Seth Price is joined by Fernando Agulo to discuss the ways SEMrush has been adapting to the recent digital marketing landscape changes. The two also dive into local Service Ads, Googles core web vitals update, key word searching, and what is in line for REMrush’s future in digital marketing.
Seth Price is joined by Fernando Agulo to discuss the ways SEMrush has been adapting to the recent digital marketing landscape changes. The two also dive into local Service Ads, Googles core web vitals update, key word searching, and what is in line for REMrush’s future in digital marketing.
BluShark Digital
Welcome to the SEO insider with your host, Seth Price founder of Blushark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price
Welcome, everybody, we are thrilled to have Fernando Angulo who is the Head of Communications for SEMrush. Welcome to our show.
Fernando Angulo
Hello Seth, thank you for having me here today.
Seth Price
We are big fans of your product. And what normally as I do these interviews, it's the stuff is all in my head, and I sort of have this rapid fire back and forth. But today, I have an experiment, which is our team was so excited, our team at Blushark was so excited that you were coming on that they kind of fed me all sorts of stuff. So I'm going to try to keep this interesting and conversational. But before I get into their questions, tell me a little bit about the history of the company. I knew this is a company that sort of came to my radar as like, oh, you get the value of websites here. That was sort of like the first thing that was like, oh, that's different. And you know, now it's just part of our lexicon and part of our everyday work. But tell me a little bit about how the company came to be and how you got to where we are today?
Fernando Angulo
Sure. Well, I started working for SEMrush the last nine years. The company overall is already 12 years old now. And when I started working for for them, I remember we were about 17 or 20 people. So we were a proper startup, we were trying to survive through all the continuous changes that I'm talking about 10 years ago or something like something like that. We were focusing on basically domain analytics, SEO keyword research. And for us, it was a huge improvement to have other languages. So how I enter the company, they were trying to get more users in different countries, different European countries such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain. And of course, I'm as myself, I'm a Spanish speaker. And also I was working from Russia, in St. Petersburg, and the company was founded in in the US, but the whole development developers team was in Russia.
Seth Price
So you were you were living in St. Petersburg?
Fernando Angulo
Yes, yes. It was such a coincidence. I finished my studies in St. Petersburg. I was living there for about 20 years. So I was Were you born? Were you born in Russia? No, I was born in Bolivia and South America. But I moved to different countries. i It happened that I finished my university studies in in Russia, and they found me there. So they say, Oh, this guy's related to digital marketing, speak Spanish, English, Russian, that was really hard to find. Yes, yes. The unicorn? Yes, that was at that time. And the focus was on keyword research to improve the KPIs that we have at that time, with the keyword difficulty with the volume to strike the right amount of words, for the US database for the UK, the UK database. And of course, we were focused. We were focusing always from the beginning in SEO, but that has changed a lot during the last five years, the last three years. Our main focus is not SEO anymore. We are focusing on digital marketing visibility all over the place because we work with content marketing, with social media, with PR with journalists with basically every single
Seth Price
but that's all SEO right. All digital PR Yes, that's true. Say it's not SEO, but it really is SEO.
Fernando Angulo
Yes, yes. That you know, at the beginning was okay, it was the SEO guy and there's a guy okay, thank you. That's it right now. They don't anymore. silence So content marketing, SEO. For PPC, you need to do SEO as well. You need to check the the keyword, the right ones that you're working for the brand awareness for for everything,
Seth Price
Right, Whether it's content, whether it's digital, PR all those things regular PR it all comes back. So you're my first love your your your company's, you know, first baby, essentially, yes, there are other components. But that's why we are on the SEO Insider. So we
Fernando Angulo
that's the core of the company. Exactly.
Seth Price
I'll just go off on a tangent for a second. I was in St. Petersburg with the family on a cruise. Last summer before last week. We had a great time pre COVID It was awesome. But the last time I was there before that, it was not St. Petersburg. It was Leningrad. I went on an exchange in college back in 1987. And it was a very beginning of perestroika and to see it as a snapshot from one One place that was really black market was the only way to get anything was long lines, no supplies to a vibrant city that look like, you know, somewhere mixed between European and Scandinavian city. It was really amazing to see that transformation.
Fernando Angulo
Yeah, that's why I was there in the middle of that transformation. Because when I arrived to San Petersburg in 2000, yes, it's gonna be 22 years already. They didn't have any credit, banking history, right? You needed to buy things, only in cash. They didn't have much restaurants in the streets. They but they developed really fast a lot. It just 15 years. They were like, from the bottom to the top of the capitalism, as we know it.
Seth Price
Yeah, it is amazing. I sort of visited Cuba, one that was legal from the US. And I felt like I'd seen a snapshot of what it had been. You know, it's very, very, very humbling. And they have a long way to go. But hopefully things will change.
Fernando Angulo
Yeah, that's true. But having a company like, like SEMrush, in the middle of what was St. Petersburg with all the changes, because 10 years for breaststroke is not enough. And 20 years is still not enough. The mindset of the people was you need to work for the boss, you need to work for the leader, right? But that is not our culture in SEMrush. From the beginning, I was not working for a Russian company. I was working at working for a unicorn company, because they told me Hey, what, what is the best you can do for the company? Hey, I can work with Salesforce. I'm a salesperson, I do marketing. Okay, just do it. Right, the goals that you want to achieve? That's it. Hey, but what do you what do you want me to do? Not do your stuff. That's it. So the goals, every single team member, every single employee, they were creating themselves their goals. That was the thing that we were doing from the beginning. Why was that big? Because every single employee needs to care about the future of the product, the future about their task as well. So from that moment, I define it SEMrush as a product centric company is product first, then is the rest of the stuff.
Seth Price
That's awesome. So I mentioned before I am taking you know today, I usually am the the person with the the interviewer. But today I'm letting my team because they are their power users and they they have their questions. So the first question is, what is the best way that SEMrush to what is the best way to use SEMrush to reverse engineer both everyday problems with rankings as well as bigger picture issues?
Fernando Angulo
Perfect? Well, I need to make the name of the company clear, since we just have a rebranding, the name of the company is SEMrush. We are not specifically said sem because we are not search engine marketing, just our brand name. That's why we are not that acronym. Right? We are SEMrush. And the best way to have the whole picture is to have three steps. Secure between all our platforms. The first one is the superficial analysis, which you can do with domain our latex keyword magic tool. So you can have okay, what is happening right now the picture of today. But you need to compare that with historical data that you have inside of a project. So for that you need to have a tracking system, you need to track the keywords. But that is not enough. You need also to have all the all the information in one single recipe. If you are using, for example Data Studio for all your results or you're using I don't know, wherever it system that you're using for just showing the data, it can be Tableau, it can be Adobe, wherever it is, you need to have a place where you can check all that information, because there are a lot of agencies that they are measuring. They have the data, but they are not seeing the whole picture because they don't have the specific reports to do that. They're just checking. Okay, right. You have this single picture. I have the data from last last week, but you need to have all of that in one single place. That's why having a Data Studio report specifically with everything that you need, you want to achieve with your goals. That's something that you definitely need to have.
Seth Price
That's great. So the digital marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the last year. How do you see sem sem rush fitting into the new era and adapting to meet marketers needs?
Fernando Angulo
Yes, definitely. Well, because we are a product centric company. We are always asking, Okay, where is the next thing you want? We are, we have different gathering gatherings, we have different surveys, we have a brochure application, it's our tool. And we saw that while SEO was developing from just a silo of our separate process, we saw that, okay, companies needs to have a communication, more secure communication, or direct communication between marketing teams we got are these different processes to have the communication inside of our platform. So if you're doing a Site Audit, you can connect immediately with your developer teams through the Trello board, you can have that in Asana Monday, wherever the task manager that you're working, if you are creating, if you're working as a freelancer, you can do that for yourself. So that's why we have the content calendar, we have the SEO calendar as you won't want to use it. And of course, if you want to go as an internal team working for for a brand, you need to have different stages between those, those processes. So you are at the top of working with the top of the funnel, you need to create the question keywords. So you go to one part of the tools when for example, keyword magic tool, you want to work with the middle of the funnel, you need to select already the topics, you can go immediately from one tool to another, for example, to the to the SEO writing assistant to create all that content that you need to build, and therefore measuring and in the middle of the formula as well, you can have all that in the reporting system that we have built for PDF, or you can integrate as I was mentioning, with Data Studio, at the bottom of the funnel, you need to have that tracking system, you can integrate your Google Analytics or your search console to see the goals how you are achieving the goals that that you have. So in every single process, we have built the cooperation between different strategies you want to promote, okay, you have Facebook ads, also integrated to SEMrush. You want to promote organically you have social media tracker, you can do the posting, you can scale all the all the posts that you that you want for the next month to come. You want to improve the content you can do and content out of it. So all different processes, you can use it in in different ways, but to achieve the goals that you are men with commitment to achieve from the beginning.
Seth Price
Great, well, in our world, the legal vertical and the professional service vertical, the LSAS local service ads have been a a huge have have had a huge effect on what's what's going on. How is sem rush working to try to help the agencies deal with the data that's coming in and the new landscape that we're facing with LSAS?
Fernando Angulo
Well, our, our data bases are alive. So there are many ways that you can that you can use, for example, the long term, the longtail keywords, you can collect all of them. Or if we don't have that information, right now, we have around 20 billion keywords in our database. Just as an example, three years ago, we have only 2 billion keywords. The process of growing our databases was really complex, but we are cheap already. The amount of data that is something is becoming popular, I don't know the legal team terms that that it can be appearing, or in the health industry or in any other industry just need to check that in our keyword magic tool. If you don't find it there, there is no problem. You can add those keywords in your tracking system in your tracking project. And we're going to be immediately checking that in in Google to say okay, how popular is this keyword, how many people are interested in that. So we're going to be building that keyword inside of our database through our tracking system. So you were you will be able to see the results of that there. So longtail keywords, very specific search queries, you can use that as well. There are so
Seth Price
many stuff specific to LSAs, beyond sort of normal PPC tracking, you know, is paid search, but it's done in a slightly different way as far as pay per call versus pay per click. Is there are you guys want me to rolling out quickly? I started with just a locksmiths and home improvements but we're seeing in sector by sector. Are there tools in the in the coming months and our quarters that that may help us manage what is a what I expect to be with the auction of very expensive widget that Google is going to be putting out there.
Fernando Angulo
Well in terms of if we took About the the legal industry. Right now we have a tool that is called the CPC map. So all these terms that are real expensive are the ones that are the most popular are there by by location. So you can enter select the US select one of the states, you can see by industry, what is the price? And what was the history behind the buildings. So for those terms, you can have all of that there, we are changing all of that information in a database. So basically, if you want to see what are the most expensive keywords for for bidding, and the ones that were that we had in the past, you can just check the CPC map for for doing that. All the LCA keywords, for example, are there we have a different section formation. So in this part, sem Rush is working in three different aspects. We prepare reports for research, we prepare the tools, so people they can do their own research, and we are working immediately with with your site. Right.
Seth Price
Awesome. Look, going into 2021. What do you think will be the biggest challenges? And how can search marketers use sem rush to mitigate these challenges?
Fernando Angulo
That's a great question. One of the biggest challenges already this year that we saw was that multi channel multi platform is here with us to stay, people are not searching in one single place anymore, or the majority of the people are switching or switching between searching giants. There is not any more. This is only a Google world, right? We have Amazon there. We have parallel searches like TripAdvisor, we have YouTube there, we have Tito there. So people are are searching in different inactive and passive ways. So we need to select the sources where the users are, we need to create the strategy. So the first the first thing that we thought is okay, we need to create a tool that is showing us where our users are or where the users of the competitors are. And that tool was launched about a couple of years ago. It's called market research and market market that isn't in the market analysis. So you just need to enter the domain. And we're going to give you all the sources of the information from the traffic that you're receiving all your competitors are receiving their social media networks, the search engines, because most of the cases people are just working for well in Google or on Google. And they are forgetting that, okay, we have been out there, we have still Yahoo, depending on the market that you're working. Maybe you don't need to have a Facebook page anymore. Maybe with Instagram, you're just doing great. So for that you need to analyze what is working. So user acquisition has changed a lot. First thing that you need to do is check where your users are, and go for them in those platforms. That's why you need to use a market research tool to understand the sources of traffic that are bringing bringing you more more online visibility.
Seth Price
Cool. Next question is what do you think the most undervalued feature on SEMrush is and how can SEOs use it more effectively?
Fernando Angulo
Yes, that's a great question and the one that I love? Well, the most undervalued feature than the team right now that SEOs can take value is one that is out there for the last three years. I believe most of the SEOs have heard about answered the public because of the question because they can build questions and clusters of topics and subtopics. With different questions, or, for example, people also as results are also based on questions, or the feature snippets, they have also, they are also based on based on questions. So for analyzing that we have created a tool that is called topic research that is really powerful, is very similar to answer the public. But I always say this with asteroids. Why is that? Because that's where the problem is, you have all the questions, you have all the categories from the cluster of questions. Here you have the trending topics, you have the volumes, and with the help of sources like Cora, for example, we can have the live questions that people are asking about one single topic and we're gonna give you the cluster of subtopics. So this is the key, I believe for content creation that is meant to be for SEO. Why is that because you have the keyword, you have the volume, but maybe the keyword or that you're using is popular, but maybe this week is not that popular. Right? If you remember three weeks ago, Bitcoin was like cryptocurrencies was were like just operating from the bottom this week, which we can see that Bitcoin as the rest of the of the coins in cryptocurrency, just in this category. Everybody is talking about this, but three months ago, if you put cryptocurrencies there it was money laundry, the black market, and so that was because of the trend because of the interests of the people. So we topic research, you can have the volume, and also the interest of the people, you're not going to be creating content because you have a great idea. But because people are interested in that, I have a really good case here with one of my friends. He's a lawyer, and he was telling me that he is working only with Testaments. He's made a list of clients. Were asking only about Testaments. And he was really, really comfortable just working with people that want testaments, because of the pandemic situation and so on. But for some, but for some reason, during the last couple of months, he was just receiving divorce requests. And he will say, No, my, my moral standards are not allowing me to work with such request. So I'm passing that to my fellow colleagues in that field. But he was losing a lot of clients. So a lot of of course, the situation, we were in lockdown, and the rates of divorce went up in many countries, and talking here about a Spanish guy. And he said, Okay, I don't have any more testaments, or requests, only divorce requests. So he changed his website, the main message, so he became a divorce lawyer. So where the user is, where the demand is, is where you should be. That's why you need to check the trend what is happening right now, right.
Seth Price
And it's fascinating, because obviously, the pandemic hit Europe first. And so I feel like you guys were a couple of months ahead of us, we went through our testament, our trusts and estates department very, very busy. And then what we've seen is that in the last few months, the divorce, practice explode, that people are sick of being. So it's like, first they were scared of dying. And now they're scared of who they're with who they're living with. So we should just call you guys up to find out what's next. We can skip the tool and just wherever is going on Spain will be happening here in two months.
Fernando Angulo
That's correct. So it's a big topic research, you can see the trends. So testament is not trending, the board is trending. So I need to change the message that I'm trending and send it to my users. Gotcha.
Seth Price
Okay, we got a big update coming May 2021, the Google's full transition of the core web vitals, how can search marketers use sem rush to best prepare?
Fernando Angulo
Oh, that's a? That's a great question. And we are doing a lot of research right now based based on that, because this is a huge change, mostly affecting ecommerce businesses. But as I was, I was talking days with some experts around the around the globe, most of the core updates from Google are affecting directly content marketing, so the content, the quality of the content of the website. So if you are solving people's problems with the content that you're It's what
Seth Price
I always say it's you solve their problems, you'll make money when there's a market of lawyers anything as as a software.
Fernando Angulo
That's correct, you got solving people's problem creating the content that is driven that message if you have a really fast web page, which was one of the prior core updates, so you need to have a really fast web page, mobile based, you should be fine with the next changes. But if you're doing some Blackhat stuff, you are not being careful. If you have not the right content, if you have all content that is really old, and you don't have the the expertise, the authoritativeness trustworthiness that the Google people are preaching or evangelizing. So you need to make some changes, and how good how SEMrush is working with this. So basically, we are working with that process. Expert expertise, you need to show that you're an expert with the topic, but you also need to find the right audience for showing that expertise. So in this case, we have a tool that is really great, which is display advertising. There we can show you what was the strategy behind your competitors target In. So we can you can see, for example, I don't know, PayPal or eBay, any company that is doing display advertising, what was the target audience for their for their core message we were they were more men or women were between what ages 20,21 or 42. For example, I have colleagues from a company that is called Rex, Rex pecks, those that that is startup they are selling glasses, sunglasses for dogs. Now it's a very, it's a very niche product. But with the help of such tools they were checking, okay, how many people can be interested in such product? Right? You can imagine that there's not too many. But there's a niche for this is specifically in those cities where you have a lot of sun, such as Florida or California where all tax, you can, you can say you have all your audience there. And they just need to be focusing on those people who are interested in pets products, in tourism, and so on. So building the buyer persona, through the analysis that you're doing with their display campaigns, it can be something really easy to find with SEMrush display analytics, for example.
Seth Price
With our remaining time, I'd like to sort of go really appreciate my team's questions. But for me, I would love to sort of help them. So for a team that is helping with local search providers primarily legal. What are sort of what would you say, Give me three to five of sort of core things we're using, we were using a tool, but what do you think are some of the best practices that you see? Not for everybody, because a lot of stuff you're talking about, like, we're not switching practice areas. For most law firms, they're in that practice area, we can't just say, hey, people are interested in that we can do that to get traffic and help with SEO. But if you're saying, Hey, you're doing Injury Law, you're doing criminal law, divorce, whatever it is, what are some of the basic fundamentals you think that should be, you know, people should be doubling down on that are core competencies of your software?
Fernando Angulo
Yeah, so we're talking about local law, that that specifically, you need to check. Of course, if you have only one office, what is your nap, your number, address and phone, that's the base, the basic stuff. But coming from coming from there, you need to have your local keywords in a very good shape. So the name of your city is the main one. So that's the basic one, you need to have the name of your street, you need, you need to have the name of your street with the product or the service that you're offering. But I will go further than that. You need to have three main questions there that I was checking that I believe that it can work for any industry at the beginning of this year. Before Well, after pandemic pandemics before pandemics, I was in Australia with a group of business owners, and they were asking me the same the same question, what do we need to do here in Sydney or in another seaters to be more visible in our local businesses? And one of the one of my answers was very simple but powerful. You need to have three questions. So for all your users, the first question is what is an unspecified specifying your service? So what is I don't know the Boers? Practice it in? I don't know the name of the CD in Miami, right? What is the best practice in Miami? Is it you can have that check? Who is having that already in your local positioning? Why is that? Because it started from such a basic question what it is you can have, or the features snippet, or the people also ask or an image snippet or obj snippet if you're creating a video explaining what is. So the second question will be how to how to use your service how you can request for to hire me, for example, to do that for you how to is the second most important. And the last one is where to that is those three questions are the main ones that you need to have with the name of your service, and then the name of your city and then the name of your free ad you have in that order. I was receiving? I don't know six months ago, three months after after my talk in Australia that most of the business owners in Australia they were having great results because they can they were provided with the exact information to those people that were searching for Then in the local in the local area, and another type of results that they were receiving course they were those sir features, the features snippet. And the people also ask results, which are created for mobile devices, when people are searching for something, and they are on the go, they are going to be searching in your mobile devices, and those and that search giant that is working. So the mobile first indexing that we're going to be carrying on March 100%, is based on question. So so it's a question engine system that you need to fit with questions related to your businesses with your local keywords. So I believe that that will be the most powerful, but basic, but powerful advice here.
Seth Price
Gotcha. So I gotta remain talking, I choose to sort of questions. The first is what case the biggest mistake you see your users, they get the data, and then they have to implement it to make changes. What are some of the one or two biggest mistakes? You see people they get the data, and they miss? How do people misinterpret and misuse the data they get from your tool?
Fernando Angulo
Yes, that's a that's a good question. Because when you have so much that data, you can create a spreadsheet a list of information you need to create, as well, you need to be able to say, what is the meaning of that? And what is the next step? So what do you want you want to do with that data? So for, for instance, our team and our C level, we were taking courses with David Allen, from the author of the of the book, Getting Things Done, which is a great, great material for just analyzing the data that they the data that you have, but activating it with some actions. So data without any actions is just love. George just listened your time. So the next actionable point that you need to create with that data, so your traffic is going down? What are you going to do about your health score is going up? What are you going to do about it? Keep it in the same way. So you so you need to create the next actionable point with all the data that you're extracting? Nobody is this is Amanda Lynch, some of the comments is this is amount of pause that you're building. What are the next step? And why are you doing that? I remember from the beginning of my career here in SEMrush, our CEO, he was always asking why. So we have this report, we have this analysis based on let's say, social sentiment, right? People are replying to us in a positive way. Okay, what is the next point? What are you gonna do with that? I'm gonna do this. Why? So if you can just transform all those questions in actions, you're not going to be having more questions, you're going to be having more actions. So actions are the companion of data.
Seth Price
Awesome. So I've kept you safe. We haven't we I don't think you've gotten in trouble. Your your your legal team is not going to get upset with this interview so far. But I'll push you for what can we can we get one great takeaway, can we make news? What is what is coming next? What don't we know about that you guys are going to be doing that we should be excited about for 2021?
Fernando Angulo
That's a great question. And of course, we right now, we have different teams, we have different tools. I remember I told you that when I started to work for sem rush, we were like 1720 people right now we are more than 1000 employees in the company in different countries, different locations. I'm based in Prague, but for some reason, stay. I'm in Ecuador. So we are all over all over the place. We are thinking to reach of course. So I was saying different type of audiences. We have built a project that is meant for Amazon users that is called similarly. So if you're a publisher, if you're a reseller, you need to create better copies of the content for your product placement, you need to check which copy is working better with AV testing. And we are creating more stuff there. That is a separate drone project powered by cembra. So similarly,
Seth Price
That's awesome. But I want you to come back as a local search market or what do you got for us this year SEO search PPC, something that's going to help people with you know in our in our world of SEO, PPC or local search
Fernando Angulo
Yes for local search of course this year at Two years ago, we are ready to launch a product, a feature that is meant to help with your local listing listings secure in those lessons to have it all in the right place on those listings, so you can manage more than 100 locations. And so we already have there that we tested that in us. And in Australia right now we have indicated the same system is working really well. So as far as can say, right now, we have created a big team that is working specifically on the developing that that project. So for local for local listings for local search, we have an entirely new new team focusing only on that. So for any requests, if you have any request, what he wants to see there, just please send me an email or write to mail. At sem rush.com. We want to see this SEMrush, we hear our users, we really love feedback. The thing that we have right now was meant for local businesses, not only in the terms that you have on your location secure or in terms that okay, this is working with your with your nap, you have your local keyword secure, when you are going to be receiving any search feature, we have alarms already in our tracking position. So you can say, hey, I have this new local local park position and right, so you will have all that power. But if you want to see any more of our that we are happy to hear.
Seth Price
Well, we are big fans. And my I think my guys probably will not use the generic email but they'll stalk your cell phone and send you a request in the middle of the night. But we are thrilled to have you here and excited to watch what happens this year. Hopefully have you back in the future discuss improvements to the software.
Fernando Angulo
Fantastic. I will be happy to help. You can find me on LinkedIn and social network at Fernando Angulo. We don't have any other Fernando Angulo, so just find me on Twitter, LinkedIn. I'm all yours.
Seth Price
Thank you so much. Have a have a great day for Fernando.
Fernando Angulo
Thank you said. Thanks for having me here. Bye.
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