SPEAKERS

Christian Klepp, John Vuong

Christian Klepp  00:08

Hi, and welcome to the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. I’m your host, Christian Klepp, and one of the founders of EINBLICK Consulting. Our goal is to share inspirational stories, tips and insights from B2B marketers, digital entrepreneurs, and industry experts that will help you to think differently, succeed and scale your business.

Alright! welcome everyone to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast where you get your weekly dose of B2B marketing insights. I’m your host, Christian Klepp. And today, I am thrilled to have a guest on the show who has made it his mission to equip businesses with the right products, services and knowledge to grow and expand, to position business owners as industry thought leaders by being honest, transparent, and having a strong will to succeed. So John Vuong, welcome to the show.

John Vuong  00:58

Well, thanks a lot Christian for the intro. I’m excited to be on your show today, and hopefully, give your listeners some valuable insights on how to be successful as a business owner.

Christian Klepp  01:09

That’s exactly right. And, and who better to talk about that than an entrepreneur? Right, John? So I’m really looking forward to this conversation, I think the listeners will get a lot of value out of this discussion. Um, so you know, let’s start with, like, you’ve been an entrepreneur for many years now in Canada, on you built a successful career and an expertise in different areas. But just for the sake of this discussion, let’s zero in a little bit on one key component, and that’s Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Alright. So, you’ve been running this for many years, as I’ve said, so you’ve probably like seen it all. So like, why don’t you just let us know or tell us about some of the most common mistakes you’ve seen out there that businesses make when it comes to SEO?

John Vuong  01:56

Yeah, a lot of people have a lot of misconceptions in terms of what the expectations what they actually do what agencies, freelancers, consultants, people actually do, like, what is SEO? People is a black box for a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs, people who don’t understand it. They think, well, it’s just google getting on the first page. It’s that easy, right? Well, you have to realize Google’s not just gonna put any website on that first page of Google, right? They’re gonna match the user intent, keywords with the websites that they deem as the best match the most suitable, intent focus, authoritative site with that given topical keyword, right. So for you, as a business owner, you need to realize why do you want that in the first place? What is the ultimate goal? Coming to SEO as one of the medium in terms of your advertising, media landscape media mix, it should be one of many things that you’re going to do in terms of marketing and advertising and sales. And one of the big components of SEO is owning your major asset of having your website prominently discovered, visible for your ideal kind of market, right? Ideal customers. And when you realize that, then you realize the power they can have for your business. And people mistakenly think Google ads or Facebook or paid ads, and all these funnels are SEO, but it’s different. SEO is more inbound lead traffic generation, which people are seeking out information or services or products, and they type in a keyword to search for, or a match, right. So the ability to be positioned well, where the customer that your prospects are seeking out the product and service, and you are one of the options is ultimately what we’re after.

Christian Klepp  04:02

That’s such a fantastic advice. And I think, you mentioned something a while ago about paid ads and whatnot. And I think, we’ve all seen that. If you’re not, if you’re not careful, or if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can kind of be like a black hole, right? You just put your money in there. And suddenly swoop! Even though you can track, like the results, and what’s going on there. If you’re not sure what you’re doing, it can get companies into a lot of trouble, right?

John Vuong  04:32

Yeah, paid ads is a different marketplace altogether. Yeah. As a business owner. Usually, if you’re just starting off, you probably have limitations. You probably have a restricted budget, and you probably don’t know where the quality of leads and how to market yourself properly, right. So usually, when you see paid ads, it’s usually through a company or bigger brands are doing it. They’re doing it effectively to understanding the cost per acquisition, cost per sale, cost per impression, cost per lead. And that’s where the refinements of it. And that’s why I would say always look for expert to do it properly. Advertising as a whole, is a whole industry, where there are experts doing it for 5,10,20 years. And you as a business owner should focus on your zone of genius, right, whatever that product service brand that you’re trying to put out there in the marketplace, focus on your strengths, work on it, let people know what you really are all about and let others do what you’re not comfortable doing and pay for it. Right? It’s just like anyone that if you have a product and service, you expect others to pay for your product or service, why not pay for other products and service that you’re not comfortable doing? So that’s what I understand. Like as you progress as a business owner / entrepreneur, you realize expertise, what it really means you don’t mind paying for expertise. And people have to realize that as a business owner.

Christian Klepp  06:08

Yeah, no that’s absolutely right. And I think just leading onto that, or just jamming on that a little bit further on, what would you say, at least from your experience, what companies can do to improve? Like, say, for example, their website ranking. I know, you brought that up a little bit early on in the piece, but like, what can they do?

John Vuong  06:28

Yeah, search engine optimization is definitely a black box. But I always tell people, to business owners in particular, to really understand how to fundamentally run your business, understand and listen to your customers or your ideal customers. Understand what the marketplace entails, what people are asking of, and producing good information on your website, producing a really good product and service that there’s a need for, and keep giving value. So yes, build a great website, hire someone to do it, if you’re not good at designing, then you start creating content, which is either visual audio, video, or images, like whatever your customers are seeking out and work on getting better answering the problems and questions that people want from your product and service. And positioning yourself as a thought leader. So all of these things place in it in synergy, right? It has to be in-sync, writing a website, you know, content on your website, amplifying all social pages, keeping the messaging out there by commenting, guest posting, creating forums and all this other stuff going out there doing more speaking, engagement, relationship building, it’s not an easy task, like this whole space of SEO, it’s not a one thing fit all. It’s not like paid ads, where you can just go to Google use the platform and bid per click, that’s pretty straightforward. You can kind of find, figure it out and do it yourself. But in terms of this SEO landscape, it’s more than that. It’s about positioning your website, the biggest asset piece of your business nowadays, into something that people will want to be going to your site to absorb information, and want to connect with your business to take that initial action of calling you or filling that form or emailing you. So you need that to be the central piece to really strategically put good compelling information there for them to convert.

Christian Klepp  08:38

That my friend was dynamite advice. And you know what, I think you broke it down so beautifully. And why I say that is because you help dispel this myth, something that you brought up at the beginning of the conversation that, better SEO is not just downloading some kind of plugin, right? There’s a heck of a lot of work behind all of that. And it includes all of those things that you mentioned, good website, content. And then after you produce the content, how you promote the content, guest blogging, how do you attract that get… like you said, like, get those eyeballs onto your website. How do you attract the right traffic? So it’s a lot of like moving parts, right?

John Vuong  09:21

Yeah, it’s much more than just putting it out there. It’s not you build it, they will come.  It’s never been like that. And even if you have a bricks and mortar store. You expect people to… you know, people, again, a lot of business owners, they spend so much money, making a nice beautiful sign, having the nicest product inside their store. And then they forget about this marketing budget, advertising budget, and they invest all this money on itself, like the actual bricks and mortar store itself, the physical location, but then they forget that with all people to absorb and know about your business, you’re not a real business because you have no revenue, right? You have no influence, no one knows that you’re around. So I would do the opposite and really focus on the marketing piece, and then make a lot of pivots along the way to figure out what works, what resonates with your ideal type customers, right? And then navigate through it. Even through my agency, like we’ve pivoted so many times, we’ve made so many mistakes, we’ve always had clients to see what they wanted, how we can improve. And these are the things that we learn that it’s not just one thing that you believe that is going to make your business. You need to continually see want to grow and want to do more and continually add value to your customers. And when you see that, and when they see it, they’re going to be more sticky with you. They’re gonna be more of a lifelong type of client, than you just being stagnant, right? Like you’re doing the same kind of deal all the time. There’s always room for improvement. And that’s where growth mindset is important.

Christian Klepp  11:06

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I mean, like it’s kind of like a fluid situation if I understood you correctly, right? Because you have to continuously iterate as you’re moving along, right?

John Vuong  11:18

Yeah, I think every business is like that. Because if you don’t, and you’re stuck on the same kind of process, right? system, and you believe it’s only one way. Well, what happens when there’s deviations, when there’s a problem that arises, when there’s a situational instance where Google algorithm changes? Right. We have to be on the pulse of figuring out troubleshooting, testing, and understanding what impact it has for all clients. Right? So I’m very fortunate to be in this industry to really challenge ourselves. Because we’re, you know, as much as we’re doing this for our clients, Google is dictating it, and what we believe is always doing the best job we can to serve the client, but also to serve the customers of those clients that we’re after. And when you understand that you’re not trying to serve Google’s algorithm, and you want to serve the customers of our clients, that’s more important, because Google is gonna eventually figure it out that it is more user driven, as opposed to AI driven.

Christian Klepp  12:35

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Hey, it’s Christian Klepp here, we’ll get back to the episode in a second. But first, is your brand struggling to cut through the noise? Are you trying to find more effective ways to reach your target audience and boost sales? Are you trying to pivot your business? If so, book a call with EINBLICK Consulting, our experienced consultants will work with you to help your B2B business to succeed and scale. Go to www.einblick.co for more information.

John, for this next set of questions, I’m going to get a little bit granular, a little bit nitty gritty. And that’s only because, I’ve seen a lot of this discussion going on on, you know, platforms like LinkedIn. And I think it would be beneficial to our listeners who basically fall into one group is certainly like the entrepreneurs, mostly B2B SaaS intrapreneurs. And the other one, the other group are people in a marketing role in mid-sized tech firms. So here are the questions. on-page SEO and technical SEO, what’s the difference between the two?

John Vuong  13:41

Yeah, on pages, anything to do with the meta, the graphics, the content that people actually see visually, when you open up a browser and web page. Technical is the but behind the scenes coding. So compressing images, compressing size, speed, cleaning up some of the plugins, getting rid of all the CSS files, or any of the things that really slow down boggle down the indexing of the site, versus the on page visually. Content wise, image wise, meta description, tags, H1, all that is on page.

Christian Klepp  14:21

Okay, fantastic. Would do you almost say, it’s kind of like if we’re gonna put this in layman’s terms like a front office and the back office comparison?

John Vuong  14:27

Front end and back end. That’s right.

Christian Klepp  14:30

Got you. This is another one of these buzzwords, in your field – link building. Right. And everybody has a different opinion about it. From your experience, and in your opinion, why is it so important? And how should companies leverage link building properly?

John Vuong  14:47

Lead link building is one of the most critical aspects of an SEO campaign and what we focus on is doing it the right way, white hat right. And it’s all about earned links, which is you do good work. So that people will refer you, right? It’s very similar to traditional bricks and mortar businesses. Before the internet, it was word of mouth and referrals that customers business owners relied on. So it’s very similar to technical right now in terms of the internet and websites. So what you want to do is make sure that you earn links. And how do you do that? Well, you have to be positioned like someone that knows what they’re talking about, in terms of an expert or a thought leader, authoritative figure, right? You need to start speaking, you need to start writing for other websites, adding value to someone’s website or Association, or publication, because that’s what it’s all about earned media. It’s not paid media, there’s a difference, right? So you have to earn your way by contributing by helping others with the message that they feel valuable for their audience members. And just like how we’re right doing this podcast, hopefully, I’m adding value to your audience members with content. So it’s earned.

Christian Klepp  16:08

That’s absolutely right. And, you brought up so many great points, which, you know, made me think of another question. Definitely, I’m all for that, like, white hat earned media. But why do you think there’s companies out there… I’m not saying everybody’s doing it. But it is one other part of that spectrum… Why are so many people resorting to like the black hat methods?

John Vuong  16:30

Well, it’s fast, right? And people understand that. Business owners don’t even know the difference. And I’m all about being as ethical as possible. I’m all about like, playing above board, because once you get hit by Google algo, or someone finds out that you’re paying for paid ads or paid links, or you’re doing things that you shouldn’t be doing, they’re going to report you. And is your business worth reporting? And if you’re supporting all these other businesses, your reputations on the line. And yes, if you’re overseas, you don’t really know and you can’t track people down, right? But if you’re local, and you want to help professionals, like it’s morals, right, it’s ethics. It’s all about laying above ground, right? Like you got to do things, the right things properly. And I’ve always been very transparent along the ways. I’ve, ethically I just tell people how it is. And you can play by either rule. And, you know, hopefully, you never get caught if you’re doing the black hat ways. But I just chose to go everything aboveboard.

Christian Klepp  17:43

Exactly. I mean, just like everything else, not just professionally, but in life, there’s a right way to do it. And there’s a…. well, the easy or the shortcut way to do it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be good. Right?

John Vuong  17:57

Yeah. And that’s life. Right? You can find fast money. There’s a lot of drug dealers out there or people selling things illegally, right? Where are they gaining a handle… how are they doing it, and I don’t want to know, right? And yeah you could play that rule or you go above board, find the material, go through the entire process, pay taxes, do things ethically build a company, like, if you’re gonna go this far, running a business, incorporating pay taxes, why wouldn’t you do everything else the right way?

Christian Klepp  18:32

Correct. Correct. That’s absolutely right. You know, we’ve been discussing all these various components in the past couple of minutes. So like now that we’ve managed to successfully unpack everything, let’s build it all together. And talk to us about like, what you believe are crucial components. And you mentioned some of them already. But like mentioned what you think are the crucial components to successful SEO?

John Vuong  18:58

Yeah, it’s not just one thing. This is where a lot of people misconceptions, like, there’s 100 things that Google’s always changing, right? Algorithm-wise. It’s not one thing that’s going to move the needle, like, yes, you need a great website, UX, design, compelling content, positioning yourself, understand your customers, right, speaking directly to them. So that’s the content piece.

Then it’s like all your assets has to be in synergies. Keep it consistent through all social channels, all the content that you’re producing continually update people, right. Then you have to keep producing yourself. It’s a lot of work. What I’m saying is, we build a team of not just one pillar, like not just technical SEO people, or developers, right, like we have developers graphic designers content. We have link builders, we have social media managers, we have account managers. We have a whole fleet of people that work together, collaboratively to do the best job for our clients, and that’s how you do it right the first time. And yes, you can try to do it yourself. You can hire people, outsource people, keep paying per job or per… but that’s not going to really amplify your message, it’s not going to do it properly. So with that in mind, it’s a lot of research as well, a lot of strategy, a lot of competitive analysis, due diligence, understanding trends, like this whole technical SEO as well as like research. Yes, it’s great to know, and you have a lot of software to check these things out. But ultimately, it’s about like, what do you want to be known as? What do you want customers to know you for? What is the value you’re bringing? What’s the product and service that you bring to the table that unique from everyone else? Once you determine that, then that’s when you reach out to a company or hire people. But if you have no clarity about your vision, and your goals and your values and your business, it’s hard for that company or people to try to realize that for you. So we typically tell people in this SEO, when they reach out to us, do you run a real business? Do you have revenue? Have you been in it for a couple years? Do you know what your ideal customer looks like? Like all these things, and we vet, right? We want to make sure that they’re good sound business owners before they reach out to us so that we can help them amplify the message. If that makes sense.

Christian Klepp  21:30

That makes perfect sense. And and I think you brought up something which I think is so important. And I’m sure it’s not something that’s just a misconception in SEO, it’s probably in other fields as well. But like, I’m sure you’ve had it previously, like, people come to you with these problems. And they expect that, once it’s all handed over to you that you can just miraculously, like turn everything around. And I think you know, and that was so spot on that you said, well, they have to understand. Well, first of all, they should have been in the game for a while. They should understand their own their own market, their environment and their customers, right. Because it all is like, you know, it’s different components in this ecosystem. So that’s why I think what you said was it seems like the strategy needs to be holistic, right? It’s not just the technology part. There’s a lot of other stuff involved as well.

John Vuong  21:35

Probably, it has to be a holistic approach. And most people have already dabbled into SEO or paid ads, right? Social Media Marketing and paid ads, and they’ve gotten really poor results, or they don’t even know what the result should be. Right? So for us, it’s more about like, understanding what their goals are, because SEO was more about the long term, positioning yourself as the leader, right, so that you can start getting inbound leads, there’s a difference between inbound versus paid ads, where you’re pushing messages at people for them to hopefully, send an offer to, and you’re probably giving something up to get something in return. But if you position as a thought leader, you’re paying, getting people to pay full part, right? And they know what they’re getting, because they’re seeking out your service. And there’s a big difference in the type of leads that you get from inbound versus outbound.

Christian Klepp  23:23

Absolutely, absolutely. Um, this next question might be a little bit obvious, but I’m gonna ask it anyway. I mean, clearly, digitalization is, again, trending toward something that people can’t avoid concentrating or focusing their energies on. But from you, I just want to know, like, what have you seen in terms of changes in the last 12 months or so in the SEO landscape?

John Vuong  23:52

Yeah, like a lot of people have…. I would say it’s interesting, because we live in Canada, and we’ve been in lockdown for over a year, on and off. And so there’s a lot of uncertainty. A lot of business owners that used to do a lot of paid ad campaigns now have to re-jig their marketing dollars, because people aren’t spending the way they used to. Right. And depending on which industry you’re in, so it’s very determined on location and industry that you’re in. And for us, we feel people who are positioned well, that are optimistic, that understand that they want to get doing this for 5, 10 years, or 20 years or whatever, they want to position their core asset as you know, their website to be better off to generate more traffic, right. So they will stay and you know, continue working.

But the ones that are uncertain like they want to exit their business within five years or three years. This basically fast track them to want to exit soon, right? Like with this current state of pandemic. It really lets people realize why they’re doing what they’re doing and what works and what doesn’t. They have a better fine tune in what’s going on in their business, a lot of people are really reflecting on what matters. And one of the biggest strengths I found is we’ve been very fortunate and lucky, where we have been more of an extension to a lot of these businesses. And they need us more than anything, because we are always updating their information, we’re keeping top of funnel, middle of funnel type of content out there for their users, and positioning them better. Let it be now or later, it’s always making sure that their foundation is set. And with that big asset of their website, it’s so strong for them. They understand the importance of having someone properly manage, that knows their business, and I’m very fortunate and grateful to have clients that trust us. And we’ve always just built this relationship stronger over the years.

Christian Klepp  26:03

That’s great. It’s like you said, it also like really depends on the organization and the way they’re structured. And of course, their long term objectives and intent. But certainly, I would, I would imagine that like, SEO is something that, like, if people weren’t focused on on it before, they’re probably dabbling in it now.

John Vuong  26:25

Yeah, and I think a lot of people just don’t understand it, right. So I feel there’s this huge misconception in this whole black hole for a lot of businesses and, they don’t even know what they’re getting themselves into. So for us as the whole industry, SEO industry, it’s the education piece that’s lacking more than anything. And because it is very difficult to speak in a layman term in a business term, to understand what really goes on in behind the scenes. Because if business owners are so busy with all other aspects of the business operations, HR, accounting, bookkeeping, sales, marketing, all those other stuff, advertising sales, that’s one piece, then there’s paid ads, and then there’s organic ads, and SEO is another language altogether. So we’re so far down, that marketing advertising realm of, even sales, right, like, it’s so small of a piece, but it’s so important. And if you partner with the right type of company, you’re going to have really, really good ROI.

Christian Klepp  27:35

Exactly. I mean, with all due respect, it’s sometimes strikes me as being SEO that is like something like a function that most people would rather delegate to somebody else. Right? And they only like start giving it attention, like you said, when they’re getting when they’re getting poor results, or things are not working. Alright.

John Vuong  27:57

Yeah, so but the challenge is, this whole industry, a lot of business owners have probably gotten emails, they get phone calls all the time, promising, guaranteeing it’s affordable, all these things, but it’s your asset that you’re really playing with. Your biggest asset. Yeah, and you start delegating, giving cPanel access, hosting access, website admin access to your whole livelihood. You better trust that person, you better know what they’re all about, if they’re actually legitimately in it for the right reasons or not. And therefore, that’s the disconnect, right? They don’t know what they don’t know. And therefore they’re trying things and they don’t know what is going on in the backend. So that’s what I always tell people, like inform yourself, educate yourself, get some basic knowledge, go on, watch some blogs, read some blogs, watch some YouTube videos, go to some webinars to learn a little bit so that you ask intelligent questions to your consultant or contractor or independent person or in house or agency, whoever you’re going to use, at least you feel more knowledgeable, to then ask questions.

Christian Klepp  29:12

Exactly, exactly. I know you’ve given a lot of like, great insights and great advice in the last couple of minutes. But if we were going to do it, like from a very, like top level perspective, what is the one thing that you think people should start and the one thing that people should stop doing when it comes to SEO?

John Vuong  29:32

So to start, I would say slow down and don’t do everything. Do one thing really, really good. And the first thing I would say is build a really good website. It kind of goes with the fundamentals right? Or is made sure the foundation is built strong. Just like when you build a home, if you live in a home or not. Like that core foundation, which is your website, but the messaging of the website is important as well. So the content piece.

What people really, really focus on heavily, and I see this in every day is social media. I mean, that’s something everyone thinks it’s free. Everyone’s on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I’m gonna put so much time and effort into it. Well, eight years of running this agency, I’ve seen hundreds of campaigns, and the traffic that social media gets, the amount of clicks in leads that business gets is very low, I would say. If you really focus on your main asset, and understand how your customers, your ideal customers, your real paying customers, how they navigate throughout that journey, the buying side. And if people resonate on Google or not, but there’s dozens of searches daily on your product and service keywords that people are searching, but they’re in control, they’re seeking out something, they need something. They just want, they have a problem, they need someone to fix it or an issue, right. And if you are creating good information, you have a great website, you have something that compels them to click on your site, then you have something that they are interested in, like paying for, right? So really work on that foundation, build a good website, get rid of all the social stuff, because yes, it’s good to just be there. But don’t spend a lot of time and effort because a lot of people invest so much time and effort into that versus their own website.

Christian Klepp  31:40

Yeah, that’s pretty sound advice, man. Um, you know, John, you’ve given us so much value. And these in these past, like 36 minutes are what we’ve been talking about, please do us the honor of introducing yourself a bit to the listeners.

John Vuong  31:54

For me, it’s just keep adding value, right? Like, I’m the type of person that wants to educate, want to inform. And I’m doing this for one specific reason is, when I was working at Yellow Pages group, I was there for five years. I met 1000 of business owners, and their biggest concern, and they were hardest working people. Like they took care of the pizza shop, the floor is the flower, coffee guys, right. They work 14-16 hours to just produce a great product, it’s coffee or pizza. Yeah, great humans. Those people are what my mission is like to help more of those hardworking people to make an impact make a dent in the world, right. Make sure that they survive. And with this pandemic, a lot of people are like suffering because big companies like Amazon, Walmart, Costco is demolishing these local retailers and outlets and service providers. So I wanted to really just strengthen them, because it was a market that was under served in this whole, ecosystem, right. And I’m just bringing the top level big brands to the small, medium sized businesses so that they can feel what it’s like to have a proper SEO campaign delivered to them.

Christian Klepp  33:19

Fantastic. And, and I love that background story about like, how you got to know or how you identified this need in the market this? you could you could almost call it a unmet need, or a need that needed to be fulfilled, we know with small businesses and what have you. So thanks again for coming on and sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. Speaking of, what’s the best way for people to like, get in touch with you?

John Vuong  33:45

Yeah, so you can check out the website. It’s www.localseosearch.ca. Based in Toronto, Canada. And we… you can reach out to me, we actually have a podcast as well. It’s called Local SEO Today. The reason we put together the podcast just like yourself Christian is to educate and inform. We did it a couple years ago, me and my VP of Sales, he actually worked at yellow pages as well for 30 plus years. We work with 10s of 1000s of business owners together. And for us, we just have a lot of insight, knowledge, real life experience with real business owners that we want to just share. And with that in mind, that’s where the tips and tricks and advice that we share with listeners and audience members so that they can all level up and hopefully make less mistakes moving forward. And the best way is probably through LinkedIn if you want to reach out to me directly.

Christian Klepp  34:44

Fantastic. So there you have it folks. Reach out to john directly on LinkedIn and you know if you can like listen to his podcast as well. So one more time for the listeners. It’s called:

John Vuong  34:54

Local SEO today.

Christian Klepp  34:56

Local SEO today. Alright, where you get your favorite podcasts. So, John, thank you so much for your time. And it was a pleasure. Stay safe. Take care, and we’ll talk to you soon.

John Vuong  35:08

Thanks a lot, Christian.

Christian Klepp  35:10

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast. To learn more about what we do here at EINBLICK, please visit our website at www.einblick.co and be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast player.