SEO: What you need to know about Search Engine Optimization w/ Charley Karpiuk

If you know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but aren’t sure where to get started, then this episode is for you.

Charley’s experience at Conde Nast, Google, and a number of start-ups has given him an insight into how SEO can be used to fuel the growth for brands and businesses. And in this conversation, he explains the four pillars of SEO that he considers whenbuilding a strategy, and how he approaches each one.

We also talk about when and how to find an agency or freelancer to optimize your search engine program; and which metrics will help to make that successful. And Charley shares some of the resources he uses to stay up-to-date on the ever-changing SEO landscape.

Key Takeaways:

• Brand credibility is an important backdrop to your SEO program
• The four fundamental pillars of SEO are on-page content, backlinks, technical optimization, and user experience.
• Quality on-page content that is valuable and useful to users is the biggest driver of success in SEO.
• Backlinks from authoritative websites indicate credibility and improve search engine rankings.
• SEO takes time, and anyone promising overnight success should be viewed with caution.

Connect with Charley on LinkedIn here.

Resources and tools Charley mentioned:

Search Engine Journal
The Moz Blog
John Mueller on the Google Search Central Blog
AHRefs
SEMRush

Timestamps:

02:00  Definition of SEO and its importance for businesses
03:00  Reasons to invest in SEO: increased traffic, cost-effectiveness, brand credibility
04:30  Importance of brand credibility
08:15  The four fundamental pillars of SEO: on-page content, backlinks, technical aspects, and user experience
09:00  The importance of high-quality on-page content
11:30  Organic search, SEO and Search Engine Marketing
13:30  Resources to learn about SEO
17:00  Finding the right agency and working effectively with them
24:30  Talking more about backlinks
27:00  The switch to Google Analytics 4

Transcript

Steve Cummins: Today I'm joined again by Charley Karpiuk, who was the guest on the very first episode of The Marketing Mix. This time we are going to focus in on one area of Charley's particular expertise, which is SEO, or search engine optimization. Charley, thanks for coming back to the Marketing Mix.

Charley Karpiuk: It's a pleasure to be here, Steve, always.

Steve Cummins: We'll make this a recurring spot. I think we'll have you come back every two or three months! Let's start off easy here. So for those who have heard the term SEO, but aren't really sure what it means let's start by explaining what we as marketers mean when we talk about SEO 

Charley Karpiuk: 

So, yes SEO can be a bit of an enigma for some, but at the end of the day, it's -  think of it as making your website more attractive to Google. So when someone searches for a topic related to your site, your business, your services, your website will appear near to the top of that search or at the top.

There's lots of things that go into that, but that is it. At the end of the day, it makes your website show up before other websites. That's it in a nutshell. 

Steve Cummins: So we've agreed on what SEO means and  the boundaries of it. For founders and for business owners, they have a lot of places they can spend their, their time and their money. We all know there's a lot of different parts to marketing. How would you convince a founder that SEO is one of those places to invest some of their resources? 

Charley Karpiuk: So it really does depend on the business.

With that said, the reasons why you would want to invest in SEO is of course increased traffic. If there's more people searching for things related to your website or your business and more people are coming in by your website is coming up first or second, or third or higher up on the rankings, you're going to get more traffic, more people, more eyeballs on your business.

This is great. This is ultimately a very big part of growth marketing. If you don't have people coming to your website, well then they don't know anything about you. So that's number one. A lot of people would also say that SEO is cost effective. It is low cost. You don't have to pay extra money or advertising dollars to make it work. If you have excellent SEO and you are ranking you will continually have people clicking and coming to your site.

It depends on how much money you put into it. It is often considered like free traffic, but we all know that consultants and specialists to set it up properly are not free. 

Another piece is brand credibility. I think that this is a really important piece, especially for, well, all businesses is the higher you rank for specific key terms or phrases, generally the more trust a consumer or a buyer or someone researching you is going to feel.

And that's a really big piece. So, yeah, brand credibility is a big part of this. 

If your website is set up properly and by that I mean has a good user experience, this actually does come into SEO, and we can go into the main pillars of SEO momentarily, but it's not just key words. It's also the entire experience on the website. Google, Bing, other search engines do look at this and once a user actually gets there, are they getting the information that they need in a good way. You know page upload speeds, things of that nature do have an effect on SEO and ranking.

So better user experience will go a long way there, and that also adds to why trust in a brand as well. 

So all of those reasons would be something that I would try to share with someone like a CEO who is planning on investing into SEO,

Steve Cummins: You know, a lot of people think about it in terms of, oh, I need to get more people to my website. But the credibility is a large part of it as well, right? How often have we gone to a website and you look at it and the experience is horrible, it looks outdated, and you just bounce, right?

So it's not just about getting people to the site, it's about making sure they stick there once they're there. 

One of the things you said when we were talking about how do you convince somebody to do this? You talk about getting the foundations right you know, getting the structure right. So do you think of this in terms of if you're going to take SEO seriously, you have to build a new website from scratch, or is it something where you can dig under the hood and go back and improve or fix an older website?

Charley Karpiuk: Great question. It's great because it's not that easy to answer. There's a lot of things going in here. It really depends if, if you were using something like Squarespace to start off, something, not so technical. Then 

Steve Cummins: Squarespace being one of the off the shelf templated websites.

Charley Karpiuk: And no code or minimal code a thing. Then you're probably looking at a full rewrite if you really want to get serious with it. Now interestingly enough, there's been recent discussions about Wix and WordPress. A lot of SEO experts are big on WordPress because they have the control to really optimize all of the things that need to be done. Whereas Wix and has put in a lot of investment into their platform to allow for similar levels of customization for SEP. So with that said, it does depend on what you have. I think if you're using WordPress, you can oftentimes go in and optimize the meta tags, the content, the structure to be much better. 

It's important to understand the fundamental pillars of SEO before really getting into SEO, or start investing in it. And you know, really quickly what those are or how I see them is there's on-page content which a lot of people know most about where they have keywords that are in in the content.

And ultimately that's going to be one of the biggest factors that ranks on your SERP, your search engine ranking. The next piece is backlinks and domain authority. So backlinks would be other websites that have authority, that are established, that have good rankings in their own Domain if they link back to your websites, that's going to give you what we call link juice.

You want good link juice. So there's two pieces. The third piece is the technical aspect. This is your meta tags, your descriptions, all of the information that Google search is going to read on your website and make it easier for it to understand what the content is about and who it should be for.

Then the fourth and final piece, I think which I had mentioned before, is the experience. And this also goes into a whole other piece in your business and you need to think about things holistically. You can't just look at SEO and drive traffic. It's great if you have traffic, but if you're not converting that traffic, There's an experience shortfall 

What's the point of driving this traffic? So user experience is another big piece. So with those four fundamental pieces, understanding that and how things tie together setting up a solid foundation for that is going to be pretty important. 

Steve Cummins 

If we look at these four elements, the on-page content, the back links, the technical, and then the experience, is there an area if you only have the capability to focus on one, is the one of those that you would recommend people go after first?

Or do you feel like you have to hit all of them? 

Charley Karpiuk: 

You really should hit all of them to a degree. I do believe that having on quality on-page content that is valuable and useful to people is going to be the biggest bang for your buck. So even if they aren't coming to your website through organic search, if they come through an email, if they come through paid advertisement, if they're just searching around, if that content is high quality and useful and valuable to a user, a viewer or potential customer, this is going to be the biggest bang for your buck across the board.

So certainly looking at that on-page content and really having a content strategy behind that and your business and understanding your audience again, all of these things come together. You can't just look at SEO in and of itself.

Steve Cummins: So when you refer to organic search, that means basically somebody types a query into a search engine and it drives them to the website. Can you talk about the different types of search traffic.

Charley Karpiuk: So there's SEM and there's SEO. SEM is search engine marketing. This would be Google search ads specifically. So now SEO is where somebody searches a query, and again, your website ranks amongst many other websites. Search engine marketing is a paid advertisement and oftentimes, I mean it, most people have seen this, some people don't recognize it, but at the top of many search results are going to be quote unquote sponsored websites.

They may not exactly rank as high as yours or others, but they will be put at the top because they're paying for it. It is an advertisement spot. 

Steve Cummins: So organic is effectively unpaid traffic that you get and, and so you're spending the money upfront on SEO to make your website more attractive so that Google or Bing sends people there without you having to pay for it

Charley Karpiuk:. Yes. And again the higher you rank, that brand credibility is a big piece. A lot of people do see those ads at the top as ads and they'll just go ahead and skip it. I think that that's a really big and important aspect to mention here. 

Steve Cummins: So if I look at the foundational pieces. On-page content, we could, and we probably should have a whole podcast just talking about that. Because that ties into the whole idea of content marketing.

Let's think about the technical aspect though. Because I think that can be the scary part of search engine optimization. If you've never logged into Google Analytics before the first time you do it, you get this dashboard, you see all of these reports and numbers and metrics, and it can be overwhelming.

How would you recommend somebody get started with that? Maybe you can even talk through some of the basic concepts that you should get familiar with, because we know with all these things, It's the 80 20, right? There's probably a few things that you can pay attention to from the technical aspect that are going to have the biggest impact,

Charley Karpiuk: The best way to get started with SEO, I think is do a little research, you know read a little bit. I read the search engine journal, that's probably one of my favorites.

Moz is fantastic. And also following John Mueller from Google is somebody you're definitely going to want to follow. Or, or at least if you're really delving into it and understand or at least begin to understand the things that are happening and changing and things are changing really quickly.

Besides doing your research understanding your business and doing keyword research on understand what terms your potential customers might use to find the products and services you have. I think that this market research is absolutely critical. So that's something you should do anyway before even delving in or even thinking about SEO.

But there's lots of tools. Google has their own tools. There's SEM Rush, there's tons lots of them. AHRefs is another one. But you can use that and look into understanding that. And that's going to help you not just with planning, but it'll also allow you to understand more about what content you should create.

It should also help you out with the technical aspect of what key words are most important for a machine to read and then understand and make sure that it's good for the, any specific searcher. 

Steve Cummins: I think for a lot of people they would say, well, the way I do keyword research is I go talk to my customers and I say, Hey, how did you, how did you find out about us? Or what do you search for when you're looking for this? Why would you use a tool like AHRefs or SEMrush instead of just going and talking to people? 

Charley Karpiuk: Well, talking to people is a really good way to get started. So that is a very good way. When we look at SEO and the tools that we use, we can see exactly how many people, or at least generalizations of how many people are searching for specific terms.

You can then see how many people are. Currently using those terms and where they are ranking. So you can see the competitiveness of specific terms. 

So you can get a lot of data and make informed decisions on where to put your resources and energy and time into what area or what content what piece needs to be optimized first. That's, that makes sense. 

Steve Cummins: Talking people gets you started and then you can dig in deeper and get some stats to, to back it up.

So you got keyword research. Great place to start. Once you start talking to agencies or, or experts on this, they'll start talking to you about page load times and meta tags and all sorts of behind the scenes stuff. How important is that and is that something that people can handle themselves or does that get into the weeds pretty quickly?

Charley Karpiuk:

All of those things get really in the weeds, but the most important thing is to find an agency or a specialist that understands or can quickly understand, hopefully has actually experience in your domain and can assist and take the planning and research that you've done.

Then create a strategy from that. And I think seeing their case studies, their testimonials is going to be critical. Not just somebody says, oh yeah, I do SEO. A little bit of proof and a good SEO specialist is certainly going to be in the weeds in the data and be able to share that with you.

They might not be able to share all of the insights because their clients have NDAs, et cetera. But they can at least show the impact. So when you're looking for an agency, a good SEO agency or consultant, they should be able to speak to that and hopefully understand your business.

I think that that's also a really important piece. You might have an SEO specialist who's worked only in e-commerce and you're a B2B company that has nine month sales cycles, and that's going to be wildly different. 

Steve Cummins: When you're talking about background, I think sales is an important one to look at.

I don't think you have to get too narrow into the industry, but it's more the type of customer and the type of purchase cycle that makes sense. So then the other part of it is if you are hiring an expert in this, how do you decide that this person actually knows what they're talking about?

Any golden questions you have to really dial in on their expertise? 

Charley Karpiuk: I think understanding their process is going to be key and whether or not it really works for you. If they do talk a lot about learning about your customers then I think that's a really good sign. They should be able to speak your language and bubble it up to a C-level you know, explanation.

So that'll be a big piece. And they should also talk about how they measure success. If they don't really touch on those, then I mean, I don't know if I'd call them red flags, but I would definitely look deeper. 

Steve Cummins:, so let's say you've, you've picked your agency. Then you actually start working with them. You touched on a couple of things that piqued my interest. I had an experience a few years ago. I came into a company that had been spending a lot of money with an SEO agency who was also doing PPC or paid ads with them as well.

They were spending a lot of money for the ads, but they were also spending a lot of money on a monthly fee to manage all of this and, when I sat down with them and went through their dashboards and their metrics, it didn't add up. A lot of it was vanity metrics, so they were driving activity that made them look good so they could have a great monthly report, but didn't really link to the activities that would drive revenue for that company. So in that particular instance, it was getting people to book a demo that was the main right revenue trigger, if you will. So let's say you've gone out, you found the right agency. Any tips on how to work with them in such a way that you get the best out of them and, and in the extreme case, to avoid getting ripped off by them.

Charley Karpiuk: I think first of all, be clear about what the goals are. I think that's start there, it goes beyond page views, right? They could be generating poor quality traffic and that's you know, not necessarily what you want.

At the same time, they would then argue that well we're generating the traffic. You are not converting it. So now this is a shared domain. I think that this is an important piece or often a shared domain, what's on the page and how the site is structured and does it link to does it bring them on a journey to the next piece?

They might, you know be bringing a lot of people that are interested in one small part of your business but that's not your core business. But you want them to see a, a flow of where they go from there and they should be able to start to connect those dots and share that with you, and certainly bring suggestions on how to optimize that.

I think if they don't, then. Then you, you don't really have a great agency. 

So never be afraid to jump ship and but I would say give at least six months to nine months to, to see the results in what they can do. It does take time. 

Steve Cummins: I think that's fair. And I see a lot ask for a six month initial contract. And I think that's why, right? Because particularly with a lot of this technical stuff, it does take a while to build up. And I think if you find a good one, they are more of that consulting agency that you're talking about where they'll say, well, look, we're, we're handling the technical stuff. We're getting people to the site. Now here's what we're seeing. Your bounce rate is high. Maybe the quality of the content isn't good. We recommend doing X, Y, Z. I think there are also agencies out there that will do both of that, right? They will do the SEO, but they may also help you generate the content, or at least be an advisory partner as well.

Charley Karpiuk: 

If you don't have a good product market fit, you don't understand your audience that would be a fifth piece that they would have to do to really be successful.

So to be fair to those and understand that all of these things are connected you know, there is a process and they need things from you in order to really do their job right. And I think that good SEO takes time. And anyone who promises overnight success or, you know huge impact in a short amount of time, that's a big red flag.

Steve Cummins: I think the point you're making is a valid one. You really shouldn't be spending money on SEO if you don't have certain basics set up ahead of time, right? So you should have clear messaging. You should already know who your ideal customer is, who your persona is. You know who you're targeting, who you're going after.

Because otherwise you could be spending money on this and driving it in the wrong direction. So you make a good point. Make sure you've got a lot of your strategic stuff set up first before you start investing in this.

The other thing I realized we've skipped by, because I really started pushing you into talking about the technical side of it. We've talked a little bit about content.

We haven't talked about backlinks. So maybe just give us the sixty second view on backlinks. What they are, why they're used for, why you need them. 

Charley Karpiuk: Sure. So I did mention this term called backlink juice. Think of it as a community of friends. And you're known as this guy that can fix any car. And all of these people are referring their friends and family say, Hey, this guy can fix this engine. This guy's perfect. Every time somebody says, ‘this guy is great at x’, think of that as a well-established website pointing a link back to your website. Google recognizes this, and the more you have, the more quote unquote people or websites talking about your website, the better.

Steve Cummins: And the domain authority is basically just a measure of that credibility, right? How much stock somebody's going to put by saying, oh, okay, it's linked to this website. I think this is a high quality website. Therefore, I believe that it's, it's a good reference, 

Thanks for that. So you've already talked a little bit about how you keep up with these things. Some of the sources that you go to. 

Charley Karpiuk: The blogs and forums that I look at Moz, m o z, search Engine Journal, that's my favorite. And of course the Google Webmaster blog. You know, again, I've mentioned John Mueller. Go listen, go to the source. They will tell you exactly how they see things. Now they won't tell you exactly all of the nitty gritty bits because that's highly classified in their world. It's very important that they keep that to themselves. 

Steve Cummins: I'll put links to those in the show notes, and I think it's important to know enough so that when you, if assuming you bring in an agency or, or freelance help, you still need to know enough so that you can ask the right questions and make sure that, that the people you're, you're working with are on top of things.

The other thing that's happened in SEO, and I do not want to get too far in the weeds on this, but I just want to get your opinion on it. Recently Google has changed their analytics suite. So there was this thing called Universal Analytics, which people have been using for a number of years. They just switched over to Google Four or Google Analytics four. Somebody who is not into SEO would come and say, Hey Steve, what do I have to do? What's the difference here? I would tell them, don't worry about it, because it's under the hood. And that if you have an agency, they should just be dealing with it automatically. But you know far more about this than I do.

Is that a fair approach or is this something you would tell people, Hey, you should make sure you're doing x 

Charley Karpiuk: I think for SEO specifically, I think you have the right approach and the right idea about this change from Universal Google Analytics to GA four. Google Analytics four is pretty much the bane of my existence right now. I am not a fan of GA four. 

There's some really interesting improvements. Lots of things to say about that, but at the end of the day, it's not providing me the information that I need. And it's much more difficult to navigate. So if you want to have control over all of your data, then you know, definitely look into some different analytical approaches. First of all, Google Analytics is free. So that, that. That's what you get at this point. Before it was much better. And, and there's all sorts of things that are tied into this and why they've been changing. So without going too deep on that definitely allow for an  SEO agency or specialization team or

Consultant, what have you do their own thing In terms of reporting.

Steve Cummins: I appreciate you running through that with us.

I'm going to hit the high points again because I think this is the critical part. So, so you're telling us for SEO, the four things, the four pillars to look at is on-page content, which is basically making sure you have enough good, interesting, well-written stuff on your website that people want to come there and read it.

You’ve got backlinks, which is basically saying that other well-regarded websites think that your content is good enough to link to. So you have some credibility with that. You have the technical side of it, which is making sure your website's built in the right way and, and basically everything under the hood is working.

And then the customer experience. So when somebody comes to your website it’s good. So if you do all of that perfectly, then you no longer have to worry about SEO. Until they change something the next week in the algorithm!

Charley Karpiuk: Exactly! And yeah, you can set it for a week and then have to change it, set it, forget it until, until next week.

We didn't talk too much about the on-page optimization. This is where the keyword research really comes in what keywords you would want to use and what topics you would want to use. Lots of strategies and different stages, but at the end of the day you will want to use specific terms that are what people are looking for. And it should be on the page that's hence on page content 

Steve Cummins: The idea here is saying if you want somebody to put a search term in like, best place to buy bourbon, then when you send them to that page, you better have that phrase on the website, on that specific page. So it's not just talking about that subject.

 Charley Karpiuk: It should also be in the meta tags, so the technical aspect. It all ties in together and hopefully you've got a bunch of credible bourbon websites pointing back to your website giving you that bourbon link juice

Steve Cummins: So it's a nice way to wrap things up. As you know, I call this the marketing mix because it's the conversation I would have over a cocktail. Now you've already been on here, so we already know what your favorite cocktail is, which was, I believe, some weird, let's say bespoke vodka concoction. Any other favorite drink you’d like to share?

Charley Karpiuk: I think you might be able to see here in the background, I've got a bottle of Angel's Envy bourbon. That is a favorite. I think it is finished in port Casks.

So that is a favorite of mine, although I'm currently not drinking because I'm training for Brazilian Jujitsu tournament in September. So I'm glad that my face is not totally messed up from training today. 

Steve Cummins: Well, Charley, Thanks again. Always a pleasure talking to you and it sounds like we'll have to have you back to dig into some of the details on SEO  all that good stuff in the future.