Unbottleneck-Digital-Martketing-Podcast-E1.mp3 was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best audio automated transcription service in 2020. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.
Narrator:
Marketing the casino for business is trying to break through to the frontier of success. These are the voyages of entrepreneurs, dreamers, really naive millennials on a mission to get ridiculously risky, to seek out new traffic to their stores, offices and websites. This is a bottleneck. The market has taken the farthest reaches of online and offline marketing with elite experts, professors and that crazy guy with the weird haircut who has two gazillion Snapchat subscribers and wields a social media influence like a sword from Castle Grayskull, dipped in CBD and lit with a blue flame ready to break through the tough bottlenecks of the market. Welcome to Umbach. Now here’s your host, the nerd of nerds, Steve Weed.
Steve Wiideman:
Hi, this is Steve Wiideman.
Reza Asgari:
And Reza Asgari.
We’re with Unbottleneck, this new podcast to help solve common problems in digital marketing and maybe have some fun. We’re going to be talking to some experts in the digital marketing industry for those businesses who have websites and want to actually make money from their websites as opposed to just kind of throwing it on a business card. We’re also going to be.
Reza Asgari:
As opposed to Etsy.
Steve Wiideman:
Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so as opposed to, you know, some of the questions that will come up and, you know, issues that we hope to solve. I think I think we’re just gonna have a lot of fun and hopefully I hopefully learn some stuff.
Reza Asgari:
Uh, settle down. Nobody said anything about fun around here, OK? I don’t want to have any kinds of fun. We’re talking specifics and we’re going to get into some details. There will be no fun had.
Steve Wiideman:
OK. A deal. So awesome. We we literally just got back from a trip to Brazil where we got to learn a lot about how how up to date Brazil is with current trends. What was interesting is one of the things that we we talked about was this whole voice search thing . We were goofing around about it.
Steve Wiideman:
And I think that Google cuss you out?
Reza Asgari:
Google pretty much was really hurtful about my question. Why does it my dad love me and it made me feel really bad. And now Google is ordering me something from GrubHub because it wants to make it up to me. So I think French fries should be on the way. Thank you, Google.
Steve Wiideman:
So it was it was interesting because the the question came up off of our Brazilians really using Google assistant and Alexa. And when you look at Google Trends, there’s this upward trend of have all these people that are that are interested in it in the U.S., but in Brazil, it flatlined and now it’s finally starting to come back up. So it was it was interesting to see how the world is adopting some of this new this new tech. One of the first topics that I thought we would share for the show is basically just starting right at the top of of SEO or search engine optimization.
Reza Asgari:
That’s not the guy that runs the company, right?
Steve Wiideman:
Seo from Korea? No. OK, yeah, no. But I thought it’d be fun just to just kind of open it up, talk a little bit about what SEO is and, you know, maybe solve some questions and problems that people have when it comes to just approaching the topic. Most businesses still haven’t really heard of it or if they have their little sort of mystified by it, like, I don’t really know if I’m going to sometimes just do myself or if I was to hire a company to do it for me or do I build a whole team, you know? And so it gets really interesting. But I think I think at the end of the day, when they all look at all these businesses, when they look at their their actual web analytics, they’re going to find that 60 to 80 percent of their traffic, especially small businesses, comes from Google.
Reza Asgari:
So what you’re basically saying is that the SEO is essentially the Shoeless Joe Jackson in this Field of dreams. And you are the Kevin Costner?
Steve Wiideman:
I’m definitely–
Reza Asgari:
Essentially, like the people are told if you build it, they will come, but they’re not sure if they will come. So they’re not really building it.
Steve Wiideman:
Yeah. Yeah, in a way. So and search isn’t just Google searches everywhere, searches, Twitter, Facebook, it’s Reddit.
Reza Asgari:
It’s on a milk box.
Steve Wiideman:
Yeah. It’s true.
Reza Asgari:
It was a show with Leonard Nimoy.
Steve Wiideman:
That’s right. Yeah, so.
Reza Asgari:
They never found Sasquatch. I’m really sad about that.
Steve Wiideman:
I actually saw the Sasquatch thing in Oregon a couple of months ago is pretty amazing. So anyway, so so thinking about search and what the heck SEO is, at the end of the day, it’s about making sure when someone’s searching for your product or your service or anything that is related in terms of maybe some high level questions or or an affinity or an interest that we have content that solves that problem. That means video content in YouTube. That means product content and Amazon. And that means sometimes just solving questions in Google.
Reza Asgari:
So pretty much if somebody’s sitting at home and they type in feet, Google gives them the best options for what kind of weird, lonely, sad things they can do with that,
Steve Wiideman:
Right? Yeah. Now there’s there’s so many more results here. In the end of twenty nineteen, there’s video and image and news and social feeds. It’s not just about getting that, that blue link in the result. It’s about having as much prominence in a search result as you can like my my video on how to do something will be here and then my article or blog post will be below it, maybe even a little thumbnail next to it. So I threw some extra code on it, maybe even a page out at the top. Right. So there’s so much real estate in a search result. And SEO is about is about optimizing your content to appear as much as it can and in as much as the space that’s available for you.
Reza Asgari:
So basically, when that first Google page of results comes up, it’s got like your link to your website, your Yelp page. It’s got a thing of your YouTube video on the side.It’s got a couple of pictures of whatever your business or thing is, is what you’re saying.
Steve Wiideman:
Right, for Web search for Google in this image search, video search so many other ways. But Web is, of course, the most prominent. It’s what you’re asking the search engines for. But, um, but it’s it’s a little bit like I mentioned the word myth. You know, it’s a little scary. It’s a big fog for a lot of businesses. They’re not really sure what they should do with it or how much it should cost. And and there’s a lot unfortunately, there’s a lot of really shady agencies out there selling snake oil.
Reza Asgari:
Yeah.
Steve Wiideman:
So it’s it’s difficult when you when you get into it and you’re like, I know I need to do it. I just did a search for Plumber in Irvine and I’m a plumber in Irvine and I’m nowhere to be found. And there’s all these shady things that are coming up that I know aren’t real plumbers that are just kind of hacking the search results.
Reza Asgari:
It’s just guys named Mario.
Steve Wiideman:
Yeah, and Luigi. It’s true, right! So that’s you know, that’s one of the challenges I think a lot of businesses face. So I hope, you know, with with on bottleneck is to solve some of those questions and some of them today, some of them in future episodes. We want to take your questions and we want to solve the problems that the that the world is having.
Reza Asgari:
H wants to your questions. I don’t care what any of you have to say, really.
Steve Wiideman:
He’s here to make fun of me.
Reza Asgari:
I have my own opinions, frankly, and I don’t need yours. But Steve will take your questions.
Steve Wiideman:
Absolutely. That’s the hope, if we want to solve problems. Then we also want to have a lot of anti-fun. Right.
Reza Asgari:
Absolutely.
Steve Wiideman:
Anti-Fun. The anti fun show. We’re also going to do some definitions and provide some links to some things to help you out. And, you know, just try to be your show, whatever you need to solve problems in digital marketing. And, you know, we hope our we’re able to to, you know, get you where you need to be to grow your business online through, you know, our our knowledge as well as, you know, from other experts and teachers and professors that come in. So I don’t want to make this all about me. But is it.
Reza Asgari:
Well, it’s their show. I mean, you say it’s your show. You tell us what you want to do. You want me to take off my shirt, I’ll take off my shirt. So you want me to come to your house and rub your feet, rub your feet. I’ll let you keep talking. I’ll come rub your feet.
Steve Wiideman:
We’ll put we’ll put this number up here if you need him to rub your feet later, we’ll have that so you can. I saw it in a mirror in a bathroom. One rest up on Sunday.
Reza Asgari:
You may have it. It was at a flying J in Arkansas? Oh, Jesus. I was a really weird time in my life and it was a terrible I got paid and zingers, not even the lemon ones. It was a strawberry zingers. Nobody likes those that I saw.
Steve Wiideman:
Oh, those are the worst. Yeah.
Reza Asgari:
You don’t even want to know what I had to do for strawberry zingers. I will tell you this. It did take an umbrella and that thing did not. All right. So what were we talking about? SEOs.
Reza Asgari:
Exactly.
Steve Wiideman:
Let’s well, let’s talk about a little bit about what makes me, I guess, qualified to even talk about search, because I know a lot of people like who the hell is this Wiideman guy?
Reza Asgari:
Let’s do that, because I’m curious what makes you qualified? Honestly, I’m still supposed to get back to my post mate’s job, so I just brought you food and now you have me in front of a microphone. I guess we’re doing this.
Steve Wiideman:
Let’s make it happen. So, so I’ve been I’ve been doing this, if you can believe this, for twenty years. I was I was in the army.
Reza Asgari:
I cannot believe that.
Steve Wiideman:
I know I was an army infantry. I got out and I decided, hey, I want to be SEO. No, I’m kidding. I was in the army. I was enjoying this new thing called the Internet and building websites, you know, for friends and clients and realizing, you know what, none of these sites were really getting a lot of web traffic and. I want to keep having them pay me money to work on their website. I’d have to figure out how to get traffic to it. Right. So so I learn from some of that. The experts in the industry. Back then, it was Aaron Wall and Bruce Clay…
Reza Asgari:
The Bruce Clay!?
Steve Wiideman:
Bruce Clay!
Reza Asgari:
WHAT?!
Steve Wiideman:
I know, right? So so I learned as much as I could. I put all the things I learned into these little organized things we called e-books back then. When was last time we downloaded an e-book?
Reza Asgari:
About the same time that I got a floppy disk autographed by Bruce Clay.
Steve Wiideman:
There you go. So so I put all this kind of context together and and sort of create a name for myself. So back in the two thousands, I was was SEO Steve. Right. And and I really enjoyed search. I was passionate about it. I was working for companies.
Reza Asgari:
Quick int. Why didn’t you take the opportunity to go by Steve-E-O?
Steve Wiideman:
That’s genius.
Reza Asgari:
I mean, if I could go back in time.
Steve Wiideman:
I don’t want to be confused with Steve and have some people come and shoot me in the head or something with a pink gun.
Reza Asgari:
Fair enough. I understand.
Steve Wiideman:
That could go wrong. Steve-o was definitely a little more adventurous, I think, than I am.
Reza Asgari:
But you were saying.
Steve Wiideman:
Yeah. Yeah. So I was I was working some of the companies you might know, a little entertainment company called Disney.
Reza Asgari:
I never heard of them.
Steve Wiideman:
Yeah. And so, yeah, they were kind of goofy. Anyway…
Reza Asgari:
Silence was the appropriate response.
Steve Wiideman:
I know, we should have programmed Google to come back with a funny response to that. But so so I was I was in charge of their paid ads.So if you did a Google search for Disneyland passports, you would see their paid ad and organic result, which is right below the paid ads. If you did a search for Disneyland tickets, you would see the paid ad and then you would see a bunch of other websites, but not Disneyland in the organic results because Disneyland doesn’t sell tickets, they sell passports. OK, so one of my you know, one of my accomplishments, one of my agenda items was to get them to start incorporating the word tickets more because that’s how people searched. They didn’t search using passports. These tickets.
Reza Asgari:
Yeah, the only time you searched using passports is if you have like a like summer vacation with your family or if you just need to change your identity.
Steve Wiideman:
Those are two actually really good occasions. So so, yeah, I did the thing at Disney for a while and I worked for some pretty exciting agencies in the late 2000s. And then 2010, I left the corporate world and decided I’m going to be a freelance independent SEO guy did that until 2015. We incorporated. We have a small team of experts now in search. We work with some pretty exciting restaurant franchises and e-commerce websites and just really enjoy testing, breaking, learning all about different ways that we can improve keyword rankings and search results.
Reza Asgari:
Ok, and are you allowed or not allowed to say the people that you’re working with?
Steve Wiideman:
Yeah, I could talk about a few. I think we will too. And some of the case studies.
Reza Asgari:
I don’t know if we had to pull like a Mitch Hedberg joke. I mean, like I can’t say who I’m working with. It’s a hotel chain, but it has two trees in it.
Steve Wiideman:
You know that that’s actually a good a good Segway into coming up with some creative ideas on how people might search to find my my clients. So, oh, one of them might search for, you know, best breakfast. Right. Or another one might be dollar Margarita deals this month. Right? Or cheap cheap dollar…
Reza Asgari:
Which by the way, I want to meet the person who’s just actively searching for dollar margarita deals. Like that’s a person who’s got a lot of things going on in their life that they need to address.
Steve Wiideman:
Yeah, I think you might find some of my search history that when I get back to my computer. So. So, yeah. And then, you know, one of the other things I do too is I teach I just started teaching at UC San Diego. I teach an online class there and Cal State Fullerton here in Florida, in California. So I’m I’m excited to take all the things that I’m teaching students and have taught people and agencies over the year and start and start sharing them through the show and through some of the other, you know, things that were going to be doing in 2020.
Reza Asgari:
So what you’re saying is we’re between the two of us. You are essentially the more accomplished clearly by a long shot. Depends on what you call accomplish because you’re tired. Say just what you did between 2005 and 2010. I don’t think I’ve done it since twelve to thirty eight I, I do. You can’t imagine getting that much done with my life. Yeah. That’s how much of a California stoner I am.
Steve Wiideman:
Remember, it’s not, it’s not about what you do, it’s, it’s who you are and.
Reza Asgari:
And that is who I am, a California stoner who does not get a lot accomplished.
Steve Wiideman:
So we hope to have a lot of fun, share a lot of helpful tips, meet a lot of amazing people in digital marketing. And we want this to be your show.
Reza Asgari:
So so let’s be honest. Some of them are going to be amazing. Yeah. There’s going to be a few that are just just going to say, yeah. Oh, yeah, we’re we’re going to want to throw trail mix at them. But hey, them’s the breaks.
Steve Wiideman:
That’s how it goes. We’ll call again. My name is Steve Wiidman.
Reza Asgari:
and Reza Asgari.
Steve Wiideman:
We look forward to seeing you on future on bottleneck shows. And thanks for watching.
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