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Learn more about Ben

https://www.skolmarketing.com

Jasna Burza
I’m on Facebook and so, so, so excited, then from coal marketing, welcome to Business Spotlight.

Ben
Well, thank you for having me, it’s great to be here

Jasna Burza
is such a great and timely conversation about marketing in general, because I feel like people, entrepreneurs, business owners in 2022 are like, we’re all our hands are up in the air with the changes in the algorithm, the social media, that what I’m hearing on the streets is like, I just want to pull my hair out, what does it even work for? We’re gonna get there because we have an expert with us, which I’m so excited about. Ben, you have a history. A few of you have worked at Google. And then you just had this idea to create this incredibly innovative agency here, here in Twin Cities. Tell me about it.

Ben
Yeah, so I’m actually born and raised here in Minnesota. And it’s kind of crazy saying this 12 years ago, now, I got hired by Google to start the first and only, you know, even to this point, Minnesota based Google team. And so our job was to put a face to Google really kind of make relationships, you know, make an out of it, I’ll be honest, it was a blessing, to be able to work for them, to learn from them. And to kind of be able to kind of just pick up all of that information that was kind of out there. Ultimately, what ended up happening is they decided to kind of restructure, and so it was more regional teams instead of state teams. And so even though I loved my time there, I became a Google certified speaker, I travel the country, I was going to begin traveling, doing Google Events, speaking events, working with people here. But ultimately, my job was going to go to San Francisco, I didn’t want to move because I do love Minnesota. And so I decided to start my own company with my current business partner who actually worked with that Google, Marty McTigue. And so both of us decided to say, hey, you know, really one of the biggest things that that, you know, came to us and the reason that we started school marketing is we were doing workshops, we’re doing webinars, and we were even trying to show people how to do all this stuff. And people kept coming up to be saying, Ben, honestly, I really appreciate that no one’s ever explained SEO, digital marketing, social media in a way that I actually understood. Not only you know how I should do it, but also why I should be doing it. But also Ben, at the end of the day, I still don’t want to do it anymore, can I hire you to kind of do this. So we kept getting people asking me and me working at Google, there wasn’t just an opportunity to do that. So in the back of my mind, I really thought and really, if you look at the landscape, 1012 years ago, you know, there was a lot of this, Hey, if I’ve got a good idea, and I can teach you how to do something, I’ve got to keep it to myself, or I’ve got to charge for it. I really thought the opposite of you know, again, Google’s whole motto, which is information should be free. And you know, again, having confidence in what we could offer someone. So we went out there and said, Great, hey, we’ll show you how to do this, we’ll teach you how to do that. And for those people that are that then would say, Hey, I understand that. But I want to work with an expert. I want to work with someone that cares that knows what they’re doing. I want to work with you guys. And that’s what we started school marketing. 10 years ago, we’re actually celebrating 10 years coming up next month. And so we’re very excited about it. And that’s really kind of how school marketing was birthed.

Jasna Burza
Oh, congratulations. That’s a feat. I love that. And, you know, I feel like you’ve gotten that message where we’re really, you know, people like Gary Vaynerchuk are talking about now. It’s like, you know, just put it out there and help people. And you still do that, because you still hold workshops, you still hold events where you’re constantly teaching people. But, you know, let’s talk about the web presence in SEO search engine optimization ranking on Google, because, frankly, it’s so over our head. So it feels like I understand why people want to hire you. I never there to do something like that myself. It seems technical. It seems complicated. I started my business not to mess with that. Right. But it is a necessary step. How do people find you? So would you just give us a brief, you know, an explanation. So why does Search Engine Optimization still matter? In 2022? And in what ways?

Ben
Yeah, well, so perfect. There’s a few things that I think can kind of help here. So when we’re talking about why does it matter? Or why should it still be something that you should be concerned about is that if your product or service or your business, you know, is essentially offering something that someone would be searching for online? That’s ultimately what SEO is SEO is someone searching for your products and services and don’t know you exist? So the best way to comprehend how you actually build up SEO and how you essentially start ranking number one is to think about search engine optimization as having a long term business relationship with Google. Any long term business relationship doesn’t happen overnight. And there’s a Usually a couple of phases. I’m sure we’ve all been to a networking meeting. And we’ve had that one person kind of come to us, and they’re almost trying to be our best friend. And then we don’t even know like, you’re like, hey, I don’t even know what you do exactly, and you’re trying to sell me on it. That’s honestly, what ends up happening. A lot of times with people trying to build a relationship up with Google is that they go to like that face to mark, which is theirs, trying to say, hey, Google, let’s be best friends. And Google’s like, Hey, man, I’m sorry. But I really don’t even know who you are. Let’s you need to begin start from the basics here. And that’s ultimately what we kind of teach. And so to give you guys just some very basics. So beyond just thinking of, you know, SEO as a long term business relationship with Google, really, you can break SEO down into three different types of SEO in done in two different phases. So the three different types of SEO are going to be front end optimization, back end optimization, and off site optimization. So front end is when you go to a website, all of the wording, everything that you can touch and feel and kind of see and interact with as a user, that’s going to be front end optimization, back end optimization is going to be this one’s usually the little trickier one, because this is sometimes dealing with coding or setting or metadata, you know, some of those things that we’ve kind of heard of backlinks, all of that kind of stuff that kind of happens behind the scenes. And but last but not least, is also off site optimization. That’s anything that is not your website, but pointing to it. So your YouTube account, your Facebook account, your Google business, profile account, all of those things. The reason I like to kind of, you know, again, point that out is a lot of times people just think that back end optimization, that tricky stuff with the coding, tricking stuff with all of that kind of stuff, is what makes up SEO. And really, it’s a really important piece, but it’s only a third of it. And so sometimes when we approach it, and we kind of break it down, realizing that, hey, if I write blogs, if I write service pages, if I write pages for different locations, that’s front end optimization, if I set up Facebook, if I get reviews on my Google listing, all those kinds of things that’s off site optimization. So it’s really important to kind of understand those three different types. And then the two different phases is going to be, you know, foundational SEO, and then ongoing relational SEO. And I know I’m kind of giving you guys kind of the quick, you know, Megan kind of tidbits here. But really, just to kind of break that down. Foundational is essentially you introducing yourself to Google so that Google knows what you do, where you do it and who you do it for, you would do this, for instance, by creating service pages like that, that’s the number one thing we tell you to begin customers is if you’re not ranking well, on your site, most most often, you either don’t have enough content, or the right content. And again, content is usually pages. So always think about it like this. So let’s use school marketing. As an example, I wouldn’t just have one service page that listed a bullet point or a paragraph saying that school marketing does Web Development Services, SEO Services, ad services, or social media, I could have one of those pages, but they better link to a page that then goes more in depth. The thinking is this is if you just have one page on your site that has all your services. This is what ends up happening when someone searches for you is, say you for snow removal service. But you also do fall cleanup, and you do irrigation systems and things like that. If you just have one page that lists all your services, someone in your area may be searching for snow removal. Well, what happens though, is that they’re all on one page, Google goes, Hey, I’ve got a result here. But your match is only 1/3 of the content. So it’s not the best, whereas then is it you the business owner, you take that third of that content, that was snow removal. And now you make it one full page who goes, Hey, I’ve got a match for you. And it’s 100% match to this page. Let me show you X, Y and Z snowplowing. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do here is again, that’s how we’re communicating this, you know, again, what we do, where we do it and who we do it for to Google. Then once we’ve got that a lot of times foundational SEO can almost be a one time thing once we get you know, everything cleaned up. You know, of course we want to do things like making sure Google Analytics is set up making sure your social media is set up all of those things. And then honestly, that that phase two, which is what we call ongoing or relational SEO, that’s now building up that trust with Google, you know, the why, why Google should pick you and rank you above another competitor. And we do that by having more results for them, which a lot of times means more content, or better results and better content more specific, as well as building up trust. So then then really you shift towards content creation, and that’s the key of the game right now. And that can come in the form of blogs, white papers, infographics, videos, social media, reviews, all of these things. Is are considered content pieces. But that’s really how we try to explain SEO and break it down for people to understand

Jasna Burza
that was honest to God. So brilliant. I have never heard it so succinctly in such a short amount of time, like I just had an aha moment when he when he talked about something, and I have been doing SEO for 12 years, right. And I’m working with people to do SEO for me. So that was brilliant. Ben, thank you. Brilliant. Two questions. We live in a world of tick tock, and video and social media. And a lot of my clients do not even go on a desktop to look for services. They look for hashtag on their on their social media, which is an interesting concept that seemingly shift right toward a search engine optimization. But that said off site, are you seeing that trend? Right, and how do we optimize for that off site? How do we get found? Secondly, you know, there seems to be the blogs are going out of business, right? Blogs still a relevant thing in SEO.

Ben
So yeah, so great. Two questions there. So the first point about, you know, again, kind of the shift in user behavior, yes, we absolutely are seeing a shift in user behavior. But I will say sometimes I do think it’s a little exaggerated than what you know, meaning that, you know, we’re getting to a realm where there is a pretty significant amount of people that do both, or either or, but that they’re not high enough or low enough, where you shouldn’t, you know, again, be putting an effort to both of them. And so ultimately, what we’re kind of finding out and also, there’s different industries, like for instance, the easiest one just kind of split up is B to C is absolutely going to be, you know, trending faster in the way that we’re kind of talking about with, you know, searching via hashtags, and being on the different types of platforms with, you know, stories and Tik Tok and just social media, then you are b2b. But even if we break those down even further, a lot of times, you know, it makes kind of sense, things that are more socially connected. So, you know, your health and beauty your, you know, again, travel industries, you know, again, those that are just more socially connected, or just socially related to everyday life, those are also going to be growing at a faster rate. But that also doesn’t mean that, again, everybody has kind of, you know, again, gotten to that point. And then we can even break things even down further from even age demographics, looking at different generations, you know, the way that a baby boomer searches is going to be different than even Gen X, which sometimes gets forgotten about to then millennials to Gen Z. And so I think the bigger thing here is realizing that, yes, user behaviors are changing. And unfortunately, what that kind of means as a marketer, is we almost need to be doing more than what we were kind of previously, because we need to be in more spots, which means more content, which means more work. And so it is I’m not gonna lie, sometimes a frustrating conundrum, because we need to balance all of this out. But it does help though, if you were to take a step back and really start to look at okay, am I b2b or b2c? Okay, who’s my main demographic, from age to gender to, you know, again, likes, dislikes, and look at it that way. Because obviously, we all have only so many resources of time, energy and budget. And so we need to be cognizant about ROI return on investment, what’s going to give us the most. So that’s how I would kind of explain that a little bit is that you are absolutely correct, that we are seeing that kind of shift. But also at the same point is, I don’t think it’s necessarily just leaving SEO behind. It’s just almost like a new age and a sense of what we’ve seen, you know, again, previously with with social media, and SEO in that realm.

Jasna Burza
Got it. So if you know, if we’re doing social media, should I one of our hashtags always be half side? Our name?

Ben
Yes, I always say that because you know, what’s kind of nice about that is one, as I’m sure you know, is you can’t really own a hashtag. So I always tell people is you’re almost doing some of your own branding. And it allows you to be able to kind of do that. So the short answer is yes, in that realm.

Jasna Burza
Okay, I love that this is such an interesting conversation, because we’re just all so overwhelmed. And there is, you know, someone that I really follow quite a bit is Gary Vaynerchuk, who is you know, content is king content has always been the king. But he’s saying now, you should be posting up to 15 to 20 posts, you know, a pieces of content every single day. And we’re all just like scratching our head right here from a perspective of, you know, a true professional, that they’re really helped because what I have noticed with a lot of my friends really take that route, is that very quickly they skyrocket. It’s brilliant, right? Because so I don’t know if it’s, if it’s the they’re serious, intentional about the content or is it just sheer amount of it, it just explode. odds?

Ben
Yep. Well, I do think that there’s a little bit of both, you know, mean, like just even like, and I know, you asked a question about blogging, we’ll get into that too. But even like when we, when blogging was much bigger than it was now, there was a little bit of qualitative versus quantitative. And so you’re always balancing those, you obviously need a little bit of both. But both of them actually do have some value there. Like you said, sometimes you could just overwhelm the whole algorithms, and you’re just going to kind of get seen because you’re kind of seeing it. But I do think that when we’re talking about like, okay, Ben, you know, or, you know, again, we just heard that you should be maybe posting 10 to 15 times a day, I do think we sometimes need to look at, you know, again, what we’re kind of promoting, and what our brand is like. And so the biggest example I’ll say is for someone like Gary Vee, is that his brand, I know, it’s much bigger, but his brand is a little bit more kind of on the influencer. And he’s kind of himself, when you have this is what I usually tell people, when you have brands that are closer to your personal, you know, Megan, that are more and more personal, your content is usually going to increase as well, that doesn’t mean that your business that you can, that you shouldn’t be creating 1015, you know, again, posts per day, but again, it comes down to ROI. And so it is when we’re trying to be that influencer, when we have a lot of times the the, you know, again, the face to our kind of business, I will say that we tend to see that we need more content. But I would say that, for the most part. And for most people that are listening that honestly, I feel like there’s a lot of open, I’m going to give up before even start to try it 10 to 15, I think the better thing that we’re seeing right now as the algorithms are getting smarter for the quality of content. And that’s why I think you’re seeing Gary Vee and things like that, because here’s my one thing is, I would say two things, post with a purpose, and faces meaning that every time you post, it doesn’t always have to be selling, but there should be some type of purpose kind of behind it, that flows into some marketing campaign, as well as algorithms are getting very, very smart now. And as much as we can, we want to see faces, we want to see that authenticity. And that’s why I’m saying that’s why a lot of times, just you inherently see that with companies, you know, like I think that you’re talking about with your friends, because they’re on the you know, again, they have faces in them. So that’s what I would say is posed with a purpose. And you know, again, faces

Jasna Burza
again, it is you’re just brilliant. I love this conversation so much. I want to before we talk about the your clients and who you work with, really refer you on to talk about blogging. Yes.

Ben
So yeah. So thanks for reminding me. Yeah, you are right, that blogging in general has kind of gone down because it used to be that was really one of our only ways to kind of express ourselves in there. You know, again, even looking at YouTube wasn’t even around really when we started talking early SEO. But here’s what I would say is that a couple things. One is Yes, I will say the value of blogging has gone down. But that doesn’t mean that it’s still not valuable. And so here’s my thing, too, is what I would say is that sometimes having blogs that are a little bit more technical are almost writing for Google, almost like you were talking about just having the quantity, a type of content can definitely type you know, can kind of help and you can even help yourself, if you know, you can hide those kind of we call them unlisted pages, you can kind of hide those in the background. But here’s what I also kind of say, though, is, you know, look at some of your old blogs, look at some of the new videos you’re doing. And the best advice that I can give you though, is repurpose your content. Because again, when we’re talking about being busy, when we’re talking about having limited resources of time, energy and budget, the best thing I can tell you is take one of those off old older blog posts, and let’s make it into a video. Let’s refresh it, let’s make it into an infographic. Or let’s take one of those tic tock videos that you just did or IG TV videos. And now let’s make a blog about let’s make an infographic. So that’s how we kind of approach it, you know, again, from that perspective, as well,

Jasna Burza
I love that you bring up an interesting thing with the changes and the AI that is so intelligent, it’s scary,

Ben
it’s scary.

Jasna Burza
The wouldn’t Google, you know, pick up on this notion were evil if you don’t have to transcribe the videos, but it will just know what the content is. Are we not there yet?

Ben
So we are and we aren’t. So we are there in that Google does that. But we’ve actually seen and we’ve done some case studies and studies have shown though, that it’s kind of funny, you know, obviously, from YouTube and other videos, you can get value. You know, again, there’s SEO value to those. What what we’ve seen though, is if you take the time and actually upload your own transcript, that Google is trusting that more than their own. Now, I do anticipate that to kind of shift here. So even like just a few years ago, it was pretty definitive, that you know, again, like Google if it didn’t, didn’t trust its own kind of, you know, again, translating and just trance, you know, scribing now we’re trying to see though that as they’re starting to do that, you know, yeah, so the, the short answer to that is yes. And into the future that is going to I think exponentially grow where we you know, again, like Google wants to know what’s inside there because really You know, up until maybe a couple years ago, until that really started, you know, again, better technology is it was almost like a black box like Google saw that you did a video on YouTube or a different kind of platform, but really didn’t understand the context of it. And that’s why they always liked the written word more. Well, they’ve also realized that, you know, times have changed, you know, that now, it’s, you know, two thirds of people would rather watch a video than read a, you know, again, webpage. So, you know, again, so with that, so, you know, that’s a long way of saying again, that yes, I would say that it’s, you know, it’s really fastly approaching that just, you know, talking authentically talking there, and getting value out of that, I still always recommend, just in case and until Google actually makes an official announcement on it, that you should upload your own transcription, because again, it’s the written word. And when in doubt, Google usually is going to defer to the written word, because it’s pretty black and white. And they can really, you know, again, read that.

Jasna Burza
I love that I could talk to you for hours, I feel like we should have monthly series on the topic for I would love that. Well, let’s really briefly talk about the kinds of people that work with you know, there’s an assumption like, well, yes, no, I, you know, I don’t make as much money as you, I don’t have a company as big as you, I can’t hire that. And I always explain to people like, what came first chicken or the egg is like you have to invest in in search engine optimization, everyone has to hands down. I mean, it is the thing that I believe has made me successful. And that’s why I’ve been able to rank a number one is life coach in Minneapolis. So who is your clientele? But you know, what is this? Is this like, 10s of 1000s of dollars? or can people who are listening to this who are solopreneurs? Can they reach out to you?

Ben
Yeah, to be honest with you, that’s, you know, that’s who I started with, you know, talking about solopreneurs. That’s why I started school marketing, I wanted to take some of our big level kind of expertise and everything with Google, and make it into affordable kind of option. And also, from a business perspective, knowing that small businesses become big ones. This is why like at school marketing, we don’t do long term contracts. Because again, we know that we put our money where our mouth is in our confidence in our abilities. And we know that we want to build a long term relationship, not just signing you to a piece of paper, say, See after six or 12 months, and we’ll see how it’s going. You know, we can get and that’s a lot of times, unfortunately, how the industry has worked. So I really came out of it, and really kind of turned that in on its own, like, you know, doing free workshops, really telling you how to do my job. But ultimately realizing that again, when when we only have time, energy and budgets, we are going to be restricted, there’s gonna be people that want to work with us. So who we work with is honestly small, to medium sized businesses. So the best word that I can kind of say is, we love to work with founder led companies, what that really means is down to a to a solopreneur. Even down, you know, school marketing, now we have a team of 20, we work with some people that are still founder led doesn’t mean we have to work with a founder. But when you have someone that’s founder led, it just is a lot less red tape, like I always joke is if we have to go through six people to change the color blue, the shade of blue on your website, probably just not the best fit. Because we’re all about ROI. We’re all about, you know, Midwest, let’s get stuff done. Let’s do collaboration, and have some fun with it. And so that’s ultimately what we do. So honestly, if you’re out there listening, thinking that you can’t, you know, again, you can’t afford us or can’t do that. I honestly, we have some packages starting at a few $100. And honestly, we do our free workshops, our webinars, our blog posts, and we do that as a way that even if maybe that lowest threshold, you can’t afford yet. Great, well, we still want to help you and be there for you when you are able to. And then of course, then we do work with some larger ones around here, too.

Jasna Burza
I love that. And like I mentioned earlier, I have a number of clients who have had the pleasure of working with you, and they’re still working with you. And they’re very, very pleased with with the attention to detail that you have offered. So it’s a great like, even though I haven’t had the pleasure of working with you, I’ve heard that they’ve had a great experience, which is always really wonderful to hear that for just their reputation. Again, it’s folks, if you’re listening to this, this was a really brilliant conversation, man. And I for all of you who are listening right now, or will be listening to this later on YouTube or any of the other channels, it is imperative that you invest if you want to grow in business in search engine optimization on site, which is what site, right? And then also off site, which is social media. And these are all the things that again, dip your feet, right? There’s so many free resources. It’s called marketing offers on their website. And then is that the best place that people should reach out to you? Should they reach out to you on LinkedIn? What is the best way to contact you? Yeah. To be

Ben
honest with you, whatever you prefer, again, just with different people’s communication styles and everything we try to be everywhere where you can So, if it’s Facebook, if it’s, you know, again, Instagram or LinkedIn, sure, you know, email or the website, I will say this is IBM again, like, what also makes us a little bit unique at school marketing is everybody that you’re working with is locally here. So we don’t farm things out. And I am actually, you know, again, still, you know, me again, like the number one salesperson and the focal person. The reason I’m saying that is, if you ever have a question, if you ever have an inquiry, it goes directly to me. So filling out that form and stuff like that, and you get to work with someone, you know, again, like me, and obviously my other you know, Megan teammates, so whatever you prefer, you know, we have texting opportunities on our website, we have email opportunities, so it would just be finding us at school marketing.com Or like I said, you can always call or text 612787 school, and we’re able to even begin kind of help you from there.

Jasna Burza
Then this has been such a conversation full of insight and joy, I cannot thank you enough. I have to have you back because I there’s so many more questions that I have. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise. And folks, please make sure you reach out to them because your business depends on it.

Ben
Well, again, I really appreciate the time. I hope that you guys took something away. I hope that we do get to help some more people. You guys have a wonderful day in school.

Jasna Burza
Thank you school. Bye then bye