Why Brand Awareness Is The Fifth Pillar Of SEO Sponsored by Spyfu Ep. 548

And welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners here at EWR Digital. And my name is Zach Bertras. I'm the lead. I can't even say my name today. I've been working so hard. My name is Zach Bertras. And I am the lead strategist of EWR Digital. Are you sure? I think so. Yes. Today I am. Yes. Last I checked. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast 549. Give or take. I don't know. I'm going to say our accuracy is probably give or take three. I think we're that good, which is not bad. That's more accurate. We are sponsored by SpyFu. So there's that. Yes. SpyFu understands there's value in this podcast. And they have sponsored yet another episode. So we're excited. We'll talk about them here in just a second. Before we do that, I've got a couple reviews. First off is from Ashley Luoma. And she just gave us five stars. I'll take it. And then next we've got Charles Coleman. It says, throughout my career, I've worked with numerous digital companies, but I can honestly say that working with EWR Digital is a completely different experience. That is far less frustrating overall. Our new site was beautifully designed and the CMS platform that supports it is incredibly user-friendly, simple to use, and reasonably priced. Each time you need to make changes, there are quick to complete tasks, professional, simple to deal with, and innovative. I think simple to deal with keeps coming back up. Additionally, they are incredibly inexpensive as compared to other agencies. We're raising our prices. We're raising our prices at the end of the year. I'm just letting everybody know. All right. We're raising our prices at the end of the year. We're doing a lot more enterprise level stuff, Chris. Yep. And so, well, Charles finished it by saying, I fully support them and their efforts. Patif to you, Charles. We really appreciate you. And just a teaser, because I think Matt is

going to chat a little bit. The article we're covering is why brand awareness is the fifth pillar of SEO. I think we've got some room for debate there. By Wilson Lau, Patif to Wilson. And you know what? It's commercial time, unless you've got something else to say. No, let's get into it. SpyFu! S-P-Y-F-U. F-U dot com. There's not too... S-P-Y-F-U dot com. SEO marketing suite. It's a PPC analyzer. There's historic data. There's competitive analysis. There's backlink outreach. There's unlimited keyword and domain projects with custom reporting. That's worth saying again. Unlimited domain and keyword projects with custom reporting. It's an amazing tool. Here's actually a testimonial. An amazing tool to dominate your competition. Who doesn't want to do that? There are so many awesome features that have given us an advantage over our competition. That is SpyFu dot com. You look frozen there for a second. So I'm going to keep on going. So make sure to go check out SpyFu dot com. I don't know if we have a discount with SpyFu dot com. There... Matt needs to get me some content. And then while we're waiting for Matt to unfreeze, maybe he's doing that on purpose. I was watching a movie the other day where the guy would just like freeze and they'd be like, what are you doing? Is that on purpose? Please connect with us. YouTube dot com forward slash best SEO podcast. Also connect with us. Instagram dot com forward slash the T-H-E, the best SEO podcast. And then also connect with us on TikTok dot com forward slash the at symbol best SEO podcast without the V in it. Go ahead and connect with us. You're back, Matt. Yeah. So I don't I don't know. Hopefully it was recording right now. We probably should have got started sooner because now the end with around my house is getting, I think, so apologize. No worries. Anything to add about SpyFu before we move on to this article? It's awesome. Certainly we're using it for paid keyword research and they've added a

ton of SEO related tools. So I know in a lot of people's minds, it's seen as a paid third party listening tool, but I would check it out for their SEO suite offering as well. They've been adding a lot of functionality. They've been adding a lot of things to it. So go check it out. They do have ability to get access for free to try it out at like a limited limited capacity. But it really is is a great tool. It's very competitive with other tools. I won't mention which tool it is, but there's a tool out there that they've taken a different direction with where they're spending all their time. Uh, and they haven't really put a lot into their tool anymore. And we've actually canceled services with that tool, um, because we haven't seen them update stuff. So we're, we're really committed to working with the best platforms, best tools, uh, that are continuously updating their technology and creating great offerings for digital marketers. And SpyFu is one of those tools. Awesome. All right. Check it out. SpyFu.com. S P Y F U.com. Let's jump into this article. Why brand awareness is the fifth pillar of SEO again by Wilson Lau. While the traditional SEO techniques work on non-branded search, they are ineffective on branded search. Learn how to grow branded search by embracing brand awareness as the fifth SEO pillar. Uh, let's get in. I, there's a, I don't know about you, Matt. I've got a little debate on this. Well, so, you know, when I was, when I was reading through some articles, this one just really stuck out to me. As a, a really interesting topic that I thought, um, would have some debate in it. So I thought it would be a good one for, for us to talk about live on the air. So, yeah. And, and if you go back and listen to the last podcast, we were covering an article by covering an article by Ryan Weber, um, about getting quality backlinks. And one of the

things that we said is put out content that is in a sense disruptive. I think that could be overused and may not be appropriate here, but, but that goes against the norm. And so a little outside the box, Chris, but focus on results. Yeah. Gee, that sounds like a good slogan. That should be, Oh, it's already there. Um, uh, so, so let's kind of jump into this, right? Um, there's consistent techniques. The first four pillars as he describes them, as, as Wilson describes them are keyword and content, technical SEO, onsite SEO, offsite SEO. Interesting how he breaks these down. Let's just go through those four first as a refresher. The first four pillars are keyword and content. So content rules and keywords are the foundation of search and therefore keywords are the foundation of the content that you should be creating. A good piece of keyword optimized content is the building block of an SEO strategy. Um, you know, absolutely. And then the second piece, technical pillar, technical SEO, a great content is insufficient. If the website hosting doesn't have a sound technical foundation, technical SEO covers areas like indexability performance of the website. Google has developed a set of metrics called the core web vitals to measure a web page's technical performance and usability. Technical is very important. Uh, number three, on-site SEO. So this is like site navigation hierarchy, schema markup, page titles, meta descriptions, heading tags, and image alt tags are tools to create an easy to understand website and page structure for search engine crawlers and visitors. Uh, so that's on-site and then finally off-site is a website can't rank well on search engines if it lacks authority and doesn't garner trust in its subject domain. That is the fundamental premise of Google, uh, inbound links, uh, are votes for credibility. Um, all right, so let's talk a little bit about non-branded versus branded searches. Are you still frozen? You may be frozen. I don't know. Um, so for branded queries, they contain branded names in the search terms. So if

you think about search terms or branded search terms that would be relevant to Apple, um, you know, the, the cell phone manufacturer, the computer manufacturer, that term would be Apple. Um, if you wanted to think about the, uh, if, and other phrases that would be the same are iPhone, iPad, MacBook. Those are branded phrases for Apple. Now, if you wanted to go to non-branded phrases that you might be using for Apple, you'd be looking for things like laptop, smartphone, and tablets. And just remember, branded searches are conducted by people looking for information, especially about your brand or your specific brand products. Again, non-branded queries, the examples, Apple, laptop, smartphone, tablet. But according to SEMrush, more than half of search traffic to Apple's website comes from branded searches. So why are branded searches so important? Branded search traffic not only reflects the level of interest of a specific, in a specific brand of that user, but also has higher commercial intent and higher conversion rate. This almost goes without saying, but is really the foundation of why Wilson is saying that branded search is, is a pillar, right? So if we look at generally speaking, non-branded search traffic feeds the upper part of the marketing funnel, funnel, and branded search traffic feeds the lower part of the funnel. A brand needs to grow both types of traffic. So that's going to be branded and non-branded to maintain a healthy and growing business. So I absolutely believe in this, and I know Matt does too, that, let's read that one more time. A brand needs to grow both types of traffic to maintain a healthy and growing business. That's branded and non-branded traffic. Because really the growth of your branded traffic represents the fact that your brand is growing, that you are making people aware of your brand, and now they aren't just looking for the generic terms like laptop, smartphone, tablet. They're actually looking for iPhone, MacBook, MacBook Pro. So you've been able to penetrate the market in a way that they're actually searching for you.

And again, that intent is significantly higher. And we've been saying for quite some time that Google loves brands, right? And there's a number of reasons that Google loves brands. So one of them, with their ability to understand what searches are, they obviously know how many searches are for MacBooks. They obviously know how many searches are for iPhones. And there are for cell phones in general. He's back. And also for laptops in general. By understanding that, they can get a weight of clarity on how popular is this brand, right? If more people are searching for iPhones than any other type of phone, and you know that iPhone is a cell phone, and believe me, Google does know that those two are the same, or at least that the iPhone is a cell phone, then when somebody searches for cell phone, they're going to put them more prominently. They're going to put Apple more prominently because they're like, hey, more people are interested in the iPhone as a cell phone than in any other type of phone, a Google Pixel or whatever. So we're going to put them higher up when somebody searched for the more generic term. So that certainly happens. There are different traffic drivers. Jump in at any point if you want that. Different traffic drivers for non-branded and branded searches. So search traffic is driven by two factors, keyword search volume and click-through rate on the search engine results pages. So that means your search traffic, your traffic that comes in from search, is based on keyword search volume and click-through rate. It's pretty clear the whole reason we're talking about SEO is the higher your keywords rank, the higher the click-through rate you get. And according to advanced web ranking, a position number one on Google can have 38% of the click-through rate, drops to about 5% on position five. So you can only get about 5% of the searches in position five and stays around 1% for anything below or after position one, 10. That sounds high to me. I think

if they're going to the second page, they're probably doing a different search altogether. Bearing that in mind, how do the four pillars of SEO contribute to a website search traffic? Well, let's revisit. Maximizing the aggregate keyword search volume and then improving keyword ranking to achieve a higher SERP click-through rate. So again, if we're trying to, how do the four pillars contribute to the search traffic? They help a website increase its traffic in two ways. Maximizing the aggregate keyword search volume and improving keyword ranking. So the more keywords that you have on a good position, the more traffic you're going to get. And then the better you're ranking, the more traffic you're going to get. Branded search and non-branded search have very different traffic drivers. I don't know if you want to jump in at any point. Oh yeah, no, I was, uh, I was on and off. I actually think I removed you at one point out of, uh, the studio. I apologize. Out of spite. Actually, I didn't have to get back in. So I think I stayed. No, no. Well, I removed you and then I added you back in. So there might've been in, when we pushed this out to everybody. I'm saying such brilliant things for the technical difficulties. Um, but Chris is doing a great job. Uh, I mean, he's, he's been doing it 10 years, 10 years. Podcaster. We need to get you a little, uh, with a little pen or something like that. A little, I need a sticker. A little pen to wear 10 year podcaster plus. Right. Uh, actually, I think Chris it's going on 12 years is actually, uh, uh, 10 years was last year. And so, so you're probably 11 years. I think our first podcast was 2009. Right. So that would put, uh, 2019 as 10 years. Oh, good. Good. Three plus two and a half. We'll say so. 12 and a half. Mr. Hill said you never left Chris. So that's good. Oh, good. So I'm, I'm, I'm just jumping around over

here. Um, it's funny because you freeze and then you disappear and then you freeze and then you disappear. Yeah, no, for sure. So this has been great. Hey, this is cool for Nils on, on LinkedIn. Well, what I would tell you is based on kind of some of the things that you said, and I don't want to go too far back to derail this, but, um, there's, there's a lot to talk about with branded searches versus unbranded search. Um, but I think the, the most important piece of data that you put out there is how important it is to be the first position in Google. Uh, a lot of people say, Oh, I made it to the first page and they move on to a new campaign and many times they move on to a new campaign too quickly. Um, and also too, you know, it's a zero sum game. So if you're ranking for one position and then you focus your attention over here, it's kind of like a seesaw. And so we actually have a client that's not, uh, it's on our lowest tier of spending and we put them in first position, uh, for keywords multiple times. But because it's a very competitive term and industry, he wants to shift the budget somewhere else without maintaining, uh, going after that keyword or, or supporting that keyword. And then that starts falling. And then, you know, you fall out of the top three positions and then the leads drop off. Right. And so it's, it's a little bit of a seesaw because when you look at your site based upon the content expertise, where the kind of domain authority is, you can only rank for so many keywords. And so you don't want to stretch yourself too thin. And, uh, I think that that's really important. And also something that Google is looking for the more branded searches you have, uh, it's very valuable because Google's looking at you as a brand. So, uh, I'm doing a couple of campaigns right now where

we're running radio ads. And they drive a lot of branded search and it helps the metrics across the board. You might not be directly able to tie traditional like terrestrial radio to what's going on, but you're seeing it in the search volume and people talking about the brand across different channels and it helps support SEO. So there's this omni-channel approach where you get this multiplier effect when you use, uh, different channels. And that's something you should really think about, uh, branded searches. What we do see a lot is when people come to us, if they're not really doing SEO or they think they're doing SEO, uh, they, uh, they have their, their ranking for their name and that's really it. There's no other strategies outside that, but certainly that's the first strategy. And if you have a term or a keyword that could get confused with something else, you want to dominate the SERPs, uh, for, for what you're going after for us, uh, specifically when we changed her name to EWR, Chris, do you know what the number one thing that EWR, uh, stood for before we started, uh, ranking for that airport. Yeah. New York airport. And so, uh, I remember our conversation about that and it was like, you know what, if people want to associate us in terms of size with EWR as the Newark airport, I think I'm okay with that. And I was like, that's, that's a good decision. Like that's, that makes sense. Well, funny enough, we're going to open actually a satellite office in New York. And I was actually having a conversation, uh, with Kevin and Andrus about that. And so, uh, there's a crypto DAO, uh, that has some coworking spaces. It's kind of the new thing after we work. And, um, so, so more to come there. Stay tuned, I guess. So that's, that's pretty cool. And, and I think what you're touching on, um, will be the, some of the wrap-up. So let's, let's kind of keep pushing through this article, uh, that

Wilson put together again, why brand awareness is the fifth pillar of SEO. Let's talk a little bit about non-branded traffic drivers. So for non-branded search, a website can harvest a virtually unlimited amount of keywords and aggregated search volume. Yes. But they, a lot of those unlimited implies, you're going to definitely be getting into where, uh, it's, uh, it's not necessarily relevant to your business or there is no search volume. Uh, but yeah, it's, it's unlimited because you're not restricted to the brand. Um, for branded traffic drivers, your website is already ranked number one for your brand name. You mentioned that already, by the way, if it's not, or it should be, right. It should be. And, and, and if, if that's not the case and many times, if you haven't done any kind of fundamental SEO, uh, many times, uh, your Facebook page or LinkedIn page, because they do do SEO and structure data and everything will outrank you. And then even there's some articles out there, but it's really important for people if they want to find you to find you. Uh, when we talk about even like paid search, Chris, the, the, the idea of running paid traffic, if you're running a different kind of offer to change, uh, the user experience to maybe direct them to an offer page. Uh, but certainly if people are searching for you, they need to be able to find you. That's the number one thing, right? And they gotta remember your name. You definitely want your site first so that you can at least do some email collection. Um, that gets rapidly out of your control when they're finding Facebook first or whatever. Um, all right. So the, the ranking is generally not an issue for the branded phrase, right? You're in position one. You're not going to do better than position one. Uh, the main lever, the main lever, the main lever of branded search traffic is simply increasing your branded keywords search volume, right? So there's two components, your rank position and how much

volume there is. And if you want more branded traffic, you've got to change the volume. And so this is how to grow brand awareness and branded searches. That's what this article ultimately is about. Whether you want to call it a pillar or not, like I, I respect Wilson for doing that. That's pretty cool. Uh, to grow brand awareness and interest, you need to increase a brand's visibility to its potential customers, develop authority and garner trust for the brand. To grow brand awareness at scale, marketers need to bring their brand to their potential customers. You can't just wait for them to come to you. Do you, there are plenty of tools in the digital marketing arsenal to help marketers build brand awareness, including advertising, influencer marker marketing, customer marketing, and digital PR customer marketing is a, is one I didn't have the name of before. Well, so Chris, I'm rereading, uh, Seth Godin's, uh, purple cow. Uh, and, uh, it's just so powerful. Uh, some of the things he highlights and writes about, um, he was talking about how mass marketing doesn't work anymore. And, you know, someone's not going to talk about a brown cow. Like everybody's seen a brown cow. No one that's not newsworthy. Right. Um, we're doing a lot more PR. We just did this Texans crypto thing. Uh, pretty cool. Um, Houston Texans. And, uh, yeah, no one's going to talk about a brown cow, but a purple cow. Okay. If you see a purple cow, you're going to tell a bunch of people are going to share it on social media. It's going to cut through the noise. It's here in Texas, it's the Oreo cow here in Texas. It's the Oreo cow. You know, the Oreo cow. I mean, is that something that you would like share? Yeah. A black and white cow. Let me put it away. So it's black on the front, black on the back, and it's got a white band in the middle. Have you seen this? Literally traffic will stop for these, right? So

you're like, everyone's blowing through a two way street, you know. Okay. Fair enough. In the craziness of Texas. And then like, you're like, why is all this traffic? Like, why are the cars stopped? Because there's a field of Oreo cows. So yeah, I think people will talk about an Oreo cow. You could probably Google it. You can Google brown cow. Nothing shows up. Oreo cow probably shows up something. Well, you know, it depends who your target audience is. It really depends. But, but that's why personalized marketing. That's why target personas. That's why different mediums and different targets are so important. And that's why mass marketing doesn't work because, well, everybody, well, almost everybody has an iPhone or Android now, right? Almost everybody has a laptop or a computer in their home. Almost everybody has a toaster and a microwave. You can't mass market anymore. And that's why there's been this growth in digital marketing versus traditional marketing because you can zero in on, on what you're wanting and you want to be something that people are talking about. And I think that that's the whole point is you've got to cut through the noise. I think there's something like 900 advertising messages that happen on a daily basis, right? So like you're getting hit with all this stuff. I'm getting hit with spam calls on my phone, on my email. Like it's, it's crazy. So how do you grab someone's attention? And, and I think someone posted this on LinkedIn and gosh, I wish I could give credit to who it was, but they said, um, I think I took a picture of it. Let me find this, Chris. This is like, this was awesome. So maybe it was per nil. He's, he actually tuned in and let us know that I never dropped off. And so, no, yeah. Well, one who, uh, well, so hold on, hold on. Uh, while you're pulling that out, just know we're going to go over the digital tools and the digital marketing arsenal. This is, I'm going to

give a, uh, punch in the face to cap, uh, chat field. Okay. Uh, we're friends on LinkedIn. He has a marketing show as well. And, uh, he said ads get skipped. Shows get binged. Companies should create shows. The end. Uh, hashtag B2B marketing. Um, I just, I love that. And, uh, and, uh, so I want to give a shout out to him. So you should be in the show making business. Yeah. Welcome to the SEO podcast. Uh, all right. So one of the tools that Wilson talks about is advertising and he works with ad role. So he says at ad role, we classify advertising into two categories, retargeting and brand awareness campaigns. So the first, uh, retargeting, uh, we, we've talked about this a lot. Um, the best ad dollar that you could possibly spend is a retargeting ad dollar, right? Yeah. You're, you're getting cut off right in the middle of with that light band, right? Yeah. It's, it's really blinding like purple cows everywhere. Um, so yeah, retargeting is your best dollar spent. And then brand awareness campaigns is, is the other side of, uh, of ad role. The next is contextual targeting. So think of a hotel chain placing its ad in a travel magazine. Um, a big difference between, right? So, so that's not actually targeting the consumer as the right income, the right age is just going after the context where the consumers who might be interested in a hotel would, would find themselves. A big difference between, uh, contextual targeting and other targeting methods is that contextual targeting doesn't rely on personal or behavioral data about the targeting audience, which of course leads us directly into demographic and interest targeting. Uh, this is that the opposite of what was just described. Demographic and, uh, interest targeting leverages your knowledge of existing customers to find new customers. So suppose your customers fit into specific demographic segment or are interested in certain activities or subjects. You want to use the context, uh, the demographics to get in front of people who

look like the people who are already your customer. This is why it is really important. You know, one of the early steps that we go through is defining the avatar for your business. Who is the person who's going to buy, who currently buys from you and let's figure out what they look like, where they like to hang out, what they like to do, because then we can speak their language, uh, with the ads that we do get in front of them, which by the way, we can get in front of them because we know what they like to do, what they look like, what their age is, what their sex is. So, so that's an, and what platform they're on and, and, and where to speak with them. Absolutely. Um, next is lookalike targeting. So this is similar to demographic, but instead of the only thing that's important at this point on most platforms that are so saturated is, is the lookalike. Yeah. I would tell you that, um, I'm seeing like Facebook and Google being so saturated right now that the campaigns, even if you're targeting the right people, uh, are not as accurate. I, I'm like loving where you create the lookalike audiences based on a best customer list and then let the algorithm go to work. And you need to spend about a hundred dollars a day to, to really let the algorithm really zero in. And there's been nothing else that, that I've been, uh, seeing as far as like running traffic like today that I've seen work better than that. That's my two cents. So just to kind of define this lookalike targeting a little bit better, but instead of manually defining the target audience segments based on a list of demographics or, uh, interest attributes, you're actually taking your existing customers, feeding them into Facebook and Facebook is going, Hey, let us figure out, uh, what other people look like this. So it's very, Facebook's doing the same thing as just internal within their algorithm. Yep. Next is influencer

marketing. Even before the digital age, digital age, it was common for big, big brands to hire famous athletes or celebrities to endorse their products. Think Michael Jordan and Nike in the eighties today. Influencers are social media personalities who have built a following with a particular audience. There are platforms to help you go after influencers. Um, I've been using quite a few of them. They're really good tools out there and, uh, and, and pretty awesome. So Chris, like if someone sponsors a podcast, is it because they're trying to leverage the influencers audience to reach the brand? Yes. In the case of SpyFu, it's just cause they're really smart. Oh, well I'll go with that. Yeah. They're trying to, that's, this is absolutely influencer marketing, right? Um, you could, but we could also fit it in a different class where some people look to our podcast as news, right? So it's just. Well, I was debatable because they're, they're launching, um, a new type of AdWords campaign or they have launched a new type of AdWords campaign. And I almost felt like we should have like announced it. I think we need to do really like news announcements too, uh, as maybe separate from the podcast, algorithm updates, that sort of thing. Probably next year we need to change it up a little bit, do some more interviews, that sort of thing. There's, there's a lot of stuff I want to do. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think that we're providing education or I think you said infotainment. Uh, and, and I think what he's referencing is where people are sharing, uh, products or reviews. Uh, we're actually doing that for one of our clients as well. So we're running a back to school campaign and we're using, uh, local moms, uh, that want to get involved in support brand to, uh, help promote it. And, uh, I think that happens a lot with political, uh, campaigns as well. I think heavily you've seen all the movie stars, uh, support different candidates, uh, yeah, politely. Uh,

and I know you're using it to, um, you know, push out different products or raise different awareness. Maybe you can speak to that more on some of your experience with influencers. Well, so, so just to kind of why spy food might engage us one, it, it certainly influencer marketing sits in there, right? Cause we have some influence in the SEO marketplace and the other can just be context, right? Because of the content that we put out there, maybe they don't like our lovely personality, but we're putting out the content that other SEOs would be absorbing. And so then that becomes a con context. I think I'm offended by that statement. It may or may not even be possible. Yeah. So it's contextual targeting in, in that case in, in terms of influencer marketing. Um, there's a, uh, a platform called Intellifluence that I've used, uh, really extensively and, and it's provided a lot of value. And I'll be honest, the value, uh, where the value ended up coming from is, uh, it was not where I expected it. So I was hoping like, Hey, hire some people, they promote the product and then we get sales. And, you know, I'm pretty diligent about having links that I can track track, having, um, coupon codes that I can track. And, and it's been very difficult to actually track direct sales to these influencers. Um, some of them work for sure. And that tends to be more of like a podcaster and I can spend more time, uh, on the show with the podcaster, um, but what has come out of it, which is extremely valuable is testimonial videos, um, images like product placement video images where, um, you know, different variety, uh, of demographic people are holding the product. And now I can use those in different ad campaigns, um, and, and different landing pages. So, so making premium content basically, or, or creatives, UGI, right. Or you, you, user generated content, that's not really user generated if you're generating it, but, but it helps create

content that others can share. They became users like, right. So it has the feel of user generated content, right? Like I, I think we could, you're right. We could quibble about, well, is that really user generated content? Um, and certainly we do a lot of push for that in the case of getting an influencer. I mean, we send them the product, they become a user and then they share it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's in that realm for sure. And certainly has the, the appearance of, of user generated content. So that's what I've found to be very valuable. Um, I also have a theory and I'm working on testing. This theory is that in the influencer space, you actually have to spend a lot more money with people who have a lot more audience to really get those gains. And I think not only are the audiences of extremely influential people exponential, right? So you can find lots of people with a hundred followers, a ton of people with 2000 followers, lots of people with 15,000 followers. But when you get to the hundred K followers, that starts to drop off precipitously. A million followers is, is, is almost unheard of. That's an exaggeration, but it's, and they charge a premium because they know that they're premium, but you actually get premium results with those. And that's, but yeah. And it depends on the platforms on organic reach versus paid reach to be able to make sure that, uh, their entire following or, or a larger percentage of their phone actually see it. Right. And so, uh, I mean, certainly Facebook and, and some of the other platforms has really, uh, hampered down on, um, just regular posts. And I'm also even seen with shorts. Now they're starting to kind of like shadow box kind of, uh, what's going on. Um, it's usually like, what's the next big thing, right? It used to be like the live streaming, uh, was big and they would show that it's wherever they're trying to drive that, that algorithm. But

certainly if someone has a lot of followers and, uh, they're doing one or two posts, they're probably not going to reach everybody. Right. So you have to be more engaged with them. So that I think makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's pretty easy to find people who have, you know, lots of followers, lots of subscribers, if you're talking about YouTube. Uh, and then you go look at how many people actually watch each video over the last of 30 days, how many people have interacted or even just viewed their post if it's on Instagram and you can, like, it's pretty easy to tell. Like those are like, I, I make the judgment whether, whether it's true or not, but it's practical for what I'm going to do next. Um, those are fake followers. You know, maybe they're real and they just don't interact with them. But that to me is a fake follower that doesn't, it's not an influence. You want the raving fan, essentially you want the raving fan that if they say, Hey, this is awesome. You should try it. Other people take action. Yeah. That's exactly what you're looking for. Um, all right. So next is customer marketing. And I wasn't really familiar with this phrase. Ultimately what it boils down to is pretty simple. The more people review a product and the higher the review rating, the more visibility and traffic a product gets, I think customer marketing could be that, um, UGC that we were just talking about that user generated content. Um, and in this context, he mostly talks about reviews, but there can be other types of, of UGC, right? There can be, um, testimonial videos, unboxing videos. Um, I used your service and this is how good it was. Uh, I tried your service for 90 days again, reviews. So that UGC, um, he just called it customer marketing, uh, very important. You know, I, uh, I think it's so important. We built the platform during COVID that addresses that. And I just posted

it. So if you're on social media, you can click on link. Uh, if you're listening, uh, and we appreciate you pro testimonial.com. I would go check it out. It's a great way to get a easy way to get video testimonials from your clients to be able to share on your website or on social media to, to let people know how they're doing it. Cause I think generating reviews is one of the biggest Achilles heels of let's say small businesses or even digital marketers or, uh, long form sales letters. You want to get those videos, right? And this is just an absolutely easy way to get it, uh, encourage you to go use it. We actually, uh, this is a value add to all our clients, uh, so they can generate those testimonials and the conversion rate optimization, the SEO, it all works better when you have videos and testimonials on your site. For sure. And the key phrase here is super easy to use. So if you've, you know, maybe cater to an older clientele that, you know, is less internet savvy, um, you know, getting them to make a video and then get it to you in a reasonable, um, uh, uh, resolution can be a significant challenge. Uh, it's the, it's super easy with pro testimonial.com. All right, back on track. That was one of the 900 ads you'll see in the day. Uh, and then digital PR is the last one that Wilson mentions. So it's all often considered link building 2.0, uh, link building is acquiring links from other websites. Yeah, we know that digital PR focuses on bringing your brand to your targeted audiences through stories published in relevant and high quality publications. Again, being on our podcast, like SpyFu is really bringing their product to the audience that they're trying to get. So that's certainly fits into digital PR, uh, because well-known publications usually have very strict link policies, digital PR pro pro pro prioritizes brand visibility and reach. So you may not get that high quality backlink. You

may only get one and it may just be, you know, a link to your website. The anchor text may not be ideal. Um, what you're really looking for in this digital PR space, uh, is, is awareness of the brand. So then they remember the brand next time they think about digital marketing, they just go search directly for EWR. They skip over Newark airport and then click the EWR digital. We're doing pretty well. We're doing pretty well because we're on other sides of the country. And many times it shows actually, uh, both of them, uh, depending on where you are and, and what's going on. And, you know, there's a lot more data, uh, that these platforms can see. I think that my, uh, two cents on digital PR is you have to be doing it. And that's something that we're doing a lot more of. I usually call it more of authority marketing, but it is just true public relations and PR. That's the next tier or, you know, the SEO 2.0 or whatever you want to call it. But it, but it's absolutely critical, uh, in this day and age, uh, I was talking about the Houston Texans campaign. We did, I pulled it up a great tool, uh, to look at what's going on when you're running a PR campaign is critical mention.com. Um, and, uh, the campaign we did, uh, which, you know, Do you want to show the video of that? Do you have that available? Uh, I, we showed it, we showed it on the last, we showed, we showed that video and, and really the, the press release, but, um, Yeah. Go back and listen, go back to the last podcast. You need to be on YouTube, so go find it. I can pull it up. I have it on my desktop here. Um, I can certainly do it. I can certainly show it, but, but, but really the point here, cause we're getting a little off track. The point is, um, really we've done different kinds of case

studies with podcasts. Um, we did a case study with a podcast getting on different podcasts. It was about a 72 X ROI. Uh, and then this last campaign that, that, that we did, uh, total online news publicity value, right. Based on critical mentions, uh, algorithm of how they calculated it, uh, 713,544 dollars. That was the, that was the value of the campaign we did for, let's say under 10 grand, right? And that's almost three quarters of a million dollars almost. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, digital PR works digitally. Digital PR is certainly important. You generate a lot of organic links. Uh, the key is the offer. Is it newsworthy? Um, you know, is it quality content and, and, you know, it's still possible to do people keep saying, Hey, like we can't do that. Or it's too hard to do that. We just did it. Okay. You just did it. And, and it took a couple of different components, but we hit it out of the park. Uh, it was team effort and it was newsworthy and, you know, you want to be, and I think I said this, I think I said this on the last podcast. I can't remember, but you want to be in the PR cycle and the news cycle every 28 days. So 13 times a year, right. Is, is really what you're looking to do. And this is something that Google is looking for and incorporating with eat. It's kind of authorship squared of, of what they're looking for. Uh, people talking about the brand. So I think this article really does a good job and you really want to hit on that PR needs to be part of your SEO strategy. And it can certainly be done in local markets. It can be done in big markets. Um, but it needs to be done. It needs to be part of your SEO strategy. I think that, you know, you're starting to look at, you know, if he, how he's positioning it, right. You're saying there's technical, there's on page,

there's off page, there's content. Maybe there's GNB. Well, PR, I think has to be part of it. I think that that's more of what he's saying than anything else. Is this a brand awareness? It absolutely should be a category. And certainly that's how we've been viewing it for the last, let's say two, three years. Uh, that's why we even started a videography company to be able to grab, uh, the videos and to be able to tell that story better. Yeah. Do you have any example of a video that, or a video? Okay. Yes, I do. Let me, uh, let me get this video playing. Uh, uh, okay. Let me see if I can find one. And I think it's, again, like we talked last time in the podcast, come up with a different angle. You know, we could easily say, you know what, this, what he's talking about here is kind of traditional digital marketing. That's not necessarily SEO. And do we throw it in as a pillar of SEO? We could make the debate, but that's the purpose of this content. I, I, we looked at it because we're like, Hey, well, what is that fifth pillar? What do you think that fifth pillar is? That's that's smart content. All right, here we go, Chris. Well, you. Hey guys, I'm here with Matt Bertram of EWR. They just purchased the first box suite in NFL history using Bitcoin through BitWallet. Matt, how was the experience? John, the experience was so smooth. We were able to buy the tickets, making NFL history. Very exciting. Love to be here. There's great team building experience for all of the EWR team, and we're just so happy for you, John. BitWallet, everywhere you look, right there, all over the place. This is amazing. We're happy to just be part of it. Thank you so much. The fastest, simplest way to buy Bitcoin is through the BitWallet app. Just so you can see. You can see we actually have done a couple of different versions of it for like

different pieces of who wants what, who needs what. But yeah, it's it's really it's really powerful. It tells a great story, gets a lot of engagement. And all those shares, OK, are links. Right. And there are a lot of branded links or URL links. And so digital PR is a thing. Do it. Yeah. Yeah. And that could have been the title of Wilson's article. Did your digital PR is a thing? Do it. You know, they probably A-B tested it. That might not have done as well, but but yeah. Good decision. Well done. Patif to you, Wilson Lau. We appreciate that article. Really good stuff. You guys, all you guys out there listening. Hey, make sure you subscribe. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure you subscribe and click the notification bell. I know that we've got Pernell out there. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that right. Hopefully he's following us. So he gets notifications on a regular basis. You guys have made us the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. You guys have made us one of the most popular internet marketing podcasts on iTunes. Matt and I could not be more appreciative of that. Well, I guess we could. We could ask you to do one small thing. Follow us on YouTube. That's YouTube.com forward slash best SEO podcast. Connect with us on Instagram. That's Instagram.com forward slash the best SEO podcast. And then on TikTok forward slash the at symbol best SEO podcast. Connect with us on those. Subscribe there. Reach out. Communicate with us. We want to hear what you're thinking, what you want to say, what you want to see. Matt mentioned, hey, maybe we're going to do some more interviews next year. Um, let's, uh, let's hear what you think. And, and it looks like Matt might be frozen. If Matt is frozen. Oh, he's, he's, I hear you. I hear you. He's there. He's coming in and out. Um, thank you guys for making us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Um, my name is Chris Burris. Matt is

over there buffering, but he probably can press the button. It seems like he can hear me press the button to, to wrap up the podcast. Oh, there he is. He's back. I'm back. All right. So I'll just be quick and just. You're freezing up again. We're time to go. You're frozen. Press the button. You can do like, it's right there. All right. We are waiting for Matt to press the button.