Previously podcast appearance by Kyle Freeman: “Microcast: Three Must-Have SEO Tools”

Blog post: “Three Must-Have SEO Tools”

POSTED March 22, 2021

SEO As A Creative Partner

About our guest

Kyle Freeman is the Head of SEO at Assurance.

He spoke with Tim Yeadon, Principal & Creative Director of Clyde Golden.

@kylejfreeman / Twitter

 

In This Episode

  • The “move fast and break things” culture at Assurance [00:56]

  • An SEO’s role within a company [3:11]

  • Figuring out what questions people are asking when they come to your site [7:27]

  • What an agency can do to rank better in a google search [8:47]

  • Building up to rank for highly competitive keywords [11:05]

  • Defining “page authority” and “domain authority” [14:07]

  • How Kyle became an SEO [16:29]

  • Exploring, finding your passion, and chasing things that make you nervous (like SEO for Kyle) [20:36]

  • A note from the producer of Input Doc [23:49]

  • Who should work with SEO’s more that doesn’t, and the benefits of partnering early with SEO [24:20]

  • How Google is advancing beyond keywords, and what it means for SEOs [30:09]

  • The role of images in search [33:20]

  • SEO tools that business owners should be using [35:43]

  • The best SEO courses to take [37:58]

  • What to look for when hiring an SEO freelancer or consultant [39:32]

  • Why an agency might fail at SEO [41:38]

  • Should you put the transcript of your podcast up on your website? [44:37]

  • Seattle-based SEO groups [47:49]

 

References

 

Podcast Transcript

Tim (00:12):

Hey everybody this is Tim. Today on Input Doc I'm going to be chatting with Kyle Freeman, he's the Head of SEO at Assurance IQ in Bellevue.

You might remember that earlier this year we had Kyle on for our first ever "Microcast". That was a 10-minute episode called "The Three Must-Have SEO Tools”. In it we reviewed keyword research, rank tracking, and website crawlers. If you haven't heard it, that "Microcast" can be found on our website at clydegolden.com/inputdoc. So Kyle is an SEO expert and I come from a content background, and so for me, I was really excited to learn about some of the more technical aspects of SEO, which we cover. That said, after chatting for a while, I think my main takeaway from the conversation is how SEO and content should partner together early and often. Let's get into it.

So I'm somewhat familiar with Assurance, and you are certainly a “move fast and break things,” crowd unafraid to try new things.

Kyle (01:07):

Yeah absolutely. I really like it here at Assurance. When my CMO reached out to me originally he was like, "Hey, you know, we're looking to fill in this SEO position." And I wasn't familiar with Assurance. I haven't been in the position to shop for my own insurance. So I was doing some research and after talking to him, he told me about all the big and exciting things that they're working on told me about how the teams are put together. And it just sounded so exciting to me that I left the agency that I was working at to join Assurance. Because I wanted to be a part of this move fast, break things, and really kind of push the boundaries, environment. I love that kind of stuff. I love really kind of pushing myself and being a part of something so big.

Tim (01:55):

There's that great phrase, was it by Patton? That it's better to violently execute a good plan today than the perfect plan next week.

Kyle (02:04):

Oo wow yeah. Alright. I like that.

Tim (02:04):

And that often reminded me of whenever we've done work with Assurance. As in like, let's knock this out, let's see how it goes. Let's try it again. Let's improve upon it.

Kyle (02:13):

Exactly. And that's what I love. It's such a healthy environment. And that's how I got my start in SEO was you know, working for this company that allowed me to really kind of try things out, learn things, pull some levers, break it. Learn fast, fail fast, and continue to do that. And I think that's such a healthy environment for all marketers, especially young marketers and continuing to grow and pushing those boundaries. So I just love it.

Tim (02:40):

You started the SEO team at Assurance in all likelihood.

Kyle (02:45):

Yes. Right now it is an SEO team of one for now. We have a lot of big things and a lot of future opportunities for the SEO team, content creation and so much more. But right now I am leading that front. The first person to do SEO there. There are some knowledgeable people that have had experience in SEO at Assurance. But definitely, you know, the first one to have the title and start kind of implementing a lot of those strategies.

Tim (03:11):

So search engine optimization technically would be the definition of SEO. But I feel like it means a thousand different things. And I talk to different people and there's always a different checklist or a different ethos or method. And if you're joining a company that's three years in and they already have quite a bit of traffic, what's your role?

Kyle (03:31):

Yeah, absolutely. You know, interestingly Assurance has not implemented a lot of content. We're not bringing in a lot of users. There are different areas of the funnel. You know, we're really missing out on a lot of top-of-funnel users. Relying a lot on the bottom of the funnel with branded searches, people, knowing what they want in other areas of advertising. So my role is to really kind of start taking advantage of all of those many different searches for the health insurance and personal finance industry and helping users really kind of guide them through that. Now if anyone goes and looks at Assurance.com, they'll be like, where is that? You know, I don't see him putting that. It's all coming in place. And I've really been focusing on leveraging the authority of our parent company, Prudential, and really leveraging them.

They had so many opportunities in the personal finance and health insurance space. It's so important to focus on EAT, which is expertise, authority, and trust. And you'll even see Google themselves talk about it, that's where it comes from, their Google Quality Rater Guidelines, which you can find online. And where they talk about how they don't want to rank just anybody for your money, your life terms. These are searches that people are performing to take care of their financial wellness. So just a non-authoritative website is not going to rank in top results. They want reliable sources. So I really focused a lot of effort on helping out with Prudential quite a bit. And they had a wonderful team over there. Really got to collaborate with them, work with them, and now they have a great SEO over there that is just knocking it out of the park. So really leveraging that authority and that expertise that's already existing, to kind of leverage a lot of those opportunities.

Tim (05:21):

So if somebody is searching for information on health insurance and you can get them to a Prudential site that has a high page authority, you can redirect them to an Assurance brand from there.

Kyle (05:33):

Yeah, we have been experimenting with some of those different approaches where we can kind of have that a little bit, that gray area of where Assurance is going to be more of the expert and the authority than Prudential is. So we do have some pages up there that we recently rolled out seeing how those are going at the moment, but that is kind of the beginning approach. And now moving on to phase two of just kind of focusing more on Assurance right now, and really kind of getting a lot of really cool things in place.

Tim (06:03):

Well, what is your responsibility or your charge at Assurance? What, what objective were you given when you joined?

Kyle (06:10):

Yeah. That was to really kind of, as mentioned, just help increase – bring in that organic traffic. I love that my CMO, he understands the value of SEO. And you won't find that a lot, which is really nice, he understands the value in it. He understands the importance of it. So like, "Hey, let's build a strategy." He kind of just gave me the keys to all of SEO. Sometimes you'll kind of come into an SEO position, working at agencies where people are still kind of like, you know, they have their own vision, their own way that they want things to be done. But here, and what I recommend for other marketing managers or higher is to just give the keys of SEO. See where they really can take it and see what they really can do for you if you aren't just fully into SEO already. So really just focusing on those different areas of the funnel. Right now, just really focusing on building a really good foundation about our core services and what resources are people going to need when they come to the website. They're shopping for insurance, obviously. They're shopping for personal loans. We know that. So what information do they need now, like to help them be confident with shopping for that information online?

Tim (07:27):

How do you establish that? How do you establish what questions somebody coming to your site may have?

Kyle (07:33):

Yeah, absolutely. And that's just doing a lot of research online, looking at the keyword research. What are the most frequently search for terms around our core service offerings? What are their pain points? Looking at our competitors has been a big one. Seeing what content is performing well for them and that is getting linked to a lot, that really ranks well. And then really focusing on, what is just important to know? So how to buy health insurance online, how to get started with a personal loan, that very beginning kind of like, what is my journey going to be? I know I need a personal loan right now for some debt consolidation or to help me out during these COVID pandemic times. What do I need to know about these next steps of my journey that I'm about to embark on? Talking to advisors and agents and inquiring on things. So just really kind of setting the expectations from here on out, and then as we'll continue to kind of grow and just kind of expand out from there, if that makes sense.

Tim (08:37):

It's almost impossible to do SEO if the person who runs the company, doesn't actually understand who the audience is and who you might want to sell to and what they may need.

Kyle (08:47):

Yes.

Tim (08:47):

Okay. So Clyde Golden is a creative agency in Seattle, and that's some metadata that I would use to describe it. Now that said, people who hire Clyde Golden, that may not be the metadata they would use to come and find me. And I'm really no better ranked than I was four years ago when I started. And I don't know if competition has grown or I have just not cracked that per se. On average, we get hired by word of mouth, truly. And maybe we've had a client or two come in because they found something I wrote about an email case study or something along those lines. What am I missing?

Kyle (09:24):

Absolutely. I'm glad you brought this up because I listened to this other marketing podcast a couple of weeks ago and the person was on there for SEO. And he said that "I don't get to do SEO for his new website because people don't know how to search for my product that I'm offering," but that's not true because people are always searching for a solution to their problem and your product is a solution to their problem. So you need to find how they're searching for that solution. That's the top of the funnel. So someone's like, "you provide a solution with a lot of great resources and creatives." And so how are people searching for that solution? Write some content, write some landing pages being like, "Hey, here's your problem. Here's the solution that we can help you with. We're going to help you out with that."

And then it also sounds like you did do some SEO efforts a few years ago. And then that has since kind of shaken things up a little bit. But algorithms have been crazy and ruthless and cutthroat these last few years. So not keeping up on that stuff can be very challenging and really set you back a little bit. So that's just one of the areas that really comes to mind. I'm just really trying to put that out there. I know that people are searching for what Clyde Golden offers, so it becomes the more... You could focus at a local level sometimes. I worked in an agency. We were nationwide, but we also focus a lot on the local level too.

Tim (11:05):

So I did some searches last night on Google Trends. And in Washington, nobody's searching for 'creative agency’. They searched for ‘marketing agency’, which was eye-opening to me. Sometimes I feel like there's, it's a lot of maintenance. It's a lot of going back and double-checking and seeing, have things changed? Are people searching for different things? Where I come from a content background, which is truly you have a product, you have an audience, what do they value? Can I create something of relevance to them? But I don't know that the ongoing maintenance is always occurring. Is that, is that the SEO partnership that we're looking for?

Kyle (11:40):

Yeah. So an SEO agency is probably going to have a pretty good stronghold on keywords like ‘marketing agency’. But ‘creative agency’, while it might get fewer searches, it might also be less competitive and a great place to start for now. And people often want to go for that top, mountain top, high search volume keyword, 15,000, 20,000 searches a month, as opposed to the one that only gets 500 searches a month. Which I don't know what those search volumes are. But you probably might not rank for ‘marketing agency’ for a couple of years if we just keep at it actively. But however, you could maybe optimize for ‘creative agency’ and be in the top 10 results in the next few months. So which one really offers the quickest ROI?

Now, while you continue to focus on the less competitive terms, you optimize for that, you get in there. Sure it's not a crazy amount of traffic, but it is traffic and you are getting visibility. And then building up your authority, seeing what it will take to get to that "marketing agency" keyword, getting in the top 10 results. And that's gonna take some time to really kind of build-up. And then once you think you're ready start kind of heading over towards that direction of optimizing for that bigger mountain top keyword.

When that defining moment is a little bit hard to just say, but that's just one way to kind of go about it. And especially coming back over to Assurance. Playing around a lot of giants in this industry that are insurance leaders. There's NerdWallet, BankRate, insurance providers that just have a stronghold on this, have very strong authority. So we have to start off finding where can we have opportunities and then we'll have to pivot later on once we build our authority. And then the second part that you were saying was maintaining. Some of the best advice I've ever heard about maintenance of your pages is, don't set it and forget it. Do not just produce content just to produce it. Always keep your content ranking high. And then as soon as you see it drop down to the second page, re-optimize that page. So don’t just keep producing new content, keep all of your existing content performing well. I know that that's easier said than done sometimes, but that's some of the best advice that I've heard that people often overlook.

Tim (14:07):

There's a lot of terms that you use while you talk that you're fluent in, that for me, I find intimidating. Let's run through "page authority".

Kyle (14:15):

Yeah. so "page authority" is not an official metric, that one was made by Moz SEO tool here in Seattle. "Page authority" measures a lot of different factors to kind of allow this metric to show how authoritative your page is compared to other pages online. And there's also domain authority, but they're measured very similarly.

One of the main factors that they're looking at with that "page" or "domain authority" is the backlinks pointing to the page or the domain. And then it takes those into consideration. And it's not just taking the number of domains, it's taking how many unique links from referring domains. So if you know, Clyde Golden linked out to Assurance 20 times, well only a few of those are really going to be worth valuing. You can't just keep linking to us and be like “boost our authority, Clyde Golden! Keep sending those over here!” It's not going to work that way. So you want to get a lot of different domains. You want to get those from domains that also have a high domain and page authority, cause that authority will now come over to your site a little bit.

If you look up the page rank math algorithm, it'll blow your mind, if you ever looked at it. I worked with an SEO, he was able to make pretty good sense of it and break it down for us. He's so smart. But it's a very kind of intimidating math equation that they put together to help determine the authority of this. So these tools like Moz – Ahrefs have their own tool and all these other own tools have their own way of measuring these page and domain authorities.

But it's a great metric to kind of see how you are put up against competitors in going up for those keywords that are highly competitive. Like, can I take on? What's their domain authority in the top 10 results? Am I going to be able to compete in that? You know, I'm a domain authority of 15 in their 50s, you can definitely cross that one off and come back to that one at a later time. But if it's a smaller difference, you can definitely – just because they're higher than you doesn't mean that you won't outrank them.

Tim (16:29):

That's very interesting. How did you get started in this?

Kyle (16:32):

So I started out in my journey, I wanted to be a well-rounded marketer, well-rounded digital marketer. I really found it to be pretty cool. And I got this job and digital marketing jobs were slim pickings in Ogden, Utah, where I'm from.

Tim (16:49):

What year was this?

Kyle (16:51):

This was in 2013. And I'd also recently came out of the Marine Corps. So a lot of skills weren't really translating over and not only were the jobs slim pickin's, but my experience was as well. But luckily through some networking, some great opportunities, I got this job as an email marketer at this agency, and it was really great. I worked there for two and a half years and really learned a lot about HTML there and also got into social media marketing as well. Because we'd build these landing pages for our users and then we would drive traffic through email and social media posts to these landing pages. And things went really well there, but I still felt like, after spending two and a half years there, that I really wanted to continue to kind of grow my experience. I didn't want to be stuck in email marketing or anything like that.

So I went on and went to this startup out in Salt Lake City, where they were an Internet of Things startup with wireless sensors, and I got to write blog articles. And I recently checked on those to see how those perform still to this day. This is where I started wanting to learn about SEO. I was doing email marketing still, a little bit of PPC, and some social media. But I still wasn't getting that SEO knowledge that I wanted.

So I bought this "SEO for Dummies" book. It was like four books in one, and I'm just going through this book, riding the train into work, reading "SEO for Dummies". And I just had so many questions about SEO. It was like my biggest hole of just being like, I don't get it. I see other job listings that are really wanting this as a skill set. And I'm like, I don't get it. You're telling me to get the keywords. What do I do with the keywords? Where do I put these? How do I use them? So I just had so many questions. So I was like, that's it. So I just applied to a full-time SEO position at a car dealership. And it was a great car dealership, there are actually 55 different dealerships I had to manage SEO for, which became a lot.

So I took on this full-time SEO position as an SEO Coordinator. And again, another great company that let me fail and make mistakes, try things out. I did some wild stuff. I was reading the "SEO for Dummies", and then I got "The Art of SEO", which is like this 900 page book. I wasn't even able to fit my lunch in my backpack anymore, but it was all right. I was learning SEO. I was reading a chapter a day and I was like, I'm gonna apply this chapter, these skills today on a website, I'm going to really try these things out and learn these things. And I was the only SEO there, and I didn't really have any mentors still so it was kind of hard to learn. Got into that. And then I've just really enjoyed it.

And then there was this SEO Manager position – I was there for six months, and there was this SEO manager position for this global enterprise company. I was like, yeah, sure. Why not? Let's see what this does. Got that job, had a great mentor, and learned so much more there. And I just fell in love from there. And I absolutely just loved SEO and that always changing landscape, the algorithms. You know, nothing's stale in SEO and there are all these different facets of SEO that you can venture down. And you as an individual can really find what you want to be an expert on within SEO. Do you want to be an expert with SEO and content? Do you want to focus on technical in SEO? There's also just local SEO, and so much more. It's just a very exciting area for me that's always evolving and always more areas to learn and grow.

Tim (20:36):

I always find that if I can find somebody who is smart and optimistic and enthusiastic, and they have a fire in their belly to learn about it, that's the choice. And I have a sense that you've been that hire several times, and that you're quite a bit self-taught.

Kyle (20:51):

Yeah, absolutely. I like to be self-taught. I like your quote from one of your recent podcasts where you said, "if you hear something that makes you nervous chase it" and I never heard that before, but that describes how I've kind of approached SEO and digital marketing quite a bit. I'm like, there's a big question mark in that area. I don't understand it. Now I'm going to go dedicate time to that. I'm going to go learn this thing because I don't like there to be this hole of like, something I don't know. And, and for anyone else out there listening, you don't have to be an expert at everything SEO. You don't have to be like, I need to know long file analysis. I need to understand Java script and how that plays in. Know enough to have conversations and to ask questions. That's all you need to continue to grow and have that knowledge.

Kyle (21:44):

But I love just always learning and it's kind of weird, cause I consider SEO is like a hobby for me. I just genuinely enjoy it. But I am fun at parties. I trust me, I do have other fun things to talk about. My best friend, he's a marketer as well. And I love just kind of picking his brain, totally different marketer. He really helps kind of bring some more insights into me. So I'm not just like pigeonholed on SEO and it's just really great to surround yourself by those other people, quite a bit,

Tim (22:14):

Really understanding the wants and needs of people and how to speak to them. And it's just, it's just the funnest thing of all time.

Kyle (22:23):

Yeah, it absolutely is. I love collaborating with other teams. Working at enterprise-level companies is a lot of fun because there are so many different people, there are all these different experts in their own areas. And I also, in my early years of SEO, I found that a little bit frustrating. Because again, I still wanted to be well-rounded. I want to be knowledgeable. So that's why I ended up leaving some of the enterprise-level companies early on in my career to go and do freelance because I wanted to pull more levers on my own. I wanted to actually go into Google Analytics and make changes, make Google Data Studio dashboards, and actually go into the HTML of the page and make changes.

And so I left these big companies where it's so restricting and I went and pursued that kind of like, I need to pull more levers. I really need to do this as an SEO. I got so much of that as a freelancer and as an SEO Team Lead at a marketing agency, I got to do a lot of that later on. And now I'm pretty happy with that and got all that experience. Now I'm going to go back over to these large companies where I get to focus on my stuff and it's just really great. I recommend that for everyone, to you know, find ways to continue to pull levers. Don't get stagnant in what you're doing. Once you're getting stagnant, you're not learning. So always find some new lever to pull.

 

Meghan O'Neill – In House Advertisement (23:49):

Hey listeners, it's Meghan O'Neill marketing coordinator at Clyde Golden and producer of your favorite podcast, Input Doc. If you're enjoying listening to this episode, I have a feeling you might want to check out our newsletter. No, I'm not a psychic, I couldn't guess how you take your coffee, but I am pretty sure about this one. So go to Clydegolden.com/report to sign up and get tips, tricks and research delivered right to your inbox. Thanks for listening. Now, back to the show.

 

Tim (24:20):

I would imagine that an SEO professional crosses over with quite a few different disciplines in marketing. Which groups do you feel should work together more that don't?

Kyle (24:33):

Yeah, I considered this. One of the biggest SEO pitfalls is SEO being so siloed and it should not be. SEO really needs to be with a lot of different groups. And just a quick story before I answer that. One of those enterprise companies I went and worked for. I was in a whole other building than the marketing team, the content writers, and everyone, and I was not with them at all. I wasn't even in the marketing department and it was just like, so hard. The bridge between us, so the gap between us was so big and it was really hard to collaborate.

So I highly recommend that you, as an SEO or a manager over SEOs, really bring together obviously your marketing team to work with SEOs. And also your social media, your content, get your analytics team and SEO working together if they’re not already. And then also your developers and IT should be working with your SEO. So before they make any big changes, before they roll out anything new, they should run that by SEO to get their thoughts.

Because one of the biggest problems I ever saw working at an agency, people would come to us panicking like, "our website traffic is gone." We're like, "Cool. What recent changes did you make." "Oh, well our developers added on this... You know, we just redesigned our website, obviously look how great it looks." It's like, yeah, but it's not crawlable, it's not indexable by search engines, and you didn't have SEO consulting you along the way.

And then also one of the other ones that's highly underestimated is SEO and the PR team. There are so many things that those two can collaborate on together. Going back to that link building, getting links from other websites. PR is going to be the one that helps you get there.

So it's not a one-way relationship either where all these teams help SEO, but SEO honestly does support all of those teams. It's a very fair two-way relationship. And continue to find ways for your SEOs to be a bigger part in your company. There's so many different opportunities there. And one of the ways that I overcame that in an enterprise company and a global company is we gave company-wide trainings. And we put together these SEO summits. And we just educated everyone on what we do and how we can help you. And it was huge, the feedback was great, we were just having all these meetings, we were so busy and just being a part of all these other teams afterward. It was just very powerful.

Tim (27:08):

Yeah. I need an SEO expert in my life.

Kyle (27:10):

Yeah.

Tim (27:10):

I do. I can tell. And the more that I learn, the more that I realize this. And that, we make some pretty huge decisions for clients as far as content. And we do take SEO into account, but, you know, I have a content strategist who I work very closely with, a director of production I work very closely with, developers I work closely with. I bring everybody in early on, in, what are we going to create, and what should we watch out for, and how do we want to plan this. And I feel like SEO is probably overlooked quite a bit. I've always been a little skeptical at a strictly SEO agency. And apologies to all strictly SEO agencies out there, because I'm coming from a place of weakness on the subject. But if you're not tied in with everybody else, what are you doing?

Kyle (27:58):

Yeah. That is such a great, like, call out there. And those strictly SEO agencies, you know, I think they have realized that you can't just be a one-trick pony. And so I think they are kind of like trying to expand out into multiple services, but mainly really trying to pair SEO with content. But if SEO doesn't have the support, and as a team lead at an agency, I'd have to work out – when working with clients, sometimes they would try – So we were a full-service marketing agency and we had content analytics and so much more.

Tim (28:42):

Who are you working for? Which agency?

Kyle (28:43):

Portent.

Tim (28:43):

Portent. Alright.

Kyle (28:46):

So really just a smart group of people.

Tim (28:49):

Yeah!

Kyle (28:49):

That's why I was like, yeah, I'm moving out there. I'm going to go work with y'all. They're so smart. And they have so many brilliant minds over there. I can't say enough good things about them.

So it was so interesting to see clients that would hire us out and be like, "yeah, yeah, we want to improve our SEO." Like, "alright, great. We're going to put you up with some SEO services. We're going to get some content creation in there." And they're like, "no, no, no, we don't want content. We just want to SEO." It's like, "no, no, that's not how it works. No." And they're like, "well, we don't want that. We just want SEO." It's like, well, "SEO can't work without content." So later on, we just started to realize that we don't separate these two services. They live under the same roof here.

And that's how it should be for a lot of people. It's just really making sure that we don't silo SEO, and we are pairing that up to get the most use out of it. And the same goes for content writers that think that they're SEOs. I know that they are brilliant minds. They really are. And I know that they get SEO, but they don't know SEO. And that's one of the bigger problems that I've been seeing is that there's so much more to SEO than just being, like, I understand how to use keywords and do keyword research, there's so much more to that to being successful. So we need each other, SEO and content, content and SEO.

Tim (30:09):

What is it that I should know that I probably don't know? Because I'm in content and I love doing content.

Kyle (30:15):

Well... I guess I'll tell you the scarier part right now. And it just kind of seems like the future of SEO is that we're getting more and more away from keywords. You know what I mean? Well, with Google. Google, a year ago rolled out the BERT algorithm update, which was a big one. So, what that was, was Google went from reading texts from left to right, to now being able to read texts from left to right and right to left, to fully understand the context of the texts. It's just mind-blowing. So now using natural language processing, Google knows exactly what your contents about so much better and clearer by being able to do that. And then there's also, in recent news, ranking passages on a webpage.

So now if you wrote about all the different types of health insurance and you had in there Cobra, short-term health insurance, ACA plans, and so much more. Typically in the past, we would only be able to rank for the keyword that we were going for, which was different types of health insurance. And it's like, "wow, that's exciting. So that's why we have to put all of that in there." But now with these passages and ranking, Google's able to read that paragraph that you wrote about short-term health insurance. And if they feel that that was one of the best paragraphs, then it will rank for information about short-term health insurance. It's just mind-blowing that we're getting more about that quality of content. So I guess that's good news for you.

Tim (31:51):

I just became more relevant. (laughs)

Kyle (31:53):

Yeah, actually now I think about it. And this is one of the bigger things I want to just share for everyone, whether you formally did SEO for a little bit, or you are an SEO. It's the power to unlearn. I'm not telling you to forget everything you learned, but don't get so caught up in your old ways of SEO. Start really seeing where it's going and getting ready for it. Ask questions. Where are you guys thinking this is going? We all don't know. We're all just making guesses. I'm reading blog articles, following SEO leaders on Twitter. And I'm just really trying to see where this is going. So this is still very new information.

So hopefully this ages well and doesn't come back to haunt me. But that's one of the areas where I'm excited about, because I'm writing a lot of really in-depth content topics. Like, different types of life insurance and how they work for you. Before I was only going to be ranking for that keyword "different types of life insurance", but now I can maybe get those keywords around "whole term life insurance" and just really, just, it opens up so much more, but keep in mind that they are anticipating that this will only affect about 7% of search queries, not a big shakeup. Well, let's continue to keep our eye on this. Continue to see where it goes. And not just dismiss these little changes. But by looking at the pattern of Google and the direction that they have really rolled out these algorithms, that's kind of beginning to be what I'm thinking, what I'm hearing from other experts.

Tim (33:20):

How about the role of images in search. I mean, on Google, the image link is just as big as anything else. And I consistently go searching for content via in image, hoping that – like if I'm looking for a technical detail in something that I'm working on, then I will search through images until I stumble into what I think looks relevant and then go in and take a look and read on. How to fix a garage door for instance, or something like that.

Kyle (33:50):

No, that's great. And it sounds like you and I are working on the same projects. But so the images will have a different sort of visibility and dominance depending on the search intent. So if users often search for that, then click on images. Google's just going to make it part of the main search engine result page for when you search for you know... We recently bought a house. And we've been working on a lot of interior design things. So I'm trying to get some inspiration. What colors to paint a darker basement that doesn't get a lot of natural light, and I'm searching for that. And then up there will be images of interior design, and that's usually where I go as well and just look for inspiration through those images.

So it really does depend on the search, on how visible images will be. We don't always need to be optimizing for images. But understanding that search intent, do the search yourself, see are images pretty dominant here? And then if not, it's still okay to optimize for images. And how you do that, optimize for images, is Google is still taking the context of what's on your page and so your page still needs to be about what you want that image to rank for. But also for the image alt-text, which is mainly used for accessibility purposes, but you're kind of giving a context of that image, for any reason that it can't show up or someone has to use a screen reader. It'll be read describing that image to that person. So that's one of the areas writing content about it. And then – I forgot what I was going to say – but you can also track your image search performance through Google Search Console. You can now see how often people are finding you through images. What pages and what search queries that they're using to find you, and what those are.

Tim (35:43):

I'm using Google Analytics, and I have Google Search Console, but I don't particularly follow it. I also stare at the Squarespace analytics that are served up. I suppose I have MailChimp analytics... Wherever I can get any little bit of info. What other tools should I be using and what as a business owner should I be paying for?

Kyle (36:04):

Good question? And I really try not... I'm not a big fan of those big expensive all in one package tools. I love all my different tools for different reasons. As the SEO team here at Assurance will grow, they'll probably be frustrated with me, the young SEOs, cause I'm like, "well, you have to go to this tool for that one, cause I really like them for this feature." That's just how I am. And those all in one package ones just don't do it for me. So I like, you know, just find what works for you, and if the enterprise tools do work for you, that's great too. But the tool that I recommend from an SEO perspective, you definitely need quality keyword research, do not underestimate that. There are free keyword research tools out there but I highly recommend going to the leaders in that and that's Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz. Those three are your safest bets.

Moz I think even kind of expanded their service offerings to cover some things within social media. I have to follow up on that. So there's a lot. Do your research on them, see which one really meets your needs. I would say those three you'll get very reliable information when it comes to keyword research and some other valuable SEO information. The cool thing about Semrush and Ahrefs is you can also crawl your website to find technical issues, which is often underestimated. Again, going back to my time at Portent marketing agency, everyone would come to us and be like, "there's something wrong with our site. What is it?" Usually a technical issue that got overlooked. Those tools will help highlight those issues for you. Then you can just either hire a developer or send it over to your IT development team and get that resolved. So at a very high level, that's what I would recommend and making sure that you have good quality keyword research tools available.

Tim (37:58):

Are there any courses or anything like that? I know there's like a one hour guide to SEO on Moz that is–

Kyle (38:05):

Yeah. Good question. There is so many. Everyone's done such a good job of creating these different courses. I know that Distilled has an amazing SEO course that I've used before and I just love what they put together. That one's a paid one. The Moz one's a SEO 101. I think they might have a paid version too. I am not too sure about that. They've been really good about going back to basics and that's what I loved in recent years, SEO has gone back to basics. Before it was like, we're only looking forward. You got to go read the old articles and then catch up. But now everyone's going back to basics. Ahrefs does really good with going back to basics SEO 101. They also have a really good YouTube channel that you can just kind of learn and understand SEO.

And then I'm a big fan of books and I love reading books. I love just sitting down at night and just going through that and using it as a reference guide. Looking through the table of contents, being like, "Ooh, I want to learn that" flip over to that page and just kind of dive into that. And I truly do enjoy that approach, but a warning to anyone that is looking to just buy books on SEO, check the data on those before you buy them. Anything that's older than two years don't buy it. It's outdated. So keep up on that. And then that's kind of my approach, follow leaders and industry experts on social media. They're always talking about new things and it will always kind of keep you up to date a little bit.

Tim (39:32):

You're a marketing manager and you need an SEO consultant. What are you looking for in a consultant either at an agency or as a freelancer?

Kyle (39:43):

Yeah great question there. I'm trying to reflect back because I wrote a blog article about this and like, what did I say on that a year ago?

First thing that comes to mind is, I would really get a good feel on how this person keeps up with SEO and what is their approach. Now you have to do some homework yourself as the hiring person, just to get your own opinion on this and ask questions. You don't have to be "the expert" at it, but ask questions. You know, you're hearing this information about where SEO is going, bring that up, see if they had a pulse on that. You really want people that are staying ahead of the industry because the second you fall behind in the SEO industry, you'll have to play a lot of catch up to get back up, especially in competitive industries. So you don't want to risk that. So you want to get a good pulse on that and ask the same questions that you asked earlier about what tools. What tools are you using to get this information? If you're working with a freelancer and they're tight on money and they're like, "I use..." You know, do your research on that tool to see if that's a great one to be using, because you don't want to be misled by that inaccurate information either. I know that's kind of vague and kind of hard to pinpoint for some people that don't know.

And then just asking questions about some of their successes. Doing some research on seeing, like, who else have you worked with in the past, if you just share that with me. And just really looking at how well they moved the needle. What was your approach for that? Where have you had your greatest successes working with other clients? Have you worked with other people in this industry and what have you seen works well? What do you see is working well for my competitors as well? Just asking all those questions that they can really come to you with a vision that really aligns to what you're trying to accomplish, then you'll be in good hands.

Tim (41:38):

And times that you've worked with agencies where it didn't go well, what are, what are hallmarks of that? What are things that you see over and over?

Kyle (41:47):

I have worked with agencies that didn't go well, I've worked with agencies that were just too keyword focused, and it wasn't really a holistic SEO strategy. It was more of a plug and play approach of like, "let's put keywords here, keywords here," which is a very primitive SEO approach. Which tells me that things are just kind of getting stagnant a little bit over there and they really need to shake some things up. And ultimately just not listening to you and your goals. Just misaligning on a lot of things. That does happen and just really kind of bringing that back a little bit. That's been some of the more... Hidden fees. I've seen that come up before. You're like, "Oh yeah, you're gonna help us out with outreach." And all of a sudden, they're trying to bill you more for per link and stuff. I've had some, some frustrations there.

And then another great approach that just came to mind for just trying to filter out these agencies or freelancers is do your homework. Go read their blog. And that's like, the biggest indicator to me is what are they writing about? Are they writing about anything at all? Or, you know go see really where they're at. And when working at Portent, we were talking about a lot of really just kind of advanced things, so many different things which really led to a lot of great opportunities. So what are these agencies talking about. And look at their website, how are they applying SEO to their own website? It's such a giveaway.

In this blog article, I totally called out this local agency. I blurred some things out, but they just keyword-stuffed their whole page. Seattle SEO Agency, Seattle SEO Agency. It's like, "do you want that to be your website?" Because that's how you get penalized. That's how you won't be ranking at all. You'll be begging Google to put you back in the search results. And blaming that on your SEO agency there.

Tim (43:51):

It's less, it's less authority and more authenticity, it sounds like, that takes the day in SEO.

Kyle (43:56):

Yeah, it really does. And you can't put a price on just quality work there. I see it a lot. I've seen it with some friends that started their own website and they hired this group internationally to do their SEO for them. And it was very outdated practices. I'm like, how much are you trying to save? Because it's going to hurt you so much more in the long run. Let me help you with that. SEO will absolutely pay for itself when you are getting those high-ranking keywords and getting that authority on your website, there's so much great benefit to that.

Tim (44:38):

A perfectly selfish question – is posting the transcript of these podcasts useful on the website?

Kyle (44:44):

Yes, very useful. You should put the transcript on there because while posting these videos on YouTube – YouTube is owned by Google. Google can crawl the made-up transcript that YouTube produces and understand the context of it. But putting that on your page will definitely help Google crawl that and rank your page for any relevant queries that we mentioned here. But also it'll send strong signals to Google that Clyde Golden is talking about SEO. So when you look to kind of venture into SEO you'll have all these kind of indicators, search engines will be like, "Oh yeah, no, they've totally talked about SEO." And then just kind of send those signals all around your website a little bit. So please do that. It'll be highly beneficial.

Tim (45:36):

Cool. We have been doing that. It is, next to the interview itself, perhaps the most time consuming part, which is cleaning up the... We use rev.com to run a transcript of any videos, like of this video, we'll run it through, and then to clean that up it takes a bit of time. But I love going back and just reading them later. I find so many interesting things. These conversations are fascinating and they're difficult while I do them. I really learn from them when I go back and listen to them or take a look at them,. I'll be like, "well, what did Kyle say about this?" You know?

Kyle (46:10):

Yes. I always go back to re-listen on podcasts. There's a lot of information that we’ve given out here and I would love the opportunity to go back and read it. So, you know what I mean? And just read through it. Cause I'm like, "what minute mark was that at?" Instead, you can do either CTRL-Find or just scroll through real quick and scan it. And depending on how you format it, it could be a very digestible read.

Tim (46:34):

For us a podcast made a lot of sense. I would say my team is as much of an audience for this podcast as is anybody else, in that we're just trying to learn and get better.

Kyle (46:43):

That's great.

Tim (46:44):

We were talking recently and I was like, "I have a thousand SEO questions." And I was like, "I know a guy, let's call Kyle!"

Kyle (46:53):

Well, I'm really glad that I was thought of, I love that. And I really love just talking about SEO. And that was one of the things that I did when I was blogging about SEO on the agency's website is, I would pick sometimes topics that were challenging to me. I'm like, "I know I can learn this. I just need to do a lot of research, ask other people, work with my team. And I want to learn this as I write it." I hope that doesn't show my hand too much, but I really do just enjoy pushing the boundaries of just how to really learn this. And you get to kind of share that perspective with this podcast on being like, "you know, we're managers, we're directors, we're leaders of marketers." And again, you don't have to be experts at everything. And this is a great opportunity for you to ask genuine questions that other people are going to have too. So I really do love that. And I think it's going to be very relatable for a large audience.

Tim (47:49):

Do you have some favorite groups here in town that you meet up with to talk about SEO? Are there any resources that you would point people towards?

Kyle (47:58):

Yeah. Here in Seattle. This is one of my big appeals for moving out to Seattle is the community out here. There's a lot of great companies out here, which I knew, but coming out here, the community of SEO itself is amazing. So a good friend of mine, Alex Ratynski, he does SEOBeers here in Seattle. And I think there are other ones in Denver as well. Where us SEOs, we get together – post-pandemic we'll get together again – and we just chat and it's been such great networking. We don't just talk about SEO. We are cool people.

But you know, Britney Muller will show up, Rand Fishkin is there sometimes. And so many like smart minds. And you do get the chance to talk about SEO with them. I've also networked with some of the other team leads at other agencies while I was a team lead at another competitive agency, but we got to talk and collaborate and be like, "here's some of the obstacles I'm having. How did you overcome this?" And they're so open to sharing their knowledge. The SEO community is fun. We're very niche, we’re a unique group of people.

So SEO beers can be found at seattleseobeers.com. You can follow them on Twitter, or their email newsletter kind of saying like, "Hey, here's where we're meeting up." And then there's also the Seattle Search Network. They do these very affordable, in-person once a month trainings – again, post-pandemic it'll come around again. And they are really great for beginner to intermediate SEO's digital marketers and really kind of learning a little bit more about SEO, but they do venture beyond that content writing, content creation, content strategy. More info about them can be found at seattlesearchnetwork.org.

And I love what people are putting together here in Seattle. I love the community here. But one of the things I regret not doing while in the smaller areas of Ogden and Salt Lake City, Utah is not doing these myself. And not putting these groups together myself. So anyone else that's not in the Seattle area, you can start this stuff. You don't have to be the expert. Start groups, start communities. The networking is phenomenal. And just having someone that you can message on Twitter or LinkedIn and be like, Hey, this is what I'm kind of seeing, can y'all help me out? The community is there for you and you don't have to be alone and trying to figure things out, especially with the unique situations that SEO can offer you.

Tim (50:20):

Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you visiting Input Doc. Would you mind letting people know where they could learn more about you?

Kyle (50:28):

Yes. Follow me on Twitter @KyleJFreeman. I post pretty regularly about SEO there and definitely a great area if you do have any SEO questions, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or through Twitter there. I'll be happy to just provide any advice or just kind of help along the way. I will do my best to keep up to date on the latest SEO trends and sharing my thoughts and advice along the way.

Tim (50:55):

Well, thank you. Have a great day.

Kyle (50:58):

Thanks a lot, Tim. Take care.