Experts On The Wire (An SEO Podcast!)

This week’s guest was referred to me as someone who could teach the value of infographics. My first reaction was ‘hmmm … infographics sort of have a bad reputation’. But when I dug into the company’s SEMrush traffic stats and was  blown away by their recent, explosive growth. That company is Venngage and my guest is their Director of Marketing Nadya Khoja. I brought her on the show to find out how...

International SEO is frankly one of those areas of SEO I never quite “got” out of the gate. So whenever an International SEO project would come up, I’d usually pass it along. But  today I wanted to solve that for myself – and for  you the listener. So if you’ve found International and even Multilingual SEO a challenge in the past, my guest is here to help end our pain! Even if you’ve had some expe...

This post is  a companion post to the actual audio episode. How ‘Experts’ All Began In late 2015, Anthony and I here at Evolving first started discussing the idea of doing some sort of ‘show’. It’s something I’d wanted to do for a while, and would finally be able to with his help. We saw it as a great way to help marketing Evolving SEO, do something I would be passionate about, while adding value...

If I was asked to do what Tyler had to, I’d be terrified too. It was late 2014. Tyler was brought into College Raptor, an exciting new startup. They have some incredible new technology. They just closed an impressive series A round of funding. Amazing opportunity right? Except for one thing. They have NO traffic (they’re starting from scratch). And they want Tyler to help scale College Raptor to 1...

I’m minding my own business, doing my SEO ‘thing’. Thinking  “I GOT THIS” . And then Mike King drops an article like this one called “ The Technical SEO Renaissance “. In it, he uses words like “critical rendering path”, “inverse document frequency” and “angular JS” – and I don’t know about you, but maybe you feel a bit behind, intimidated or overwhelmed? Seems like, per usual, SEO does  not stop,...

There’s massive opportunity in YouTube. But maybe like me, you struggle to understand how to rank videos, how to market them, or how to  monetize and drive  business value from your YouTube presence. Whether you’re trying to understand YouTube for yourself or your clients, you’ll walk away from this show with a  way better understanding of how YouTube works in 2017. My guest, Roberto Blake, is a Y...

Do you experience the pain, frustration and overwhelm I feel when logging into Google Analytics – and you’re just  buried in data. Maybe like me, you struggle to immediately connect all the dots to  useful reports, outcomes and action items. My guest today told me about some things I’d didn’t even know were  possible in GA – and better yet – how to apply them to better our SEO and Content efforts....

You may not know this, but when Tim Ferriss was launching his enormously successful Podcast , my guest today was one of just a few veteran podcasters Tim  reached out to ask for advise. That makes sense. John’s show, EOFire, receives  over 1.5 million monthly listens  (and Tim’s show has crossed  over 100 million downloads total). I was lucky to grab 20 minutes of John’s time to have as a guest on...

Has this ever happened to you? You create the best 10x piece of content imaginable. (It really is 10x right?) You invest time, research and money into it. You hit publish and you  know it’s going to go crazy! But then it doesn’t. That’s because “build it and they will come” is not always true. You have to build it,  promote it – and then if you’re content and message is good enough – people will c...

That title is no hyperbole. I don’t know what number you would guess ‘massive’ means, but Ross and his company Siege Media have grown traffic by 250,000-500,000 monthly visits for clients like Zillow, TripAdviser and ZipRecruiter. I’d call that ‘massive’! I wanted to know how they do this, so I invited him on the show to find out. We chat about: how he estimates if a client will see ROI from conte...

If you were to ask me: “Dan, choose an industry to build a website around to get traffic from Google” I would definitely NOT choose the medical and supplements industry. It’s super hard to get Google and users to trust you, and rank above sites like Wikipedia, WedMD. But that’s  exactly what my guest, Sol Orwell did with his site Examine.com – which has amassed over 2 million monthly visitors in a...

Yes, I copied the title exactly from Mark’s Moz Post. In fact that’s WHY I invited Mark to be a guest on today’s show. He wrote a post on Moz a few weeks ago that caught quite a bit of attention from the SEO community. It was actually a response to a prior post on Moz by Tomas Vaitulevicius. called “The SEO Myth Of Going Viral”. You see, Mark used to work for the agency Distilled. And during his t...

  NOTE: I originally wrote this for The Next Web In August of 2016. It was officially accepted… but never published (not sure what happened). UPDATE: It’s been published over on The Next Web (whoo hoo! as you can imagine they have a long queue of content.) You can read the whole thing there: http://thenextweb.com/tq/2017/01/19/12-keyword-research-tools-and-creative-ways-to-use-them/ I’ve removed t...

This episode is packed with tools & tactics that will help you do better marketing, by having better  systems . In my last year of client work – I noticed a funny pattern.  The clients getting the best results were the ones that had processes in place . This is because this means they are actually executing, and actually getting work done. So I wanted to bring a guest on to help crack the syst...

Feel like your content is not earning the attention, traffic and links it may deserve? Sometimes it just needs a few tweaks in the right direction. It’s probably 80% there, but that last 20% will take it from ‘blah’ to ‘best in class’. My guest – Craig Ballantyne talks about how he has used content to earn hundreds of high quality links, converts visitors into customers and drives tons of organic...

Mark my words. The future of  winning  educational content – lies in  also being entertaining. Or, as a friend said to me once “oh, you mean wrap it in bacon.”   No… not that Bacon. This bacon. OK Dan, focus… The battle for attention is fierce, and you can educate with content, but you have to  engage . You have to make someone feel something, or surprise them, or grab them with a story. My guest...

This episode is for all the SEO-heads. My guest Bill Sebald of Greenlane SEO brings massive insight into the world of agencies and working with medium to enterprise scale businesses (walk in any Mall and you’re likely to see at least a few of Greenlane SEO’s clients). We talked about: The ONE thing that helped a billion dollar brand recover organic traffic to 100’s of thousands a visits per month...

I asked Corbett how he originally connected with ‘influencers’ like Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas and Andrew Warner. His answer was so interesting, I’ve been thinking about it all week – and frankly – it’s changed my mindset about marketing, podcasting and even business. And that’s what I think is so great about this discussion. It’ll get you thinking  differently and with  fresh ideas about your mark...

Orbit Media is a Chicago web design and development company. Yet … they’ve acquired 1,200+ links, and grown traffic to over 70,000 sessions per month with content marketing … about marketing and analytics! Andy Crestodina is the co-founder of Orbit, and he’s going to tell us all about how they grew their traffic and regularly acquire so many backlinks. This is  exactly the type of guest I know YOU...

Your copywriting… the words you use – can be the difference between a sale or silence. On the web … words. They’re everything! (Yes I know there’s videos and images – but your message – starts with copy). My guest today, Pamela Wilson of Rainmaker Digital (CopyBlogger) is here to save us from bad copywriting! She gets into hands on tips for improving your titles. Improving your first sentence. Spe...

Have you ever struggeled with knowing  where to actually reach your target customers? Or knowing what  problems or friction points they hit when researching your product or service? Or what to  say to them to connect and convey that you understand what they are trying to solve? Enter ‘User Journey Mapping’. Rebekah Cancino uses Journey Mapping to help businesses (including fortune 200 companies) s...

My guest today is Peep Laja of ConversionXL. Peep got started in the marketing world in 2011 when he grew his blog to 100,000 monthly visitors in just a year. Since that time, he’s become known as one of the foremost experts in the world of CRO. This interview is jam packed with actionable CRO tips you can try on your website. Enjoy! Don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes ! Links ConversionXL Growth...

A lot of us “do” SEO, Inbound Marketing or content creation, but it’s  essential we know about everything going on in the digital space. (You may have heard this referred to as being a  T Shaped Marketer ). And … the NY Times JUST announced their purchase of Wirecutter – which is a site built on Affiliate Revenue (NOT ads). My feeling is that affiliate marketing is a revenue channel we all need to...

Marshall is a rare voice in the SEO industry. He combines 20 years of experience doing SEO at sites like The New York Times and Boston.com, while continuing to work hands-on with SEO with some of the world’s biggest publishers and enterprise sites. I hit Marshall with all the burning SEO questions I thought YOU the listener would want answers to. You’ll hear his distinctive take on losing AdWords...

This episode covers a LOT. But despite the wide variety of topics – I realized –  everything points back to  branding and  simple, straightforward strategies you can implement right away, that will make a difference in your company’s brand, or your personal brand. Specifically, you will learn: How to get your CEO to invest in personal branding. An uncommon (but highly effective) way to build links...