Listen
Growth, Marketing, & SEO with Matthew Barby
Matthew Barby is one of our 5 favorite marketers. He’s not an “inspirational guru“. He’s a dude who actually does SEO, marketing, and research and talks about the tactics that work…and, more importantly, what doesn’t. He’s basically the anti-Gary Vee (sorrynotsorry, Gary).
Today, we’re serving up a presentation that Matthew gave to Canva. In it, he talks about marketing fatigue, SEO, and gives a ton of great marketing advice.
You know what? Enough intro. We’re just gonna dive right in.
- (1:02) Every marketing channel eventually suffers fatigue. Take Facebook for example, as more and more marketers dump money into ads, the cost to compete will rise. On top of that, people will just get tired of seeing ads on the platform. Eventually, it’ll get too expensive, and not effective enough, to use anymore.
- (3:30) Don’t become a bag of tricks. Marketers need to understand problems, not just learning simple tricks to fix things.
- (9:06) The framework that Matthew’s team uses to prioritize work.
- (11:45) One of Matthew’s biggest f*** ups. The point he makes here is that marketers have to get used to failure and learn to accept it.
- (15:29) Document everything you do in marketing. We’ll repeat that…document. everything. you. do.
- (18:57) Publishing more content isn’t the key to SEO.
- (21:47) There are 3 sections to SEO: crawling, indexing, and ranking. Understanding all of the sections will make your SEO more effective.
- (22:19) A short case study about Matthew’s team understanding and testing the “crawling” section of SEO.
Confession: today’s Listen is actually a video, but you can just listen to it. It’s definitely worth the listen (or watch).
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Read
10 Things that DO NOT (Directly) Affect Your Google Rankings
Last Friday, Rand Fishkin over at Moz spilled the beans. But, these aren’t the scary kind of beans — this is more Sigh-of-Relief kind of news. Not like this news Facebook dropped Thursday…
Okay, back to the stuff that makes us feel good — Google not givin’ a crap. Well, at least in the sense about things we all thought they cared about. A lot of people are under the assumption that anything ‘n’ everything they do with their website or on the web can have an impact. But so many of those things don’t. Rand talks through ten of them in today’s Read (which can also be watched if that’s your thing.)
Here are just a few:
- The age of your website. Google doesn’t care if you’re old or young. Ain’t that beautiful?
- Whether you do or don’t use Google apps and services. Google ain’t shady like that.
- The tech under your site’s hood. Are you using certain JavaScript libraries like Node or React? One is Facebook. One is Google. If you use Facebook’s, does Google give you a hard time about it? Nope. (Facebook might, due to patent issues… that’s, like, strike #3 Facebook!)
- What about using shared hosting or some of the inexpensive hosting options out there? Does it hurt load speed or up time? No? Then, Google doesn’t care.
- Characters that you use as separators in your title element. Does it matter if that separator is the pipe bar or a hyphen or a colon or any other special character that you would like to use? Nah.
Check out what else Google doesn’t give a crap about. Plus, a string of comments from the community adding even more things that don’t affect your rankings!
Watch
Break Free for Summer (Wait, What?)
The first day of fall was last Friday, but it’s still a sunny, 89 degrees here in Pittsburgh. Kinda hard to get into the spirit of the season when you’re hot af. So we thought we’d bring it back to those lazy, hazy, days of summer with a playful and prismatic ad from June.
Cleverly portraying a town stuck in a Boomerang loop, Bacardi is just what these people need to break free. This ad just screams summer, and if we’re going to be sweating at the end of September, we might as well keep embracing the energy of last season.
“Approach your acquisition strategy as if each of the tactics you use won’t work tomorrow.”
Matthew Barby
