Why you need to think about how AI is impacting your SEO strategy.

And hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we are going to Philadelphia to meet Dave Snyder. We're going to talk about how he's managed to build a team in Macedonia, of all places, to run his business. And I'm still here just in, in Wiltshire. Doesn't sound nearly as glamorous as running a business between Philadelphia and Macedonia, but we're going to talk about backlinks, we're going to talk about managing an intercultural team, and we're going to talk about Things that we can all do better to get our businesses noticed. Dave, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jim.

Hey, it's my pleasure. Now, you have had your company shortlist.io since 2018, and you started it in Philadelphia, but you've got a team in Macedonia. So I'd love for you to first of all tell us about the business, but then also how can you end up having a team where you are the remote worker And the business is somewhere else.

Yeah, those are, it's sort of funny to be here as well 'cause that wasn't exactly what I was expecting when I started business or entrepreneurship. Shortlist in and of itself is a, we'll call it a link building agency. We offer a couple different services related to SEO inbound marketing such as link building, content strategy and creation, and website design dev. So you can think of it as a mini marketing agency. As you mentioned, the entire team, for the most part is in Macedonia. There's a person or two also in Serbia and Croatia, but the vast majority of around 20 of us or so are in Macedonia. And we have an office in Skopje where the majority of the team meets daily, with the exception of myself. It's interesting to be working with a company based in Macedonia. In fact, I've met a lot of entrepreneurs, but sort of the first one who has picked that location. Historically, going back some years, I was a digital nomad and traveled to a lot of different countries, Macedonia being included, one of them. And during that time, I got used to working with virtual assistants from the Philippines and Asia and Eastern Europe. And I myself am married to a girl who was born in Russia. I speak Russian, so always very comfortable with Eastern Europe. And when I started Shortlist 5 years ago and was looking to grow it and finally had a little more work than I could handle, I went on, I think it was Upwork, and put out some requests. And an individual named Viktor got in touch with me from Macedonia, and his pitch was really good. And I invited him on to become a member of the team, and we worked together for a couple months. And when we had enough work that we needed a 3rd and a 4th person, I asked him if he knew anyone because I I had done a company before called Ninja Outreach where I had a remote team and everybody was all different types of geographies like Mexico and Eastern Europe and Asia. And basically, as much as it was great to have this multicultural team, I always struggled with the logistical aspects of scheduling a call that worked for everybody. And everybody had to speak English when it wasn't their native language. They were never able to work in person, obviously, because everybody was remote. And I wanted to try something a little different this time with Shortlist. I wanted to have the company be based in one individual area where everyone could get together, speak their native language, and maybe we could— I could go visit them and visit their office. And eventually that became Skopje, Macedonia.

Well done. I think on your website, which I'm showing for those people watching the video, we can see Viktor, and I think the lady next to him has the same surname. So is that his wife or his sister?

That's his sister. Yeah. So those are, those, uh, 3 that you're showing there are kind of employee number 1, 2, and 3. Um, essentially when, uh, you know, I was looking to add to the team, I asked Victor who he knew, and his sister and his friend were available, so they came on.

That's a, a lovely story. And, um, so Dave, link building, it's a little bit of a black art. And, and, um, I've had some guests on before talking about link building. Um, But how does a company sort of use link building? Because one of the challenges that we've seen is getting people to link back to our website. So if we have some content, why would they link back to someone else's website? Because they, they really only want the traffic one way, don't they? How do you get a relationship to be two-way?

There are many different ways to do link building. Uh, it's a surprisingly larger industry or marketing strategy than many kind of understand. And even the link building that we do at Shortlist is a very kind of subset of all the different approaches and techniques to link building. So, you know, in some ways that has to be taken into consideration. There are— but I guess for starters, when you create content on your website, people hopefully will eventually link to you naturally just from you creating some content, it being valuable, it being useful. People will across it on the web and they will link to you. But often the amount of links that you will get or the keywords that the individual will choose are not satisfactory to what you require or want in terms of growth. And although Google's algorithm for search is, you know, secret in the larger sense, we know that links, backlinks are a large part of that algorithm. And so many companies will say, you know, we need to go out and proactively acquire some more links to kind of meet the demand that we're looking to have here. The methodology that we use for link building is primarily guest posting. Guest posting is when you write a piece of content and then you publish it on another individual's website. Because you are providing them with content, they're receiving something of value. On top of that, you may also pay an editorial fee. This is a fee for the blogger to review the article and to edit it and post it. And the combination of that content and that editorial fee usually results in a backlink that will be placed in the article that was written. So our agency facilitates that. We have relationships with thousands of bloggers, and when a client comes to us, we can determine who we think are the relevant ones that would be a good fit for them. what type of content we should write in order to feature them best. We know the bloggers' editorial fees and standards for writing guidelines, and we can handle that all done for you and essentially help them bridge the gap between, you know, the amount of links that they want versus what they've been getting kind of naturally.

Okay, that's interesting. And out of interest, then, how much does it cost to have someone write an article and then have that article placed That article will be placed on a third-party website but linking back to my website. Is that, is that right?

Yep, you're right. On average, clients are likely to pay probably between $150 and $250. Um, there are obviously— it's a service industry, so there are people that will do it for less and there are people that will do it for more, but on average it's about that amount.

Okay. And Dave, I've got to ask you the question, impact of, you know, the AI writers, whether it's ChatGPT or Jasper or Peppertype. How is that impacting the copywriting and the backlinking industry?

I think significantly. We're seeing more and more written content be generated through AI. And even if you are working with a writer, a human being, so to speak, and you think or feel that your content is being written by a human, there's no one to say that that human being is not using AI as a tool. So even if you as an agency maybe are not sort of sanctioning it directly or it's not part of your tool suite, the individuals, contractors that you work with may be using it. So it's, you know, one way or another, you really have to kind of confront this trend and find out the best way to incorporate it. We have human editors. So everything that gets written for us, either it's written by a human being or if there's an AI component to it, it always goes to a human being writer as well. A lot of the AI tools have improved a lot, but they're still aspects of the content that they create that if you look at it, you can tell that maybe it isn't quite natural or the way that you want. But at the end of the day, certainly this technology is becoming very prevalent in the industry. And, you know, on the one hand, that might— that may result in some lower quality. So that's something that people have to be aware of when they choose who to work with and understanding the quality of the finished product. But it may also drive prices down. I mentioned $150 to $250 for a single backlink is quite a a lot, I think, for most businesses. But as AI content becomes more prevalent, the cost of the service may be driven down. So that might be a positive.

But from what I've understood, the AI content as well may be ignored by the search engines because they will see it really as filler content, not authentic human-generated content.

Yeah, and that is Potentially true, or at least that's sort of what is being said. I will say that I have seen companies like Google and others sort of make these statements, and they make them often as a way to deter people from doing it. But I have not necessarily seen that backed up by actual data to show otherwise. For example, you can go back many, many years, like five years or more, and you'll find articles that say guest. posting is dead, you know, that Google came out and said there will be no more guest posting, it's not going to be useful for you. But year after year, people do it, and year after year, I've worked with many clients, I can see results, you know. So, uh, their ability to necessarily, uh, determine what content is AI-generated and what is not is maybe not, um, uh, sufficient to back up that claim.

Okay, very interesting, Dave. Um, final question about Backlinks, because I do want to move on, but how many backlinks should someone aspire to have? I mean, you've mentioned a price per. Should companies have 1, 2, 3 a month? Can you give us some idea of metrics?

I can say that in most cases, clients that work with us are usually looking for between 5 and 10 per month. However, there really is no one-size-fits-all for this type of thing, and that's true for marketing in general. It's very dependent on the company, Their level of maturity, what the goals of their campaign are, what, how competitive the things that they're trying to achieve are. And that's, excuse me, part of the analysis that we do with every client who kind of comes on, you know, to meet with us. We'll go through their website and the keywords and their competitors. We'll do a complete analysis and we'll give them a recommendation.

Dave, that's great. I want to switch gears a little bit now. Let's talk about how you've been getting the BusinessShortlist.io noticed. What have you been doing as an entrepreneur? And I would like just to sort of draw your attention to what you've been doing on the environmental side, because I noticed on your website, you've got some core values, but you've also got some work that you've been doing, I think, with regards to planting trees and so on. So can you just share with us what you're doing to get the company noticed, but also quite interested in this environmental Do good in the world dimension to your business?

Yeah, let me start with the latter and then I'll kind of go with the former. You know, as an individual, sort of as an entrepreneur, obviously there's a top-level need, you know, with running the business and earning a certain amount to be able to kind of provide the life that you're looking to live. But beyond that, I like to think that many of us, when we do get into entrepreneurship, we have a greater good mentality that we're looking to kind of you know, help people or help the world in some way, whatever way that we can. When Shortlist was first started as a really young company that was just trying to get some legs under it, we weren't necessarily in a position to do volunteering and things like that. However, as the company has sort of grown and matured, you know, reached a little bit of a level of profitability, The questions about what else can we really do here started to come up. At first, so first I looked at some of the things that I thought would be nice, which was the environmental aspect. Stripe actually has a nice— Stripe is a payment processor that we use. They have a nice climate initiative program. You can donate a portion of the revenue that comes in, is processed through Stripe, into some programs that they have picked out that are working on climate. Climate change. In addition to that, there was a nice organization called One Tree Planted, and we came up with a thing that for every link that we build, we'll plant a tree. And so those two things basically became kind of pillars of you know the environmental aspect of the business. And then you know recently in the last six six or so months, as much as you know I thought those are really nice initiatives and we were sort of proud of them, I started to realize that you know we are a company in Macedonia. Macedonia for lack of a better word, I think is classified as third world. I just, based on the economic situation in the country, it's not a wealthy country. And I said, you know, we should probably, this is something unique about us, about Shortlist, that the majority of the people are in Macedonia. So we should also try to tailor our efforts to be doing something in Macedonia. And so we found an organization called Open the Windows, which is basically an organization that helps kids with developmental issues learning. And so we have been, Donating to them every month, and also because it's a local business, local to the people that live in Macedonia on the team. Once a month or so, we send a couple individuals from the team to go over there and volunteer, and and I thought that was you know really cool. I mean, unfortunately, being in Philadelphia isn't something that I'm able to participate in all the time. I'm hoping to make a trip out to Macedonia soon and to visit them. But basically, I thought it was cool that we could not only provide something for them financially, but also really some hands-on. work as well and helping them with their marketing. Yeah.

And I was just trying to find, you know, Macedonia is just north of Greece, isn't it?

Correct.

So, it's a beautiful part of the world actually as well. So, that's really wonderful. And speaking of little legs, if anybody heard any noises in the background, I think, Dave, you've got a young one. Yeah.

Yeah. She should be going down for a nap pretty soon, but she's out there now.

Yes, and nobody— so if anyone can hear any noises in the back, and, and my bells are going because the church is ringing. So, uh, for anyone listening in, uh, if we can't get rid of those noises, Dave and I decided to carry on like troopers. Uh, I hope your daughter gets, gets a bit of a rest because they're not, not easy. Um, Dave, in terms of what you've learned as an entrepreneur and maybe a mistake or something that you think From a visibility point of view, hasn't gone according to plan while you're building shortlist.io. Is there anything that you could share, sort of almost like advice to others, unnoticed entrepreneurs?

Yeah, made plenty of mistakes along the way. I think many of them came from trying to be something we were not. So for example, 2 things that we did in earlier years. Number one was I, thought that the natural progression for our business was to be a full-service marketing agency and to include other services that we don't offer now to sort of round us out. I sort of saw what bigger companies were doing and what they looked like and thought, oh, I want to be them, so I should basically offer those same services and things like that. In doing so, I felt that we really kind of lost our identity and it became very difficult to manage the business and to kind of unite the team around certain kind of services and principles. We ended up eventually having to kind of cut certain departments and I had to find replacement jobs in other companies for all those individuals to essentially kind of make it, make the team kind of leaner. We had also tried to niche ourselves down too much. We, I had decided at one point that we were going to work very specifically with health and wellness brands and that that was going to be our angle. There are many, many agencies who do link building and SEO services And we were looking for a way to differentiate ourselves. So we decided to come up with this kind of health and wellness sort of angle. But we really didn't have any credibility behind that. We weren't known in that space. We weren't operating, you know, we weren't really promoting in those spaces. A lot of the customers that originally came on the shortlist were people that my partner met, and he wasn't necessarily meeting those types of companies. And so all of that really just kind of failed. And I think, you know, when we looked at it, we realized that You know, we were okay being smaller and we were okay being boutique and we were okay servicing everybody. And that has worked for us.

Okay, that's very interesting. I noticed on your website, you've got quite a few healthcare. So you had to get the balance between being too broad and too multi-service and too niche as well. And Dave, I did want to just touch on something that we discussed a bit earlier on about A slightly different approach you've got as well with your team because you have to manage them remotely and sort of the cultural issues and around your holiday policy because, you know, as a smaller company, it's often hard to engage and retain staff, especially at a distance. Do you want to share with us your rather innovative approach to dealing with, you know, the fact you don't have a lot of budget necessarily to hire people in, but you do have something else that you can offer staff or potential employees. What, what is that, Dave? Just share about your holiday policy.

Yeah, sure. So, uh, one thing to know, obviously, when you work with remote teams from different cultures is that, um, the way different countries handle, uh, their, uh, benefits and, and their expectations for work may be different from what you're used to. In the States, companies do different types of holiday policies, usually 2, 3, 4 weeks. Um, but in Macedonia, there is sort of a legal, uh, law of, of a minimum number of days. I think it's something like 23. And Shortlist has always sort of been, um, kind of a a weird, you know, I'm in Philadelphia, it's an American company legally, but the majority of the team is Macedonia. So whose holidays, whose laws do we sort of honor here? But more and more as the team grew in Macedonia, I think the expectations came that we would honor kind of more the way they do business. And so when originally Shortlist being kind of a 1-year, 1, 2-year startup didn't really have the, like I said, the profitability really to honor 23 days for every single employee at the time. I did want to make some good on that as we did eventually mature. And now we're in a bit better shape. And so we've decided to offer, you know, an unlimited vacation policy, which is a policy that you see kind of like in tech companies these days in the States, and it's become kind of trendy. But at least in Macedonia and other countries in the world, I think is a little bit uncommon. And so people were very intrigued by this idea and to sort of double down on it, not just to sort of have like the policy, but it's important to kind of like embrace it. So we really do encourage people to take trips. And then every month we do like a state of the business meeting. And part of, you know, part of that meeting, aside from talking about the company, is, uh, having people who went on a trip that month share photos and share aspects of the trip that they did so that people can kind of get comfortable with the idea of taking vacation. Otherwise, the point of policy would be nullified.

Yeah, Dave, I love how you've turned, um, some, you know, something that's often considered as a burden into a reward and a way of, of attracting and engaging your team. I think that's absolutely inspiring. Now, Dave Snyder, if there's one piece of advice that you'd like to give my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs about getting noticed, um, as an entrepreneur with or without link building, um, in there, what would you say? to my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs?

For sure. So Shortlist as an agency doing link building, as I mentioned, there are many, many companies that provide a similar service, so much so that you could argue the market is like completely saturated. And that was the case when I started it 5 years ago as well. There are just many, many thousands of marketing agencies, yet Shortlist has managed to kind of carve its space and basically be successful, at least by my own standards. And I think that there's a testament to the fact that if a market and a need is big enough, there's almost always room for one more. Maybe not to be like the biggest fish in the pond, but enough to sort of establish your roots. You do have to find a little bit of a differentiator. It doesn't necessarily have to be with, you know, who you target. Like I said, the health and wellness thing was a mistake on our part, or you don't necessarily need to offer all different types of services. You need to have a little bit of something. Ours is usually related to the quality of the links that we provide. Nevertheless, I don't think that the fact that somebody has done something before or that there are many companies doing something should discourage you if it is what you really want to do. You'll find kind of your own path there.

Dave Snyder joined me from Philadelphia. If you want to find out more about you, where can they do that?

Email is the best place. I'm not that big on social media, so feel free to shoot me a message at david@shortlist.io. Reply to everything. Almost always within 24 hours.

Dave Schneider, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. I've loved hearing about how you've built a blended international team. That is brilliant. Thank you.

Thanks so much, Jim.

So you've been listening to Dave Schneider, and obviously shortlist.io is doing great work in backlinks and content. But we've got some great insights from Dave on that. But I was also really interested in this inter— international, uh, cultural team management and how he's managed to transcend some of the challenges there by being flexible with his employment policy. If you've enjoyed this as well, do please share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And if you've got a chance to review it on a player, that would really help out and let me know what you think of the show. And until we meet again, I do encourage you to keep on communicating. And thank you for listening.