Michael King On Why Content Marketing Is Overestimated & What You Should Focus On

Razvan: Hello everyone this is Razvan from cognitive SEO and today we have Mike King from iPullRank. Mike is the Founder and Managing Director of iPullRank, an agency specializing in performance marketing. He consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC as well as promising startups and small businesses. Also, I will let Michael now introduce himself.

Michael: Hello everybody! I am Mike King and I am excited to be here excited. I don’t have anything else to add to that fantastic intro.

When did you start to work in SEO? Was this your first career or you had another career before doing SEO?

Michael: I’ve started an SEO in 2006 and I worked more on the development side of things. I went to school for computer science and I did a bunch of internships around being a software engineer inside. But then I decided I wanted to do music, instead, and I did that for eight years between school and SEO.

Being a musician taught me a lot about marketing and kind of set me up to fall into SEO. Once I did, that’s exactly what happened. I got into an accident and I needed to get a job because didn’t have health insurance in the first place to hire me as an SEO agency because of my development background.

What intrigues you most about digital marketing?

Michael: I like the idea that we have the opportunity to really affect how people are thinking about things. It’s not just advertising, it’s also this idea that we can put the right thing in front of the right user at the right time then effectively measure it to see if that impacted like we expected to actually happen. I think it’s really compelling the measurement part of it and then also just the ability to really target precisely who we’re trying to get.

How did you start on the speaking circuit? Was it in the same time with your digital marketing career or did you have any experience before that?

Michael: I’ve done speaking before but in completely different context. It was always like me as a rapper coming in to speak about hip-hop related topics or speak to troubled kids and things like that. I’ve always been comfortable with speaking because it’s very similar to performing. But as far as getting involved in and speaking in the marketing side I just started from blogging on Moz. Then, I went to MozCon. Then I got really inspired by some of the speakers, I thought that I could probably do this too and so I pitched for SMX East. Some people saw me and they thought I was pretty good. It just created that snowball effect where I just kept getting invited to events and now here we are.

Do you do SEO yourself or do you mostly manage the company?

Michael: It is a combination. There are there instances where I’m working on projects directly and then there are instances where the team is taking it over entirely. It all depends on the campaign and the needs. There are things that my team is far better than me at and in those cases I make sure to defer to them. But then, there are also situations where I’m the expert on the given topic and so I’m the one that works on it. It all depends on what the engagement is. As we grow I hope to get to a point where I can be more on the strategic level rather than having to dig into the leaves as much as I do.

When you switched from being a programmer to SEO did you try to use your programming background from an SEO perspective, to help you implement better and various strategies?

Michael: Absolutely. I think it was largely from an analysis standpoint. There were a lot of things in the space early on. When I say early I mean 5-10 years ago, where just weren’t tools for this. I’m clearly a cognitiveSEO user because I believe in it I think it’s a great tool but before it existed I’ve built my own kind of version of that. There was nowhere near as sophisticated as what you guys do but it basically took all the links from the different link indices for a domain and then would crawl them an collect a ton of data on them. So that was like one of those tools I built that did help speed up what I was doing.

I had a lot of small tools like that. Well, I mean that one was probably the bigger one of the tools that I had but I had a lot of small tools that I would just build because one, there wasn’t anything out there and two, the process followed by people in the company and I, didn’t make any sense to me. I can’t stand having to copy and paste things over and over again. I can’t stand having to do things manually and if there isn’t a tool for it then I just make it.

Also, having an understanding of how the web works based on my experience before that, it was just incredibly invaluable for analysis, for coming up with strategies because there were things that I would want to do. On the other side, there were SEOs saying “I have no idea what you’re talking about” or “I don’t understand that thing that you found here and you’re calling an issue”. It was definitely very valuable for me getting into SEO because I had an understanding and the ability to do things that a lot of people around me didn’t.

Do you think that nowadays to be a really good SEO you need to have some sort of technical knowledge or is it enough to do content?

Michael: I completely believe that the best SEOs are very technical but that’s not to say that people that have been awesome at content haven’t been able to do great in SEO because they absolutely have. Into the day, we all know that the most relevant content with the highest quality links is going to win. If you’re able to effectively put out the right type of content and then effectively build those links you can pretty much overpower a lot of the technical issues. But that being said if you’re able to combine the two you’re going to do better than just the standard content marketer.

I think it’s a nuanced question but I think that the best of both worlds is to be technical and to be able to be effective at content. Also, I think that a lot of the times people put too much weight on one and not the other and then there are people that come in and have both things and they beat the person that is only strong at one or the other. They are thinking technical is everything or content is everything and then they’re not sure why they just got beat.

Do you think these are the most important signals or factors when we are talking about Google rankings or what signals do you think are the present and the future of Google?

Michael: Unfortunately, yes. I do believe that if I had to choose between which factors are most important I would say that content and links are still there. We’ve all seen sites that are technically garbage and rank very well because they have that authority and they have the content that is most valuable to the user. I would say those are still the most important factors. My platform has been focusing for a year/ a year and a half on the technical part.

We can’t absolutely ignore the technical components of it. That is because of the fact the modern web is driven by things that are still difficult for Google to crawl. If you’re not really accounting for these items then you’re just shooting yourself in the foot. I still think that people should understand how the web works. We’re always chasing the algorithm but if we understand how the web works we know where they’re going.

So as far as the future of search goes, it’s still ultimately content and authority. We’re at a point where Google is becoming more the front-end to the web and they’re just extracting content and then representing it through voice results or through other search features. It’s still about the content but whether or not they can access that content and understand it is still a technical problem. So again, I still believe that it has to be these two things working together.

Do you find SEO to be a hard sell nowadays?

Razvan: Because doing SEO and improving rankings in Google, nowadays, has become harder and harder, from an agency point of view, and clients sometimes have had it harder to understand this issues. They need to pay for it three or six months until they see something actually changing in their rankings. Do you find SEO to be a hard sell nowadays?

Michael: No, I think it’s actually an easier sell nowadays because I think that this understanding that you do need content in order to get links has been a paradigm shift. Before, when I was at other agencies it was always just like “just give me links, just give me links” and, now, people understand that you have to create compelling content in order to position the site to get those links. So it’s a lot easier to sell that.

As far as SEO, in general, being a hard sell, I don’t know that I’m seeing that either. I think people have a much better understanding of what SEO is at this point and what goes into it and how long it’s going to take to get the results that they’re looking for. Those conversations are no longer hard for me. A few years ago it was far more difficult but at the same time I was always behind a salesperson so maybe that was why I was difficult. Now that I am the salesperson and I’m able to speak to these things in great depth I’m not having that problem at.

Do you usually find the sales pitch to be technical or non-technical?

Michael: Yes. It’s a combination because what I do is I want to show you why you’re having these problems. So I’m gonna give you some technical aspects as to why that is and explain them to you in a way that it makes sense and it has context for what you already know. There’s going to be components of it that are quite technical but then there’s going to be some components of it that are on the business level to really tie it back to what it is that you care about. Yes, there are definitely technical components but there’s also a lot of stuff that’s digestible as well.

Do you think that content is overestimated somehow nowadays?

Razvan: Let’s move back a bit to the SEO side of things and how Google ranks stuff. I know you wrote an older blog post where you said “Let’s stop chasing the content train and get back to making the experience that performs”. Do you think that content is overestimated somehow nowadays?

Michael: I think that people put too much emphasis on content marketing. What I mean by that is it’s always the emphasis of “we have to make a lot of content, we have to make more content”. It’s not necessarily about making more it’s often times about optimizing the existing content and then some of that could be just technical fixes. If you’re thinking about a big site with tens of millions of pages built on templates and such, there are lots of optimizations from a technical perspective that will make that site perform dramatically more.

Whereas a lot of people will come in and say things such as “you know these are listing pages and there’s not any real content here”. It doesn’t necessarily matter for that type of site. I think, in large part, a lot of businesses are built this way and then they think “we don’t have content we need to do content marketing”. That’s not necessarily the fix for every business.

I do think it’s overestimated, in the end, the idea that it is a blanket fix that everybody wants to use. In a lot of ways, technical SEO or technical components for optimization, in general, have been downplayed in the last few years because it’s difficult to wrap your mind around what are the technical aspects of SEO. There’s a lot of people that don’t know the first thing about code and they are dealing with developers, that tend to be very difficult.

Therefore the business owners are thinking “let’s just get away from coding because we’re marketers and we know how to make essentially commercials and put them all over the web”. Then they’re going more in that direction and I believe that there is a lot more to pursue in the technical side of it if you just understand what goes into that domain.

Usually, when you do content marketing and create pieces of content do you have a specific strategy in mind to create successful content?

Michael: It’s not that we like do the same thing for our clients. In fact, the approach on how to get to the point where we know what we have to create, it is the same process. We don’t go into the client and say “well we’re gonna do five infographics because infographics will always work”. NO. What we do is starting from audience research market segmentation to figure out who are their audience, what do they want, what are they motivated by, what do they care about and then we review the existing content within the frame of those market segments.

Therefore, both quantitatively and qualitatively to see how’s performing, what’s not performing, what can be repurposed and then we have a sense of what needs to be created because we’ve essentially done this gap analysis based on the audience.

We also do keyword research which we then marry with the audience as well so we can figure out what are the questions being asked and what stage needs the users are in or which stage in the user journey are they in, when they’re searching for a given keyword and then we use that to inform, what we call, a Content Plan; where we outline what’s going to be created; where’s it gonna live what are the the models, the workflows and governance models for creating content; how’s it going to launch; how are we gonna promote it.

In this way everything is planned out based on their situation and then we figure out what is that we’re gonna create and then we move forward with that and then we measure things based on what these KPIs are. If the KPI is links, the question goes forward to see if it’s traffic, leads and so on. Then based on that performance we use the reporting on that to determine what we’re gonna do next and further optimize the content campaign.

Usually, for the content campaign, the target is to just drive traffic to the site or to boost other rankings also?

Michael: It depends on the campaign but in a lot of cases it is about attracting links and then it comes down to how are we attracting links. Is it going to be through PR level outreach or is it is going be through your standard blogger outreach resource pages, broken link building and other techniques of this kind. It determines how we’re going to position the content because of its PR base it has to be content that’s big enough that we can roll off a series of different stories from it because we need to effectively pitch different news outlets and journalists and such to have a story that they can tell that potentially no one else can tell.

Then, we’re trying to figure out the best way to position the content for the goal and in a lot of cases when we’re talking about SEO it is in terms of links. Finally, at the end of the day, we are trying to drive traffic back to the site no matter which channel it is.

Obviously SEO or even hate search it’s going to be more qualified traffic because we have that intent but at the end of the day, the user or the client is looking for us to drive traffic that converts. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Do you also use PR companies in the outreach journey to help you with attracting journalists or getting media coverage or do you do it yourself?

Michael: We don’t. We actually do it on our end. In a lot of cases our clients will have a PR group and so we might consult with them on it but beyond that now we haven’t partnered with PR agencies on anything.

Which top two outreach methods or strategies would you recommend to our listeners?

Razvan: I know you had a presentation in the past which I’ve checked. “Building your outreach machine,” I think it’s called and you’ve talked there about a lot of technicals models, on how to do the best outreach possible. Which top two outreach methods or strategies would you recommend to our listeners?

Michael: In the presentation that you’re referencing I talked about a lot of different tactics but I also talked about how we’re using machine learning for two specific things.

One of which is for prospecting. Essentially if you’ve collected your prospects and kept that data over time so prospects are saying “this is a good prospect, there’s a bad prospect” you can use a machine learning model to essentially determine from a new set of prospects which ones are likely to be good prospects for you. That takes the prospecting process and essentially automates it.

Then the other thing that we’re doing is automating the overcoming of objection. Which you’ll find when you do outreaches and get consistent objections from people saying “we don’t take this type of content for links” or “we only take money for links” and things like that. So, you’ll see what those trends are and you’ll be able to determine what those responses will be and then effectively you can just use a chatbot to respond to that in your email and saying “let’s talk about how you can do it”.

As far as tactics that are generic, if you don’t want to do anything like what I’ve described, video outreach is the most effective tactic I’ve ever come up with. Just use a tool like Bom Bom which allows you to send a short video and also get analytics on it. Technically you could just use YouTube for it too but you’re only gonna get the view count and all of that.

Do a short video, no longer than a minute, just introducing yourself and saying “Hey! I’ve got this content that I’ve been interested in getting you a link for or getting a link from you for”. The reason why I think it works so well is one, it’s different so you’re differentiating yourself from all the other emails that people are getting and then two, it shows that you’re a real person like you’re not just a spam bot. I got such a high response. I’m not doing anymore. We got such a high response rate from those types of outreach that it’s like far and away the best thing.

You simply included this video as a youtube link in the outreach email?

Michael: We’re not using YouTube for like I said we’re using it so-called Bom Bom which is like email platform for sending video emails but YouTube would be fine. I would recommend that if you’re doing YouTube you would do like a screenshot of the video and then a link. On social media, there is the play button for me on the screenshot, and you can take one of those because then it looks clickable and the user will click on it.

The other tactic that we use in our outreach Elijah, that is very effective, is to look up the most shared piece of content on the site, any number of tools do this, and reach out to them. It’s more likely that people have already talked to them about that content so they’re far more receptive if you use that in your outreach email. We get a lot more response doing that tactic as well.

How do you collect the prospects?

Razvan: You told us about the part of how to actually do the outreach a technique for doing the outreach but to whom should people outreach because there are a lot of potential prospects collection method. How do you collect the prospects?

Michael: It all depends on what you have. We use a tool called Pitchbox and it essentially automates the prospect collecting for us and it allows us to do things like filter based on whatever metrics we’re looking at if it’s domain authority or citation flow or some of the scoring metrics that some other tools provide. If you also have a very large list of Twitter followers I would say use that because what you can do is just marry that list with the linking root domains in your link profile.

A lot of people put links in their in their Twitter profile then you just want to use like a URL expander to turn those from shortened links to the actual URLs and then extract the domains and compare that to the list of linking root domains in your link profile. Whoever’s following you and has a site or writes for a site that doesn’t link to you those are all good prospects because they already have some sort of connection with the brand so you know that’s a good way to do it or you could use any number of tools like we use Pitchbox as I said.

There’s also another tool that I use a lot. I’ll get back to you on that. I can’t remember the name of it. It is a variety of tools out there that allow you to do prospecting based on search queries and such.

Do you think it’s hard to go viral with a content piece? How hard is it to create a piece of content that goes viral?

Michael: I just remembered the tool. It is called Ontolo it’s O-N-T-O-L-O.

Regarding your question, I don’t look for pieces to go viral because I’m more focused on a very specific audience. If it goes viral it is fantastic but it’s not something that I’m specifically looking to do. I’m looking to create something that meets the goal and that’s pretty much it.

Do you use lots of tools or do you have a specific set/ a minimum amount of tools to work with when you do SEO?

Michael: I definitely use a lot of different things. When people come on board here they’re they’re kind of like “There are so many tools. Where do I start?” Because for me it’s very easy to hop around and use the best of everything. I definitely use a lot of things.

Razvan: There is no perfect tool. There are good tools at specific things but I don’t think there is one tool that covers every aspect as SEO is so broad and complex nowadays from a technical perspective at least.

If you had the chance to tell every person that is starting in marketing one thing what would you tell them?

Michael: Learn how to make something. I think that one of the things that set apart really good marketers is that they have gotten their hands dirty and they’re able to really understand the nuances of things. When you’re just talking about doing things which is largely winds up happening, when you’re a consultant or you work at an agency or even if you’re in-house and you’re not the one that’s actually doing stuff, it’s very difficult for you to be able to turn the idea into an execution even if you can do that you may not have the strongest idea because you don’t know what it takes; it’s actually executed.

I think it’s really important and it’s something that I look for when we hire people, that you can actually do stuff.

What’s your biggest mistake fail that you’ve experienced in your career and what did you learn from it?  If you had any mistakes, maybe you didn’t.

Michael: No. I definitely made mistakes. If you don’t make mistakes you’re not trying hard enough. It’s hard to say because I make a lot of mistakes. I definitely learned from them and tried not to make them again. It’s also hard to be like “it is a huge mistake” because again I learned so much from it. Working at iAcquire was ultimately a mistake but again I learned so much from being exposed to a lot of things from the role that I did so to that end it’s not a mistake.

More recently with undergroundhiphop.com, when we bought it, I immediately started going after SEO and content and such but it would have been way smarter to go after pay media first. It’s a pretty standard thing in e-commerce but I didn’t because I was so confident that we’d be able to knock it out of the park based on what we do for all of our clients. Those are two key mistakes.

Is it something that smaller brands can apply as well?

Razvan: You’ve worked with some of the biggest brands such as Microsoft, Citibank, LG. What is the most important thing that you’ve learned from working with them? Is it something that the smaller brands can apply as well?

Michael: It’s interesting because we get to see the differences between the smaller brands and how they operate and then also the bigger brands. The thing that I’ve learned from bigger brands is just that I don’t ever want to get to a point where we’re so big that we can’t be agile and effective. There are so many organizations that we’ve worked with and they just can’t do things because there are too many people that are in the decision chain and not just that. There are so many political things that go on that stop the organization from moving forward.

That’s the main thing that I’ve learned with working with big companies. I just don’t ever want to be in that type of situation where just our size stops us from innovation.

Did you also see something positive that a smaller brand could apply?

Michael: There are processes and then there’s also the quality standards that some of these bigger organizations put in place and require. It sounds like it may contradict what I just said but at the same time, I do want to be thoughtful about all the things that we do and also just make sure that we’re maintaining a quality standard because smaller organizations want to move so fast that they’re not thinking about. They’re just simply not thinking through what they’re trying to do.

I think that smaller organizations can benefit from taking a step back and being strategic but also not slowing themselves down in such a way where they’re not being agile. I think there’s a fine line and a good balance that needs to be maintained in order to be effective and also just present yourself in the same way that some of these bigger organizations do.

Let’s imagine that we are ten years from now, how do you think the SEO landscape will look like? Will the concept of SEO still exist?

Michael: Ten years from there I think technology will be dramatically different but I do believe that search it will be our primary interface for everything. I think that search is going to be primarily driven by a voice at some point, probably in the next ten years. That doesn’t mean that the desktop environment is going to go away but I think that the primary mode will become voice. At that point it becomes a lot harder because a voice search isn’t going to give you ten answers it will only give you one. It will be a lot more important to be number one but I think personalization is going to be just as big as the voice search being the interface.

It’s going to create these filter bubbles based on your implicit query and your explicit query so based on where you are and who you are and what you’ve shown interesting in. Those being the implicit vectors whereas the explicit thing is precisely what you asked for. I think that personalization is going to be huge and it’s gonna really require us to do hyper-specific content to penetrate those filter bubbles and be that one answer.

The hip-hop site that you were talking about; Is it a site project of yours or you’re focusing full-time on it? Do you dedicate yourself professionally to it?

Michael: The undergroundhiphop.com. We purchased that at the top of the year. Essentially what we do is we treat it like a client. The same way that one of our clients gets X amount of hours per week. Of course, me being the owner of it or the majority owner of it there’s a lot that goes into just operating the business and so we do have a couple people on staff that do just that. We’ve got a guy who texts the boxes and sends them out. We have a guy who manages an inventory and manages the sales. Then the iPullRank team is managing the website and the social media and all of that. We treated like a client but there’s more to it for me as far as managing.

Do you see a difference in perspective in terms of owning this side versus treating it as a customer?

Razvan: I mean in your mindset, as a business owner, do you do consulting services for a client or operate yourself and get consultancy from someone for this particular thing?

Michael: It’s definitely different and it made me realize that in some of the consulting work, I think this is true of most agencies, has gaps between what you’re presenting and then the client being able to do it. I think that’s allowed us or informed what we’re doing in such a way that we’re able to improve it because we’ve essentially had to eat our own dog food so to speak. We discovered this isn’t necessarily enough for someone to take this document and then go do the thing. Because of that, we’ve made a series of improvements to our strategic work in order to be better for our clients I think it’s a good thing really.

If you have 1 million dollars to invest in a business or to start a business, what would you start?  Or what would you invest in?

Michael: Maybe I wouldn’t start a business maybe I just buy a bunch of Bitcoin. I’m very fascinated by blockchain. I’ve been digging into it. We’re actually doing an initial coin offering pretty soon. I would definitely invest a million dollars in a blockchain app; probably built on the theory at the start. Then I will pivot in my own blockchain later. I think that space is really interesting. It definitely hasn’t matured yet and it definitely feels a lot like SEO did when I first got into it. It is so much to learn and there are no rules.

There are a lot of opportunities to do really cool things. But to the point of it not maturing there hasn’t been a blockchain app or block chain-driven app that’s better than a centralized app yet. What’s really interesting to me is creating something that is that good, creating something that not only did you get the benefits from a decentralized application but you also get benefits of speed and create something that just changes what we do on the internet rather than just creating something that already exists and putting it in a block shape.

Razvan: It was a pleasure talking to you Mike. We talked a lot about a lot of things such as SEO, Bitcoin, in the end, and your agency. Would you like to add anything more to this end of the discussion?

Michael: Check what I’m working on. Like I said, we’ve got this ICO  coming out soon called scratch. I’ve got undergroundhiphop.com and of course, I’ve got ipullrank.com. We’ve got some really cool content coming soon. We are wrapping up a guide to machine learning for marketers which I think is going to be really interesting for a lot of people. Just keep checking up what we’re up to.

Razvan: It needs to be digestible when we’re talking about content and when you’re talking about machine learning to present it to marketers. Machine learning is very complicated so you need to present it in a very nice format so people can understand it and digest it.

Michael: That’s definitely the goal we have. If you’ve seen the guide to Google tag manager that we did it’s gonna be very similar to that. Hopefully, it is digestible. My whole goal on talking about machine learning to marketers it demystifies it and kind of make something where it’s not too different from how we approach everything else.

I really like to think that when most people do digital marketing they are doing an educated form of guess and check. Thinking such as “Let’s build this thing and see if it worked if it didn’t work we need to try something else”. Effectively, that’s what you’re doing with machine learning. You’re trying to trade a model and then you try different models based on one, your experience and then two, just trying different models. Then you see if that model ultimately gives you the results that you expected and if it doesn’t, you need to try another model.

I think bringing it down to that frame makes it more approachable for marketers and also just there being so many tools out there that abstract the math and also the programming of it make it a lot easier for people to try it out.

Razvan: Thank you very much! It was a very interesting discussion and I would love to have you later on our podcast.

Michael: Thanks for having and me peace out!