Knowing how to properly manage SEO is crucial to your small business’s digital marketing strategy. It determines how easy you are to find on search engines like Google, and how effective your online marketing will be.
On today’s show, we’re excited to welcome Rand Fishkin, one of the leading global authorities on SEO and inbound marketing. Rand is the founder and former CEO of Moz, as well as an author and an Inc 500 honoree five years running. He has accumulated an impressive 500,000 plus social media followers and his wildly popular web series Whiteboard Fridays has amassed millions of views.
As more and more people around the world are using Google to find everything that they need, a good SEO strategy is just as important as it has been, maybe even more so. In fact, your Google ranking has a tremendous effect on your small business’s website traffic.
While it’s true that Google’s ranking algorithms are constantly evolving, the basic foundation and underlying principles of investing in SEO have not changed very much in over a decade. Some of these techniques include the use of keywords and having an accessible website that the search engine crawlers can reach. If you’re having difficulty coming up with the keywords and phrases that your business should try to rank for on SERPs (search engine results page), Rand recommends three different tools: Google AdWords, Google Trends, and for more advanced data, SEMrush.
In the last year, Rand stepped away from Moz and started a new company called SparkToro. While Rand and his partner are still about three to six months away from launching SparkToro, their goal is to assists businesses in discovering where audiences pay the most attention on or offline. This is one of the more challenging SEO tactics that plague small businesses who don’t have the funds to pay a market intelligence agency.
Rand also released a book last year titled, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. He believes that all startups will find a tremendous amount of value when reading this book. Not because it lays out guidelines and a step-by-step plan to become a successful startup, but because it is brutally honest and raw about what it’s like to build a venture-backed company.
Rand then discusses his incredibly popular web series Whiteboard Fridays. Not very popular to begin with, Rand stuck with it because the audience, while small, had such a high level of engagement. This was a huge indicator of potential success, and that certainly proved to be the case.
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