Welcome to another in-search SEO podcast interview session. Today we have with us a living legend. He is the co-author of The Art of SEO, among many other titles. He is the host of not one but two marketing podcasts. He is a prolific SEO speaker. He is Stephan Spencer.

Hey, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

M: Absolutely, my pleasure. So, you are a fascinating person to me. You’ve been around the SEO industry since its infancy. At the same time, you have this sort of wonderful inner balance and harmony to you. And I’m just wondering, before we get started with the SEO stuff, if you could sort of speak to how all of that came about, both professionally and personally.

Yeah, great question. So I was going through a dark time in my life in 2009. I was going through a divorce. I’ve been in the SEO industry for a while. By then, I’d spoken at a lot of conferences and other stuff since the 80s. And I just was not feeling super resourceful. Several friends, all within a two or three-week time period, told me to go to a Tony Robbins event.

I’m like, “Who, what,” but yeah, they, I thought this was not a coincidence because three different people who don’t know each other are all telling me to go to some Tony Robbins event. I thought he was just some infomercial guy, but I was like, all right, I’ll give it a shot. And that started my whole journey of personal transformation. I did essentially a complete life reboot, and over the course of the next 10 months, I became unrecognizable from the guy I was previously. And to the point, to the extreme that I would show up at SEO conferences, and people wouldn’t recognize me anymore. That was pretty cool.

M: That has to be a weird feeling.

It was entertaining. It was kind of weird, but it was fun. I remember being at SMX East in 2010, and nobody recognized me. I would join a group of people who are already talking, and I’d just be listening to them, and they wouldn’t know who I was until like five minutes into it, and I let them know. So it was pretty fun. But that physical transformation was just a small part of the overall transformation because then, a couple of years later, I went to India on a Tony Robbins Platinum Partner trip. I joined his high-level program, very expensive but totally worth it. I ended up meeting my wife through the platinum partnership.

M: Well, that is totally worth it.

Totally worth it. I also got a spiritual awakening from the platinum partnership experience as well. So that was on a trip to India that we took, and it was a Monk who touched me on the head and gave me what they call a Deeksha, an Oneness blessing. And it was almost like an out-of-body experience. It’s kind of, kind of impossible to really describe, but I felt this deep sense of connection and calm, and it explained afterward amongst that the divine is an experience, not a belief. So I totally get that now. And I went outside shortly after. I remember seeing the grass and the trees and everything.

And everything was so brilliant green, like a cartoon technicolor green. It was just the most bizarre but beautiful thing. And that started a whole spiritual transformation for me. And so I’m big into Kabbalah now. So, for the other show that you mentioned, I have two marketing pockets. I actually have one marketing podcast, Marketing Speak.

The other one is a personal development, spirituality, and biohacking podcast on productivity, too. So, for that one, I’ve had three Kabbalah episodes. I’ve had one oneness episode with one of the monks from India that, did not the one who did the Disksha on me that got me the spiritual awakening, but one who gave me a different Disksha at another time at the event is just an incredible journey.

And I wanted to share that with a wider audience. So, the podcast was the way to do that. I’m also working on a book. A book about that journey and how we live in a friendly universe as somebody who is a former skeptic and very scientific and not spiritual at all, really agnostic and termed spiritual. That I think will be an interesting book and I interview all these people. For the book, might as well turn those into podcast episodes. So that’s what started the whole podcast called Get Yourself Optimized.

M: Yeah, it’s amazing, I can speak to this a little bit personally, not to the same extent as you, but that inner transformation, and it sort of hits you from nowhere, somewhere like a bolt of lightning almost, the way I’ll describe it personally, where you see something very clearly and something really meaningful, and your whole way of thinking can actually change. It’s a really cool experience if you haven’t experienced it yourself. I wanna, from that, let’s get into something a little bit more mundane. The succeeding at SEO at scale, or I’ll call it sort of the forgotten essence of SEO at scale because I have a million questions I want to ask you, but I’ve boiled them down to just a few. But before we get started, I always try to make sure that my audience is up to speed and on the same page. When we speak of SEO at scale, what do we generally mean by that?

Well, if you have, let’s say, more than a million pages to your site, or if you have, numerous sites in your portfolio, or you’re in the business of, let’s say, acquiring sites or online businesses or brokering them, or you’re a VC or some sort of private equity firm type company that It works with portfolio companies and those portfolio companies are running on different platforms and some are larger and some are smaller sites and so forth and you want to roll out SEO across more than just a small number of pages that you just don’t have the ability to touch each page individually by, you know, human, SEOs. It’s just, there’s no scale to be able to do that. That’s the kind of issue that, I think, is very interesting to solve.

M: Yeah. And there’s so many unique considerations that come about that both on the technical side and I’ll call it more on the holistic side. And I have a lot of questions on, the ladder being that you sort of are this person who has all of this experience in SEO and has a very cool outlook on life at the same time. So I thought maybe I’ll sort of combine the two, the best that I, the best that I can. We’ll see how this works. So one of the things that I always see people discuss when they talk about SEO at scale is, automation and technical considerations, you know, site structure, that sort of things. But I want to go maybe a little bit of a different direction here and talk about, team development.

Because when you’re dealing with a large site, or if you’re managing multiple large sites, if you’re not working in-house, there’s, there needs to be an overarching strategy, as a part of doing SEO at scale, and a major part of that is how you build your, team. To what extent do you think other factors, outside of those technical considerations that we always hear about, or automation, those sort of more holistic things, team building and so forth, where do they fit into succeeding with SEO at scale?

That’s the cornerstone, I would say. One of my clients, for example, owns 1, 800 websites. 

M: Wow.

And they have a big internal team; they work with a number of agencies, a bunch of individual freelancers and companies that aggregate freelancers and stuff. So it’s an interesting problem, and the thing that is, the kind of foundation of success in that kind of scenario has really solid SOPs (Standard operating procedures), even transforming those SOPs from big documents that people only read once or once in a while to something that people operate off of on a daily basis. And that would be to utilize tools like process street and make these that are interactive and the prerequisites or the dependencies are baked into the checklist, right?

So you can do that with process street or sweet process or, you know, there’s, multiple tools that allow you to do that, but it makes the SOP into something that’s more of a living document. You need to think about who is on the team and who needs to be on the team. What the success metrics are for each team member, what the handoffs are, where that person’s job ends and the next person’s job begins. What are their roles and responsibilities. And those are different things. Roles versus responsibilities actually getting their buy in and maybe even get them to write up their roles, responsibilities, success metrics, and handoffs, themselves. And then you provide guidance on that. And you also do, values determination process.

I like using Dr. Demartini‘s, process for that. And he’s got an online tool on Dr.Demartini.com for determining your values hierarchy. So let’s say that you know that somebody has, highest value around family. Right, or their highest value is, their church or their religion or their highest value is world travel or whatever it is, then you can map that highest value to their roles and responsibilities. Let’s say that you have, like a VA type person on the team, virtual assistant who, they do some travel bookings for you and let’s say travel is one of their highest values. 

They want to travel the world someday, do a round the world trip and you teach them how to get the best deals on sites like Priceline, how to use specialized tools that most people don’t know about like autoslash.com to book your car rentals, cause it does this comparative search and it knows all the special discount codes for, if you like have a Costco card and all that sort of stuff, triple A, et cetera. So, you learn all these hacks and travel hacks as a VA and that happens to be one of your highest values is travel and you’re like, wow, this is amazing.

And you’re totally engaged, and you feel functional ownership. So, functional ownership, I get that. the book From Impossible to Inevitable, which is by Aaron Ross. I interviewed him on my podcast, great episode. so anyways, the idea here of getting the team members to feel like they’re functional owners so they’re not renting their jobs like they rent a car and they beat it up and they don’t care about it and they don’t bother washing it, et cetera, to owning their jobs like the car that they own, that they do take care of.

So getting that team structure, getting them in the right seats and the bus. That’s an analogy from the book from Good to Great, also another great book about, kind of building the systems and structures and so forth to have a successful, scalable business. One of the most important books to read about this is the E-Myth, the Entrepreneur Myth.

So the E-Myth, well actually the E-Myth Revisited and also Beyond the E-Myth, both of those titles by Michael Gerber. You don’t want to, for example, try to fix your existing business, building all the systems and so forth into that. You want to start over with kind of a skunk works company, what he refers to as new co and build your systems and SOPs. And all that into that business first. That is a much more viable strategy. So you would do all this stuff to get the team right, working on the right things and that sets you up to win. Whether you are trying to scale across millions of pages or you just have a hundred-page website, that is a serious revenue generator for you.

Given the scale that you’re at, whatever the size of your business, whether you’re a solo consultant listening to this or you’re a marketing manager at a big company, this all applies. Cause how do you scale otherwise? If you’re not using the email, you’re not using, the ideas from impossible to inevitable with the functional ownership and all that. So, that’s the basis for success. It’s not like the using the right SEO tool or checking the right metric like, Oh, I didn’t think to check link velocity trends or LVT and link research tools. I should have been checking that. Right.

M: Yeah, I think I’m definitely speaking to the right person then about this topic. Boy, am I excited. You know, I wanted to jump into a lot of the ideas you just spoke about, self efficacy and people’s values, and allocating people as resources and so forth but I want to sort of jump back maybe to a more meta question, and that is, and it’s from my personal experience, I’ve always wondered to, to what extent this applies, but, when looking to build a team and looking to create a functional workspace, how much of that starts not just in your goals, your team members, skill sets, your team members likes, dislikes, their values, but does, how much does it start with you as the, main person, the, owner of the agency or the head of the SEO team with your values?

Well, it’s, it is definitely, I’m not going to use the S word in the podcast, but there’s this expression that S word rolls downhill. So if you don’t have great values or you’re all into shortcuts or trying to exploit the weird loophole until it closes, that is a virus that spreads throughout the company. So it’s very important that you get your head straight in terms of why you’re doing something. You’re not gonna like take a thousand word blog post and turn it into a 3000 word blog post so that you can better monetize the page. And that’s it. Like what’s the least amount of work I can do to get it to 3000 words so that I can. 

Double or triple the traffic coming into this page and triple the revenue generated by this page is terrible in my opinion and if instead Everything that you do is underpinned with the idea of value generation or value creation So it’s like how can I create massive value? For the readers, for the community, for the world, how do I reveal more light in the world to tie in a Kabbalah concept? How can I do that with going from 1, words in this blog post and do it cost effectively. So it’s like, you know, there’s the old adage. How long is a piece of string, right? So you could work on that page forever and ever, like a website’s never finished. So how do I not spend an inordinate amount of time optimizing and building this page out? Expanding it, and get the monetary revenue that I need and do massive value creation while I’m at it. 

Because that’s the main driver of everything that you should do. So whether you’re doing link outreach, how can I create massive value in my outreach emails? If I’m setting up JV partnerships to increase my monetization, maybe I’m only relying on AdSense, do some JV deals. How can I create massive value in putting those JV deals together? If I’m doing a state of the union meeting internally with my team, how can I create massive value in that? My content creation going from 1000 to 3000 words or building out my website from 100 pages to 5000 pages. How can I create massive value? It’s not about just trying to game the system.  

M: Right. And, speaking of creating, you know, value, when working with, when you’ve set up your values for yourself and you set the values for your, core values for your company, and you’re starting to hire people now, and you bring them onto your team, how do you go about bringing out that value in the employee? How do you, and to me, that means, Self fulfillment always means self fulfillment to me. One of the most massive, if not the most massive driver of motivation is this idea that I am going to be fulfilled in a meaningful way by doing this. How do you sort of foster that? How do you sort of foster self-efficacy within the SEO setting?

So I want to understand what drives them. And that’s part of what every staff person has to do. The Values Determination process on the Dr Demartini site. They also need to do other assessments like strengths finder. So I know what their highest strengths are. Their top five strengths. It’s only like 19 for that test. Something very inexpensive. So out, of the 62 or so strengths, then you know their top five, and you can have them work on their biggest strengths because you’re setting them up for success. And if you could imagine here, like you, people want to feel successful. 

They want, what, BJ Fogg, who is one of the top behavior change experts in the world, he, came up with this concept, this idea that there’s an emotion that nobody has a name for, but he just named it. He’s got a new book coming out, Tiny Habits. We’re doing a workshop together, in fact, at Stanford on October 1st. So, folks who are interested in that, it’s going to be amazing. You should totally sign up. But, BJ Fogg. world expert on behavior change and this emotion that he named is called Shine.

Shine is the feeling you have when you’re successful, right? So, people stop using apps that make them feel less than successful. There’s an app called the way of life, and that way of life app was very helpful for setting up a new habit for me. But I stopped using it because when, you, when you kind of fall off the wagon and stop doing the new habit, let’s say it’s a morning routine or whatever, and you stop being able to tech, tick the green box, the check mark, and your chain is broken of all the green checks.

You feel failure. You feel. Like you let yourself down and that’s the opposite of shine and you stop using the app. So in everything that you do, with your team, are you instilling more shine? It’s kind of like the, do you know about Marie Kondo? The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. That’s her New York Times bestselling book. It’s like sold many millions of copies. She’s got a show on Netflix now. She’s a big deal and her concept is all about sparking joy. If you hold a book in your hand that’s on your bookshelf and you’re trying to decide do I give this away or not and you don’t even open it up and start thumbing through it, you just hold it in your hand.

And you kind of tap into that feeling of joy, do I does this spark joy for me or not? Or do I feel a sense of dread like I really should have read this already and I haven’t like Get rid of it. If it doesn’t spark joy, if the, if what you’re doing to manage or better yet than manage lead your team member, isn’t sparking shine, you’re on the wrong track. You’re not being a good leader. So that. is a huge game changer. Just knowing that shine exists and trying to build that and not just like align with their highest values. Cause of course you’re doing that at the very beginning with and checking in with them on a regular basis with the performance reviews and all that.

But the values mapping of their highest values to their job functions, that’s something that you do at the beginning of the job. And then you check in performance reviews and how are we doing? How am I doing at tapping you into your highest values with what you do on a day to day basis. And then when you’re doing things like a team meetings, I just had a state of the union meeting with my team and I, we went around, the like virtually went around the room cause we’re all in different locations, virtual company.

 But on Zoom, after I gave my state of the union of where things are at and what, excites me about the next quarter and so forth, then I asked each person to share what their, what’s exciting them and what they’re up to and what challenges they’re facing and personal ones, too like how can I help somebody who has a family member who’s very sick and like, you know going probably going into hospice like, oh, well, there was this blog post I read from Brendan Burchard where he talked about interviewing family members before they pass and like parents and so forth.

And here’s the questionnaire that he used on his parents. And I shared that. with the person on board with actually the whole team as a follow up because one person was talking about that challenge, which was totally personal and is very important to them. It’s not like, Oh, well, I really need access to this additional tool because it’s, You know, we’re going to make my job more, make me more effective at my job. No, you’re, you missed the point.

M: Yeah.

Yeah. Like people are humans. They’re not robots. You gotta, really truly care about them.

M: Yeah. That’s a, that’s an amazing point. there’s so much to say about this, but yeah, there’s a certain sense. I think that we’ve moved away from, I don’t know what’s a society in general. I feel if I’m over my balance as a sociological commentator then forgive me, but we’ve sort of forgotten in a way what it means to exist or to sort of tap into that ineffable sense of I exist. And I think that’s what you mean by joy and shine. There’s a certain sense that you’re, tapped into like of actual existence. I don’t have a better way to describe that, but one of the ways to fulfill it is through work. Work is a very, in a way, Work is a very spiritual thing, oddly enough, and it’s a monumental task to sort of cater to that, and to sort of, what’s the word I’m looking for? Cultivate and foster that sense of.

Yeah, it’s funny you say that, because I just, three days ago, I spoke at Affiliate Summit East, and one of the things they said in the session was that business is a spiritual game. And that’s really struck people. In fact, I had people come up afterwards and like, what do you tell me more about that? That really, that, that resonated with me. So I think of business as a spiritual game, or spiritual discipline. Where you’re out there in the world, either revealing light or not and adding value or not.

And if you’re just trying to, again, like, exploit the weird loophole or whatever, like, like the trader who’s day trading and not actually adding any value just trying to exploit, to exploit the weird, loopholes. The things that are, just like moments in time where they can just jump in and, make a bunch of moneybefore everybody else, like using automated trading platforms or whatever. Where’s the value creation in that? How are they revealing light in that? 

That’s not going to last. It’s not going to, have longterm viability. And I know this sounds pretty woo-woo and but I think it plays out really well, you know, just like if you don’t have, the, customers or the clients or the visitors best interests at heart, you will lose. It’s just a matter of time. And even just business, philosophy will bear that out. You look at what Jay Abraham teaches, for example, the concept of preeminence, Like, if the prospect is better served by being sent to your competitor, you send them to your competitor.

M: It’s a different notion of winning, I think.  

Yeah.

M: I have to ask you then, because of what you just said, when you’re looking at a new team member, prospective employee, how much are you looking at their knowledge and skill set versus how much are you looking at their disposition or their values and attitude?

I’m looking at a number of things. It’s the values I can’t change, right? So I, do this whole test called the honesty test and you can probably guess based on the name of it, what the right answer is to this question. But let’s say that I ask in the interview process, tell me what do you think, is the most important attribute for this position? Is it attention to detail, creativity, honesty, dedication, technical acumen, which, are those for this SEO position or this VA position or this link outreach position? Which of those five is the most important attribute? The only right answer is. Take a guess.

M: Making a lot of money. I’m going to go with honesty on that one.

Yeah, because you cannot train honesty into somebody that you bring on board. So somebody who doesn’t consider honesty is super high value, very important attribute. They’re going to do stuff like cut corners. They’re going to maybe be surfing Facebook and doing personal stuff, buying things on Amazon for personal reasons while on the company clock. They’re just, that’s how things are going to play out. So you’re not going to fix that. Same thing with if somebody doesn’t feel a sense of ownership in their life or a sense of personal agency, they don’t, They’re not a go getter. They’re don’t feel responsibility. And I’m using responsibility very that word very deliberately because it’s being response able.

Able to respond. and that, That’s not just like, okay, it’s my duty or obligation to do this thing or even like, Oh, you know, I’m, I don’t want to be to blame for this if this goes off the rails or I want credit for this. If it’s a, if it’s a win, no, it’s, a higher level responsibility. Like true responsibility is about being caused in the matter. If it needs to be done. Well, it needs to be done. Like, if not me, then who? And if not now, then when? Like the, I remember getting this lesson at a workshop, taught by Efra Malshevsky, who, this seven figure, coach, you have to spend a minimum of six figures paid up front, no refunds to hire him to get coaching, an hour a week, or to work with your executive team for seven figures a year.

Again, no refunds, amazing guy. He is awesome. So I learned from him this concept of responsibility and I had this breakthrough at, in the men’s room during the break, there’s the soap dispenser right and the soap dispenser was empty there was enough to get the tiniest bit out now the previous version of me prior to the workshop would have just said “Oh that sucks” try and eke out the last little drop of soap and wash my hands and then get back in the room. 

I felt responsible so I found, you know, what a house phone or whatever to contact housekeeping. This was at a hotel and said, “Hey, there is a problem in the men’s room on the whatever floor it’s out of soap.” Oh, thank you. Appreciate you letting us know. And then I knew it would get handled because somebody after me is going to be affected by that.

M: That’s an amazing outlook on life. I don’t think it would, I’ll frankly admit it. I probably would have used up the soap and walked out the door.

Yeah. So you want people who you want to screen for people who feel like I’m responsible in that higher level capacity and the skills are so secondary. Like if somebody is, I don’t know, a liberal arts major and they get around fine on the computer. They’re, like comfortable, but they don’t know about all the SEO tools. They think SEO is about keywords and like, okay, you’re hungry to learn and you’re motivated and this isn’t, you know, your personal passion for this and so forth.

Okay. So that’s all in place and you’re, you answer the right kind of values, questions and honesty and all that sort of stuff. You’re in, I’ll give you a trial period and, some trial projects and stuff like that. Cause I always want to make sure that somebody might interview really well and then they suck at the job.

M: Oh yes.

So, you want to have a trial period or trial project. Anyway, so, I want that person. I don’t want the person who knows all the tools, knows all the different features and all the metrics. And of course, if somebody is trying to fake me out, like this is a great question I asked. So I interview a second interview candidates a lot of times on behalf of my client.

So they’re trying to bring in an in-house SEO. And they want me, the SEO expert, to interview the guy or gal to make sure that they’re not blowing smoke. And so I ask a question like, “tell me what are your favorite SEO tools?” And I remember this one guy said, “Oh, Majestic SEO,” as his favorite. I’m like, okay, so the little spidey sense was already tingling because he said Majestic SEO, which was the previous name for Majestic.

So I already thought, that’s not good. And then I asked him, “Alright, so what’s the, in Majestic, what’s that metric? That is really important. You know, just remind me of that.” Of course, I knew. Trust flow and citation flow are two metrics. So I was already kind of leading the witness there. And he, I knew it. I knew it. AC rank was his answer. What? That metric was deprecated three years ago. This is your favorite SEO tool, huh? So I didn’t tell him any of that. I just quickly wrapped up the rest of the interview because it was a complete waste of time. 

This guy was a liar. So that bugs me. If you just, if you come clean and say, you know what? I don’t have a favorite SEO tool because I’m new to this space but I’ve been reading Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal and I’ve started reading your book Stephan and I’m on chapter 2 and I really like XYZ in that chapter. Okay That’s cool. I can work with that. But don’t lie to me.  

M: That’s a good piece of advice across the board, I think, in your life. Don’t lie to people. Outside of honesty and outside of, You know, it is interesting. Let me jump back, actually. In the SEO space, and I’ve personally benefited from this, there’s a large chunk of people who didn’t come into the industry, they weren’t data scientists, they weren’t computer, you know, they weren’t majoring in anything to do with, you know, computer sciences or anything like that. I came through the content end. 

There are so many people like this. Do you think that one of the, I guess, maybe the unique traits about SEO is the ability or is the, The ability to assimilate people who are not coming from a technical background into the industry, which on the flip side of meeting is one of the major, tendencies or one of the major traits that you can have coming into SEO is the ability and the drive to learn. More than other industries, for example.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it’s again a kind of a personality trait That hunger to learn and grow and that’s the kind of person you want to employ in your company or that you want to contract with or The agency you want to work with, right? Your team that’s been assigned to you, the account manager, the consultants, the analyst and all that, they have that hunger, that drive to learn and grow. And if they have that, then you’re set because you just make sure that they have the tools and the upskilling available to them, right? 

They’re going to the conferences, they’re accessing the online trainings and courses and stuff like I have a 20 hour online course on do it yourself SEO auditing. And so if they’re finding these tools, finding these resources, and even if they’re just free. Some people just learn for free off of my learning center on Stephanspencer.com instead of buying the courses. And that’s totally fine too. I just want to see that hungers there. And again, I’m looking at their strengths as well. I’m using strengths finder to assess that. I’m also looking at their cognitive abilities, which is different from cognitive abilities. cognitive, at the, test for that is Kolbe.

And you can find out, for example, if you score really high as a fact finder, you score really high as a quick start. Like, I’m super high, quick start. I love starting stuff, but I hate finishing it. I need the cleanup person behind me.That’s why I have a team. Cause I can’t, I want to focus on my strengths. I want to be in my zone of genius and not just in my zone of competency. Yeah, I could finish everything, but I want my cleanup crew to do all the implementation and, grunt work stuff that after I’ve developed the crazy brilliant strategy for the content marketing campaign that gets tons of, high trust links. So that is what you’re scanning for and trying to get the right fit again the right. Right person in the right seat on the bus and not just the right people on the bus

M: Yeah, and there’s no substitute for self-awareness in that case.

Yeah.

M: I want to jump on to, more on to a point you spoke about before, which was, evaluating your team and, progressing them, moving them along. And one of the things that I find is, in general, and nothing to do with SEO in particular, is that the way we analyze people in the workplace, the way we relate to them is, you know, very quantitative, very results driven, and the way we assess them is, based on their results per se. 

Yeah. And we sort of forget to look at the person themselves and what they need to grow and what they need to develop. So how do you go about doing that in, the SEO setting? How do you go about developing your team, members, and sort of nudging them and guiding them along the process so that you, so that they can be where you want them to be?

Yeah, well, it goes from being activity oriented or, activity focused to outcome focused. And once you and the team are all outcome-focused, the game changes. The need to have the quantitative measures, kind of drops. It doesn’t completely go away, but it becomes much more qualitative. So let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’ve been delegating tasks of writing ghost writing articles for some website that you contribute to. So you got this ghostwriter, and that person is producing three articles a week or whatever, right? So that person is just delivering quantitatively on the understanding the requirements for their position. 

But there’s no functional ownership. There’s no, understanding or buy into the bigger picture, like as the business owner, if those articles don’t end up getting published. It was worthless. The quantitative metrics are irrelevant because there was no result. There was no outcome. So you have, you as the leader in the company or the leader of your department or whatever, it’s your job to delegate the outcome and not the tasks. So then it becomes about the qualitative and not the quantitative. They feel that, that sense of ownership and, agency in their destiny because now you’ve got them to buy into the bigger picture on what’s happening and the why. 

Why do I need to keep contributing to this website? What’s the value? What’s what makes it relevant to the company and to me in my position that this? Makes sense to me and then you’re not having to babysit every step of the process like Yeah. All right. You drafted those articles, but you forgot to submit them to the editor for proofreading. Oh, oops. Sorry about that. But they were task oriented and not focused on the outcome. Right? So then if that’s the situation they’re task oriented, you need all the quantitative metrics like, how many words, produced and what’s the cost per word and, you know, what’s their total output per week and, articles and are they hitting the deadlines and all that. But that. Totally misses the point.

That’s all tactics, and there’s no strategy there. My favorite line from The Art of War is “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Yeah, Sun Tzu wrote that like whatever hundreds and hundreds of years ago So powerful and applicable today so you could be focused on all the tactics and the stuff that happens at the ground level and miss the entire big picture and the whole war, you lose the war.

M: Yeah. And it’s not possible to manage things that way. If someone’s not bought in and they’re not looking to really drive home what they’re doing, you’ll never be able to micromanage them to the point where you feel happy.  

Yeah, it reminds me of this Dilbert cartoon. Are you a fan of Dilbert?

M: yeah.

So there’s this one where Pointy Haired Boss is standing behind Dilbert, who’s in front of the computer, with his hand on the mouse, and Pointy Haired Boss has his hand on Dilbert’s hand. So that’s the epitome of micromanagement, right? So don’t do that.

M: all right. So to quote the great Bob Dylan, the hour is getting late and I want to end off a little bit of a game that I do with all my guests. I can’t optimize it or disavow it. And it’s basically a little fun little thing that I do where I give you two options and it’s a zero sum world. So either I’ll give you two great options and you’re stuck choosing between one great option over another great option or I’ll give you two really bad crappy options and you’re stuck choosing between two really uncomfortably bad options. So this if you’re willing to indulge us is the Stephan Spencer version of optimize it or disavow it.

So, being that we’re an SEO tool and I have completely steered this conversation away from SEO tools, which you can now never accuse me of trying to just plug myself purposefully at end, I do want to bring it up for one quick second in a weird, fun sort of way. So, SEO at scale, again, every conversation is going to talk about, you know, automation and tools and so forth, which is why we didn’t do that. But I will ask you if you had to choose. And you can either have way too many tools at your disposal, or way too many, people, way too many members of your staff, which is worse for, efficiency, which is worse for producing SEO results at square, at scale. Too many people, too many tools.

Yeah, that’s so easy. Too many people.

M: Too many people.

You know the old adage, too many cooks in the kitchen?

M: Oh yes.

Or another one I love even more is, camel is a horse designed by committee.

M: I don’t think I’ve heard that one.  

Yeah. So that’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna end up with a camel if you’ve got too many team members. And there’s also Parkinson’s law and at play. Parkinson’s law says that, the, the work or the project will expand or shrink to fit the budget and the time frame given to it. So I mean, that’s a paraphrasing, very rough paraphrasing of the Parkinson’s law. You can Google it. There’s a whole Wikipedia page on it. But the idea here is if you want something done fast and efficiently, give it to the busy person. And give it to them with a very aggressive deadline. 

They’ll say, well, they’re really busy, so I’m going to give them extra long to work on this, because they will take extra long to get it to you, and take extra long hours to produce it.

Whereas if you say, well, what’s the, to get quality, let’s really be aggressive here, and let’s say, I need it by Friday, and you know, whatever other parameters, and you’ll get it. It’s really good. So Parkinson’s Law works. And if you have too many team members, then you have the opposite happening, and it’s just gonna be a train wreck.

M: So you heard it here first. You should get it. SEO automation tools like RankRanger. I’m joking.  

No, you totally should. I love RankRanger and I love how you guys have a feature where you can track your YouTube search rankings and they’re not very many ranking trackers, can state that. And what’s the number two search engine, but YouTube, so you definitely want to track your YouTube rankings.

M: And we just added a tool very recently yesterday, day before yesterday, where you can look at, we call it the SERP feature monitor, where you can track. CERP features like the feature snippets, the related questions box, and also the video carousel, the video box, we would like to call it, and see what keywords bring it up and how consistently which URLs Google is placing within it so you can optimize for YouTube. And at the same time, you should always try to optimize for the video box on the CERP. So check that out.

I’m really big into featured snippet optimization. I’ve got a couple of search engine land articles on that, which I can give you and you can add in the show notes if you’d like. one actually one is to test your knowledge, a featured snippets expert because featured snippets isn’t just position zero. In the SERPs that preempts all the organic results, it’s also the voice answer for voice search, and that’s, huge. You want to be the answer.

M: I’ve always wanted to do a study, I haven’t had a chance to do this yet, but to see how often they, like, how often they align. Notice Google can pull a snippet from, really anywhere. It could be a feature snippet on desktop. There could be a different snippet on mobile. Which one would Google use when doing a voice search? Are they going to pick up if there’s a different URL on mobile and they can use a mobile or they can use a desktop feature snippet? It’s always been a curiosity of mine.

Yeah, that’s an interesting question. Do you see that often, where the featured snippet is different between desktop and mobile?

M: So, I just finished the research on this very recently. That’s why I’m bringing it up. Depends how you look at it. From a URL to URL, if there’s a URL on both desktop and mobile, they usually match, I think it’s somewhere around the 90 percent range.

Yeah, I would expect that.

M: Yeah, but there are a lot, if you insert the days where there’s just a desktop feature snippet and not a mobile feature snippet, then you’re down to something like 75%.

Gotcha, but what about different featured snippets between desktop and mobile?

M: Listen, I’m saying they, there’s only, that only shows up.

Having one and not having one. That’s a slightly different scenario than having a different site occupying the featured site.

M: Right, so that only happens 10 percent of the time.

Okay.

M: Over a 30 day period. Okay, yeah, I rarely see that.

Yeah.

M: Which is interesting, because I was talking to somebody, I don’t know if you know him, Nigel Stevens, I was just speaking with him. He, I said, wow, that’s really interesting, what’s the other 10 percent of the time about? Like, why wouldn’t it just be the same 95, 98 percent of the time? And he said, why is it so high? I would expect it to be a wider gap.

No, I think it’s, I think 10 percent is very high.

M: I think it’s high also. I’m curious why, I can’t imagine for an informational query, the intent being that drastically different. I understand something like, you know, commerce query, I’m not going to buy it on mobile. I’ll wait till I’m on desktop. But you’re looking for information, I understand the difference.

Well, I would say that you’d want to put the same site reference as the resource that gave the answer in both, almost all the time, both desktop and mobile. But then the presentation of the snippet would change depending on whether you’re desktop or mobile. So, like, you’d want to get more succinct. You’d want to, utilize, fragles of fragments, more and drive people directly to that little piece of the answer, and let them drill down for more, that would be more appropriate for mobile and not as necessary for desktop.

M: Yeah. Well, we’ll see how it goes. Yep. All right.

So, so is this just the one question for this game or do you have a whole bunch of them?  

M: no, Just that one question. Just a little, you know, fun thing to end off with. All right. Awesome. Lighten, lighten the mood a little bit. so we’re good.

All right. Yeah. Well, I feel lighter.

M: Well, let me wrap, wait. let me just wrap this up officially. Stephan, thank you very much for coming on the InSearch SEO podcast. Great insights. Wonderful to talk to you. Really, enjoyed that conversation. It was very meaningful.

Oh, thank you. And you know to give our listeners something to take as a next action if they’re interested in using my approach to hiring and screening candidates or, team members. I have an SEO Hiring Blueprint. And also an SEO BS Detector. So I gave that one test question as an example of what’s your favorite SEO tools. And, but there’s also ones where there’s only one right answer and it’s a trick question. So, people who are just blowing smoke or be, they’ll be totally found out even when they’re being interviewed by somebody who doesn’t know SEO, as long as they have that BS detector document in their hands. Very cool. So that, both of those I’ll make available to your listeners and I’ll put that on marketingspeak.com/insearch.

M: Awesome. Thank you. Really appreciate it. And we are back to your regularly scheduled in-search SEO podcast. He has such an interesting, both are really an interesting and sort of calming aura about him, doesn’t he? Like the, if you wanna get into holistic SEO or SEO at scale or anything holistically about SEO and SEO overall, he’s definitely the person you wanna speak to about this. So that was a great conversation. I really enjoyed that.