Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard: Personal Branding, AI Strategies, and SEO Insights for Visionary CEOs

Paul Shapiro with Jason Barnard at Global Marketing Day 2019 Paul Shapiro talks with Jason Barnard about the wider view of technical SEO. We start with an idiotic James Bond analogy. Paul Shapiro pulls me back to the serious business of ‘what is technical SEO’? And the definition is wider than I thought. 4 types of tech SEO. Paul has a plan to tell me the 4 types. Like a child, I keep trying to jump ahead. Paul then looks at skillsets and venn diagrams. And that we should look at (and accept and appreciate) these crossovers. Search Engine Optimisation is one giant Venn diagram of skillsets. The https://jasonbarnard.com/ onto the fact that in SEO we are (and need to be) multi-skilled. We end with ‘it’s important to get into the weeds’. Who knows what that means (ask Paul)

Marty Weintraub with Jason Barnard at Pubcon Las Vegas 2020 Marty starts with his musical career and the segues very neatly into why that initial career path helps with digital marketing. And, as we all know, there are a lot of musicians in this space. Mentions for Robert Smith, AC/DC, The Monkees… And we also learn to love our lard pack… and it becomes yet another spur of the moment silly ditty

Once again I get the pronunciation of someone’s name wrong. How does James Norquay find clients: referrals, conferences, content promotion… and a little SEO :) Keep a good customer base. Never have one single client who represents more than 10% of your income. Next how to hire great staff. Conferences, job sites, Facebook groups… Enthusiasm, a personality that fits in to the team, motivation… I decide we are talking about ranking factors for getting jobs. The first year is always going to be really tough. Surviving the first 3 years is key. Then you are rolling. After 8 years, 80% of Jame’s job is networking. Great clients are hard to find and bad clients and easy to find.

Barry Adams with Jason Barnard at TakeItOffline Amsterdam 2019 In the pub, just before the second day of the Takeitoffline unconference. Barry hates AMP and is an attempt by Google to force the web to conform to their vision of the web. Now they are getting involved in WordPress, and we should be very worried (especially when we get words like PWAMP). A commercial company should not be the organisation that decides how the web works – because they will do what is best for their bottom line, not what is best for the web. Google is an advertising company with 90% dominance and should be regulated. They started wanting to make the web a better place, but are now a company looking to make money. We dig into how the European Directive may pan out for news sites. Although they are playing hardball on the EU directive, and the recent updates have impacted the publishers enormously (and cost them dearly), Google are trying to be more political with the publishers. Then onto what business models might work for news publishers – not a one-size-fits-all. I vaguely float the idea of calling him Happy Barry. Then onto Google breaking the Social Contract, and the ins-and-outs of permission to scrape. Conclusion – Barry chirpily says that Google don’t feel they owe anyone anything.

Thomas Ballantyne with Jason Barnard at Pubcon Las Vegas 2019 Thomas Ballantyne talks to Jason Barnard about reviews. We discuss pest control, cartoons, and eventually get onto how to get great online reviews for an offline business. It’s all about relationships. Oh, and asking nicely. Bribing people doesn’t work. Top 3 platforms are Google, Yelp and Facebook.

John Morabito with Jason Barnard at Pubcon Las Vegas 2019 For once someone gets all over excited about Brand SERPs. I manage to keep reasonably quiet and let him talk, despite the fact I am over excited about it too. He actually does proper SEO audits on all terms that contain the brand name, and gives some super duper insights we should all be taking note of. So go out and manage your branded searches. Easy win, and vitally important.

Kristine Schachinger with Jason Barnard at PubCon Las Vegas 2019 Kristine Schachinger talks with Jason Barnard about the 3 common misconceptions about E-A-T. Google don’t look at author. They look at entities. Google don’t look at accuracy of facts. Kristine Schachinger uses Omegas as an example as to why. Then why linking out is so important. I expound my topic layer theory. They don’t use NLP, they use NLU. Which is why we need Schema.org… and we end up with a sulky robot on crutches.

John Paul Sherman with Jason Barnard at PubCon Las Vegas 2019 John Paul (JP) Sherman talks with Jason Barnard about findability and discoverability. Jason Barnard and John Paul (JP) Sherman discuss both findability and discoverability = matching user intent with information or content that they want. Quickly. On and offline. Grocery stores, for example. We end up trying (and succeed) to shoehorn the idea into punk music and Dada movement.

Elmer Boutin with Jason Barnard at PubCon Las Vegas 2019 Elmer Boutin talks with Jason Barnard about human centered data driven content. Google, Bing and Amazon have a user-centric design perspective, and we tend to forget that. Jason and Elmer Boutin discuss how we should pull and analyse the data to discover the real pain points of our potential clients rather than use our instincts since we are all biased, and our content will therefore be biased. Helpful Resources About Human Centered Data Driven Content Why A Website's Folder Structure Is Important for SEO Your Website - Another Business Asset “Media Champions” with Elmer Boutin from WrightIMC

Fabrice Canel with Jason Barnard at PubCon Las Vegas 2019 Fabrice Canel talks with Jason Barnard about Bing's crawling API and solving JavaScript. Fabrice Canel us downloading the whole worldwide web every day (even my site). Bing have launched a crawling API, and that is putting Fabrice out of a job (and he wants to be out of a job) – simply ping Bing to have an URl crawled immediately. They also have solved JavaScript.

I have to read her name tag to get through the difficult first moments of the podcast. Then Karina Tama - Rutigliano talks about the health industry and getting old (it is expensive). Plus the target audience is not necessarily the people themselves, but their children. And if the audience is the older people, Bing is a good marketing target. She goes on to say that if you do the right thing, Google updates are not a worry, and you sleep well.

Craig Campbell with Jason Barnard at PubCon Las Vegas 2019 Craig Campbell talks with Jason Barnard about the ultimate podcast strategy. Craig Campbell explains that I have got the strategy for my podcast all wrong. My plan is to not have a plan, which is not a good idea, it seems. So he tells me what I SHOULD be doing. Hint – have a plan.

Dixon Jones with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO September 2019 Dixon Jones talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about analysing the web in Blocks, Chunks, Fraggles, Segments. Majestic don’t keep Dixon Jones informed about very much. Because he can’t keep a secret. When they DID tell him what they have been doing for the last year and a half, he got rather enthusiastic – context around links by analysing around chunks / blocks / segments / sections / fraggles of content… and so scoring content according the context of the segment it is in… text, semantics, link density, images, alt tags and so on. Cool! The fact that Majestic are doing this (and looking at how well they do it) gives us a good indication of how well Google will (probably) doing. Then onto the new link tags, the problems inherent in the UGC tag… And Dixon suggests that Google add a rel=important tag. Dixon digs his grave by suggesting that Google lack variety and are moving to echo chambers… and somehow uses Middle Ages Villages to demonstrate. I get excited about self-fulfilling prophecies and the problems of discoverability and trust for some authoritative content … The World’s best content is the very stuff that is buried. Helpful Resources About Passage Indexing Do Not Ignore Passage Indexing - with Dixon Jones, CEO of InLinks and Majestic Brand Ambassador

Paul O’Donoghue with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO September 2019 Paul O’Donoghue talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about the wilder lessons from local SEO and near me searches. Jason and Paul O’Donoghue start with a discussion about horrid nicknames at school (that were secret until today) Then we move quickly onto local search and near-me information. There are more near me searches now than ever before – both explicitly expressed in words, and increasingly by geo localisation. We are now expecting local results within 500 metres, down from 5km in just 6 years. Local search is all about the answers. And that is increasingly true of the wider world of search. Local search also brings to the fore that online / offline are intertwined. And that is increasingly true of the wider world of search. Google is now pulling in information from all sorts of sources. And that is increasingly true of the wider world of search. The parallels go on and on… Being in local search is the best place to be for digital marketing now. Getting that right is the starting point for any business – and most get it wrong. Then onto the other players in the near me field – we often forget that “near me” information comes from a variety of sources in the near me world – Yelp, Facebook, Bing, FourSquare… Local is a global thing.

Andrea Volpini with Jason Barnard Andrea Volpini talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about Google's reaction to the link tax. Google formalised its reaction to the Link Tax on 23rd September. I was a bit confused. Luckily Andrea Volpini has already figured it out and gives me the rundown / lowdown on the EU copyright Directive, Google’s reaction to it and the practicalities for publishers… Google News publishers are opted in by default, other publishers are opted out by default. Search Console gives publishers the means to control this. Schema markup is the solution if you want to opt-in and yet keep your rich results. Could this perhaps even be an opportunity to take control of our content? Brilliant !

Liz Raad with Jason Barnard at Search Marketing Summit 2019 Liz Raad talks with Jason Barnard about buying, pimping and monetising websites. Liz Raad was at SMS Sydney to get some extra SEO knowledge – but she knows more than she lets on. She has a Norwegian name, is Australian… but is part Swiss (but she has never been to Switzerland). Liz and her husband (Matt) buy fully functional domains that they can monetise, or sell on – a bit like buying property, apparently. But the ROI on websites is incredibly high. MUCH higher than real estate. She suggests that the due diligence in their industry is simply an SEO audit – and it is mad that more SEOs aren’t doing it (how stupid are you Jason?) She encourages me to dip a toe in the water – I could buy a $500 website and get my start – I call it pimping websites, Liz calls it renovating. A lot of the work that needs to be done is simple SEO cleaning up and UX. Liz insists it is easy money if you work at it from a business point of view. Quick discussion about international expansion for manufacturing SMBs (Sarah Carroll gets a mention there). Then back to buying websites to monetise them… she doesn’t look for sites by topic, but rather income or profit. She has a site all about pigeon racing, so we have a lovely discussion about pigeon racing that goes from the Philippine to betting, to Little Voice, to Mike Tyson. Amazon affiliate sites are blue chip, AdSense sites are blue chip. And since Google AdSense delivers ads based on the search algorithm, we SEOs have a DOUBLE advantage.

Jono Alderson with Jason Barnard at TakeItOffline Amsterdam 2019 Starts with a yawn. Then he forgets one of his jobs. Jono’s current job at Yoast and it is his double dream job – his role is to turn up at work and think of fun and interesting things to work on that are impactive. I have never had a real job, and spending a couple of days at Yoast HQ is the first time I have thought it might be nice. Jono could have chosen anything he wanted to work on, and he chose Schema.org (the most boring thing on the web). He is swimming in relationships, philosophy, … and then he gets into the pure scale of what they are doing – 14% of the web uses Yoast… Um. Wow. And on top of that, they need to be backwards compatible and remain compatible with all the plugins that hook into Yoast and all the badly coded sites. One simple, genius idea has made all this possible (like all the best systems). Schema.org markup gives Google confirmation, confidence and precision. Jono wants a t-shirt! Google are rolling out a conveyor belt of carrots (in the form of embellishments and additions to rich results). Next up is booking a restaurant or buying a product enabled by Schema.org (and we find out why a Bose headphone costs $33900). Quick discussion about Joomla and Typo3 (Jono likes Typo3). Followed by a bit of memory loss. Jono then gives a quick rundown of how and why Google are betting the farm on WordPress. Lastly, Yoast is investing very heavily in Schema.org – it is the future of the web, apparently… as big a jump as from Web 1 to Web 2. From interactive communities to interoperable data.

Martha Van Berkel, Robin Allenson and Dateme Tubotamuno with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO September 2019 Martha Van Berkel, Robin Allenson and Dateme Tubotamuno talk with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about structured data, ontologies and commonsense Knowledge Graphs. Three amazingly intelligent and eloquent people help me understand rather a lot of concepts, Martha Van Berkel, Robin Allenson and Dateme Tubotamuno. What is a common sense Knowledge Graph? Using Schema.org structured data to manage your data layer. Ontologies are containers full of entities that have relationships (use triples !!!). Lots of philosophy around computer science – specifically ontologies. Entity management is the future (thanks, Greg Gifford). We are all becoming data architects. Three levels of knowledge. Databases expressing opinions. How semantics help sell t-shirt bras. Manage your brand for machines (not just search !). And rather a lot more… Amazing.

Paula Didone with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO September 2019 Paula Didone had just given a talk at BrightonSEO in (April 2019 edition). This is a great follow-up to Dan Saunders’s episode… Amazon is challenging both for PPC and SEO. PPC can become very expensive very quickly, especially as a side business. Reviews are the key, and the step to getting enough reviews is very big. And when you get enough, your competitors will spam you down, and then Amazon replicate successful products with Amazon Basics… double cut-throat. For SEO, brand is vital. Just like Google, Amazon want to get their users through to the best product / sale as fast as possible. So conversion rates are the single biggest thing to get right. Intent is vital for that, and an opportunity is to be found where your competitors are falling down – just check out their reviews :) Rank well on Amazon, you will probably rank well on Google – I get carried away and suggest you can forget Google-centric SEO, and perhaps dump your website. Paula brings me back to earth. We end with Google’s problem of owning path to purchase, but not owning the sale. And Amazon’s inverse problem.

Jeff Ferguson with Jason Barnard at Search Marketing Summit 2019 Jeff Ferguson talks with Jason Barnard about how Google is using machine learning (SEO and SEA). Jeff Ferguson gets us started with a repeat of his groovy Elvis impersonation. Then gets serious and gives some amazing insights into what machine learning Google is using that affects SEO. Obviously Rankbrain, but also crawling and extracting unstructured and structured data for the web. I love the idea Jeff throws out – that Schema.org is the only thing we are doing ONLY for the search engines. We debate whether Schema.org is needed for understanding or is it really mostly for improving confidence. We move onto how many legs does a horse have (pretty funny) and how fast does an ostrich run. Jeff has a lovely line on cocky human beings. Onto ML in Google Ads, specifically DSA. Volume of data is incredibly important, and is a factor we (I) often overlook. Lastly Smart Display – Maybe machine learning will push some ugly ads because they work better… in which case we still need the human touch!

Joel Bondorowsky with Jason Barnard at SEMrush Meetup Tel Aviv 2019 Joel Bondorowsky talks with Jason Barnard about attention deficit disorder and PPC. On the beach in Tel Aviv, Joel Bondorowsky tells me he has Ukrainian roots. Joel has attention deficit disorder, meaning he has trouble achieving long term goals… unless under pressure, or the goals are incredibly short term task-driven or when it is fun. PPC is all three! He was unemployable, but PPC at Wix.com changed that. Learning PPC is easy – just 3 days if you read fast enough – so it is a great career for someone who could have been a lawyer but couldn’t remember swathes of detailed information. I suggest PPC is simply functionality and common sense. Joel adds that I had forgotten to mention experience, which is vital. We agree that our jobs are like playing a game. PPC is a game that has fairly simple rules, and is fun to play (if you like that kind of thing, and Joel does :). Lastly, onto gamification and the similarities and differences between gambling and PPC. Professional slot machine players, Google Analytics and the one armed bandit technique, which is brill.

Ric Rodriguez with Jason Barnard at Digital Elite Day Ric Rodrigues talks to Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about reviews in SEO. Ric is the first guest to ask specifically for the song. Apparently it haunts his dreams! Ric is really into local SEO, and so he is a big fan of reviews. I start on the obvious advantage – reducing Google Ads costs. Ric suggests takes it much further. He gets very excited about the amazing insights we can get from analysing the reviews data we have. Trustpilot have seen a 40% uptick in organic traffic due to the E-A-T updates … Three factors for local search – proximity, NAPS, credibility (and accuracy, so four!). Google are looking for trust in you as a brand, and trust in the information it has about you. Reviews help enormously with both. I mention inferred reviews back in June, two months before Bill Slawski’s article about Quality Visit Scores Patent (Granted: July 30, 2019). Then we get into Android tracking – both direct and indirect, touching on probabilistic and deterministic wotsits for tracking (I get a bit confused). We debate whether Jim Carrey in Yes Man could be tracked by his behaviour. Then into the BIG (and most interesting) chunk of the conversation – aggregating and using review data ourselves, where reviews are being used by Google, and where they might be taking this. Reviews are the pulse of your clients. By doing analysis of the sentiment pre and post offline marketing campaign, you can measure the success. Reviews feed into E-A-T, the Knowledge Graph, brand measurement, We agree that everyone in SEO should be looking into reviews. During the conversation, Bill Slawski comes up a few times, and every time, we both get unreasonably enthusiastic.

Patrick Reinhart with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO April 2019 Patrick Reinhart talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about where is the war on new hardware technologies lies. The first guest who is more overexcited and enthusiastic than I am. You can almost hear his arms waving. Very fun conversation, and Patrick Reinhart is super-smart. The importance of Amazon Alexa is overestimated. There are so many devices that we will soon be talking to. All fun for us, but it is still too early to make it the focus of our strategy. Patrick sees a world where we no longer actively search as assistant devices like fridges, stoves, Bose glasses, necklaces, contact lenses become so much part of our environment that search and discovery are delivered to us as part of our everyday interactions. To get the biggest slice of this cake, Google is acquiring access through partnerships with Samsung et al. Google needs the manufacturers more than the manufacturers need Google and so it pays them, not the other way around, which surprised me. But Amazon are going to give Google a run for their money if only because of generational bias. We are soooo Google, but the youth of today are more Amazon.

Chris Liversidge with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO April 2019 Chris Liversidge talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about the truth about attribution (hint, use Machine Learning) Google Analytics doesn’t clean the data and that makes it **** (expletive). That means in SEO and SEA, you are constantly being driven towards last-click terms. And that is saturated. If you can understand attribution, then you can show the value when you choose target terms earlier in the process of attribution. That makes attribution a critical part of the future of search – bringing the multiple sessions together to reflect how people engage with you before transaction. When I say “what all 5 channels?” and Chris Liversidge sniggers – he is talking several dozen – both online and offline. He uses machine learning to calculate predictive probabilities about cross-channel actions that are as statistically accurate as those used to calculate the Higgs boson. The conclusion is that big corporations are underestimating the impact of organic search by more than 50%. Email too. And we can quote Chris on that :) And Direct is the “rubbish bucket where all hope goes”, according to Chris. Conclusion is that we are going back to more traditional marketing. And that is a conclusion that just keeps on coming up in this series. Must be true, then :)

Andrea Volpini with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO April 2019 Andrea Volpini talks with The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard) about dancing with Google. Andrea Volpini describes a dance between machines and humans that means much of what we see is really a semi-automated approach to SEO. Absolutely brilliant insights. Brilliant enough to stop me talking too much, for once :) A cycle of a machine and humans correcting, stimulating and teaching each other. Never forget that everything comes down to two humans communicating and the machine is simply a go-between. Then we go onto agentive technology, so I now understand what the term means. And Andrea shares his research into having a machine finding new search terms and intent through an agentive dance. We both agree that machine learning applied to SEO is a fantastic area, and that Andrea knows a lot more than I do. Semantic text similarity, RNN networks… what is he talking about?

David Bain with Jason Barnard at Digital Elite Day 2019 David Bain talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about the 5 steps of podcasting. We kick off with a singing duet. David Bain then suggests that I am not so good at preliminaries. We then quickly get onto the five steps. Step 1 is prerecorded audio – make sure that is really good or you will hit problems later on. He gives some great tips on recording sound and getting the audio to sound great. I go off topic by jamming ‘All about the Bass’, then we get sidetracked by iPhone theft and motorbikes falling on us before getting back on track (which is a very appropriate turn of phrase). Step 2 is live audio and David Bain gives practical tips about how to prepare, editing and what is annoying for listeners tuts, for example. Step 3 is using as-live video. He gives super tips and tricks, and we have fun describing what we are doing for people who are just listening to the audio and cannot see what we are doing. Step 4 is live video – by this time, you can really concentrate on getting the live-chatting part right since you will have mastered the audio and getting the video right. He talks about platforms he uses – Vmix, Google Hangouts, LinkedIn, Periscope, Facebook, Blab.im. Step 5 is a live event such as David’s rather ambitious 120-guest 5-day live digital marketing marathon on Facebook. We end up agreeing with Mark Askwith that Digital Marketing is just marketing now. BIG thank you to Monte for being videographer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW0eFySP82k

Fili Wiese with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO April 2019 Fili Wiese talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about Google penalties. Second episode with Fili Wiese. First point – manual penalties are real, but algorithmic penalties do not, just a change in the calculations. An algorithmic updates are not like cars with slashed tyres, they are like navigation systems (or something like that). If you lose rankings after an update, you need to look at your SEO, especially on-page. Onto manual penalties. Link building, doorway pages, structured data penalties (that are more and more frequently) etc. He tells some entertaining (and surprising) stories about some of the reconsideration requests he has read. My best advice is ‘don’t do a shouty thing’. Fili gives some more helpful advice. I am very impressed by the word egregiousness. Google does not hold grudges. In fact, very much the opposite. Fili explains the procedure for a manual penalty – a Googler builds a case, a bit like in the courts and present that to get a judgement. They apply benefit of the doubt, just like in the courts. But getting rid of a penalty is NOT like parole. A bit of philosophy about why it is logical that everything in SEO is ‘it depends’. Helpful Resources About Google Penalties Google Penalties: The Newbie-Friendly GuideWebsite Migration with BingYour Questions Answered About Google Penalties and Their Impact On WebsitesThe Complete List of Google Penalties and How to Recover

Emily Potter with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO April 2019 Emily Potter talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about Google being the enemy. Emily Potter has had a varied career. Google aren’t playing the game anymore, on-SERP is making SEO harder and harder and featured snippets are having a major negative impact on CTR. Or are they? And what is the type of traffic? I love Emily’s Monday morning actions. Google has the route to sale but not the sale and Amazon have the sale, but not the route to sale. Which means they kind of rely on each other. If you are smaller brand and/or a published, fear the Featured Snippet. I mention the idea that the Featured Snippet has a separate algorithm based on the Knowledge Graph. Whatever the effect on CTR, at least you get your brand out there and in front of people… plus Featured Snippets are a very achievable Rich Element or SERP feature to grab.

Nik Ranger with Jason Barnard at Digital Elite Day 2019 Sitting in CitizenM in Shoreditch, we start talking about pizza parties. Then onto horses – should we run like a blinkered horse, and concentrate on what we are doing and focus on the finish line? Or should we look left and right at our competitors? Nik argues the latter, plus think about context and perhaps we should open our horizons by exchanging with other people. We should now be taking into account the rich elements and perhaps look at the opportunities to rank on those and leapfrog the competition (coming back yet again to the explanation Gary Illyes gave me). That means having a very good look at your competitors’ content strategy, but also prioritising the pages you are aiming to rank, especially when you are working on a tight budget. We get carried away with mentions of tools: Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Accuranker, Majestic, Sitebulb. Then get back on track. It turns out that when you have budget, you can perhaps be a blinkered horse. If you have limited resources, you need to pick your battles. SEMrush is great for competitor analysis and perfect for picking your battles.

Peter Mead with Jason Barnard at Search Marketing Summit 2019 Peter Mead talks with Jason Barnard about WordPress SEO and the new age of Gutenberg. We start with the Sound of Music, move onto the wonderful, sharing SEO community and supportive companies such as Yoast and SEMrush. Peter Mead is a fan of Yoast, and Yoost. Expert is a misnomer – its more about depth of knowledge and experience… with (perhaps) a little magic. Peter then makes an analogy with art, and we get onto the simplicity of Picasso. In the competition between Yoast and WordPressSEO, Yoast wins hands down for Peter. More functionalities, easier, new (rather exciting) Schema markup. We get onto the treachery of updating plugins, PHP and the WordPress core. WPengine makes all that easier and safer. Peter has three rules: install Yoast, get onto WPengine and get onto Cloudflare. We get in a bit of philosophy with Sun Tzu and Monty Python. Then back to Google’s investment in WordPress and fun with Gutenberg for the final furlong.

Chris Simmance with Jason Barnard at SEMrush Live Prague 2019 Chris Simmance talks with Jason Barnard about crawl budget and speed. We start with beards – Chris Simmance has his in the build stage. Chris tells me not to grow a beard. So that is exactly what I did :) Make your site easily crawlable and use your server logs to optimise the crawl using beautiful spreadsheets. Find the robot holes and fix them using signposting. Intriguingly, Chris uses Screaming Frog for log files and Site Bulb for crawling. He is a fan of equity sculpting, when it it done well, and gets excited about TTFB and sitespeed. Onto music instrument sites (Thomann is dreamland for musicians, according to me) and how complex they are. A bit on JavaScript, then we end with the concept of perception of speed and seemingly instantaneous siteloading – in the blink of an eye (340 ms).

Kenichi Suzuki with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO April 2019 Kenichi Suzuki talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about structured data and Google. Kenichi Suzuki is a leading SEO blogger in Japan. I put him right on the spot with questions about FAQ and Q&A markup – he sets me straight – Q&A is for user-generated content. For FAQ the debate whether we should have single page for all FAQ or multiple pages. Google is still experimenting, so there is no conclusive answer. Although he makes a great point for putting multiple FAQ on one page. Kenichi goes onto JobPosting, citing Google case studies. Then onto Event markup. And over to which is the #1 search engine in Japan. Clue: not Google. But Google nonetheless. Confused? I was! So much so that I suggest eating hot soup with your finger

John Mueller with Jason Barnard at Google Webmasters Hangout 12th July 2019 John Mueller talks to Jason Barnard about working at Google Sitting in Google’s office in Zurich. We discuss the numerous John Mueller’s at Google Inc… and the world. And the problems with the ambiguity inherent in people’s names. John cycles to work, eats in the café, answers emails, meets with Google teams, but doesn’t play much pool. We then discuss beer, street names and Google offices that used to be a brewery. Then I suggest that SEO is changing at an accelerating rate – John doesn’t agree. Then a bit of Javascript SEO and valid HTML. Then the importance of having a system and being consistent – John does agree. He gives a lovely insight into his role at Google, what he is trying to achieve and how he goes about it. A bit about Darwinism in search, the increasingly multimedia SERPs, onSERP SEO and GMB. We have a bit of a love-in about Google Maps, and reminisce about how life was different before Google Maps. That leads naturally onto knowledge graphs, relationships, entities and attributes… and review spam. John points out that most of what he says is site-specific, and two thirds of what he is quoted as saying is misquoted or quoted out of context. He is very phlegmatic about that, and says he is moving more towards talking off the record and having one on one conversations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiH9xvhOjSU&feature=emb_logo

Fernando Angulo with Jason Barnard at SEMrush Meetup Tel Aviv 2019 I start by overdoing his surname in the song. Then he tells me that he did 152 events last year. Then onto featured snippets – and SEMrush’s study of 80,000,000 featured snippets (with hints as to how to get them). I link the 20th March update with the big uptick in featured snippets on that date. Fernando gives me the lowdown on how featured snippets are evolving. Fernando sees beauty in featured snippets and tells me about the most beautiful tabular featured snippet he has seen (Australian). Featured snippets are for brand awareness and consideration – embrace them, and you will flourish. Don’t ignore preposition keywords – that is how people research the purpose of a product. Apparently the search results for queries around iPhone are very, very different across countries – and that becomes very obvious (and important) for the latter stages of the purchase process. Onto the factors for ranking as the featured snippet. Then 55% of featured snippets have a ‘people also ask’, as do results with images, carousels and videos – this is the start of predictive search and Google preempting our needs. Loads of countries don’t have featured snippets in their language – and that is an amazing opportunity (unless Google gets really good at translation). Then onto the number of words in different languages and the ensuing ambiguity and the need for context… I push things too far (as usual) and get over-theoretical about Polish, Russian, Hebrew… Finally, Fernando tells us that ranking factors will no longer be a factor in our thinking in the near future. Finally, if you can solve the users’ question or problem quickly, then you will win the game.

Tim Soulo with Jason Barnard at Search Marketing Summit 2019 Tim Soulo talks with Jason Barnard about creating content for the real long tail. Tim Soulo - I am very curious about his name, given that he is from Ukraine (I think). He cites Arnold Schwarz-a-thingy. The onto more serious matters – starting with a definition of ‘Long tail keyword’ (we mostly get the definition wrong, by the way). Long tail does not refer to the number of words in a query, and Tim proves it. Interestingly, some one word queries have very small search volume. Which ones? In short ‘if the query is long it doesn’t necessarily have low search volume and vice versa’. Then, 90% of content on the web gets no traffic from Google. We are producing a lot of content for no payback. Another misconception is that the page ranking #1 in Google for a given keyword gets most organic traffic. Not true. Tim gives a brilliant explanation. I then ask a brilliant question (Tim’s words , not mine :) This encourages him to give an amazing example of content for ranking, clicks and conversions (the dream !) Tim then states that user signals are super influential on ranking, whatever Google says. Finally, we exchange quotes about simplicity in writing… and Tim wins with the best ever quote from a French philosopher. Helpful Resources About His Work: Personal Website

Alina Ghost with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO April 2019 Alina Ghost talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about content creation for voice. We discuss Alina’s name, Alina Ghost, and how much we both learn from our respective podcasts before getting down to the nitty gritty. Content and strategy for voice search. Voice search saves time and time is our currency. Brilliant. Dan Shure suggests is a fan of providing multiple formats for content so that you have the right format at the right time for users. Text and audio, perhaps video… then I get predictably overexcited by Dan Shure’s name. Speakable content, accessibility (where I do a terrible Simon Cox impersonation), images, then APIs (companies will need to develop them to feed these devices). Lastly, we swerve into push notifications, specifically on voice. Warning – I talk too much in this episode. Poor Alina is very polite about it.

Anton Shulke with Jason Barnard at SEMrush Live Prague 2019 Anton Shulke talks with Jason Barnard about using webinars for marketing, specifically influencer marketing. I start singing lower than ever before (you can almost hear the hangover in my voice). Anton Shulke then tells me ‘you could do the song better’ (which I could). He also tells me he worked more than he drunk at SEMrushLive. I didn’t. He tells me how he got where he is today. Then onto webinars… first off, ask yourself why you are doing it. Just because you can? Or you have a good reason? Jo Pulitzer suggests not trying to sell anything. Building your audience in three stages : people get used to you, then build that to trust (by giving value), then you to loyalty. That loyalty and trust is then extended to your brand. Brilliant. And always remember that people are investing their time in your webinar. At the end, they need to feel that invested their time wisely. We often forget that conversation has a value… and he agrees that if it doesn’t, my podcast is dead ;) We then get onto 70% of the quality of the answer is in the question. Then back to webinars. Sexy titles and descriptions are vital – often more important than faces. And SEO is not your principal question for the announcement landing page. Make it for people, and reach out to them. Then I get over-analytical about entities, so-occurrence, relatedness, semantic triples… And Anton brings me back to earth very politely. What is his point of view on volume vs quality? We end with the part about influencer marketing – Anton doesn’t know a better tool for influencer marketing. I suggest podcasts. Guess what he replies. Then he quotes President Kennedy at me to make his point. Finally, Anton gives me a lesson in business (which I need). It isn’t rocket science (and yet I didn’t spot the trick). Helpful Resources: We Are SaaS: Mergers & Acquisitions

Sarah Carroll is a lovely companion to my conversation with Gianluca Fiorelli’s International SEO podcast appearance since this looks at international expansion in digital from a business strategy perspective (beyond the website). She starts by wonderfully singing thank you (turns out Sarah is Welsh and therefore can sing like a bird). She admits that talking is her favourite hobby. Onto the business at hand, she tells me that the six steps: Get Aware, Get Ready, Get Started, Get Strategic, Get Building, Get Performing. Businesses try to run before they can walk (Sarah uses the term ‘fools rush in’, but that is a song and thus dangerous territory), and too often skip steps. In SEO we are very much working in the ‘get performing’ stage, but many of our clients have skipped one or more steps and are not truly ready. But when they do faithfully follow the 6 steps, unstoppable international growth ‘simply requires nailing one territory before expanding by replicating to the others.

Bartosz Góralewicz with Jason Barnard at SMX London 2019 We start off discussing SEOcamp Paris, then move onto the heart of the matter. Bartosz is a super Javascript SEO expert, but doesn’t see a long-term future for his skillset. Javascript is too difficult and expensive to process. And Russian Dolls somehow come into it. Google has been struggling with JS for years, but will nail it soon, which is great from a geeky point of view, but bad for Bartosz’s business…. maybe in 2 years, maybe in 5, depending on when Google figure out how to digest the cost of Javascript. Because they haven’t until now, Javascript SEO is a ‘thing’ – Which.com has been deindexed because of Javascript, Netflix have sidestepped JS, Hulu were unfindable for a while (and replaced by Torrent). They all need people like Bartosz. I get a bit keen on internal politics at Google (about which I know very very little). Bartosz helps me out by improvising a short piece of theatre in the role of a Google fellow, which is super fun. In the middle of it, he suggests how as a Google fellow) he would put Bing out of business. He then switches sides in his ongoing piece of theatre, and slips into the role of a Bing fellow… and switches sides again by moving over to Amazon. Then back on topic, and there is light at the end of the tunnel – Javascript sites are starting to rank and that means something is happening and the process towards Google handling JS easily has started. He ends by admitting that he has never written Javascript code – but that is actually a positive thing for his role.

This episode is full of half-remembered quotes, which makes for some fun listening. In between misquoting people (and cartoon cats), we have a lovely discussion about ways of automating SEO tasks. Laziness pays… but Michael Motherwell got into this not because he is lazy, you understand, he just doesn’t like doing unnecessary work :) Specifically keeping store data up-to-date in GMB. A chat about our role as digital marketers in this world. Facts are a marketing tool and SEO is about communicating facts and getting those facts to people in the right way at the right time. Then a bit about email – there wasn’t anything like email before email came along, apparently. Who is the Reverend Spooner? And how do we end up talking about Rowan Atkinson? You don’t know what you don’t know. Even the bit about archiving and storing data is fun. Or maybe you know what you know you do what you do and you can’t use it if you don’t have it. Or something. And lastly, Michael makes me feel better about not using Big Query and Big Data. A lot of fun and informative + interesting (really !).

Anders Hjorth with Jason Barnard at European Search Awards 2019 Anders Hjorth talks with Jason Barnard about DIY marketing and the empowerment age. We start with a discussion about sunglasses, then quickly move onto InOrbit2019 in Slovenia and some great advice from Ian Anderson Gray and Dennis Wu – create a one minute video. now. Going into people’s houses to do their paperwork in France (sounds creepy to me, but isn’t … and is a ‘thing’, apparently). Administrative Phobia is a thing too, and ZenCafé is going to help people with that problem. Interestingly, InOrbit2019 and ZenCafé is the (strange) combination that pushed Anders into DIY marketing and inspired him to embrace the empowerment age. Anders brilliantly takes DIY Marketing to the next level live on screen (you’ll need to watch the YouTube video). Onto the fear of looking stupid (Anders and I got over that a long time ago :) We get a bit sidetracked with Paul McCartney (and I sing a Beatles song). Anders goes on to sing a Danish love song adapted for LinkedIn (who wouldn’t want to hear THAT ?) Then back on track with a video a day to promote on social media. Anders’ motto – Do It Yourself, I have no clue I will try. Brilliant. I make the worst Bing/Google joke ever. Another great quote from Anders. The more you try yourself, the better you will be at hiring people to do it for you. Anders answers the question “What is perfect?” (wow !). Then he tells me where innovation from. And that rotten food is the way forward in Digital Marketing. Makes sense to me. Go figure ! Finally, your marketing budget can be 150 €. And Money can’t buy you love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKFRhnUD1xQ

GAFAM - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft. Brad Geddes starts by telling me why Microsoft won’t stop Bing anytime soon even if the they stay on a low market share. He also gives a breakdown of the MAG cloud businesses, and moves onto the voice assistants. Microsoft are a great number 2 player who bide their time and step in when the number 1 makes a mistake. Microsoft were ‘the borg’ and are now a nice, cute puppy. They are the slowly slowly gets the monkey company. Google have messed up on search, apparently with entity based search, specifically in cases where there are multiple entities. Bing are better at entity based search. Brad looks at Google as a verb, and why Google are now OK with it. A quick diversion Facebook being a bigger worry for Google than Amazon. Amazon is not a worldwide competitor, whereas Facebook is. We have a quick chat about the different business models. AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud. And finish up with ‘What ARE Facebook doing?’. Brad figures out a new business model. Mark Zuckerberg, are you listening?

Jeff Ferguson with Jason Barnard at Search Marketing Summit 2019 Jeff Ferguson talks with Jason Barnard about AI and ML in Google. Jeff Ferguson gets us started with a nice Elvis impersonation. And we agree he has an admirable business card. On a more serious topic, AI is science fiction, Machine Learning is what we mean. And will we ever allow AI to get to the stage where it can truly emulate a human. In Digital Marketing, ML has allowed us to move to become more marketers that tech. What we are doing in marketing, but just using modern tools. And that means we should be thinking in terms of strategy rather than focussing on tactics. There is no point in trying to hack the algorithm. Understanding, deliverabilty and credibility is a solid approach (I led Jef very not subtly into agreeing with me there). Then onto “ML started in the 50s… why is it blossoming now?”. And with that our job is now to effectively feed the machines with information. We are moving towards a knowledge graph in real time. And things are moving forwards at an accelerating rate. Are we perhaps moving too fast? And as it moves forwards we are now at the stage where we can no longer even look into the algorithms and data since the format is not understandable to us. Then I get overwhelmed with something as simple as Captcha. GAFA use mechanical Turks. R2D2 gets a mention. Jeff tells me that I do indeed have more computing power in my phone than NASA took to the moon.

Ross Tavendale with Jason Barnard at SEMrush LIVE Prague 2019 Ross Tavendale talks to Jason Barnard about branding. Quick fun discussion about Scottish accents (he says that he sounds like Mrs Doubtfire on Helium). Then onto Brand, Brand, Brand. Ross loves brand :) A great approach to link building / PR is to help make their life easier… and to make YOUR life easier, scrape their articles and use NLP to write the perfect pitch to each journalist – Ross calls this programmatic PR (and it is brilliant). We manage to get onto Justin Bieber who doesn’t have two babies (and Ross makes a brilliant groan-worthy joke). We briefly discuss hacking the social media algorithms – trick is to have a video of my daughter playing with a cat. Onto images and then videos (Ross is enthusiastic) and then trite Cornflake Packet philosophy in Public Relations (Ross is sick in his mouth). Interestingly he was down the Old Kent Road when he started his Bootstrap business. He’s not there any more. Quick plug for the Canonical Chronicle – no idea what is in it, but the name is brilliant.

Simon Cox with Jason Barnard at TakeItOffline Brighton 2019 Simon Cox talks with Jason Barnard about Google bugbears and Gremlins. Why should we respect web standards when Google doesn’t even respect those who DO respect them? There are more invalid sites on the web than valid. I suggest 98% with absolutely no supporting evidence. Simon wants a reward system for well-built sites. I suggest that there maybe an indirect ranking benefit. Simon refutes rather deftly. He then moves on to getting inaccessible US results on Google UK. More and more US sites are blocking EU visitors due to GDPR, money-saving and copycatting. The bugbear goes further to include a rant about US-centric results. Next onto the homepage deindexing issue – 6 days to fix a bug is simply too long. Are Google losing control with the AI stuff they are pushing out? Simon suggests that Google’s AI is all string and sticky tape with Homer Simpson in charge. Then onto a gremlin about structured data. Apparently Screaming Frog have a great validation tool (that I didn’t know about)… and he loves their customer support (and Hover’s). Google is a slow, giant corporate beast with internal politics and infighting. Along the way, he sneaks in some French. Helpful Resources: SimonCox.com

Nagu Rangan with Jason Barnard at SMX London 2019 Nagu Rangan talks with Jason Barnard about how Bing ranking works. First question. Very obvious “What are the ranking factors”. He tells me that ranking factors are just a means to an end. Then Nagu tells me that relevancy is Bing’s North Star. There is no point in distinguishing between ranking factors and ranking signals. I ask what the ranking factors are (again) and Nagu politely that he gets leery when answering on the details. Tells me that obsessing on individual ranking factors is a futile excercise since the factors and their weightings are constantly changing. He guides me to the three considerations that a search engine to optimise user satisfaction. Relevancy, Quality and Context. We move onto what is the optimal keyword density. understanding without Deep Learning and Neural Networks (that Bing has been using since 2006). I manage to bully Nagu into agreeing that that everything we do as SEOs should serve Understanding, Deliverability and Credibility. I tell Nagu my theory about how the topic layer might work and he tells me my theory is a great product idea. Then a chat about the weather which sounds boring but isn’t. Does Bing have the same bidding system as Google for rich elements. No clear answer there but Nagu hints that it is a similar system. Bing is getting jiggy with real time information so freshness and recency is really important to Bing and is a driver of rich elements too. Theresa May gets a mention – because when she was 5, “Bing wasn’t a Thing”. Transcript for How Bing Ranking Works (Nagu Rangan with Jason Barnard) Jason Barnard: Welcome to the show. Nagu Rangan: Thank you. Great to be here. Jason Barnard: Now, I just met you walking out of the conference, SMX London. You're a guy from Microsoft, and you are product manager — or program manager — of ranking, which is incredibly exciting. At Bing. And you were talking about ranking and relevancy, and we started a discussion. What I'm interested in: what are the ranking factors? There's a big smile on your face there. Nagu Rangan: Yeah. Jason Barnard: You've heard that question a few times, I take it. Nagu Rangan: Yes. Jason Barnard: And how far can you answer it? Nagu Rangan: I can answer the question. Ranking factors are not the end. They're the means to the end. Jason Barnard: Brilliant. I like that. Nagu Rangan: We talked about this offline before getting onto the podcast. The way we think about the goal of building a search engine — our northstar is user satisfaction. Jason Barnard: "Northstar" — is that official Bing terminology? Nagu Rangan: Yeah. So our northstar is user satisfaction. The way to understand it is to provide timely, relevant results that users can trust. That's what we're trying to do. And ranking factors — there are several hundreds of them, and they help us determine the results we should be showing to users. Jason Barnard: Is there any point in differentiating ranking signals and ranking factors? I'm starting to think ranking factors are these big clumps of ranking signals. Nagu Rangan: I kind of use them interchangeably. It's a set of signals, or a combination of signals, used for determining ranking. Jason Barnard: So the distinction isn't really— Nagu Rangan: In my mind they're interchangeable. Jason Barnard: And you're the king of ranking algorithms, so your mind is— Nagu Rangan: Quite the king — but there is an entire team. I'm just representing the work of Bing at SMX. Jason Barnard: Brilliant. So, ranking signals — give me some examples. Nagu Rangan: Making sure your site is indexable — that's a ranking factor. Making sure there's clear content. Making sure the site's marked up, all of that. Jason Barnard: That wasn't a very fair question. You were talking about relevancy. I'm really interested in relevancy — I missed your talk this morning and I'm very sorry. Nagu Rangan: No worries. Jason Barnard: Go ahead. Nagu Rangan: Let's talk about the aspects of user satisfaction, which is our northstar goal. There are essentially three factors. One is relevance — is the result on topic? Say I want to learn about, or visit, the Tower of London, and I search for "Tower of London." I want to see a result about it. Jason Barnard: Not Tower of Pisa— Nagu Rangan: Or Tower Hamlets, London. Jason Barnard: Or the Taj Mahal. Right. Nagu Rangan: So that's essentially what relevance is. The second one is quality — can the user trust this result? One of the signals is inbound links, but there are several. Jason Barnard: Inbound links — you've got your equivalent of PageRank. Nagu Rangan: Yeah. As I mentioned, there are several hundreds of signals that work together in this context. Jason Barnard: Yes. I'm not going to get much more out of you, am I? Go ahead — the third one. Nagu Rangan: It's more around how to think about it. Rank

Stewart Rogers with Jason Barnard at SEMrush Live Prague 2019 Stewart Rogers talks with Jason Barnard about image search versus voice search. Stewart starts by stealing my job as host. He quickly gets back on track as the guest. And proceeds to look at why we should be taking image search more seriously. Where and when voice is not appropriate. That voice search will lose out to image search. Clue: images are good for public use, voice for private. I shamefully get Lukasz’s name wrong by calling him Kaspar. Use Google lens to translate a menu or to find out what cocktail your neighbour is drinking or a live band we should go and see. Marketers should be flooding the web with images. This is all very convincing, especially as Gary Illyes says that image search is his new favourite thing. Then look at what Pinterest, Facebook and Microsoft are doing. He goes on to talk about the ‘generation timeframe’ for new technology’ and the fact that image search have a big head start on voice search. WeChat gets a special mention. And Squirrels. And my Grandma. And Fridges. Cellphones are the driver in image search and image as part of the user experience – we have been using them to take photos for 15 years and there will soon be 4 billion cell phones in use… all taking photos and pushing them onto the web. Images are here and now, voice is tomorrow. The ending song is a stunning fail.

Razvan Gavrilas with Jason Barnard at TakeItOffline Brighton 2019 Razvan Gavrilas talks with Jason Barnard about user intent and brand mentions. I start badly by getting his name totally wrong. But Razvan is kind and (I think) he forgives me once I call him a genius. Razvan then kindly goes through the three types of keyword – know, go, do / informational, navigational, transactional… and helps me make better sense of them, how to include them more intelligently in your content – in short what to do, what not to do and how to best exploit the three types. He also agrees with Kate Toon – getting rid of churners is a good plan. Razvan makes the same point as Andrea Volpini – that when using machines to do SEO, the human remains essential and that there is a dance between humans and machines. We then move onto measuring brand and product mentions, including sentiment, and using context to disambiguate.

Barry Schwartz with Jason Barnard at SMX London 2019 Barry Schwartz talks with Jason Barnard about Google and Evergreen Googlebot. An episode that is fresh news – ironically about evergreen Googlebot :) Its implications for crawling, Javascript rendering. A bit of a chat about what the User Agent is likely to be. Martin Splitt gets a mention for his mythbusting videos. Then onto Google Discover and content / ads on their homepage taking Google away from ‘the do-no-evil Google way’. And a bit of a chat about the ‘disappearing spam team’. Barry beautifully catches me out with my own comment about being careful not to generalising from a specific example. We end with Larry Page setting himself up for a fall back in 1999. Recorded at SMX London 21 May 2019.

Dawn Anderson with Jason Barnard at BrightonSEO April 2019 Dawn Anderson talks with Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) about context clouds, co-occurrence, relatedness and BERT. She starts with the quote ‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps’, which is really cool. She uses seashore as an example, which is perfect because we are sitting on the beach in Brighton with the seagulls in the background (but that isn’t the reason she chooses the example, surprisingly). Dawn is a super interested in academic papers and their importance to industry, so we end up talking a great deal about that… I assume that academic papers come from university, and Dawn gently corrects me and gives several really interesting examples of academics in industry at Google, Spotify, Yahoo… Conclusion is that industry would not be funding these studies if there were no commercial potential. Her (convincing) argument is PhDs are often the precursors of commercial implementation and patents, so she has the jump on pretty much all of us. Finally, NLP and BERT – whereas NLP will look left, then right of a word, whereas BERT looks both ways at the same time and thus vastly widens the context window. And that is going to revolutionise machine understanding of context clouds, co-occurence, relatedness (and probably RankBrain). She then goes on the theorise of what is coming next, which is wildly mind-blowing (and VERY hard to keep up with her). Listening back now to the conversation, I can picture multiple jaw drops. The future is about machines understanding language more and more within the idea of entities, knowledge graphs and… context.