This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about Real Marketing Technology With Stephan Spencer on Six Pixels of Separation.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 458 of Six Pixels of Separation, the Miram podcast. My name is Mitch Joel. It’s Sunday, April 19th, 2015. Let’s get on with the show.

So, who are you, and what do you do?

Well, I’m an SEO consultant, speaker and author. I wrote Google Power Search, co-wrote The Art of SEO, now in its second edition, soon to be in its third edition, and co-wrote Social Ecommerce.

And your name is?

Stephan Spencer.

You forgot the most important part, Stephan.

Oh yeah. You’re like, I know you, so I don’t have to say my name.

How have you been?

I’ve been awesome, yep. Traveling the world, speaking at shows, attending seminars, helping clients out with their SEO. Yeah, keeping busy.

So, talk a little about the world of SEO. I think from the perspective of a lot of brand people, I don’t wanna say that SEO has sort of fallen by the wayside, but there have been a lot of things that have come into the world that have probably diverted the focus away from making sure that your search is powerful and that you are strong in that space, in particular, obviously, social media. And even, I think, mobile, to a certain degree, has pushed it away. How do you feel about the space? Is it a space that is still growing? Is it a space that you feel is sort of, is where it is?

It’s still very relevant and very important. Google is the first protocol for most people looking for, whether it’s services, products, research, or whatever it is. They’re not going to Facebook or Twitter to do the research on which product to buy as much as they’re looking at a Google search to see what sort of reviews and ratings pop up and product information, the best prices and so forth. You really need to be on Google and highly ranked. If you aren’t, then that kind of puts a question in the prospect’s mind, like, are you still relevant?

Are you still around? Are you legit? So even if they found you through a social media channel such as Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or whatever, you still have to rank highly in Google. Whether it’s for your brand or it’s for non-brand keywords where they think, okay, you’re supposed to be a leader in your industry, I’m gonna search for your industry, I’m gonna search for your product, your type of product. And if you don’t show up, that doesn’t look good.

So let’s take lots of stuff to talk about in there. You said, you know, it’s the first port of call. My feeling and my instinct would be that if you’re looking for something, the first place we might ask now in front of Google might be our social graph. It might be on Twitter. Hey, does anybody know XYZ? Or will it be on Facebook or somewhere else? Is the proliferation of these newer spaces and opportunities for people to connect, even messaging apps, I would say, taking away from the Google space? Or do you still feel that inevitably, search and Google play a factor?

I’d say it still plays a factor, and it will in the future. One is augmenting the other and vice versa. So if you start with Facebook and or Google Plus or wherever you ask your social graph for their opinions on whatever it is like an agency that you want to hire or consultants or some sort of new technology, you still want to check that out in Google and see what comes up, you know, what sort of? News articles, research papers, and blog posts are out there in relation to that product or technology. So, if you start with Google, you’ll turn to your social graph for confirmation that you’re on the right path. Conversely, if you started with your social graph, you’ll want that confirmation from Google searches, I think.

Talk a little bit about what that landscape looks like when it comes to search. And I’m really fascinated with it because, one, my background: I started at one of the first search engines, so this was an area that I was very, very early into, even before Google was doing what Google does. And when I think of Search Now as a guy who is part of a much larger organization now with Miram and 2,000 plus employees and all that, I often wonder what great SEO looks like only because we see things like, obviously, once you’re logged in, it’s personalized, it knows your location. It used to be that if you were really smart with some keywords and some great content, you could be number one. Are those days over? Am I wrong to think that it’s so much harder to place?

It is harder, Mitch. Well, we’ve both been around for a long time, right? I remember us speaking on panels together and stuff.

One of the first search engine strategies.

Yeah, it was a long time ago. And neither one of us looks any worse for wear, by the way.

I think we’re both actually getting better looking as we get older, but that’s another story.

Yeah. So, if you think about like what’s been happening in this space and SEO and search engines, a lot has changed, but the fundamentals of quality content, appropriate context, good authority and importance and trust signals. These are kind of tried and true foundational algorithms, right? And so there’s been a lot of stuff that Google’s put out there to really stomp on the efforts of the spammers, right? So, Google Panda and Google Penguin, for example, have been trying to thwart the efforts of spammers with their unnatural link-building, that’s Penguin. With their low-quality content and content farming, that’s Panda. 

There are a lot of other lesser-known algorithms and bits and pieces that are baked into the main Google search algorithm. And it’s really to thwart the spammers, not so much to take the search experience to another level. Yes, there’s that, too, with Hummingbird and the re-architecting of the way that Google looks at keywords versus entities, correlations between words, and so forth. Yeah, there’s co-occurrence analysis, which is all sorts of geeky stuff, right? Like the semantic web and all that sort of stuff, but if you think about it from a marketer’s point of view, what’s relevant, what’s important, it’s really about getting your message to your market. That’s been the case since the very beginning. It used to be a lot easier for spammers to get their way with search engines, throw some garbage keywords into meta tags, and boom. Google never counted the meta keywords tag.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there, people saying, well, you know, this thing is the secret weapon or, you know, this is the shortcut. And it’s all misinformation, disinformation, and mythology. The science behind SEO—and I know it’s ironic since I co-authored The Art of SEO—is really a science more than an art. And that means experiments and hypotheses.

Test your hypotheses, control groups, and all that sort of stuff to see what works and what doesn’t work, reverse engineer Google’s algorithm, and figure out the inner workings without having to work on the inside at the Googleplex. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it, so. I’m doing it.

That’s my point, Stephan, that not only is it a tough job, but it also seems like it’s getting tougher because there are so many people in play. I mean, I think back to, like to me, it was simple. If I wanted to own a bunch of keywords, like in terms of someone looking for them and finding them at the time, it was obviously Twist Image and the blog that we had. I sort of knew how to do that. It feels to me now, like even in the realm of digital marketing in Canada, where ten years of legacy and blogging and all this, I feel like it’s, others have come in and have figured out, “game the system,” whether it’s ethical or not.

I’m fine with it being ethical, by the way. No issue with that. It just seems almost insurmountable for a brand to be able to have any form of dominance without, I don’t know what. It seems like you really do have to pay to play to make it really work. The free rides are over. It feels to me like the free rides are over. You’re saying they’re not, but it feels to me like they are.

Well, I think that’s a good point. I don’t think they are. I think you actually have a leg up if you’re an established brand compared to the Wild West days of SEO. So, a lot of the brands are overtaking smaller, more specialized players. They could be the Walmarts and Amazons of the world, who have a product line out of a bazillion other ones and suddenly outrank all the niche players who have been used to having a dominant position. So that’s tough for the smaller businesses. But the thing is, if you have a secret weapon, namely somebody who understands the ins and outs, the science and the art of SEO, then you have that secret weapon, and you can leverage it.

With that, there is a lot of snake oil. I mean, you say that, but I’ve got people calling me day in and day out that they’re paying these people thousands of dollars a month, and they have no idea what they’re doing.

Absolutely, so you gotta sniff that out because there are lots of posers, lots of pretenders out there and a lot of mythology. I wrote an article series for Search Engine Land on that very topic of SEO myths. I wrote one called 36 up with. Another 36, so I came up with a total of 72 myths. And then there were a lot of posers and pretenders who came out of the woodwork to say, no, no, that’s not true. This is the scenario where this is true or whatever because they’re afraid that their boss is reading the article and is going to fire them for all this nonsense. Like, oh, we’ve spent all this effort on developing our meta keywords, and now you’re telling me Google never counted them?

What the heck were we paying this guy for? You know, we need to fire him, so they came out of the woodwork to make their point train and safe face, but I just crushed it all in enough. Another follow-up article of the myths reloaded and all this controversy and insta so forth that were showing up in the comments, and I’d put them all and their place one after another, but the thing is, if you don’t know SEO, you don’t know which questions to ask. So that’s where another Search Engine Land article comes in when I wrote a few months ago on hiring and vetting an SEO, whether it’s an employee, a contractor, or an agency. So imagine having a handful of questions that you just kind of slip into the interview process. So you’re asking about things like what your process for doing keyword research, what sort of tools you use, and so forth, but what if you have some trick questions up your sleeve, they don’t know that you have this, and they don’t know that there are only certain answers that are acceptable, and the others will expose that person as a pretender, or as really outdated in their SEO knowledge. So you might slip.

Give me a good one.

All right, okay. I’ll give you some good ones here.

We’re friends, right?

Absolutely, so why not share this with the world, right? So how about what sort of tools do you use for keyword research, blah, blah, blah, and then you just let them answer that. But then you lead in with another question about keywords and say,” So, tell me, what is your process for optimizing meta keywords?” And you’re just ready to take notes or whatever. And this is a trick question because remember I told you meta keywords never counted in Google. Google went on record to say this in their Google Webmaster Central blog.

Back in 2009 or so, they said this, “They never counted it, and it was never part of the algorithm as a positive ranking signal.” So here, you’re just giving them enough rope to hang themselves. Another example might be to ask them, let’s say, you know, what, for meta descriptions, how does that influence the rankings? And the only correct answer here is that they don’t.

They don’t influence the rankings; they only influence the snippet that is displayed in the Google search results. So they’re not gonna move you up to, like, go through and optimize all your meta descriptions across your site. 

At best, it is a second-order activity, and that’s just to get better snippets instead of the copyright statement and all rights reserved. You might have something more compelling there, but you didn’t move from position two to position one or from position eight to position five.

By doing these meta descriptions. And so that’s another example of a trick question.

So, talk a little bit about it. I mean, we’re sort of in the world of Google. And when you talk about search, is it just because it is such an 800-pound gorilla, or do you see anything? I mean, we constantly hear about Bing and Yahoo. Is that war completely over? Is that just never gonna come to be? Because for a time, I mean, especially when we were in the early days of it. It could have gone another way. It didn’t look like it would, but it could.

Yeah, I think that war is over. It really is about Google. That is the 800-pound gorilla Bing, and together with Yahoo because, Bing powers Yahoo. It’s a reasonable percentage of the search market share that I wouldn’t totally neglect, but it’s not what I’d focus on. It’s kind of like the cherry on the top. If you also get, by your various authority, link-building type efforts, and your on-page optimization work, you happen to also get high Bing rankings as well as high Google rankings. That’s great, but I’m not focused on that.

I’m focused on Google. Actually, the number two search engine, if you break out Bing and Yahoo separately as two individual search engines with separate query volumes, is YouTube. It’s not Yahoo, and it’s not Bing. It’s Google, and then it’s YouTube, another Google property. And by the way, if you’re curious about how search behavior is different between Google and YouTube, one way is simply to start typing Google keystrokes into the search box in Google and YouTube and see what the search suggestions are.  So, that’s one way to get a sense for, wow, this is, searcher behavior is very different on YouTube versus Google. Another way you can do it is simply to use a tool called Soovle, which is really cool. I love this tool. It’s free. Soovle.com. 

As you type your keystrokes, the autocomplete gets fed in from not only Google but also YouTube, Yahoo, Bing, Answers.com, Wikipedia, and Amazon, all simultaneously. It’s really cool. So there’s that piece. And then also you can check what the search volumes and kind of trends are over time using Google Trends. Most people don’t realize that there’s a feature in Google Trends, which is another free tool, so Google.com/trends. Another free or capability of this free tool is you choose instead of web search, which is the default. You click on the little pull-down and then choose YouTube search. Now, you can see what people are searching for on YouTube and how that’s changing over time over the course of a year. Pretty cool.

Someone’s listening to this, and their heads are spinning because we sort of went out of the gates really fast. And I think Matt told you and I do that because we live and breathe this stuff.

We’re geeks, yeah.

Yeah, of the highest order. I’m actually a worse geek than you because I’m like a search and technical geek, although I’m not that type of person, and Mark is; I have multiple levels of geekdom. You would probably do it, too, actually.

I do, too.

Yeah, you do, too. But is this the type of thing where you’re like, it has come to the point where you should never try to do this in-house unless you have a Stephen Spencer type of person around is the type of thing where you’re still like, hey, you know what, it’s okay, go out there, get a dummy’s guide, read the art of SEO, whatever it might be, and you’ll get the hang of it. Are we just like it is a completely immature market? This is its own specialty unto itself, and this is like neurosurgery.

Yeah, it’s like neurosurgery.

It is, damn, I can’t believe we’re there already.

Well, if you look at the art of SEO, it’s a 700-page book, and this is not a light read; it’s actually used as a textbook in some universities. So this is quite a discipline, and it’s a technical discipline. You have to think about like rewrite rules and regular expression pattern matching. I mean, super geeky stuff. And you have to be ultra creative at the same time. So, this is a team effort because it’s rare to find somebody who’s really exceptional at both. I happen to be, I’m able to do that kind of the ad agency creative director sort of brainstorming for really authoritative links, coming up with all sorts of crazy, brilliant ideas, scavenger hunts and personality tests and infographics and viral videos and all that sort of stuff, listicles, et cetera, et cetera. 

Kind of stuff that would make it to the front page of BuzzFeed or Viral Nova, Distractify, Upworthy, that sort of thing. So it’s link-worthy. You need that, and you need the technical acumen. That’s rare. You need to have that expert come in and guide this whole process and then hopefully teach you how to fish, not just continue to do the fishing for you forever. But it’s a Vulcan mind-meld sort of thing, not just, oh, we’ll just give it a little training session and boom, we’re done, here you go.

It sounds to me, and I’m wondering about your perspective, Arnold; although I think I know where you’ll go, maybe you’d better forget about this and just pay.

Well, you know, it’s a good starting point to pay, and I actually recommend that many folks, many of the listeners who want more brand reach and visibility, experiment with Facebook advertising versus Google AdWords advertising because the cost for entry is so much lower, and you can experiment without losing your shirt with Facebook.

You might say, “Well, I’m in a very specialized market. It’s very B2B, and we only have a handful of customers in the whole world.” Well, with Facebook, you can hand-pick the people that you want to reach with your ads. You can upload your email list and create a custom audience. You can create a custom audience using retargeting pixels so that people who have been to your website will then see your Facebook ad.

You could create a look-alike audience; that’s a fancy term for similar-looking people to the ones that you’ve already created in a separate custom audience, like people who are similar to your email list or to the people who have visited your website. You can do all this on Facebook; it’s really cool. But of course, it costs money. And then organic, you know, SEO is like free traffic if you’ve got somebody in your hip pocket who knows the ins and outs. But trying to do it all yourself, I think we’re past those days unless you’re an Uber geek and you love going through 700-page books and devouring them.

So, searching in and of itself has obviously been a fascinating area. You alluded to a piece of data, a stat that most people don’t know, which is that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and it is also owned by Google. So there you go with that. But there are other things that I’ve noticed smart brands do. One in particular would be a site search. And I see this a lot in smart brands that are obviously driving to either e-commerce or retail, which is not just about really owning the sort of organic and paid search environments that people go into.

Google would be one of them or YouTube, but even on-site, they’re really dominating. And it seems to me, if I were a retail brand like that, really is low-hanging fruit, and yet it completely mystifies most brands. They can’t figure out why their competitors are everywhere, and it’s because they’re literally dominating in search across the board, not just Google search.

Yep. You can’t just throw together some half-baked search engine on your site and expect that you’re gonna convert people who are using your search box. SLI Systems is a great third-party tool that has the smarts underneath the hood. That’s the sort of thing that you need, not just like, “Oh, we’re going to throw up a WordPress site and might as well just use the search capability that’s built into WordPress. That’ll be sufficient.” No, no, no, no. That’s not sufficient.

 And you’re going to lose a lot of your search-inclined visitors who are really dissatisfied with the experience because they didn’t put in the right synonym or they searched for a plural and not a singular, and your search engine wasn’t smart enough to be able to correlate the two together. So yeah, absolutely, site search is key. Having a really compelling user experience, following the three-second rule. Within three seconds, they have to get the next action and the value proposition, or they’re out of there because users nowadays have no tolerance for fluff, for waiting or for trying to figure stuff out. It’s just that it’s like road rage but in front of a computer.

But there’s also a diversification, right? Like when you look at you talked earlier about branded and non-branded terms, and obviously, I won’t disagree with that; I think that that’s true. But we also tend to think that Google AdWords or just search in general is very much like a conversion-driven process when, in fact, what we’ve learned, and I hope you do agree with this, is that search can be a really interesting platform by which to do a whole bunch of things, like just seeing if there’s an interest in a product or service, it could be lead towards a potential conversion further down the way. It could just be even I’ve seen search done really well for just general branding, just sort of being there and present. Do you see that as being a valuable slash part of a smart marketing mix, or is that really only held for the brands that are already doing a ton of spending and doing everything sort of right?

Yeah, so let me give you an example for your listeners that I think would be really cool. So, let’s say that you’re selling, for example, baby furniture online. Baby bassinets and cribs and so forth. The obvious keywords you target would be baby crib, baby cribs, baby bassinet, bassinet, bassinets, et cetera. But then what about going after the expectant parents, that’s your target market, earlier on in the buying cycle when they’re trying to figure out what their baby’s name is gonna be? 

So, you might not be able to rank for baby names because that’s this ultra-competitive keyword, but what about the kind of torso terms, not the head term of baby names, but like baby name meanings or cute baby names or overuse baby names or baby name trends or what have you right so you create a whole section of your site around those keywords baby name meanings and trends and cute and ugly names and also names that’ll be sure to get your kid beat up in the playground when they are grown up at that center then on the side you would have an irresistible offer, some sort of checklist or something that would be like, “Oh wow, that’s really helpful. 

The essential nesting checklist,” right? Because you don’t want to be too aggressive in selling your stuff when they’re in this planning mode of trying to figure out what their baby’s name is. So you’d have this essential nesting checklist, get people to opt in in order to get that.

Now you’ve got their email address, you can continue the dialogue after they’ve left your site and gotten these great ideas for baby names. So, you just need to think outside the box in terms of what your target users or your target audience are searching for that are related, or not even necessarily related, but this is your audience. 

And if you can offer some value. And not just a little bit of value, but massive value. You gotta differentiate, you gotta be remarkable, and I’m using Seth Godin‘s definition of remarkable. It’s worth remarking about. It doesn’t have to be the best, most interesting, or most useful; it just has to be a Purple Cow in some way. Something worth remarking about. That has the potential not only to spread and do well on Google but also on social sites.

So someone found it then, and they shared it on Facebook because it was just fun.

Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure you’ve seen all these kinds of quizzes and things, such as which city you should live in and which superhero are you and so forth. It spreads through the blogosphere, through Facebook and all that.

So we’ll walk the average person through this because they think they’re taking out this thing: What would if I had a baby? What would my baby’s name be? Let’s go along the sort of mental thread that you’re working on. And I will. This is really fun, and I will post it on Facebook. How does the next person who does it on the Facebook app know what the connection is back to the brand?

Right, so like I said, if the person ends up on that landing page to take the quiz or to utilize whatever functionality or whatever is there, and they’re like, “Oh wow, this is really cool.”

Over on the side, you’d do a little soft sell and say, “Hey, we got this essential nesting checklist, or we got this video or whatever, some little bit of training, et cetera, et cetera,” right?

So this is a core thing. I wanna stop you for a second because this is like, it’s stuff that, like, I think you and I know, and maybe people are hearing, and I don’t know if they’re computing. What you’re actually saying is that we live in a world where a lot of brands are thinking about native advertising. How do I go on BuzzFeed and work with them to create something unique that might create attention? What you’re saying is, sort of forget that. 

Why don’t you create the survey on your own? That page is also your content area. It’s your place to create a call to action in another way or take them somewhere else or further down that line of how they might get more and more engaged with you. And you’re sort of saying it off the cuff, but I think it’s a really critical component because it opens up a prism of marketing that isn’t advertising-based, right? That’s what makes what you’re saying to me, so, well, of course, duh, why don’t we do this? 

And so few people do this because the opportunity then is you could actually leverage keywords even, you can even do a keyword buy against this, which I think would be pretty reasonable because you wouldn’t be going off of massive brands, people are looking for quizzes or fun things to do, whatever, you could probably buy some cheap, even advertising space to let people know about this fun quiz, viral, getting your friends and family to start to share it. So the benefits of a transcend just SEO, you’re actually creating this stable of content that is actually ad supported by you as a brand.

Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. It’s content marketing, I think, on steroids. So ins

tead of just leaving it to Buzzfeed, you pay them money, and then they help you create some content pieces; it’s really only helping them. Because if you notice, those articles that are sponsored never have a link out that passes page rank. It’s always not followed if there’s a link at all to the brand. It’s no followed. So, you get zero SEO credit. Yeah, BuzzFeed has a lot of authority in Google, but you get zero of it, and you pay them a lot of money. So why do that when you can create link-worthy, buzz-worthy content on your site and on your blog?

That’s the launching pad for this fantastic content marketing, this remarkable content. And then you’re going to use social power users and.

Influencers, your own link, even your own face. You could have ten people who like your brand on Facebook. Even seeding it with them is a good place to start.

Yeah. So, I have a two-pronged approach that I’d recommend. One would have influencers that are already friends or in your network that you can leverage. So, I, as an SEO consultant, have nurtured some really great relationships with power users. I have a power user friend who is in the Century Club on Reddit, which means she has over 100,000 link karma points. That’s pretty powerful.

She hits the front page of Reddit all the time. Now you don’t want to have some salesy piece of garbage on the front page of Reddit. I mean, it would never make it to the front page then because it’s gotta be high quality and worthy of being in front of that Reddit audience. But you wanna be very careful with an audience like that. You don’t wanna alienate them or create something that’s just not adding massive value.

Let me hop in. What I tell people is this, and tell me, I’m simplifying it because, again, your brain is awfully big. It is both a curse and a blessing, as you know.

Thank you, Mitch.

Exactly. It’s a backhanded insult almost when I say your brain is so big. What you’re saying is that a lot of brands look at a platform like Let’s Use Reddit and ask how they can sell their stuff to these people. What you’re saying, and what I say all the time, is don’t ask that question. Ask yourself, how could I, my brand, become a valuable part of that culture? And if you start with that slight perspective, you actually start thinking about assets that you have, and content would be one of them, ideation, team support, size, and figure out ways that you could help that community be better, be more interesting, want to connect. That’s what you’re saying.

Yep. Good. Exactly.

I wanna, you know, time quickly trickles away when you start going on your tears, and they’re so interesting. You did talk about video. I think we would both agree that one of the most profound shifts in search has been image-based, whether we’re looking at things like Instagram or, even now, I would say, Pinterest and those types of audiences. Talk a little bit about what a brand needs to understand when it comes to things like image-based playing. I mean, it’s such a different world, and I actually think it’s the best world, even Facebook, you know, quick images, getting people to just look at things. From your perspective, what do they have to know in terms of making sure it’s in there what you would call properly or right?

Yeah, so there’s some strategy, and there’s some tactics here. So, in The Art of War, Sun Tzu, “Tactic without strategy the noise before defeat” is a bunch of tactical stuff that makes noise and doesn’t actually move the needle. So you’ve got to have an overarching strategy here for your Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, and so forth. But let’s just say from a tactical standpoint, you already have the strategy in place. You’re going to do these amazing scavenger hunts and leave clues on your Pinterest channel. You’re going to do some really cool stuff, right? And maybe some influencers’ Pinterest channels, blah, blah, right?

Now, from a tactical perspective, there’s a bunch of things that you can do just to make things that much more effective. So let’s say, for example, you reorganize your pinboards so that the pinboards that are most important to driving your brand and your outcome are high up on the page. So they’re not just kind of random. You’ve decided that, all right.

These are the five or four most important pinboards; you just rearrange them so that those are the ones on the top. Maybe create some seasonal pin boards because those can do really well, and you do it not last minute, like two weeks before Christmas, but like September, right? When everybody’s thinking back to school, that’s when you start building out a killer pinboard for the holidays.

You’d also, and there’s a ton of stuff. I went through a whole huge PowerPoint deck of tactical tips, tricks, and so forth for Pinterest at PubCon in the fall, which I’d be happy to share with your listeners, that PowerPoint deck if they’re interested. But let’s take YouTube because it’s a visual medium, and it’s not just images. It’s movies, you know, and so if we can optimize our YouTube channels for greater reach and views and so forth, that’s even better, as it’s also the number two search engine as well as a social network. 

So, some things you can do, just really simple things like the image thumbnail. You can do a custom image thumbnail, and it could be an old video, it doesn’t matter how old it is. You could go back and optimize your image thumbnails if you are a verified YouTube user, provide your mobile number and then it sends a verification code and boom, you’re a verified YouTube user. You can upload a custom thumbnail. It doesn’t even have to be a frame from the video, and you can add graphics to it and so forth. If you just do that, you’ll find a profound impact on your views and engagement on YouTube because the video the video’s image thumbnail is a bigger influencer on the user’s click decision in the YouTube search results than the title or even the position you are in the search results. 

So that thumbnail is critical, and you can easily go through and just optimize a whole bunch of those, optimize while you’re at it, all these old videos on your channel, the titles and the description, make sure that your URL is at the beginning of the description. Where you want to drive people to not weigh down where they have to click on the show more in order to see it because then you’re just gonna kill the click-through rate to your landing page. Make sure that you turn off statistics so that all your competitors can’t see your stats on your video, like the trends of embeds and views and all that. There’s a lot of old tactical stuff like that. So, if you’re interested in learning more, I know I can go on about this forever. My book, my newest one, Social E-Commerce, has a whole section dedicated to YouTube optimization tips and tricks.

And it’s great; I’m not just saying it because I blurbed the book. I mean, it’s a crazy book. I think one of the things, Stephan, that if people had not heard of you before, what I would say about you is sort of what you just demonstrated, is that sort of depth of tactics that you get into. Like when I read, I didn’t read the whole thing. When I glanced through the art of SEO, it really was. It was an awakening for me when I realized this was not just a master class. It’s not for me anymore to have that depth of knowledge. 

And I wound up reading the beginning of chapters or certain components, but when it got into the weeds, I thought, wow, like this is, it’s now taken away from me. And the reason I say that is because when you talk about things like, you know, you got to get in there, get into this thumbnails. I often worry that the people who hear this will think, well, now we’re getting into them. The minutia and the stuff that doesn’t matter. And I think what I get overall from your message is that even just being aware that these things exist, whether you’re doing them or not, hopefully, and this is why I wanted you on the show, opens people’s eyes to the fact that this has become a sophisticated, very mature market, that it’s not just pay to play. 

And that the opportunity to really lead digitally still exists. I think a lot of brands look at it and forget it. The 800-pound gorilla is my top competitor. They’re out spending me. They’re out SEO-ing me. They’re out doing all this. And what you’re saying is that if you get somebody in there and there’s a little bit of elbow grease, odds are you can dethrone people like that because the opportunity is there.

Yes, you just said it perfectly. It’s like there’s some secret knowledge, which isn’t that secret. I mean, you can buy books such as Socially Ecommercee and read up on it, or you can hire a consultant, right? So I’m for hire, but you know, it’s expensive. So you just get these resources and people in your corner, and you can punch above your weight. You can beat Goliath, and that’s, I think, amazing that this opportunity still exists. Many years later, in the maturity of search and social media, there are still tons of untapped opportunities where the 800-pound gorilla in your market and industry does not know this stuff. And you could leverage that.

So, I want to close out by just getting some of your thoughts because it’s one thing to recognize that even if someone isn’t as skilled or as experienced as you are, mistakes are made. And these things are sort of normal in the work and play of digital. And I always say a lot of it’s like MacGyver. You know, we’re still putting this thing together with chicken wings and paper clips and bubblegum. There’s just a lot of it being cobbled together on a platform that was never meant to do the things that it’s done.

 But where I want you to talk a little bit about is the fact that you know, you could know all this stuff that you know, and yet tomorrow, Google could change an algorithm that fundamentally changes everything. No, that’s not the case because that is sometimes what we hear, is it like, oh, I brought in a search consultant, and then they just said that Google changed everything, and then I’m, you know, SOL, as we say in the business.

Right, so I wouldn’t worry about that because, foundationally speaking, the Google algorithm of PageRank, which was the foundation from the very beginning, looks at the importance of webpages, their importance, trust and authority. Now, you know, it’s not just about getting votes as links. It’s about the power of each of these votes. Not every vote is created equal. Not every link is created equal. So here’s your opportunity to differentiate and outsmart the competition and get powerful links and powerful votes that propel you forward. It’s the rising tide that lifts all boats, so your entire website will benefit. 

Do some crazy brilliant content marketing campaign, and it’s over there tucked away in your blog somewhere. Your entire e-commerce site would benefit because you did this killer campaign, and it took off and went viral. It has lots of links, social shares, etc. So this is still, I think, a ground for the opportunity. Even though we’re well into the maturity of search, as I said, it’s just a question of what your priorities are. If you think in terms of outcome focus versus activity focus, that’s gonna change the game for you because most SEOs, most online marketers, I think, in fact, are activity focused. 

There’s a huge to-do list, and they gotta check off every single item, like, oh, well, we haven’t optimized your video thumbnails yet, we gotta do our keyword research on YouTube, we gotta do our. Optimized titles and blah blah blah blah. There’s 50 or 100 or 500 things to check off. No, that’s the wrong way to manage anything. A project, a discipline, or your life in general is about your outcome. If you think of these activities as arrows in your quiver, if you can hit the bullseye, that outcome you’re after.

With just the first arrow or first few arrows, boom, you finally got it with three arrows. That’s amazing. Why would you use up the rest of your arrows? Why would you check off every single to-do on your to-do list when you can come up with a bigger, more hairy, audacious goal, a new outcome, a new target for your bullseye to hit, and now you have a different set of arrows in your quiver. That’s the way I think you should look at your marketing, your SEO, and your life.

Ah, Stephan, here we are in a world where you’re telling people, please optimize on the go; please test little things as you go, and we all get trapped in these things every day where we feel like we can’t get down to the little stuff. So, it’s always a pleasure talking to you and always a pleasure hearing all of these little things that actually can do really, really big things to help change a business digitally. Let people know where they can best connect to you and your work.

Alright, thank you, Mitch. Yes, StephanSpencer.com is my personal site. You can reach me there. You can find me on Twitter. SSpencer is my Twitter handle. I’m on Facebook, Stephan Spencer, Pinterest, and all the various social sites. You can also check out my information product on a training program on SEO. It’s scienceofseo.com. And my email is Stephan@stephanspencer.com. It’s P-H-A-N, not E-N. So yeah.

Thanks so much for your time, Stephan.

Thank you, Mitch. It’s been a pleasure.

Yeah.