Podcasts about moz local

Creating a personal brand can feel daunting, especially when imposter syndrome keeps telling you you're not enough. But if you put in the work, a recognizable brand unlocks opportunities for career growth. In this episode, you'll get actionable advice on finding your unique voice, maintaining consistency, and turning your story into a powerful asset. Rejoice Ojiaku, an award-winning SEO expert and public speaker. She has worked with companies like Incubeta, Starcom, and Nelson Bostock UNLIMITED. This episode is excellent for anyone trying to build a personal brand from the ground up.See behind-the-scenes images and our full transcription on our show page.Thank you to our guest, Rejoice OjiakuLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rejoiceojiakuThis episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer. Try it for free: http://mz.cm/KeywordExplorerGet access to our full suite of tools with a Moz Pro free trial: https://mz.cm/3WYFh28*************************************** Additional Moz Resources: 30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3 Check out Moz Local ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7hLearn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzfWatch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK*************************************** STAY IN TOUCH:Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCmFacebook ► https://www.facebook.com/mozX/Twitter ►

How do you compete with industry giants on a limited budget? John Burton shares how Staffology went from barely ranking for their own brand terms to outranking Sage Pay and becoming IRIS's go-to growth product in just 2 years.Thank you to our guest, John Burton!https://www.linkedin.com/in/jburtonuk/This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer. Try it for free: http://mz.cm/KeywordExplorerGet access to our full suite of tools with a Moz Pro free trial: https://mz.cm/3WYFh28Key takeaways:How they achieved 400% ROI and ranked 4th for "payroll software" in 18 monthsSmart content repurposing: turning 2 monthly pieces into 6 using existing resourcesLeveraging founder stories for digital PR (featuring Duane Jackson's unique background)Building topic clusters around fundamental industry questionsHow they recovered and improved rankings after an unexpected website relaunchDominating branded search in the SaaS spaceWhether you're competing against industry leaders or maximizing SEO on a budget, this episode shows you how to punch above your weight class with practical, proven strategies.Timestamps: 0:18 - Introduction & Background 1:03 - Leveraging Founder's Reputation for SEO 3:56 - Pre-Campaign SEO Status 4:40 - Campaign Results and Achievements 5:43 - Key SEO Strategies (Topic Clusters) 12:21 - Brand Recognition Growth 13:02 - Technical SEO Challenges 15:31 - Content Strategy and Repurposing 18:56 - ROI and Metrics Discussion 19:45 - Handling Website Relaunch Challenges 23:13 - Key Learnings for SaaS Companies#MozPod #SEOStrategy #SaaSSEO #ContentMarketing #DigitalPR #ROI*************************************** Additional Moz Resources: 30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3 Check out Moz Local ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7hLearn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzfWatch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK*************************************** STAY IN TOUCH:Moz ►

Can poetry and personal identity reshape the world of SEO? In this episode, Chima Mmeje explores the powerful intersection of art, identity, and search optimization. Join us as Chloe Smith, a talented spoken word poet and Strategic SEO Lead at Blue Array, shares her unique journey: Discover how Chloe's background in poetry influences her approach to SEO Learn about the impact of disability and LGBTQ+ perspectives on digital strategies Explore innovative ways to make SEO more inclusive and accessible Uncover the surprising connections between creative expression and search optimization Chloe offers insights on balancing artistic passion with SEO expertise, challenges faced around identity, and practical advice for creating more inclusive digital spaces. Whether you're an SEO professional, a creative, or simply curious about diverse voices in tech, this episode promises fresh perspectives and actionable insights. Tune in for an inspiring conversation that bridges the gap between art and analytics, proving that diverse voices can drive innovation in unexpected ways. This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer. Try it for free: http://mz.cm/KeywordExplorer Get access to our full suite of tools with a Moz Pro free trial: https://mz.cm/3WYFh28 Thank you to our guest, Chloe Smith: https://twitter.com/chloeivyroseseo https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloeivyrose ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Are you dreaming of launching your own e-commerce brand but unsure how to make it thrive?  Join us for an exciting episode of MozPod as we dive into the incredible journey of Ash Young, who turned a simple idea into a thriving e-commerce business. Learn how Ash grew his car mat company from its first sale to a £5 million revenue powerhouse. In this episode, we explore: The inspiration behind choosing car mats as a product Unconventional tactics that fueled early growth Overcoming competition in a crowded market Crucial moments in scaling from £100k to £1 million and beyond Risk management and adapting to rapid growth The importance of customer feedback in shaping the business Ash's advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, including when to invest in SEO Whether you're an e-commerce enthusiast, a budding entrepreneur, or simply curious about business growth strategies, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical tips. Don't miss Ash's "hot take" on bringing SEO into the mix earlier and his candid reflection on what he'd do differently. Tune in to discover the highs, lows, and everything in between as we uncover the secrets behind building a successful e-commerce brand from scratch. Hit play now and get ready to be inspired! #Ecommerce #Entrepreneurship #BusinessGrowth #SEO #StartupSuccess #MozPod Thank you to our guest, Ash Young: https://twitter.com/webmonkeyash https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashyoung This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer. Try it for free: http://mz.cm/KeywordExplorer Get access to our full suite of tools with a Moz Pro free trial: https://mz.cm/3WYFh28 ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Considering a career as an SEO consultant or looking to grow your existing consultancy? This MozPod episode with eCommerce growth expert Luke Carthy offers valuable insights to help you succeed. Learn how to make the leap from corporate work to consulting, win high-quality clients, and price your services to support your ideal lifestyle. Discover strategies for effective sales calls, compelling presentations, and balancing client work with your own content creation. Whether you're just starting out or aiming to scale your business, Luke shares practical advice on building a sustainable consultancy while maintaining a work-life balance. Gain tips on personal branding and public speaking that can set you apart in the competitive SEO landscape. By the end of this episode, you'll have actionable ideas to help shape or improve your consulting career in SEO. #SEOConsultancy #eCommerceGrowth #FreelanceSuccess #WorkLifeBalance #MozPod Copy Thank you to our guest, Luke Carthy https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecarthy https://twitter.com/mrlukecarthy This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer. Try it for free: http://mz.cm/KeywordExplorer Get access to our full suite of tools with a Moz Pro free trial: https://mz.cm/3WYFh28 ===TIMESTAMPS=== 00:00 Introduction 01:24 Luke's transition to consultancy 02:28 Foundational steps for starting as an SEO consultant 03:36 Strategies for attracting initial clients 04:57 The importance of niching down in SEO 07:17 Leveraging personal branding and content creation 12:08 Hot take 13:00 Coming up with content ideas that resonate 16:45 Finding time to write 18:59 Structure your consultancy for scalability and success 22:41 Pricing strategies for consultants 26:52 Public speaking tips and experiences 32:53 Advice for nailing sales calls 35:28 Work-life balance as a consultant 38:02 Tiny pocket of joy 39:06 Outro ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Ever wondered how a conference can grow from a small pub room to an event with 5k+ attendees? In this episode of MozPod, Kelvin Newman, the founder of BrightonSEO, shares how he grew the event into the UK's largest SEO conference. If you're interested in the strategies behind growing large-scale events, this episode is a must-listen! Thank you to our guest, Kelvin Newman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelvinnewman https://twitter.com/kelvinnewman This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer. Try it for free: http://mz.cm/KeywordExplorer Get access to our full suite of tools with a Moz Pro free trial: https://mz.cm/3WYFh28 Resources relevant to this episode: ​​https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results https://moz.com/blog/seo-conference-preparation ===TIMESTAMPS=== 00:00 Intro 01:20 Story of Brighton SEO inception 03:28 Scaling journey…progress 05:28 What Brighton SEO apart? 06:58 Unexpected challenges 09:08 Covid and going virtual 11:58 New innovations  13:45 Hot Take  14:40 Ad for Moz AI 15:35 Taking Brighton International 18:19 Unique spin on advertising  21:00 Diversity in events  and why it is important  23:43 New trends and innovation for Brighton CEO going forward 25:17 Advice for someone attending the first time 25:45 Most reward part of running Brighton SEO.  28:12 Meaningful feedback  29:13 Tiny Pocket Of Joy 31:07 Outro ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Have you ever wondered how to transform a brick-and-mortar in-store lead gen model into an e-commerce powerhouse? Join SEO strategist Katie Barnard and Digital PR expert Emma Carstairs as they reveal the secrets behind their success. Discover the PR and SEO strategies that fueled this incredible growth to achieve £1M monthly for this prestigious retail brand. Get actionable insights for website migration, effective PR and SEO collaboration, and driving e-commerce success. Don't miss out on these game-changing tips from a standout digital marketing campaign! ***************************************  Thank you to our guests, Katie Barnard (SEO strategist) and Emma Carstairs (Digital PR strategist) at Impression Digital Social:  https://twitter.com/impressiontalk https://www.impressiondigital.com/blog/category/digital-marketing/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-barnard-6a4297108 https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmacarstairs/ ***************************************  This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer Try it for free https://moz.com/explorer Streamline your SEO strategy with Moz's updated Keyword Explorer. Our AI-powered tool effortlessly identifies and adapts to changing search intents, ensuring you always target the most valuable keywords. ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Balancing dual careers is challenging, but James Miller, Senior SEO Analyst at Re: Signal and Associate Ballroom and Latin Teacher at Country Dance, proves it can be done! In this episode, you'll learn how the discipline and precision of ballroom dancing translate into the analytical world of SEO. James shares practical tips for maintaining balance and excelling in both fields. If you're contemplating a dual career, this episode offers valuable insights on harmonizing different pursuits and achieving success in both. ***************************************  Thank you to our guest, James Miller https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-miller-marketing https://www.instagram.com/jxmes_mdance/ ***************************************  This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer Try it for free https://moz.com/explorer Streamline your SEO strategy with Moz's updated Keyword Explorer. Our AI-powered tool effortlessly identifies and adapts to changing search intents, ensuring you always target the most valuable keywords. Get access to our full suite of tools with a Moz Pro free trial https://moz.com/moz-pro-free-trial ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Are you looking to scale your content production tenfold without sacrificing quality or relying on freelancers? Tom Bangay, Senior Director of Content and Community at Juro, reveals how to achieve this and more. Learn how to drive revenue through organic traffic and create a winning keyword strategy with limited resources. This episode is perfect for content marketers and business owners looking to grow efficiently. Don't miss Tom Bangay's insights and practical advice tailored to help you succeed. Are you looking to scale your content production tenfold without sacrificing quality or relying on freelancers? Tom Bangay, Senior Director of Content and Community at Juro, reveals how to achieve this and more. Learn how to drive revenue through organic traffic and create a winning keyword strategy with limited resources. This episode is perfect for content marketers and business owners looking to grow efficiently. Don't miss Tom Bangay's insights and practical advice tailored to help you succeed. Scaling content is hard enough. Doing it with a lean team and no freelance support is nearly impossible. How do you achieve this level of growth without sacrificing quality? This episode explores how to 10x your content output without outsourcing anything. You'll also learn how to leverage organic traffic to drive revenue and develop a winning keyword strategy with limited resources. Tom Bangay, Senior Director of Content and Community at Juro, shares his experience scaling content production without external help. If you're a content marketer or business owner looking to grow content without breaking the bank, this episode provides valuable insights to guide you through the process.  ***************************************  Thank you to our guest, Tom Bangay https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tom-bangay ***************************************  This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer Try it for free https://moz.com/explorer Streamline your SEO strategy with Moz's updated Keyword Explorer. Our AI-powered tool effortlessly identifies and adapts to changing search intents, ensuring you always target the most valuable keywords. Get access to our full suite of tools with a Moz Pro free trial https://moz.com/moz-pro-free-trial ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Tim Cameron-Kitchen, the founder of Exposure Ninja, shares the strategies they used to create an organic traffic-driving strategy on a shoestring budget. Discover how Exposure Ninja turned a 5k monthly budget into a 75% revenue increase for a rehab clinic—far beyond their original goal. Focusing on SEO, Content Marketing, and Digital PR to build links. ***************************************  Thank you to our guest Tim for joining us! https://www.linkedin.com/in/timcameronkitchen https://exposureninja.com/ ***************************************  This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer Try it for free https://moz.com/explorer Streamline your SEO strategy with Moz's updated Keyword Explorer. Our AI-powered tool effortlessly identifies and adapts to changing search intents, ensuring you always target the most valuable keywords. Get access to our full suite of tools with a Moz Pro free trial https://moz.com/moz-pro-free-trial ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

When it comes to SEO, there's a world of tips and tricks out there, but not all of them are worth your time. In our latest episode, we cut through the noise to bring you the five most effective tactics for boosting your local SEO. From optimizing your website's main pages with location-based keywords to using a Google Business profile, we break it all down. We discuss why consistent online directory listings matter and how tools like Moz Local can save you time. You'll learn the importance of accumulating Google reviews and creating niche, location-specific content. Get ready to take some notes!Your website's SEO can make or break how easily your customers find you. Don't let your great service go unnoticed. Tune into this episode to get the insights you need to boost your small business's online presence effectively.Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:Optimizing website pages with location-based keywordsLeveraging a Google Business profileThe importance of online directory listings and reviewsOther Mentioned Links & ResourcesEpisode 042: Why Backlinks Matter for SEO & Six Ways You Can Get Backlinks as a Creative Entrepreneur:https://treefrogmarketing.com/ways-you-can-get-backlinks-creative-entrepreneurLearn More About Treefrog's Small Business Marketing Resources & Services:https://www.treefrogmarketing.comGet this free PDF guide: How to Use Keywords to Improve Your Small Business's SEO:https://treefrogmarketing.com/how-use-keywords-improve-small-business-seoTry Moz SEO Tools:https://moz.comReceive 50% Off Your First Year of HoneyBook:https://www.treefrogmarketing.com/honeybook-coupon-codeJoin the Priority Pursuit Podcast Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/179106264013426Follow or DM Treefrog Marketing on Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/treefroggersFollow or DM Kelly Rice on Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/treefrogkellyFollow or DM Victoria on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/victorialrayburn

Are you looking to earn quality backlinks? Join our host, Chima Mmeje, as she chats with Amanda Walls, director of Cedarwood Digital. Discover how Amanda transformed a supermarket roast dinner price comparison into a link-building triumph. In this episode, you'll learn Amanda's strategies for using data-driven storytelling to capture media attention and secure 100 high-quality backlinks for a financial services brand. Whether you're a digital PR professional or an SEO specialist, you'll gain valuable insights to enhance your link-building efforts. A very special thank you to our guest, Amanda Walls! https://x.com/amandajwalls https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandajwalls/ https://cedarwood.digital/ ***************************************  This episode is brought to you by Moz's Domain Overview. Quickly discover key SEO metrics to better assess a site's online authority, performance, and health. Start your free trial now https://moz.com/moz-pro-free-trial ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Join James Hayward-Browne, Marketing Director and co-founder of Bottled Imagination, and our host Chima Mmeje as we explore the strategies behind the Dead NFT PR campaign.  Learn how James and his team used data storytelling to achieve over 150 million social media likes, 1,000 backlinks, and coverage from CNN and Rolling Stone. If you're interested in impactful, data-driven campaigns, this episode is packed with valuable insights into successful Digital PR strategies. From scraping data on 73,000 NFT collections to capturing the attention of major media outlets, uncover the strategies and challenges behind this viral success. This episode is brimming with insights on crafting campaigns that resonate. Tune in now to get inspired and learn from one of the best in the business. A very special thank you to our guest, James Hayward-Browne! https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjhb92 https://bottledimagination.com/ If you want to bop along to Busted with James https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCueKqV4BVrjwZAqjPmGw72w ***************************************  This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer Try it for free https://moz.com/explorer Streamline your SEO strategy with Moz's updated Keyword Explorer. Our AI-powered tool effortlessly identifies and adapts to changing search intents, ensuring you always target the most valuable keywords. ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK STAY IN TOUCH:Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCmFacebook ► https://www.facebook.com/mozX/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/MozLinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/mozInstagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

A 30-second Super Bowl ad costs millions, and the pressure to show ROI is intense. What would you do with that ad space? Could you create something that captures the world's attention and generates a massive buzz? This MozPod episode uncovers how Tourism Australia took a $36 million gamble and turned it into a viral sensation by disguising a commercial as a Crocodile Dundee movie trailer. Join Catherine Lux and your host, Chima Mmeje, as they discuss the strategies and technical insights that drove the campaign's success. Discover how an SEO expert played a critical role from the planning stages through execution, contributing to the campaign's success and driving organic media coverage valued at $90 million. This MozPod episode shows how SEO and high-impact advertising can work together to make a highly successful PR and marketing campaign. ***************************************  This episode is brought to you by Moz's Keyword Explorer Try it for free https://moz.com/explorer Streamline your SEO strategy with Moz's updated Keyword Explorer. Our AI-powered tool effortlessly identifies and adapts to changing search intents, ensuring you always target the most valuable keywords. ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzfWatch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

In this episode of MozPod, discover how you can transform your agency from marketing generalist to specialist! Dive into a conversation between Aaron Rudman-Hawkins of Evergreen Agency and your host, Chima Mmeje, as they discuss managing risks, strategic decision-making, and attracting new clients with creative content solutions. This episode is sponsored by MozCon, the leading SEO conference where you'll learn how to become a better search marketer.  Grab a ticket at https://mz.cm/podcast to secure your spot now! ************************************** A very special thank you to our guest Aaron Rudman-Hawkins! https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronrudmanhawkins https://theevergreenagency.co.uk *************************************** ADDITIONAL MOZ RESOURCES: 30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3 Check out Moz Local ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK *************************************** STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Paul David, co-founder and CEO of Literal Humans, joins MozPod to discuss what led them to implementing compressed hours over a four-day workweek. Diving into the initial challenges, and how they addressed them and adjusted course along the way. If you're wondering if a four-day workweek could benefit your agency, this episode is packed with advice to guide your journey. Agencies are fast-paced, with employees juggling multiple roles, so a four-day workweek sounds risky when there's already too much to do. Will productivity suffer? How will it affect employee retention and client satisfaction? This episode of MozPod explores these critical questions, revealing how a London-based digital marketing agency embraced a four-day workweek and the resulting impact. This episode is sponsored by MozCon, the leading SEO conference where you'll learn how to become a better search marketer. Grab a ticket at https://mz.cm/podcast to secure your spot now! *************************************** More about employee wellbeing on the Moz Blog: https://moz.com/blog/employee-wellbeing More on our guest Paul David https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauldavid-lh https://literalhumans.com/ Additional Moz Resources: 30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3 Check out Moz Local ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK *************************************** STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm

In this episode of MozPod, Chima Mmeje talks with Donna Bloss Gleize and Miracle Inameti-Archibong about the intertwining worlds of motherhood and work life balance. As they share their daily balancing act between strategic planning sessions and school runs, the conversation reveals the raw realities of striving for professional growth while nurturing a family. From the chaos of morning routines to navigating the challenges of returning to work post-maternity leave, they offer a glimpse into the resilience and adaptability required to thrive in both domains. This episode, "Pursuits and Potty Breaks: Navigating Motherhood as a Marketing Leader," isn't just about the hurdles; it's filled with moments of triumph, candid stories, and the shared understanding that, in the quest to balance personal and professional life, embracing the unpredictable is perhaps the most valuable strategy. Join us for an episode that delves into the heart of what it means to lead with empathy, both at home and in the workplace, and discover why sometimes, the most powerful leadership lessons come from the art of motherhood itself. ***************************************  This episode is sponsored by MozCon, the leading SEO conference where you'll learn how to become a better search marketer.  Grab a ticket at https://mz.cm/podcast to secure your spot now! ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH:  Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ►   / moz   Twitter ►   / moz   LinkedIn ►   / moz   Instagram ►   / moz_hq  

Scaling a startup is a tough challenge. As a founder, you may need help with cash flow issues, team burnout, and finding your customer base. But could a marketer's touch be the secret to taking your startup from zero to £1m MRR? In this episode of MozPod, we discuss how a marketer can make all the difference in helping you find product-market fit, acquire your first 100 customers, and reach your first million in revenue. Rod Richmond is a serial entrepreneur and CMO with a unique approach to startup growth. If you're a startup founder or growth-focused entrepreneur, this episode will give you actionable advice on tackling your scaling problems and reaching your business goals. Find out more about the next MozPod episodes https://moz.com/mozpod Get to know out guest, Rod Richmond: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rod-richmond This episode is sponsored by MozCon, the leading SEO conference where you'll learn how to become a better search marketer.  Grab a ticket at https://mz.cm/podcast to secure your spot now! ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH:  Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm

ClickSlice's founder, Joshua George, shares his inspiring journey from earning just £7 an hour to building a seven-figure SEO agency. He discusses signing his first agency client, scaling his business to 7 figures during challenging times of COVID-19. Don't miss out on Joshua's wisdom and experience as he navigates the world of SEO with passion, authenticity, and a commitment to continuous growth. This episode is a must-listen for anyone trying to scale an agency and achieve extraordinary success. This episode is sponsored by MozCon, the leading SEO conference where you'll learn how to become a better search marketer. Grab a ticket at https://mz.cm/podcast to secure your spot now! *************************************** Additional Moz Resources: 30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3 Check out Moz Local ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK *************************************** STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Neuromarketer and ice skater Giulia Panozzo shares her journey from psychobiology to SEO and how ice skating complements her marketing skills. Dive into how neuromarketing can enhance customer engagement and discover insights from her experience balancing dual careers. Tune in if you're curious about applying neuromarketing principles, navigating a multi-faceted career path, or seeking inspiration on integrating personal interests with professional growth. This episode is sponsored by MozCon, the leading SEO conference where you'll learn how to become a better search marketer.  Grab a ticket at https://mz.cm/podcast to secure your spot now! ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH:  Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Content Warning: This episode discusses sensitive topics such as sexual assault, and workplace harassment. Viewer discretion is advised. In this episode of MozPod, Chima Mmeje discusses with guests Myriam Jessier and Kari DePhillips their personal decisions behind choosing a child-free lifestyle. Together they reflect on societal expectations and varied reactions from peers and family. This discussion extends into their SEO journeys, touching upon their experiences with sexual harassment in the workplace and the impact of personal choices on professional pathways. We acknowledge the sensitive nature of topics discussed, including mentions of sexual harassment. Listener discretion is advised. ***************************************  This episode is sponsored by MozCon, the leading SEO conference where you'll learn how to become a better search marketer.  Grab a ticket at https://mz.cm/podcast to secure your spot now! ***************************************  Additional Moz Resources:  30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3   Check out Moz Local  ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK ***************************************  STAY IN TOUCH:  Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

In this inaugural episode of MozPod with Chima Mmeje, Areej Abuli, the founder of the Women in Tech SEO Community, discusses why safe spaces matter for women in tech SEO. She shares her inspiration for starting the WTS Community, challenges, and best memories. This conversation provides valuable lessons and perspectives for those thinking of building a community and for founders who want to foster a more inclusive workplace. This episode is sponsored by MozCon, the leading SEO conference where you'll learn how to become a better search marketer. Grab a ticket at https://mz.cm/podcast to secure your spot now! *************************************** Additional Moz Resources: 30-day Moz Pro Free Trial ► https://mz.cm/3jZq3p3 Check out Moz Local ► https://mz.cm/36Pbz7h Learn about STAT ► https://mz.cm/2IiqTzf Watch Moz Webinar ► https://mz.cm/3TgJgGK *************************************** STAY IN TOUCH: Moz ► https://mz.cm/30QvHCm Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/moz X/Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Moz LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/moz_hq/

Episode 53 of the "Everything Except The Law" podcast has arrived! This time we're speaking with ABA TECHSHOW 2024 presenters Mathew Kerbis and Gyi Tsakalakis.In this episode, Mathew, Gyi and host Nick Werker discuss what lawyers should know about attending the ABA TECHSHOW, how to make the most of your time in Chicago, what types of AI discussions will take place at the event this year and much more!About our guests: Mathew Kerbis is The Subscription Attorney. He's on a mission to get more attorneys to adopt the subscription model and abandon the billable hour. He founded the law firm Subscription Attorney LLC in 2022 after working for private practice law firms for nine years. It's a modern law firm offering legal advice starting at $19.99/month. Kerbis realized the subscription model could revolutionize the legal profession, so he launched the podcast Law Subscribed to help the rest of the legal profession make the same choice.Kerbis is a frequent public speaker, and you can watch/listen to him at https://mathewkerbis.com. As the President of AttorneySync, Gyi Tsakalakis has been helping law firm leaders exceed their business objectives with digital media for over 15 years. He is a licensed Michigan attorney (not practicing), a Google certified partner, a Moz Local trusted provider, an Avvo SEO partner company, and a contributor to the Moz Local Search Engine Ranking Factor survey. Gyi is also interested in emerging technologies and innovative solutions for the legal industry. Learn more about Gyi's company here: https://www.attorneysync.com/Subscribe to the Answering Legal Channel so you never miss an episode of Everything Except the Law! Check out audio versions of the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Anchor. Learn more about the show here: http://ow.ly/Eni250LekLgInterested in learning more about Answering Legal? Book an appointment to speak with us here: http://ow.ly/LSUq30sjviNYou can also give us a call at 631-400-8000 or go to www.answeringlegal.comThis podcast is produced and edited by Joe Galotti. You can reach Joe via email at joe@answeringlegal.com.

This week, Erica and Cassie are joined by Teddy Cheek, Senior Director of Marketing at The Escape Game, for a peek into B2C (business-to-consumer) local marketing and a conversation on marketing team leadership. In this episode, Teddy shares what it's like growing a nationwide brand, how to utilize local SEO tactics for online exposure, and what qualities make for an excellent marketing professional. He also highlights The Escape Game as a killer place to build a marketing career, and explains how you can join in on the fun! Surprise for you! ⁠Use code "MarketingHappyHour" at checkout for 15% off at all The Escape Game locations through 2023⁠ Here's a peek at what we cover in this episode: [00:03:33] - Teddy shares his background in marketing, first joining Crowd Surf in Nashville then transitioning into his role at The Escape Game in 2016. He also talks through unique qualities that make a great employee. [00:12:00] - Teddy explains how he and the team are currently marketing The Escape Game and how it differs from marketing a traditional product or service by having to balance the "hyper local" and the holistic brand. He then dives into local SEO tips and uncovers how to combat brand confusion, understand market variation, and master local marketing by measuring and exploring the complexities of your efforts with the help of tools like Local Falcon, Moz Local, Semrush, and Google Search. [00:24:05] - Teddy shares why he loves working for The Escape Game and how he's building team chemistry by drawing inspiration from heist movies. He also lets us in on the vision for his team's growth in the near future and how you can be a part of it! Grab a drink and listen in to this week's Marketing Happy Hour conversation! ____ Other episodes you'll enjoy if you enjoyed Teddy's episode: ⁠⁠Brand Identity and Partnerships 101 | Neal Cohen of Tip Top Proper Cocktails Unique Growth Marketing Tactics | Kelly McGlone of Avaline Wine How to Build Brand Loyalty | Kara Salazar of Southwest Airlines ____ Say hi! DM us on Instagram and share your favorite moments from this episode - we can't wait to hear from you! ⁠⁠⁠Join our MHH Insiders group to connect with Millennial and Gen Z marketing professionals around the world!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Get the latest from MHH, straight to your inbox: ⁠⁠⁠Join our email list!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Connect with Teddy: teddycheek.com | LinkedIn Check out The Escape Game: ⁠⁠theescapegame.com | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube Use code "MarketingHappyHour" at checkout for 15% off at all The Escape Game locations through 2023 Follow MHH on Social: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter, Marketing Happy Hour Weekly: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/marketing-happy-hour-weekly-6950530577867427840/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marketinghappyhour/support

Ken Magma Marshall is Chief Growth Officer and Managing Partner at RevenueZen, an agency focused on helping high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn . . . to get real leads that actually convert. Ken started his agency four-and-a-half years ago. His first milestone was developing a successful, process that worked and that he could pass onto another person with his SOPS and get the same results. Instead of waiting for clients to request particular services like keyword research or gap analysis, Ken could tell a client, “In the first 90 days, we're going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.” The second one, he says, came about when the repeatable system evolved to the point where he no longer had to tweak the system himself to continue to get targeted outcomes.  About six months ago, Ken's agency reached its third milestone, when it was aqui-hired by RevenueZen. RevenueZen, with a traditional focus on lead gen, appointment setting, and LinkedIn, got Ken's agency's assets, his knowledge of inbound technology, his presence on the executive team, and his agency's book of business. Complementary strengths have proved win-win. ReveueZen's clients are typically established professional, mid-market service companies that have good revenues . . . but may or may not be profitable. All but three B2C “outliers” are B2B technology companies, with 60-70% in SaaS (software as a service). Most of these companies have marketing teams, but are not problem- or solution-aware with respect to RevenueZen's methodologies, don't know what kind of solution they need, or don't know the right provider.  What do they know? They want results. Ken says it is imperative for the agency to qualify its potential clients through the discovery process – if clients don't understand customer lifetime values /average lead values, they are likely to have unrealistic expectations of the value of conversion or question whether they will get a positive return on spend.  Ken will be moderating a HubSpot's Inbound2021 session, “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” In answer any participants' subjective blanket assertions, such as a statement that “Chatbots are the future,” Ken will be asking such probing questions as: “For whom are chatbots correct?” What other marketing stack does the company use?” “How will the company measure effectiveness?” The objective is to dig to a deeper level . . . to determine which use cases are appropriate, who they're appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. This year's online HubSpot Inbound conference is scheduled for October 12-14. Ken is intrigued by some of the newer technologies: Lead-qualifying software that captures online prospects' form data, qualifies leads programmatically in real time, filters their information to match rep data, and immediately either notifies the appropriate sales rep or establishes a live video chat. Conversion.AI software that generates scripts based on user inputs and expectations “learned” over time. Alex Boyd (RevenueZen founder and CEO) and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II (a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall), can be reached on LinkedIn or on the agency's website at: revenuezen.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and it is that time of year once again. It is almost time for the Inbound Conference. Much like last year, it will be virtual, but what that means is this is the time of the year where this podcast gets a little bit more salesy, but in a good way. It's just a different flavor of the agency services world that we like to cover. I am joined today by Ken Magma Marshall, CGO and Managing Partner at RevenueZen based in Portland, Oregon, though he himself has newly moved to Brooklyn. Welcome to the podcast, Ken. KEN: Thanks for having me, Rob. Really excited to dive on it. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about RevenueZen and the agency's superpowers, what you're known for, where you succeed well for clients? KEN: There's the 10,000-foot view elevator pitch, which is that we aim to help high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands to generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn. Or in layman's terms, we help our clients get real leads that actually convert. Really, the company itself is the story of RevenueZen before Ken and then my agency. I actually started an agency four and a half years ago, and about six months ago, RevenueZen acquired it. So now, whereas they were focused on lead gen, appointment setting, LinkedIn only, I brought the inbound methodology with me. So now we've got a hybrid and best of both worlds. ROB: Is that maybe also where some of the SEO flavor came in? I would say it's a little bit atypical for HubSpot agencies in the whole ecosystem, lead gen agencies, to know SEO as well as you're articulating. KEN: That's exactly right, and that's why we utilize the terms “demand gen” and “lead gen” very intentionally, because with SEO agencies you get the whole “These are our deliverables and our clicks and our keyword increases.” We're former salespeople. Three of our executives out of four were cold calling back in the day, so we understand how to map that search intent into pipeline, how things are going to go from each perspective that actually leads to those people converting, not just being users and clicks and searches. So full funnel knowledge helps inform the strategy. ROB: I'm going to pull on a thread that you mentioned in there. You mentioned being acquired. What does it look like to be acquired, and how does that happen? KEN: That's a fun conversation. If I were a startup in Palo Alto and I was a kid in college, that might look like somebody buying me for a certain undisclosed amount of money. But for me, it was more about joining a team that was a little bit established. My run rate at my old company I think was around 600,000 ARR. When RevenueZen acquired me, it was basically acqui-hire situation – they get all of my assets, my knowledge, me on the executive team, and all of my book of business. But the strength of it and really the allure for me, or I wouldn't have done it, is that they understood these lead gen methodologies and channels and had these systems that we didn't that strongly complement the inbound engine that I taught myself and learned how to build over the years. It was really that complementary partnership with a slightly mature agency where I could really hone in those growth focuses and new innovation initiatives. Because I'm a mad scientist at the end of the day, Rob. That's what I love to do. [laughs] ROB: Not to project too much of this onto you in particular, but in general, there's a certain amount of confidence and ego that flows into starting a business, starting an agency, and then layer on top of that the degree of confidence and resilience required coming from a sales background. How do you navigate that into – there is a mutual admission of need and benefit. You have to get past the outer defenses to even have the conversation of “Hey, maybe we should get together,” and number two, “How does that look so we can all feel like we have the right seat at the table when we're together?” KEN: Absolutely. My ego, to use an analogy, went into the boxing ring and did not come out on top for the first few fights. I had to sit down with my wife, my friends, family members, and we really chewed on it. I even chewed on it with the CEO of the company. Now I'm the CGO. We lived in the same apartment building. What it came down to was really just that I understood that he has a finance/sales – he worked at a revenue-based software company, very high growth. He has a ground level understanding of what it takes to scale, whereas, like I mentioned, my strength is in customer success and product development. I'm really gangster when it comes to those two things. So I had to look at it and say, he knew that if he could just bolt on these assets that have taken me six years to create, and I knew that with his ability to understand scale and the other two executives taking on those things that I don't do well – I hate this word because it's overused, but we could create some real synergy and grow a lot more quickly. It just came down to that: being able to do what I love and a little bit more stability. ROB: Especially early on, we all want a little bit more stability. Maybe not too much, but definitely more than that early entrepreneurial journey. KEN: Exactly. ROB: Paint a picture, Ken, of what a typical customer looks like, a typical client for RevenueZen. Is it B2B? What's the mix and focus there, and maybe the size as well? KEN: At this point it's all B2B except for three companies. Upwork is one of our clients; Nalgene is one of our clients. But they're the weird B2C outlier as far as consumer goods go, Upwork being this monster that it is. But most of them, 60-70% are B2B SaaS companies. These are technology companies. They have Series A, usually, investment. They've got a marketing team, but the marketing team are not problem- or solution-aware with our methodologies. They just know that they need to turn those levers because their investors or the CEO or whoever is talking to the, VP of Demand Gen or Marketing, and they just want results. They have money to do it, but they typically don't have the knowledge of what kind of solution they need or the right provider. So we can attach ourselves on as the Chief of Digital or an ad hoc CMO and guide them not only in knowledge-gathering, but lay the strategy out and then literally bolt on our team to execute it for them. Really, it's those kind of companies who are more mid-market. They're already established professional service companies, but as far as the SaaS companies, they have a go-to-market somewhat defined; they understand product-market fit. They might not be profitable, but they have good revenues. They really just need somebody to come in, tell them what to do, and have the army to do it for them. ROB: Do they typically have an understanding – you said product-market fit, but they might have a general understanding of customer lifetime value so they can measure you that way? KEN: Yes. Actually, when I'm qualifying them, and same with our CEO, we actually still do all of the sales. At my old company I sold every deal, and now it's just us two closing every deal. But when we ask them about CLV or even their average lead values if they have lead storing and they understand the value of a lead, that's actually done in the discovery process to qualify them as well. Because if they don't understand those values, they'll have unrealistic expectations when we start getting those conversions as to how much they're worth or if it's even going to return on their spend with us. Yeah, that's pretty imperative. ROB: I would imagine once you have provided a lead, that's an MQL (marketing qualified lead). Then there's that sales qualifying that happens after that. Is that typically on the client side? Is there an element of going further down the funnel that you get involved in? Where does that boundary start to happen? KEN: Yeah, we do lean more heavily on inbound these days. I would say it's about a 70/30 split as well. But the furthest we'll get is when we are doing let's say an inbound/outbound hybrid LinkedIn content marketing and outbound service – happy for you to go on the website and check out if you guys want to – the furthest we'll get is setting those appointments with them and then letting them take over. It's part MQL or SQL depending on how they define it, but it's appointment setting as far as how far we go. ROB: Which still can be, with the proper – it sounds like potentially a real blessing for a sales rep. You're hanging out and stuff shows up on your calendar, and it's people who seem interested in buying your software. That's a good way to wake up in the morning.  KEN: Right. That's why we love inbound. Not that outbound doesn't have its place, and in fact, for a lot of startups it does in the beginning. There's urgency. But that's why we love it, because these people are coming to you saying, “You've built my trust, you've educated me, I've compared solutions and then learned about your solution, all on your site. All you need to do is not give me a reason to put my credit card down.” ROB: Very interesting. You mentioned a little bit about the merger, but if we go a little bit further back, what led you to start your own business in the first place? And you got it pretty far along. That level of bookings is more than just typically one person in their closet. What led you to get started on the journey? KEN: Not that amazing, but I'm pretty proud of it. For me, I think I'm the cliché entrepreneur without any background in it. Nobody in my family, none of my friends. But I was that kid with the lawnmower, I had lemonade stands. I used to take my neighbors' trash and put it on my parents' lawn and sell it at a yard sale. I always knew I was interested in making money and seeing what I could do, but I didn't really have the background, or I would say some of the mentorship, to know that's what it was called and how to start a company. I went to school thinking that I would be a salesperson. I was personable, I understood psychology to a certain degree. Right around my junior year, I believe, I asked a counselor, “What should I be doing? I don't really like this sales thing” when I saw my first sales job that I could get. She's like, “You seem like one of those kids who should go check out that digital marketing thing.” That really was the spark, when I started to understand if I can reverse-engineer this thing called an algorithm, nobody knows what that is. I asked a bunch of people, I asked business owners – that's actually how I got my first client – and they had no clue. So that was my first lightbulb moment: I could start a business doing this. However, I've always been geared towards being an entrepreneur, and I always knew I would. That's why I quit my last agency after only being there for about two years total between both of them. ROB: As you got into the starting and progressing the business journey, were there any key inflection points? Obviously, the merger itself is a key point of validation. But before that day, there had to have been some key inflection points in the business, some points where it really seemed to be materially different than just rubbing two sticks together, making some phone calls and getting some clients. What were some of those moments in the growth of the business that were memorable? KEN: Obviously, I still have the first dollar I ever made. Still have that first check. That's the big one. That's the pure validation of “Somebody's willing to pay me money for this thing.” But apart from that, I think the first milestone that sticks out was going from freelancer to having a repeatable process that worked and involving another human being. That was the first big thing for me. I was on Upwork – like I said, they're now our client, so it went full circle. But I remember doing these projects, and I'm like, instead of people telling me what they want me to do, like keyword research or a gap analysis, I'll just say “In the first 90 days, we're going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.” So I had this system that was starting to form. I could give it to another person with my SOPs and then they could do it, so it's now an actual business. That was the first one that was really exciting. The second one, I would say, is when I evolved from doing the work. I had downloaded this repeatable system to a point where I didn't have to actually implement the changes or the recommendations myself for us to still get those desirable outcomes. That required a coach, who was not cheap [laughs], and a lot of hours and mistakes. But we finally got it dialed. Other than the merger, that was one of the most exciting. And then your first six-figure year is always exciting too, as far as validation. ROB: I think people often underestimate the value of what they can do in terms of documenting a process, having people execute on it. The good part is you mostly don't have to think about it. I think the risk after that, however, is that that process gets stale. How do you go about ensuring that a process you've understood and documented can then be also maintained as the landscape changes over 3, 6, 12 months, etc.?  KEN: I think I'm going to answer that in two parts. When I was still general managing the other company, I am so obsessed with strategy; I'm a technician, I'm a strategist by trade. I'm not a banker, I'm not a programmer. So it was always easy for me to have that layer of QA and innovation just because I was reading this stuff every day. I remember – shout out to Rand – after one Moz Local, going to a wine bar and having a bottle of wine and getting to chop it up. But I always found that very easy because I loved that stuff and was interested in it. But now that I'm with this bigger organization and there's four executives, our COO might say, “Here's how we can squeeze out this operational efficiency.” The CEO is like, “Here's how we hedge against risk.” I'm sitting here – and I think that's why it's such a blessing to be in my position – as the Chief Growth Officer, all I think about all day long is how we can ink out that efficiency for the team, make our client have less friction but also stay on top of effectiveness and industry trends. So for me, the answer is simple. It's my job, and that hasn't changed at three companies. [laughs] ROB: That's a critical job, for sure. I would be remiss not to mention the reason this is an Inbound episode is because you are, in fact, moderating a session for Inbound. The session you're moderating is “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” Inbound is in October this year. I think it's usually Labor Day week, if I'm not mistaken, but things change in a pandemic. Tell us about that session, what you think you're going to talk about, and especially how you're thinking about moderating that session. KEN: I'll talk about the moderation aspect, because it speaks to who I am as a person and my temperament. Whenever folks get into very sensational language or subjective language, I like to systematically remove that and dive into the concrete, the nuance of what they're talking about and why it's effective. For instance, if somebody says “All hail chatbots, chatbots are the future,” I'm not going to give them a response. My first instinct is to give them a question of, for whom are chatbots correct? And what other marketing stack do they use? And how are they going to measure their effectiveness? That's how I'm planning on moderating things, by having these specific questions to get to the bottom of what use cases are each appropriate, who they're appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. I want to make both people frustrated to get the most out of them. [laughs] I haven't talked to them about that, but now they've heard. That's my style of moderation. That's how I talk and that's how I do business. As far as forms versus chatbots, I go back to when I talk to clients who might come in for inbound, and we convince them they need to do an outbound hybrid on LinkedIn. Or they come in for only appointment setting and they want 10 SDRs tomorrow. I'm like, “You're so niche, and there's this clear keyword opportunity that you can own these terms and have a better ROI. Why are you hung up on that?” There's no right or wrong answer. I've actually used chatbots effectively, and I think forms and demos are perfectly appropriate, especially for a self-serve model. So chatbots have their place, forms have their place, but let's dive into the nuances of it to parse that out. That's my philosophy. ROB: There's a certain attention to that at any sort of conference. I know HubSpot goes to pretty good lengths to make Inbound not all about them, but it is to an extent still about them, and they will hop up there and talk about what they're doing, and they'll certainly talk about it in terms of their agencies, their clients, and the customers they're looking to acquire. They are very visionary in terms of looking outwards, but inevitably, they're also going to unveil some new toys, some new shiny objects, and it will be easy for that to be the topic of the next year, the chatbots – you name it, really. KEN: Yep. ROB: What are you hearing from the ecosystem? Is there anything, whether it's on the agenda at Inbound or bubbling up through the product roadmap, and even outside of HubSpot in the broader lead gen space, what do you see coming that's important? Certainly that isn't a shiny object, because the shiny objects are in service of an objective, as you highlight. KEN: While we're on this topic of qualifying leads and once something's in the pipeline, helping sales ops with their objectives and making their lives easier and helping them be more effective – and shout out to Chili Piper. I'm actually very intrigued by these softwares that are, once somebody fills out a form, qualifying them programmatically, and then based on that response, immediately notifying the correct rep. I've even seen softwares that will allow somebody to live video chat right after they've gotten qualified on the form. Those kinds of technologies that remove friction – and again, chatbots can do this, forms can do this; you can integrate both with these other softwares that I'm describing like Chili Piper – those are the things that I'm interested in. Sales ops is, I think – you see these crazy valued companies. I think that's the future of this stuff. Taking the friction from that person who's a user that might be a lead, quickly and programmatically qualifying them, and then diverting them to the correct part of your sales process or person or folks on your sales team and reducing that friction. I think that's where a lot of opportunities get lost. It's the classic somebody taking 72 hours to follow up with a lead that's inbound. Why? And the same thing as sending the templated email. That's also played out. People don't want that. They need a hybrid of both. That's what I'm excited about and what I'm hearing and seeing. ROB: That's really, really interesting. You may know their product a lot, you may know it a little, but when I speak of shiny objects, one of those shiny objects out in the world is AI and machine learning, but it also seems like this area where Chili Piper is playing could perhaps be a legitimate application. Are they looking at the history of the rep, the history of accounts, the history of places where they've been effective? Is that part of the routing of how they're getting the right reps to the right leads? KEN: Yeah, the cool thing is that they plug directly into the CRM. HubSpot, let's say you have a rep assigned to certain accounts based on – native to HubSpot, within HubSpot, let's say if the person comes in and they typed in “SEO” for their focus, or it includes in the form XYZ terms, then they can automatically say, “This person is qualified as a mid-market opportunity who has X, Y, and Z criteria. Give them to the rep based on our different filters that we've created within the CRM.” And then pushing it to the email address of times that are open for that rep in an automated fashion. We're talking about logging into something, back and forth emails, a form for somebody that might not be qualified – all these components are broken down into very seamless automation. That is what I think the uniqueness of their platform is. Those kinds of automations. There's lots of platforms that do one-off of each of those thing, but it's the fact that it's seamless and it directly integrates with the CRM. That's where I think the benefit is. ROB: It's almost a way to see how the things that they've announced over time, the tools that get rolled out over time, how it's accretive and how it starts to come together. Something like scheduling has been in some CRMs for a while. I recently logged into a CRM of one of our clients, and I was in there because they emailed me. I looked it up and they have our number of employees and our revenue. I'm like, man, I don't think I've seen that in someone else's CRM before. How'd they get that? Because we're a vendor. They're not going to go in and enter that data on us. That was entered for them. KEN: Exactly. ROB: You combine that with – you have some rules engines, you have some AI. It all comes together in a pretty meaningful way. KEN: I was going to say, that's so spot on. It's that accumulative knowledge put together in a way that's seamless that's the benefit. As you mentioned, calendar scheduling tools, integrations with CRMs, those have been around for a while. Even certain routing has been around for a while around automation of sending certain things out based on criteria. But the strength is really in the nuances of those experiences, like when somebody fills out a form, prequalifying them based on their responses in real time. How many different form softwares haven't taken advantage of that very simple opportunity that saves the sales folks so much time? Me and Alex, we're still selling. Every 30-minute call that we do is a pretty big part of our day as executives. So if we can, without even thinking about it, take care of that, have them go through and get that messaging out that they need within a really short period of time, we dramatically increase the chance that that lead will close without lifting a finger. ROB: It's really interesting. It's really meaningful. I think something that's also underestimated – in a lot of our processes that we document out, we put a lot of emphasis on humanizing the language of templates. I don't know if anybody's doing some good work around that. That is the hardest thing to do, but I daresay it might be one of the most important things to do: to write templates that don't sound like templates. KEN: Yep. ROB: I need tools for that, I think. KEN: We have lots of SOPs that we've attempted to do, and thank goodness that every software, even Gmail, allows you to do templates that you can drag and drop and place. But I've also been toying around with Conversion.AI to write these scripts based on inputs that we give it, but over time it obviously learns what we're expecting. That has been a bit of a game-changer in terms of templates as far as email follow-ups and responses with prospects. Or even in our SEO work, making sure that we can do optimizations at scale without having to burn out the strategists or charge these companies an ungodly amount of money. I am very fascinated by continuing to tweak and make automation work for us, and machine learning but without losing that component of human that all of us still look for. ROB: Super sensible. Ken, when we zoom back a little bit, across your founding journey, across your merging in with RevenueZen, what are some lessons you have learned on that journey that you might go back in time and tell yourself, if you had a chance to do them differently? KEN: What a question. Something I chew on regularly. I think the first would be that – Alex, our current CEO, my good buddy, has hammered home a lot that you can create a line of best fit, of effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. I was so focused on the effectiveness, being 99.9% effective, that I forgot about that aspect of “I'm only ever going to be able to help X amount of people, and I actually can't help them that well because I'm personally burnt out from doing too much work.” I think that's a trap that creatives and agencies often get into, which is that we're so heads down on the custom, we forget about the scale and making it efficient enough to come down at a price point that's affordable to a broader market. So that's thing #1. Again, took a coach and a lot of money and a few years to learn that. The second thing I would say is when I go on a discovery call and I set the tone with the prospect, I tell them, “This is to make sure we're a good fit.” Salespeople have been saying that for years. Used car salesmen say that. But we've taken that in as a value of the company. I am so quick to disqualify in our CRM, in the pre-opportunity stage. That just saves headache for the strategists, it increases the lifetime value of our clients with us, and it's just better for our reputation. Good fits, good case studies. So that's the second thing: disqualifying them. I would say the third thing is the benefit of really good partners who complement your skillsets. As a solopreneur in the beginning, I think I had to learn a lot of hard lessons myself and chew on a lot of hard things without the aid of somebody. Whether it's a mentor or a co-founder or a really good book, just being insatiable about learning and getting help from others, external help, is invaluable. You literally cannot calculate the time and headache that it'll save you. ROB: Disqualifying almost seems like a subset of an SOP. What I mean by that is if you have to look at every lead that comes in and you have to think about all of their constraints and you have to say, “This person's in a closet by themselves and they haven't built a product yet, and they have $1,000 a month that they want to spend on inbound; what can we do for them?”, you'll kind of lose your mind trying to fit yourself to that opportunity, versus understanding when to say no, and maybe even sometimes “Here's someone else that would be a good fit for you to work with” and focusing on the things you do know how to solve. It keeps you from overthinking and getting paralyzed by choice, really. KEN: Ain't that the truth. Preach. Part of that, not only will we say this business/person is not a good fit, but what could we give them or how could we use the network effect to create value and have them go give a referral? So we do have templates of like “You're not a good fit, but here's some standard resources and here's a good one of our vendors as far as our partner program that we partner with.” That's exactly right. A good ICP defined, having that defined will save you a ton of headache and make your marketing better. ROB: As we round the corner, Ken, I can't help but highlight – you've mentioned a couple of times working with a coach and paying some real money for it. I know what that's like. How did you go about finding a coach that worked well for you, and to an extent justifying the cost? KEN: I'll start with justifying the cost. For me, I audit my time, and I audited my time in terms of how much dollars it was likely to bring in based on the activities. I started to hit this ceiling. Like, “There are all these operational inefficiencies that are holding me back, and I don't actually know how to solve them. The problem of why this is a bad thing, I have no clue. I guess I could learn about this or go get an MBA, but I'd rather just expedite that by paying somebody.” The ROI for me I knew would come because I knew I had a good system. I trusted in my “product” back then. But as far as knowing who was the right person, I always tell people to look for somebody who's done it multiple times but isn't so far ahead of you that they can no longer relate. I wouldn't want Jeff Bezos as a coach, even though he's clearly taken over the world. So this guy was a former founder three times over, but currently just wanted to give back. I mean, he charged money, but really it wasn't that much compared to the market and his expertise. I did a little bit of research. I got a beer with him. Those two components – he's done it before, I can sit down and have a conversation, and he's not too far ahead of me in my industry in the service business to be checked out and just in it for the money. I think if you look at it from that perspective, it's often worth it. That's what I would say. ROB: That's a great point also. Price is significant, but it's not always an indicator of quality. When I was interviewing coaches, I talked to – might be a wonderful guy, but he was a coach in a box. He literally had a box with a coaching methodology, and I think he was doing a career change. He was actually more expensive than the guy I ended up working with, who coaches execs of SalesLoft kind of legitimacy. SalesLoft probably pays him a lot more in total. But the credibility did not always correlate with price, is my point there. KEN: Hundred percent. ROB: Ken, when people want to catch up with you, connect with you and with RevenueZen, other than online for Inbound in October, where should they go to find you? KEN: You can check out either my or Alex's LinkedIn. Alex Boyd and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II, a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall, on LinkedIn. RevenueZen, we're building a new website, so if you go to revenuezen.com any time in the next quarter, we'll have a lot of goodies in our Resource Center. That's always a great place to start. I'll say it now and I'll say it until the day we sell this thing or we keep doing it off into the future: I am always geeked to jump on a call with somebody who isn't our ICP to have a strategy conversation. It's not a sales pitch. It's me in real time, fixing stuff on your site and your pipeline and your methodology. I could do this just with my brain because I've been doing it for a while. So it's always good to get in touch, regardless of if you think you have the money or need SEO. I'll give you something to walk away with every time. ROB: That sounds like a YouTube channel. You let Ken give you help for free and you just agree it's going to be on YouTube in real time. KEN: I used to do that. That's how I used to prospect. That's how I got my first few clients. I would do a real-time, off the top of the dome analysis of their site and fix three to four things. I'd give it to the developers, not even the marketing contact, and the developers would be like, “You increased our page speed by like 60%. How did you do that? Aren't you an SEO provider?” I'm like, “Exactly.” [laughs] ROB: Excellent. Thank you, Ken. Hopefully we can meet up in the skin at Inbound some year when it's back in person. I wish you and the RevenueZen team all the best. Thank you for coming on and sharing. KEN: I would love that, Rob, and you're welcome to come to Brooklyn any time for a beer. Cheers. ROB: Brooklyn's awesome. Cheers. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

When do you need local SEO?Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.Let's talk through today about when you might need to invest in a local SEO plan for you or your client and what that would even mean.If you've been working on SEO for a site that does NOT have any local offices or a brick and mortar presence where customers can interact with you or your client, you might not be aware of what local SEO is and if you need it.Ultimately, if your audience is looking for your topics and adding a local identifier (like whoopie pies in Camden, Maine) or “whoopie pies near me,” then you need a local SEO plan.And unfortunately, it will just mean more work for you- as these are signs you need a local SEO plan.  Local search queries often show map results pulled from a Google My Business listing, so you're going to want to claim that for every locality.But it's more complicated than that. There are some big data aggregators where you're doing to walk to make sure that you're Name, Address, and Phone number are accurate because those listings populate much of the rest of the Internet, and a punctuation difference could mean that the various search engines don't understand your local business or local office.You're going to want to do an audit and fix every mention of your name, address, and phone number and claim your listings in all of the major directories used for mobile and voice queries for local businesses, which includes things like Bing and Apple Maps and Yelp.And ranking? Well then, beyond relevant content, you're going to need local links — think like from your local church or community bulletin board.It's all frankly a lot of work. There are excellent resources out there for you to learn more like Moz Local, BrightLocal, and WhiteSpark, and if you can find a video from any search show with Greg Gifford, I would highly recommend watching as he's one of the rock stars in the local SEO space.So that's your tip for today – when you might need to consider a local SEO plan.Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

FULL SHOW NOTES[ INTRO music]00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 19. Navigating the Unknown.00:16 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a Bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.00:43 Aaron: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:47 Aaron: And the way we usually start our episodes is just by catching up. What's going on? What's happened lately? 00:56 Darren: Yeah, what's going on, Aaron? What's going on? 01:00 Aaron: Well, it seems like we're all... Have been doing the same thing for quite a number of weeks now. And it's interesting, until COVID-19 and everything else, anytime someone would post the Bill Murray Groundhog's Day meme on Facebook, or Twitter, or something else, I just never gave it much thought. And, literally, the last... I would say for me the last 10 days, I absolutely feel that way. Like it is such a lather, rinse, repeat of the same day with such little variance, it's wild.01:34 Darren: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. My days are a little bit all over the place actually. I just keep working on different things and I'm getting pulled in many different directions right now. Things are changing quite a bit actually for me, I feel. Yeah. Things have been really up in the air and I feel a little scattered.01:51 Aaron: Well, I will take some of your variance. I don't know if it's my attitude, or my outlook, or whatever else, but it definitely doesn't feel like enough variance for me. And I think some of it is just other things that I enjoy, like conferences, and things like that, all shut off. Sports, right? It's baseball season and every night I love sitting down with my Minnesota Twins on in the background, and happily writing a blog post, working on a contract, whatever that might be, just getting some small things done while I'm watching baseball, and that diversion of sports for me, isn't there, and that leaves a big hole.02:38 Darren: Apparently, there is a huge surge in Marble Runs sports. [chuckle] Have you seen this? They've got a big table and you're watching the marbles race through a track. Massive surge in viewership there.02:52 Aaron: Can you bet on it? 02:54 Darren: Probably, yeah. Bet on the white marble.02:58 Aaron: I need those small sources of joy.03:00 Darren: You can start watching that while you're doing contracts and stuff.03:03 Aaron: Yeah? 03:04 Darren: Yeah.03:05 Aaron: Interesting, just as we were talking before and prepped some notes, we definitely have some things to walk through, but I think a great place to start is both of us being remote and to some extent work-from-home. Me not so much really work-from-home, but with having a separate office, but has it felt that much different for you? Family life, at home life, what's that been like for you Darren? 03:31 Darren: Oh, yeah. It's kind of weird really. Because there is the sense that we're not going out anymore, and so a bit of isolation. But it doesn't feel that different to me. I've run a remote company since 2005, I've worked from home since 2005, and so our entire way of working... The way that I work is completely the same. No changes here. The only thing is, I see the Sun a little bit less right now. I'm just in the house and not going outside really. We're not even going for walks really, because Jill and Violet, my wife and daughter, have had mild symptoms, so we're supposed to be really isolated. I've been getting out into the backyard lately, but basically, from a work perspective, it didn't change much for us because we're 100% remote. We've always been that way. How about you? 04:27 Aaron: Yeah, same for myself personally and the GatherUp team. I've only been remote the last five and a half... Almost six years now, but long enough to forget the days of commuting, and in-office, and everything else. So that shift wasn't that hard, where for the rest of our company, which I should drop in I guess really quick just because I'm trying to get good at my references. Our group of products that Alpine Software Group had purchased that are Aramark tech that we used to call ASG MarTech, we actually rolled out a full brand for. So now it's called Traject. Traject includes the seven companies, SocialTools, Cyfe, Authority Labs, ourselves, Grade.us, we're all under this Traject umbrella. So we launched that just prior to everything with COVID-19 taking off. And I need to make that note before I start saying things, 'cause I'm trying to get good in being part of re-brands myself. Re-training yourself on how you refer to things.05:28 Darren: For sure.05:29 Aaron: So, for the Traject team, there's about 60-70% of the team as an overall that's all in-office and located outside of Seattle in Bellevue. And so it was interesting to watch. That first week, especially, was a struggle for them in moving from a centralized office to remote work and many of them have not been doing it right, they're working from the kitchen table and things like that, and especially with having others at home, if your spouse works, they might be just 10 feet away, and they're working remote, right? And it's like... I don't have any of those problems, my wife stopped working last year, it's a little different at my house, I have four kids that are home all the time now, ages 4 to 16.06:15 Darren: Yeah. She's working. Oh, she's working hard. [chuckle]06:19 Aaron: Oh my gosh. And they've done fabulous with leaving me alone, and they know if the office doors are shut, to cool it with dad. And luckily, in the last two weeks, their distance learning e-school has fired up, and so that occupies anywhere from two to six hours of their day depending upon what's going on and everything else. So, yeah, same as you, I feel really lucky that things haven't changed that much. But, yeah, the same... My 10-year-old daughter just said to me last night like, "Dad, every like hour or so, I'm gonna come get you and just make you go outside for five minutes." She's like, "You're in that hole all day." And I was like, "Yeah, you're right. That would probably be a healthy thing."06:56 Darren: Once an hour though, that'd be tough. I don't know, how about every two hours? 07:00 Aaron: [chuckle] I'm gonna try to appease the troops. If they have a suggestion for me at this point I'm just gonna take it because, yeah, I feel for them and all the small things that they're missing out. My kids all love school, but man, they are just missing friends, and socialization, everything else.07:19 Darren: Oh, man. So much, yeah. I used to have a pretty closed-door policy with my office when Violet comes home from school and stuff the office is closed, you don't come in. But now it's like, she wants to come and say hi to me, I'm gonna stop whatever I'm doing, just take some time to chat with her, "Oh, what are you working on? What are you playing with these days?" And you just hear her stories and just spend that time, because she doesn't have any other social interaction. Gosh, neither do I, so it's like, "Yeah, go ahead, interrupt me anytime, come on in and we'll have a little chat for a few minutes and then I'll get back to work." I think it's the way it has to be right now.07:56 Aaron: For sure. My kids have siblings to play with. They're very blessed, they have a lot to do. We're not in a traditional neighborhood, it's a little more spread out, so there's a couple of acres for them to be outside and play on without getting into some of those things and whatever else, so I'm more fortunate than not on a lot of things. I think the biggest emotional toll on me is just, for however long now? 12 years, 15 years, everything for me professionally has been growth, success, constantly going up, right? You still have your small struggles and dark weeks, or months, and whatever else, but really, the overall momentum is always forward. And I've never been a part of something like this where that momentum has been pulled back and you go from this growth mindset to a survival and circle the wagons to some extent. And I think that's been the hardest part on my mood.08:52 Darren: Yeah, it's a real shift from, "Okay, we've gotta build all this stuff and do all these things and keep growing forward," to like, "Oh wow. What do we have to do to protect at this point?" So, yeah, that survival mode instinct has kicked in and, yeah, it's tough to have that shift, and it doesn't feel good. All that growth always feels good and that push for success, but, yeah, it feels bad to be like, "I'm gonna make these tough decisions now."09:21 Aaron: Yeah. And still trying to find the success within it. I was listening to the last weekend local podcast on LocalU and I think Blumenthal coined a term of "sur-thrival". So it's like, how do you find ways to thrive in surviving? 09:37 Darren: Yeah. Totally.09:38 Aaron: I instantly grabbed on to that and I was like, "Yeah, that's a great way to refer to it. I totally agree."09:43 Darren: Yeah, and I'm seeing it actually, I'm seeing lots of opportunities in my business to thrive a little bit. And so we're trying to put in some defensive moves just to make sure that we can ride it out and some offensive moves. And so, I don't know, I'm feeling okay about it. The dust is starting to settle from the first few weeks of it really getting crazy and just starting to settle into this new way of how we're gonna operate, this new economy, and identifying the markets that are opportunities.10:14 Aaron: Yeah, for sure. And I agree with you, it's like there's a first big tidal wave where there was a lot more panic, less information, nothing had really been settled into, and I feel like this week, I feel like that wave has come, crashed, and it's now pulled back out. I think there's gonna be more waves, maybe not as big or aggressive, but it is starting to get a little different and a little more than norm.10:42 Darren: Yeah, and it's kinda like... That's happening for me, I have that feeling that, okay, well, those first few weeks I was just scrambling trying to figure out, "Okay, what the hell are we gonna do?" And I couldn't really focus on all of the regular operations. I was busy filling out government relief applications and sorting out all this kind of stuff. And so, I feel like, while that's happening for me, it's also happening for every other business in the world, where we're starting to kinda, "Okay, the dust is settling, now let's get back to business." It's like, what does the new business look like? What does the new way of operating look like? And all those businesses are gonna start coming out of the woodwork again and the economy will pick up. Sales have been super quiet, but we're starting to see more leads come in now as people are looking at alternatives to whatever else they're using.11:33 Aaron: Yeah. You just stated about five different things I wanna break down. One thing that you kind of mentioned, I know from you and I, we've both been talking professionally, we've also talked as friends during this, just 'cause you need that support in those outlets, but I know you've had to make some hard decisions around your business, and Whitespark, and some employee moves. What has that been and what does that look like? 12:01 Darren: Yeah. So once this all came out and we started realizing what a massive impact it's gonna have on the economy, we had to look at our expenses. Where are our expenses, what can we cut? So the first thing of course was to just take an axe to my credit card statement and be like, "What can I cross off here? What due is absolutely not essential? So we did some major cuts there. It's kind of crazy, I cut like $5,000 in monthly expenses off my credit card. And after I did it, I was like, "Well, dang, why didn't I do that a year ago?" It's just like so much.12:30 Aaron: You weren't forced to.12:32 Darren: Yeah, I wasn't forced to. It's like you kinda get into this. "Okay, well, finances are good, and yeah, those services are pretty good, but are they that essential?" And so I was able to do some pretty good cuts there. And then of course the next most major expense for our company... We don't have an office, we don't have a lot of overhead, it's really labor. So there were a couple of layoffs. One was on the development side, another one was on our GMB management team. We were actually in a pretty good growth mode with the GMB management team, where we were bringing on about 10 to 15 new clients every single month. And so we had just crossed that threshold where we're like, "Okay, well, we need to get someone hired and trained in order to meet that growing demand." And so we had just hired somebody and she had taken on a handful of clients right when this hit. And so we knew that that one was gonna start backing off, we were actually gonna start losing clients, so we had to make a lay-off there.13:38 Darren: It's really sad. She was amazing. We'd love to hire her back as soon as we can. So, once we can, we would love to hire her back. So a couple of layoffs and then another thing is that the government of Canada introduced what's called a work-sharing program. I think they always had it, but they loosened up some of their guidelines around it and made it easier to get into it. So we reduced hours with the team across the whole Canadian team and just to the point where they could still maintain all of their health benefits. So they still get all their health benefits, they reduce their hours by about 37%, and then the government work-sharing program tops that up for them. So it actually doesn't have a huge impact on them, it shouldn't be too bad, but it results in pretty significant payroll savings for the company. So all of those things are the defensive moves to make sure that we're shoring up some resources in the bank, because honestly, Whitespark has been in this growth mode where we've been running the line, where certainly we've been profitable, but it's not like we had millions in the bank or even hundreds of thousands in the bank.14:50 Darren: We were always like, "Okay, once we have enough more revenue, we hire somebody else," we'd have more expenses, we'd expand our servers. As a Bootstrap company, I think that's just what you do, you continue to grow your resources and your ability to build faster as you get more revenue. And so that's certainly what we're doing. So we didn't have this huge cushion. So my defensive measures were to try and create a little bit of that cushion, so it was tough. What was it like for you? 15:23 Aaron: Yeah. Well, one, I commend you, because those are hard decisions and just so many decisions in this are all about the balance between short-term and long-term effects. You make difficult short-term decisions to survive long term. And it's so important, I and we, the company, have definitely benefited from being part of a larger org within this. So, let's just say, as I commented to you, if GatherUp hadn't sold and we were still all by ourselves, I will say we had cash reserves for three months of zero income and 100% of our burn rate to be able to pay bills. We had done a good job of always investing our growth, but we always looked at... We definitely put money away when we were doing well within our growth and created a little bit more margin to have... Whether it was something like this, a crisis, economic downturn, or an opportunity where we were like, "Oh, if there is a small product, or a small team, we can purchase... " Or whatever else we wanted, to have at least a little bit of cash on hand.16:36 Aaron: But even within that, if it was just me and running the company, we would have made similar moves to what you did. There probably would have been... Obviously, the first thing is analyze every cost, cut everything out that isn't necessary, but then, just with about any company, bodies are your most significant expense. And, yeah, we probably would've at least had to make one, two, possibly even three moves, depending upon how we saw it, just to ensure that everything else was in the best position possible to survive at least a three-month if not a six-month economic winter of what we're just starting to get into.17:18 Darren: That timing, it's so unknown. That's the big thing, is this uncertainty, right? It's like, okay, we're seeing some drops, it's not that significant, but who knows, maybe in three months the US economy is gonna be so shut down because of this virus that we're in huge trouble. So if there's no spending happening anywhere, then some of the services and software that we provide will certainly get cut, and so it's trying to make sure that you can weather the storm. And that's what I think we've been trying to do. And it's nice that you're in that position. The timing actually of the acquisition really worked out in your benefit, certainly for the founders, and also, I think, just having that huge strong umbrella above you that can help protect from some of this, is really a nice place to be.18:10 Aaron: Yeah, no, who would have known? No way to tell, but yes, this scenario, it just shows you how much timing is a part of everything in life. So many different angles with it. But, overall, I really feel like Traject has done an awesome job. One is very early communicated the position of the company, the financial health of the company, and that they were already in talks with... We've talked before... There was a couple of layers between the very top level of the company down into the group we belong to. So immediately, there was strong communication, hit upon things that people would be most concerned about, and delivered a lot of good messaging there. And really, overall, the company just kept reinforcing, people first. This is tricky. Take care of yourself first. We want you to be emotionally and physically healthy, that comes first. If you're taking care of that, then we'll get at working and keeping the company healthy and all that kind of stuff.19:12 Darren: Right. For sure.19:14 Aaron: We basically have weekly AMAs with the exec team with Traject. So people are able to ask, "What's changing? Do you see anything different? What other decisions have you made?" So, just a really quick and easy way for whatever is a concern for people to hear that, and also for others, instead of those happening one-to-one in an email to the CEO or whatever else, everybody's able to hear it asked out loud and hear the answer to it, which I think...19:28 Darren: I love that. Oh, man, I'm gonna do that. I've been doing a weekly call with my team, but I always have a weekly call anyways, where I try to communicate the current health of the company, what's been happening in the company, what we're seeing in terms of our revenue and our different lines of business. So try to communicate that and be clear about that, but the AMA thing is a really good thing. I often get questions after the call, like people will just ping me on Slack, and I think it'd be really helpful for everyone to have that, and just, "Okay, that's the end of my spiel, now let's get into the AMA portion of the call." So I really like that idea and I think I'm gonna open that up for Monday's call.20:18 Aaron: Yeah, no, I think it makes people feel more comfortable. Everybody hears the same questions and the same answers, which is also great. And then lastly, they just put together a really good prioritization on, "This is what we're doing first. This is what we're doing second. This is what we're doing third," so the same things that we've just discussed on reducing expenses, different allocations, looking at this. And at the bottom of their list is, if these things don't work based on where things are at, then we potentially look at a percentage of salary cut across the board. And then, if that didn't work, then yeah, we'd have to look at the elimination of some positions. But the great thing, I think, it lays out is, one, it helps people understand the playbook that they're operating off of, which allows everyone to buy into the strategy. Two, it really helps them understand, there's a whole bunch of things before that comes on the table, and the thing I keep preaching to our team is, the thing to be grateful for right now is you have some control over this. We have our jobs, we have our personal income, and doing productive work is such a healthy thing right now.21:27 Darren: For sure.21:28 Aaron: Yeah. And a great distraction, and do what you can to not be paralyzed, or inundated, or overwhelmed, by all of this that's there, and focus on your work, because being successful with what you are doing is gonna contribute to the survival and some success inside of this, and making it to the other side. So when you get into that high level of like, what can you control and what can't you control, well, we can't control the economy and what happens to our customers businesses in full, and all of those kind of things, but we can control how well are we doing at our job, are we doing the right things that are needed to survive right now? Are we doing everything we can to help our customers so we're contributing to their survival? Those are all positives that I've personally worked hard to remind our team. Like, "Be grateful for that and let that gratefulness, and what you have, be the passion into what you're doing right now, in a difficult time for some to find that motivation."22:26 Darren: Yeah, totally. There's so much value in that. When I have a a really productive day in the office, you feel good about it, right? So it's a nice thing that people can lean on when things seem so bad. Being able to take your mind off of the struggles of the world and the stress of the uncertainty of what's gonna happen with this virus, and all the health concerns, and being able to just put your head into some work for a while and get that sense of accomplishment. I find a lot of value in that and I think it's a great thing to communicate to the team.22:58 Aaron: Yeah, you're exactly right. I've said multiple times in communication with stuff where we've elevated something very small and then pushed it out to everyone on our weekly stand-up or Slack, or both, whatever, is like, "No win is too small right now. Celebrate the smallest thing like it is a Super Bowl championship right now, because it's so important for the psyche and for your emotional well-being professionally," right? 23:26 Darren: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, it's great stuff. I'm gonna work on implementing some of that with my weekly calls too.23:33 Aaron: Nice.23:34 Darren: Yeah.23:35 Aaron: The next thing, I think, for us, the big shift almost immediately was just really realizing and I think all companies, especially SaaS, is in this boat right now, it's like, retention is absolutely the name of the game right now. Just as you said. And the same for us, leads, sales opportunities, whatever else, are like, I don't think they're even 10% of what they were in January, February, and early March.24:01 Darren: Right. That's amazing. I would say, if I had to guess in terms of leads for us, it's probably down only maybe 50%. Yeah. So our leads are actually still pretty solid. We're actually seeing quite a few people looking at cutting ongoing recurring citation services. So, let's say we're using Yext or Moz Local, or some of these other services, they are looking at our one-time offering and saying, "This is a much better way to go for citation management." So we're actually seeing pretty decent leads there, and then our software leads are... I'd say they're down about 50%.24:43 Aaron: Yeah. Do you feel like some of those people are looking like, "Okay, I want something around this service, but I want a more cost-effective solution?" And is Whitespark that compared to those. So you're gonna see some trickle down from those.24:54 Darren: I think it's exactly what I'm seeing, and I think also, on the software side, we're quite reasonably priced, and so I feel like a lot of people that are with more expensive solutions are looking to us. Or let's say they had to cut a $3000 a month SEO engagement with a good firm, and so they're like, "Okay, we're gonna take this in-house and now our marketing director has to manage some of this," and they're like, "Okay, local search software," and then we come up. And so I think that's where we're starting to see some of this. It's like people cutting expenses elsewhere and then finding us 'cause we are generally more cost-effective.25:33 Aaron: Yeah, that's awesome. I think that can be a big win. A forced changeover. Just the same as you analyze your credit card and like, "Why am I paying for this," or "What can I do," right? When people are doing that, and then you are positioned that way, that can definitely be a great migration from competitors to you at this time, which is awesome for you.25:57 Darren: Yeah. So we're actually... As part of our offensive moves, is we're putting up some landing pages that are specifically around that and we'll start marketing those.26:05 Aaron: Excellent. Yeah. With that stuff I always think of... I used to... Back in the day when... Building and running, maintaining websites, has worked with a lot of banks, and they would do a lot of campaigns on switching. Just like, "Here's what it's like to switch your checking account from Wells Fargo to us as a community bank."26:22 Darren: Oh, man, that's a great idea.26:26 Aaron: Yeah, just really laying it all out. So they're able to see like, "Hey, here's what's different, here's how we handle it, here's what we need." And just making it so that the consumer felt really comfortable with like, "Oh, this switch happens a lot. It happened so much. It's all laid out. And here's the majority of my questions. I feel really good about contacting them to do this."26:28 Darren: Yeah, I see the same thing in the cellphone companies. Telecom stuff. And so, yeah, I'll definitely look to that for inspiration for how to position those landing pages and those marketing messages.26:45 Aaron: Yeah. What was really interesting to me when you see... And just the way SaaS and recurring revenue works, March was still our best month in the history of the company. Every...26:58 Darren: That's amazing.27:06 Aaron: Yeah, minus one, two, three months over the last six years, it's like up into the right every single month. You know that predictable revenue, it compounds everything else, that's why so many people love software as a service. And so, with everything that's gone on, new clients early in the month, we signed a big deal midway through the month, there's still all these positive things going on, and most of the customers, some canceled, and others, we've been working with ways to help them with their accounts, but that stuff won't kick in until April. And just as you and I were talking before, it's like, I can already see from our predictive revenue tools that our April billing will be about 6% to 7% down from our March billing. And getting back into the psyche and whatever, I was like, "I've watched that number go up." The months where it didn't grow, it was maybe a quarter percent that it went backward, or almost even, but never even a full percentage point, and all things considered, a 6%-7% drop and considering a lot of that, is just paused billing. I think that's somewhat of a positive signal at this point after this first wave of crashing.28:29 Darren: Totally, yeah. Absolutely. I feel the same way, it's like, "Man, the losses are not that bad." And so my confidence grows every week, where I look at the numbers and I'm like, "Okay, I think this is gonna be okay." My confidence is growing but then I'm also a little... I don't wanna be overly confident because there's still so much uncertainty. It could get really bad in the next couple of months. So I don't wanna be overly confident, but I'm starting to feel like, "Okay, well, if we all settle in and this is the way it is, then there's still certainly some thrive opportunities." How can we thrive in this situation? And if we tap into those, certainly we're gonna see some losses, but how much of that can we recover with new initiatives? 29:14 Aaron: Exactly. I kinda look at it, as I mentioned earlier, baseball is a favorite sport of mine, right? It's like a baseball game and we're pretty much in the second inning right now. There's a lot of game left to be played, but it's underway, we're out there, a couple of things have already happened, and for us in these first couple of innings, the biggest thing around that retention is, we changed our cancel process. So instead of just being able to go... Hit "Cancel", drop a quick... We ask, "Alright, tell us why you're cancelling," and getting a little bit of info. We changed that to, you hit "Cancel", now you get a pop-up that says, "Hey, just so you're aware, with COVID-19 and everything going on, we get it, let's have a conversation and let's figure out how to keep you on board with us. Whether it's a reduction in billing, we need to pause your billing for a month." But we put a bunch of things in place and then we built that framework for our customer success team so that they could manage it, where they weren't coming to me and saying, "Alright, here's what this customer wants. They want 10% off this month," or whatever else.30:16 Aaron: We gave them a framework so that they could make those offers, handle those decisions, and take care of it right in the moment with the customers. So it really felt a win for them, win for our customer, win for the business, especially if we kept them from cancelling just to say like, "Oh, great, yeah, I'm a restaurant, or I'm an agency that serves restaurants and hotels. I just went to zero income, but I still wanna retain this data, 'cause they're gonna need this when they come back, what can we do with it?"30:45 Darren: Yeah, that's really smart. Yeah, actually, we put some measures like that in place too, and then we talked to your team about it, and got some more ideas, and it's so valuable. I think that is one of the big lessons for any of our listeners that are also doing SaaS, if you haven't put something like that in place, get that up immediately. Some kind of retention recovery program, right? 31:09 Aaron: Yea. 'Cause, yeah, the cancels are just likely gone. It's so much harder to get them... Say things recover in three months, getting them to physically come back, sign up, even if you market to them, send them messages, they've already... They've mentally divorced the situation. But if you're able to reduce billing or even pause a month or two of billing, then when it comes back, then it's like, "Okay, great, things are back, close to normal, are you good? Let's turn billing back on." Just so much easier of a process, and you need to do that when you're dropping or pausing revenue like that, you need more of an instant on when things return, instead of having to work a marketing program around it.31:49 Darren: Yeah. We actually had some reductions on our support team too, and our support is still as... It's certainly seen a drop in tickets, but it's still fairly active. And so I didn't wanna overwhelm my support team by having them talk to everybody that wants to cancel, 'cause there's a lot of them, obviously, they're coming in. And so we did the same kind of thing, but it's completely automated. So when you hit to cancel now, it gives you an option to be like, "Well, here are a couple of options for you. One, if you wanna keep everything still active, and still be able to use the software, we know things are tough," it's like, boom, "Here's a discount for you, you can get that discount." And so people could choose that option and continue to operate, or they can just choose the pause option, which means we'll stop actively doing anything in your account, we turn off all of the functionality, but we'll preserve your historical data, so that when you're ready to come back in, you can just press one button and turn it back on. So people get to choose themselves on the checkout and that's been helpful for sure. We're seeing a few people take us up on that option.33:02 Aaron: And I don't know if any of my CS team ever listens to this podcast, but I do wanna give them a shoutout. They have been doing an amazing job of taking care of GatherUp customers, and helping, and that's not easy right now for them either, right? Instead of solving technical issues, or usability issues, and things like that, you're talking to people who, they're fearful, they're losing their business, they're in a panic situation. And you're trying to calm them, do your job, and keep the business that you're running maintainable. So, really, a commendable job, a very tricky spot for them in their role right now for sure, and I super appreciate it. They have handled the lion share. I've handled 2% of the conversations that they've handled and they're killing it.33:05 Darren: I can attest to that. As a customer, we had... One of our large customers and reputation builder looked to cancel, and so that conversation happened with us and your GatherUp customer support team, and, man, they're awesome. They did an awesome job, really helpful, many ideas. And the real thing that comes across is that, what can we do to help? You can just really feel it. They're just... It's not about trying to save the money from the account, it's about, "Okay, well, what can we do to help here," and just really being helpful. And you feel it and it feels good. Yeah, I think they're doing an awesome job.34:29 Aaron: That's good. I think we have a lot of genuine care in our culture. I've always appreciated that about our team. So that's awesome to hear come through. Alright, lastly, let's end on something, I guess, a little more positive, some of the things that we're doing right now. What are you doing, Darren, as far as within marketing, within sales? I know you mentioned a couple of things right now, but how are you working this to find some success and get some new business inside of everything? 34:58 Darren: Yeah, for sure. We have a few initiatives that are about to launch. One is what we're calling... One of our big competitors that people look to us as an alternative is Yext. People have a subscription with Yext, they're paying for a monthly fee, or an annual fee, to just have their citation sitting in a database doing nothing, right? And so we have... We're about to launch what we call a Yext replacement service. And so, "If you're currently with Yext, here's how you could switch to us." And so it's exactly what you were talking about with the banks. We have a landing page specific for it, we have a custom package for it, and so that we're planning to launch next week actually. And so that's one of the big offensive moves that will keep our revenue on the citation team rolling. We actually haven't seen huge drops over there. A little bit, but not too bad. And so I think that this service... We actually are predicting some growth and we already have two potential new hires lined up in case we see some growth there from the launch of this service. Which would be great, it'll offset other areas of the business, right? So that's one of the big ones.36:08 Aaron: That's awesome.36:09 Darren: Yeah. Yext replacement service I think it's overdue. We've been thinking about it for a long time, and so we're pulling the trigger on that one and trying to get that up as soon as possible. Another huge one is, our biggest recurring software is our local citation finder. It's basically what we've built our business on. And that software honestly hasn't had a line of code added to it since probably 2015. We have not touched the thing, it's ridiculous. We've partly not touched it because it's been in this sort of complete overhaul redesign, re-development phase forever. We're actually shooting for a launch in 10 days. The 27th. April 27th, Monday April 27th, we're trying to finalize the final pieces of marketing, and polish, and we're pushing that out the door. And, oh my God, it's unbelievably better. And it's actually one of these weird pieces of software that over the period since this COVID thing happened, we haven't seen... I look at it on a daily basis and it's like, six new sign-ups, five cancellations. The next day will be like, seven new sign-ups, eight cancellations.37:27 Darren: And so it's holding fairly steady, and I feel like once we launch the new version of this, massive retention, because the software is just so much better. People are canceling not necessarily because of COVID, but they cancel because the software is like... It did the job for them, but it's pretty weak and it doesn't have a lot of reason to stay subscribed. The new version provides ongoing value in a way that's so much better than what the old version did, and it's a delight to use, it's fast, it feels great, it looks great, and just delivers so much more value. So I think we have the retention, but massive marketing push. There are so many people that are familiar with that software and have been using it for years, we have a huge opportunity to get our name out there and push the marketing for that. There's probably a hundred blog posts out there that reference the local citation finder. All the outreach to them, we can mention to them, "Hey, we got this new version. I've set you up with a free trial account, check it out." So I think we're gonna have a massive blast of additional marketing value, which of course will bring people to citation finder, but once they're there, they see all the other stuff we do too. So I think those two offensive moves are huge.38:43 Darren: And then on the Google My Business Management service, that's a great service that we're seeing fantastic growth, and I was really excited about where it was going. We've certainly seen it cut back, probably lost about 20 to 30 percent of our clients over there, but I did some talks in the fall for auto dealers where I crawled every Google My Business listing in all of Canada for auto dealers, and I broke it down. How many are using Google posts, how many are using... Have filled out the services fields, how many are using products? All these different features. And then I presented those stats, and then I talk about, "Well, wow, no one is doing this, it's a massive opportunity, here's how auto dealers can take advantage of that." And then, of course, I think that data which we're about to publish, for auto dealers, it's not a great time to be targeting auto dealers, but we're re-running that crawl for accountants, and lawyers, home services, all these businesses that are still continuing to operate, we're gonna re-run that with those marketing initiatives, so that we can get in front of those audiences and present our Google My Business Management service. 'Cause that management service is actually really reasonably priced.39:53 Darren: It's 349 a month. And so, for a lot of businesses that are cutting bigger expenses, it's one of those ones where they can come to us for a much lower cost. They're offsetting their cost, taking off that huge bill off their credit card, replacing it with this and still seeing great value in their marketing. So those are the things that we're looking at and cautiously optimistic that we'll be able to even potentially thrive over the coming months.40:19 Aaron: Yeah. No, that's great. And to some extent the same backbone of what we're trying to do. One, I've seen, you put out some tweets and sharing some visuals on the updated local citation finder. What a great way, build some excitement before it even happens.40:37 Darren: Yeah, a little bit of... Yeah.40:38 Aaron: Yeah. Love doing that stuff. Big believer in just doing your work out in the open or looking at your product as an aquarium and everybody can see in. I think those are great things. But I think the core of where you're getting is having things to talk about. If the only thing you have to talk about is, "We need sales," that's a boring conversation that nobody wants to listen to. Kinda like how you and I joked before this started. You made the statement that you have COVID blindness because every email that comes in says COVID on it. [chuckle]41:10 Darren: Oh my God. "A new message from our CEO." It's like, "Oh my God, I don't wanna hear what your CEO has to say about how, yes, you're still operational. I'm sure you are, 'cause everyone is, and thanks for the info."41:22 Aaron: Yeah. Yeah, no, totally. I'm with you on that. But, yeah, what we've looked at is the overall... Again, back to retention, is like, how do we help customers? One initiative that I launched is, I wrote out in a couple of hours, I created a spreadsheet and wrote down 120 blog topics. And then I took it to our team in our stand up and said, "Everybody pick at least two of these to write on in the next few minutes."41:47 Darren: That's impressive brainstorming, man.41:51 Aaron: [chuckle] I'm never short on ideas, only time to execute. So it brought it to everyone where usually it's like Mike and I blog and then we have a product and content marketer. She blogs a little bit, a lot more on feature releases. So we've gone from a once a week, once every two weeks post, to three posts a week for the last three weeks now. And it's been great.42:14 Darren: Yeah, smart.42:15 Aaron: And more social chatter, more things to come in, more things to talk about. And also, internally, I find... People already, it's great gratification for them to put work into it, put it together, and then have it published. And instead of sharing on their LinkedIn or their Facebook like, "Hey, here's what Aaron wrote, or here is our company blog," now it's like, "Here's what I wrote," right? And there's pride and accomplishment behind that. And so, I really feel like it's been a great movement. It's interesting, it's created a lot more work for me, 'cause I'm basically editing and finding really good visuals, and all that kind of stuff, but I love it. The post is at least half-written, if not more, by the time I'm able to get into it, so that's been a really big plus. And I'm always kind of a slogan or a catch-phrase guy. And so, internally, we've just really rallied around like, "Mentions are your best marketing and inbound is the best outbound right now." So, yeah. And going with those, content, then we have the... We're doing the local search Ask Me Anything webinar with you and Joy Hawkins on April 23rd. We already have a hundred and some registered for that. So I'm pumped about that. Traject has been great.43:30 Aaron: If you're a paid GatherUp customer, you can use our social product, Cyfe which is Reporting, or Authority Labs for free for 90 days. So we're offering access to other tools as well. So it's given us a lot to talk about, write about, be out there with, and, yeah, it's helped. It's like, our agency leads are down probably about 25-30% of volume of what they were, and then our multi-locations are really far down, that's the one that's below 10%. And they were just trying to, "Alright, what are the industries that are doing okay right now?" Certain areas of logistics, that's doing well. Grocery, pharmacy, things like that, they're doing well. So we're doing some light outbound with those, but much more we re-calibrated around... I just kinda put together a strategy of the the three Rs. And it's like, research and know the prospect super well. Reach out as a friend, a colleague, ask questions, how it's going for them, what are they seeing, things like that. And your goal is to build a relationship. So instead of trying to slam them into a demo, all you're trying to do is get a conversation going.44:43 Darren: Yeah, and try to solve their problem. What is the thing that they're struggling with, why are they even considering you, and then understanding what their challenges are and seeing if you can help them with that. That's all people want.44:56 Aaron: Yep, for sure. So we've just been hitting on that and we're starting to see progress. It's like, we're seeing the uptick in traffic to the blog, we're seeing more social chatter, we're seeing some of these other things. And these things are there a little slower. It's not gonna be next day success, but I really feel like if things cycle down another level, that's when this stuff is gonna kick in for us, and it's gonna keep us where we're at, and then at even kill, and we're also... We're not pissing people off by trying to shove sales and demo requests, and everything else, in their inbox, doing cold outreach at a time where nobody has mental bandwidth for that.45:36 Darren: And, man, I cannot believe the uptick in terrible cold outreach emails I've been getting in my inbox. And so, it's like, "Gosh, people are extra sensitive to it right now. Do not be taking that strategy, it will not pay off for you."45:51 Aaron: Yep. I don't even read my sales pitches right now. It's just...45:56 Darren: Forget it.45:57 Aaron: Yeah. Not even to see what they're saying. It's just such a hard delete, right? 46:01 Darren: Of course, yeah. It's the worst time to be pitching. If your company was built off of outbound, man, that was not a good move. Right now you need to be an inbound-based company.46:14 Aaron: Yeah, for sure. I agree. Alright. Well, I think we've ran a gamut of things, and I'm hopeful the next time we record it's not Groundhog's Day and we're talking the same things. [chuckle]46:25 Darren: Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to talk again in a few weeks and see where we've landed. There may be some of these proactive moves. We'll see how they're paying off, and see where things are at.46:37 Aaron: For sure.46:38 Darren: Yeah.46:39 Aaron: Great to catch up, Darren. Glad things are going as well as they can for you guys. I'm excited to see the launch of the local citation finder, and I think you set it up perfectly, it sounds like it's gonna launch in about two weeks. [chuckle]46:54 Darren: You know what? It's even less. 10 days now.46:58 Aaron: Oh, I like this.46:58 Darren: Yeah. I've shortened my two weeks to 10 days.47:03 Aaron: See, we're always evolving and improving, that's what I like about talking to you.47:07 Darren: Yeah. Alright, cool, great talking to you Aaron.47:11 Aaron: Yeah, you too. Hey, everyone, wishing you guys are well in personal lives, emotionally, fighting for your business, all those other things. Many of you are so gracious. You reached out on Twitter, have sent encouraging emails on our episodes, and they're helpful and everything else. If you have anything going on in this time that this is sparked that you have a question on, or you wanna know how we're operating, or even wanna share some of yours, please feel free to reach out to Darren and I, we're really easy to get a hold of, either from our website or on Twitter. So go ahead and reach out to us, we'd love to cover any of that on our upcoming episodes.47:47 Darren: Yeah, even if you just wanna chat via DMs on Twitter, or something, and you've got some questions, happy to talk and see if there's anything I can do to help.47:57 Aaron: For sure. You're a good guy.47:58 Darren: Alright.48:00 Aaron: Alright. Take care, Darren, and we'll talk to you soon, and thanks everyone for listening.48:04 Darren: Thanks, everyone. Bye.[music]

In the first episode of the In Camera Podcast, Grace and Liel introduce themselves and explain why they started this podcast and what you should expect to get from listening to it.   They share valuable tips on various topics across legal digital marketing (including local SEO, PPC and websites), and they walk you through the best practices on citation building and Google My Business listing optimization for optimal rankings. Moreover, they explore attorney reputation management, and they share their insights with regards to review generation and monitoring.  After listening to this episode, you will know the best digital marketing channels for your law firm to advertise on and how to do it correctly and efficiently in order to get the most out of your advertising investment.  Resources mentioned in this episode: https://www.yext.com (Yext) https://moz.com/ (Moz Local) https://business.google.com/ (Google My Business) https://skillshop.withgoogle.com (Google Skillshop)   Want to share your story, ask a question, or share your comments about the podcast with us? You can connect with us by visiting our website: https://incamerapodcast.com (incamerapodcast.com) Send us your questions at ask@incamerapodcast.com Enjoy the show? Please don't forget to subscribe, tell your coworkers, and leave us a review!

In our newest episode of Tower After Hours, Kelly, Tim, Meg, and Ashleigh tackle topics including upheaval in streaming TV, a recap of Leadercast, changes in Moz Local, and creating video content. Listen in to discover more and find out what exactly Crunchyroll is.

Helpful links from the episode: MozCon ticket giveaway Whitespark's new Local Search Service FULL SHOW NOTES:[music]00:10 Aaron: Episode six. Competitors, obsessed or don't care?00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:45 Aaron: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:48 Darren: I'm Darren.00:49 Aaron: And today, we are going to dive into the topic of competitors. But before we get into the main course of this episode, Darren, I'm excited to hear about all the prep you had to go into the Brighton conference and your travels over to England. I'd love to hear how both the conference went for you and did you get a chance to do some touristy and fun things? How did all that go? 01:16 S2: Yeah. Totally, yeah. So, it a was pretty great trip. It was grueling trying to get ready for it, actually, because prior to giving my presentation, the day before, I was giving a full day of local search training which I had never done before, just everything up to... You could imagine with local search, so covering the full gamut and...01:39 Aaron: Did they get a certificate that says "Darren Certified," when they were done? 01:44 Darren: No, no.[laughter]01:46 Darren: I should have that though. I should have a nice stamp to give everybody. Yeah. But it was seven hours of training, so my slide deck ended up been 530 slides of just trying to get everything I could think of. It's basically, "Darren does local search brain in one massive presentation." It was crazy. Also, my flights got messed up. So, I was supposed to fly in the morning on Tuesday and then, I basically fly all day and arrive on Wednesday at 10:00 AM. But then, they bumped my flight from Edmonton to Toronto to leave at midnight. So, I left at midnight, Edmonton time, arrived in Toronto at 6:00 AM, and then, I ended up getting a hotel, so I stayed in Toronto in the hotel so I could get some sleep from 6:00 AM until about 1:00 PM. And then, I was just working in the airport waiting for my flight to leave at around 10:00 PM. While I'm working at this local pub, this pub in the airport, I dumped a beer on my laptop.02:44 Aaron: No.02:45 Darren: I totally fried my laptop and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm getting on my flight in two hours and I still have so many slides to make." So, I raced to the little electronic store, I buy a new laptop, I'm trying to get everything loaded on to the laptop before my flight takes off. They're calling my name and I'm watching the ton download of PowerPoint probably has to get a load on my laptop. They're like, "Last call for Darren Shaw to board flight to London." And it's like, I got 1% left and I'm holding the laptop, ready to close it, and ready to run into the gate. It was insane. So I finally got on my plane, worked a little bit on the plane, slept a little bit on the plane. It all worked out in the end, but man, it was stressful.03:28 Aaron: Oh my gosh, that sounds one of my worst nightmares like, "Holy cow."03:33 Darren: Yeah, it was really bad. But yeah, the presentation was great. I thought it was fun, and it's a cool case study I'm doing. I'm just taking a business that had zero local search presence and then, slowly stepping through each sort of thing that you would do in a local search, and measuring the impact of that like, "Okay, they got five new reviews. What impact did that have on local search?" We did other citation building, then we did a whole bunch of citation indexing. So, each step, I was like, "What impact did that have on the rankings?" And so, it was cool to do the study and I'm gonna continue that study as I go to MozCon in July.04:09 Aaron: Yeah, I'm super excited to hear about that. That sounds like such a great piece of research and everything you put into it. And also, if you and I, when we hang out next, if we're gonna have beers, I'm keeping my computer away from you.04:23 Darren: Seriously, keep it in your backpack. Do not get that anywhere near the table.04:28 Aaron: Oh, man.04:29 Darren: Yeah. I did a little touristy stuff, too. In Brighton, they have this i360 thing which goes... It looks like a UFO that goes up on a big stick, "Bzzzzz". Goes like way up high so you can see all the way out to the ocean, all of Brighton, which is kind of touristy and interesting. It was alright. And then, I went to visit a friend. I went up to London, ate some great meals. Yeah, Brighton's a beautiful spot, and London, of course, is awesome. I did a couple of days there. After that grueling work, I just wished I had gone home instead of taking a couple of days in London, actually. I felt like I'd rather be with my family than trudging around London by myself.05:11 Aaron: Yeah, I can see that but I almost always get like this. I don't know if it's like a high or just relief after when you have something that big and then, it's off your plate. It is such a... There's a lot of decompressing that you have to do. That was something for a long time that I think even my wife struggled with when I would come home from certain conferences or events where you had big talks and things like that, where I was like, I just need to check out for a few days and I feel really great about it but I have no... I don't have any purpose to accomplish big things right now, professionally or personally, so I'm just gonna be happy, have a beer, and walk around without a care in the world for a couple of days because I just had way too many.05:58 Darren: I totally get that. I feel the exact same. I love it when I go to a conference, say, something like MozCon, and I speak on the first day, because then, I got the next two days to just like, "Yey, I'm having the best time hanging out with all my industry friends and having some drinks and learning some new topics." And I'm just like, "I'm not checking my email for two days." Yeah.06:16 Aaron: That's awesome. Well, good. I'm glad it went well even though you threw the biggest curve ball at yourself ever, but way to overcome.06:25 Darren: Yeah, sucked. What's up with you? 06:28 Aaron: Well, on company-wise, I'm really excited. We just hired a new VP of Customer Success.06:35 Darren: Awesome.06:36 Aaron: Yeah. It's someone that I've known for a long time, has a great background and really, we already have a great customer success team. We have three direct reps, and we have had one that served as a lead. But I was directly managing or overseeing our lead customer success rep, and in the 100 ways I'm at, like I'm not giving him enough support. I'm not giving enough guidance to the team. And it just really became aware to me that, even though this wasn't like our number one need, that I knew the right person for this job, and that would be a great fit culturally for us and within our mission and a bunch of other things, and it would really help this team have more experience to draw from and more time with somebody to help both what we do and them individually grow.07:27 Aaron: I'm really excited about that. One of the things... We already have for, especially our multi-location clients, five locations to into the thousands, we have a really great onboarding process that we've developed and put together and communicate and everything else, but we almost like, Launch is like the finish line. And once they're up and running, then we kinda turn reactive again, and then we're like, "Okay, if you need something, let us know," where we should be...07:54 Darren: Not checking in on them. Yeah.07:55 Aaron: Yeah, we should be hands-on. What's their week one look like, what's month one, what's the first 90 days? How are we ensuring they're getting off to the right start, to really be successful? That's kind of one of our main high-level goals to get going, and I'm excited with how this hire is gonna plug in and help make that happen for us.08:13 Darren: How big is your customer support team? 08:16 Aaron: So total of four now with this hire. So we have three direct reps that those guys are handling everything from email tickets, phone calls. We do a live chat during normal business hours, on-boarding, all of those different things. We have four in total dedicated to that now.08:36 Darren: Right. And so, this made me think about one thing you could do is measuring engagement and then if you see a client fall off of engagement, they're not logging in, they're not sending out requests, then you could algorithmically send an alert to your customer service team and say, "Hey, you should check in with this customer."08:55 Aaron: Totally... Maybe that's another podcast. We talk about that, but we're definitely looking at a combination. We're just starting to do a deeper install with the product called Heap Analytics. We're gonna do a lot more event tracking in the app and things like that. So yeah, definitely a combination of we wanna be proactive and digging into accounts and looking for things. We wanna develop some systems that are kinda giving us those warning signs or being able to really high level kind of spot check where they're at.09:25 Darren: Yeah, totally. And I say that as just suggestion for you, but it's like, "Damn, we should do that too."09:30 Aaron: No, totally. And it's a great thing to talk about. And as we get further down, I'd love to talk about where we're getting with it, but it really is like, How do you have this prescriptive path that you know that they need to achieve and we know certain things based on how often they're logging in, often they're engaging with the feature, and then some of the metrics that are coming out. Those are key performance indicators that we really need to ratchet down on.09:58 Darren: For sure. What else is going on? Anything new? 10:01 Aaron: Excited that we landed our first customer from... If you remember back a couple of months ago, we did that IFA conference.10:07 Darren: Yeah, we talked all about ROI on that. So you got a good customer? 10:11 Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got a good customer that basically, zeroed out our investment, right? We'll make money back on this customer in under a year from our investment on that. We signed them to a two-year deal. And then I still have a number of other conversations in addition to the exposure we got and everything else. I feel really, really good about that. Yeah, that's all I wanted out of our... Again, our first time. You have to understand these things that you're not gonna go in and shock and awe people first time in a giant conference like that, so it's like, "Can you just get a little traction? A lot of visibility, a lot of conversations." We're already signed up for the next one, next year, so excited about that.10:50 Darren: Yeah, and I think it's a good point. You definitely zeroed out. So you know you've got that exact measurable impact from the conference, but you did better than zeroing out because there was all that exposure of people that are coming to you because they saw you at the conference and you have no idea that you have a new customer, you didn't know that it was because of IFA.11:09 Aaron: Yeah.11:10 Darren: So you're definitely getting more than just this one big client, for sure.11:13 Aaron: Yeah, absolutely, but it's great to be able to go to the team just because some of my partners weren't always on board with doing these types of events and conferences and be able to say like, "Hey yeah, dollar-to-dollar. We got our money back and now here's all these other intangibles that continue to pay off, right? It's like anything in marketing. You have to look at it as an investment and some investments, they are short-term payoffs and some are more mid and long-term and you need to keep going back on it to get where you need to go.11:42 Darren: Yeah, and then you also get the lifetime value of that customer so it's more than just whatever the contract is that you sign, it's into the future. And then, a new customer and all the referrals that can potentially come from that customer.11:54 Aaron: Yeah, you just hope it's... You planted a seed with it and then it starts to grow and branch out and everything else, and you reap all those rewards.12:03 Darren: Totally, great. And I saw you guys were sponsoring MozCon.12:04 Aaron: Yeah.12:05 Darren: And I got to see all the tweets. Everyone's excited about giving away tickets.12:08 Aaron: Yeah, yeah, giving away a ticket, which is awesome, 'cause a MozCon ticket is expensive, like face value.12:15 Darren: And it's a great conference.12:17 Aaron: Yeah. Of like 1700 bucks and great speakers like yourself and Will Reynolds and Cindy Krum and things like that, where it really is awesome. And interesting enough, I saw in one of those side benefits, right? I was just on site a couple of days ago with a new customer that we're onboarding and kicking off with, that has hundreds of locations. And our main contact there was like... She's like, "Hey, can I ask you a question? I'm like, Yeah, totally she's like... Well, I was just looking into 'cause I need to get out to some conferences, and whatever. And lo and behold, I came across MozCon kinda looks great. And then I saw you guys are sponsor. So I thought you'd be able to give me really good insight on the... Is this a good conference and should I go to it? 12:58 Aaron: And to me, it was like one of those, it reinforced in other reasons why to sponsor conferences and things like that, 'cause even your customer see like, "Oh these guys are active in the space and they're part of these things and whatever else. So, that was kind of a cool full-circle moment there.13:10 Darren: There is no conference I've ever been to, I've never seen a better opportunity for vendors than the MozCon setup because at MozCon, they only take on eight to 10 exhibitors really, and they have these nice little, they call them partner hubs, and they're right as you walk into the conference. It's not like in a separate room like an exhibit hall that you have to go to. They're right there so your visibility is amazing and when people come out from the conference sessions to go and get a coffee or a snack, or they go off for lunch, they have to walk right past you. And so, all these people are mingling about and the snacks are right next to where all the vendors are. It's amazing. It's the best visibility I've ever seen at a conference. It's a good one.13:52 Aaron: Nice. I hope we can capitalize on that. Maybe we can even book like, Darren Shaw's in our booth for an hour and you can get photos and autographs.14:01 Darren: [chuckle] It's not just me, there's some great local people coming so Joy is gonna be there too, and Greg Gifford got a community spot. Oh, maybe I'm supposed to keep that on the down low. Well, it's out there now. [chuckle] It's definitely out there now.14:14 Aaron: Well, we'll have a handful of our team. Mike Blumenthal will be there as well, so we'll have a good crew.14:21 Darren: Yeah, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be fun. Can't wait.14:23 Aaron: I think maybe we do a thing where, for an hour, you will dump beers on people's laptops.[chuckle]14:29 Darren: You would get so many people lined up for that. Yeah. [laughter]14:33 Aaron: Oh, see I love these ideas. And other than that, man, I just... I know you know what this is like, too, but I've been on a plane every week the last five weeks. Monday, I leave for a local U in Austin. I go directly from there to North Carolina to one of our new clients and their internal conference for franchisees, so it's just been really hard to get time at my desk and to keep the other things moving forward when you don't have that focus time gap.15:02 Darren: And that's where this new hire comes in, right. Someone that can just... "Okay, you manage the customer support initiatives that we wanna run with? Like all this stuff that I don't have time to stay on top of."15:12 Aaron: Yeah, totally. Anyway, that's a normal struggle. You know what that's like, but man, it's crazy sometimes when it is. I'm going on week five of a trip, of multiple days every single week, and it's like I need a week just no calls, no emails, get caught up, get directions set on some things.15:32 Darren: I do not envy that. I know that feeling of just feeling like you're getting further and further behind with all the traveling and speaking, and all that kind of stuff. It takes a lot of time and I am really looking forward to this next stretch I have where I don't have anything until Moz... Oh, have a little one, a local U, in June and then MozCon so... But yeah, I'm basically free and clear for a while and I love it and I'm not gonna book anything. I've got so many initiatives that we have on the go here, I'm really excited about, and I'm so happy to be involved with.16:03 Aaron: No, that feels so good.16:05 Darren: One other new item for me, actually, is we launched a new service so I'm excited about that. It's called the local search service and we basically... You can kind of think of it like a Google My Business management service. We really tried to build a great productized service that we can scale, and I'm really excited about it and getting a lot of interest from it and I think there's great potential. We have so many customers that come to us that are like, "Okay, I don't even know what a citation is. What am I supposed to do? Can you help me?" And we're like, "Yes." Now, we can say, "Yes, we can help you. Sign up for this. We will basically manage all of the local pieces of search for you and so we can now meet the needs of all those clients, so I'm excited about that.16:47 Aaron: Yeah, you should be. That's really cool. And once again, it's usually when we talk, that totally sounds like an episode I'd love to do a deep dive on because I have some ideas around some productized services that we can bolt on top of what we're doing, especially with some of the features we have coming out in the next three to six months. So, that's really interesting. And yeah, let's put that on or our dock of notes on something 'cause I'd love to hear how all that unfolds for you more and what you understand as this rolls out and the success...17:17 Darren: For sure, yeah. There will be lots to talk about. Yeah, I'll be interested to hear more about your productized services. But now, let's get into the meat of it. We're gonna talk about competitors, right? 17:24 Aaron: Good old competitors.[chuckle]17:26 Darren: Yeah.17:27 Aaron: It's like an opinion, everybody has one, right? 17:30 Darren: Yeah, totally. Totally. You have lots, actually. Your space is pretty saturated and I suppose I have even more because we do everything so, yeah. How do you deal with your competitors? Are you like... Do you have alerts set up? Do you have a team member that's, it's their job to watch what the competitor is doing all the time? How do you deal with it? 17:51 Aaron: Yeah. I definitely fall into the camp where I pay attention and I think about them. I'm not as far... I know people who obsess about it and things like that. I think that's really unhealthy 'cause it derails the direction you're going.18:07 Darren: Yep.18:07 Aaron: But, especially when you're young, when you're a start-up and... Alright, I've been with GatherUp for just a couple of months shy of four years now, but in the earlier stages when I was there, especially when you haven't carved out where you are and you're not as secure in where you are, or confident, then you pay a lot of attention to it, right? And I think that can be a really hard evolution in just figuring out what the right balance is for you because it's smart to pay attention to them and understand what they're doing but when you obsess, then you start going backwards and the other way with it and that becomes really, really dangerous.18:47 Darren: How do you deal with feature parity? So one of your customers will be like, "Hey we used to be with this... We're currently with this competitor. We're thinking about switching to you. Do you also do this thing that my competitor does? Like is that something that you're like, "Ooh, we should really get that on a roadmap," or you're like, "No, we have our roadmap. We're staying the course. We don't care if this other competitor has this feature that this one customer wants."19:13 Aaron: It depends so much. I think if you go back to my first statement, I'm like knowing who you are and where you're going. A lot of times we're really easily able to say, "Does that feature even fit in with our vision and our direction or doesn't it?" And there are certain features, though, that you consider these are standard things that are needed in what we're doing, and that becomes the really tricky part in kind of parsing that out sometimes.19:41 Darren: Yeah.19:41 Aaron: We have certain competitors that I call  "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" competitor where no matter who builds what in the space, they have enough of an engineering team where they will basically copycat everyone's feature. And they really don't ever innovate anything or bring out something that's really strategic. They're just gonna say, "Hey, we have 250 features. We're never gonna lose a deal on a feature," and as a bootstrap company, we can't afford to do that. We have to align very tightly with our strategy and our vision with it. So that's the big thing that we always use is like, "Does this align with what those are?" And then we have to give the consideration like, "Is this an expected across the board?" So an easy example in our space would be like if we didn't have review monitoring, right, people would be like, "That's great that you helped me get more reviews and all these other things, but you're not letting me know when new reviews happen when I get them and giving me a notification about it."20:40 Aaron: That would be an issue no matter how our focus of like, "Well, we wanna help you connect with your customer and that's a reactive thing, and we only wanna do proactive things." So, definitely pieces like that. How do you look at it just as you talked about... You have this feature set that's so broad that you then hit all kinds of people that just focus on one of your features, but that's all they do is that one? What does that look like for you and your competitive landscape? 21:09 Darren: Yeah. So for us, I feel frustrated about competitors often because it's like I have this broad vision about what we wanna do. But we're kinda small, actually. Our company is not huge, and then competitors seem to always be a step ahead of us. We're like, "Damn it, we were gonna launch that." And then they put it out like a month before us. Things like that often come up that are frustrating. So there is, obviously, in my space, one major competitor which is BrightLocal, and it was funny because at Brighton SEO, that training I did, there were ten attendees for my full training session, and five of them were employees with BrightLocal 'cause apparently they're based out of Brighton. And so, I basically was training Myles and [21:56] ____ how to do local search, which was good times. [chuckle] And...22:00 Aaron: That's so crazy... Like did part of you just kind of feel like... Asking them to walk out of the room like, "This is not for you." [chuckle]22:07 Darren: Well no, 'cause it wasn't really like... We weren't really talking about our software and our services. We were just talking about local search in general, so it was totally fine. And I did my best to try and train them up as well as I could. And then the next day I actually went for lunch with my top competitor, Miles Anderson, from BrightLocal. And yeah, we had a great, great lunch, we chatted about things. I feel like we were both pretty open and it was interesting to hear about their business and what they're working on and tell him a little bit about what we're up to. And it's funny because you have some competitors that totally seem like assholes and you're like, "I would never go for lunch with that guy, [chuckle] but then I have BrightLocal and Whitespark, we're friendly competitors.22:51 Darren: I feel the same way about Moz, Moz has their Moz local product, but I love them all over there. It's a great group and so I don't really... I don't worry about the competitors, and I don't, I don't hate my competitors, but sometimes I'm frustrated about their ability to release faster than us. But other times, I just don't obsess about it either because, like you said, we have our road map, we have our style, people choose us because of who we are and what we do and how we do things because they just... It feels like more of a fit for them than this other product. And so, we just have to be clear on who we are and what we're doing, and I think that there's room in the industry for lots of competitors. If you think about how many email marketing systems are there? You got Mail Chimp, you got... I'm drawing a blank [chuckle], what are some of the other ones? Campaign Monitor.23:47 Aaron: Campaign Monitor, AWeber, Constant Contact. [chuckle]23:48 Darren: There's probably 30 of them and they are all making money. So it's like, to some degree, spaces will eventually merge to like a top winner but... And I would love for that to be Whitespark in my space. And you would love for that to be GatherUp in your space. But I don't worry too much about the competition. I'm not worried about my business... My business continues to grow, your business continues to grow and so.24:16 Aaron: And you have to look at it that way. If you're in a space you can see there's enough business for all kinds of people. And there's just so many different... It becomes interesting to me, based on who we're selling into, we might have a different set of two or three competitors. And that always becomes really interesting as you get into those. And I can kind of, like, for the three main segments we work in, there's kinda two competitors in each of those segments, that that's who we bump into in a comparison process, more often than not with it.24:51 Darren: I was just gonna say, speaking of comparison like, how do you handle all those questions where people are like, "Well what makes you better than competitor X?"25:01 Aaron: Yeah. I think, going back to the other things I hit upon, the thing that we always look at is, strategically, right, we really rely on like, "Hey, you have some of the people who have cared a long time about local search, people who care about business and reputation and communication. We understand all those angles, and we're not giving you... We're not the Walmart of SaaS products, where every feature's on the shelf and you grab what you want. We are this honed experience, that if you come in, we have the right things that you need, and we also can help you with the right ways to use them.25:34 Aaron: And I think that's really important coming from that angle, we point that out all the time as a difference, and we also use the fact that like, "Hey, we are hard-core focused on helping connect you to your customers." So at the end of the day, we're not gonna be creating a bunch of other things around local listings or some of these other things. And I get customers want... When they find like, "Alright, I can get one bill and one provider and there's some overlap." I get all of those are wins, but we really look at it as like we wanna be the best option with what we're trying to do, more so than, we have more things to sell you and, all across the board, we can make it so you don't have to need three people, you just need one. But we have our own ways that we make that happen.26:22 Darren: Yeah, that's interesting, our approach is a little bit different. We are kitchen sink for sure, and we continue to expand, and add new things like, "Oh, customers need this, we're gonna build it." So, I don't know, I feel like we're kinda stuck there now because we already offer so many different products and services around the whole range of local search that we can never get out of that, but I do think your approach is really smart, from a competitor perspective. And I think there's a service behind it too. It's like, "Hey, we are subject matter experts on customer experience, customer feedback, reviews, you come to us and we're not just like a software you're gonna sign up for, we're gonna actually help you get the best results that you can from that review process, and feedback process." So, I think it's smart to... The way you have honed in on that.27:10 Aaron: Well, hopefully, 'cause... But it's also you have to make the most of what you have to offer too. I don't have 100 engineers building every last feature, so I can't be in that arms race, I'm not gonna win that. So, we have to build really great, well-thought-out strategical features that align with things we understand. SEO, and local SEO, and communications between business and customer, and really dial those in so that we can show them like, "Hey, here's a really great repeatable process that your business can prosper with." Rather than, "Hey, spread yourself super thin trying to do all these things." And more and more, I'm hearing customers come back to that just because I think there is such an explosion in the ebbs and flows of software, and SaaS and that explosion where there is that feeling of adding more features, adding more features, adding more features. And I've actually had some clients say, "What I like about you is you are laser focused on this, and that other stuff is just kind of fluff to me, or thrown in or whatever else. And we don't need it, we're likely not gonna use it, we need to put our focus here."28:19 Darren: Yeah, and you also end up with feature bloat, where someone logs in to the system and they're like, "Wow, this is insane. I don't know how to do anything. Do you have a two-day training course for me to figure out how your software works?" And so staying focused and not building every damn feature can really help to make your customer experience of using the software better too.28:40 Aaron: Yeah, you always wanna find it. And this is something we are constantly battling 'cause sometimes I think we're getting that, as we offer so many customizations and configurations, or whatever else where, to me, it's always figuring out this top-down approach of how can I do the easiest things up front and right away, and then I have easy pass to go into second, third, fourth level advanced type settings, and I can dig deeper if I want to, but I don't have all that depth thrown in my face right away, and that's something I'm...29:08 Darren: Yep.29:09 Aaron: Really trying to philosophically work into our user experience. Let's not expose everything right up front, I get that makes sense when we're creating it 'cause we understand everything. But when the first time user comes in, that's the last thing you want them to be, it's like, "Where do I even start?" You don't want that.29:25 Darren: Yeah, totally. You got a dropdown with 30 different options and it's too much.29:30 Aaron: I'm interested, Darren in yours, how often do you see customers switching from one provider or another, and how hard is that switch for someone to pick up and leave BrightLocal, and come to Whitespark or something like that? 29:43 Darren: Yeah, interestingly it depends on what they want. So, BrightLocal has a couple of things that we don't have and so, but there are a lot of people that have a Brightlocal account, and they're paying for all this extra stuff that they don't actually use. And so we did recently make it pretty easy to switch to us. We've added some features that make it easy to switch, and we will support people that wanna switch too. So, if they wanna switch, we're gonna do all the work to try and make it as easy as possible for them. And that's been pretty successful for us, and we find that our customers that do switch are like, "Wow, this is a whole new world, we really love it." And that gives us some confidence in what we're doing. But we also see people go the other way too. When people cancel, one of the options they can choose is moving to a competitor. And then, of course, we ask for more details. Yeah, we do see people switch over to BrightLocal, and they list their reasons, and we think about those reasons, and we figure out whether or not we need to make any changes based off of what the feedback we're getting. And then there's so many people that are switching one way or the other, you never hear from. You don't know if they're switching.30:51 Aaron: Would you ever consider... Do you market that switching process? I think about, I've seen this for a long time with banks, they will actively put out content on their website saying like, "Hey, here's how you switch to our bank and we make it easy. And here's what's involved." Do you do any of that or would you consider doing that? So people know like, "Hey, it's not super painful, and we actually will guide you through it, and make it easy."31:14 Darren: Yeah, we've recently built these features to make it easy to switch. And we are going to definitely market them. We're just putting it on the landing page and saying, "Hey listen, if you're currently with this competitor, it's so dead simple for you to switch. We move everything over for you, contact us today." So we definitely wanna market it, we're not gonna do a blog post and tweet about it, and be like, "Hey, anyone that's with BrightLocal definitely come to us." [chuckle] We're not gonna do that, it just feels kind of douchey. But we will let... We wanna let people know that it's easy to switch. And we're putting it into our welcome email. So, someone signs up for that, we're like, "Oh hey, are you with BrightLocal? If you are... " Just a line that says, "Hey, it's easy to switch."31:56 Aaron: Nice, very, very smart.31:58 Darren: And it's not just BrightLocal, we've made it easy to switch from other providers too.32:01 Aaron: Yeah, so in your space, and I can't remember if BrightLocal has taken any funding at any point or not, but do you have...32:10 Darren: They have not.32:10 Aaron: Okay, so are most of your competitors in your space bootstrapped or do you have... Are there certain ones that are big VC-funded, and on a different trajectory? 32:21 Darren: It depends on what you're looking at. For someone that is pretty close to almost exactly what we do, it's BrightLocal. But then we have competitors in different areas like business listing management. You've got Moz Local, and then you have Yext. So Yext, of course, massive funding, Moz Local, massive funding, and so they are different. And then we have some that are a little bit more agency, but also a little focused on business listings, and that would be, Advice Local is one that comes up here and there. And I think they might be funded too. It's an interesting thing like that, bootstrapped versus funding.32:57 Aaron: Yep.32:58 Darren: I feel like I don't know why, but we have a market advantage and maybe it's just because of the speaking and stuff that I do, but I feel like people look to us as experts and that helps drive business for sure, for us.33:10 Aaron: Yeah. As you know, we're in that same boat where we wanna be thought leaders in the space, especially when it comes to search. We're the only one of our competitors that are at a MozCon or talking at search conferences where our competitors especially like BirdEye or Podium, that these guys have taken $30 million rounds of funding those guys are talking at SaaS conferences and VC conferences and things like that, and we definitely use that to our advantage on how well we understand the space and what Google is doing and what they're up to, and that we even have relationships there that are productive strategic ones. But there's such a gap in our space, 'cause we really have a competitor that's just, "Hey, they got a couple of million dollars in funding and it's allowed them to accelerate." We have these behemoths that have taken on tens of millions of dollars or you have us, that have not taken on any money. And so, that discrepancy that divide is so large and you see it in size of engineering teams and size of sales teams. It's like...34:18 Darren: Yeah. For sure. Yeah.34:19 Aaron:  I'm the only one that does outbound sales. I'm hoping that changes in the coming months, It's been top of my priority list for a while. We still haven't found the right fit. But I wanna grow an outbound sales team because our product is good enough for it now, and we're doing very well just through inbound marketing and all the things we do there, but it's really time for us to scale up those efforts. And those guys already have sales teams of 50, 100, and every last...34:45 Darren: That's insane, I know.34:47 Aaron: Yeah.34:47 Darren: Yeah, it's totally insane. So what kind of outbound sales do you do? Who are you talking to you? 34:51 Aaron: Yeah, I focus all on multi-locations. So I wanna talk if your... For me, I'm probably targeting anyone like 50 locations, and up. So yesterday, I saw one of my contacts is friends with the COO of a 200 location coffee shop. So I asked for an introduction.35:08 Darren: Right. That's smart.35:09 Aaron: I'm looking at brands that have size, continue to grow. And I can usually pretty easily see from even their own website. Are they using something to streamline feedback and reviews, are they displaying reviews on their site or location pages. So it's like this, three to four item checklist where I can see like, okay, they're either doing one of the five things we offer or two of the five, or none or I see they're using two different services, where I know we could help them consolidate.  I'm reaching out and try to start a conversation. I'm gonna put some of our case studies in front of them or some thought leadership articles from our blog or, "Hey, are you gonna be at this event that we're speaking at or we're sponsoring." And try to spark that up that way. And I would love to have one, two, three, four, five people duplicating my efforts there, just because those relationships are so much demand... It's one thing to get the conversation started, but then it's the calls, the demos, the meetings staying on top of it, keeping it moving, all of those things that you gotta have a team for.36:10 Darren: Absolutely, I find like... Sales are great, I can do the sales, but it's all the work that comes after that. Great, I've started a conversation I have a client that's interested, and then it's like managing that relationship is really time-consuming. You definitely need to build a team or it'll end up taking up all your time.36:27 Aaron: Yup, absolutely, I'm with you. Anything in closing, Darren I think we've ran our course, but do you have any final takeaways or a statement that you'd offer advice to anyone when... How they're thinking about or watching their competitors, researching them, what would you put out there to our listeners? 36:45 Darren: Yeah, I think it is important to keep an eye on them. You wanna have... I do have [36:51] ____ what they do and I keep tabs on it and I keep looking at what they're doing, but also, having that mentality that you touched on which is making sure that you understand what you're about and what your mission is, and not getting pulled off course for this feature, or that feature, 'cause competitors are always gonna be doing things slightly different from you but understanding what value you're bringing, and if that feature contributes to that value, then it's something that you might wanna include or if whatever marketing thing they're doing makes sense that it might be something you wanna do. But knowing who you are and what you're providing, and what your value differentiator is against that competitor is really important to get nailed down, so that you're not always just chasing every little thing that the competitors are doing.37:36 Aaron: Totally agree with you, self-awareness of your product and your company, is so important for people to be as soon as you can find that way, to be secure with that. You can't be over confident where you bury your head in the sand, you still need to be aware, but you need that self-confidence so that you can build your own path. And the cautionary tale, I tell people all the time, is if you build yourself to be so alike a competitor. Now there isn't just as you hit about there isn't this unique distinction on why someone would choose you or the other one.38:08 Darren: Yeah totally.38:09 Aaron: And it's like, Oh, you're both the same. Alright, well, which one's cheaper, now? Which is the last comparison that you want.38:16 Darren: Exactly.38:16 Aaron: I never wanna win, because I'm the cheap option, I wanna win because I'm the best value that's there. So I'd tell people to really be thinking about that. When you are paying attention to your competitors, you're not obsessing but how do you carve out the value that you have in comparison? 38:31 Darren: Yeah, and I would add one little thing. It's very valuable to hear, as customers are coming in when they do switch over, to touch base with them and find out what was happening over with your competitor that you had problems with? And then being able to speak to some of those things and trying to amplify your benefits against those perceived problems over there. That's one thing that we try to do over here.38:54 Aaron: Yes, yep. Now we have that going on in our reseller space right now, and we have a number of resellers, coming to us from our biggest competitor there that are like your feature set is better, your interface is better, your customer service is way better, and those are all things that we need to just be a little bit more touting and put out there so the people understand that there is that difference and that makes up for, "We are a little bit more expensive than they are." But as everyone that switches said, "You're 10X the value because of those things." And we need to do a better job of bringing that...39:29 Darren: Yeah laying that out for them. When you're onboarding new clients or when you're prospecting in the sales process, that's where that stuff should come out, where you can speak to those things. So yeah, that's where I really think the greatest value of keeping your eyes on your competitors is in that, in the sales process.39:44 Aaron: Yep. Nope, you're completely correct, I agree. Alright, well...39:47 Darren: Alright.39:47 Aaron: Thanks everybody. That concludes another episode. Hopefully, we've had about three, four weeks between our last one, just because of, as we touched upon travels and conferences and everything else, hopefully Darren and I, in the next couple of weeks will be sinking again to get you out another episode of the SaaS venture. Please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter. We've had some questions in the past we love to answer listener questions, or topic ideas and if you have the time, leaving us a review in iTunes is super helpful, helps with the visibility of our podcast, as we continue to reach more 100 people and have more listeners interact with us. Love doing that.40:26 Darren: Alright, yeah, what Aaron said.40:29 Aaron: Have a good one, until we talk again, Darren.40:30 Darren: Yeah, we'll schedule another one and we'll talk again soon, thanks Aaron.40:34 Aaron: Alright. You bet. Keep your beer away from your laptop and we'll talk soon.40:38 Darren: I will. Okay bye.40:39 Aaron: Alright. See you everybody.

Small Business Owners need to understand the importance of local business listings. In the entire history of the internet, any business has been listed on thousands of directories, whether they want to or not. The reality is that much of that information is inaccurate. From phone numbers to addresses to hours of operation and web URLs. Not only is this a detriment to the business owner, but this inaccurate information actually hurts your Google SEO ranking. Google's algorithm crawls the local business directory sites and ranks websites with consistent information higher than those without consistent information (well, let's just say accurate and CONSISTENT information increases your business' chances of ranking high on Google. From Yelp, to FourSquare to Facebook to WAZE to Bing to many others, there are tools like Moz Local and Yext that "clean up" your local business listings via one time submissions. This isn't the whole puzzle, as Google My Business is still the biggest piece. But behind Google My Business, I highly recommend Small Business Owners and marketers with many local listings consider Yext or Moz local. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/paulhickey/support

In Episode #454, Eric and Neil discuss how to improve your ranking position on Google Maps. Tune in to learn why citation is important for your local SEO and why your name and address need to match what is used on Google Maps. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: How to Improve Your Ranking Position on Google Maps 00:34 – First, verify your Google My Business information 00:46 – Use the same name and address for your website that is shown on Google Maps 01:18 – Acquire Google reviews for your business by asking your customers to leave a review 01:41 – Integrate the Google Maps location onto your website 01:48 – Use citation tools like Moz Local, Yext and BrightLocal for local SEO 02:07 – Make sure you have great images for your locations 02:17 – Links to your site help a lot 02:56 – Run ads on Google Maps 03:03 – Marketing School is giving away 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 03:14 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to get your FREE copy 03:18 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Google Maps can drive more traffic to your website. Have the same name and address on your website that is used on Google Maps so Google can read it properly. Ensure that you have reviews on Google as people rely on these reviews. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #454, Eric and Neil discuss how to improve your ranking position on Google Maps. Tune in to learn why citation is important for your local SEO and why your name and address need to match what is used on Google Maps. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: How to Improve Your Ranking Position on Google Maps 00:34 – First, verify your Google My Business information 00:46 – Use the same name and address for your website that is shown on Google Maps 01:18 – Acquire Google reviews for your business by asking your customers to leave a review 01:41 – Integrate the Google Maps location onto your website 01:48 – Use citation tools like Moz Local, Yext and BrightLocal for local SEO 02:07 – Make sure you have great images for your locations 02:17 – Links to your site help a lot 02:56 – Run ads on Google Maps 03:03 – Marketing School is giving away 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool 03:14 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to get your FREE copy 03:18 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Google Maps can drive more traffic to your website. Have the same name and address on your website that is used on Google Maps so Google can read it properly. Ensure that you have reviews on Google as people rely on these reviews. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Jacob Butler of the Moz Local team describes common SEO business listing issues

In Episode #377, Eric and Neil discuss the tried and tested methods for building local links. Tune in to learn the simple steps that will help you increase your rank on a local scale. You'll also find out who you need to be reaching out to when it comes to asking for those links. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: Tried and Tested Ways of Building Local Links 00:41 – When it comes to local SEOs, citations are important 00:45 – A citation can be counted as a link 00:56 – You can get multiple citations from Whitespark and Moz Local 01:05 – Another way to get a citation is to reach out to the local chamber of commerce 01:13 – They also have events where you can network with people 01:41 – Reach out to people and try to add value 01:46 – Local stores take anything that can help their business 02:00 – It's a lot easier to rank for local keywords 02:14 – Go to Ahrefs and put in your competing URLs within your region 02:26 – Reach out to those linking to them and ask for links 02:35 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Crazy Egg which helps you increase your conversion rate 03:28 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway for multiple entries 03:35 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Reach out to your local market to get citations. Build a network with your local stores and always try to add value to them. Check your competitors and get in touch with those who are linking to them. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #377, Eric and Neil discuss the tried and tested methods for building local links. Tune in to learn the simple steps that will help you increase your rank on a local scale. You’ll also find out who you need to be reaching out to when it comes to asking for those links. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: Tried and Tested Ways of Building Local Links 00:41 – When it comes to local SEOs, citations are important 00:45 – A citation can be counted as a link 00:56 – You can get multiple citations from Whitespark and Moz Local 01:05 – Another way to get a citation is to reach out to the local chamber of commerce 01:13 – They also have events where you can network with people 01:41 – Reach out to people and try to add value 01:46 – Local stores take anything that can help their business 02:00 – It’s a lot easier to rank for local keywords 02:14 – Go to Ahrefs and put in your competing URLs within your region 02:26 – Reach out to those linking to them and ask for links 02:35 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription to Crazy Egg which helps you increase your conversion rate 03:28 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway for multiple entries 03:35 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Reach out to your local market to get citations. Build a network with your local stores and always try to add value to them. Check your competitors and get in touch with those who are linking to them. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Today I'm talking with Mike Blumenthal, an expert in online reputation creation & management as well as search optimization and online presence building. Three years ago, only about 50% of Americans were potentially willing to leave a review about their experience with a business. In the past three years, that number has gone up to 65%. With two-thirds of customers and clients potentially ready to review your business, you can no longer get by with assuming a customer with a lukewarm experience won’t leave a review for the whole world to see. In our conversation today, he uses his expertise to offer a huge amount of actionable advice. If you have a business with any sort of an online presence, you need to hear this episode! Find Out More About Mike Here: Blumenthal’s Mike Blumenthal’s blog @mblumenthal on Twitter Mike Blumenthal on LinkedIn Mike Blumenthal on Get Five Stars In This Episode: [01:14] - Mike suggests starting off by talking not about reputation management, but rather reputation development. [03:30] - We learn what a Net Promoter Score is, and why it’s a valuable number to keep track of. [05:24] - Mike touches on why most small businesses don’t like Yelp, then explains that many reviews are now showing up on Google anyway. [07:29] - If Yelp is ranking #2 for your company game in Google, that makes its contents more important, right? [08:57] - In general, Mike suggests just leaving sites like Ripoff Report alone and ignoring them. [09:34] - Stephan steps in to explain a bit about how Google features various sites. Mike then defines rich snippets. [11:15] - Mike explains more about the use of rich snippets and other review-related items on your own site. [13:04] - Are you allowed to take reviews you find elsewhere (like from Yelp) and put them on your website? [14:40] - We hear about Mike’s suggestions on the process of getting reviews on your own site. He then offers advice for what to do if you already have testimonials. [19:39] - The term for paying for fake reviews is “astroturfing.” [21:22] - Mike discusses how to correct Knowledge Panel information about their business. [25:38] - Can Moz Local fix things in existing listings, or is it only for new listings? [26:37] - Mike strongly recommends hiring a consultant to write your Wikipedia content instead of doing it yourself. [27:27] - We move on to Facebook, with Stephan and Mike talking about its increasing popularity as a review site. [30:35] - Mike offers advice for how to get Yelp reviews if you need to manage a currently negative Yelp profile. He and Stephan also discuss the importance of having Yelp friends. [33:27] - Should we pay attention to sites like YP.com and Superpages? [35:44] - Mike discusses Glassdoor and how to use it to your advantage. [38:43] - Stephan recommends a previous Marketing Speak episode with Kenton Hutcherson if you want to learn more about Ripoff Report. [39:25] - We hear Mike’s tips for getting better images to show for your business. [42:25] - Do you still need to upload inside photos if you run a home-based business rather than a retail store, for example? [43:42] - Mike offers Barbara Oliver Jewelry as an example of a site that has done a great job with its reviews page. Stephan then talks about his own testimonials page. [46:59] - In the world of reviews and ratings, what does Mike recommend that people do in terms of badges? [49:27] - Mike shares his thoughts on Trustpilot. [50:31] - Does Mike have any suggestions on types of awards to apply for? [51:51] - Local search is fundamentally different than organic search, Mike explains. He talks about how these differences are relevant and how to take them into account for your business. [57:13] - Mike points out that it’s important to have followers who engage and share your content, not just disengaged followers. [59:04] - Mike offers listeners several resources, including his Moz Local 2017 presentation. Links and Resources: Blumenthal’s Mike Blumenthal’s blog @mblumenthal on Twitter Mike Blumenthal on LinkedIn Mike Blumenthal on Get Five Stars GetFiveStars Local U Net Promoter Score Yelp Barbara Oliver Jewelry Ripoff Report Pissed Consumer Rich snippets Schema.org Gravity Forms Astroturfing The Carter Center Wikidata Knowledge Panel David Deering Touch Point Digital Marketing Moz Local Jonathan Hochman on Marketing Speak YP.com Superpages Houzz Glassdoor Kenton Hutcherson on Marketing Speak Google My Business forum Better Business Bureau Trustpilot Davey Awards The killing of Cecil the lion Are Words the New Links? - Mike Blumenthal’s Moz Local 2017 presentation  

We look at a number of tools and services that we use on a daily basis. These are services that make a big difference in how we run our businesses. We move at speed and cover a lot of ground in this pre-Christmas show! Summary: We talk about our favorite web tools of 2016. Covered: tools for productivity, project management, accounting, invoicing, social media, content management, and content creation.   Episode 152 Table of Contents 0:00 Podcast intros. 1:37 What we use for video conferencing. 4:50 Our choice for video hosting. 8:32 John's choice for invoicing software. 10:56 Jonathan's choice for invoicing software. 11:44 An alternative for external email addresses. 13:54 Jonathan's choice for a CRM. 16:44 A tool John uses for local SEO citations. 20:09 Jonathan has a pick for SEO keyword research. 21:04 Another pick for email outreach. 23:00 A tool we are using for project management internally. 24:54 John's tools for migrating websites. 27:20 Jonathan's choices for site backups. 29:28 Two cautionary tales of why you want to have a reliable plan for website backups. 34:54 John's advice for getting blog posts written. 36:53 Jonathan has some picks for spell-checking and editing. 37:55 Our mutual pick for capturing screenshots. 38:34 Some more picks we have for cloud storage and productivity. 39:40 Podcast outros. ===================   Links mentioned during the show: Zoom https://zoom.us/ Go To Meeting https://www.gotomeeting.com/ Wistia https://wistia.com/ FreshBooks https://www.freshbooks.com/ Zoho Invoice https://www.zoho.com/us/invoice/ Harvest (Time Tracking) https://www.getharvest.com/ Zoho Mail https://www.zoho.com/mail/ G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Business) https://gsuite.google.com/ Agile CRM https://www.agilecrm.com/ Drip - Email Marketing Automation https://www.drip.co/ Active Campaign http://www.activecampaign.com/ Moz Local https://moz.com/local Yext (DON'T use this) http://www.yext.com/ Get Found (Go Daddy) https://www.godaddy.com/products/business-marketing.aspx Moz Whiteboard Friday https://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday Rand Fishkin on Twitter https://twitter.com/randfish Distilled on Twitter https://twitter.com/distilled Wil Reynolds on Twitter https://twitter.com/wilreynolds SEMrush https://www.semrush.com/ Majestic (SEO Tools) https://majestic.com/ Raven Tools https://raventools.com/ KWFinder https://kwfinder.com/ Mailshake https://mailshake.com/ Teamwork - Cloud Productivity

In Episode #82, Neil and Eric highlight the tips, tools, and tactics to use when marketing your local businesses. Listen to learn why you're not capturing your local market and what you can do about it. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 – Today's topic: How to market your local business 00:40 – Do local SEO 00:46 – Check out and read Moz and David Mihm 01:49 – Make sure you understand variables 02:06 – Use tools like Moz Local, Yelp, and City Search 02:22 – If you're not in them, you'll end up losing tons of revenue 02:45 – Make people happy to encourage them leave a review 03:16 – Use Facebook for geo targeting to market your local business 04:16 – Use Pretty Link in Wordpress to track local ads 04:41 – Use localized websites to network with 05:50 – Make sure you're getting reviews 06:18 – Don't forget Google Adwords for call tracking 06:34 – Another tool is Callrail 07:18 – Your website is important 07:41 – Make your phone numbers clickable 07:59 – Make your form fields simple 08:16 – Keep images and copy short and on point 08:28 – Make sure your server is close to that localized region 09:21 – Don't forget about phone calls! 09:41 – Waze local is worth a try too 09:56 – Be aware on all the new stuff that's going on 10:10 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Make the most of your marketing efforts by trying all the tools applicable to your biz. Business owners often neglect local details that can cost them revenue. Large-scale growth starts locally and expands outward. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

In Episode #82, Neil and Eric highlight the tips, tools, and tactics to use when marketing your local businesses. Listen to learn why you’re not capturing your local market and what you can do about it. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 – Today’s topic: How to market your local business 00:40 – Do local SEO 00:46 – Check out and read Moz and David Mihm 01:49 – Make sure you understand variables 02:06 – Use tools like Moz Local, Yelp, and City Search 02:22 – If you’re not in them, you’ll end up losing tons of revenue 02:45 – Make people happy to encourage them leave a review 03:16 – Use Facebook for geo targeting to market your local business 04:16 – Use Pretty Link in Wordpress to track local ads 04:41 – Use localized websites to network with 05:50 – Make sure you’re getting reviews 06:18 – Don’t forget Google Adwords for call tracking 06:34 – Another tool is Callrail 07:18 – Your website is important 07:41 – Make your phone numbers clickable 07:59 – Make your form fields simple 08:16 – Keep images and copy short and on point 08:28 – Make sure your server is close to that localized region 09:21 – Don’t forget about phone calls! 09:41 – Waze local is worth a try too 09:56 – Be aware on all the new stuff that’s going on 10:10 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Make the most of your marketing efforts by trying all the tools applicable to your biz. Business owners often neglect local details that can cost them revenue. Large-scale growth starts locally and expands outward. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Episode 11 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to discover, standardize and monitor your local search listings so that Google has confidence in your business. Google’s primary objective as a search engine is to send someone doing a search query the most trusted information. Therefore, to earn Google’s confidence you have to do the work […] The post Local Search: Why Accurate Listings Are Important appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Why have we decided to talk about this subject? Well, a lot of users of WordPress are small business owners who have physical businesses or have a joint set-up of local business and e-commerce online presence and are using WordPress to build their company's website. However, for you the small business owner to get any real value from your WordPress powered website it's got to show up in Google local search. Unfortunately, I see so many small business owners making a lot of fundamental mistakes when it comes to getting their WordPress optimized for Google local search. Show Table of Contents: 0:00 Intros 0:43 The Marketing Funnel 1:35 The Importance of Local SEO 2:10 Local SEO is Different than National Search 2:38 Directories and the Internet Yellow Pages 3:00 Getting a Consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) 4:05 Moz Local for managing your NAP and data aggregation 6:50 Reviews and the Internet Yellow Pages 8:00 Google Local / Google My Business 10:40 Google Search Console 11:10 Yoast SEO and sitemaps with Google Search Console 12:00 Make sure you're not blocking Googlebot in Yoast 13:37 Verifying your site in Google Search Console 16:50 Submitting a XML sitemap to Google and Bing 18:37 Collecting email addresses and some harsh statistics 21:13 Using Google Search Console for keyword research 22:31 Contact information and local SEO 24:32 Where you want to send customers who click on your PPC ads 25:50 Podcast outros     Get additional content for this episode on the WP-Tonic website https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/090-wordpress-local-seo/     ===================   WP-Tonic is not only a WordPress support and maintenance service, but we publish a twice weekly WordPress podcast where we talk with some of the brightest minds in WordPress development, web design, business, and online marketing.