Join Seth and Will Scott as they discuss paid search, SEO, agency-building, and more. Seth and Will speak to the prevalence of spam in local search and Google’s efforts to validate businesses in paid ads. Will emphasizes the importance of reporting bad listings and shares some of his favorite lessons he has learned over time in the SEO field. Will’s biggest takeaway from 20+ years in SEO? The importance of non-sexy SEO: How do I get locally relevant, non-spammy links? How do I develop content that answers my customers’ questions?
Seth and Will go on to discuss agency-building, speaking on the importance of not putting all of your eggs in one basket and leveraging the power of your team.
Will Scott is CEO and Co-Founder of Search Influence, an online marketing company that provides a holistic approach to Search, Social and Online Advertising.
Join Seth and Will Scott as they discuss paid search, SEO, agency-building, and more. Seth and Will speak to the prevalence of spam in local search and Google’s efforts to validate businesses in paid ads. Will emphasizes the importance of reporting bad listings and shares some of his favorite lessons he has learned over time in the SEO field. Will’s biggest takeaway from 20+ years in SEO? The importance of non-sexy SEO: How do I get locally relevant, non-spammy links? How do I develop content that answers my customers’ questions?
Seth and Will go on to discuss agency-building, speaking on the importance of not putting all of your eggs in one basket and leveraging the power of your team.
Will Scott is CEO and Co-Founder of Search Influence, an online marketing company that provides a holistic approach to Search, Social and Online Advertising.
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
We are thrilled to have Will Scott here, he's the co-founder of search influence. Scott, great to have you.
Will Scott
Thanks, Seth. It's nice to be with you.
Seth Price
Well, look, I've known of you and followed your writings and gotten to talk chat with you at conferences over the years. What what excites you right now in the in the world of search?
Will Scott
You know, I think there's something that we're spending a lot of time thinking about is actually advertising. Oddly enough. We, we have been, we've been working more and more with larger kind of institutional clients, particularly universities and and, and medical facilities. And what we're finding is that, particularly over the last year, when their focus is on on pretty specific lead generation, that deploying ads is a great way to get us there. But as always, you know, I've been I've been doing SEO since 2000. So it's always near and dear to my heart.
Seth Price
It's so funny, because, you know, for us, you know, I come from the legal vertical, that's where we cut our teeth. And we've expanded beyond some degree. But, you know, SEO was my passion first, but obviously, paid search is part of it. And as I opened the agency, Blushark, TV, advertisers would brand as I'm sure your institutional clients to that the advantage. And what we've seen over some of the recent algorithm updates, there's been a huge advantage to those people with brand. I'm curious to know, as you've added paid search to the mix, which, for many of these clients, one of the things we've seen just like brand, bringing branded searches through traffic through the site that paid search, one of those sort of like dirty secrets that Google wouldn't acknowledge for a long time, but the fact that paid search with those clicks coming through in the traffic, they it does have a huge impact positively on search.
Will Scott
Yeah, I think anything you can do, anything you can do to develop brand, is going to be beneficial for search, right? Because the that whole, How do you demonstrate authority, you demonstrate authority by getting people to search for you by name. So to my mind, the the things that we do around brand building, whether that's paid search, or display advertising, are going to have a big impact. You talked about TV, one of the things that we're starting to work with a fair amount is, is OTT and digital display. And we're really excited about the opportunity to be present in those new places where people are starting to engage with content.
Seth Price
Ya know, in the legal space, there's that I'm playing around a lot with the the, the pre roll on YouTube, things like that, you know, the opportunities are huge, you know, for somebody who has been so plugged in writing for surgery, Search Engine Land and other other places over the years. What you know, I know that you've said, Your professed, none, you don't like to chase algorithms changes, and I get that, but what were how have you seen things develop over time brand is certainly a major factor. But when you're working with clients, you know, is it still the fundamentals of content and links? Are there other things that you're sort of finding helps put some, some gasoline in the engine?
Will Scott
Yeah, so I know that I know that this idea is now a few years old, but I was really happy when people started coming out with actual, you know, quantifiable data that indicated that site authority drives local search rankings as well. So behind the spammers who are, you know, stuffing keywords into their names, the strongest sites, when proximity is not the key indicator, seem to win. So as an you know, as somebody who's been doing SEO for 20 years, it's gratifying to me to think that we could do all of the things that we've always done, build good content, optimized for the way that people are searching, and then develop site authority through inbound links, and have that big of an impact throughout the ecosystem. You know, go ahead.
Seth Price
No, I was going to say, you know, and this is a conversation common theme of this of this podcast has been the spam in local search that it's really, and you know, I just presented a PubCon. And in doing so, I thought for a moment that it might have thinned out much of the research we did, you know, just trying to sort of prove certain stuff, not the research we presented, but trying to find some examples right leading up and like finally, but the fact the key word, the power of the keyword and the name, combined with the fact that they really don't have a great protocol for calling out spam It's just one of these incredibly frustrating we you know, you live, you live through the algorithm changes that cleaned out link spam, and made it much, much harder to to play that game. And thankfully for those of us that play the game, the way we do that that was a good thing. What are your thoughts? Do you think that you know that we will see Google get to the point where they, for example, use the green checkmark from their their Google screen process in the three pack or they're going to be, they're going to end up having to move to places to fight spam, because what they're doing right now doesn't seem to work particularly well, on the local search.
Will Scott
Yeah, I think that the, you know, I think that they're trying with things like the trusted providers, with things like local search, as they're trying to get in a place where they really can kind of validate that business. But when it comes to actual, organic, local search, I don't get that it is driving enough. It's not driving, sort of algorithmic intent that that much about it, right? It's a it's a, it's a blip on there. It's a blip on their radar, if I handful of bad actors, even if it's a big handful are are spamming that system, right?
Seth Price
And so, right? It's not it's that's what I'm getting that statistically significant for their macro, but in our little fish in our little fishbowl. It's significant, you know, professional services, it's, it's a cat and mouse game, that's, you know, you don't always feel like you're winning.
Will Scott
And I tell you, I think I'm especially glad that you know, that Jason Brown and some of Joy Hawkins team are spending so much energy identifying this stuff and trying to smack it down. And I do believe that we talked about this when we are looking at local search rankings for clients. One of the things that we do, and I think it is a lot to the credit of the local you crew is, is we look for bad listings, and we try to report that we look for duplicates, we look for spammy stuff, and and just getting that stuff out of the way I think can have a big impact for local search results.
Seth Price
Right, and I put there, two different categories. There's the ones that are completely, you know, created with nothing else, and then they're ones attached to legit sites. And to date, there hasn't been any, you're like, okay, so they take it down. So you do another one, which would it's a joy has been a guest on the show, and we've talked about it, as well as others in the space that do it, it's great that they're able to knock them down. But it's insane that there's an entire industry doing that, and then Google can't start putting some procedures in place to to call that world. Now, again, it take your point, well, will that you know that you have the it's not maybe not statistically significant to the to the larger world as it is, but for these different, very competitive spaces, it's created a cottage industry for reporting stuff, which should frankly, not need that to, to cultivate what, you know, the legitimate results.
Will Scott
Oh, I totally agree. I mean, I think that the, you know, it shouldn't exist, but the unfortunate reality is it does exist. And, and, you know, Google, except maybe in Australia, it big to take anybody else's input. And so so for me, I'm, you know, I, over the last few years, I've adopted a meditation practice. And so I do my best to try to identify those things that I can actually have an impact on and those that I can't. And so what I can have an impact on, you know, reporting the spam, cleaning up duplicates, but but I don't have nearly enough Google stock in my portfolio, that they're going to listen to me when it comes to their internal.
Seth Price
So what you're what you're telling me is the triathlons didn't get you to that happy place, and you had to add meditation on top of that, to make it to get you to the zen place.
Will Scott
Anything we can do, right? It's, it's all but I've been having this and I have to say, you know, we're we're recording this. Only a day or so after our industry learned that we lost somebody, a lot of people felt really fondly about Hamlet Batista to COVID. And, and so I've not to get all melancholy here. But I've been thinking about this, that there's all of these, there's all of these things, which you think should be, you know, transformative. Right? Like, seven and a half years ago, I had a heart attack, which is what started me on the triathlon road. And as you may remember from some early local you events, I've had some anger management issues from time to time. So all that taken together. You know, that that transformation I think that we're looking for, we're on any one of these events. It doesn't come, right. it's a trigger, It's a trigger to hopefully, better action. And I think that to me, to me is the single biggest lesson we can take away in work and in life is except the things you cannot change and work on those that you can, you know...
Seth Price
Wise words, I gotta just say physically watching you hear you, you seem like a different person leaves him hat you seem like it is, you know, with with age comes comes wisdom. So it's, it's a cool to see, to see you over the years, it seems like you're in a great place now. So congrats on whatever you are doing.
Will Scott
I really wish I'd gotten started 20 years earlier, but you know, don't we all?
Seth Price
So my question is, based on this, this corporate work that you're doing these, what I call the macro world, what are some of the things the lessons you've learned working with these larger organizations that you think are could trickle down to us? Who are, you know, with, I'll call the micro world with local search, etc? are there any lessons that you any truisms or things you've picked up that you think are would be helpful down the food chain?
Will Scott
I am forever amazed at the extent to which people don't know the things that we think are common knowledge. Right. So just to give you, you know, my example that I often go to his back in 2006, before there was local search, you know, when local search was, was a well localized title tag, we were approached by folks in the plastic surgery industry, and I said, You got to be kidding me, there's no room for anybody to do work in this in this area, right, it's got to be completely saturated. And so we spent the next five years just killing it in plastic surgery. So, so to my mind, a lot of the things that we take for granted are, are still really not understood even by folks and we think should be relatively savvy marketers. A great example of that is canonicalization and duplicate content, right? It's something we've been talking about for a decade, you know, on stages and, and in the bar is after the conference has ended. But but it is still a huge deal. We have, we work with a department, a couple of departments, actually at Tulane University, who is just about four blocks out my back door. And they are you know, they have a big, a big Master Site. And then each of the departments have their own individual silos. So in our case, it's sofa dot two lane.edu SLPA for school professional advancement. And, and when we started working with them, there were at least three prior iterations of that domain. Because SOPA was a new name to them, when we started working with them, there were three prior iterations of that domain name, and a development site hanging out there. And so to us, it's just simplicity itself, to look for duplicate versions of the site and get rid of them. But it just amazed me that this this organization that spends millions of dollars a year on their digital product, isn't thinking about this. Right? So, to me, if I'm, if I'm talking to, if I'm talking to other marketers, you know, a lot of times they'll say, these are things everybody should know. Right? And I say, Yeah, sure, there are things everybody should know. But the reality is, they don't and just because we've been talking about it for the last decade, doesn't mean that it's made its way over there. And I think it's a it's important just not to discount things because we've been talking about them as everybody knows this and it's not worth having that conversation with prospective customers.
Seth Price
You know, I just I get it more than you can believe I you know, for I've always spoken within the legal conference and and by the way, my the first one back in September is going to be in New Orleans. So hopefully get to a nice person and we'll all be inoculated etc, by then. But, you know, one of the things that I prepared for PubCon presentation was as it can be for many years watching you from you know, from the audience, you know, that that there was always this idea of the to me it was it was the it was a huge sort of overcome and present there I thought that I had to come at the highest possible level because I was thinking of you as my audience member Yeah. And what I realized when I saw because I did you know, I spent a lot of time preparing this the presentation got slotted as advanced and I realized that like the target is not is not you, and that is like I've always thought of it as because to me PubCon has always been a out the people in the hallways. And you've mentioned, literally, I've been to those drinks talking about canonicalization that you really, that the people that you end up selling into, especially when you're even with these multimillion dollar operations, that you're very often bring fundamentals to the execution, not the you know, you're saying when I started the question saying, hey, it's the fundamentals of high quality content, authoritative links, the site structure and so that the Googlebot can know what's there not confused, you're, you're you're basically it comes full circle to, hey, just get the basics, right, which is not nothing, you know, especially at scale. And that, you know, executing on that. And that's ironically, something that I've taken a hit for sometimes. And that, well, it's not, you're not being sexy, I mean, there was a period where geofencing was the rage. And it's like, you know, and the guys who were yodel salespeople were now you know, selling geofencing, look, it may get there, maybe you won't be the first guy who figures it out, but just get localized content, a localized links, you're going to do well, when this is right, like Elon says, everybody's going to move into it, you might lose money for the first month not being ahead of the curve. But the fundamentals are going to work nine times out of 10 compared to whatever the the sort of exciting, bright lights are.
Will Scott
Yeah, it's, you know, it's funny, and, and I, and we come across these examples all the time. So, you know, for this for this client, at Tulane, they were working with somebody else who had built a blog on a separate domain, completely separate domain, I remember what it is. But we talked to them for over a year, and finally convinced them to move that onto their domain into a subdirectory. Right? Not even a sub domain.
Seth Price
I spent much of my day with that exact discussion with people.
Will Scott
Yeah, I mean, because because there's all these, there's all these blog sites out on in your world find law, Trulia, etc, right. And if you can just get them moved on to the master domain.
Seth Price
We all actually we let find law do its own thing. So we should be against it. But yes, point taken.
Will Scott
The the so this, this blog site, we moved it from a unique domain, into a subdirectory. And, and a year later, we 890% increase in traffic.
Seth Price
You're preaching to the choir here, there's a guy in the in the legal space, who sells blogs, and he's always like, it has to be a separate blog, you're not a real lawyer, if you don't have a separate blog, I'll stop the insanity. Again, you can have both, you're already have a business, the fact that it's on a law firm site versus a standalone blog, if the content is good, you're gonna get your traffic. And when you do that one two punch of the authoritative site and your case and edu, rather than saying, Hey, we're gonna try to like, make create it from scratch, when you get that juice coming down from this sub sub folder, just incredible...
Will Scott
Well, but let's take that idea and bring it down to the local level, right? Which is what do we learn there, we learned that an authoritative site is going to have much more impact regardless of what you do to it. Right? So basic blocking and tackling of SEO, which is bring the bring the third party blog onto your own site. And if it's an authoritative site, bing, bang, boom, you're going to have tremendous results, right? I'm not saying that that 890% increase in traffic didn't have something to do with our brilliance. But it was at the end of the day, just know
Seth Price
It's your strategy, which is, which is not, you're not gonna You're nobody's saying, Hey, you're crazy. It's a best practice the, you know, the subdomain didn't get those results. And there are exceptions to every rule. There are people in legal that use blogs as a link wheel that worked really, really well for many years. And if it works, God bless. But you know, what you're saying is we can we I go to the conference, I speak to people I my own portfolio, this is the best practice. And when you did it, shockingly, it worked.
Will Scott
Right. But so taking that back again, to the very local level, and where we started with this, this idea that the basic blocking and tackling of SEO benefits local, right? So what did we what did we have as a as a given as an engineering constraint, we had an authoritative site that we could work with it. Now, if I'm a, you know, if I'm a local practitioner, whether I'm a a law firm, a doctor or a roofer, the first thing I need to do is make sure that my site has some semblance of authority, which thankfully, in a local context, it's a lot easier. So so at that point, you're back to your back to non sexy SEO, how do I get some links that are locally relevant, that aren't spammy? How do I develop content that's actually going to speak to the questions that my customers are asking? Right. And so so that's what I, after 20 years in SEO and you know, 25 years working online, I love the fact that we can still have the same conversations and still have some impact.
Seth Price
Talk to me about the We have an agency, I'm the accidental agency owner, you know, I was an end user that loved that so much and geeked out and said, I can do it better than than others and started my vertical. What, you know, what are some of the sort of things that you've seen as an agency that you've developed in order to help scale? Your your knowledge and brilliance? Yeah, I think that's a you know...
Will Scott
It's it's a tough question, especially right now, right? Because I think that we, I think that we've, we've we've had, you know, we've had 13 out of 15 great years, right. The last year, obviously, I think nobody was, Nobody's expecting that. And it turned out that we were a little bit, we were a little bit over invested in tourism, hospitality clients, right. So last year was not the year to be an agency owner.
Seth Price
A least on that side of the fence. Right?
Will Scott
You know, the good news is that it wasn't 100% of our portfolio, but it was a pretty big chunk. A couple of years. Prior to that we had, we had a big partner who was reselling, for us who decided to take all our stuff in house. And since they had an entire floor full of lawyers at One World Trade, there wasn't a lot that we could do about it. But the lesson for us there was about client concentration. Right. And and I think both of these lessons are, are similar, which is, in that case, we had half of our business with a single client. And, and in 2020, we had about 40% of our business in an industry, right. And I don't think any of us could have foreseen something that would have taken out an entire industry like it did. But shockingly enough, as the year went on, we started to resign, we started to bring back some of those, particularly the the kind of destination clients, and also added some who were opening new businesses, believe it or not, in hospitality, during a global pandemic. But I think that the, you know, if you if I was to walk down, what are the you know, what are the handful of lessons that I think anybody who, who is thinking about starting an agency, or who is building an agency right now should consider? They are, you know, first and foremost, don't put all your eggs in one basket, right? Because because you can, you, if you if you're not good at managing cash, and you have all of your eggs in one basket, you're going to be looking for a job, right. The second is, the second is really leverage the power of your team, whether it's internal or external, right. I don't know, nearly as much as we know. And, and to my mind, the, the greatest benefit that I've gotten as an agency owner has been my interactions with other agency owners, and with other folks who are in the space.I will go to my grave, thankful that I had the benefit of people like Mike Blumenthal, and David, and, and everybody else who has been, you know, supportive of our process. The third is, and this is this is really, this is really important. And only something that I've learned over the last few years is, forget about ego. There's, there's, there's nothing, there's nothing proprietary, it's just execution. Right? So so so there's not, there's no secret sauce, it's just doing the work. I could, I could open up our internal training documentation, and let some aspiring entrepreneur get in there and digest 100% of it. And if they don't execute, then then what is there, which is..
Seth Price
What allows you to speak at conferences and share so much in that you're not really it's the execution of the work?
Will Scott
Yeah, I mean, if you don't have if you don't have the commitment to developing processes, and people and all the knowledge in the world isn't going to help you. And that's it. So I think those are probably a good, you know, a good starting point. But the fourth so aren't, you know, our, our company values spelled charged. And the H is for hungry and hungry for us is the constant acquisition of new knowledge. Because even though 80% is the same as it was 20 years ago, there's that 20% That if you can continue to grow and learn. And as we're adding new members to the team who don't have those 20 years of experience, they have to gain it. That that hungry piece the constant acquisition of knowledge is is I think critical in any industry, but especially so in ours.
Seth Price
You know, in our remaining time, one of the things I love talking and the people you know, who've seen everything. You know, you've spoken on stage, you've heard, you've heard what the other experts are out there. What are some of the things that you hear spoken, that you use sort of common myths that are out there that get perpetrated? You see, you know, with your lab, you see the results when you try things? Are there any things that are out there that people think of as, as as practices that they should be doing? But you're like, yeah, it doesn't, this isn't. And I'll give you an example, I see that a lot of people in the local space, have a GEO tagging photos is the be all and end all? You know, are there any things like that that are professed, but you sort of you call BS on?
Will Scott
Yeah, I always I always try to help people understand, you know, there's people refer to a duplicate content penalty. Right. And, and I try to help them understand it's not, it's not that it's a duplicate content penalty. It's just that the cardinal rule of SEO is don't confuse Google. Right? If you confuse Google, they're going to make decisions in a way that you don't want them to. And so the, you know, we, we had a guy, and this is, man, this is probably maybe 2008, who was a Yahoo seller. And when, you know, literally, he had, so now help people build out their Amazon shopping cart in 2008. It was Yahoo that people were doing that on. And, and he had a lot of content that was getting scraped by other sites. And and I said to him, you don't have a content problem, you have a link building problem. Because through good link building, you can drive your site authority, and you can especially affect the authority of this individual pages. And and that is going to be the thing that, you know, that helps you help Google understand that you really are the authoritative source for this content. Interest. That's a that's a big one. I think, you know, the another one that I think is, is people are starting to move away from but that I think is still really important, is thinking about thinking about your content. From Google's perspective, that site structure still does really matter. Going back to some of those, Greg Gifford did a great thing a few years back on content silos. And I think that there's still real learning there. And and new SEOs and particularly marketers who are who are tasked with SEO, who didn't grow up in it, tend to believe that Google is omnipotent and omniscient, right? And, and our job as marketers is to feed Google the information in the most digestible possible way, so that we don't run the risk of confusing. And this is where you know, people people think Sitemaps no longer have value Sitemaps still add huge value. Because they can they can be especially if they're linked from every single page, they start the crawl they're there the thing that helps Google understand what is it that's most important than.
Seth Price
Like a local space that you're you're preaching to the choir, that that's, it's the silos are everything, and it's how do you the biggest debates we have internally are, you know, when you have two terms, let's say of a criminal defense lawyer, and you have a criminal term that you want, that's a money term and a DUI term? Do you put them both on the homepage, you put a DUI page on the second page of your DUI on the homepage, and it's DUI landing page, will you confuse Google and you go, you can, you know, I would have a lot more hair, if I didn't have to process through how, you know, if you want the leverage of the homepage, at the same time, you know, the secondary page can can do that. But then if you try it, then you sort of try to hedge and get both, and that becomes problematic. So those are real issues that we struggle with on the local level.
Will Scott
The other one that I think is that people are still kind of coming to grips with is that blogging for its own sake, probably doesn't have any value anymore. Right? That that there are as you know, we're guilty of it too, or we'll publish a couple of blog posts a month for our client. But but as a, the idea that frequency of publication is going to drive significant value, I think is is coming to an end.
Seth Price
Or is it good meaning there, there are different things you can do something we struggle with is as sites mature, that updating content rather than just adding pages of content. You have over a six year period, you may have the structure of content that you need. Now the question is can you consider it like almost like a building that's constantly a bridge that's constantly being painted as soon as they finish in one and they started the other? Read, you know that that to me there you can be taking that 1000 Word page and making it 1500 words and adding new, you know, adding new differentiators adding video, you know, adding picture, whatever it is that you're improving, not just building volume for the sake of volume.
Will Scott
Yeah, I think that's definitely I think it's definitely true. And I think that the, the thing that really kind of interests me right this second is, is this idea of a content gap analysis, right? Like, when you look at, particularly for bigger terms, even some local terms, if they're really competitive, I think looking at the gap between where you are and where the leaders in the SERPs are, there's a couple of things that it can do for you, you no one is it might show you the content isn't the thing that's going to win written word content, it might show you that it's got to be video, or it's got to be something else. But what we're learning more and more is that when we look for the gaps, even though we've got the same words, we're not using enough of them. So to your point, it used to be good enough to put up a 500 word page on a topic and have it rank well. But now for some of the really, sort of higher head terms, you might be writing three to 5000 words, which is, you know, that's six months of your three to 500 word blogging budget, right, is to produce that, that really high quality content.
Seth Price
And blah blah, I get it in our space, the the we have to put a large budget towards the content that it's that you know, that you know, that has been one of the things we've seen paid pay huge dividends, any final words of sort of advice out there, you've given us a lot of nuggets, a lot of good stuff, a lot of good themes, but what any parting words to the you know, SEOs who are aspiring that, you know, what, 2021, what would you, you know, where would you turn your attention?
Will Scott
I, you know, I and maybe maybe it's my advancing years, but but I'm gonna say keep it simple. To you know, start, start with the basics, and make sure that you've got those covered, before you start getting too concerned about the next algorithm update, or, you know, this or that social channel that's coming up as an opportunity to drive tons of business, the reality is, the vast majority of business that's going to come through any website is going to start at Google. And if you can do the things that are going to fit are going to make you attractive, they're great. And if you can't win fast enough with that, by some ads until you get there, and you'll get what you need. But but you know, keep it simple, and and life is a lot easier.
Seth Price
Well, that that was awesome. You know, great, great words, thank you so much for your time here. I can't wait till we get to see you in person and get to, you know, sit there and talk talk late night about the interesting things that are the nuances Beyond The Beyond the basics, but I'm with you just executing on the basics really does. For most people get them most of the way where they need to be
Will Scott
And I always tell my team, you know, just if it's if it's new to them, it's news, right? Just because you've known it forever, doesn't mean that the client you're talking to has that same level of understanding. And it's our job to bring them there. So don't Don't worry that it feels cliche. Give them the information, and hopefully they'll understand that, that it's going to have a positive benefit.
Seth Price
Well, thank, thank you so much. Can't wait to see you in person.
Will Scott
Thank you, Seth. Appreciate you asking me to do this.
BluShark Digital
Absolutely. Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital's website.