Mmm, that's good. And welcome to a new episode of digital Coffee marketing brew. And as always, I'm your host, Brett Deisser. And we're gonna be talking about digital marketing SEO. Local us a little bit, but also with a touch of podcasting because it's the ever popular how can we implement this type of industry for digital marketers that their boss is like, how can we get on podcasts? How can we do podcasts? But with me, I have cash with me.
And he has a vast knowledge in digital marketing, specifically SEO and local, and he just recently is getting into podcast production because it is a interesting slash fun industry to be a part of. I've done a little bit in the behind the scenes and there's a lot of different things you do, editing from producing and also your SEO and making sure that you are up to date with where all your podcasts can be at. Like for example, don't be on Google podcasts anymore, be on YouTube music.
That's like just one of your free advice with me. But welcome to the show, cash. Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yes, the first question is all. My guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker? Oh, yeah, coffee. It's definitely become a coffee thing lately and way more into the afternoons than I usually do. It's, I don't know, I don't need the caffeine. It just, right now it's cold weather, it's a hot drink, but later in the year I'll slow down a bit. But tea, hot tea's okay.
Prefer cold teas and stuff. Hit the summertimes. That's fair. Like I see. Or cold brew tea is the other version of it. Yeah, I think with the, obviously the Starbucks on every corner and things like that, there's so many ways to drink coffee and it's gotten insane. And of course, some of them, like, they start as coffee, but I'm not sure that they finish that way by time. They've mixed everything else in. That's fair. So I gave a brief explanation of your expertise.
Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do? I would say I'm a longtime digital marketer. I started actually studying SEO back in 2007, so I'm an old hand at it. I started at my agency, which I recently exited, but I started at Titan Digital in 2011, and we grew from just myself to where we had 30 people. And then I was able to successfully sell it to another, larger agency so that they could integrate everything.
Yeah. And I moved into podcast production because it's a great way of, you know, for content creation, which everybody, if you're doing any kind of digital marketing, content creation has been all the rage for years now in one form or another. So I've been at SEO since not quite the beginning, but definitely it's early stages of it. And so what has changed in SEO? Cause we talked before we were doing this podcast.
Like, it feels like it changes every few months and specifically every year, but more specifically, it's every quarter. It seems like there's a new thing that you have to figure out. Here's the thing about SEO. So everybody thinks it changes like constantly, but I would argue that it doesn't as much as people think the nuances change.
Okay, so what I mean by that is if you do local search and you want to rank somebody on maps, a lot of the tactics are still the same, but it's, you need to optimize your site. You need to get backlinks, which are mostly directories. You want high profile third party sources and stuff linking back to you, but you can optimize your Google map listing so you can raise the ranks up once in a while.
Google will shake things up a bit for a specific segment, but when you think SEO, you have to realize that things are broken down in different ways. So organic is separate from the maps, and e commerce is a different type of SEO than maps is, or even regular organic because you're trying to get products to rank. And so there it's, everything is a bit more nuanced than just saying, hey, it's SEO, and it's changed. No, there's pieces of it that will change that affect certain things.
We focused for years on local search and we had what we would call national search because we didn't. There's not really a great way to term it, but if you are, for example, a product manufacturer and you want to rank for something across the whole country, for example, I've worked with, I used to work with one that did, a company that did fuel injectors. They didn't care about selling locally.
Their buyers were all over the country, so they needed to rank high for fuel injectors or, and I think they were specifically for like diesel engines or something. So you end up trying to rank for that. They don't care about the maps. So if something changes in the maps, it didn't matter to them. If something changed that was e commerce related because they would sell them online. Now they got to pay attention.
So that's the thing, is SEO has evolved, but people, I think, and I think there's a little less of this going on, but for a long time, remember back to the days of the Penguin update and the different updates that Google would roll out, everybody would freak out, okay, and be like, oh my God. And some sites would be dramatically affected, but most of them, after the rankings were shook up, a lot of them ended up pretty much back in the same place.
Or if they were going to get hit, they had done something that caused it. I worked with literally thousands of sites over the years and we never saw anything that shook it up that bad because it was the nature of who we worked with. But maps had been left alone until just recently, for a long time. Yeah, I think. I don't think people pay enough attention to the nuance of SEO and that it comes into it affected by different categories. So you can change something here.
In other areas, it doesn't do anything, it doesn't make any difference. So it's almost like the umbrella of marketing. Marketing as a core hasn't really changed since its inception. There's core strategies like word of mouth pricing, placement, location, ad placements, all that stuff is still core of it. But digital marketing, SEO and then within e commerce, maps and everything that has evolved, I think is the best way. Of saying, yeah, yeah. Because things have been added to.
I say when digital marketing started, you had like banner ads and stuff and that was the core of what you had for pay per click ads. You would literally buy an advertisement on a website. We didn't have things like programmatic or doing Google Ads. None of these things existed. It was very in its infancy with Yahoo and stuff running essentially ad buying platforms, but you were literally buying it directly from that website.
So that eventually evolved and SEO, everything was keyword stuffing back in the day. Just pop it in as many times as you can because the algorithms were very primitive at the time and now they're really sophisticated. And try to do that now and you'll get nowhere. Google and even Bing and stuff, over time, they've been able to look at a specific area of what they're doing. You think about, I mean, you are literally doing the things that Google tells you not to do.
Like, for example, buying links and stuff. It goes on all the time. Google says don't do it, but in truth, they don't really have a great way to identify what's a paid link and what's nothing. So there's a huge market for it and I don't know that they really care because they can't stop it, you know, and really set a standards that they wrote. But it's not their Internet. Like, Google may be all powerful and everything, but it is a search engine.
While they are powerful, there are other search engines. Bing right now is having a little bit of a run because they've got the chat GPT integrated and stuff, and that can make a big difference to them. Over time. We've added tactics, we've added things along the lines of content. Content wasn't huge when we first got going. And then eventually you had social media comes along, right? Facebook gets really popular in 2011, 2012. It came around in what's 0506.
But now suddenly social content and blogs have been around too. But now, hey, we can use all of this blog content to create backlink opportunities and stuff from an SEO standpoint. And then you have HubSpot comes along and says, content marketing. And then it becomes a buzzword and everybody says, we got to do content marketing. Now. You bring along chat, GPT, and I can create gobs of content at will. I can write you 20 blog posts in all of five minutes.
So to me, that devalues the content because Google said, okay, you can use that kind of content, no problem. Now they're saying, okay, maybe it's like it's going to be a little too much. They don't even know the total impact, but people are using it left and right. I love the fact that you can do AI content because otherwise they've had article spinners and stuff for years that would pump out tons of really horrible stuff for the purpose of backlinks.
So over time, there's been new strategies added and some things opened up. Programmatic advertising is opened up to where a lot smaller businesses can use it. The ad platforms have gotten more sophisticated. Facebook needs to stop screwing with theirs because they are horrible about it every time they make a change. But as an industry, digital marketing has truly evolved from where it was, and it will continue to evolve. I've never lost sleep over worrying about the latest Google change.
That's the thing, because that stuff happens constantly. Yes, it does. Quite a bit, even from their own. As an Android user, they've done five different messaging apps in one time, which they finally just went to one. And I'm like, that's what you guys need to do is go to one. Five different things. I'll give you. The biggest thing is what people tend to, especially in digital marketing, that what they don't spend enough time paying attention to. But what is really evolving is our behavior.
Okay, so, for example, I tell people all the time, I get my phone right? And I tell people, like, if you're a local business, people are still trying to tell you organic matters. And I'm like, you want to rank and all this? You don't get your traffic from that, not anymore. You don't get it from the desktop. For most businesses, if you're a local h vac guy or a plumber or anything, the maps matter and the ads matter and the maps matter most. And you can use a map ad to get high up there.
And the reason being is when I needed a plumber, I go and I open my Google Maps app and I find a plumber there and I'm going to use my phone. I'm not going to pull out my computer. A lot of people don't even have one at home anymore. Like, they have work computers and stuff like that where they have a laptop, but that's not where you're going to go. I take my laptop home in case I'm going to do some work. I do not pull it out because I need to find a plumber.
I go get my phone and I don't go do an organic search. I don't open Chrome. I open the map app. Or if you're like, you could do Apple maps if you're using an iPhone or something, but you're still going to do that. So that's where it matters that you be. And I think we, there's too many marketers and stuff. They're not realizing or not paying attention to how people actually search for things. I say it's not even just, it's not the keyword so much like that matters most things.
If I want to find it, if I need it locally, I'm going to go straight to the map and I'm going to do a search for it there, whatever it might be. If I can go there or they can come to me, that's where I'm going. Oh, yeah, we can even do that with local SEO and just after the pandemic is that everybody wants it to come to them now and they don't really want to go out as often. Not saying that they don't want to go out at all. But yeah, you're right.
If I want to look for a local coffee shop, I'm not going to go to chrome. I'm going to go to Google Maps and say coffee shop. And I hope I can find a good one through there. They usually try to do, like, local independent ones because Starbucks is plentiful yeah. I want to see the reviews and stuff. I want to see the stars really fast. I want to say, okay, this guy's got a bunch I like with the maps I can scroll through.
So, for example, if I was on desktop and being a digital marketer, of course I pay attention to these things. But if I'm on desktop and I get the three pack on an organic chrome result, and then I got to dive in further. I don't do that with the map app. So I'm not worried as much.
You can actually have quite a bit of value from a local business standpoint if you're the fifth or 6th person, because if you've hammered your reviews and you've got 100 of them, even if you're in the fifth spot, I'm going to notice that when I'm scrolling down and I can, I'm going to scroll down really fast because I'm looking at who's open, I'm looking at who's got a high rating. Those are the things I want to see.
And based on what I searched for, is how the listings will pop up, because people do not realize how well you can optimize a map listing. You can go and do as much or more than you can to your website. Because I can target that thing to show up for all sorts of services. Yeah, because it's got tons of categories and the maps, it's searching through everything you've put on the profile. Your website's just backing it up and other directories and stuff that you've also listed your services.
So that's the thing is people need to pay, especially as marketers pay more attention to the actual user behavior. And the simplest thing to do is look at how you use stuff, start there, then ask some friends, see what they do. What are the habits that we have developed? Because over time, ten years ago, we weren't doing that. In fact, was it mobile?
Responsive websites weren't even a big deal until like 2015, 2016, and then eventually it's okay now we got to add in SSL certificates and things like that. But for a long time, it didn't matter. But as maps got better, regardless whether it's Apple or Google, it's made all the difference. And so our behaviors have changed.
At one time, when phones first came out and you think of doing searches that way, everybody was worried about, okay, they're doing searches on Chrome, we have a tendency, like people that are in SEO, they're still too focused on organic search. If I'm looking up information for something, then that's what I'm going to do or depending on what I'm doing, especially if it's a diy project or something, in which case I want to go find YouTube. So it depends on what you need.
Yeah. I feel like for those local searches, it's like reviews. They want to know how close you are. And then for me, as an Android user, I look how busy you're going to be. So I'll go, okay, how long is this going to take me? That's exactly it.
Yeah. Google's been spending some time with the map system and making it more sophisticated and you're getting a lot more information, some of it being real time, depending on the business itself and how much time they're taking and of course, anything that requires directions and, you know, to get anywhere. I do a quite a bit of travel and everything. And anytime I'm in a city that I don't know, they say top ten restaurants and all that kind of thing, forget it.
I don't care about Tripadvisor in all honesty, because if I need a restaurant or something like that, I'm going to go to the maps. I don't know why. Like Yelp, I can't see them surviving long term. Like they've been around quite a while, 15 years or something like that, because I don't need it. Why do I want to go to a site just to see, I was in Orlando recently as at the Podfest convention, and we got an Airbnb every night was, okay, what's the restaurants nearby?
And it's just going to be restaurants near me. And I'm looking at everything in walking distance and stuff because there's a lot of variety. And then I'm going to the reviews. I'm like, okay, let's find something local. What do they got sorted by cuisine type or whatever? That's how we're doing things. And those evolutions take time and we don't even realize we're doing them. But eventually you notice and you realize, yeah, I used to do everything this way and now I don't.
And marketing has to keep up in how we're the user behavior. And a lot of times, especially smaller marketing companies or smaller businesses, they're always a step behind. Yeah, it sounds interesting what you said about Yelp, because in the beginning, Yelp and Foursquare were the thing where you check in, you become the mayor, which didn't really do anything for you anyways. I was the mayor of a restaurant that doesn't really care, that you're a mayor of the restaurant at all.
Yeah. And then Foursquare split off and to do its own things, but I never use it anymore. I barely use Yelp and I still have it on there and I don't even know who I have it, to be honest with you. Yeah, I don't. You. I haven't used yelps in years. And Foursquare, I think they've almost become like a data aggregator, so they sell the data that they've collected because otherwise they wouldn't make any money.
But, yeah, I said, even Tripadvisor sometimes can be okay if you want to find things to do around you, and that's where it can come into play. So that still has some relevance. But our habits change, and that's where marketers need to be cognizant of these things that happen. You can just look around you and say, go back to phones and stuff.
We said, hey, if you looked at 2014 or so, somewhere around there, it was probably 80% of searches happened on a desktop, 20% were on a phone or maybe a tablet. Tablets have always been a very small percentage of searches, and they thought it would take off and it never really did. So 2014, you probably had about an 80 20 split. Now it's probably 80 20 in reverse. And the 20% that's happening, even on desktop, is mostly work related.
I use my desktop or my laptop anyway for when I need to do informational searches. I want in depth searches, I want a larger screen. I want to be able to see things, that kind of stuff. But if I need something quick, there's. No reason then pivoting over to SEO with podcasts because you're doing podcast production, and podcasting has been around since, I believe my research is like, 2005 was around where it started. Yeah, yeah.
I don't think really anybody noticed until about 2010, something like that. Yeah, that's about the same with blogs, though. Yeah. So it's still relatively new, but not new in technology terms because of everything else that's going on. But I. What can podcasters understand about SEO? Because there's id, three tags, which kind of were relevant but not really relevant, but still, people talk about it all the time. We compete against ourselves because we put it on Apple podcasts and all that stuff.
So what's that all about? In all honesty? The way I approach podcasts is I don't worry about SEO. So you have to think about it that I think the number right now is around 380 to 400,000 active podcasts at any one time, and then you have about 3 million in the ecosystem. Everything that could be targeted has been targeted pretty much because even the stuff that's not actively recording is still going to be there.
So my recommendation with people is focus on the social aspect because you can build up an audience over time. Podcasts are great for two things, in my opinion. One, you build an audience, okay, and you can be that thought leader and all that, but also the networking opportunities, because you can meet more businesses, business owners through podcasting than I've ever seen. To me, it's way better than any networking event you'll ever go to.
So as a business use, it's an awesome way of doing things. Because think about this, we've never met, right? I could walk into a networking event. Let's say it's a local chamber of commerce event and it's got 50 people for whatever going on. Some after hours thing, right? What's going to happen for most people? Okay, you're going to have a few extroverts that can network with everybody in the room, but the majority are not.
So they'll gravitate to people they know already and they'll talk them up and then, and they may just stay there and blow the entire time. They may gravitate to somebody they know that's talking to somebody they don't know, and then hope for an introduction and maybe they'll network for the few people and get five minutes to talk to them. Podcasts, no matter what, whether you're running a show and bringing on guests, or you're being a guest on shows, I do both.
You're going to meet people that potentially you can collaborate with, and you just have to consider how you use your podcast. And if you think about, they say, this is why the social aspect, even on a local level, the social can come into play. One of the suggestions I had for somebody the other day, Washington, let's say you ran it just as an idea, as a moving company.
Rather than going to networking events, they want to network with realtors, real estate brokers, mortgage guys, all those people, right? Everybody that helps a homeowner buy and sell houses, run a podcast about your local area and bring in guests that are realtors from the local area, and suddenly you become this resource for people to listen to that might be moving, might already live in the area, but are moving from one house to another, any number of things.
But the idea is that you can talk to those people by bringing them on the show. And then a lot of cities and small towns have the local person that's taking control of the social media presence. It's not the government necessarily. Back in the early 20, 10, 20 through 2014, there were some companies that said, hey, we could own the local presence, put out news and stories and everything, and eventually sell advertising. Those entities, a lot of them still exist.
We've got somebody here where I live, and he does local news stories and video interviews and all sorts. But he's built such a following on the page that he does pretty well because there's so many people that follow that local Facebook page. He actually, I live in a town called Murfreesboro and he actually owns Murphysboro.com, not the city, which is hilarious, I think, but you can partner with those kinds of organizations to help put that content out.
It goes back to traditional marketing in many ways. If you ever remember when you go down and see a bunch of billboards and the billboards all had the local realtor and everybody eventually knew who that person was, there's always a few local names that everybody knows who they are, right? Remember seeing that kind of stuff back in the day? Yeah, I remember that stuff. Like the big ones. Plus they still do the mailers as well, so you always have those. That local touch.
Yeah. And so that's the idea is if you use podcasting, you can do it that way. And then through social media now your podcast can become known. You don't need a national audience, you can have a local audience, in which case, though, you become that person, that known realtor, mortgage broker, moving company, plumber, whatever it might be. But you're able to put the brand out there even better. Individual. It's great for individual branding that way.
So I say it's just because from an SEO standpoint, for podcasts to rank, you want to end up ranking on the platforms. There's only a couple of platforms that matter, Apple being the primary one, and Spotify, any other platform, there's other distribution. But ranking on those aren't going to be a ton of listenership. But even on Apple, there's only so many podcasts that it can rank really high. It's a clogged up space, but there's other reasons you do it. Not for the SEO purposes necessarily.
Yeah, there's so many out there. But yeah, I would say the top three is probably YouTube, music, Spotify and Apple Podcasts is probably going to be your main three that are actually going to be the traction and actually rank you. That's why I said podcasters are almost, if you have your own website, you're fighting against yourself on the other platforms because you want to give your podcasts away.
So SEO almost seems a little irrelevant because you may want people to go to your website, but you still want to rank on those podcasting sites. Yeah, you want to rank on the sites. YouTube's great for it now because video podcasts have become all the rage. I'm not totally sure why people want to watch us talk like, I love listening to podcasts, but I do it while I'm driving, typically, in which case I just want the audio.
Some people are still just using YouTube and putting it on the background. When I throw a baseball game up, I'm not really watching the game. I'm really just listening while I do something else. But you can build audiences, and that's the thing about it. Anything social, you can build those followings and then whatever your goal is, you can, you know, push them to do that and send them back to your own website or whatever you might want to do.
Because of platforms like YouTube and combined with Apple Spotify, your reach can be really big. You just have to give it time. There's a lot of investment. That's the one thing about podcasts, time or money, but it's going to be a bit of both. To get it done, you need to understand that you have to have a strategy behind it, an end goal. What are you trying to accomplish to be able to see, hey, if I do these things right, then this is what I can get out of it. In the end, what I've heard and.
I've read some books about it, just because I've, when I get to it in strange, really want to know as much as I can. For those wanting to start, let's just say should they niche themselves into a specific industry? When I talk to a lot of people are like, I just want to be for everybody. I'm like, that's not going to work because you can't be for everybody. Yeah, you want to understand, like who you're trying to connect with and stuff. So for example, I run a podcast where I talk to franchises.
We've got something like 3000 in the country. And what I try to do is I said, okay, I could talk to a lot of franchises. There's plenty of those. But I only run so many episodes every month. So what I did is I focused on emerging brands. So younger franchises, they might have a couple of hundred locations, they might have ten, but I don't like, there's some that have been around for 30 years and they're going to have a thousand locations. That's not who I want to have on there.
And we're building an audience for that particular show of people that might be, that want to be entrepreneurs. And I do the show with the idea that I can talk to the franchise development people and the founders is who I typically have as guests. Sometimes I'll have two or three people on and then we can go through what the concept is, what's the opportunity, what's the investment, how much, you know, if possible, how much money can you make? Like, what's the history behind it?
And we want to know the business model. And I just tell whenever I have the guest on, which for me is a great opportunity to network with the guests, I'm looking to potentially do some franchise investing on my own. So I get the inside look that I want to, but when I have them on, I tell them, I said, look, franchises, they do franchise shows, which are conventions where the public can come check out concepts.
And so I said, I, the questions as if I had just walked up to a booth at a franchise show, and I'm going to ask you these things and that puts them in a comfort zone. That's how I see it. And every show's got to be like, whatever you're going to do, you want to have a point behind it. And yeah, you can get specific. You don't have to remember, if you also want to take advantage of the networking opportunities not being so broad, the networking will be more focused.
I say a moving company could offer up a show and they just interview local realtors. They don't have to interview other moving companies. They don't. That's not where their business is going to be, but they want to have a market related show. What's the housing market like? Wherever. Okay. If I'm interviewing these, all these real estate agents, they're going to give me the information I need.
And we can talk about the trends, we can talk about new developments that are happening, like literally new subdivisions being built. What's the advantages of this? What are the price ranges? Where's the hot areas in town? All of these things.
And you can bring on different real estate agents and get different points of view, but you've accomplished the goal of networking and you've kept your show focused, which makes it so that people would want to listen because they know what to expect when they do. And so where do you see, like, for yourself as you're doing a podcast and podcast production, where you see this going for podcasting? Do you see it more social we have podcast 2.0 supposedly coming out.
That's new features and tools for podcasters and listeners. Do you see it better analytics? Because it's still not great analytics. It's okay. Yeah, the analytics I found that they're really iffy on the number of listens. For one, even if you run the podcast, how much can you trust the stats for how many listens you actually get?
And then what I found is in the way of website traffic and stuff, too, it's very hard to determine how much anything gets, whether it's a visitor to a website or a listen on a podcast. So third party tools that are estimating how many listens a particular show would get, I'd be like, yeah, there's no way. Because they tend to overestimate, not under. In fact, the overestimating can be really over. So you have to be wary of those things.
I don't think, having seen website traffic tools for years, they're not going to be able to make it much better if the platforms don't give third party access to, if Apple doesn't share with some other company the actual data, then they're not going to be able to do anything. If they can't make it better, it's always going to be just a educated guess. And unfortunately, I don't see that changing much. Just having seen over the years where website traffic never got a better.
If there's a years ago that, and I think it still exists, there's a ranking called, it's not Amazon. It was called Alexa. Yeah. And it was actually the, like, rankings of the most popular sites in the world. Okay. I think it was Alexa. And that thing was so inaccurate. I think at one time I had a site that ranked in like the top 500 or something, and I'm like, yeah, there's no way. Of all the sites, this was like years ago.
That's one of the hardest things for any system to be able to accurately predict or determine. And so people are going, man, you got a lot of great information. Where can I find you online to. Learn more about what you do on the podcast side? You can find me at Titan Mediaworks with an x.com. that's easy. And of course, my emails. Cash at Titania works.
I'm the easiest guy to find on LinkedIn, I think, too, because you can literally just look up cash MiLLER and you're going to find me because my LinkedIn is. I think they do LinkedIn.com, forward slash in forward slash, and then it'd be like your name and a bunch of numbers and everything, and mine is literally just cash Miller. Oh, yeah. I've been on LinkedIn a long time, so I guess I got the first slot, and I'm probably the only cash Miller on there. I would hope that makes it a lot easier.
I've seen people with these numbers because you get a lot of people with similar names, so not for me. That's always the easiest place. We're on LinkedIn a lot. We run our own podcast network of multiple shows, and so we're building our own audiences for the network as a whole versus trying to do it just for individual shows. We want to drive people back to the site and I say and be able to enjoy because we've got shows covering a bunch of different topics and stuff. Check it out.
And if they ever needed help on the podcast side, they can reach out to me if they want advice. If you're an agency owner, I'm doing some consulting for some agencies and stuff now that I've exited my own. All right, cash, thank you for joining digital coffee marketing brew and sharing your knowledge on SEO, local SEO and podcast. Hey, it's great to be here. I love going on other people's shows. And thank you as always.
Please subscribe to this podcast of all your favorite podcasting apps with five star review. It has helped with the rankings, but join us next week as we're talking with great father in the pr and marketing industry. All right, guys, stay safe. Get to understand your SEO, and if you're in the podcasting industry, that and Google Maps, make sure you're on top of that. See you next week. Later.