Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond Ecommerce Growth Podcast, host Greg Shuey speaks with Colin Gardiner, co-founder of Long Tail, about programmatic SEO and its potential to scale SEO efforts for marketplaces. Colin shares his background as an economist and experience in various tech companies, including Ancestry.com and Outdoorsy, where he honed his expertise in SEO and marketplace dynamics. Programmatic SEO, as Colin explains, is a method of creating large volumes of content targeting long-tail keywords to drive traffic and conversions at scale. The discussion covers practical strategies for businesses to leverage programmatic SEO, the tools and platforms best suited for implementation, and how this approach can offer a significant competitive advantage for marketplaces and other businesses with location-based or highly varied product/service offerings.
Key Takeaways
- Programmatic SEO at Scale: Programmatic SEO allows businesses to efficiently target large volumes of long-tail keywords, helping brands gain visibility and rank across multiple locations and product types, which traditional SEO methods might not cover.
- Platform Selection Matters: Businesses should choose a scalable platform, such as Shopify or Webflow, to support their programmatic SEO efforts. Some platforms may require additional plugins or technical work to automate page creation and management.
- Content and Automation: Scaling programmatic SEO involves combining AI-driven content generation with human editorial oversight, ensuring high-quality, SEO-optimized pages without the extensive resource requirements of manual content creation.
- Linking and Backlinks: Internal cross-linking and building external backlinks are critical to improving SEO performance. Colin emphasizes the importance of adding links in content (not just headers or footers) to help with crawlability and domain authority.
- Layered Marketing Approach: Programmatic SEO is most effective when paired with other marketing strategies, such as brand-building, PR, and even paid social campaigns, which can generate synergistic effects and amplify overall results.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Colin Gardiner LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colingardiner/
Longtail: https://longtailgrowth.com/
Yonder Ventures: https://www.yonder.vc/
Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/
SEMRush: https://www.semrush.com/
Webflow: https://webflow.com/
Airtable: https://www.airtable.com/
Whalesync: https://www.whalesync.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.464)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond Marketing Growth Podcast. I hope everyone is having a fantastic day today. I’m really excited about our guest today. So I was just recently introduced to Colin Gardner. He is one of the founders of Long Tail and Long Tail is a full service platform for helping marketplaces scale their programmatic SEO.
So I was introduced to Colin from John Doherty, who was a guest about a month ago. And I am excited to dive in and understand the strategy behind programmatic and how it can help brands really scale their SEO. Programmatic is something that is very foreign to me. So this is going to be a really fun discussion. I’m excited to listen and learn from Colin. Colin, thank you so much for spending some time with us this morning.
Colin (00:59.498)
Of course, I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Greg Shuey (01:01.654)
Awesome. Absolutely. So before we jump in, could you just take a few minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your history, your personal story, and the steps you’ve taken to get to where you are today.
Colin (01:17.814)
Yeah, I’d love to. So I’m an economist by training. So that’s a hearken way back to the dawn of time in college. I took a microeconomics class and it changed my life. And I really felt at home in that. And it felt like what I wanted to learn and do. And so I got a economics and math degree and graduated college and went and worked at the Federal Reserve in San Francisco.
And I worked for Janie Ellen, who now runs the treasury. And I had the really cool job of studying the US labor market during the great financial crisis and understanding why none of my friends and fellow students could get jobs. So that was what I did. But it really started me into this world of marketplaces. Economics really is the study of economies. also, are underlying all those is marketplaces, buying and selling, demand and supply.
And from there, just, you know, I got a job in San Francisco in the early two thousands and it’s hard to throw a stone in that neck of the woods and not get into tech. and so I was, going to go get my PhD, in econ. but I met my wife and decided I didn’t really want to be poor, doing a PhD program in the Bay area at Berkeley. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (02:38.458)
I probably decided that for you, right?
Colin (02:40.638)
No, no, she, she was super supportive either way I wanted to do, but I was like, you know, maybe I don’t want to go that route. and so I, I went out and started applying for jobs and tech and was like, wonder if someone will hire like, someone that does numbers and analytics and things like that. And it just was right around when people were starting to throw around the terms, big data, data science. And so I got a job very quickly and it happened to be for marketplace, called just answer, which was a horizontal marketplace or is.
Where’s on a marketplace where you can ask a doctor or lawyer of that. can ask a priest for confession. can do fortune telling, you can do it all. the whole kitten caboodle. and so that’s where I cut my teeth on online marketplaces. And I’m like, these are super cool and super powerful businesses where, know, if you can connect supply and demand, you can do really cool things. and you can grow really infinitely. And so from there ended up going to ancestry.com. We talked a little bit this.
pre-show, know, in your neck of the woods in Utah, that didn’t spend a lot of time there. and really what I managed there was everything by button forward, on the product side. And that had a lot of SEO involved with it. and really spent a lot of time with like marketing and growth, from a product perspective and how to support that. And so that was really kind of like the first foundations of this, programmatic, SEO and where I really got to understand the opportunity set there. from there, I went to tripping.com, which is a.
Greg Shuey (03:52.308)
Mm-hmm.
Colin (04:08.278)
vacation, real aggregator, again, you know, something where you wanted to rank for many different keywords across many different geographies at scale. after that went to outdoorsy, which is like Airbnb for our bees. again, wanted to rank for, you know, terms across everything. And then, after leaving there about two years ago, I am, didn’t know what I wanted to do. I started advising and sold a bunch of marketplaces.
Greg Shuey (04:14.508)
Yeah.
Colin (04:34.114)
And what was clear is that a lot of people wanted to do programmatic SEO. They just didn’t know how to do it, nor did they have the budget or the expertise in house to go do it. And so it just happened to be around that time. had another co-founder of mine, a former coworker at Al Doursey plus some other places who was like looking to do the same thing. And we were like, let’s go solve this once and for all with AI. And it just was auspicious timing.
Greg Shuey (04:40.109)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (04:58.102)
Let’s go.
Peace.
Colin (05:03.104)
At the same time, also realized that lots of early stage marketplaces and companies also need funding and don’t have money. And so I’ve also launched my own venture fund, which focuses exclusively on early stage marketplaces called Yonder. If you want to check it out, yonder.vc. But yeah, we really fund early stage marketplaces. two very, I would call synergistic businesses. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (05:29.442)
That’s awesome. That’s quite the story, quite the history. That’s amazing. So let’s just jump in. I mean, because we probably have listeners on here who have heard of programmatic SEO and they don’t know what the heck it is. So what is it and how does it differ from traditional search engine optimization?
Colin (05:52.768)
Yeah. So I kind of consider programmatic SEO is like just a subset of the overall big picture of, Hey, my brand, my website, whatever it may be, a company, whatever your entity is kind of your footprint on the internet, you know, and I kind of view Google searches like this canvas, right. And this like landscape of keywords and searches and really just entry points into different things. And programmatic SEO is really a way.
to essentially carpet the internet around the terms that you want people to find you for. And specifically around this very long tail, hence the name of the company, of keywords where traditionally you may not see enough volume to go write a blog post specifically about that thing. And to do that and do it at scale requires some expertise. So programmatic SEO to me is really about
defining a strict keyword set and then some permutations with it, whether it’s location or different modifiers and really rolling those out kind of at scale with a template. And so that’s what I consider programmatic SEO. And we can go into more specifics on examples of it, but that’s the gist.
Greg Shuey (07:03.33)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Shuey (07:12.824)
Cool. So for a brand who is brand new, they know they need it, right? They’ve got so many pages and so many locations. Where should they start? What should those foundational elements look like in order for them to be successful?
Colin (07:30.198)
Yeah, I think, you know, there’s probably a lot of opinions on the SEO community of how to start. Obviously, you know, have a homepage domain that, that work. I think one of the things that’s under weighted is, you know, a lot of people go for a domain name that they really love. Maybe on a, you know, TLD that they. Isn’t the best like.io or whatever it might be.biz or, and those are fine. And like Google does.
Greg Shuey (07:53.24)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Colin (08:00.706)
treat them more fairly now. But I think one of the things that really for folks I say is like, try and go buy a domain that’s been around a long time doing what you’ve done or pretty closely associated with it. So that’s a pretty like, I think easy hack to starting to rank faster just because Google has history. You know, it’s just like, like anything, if you know someone and you have some rapport, you’re more likely to trust them. So it’s that.
Greg Shuey (08:23.806)
my favorite conversation to have with prospects is, your website’s two months old, you’re probably not going to rank very fast.
Colin (08:31.774)
Exactly. So that’s one piece of it. the next piece is, would say is backlinks in general. Like, can you get, I kind of view it as like a bibliography, right? Like do people reference you like as a trusted source? And if not, then you probably are, you know, it’s going to be harder to rank in Google, but if you can go get those citations and kind of get those continually, it’ll really help. So those are kind of like two big picture things that I see that really help people be successful.
Now flipping over to like the actual content on the website, there’s kind of two buckets. One, would put more in like this, like, what I would call like blog content slash long form content, where you maybe write about a query, something like, how much does it cost to do X, Y, Z, or what is the value of this or how to find this? You know, like a lot of different queries like that where
You may want to write a long form piece just specifically addressing that. And then there’s what I consider your money terms. Right. So let’s say you’re an e-commerce website selling widgets, right. And they’re kind of localized. Like you want to sell them in particular geos. You might say, you know, you might want to rank for buy widget in St. Louis by widget in salt Lake, you know, so on and so forth. And so all of sudden you realize, well, I need a page for every city that I can service, hopefully every city in the world. Right.
Greg Shuey (09:31.895)
Yeah.
Colin (09:58.034)
And so programmatic SEO, what you need to do then is be able to like stamp out all those pages and have unique content on them, whether it’s like unique listings of what you’re selling or even unique written content. So the foundations like typically are going to be like having a good platform too, like whether it’s like Shopify, you know, we see a lot of people on Web below and WordPress as well. You know, picking a good platform where you can actually scale is
probably one of the most important things from day one.
Greg Shuey (10:28.972)
there’s some platforms that you absolutely don’t recommend.
Colin (10:32.8)
I don’t want to speak ill of anyone. I, know what, it really comes down to, technical expertise, right? So if you are a, you know, founder owner, business owner, that’s like technical, you know, do whatever you want, you know, like whatever works for you. But if you’re non-technical, you’re really probably going to want to like specifically around e-commerce, like Shopify, it’s like hard to beat. If you’re more marketplace style though.
you know, obviously Shopify can do that, but I wouldn’t say it’s as like built out. Yeah. So there’s, there’s platforms like share tribe. there’s another one, a really cool new one that has a little bit more of a social commerce angle to it called district.net. that’s like former Snapchat folks. it’s a really cool product. There’s a lot of like, you know, bigger platforms out there to run marketplaces on too. so.
Greg Shuey (11:05.144)
Definitely not as easy to use.
Colin (11:28.971)
The list goes on and we could add them to the show notes. yeah, know, overall though, like I think a lot of people could get away with like Shopify is like a pretty good starting spot.
Greg Shuey (11:38.008)
Cool, awesome. So when you look at all the different kind of businesses out there who could benefit from programmatic, what types of businesses or what industries do you see benefit the most from a programmatic approach and why?
Colin (11:53.632)
Yeah. So I think that like the straight down the fairway easiest to understand is anything that has like a key term, like their money term, like, you know, rent or buy X, Y, Z thing, plus location. I think those are the easiest to understand, right? Like you, you know, and it doesn’t even have to be goods. It can also be services. like, think, like anything home services is like a perfect fit for programmatic SEO.
Greg Shuey (12:21.432)
Pest control, lawn care, whatever.
Colin (12:23.2)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, and those are really interesting because they actually can be even more localized than searches than say like, outdoorsy, know, we were like RV rentals. So it would be like RV rental people search RV rental plus city name. They really wouldn’t go any lower than like that. They wouldn’t pick a neighborhood. They wouldn’t pick a zip code, but for like things like roof repair and things like that, people actually search zip code for roof repairs and things like that. So.
Greg Shuey (12:43.608)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Shuey (12:50.334)
Interesting.
Colin (12:51.532)
So it really depends on what you pick, right? Or what your area of focus is. But people can get hyper local. And so that’s where, like, if you have really good programmatic setup, you can actually rank for every zip code term as well, you know? And so I think that’s, you know, just figuring out the search pattern in your space is really important to kind of help dictate it. But definitely location-based searches are really important.
Greg Shuey (13:12.344)
So if I’m thinking back to like consumer product companies, we’re looking at people, brands who have like a lot of storefronts across the entire United States that have a geographic location. Those would be a really good candidate.
Colin (13:26.336)
Yeah. The other like big segment I would say is things that have a lot of like permutations. so like one of the clients that we, work with is in the sticker space or like printing space. And so there’s like a ton of permutations around band sticker, you know, car sticker, you know, like there’s just a ton of long tail permutations around that. We also have clients, you know, in like the home goods space and there’s a ton of permutations around blankets.
Greg Shuey (13:46.921)
Interesting.
Yeah.
Colin (13:56.37)
and blankets types, also blanket materials and how the blankets made, you know. so it could be like vegan. could be hemp. could be, know, like there’s just a women owned so on and so forth. There’s a ton of permutations there, which make programmatic just perfect.
Greg Shuey (14:11.202)
Yeah, got it. Okay, cool. All right, so once you’ve identified you’re a good candidate, like how do you approach keyword research and content creation differently than just someone who doesn’t really qualify for programmatic? I would imagine it’s pretty resource intensive.
Colin (14:30.57)
Yeah. mean, I think like just talking a little bit about the resource and intensive piece of it. think that’s a lot of why we built long tail was one people in house are like, okay, hey, I want to go rank for a thousand. I make a thousand pages to rank essentially for roughly a thousand terms. Let’s call it right. Like, I want to rank for every major city in the United States plus my term. Okay. Well, that’s great. Now I have to like.
Greg Shuey (14:38.156)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Shuey (14:48.834)
Yep. Yep.
Colin (14:58.39)
Does my platform allow me to just upload a list and it just auto-populates that? Typically, no. There are ways to do that with like, I at least know how to do it with WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, less so. And we’ve actually, we actually built a plugin for Shopify to be able to do this because it is a limitation there. So we have an app for that. But yeah, so that’s like the first thing to figure out is like within your platform, how do you even go about doing this?
So Webflow has like collections. The issue then becomes around how to manage the content on those pages, the listings, but also the written content on those. And so you have to usually have a CMS and a syncing to your platform. So there are ways to do it. It’s just, it requires some technical ability and some gumption, I would say.
Greg Shuey (15:44.984)
Hmm.
Colin (15:54.006)
But under your question about like the keywords and like figuring that out. So everything to me comes around user behavior and intent. Right. So the better you understand what people are looking for, the better off you are. And so I always try to get people to go back to first principles of like, what, what is the pattern people are after? and so for example, at outdoorsy people would search, you know, RV rental plus location. That’s what they would serve. And,
So that’s what we really anchored around. Other spaces, you know, they may have a different search pattern around like, you know, like in the travel space, it can be like really varied. It’ll be like rooms for rent, hotels in like, know, and so those all have actually very different intents and very different purposes. And so like Airbnb is like definitely goes after a room for rent term, whereas Airbnb
like probably doesn’t do as well on a hotel term, right? And so you need to figure out what of all of the search patterns out there is like your right fit and kind of like colloquially makes sense. So for e-commerce, usually it’s like product name plus, you know, some other permutations like location or whatever it might be, you know, for sale or for rent, those are unusual, typical modifiers. So figure that out and then say, okay, like of that key term, like,
For example, RV rental, like we knew we wanted to get every permutation of city. But then we also learned that people search for the class types of RVs. So it was like ABC, camper van, exactly. And so then we’re like, okay, well, we actually want all those permutations plus all the locations, right? Yeah. And so that’s where it balloons in a good way, right? And then all of a sudden you have this amazing footprint.
Greg Shuey (17:29.58)
Yep. Travel trailer. Yeah. Yep.
Greg Shuey (17:40.256)
my goodness. Yeah.
Colin (17:46.434)
across all of these high value keywords because people with that go to that detail of searching are highly intended to know what they want. And that’s why programmatic is so valuable is you’re catching this long tail of people with high intent. And so in aggregate, makes sense to do that, to capture that volume. Whereas if you just looked at an individual keyword, you’d be like, there’s 30 people searching this a month. Like why bother? But when you aggregate a thousand of those pages, 30 to 50 people searching a month.
Greg Shuey (17:55.042)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (18:10.189)
Yeah.
Colin (18:15.402)
and like a pretty high conversion rate. Yeah. Then you’re like, okay, this makes a lot of sense.
Greg Shuey (18:15.682)
You get some serious scale.
Greg Shuey (18:20.92)
Got it. Okay, cool. From a content perspective, are you like leaning heavily into AI to help you kind of scale that? I mean, I can’t imagine someone’s writing that content from scratch.
Colin (18:34.018)
Yeah. Well, you’d be surprised when we were out of Dorsey, we actually had a whole team. And when I was at Tripping as well, we had like whole teams that did this outsource writers and it was expensive. It was hard to manage ops heavy, do not recommend it anymore in the age of AI. What we do is we kind of have a, like a tiered system, I would say is, and like you mentioned, John Doherty. he, they run an editing business. and so they, that’s a good example of like.
Greg Shuey (18:41.332)
my gosh. Yeah.
Colin (19:02.698)
something in the tiering that you would need is basically what we do with our system is we try to create like you know, an LL like an LLM specifically by client and pull in lots of interesting data. like whether it’s competitor data, like content or customer interviews, or even just interviewing their customer service person for frequently asked questions and then putting that in. ragging data into the model.
And then producing AI content on top of that in a very formulaic way. like specifically, like here are the bullet points we need to hit for this. and we spent a lot of time iterating on it. And then we actually have a human editing team that’s like optimized around SEO. and so that’s like, that makes it amazing. and then, you know, push up and edit, you know, and publish.
Greg Shuey (19:53.048)
Cool. So that kind of leads me into our next question is the automation side of this, right? Like what other tools or technologies would you recommend to make that process as tight and as efficient as possible for someone who’s getting into programmatic?
Colin (19:57.9)
Mm-hmm.
Colin (20:08.704)
Yeah. I mean, look, it’s hard to, hard to go wrong with chat GPT on, all of this, think for, keyword research, you know, think pretty interchangeable SCM rush, refs. prefer refs, just for like keyword research and understanding competitive research, pulling down those things. but realistically a nice combination of those, of like refs and,
Greg Shuey (20:12.087)
Right?
Colin (20:36.642)
Chat GPT can produce like a whole keyword set for you, like pretty easily. And some of the like the, I would say more manual solutions outside of long tail out there, you could probably put all your keyword sets into a database and then use like, just functions, whether it’s in Google sheets or an air table to like, like permutate and create all the variables that you need and the values you need. So that’s probably what I would do. There’s also another, service called whale sync, which
Greg Shuey (20:59.021)
Yeah.
Colin (21:05.738)
If you connect to Airtable, can also connect to Webflow and then sync your data. like that is a one way to, that would be like the DIY version of it. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (21:16.044)
Yeah. That’s awesome. I’ll tell you what our show notes and links are going to be super long today. We’ve got a lot of tools to share. That’s awesome. Cool. Awesome. Well, can you share a success story where programmatic SEO led to significant traffic growth and revenue for a business?
Colin (21:39.03)
of course I’ve the list goes on. I think one of the, know, an interesting business to look at is land trust. it’s like the Airbnb of land for, hunting, fishing, you know, really recreation. And, you know, they did a really great job early on bringing on really unique supply, you know, going out, convincing landowners, put their land on and make it accessible to people. Cause you know, traditionally private land is not accessible. That’s the.
Greg Shuey (21:54.848)
Interesting.
Colin (22:08.705)
private.
Greg Shuey (22:09.08)
Sure. I mean, you can assess it. You might get shot, but, you know.
Colin (22:12.488)
Exactly. So you’re paying not to get shot. So they did this wonderful job of collecting this really amazing assets. And I think for them and for most people, programmatic SEO is not some skill set that just is obvious or that you know about. And so I got the pleasure of working with them as our first client at Long Tail. they’re a great team. basically
Greg Shuey (22:31.362)
Yeah.
Colin (22:41.472)
rolled out a programmatic SEO strategy where we got to rank for basically every species plus state for hunting. And so like, you know, it’s a huge list of all these things and then different activities. And they have, I don’t think I can say the exact amount they’ve grown, they’ve, you hundreds of percent year over year just on that volume alone. And it’s highly profitable, right? So once you pay the piper on it,
Greg Shuey (22:53.089)
Wow.
Colin (23:09.59)
You know, you have relatively fixed costs and then you’re just pulling in traffic as an annuity. And so it can be really, this is a huge lifeblood for the business and really change the whole like, profitability structure behind the business. And I think that’s like what’s really exciting for me. And so we learned it outdoorsy too. Like, you know, once we started ranking number one for all the RV rental terms, just, the business took off.
Greg Shuey (23:11.725)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (23:32.386)
Yeah. So after you build the page structure, after you build the content engine, like what does maintenance look like? And you’ve got to continue to build links into the website and into certain sections and pages. Like what does that look like?
Colin (23:46.478)
Yeah, the, I’d say the, after programmatic generation, it’s actually like not that bad. I think kind of the cycle that we see is you’d launch it. It doesn’t immediately take off. It’s like usually, you know, Google’s slow. That’s like, that’s their thing. That’s their stick. but one of the things that we recommend immediately is starting to cross-link across your site and finding tons of contextual ways to cross-link between all the different.
Greg Shuey (23:50.353)
Yeah.
Colin (24:15.49)
content in your site. Like that is like the number one thing we recommend. And as soon as we see people add links to their homepage, to their other key pages, not in like the nav or the footer, but like actually in the body of the homepage, massive improvements for just crawlability. you know, it’s like, it’s like the, could add the same links in the footer and the header and they wouldn’t have the same impact as Adam in the body.
Greg Shuey (24:27.256)
Yeah, interesting. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (24:39.288)
and then you add it into the body content, boom.
Colin (24:41.556)
Yeah. And then going back through all of your old blog content, adding contextual links where you might mention location or permutations, like any of those keywords, and then backlink into your programmatic pages. You know, any and all cross-linking between the site that’s contextual is really valuable. And that really the purpose is to spread domain authority. And then like you said, like the external backlink building is just so, it’s still so powerful. I know people say it isn’t and people don’t.
Yeah, maybe Google doesn’t want you to do it, but it is like, you know, maybe it’s an unpopular opinion, but I think in the age of AI, backlinking will become way more important again than it was before, mostly because so many people can create content and it’s hard to discern who’s expert. So if you can get proper backlinking from other trusted sources, it does really signify how valuable that content is. So.
Greg Shuey (25:10.956)
Those people don’t know SEO.
Greg Shuey (25:24.65)
So yep.
Colin (25:40.098)
That’s my counterintuitive back linking is not dead.
Greg Shuey (25:47.48)
And I guess kind of one last one in relation to kind of our discussion today is, you we just talked about back linking. What, what role does content like building blog content and resources? Like how does that play into programmatic strategy and helping those programmatic pages rank better?
Colin (26:06.944)
Yeah, totally. I think they really fill in the gaps around things that programmatic probably isn’t the best for like very specific query type searches. So I personally, and I also think that like head terms versus like long tail terms tend to be better suited for like longer form content. That’s not like, that’s a generality. It’s not like always a given, but I think that tends to be the case. And so what I really like
Greg Shuey (26:12.791)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (26:23.224)
Mm-hmm.
Colin (26:34.656)
doing is viewing the blog content as like a hub and spoke to those programmatic pages where you can start layering in really relevant, like query type blog articles, and then back linking or cross linking to all of the other like programmatic pages. And so really giving contextual linking for terms that are really related. And so just increasing your footprint across all the things that matter. And then the other thing is that like the
I find that the blog content, may be reaching a person that’s a little bit different point in their purchasing path where they’re a little less intended. So they may just be in the, you know, in the, like the find out phase and. Yeah. And then being able to point them to the programmatic pages as a user path, you know, is a good one because that’s really where they can keep building their intent. And then also when they go search for that particular term, they see your brand, around that thing. And that’s just a virtuous cycle.
Greg Shuey (27:10.488)
Sure. Yep.
higher funnel.
Greg Shuey (27:33.016)
Awesome. So kind of wrapping things up and closing out our episode, you know, we know as we’ve witnessed over the last 20, 30 years, Google likes to change things really fast. They like to change the way that they display search results on a SERP. We’ve seen that in e-commerce like nothing I’ve ever seen over the last 12 months. So looking to the future, how do you see programmatic
SEO evolving? Like how do you see things needing to change to adapt to the way that Google lays out search engine results pages? What trends should brand owners and marketers be aware of as they start to sit down and map this out over the next few years?
Colin (28:20.49)
Yeah, I think it may sound very basic, but I think always doing things in the best interest of the user, right? Is really what keeps you in the straight and narrow and safe, so to speak, quote unquote. That said how Google shows things in search, like you really have no control over. I.
do feel like worrying about it is like a little bit. like, just can’t control it. So it is what it is. But I do think there are opportunities to stay abreast of it and take advantage of it. like, give you an example, this is years ago now, and I’m not suggesting people go do this because it won’t work is, you know, they really wanted to roll out structured data. And so anyone that was a first mover with adding ratings, reviews, any kind of structured data was able to get like huge click through rate increases because Google really wasn’t understanding.
Greg Shuey (29:12.13)
Yep.
Colin (29:18.73)
If it was being spammed. So I think you have opportunity to capture market share. If you stay abreast of the changes and think about it as opportunity rather than an obstacle. If you’re just set in stone on the way you do things and you don’t want to change, well, yeah, for sure. You’re going to get left behind. Right. And then you’re really just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. Yeah, exactly. So I view it as opportunity all the time. Like, I mean,
Greg Shuey (29:41.036)
And you’re praying that nothing changes.
Colin (29:48.438)
You know, in a lot of ways, these snippets at the top of, know, these like, you know, AI snippets or featured content, whatever it is, it’s actually a lot of opportunity for you as a brand to go try and put your content in the way of those things, right. And get referenced. so that’s, that’s my two cents on it.
Greg Shuey (30:07.404)
Love it. Awesome. Colin, that was a fantastic discussion. Do you have any final words, kind of any final thoughts that you’ve been thinking about?
Colin (30:17.61)
think w you know, one piece of advice I would give to people is programmatic SEO isn’t for everyone. Like you may have a narrow subset of keywords or you don’t have people searching for your keyword and that’s fine. That’s okay. Don’t go beat your head against doing this, for sure. But I do think for a lot of people, they’re not leveraging it right now. And it’s like a real opportunity to get.
customer acquisition costs really low. Some upfront costs to be clear, it’s not like it’s free, but it’s like, you know, it’s more, pay once and then you can really hum. The other thing I would say on top of all this that we really see where brands do well is where they pair their link building and with PR and brand building and
It can be really powerful. Like Google puts a lot of weight on people searching for your brand name plus your money terms as well. there was a, when we were out tripping, there was a competitor that actually ran all their TV ads that said search, there were, there still exists today and actually acquired tripping, home to go. It said search home to go Florida search home to glow. And so they basically were just directing people to go into Google and sculpt the search. Yeah. And so.
Greg Shuey (31:14.188)
Mm-hmm.
Greg Shuey (31:19.597)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (31:37.758)
to Google and type a certain term in
Colin (31:42.082)
And so I think there’s a lot of opportunity as brands think about how to do marketing where it isn’t just like, Hey, I’m going to launch organic search. Hey, I’m going to launch paid search. Now I’m going to launch social. have three channels actually really like stress to people. Like what channels can you layer on top of each other that create like exponential effects rather than like just three different lanes, not really talking to each other. And so.
Greg Shuey (32:04.056)
Yeah.
Colin (32:10.434)
If you are going to get into SEO and you really want it to be like this lifeblood of your business, you, what you want to think about is how do you get really strong brand and direct search as well? And a lot of external linking to your site. And how do you maybe leverage other channels to do that? Whether it’s like paid social now, which are not even the organic social now, like using Tik TOK and YouTube that become search engines in of themselves to actually go sculpt search. so that’s my, my parting thought is.
It’s a fun game to play, but use the marketing Lego blocks to stack on top of each other to make something really interesting. That’s the exciting part.
Greg Shuey (32:49.068)
Yeah. I love it. That’s a fantastic stopping point. Thank you so much. And thank you for spending some time with us. I know you’re a busy guy.
Colin (32:58.412)
For you, may make it happen, obviously.
Greg Shuey (33:01.272)
For this random guy you just met, we made it happen.
Colin (33:06.05)
Hey look, if John Doherty says you’re a good guy, that’s good enough for me.
Greg Shuey (33:10.626)
There you go. Well, Colin, thank you so much again. We really, really appreciate you being with us today.
Colin (33:17.218)
Thank you for having me.
Greg Shuey (33:18.496)
Awesome. Well, everyone, we’ve learned a lot today and I hope that you’ve been able to take out a, you know, one or two takeaways that you can then take and start executing. So take what you’ve learned here, make a plan and take massive action. And we only have a couple of months left in the year, so you better take some massive action. We got to generate some revenue here. So thank you everyone for joining.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
