use alt tags, surrounding content, but also analysis of the image using machine learning. They process every single image and recognise objects in the images. In terms of image analysis / object recognition, they started with faces of celebrities, and developed their machine learning from there. For video, quality is vital... but also engagement. And the platform. And the player. Then also the sources that dominate depend on the type of query - news would tend to pull the BBC, CNN et al, entertain

Ali Alvi with Jason Barnard at The Bing Series Ali Alvi talks to Jason Barnard about the search algorithm for featured snippets. First thing we learn is that this feels a lot like a soccer interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0UhsQb5iAU Then Ali confirms what Gary Illyes said in 2019 - the different candidate sets use the core algo in a modular fashion. Ali is team lead for the Q&A candidate (Q&A is Bing's name for featured snippet) But also that all of the algos are end-to-end neural networks. We know what goes in, we see what comes out… but nobody knows what goes on in between :) And a nice clarification - Q&A are pulled from the blue links below it. Other rich elements such as video and images don’t rely on the pages the 10 blue links provide - they have a separate selection process. Now that is interesting. Even more interesting - Ali answers the intriguing question “where do the descriptions for the blue link / core results come from?” (spoiler alert - it isn’t from the core

Fabrice Canel with Jason Barnard at The Bing Series Fabrice canel talks to Jason Barnard about Bingbot. Fabrice was on the podcast last year talking about Javascript and the new indexing API. That was very interesting and he shared quite a few insights... If you would rather read than watch or listen, here is an article I wrote based on this conversation >> This Episode Takes the Conversation a BIG step Further https://youtu.be/dSSZeTYOtMk This conversation is on a whole different planet. Fabrice is head of the entire discovery-crawling-extracting-indexing process. Think about how much that involves. And how important he and his team are to the process of getting your content to the top of the results. You cannot hope to get your content into search results if it isn't found, crawled, extracted and indexed... and since he manages every single one of those steps, he is a person we really need to listen to. Bingbot and Googlebot Function in Much the Same Way Obviously they do

Rich Goldstein, Principal Patent Attorney at Goldstein Patent Law explains patents and trademarks in simple terms so you can protect your business.

Purna Virji, the Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft spills her top secrets for researching competitors using search.

Digital Marketing Excellence Practitioner, Eric Enge shares the latest tips and trends to help you drive great SEO gains through high quality content.

Jason Barnard interviews SEO copywriting specialist, Kate Toon where she shared some ace tips to help you develop your personal brand

Jason Barnard interviews Event Photographer & Video Producer, Joyce Ong as she shares great tips to help you produce a bulletproof video shoot

Daniel Hunjas explains his analogy between traffic lights and the sales process. When selling, we often have a tendency to speed up at a yellow light, and that is the wrong thing to do - a yellow light is an objection, so you should slow down and take the time to explain to the potential customer… Daniel advises taking people to their pain points right from the start, which reduces churn and avoids wasting everyone's time. Some lovely quotes "solutions hold no value, they only derive value from the problems they solve", "tension is the chemistry of sales"…. this is the day I switched from being an SEO to being a marketer. Thanks Daniel. Daniel on LinkedIn

Jason Mun with Jason Barnard at Chiang Mai SEO Standing by the pool in a posh hotel in Chiang Mai, I start by mis-singing his name very terribly. I then insult him very rudely. And despite that, Jason remains really delightful. Building an ecommerce site from scratch is easy. Getting the foundations right is the only way to make it work long term. And that is very very difficult. It isn't just me who thinks that Prestashop is particularly tough… Shopify is the platform Jason recommends. No doubt in his mind. Then onto reviews, how they help convert - pre and post purchase reassurance - but also with features, functionality and attributes. He likes Trustpilot quite a lot. And at the end, I sing to myself. Jason on Linkedin and Twitter Poolside in Chiang Mai

People think "what do I have to do" rather than "what do I want to do"… outsourcing allows you to get to the place where you can choose what you want to do, and not be stuck in the rut of "need to do". BUT, that can lead to a midlife crisis, even at 25 years old. It's easy to outsource, but apparently, attaching your name to a project tends to make the process much more difficult, especially if you are perfectionist like Lee Louis Gung. We didn't get to the practical stuff - how do you outsource successfully… so we recorded a follow up episode that is a must-listen if you listened all the way to the end of this one :).

Nobody seems to know where that magic figure of 7 touchpoints come from… Daniel Hunjas suggests it used to be 5.4 just to dialogue with a brand. With the advent of the internet, and the explosion of information that number is quickly approaching 20. As brand we are getting drowned out by the noise. Intelligent use of remarketing is now absolutely vital so you are front of mind at time of purchase. Aiming at bottom of funnel is like asking someone to marry you on the first date. Daniel gets a whole football team of touch points... and the Brand SERP is the striker who scores the goal. Luckily for me. We also discuss the rebranding for the podcast, but didn't figure out the new name :( Daniel on LinkedIn

Ahmed Khalifa with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO September 2019 Ahmed Khalifa talks with Jason Barnard about why you would use captions and subtitles for your video.   Firstly, accessibility. All sorts of people benefit from captioned / subtitled videos, not just deaf people says Ahmed Khalifa: non-native speakers, people watching with the sound off, when the speakers’ accents aren’t clear (think Glaswegian :) … and some people just like to read along. Automatic captions need to be corrected. Machines simply cannot get everything right (especially the scene directions and ambiance descriptions). Apparently, professionals can write captions almost in real time, including descriptions about background noise. I personally hadn’t thought about how important that can be for context. It’s not just what we say, but the context in which we say it. Ahmed is deaf, and relies on captions. But all sorts of people benefit from captioned videos… Of course, we get onto Glaswegian accents. Heads up Craig Campbell. Auto

What is Microsoft's Business Model? Gennaro Cuofano Gennaro Looks at financials. He likes numbers. Microsoft has survived almost 50 years and ridden all the innovation waves (unlike many other large corporations). Microsoft are making $110 billion - almost as much as Google. But with a more varied and balanced business model - Office, Windows, Cloud, Gaming, Search and digital platforms. They have a lot of work to do to retain their existing clients, especially in Office. Their key worry with Office and Windows is how to stop their client-base shrinking. Investments such as LinkedIn are part of a strategy to expand their customer base. In both cases, they are dealing with very different demographics. And looking to the future... LinkedIn is making almost as much money as Bing advertising, but it still hasn't paid for itself... but is key to their future because it hooks into so many other of their products.

Paul talks about the rarity of tech startups that actually survive... and the even more rare case of one that succeeds. Part of that is educating the audience for a new innovative product they didn't know they needed. In this space, the new product is often the solution a company created to a problem they had... and then open it up to the wider world. Once out to market, the product often needs to adapt. You start with your core market. But then once investors come in, many startups expand the functionality of the product to try to reach a wider client base in order to please the investors. Not always a good idea. Knowing how to pivot is vital. Paul talks me through how SEPO tools have pivoted. And points out the irony that we are amazed that people are talking to their phones, given that Alexander Graham Bell invented it for exactly that purpose.

Jim explains how he identifies the patterns that link buying and PBNs create. Anyone who is selling links is creating a network that can be mapped (because they are using a Rolodex, apparently). There is no safe way to buy links, says Jim. And don't expect natural links into your product page. They will be to your content pages, so use the internal linking to benefit your product pages. When you create that linkworthy content, then spend time promoting it using the 80/20 rule. Jim is happy to stand by the idea that links are still the biggest thing, and will be for a long time to come. Jim is a content creator who happens to get links rather than a linkbuilder who happens to create content.

The father of SEO - he's been in the industry for almost a quarter of a century. He started with Infoseek. Then I say Google and my phone joins in the conversation. He then goes into the details of the 19 major search engines of the early years. And the tiny numbers we were using at the time. And how simple it was to rank, and yet complicated at the same time. Then the power of human intuition. And the glory of Macromedia Flash (that's me, not Bruce). Rumour has it that only 10% of companies have even done any active SEO. Bruce suggests that there is an 80/20 half life of evolving SEO strategies. Lastly onto E-A-T - expertise is your onpage content, authority is that peers agree with you and trust is a reflection of the sentiment / praise of your users. Ends with a delightful Einstein SEO quote.

AOL were very very big and were going to dominate the world. Did the CD work? Yes it did. At one point, for 2 weeks, no other CDs were produced in the world. Simon was doing SEO for TechCrunch, but the journalists didn't want to listen. So he took them out to lunch and charmed them into submission. Problem solved! Both Simon and AOL were precursors. They had a two-pronged approach - copywriting and tech. Then onto examples of extreme preciceness, then the vagueness in queries and results... and how queries change with story evolution (and articles must change too). Play on people's vanity to get them to do what you want. Sounds very creepy, but is less so than it sounds.