Author: Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Inge Boubez - Moz

Inge Boubez, Director of Enterprise Marketing at Moz, is the latest guest to join the Marketing B2B Technology podcast. Inge explains how, although the fundamentals of SEO haven't changed, the rise in AI may have an impact in the industry and offers some thoughts on how marketers can address the potential challenges. She discusses both the Moz and STAT Search Analytics platforms, their functionality and how marketers can get the most out of the platforms.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

About STAT Search Analytics

Inge focusses on STAT Search Analytics, a product by Moz. STAT is a SERP tracking and analytics platform for tackling large-scale SEO with accuracy and ease. STAT delivers precision SERP insights, fresh each day, helping unlock new opportunities, drive more visibility, and prove the value of SEO.

About Inge

Inge brings over two decades of technology marketing expertise to her role as Director of Enterprise Marketing at Moz, where she focuses on STAT Search Analytics. Her extensive career has covered a wide range of settings, from innovative startups and small-to-medium-sized businesses to global industry leaders. Notably, Inge has contributed significantly at SAP and Layer 7 Technologies (which was acquired by Computer Associates) before her tenure at Moz. Her broad skill set includes demand generation, branding, customer engagement, channel strategy, global event management, and public relations, making her a highly respected and well versed professional in the marketing field.

Time Stamps

[00:48.8] – Inge shares her career journey and explains how Moz and STAT fit into Ziff Davis.

[03:56.5] – How can STAT help with SEO? Inge explains.

[07:39.0] – Inge explains who can use STAT and the training resources available.

[12:25.0] – Inge discusses some of the common mistakes made when optimising for search engines.

[13:52.9] – The potential impact of AI on SEO

[18:07.9] – How is SEO going to change in the future?

[25:23.1] – Inge’s contact details.

Quotes

“We're not just reaching out. We're engaging and understanding what makes our audience tick. And that's the future of marketing.” Inge Boubez, Director of Enterprise Marketing at Moz.

“Keep your eyes peeled for the next big thing, but don't forget that it's all about connecting with people on a human level. We're all humans, whether we're talking to the different personas like CEOs, CFOs, SEOs all over the world, we're all still humans.” Inge Boubez, Director of Enterprise Marketing at Moz.

“We're helping SEO professionals understand their unique search landscape and how they're positioned in it, and also helping them find new search opportunities and strategies.” Inge Boubez, Director of Enterprise Marketing at Moz.

Follow Inge:

Inge Boubez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/inge-boubez/

STAT Search Analytics website: https://getstat.com/napier/

STAT Search Analytics on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/stat-search-analytics/

STAT Search Analytics on Twitter: https://twitter.com/getSTAT

STAT Search Analytics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getstat/

Moz website: https://moz.com/

Moz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/moz/

Follow Mike:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547

Transcript: Interview with Inge Boubez - Moz

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Inge Boubez

Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Inge Boubez. Inge is the director of enterprise marketing for stat at Ziff, Davis. Inge, welcome to the podcast.

Inge: Thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here. What an honour.

Mike: It's, it's great to have you heard, I'm really excited. So what we always like to do before we start talking about what you do at work, and things like that, is find out how you got here. So can you tell me a little bit about your career journey?

Inge: Gosh, my career has been quite the ride, I must say, I started in the trenches of tech marketing moves through various startups, and even spent time with the giants like SAP. But I feel that zip Davis, that's a different story. They might seem like an old school publisher at first glance, but they're anything but when they scooped up Moz and start, I knew they were serious about leading in the digital world. And joining them felt like jumping onto a moving train of innovation, which is exactly where I want it to be.

Mike: I mean, that sounds awesome. And you've mentioned a few businesses there. So can you just maybe explain to the listeners who might not know, you know how stat fits in with Ziff Davis and also miles, please.

Inge: Yeah, it's a pretty interesting landscape, I must say. So Stott sits alongside Moz Pro, and Moz. Local as the SEO vertical of Ziff, Davis MarTech arm, which happens to be called the Moz group. Now, other brands within the MAS group, our eye contact campaigner, SMTP and kickbox, which make up the email vertical, and then there is line two and E voice, which then make up the communication vertical.

Mike: Oh, that's fascinating. I actually didn't realise it was quite so much within that Moz group inside Ziff Davis, I didn't know you had, for example, the email side on the voice side, so Ziff, Davis obviously invested a lot in digital technology. So one of the things they've done and I think through through Moz, they brought stat into the business, is that right? Absolutely. What do you see as the future for stats? I mean, how is that gonna develop? You know, how can Jeff Davis develop the brand, but also think perhaps maybe there's an opportunity for stats and the rest of Moz to help Ziff Davis grow and develop?

Inge: Yes, and thank you for asking that question. I believe the future of stat is bright, very bright, there is renewed interest and investment in the business. And we've got a packed roadmap this year. And that includes rolling out a brand new website and product user interface, both of which are looming just around the corner, we're talking about just in a couple of months. So there is a strong affinity for the stock brand, within the business, for sure. But also in the SEO industry at large. We've got a lot of stat advocates rooting for us. So we're really excited to deliver on this next phase of stat. And with SIP Davis being such a big umbrella, we had the unique opportunity now to connect directly with a much larger, diverse group of sister brands to test new product ideas and get insights into cross industry use cases. And of course, there's also the upside of continued investment in our platforms and in our people.

Mike: So you sound really positive. I mean, I think maybe one of the things I might need to do for some of the listeners is take a step back. I suspect most listeners are familiar with Mars, which is one of the best known sort of, you know, self serve SEO tools available. But can you explain what that does? And how it helps people with their SEO?

Inge: Absolutely. The short answer of what stat does is stat is a superb tracking and analytics platform built for large scale SEO needs. And the long answer is that it helps clarify where stat sits in the SEO tool market. It involves expanding on a couple of points. So first of all, that could mean that you work for a really big website, one that has 1000s, or even millions of pages that you're responsible for, you know, think the retail and E commerce, finance, travel and hospitality or media and entertainment spaces. Or it could also mean that you work for an agency, and maybe you're not a big agency, and maybe each client website isn't massive, but when you add all of them up, you add up everything that you're actively working on. It turns out that you've got a lot of SEO in your hands. Basically, a typical stat client ends up tracking 1000s of keywords, whether that's for one website, or across many websites that you're managing. Second, we'd tend to favour saying that we do SERP tracking instead of just rank tracking. Because our data is more than just here's your tracking or ranking position and ranking URL. The SERP itself is more than just rents. It is essentially a treasure trove of consumer research. We all know that Google puts a tonne of money and effort into understanding what searchers want, and delivering on that. And competitive Intel as well. So we parse, analyse and deliver what's on the entire 100 results, sir. So you're also going to get SERP features, and better insights, visibility, metrics, and more. So in many ways, the large skill of stat also applies to the sheer amount of data that we collect, and the fact that we collect it daily. So by serving these precision SERP insights every single day, we're helping SEO professionals understand their unique search landscape, and how they're positioned in it. And also helping them and find new search opportunities and strategies, which in turn, of course, helps them drive more visibility, traffic and revenue, and ultimately helps them prove the value of their SEO. Now, SEO is both very cross functional, and also not always the most understood function within an organisation, even by the team that it sits on. So one of the biggest things we hear from SEO professionals is that they often spend a lot of time educating the organisation on the value of what they bring to the table, which is a big frustration. So having this kind of data always allows them to show the impact of their work. Additionally, compared to a discipline, like PPC, SEO has huge returns and potential, but it lacks concrete data to prove it. So stat aims to bridge that gap. By giving SEO professionals the scale of data they need to explain the value and context of their work. So I hope I've kind of painted the picture that you're asking there.

Mike: I think that's that's a great explanation. I mean, it sounds very much that what you've got within the SIF, Davis organisation is you've got the Mostoles, which a lot of people know, very much self service, but they're going to be looking at maybe 10s of keywords. And what you've got with stat is something that perhaps is designed for SEO press people really deep into SEO. So I'm really interested to learn a bit more about that and perhaps learn a bit more about you know, pricing and how people justify the cost of what must be a much more expensive tool.

Inge: You are absolutely right, Mike. So stat is designed for large scale SEO activities. It is designed more for a what then a who we do mostly attract users that have SEO somewhere in their title. So that would be an SEO manager or SEO, lead, SEO director, SEO analyst SEO technical or technical SEO experts and so on, versus a general marketer. But you certainly don't need to consider yourself a pro or an expert, or an advanced SEO professional to use stat. So what that means is, if you're working with the kind of scale that stat is best suited for, we're definitely an affordable option. Our competitive per keyword pricing, for example, is designed to scale with you without breaking your bank as you go. Plus, our billing is extremely flexible. If you only need a few days worth of data, for example, whether for a pitch or a short term campaign, you can jump into stat and toggled tracking on or off for any number of keywords, and your billing will follow suit. So essentially, you're only being billed for the days that you track.

Mike: That's great. It sounds like you're you're really focusing on delivering value, which I think is brilliant. I mean, one of the things I wonder is it you know, obviously stat is incredibly powerful. But SEO is important to a huge range of people who are often non SEO experts minimal loss of marketing, people want to know the impact of what they're doing on SEO. So how would a non SEO experts learn to use stat to improve their rankings and improve what they're running as campaigns?

Inge: A great question. We've got a learning team that's dedicated to creating training materials coursework and documentation to help get clients up to speed with stat quickly, and the top notch client success team who is available for training and strategy sessions. So we just want to ensure that our clients are staying up to date with features and functionality and also feel equipped to handle whatever new thing Google might throw their way. Now, on the marketing side, we also spent a lot of time on mid funnel content. So product use cases and client case studies for example, as it's a valuable learning material for our clients as well. It gets a second life outside of helping leads along the funnel, if I may say so. And of course, you don't have to be an expert in SEO to use stat. And chances are, you aren't just starting out in SEO if you are using stat, but if you find yourself in that place, one of the perks of being part of Moz is that it is the place to learn SEO. So we've also got a tonne of resources at our disposal for you to utilise.

Mike: That's great. And certainly, you know, I mean, we're very familiar with a lot of the Moz training at the basic level that that's awesome. But you mentioned some of the customer case studies and looking at how stat benefits customers. I'm really interested if you've got some examples of how customers could increase their search performance by using the stat.

Inge: A lot of times clients think that they're competing with a handful of known business competitors. But from an organic search standpoint, there are almost always plenty that they aren't aware of stat surfaces, those true search competitors, and how much served visibility everyone owns. You've now saved yourself a tonne of wasted effort and are in a position to be super targeted with your strategy. You know who your competitors are and what type of content you need to beat. And now you can chart your progress in visibility that you've gained from it is invaluable. Since the SERPs are more than just 10 Blue organic links. Understanding the different types of search features that appear in your search space is definitely key. Not only do they present a golden opportunity to own a larger piece of Serb real estate, crucially, their Google telling you the type of content that it knows searchers want to see now stat will show you exactly which sir features are showing up for your whole keyword site specific keyword segments and even for individual keywords. So that way, you can understand the content formats that are worth pursuing. There's no sense in showing up to a SERP full of video results with a blog post, for example.

Mike: Oh, I love it's a great point. And I think something often overlooked in SEO. And actually, let's stay on that topic. I'm interested. Are there other things that you see it stat where marketers are getting it wrong? They're trying to optimise websites for search engines, and they're not really doing the right thing?

Inge: Well, I love this question. Okay, I'll outline a couple of things that I've seen. Some common missteps are focusing on the quantity of articles versus quality, something that has really popped back up with the explosive rise of generative AI, this is quite common. Second point would be using dated SEO best practices like keyword stuffing. That's the second example there that I see quite common. And the third would be ignoring internal links and relying on external links instead, which are far harder to get and don't always have as big of an impact as you may hope. And lastly, what I'm also seeing is getting hung up on on two to three big head term keywords that might be at most one to 2% of the total traffic picture. They're often highly competitive and therefore difficult to be successful with. So you end up sinking a lot of time, effort and money into them. And similar to external links, the payoff may not exactly be worth it in the end.

Mike: That's a great point. And I think, you know, a lot of people do get hung up on those big keywords. So So I love that tip there. You mentioned AI. I mean, we're gonna have to talk about AI. And I think, you know, some of us are wondering, is with generative AI being used more particularly becoming more of the interface of the search engine? Is SEO going to be less important? I mean, how's that going to help marketers, once generative AI starts driving those results?

Inge: Oh, you know, this is a really, really good question. I love questions around AI, there has been a lot of apprehension around it, not just an SEO, but really in every walks of our life. So let me focus on the SEO side, we definitely don't think SEO is going to be less important. And for a few key reasons. Number one, we don't think generative AI interfaces will replace search engines. It's simply not an efficient solution to many of the problems that search engines currently solve, like quick answers to simple problems, navigating to a website or seeing a range of content on a topic. Secondly, we don't think that AI written articles will replace content in search results. Users absolutely do not want this, and Google seems committed to engaging in an arms race to detect and deter this behaviour. The kind of content that AI writes well, and that users don't mind being a written is a kind of content that Google will likely answer in featured snippets or similar features. And number three, we don't think search generative variants are similar AI written SERP features will replace organic results. Fundamentally, Google's business model is sending traffic to websites, and they don't want to do anything to disrupt that revenue stream. And again, there are just many cases where generative AI is not always an accurate answer, or ultimately what users are looking for. Things as GE experiment, unlike Google was widely rolled out. And gradually over time, they've shown it on fewer and fewer queries and lower and lower down the search. So unless S G pivots drastically, that gives us a decent picture on what to expect for for the time being in this realm. And as for how stat will help marketers in the age of generative AI, the SERP landscape changes, so does SEO. And so do we, just as with knowledge, graphs, and featured snippets before, when or possibly if Google decides to formally rollout as Ge will be one of the first to parse them and help our users understand them at scale?

Mike: That's pretty interesting. I mean, it sounds like for the hype around AI, is perhaps gonna have less of an impact than some people are predicting. But what I'm interested is, how can I help particularly help people who are looking to improve their search engine optimization? I mean, you know, particularly Are you planning to use AI within the stat tool?

Inge: Well have salutely. And absolutely, we think AI can and does help with SEO. Like any other discipline, and especially technical disciplines, AI can help to parse and interpret large quantities of data, provide example code or spot anomalies. Many SEOs have used machine learning, natural language processing, and even generative AI such as GPT. In this way, for several years now, some AI SEO use cases, for example, would be producing titles, meta descriptions and alt tags at scale, grouping keywords and topics, and creating schema structured data markup for technical SEO needs. In all cases, though, human oversight is always a must. Now, we actually already employ AI in stat Domain Authority has been a machine learning metric since 2019. And our keyword suggestion tool uses NLP algorithms, among others to provide good query matches. And for sure, will continue to augment and process the data we show to users in this way. Although we had no such plan when it comes to our ragging data that has to come straight from the horse's mouth, which is Google. And you know, it can't be modelled or estimated.

Mike: Well, it's good to hear that AI is having a positive impact. And it's been used, I certainly was surprised that domain authority is an AI metric. That's something I've learned. Thank you. There's other things happening as well in SEO. So how else do you think SEO is going to change in the future?

Inge: Well, we've been in the SEO industry for a long time now. And honestly, as much as things change and have changed, they also stay relatively the same, at least in principles. There will always be the scheme of the day to game Google and get quick, but short lived results before they put an end to it. Today, it's aI content. Tomorrow, I'll do something else who knows. The long running trend though, is that if your SEO strategy relies on formulaic or thin content, the top you can imagine being replaced with a search feature, for example, then it's going to get harder and harder for you over time, the bar, what constitutes valuable or helpful content is going to keep getting higher and higher. We expect Google to get even better at understanding nuances and relevance in queries and content. So there'll be less opportunity to rank with questionable or relevant content, even if you've got otherwise good SEO.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense, I think has great advice as well around quality of content. I feel I need to ask you a question, which perhaps is a little bit cheeky. I think like most people, you know, who saw malls in the early days, muscles always generated, you know, great content. And one part of that was certainly Randall I think he was he was seen as you know, being somewhat synonymous with Mars. And obviously, he left and maybe wasn't exactly super happy with what happened. Do you think he'll return what what's the future or are you looking towards a new future?

Inge: Gosh, I feel like texting ran right now. Kidding aside, I can't speak for random on returning to Mars. But I can say that we continue to value and strive for what's been at the core of Rand's vision since day one of Mars and that is a community that shares really its ideas and best practices, thought leaders to champion the evolution of our craft, and innovative tools that underpin the practice of SEO, hope that answers your question.

Mike: I do you know, I think that's really positive. I think that there was a very strong vision. And I think Moses is one of those companies that managed to continue a vision, irrespective of who's actually driving it. So yeah, I mean, I love that answer. Thank you. And I'm very positive. I really appreciate you know, you talking about stats and about Mars. I wonder if I can ask you some more general questions, we'd love to understand, you know, what our guests are doing in terms of their own marketing as well. So how do you promote stat, what's most effective for you?

Inge: We use all the standard channels. But I've always found a lot of success by attending SEO conferences and events. the SEO industry, I find is a very tight knit community where strong relationships and word of mouth go a long way. So it's less about us showing up to an event and walking away with a tonne of ready to convert MQLs. And more about making great personal connections while we're there. And then developing and maintaining those relationships over time, you start to see the same faces at the same events. Now, some of our best leads actually come from current but also former clients who introduce us to their network at events, which is always an honour, and speaks to our general approach of just showing up as a good partner in business. And it's really important to us that we develop a good rapport with our clients, build trust, and forge a productive relationship, that's going to set them up to do the most ambitious and successful SEO in their careers. That's awesome.

Mike: You've beautifully said that. You help people be successful. And that's your best marketing tool. And I love that

Inge: their success is our success. You know, this is something that we want to hone in on every day in what we do.

Mike: That's brilliant. We've also got a couple of standing questions, we always like to ask people. So what's the best piece of marketing advice you've ever been given?

Inge: Oh, gosh, I have had so many advisors, constructive feedback and support given to me over the years, even including where I stand right now. But you know what the best advice I ever got is to talk to people be curious and want to find out talk to people and not the demographics, you know, it's easy to get lost in the data, and forget that there are real people in the other end, the little nugget reminded me like this little nugget reminded me to keep things real, make that emotional connection. It's been my North Star guiding principle ever since it guides how I craft my campaigns, foster work relationships, and lead teams. What I do is I strive to treat people as people first so that we can move in the right direction together as a strong unit. And this speaks to everything that we try to do as a team as an organisation and in the product that we try to create.

Mike: I love that. I mean, our next question is what would you tell a young person who was thinking of marketing as a career maybe an SEO now you've been super enthusiastic? Inger, so I think you're going to be quite positive on this one.

Inge: Don't go in it. No, no, that's just me being facetious to the newbies thinking about marketing, gosh, dive in headfirst. And stay curious, you might get a bit bloody you know, at times, it might be a little bit rough, but it's worth it. This field is a wild mix of tech and human psychology for sure. And sure, it's changing at lightning speed. And some of us may get nervous about that. But that to me is the thrill of it. Keep your eyes peeled for the next big thing. But don't forget that it's all about connecting with people still, on a human level. We're all humans, whether we're talking about a different personas like CEOs CFOs. You know, SEOs all over the world. We're all still humans. So your ambitions, your passions, your empathy and your honesty. That's your key to success. And that's been my secret sauce.

Mike: That's great advice. Ingress has been a really fascinating conversation. I feel SEO is such a complex and deep subject. Is there anything else you feel that maybe we should have covered that we skipped over?

Inge: Well, since we are in the tech world, it's always about evolution. And the next big thing as I as I mentioned, so speaking of evolution, SEO and analytics have come a long way, right? It's not just about keywords and backlinks anymore. Ai stepping in as we've touched upon earlier, changing how we understand and interact with data. It's like having a microscope that shows us not just the what, but the why behind user behaviours. This technology is making our strategy smarter, more personalised. We're not just reaching out we're Engaging and understanding what makes our audience tick. And that's the future of marketing. They insightful, data driven yet deeply human. That's what I stand by.

Mike: That's such a positive view of things. So thank you so much, Inge. I'm sure people listening to this would want to find out more. So how could they contact you if they'd like more information?

Inge: Oh my gosh, that is music to my ears. Well, if anyone wants to get into the nitty gritty of this stuff, or just swap stories, I am all ears, shoot me an email or let's connect on LinkedIn. I'm always up for a good chat about the next big thing in marketing.

Mike: I really appreciate all your time. You've been very generous with your knowledge. Thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast.

Inge: Thank you.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Farzad Rashidi - Respona

Farzad Rashidi, lead innovator at Respona, a link-building tool, discusses the origin of the business as an internal tool within the content creation platform Visme. He shares top tips for getting good quality backlinks and creating backlink campaigns that benefit both the requesting business and the providing business.

He also shares how to capitalise on current trends and discusses a successful campaign involving Game of Thrones that dramatically increased Respona's page rankings.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Farzad Rashidi - Respona

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Farzad Rashidi

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.

Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Farzad Rashidi. Farzad founded and is now the lead innovator at Respona. Welcome to the podcast. Farzad,

Farzad: Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

Mike: So far said we'd like to start off by asking our guests how they got to where they are today. So can you tell us a little bit about your career journey?

Farzad: Sure. Thanks. So I started my career in marketing at a company called Visby. Have you heard of vids? Me, Mike before?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Their presentation tools company.

Farzad: That's right. Yeah. So it's an all in one visual content creation platform. For businesses. We came around the same time as Canva kind of went down the b2c market and they've now become a household name, we took a different approach focus a little bit more on the business side of things. So cater predominantly to SMB, and enterprise. And so I joined as a first marketing hire Bazmee. And we basically grew, the company completely bootstrapped to over 20 million active users. And the way we acquired all these customers and users has been predominantly through our content and SEO. So right now visit means website is getting close to about 4 million monthly organic traffic. And so lots of lots of trial and error to get there. However, what what was really key to kind of help skyrocket our traffic at this meeting was our Off Page promotion tactics, which basically helped us build relationships with relevant authoritative publications in our space. And those tactics were sort of done all over the place by manual work and spreadsheets and whatnot. So we put it together under one roof. And it was sort of an internal software for us for for a little while, and it just worked ridiculously well. And we decided to release it as a standalone product. So that's kind of the backstory of how we ended up with Respona.

Mike: And did respond to spin out as a separate company, or you will the same company,

Farzad: separate entities. However, we are self funded, in a way. So we are funded by Visby. They're technically our investor. But yes, we were kind of incubated out of there.

Mike: So it's pretty cool. So you did so well, with the first company, you were able to fund the second that sounds awesome. Thank you. So you talked about your off page SEO activities, and that was how you grew versus me. So Respona is basically that internal product you built that's now available to the public. So can you give me a you know, just a brief overview of what Respona does and what people would get if they subscribe to it? Sure,

Farzad: I mean, I don't mean this to be a plug for Respona. Most of us responded as really, you can do manually yourself. And that's actually what I recommend everyone to start, if you're not doing any sort of off page, promotion is better to always start manually and kind of get a proof of concept and see if this is something that works well in your niche. And if so then great. And our respondents kind of a gasoline, a floor on that fire and help scaling things without losing that personalised touch. And in that human touch. So kind of what our platform does is very simple. So from a technical perspective, you can find any website and it finds you the right people on those websites and helps you contact them with a personalised pitch, both through email and LinkedIn. So there's a bunch of different components to it. So today, you would normally have to purchase multiple different tools and conducted them together that respondent sort of brings together under one roof and automates a lot of dirty work and a lot of that, that tedious manual tasks that you can focus more on personalising the pitches and actually building relationships versus, you know, dealing with overhead. Now, as far as the use cases for the platform goes, just to kind of give you some examples, there's there's myriad of different ways in how we use this internally. And also different ways that customers find use cases for right. But predominantly, unless you produce a piece of linkable assets and, and you'd like to potentially get other publications to talk about and mention it, and then those backlinks and those mentions from those relevant publications, help your domain authority to go up and, and help that content piece kind of pass on that link equity to other pages in your websites. And now you start coming up in the search results for your own target keywords. So that process though, basically, just to kind of give you some examples, that there's one strategy, for example, what we call the podcast outreach strategy, and this is what I'm doing right now. Right?

So the way we found a you Mike and team got in touch with your team and found you and reached out was all through response. So responding, for example, helps you find people in your space that I've been on auto podcasts and And, and helps you weed out the podcasts and nobody listens to you and, and find you the right person in charge of that podcast gets you the contacts, all of that stuff is fully automated so that you can actually spend the time to do research on a podcast and say, Listen to feel the episode, see if this is the type of podcasts that we can come and add value to, and then reach out to the right person. And basically ask them if they'd be open to hosting a guest because now at that point, we have a pretty clear understanding of what the podcast is audiences and what they're interested in. And then we come on to the show to help the podcast hosts create an episode, but at the same time, we get indirect awareness for our brand. And also at the same time you kind of chopped this episode into no other blog posts or the types of content or repurpose them. So that also gives us a mention or a backlink from your own website. And that, you know, it's a vote of popularity and other search engines. So that's one out of a myriad of other different tactics and strategies that respond to help sweat.

Mike: So that's such a really interesting answer. I mean, we were out guesting on podcasts as well. And it was really interesting, because we found that our SEO was improving. When we started guessing on podcasts, we had no idea why it was improving. And eventually we dug in, we found out what all the new backlinks were. And most of them were driven by podcasts. So I think that's really interesting. A lot of people are excited about podcasts. But there's more benefits than just appearing on the podcast.

Farzad: Exactly. And you know, obviously, it's not to say we're only here, Mike just cannot get a backlink from your website, that that's just a simplistic answer. Obviously, there's myriads of benefits. Number one, for me, at least, the reason why I spend an hour of my time is because I want to meet smart people in our industry, like yourself, building these relationships. And also at the same time, you know, that's advertising to a niche audience helping you create that content piece. So it's a mutually beneficial collaboration that happens. And that's the type of approach that we take when it comes to any sort of outreach tactic, right? They know that, for example, we applied that also to digital PR, which is I know, it's one of your expertise as well as your agency. So like, the way we go about kind of average is a little different than most people were that basically just span the world and kind of hope for the best. It's like very highly mutually collaborative type of approach that we take when it comes to average.

Mike: So I think, you know, a lot of people here, even if they're not SEO professionals, they understand that the more backlinks you get the high quality backlinks, the better your ranking, and Google is one of one of the factors, not obviously the only one. But it seems to be that Link building is is a real problem. And it's kind of got tarred with this reputation of being a bit sleazy sometimes, so I'm really interested to know, you know, why is it such a problem for SEO to build those links.

Farzad: So it's just because it's new. So if you think about like, in the early 2000s, when sales outreach became a thing, like outbound, I know. And then people discovered email, as a broached when it comes to prospecting. Everyone just started blasting emails to everyone, and it was quite spamming. And now fast forward two decades later, now, it's a much more sophisticated type approach, where now the account executives that reach out to you know your dog's name, and, you know, they actually are reaching out with, with a clear value prop, and it's working for some of the companies, not something we're good at at all. But you know, it's working for some companies in some certain industries, when it comes to Link building is just because I feel like that's my personal opinion. It's just, it's simply new. It's become a thing recently in the past few years. And marketers don't really know what they're doing yet. They're still discovering it. So what what happens when you don't know what you're doing is that you kind of resort to simplistic tactics like, Hey, let me just send an email to 1000 people and ask them for a backlink. See what happens. And 99.9% of cases is that answer dot question is nothing, nothing is going to happen. So wasted time, you just wasted your time. So I think over time marketers kind of kind of learn sort of what, what strategies work. And a lot of it has to do with adding value, right? So you don't want to ask people to do something for you. You add value and create value together. And the sort of mutual benefit of collaboration is sort of what we're advocating for. And that's something that respond facilitates.

Mike: That's really interesting. See, you mentioned, you know, that there's a few ways to build those, those mutually beneficial partnerships. So, I mean, it sounds like you believe Link building is not just something that should sit in, in the SEO professionals role, but actually, other people, you know, for example, PR, should be thinking about the impact on SEO, of what they're doing. I mean, you want to talk a little bit about that,

Farzad: Of course, and, you know, I can I can talk some examples. I feel like it's a lot more helpful than just talking in hypotheticals. So when it comes to link building, the way we define it again, I I hate that term, even though that's kind of what our industry is just because so much negative connotations involved with it. And the UK, you folks call it digital PR, and that I like the sound of that more. But as far as the strategy goes, still comes down to the very basics. So one of the biggest mistakes a lot of folks make when it comes to average, that they try to build links to sales pages and like pages that they want to come up in the search results, right. That's the number one thing people think about when it comes to link building. And like, Okay, I built this landing page of my services page, and I want it to come up in the search results. So let's go see if I can build links to it. And that's just the wrong approach because nobody wants to mention and genuinely talk about a sales page. Right? So let me let me give you an example. One of the very successful campaigns are ran at visit me was right before the last season of Game of Thrones came out. Have you watched Game of Thrones, Mike,

Mike: Do you know what falls out? I've not watched Game of Thrones. I think I'm the only person on the planet. Oh, come on,

Farzad: Mike. All right, you got some catching up to do. But anyhow. So before the last season, the cable firms came out. Everyone's talking about Oh, who's gonna win the game of thrones. Yeah, yada, yada. And so this means the data is tool that's one of the unique features that they know helps to create really cool data visualisations. So what we did was just take the data from a betting website of what characters people were betting on winning the game of thrones. And, and put it together in this blog post that we talked about, okay, here's like when we predict or who the public predicts, to be that to be the winner. And what we did then, was that we fired up response. And then we looked up all the latest news articles that were published on the Game of Thrones. And it's something they don't normally traditionally do with a PR database, right? Because it's not a traditional industry, you don't reach out to anybody who's interested in movies, right? So we want it to be very targeted towards people who had just covered like, earlier today, published an article on like a character and give us a response to helps you find those contacts with the author. And that gets through the contact information. And then we reach reached out and say, Hey, Mike, and I just found your article on Forbes about Game of Thrones. And we just put together a really cool DataViz, on whom the public is picking to be the winner. And that brought in by 60 or so press mentions that just one campaign to that content piece. Now, you must say doesn't have any business value? No, absolutely not. Because, yes, those press mentions are not necessarily something that we're directly selling, right? We're not in the movie business. However, those mentions to our website, are a voucher of popular vote to popularity, nice photo searching. And so what we call link equity, which is means basically how much popularity you have gets passed on to other pages on our website. So now our data visualisation software landing page is ranking number one, because of the amount of credibility we built for our website in those topics. So this is not to say this is the one sites you know, everybody should go create DataViz on. The reason why we did that is because we are in the data was business, right? So there's a myriad of different ways on how you can go about this. But I just wanted to kind of paint a picture of an example of a type of campaign that we ran, specifically when it comes to digital PR.

Mike: So that's really interesting, because I know, when it comes to the links that come in, the more relevant the site the links to that, that's also good. So what you were looking to do was, was pitch this story ostensibly about Game of Thrones, but pitch it into articles that talked about data visualisation. And so you've got that credibility for being a database product through the content of the story. Is that Is that what you're trying to do?

Farzad: Yes. And it's not to say this is all we do, right? So we actually do those and batches anytime it would make sense. On a more granular basis, anytime we put out a linkable asset, or any sort of pieces of content that add some value in terms of education. We have other strategies that we follow, for example, we can understand, okay, what are some of the older pages on that topic that have been published? Dad, obviously, we've created a far superior piece of content so we can see, okay, where else they have been mentioned. And so that normally gives you a lot more relevant, you know, websites that are not necessarily news publications, but other websites that we could potentially reach out to, and again, start a collaboration with them to either give us an addition or replacement. And again, I'm just going through different types of strategies. Each one has a different specific purpose. And that's been one of the main challenges. That response has been customer education, right to kind of teach people how to do these things the right way. And so we kind of had to incorporate a lot of these education into the product as well. So now when the users go in there, we don't just put them into this blank canvas and we're like, okay, you should To start your campaign, we'll give you like specific strategies you can click into and kind of walk the user through that different strategies to kind of help kind of do some hand holding to get put them on the right track.

Mike: So that sounds like you're aiming this product, you know, almost open up access to this, this part of off page SEO, to people who actually aren't SEO experts. Is that is that one of your goals?

Farzad: Absolutely, yes. And we don't actually require folks to be an SEO expert to do any sort of promotion. Because when it comes to getting other folks to talk about users, there's several benefits to it. Other than just the backlink you get to your website, for example, one of the first strategies we ever ran for respond to, and actually nothing to do with our SEO, what we did using our own platform was to reach out to other blog post I had listed, for example, what are some of the best tools for link building or some of the best outreach tools? What are some of the best PR tools and secured mentioned in those listicles that basically would potentially drive referral traffic? So the goal of that campaign was actually tirely? Independent of right SEO? Does it help with our domain rating? Absolutely. Because, you know, there's a website talking about us. But that's kind of an indirect benefit that happens after the primary goal. So, you know, these sort of tactics, I think any business has to do, like, even if you, for example, you're in commerce, like we have lots of online stores, they use responded like, for example, one of them. And that was quite interesting, it's quite eccentric was was a CBD gummy company that basically sell like CBD gummies, that just became legal in the US. So they can't do any sort of advertising, Facebook or Instagram. So what they do is basically reach out to other news publications, blog posts that have elicited similar products or whatnot, and trying to send them a free product to get themselves mentioned on there. So again, every day, I find, you know, different use cases, different type of ways and how folks try to make it work. But yes, that's kind of the gist of it. So it's far beyond the scope of SEO.

Mike: I mean, that's an interesting range of customers you've gotten and so you know, markets, I mean, presumably, off page SEO, SEO link building, I mean, that's something that applies to almost any company can benefit from that.

Farzad: Yes, but when it comes to developing a marketing strategy, you can't say we developed this platform for all businesses of all kinds, right? It's just a big mistake. So we had to kind of narrow down our focus on some of the more tech savvy customers that were, they were aware of what Link building is and what they were doing normally themselves manually. So we get to target market we picked to start with the market to again, the product could be used in different ways. But that from a marketing standpoint, where we developed, our messaging was mainly targeted towards marketing agencies, because first of all, you guys are doing this on a daily so and you normally do it at a larger scale, because you're managing dozens of clients. So normally, these are higher value customers for us, because you're gonna stick around for a long run and also, ideally purchase the higher tier plan. And also other software companies, SAS companies that in already had a content team that already have an SEO person, they already know what they're doing. So it's very easy for them to get the value of the platform, not ecommerce bloggers, publications, we have a small percentage of our customers that are from those areas, and they get a lot of value from it. But obviously, you know, we have to kind of pick our battles when it comes to messaging. So those were the two target markets we pay.

Mike: That's interesting. So looking at the people who, you know, obviously everyone could benefit, but you're really focusing down on who's going to get the maximum benefit from that platform is a great bit of marketing in terms of identifying the target market by value and love that. Thank you. I just need to move on. I mean, it's a question. I think at the moment, everybody's got to ask, and that's that's the AI question. There's obviously a lot of hype around AI and particularly, where people are using Respona to reach out to people, you know, I think there's obviously opportunity for generative AI for for emails. I mean, what are you doing around AI? And what do you think the future is for AI in marketing?

Farzad: You know, it's interesting, bring this out, Mike, because we're actually in the development process. Now. I think it may sound like it's tech ro. saying these things, but I think AI is definitely going to revolutionise the way businesses do business. And it's something that's applicable to all sorts of industries, not just software, but law like lawyers, I don't know, real estate agents, all sorts of businesses are going to be impacted sooner, sooner or later. And any company that doesn't keep themselves updated is at a risk of becoming obsolete. So, as far as response goes, there are several stages of phases that we've planned phase one is going to be kind of creating that messaging. So, you know, generative AI has become pretty good at creating very engaging emails and pitches based on campaign objectives, obviously got to train it, modify it. And we have a mass amount of data available to us in terms of what are some of the best practices, what are some of the best type messaging to work best. And so helping other customers kind of getting to that level without having to hire you know, or contact manager or whatnot. And also from second phase perspective is in terms of personalization. So, we actually already utilised a good amount of artificial intelligence in the background of respondents. Like, for example, we have an article summarizer feature where it would actually read the article and summarises the piece, so that you can take that information and personalise your messaging, that process of personalising your message is right now manual. So next phase of our products kind of go live this quarter is automating data as well. So not only it will go and reads the article, and also knows the author and Li reads their LinkedIn URL. So now we have information about the person, we have a lot of information about the content that you have written, and we already have a pit. So it's quite easy to combine this together and create a highly personalised pitch without having human involvement. And so that's something that's coming next and that we're very excited about. So what's going to happen after is predominantly going to be in terms of putting together these campaigns in the first place, right? So right now respond has a lot of automation that helps you kind of go through these campaigns pretty quickly. But coming up with those campaign ideas, and having those done in the first place, is something that a human has to do. And I don't think that's required. So the next phase of that will probably be actually helping you automate a lot of that. So you kind of plug and play your website and help respond to kind of take care of the rest. So that's kind of the direction we're heading to, obviously. And are we going to have to play it step by step?

Mike: And do you think this is going to be a positive thing? Because, you know, I think one of the things a lot of people are concerned about is once AI is being widely used to generate emails, that the volume of marketing emails can be almost unmanageable to deal with the inbound emails you get.

Farzad: Right? Absolutely. And I think there's going to be solutions to help you manage your inbox after they're already sent out there. So yes, you have to kind of go back to the beginning of the interview where I mentioned, when we conduct average, we're creating value. We're not just asking people to do something for us. So what well, we facilitate with respondents is these mutually beneficial collaborations, for example of kind of going back to that podcast, interview, podcast hosts are on the hunt for good guests. And they welcome good guests to come on to the podcast. So if respondent helps you find those podcasts that are a perfect fit and reaches out to them, and actually does the research to know that there's a fit and sends you a personalised pitch. This is something from a podcast host perspective, you get three or four different pitches, good pitches from suitable guests, that's something that you would welcome because then now you have a pool of candidates of interviewees that you can pick from, right. So it's not to say that this is going to necessarily spam your inbox, but also just putting better guests in front of you from that perspective. So, you know, the way I would look at it is as long as it's done for good, it's never a bad idea to do more good. If that makes sense.

Mike: Now, it makes a lot of sense that he's certainly work with us. I mean, we turn down the vast majority of pitches we get for guests on our podcast. So whatever you you did through a spoon, it definitely worked for us. So that's great. I'm interested. No, I mean, I'm aware of your time. And when there's a couple of questions, we'd like to ask people. So I'm really interested to know, if you're talking to a young person today, would you say marketing's a career to go into? Or would you advise them to maybe look elsewhere?

Farzad: That is a very great question. I think it comes down to what you're good at, right? Because marketing could be a great field to be in if you're, if that's something that you're passionate about, and you really like as cheesy as it sounds. And it could be a horrible for a person that may not necessarily like the nuances that goes into it. So if a young person is listening to this, I would say do look at what you're doing your free time and see what you do for free that you it's not for work, it's not for money, you do it out of your own entertainment. And it could be sports, it could be, you know, it could be whatever that you do and see if that's the type of area he tend to look at as a career. So that's what I would leave with that.

Mike: I think that's great advice. I love that. And we also like to steal a few good ideas from our guests as well. So I'm interested to know what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?

Farzad: That there's no one size fits all strategy. You know, when I started my career, I was looking at other companies and how they were doing their marketing. And I would try to copy a lot of his ideas and they'll most of them didn't turn out to bear any fruit even though it worked for another business. So instead of kind of focusing on what other companies are doing, what really worked for us has been kind of talking to our customers understanding how they come across a solution like ours. And having that face to face interaction really directs a lot of our marketing strategy. So I guess that that would be something I would say is that I wish I knew this sooner that instead of looking at Laura's kind of look, and works when it comes to marketing,

Mike: I love that. And that's also a great way to get more creativity into marketing, which I think is a real positive thing. Absolutely. So far, so thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm sure. There's a lot of people that would like to, you know, maybe ask questions or just learn more about Respona. So, what's the best place for them to go to either contact you or find out about Respona?

Farzad: Well, my name is Farzad Rashidi aren't a whole lot of us out there. So I stick out like a sore thumb on LinkedIn. The best, best way to get a hold of me is just to look up my name on LinkedIn.

Mike: That's awesome Farzad. Thanks so much for being a guest and sharing your insights. I really appreciate it.

Farzad: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Mark Williams-Cook - AlsoAsked

Mark Williams-Cook, the Founder of SEO tool AlsoAsked, explains how users can maximise the data provided by Google’s “people also asked” feature and how this information can be useful beyond just SEO.

He shares his journey to founding AlsoAsked and the advice he would give to someone just starting out in marketing or communications.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

• ‎Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
• Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
• Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com

Transcript: Interview with Mark Williams-Cook - AlsoAsked

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Mark Williams-Cook

Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.

Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Mark Williams-Cook, who is the founder of AlsoAsked a tool for SEO professionals. Welcome to the podcast, Mark.

Mark: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Mike: It's great to have you here. I really appreciate you taking the time. I mean, I think let's start off by talking about your background and how you ended up founding also are so you know, I look to your LinkedIn, it's very interesting. You've done a lot of different things. Do you want to, you know, just give us a potted history of your career and how you ended up where you are today?

Mark: Yeah, sure. So I've been working in SEO for around about 20 years now. I'm 39. Now at the moment, almost 40. And I think for a lot of people that got into SEO, that amount of time ago, I kind of stumbled into it. Because there wasn't really much in the way of even online courses, let alone SEO being covered in like any kind of marketing syllabus or anything like that. So a lot of the information was kind of on forums. And I fell into it after making some of my own kind of just passion websites, and then realising, hey, I'm starting to get traffic here. And I'd had friends helped me set up like little affiliate schemes with Amazon. And as it happened through complete luck, and chance, absolutely no skill or effort whatsoever. One of those sites started earning like 50 6070 pounds a day through affiliates. And that started this investigation of, well, where's it's coming from? And I think it was Aw, stats at the time we had to use because there was no Google Analytics. And we found a lot of that traffic was coming from Google. And that really started kind of my interest of well, how does Google decide who should be top of the search results and who should be second and third?

So I started teaching myself a bit. And I was fortunate enough that there was an agency at the time, local to me hiring for an SEO role. So I'd been sort of amateur practising for a couple of years, myself, and I moved into an agency role that was really helpful. And, you know, to fast forward many years, I've worked at various levels that four or five different agencies in the UK have always been agency side, I've really enjoyed it, because you're constantly surrounded by people who are very good at what they do and constantly learning. So you're never, you know, while I've thought about getting in house roles before, I think a lot of the people that I know work in house sometimes get a little bit isolated, because they don't have that big team to work with. So I've worked my way up essentially, through through that and actually released some of my own SEO tools along the way as well. So very spammy ones to begin with, that were helping throughout YouTube videos and kind of game Google AlsoAsked came about as kind of a shadow IT project in that weird started to build some tools internally to fix issues we have. And then it was, you know, just, I think this might be useful for other people as well.

Mike: so I mean, just tell me a little bit more about what AlsoAsked does and why you built it.

Mark: Sure. So AlsoAsked, essentially, is a very easy, convenient way to harvest what's called people AlsoAsked data from Google. So if you do a Google search in English, approximately 50% of the time, you will get a little box below, normally the first result that says people also ask, and it'll give you four sets of questions. If you then click on those questions, you will get questions related to those questions. And we've been using this data for content for SEO purposes for for a couple of years. And I'd originally done that just through using like local Python scripts where I've programmed something to grab this data and use it. The reason why I was kind of attracted to this data in terms of this, it's helpful for content is it's one of the very well a couple of reasons, actually. But one of the most interesting to me is it's one of the only sources of data you get where Google has done a lot of the clustering for you. And by clustering, I mean, if you do a search term, Google is giving you insight into what the closest intent proximity is. So if someone searches for this, this is very likely going to be the next question that they ask. And that's really powerful when it comes to the overall strategic goal of making your content as helpful as possible, which is having that information.

There's lots of things but the other main thing that makes the data particularly interesting for me? Is that a lot of those questions that Google gives you, if you look at them in standard keyword research tools, they will normally incorrectly come back with that they have zero search volume, zero monthly search volume. So actually, it's very hard to sometimes discover this information and these links anywhere else, but Google. And yeah, our tool essentially helps people get this data at great speed, map it out, allows you to do all different countries and do it at scale. So we can get you 50,000 questions in a few minutes and have it all out in CSVs. For you with what's ranking, what's not.

Mike: So you're effectively doing a Google search and seeing what Google says other related queries. I mean, you're literally scraping this off the Google search.

Mark: So we we also, we do that by simulating the click on the question, which we're the only tool to do it that way. And why that's important, as opposed to the other method, which is essentially re googling. The question is, I discovered something really interesting when we're doing this research, which is, if you do a Google search, and you get your four people also ask questions, if you click on one of those questions. So the top one, the questions that Google will then show you are different to if you just Google that question. And that's got to do with Google's understanding of intent, the journey, what knowledge you already have, as it affects the like probability of what you're going to ask next. So by by simulating these clicks, firstly, we actually get more than just four questions. So you get more data this way. But you also get a much better view of what that intent path is, because that's really what we're trying to, to help people understand, which is okay, if someone is interested in this, what is the nitty gritty specifics of what they need to know, what do we need to be providing them in answers in terms of value? And that as well, I think from a purely SEO algorithmic point of view, statue up very nicely of Google can say, well, when people search for this, they search for these 10 Other things, and this page has answered nine of them. So that's quite a good from a probability point of view that you're being helpful there.

Mike: And that's really interesting. And the way you present it is in this this really neat kind of mind map format. So you can you can see that flow of what what is directly related. And then also what's related to those, those secondary questions. So you actually get to see visually what the questions are.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's important because it naturally, I think it naturally blends into how we can structure content for the web in terms of you know, people read webpages, we know very different to say like a magazine or a newspaper. It's not this just we start at the beginning. And then linear linearly read, a lot of the time people are looking for specific information or their scan read, which is why, you know, we've got this all this encouragement about using like headers to let people know what that section is about. And having the intent kind of group that way, gives you an idea, firstly, of maybe how you should lay that content out. And secondly, there comes a point because you can continue clicking on those nodes essentially, forever. Until you'd have a huge web of questions, there does come a point where this needs to be a new article. And the other interesting thing that you see from that data is maybe where the intent is completely different to what you expected. So working in any particular industry, you get a little bit blinkered vision on well, people search for this, they're obviously looking for something in our industry. And then you realise when you do this research that that word also means something completely different. And it shows you how that branches off. And just the number of questions that fall into one of those two categories also gives you an idea for the overall intent if you like, so if actually, your business is only, you know, related to 1/10 of the questions have that root keyword or root query, it's actually unlikely you're going to rank well for it. Because Google knows nine out of 10, people are actually looking for something else.

Mike: And this is really interesting, because what you're doing is you're, you're giving people ideas for content effectively, you know, if you're looking to rank for a keyword, and then ranking for the related searches, typically will be the right thing to do. But you're also telling people when you've got a keyword that's going to be really tough for you to rank for, because it's more frequently used for something else. I mean, I remember an example where we were working with a client, and we're talking about coding standards for software. And we thought that nothing in the world is going to have a coding standard because it's got to be software. And as it turns out, coding standard is a very common term that is used in the medical industry about blood

Mark: I've worked with a company that runs coding courses. And this was my surprise as well, coming from that bias background on the word coding just means computer coding, and then you get I think you actually get the Google Knowledge Graph come up, that it's a medical thing. I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah, yes. Brilliant example.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's also really interesting in terms of coming up with ideas. I mean, I've just, I've actually literally just put hardware learn cricket into AlsoAsked, I thought I'd better try this whilst we were talking. And it's interesting, because, you know, I would think the related questions would typically be around, you know, what skills do I need and things like that. But you know, one of the related questions is, what's the best age to start cricket? And I think that's, that's interesting, because maybe you wouldn't have thought to write an article about what's the best age to start cricket. But clearly, if you want to attract people who are looking to take up cricket, this is a great term.

Mark: So there's two sets of tools that we'll use very regularly with content planning. So one's quite famous. It's called Answer the public that uses Google suggests data, which is very different people get them confused. A lot of the time are two tools, because the output looks similar. But a tool like answer the public using suggest data is a really good way to get an overview of different topics you want to write about, because it's using Google Autocomplete at the actual article levels, you've decided I want to write about learning cricket, that's when you might use also OS and as you say, yes, there's probably a whole separate article you could do about, you know, examples of people that started later in life and became really good at cricket. And you know, the benefits of starting young, that's like a whole, even, you know, you could dig deeper into that as an article itself.

Mike: And so this is great. And obviously, SEO professionals, I can see how they're going to use it. But I think a lot of our listeners are probably not specialist SEO is that they're looking to generate interesting content that's relevant to their audience. And to me, this is perhaps where, you know, we, as marketers should, should look towards some of the SEO tools, because this is a great way of not only finding relevant questions to answer, but But surely, it's also a great way to get ideas to write content that actually resonates with your audience as well.

Mark: Yeah, 100%. And I think it's, it's been marketed a little bit as an SEO tool, just because I'm ingrained in the SEO industry. But from speaking to people that have actually used it, the use cases have been surprisingly wide. So even things like product designers, people are getting a view on how people perceive their brand. Just understanding your customers, pain points, their insights, all of this, you know, even if you're not writing content, it's helpful to know, okay, if someone is looking to solve this B2B problem, these are the kinds of things they're Googling and that they're that they're worried about. But yes, absolutely, I would hope it's used by anyone producing content, let alone you know, even if they're not involved, even in SEO, but I've even had people do pay per click. So it's been really useful for them again, to even in writing their ads, their ad copy, so not just what questions they're targeting. But if they do a search around a product, and they see lots of comparisons to another competitor brands, they know they need to focus on that.

Or if there's lots of, say, searches that are price sensitive, then they know that's a particularly big thing for customers. So that yeah, there's there's all kinds of value you can get from getting this insight from from people's searches. So just unpack that analysis of what people think your brand.

Mike: So you'd actually put your brand in as a query and see what the related queries are. Is that what you're saying? So larger brands?

Mark: Yes. So you have to have a brand that's kind of understood by Google as an entity. But most most of the larger brands, when you put them in, you'll get people also ask questions. And some of them which I won't name have questions like, you know, is Brand X a scam? And why is this so cheap, and then direct comparisons to their competitors, and it gives them insight into? Firstly, well, if people are asking those questions, maybe we should produce content. So we own that space to answer that question, because there's a good chance as the brand if you produce that content, Google will pick you to answer that question. Rather than leave it to some other random website or blog to tell the world it's piggybacking on your brand search, which might have hundreds of 1000s of searches a month. So it gives you that visibility about again, what people are thinking and asking what questions they're asking you about your brand.

Mike: And that's fascinating. I mean, I've literally just done this with one of our clients ABB, you know, he's an absolute total business to business company of a very large company, but you know, got back some very interesting questions. So, one of the big questions is what does ABB stand for? Which

You know which key I guess people want to know, what does the company do? But then there's a question is Abb owned by Siemens, which I think is very interesting because it shows that people don't actually understand that ABB and Siemens are direct competitors. So that's an amazing tool to get some insight as to what people are asking about clients. A fascinating use, I'd never thought of. So I mean, yeah, the question there? Well, in my mind would be, you know, why do they want to know that? Is that affecting their kind of businesses? Usually they're making if it was a was not owned by Siemens, why are they why is that important to them? And how can that be covered in our kind of content, even if we don't directly answer that.

Mark: So I can immediately see some, some opportunities to create content. And it's interesting what you say, as an SEO professional, it makes sense. You know, if you ask, answer a question about your brand, you're saying that Google is likely to rank your answer quite highly, because you're considered authoritative about your brand. Yeah, absolutely. So generally, for branded search terms, you know, there's there's high a high probability, you can control the search engine result page for that. There are some exceptions, when it comes to things like reviews where Google wants a third party. That's, that's non bias. But certainly, again, for larger brands, I will try and own as much of that space as I can, because you know, that's, that's your brand, you want to convey the truth and control the information that goes out if you can.

Mike: And it's fascinating. I mean, I love the idea, I love the idea that someone who's who's a real practitioner has come up with a concept and made it into a product. I guess one of the things you know, a lot of people will be asking themselves listening to this is, are you as a software engineer by training? And if not, how did you manage to get something coded? Because it's obviously a very polished, very professional product?

Mark: Yes. So I wouldn't say I'm a software engineer by profession, very much amateur. So I have coded for many, many years, I've released like games for iPhone and stuff like this. So I'm okay, at kind of a hobbyist level, but I do work at an agency as well. And we've got coders here.

So essentially, as I said, the way this tool emerged was I made the kind of local version as a proof of concepts that we were using getting value from. And then it occurred to me that we could possibly make this as an available tool, because the libraries to do this did get released. And I was aware that while it was kind of plug and play written in Python, that still quite an entry barrier for a lot of people that aren't comfortable with like command line stuff. And it just seems all a bit techie. So we had a very kind of brittle version, put online as a would you like to use this. And essentially, it was phenomenally popular. To the point, it got so popular, it was like many sites just breaking. So we ran a beta for a year and a half, which allowed us to get feedback from customers, it allowed us to stress test things, because we were just running it for, for free.

And this is where we had to get Professional Coders involved. Because, you know, we had to start using AWS have to have things scale. And even during the free trial of this, we were handling around about a million searches a month. So even the database size as we were caching the results was growing very, very quickly. So there needed to be a lot of planning and testing in terms of how does it scale? How many concurrent users can we have? How much does searches cost, because when you're interacting with Google that way, they tend to like blocking you. So like, you know, like many of the major SAS tools, you have to use proxies. And then that's got its own cost and complexity. So it did take longer than I thought it would.

But it was around about a year and a bit development to get something really solid to where we are now. So we launched the paid version in March, we still operate a freemium model, which means people can go in and they can do 90 searches a month for free, which is three a day. And they're tapered like that to allow us to make sure there's no like spikes in demand. Because if everyone gets 90 Free whenever they want, and you get lots of people pile on, it can be difficult to maintain the service. But then there's a subscription model for people that do want to get slightly heavier use, there's more features as well, if you pay for a subscription, and essentially everything at the back end like scales as we get new people sign up so we can meet that demand. And we've just put status kind of checking lives. It's publicly available now the status of the website and the back end. But yeah, it's Touchwood been super reliable so far.

Mike: Yeah. And I think that's very cool. And a lot of people probably listening to this are working. You know, with Napier on PR perhaps as a PR pro three searches a day is probably more than you need. So, to me it's fascinating. You can access this kind of technology and insight, but you can do it basically for free. I mean this is not an expensive enterprise product or not something you need to go cut a purchase order for Yeah,

Mark: That's true. Yeah, it's very interesting. So I did some pricing research at the beginning on what people would pay and how much they expect for free. I got hundreds of responses, but no parity in some people were very angry about the fact that it was ever going to cost anything for anything. Other people were saying they would pay hundreds of dollars a month, other people were saying, you know, five bucks. So it's, I think we settled essentially on a model that I don't think is greedy at all, it scales with our cost. Even on the most basic plan, you can have unlimited users attached. So we just scale on on the certain number of searches, which is where our cost basis.

Mike: I've got to ask this, and it might be hard for you to answer but you know, is it a nice profitable part of your business?

Mark: Yeah, it's working well, now. I mean, I guess on a, on a monthly view, like starting from now, yes, it's profitable, like a lot of SAS tools are? Probably not if I dug into the couple of years of development and head scratching and time spent on it. I don't think we've recouped that yet. So as of wide view, we would still be in the red. But that, you know, that's the that's the thing with SAS tools that yeah, once they're up and running, if they're stable, if they're providing value, it's been growing naturally itself very strongly. Every single month, we've had more users sticking with us than the month before, with without any type of paid marketing, it's all just been kind of word of mouth and me demonstrating it to various people. So that that gives us confidence that at least it's a good product, people are enjoying using it. They're, they're getting value from it.

Mike: That's very cool. I mean, you did mention before that, you know, your day job, if you like, is it an agency, but you're also running this business? Or? I mean, I'm intrigued to know how you balance your time between those two competing roles.

Mark: Yeah, that's the million dollar question, isn't it. So I've worked at a couple of agencies where they wanted to do side projects, and it's inevitably ended up in disaster, because you just never get time to do your own thing. The key here, all stems back to when we founded our agency, we did this on the premise of trying to make it a very nice place to work, because there are some agencies where, like burnout and staying late and unreasonable expectations are kind of the norm. And this has had a cascading effect, I think, in that we've got very good staff retention, which has meant we've been able to train and have people stick with us and promote them to positions of responsibility, where I've actually been able to take a step back, and we've got a brilliant, you know, head of marketing. Now, we've recently taken someone on giving them shares as a director, so it's given me more time to try and run these projects and, and peel off time for them. So we actually run an E commerce business as well. And we started some different content sites. And that's all been from essentially, I think, through staff retention and unhappiness, which seems kind of abstract in the, you know, how did we implement a system to divide up this time? It wouldn't have been possible if we didn't have the right people there to do the work that was left over. But I honestly think that's what it was. And it wasn't easy, and it took a long time.

Mike: Yeah, I think that's awesome. I mean, it's interesting, there's been a couple of really great products actually come out of UK agencies. I mean, obviously, also ask is extremely well known, particularly in the SEO industry, and I think should be more broadly known in marketing. But you know, we also see products like coverage book, which again, came out of propeller net, which is another great product, it seems actually search agencies are really good at doing this.

Mark: I think it's got to do with the, the age of the industry, and that, as I saying, nothing existed in terms of specific tooling. So probably the most famous technical SEO tool is one oddly named one called Screaming Frog. And, you know, this came from an agency, because before that, there was only one piece of software I could think of that did anything similar. And lots of agencies just kind of half bake, you know, make their own solutions. I think we're still in a, even from a digital PR point of view, to be honest, you know, we've got things like rocks Hill, which cost quite a bit of money, and all respect to them, even things like adding and removing users, you still need to email them to do that, which doesn't seem very 2023. So I think there's definitely in the kind of digital marketing industry still spaces where the demand for certain types of products exceeds the supply of good up to date. Products that that make things easy.

Mike: That's awesome. It makes me feel we should be doing something as well. Yeah. Well, I've got a list of ideas always. It's just like you say, trying to find time to do them. Well. I think my favourite phrases though, is ideas are easy, execution is hard. I mean, the fact the fact you brought an idea to a product, a real product that's, you know, not only being used but also is commercially viable. That work is really tough. And it's amazing. You've done it.

Mark: Thank you.

Mike: I'm really interested, you know, so you obviously started, you started, you know, relatively early in the world of SEO, you stay there as a career. I mean, if you were talking to a young person today, who was looking to start a career in, in marketing or communications, I mean, what advice would you give them?

Mark: I don't know how good of a person I am to ask that question. Because I came into SEO, from a very technical background, having no clue about marketing, I was essentially hired by an agency because I could get things to rank well in Google. And it took me many years of sitting next to people who knew about marketing to understand, you know, concepts about brands and, and things like this. My advice would be from being an employer as well. And obviously talking to people coming straight out of uni, and people that want to work in, in marketing, especially digital and such, I think there's still a big gap between maybe what you're taught academically and theoretically, in marketing, versus when you go into even very big companies, the reality of what's happening, and who's doing what. And in between those two realities, there is a lot of room for you to teach yourself to try things yourself, it's the bar to set up even like basic websites is very low. Now, there's no code solutions that cost no money, you know, if someone can come to me interested in a job in search, and they can say, Here's my blog about my hobby, I got it to ranking Google, because I did these things. That is hugely impressive to me that they've gone and had that real exposure.

You know, I've spoken to many, like graduates that come out of courses. And they've never, for instance, even looked in how to look at Google Analytics, which is one of the main tools, you know, that our industry uses. So you can really give yourself an edge just by getting some hands on experience, even if it's just playing around with it, again, like Google Analytics, completely free, you can set it up yourself, and you're spoilt for choice in terms of videos as well. Even if like me, you've got a very short attention span, you can put the YouTube video on times to speed and whip through tutorial and you can learn something new that you can you can demonstrate. So the actual application, I think, of what you're learning, if you are getting that education, and I don't even think that's, you know why it's good. I don't think it's necessary. So I don't, I don't have a degree, I didn't go to university. I'm self taught. So there are ways to get there. So don't think if you're sitting there maybe thinking well, I didn't go to university that this rules you out at all, because it certainly doesn't.

Mike: I think that's a great point. I love the idea of getting some, like, you know, practical experience. I think that's really important, often underestimated by a lot of students. I think that's, that's awesome. You know, I'm aware of the time and we need to wrap up. I mean, I think the first question is, you know, if people want to actually try using also ask, I mean, how do they go about that? How do they get on the system?

Mark: What made it as super easy as possible. So you can literally just go to also ask.com, and you'll see a big old search box there just like Google, and you can just start typing away. As a head, you've got three questions a day, you can use three queries a day, you don't even need to sign up for anything, it will just give you the results. There's live chat on there. So if you get stuck whatsoever, you know, you can ping me and pretty much no matter where I am, it probably be me answering it. This is the bootstrap nature of a SAS. Yeah, it's meant to be super easy. There's an inbuilt help system as well. And if anyone does use it, and has any feedback, I always love to hear it. Because there is always, you know, the, when you're building products like this, people encounter friction. And it's the right expectation to have that everyone tells you when they get problems or errors, because most of the time and experienced they just leave. So if you do think of you know, this is very good, or I wish it did this, just let me know, because I can probably do it.

Mike: That's brilliant. I mean, in terms of people contacting you whether they got a question about, you know, something we've discussed today, or, or have some feedback on AlsoAsked what's the best way to get ahold of you.

Mark: If you want to kind of just talk to me, I'm very active on Twitter. I'm also fairly active on LinkedIn. If you just Google Mark Williams-Cook, I think I'm actually the only Mark Williams-Cook on the internet. So if you just Google me, you will find all my social profiles and creepily everything I probably posted online. But yeah, I'm super easy to find.

Mike: Oh, that's awesome. I mean, Mark, it's been absolutely fascinating. I think it's great, you know, that not only have you been able to take an idea and produce a tool that works really, really well and it's certainly something we've used. It's also a tool that's got a whole range of uses, you know, may have been designed for SEO but as we talked about, you know, the the ability to find out what people asked about brands is super helpful to lots of people in different marketing roles. So, really appreciate it. Thank you ever so much for your time, Mark.

Mark: Thank you for having me. I've had a lot of fun. Thank you

Mike: Thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes, or on your favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale