How to achieve +163.2% Increase in Conversion Rate using SEO with this fuel.

Hello, welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Jared Spiewak, who's joining us all the way from New Hampshire in America. Jared, thanks so much for joining.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Now, Jared, we've met because you are an expert on SEO and that most businesses are wasting a lot of money on SEO. So how can you help an entrepreneur not waste money on SEO and still get noticed?

Yeah, so when it comes to SEO, it's really that bandwagon marketing tactic right now. It's that really sexy, appealing thing that everybody wants, because everybody uses Google to find anything and showing at the top, it's part vanity, it's part revenue. It's, oh, this is free because once you're, you know, because it's not like ads, they have to keep paying for every click. But, you know, it's not free to get there necessarily. So it is that thing that everybody wants. But the reality is that there's a limited amount of space. And once you earn a position, doesn't mean that it can't get taken away from you. And so what I have found over the years, mostly through trial and error, is that there are just unfortunately a lot of companies who are investing in SEO that either make very little progress, make very slow and expensive progress, or good progress, and then have it quickly taken away from them by somebody else in their space. And one of the biggest determinations is having a brand that builds that momentum that starts a snowball effect. To give you a very quick example. We were working with a company that did an internal correlation study and found that cities where they have billboards, their CTR, the click-through rate, was higher on Google. And so just by having a more recognizable brand, we go back to Psychology 101, things that we're more familiar with, we're more drawn to. So even if they rank lower, they would get more clicks than a competitor would, presumably in that position, meaning that each position was worth more to them than it was to a competitor. Not only that, but when it comes to the sophistication of the algorithms, there's something called a re-ranking in which a higher than expected click-through rate within a designated search position for a designated keyword may influence Google to say, hey, more people than expected are clicking on this result in, let's say, position 4. Maybe this should actually be position 3.

Wow.

So they get the additional benefit, not just more traffic, but also an easier time moving through those top positions because their performance is higher than expected for what Google would see from other competitors. And that's the benefit, or at least some of the benefits that having that brand does, that makes it much more difficult for somebody to compete against that.

So Jared, if you're a big company, you can afford to build a brand and you can afford these billboards. That's great. But does it mean that being on the front page of Google, if you sell something, is A, impossible, and B, the only route to success?

It's not. It's just that these larger companies have distinct advantages. If we look at the link building aspect of Google, larger companies are going to attract more media attention with, for far less cost and sometimes without them even having to do anything compared to smaller companies. And so smaller companies may have to try harder in order to gain that attraction, but it's still very much so possible to beat out bigger brands. It's just that the methodologies you use to achieve that are a little bit different.

Yeah. Let's just talk about that. Because when you think about links, Jared, for example, because you're an expert and you've been doing this since the age of 14, by all accounts, and you've been running accounts for many clients. Just simplify it for a little bit, especially for us older members of the community that are listening. Links, SEO, fundamentally, what are we talking about? Make it so that we can understand it.

Very quick history lesson. If we go back to pre-Google, all search engines just looked at what you told them about yourself. Everybody wants to say that, hey, we're the best. And so keyword stuffing, just throwing, saying, hey, I'm the best, is what ran rampant. Google decided, hey, what if we use other people saying that you're good at what you do, that you're a reputable business through the use of hypertext links, which is when you click on something and it brings you to a different website or webpage.

Yeah.

Because if other non-associated sources, say, just if you look at any sort of journal, you want to cite your sources. If other people are recommending resource, it's a stronger indication that they are actually good at what they say that they do compared to them just saying that they are good themselves. So that's what the link is.

Okay. And you can put the links to other people's websites on your own website, for example, can't you? So it is possible to participate in this through, for example, your blog on your website. So take us then, Jarrad, through your company Comet Fuel. Can you tell us sort of an example or a case study of how you've helped a smaller business? And I know that you've got a way of actually profiling the clients you want to work with as well. So can you take us through who you chose to work with and what you did for them?

Yeah, sure. So when it comes to how we profile, it's something that's really based on experience, which is that I spend a lot of time talking to a lot of different people in marketing or C-level positions, depending on the company, depends on who we're talking to, to determine if I feel as though that they're a right fit for us, if they're going to take suggestions that we make, or if they're really going to be, it's our way or the highway. If it's going to be basically a good mental fit, if we're on the same wavelength with what we're doing, because if we're not, if we just don't agree with each other, it doesn't matter how good we are. It's just never going to make that connection. When it comes to a case study, there's some businesses I can mention by name, some that I can't. But one thing that I'll mention, I'll talk about one that I can maybe talk about a little bit further. Is podcasting is actually a really great example. Podcasting is still a relatively new medium. When we're competing against really large organizations, if they want to get into podcasting, what does that look like? That looks like employee number 87 reaching out to their boss who says, hey, I think we should do this podcasting stuff. Okay, I guess I can look into that, of course, amongst 1,000 other things. And then it goes through weeks, months, potentially even years of deliberation. Who's going to be the spokesperson? Oh, is it this person? What happens if they leave the company? Then how is that going to do? How are we going to record this? What are our KPIs and metrics? How can we get the budget approved, et cetera, et cetera? Where a smaller company, we're either talking to the decision maker or one person removed from that decision maker, and we say, hey, we think you have a cool story, let's do some podcasts. They go, okay, great, book me on them and I'll be there tomorrow. And so the speed of execution can sometimes massively outweigh the excessive amount of resources that another company has, because it's a matter of are they able to effectively deploy that capital where a podcast Think of, they're going to invest in all the best equipment. They have to make sure it's brand representative, is up to par where you can just be like, yeah, I'm fine with buying a $50 Blue Snowball from Best Buy and just popping on with my webcam and making the rounds. You're going to be able to compete at a level that, sure, if your competitors got into it, they'd probably be a lot more professional about it than maybe you are at the moment. But guess what? You're going to have a year of experience on them before they even start.

Yeah. And I think that's essentially a wonderful message for the unnoticed entrepreneur that speed, not scale in the digital age is actually a key success factor, isn't it? If you can get on, and I think the same, for example, about mobile as well, mobile marketing, because many people now, especially in China, for example, where I was based for 13 years, they really do everything, the viewing and the shopping on the same device, actually on the same app. Jared, how do you get SEO to cross over from the desktop to the mobile? Is that the same? What about location-based SEO you mentioned earlier on about, for example, the billboards?

So with almost anything SEO, there is some amount of ambiguity, because Google obviously, for proprietary reasons, can't lay everything out there for everybody to look into. But it's from my understanding and how I would phrase it, Is that Google has moved towards a mobile-first index, meaning that when they crawl your websites, for most websites nowadays, not everybody, but for most websites, they look at your mobile version. So take out your phone and see how long it loads. That's what Google is experiencing. See how the navigation works. That's what Google is seeing because we've moved towards a mobile-first world. When it comes to locations, there's local, international, national, etc. When it comes to local versus national, usually that's just a matter of If you're a national-based company that also has locations, then usually you have some sort of location-based structure on your website to make it more clear what that's relevant to. Internationally, you might have different languages on your site, you might have different TLDs, you might have a .us versus a .fr, etc. People will approach that different ways.

So that's very interesting. So we are going to a sort of geography-specific SEO level then, aren't we, is what you're sharing there, because from a PR point of view, we were at one place all local, and then it went regional 15, 20 years ago. And now it sounds like the search engines are going back to being local. And for example, PR, and it sounds like SEO needs to talk to the local audience as much as the regional and the global. Does that then create challenges when it comes to content creation, Jared, though? How do you handle that at Comet Fuel for clients that are local and Regional and global?

So it does depend on the type of content where informational content that doesn't— it's all about intent. So there's no local intent based on that search, then it doesn't matter where someone's based out of. For example, we saw a bunch of ants in our house and we were like, oh no, how big of a problem is this? So I did some searching. I said, can I identify the species? Is this like a small issue or is this one where it's going to be like 50,000 of them, like behind my wall that I have to deal with? And so the pest control articles that I found was from a pest control company, a local service company that's nowhere near where I live. Because Google just decided that was the best one because I didn't search specific enough. Now, if I were to change that search to what ant species are in New Hampshire, I'm much more likely to find New Hampshire Fish and Game websites or New Hampshire government websites or other people that have written articles about that. So it depends on the intent of the search. So when it comes to people who are focusing locally, so we have some clients in the cannabis space. And so depending on where you are in the US, somewhere it's legalized completely, somewhere it's just recreational, other places it's medical, some places It's still completely illegal and every state will have different rules. So if we want to talk about getting a dispensary license, we might have a general page about how to get a dispensary license at a high level. And then depending on how we want to play it, we might have subsections on that individual page that will go into detail about individual states. Or what we can do is create individual pages. That is how to get your dispensary license in Michigan, in California and Colorado, et cetera.

So very interesting. So let's just talk a little bit about content because this does sound like really a content-centric approach is what we really talk about now. And in PR, we talk about really content-centric replacing relationship-driven PR. How do you think companies are faring, Jared, especially small ones about content? Do you think they should outsource the content creation to a copywriter or? Use an AI tool? What's your guidance on that? Because it sounds like a lot of this comes down to the quality of the content.

If you look into anything SEO related, PR related, et cetera, you'll always see it's always about content quality. But if you search for something that you, you personally know really well and look at what ranks on Google, you'll oftentimes be disappointed in the actual quality of that content. A lot of the times it's fairly generic. It reads the same. You look at the top 5 results and you're like, okay, cool. I got 95% of the information in one of these articles, and it just sounds spun. Unfortunately, what happens quite often is people outsource content to just someone who is maybe a professional writer, but they aren't necessarily aware of what happens in this space. And it can be because it's a lot cheaper. It's a lot cheaper to pay somebody to just look at what's currently on the web and just essentially rewrite that in a way that isn't plagiarism. And then say, hey, here's unique content in the sense that it's your legally fine and that it can rank, but it's still no more helpful than everything else out there because it's more cost prohibitive to have somebody who is not only a great and engaging writer, but also who is able to learn about your industry or already involved in it, and who is also able and willing to sit down with you to ask you questions, to actually understand your internal methodology. Because if you were to take any SEO article out there on the web or any agency article on the web, I can almost guarantee The way that we approach that is different. And it would be very hard for anybody to write about how we do stuff. It might be hard for anybody to write about how you guys do your stuff without having that conversation, because that article on the web that says, oh yeah, hourly-based pricing is standard. We've never done that. So it just wouldn't be relevant. So without that conversation, without that understanding, the only thing you could ever get is fairly generic content. When it comes to AI, I'm not as well-versed in AI content production as I would like. From those who I know that do it a Effectively and at scale, it's usually all enterprise-level stuff that you're going to get good enough quality out of. And usually it's more so basic content where it's let's write about our store across our 1,000 different locations and just use it through an AI to do.

Yeah. So it's, it's the origination, isn't it? So somewhere the entrepreneur or the business owner needs to be involved, don't they? Even if it's making audio recording. And Jared, what about how you as an entrepreneur get your business? Is it all SEO? What's your source? Because as an entrepreneur, you like me are trying to find leads as well.

Yeah, so there are a couple of things that we've done throughout the years. One of, one of which is the more long-term is we've produced some tools that we have made public and free, in which case we've sometimes gotten agencies to use our tools internally as their main tool, which then can sometimes lead to leads coming to us, or businesses who are sometimes familiar with the tools that we have created over the Also, the content that is created. I've had people reach out and say, hey, like I first heard about you 4 years ago, been keeping up with your content ever since, and now I'm ready to try and work with you. So content production is another big one. Another one is referrals that everyone gets. But what was interesting is my background prior to owning an agency was freelancing. I freelanced for about 6 years, full and part-time before I started an agency. And how I got started was that with that was on a site called Upwork, right after the merger of oDesk and Elance. And so it's primarily known as a freelancing site. While I was freelancing, that was my primary source of leads, and I built up a very strong profile that still sits there today. And I'll get people reaching out that are still mid-four-figure or five-figure-a-month contracts, which mainly because the profile is established enough that it will attract those types of people. And so it's something that I've been able to essentially just leave there and organically turn something that is somewhere in between an inbound and outbound channel into a purely almost inbound channel just by having that over the years.

Yeah, that's very interesting because the sort of reputation or positioning of Upwork in my mind has been for the sort of outsourced, low-value, almost admin jobs. So you're saying that as an entrepreneur selling 5 figures, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 projects are being posted on Upwork. And is that from multinational corporations posting on Upwork or is it from other smaller businesses? Is it now becoming a procurement platform? Do you think?

It's hard to say now because they just recently went public and I don't know where their intentions are going to be because now they have to worry about share price quite a bit. But over the years, when I first got started on the platform, it was mostly that. It was mostly admin work. It was mostly lower quality, like cheaper, like it's a little bit better than Fiverr, but like that kind of stuff. And at the time, there were very few US-based people offering medium to higher-end quality SEO services. So I was very aggressively using that platform, very little challenge. Over the years, it got a little bit more competitive. And then over time, it has moved into a lot of agencies, at least on the marketing side of things, where it's, in my opinion, right now, when we try to hire somebody as a freelancer to help us with a project or for a specific task, it's very hard for us to find someone that isn't an agency on it, for better or for For worse, there are a lot of lower-end people on it in terms of the businesses that are creating jobs, but there are also plenty of enterprises. I can't mention the business, but we did get some work for a company that's owned by a $15 billion company. And they're a brand that if you go into any supermarket, you'll recognize some of the brands that they own. Now, they weren't looking— what they were essentially looking for is a one-time engagement for an initial project, but there are companies of that size that are searching out. We've had multiple 6-figure 6-figure contracts come out of that. There's a good mix and they're out there if you stand out enough to attract that kind of attention.

So it's interesting, Jared, you've got a number of things. You've created some applications to share your sort of skillset, and then you've got the content. And a big part of what I'm hearing on a repeated level is that is the importance of being on a platform, whether it's on Etsy for selling merchandise, on Spring or on Amazon, or as you were saying, on Upwork. The need to be somewhere where other people are shopping sounds really important. And Jared, if you want to find out more about you and the Comet Fuel business that you're running out of New Hampshire, how can they find you? And I mean, I guess they can type in Hero for SEO, right? And find you, but where else can they get you?

You can, yeah, you can go to cometfuel.com or you can find me on LinkedIn and I'd love to connect Jared Spiewak, thank you so much for joining me, joining us today on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show.

It's been a real pleasure and a real education. It really is a whole new art and science. So thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

So you've been listening to Jared Spiewak over there in New Hampshire, and he's the CEO and founder of a company called Comet Fuel, which is doing some amazing work on SEO. And for all of us who have grown up without SEO, Having a guide like Jared on board is absolutely essential. So thank you to him very much for joining us on the Unnoticed Show. And until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business,