Steven Schneider 7:47
an SEO there’s really you can’t reinvent the wheel. So even though it worked in the 90s, it’s just probably going to be more important and work better. Now, everyone wants to think that there’s a secret hack to SEO, when really it’s just, how well can you do the same core fundamentals over and over and over again longer and better than your competitors. So at least in the sense of backlinks, now they matter more than ever, because they act as a vote of confidence from Google’s perspective. So if I’m choosing to link to your guys’ website and say, Hey, like I can vouch for them, go visit their website. Check out their stuff. Google looks at that as, hey, I’m putting my name, my credibility on the line in order to say, go look at this other person’s website. And that back link when I connect my site to yours, that’s that authority building aspect. So if you have zero of those, you have no credibility whatsoever. If you have a million of those, a million of those, a million people are talking about. You think about how many back leaks Neil Patel has pointed like saying Neil’s the guy. Neil’s the guy. Everyone’s gonna recognize him as the authority figure, and so does Google. Same logic applies whether it’s a brand, a personal brand, or any kind of startup company. SEO is still that’s how it works.
Rolando Rosas 8:58
All right. So although things are new, that could be old and new again, and you could still use those strategies. So would something like keyword stuffing, because that was the back in the day type of thing. I’m gonna put my keyword 100 times on a blog post, then up to page one. Is that still valid? Or No? Touche, yeah. That
Steven Schneider 9:18
is definitely not advice whatsoever. Yeah, I think that there’s also a something to be said about what’s now classified as white hat versus black hat or gray hat. And that’s how people look at White Hat being the all true fundamentals. You’re not going to get penalized. It’s like the status quo for SEO fundamentals when you start dabbling in black hat. These are more of the shady get rich quick schemes to bootleg your SEO, so to speak. And people are very clear with what Google has said. Of these will get you penalized if you do this. Heads up like, what is stuffing keywords? Stuffing keywords is a great example if you were to write a five. 100 word article, and there’s an extra 1000 words at the end of it with text that’s white on a white page, and you’re trying to trick Google into all this extra content, anything that’s meant to quote, unquote, trick Google is considered like a shady metric, or like a kind of a scam.
Rolando Rosas 10:15
So it doesn’t work anymore, or does it?
Steven Schneider 10:19
You might it might work for 30 days. It might be a short term simply, like Google will catch on eventually, and you’ll just get crushed, like you’ll never have a chance to succeed. It’s not a sustainable approach,
Rolando Rosas 10:28
so you get penalized 100% Yep. Okay, Dave, you making notes a white text message. That’s
Dave Kelly 10:37
funny, that white text trick. People still do that on Craigslist. A couple years ago, I was looking for a vehicle for my son for his first car. And I’m like, You know what? We want to look at Honda Civics. We want to look at Toyota Camrys. And you punch in those words, and here is every Ford Focus in the world. Like, I’m not searching for a for Ford Focus. Why is this coming up? And again, you when you keep scrolling, you’re like, oh, that’s why. Because they have just put every single keyword that they could possibly generate in that bottom piece of that ad.
Steven Schneider 11:12
And hey, from that point of view, like, why wouldn’t you? You don’t own Craigslist, your only incentive is to sell that car. But I think that if you have a brand and you’re trying to generate organic SEO traffic, and you live and play by the rules of Google, like kind of want to make sure that you abide by those rules. True.
Rolando Rosas 11:31
Let me ask you about the rules. Let’s say you’re an E commerce company, or a company that uses e Commerce today. There’s no avoiding e-commerce. It’s where a lot of the action is at. What do you see that’s working for clients that are e commerce focused, or that’s e commerce is a channel they want to grow in 2024
Steven Schneider 11:53
the biggest thing is, is trust when it comes to selling that product and making it seem like it’s actually put and sold by someone who is a real person, a real brand. The photos, do they look overly stocked? Does it look like you just collected the same photos from Amazon? All that sort of stuff is that’s not going to work nowadays. Like what people want to see is the fact that you took it on your iPhone. It’s on your kitchen table. It doesn’t have to be like a bad looking photo, but the more that you can communicate that, hey, there’s a real, authentic person. I tested this product. I have faith in this product, and I have faith in this brand that’s going to communicate well with your buyers. So I think people are just more in touch with what is a scam nowadays compared to what it was in 1990s and I think that just people are more aware to try to poke holes and stuff. So if you’re just transparent from the start, and your entire brand is built on credibility, trust, professionalism, authenticity, that’s going to go a long way to the end of the
Dave Kelly 12:54
day. Yeah, we work really hard to differentiate ourselves online. Where Amazon sellers, we have our own website, we use other marketplaces, and we’re in a world where our competitors are selling a lot of the same products, sometimes for a lot less money than we’re able to sell it for. And what we found successful is just that we put a face behind it, we put out content so that people understand that these guys aren’t just selling SKUs. We’re not just selling plastic and it has certainly helped us to retain and obtain new customers, because they’re telling us like Rolando had spoken with a customer last week. I was out on vacation. We had an issue on Amazon. Someone had hijacked one of our listings. They came back to us with an issue, but they found out that they didn’t buy it from us, and they told Rolando. They said it was our full intent to purchase this from Global Teck. We’ve consumed your content. You guys seem to understand these products. You have the relationships with the manufacturers and the customer just left like, how did I get tricked into buying this from someone else? And it reinstated our strategy of kind of what you’re saying, put a face to our brand and show our expertise, and hopefully we can sell at a higher margin, more importantly, better support the customers that are buying the product. So we do a lot of that, and we’re going to continue to do that moving forward. Yeah,
Steven Schneider 14:18
I think that’s a great approach, and I think that especially if you have the kind of trust built into each sale and like people are coming to you saying that feedback, that’s a great opportunity to even lean more into that and say, How can we get testimonials and reviews from people? Or you take it one step further and get video testimonials. That’s huge from our perspective, too. With high SEO being such a kind of a high ticket sales price, we want a 60/32 video of someone just speaking on their phone, or even giving us an audio clip saying, Hey, this is my real authentic review of these guys, and it’s coming straight from my word of mouth. I think that the more you can do that, and if it just becomes a consistent little here and there thing you look back over a two year period, and you have now this. Library of content where people are now backed into your brand, and that’s just going to go pay dividends on the road,
Dave Kelly 15:05
for sure. Yeah, it sounds like it will. We have some. So we’re also a SaaS provider. We sell UC as a service, call center as a service. Some of the features of the services include call recording and another quick story after our episode with Neil Patel, my team had received an inbound telephone call, someone that was just looking for some suggestions. They on some hardware that they had already purchased, but it was a brand that we sell, and our team has a conversation with this person. And long story short, with the hardware, issue is we ended up not having to sell them anything. We gave them some advice so that they could just update the product that they already had. So we saved a piece of product from going into the ocean. But when you listen to the recording, he says, I’m actually calling you because of the episode with Neil Patel that I saw on YouTube. He had never contacted an Amazon seller ever, and he’s like, this is the very first time I did this. He was impressed that he was actually speaking with a sales organization that wasn’t even trying to sell him anything. And after we took this recording and I shared it with the team, Roland was like, listen, we gotta get this in the hands of our editors so that we can turn this into some sort of a testimonial. So I think, gentlemen, I think I’ll start a new file within descript, and we can just start putting these there, because we do get them. And I think the more content we put out, we’ll hopefully get more of them. That’s a good idea, Steven.
Steven Schneider 16:38
Be here for the next 45 minutes. Just keep pulling ideas out
Rolando Rosas 16:42
there. I want to lean into Dave was talking about Amazon, and there’s no, no escaping Amazon. There’s just, there just isn’t. And no matter what metric you use, Amazon still dominates. Walmart made some progress. Made some inroads. The last quarter, they grew their sales faster online, by 20% where Amazon didn’t grow it there, but it was interesting to know where they grew it versus Amazon. But let me ask you something, Amazon still, no matter who you ask in the paid ads world, when it comes to converting those ads, Amazon still is the place to be. Why do you think that is
Steven Schneider 17:20
same thing, trust. If everyone has prime everyone has the brand recognition, the no brainer to say, Add to Cart. It’ll be here in 24 hours. If you live in Seattle like me, I can have my packages in two hours. It’s just crazy that the deliverability and the trust and the reliability of knowing that I’m going to get this thing, and it’s going to be 99% of times exactly what I ordered, good price, good customer service returns if I want it, if I have to go and vet a new brand and create an account, like, you’ll lose a majority of your people just by creating a new account. If it’s on a one click sign on, okay, they have to pull out their credit card like, I’m same thing. I’m the same exact way. If I have to pull up my wallet, which is usually tucked away in my backpack, just to go buy something like I’m gonna go somewhere else where I already have a credit card on file, I’m lazy. I think that’s just gonna continue to hold true.
Rolando Rosas 18:11
So the fact that they’ve taken a lot of friction to process millions of prime accounts, both business and personal accounts, makes them, among other things, the gorilla in the room. And when you look at that landscape, you’re looking at Walmart, which is probably their closest competitor, which is still far, far away. Whether you’re looking at site visits, whether you’re looking at products sold online, they’re very far second. You got some new players, shine, temu, TikTok Shop, Meta and Etsy, they’re all further back. What’s interesting is that Amazon now has signed agreements with meta to run Amazon ads on meta. TikTok is the most recent one Pinterest last year. What does that tell you about the state of play of e-commerce, when all of these online players, they’re all they all want it, even Google, they shut down their efforts on trying to compete with Amazon. What does that tell you about the state of play when it comes to e commerce, and how Amazon’s role keeps changing, and even their enemies or competitors are now frenemies with them, at least when it comes to sending traffic back to Amazon,
Steven Schneider 19:23
it’s better to have a small piece of a big pie than a big piece of a little pie. That’s how I look at it. I think that at the end of the day, why not be allies with this giant who can at least help support your business in one way or the other? And if you close yourself off to that, you’re pretty much essentially shooting yourself in the foot. So I think at some point, these other massive companies, they have a lot of smart people running the companies, are realizing that, hey, we’re going to lose a lot of money if we don’t at least try to work with them, and if we try to compete against them and just close ourselves out. Is that? Actually doing the best interest for our company at the end of the day, regardless of whether we are trying to get market share. I think that there’s also just they realize that they can’t ever gain that much market share, and that’s fine, but kind of just goes back to like, some is better than nothing. And
Rolando Rosas 20:16
I like this phrase that I like I coined, social commerce. You’ve got the social media companies, you know, Tiktok, meta, Pinterest, the rest of them, they’ve all tried their hand at E commerce. You’ve got Amazon that, in some ways, tried to be social media like but they’re not Tiktok, right? They’re not Facebook, they’re not Instagram, they’re not Pinterest, even though they have little pieces to try to do that. And it’s interesting that it goes back to, you know, we’re on Amazon. So what I see when I look at Amazon, especially this past weekend, I drove up to New York. And as I drove up to New York, I could not believe how many prime trucks? Fully 53 foot trailers. I kept seeing up 95 all the way up to New York and on the way back and on both sides of the highway. And it had to be I clocked it almost every five minutes there was a truck going that was a prime, big, full, prime tractor trailer heading in either other direction. There is, to me, I don’t see how these other social media sites that want to be social commerce can compete unless they have that last piece. The closest one, again, is Walmart. They do have that infrastructure, but Amazon’s got that most expensive piece, which is the last mile closing the loop for the customer experience, like you were talking about, do you see any of these marketplaces getting in there and really tangling it up with Amazon when it comes to that?
Steven Schneider 21:55
Yeah, I hope, I want to say yes. I think that, you know, I think I’m definitely all for fair market and kind of all the things that come with capitalism. And I think that it’s good to hope that Amazon is not going to continue to be a monopoly in some sense, one way or another.
Rolando Rosas 22:12
We’ll see, we will see there’s a little pressure on them about just that.
Steven Schneider 22:16
But I think the thing that could really change the game is when drones start getting added to the mix. And obviously Amazon’s gonna dominate that game as well. We’re gonna start seeing drones every 60 seconds in the air. But you know, aside from the creamy counts and the trust all sort of stuff, Amazon’s been famous for saying people are never gonna complain about getting their packages quicker or faster. So, you know, when it comes down to it, if Walmart could beat them at that, and they don’t already have it in their arsenal, like, who knows, maybe I would switch to Walmart. I
Dave Kelly 22:51
remember we had a video that we showed during one of our podcasts, and Walmart was testing out drones. They weren’t a traditional hover, like a helicopter style drone. They were more like an airplane with wings, and they launched them. I’m wondering. I never really read any updates to how that was working out for Walmart, but I just saw that video from I think I was just looking through some of our older videos. Did anything come of that?
Rolando Rosas 23:22
I’m not aware it. I’m certainly I would have heard, I may have heard, but I’m not aware of it. I’m not sure about it. I know, Steven, have you heard anything about Walmart’s drone efforts? I haven’t, but that
Steven Schneider 23:32
sounds pretty cool. I would say, at least from a novelty perspective, if they could say, Okay, we’re having this drone feature, but I’m game to test it out. It kind of reminds me of the driverless Uber cars. I don’t know if you guys have experienced that yet. If I have an option to take a driverless Uber, like, yeah, why wouldn’t I? That’s just super cool. And maybe that’s not for everyone, but it’s kind of the same thing. If I have an option to go a drone deliver my stuff, yeah, it’s into my way. So I hope that’d be pretty cool. I feel like we’re not too far out from that future.
Dave Kelly 23:58
I would think the sellers would be a little concerned about that. So we’re shipping 1000s, a few 1000 orders a month. If those were going by drone, my fear would be that would increase delivery issues, A to Z, claims, lost revenue. It hasn’t been seen yet. We haven’t tested that out from the seller’s perspective, from the buyer’s perspective, I think it’d be great, but I wonder if there’d be some apprehension from the seller’s side.
Steven Schneider 24:24
Yeah, just a whole arsenal of risks associated with that when it comes to aviation control and just safety and deliverability, making them back. Hopefully the drain the drone doesn’t hit a tree, you know, like you just, who knows. But I have to believe that there’s some pretty bright people already try to leave that charge. So,
Rolando Rosas 24:44
yeah, it’s inescapable. Things, things change. Change is inevitable. And the longer I’m in business, people don’t change. You know, people still laugh and joke and do what humans have been doing for 1000s of years the world around us. Changes, including AI, and this is where I really want to pick your brain. AI, pretty much since chat GPT, AI was around before chat GPT and open AI, I would say you probably agree with this, that it was mostly large companies doing large language models and machine learning, but the fingertips of the average person doing generative AI, things was not available right now when it comes to AI, what do you see the potholes are when you’re talking to clients that are maybe not so apparent?
Steven Schneider 25:43
I think the biggest thing is that people often confuse the efficiency with quality, and what I mean by that is as human nature to want to get things done faster, cheaper and just with fewer resources. However, when it comes to AI, I feel like we’re still so early in that game that if you rush those processes and try to cut corners, at least in content or SEO, you really lose that human aspect. And at least at TrioSEO, we’re 100% human written content agency. So it’s very clear if we’re in the hiring process for a new writer and they submit a sample that’s AI, like, people don’t talk and sentences I start with in the digital age of not like, no one’s saying that, like, go away. So I think that, you know, it’s easy to say, like, well, we could produce 10 times more content if we just used AI. And it’s like, okay, well, imagine if you produce 10 times more content, and then your SEO failed after four months, and now you’ve just wasted 10 years of what your SEO could have been like. Is that worth it? So, yeah, I just feel like it’s definitely the carrot on the stick right now, shiny object syndrome is very apparent in how AI could change the game, and I think it’s just a matter of keeping the blinders on, being patient, letting things run its course before making any crazy, drastic decisions.
Dave Kelly 27:09
So you saying to question the accuracy of the output when using AI.
Steven Schneider 27:17
I don’t think of accuracy is at play. I think it’s more or less the how people are going to receive that information and the engagement within it like we for example, we were looking at a piece of content the other day and someone was trying to like stuff keywords, not exactly like what you were saying seconds ago, but when you give AI a role or a task to say, hey, use these keywords as best as possible within the article. It’s not going to come out like you, and I would be speaking like you, and I are going to say things here and there conversationally. And there’s an assumed undertone that we’re still talking about AI right now, even though every other word does not have AI in it. When AI is asked to use words like aI SEO, it’s going to sound like I’m saying AI and SEO and every other word, because that’s how it’s trying to convey that message. So there’s a lot of human implied mannerisms that are also transferred through content. And just because of that, it’s just AI is not there yet.
Rolando Rosas 28:13
I’ve seen so many videos the last couple weeks that if you’re putting content and you’re talking about your experience or experience says that’s something no AI machine can replicate. If you mention, you know, I like I was telling my story in New York. This is what happened to me when I drove to New York the other weekend. Ai can’t really write that, because it’s not their experience, it’s my experience. And talking about experiences, what you’ve what you feel, what you felt, is still something that no AI machine yet is yet able to do, just like human Yeah. I
Steven Schneider 28:50
mean, that’s you get the nail on the head there, especially like when the content that we’re writing for a client should be backed by an expert opinion or a real world kind of firsthand matter scenario, and say that we have to go hire an expert writer to cover this niche that’s super technical, they’ll be able to offer that kind of opinion in that kind of firsthand experience. Of like you’re saying, AI just can’t translate, aside from a lot of other things too. I just think that we’re still very early, but don’t get me wrong, I’m pro AI all the way. I think it’s a great tool, but it’s just that it’s a tool. It’s not a replacement by any means. I think it’s all about how you use it and how you choose to be responsible. It goes back to the with great power comes great responsibility, sort of situation like AI is just that,
Rolando Rosas 29:38
is there a holy grail when it comes to Google search results, here’s what I mean. I want my article, blog, video, fill in the blank. I want that piece of content to show up on page one. What are the secrets? Today to show up on page one,
Steven Schneider 30:04
high quality content, some optimized content, and backlinks like I know those three could be a two hour conversation each, but it’s just like I said, there’s really not a lot to reinvent as long as you’re getting credible, reliable votes of confidence in the terms of backlinks from other authority sites, lots of them, and then quality content, like I said, conversational tones, expert experience, trust, credibility, optimized for flow and making sure it’s mobile formatted too. So many people will just write in like five paragraph essay formats, forgetting that our phones are the sides that they are then they’re reading, if you’re reading a research paper, no one’s gonna do that. No one wants a page that’s bombarded with ads like just thinking more through that user experience. I think that more often than not, people are so tied up and create, create, create, that they often forget to even look at their own site and look at their site in Cognito mode, as if they’re that visitor. What is the true experience from first click to your CTA and that journey? I think that to your question, Google knows everything about what I just said, like they know how long they’re on page. They know where they’re scrolling, they know when they stop scrolling, they know when they leave. They can also look at the structure of your site. Does that makes sense for the user. How are you setting it up? Does the content have original images? I mean, everything that we think they know they know. So this ties back to branding, trust, credibility, authenticity, quality, all that sort of stuff.
Rolando Rosas 31:38
Amazing, amazing. I we could, we could go on for a couple more hours, like you said, easily, because if we go dive into the X’s and O’s, it’s easily another two hours. But what I’d like to do, as we always do with guests at the end of this, is play a little game we like to call rapid fire, or give us the rapid fire segment. All right, so Dave and I are going to take turns on this one, Steven and we’re just going to ask you a phrase, whatever comes to your head, hits your brain, a right or wrong answer. It’s your answer. You ready to play? Let’s do it. All right, Walmart versus Amazon.
Steven Schneider 32:28
Oh, Amazon. 100% Okay,
Dave Kelly 32:32
favorite social media platform,
Steven Schneider 32:35
LinkedIn, without a doubt, it’s only when I’m on I’m on there every day. All
Rolando Rosas 32:39
right, nice, nice, favorite piece of tech,
Steven Schneider 32:46
my computer just, it really just does the job. It’s literally my life. Yeah,
Dave Kelly 32:52
all right, so what is the first thing that you check on your cell phone in the morning?
Steven Schneider 33:00
It’s probably LinkedIn. My my LinkedIn posts are scheduled for about a half hour before I wake up, so I always check to make sure that they actually went
Rolando Rosas 33:09
out very good. Here’s where I like to learn more with this one game changing book I
Steven Schneider 33:17
really enjoyed, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s just like that psychology book of just human interaction and psychology nerd out all that stuff. Terrific.
Dave Kelly 33:27
We’ve had leaders of sales organizations that’s required reading for their sales team. And Steven last question, who’s a person that you admire?
Steven Schneider 33:38
I’m gonna say person. I’m gonna say Connor Galvan and Nathan Hirsch, my partners, they’re great mentors, great entrepreneurs, just great friends,
Rolando Rosas 33:46
terrific, great, awesome. You know, Steven, if you want to leave us anything else on SEO, something we missed, something you think maybe is flying under the radar, tell us
Steven Schneider 34:00
one of my favorite SEO hacks, I would say, is that in 2024 and looking forward, podcasts are without a doubt going to be the best way to build backlinks. I think that they are underutilized and overlooked. It’s one of the few multi win strategies you’ll see. And I think that nowadays, people are trying to build back links through guest posts and content and paying for links, and all of that is just a waste of time. Like you jump on a podcast, you 4560 minutes later, you have content. The host has content. You now have a network of new people, new friends, and more often than not, the show host will link to you. So I think that if you’re looking at it from a kind of multitude of wins across the board, yeah, do more podcasts. Wow,
Rolando Rosas 34:50
wow, oh, man, I like that. That That right there. It’s a clap. That’s an awesome it’s i. The only thing I would add to that is that it takes time to really get your footing from podcasting. Whether it’s the guests lining guests up, feeling comfortable with topics you want to talk about, it doesn’t happen overnight. And I famously have heard Gary Vee say you can’t get in shape with one rep, one push up, right? You’re going to do it over and over and over and over and over and over again in order to get in really good shape. And that’s the one thing I would offer as advice anybody. If you’re not on the podcast circuit or doing podcasts, you’re gonna have to do many reps to get your message, get your flow, get your look and feel, get the topics you like and lining up guests. And so it’s my advice. But I love that. I love that that podcast is the way I may have to pick your brain on that one for part two, when you come on again, if people want to learn more about you, Steven, what should they do? As you
Steven Schnieder 35:50
can visit trioseo.com trioseo.com, and you can also find me on LinkedIn, same way TrioSEO. My name very active on there, yeah, you can also Google me, plus the name. We’re an SEO company, so we show up on Google.
Rolando Rosas 36:05
There you go. And if you’re watching us on video instead of the audio, we’ve got the website for you so that you can go to it, trioseo.com, so thank you for coming into the podcast today, Steven. I really appreciate you sitting down giving us some knowledge. I can’t wait for doing episode two. I want to jump into that podcast and back links with you again and see if we can uncover some more secrets there. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast today with Steven Schneider from TrioSEO, I want to encourage you go ahead and hit that subscribe button, because it means the world to us, because we can bring you other guests like Steven onto this podcast to feature as well as talk about those topics that are trending. Now, if your business and you’ve got complex technology issues, you want to go ahead and check out the links that we have in the description about Global Teck Worldwide your partner for all things, it hardware, as well as services. We know how to make it work. Been doing it for over 20 years. Go check that out. We’ll see you in that. And I want to encourage you, if you want to nerd out, probably going to have a video somewhere up here somewhere on YouTube. So if you’re watching us on YouTube, go check out Neil Patel’s episode. We’ve been talking about him. He talks about why we’re drowning in a sea of content with Dave. Remember, 4 billion pieces uploaded every day. He’ll tell you exactly what to do when you’re confronted with this daily barrage of content and what’s the right approach, I want to thank my guest Steven today for joining us on What The Teck? Dave and I will see you in those episodes, joining us today.
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