Digital pioneers talk about the evolution of SEO

2025-01-30 John McDougall
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Introduction to John McDougall
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[00:00:00] John McDougall: So my guest on this episode of Digital Marketing Stories is John McDougall. It's not often I meet people who have been doing digital marketing for longer than I have, but I think John, you're in that camp. So how long have you been doing digital marketing? I

Early Days of Digital Marketing
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[00:00:12] Jim Banks: n 95, my father gave me a laptop at his agency and said, go sell websites, whatever those are,And you've been doing it ever since.

[00:00:19] John McDougall: yeah, ever since and, 96, we were starting a children's educational startup thing and we got some funding, a half a million or so. And, We needed a little more to keep it going.

SEO Beginnings and WebPosition Gold
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[00:00:33] John McDougall: But anyway, during that process, my brother actually came up with the idea, Hey, I signed us up for an SEO class, 1996, like what's, I was selling websites, but I still didn't really, nobody really knew what SEO was. So yeah, hats off to my brother for signing us up. Robin Novels, I think was the woman's name.

And it was, it was a remote thing even back then. And, picking keywords and learning, before Google, so right before Google's first patent in 97,

[00:00:58] Jim Banks: It's funny, you're talking about, selling websites. that was my first foray. I started selling websites and then once you present them with the website, most of the clients were going, what do we do now? and we'd say, you need to do some web marketing.

They'd be like, what's web marketing? And it's like, I don't really know. 

SEO Strategies and Challenges
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[00:01:15] Jim Banks: there was a piece of software at the time called Web Position Gold. I don't know if you remember. Web.

[00:01:19] John McDougall: Oh God, I use that. I absolutely use that. We can talk about that briefly.

[00:01:24] Jim Banks: WebPosition Gold was a piece of software and it had an amazing tutorial that came with it, 

So the agency that I was working with at the time, what we did was we actually, copied word for word the WebPosition Gold tutorials and help guides. And we sold that as, we called it the full web marketing pack. And we sold that for 1, 500 bucks, right? And every single person that bought a website Bought the full web marketing pack, 

and ultimately we wanted to, understand how it worked and that was really how I got introduced to the whole marketing.

[00:01:57] John McDougall: Wow. 

[00:01:58] Jim Banks: and again, I've been doing it ever since then. 

[00:01:59] John McDougall: Oh, wow. So we're right at the same time zone, really. yeah. What, quick story. So Dominic's music, I mean, this was around 99 or 2000, but late. Yeah. a local music store selling band instruments. I he was selling all around the country, if not to the world, but he was near me and he mostly made his thing on, eBay made him a lot of money and he had two or I think 200,000 email subscribers from eBay.

Cause back then they would give you the people that you were selling to in like a, you get their email and everything. So anyway, so we built a website for him. And I used web position gold and it said like, Oh, well, AltaVista likes these, this amount of keyword density, Lycos this, AOL this.

Wasn't that the thing was, and so he had like, Maybe like a 300 page website or something. And I copied every page and put up another page, duplicate content of the page with slight variations based on what WebPositionGold said to do. And I had some naming structure. So it was like, Alto Saxophone 1, Model 29, Lycos.

All the, like five search engines or so, five flavors, Multiplied by hundreds of pages and I uploaded it onto the server and he had been uploading everything for eBay up there. So it was just a mess. Like the, when you FTP'd in with like WSFTP back then, and it was just this big mess. And I just.

Added 600 pages or whatever it was. And then when we go, Oh crap, Google, search engines don't like that. I had to go in and just delete all those like stupid duplicate content pages. But what, it was that similar to what you saw with web position

Evolution of SEO Practices
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[00:03:48] Jim Banks: Yeah, it was always one of those things, like, I guess SEO back then was, it was very much keyword stuffed pages and you would just. it would, literally you would have like a daily battle to see who would be top of wherever it was, And as you say, you had

all 

[00:04:02] John McDougall: the meta keyword tag. Yeah.

[00:04:05] Jim Banks: the kind of thing that we used to do was, like, Google had page rank, so it would be, we would sign up for a Yahoo directory listing, set up a DMOZ listing,

and that would guarantee us a page rank of four, right?

And page rank four was like the entry level, and you can go from there, and ultimately the Holy Grail.

[00:04:24] John McDougall: good memory. That's cool.

[00:04:26] Jim Banks: The holy grail was always like edu domains because they had more trust and authority.

I always remember telling the story of, one of the ways I used to generate links from edu sites was there was an awful lot of fraternity houses, And quite often the people that were in the fraternity houses would work in the IT 

[00:04:44] John McDougall: Nice.

[00:04:45] Jim Banks: they would have an email address in the edu, And, and I would say, look, can you put a link to my website from your, your university

website, and I'll send you like two kegs of beer to

[00:04:55] John McDougall: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it.

[00:04:58] Jim Banks: Yeah, we could do that.

[00:04:59] John McDougall: Beer for links.

[00:05:00] Jim Banks: So, you know, and that was, that was kind of how, 

yeah, 

[00:05:02] John McDougall: which, what would people judge now, you

[00:05:04] Jim Banks: Yeah. it sounds, it sounds crazy to think about it now, but that was the equality of, of what you were looking at, at that particular point in time, there was like, there was.

[00:05:12] John McDougall: I wish it was that easy, don't you? back then, because clients would come, and you'd do some of that stuff, and it would work. Almost, like, guaranteed. Like, everybody you touched, even if they wouldn't let you blog or do any content, like, you could pretty much, with on page SEO and some links, You could be like, Whoa, look at this ranking report.

You're going way up, man. I mean, we got clients now where you're doing 15 articles a month and you're just in a sea of content. So there's so much to do now.

[00:05:40] Jim Banks: content creation has become like ubiquitous now it's so easy like and again I always remember it used to be that you know the the only content that mattered was you know blog posts that were like four or five hundred words right and sometimes I would Query and question the validity of whether a 500 word blog post was more valuable than a really solid link from a, very authoritative site, where it didn't come from a 500 word blog post, they weren't linking to a blog post, they were just thinking to you because they liked you, They liked the,

[00:06:14] John McDougall: you know, the way in which you conducted business. Yeah. Yeah. Times have changed radically. I mean, my, my right hand man, John, has been with me 21 years and, you know, we, we sort of are nostalgic for, especially with the advent of AI. And, you know, I mean, I wrote, I wrote this, this book, a couple of years ago, and, he. E A T is in there, but not E E A T, right?

Like right after it comes out, chat GPT comes out and it's like, well, the whole world's flipped upside down again. And Google says, Oh, let's add experience to expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. So, and now we're at some whole other thing, it's just wild.

[00:06:50] Jim Banks: Yeah. So, I mean, it sounds like you're, you're a bit like me. 

Niche Marketing and Client Stories
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[00:06:54] Jim Banks: You've kind of reinvented yourself on more than one occasion. when did the most recent iteration of, John McDougall come into being? All

[00:07:14] John McDougall: and we still do, but, you know, I was joking yesterday, but John, my right hand man, also John, John Marr, and, Like we went down the rabbit hole and wrote a book for the Mad Hatter and the Caterpillar while we were down there, like selling courses is, it's its own whole world.

I'm a, I'm an SEO services guy, content marketing, SEO, digital marketing, Google Ads, Google flew us to the headquarters four years in a row for our Google Ads, but I, I've always loved SEO. we were selling courses. We don't sell that many courses. We're really better at,Services is our main thing, but that's what makes us good at teaching too, because we, we know what we're talking about because we're doing it every day.

but my, my book before talk marketing, content marketing and SEO for law firms, book before that was just general digital marketing and SEO was a college textbook for five years, but so as of late, we're, Really getting deeper as of, yesterday, getting really brainstorming this. We're starting another agency just for lawyers because we've had on our site for years, we work with lawyers, we've done 20 banks and credit unions, some amazing stories, colleges, like you being around this space so 

[00:08:26] Jim Banks: How did you arrive at those three verticals as being the ones that you would niche down on? How did you kind of

arrive 

[00:08:33] John McDougall: so, My father had an ad agency, MacDougall Associates Advertising, sixth largest agency in New England. So in 94, I was a media planner. Before that, I was a musician. You could probably tell, uh, and, um, so. And, and, at, at my father's agency, he did a lot of bank marketing, financial services, largely community banks.

So my sister married the copywriter and they started McDougall Duvall advertising and they focused on banks. And, back when SEO was like, we were like the redheaded stepkids, It's like, Oh, Mark, that's cool. But like the, the mad men here, we're good. We're, we're really doing marketing.

You guys just do that little weird tech thing for like, $1,000 a month or something, you know? but my, so my father would give me leads. My brother in law gave me leads. My brother in law was, was cranking. I mean, I probably got 15 real banks to, to work with Metro Credit Union, Blue Hills Bank, some of the biggest in, in, in New England, certainly Massachusetts.

We did the best, second best online only bank in the country. Bank number five, connect. com. that was about 2011 or 12. we, we did some podcasts. We got it on their social. It got picked up by NerdWallet. Whoa, it just like blew up. We got all these leads. So, it was largely like a family thing with, with bank marketing being in, in the family businesses.

That's And then legal, I just had someone come to me and, I got this pretty wild gig. It was like a million dollar SEO project for less than three years, 20, 27, 500 a month for about three years. And, mesothelioma, stuff. And I mean, they make millions. We have one now that pays us well too.

you know, and that I had done legal before, but when, you know, A guy brought me into that big project. We just started getting like 20, you know, 10, 12 other lawyers just, through that networking. Then I started speaking at Legal Marketing Association and writing on National Law Review and things like that.

That was that one. Colleges, I don't even know how that one came about, we got Art, Montserrat College of Art ranked number one in Google for Art Colleges, and the, the Dr. Emmerman, the president at the time, was like, we got a line at the door, and then the new president let us go, and now they're struggling, and really struggling.

It's some people don't realize, like, your Google ranks, don't mess with them.

[00:10:57] Jim Banks: I always take a bit of sadistic satisfaction when that happens, when, when you get providers, the agency, and you

[00:11:03] John McDougall: I'm not alone. Yeah. Like, look, they tagged, I've gotten clients back by, by, uh, I have a law firm right now that I, I kept emailing them, once a year, once every six months, maybe at best. And after three years, this medical malpractice attorney came back because I'm like, Dude, I mean, you went up with us, you let us go and you literally became invisible.

No 301 redirects, changed the domain name. Look in SEMrush and there's nothing. I'm like, do you realize, like, you're like broken, man. You know, it's like, okay, you know, comes back on. Now he's straight up again.

[00:11:38] Jim Banks: with a big sort of, e commerce retailer who, was based out of Germany, but, but we were kind of managing all of their UK based stuff and they, they ultimately got bought by a publicly traded company, and the publicly traded company wanted to give the account to their incumbent agency. So we lost the account, not because we were doing bad work, but just because they wanted to consolidate everything under one maybe group arrangement or what have you.

um, so the new agency picks up the work, and I stay in touch with the client because I like the guy and everything else. And he was like so apologetic, like, Jim, you guys were fantastic. You did a great job for us. I'm sorry. I wish we could have kept it. I said, look, that's the nature of business.

Sometimes these things happen. And, and what happened was that, The agency that won the business, they called me up and they basically said, Jim, we can't get anywhere close to the performance that you were getting. Can you help us? And I went, 

[00:12:29] John McDougall: that. 

[00:12:29] Jim Banks: no, go fuck yourself, I thought to myself afterwards, is that the right way to handle that?

And I'm like, yeah, it was the right way to handle it. I was never 

going to, 

[00:12:38] John McDougall: kind of because it's, you know, I mean, we've had agencies, we're nice enough to say like, Oh, you lost your password. We still have it in a password vault. Okay, https: otter. ai Yeah, sometimes I'll, like I said, I'll point it out, like your new agency sucks, I'm not out for a fight, I'm going to point it out if I see it, we don't usually need a lot of business, we, we're always happy to take like one or two new clients, we, we're not a big agency and we don't look to scale to be like hundred, like a big, like a Feinbar or a Scorpion or something they're trying to be like, 

Thousands of clients or something. And I have no interest in that. I just want to do good work for a smaller number of people. But, Yeah, if I, I'm a businessman, so if I see someone tanking, I'm like, hey, check this, did you know that the new agency botched everything?

[00:13:27] Jim Banks: I used to be a little bit like you. I used to like, cause again, I think unfortunately it's, it's very difficult sometimes for the client to know who to kick out of their Google Analytics or their Google Ads

or, you know, webmaster tools or whatever it's called now. I can't remember what it's called now, but I'll call it webmaster tools.

[00:13:44] John McDougall: Yeah.

[00:13:45] Jim Banks: And, at one point in time, I, I used to stay in all the accounts I wasn't deliberately going and looking, but sometimes you would just out of morbid curiosity, check to see what's going on. And in the end, I just, I just said, right, the day that we lose an account, if, if it ever happens.

I'm like, right. I would take myself and the agency out because I just didn't want to, I just didn't want to be seen in, in the account. I didn't want to see the, the kind of carnage that would 

[00:14:10] John McDougall: yeah. The other thing that's annoying to me is, we go into our password vault and you go Google Analytics or something and it's like, oh my god, there's, dozens and dozens of Things in the way, should really just delete it all. And they're like, Oh, we're locked out of our Facebook.

Not my problem. that one's happened a couple of times, one, one recently, an IT, an IT company, funniest thing, right? Managed IT services. We're locked out of our Facebook. Disaster recovery is kind of part of what you do, isn't it? Shouldn't you have backup,admins? 

I think it's, it's good that you've niched down. Like a lot of agencies don't, when you talk to them, they go, yeah, we just like, we work with anyone. And it's like, I don't think you can't do a good job if you work with anyone. Well, I think those days are changing because after COVID everything got like, so many people working from home, more agencies than ever. I kind of wish I did even, even stronger in 2011, 12, when I'm working, you know, that big project I mentioned and tons of lawyers really just, just. Burn the boat is what David Baker, this awesome agency consultant, told me recently.

It's like, you gotta burn the boat because when you hang on, like you said, Oh, well, we don't want to lose if someone comes and they do this other thing. Well, that's what holds you back from being a real specialist. And I think SEO is so difficult now by comparison to what we were saying earlier. It's just a lot easier for like, Hey, for lawyers, we should be running local service ads.

We should be doing this with Google local, maybe they get these certain types of backlinks, look in ahrefs, it's just a routine that you can come up with or personal injury lawyers. they like certain types of blogging or other types, even down to certain types of lawyers.

Whereas like general lawyers that make contracts or things, they don't really care about SEO. They're like trying to impress the general counsel at GE or something. They're into thought leadership. So, but. The more you niche down, even within legal, you get better at it. And especially, I mean, especially if you're a small agency, your team will be so much more effective if you're not, Oh my God, how many times have you, Oh, wow.

We've got this new client, plastic bonded manifolds, putting stuff in spaceships, literally, this was a client controlled fluidics. They put stuff on. NASA is their client, stuff going to Mars. And it's like, great, let's learn about this today.

[00:16:34] Jim Banks: yeah.

[00:16:35] John McDougall: My head is only, I only got so much space left at this 

[00:16:39] Jim Banks: I always remember I was helping a friend out who ran an agency and I was doing a bit of consulting and helping him enhance and expand his paid search proposition. he had two guys that were doing sales for him and these two sales guys were just hustlers. They were just out there trying to sell anything, to anyone.

And, and one of them called me up one day and he said, Jim, we've just signed a $10,000, Audit, So we want you to do a paid search audit on this company. you know, and like a $10,000 audit, so it's got to be pretty good, right? so I'm like, yeah, yeah, sure. We can do that.

I just need to log into their Google Ads account and, have a look and see what's going on. and they went, oh, they're not running any ads at the moment. They don't have a Google Ads

account, right? And I'm like, so, so I said to the guy, I'm like, So what am I going to audit?

And he goes, you'll figure it out.

[00:17:28] John McDougall: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You figured out. You'd have to do a conversion audit of their site. I

[00:17:34] Jim Banks: So, I mean, so in the end, I mean, you know, what I did was I kind of like, I think I organized a two or three day training session, right, to basically train them on kind of like

the mechanics 

[00:17:42] John McDougall: that's fair. 

[00:17:43] Jim Banks: all worked and everything else. You know, I 

[00:17:45] John McDougall: Audit a non existent account. That's

[00:17:47] Jim Banks: I sort of built it sort of while they were looking over my shoulder.

I was building it kind of as we went along and explaining what I was doing and, and they, they, they enjoyed it. And I felt it was good value for the 10 grand, but, you know, but it was still a really kind of scrappy. I had to think on my feet a little bit to try and sort of,

[00:18:03] John McDougall: That's a good one. Yeah. 

Yeah. What do you do with that? Turn them away or you'd like be scrappy? Like you said, I think that's the key as agency owners, you know, turn, turn lemons into lemonade pretty much all the time, you know?

[00:18:18] Jim Banks: It's funny, like, I, like, I remember I, like, I started out working for this web design company and the two guys that run it, one was a kind of used car salesman and the other was a lawyer, right? And I think it's probably that 

experience of working with the guy who was the lawyer that put me off wanting to work with lawyers as, as a kind of, you know, to do the paid 

search for them.

Because it's just like, it was such a horrible experience. So this guy would 

basically, 

you know, like everything was so, it was so. Contract heavy and what have you. Remember we had a kind of a client who for whatever, again, you know, sometimes your credit card doesn't get processed and the payment doesn't go through, right?

So the client phones me up and he goes, Jim, there's a bit of a problem. I've just gone to the website. So I've kind of typed in the URL and there was a great big splash page that said, this site has been taken down because they haven't paid their bill. Right. And what had happened is that lawyer kind of.

COO had basically put up this page to shame them into paying the bill, right? 

I'm like, 

[00:19:20] John McDougall: Oh, 

[00:19:21] Jim Banks: yeah, that is not the way to kind of conduct a 

[00:19:24] John McDougall: Not cool. 

[00:19:24] Jim Banks: business, you know, but, but anyway, I 

[00:19:26] John McDougall: No, 

[00:19:27] Jim Banks: to, you know, look, let me sort it out. I'll take it down, put your website back up and, you know, we'll sort out

the payment. And, and they were fine. I mean, they said it wasn't an issue of them not paying. It was just credit card wasn't processed and

[00:19:40] John McDougall: right. But that is so Tactless

[00:19:42] Jim Banks: really tagless. And ever since then, I'm like, Yeah, I don't think, you know, like lawyers are just kind of, you know, trigger happy, right? But again, I've got some really good friends now who are lawyers.

I love them. They're great. And, you know, they're clearly not all like that. So

[00:19:57] John McDougall: the not all. Yeah. I have a really wonderful one. Right. Well, I'd say actually all the lawyers at the moment I'm working with are great. I have had some where you're like, I've had actually a few where you're like, holy crap. I had one tax lawyer, and. Oh my god, this guy, everyone was like, you gotta fire this, he's just an a hole, I mean, just like, unbelievable the way he treats you, you know, and then another one would just come in to the agency like, oh, do this, do this, you know, like, you don't own our agency, yeah, it's a big account, but.

Don't be a dick and come in and go from one desk to the next or do that on the phone. Call one day, he'd call. He just literally, it's like he had the, he had his days structured. So it was like harass McDougal in an interactive day, you know, my team members would come need therapy. We'd be like, Whoa, yeah.

Well, this guy, I shouldn't say his name, you know, he just one to the next around the whole room, you know, around the whole agency, you know, every, every office had

[00:20:56] Jim Banks: I've 

[00:20:56] John McDougall: 20 minute call.

[00:20:57] Jim Banks: definitely fired more than one client for, you know, the way in which they've, they've treated my staff. I just like, you know, 

You don't own them, you can't boss them around.

[00:21:05] John McDougall: It's hard to fire sometimes, but you know, when you 

[00:21:09] Jim Banks: Yeah, you know, again, I've had clients where they paid us really good money, but, you know, I'd have members of my team coming to me in tears, right? Because this 

client had basically, you know, completely kind of ripped them apart in public in front of 

the rest of the team. And I'm like, well, wait a minute, just, you know, just that, that's not cool.

[00:21:27] John McDougall: Not, not cool at all. Right. So, I don't know if you've had this one, but you know, this one, one particular guy would like make the rounds, tell everyone what to do. We would then, my team would all individually start doing what he wanted, email him and say, Hey, you know, we did X, Y, and Z. He would get lost for six weeks and then come back and be like, where the hell is all this?

And they're like, You know, you, you told us to do this, we, we started, but there are prerequisites, like, you need to reply and give us this to go to the next thing, and you didn't reply, but you just couldn't see that that's true, you know, just like, it's not done, you know, it's not done because you, you know, you flame like a freak.

Every six weeks, but that just doesn't work. Anyway,

the whole, you know, more stories with agencies are certainly not uncommon.

Podcasting and Content Marketing
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[00:22:21] Jim Banks: So one of the things I was like, really keen to kind of talk to you about, like, getting you to kind of come on is, is the kind of the concept of podcasting, right? Because, I mean, I set this up, I think I did it, like, just, just before Christmas 2023. So just over a year ago, I thought, I know, it'd be cool.

I'll set up a podcast, right? And I didn't really realize just how Two things. I didn't realize how time consuming it was, but I also didn't realize how much fun it was. It's so much fun, right? I really, really enjoy it, right? Because I, you know, I get to kind of meet, meet people I know, people I don't know, learn about stuff that I really kind of have no clue, but I'm very curious about, right?

So it's almost like I get the opportunity to kind of watch a keynote presentation and I'm the only person in the audience initially, right? and then I get to share it with everyone else. but I'm, I'm kind of curious from the point of view of, you know, you have a sort of dedicated space on your site specifically for podcasts.

You show some, some really terrific kind of examples of the growth that you've been able to kind of have. And that clearly seems to have been something that's been happening for a long time. I know a lot of people got into podcasting during COVID and everything, and some kind of carried it on. But it looks like you've been kind of doing it for longer than that.

And, you know, it seems to be part of your core kind of service offering. for

[00:23:44] John McDougall: honest, you know, I've started. Podcasts for myself, for different things, for talk marketing. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't, you know, I'm literally just about to start the legal marketing one backup that I did. And, you know, 15 years ago and interviewed like 50 attorneys and, you know, stories with attorneys turned it into a little book and survey and everything.

but with clients, we are very proud of how we consistently. I mean, we're responsible for SEO. And as you know, you really can't do that anymore with keyword stuffing. I mean, you just, you know, like these 500 to 1500 or 2, 000 a month agencies that say they're doing something, but I don't know what they're doing, you know, like we come on and they're like, Oh, we had this SEO company, like, that's like a nine page website, you know, you've had them for five years, the hell with it, you know, and you have a crappy backlink profile.

So basically they were like, you know, buying links on Fiverr and like, you know, I don't know, shifting the keywords around every few weeks. You know, or nothing. so we learned early on, you know, that you needed content and we would write it and blog, you know, when, after, you know, Panda in 2011 was like, Google said, Hey, you know, you can't just copy each other's content.

You can't have duplicate content. 2012, Penguin, oh, every, you know, got crashed. Like, oh, we were doing E zine articles and like, we were never black hat, but we did E zine articles and article link building. Cause that was just like what most SEOs did. Cause who knew that was going to be a bad thing? Like new, I don't think you knew.

I mean, it was kind of like, you kind of knew that it wasn't the best thing, but you didn't really know it was like, going to like kill you. And, so, I think after Panda and Penguin, those things back to back, like, kicked off official, like, okay, content marketing isn't some kind of, like, optional thing, and ever since then, everybody's, like, gung ho in content marketing, but, A lot of people like controlled fluidics, like how the hell are we going to write about bonded plastic manifolds going in a space, NASA, literally a NASA spaceship to freaking Mars, you know, so we start doing audio interviews about 2008, you know, to get extra content.

The first one was a artist interview for my father's, after he sold his agency, he had McDougal Fine Arts and we did this guy, Jeff Weaver. A local artist in Gloucester went down with a little, you know, I don't know if it was Tascam or Edirol or some little MP3 recorder and hit go and had a conversation.

It's like, geez, that's, you know, imagine we interviewed like a hundred artists. There'd be a hundred pages on the site with the transcripts of like, you know, actually not BS content. I mean, that's actually interesting, useful content for, for an art gallery. It doesn't get much better. 

[00:26:28] Jim Banks: because it's, because it's like recorded, it's unique, right? It's not like it, you know, it's not like it's the same words because it's somebody talking and it's kind of, you know.

[00:26:37] John McDougall: That's right. Yeah, it's it to me right now. It should be on people's top of mind because AI is the opposite of that. AI is just like scrape all around. It's more or less an article spinner. It just sounds better than an old article spinner, but I don't really see how it's much different yet. You know, I think you can use like lots of different AI tools at once and like move them around, you know, there are things you can do if you're like a guy in a garage selling pea protein powder, and you don't care if you burn your domain, you know, you probably just use AI.

But I think Neil Patel Digital has stated pretty clearly that like, if you just push a button and use AI, your ranks are going to go down. So You know, to us, we had been doing podcasting and videos, like talking head videos, not like documentaries or any like high end, super high end video, we don't pretend to be that, but we go into lawyers or banks and, you know, whoever, and, you know, the local HVAC people and like, hey, tell us about, you know, LG red ductless heating, cooling systems.

Well, you know, the LG red, they talk, it's, you know, we can do that on, you know, Audio and video. And now actually squad cast that we're, we're on right now. That's our favorite tool. We love it because of this, you know, you got video right here. Why not? Now, is this the best, you know, video you're ever going to get like YouTube channels that succeed now they're, they're like, Oh man, they're like really thinking through every video and cropping it and sound effects.

And like all these cuts and, you know, people like my son seven and he's watching stuff and I'm like, Holy crap. Like my videos don't do that, you know, like to keep his attention. And they're just like wild. But the average, I mean, we've got a YouTube channel for, uh, HVAC company with well over 2 million views for, for mostly from just a combination of squad cast, caught up shorts and summary, some podcasts,And a good amount of like just in in person talking head videos, but then they're not like super, you know, produced.

They're mostly like, hey, let's talk about this keyword. so yeah, that, that's kind of the, my thesis or mechanism with talk marketing is just to say that, you know, having done SEO for so long, just, you know, people need good content and I just don't see why you wouldn't want to leverage the power of, you know, You just being an expert and talking, whether you're a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, a plumber, whatever, or bonded plastic manifolds for NASA spaceships, you can talk about it, you know, 

and we you.

[00:29:07] Jim Banks: You're really into that bonded space.

[00:29:09] John McDougall: I love that one. That one drive drove me nuts guys. Like how the hell are you going to do SEO for me before I hire you? Like, is this even possible? You're never going to write for me. I'm like, do you want me to write for you? No, I don't want you to write. No. Okay. Let's do like,

[00:29:22] Jim Banks: I always remember a friend of mine said to me once, Jim, there's only so many ways, because, you know, we were talking about, like, the content's got to be unique, and they said, there's only so many ways you can describe a pair of socks in black, size 9 for a man, right? Kind of, you know, there's not really much you can kind of do beyond that.

[00:29:40] John McDougall: the longer the sales cycle and the more complicated the situation, the better content marketing is. So, like HubSpot has some famous things, boy, did Marcus Sheridan with the pool thing, you know that one, you know, and that's a great story because like if you want a pool at your home and you're like, oh, above ground, below ground, concrete, this thing, these tiles, You know, saltwater, freshwater, all the, anything that's got a long sales cycle and HVAC and solar.

I mean, there's stuff to think about. I'm frankly, it's a little tiring after 30 years of doing SEO. And you're just like, Oh my God, you know, another dog bite blog post or dog bite law or, you know, auto, you know, if you're in Massachusetts and you got hit by a car, well, statistically speaking, you know, this many people get hit by cars and our law forget, you know, honestly, some of it.

We'll make you sick. But, at the end of the day, as long as you're helpful, everyone's got to do it. I mean, this, at least at the moment, it does still work. It's harder than ever, but you can get in front of people. 

The Importance of Consistency in SEO
---

[00:30:42] John McDougall: And if you, if you stop, it's like, if you're taking medicine and it's working, it's like, geez, it's tempting to stop.

You stop and then You know, your thing might come back. I think it's kind of like with SEO, if you're in it and you want to keep your ranks, I, what I'll tell you, you, you, I think you also do, you talk a lot about like, mistakes and, bad, 

you know, yeah, bad decisions. you know, I've, I, I've started and stopped my own projects, and I'll tell you, it's, it's, it's not instant, but I'd give it a two or three months, and Google is, you know, if you just stop blogging entirely, whatever ranks you had, it's gonna change, you know, there's no doubt, so like, if you plan on keeping a blog or site going with the SEO, like, As much as it might make you sick to keep writing about something, you're going to have to keep being creative because, and again, that's where you maybe break it up.

Videos, podcasts, regular articles, case studies,

[00:31:42] Jim Banks: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's always interesting. it's, always

interesting. 

The SEO Community and Networking
---

[00:31:45] Jim Banks: Like, I always remember like with the, the whole, you know, SEO community, right? So again, SEO community is, is, again, it's, it's very, It's full, full of people with that kind of very vain, love seeing them, their name in print and everything else.

Right. And there was always this kind of thing that the tail end of the year, there'd be the top 25 list of people and they put it on LinkedIn and named 24 people and include themselves in it and the other people would, and all of a sudden I think kind of everyone gets kind of some love by, You know, the kind of osmosis, right?

Everyone gets shared love, right? And I think in some respects, it's sort of like, I'm finding that with, with podcasts, right? 

Promoting Through Podcasts
---

[00:32:27] Jim Banks: I mean, a lot of people will go on to podcasts because they want to promote their own podcast, which is cool. That's fine, right? I mean, you know, you've got to look at it and say, well, people are going to give up their time in return for something, right?

I mean, you know, at the end of the day, you promote your books and I'm, I'm. Absolutely, 500 percent cool with people promoting whatever it is that they have, whether it's services, books, you know, courses, doesn't really matter, right, as long as they're adding value, right, because ultimately, that's what is adding value, telling stories, you know, good, bad, indifferent, because I want to help people.

You know, people that are thinking of marketing as a career, right? You know, knowing what some of the challenges are and some of the industries and again, some of the war stories, right? Because I think, you know, it's important. Eventually these, these war stories will not be told anymore because the people that, you know, that lived them at the beginning will have retired or whatever.

I mean, I, I always,

The Evolution of SEO Training
---

[00:33:18] Jim Banks: I've had two podcast guests recently, both of whom went through the process of kind of um, you know, getting into the industry by going to a Bruce Clay training workshop, right? 

[00:33:29] John McDougall: We did that in the, way back, 20 years ago. I went and then sent John to California. Bruce is cool.

[00:33:36] Jim Banks: and again, Bruce is a great friend of mine. I see him at

[00:33:40] John McDougall: Oh, 

Bruce Clay's Influence and Tools
---

[00:33:41] Jim Banks: I see him at PubCon, I saw him, I saw him just sort of tail end of last year. He's come up with this new tool, but again, I mean, you know, he's not, he's not afraid to tell you. I mean, he's now in his kind of like early seventies, right? So you're thinking,

[00:33:52] John McDougall: Yeah, I was gonna

[00:33:54] Jim Banks: I'm like, fantastic, I'm, I'm just, I'm just delighted that he still has the passion to kind of continue 

[00:34:01] John McDougall: Yeah. 

[00:34:02] Jim Banks: and get dressed and go out and hustle and, you know, and have, you know, fun.

You 

[00:34:06] John McDougall: originals.

[00:34:08] Jim Banks: know, so yeah, so, so, and, and for, for me, I, I, like I said, I love the fact that, that, you know, like I said, so many people have been touched by his training and, and, you know, his, his experience back in the day, but yet he's still reinventing himself. I mean, if you look at the Bruce Clay today, very different than Bruce Clay from before.

[00:34:26] John McDougall: I haven't looked in a long time, but we've been talking about him lately because the search engine relationship chart. Actually, I did look that up recently. He still has it. I was like, holy crap, it's still there. I think it's almost coming back. 

The Search Engine Relationship Chart
---

[00:34:38] John McDougall: I mean, we've gone down to basically the search engine relationship chart is Google.

You know, like it used to be like AOL, Lycos, Altavista, like, Whoa, now Google came in. It's like, Oh, and Google was feeding Yahoo. And then Yahoo was like, well, wait a minute. We can't, we can't take the results from Google because we got to be like a competitor. And then anyway, so Bruce kept changing that. He, that was a really super smart move on his part, like a link bait to beat the band, that relationship chart.

But I think that relationship chart. Is maybe more than important than ever because as Search GPT and Brave and DuckDuckGo and Bing is making headway. I mean, it's, I don't know what's going to happen, but, and then Google investigated, you know, for, for monopolistic practices, which is basically true. 

Google's Market Dominance and Challenges
---

[00:35:23] John McDougall: I mean, they have some, some of that, you know, I don't really know if I have the answer to what, should they be broken up, you know what I mean, but if I almost, as much as I think maybe they deserve it if they, they, you know, certain, you know, they have to break certain things up, but on the other hand, it's like, I would feel bad for them too, because like, if you take Chrome away and the data, it's kind of sucks.

[00:35:43] Jim Banks: Like, so, you know, I don't know. I hope there's a, there's a nice solution for everyone wins because,You know, obviously Google's been good, good for me over the years. Um, but you know, I mean, Google's Google. They're just, they're just huge. And, you know, that's controversial. Like, I hate them, they hate me, and it's fine, right? We know we have to work with each other, so we just get on with it, right? And, you know,

[00:36:08] John McDougall: what's wild is Danny Sullivan. I'm, you know, Met him a couple times at, it was PubCon or something, searching strategies or something many years back. It's wild, like, you know, they just sucked him right in there. He, he's a cool guy, you know, but that's pretty wild. Like, he's in the trenches right in Google now.

[00:36:25] Jim Banks: it's funny, I, like, I live in a place called Salisbury, and Danny, when 

he was in the UK, he was living in Salisbury, right? And, I think you went back to the States, 

and I was, I was in a restaurant in Salisbury, and I'm like, I looked over and I thought,

[00:36:39] John McDougall: That's deep.

[00:36:40] Jim Banks: I'm sure that's Annie Sullivan, right? And I'm, 

and I'm like, I'm sure that's Ginny Marvin that was with him.

And there was like a, like he was there with a whole bunch of, you know, Googlers. Right. And I was really tempted to kind of go over and I thought, well, if he's there in a sort of personal capacity, cause it looked like he was there with his wife and children and everything. 

I'm thinking personal capacity kind of meets over

there. I sent him a DM on Twitter and I'm like, You know, having a nice meal, blah, blah, blah. I think you responded to me like two or three days later. And,

[00:37:08] John McDougall: Yeah, 

yeah.

[00:37:09] Jim Banks: I mean, but you know,

[00:37:10] John McDougall: No, that was nice. You know, I mean, I think if he got up and you could, you know, comfortably bump into him and say hi to him, but yeah, to just jump right over with, break it up. 

SEO Careers and Education
---

[00:37:21] John McDougall: But yeah, I mean, I think, so, so you, you talk also about careers and people trying to advance their careers, right? So I've done some speaking on, at colleges on, you know, how to get your first job in digital marketing and like how to think about it.

We've had tons of interns back in the day,

[00:37:42] Jim Banks: I mean, I'm going John, I'm encouraged that somebody like yourself is actually in colleges teaching people. Cause for me, I, I I've, I've been very concerned that the, the college syllabus or the kind of university, whatever syllabus about digital marketing is not being taught by people who really kind of like know it, know it.

at the level that they probably should to kind of, again, I think people need to kind of go into it with, you know, with all the sides of the story. They don't need to kind of go in with, it's all just amazing and fantastic because there are times when it is not right. It's definitely a 

difficult industry at times, you know, as you say, the, you know, the, the, the target's moving all the time and you need to be able to adopt and adapt.

Right. so, so I'm encouraged that people like yourself are in there kind of giving you time to kind of educate people in the right way.

[00:38:32] John McDougall: Well, last week I had lunch, with Gordon College, this, the marketing guy there, local Christian college in my area, you know. 15 minutes down the road that used to be my client for like 10 years. John, my right hand man, and I were like, well, we could change our tagline could be saving souls solely through search, you know, like the Christian, I could be our niche, the Christian thing.

But,Yeah, I've advised various colleges, Brandeis, their master's program. I was on the board, got paid by North Shore Community College to help them pick the curriculum and get accredited for social media. But this guy from Gordon College was like, Hey, can I take you to lunch? Because I'm teaching SEO and digital marketing.

And I mean, it's all I can do to keep up with this. Can you kind of be an advisor? you know, and I said, yeah, and we had lunch. He's like, Oh, I didn't even know you did our marketing before, our SEO before. it was cool. And, the, the woman that used my book for five years, at Northshore Community College, wonderful woman, but you know, she, she doesn't do what you and I do.

So, you know, she sells some websites and stuff, but not. I mean, you got to be having 10, 15, 20 retainer clients for SEO before, you know, like systematic, you know, workout processes and the whole nine yards. 

Internships and Real-World Experience
---

[00:39:48] John McDougall: And, I mean, I used to joke when the interns were working with us, we'd sit them down day one and say, you know, just to get them started, you know, take the free HootSuite and HubSpot courses.

And then we'd come and say, okay, do some keyword. What's keyword research? We're like this one, Endicott College has a four year degree in marketing. And in the last year, their senior year, their first semester of the year, they have to do a four day a week full time job off site and then write about it, write a, not a thesis, it's undergraduate, but sort of a thesis, like a big project.

On Fridays, they would just do all the writing of what they're learning at their internship. So we liked those interns because it was a full, you know, three, four months, four days a week, full time, and they had to act like they work here, you know? We'd be like, okay, you're now wrapping up the four year degree in marketing.

And we're like, you don't know what keyword research is? Do you know how to use Hootsuite? No, you know, you know, Seminar, you know, anything, Ahrefs, no. What's that? What's this? What did you learn? well, Japanese marketing, different than American marketing, you know. Retrospectively, like you have the local lawyer or plumber or a bank's going to love, you know, when you write a dissertation about that, when they're trying to get like more loans for their bank or whatever.

So yeah, it horrified me over the years to see that, you know, schools just don't know jack about SEO for in particular, probably not even maybe social media a bit, but the average. Small business, you know, and a lot of businesses get most of their leads from SEO and paid search and paid social now, but, social media people get all wound up, but at the same time, it's like, well, they don't always get their leads that way.

So it's like, but the schools would put more emphasis on social cause it's cool. And then all the young kids are like, Oh, I can do social. I can like, I can post on Facebook. Well, yay. You know, I mean, anyone can. So that's like, you know, I don't know how advanced you are with that. So yeah, like with Brandeis, when I was advising them, I was like, they were, they were in the master's program.

They're like, wow, we're going to have them take C and two writing classes and, and, and a photography. And I'm like, holy crap, what do you expect people to be? I, what I tell people when I, you know, Speak to young people about like where you're going to head. Try and imagine what you really love. Are you Picasso?

You want to be like a designer like Picasso? You want to be Shakespeare? You want to be Einstein like a mathematician? And I kind of joke with these characters, you know, Picasso, Einstein, Shakespeare, you know what I mean? Because yeah, You or I, like I imagine, we're not both like the best, maybe you're a designer, I have no idea, but I can't design them.

I'm not a great designer. I can play guitar, but I can't draw, my son can draw an apple, looks like a real apple. I can, I could draw like a stick figure apple and it look, you know, you'd want to rip it up. So I pay people to do the design work and I know better. And there are so many SEO guys that, you know, they're like Dungeons and Dragons dudes.

And it's like, you know, they, they build a website and it's like black and purple. I mean, thankfully the internet's grown up so that you don't see that as much, but you know what I mean? Like there, there are naturally people types and you need to learn your people type and then, you know, pick a niche within it and don't be afraid, you know, learn a little bit.

About, you know, like my first book, you know, web marketing and also there's like 13 chapters about, you know, social, paid search, conversion, optimization, I mean, web design, there's all these different, there are all these different things that you could learn and you should learn a little about all of them, a little.

But then you should really deep dive, you know, because I think, you know, I, I don't know if I would want to hire someone for SEO that just sort of like was a little bit of all things. Cause you know, if you do SEO wrong, it's just, you're pissing in the wind. You know, cause if you're number 25 or 30, you don't get any, 

especially now. 

[00:43:58] Jim Banks: I mean, I'm amazingly good at the things that I'm kind of like amazingly good at, and I'm kind of passable on a lot of other things. I know enough to be like a little bit dangerous, but not too dangerous. 

enough to 

be confident that I can kind of turn that

into 

a line item on a bill here. But 

what I've done, what I've 

done, is I've made it my my kind of quest to go out there and find the very best people in a particular discipline that I know is going to be important, right?

So then when I'm kind recommending them to, you know, clients or prospective clients or people I don't, I feel I can't kind of deliver a good service for, right? I will quite happily kind of yield them to somebody else, knowing that I'm leaving them in good hands, right? Again, I've just, my whole reason for doing it now is I want to make sure that I leave the industry in a good, in as good a shape as possible and 

continuing to 

grow, right? And that, you 

know, 

[00:44:56] John McDougall: refreshing to hear

[00:44:57] Jim Banks: That's only going to happen if people are trained the right way, they're getting the most up to date knowledge. That's the thing I've always, as much as I admire people that write books, and I know loads of my SEO friends have written them, the problem with books is, you know, they become outdated pretty quickly, right?

And if people are picking up

a syllabus, Well, maybe. And, and, and I think that's where, you know, training in, in a, in a university or college or whatever is important that, you know, that way you can kind of say, although it says this in the book, this is the kind of current situation and this is the information that you need.

[00:45:30] John McDougall: the guy last week said he doesn't use any books for SEO, which, you know, I always told like Brandeis, I said, you got to make sure all the schools I talked to, I'm like, even if you use, like they were using my book for five years, I told them to stop. I'm like, please stop. It's so old, please. Five years was like crazy, you know?

but I always said like, even if you use my book or anyone's book and I recommended other books, you know, Rand Fishkin and whatever, Bruce Clay, But, I mean, if you're not on search engine land and search engine journal or whatever, pick your best

favorite, you 

[00:46:04] Jim Banks: was, 

[00:46:04] John McDougall: marketing ninjas.

[00:46:05] Jim Banks: I always say that there's probably like seven Barry Schwartz's, right? Because he, he seems to be the most prolific writer I've ever seen in my life. You know, he seems to have his kind of finger in pie and every single story that's going on and he's breaking, he's usually the first to break it.

You know, so deep and so, so in depth, he knows everyone, right? Again, I love Barry to pieces, 

you know, but again, he's, he's kind of made his, his business on the back of, you know, being a sort of a central depository for all the kind of most current information and opinion pieces, right? So, you know, that's, that's where people can kind of go to and know that they're going to get the right information.

At the right time, you know, and they can kind 

[00:46:41] John McDougall: yep. 

[00:46:41] Jim Banks: with that. So

[00:46:43] John McDougall: Actually, it was, not to go on a tangent on it, but Danny Sullivan, actually, it was, search engine, was it search engine watch or search engine land was his, and then he sold it, right? Yeah, watch, yeah. I remember, I can almost see the look of it, the very 90s look, but it was cool. It was like, we needed that,

[00:47:02] Jim Banks: because I mean, I know it was like third, third door media and it was search engine watch 

and, you know, and again, I mean, Danny was a very, very accomplished journalist, you know, and an incredibly good writer. I mean, he wrote some fantastic 

content back, back in the day, in the very 

very early days. know, and he 

had some, some really smart people writing content for him.

He had Jill Whalen and Heather Lloyd Martin.

[00:47:26] John McDougall: Yeah. Jill Whalen. She was great. Yeah. I think I remember, didn't she, like, throw in the towel at one point and say, like,

[00:47:33] Jim Banks: she's, I

think 

she's retired. I think 

[00:47:36] John McDougall: Yeah. 

[00:47:37] Jim Banks: I mean, you know,

[00:47:38] John McDougall: Yeah. I thought it was Jill that actually put out a post of, like, I think I've said everything. It's like, oh my God, if she could jump back in right now and have plenty to talk about.

[00:47:50] Jim Banks: I think Heather wrote the book and, and, she cited one of my, I, I sort of said something and she cited it in the book and she invited me along. She was, she was presenting at, I think, one of the events in, in London. And she kind of asked me to kind of go along and that, and that was how I got, I think that was kind of how I got introduced to the, the sort of speaker circuit, you know, the kind of, you know, the people that were out there talking about stuff.

Because again, it was like very rough back in those days, you know, we'd all kind of, I mean, that's, that's the origins of PubCon. It was like it started in a pub, right? And it was like,

[00:48:21] John McDougall: yeah, 

[00:48:22] Jim Banks: and yeah, I mean, it, it became great. And, and although there was presentations, there was also, you know, two, three o'clock in the morning sort of sessions in 

Nepal where people would really kind of dig into the weeds and talk about stuff as long as

[00:48:36] John McDougall: yeah, it

[00:48:37] Jim Banks: all the social media, right.

So there was no tweeting,

[00:48:40] John McDougall: things, not just the actual talks were like eye openers when you went to those,

[00:48:45] Jim Banks: you know, but, but again, I mean, you know, like every single PubCon we would have Matt Cutts would turn up and, you know, he'd do

[00:48:51] John McDougall: yeah, 

[00:48:52] Jim Banks: hang around, kind of go out for dinners with people and, you know, 

[00:48:56] John McDougall: yeah, 

[00:48:57] Jim Banks: Bye.

[00:48:58] John McDougall: I had some good dinners like with Jim Boykin, Internet Marketing Ninjas, he was like super link guru, I don't know if, he's probably still doing it, man, freaking genius. I met Dr. Cini, that was cool. The Influence and Persuasion author, Brett, I was gonna hear him talk and I'm sitting there early, like a nerd, you know, like, oh, Cini Wow.

And Brett, tab Key was there and he's like, oh, you wanna meet Cini? Like, oh cool.

[00:49:26] Jim Banks: Yeah, I 

had Brett on, 

on his 

guest. I mean, I've known Brett for forever, right? The very, very early days. I always tell the story,

I introduced him and his wife to each other. So, you know, like people say,

[00:49:37] John McDougall: Oh wow.

[00:49:38] Jim Banks: people always say, you know, I haven't, I haven't, you know, I haven't put in my pitch to kind of speak at PubCon and I'm like, I don't think I need to pitch to speak at PubCon, right?

Because, Brett's wife, Erica, would kill him if I said I'm not going to come because I'm 

not speaking, right? So.

[00:49:52] John McDougall: Yeah.

[00:49:52] Jim Banks: He'll always put me on something. Panel, moderating, I don't care. I'll kind of do anything to help 

[00:49:56] John McDougall: Awesome. 

[00:49:57] Jim Banks: great guy.

[00:49:58] John McDougall: Yeah. No, I, he really just went out of his way. I just started chit chatting with him. I think I didn't know who he was until, I mean, I knew who he was. I didn't know it was him until he said, I'm like, Oh, it's like Brett, the organizer. He's like, yeah, yeah. Let me introduce you. I was, you know, he, he went out of his way.

I didn't say, Oh, can you, you know, he, he just knew how to put the dots together, you know, and

[00:50:23] Jim Banks: Yeah. And he could always, he could always get like, you know, pretty top notch keynote speakers to come along and speak. I mean, he had, you know, Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, you know, yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think of something, some of the others were, but yeah, some, some phenomenal keynotes. The only problem was, is that it was always Vegas and it was always like nine o'clock in the morning.

And I'm, I said to him, I don't do nine o'clock very often in Vegas. It's not my thing.

[00:50:46] John McDougall: yeah.

[00:50:47] Jim Banks: You know, if I do nine o'clock, it's because I've stayed up the whole night rather than I'm going to bed and waking up at that time. So,

[00:50:54] John McDougall: God, you're making me nostalgic for those days. Search engine strategies in New York. I used to always go to that and because I'm pretty close to New York. I mean, PubCon was almost like more hip in some ways, like, you know, it's its own little small thing. But then, I mean, the early search engine strategies, it was such a bunch of nerds.

And then I don't know what year it was. It went from like, Esoteric dudes to like, all these like hot chicks and like, uh, fancy dressed guys. And I'm like, wow, it's totally like mainstream, man. We're not the redheaded step kids 

[00:51:29] Jim Banks: it did have a, it did have a, neat solution. I mean, you know, like the 

very early kind of PubCon events, there'd be 95 guys and like women, right. And, and,

you know, and I mean, it's, it's very different now and I'm so, so pleased that it is. I'm so pleased that it's 

[00:51:46] John McDougall: Yeah, it's good that it's 

opened up, but it was a special time, I think, in a way when it was like this kind of odd little circle, you know, it was like a, just a moment that just disappeared as it evolved. And now it's like HubSpot. I, I haven't been to the HubSpot conference in a while, but that was like an eye opener, like how big, like, holy 

[00:52:06] Jim Banks: yeah. 

Yeah. And I mean, I've 

The Role of Women in SEO
---

[00:52:08] Jim Banks: got, I've got like some, some phenomenal female, whether they say female or women,

[00:52:15] John McDougall: Yeah.

[00:52:16] Jim Banks: women SEOs, right. Who, you know, and, and, and, you know, they come out with these lists of top 20 SEO women, right. And they hate those lists, right. Because they go, I just don't, you know, to me, it's, it's sort of like, there shouldn't be a top women

SEOs. it should just 

be a top SEOs, and I should damn well be on that list, and they're absolutely right, they should, right? So, you know,

you know, there's definitely, and I've always kind of said, well, What makes them top, right? What's the kind of criteria for it, right? I mean, I've, I've always maintained that, you know, if I ever end up on the, there's a sort of top 25 PPC or top 50 PPC 

PPC kind of 

personalities. And I'm like, if I ever appear on a list like that, I, you have my permission to shoot me, right? I just, I just, I have zero interest in, in, you know, being on a list or, you know, whatever else it's just, it's just bad. It's never, ever, in all the time I've been doing it, it's never been about me, it's always been about 

[00:53:16] John McDougall: Yeah. 

[00:53:17] Jim Banks: I'm serving, whether that's my staff, my clients,

[00:53:20] John McDougall: Yeah. I'm with you on that. I don't, I don't, you know, and I think when I was younger, it was like, I, you felt like you needed the authority of like, Oh, I got to get on New York Times and Forbes and all this. And then once you do, you're like, Oh yeah, over and over again. Like, I don't need to do that over and over and over again.

I mean, I suppose you should keep it up just, you know, but yeah, I just, I, like I said, I like to just do a good job for a small number of people. And I think niching, you 

get 

to do an even better

job. 

Yeah, you get paid better and I think you maybe can just do better because it's more efficient, you

[00:53:53] Jim Banks: and I've always maintained that the clients that I work with, the relationships I have with them, I always kind of say to them, I will always, always put far more money on the table than I will ever take off it. Right? So I will deliver immense value, right? And in return, I expect to be paid for that. Right?

But if I don't deliver immense value, I don't expect to be paid. Right? So, you know, I mean, I call myself a performance agency. Um, that doesn't mean I'm. 

Only getting paid commission, but I, you know, but I'm 

very, like I said, I'm, I'm very sort of selective about who I work with because of that.

Right. 

I want to make sure I can add value, right?

If I can't add value, then. It's probably not worth me working with them, because I don't, again, I don't think it, but, again, I can't remember if there's ever been a time where I've sat, haven't sort of sat down and within a couple of hours been able to find a ton of money that they're leaving on the table, painfully obvious, and regardless of whether they're a small company, startup, right, or a big company, they're all leaving money on the table, and quite often they don't realize it, and part of the reason for that is, you know, they They're only as good as the people that they have.

And if the people that they have, even though they might be a big, you know, billion dollar company, right? If they have somebody who doesn't understand things at the level maybe I know at, right, then I can kind of go in there and add value immediately. You know, because 

I'm bringing things to the table that they don't have now, so.

[00:55:15] John McDougall: Yeah. And you do a conversion optimization to, you know, 

[00:55:19] Jim Banks: A bit of that, I do it, not

because, it's not because I'm a CRO or anything like that, but I just, again,

I want to make sure, if I'm going to spend their money on advertising, and I know that their 

website landing pages are horrible, right, I'll say, well, 

we need to change some aspects of it, make it quicker, and, you know, scrap the

[00:55:38] John McDougall: Yeah. You combine it in with what you're doing to give them insights and yeah.

[00:55:42] Jim Banks: makes my life easier, you know, if I, if I know that 

I can kind of double the 

conversion, 

[00:55:46] John McDougall: double or triple or quadruple.

[00:55:47] Jim Banks: I can take it from 2 percent to 4%, it's like, 

you know, I can be more aggressive with the advertising and know that we're still gonna, you know, achieve a level that, that's acceptable. But if it's, you know, if the performance is horrible, because the landing page doesn't work, that just makes my life that much more difficult.

[00:56:05] John McDougall: Yep. 

Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid
---

[00:56:06] John McDougall: Well, I, real quick, I thought I would share a little value, super, like a little quick, like machine gun style, 

if, if that's all right. so I, I, I, and this is just quick and it was kind of off the cuff, but I made a couple notes just because I thought,you know, because of some of the things you talk about mistakes and like, you know, stories of things to fix.

one webinar we used to do was like 25 mistakes to avoid with digital marketing. So just maybe a dozen of them really super quick. So like, 25. What's amazing people we come to a website like there's no SEO like well There's no index nofollow on your site like the guy that launched the website forgot to put take no index nofollow off lack of 301 redirects people don't do like If they had value in their old site and they changed the page names and all of a sudden Google seeing like broken links because they didn't 301 redirect.

We've seen huge catastrophes from that. or they delete lots of good content and they say, Oh, some super smart agencies like, Oh, people only, I mean, StoryBrand is a great book and a great concept, but at the same time for Google, longer in depth content tends to work better. Sometimes people redesign, they don't do 301s and then they delete like Huge chunks of content.

The other flip side of that is not deleting enough content now because content marketing has gone so out of control, like. We're trying to delete maybe even a third or 20 percent of our 1, 000 page website or 1, 500 page website clients where we might have developed 15 pages a month for 4, 5, or 10 years.

You know, that's a lot of content and some of it's not that great or it's cannibalizing others. you know, obviously some people don't even know to do technical SEO so they get broken links. Issues like that are just poor load time, lack of picking a niche. Maybe there's a video loading right when the site loads, or they've got people uploading images and they just don't even realize they're uploading like some massive image from their phone and that's screwing up the load time.

Speaking in me, me, me language like, Oh, since 1995, it had done SEO, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who gives a crap? You know, like say you are, you're looking for a better SEO. We, this is how, you know, this is how we can help. Sure. But you got to speak in you language, have good calls to action, good user experience, people on the site longer, hence podcasts and videos, keep people on the site longer, optimize good user experience, people on the site longer post and they don't rely on you or they're doing all this stuff and they just give up too soon. So, you know, those are just little snippets of that, like

[00:58:53] Jim Banks: So John, I would love,

Conclusion and Future Discussions
---

[00:58:55] Jim Banks: I would love to kind of like continue talking, but I think we're probably due a part two, right? 

So why don't we kind of, 

we'll reconvene at some point in time in the future.

I'll have you back, you can give me the rest of your list and we can kind of talk through some more changes.

Changes and challenges and things that have kind of developed since we, we pick up here. Cause I can guarantee you the one thing that is absolutely certain to happen the minute we kind of, you know, finish this conversation and it gets published, right. Things will change, things will move on. Some things will kind of come back into, into fashion.

Some things will go out of fashion, right. And, you know, hopefully we can kind of keep people, heading in the right direction in terms of where they need to go to. So thanks again so much for coming on today and I'll talk to everyone else on the Digital Marketing Stories podcast for the next episode.

Thanks a lot.