Because Business is Personal

Unlocking Organic Growth Strategies with Break the Web's Jason Berkowitz

• Mike Caldwell/Jason Berkowitz • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Join us for a journey into empathic marketing with our special guest Jason Berkowitz, the founder and SEO director of Break the Web. With his decade-long expertise in the digital world, Jason's insights promise to provide a fresh perspective on how to grow your business online. This conversation is not just about SEO and advertising strategies, it's about the significance of empathy in marketing and Jason's love for dogs which reminds us of the importance of companionship and comfort in our lives.

Our episode takes you through Jason's transition from traditional marketing to entrepreneurship and the birth of Break the Web. You'll be inspired by his battles with imposter syndrome and his continuous evolution in the marketing field. We unravel the intricacies of SEO strategy and how a niche audience plays a pivotal role in your business growth. Jason also shares his invaluable knowledge on long tail keywords, SEO-driven content marketing strategy, and ways to organically boost your website traffic.

We then dive into the challenges and strategies of SEO campaigns, discussing what can make or break your campaign. Discover the unique differences between SEO and other forms of marketing and how a good brand name and reputation can be beneficial to SEO. As we move ahead, we delve into the applications and limitations of Artificial Intelligence in our daily tasks and content creation, while also touching upon the potential legal liabilities of AI-generated content. Jason's fascinating experience with chatbots and how to understand website authority adds an extra layer of intrigue to the discussion. So, don't wait, indulge in this enlightening conversation and give your marketing strategy a supercharge today!

Eager to harness the power of Empathic Marketing to propel your business growth? Get your hands on my #1 Amazon Best Selling book, 'Empathic Marketing,' or book a '30-Minute Gap Analysis' session directly from my website: www.becausebusinessispersonal.com.

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Speaker 1:

Hey, welcome to the Because Business is Personal podcast, the podcast where empathy meets marketing strategy. I'm your host, mike Caldwell, but I'm also known as the marketing medic. Now, the reason for that is because, before becoming a marketing strategist, I actually worked as a paramedic for 12 years, and it was during that time that I realized how important it was to truly understand the problems your patient was facing before you started providing treatment. And it's this same understanding, the same empathy, is just as crucial when it comes to understanding our prospects and making sales, and that's why, in each episode, we'll dissect the art of empathic marketing, exploring how top professionals infuse empathy into their strategies to build stronger relationships, boost their sales and make a lasting impact. So buckle up and prepare to turn up the dial on your marketing effectiveness. As we gear up to dive deeper into the realm of empathic marketing, I'd like to share a couple of special offers with you. First, you can get a free copy of my international bestselling book Empathic Marketing. You only need to cover the cost of shipping. Reading this will provide you with a much more in-depth understanding of the empathy-based marketing approach that we explore in this show. Next, I'm offering a 50% discount on a transformative 30-minute gap analysis session with me. Reading this session will identify the hurdles in your marketing efforts and together will develop an actionable roadmap aimed at winning you more clients and making you more sales. Just visit my website, wwwbecausebusinessispersonalcom to grab your book or use coupon code podcast to take advantage of my gap analysis offer. So why wait? Let's start turbocharging your marketing strategy today.

Speaker 1:

Now let's get started with our episode. All right, hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Because Business Personal. I'm thrilled to have Jason Berkowitz, the founder and SEO director of Break the Web, with us today. With over a decade of experience in the world of search engine optimization and paid advertising, jason has been instrumental in helping businesses achieve remarkable growth by demystifying organic growth strategies. As a true advocate of accessibility, transparency and meaningful results, jason's expertise aligns perfectly with our empathic approach to business. So join us as we delve into his journey and uncover valuable insights into building a successful online presence that truly connects with customers.

Speaker 2:

So welcome Jason. Oh, thank you so much for having me, mike. That was awesome. I appreciate that intro.

Speaker 1:

I did my research, man. I know all about you, not all about you. I don't know much personal about you.

Speaker 2:

Social security nerd. Yeah, talk about personal yeah.

Speaker 1:

Because business is personal. The way I like to start each podcast is to learn something a little bit more personal about you, something quirky, something interesting to our listeners, that's non-business related, and I know what I want to hear from you. So if you don't give me that answer, then I'll get you to change. So what do you got for us?

Speaker 2:

Oh man, I feel like there's a million things.

Speaker 1:

I love Puppies.

Speaker 2:

I love. Puppies, she's actually snoring right through my desk. So if you hear some weird noise, I mean puppy related, yeah, we have a cleft lip, a cockapoo. She's got like a little weird, weird lip and a little rescue. So she has weird sleepy sounds because an extra hole, I guess, in her face. Yeah, she's a cute little one. I would wake her up and show you, but she's asleep.

Speaker 1:

No, no, no, she's about a year and a half. Let her sleep, let her sleep, let her get that beaty rest. So what makes you like dogs so much?

Speaker 2:

No matter what you're going through, no matter how your day is going, they're always chipper and happy and makes you smile. You get home and again doesn't really matter what's going on in your life. You always got like a friendly face. They call it man's best friend for a reason a friendly face, smiling, you want to give you love and they're fluffy and they're fluffy and they're cool to cuddle with. I understand you've got a few dogs yourself, right? Actually, I see in the background we have five rescues.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, if you're on the video, then you can see. That's the puppy, that's an Australian shepherd, Pico, and then there's a basset hound, a basset hound and a Labradorian right there. Oh, then Fred's under the desk. The border call, we're going buddies. Yeah, buddy's over. Oh, you can't see him. We actually. So we had two leather sofas and we had to get a third, even though there's just my wife and I. But the way it works is I watch TV while my wife's making dinner and sounds very patriarchal, but that's the way it is. She'd make my dinner and bring me my dinner because I'm the man, and then she'd have her place. She's like I have nowhere to sit because I'm one part of the couch, the dogs be on the other two, just so. We actually had to get another sofa, just so my wife could have dinner with us.

Speaker 2:

I love that you get in and dogs get priority right On the couch. They do, they do indeed.

Speaker 1:

So tell me a little bit about the skydiving and then we'll get into some business stuff.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean. Very similar actually to why I love dogs. Oh, just a sec, I forgot a joke.

Speaker 1:

I forgot a joke. Yeah, the dog joke. Yeah, so it's always funny. So again I'm going back to patriarchal thing. But you know, lock your wife in the trunk of your car for an hour and lock your dog in the trunk of the car for an hour, and who's happy to see you when you open the truck? That's just dogs, man, they're just always. They're not mad at you for what you did. They don't judge you, they just love you for who you are. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

They're good. They live simple, awesome lives. You know, they just chill out, lay down in the sun, run after a ball. Yeah, yeah, pretty chill. I mean I would come back as a dog. Yeah, I know we can learn a lot from our doggy friends for sure.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, okay, so sorry interrupt. Let's go back to the skydiving.

Speaker 2:

Oh. So I mean skydiving is pretty similar where, no matter where you're going through in life outside of the, you know it's, of course, really adventurous and kind of out there as a sport, but you're kind of in the moment, which is nice. It's like a mental vacation where you kind of have to be in the moment, which is cool and exciting. Everything else going on in life can be put on a temporary pause and you're with those friends, have a great time, laughs, and even the community is pretty awesome. No matter what status you are in life, income, occupation, whatever it is all gets put away because everyone there is just skydivers.

Speaker 1:

So skyd? I know nothing about skydiving. I bungee jumped with people say a scarier than skydiving by, just I'm afraid of heights. I was a helicopter paramedic but I'm afraid of heights, but so I don't know anything about skydiving. Is that something you can get better at? Or like, is what you do what you do?

Speaker 2:

or yeah, you mostly suck when you get started. Yeah, I mean, you mostly suck when you get started. You had to learn how to control your body in the air, how to maneuver, how to go left right forward, back, slow down, speed up, and especially if you're in a group, you don't want to just tumble over people and that can be bad. So usually when you first get licensed you're probably pretty bad. Everyone likes to think they're good because they already can do something really awesome. But even after a couple hundred jumps you're still, for the most part, learning something new.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so the cool part is like the actual flying around like before the shoot opens.

Speaker 2:

So am I right? Some people like it differently. Some people enjoy the canopy time or underneath the parachute a little bit more. Some people like the free fall. Okay, I enjoy both, actually almost as equally where it's calm, quiet, serene under the canopy, but also the thrill, excitement and going 150 miles an hour through the sky. That's exciting in its own way. So some people enjoy different parts. Some people will even pull their parachute much higher so they can have more time underneath the canopy. So that's it.

Speaker 1:

Okay, all right, so let's get into some more business related stuff. So you're the founder and SEO director of Break the Web, so how long have you been doing that?

Speaker 2:

Break the Web as a legal entity started about 2017. I've been doing SEO since about 2010. So I think 13 years at this point. But we went under a different company name at the time and I also kind of want to rebrand and restructure everything from the ground up, so kind of creating new light, and our old company name kind of sucked. It was hyper web marketing, which is stupid. It's not even brandable, I mean nonsense. So that came in 2017 restructuring and things and trying to build out a more efficient agency.

Speaker 1:

Okay, actually I want to talk about that just a little bit. So my first, when I was doing marketing for others, I was a CastNet marketing and CAST stood for something and you know it's CastNet and I had this logo and look at back, it was so garbage. Now I'm the marketing medic with empathic marketing like two much more powerful statements. So what gave you? The epiphany that your first name was no good and break the web. Man Like that says something.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean it's so interesting because when I first started with SEO SEO is very different back in around 2010. And it still kind of works a little bit today. But I registered a domain name. That was also the exact name of the search keyword I wanted to rank for in Google, which happened to SEO services New Yorkorg. Oh, wow, that website is still live. It's kind of a weird legion for us. Hasn't been touched in years and still ranking surprisingly. But SEO services New York is not really brandable and it's kind of stupid. Oh well, seo companies, we use SEO services New York. It's a category.

Speaker 2:

And then, okay, for legal purposes, we went hyper web marketing. But I also thought that was kind of just bland. You know, hyper web marketing it also doesn't really say what we do. It doesn't really create any differentiation. And in that time around 2016, 2017, I had probably a little too much whiskey and was reading about or saw something on the TV, maybe about Kim Kardashian breaking the web, and I went and saw if the domain name was available BreakthroughWebcom. It wasn't and it's still not, because some squatter just doesn't even want money, just wants to hold onto it and not do anything. So that's where it kind of break the web started, though I like the idea of more of like a, like an action type brand name. Breaking the web and, of course, even the web is ambiguous breaking Google and breaking SEO and breaking search engines.

Speaker 1:

Huh, and that's so important because one of the things I talk about is your big difference here, what separates you, and so, and that's like planning your flag, naming what you do, and so hyper web, it names it, but, like I say, it doesn't have the same intrinsic meaning as break the web. Right, and that's like I could be Mike Caldwell marketing and nobody else could be Mike Caldwell marketing. But who cares? Right, empathic marketing. Empathic has, has some meaning behind it. Break the web has some meaning behind it. So, yeah, that's that's really cool. One other people have clued into that.

Speaker 2:

I like that. I've heard nothing but positive feedback over the years. So even sometimes when I'm doubtful of myself or like have the imposter syndrome, Mike, is that even a cool like brand name? We do SEO and people always give it some compliments, so I'll take it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and because there's the flip side to that as well. Right Like like everybody, you've spent so much time trying to figure out your name and if you can't come up with one, I look at like Apple computers. That's pretty good company. But what does Apple have to do with anything? Right Like could be pair computers or nectarine computers. So yeah, as much as I love empathic marketing, as much as I love break the web, at the same time Apple computer seems to work, you know just fine for them.

Speaker 2:

So you know one thing I tend to notice, especially in the marketing world and agencies they always have kind of like a color plus animal, like right one. That's not an actual agency name but like orange iguana, you know, it always tends to be one that I see quite a lot, those colors and animal names.

Speaker 1:

So be so. Hyper web you started that as well.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's now defunct. It's the legal entity, I'm just so you've been an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1:

You've been a business owner since 2010.

Speaker 2:

Then, yeah, I was freelance for a couple of years and over time, naturally from maybe about 2010 until 2017, I was slowly bringing on people to help me, whether it's virtual assistance from all around the world, just for the mundane tasks that I don't have time for or just didn't really want to do, and before you even know you, before you realize, you have maybe like a small little agency in a way. But okay, it was around 2017 where I'm like, okay, I want to. I have a lot of bad habits myself. Team members also have a lot of bad habits. We need to restructure from the ground up. We organize things and team members did stay, which is great, but they also had the understanding that me as a leader, we're going to be very different. The organization is very different. How we go about things is going to change. So it was an interesting time and I mean it's still interesting Always. You know what it is like. Entrepreneurship is kind of like an emotional roller coaster quite frequently.

Speaker 1:

So that's actually my next question, like, do you have any regrets? You know going off on your own and you know being responsible, especially once you start hiring people, because that amps up like your responsibility even more right. So do you have any regrets for going that route?

Speaker 2:

I wouldn't say I have any regrets. I would say imposter syndrome gets you or gets me all the time. I'm like why am I doing this? I can go in house and a company and do pretty well for myself and not have to deal with any of this stuff. I'll never get like the freedom and flexibility that I have now with my life. Being also able to build something that's mine is also kind of cool and gratifying in a way. Yeah Right, when those highs come, you just get beaten back down again to a low. What's? Am I capable of doing this? Am I worthy? Why are people paying us money for this crap? Yeah, yeah, that's a day to day for me sometimes.

Speaker 1:

I've always had cool jobs. I've been an international white water guide, I've been a firefighter, been a helicopter paramedic, self-employed. I had all these cool jobs. But one summer, back at university, I worked in a corrugated box factory and so my job was sheets of cardboard would go through the waxing machine standing upright and wax would pour down on them. Then those waxed cardboard would turn into like fruit boxes right, that was my job. All I did is I grabbed the wax and things of the thing, I put on the roller belt and a strap went around and I put it over there. I did that for eight hours.

Speaker 1:

Sounds pretty boring. It is pretty boring, but we had music on. It was good. But you know what, when I left that job, I didn't think about that job again until I punched in Free and clear brain, right. And I agree with you entirely on the freedom that we have being self-employed. Like if somebody asks me this afternoon to go do something, I could probably go just do it, right, I don't have to ask the boss, I just go do it. But at the same time, while I'm doing it, I'm going to be thinking about work when I go on a lot of vacations, but I usually work for an hour or two in the morning, which I don't mind. I like doing it.

Speaker 2:

Even though you're not supposed to, we still do it.

Speaker 1:

I'm never 100% free of my job, right, and you're probably the same way. Even though we have all this freedom at the same time, we do kind of have shackles, unlike the corrugated box job where I can say, when I punched out, that was it. Even as a medic, right, I was punching in and punching out, but I have the PTSD. I've got to be thinking about that patient I had the night before or I might be worried about what I might be having tonight. It was always with you. Sometimes I envy the hardcore blue collar worker that just punches in and punches out, because when they're punched out they are 100% punched out.

Speaker 2:

It's like a blessing and a curse, but also it's interesting. The empathy marketing really resonates with you. It sounds like again, even when you're a medic, thinking about the patient from the day prior or thinking about what the next patient could be. I find that really interesting. What made you stop being a medic and going into marketing?

Speaker 1:

It wasn't. My last job was out in the helicopter. I loved being on the helicopter because I was as close to a superhero as you can be. You would just literally fly into a scene, save somebody's life and then fly away. That was really cool.

Speaker 1:

There were two things about the job I didn't like One, as I was the base supervisor and I suck at politics. I am just terrible at politics. I'm a straight shooter. I tell the way it is. You're not allowed to do that with your staff. You're not allowed to do that with your superiors. I was getting in trouble with both sides all the time because I was just honest. You're not supposed to be honest in work. Anyway, I had a hard time with the politics and I also am a day person.

Speaker 1:

After 10 o'clock at night, my body just shuts down and just starts to hurt. As a medic, especially in that job, we could go to bed. If we have no calls, go to bed at 11 o'clock, 1 o'clock, alarms would go and, oh my God, just getting up just literally hurt. The other problem is our shift would finish at 7 am. I get home by 8, be in bed by9 am and I could maybe sleep until 10 am and then I'd be awake. It's like, no, I have to get eight hours. 30, 40 minutes isn't enough. Go back to sleep and it wouldn't happen.

Speaker 1:

I'd be up all day just putzing around and I'd go back to work. Anyway, I think physically I would probably have died a lot earlier if I kept doing that, because my body just doesn't work that way.

Speaker 2:

I get that working during night and trying to sleep during the day just going against your body's natural ebb and flow.

Speaker 1:

And I'm an outdoors guy, right and so to go to sleep on a nice and I'm in Canada, so summers are short and to waste a day sleeping because you've you know it's. I know I worked the night before, but it seemed like I was like sleeping the day away. Yeah, it was tough.

Speaker 2:

It was tough, for sure.

Speaker 1:

So my thing is I've always done paid advertising. If I want to get in front of somebody, I just pay to get there. Right, that's the quickest, shortest, the easiest way in my mind. So what's the benefit of SEO? Like, why should we invest? Not the money, I guess. So much for the time. Like, tell me the value of SEO.

Speaker 2:

I mean the cool thing is you don't need to invest as much in SEO, especially in a large market, as you would with paid. Also, it's free clicks, you're not paying per click. I mean there's pros and cons to going for SEO, going for paid ads, even sometimes going for both. I mean we have clients that like to test markets and test different topics and categories with paid ads First to justify if it's worth it from an SEO perspective.

Speaker 2:

But if you can be in the organic listings, people, as you know, have the tendency to skip ads. Even no matter how hard Google tries to hide those little words that say ad, people tend to skip it. So free clicks, there's a lot of different features that appear in the search results also that are not only part of paid but in the e-com category, for example, product grids, free shopping listings. So there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of real estate on page one of Google, paid ads listings being one of them. But essentially free clicks, that's the big one where you won't have to necessarily up your budget during high seasons, lower your budget during slower seasons, where I mean money is time anyway, time is money anyways, so you might not have to work as much during certain times and certain areas, but you're not throwing down as much money overall.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So the other thing I like about paid. So this is a question you might not have had before when it comes to SEO, and you said you wanted some hard balls. So one of the things I talked about is Eugene Schwartz breakthrough advertising. He talks about your audience's level of awareness, where you have an unaware audience. You have a problem aware audience, you have a solution aware audience, you have a product aware audience and a most aware audience, and so, when it comes to SEO, it seems like you could only really target the people looking for the solution, right. So, which is good, because you've got a high intent audience, but you're missing all the people who aren't actively searching for your solution, right? So is there a way that SEO can be used beyond that solution or most aware audience?

Speaker 2:

Probably not. Seo is demand based. If people aren't actively demanding something whether, again, it is an answer to a problem, they have product, a service, whatever it might be then SEO is not fruitful. I mean also, if your market doesn't necessarily exist like this is notorious for startups in which they want to integrate SEO, but nobody's searching for your product because nobody really knows it exists yet. And that's where paid ads come in, of course, usually during social media, and paid ads and that way are good for creating markets, but SEO is good for disrupting markets. So it's a lot of it's based on what demand already exists.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I guess this is getting into like the nitty gritty a little bit. So what do you do like if I came to you as a client? What would you do to ascertain whether or not my business, my offer, is a good fit for SEO? What's the first steps?

Speaker 2:

there. There's a lot that would come into an answer like that, directly related to just solely SEO. I mean, where are you? What other marketing efforts do you do? What resources do you have available? I mean, that's one of the most underutilized aspects of good SEO is the collaboration among different people developers, copywriters, conversion teams, product teams, sales. That's where everything in paid ads too everyone should be working together. So that's the first one is to understand what kind of resources you have available. If we find a lot of glaring technical issues, who do we present it to? I mean, we're not developers, we're SEOs. Do you have a development team?

Speaker 2:

Then, looking at the market size, what is kind of the? Where do you stand in terms of authority? I would carefully use the net word because I don't want any of those vanity metrics or numbers to pop up like domain authority. But how does Google view your website? And then how do they view your website against the competition? Are you gonna be obliterated by the bigwigs in the industry? Do you have a realistic chance? Does a good chance? The answer actually might be no. You may not be able to compete actively against the bigwigs. Let's find some different targets. If we can't, then probably SEO is not for you, but or at least in the short term. But there are ways that, again, solely but surely, you can build your authority online, build your presence, build your visibility so that, as you grow, you can start targeting more competitive aspects.

Speaker 1:

Okay, cool and like. So my business is empathic marketing, creating an empathic marketing message, and I always talk about so. One of the things I always say is like imagine I showed up at the Monaco F1 race. Okay, I showed up my Ram 1500 truck right and Max Verchappen was there with his F1 car right and we switched vehicles. It's just him and me on the course. Who would win Max driving my Ram pickup truck or me driving his F1 car?

Speaker 2:

And the answer is oh, sorry oh what would you think I don't know if you're asking me or is it like a sorry Okay?

Speaker 1:

well, yeah. So the answer is Max would win. Max would beat me driving my truck over me driving his car, and the reason for that is because those things are just the vehicles. Like the truck and the car are just the vehicles, it's the driver that matters. And so, like Max to take my truck to its limit, right, and I would crash.

Speaker 1:

If I could get started, I would crash, you know, max's car into the wall in the first turn, and this is what you're saying as well. That's why I brought that up. It's because the message is so important. So you could be at the top ranking of an SEO, but it's not gonna relate to a single sale if you don't have everything that you're talking about behind it. You know a website that works and the copywriting and all that other stuff, the team and it's so cool that somebody who focuses on SEO and you're saying that's so important because it is, but you recognize that you know SEO won't get you a sale on its own. It's just the. It just opens the door. It's just a vehicle that gets the person searching for what you're looking for to your message.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean we've had leads come into our agency of people saying like I need SEO to work or else XYZ will happen or whatnot, and almost nine times out of 10, we'll probably turn them down. Because SEO is not a saving grace and you can bring, like you said, you can bring in as much traffic as you need, even qualified traffic, but if CTA buttons are in a different color, if messaging is off, if things aren't even loading properly and you wouldn't even know, then that's all gonna affect the conversions and revenue. So, yeah, I mean we say we play well with others and we wanna ensure that everyone gets what they need out of a collaboration. And also we understand that SEO is not the end of all be all, where we might make an SEO recommendation and the product team comes back and says we need that to be the way it is and that's it. We're like, okay, we'll try to find some other areas that we could win at.

Speaker 1:

That's the one marketing vertical. So I don't know how many websites are on the interweb today. Do you know Five, six? Five or six Hundreds and billions Billions, maybe Right and each niche is growing, and so we've spoke a little bit before and I think a lot of us who know just a little bit about SEO, I know just a little bit we've heard the term long chain keywords right yeah long tail keywords yeah. Long tail right. Sorry, long see, I don't know that much.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, so do you want to expand a little bit on that? Like is that one of your strategies, or like?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, especially in competitive markets where they, of course, want to be the new up and coming, let's say clients.

Speaker 1:

an e-com brand wants to be the new up and coming player and let's just go back a little bit and to those who know even less than me, I don't know if it's out there. So what is a long tail versus short tail? What's the?

Speaker 2:

Long tail technically is a keyword which keywords? Sometimes even just a vanity metric and SEO, but a long version of a query that someone might type into Google that may not have as high search volume in Google search, so the amount of people searching on a multi basis would be significantly lower. But the intent is significantly higher, the buyer's intent, the conversion value is significantly higher because it's a lot more specific into someone, into what someone wants. So if I said, hey, mike, I got a widget for you. Or hey, mike, I got a small red widget that you can put in your back pocket I think the second one if that is what you're looking for right, you probably have much higher conversion value. So it is a bit more longer tail, I mean long chain.

Speaker 2:

Long tail at the end of the day is just a keyword and keywords are sometimes dangerous too to focus too heavily on. But it allows you to start building some SEO value. Start building some great links to your site, start building some topical relevance, like Google really understands what your site's about. Bring in some organic traffic. If Google is giving you organic traffic, that means that they kind of like you a little bit and continue building off that and I mean we had to break the web. We do our own SEO driven content marketing. There are times where we might go for keywords in our content that maybe gets 50 to 100 searches a month, but the traffic that it gets has a higher value and goes down the funnel a lot easier than it would going for the big money keywords that have hundreds of thousands of searches per month. Which distractions.

Speaker 1:

Right. So, yeah, something that gets that many searches, they've also got a lot more options right, and so with a long tail keywords you have less competition in some way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and then if you have big players in your competition, they're spending a lot of money and time and resources on those big keywords, especially if they could realistically position for themselves for two. This might be best, even initially, focus efforts elsewhere.

Speaker 1:

Okay, yeah, one of my first success stories as a marketer is I went to California to help a bootcamp gym just really small bootcamp gym and they were going under and what they were trying to do is they're trying to compete with LA Fitness and Gold's gym and they're the two owners. They were ripped. They look like freaking superheroes, they're so fit, anyway, and they're going after people like them. And those are the people that were going to Gold's and LA Fitness, like they were going after the 20 something who wanted the beach body. But when I went to the gym, I saw that nobody like that there's nobody that looked like that in the gym.

Speaker 1:

It was all like middle-aged Hispanic women. Right, they were. Just, they were significantly overweight, just trying to get healthy, not beach bodies, but they were. So they were targeting the wrong audience and we weren't doing SEO, we were doing paid advertising. But they were probably women that, like the women at their gym, were afraid to go to LA Fitness. Like they even told me that, right, because they're just so embarrassed, because, you know, if you're a 35-year-old woman who's 60 pounds overweight, you don't want to be beside Heidi Klum working out at the machine. So I can see how SEO would work really well there, when you've identified your sub-niche in a category.

Speaker 2:

And then you may even find out and that's just general marketing that maybe your ideal audience might be wrong. Let's say you might be targeting the wrong audience because you think you know your audience. Especially if you're being scrappy, you're like maybe I'm spending too much time focusing on this one audience that is harder to acquire. But I have this giant audience right here, who may not be what I personally want. You know entrepreneurs and founders and their egos. You know they want all the jacks people, but maybe they can also bring in a crap ton of revenue running bootcasts for people who want to lose weight.

Speaker 1:

Yes, oh my gosh, this name escapes me. I just read his book Seth Goadon. Oh yeah, seth talks about your smallest viable audience, and I think that's probably like sort of a small tail, a short tail keyword thing as well. Right, you don't need everybody, you just need your core of like diehard fans, and so I can see how that would work there.

Speaker 2:

Getting more specific. I mean our agency. We niche down not by industry but by persona type. So our pitch, in a way, is we make SEO less annoying for in-house marketing teams of B2C, d2c brands. So we only work with in-house marketing teams and I mean that's our goal. Seo is annoying, it's confusing, it's our nuances and a lot of weird million different parts of it. I mean our goal is to just make it a lot less annoying. It's always going to be annoying, but less annoying.

Speaker 1:

Okay, all right. So is there any stories that you have where you ran a campaign or something that you were sure was going to work and just like you were sure, like so sure it was going to work, and it failed, or the flip side? You're like we don't know what to do, so you just hail Mary this and then it ended up being like your biggest home run and ever, ever. Do you have any stories like that?

Speaker 2:

Probably a good amount on both sides. I mean, okay, the hard thing about SEO is that there's no proven framework. I mean there's frameworks. There's no proven science to how it all works. It's not like you do this exactly, this will happen. Then you do this, this will happen.

Speaker 2:

So for the most part, everything is kind of theoretical in a way, and sometimes you want things to move and you hope that. Sometimes you hope that Google is doing this job correctly. Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does, sometimes you might be missing something that's just right off on the side, but not obvious, that is ruining the entire campaign, and it's usually something small and weird and annoying when you find it. But I mean transparently, we've lost clients in the past, especially early on when we didn't have our processes and our frameworks down pat, where a couple months go by and the client's like, hey, what's going on here? And it could have been. Maybe we set bad expectations, we didn't do as we needed to, maybe Google is being weird, maybe their competitors have more resources, time and money to dedicate to the SEO campaign, which keeps them down. So yeah, I mean there's probably a whole bunch of campaigns over the years that didn't go as planned.

Speaker 2:

And, at the same time, there's small little things that we do and you're like holy crap. I mean sometimes even like a little tick in a box, in a way, where Google is kind of waiting. Like hey, domaincom, we want to rank you, we want to put you on top, but there's one little thing that's stopping you, and that doesn't happen too often.

Speaker 2:

Seo is like a culmination of many different things, but, yeah, there's been times where even campaigns that we have a client right now that we normally don't work with startups but our team has a lot of great rapport with their founder and he does have the resources available. And we said like hey, you're brand new, we're literally going to be there when you press the live button on your domain. And we said it's probably going to be a year until you see some like really big stuff happening three months. We're like, wow, we look like the savers of the universe in a way, and we look like the kids and they're doing really great. And it's only a month over month and I think we're on month four right now and they're absolutely killing it. So there's campaigns like that where, when we have our team meetings, we're like the site's doing really well. You didn't expect it to move as fast as it is. But they're also kind of a small but big niche. There's not a lot of big players there, so good SEO can surprise you.

Speaker 1:

I couldn't do your job.

Speaker 2:

Too much unknown.

Speaker 1:

Well, no, I'm a firefighter paramedic by trade, right. And so if I take an action, if I put the wet stuff on the red stuff, I should see an immediate response. Right, if I inject this medication, I should expect to see an immediate response, and that's what I do now. If I run an ad and I put $100 on that ad, I'm going to know with when $100, whether that is working or not, and that could be, like, you know, 12 hours. I will know definitively what I'm doing is working and there's nothing you can do in SEO that you can measure in hours, little weeks, like how long does it take?

Speaker 2:

SEO is not an instant gratification game. If that's like what raises your dopamine. In a way, instant gratification and SEO do not match. You know, I get 100% what you're saying. A part of me actually kind of enjoys that. We live in a world of basic gratification or phones, everything at the palm of our hands.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes, you know, I mean I'm weird. I like to think back, like what did my ancestors do when they had this issue or they got lost? They didn't just pull out Google Maps, looked at the stars and where the sun was setting, and you know, I don't know I'm weird like that. Sometimes, though and try not, I'm absolutely a product of my time, 100%, like I love central hair and I love my phone, but fighting that urge for instant gratification, I actually enjoy quite a lot. Do I make a good choice now to get that? Like, if I'm going to diet or something, I can eat this cake and it's going to be absolutely delicious. Two hours later I might feel like crap, but I also won't remember that I had the cake. The taste will be gone out of my mouth.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, it might be instant gratification, it's just more the patience, the weight Like. I don't need to be rewarded right away, but I need an answer.

Speaker 2:

You're data driven, you mean you're a data driven marketer. We feed off data and then if we have to wait sometimes a week and a half or days to collect, like even for a search console Google search console to update its number, we're at the mercy of that at times which is, I guess, and that's like bad Bad.

Speaker 2:

If you want to make quick data driven decisions, then yeah, but SEO is more for like long term plays, where testing a market with SEO is not the best, and that's where paid ads are. You know, even Google ads can come in and help show if SEO is viable.

Speaker 1:

So I know with Facebook I'm a big Facebook guy advertiser and I know if we pay for ads to an off to a page or whatever that also Facebook rewards is with more organic traffic, does that work at all with Google? So if you're paying for ads for a page, your organic doesn't grow.

Speaker 2:

No direct, direct correlation, okay, pardon me. I mean, let's say, someone sees your ad, they go to your website and they're also writing a blog post about something on their website. Then they link from their website to your page, which they saw from a paid ad. Then you'll get SEO value. Okay, but it's not a direct correlation, right?

Speaker 1:

Okay, all right, so what? I've got two final questions. One of the top three things that drive SEO? I'm thinking backlinks, I'm guessing, like what are the yeah backlink?

Speaker 2:

I'll let you answer what are the top three yeah other strivers of SEO, other sites linking to yours ie backlinks but also other sites that are reputable, that Google themselves likes, gives them organic traffic. They themselves also, in turn, have good links, thematically relevant. That always helps If it also drives traffic. That's like an added bonus. So that's also really cool. Like digital PR in a way, that's a big one. I mean, even just branching off broadly, that would be kind of 50% of it off page SEO and the other 50% would be on page SEO, so kind of making sure that your site is thematically relevant.

Speaker 2:

But unfortunately every website and competitors can be thematically relevant. Every website could genuinely create really awesome content. How far could you go when they say, oh, just write better content. But I mean, sometimes you might be at your point of like this is the best content. And also that's kind of subjective too, who deems what's better than another. And that's where backlinks come in also to signal trust. Relevance from the on page and trust coming in from the off page helps you dominate. It's like if I said, hey, mike, you got a plumber I can use. Yeah, jason, use ABC plumbers. I'm going to trust ABC plumbers because they came from your referral and your recommendation.

Speaker 1:

So I paid a PR agency to get me on like 90 different reputable sites so I can say I've been on ABC. You know it's kind of bogus. But I really am on all those sites. We paid to be there. Do those links count as backlinks to the same degree, or does Google differentiate it?

Speaker 2:

depends. I mean, it does depend on a lot of different things. First and foremost is the link what's called a follow or no follow link. You can attribute in the HTML code of your website a little tag for every link that might have the words no follow in it, which is telling search engines like we're going to link to the site, but we may not necessarily trust them, so don't give, don't blame us if the size is not good, you know, type of thing. Okay, but also a site with PR like that, which, when I reference digital PR, more like public relations in a way, where I'm I know exactly what you're talking about, about press releases back in a day so you can get the ABC logo and all these different logos next to your icon.

Speaker 1:

I've seen on yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So that's essentially contents indication in a way. So if the same content is being published to a million different places, Google's not going to give you value for every single unique one, but maybe the source Most of the time they will link back to the source or they will have a code in their HTML as well.

Speaker 2:

That's called canonical. That'll tell Google hey, this is duplicate. This is the true version of the main page. I mean it did work at a point. I remember we used to do tons of press releases because they're also pretty cheap to do back in the day, Right, and you can use software and tools to click up a button and article submissions and directory submissions and all that. Yeah, At this moment not much. I mean you could do it, it won't hurt, but it probably won't help you.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So, speaking of help, what is one actual thing that our listeners could do today to help move the needle to get better SEO rankings?

Speaker 2:

Try not to reinvent the wheel with SEO. Look at what your competitors are doing and try to mimic it. If they have a certain architecture of their website, don't copy them, but try to use that to brainstorm your own unique ideas on how you can do something similar, especially if multiple competitors are doing the same thing. If you see a correlation among your competitors having a specific word in their title tag and title of the page, maybe throw it into trying to get your unique also so you can differentiate yourself in the listings. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. A lot of people try to create something new but if you look at your competitors have a strategy and have a framework of what to do just by looking at what Google is already showing for your target search terms.

Speaker 1:

Okay, cool, that's usually my last question, but I thought of one earlier that I forgot to ask, because this is topical. So AI are you doing anything? Is AI because AI has really improved a lot it's more accessible to us mortals in the last three to six months. Is there anything you're doing with AI now that you couldn't have done a year ago? Mostly?

Speaker 2:

random tasks and things that would take us a while to do, we would throw it through AI. We're definitely not using AI for content, art, belief and a decent consensus, I think, where I guess people to hang around with in the SEO community. It's just not there yet to be really that valuable. And the topic also of what is the AI trained on, the LLMs, the language learning models if they're trained on other people's content as well, I mean it is a huge liability issue. I know OpenAI is under various lawsuits for just that exactly AI content and having AI generate some thought leadership. We still wouldn't trust. They're also actually wrong. I mean I've gone to OpenAI and Google Bar and even Bing Chat, which uses OpenAI, and they just give out wrong information.

Speaker 2:

I was sitting on my phone yesterday. I went to Google Bar and I wrote is Break the Web a legit company? I saw I think Lily Ray might have posted this on Twitter, an SEO thought leader, and I was like, okay, let me try this. It said, yeah, here are some reviews about Break the Web. It said John Brown at Acme literally said Acme company. It just gave me a whole bunch of reviews for the company of non-real people, fake companies to help make your life easier and your day-to-day easier. Sure, if you also wanted to help you write an article, like create an outline and create some topical themes within an article, absolutely, I mean, that's just smart time utilization. If you wanted to help calculate a whole bunch of data in a Google Sheet, absolutely, content. I mean it's gonna happen at one point where everyone's using AI content not everyone, but it's gonna be acceptable. But when and will technology be there and when will it be?

Speaker 1:

there. Yeah, I don't think you have to be that sophisticated to be able to pick out what AI has generated. Like I just saw an ad the other day where in the ad, I said but hang on to your hats, blah, blah, blah. I'm like nobody says that. Yeah, and also because I've got a Facebook group that I post daily content in and that I just I just want to be on the group. So I asked the chat to give me like 30 topics. Gave me 30 topics and every morning I'm like write topic one for me, I just copy and paste and put it in the group. I mean you could.

Speaker 1:

But I just know all that.

Speaker 2:

So go ahead. I was gonna say, I mean, you could train chat GBT in a way, to kind of mimic you in a specific thread Like a chat combo. Oh, it definitely does, and so that's something I don't know.

Speaker 1:

If you're using chat Now, there's a. You can pre-instruct chat. There's a little thing down the bottom left. So you can tell a fair bit about yourself and what you want and what you don't want. So in my instruction I'm like don't say things like hang on to your hats and don't say in this, you know, I say like lay off the adjectives and the adverbs and all the flowery nonsense.

Speaker 1:

But yeah, but I see all the all the emojis that puts up and stuff right. And so this one ad had had all the same emojis as I have and, like I said, it said hang on to your hats. I'm like, come on, this is an ad. You didn't even try, yeah.

Speaker 2:

I mean it just doesn't sound human, sometimes too Like there's a very big difference between what's grammatically correct Also what's conversational. You know, so I mean we use we might use chat, gbt or an AI to generate meta descriptions. Sometimes then we might like swap things out here or there and we're running joke internally here that they always use discover to start up a description and we always have to say don't use the word discover or explore. Well, discover the five dogs with cleft lips and you know stupid.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I have one of my clients as a lawyer and I was showing him what I was doing with chat. He's like, oh, I'm gonna. So he went home he started playing with it and he was like, oh, I love this, like it's for a lot of the research and stuff. But he's but you, when you're using AI, when you're using chat, like you say, you have to know some stuff. Because one of the things he was researching, chat quoted, like we're in Canada, british Columbia, law 67.2 and Harold my client's like wow, I don't know that one. And so he opened up his book and chat just completely made up a law, Like like the reviews acne company gave you, like they just made up a law and I mean let people adopt more AI into their lives and then realize like, oh, I'm not gonna use AI because it's just wrong.

Speaker 2:

I mean, if you look at like Google Trends, ai, chat, gbt, open AI, it's gone down over the last few months. It was a big topic discussion but the trend seems to have gone down significantly. But let people try and integrate it into their day to day and they'll be disappointed and say I'm not gonna go chat anymore because it's wrong. They also don't care about giving wrong information. Doesn't say like take this with a grain of salt, but XYZ law, number whatever and book whatever you know.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, like just yeah. And actually the same client. He has a car that's on the lake behind us and we live off the grid. He lives off, he was, so I was gonna install his off the grid system for him and I wanna know what size battery bank. And so I'm like he's got a fridge that uses this much power and they're gonna use a currig and well, pump like three or four other things.

Speaker 1:

So, based on this energy consumption, what size battery bank? And oh my God, the battery bank was 10 times as big as our home here and I knew that because I know how big ours is and I know what the chat was recommending with the calculation that it wrote out the calculation for me, but it was 10 times as big. I'm like, hey, chat, and I just said conversatially I think that looks too big. Can you check again and check his bags? Like, oh, yeah, I made a miscalculation, my apologies, my apologies, but had I just like trusted chat with its first answer, because it's a computer and it knows everything, I would have went out and bought this like million dollar battery bank is like well, that's what I told I needed, right. And so, yeah, I think I love it, I use it a lot, but you it's gotta be used as a tool and you've got. You have to have a foundation before you use it or it's gonna it's gonna run you off the rails sooner or later.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, People are nervous about it taking over their jobs. Maybe depends what you do, but definitely not anytime soon.

Speaker 1:

No, no, no. Well cool, If our audience wanted to work. I don't know if you could help somebody, if you've got an offer or how people can reach you, but what do you have for people listening?

Speaker 2:

We do SEO for in-house marketing teams that wanna make SEO less annoying. No specific offer. If you wanna find us, you can Google break the web. We're also at breakthewwebagency Cool.

Speaker 1:

And that's back in the day. I used to get spam emails from SEO companies and I would in India, mostly right and I would try to find them with Google searches and I normally couldn't find them. And this is when I had more time than sense. I like I just spent the last five minutes like trying to find you with Google and I can't find you. So if you're not doing SEO for your own company, then I don't think I want you representing me. But break the web it was the first search, it was.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and companies are spot. We own the service mark for that, the legal trademark for that word. But yeah, I mean, it's easy to neglect your own marketing when you offer marketing as a service, and it happens first of all from like. It's been a couple of months since we published a brand new blog post. We have our writer going in the next two weeks and start getting another. One can't neglect it. You can't get complacent.

Speaker 1:

Right, and that's. I spoke with that in my last podcast. We were saying how, like you said, business is good, right, business is good. You're just cruising along and then, like the woman I was speaking with last week, we both lost our like biggest client out of the blue. Like he retired, my client retired, hers died. And then we're like, oh shit, that's a big gap in our revenue because we weren't marketing for ourselves anymore. We were just like coast along on easy street and so you can never, you never take your foot off the gas pedal there for sure.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, actually just made a LinkedIn post on something similar this morning about one URL being a primary organic traffic driver and if something would happen to that one URL, your whole traffic might drop and then the metrics look like it sucks.

Speaker 1:

So spread out and diversify your traffic sources and I guess even spread out and diversify and like say, don't take your, you don't have to have your foot on all the way down on the gas, but you need to have it on the pedal. You need to be always you know, always moving forward.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, cruisin with a little tap.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yeah, yeah, well, anyway. Well, thanks, jason. It was great having you on the show. I learned a lot about SEO that I didn't know before, and you seem like a cool guy, and so if there are any in-house marketing agencies that need help, they should definitely reach out to you.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate the time, Mike.

Speaker 1:

This was great and that is a wrap for this episode of Because Business is Personal. Thanks for joining us and don't forget to take advantage of my two special offers. First, you can get a free copy of my best-selling book, empathic Marketing you Just Pay for the Shipping. Or you can have 50% discount on my Gap Analysis session with the coupon code podcast Just head over to wwwBecauseBusinessIsPersonalcom or check the show notes for details. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to follow, subscribe, leave a review and share the podcast with others who might benefit. Your support means the world to us, so stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll continue to delve into the intersection of empathy and marketing strategy. Remember, because Business is Indeed Personal, every connection counts. Until next time, see you then.