How to Harness the Elusive Power of SEO

Mythbusters: SEO Edition

At Stone Temple consulting, the main areas of focus are content marketing, search engine optimization, and social media. As CEO and founder of the company, Eric Enge is charged with responsibilities like determining the future of the industry and a vision for the company and its clients, making Eric an authority on the aforementioned subjects.
When analyzing these three deeply related topics, Eric seeks to debunk SEO myths that portray it as a cheap trick to increase website traffic rather than as a strategic part of strong marketing design.
Redefining SEO, Eric cites the importance of both data-driven research and storytelling as two of the most important SEO determining factors in content marketing. Breaking it down in clear, mathematical, and data-supported ways, Eric explains how most of us have historically had SEO all wrong.
Eric speaks to the importance of elite content, how page rank actually works, and why Facebook shares can be very misleading.

In This Episode:

• How important is modern day SEO?
• Debunking common SEO myths
• Revisiting the quality vs. quantity debate from an SEO perspective
• How strategic linking has evolved and what you need to do about it
• Why social media shares can be misleading
• Why you should stop trying to produce good content
• Why you don’t necessarily need to write a blog to have great SEO
• How storytelling affects your SEO

Quotes From This Episode:

“You’ve got to be more strategic now with SEO. You can’t game the system.” —@RandyFrisch
“Good content isn’t good enough. You have to be thinking about elite content and how you can stand out from the crowd. Let’s face it, the market out there is really flooded with all kinds of people putting content out there, so what are you going to do that’s different? What’s going to attract attention and really dial it up another notch?” —@stonetemple

“People engage with stories. They absolutely love to follow a story and feel a sense of connection. It really does draw the people in. They’ll spend longer in the content when it’s done in a story mode than if it’s sort of just a dry, factual thing because when doing this kind of stuff you have to be concerned about audience too. That feeds the process of more people engaging content, resulting in more links, and therefore assisting with the SEO, and storytelling really helps accelerate the building of an audience.” —@stonetemple

“If I try to do everything, I’ll get lost. If I try to do infographics and videos and podcasts and webinars and speak everywhere, and you try to do all those things, it’s too much. So you want to find a good place where your target audience exists, and then you want to focus on, ‘what’s the right content for that and how can I do that?'” —@stonetemple

Resources:

• Stone Temple Consulting
• Stone Temple ‘Here’s Why’ Video Series
• Chartbeat Engagement Studies
• Moz and Buzzsumo Joint Content Sharing Study
• Best Made, American Axe Instagram

What did you want to be when you grew up?

SEO didn’t exist when Eric was a child, but he contends that he is perfectly happy doing exactly what he does now. “I love getting up and going to work every day. I’m just thrilled with what I’m doing currently, but at some point that comes to an end.”
Eric considers where his path might lead if that moment comes, “I can see myself getting to a point where, gosh, I could be a university professor. I love teaching. I’m actually the only person in my family who’s not a university professor, truth be told, so I’m the odd duck.”
He also reveals another facet of his personality that could come to the forefront, “Or I could sit back and do programming for a living again, because it’s really cool to solve those kinds of problems and sort of just geek out, because at the end of the day, once a geek, always a geek, I think, is a fair characterization of who and what I am.” Not a bad characterization at that.