SEO, Entrepreneurship, and the Evolution of the Industry

Hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of E-Coffee with Experts. I’m your host, Matt Fraser, and on today’s show, I have a very special guest with me, Eric Richmond. Eric is the president and founder of Expert SEO Consulting, a search marketing and social media agency headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut.

As a veteran of 25 years in digital marketing, he’s established himself as an expert in s e O and has held speaking roles at SMX, SES, and other conferences. He is on the board of directors for the Internet Oldtimers Foundation and US Internet Pioneers Foundation. He also has a lifelong He is, he’s also a lifelong car enthusiast.

My apologies and serves on the board of directors of the Connecticut Valley region of the Porsche Club of America, where he’s also editor of the challenge. The club’s monthly magazine. On weekends, you can find, you can often find Eric and in and his Porsche boxer on the track at Lime Rock Park. Eric, thank you so much for being here.

It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Eric, how would your high school teachers describe you as a student?

Terrible. They would not describe me as a very good student. I did well on standardized exams, Uhhuh, but I was always wondering, my mind was always elsewhere in class.

Have you always wanted to be an entrepreneur? For instance, did you have a paper out when you were a kid? Lemonade stand, things like that. Did you always wanna, Be your business owner?

No. No, but my family had a retail store when I was growing up. And so from the time I was 12 years old, on the weekends, I’d go into the store with my dad, Uhhuh.

And when I got to be 16, I went to work there every afternoon after high school. But because it was a family operation, it was for me it was very entrepreneurial. , course I had, of course, I had a big role in all of the things we did. It didn’t manifest itself as a paper route or lemonade stand or anything like that.

But I think it was always there.

It was all, It’s interesting. I recently found out that part of your personality is not just nurture, but also nature. Like it’s in your DNA, which I find fascinating. Sometimes people are entrepreneurs and their parents are entrepreneurs.

It’s all, it’s generational. So it’s very interesting. So what was, besides the retail store that you were involved in with the family business what was one of the first businesses, that you started?

I went from the retail business to doing computer consulting.

I set myself up my dad retired and I had written a software package that we used to manage the inventory. At the store. It was very early on. I built the thing using an IBM 80 86 computer. And dBase two Uhhuh and word got out that I was a bit of a computer guy, so when my dad decided to close the store and I had to go find something else to do, there were a number of people who said, Hey, can you come and do some computer stuff for us?

So I went right into the consulting space.

And how did that evolve from that into where you are today, into starting an SEO agency?

It was all dumb luck if I’m perfectly honest. Yep. So computer consulting became less about writing software and more about Marketing consulting.

And I did a lot. There were a number of years where I did a lot of print stuff for people using desktop Adobe PageMaker Office PageMaker originally. And I had a client who had started a dinner delivery business who was a nice guy, but a complete Luddite when it came to computers.

Probably about 1995, he was getting phone calls from what was then a very small marketing company called Mode Media. And we used to deliver dinners to their offices back before they were anything. They were just, a tiny business. And somebody would call ’em up and say, listen, it would be a lot easier for us to order food from you every night if you’d build a website.

And he, his eyes glazed over and he called me up and he said, you’re my computer guy. What’s a website? And. This was early. This is, I remember in 1995, over Christmas break, I built the guy a 200-page website. I said we don’t need to pay them to do it. I can do this. So I built them a website?

200 pages. 200 pages?

Because it was restaurant menus. And it had to be searchable. But in 1995, you couldn’t do any kind of custom searches. No. , so I had to build, I remember I had to build unique pages. So if somebody wanted Chinese food, here’s a list of every Chinese restaurant that we serve.

Then are those all HTML tables? Yep. Yep. I was, I made extensive use of HTML tables. , which I learned from the people at Lap Link was the first one I ever saw that had tables on their website. It went from there. I did that kind of thing for about six months and my wife said to me, you need to get a real job.

A friend of mine was working for a systems integration company in New York City, Uhhuh. They were looking for an internet consultant. Okay. And he brought me in. I interviewed with the CEO of the company and they hired me on the spot I went and they placed me at a bank and I built an intranet for them.

And then I got a phone call from Modem Media. And by that time, they’d gone from 10 people working on the second floor above a restaurant in South Norwell, Connecticut, to having their own office space with about a hundred employees. And they were staffing up they’d just taken on the compact computer.

As an account. No, I’m sorry. It was not compact. It was this goes back it was Delta Airlines Okay. That was what they brought me in for. It brought me in, to do a small project for them. They liked the work and they kept me, and it just, it mushroomed from there. I went from motor media too.

APL Digital, which was the very first digital advertising agency on Madison Avenue was part of Amira purist Lentis, and then from there to Gray advertising until the bubble burst.

What was that like living through that?

It is, the timing couldn’t have been worse. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

We, That’s where I worked on the compact business. I was in Houston constantly. And we had plans to go public gr so Gray Interactive was going to take over Gray Direct, and we were gonna go public in August of 2000. Okay. And they put me on the roadshow. I went all over the world with a couple of bankers from I N g Barings Bank.

And then, the bubble burst. Pulled the I P O . And started cutting staff in every place.

Were you eventually part of that stuff that was cut, So how did you overcome that challenge?

I switched gears. Okay. We had done a project for Lucas Film.

For one of the Star Wars movies in conjunction with a tech company in New York City called Viewpoint. And I got friendly with the CEO of Viewpoint and he’d been trying to hire me for a while and I was perfectly comfortable with Gray. And when they led, everybody goes over there I called him up and I said, Bob, you still want me to come on board?

He’s yes, now come Uhhuh. So I over there And I did that for probably three years, maybe four. And I wanted to get back into the agency business. I found working for an agency to be fulfilling. You’re, Especially if you’re a bit of an entrepreneur. You’re in a room with a bunch of creative people, you’re knocking ideas around.

The juices are flowing and it was. I missed that environment. , so I saw an ad for somebody looking for an account director at 360 I which at the time was the search marketing agency of the year. And I answered the ad. They called me in for an interview and I had no idea.

The guy that I was gonna be interviewing had been my boss at Modem Media. So I walked in. I walked in, and he said, don’t you bother bleeping checking who you’re gonna be interviewing with. Laughed. Gave me a big hug and we sat down to talk and after about 15 minutes, he said, you know what?

I don’t need you. To come in as an account director, which is what I wanted to do. I enjoyed the accounting side of the business. Uhhuh, he said, I need you to hire to herd the cats in the SEO department. And I said interesting. I said Jn, I, SEO is not my strong suit. This was 2007 Uhhuh, August of 2007.

And he said, but you know it, right? I said. And as it turns out The wife the husband of one of the women I worked with at a p l digital had invented a very early search engine. And, we used to talk about it all the time. So I understood what a spider was, and how they went about crawling.

I knew all that stuff, but it was not something that I’d specialized in. Anyway, they hired me at 360. I put myself in charge of a staff of 22 people. Across two different offices. One in New York, and one in Atlanta. And my very first client, the very first meeting I took when they hired me that day I had to meet with the chief technology officer at Martha Stewart the media who was one of our clients.

And I won’t give you his name, but he had been whining that the that 360, I wasn’t giving him somebody senior enough. In the meetings. So they had hired me as Vice President of Search and Technology, and they said, okay, you’re high enough. Go talk to him. But it turned out I had a knack for it, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

That’s amazing. That’s an amazing journey.

I stumbled into it.

No, that’s cool. You’ve been in SEO for nearly two decades. How much has the SEO landscape changed since you first became interested?

Quite a bit. Quite a bit, It’s one of the things that if you’re gonna be in this business you have to like sifting through data.

You have to do that research. But you also have to like, every day waking up and knowing that there’s gonna be some kind of a change that you hadn’t anticipated. Is SEO one of them, is it one of those things where there are three p three legs of a stool on SEO what I tell people? There’s what you’re doing, there’s what your com competition is doing. And here’s what Google is doing. And the only thing there you can control is what you’re doing. The other two legs of that stool, you have to pay attention to them, but you have to realize that they’re completely outta your control.

There’s nothing you can do about it. Things have changed a lot. You can’t just count on the number of backlinks that your website gets. That, that, that ship sale a long time ago. You get very little help from Google in terms of figuring out which keywords you need to pay attention to. Since they were buried. The guidelines for what they’re going to determine to be quality content shift constantly. So there’s always a challenge and it’s, that’s the fun part. It keeps you on your toes. How do you keep up with that then? A lot of reading.

There is a lot of reading and a lot of networking. Okay. And I find them to be equally valuable. , for sure. There, there are some blogs that I pay attention to. I Barry Schwartz am an old friend. I read the stuff that he puts out. I used to pay a lot of attention to what Danny Sullivan wrote till he went over to the dark side with Google.

Marie Haynes is invaluable. She does a really good industry newsletter that she puts out. And there are some others. And I used to until Covid hit, I religiously went to four to six search conferences every year. And there were some that, there were some that I spoke at, you had mentioned them, but, for me, I learned the most after the sessions were over from networking. I had, I had some fairly high-placed friends. Google and it is, and at Majestic and Moz and many other companies, and we would all go out and grab beers after the conference was over and chat and that’s, That was valuable.

What would you tell someone who is just wanting to get an SEO today? What’s one of the first things you tell them to do if they wanted to learn about SEO?

Boy. I would say it’s not as easy as it used to be. You can’t pick it up learning it yourself, learning by doing is.

Is always an invaluable experience, but it’s changed so much that it’s not as easy to do that as it used to be. So I would say find a college that’s teaching that or take some online courses. But that does that to learn the basics of what’s happening with SEO.

There are so many different things that are going on that are impacting it. And of course, the tools that you use to do the job are changing constantly for sure.

What are some of those tools that you used to use that aren’t in existence anymore?

I was waiting for you to ask that.

I used to have a favorite tool called Market Samurai, which is not around.

I’m laughing cause it’s not and I knew you were gonna say that cause it used to be my favorite as well. And it’s, it died.

It was a wonderful little Swiss army knife of a tool. Yep. , it was, You could get competitive research, you could do some keyword research, you could do a lot of information, and it was very handy.

And the nice thing was that you just bought it once for the year and it sat on your desktop and I missed, I missed that.

Now it’s all subscription, monthly subscription, or annual subscription based. It almost seems like there is no one tool to rule them all. You almost have to use No.

Several of them and maybe some of them at the same time. Like there, I’ve, I know there are some data that Majestic has that maybe Atress doesn’t have and Sems doesn’t have or so on and so forth. And you want to put all the data in one spot and correlate the data and look at the data and say, okay, hey, there’s something here that.

The SMRs don’t have a majestic, that, maybe even in a competition, competitive analysis or an on-page analysis. And then, in the on-page tools like Surfer, SEO, Page Optimizer Pro, and so on and so forth. So, there’s a lot to learn. Would you say learning HTML would be important?

I think someone should still understand what a heading tag is. H one, HTML.

You Know what, I don’t even think about that because I think they, teach h html coding in elementary school these days. , probably. I have no idea. My, my kids are in their forties, okay. I have no idea.

But you need to have a working knowledge of H T M L. It’s really helpful if you understand JavaScript and style sheets and P H P. In particular, simply because 85% of the world runs on WordPress these days. For sure. So even if you don’t, even if you’re not good enough to write code.

Having a working knowledge. So at least you understand in theory how a script is processed, and how things are moved along. I think that’s very helpful.

Do you think OnPage SEO has become way more important in the latter days as of recent than it was before?

I would say to you, yes, depending on how you define OnPage SEO.

Okay. So what I mean by that is. If part of your definition of on-page SEO is, for example, keyword density, I would say that’s not nearly as important as it used to be. There’s a guy who built an agency called Stone Temple Consulting. Eric Ange. Okay. And a number of years ago, well before Google started thinking this way, Eric talked about the concept of topical relevancy. And I remember that because a light bulb went off. Okay.

So you were mentioning Stone Temple consulting and the changes in on-page SEO. In regards to topical authority and the difference, if OnPage SEO is defined as keyword density, then that’s not what you mean, and you’re defining what you mean by OnPage SEO.

And how he, before Google was even considering topical authority, that gentleman who started Tone Stone Temple Consulting, is that what you said?

Eric Engie. Which, and I believe they’re now he sold the company, he’s still with it, but now they’re called Proficient Digital. , I believe that’s the new name.

So anyway Eric used to talk about the concept of topical relevancy, which is that if you take your webpage and you pull the header and the footer out of the equation. It means that the written content, the body content, as well as any of the Content circulation widgets that may be on the page in the right rail or someplace just below your body content.

That those things all need to be related to the topic that’s discussed on that page. And the idea was that as publishers, a lot of media people would. Excuse me. Would put links in the right-hand rail of a webpage that was important because they wanted to circulate traffic to them.

They were important because they had a high revenue per thousand number on that page. And if you were able to drive traffic to that page, you were able to increase your advertising revenue. Or you were able to drive people to other pages to increase time on site because that was important to your comScore numbers.

And Eric used to say that’s all well and good, but from the perspective of the search agency or the search engines rather, you want all of those links to be topically relevant so that if the person leaves that page and goes to another page, it’s because. They’ve found what you have said to be interesting to them and they want to learn more.

And if you think about it that way, then you’re putting less reliance on the idea of making sure your page is ranking for six or seven or eight keywords and more on, okay. Am I? Presenting information for this topic that addresses the need of the user. And if you fast forward several years to where Google’s algorithm right, is right now, and you look at their quality rate or guidelines, one of the things that’s in there is did you meet the needs of the user?

Do you know the user’s search intent? Met. By the content that you’ve put on that page. And, that goes back to what Eric was saying about topical relevancy. So there are certain things about on-page SEO that I still consider to be important, right? You want, you need to pay more attention now than ever, I think, to the structure of the page. In other words, absolutely. Use of headings and subheadings and sub subheadings. Because all of those things need to be related to each other. And they give the search engine at the very beginning a rough outline of what you’re presenting on the page and how you’re presenting it.

And if you structure your outline properly it’s a signal to the search engine that, hey, these people know what they’re talking about.

Absolutely.

It’s also helpful because if you do a query on Google, I don’t think B Bing has implemented this, but Google certainly has you put in a four or five-six-word query, and if you click on a link, the link you go to will be highlighted in yellow and there’s you.

There’s your specific query information within the body of the page that you’ve gone to, but it’s highlighted for you. So you, And notice, notice that lately, that goes back to a properly structured piece of content. I think on-page SEO has, I think it’s just as important as it used to be.

I just think it’s changed a little bit. The dynamics of how you implement your on-page SEO have changed.

And it’s amazing how the rich snippets and feature snippets, sorry. And all of those are changing. And the people also asked to the point where Google is showing so much information on the SERP result date.

Sometimes it’s the website traffic, the information’s already being provided there. So how do you think website owners and business owners can overcome the challenge of Google’s showing people the result right there and they’re not letting the traffic might be down? And how do you solve that problem?

That’s been, that’s a good question. It’s been an issue for several years. Ever since then, they came up with the concept of a featured snippet and they started adding the people also ask and related searches and the different pieces of the knowledge panel. I think there are 13 or 14 different addressable pieces of a search result page right now.

And the question a lot of people have is, how do you? How do you handle that? You framed it right perfectly. The answer is that you, at least for me and for my clients, I tell them don’t fight it. Work with, particularly concerning the featured snippet the related searches and the people also ask.

I tell my clients, Don’t just think of the search result page as the organic listings. It’s great. It’s a wonderful thing if you rank number one in the organic listings, but if there’s a featured snippet available, that’s really where we wanna be. I don’t care if the featured snippet pulls five or six lines out of the piece of content and shows it on the search result page.

It’s never gonna show the entire no article that you’ve written, and there’s a link right below it that’s gonna take people to your page. So that’s the first thing I wanna target. I still wanna try to appear within the organic listings, but it’s not the worst thing in the world to be in those related searches.

And the people also search.

People also ask, I would agree with you. It’s amazing to see where we’ve gone. I remember when I first signed up for a Google account, a Gmail account with an invite, like my friend sent me an invite for a Gmail account.

And I don’t have that Gmail account anymore. I shut it down. But I wish I had chosen my name as my username, frankly. Cause I could have at the time, But anyway I thought all privacy and all this stuff, but whatever. Anyway, nevertheless, the point I’m trying to make is since, and their names escaped me right now, my apologies.

The founders of Google,

Larry and Sergey Brin

Since they came up with the page rank algorithm and all these things. And since Google was created in, I believe it was 1997 we’ve seen an incredible amount of changes happen, over the years where you could just stick a meta title in the keyword, in the meta title and its keyword stuff.

The meta descriptions with keywords and so on and so forth to becoming incredibly sophisticated. But in some ways, Google has dominated search, and for the first time since it started as a company, they have felt threatened. I’m not sure if you’ve been watching the news or not. But on November 30th, 2022, the world changed.

As we know it. People don’t. I know, even my parents and other people, my wife, friends, non-geeky people, tech people, and marketing, don’t understand the significance of the change that has happened. And what I’m referring to is the launch of chat GPT by opening open ai. Yep. It is literally, People are going to be looking back and people may say, I’m being melodramatic about this, but I’m not, I don’t think I am at all.

People are gonna be looking back at this and seeing that was a day in the world when history changed and it was like if you could count the first day of the industrial revolution for AI evolution and revolution, that, that, that would be the day to me. It’s the first time in 20 years Google has felt threatened.

Buy another product in their position. Even the owner, not the owner, the creator of Gmail said that within three years of opening, AI will put Google outta business if they don’t do something. And what’s his name? Then, my apologies. The owner of not the owner, the c e o of Microsoft. And his name is Escape Me at the moment, was on an interview recently saying that the search is, it’s now a brand new game.

It’s, we’re all starting from Zero games. And when I’ve seen the implementations of what I already signed up for to be pre-notified to start using it. The implementation of Open of Chat GTP with Bing and Google is, they lost what, a hundred billion dollars because of a flubbed-up presentation that they never should have done.

It’s interesting to see them on their heels, and I’m not gonna lie and say I’m not happy about it. I am happy about it because Google’s been this big bad. For some people of us in eo, you look at them in one way as a big bad tyrant sort of deal with where they’re like, you can the maker of the rules and now someone’s coming along and challenging them.

What do you think about that? Like the influence of AI on the search and how much that’s going to change things? To me it’s unbelievable.

I’m gonna, I’m gonna take a slightly different one. View of it than you? Sure. I think the place that opens that chat, g p t, and its ilk will have the biggest change concerning devices like Google Home and Alexa.

Where people. Where people are doing voice searches. Voice search, and by extension com this is especially, so it’s ok. And also on your cell phone where people are doing searches and the reason for that is searches on mobile gadgets. Sorry. Okay. The reason for that is in an environment where you are more likely to speak your query than to type it out. You’re also more likely to ask a question in a format that is actionable by ai. And people aren’t trained to do that yet on a no desktop device. So I think there’s, I think there’s gonna be some time there where that needs to phase in. The other thing is Both Bing’s implementation of chat, G P T, and Google’s implementation of bardClam.

Google’s been toying with this for a while. The Bert was their first attempt at ai, and that’s been running with Google’s algorithm for several years now. And Bard is a complete re-imagining of that. It’s using a different technology, but it’s still ai, ai and I think that I think that it’s going to change. But I do think people will still want to see several different results for whatever they’re searching for. I don’t think that it’s our nature to ask a question and get an answer and go, okay, that’s it.

I’m satisfied. , you’re still gonna wanna look a little bit deeper. And from that perspective, I think that at least in terms of. Visual search, which is what Bing and Google are for the most part. Now there are still going to be organic listings and there’s still gonna be visual listings because you are gonna want a second and third and a fourth opinion.

You’re just not going to blindly accept whatever the AI feeds back to you. So from a user perspective, I think there’s still a lot of opportunity. For search.

I agree with you. I just think that Google now has a competitor like Bing with Chat GPT is a real competitor for Google.

They’re they unless they, and as I said, they, the Bard was a total flub up. I think they did it prematurely cuz they were on their heels and for instance, it’s like the other day I’m not sure, this is my experience and it may not be yours, but I’ve been noticing Google search results.
I’ve been terrible lately. There are things I’m searching for and they’re not matching the intent of what I wanted to find. And this could be on behalf of, there are no better searches, but I can’t I wish I had written it down as a, for instance, that I could share cause I spent so much time on the computer, but I finally got so pissed off or frustrated that I just went to CHAT GPT and asked it the question and it gave me the answer.

And Google couldn’t. I was like, There are so many things I ask it now Did I go there first?

I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but as I mentioned earlier, I had some friends who were fairly highly placed at Bing and Google.

And one of my buddies from Bing said to me were at October Fest at one of the search conferences, and he said Google. Wants to index every piece of digital content that’s out there. They wanna have the absolute largest index of everything digital. That’s existing in the world.

Bing doesn’t. Bing’s mission is interesting. Is to have only the most important stuff in its index. Interesting. So where Google might index 2000 pages that it finds on a website, Bing would be perfectly happy if it only had the 200 most important ones. Interesting. Now, I don’t know if that’s changed because that goes back a number of years. Maybe five years. But the person that I heard this from. Was high up at Bing. And he said, we just. We can’t compete with Google on the sheer volume, the sheer size of the index. But we can have the most relevant, most important content. And if that’s still the case, then I would argue that also applies to the use of chat gpt.

The only thing is that Open AI has crawled the entire internet for chat GT P.

Yep. So it’ll be interesting. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. It’ll be very interesting.

I’ve seen I’ve used chat GPT to write code for me. , I find it good. I say this is what I want you to do. I want you to write this particular routine to accomplish this.

These are the variables I want to use, and I want you to write it in p h P I want you to write it in Ruby and Rails for me. And I will get back a wonderfully functional piece of code that I don’t have to pay attention to. When I ask it other questions. You get back sometimes some really good information and sometimes some stuff where you’re reading it and you’re going, ha what? That just doesn’t make sense in there. , it there, there’s work to do on it. And, but I do think that sort of technology is the future of It brings us into the, to the future of Star Trek where you’re tapping your communicator and you say computer and it gives you an answer.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I could talk for an hour about the ways I’ve not only used chat GPT, but other AI instances like Jasper over the last year regarding creating taglines for businesses. Coming up with business ideas, doing SEO, meta descriptions and titles, and so on and so forth. It’s been quite fascinating to me.

But anyway, I’ll leave it at that. And it’s been a pleasure having you here. I’m so glad you came to the show. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Hey, where can our audience find out more about you if they choose to do so online?

You can find me at @expertseoconsulting.com.

Right on. Right on. And are you on Twitter or LinkedIn or anything like that?

I’m on Twitter. My Twitter is for SEO expert, Eric. , cool. And on LinkedIn, I think I’m actually one of the lucky ones that got my name. , you can go to linkedin.com/ Eric Richmond.

Cool. Cool. Cool. Right on. We’ll make sure to put those links in the show notes.

And it’s been an absolute pleasure, again, having you here. Thank you so much for coming to the show.

Thank you for having me. Have a good day.