On today’s episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I am speaking with an SEO expert named Logan Bryant. Logan is from the United States and is joining me at a ridiculously early time for him (and a suitable time for me because I’m selfish that way).
I’m going to be talking to Logan about how he does what he does, how he gets the sort of results that he gets, how he convinces businesses that they need what he does – because that’s not always an obvious thing for people to put their trust in SEO – particularly if they’ve been bitten before by somebody else who’s not necessarily done a good job. And obviously, I’m also going to be talking to Logan about ChatGPT because, let’s face it, you cannot have an SEO discussion from somebody that does content-driven SEO without talking about ChatGPT.
Logan on his specialty within SEO…
Darren: Your actual specialism within SEO is SEO testing, is that right?
Logan: Yes. I would say that I’ve got two specialties, in a sense. My background is mainly B2B, so like doing SEO for B2B SaaS companies and building programs as an in-house SEO for B2B SaaS companies, right. So on the one hand, it’s like I’m a well-rounded content-driven SEO, then as part of that I like to test what content is working and what elements of the content is working.
…on how he measures success in SEO…
Darren: You mentioned measuring successes is crucial because you have to measure everything for it to work. Is it typically rankings and traffic that you’re measuring or are there other aspects that you’re measuring as well?
Logan: Typically its rankings and traffic and click-through rates, those are the three that I usually go to as leading indicators of success for the tests that I wrote. Sometimes my primary goal is a ranking, sometimes it’s traffic.
…on how businesses fail with SEO…
Darren: Over the years I’ve been involved in the industry, I’ve found that often where most businesses fall down is they’ll have somebody do SEO for them, they’ll get more traffic and they’ll get more rankings. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the client is going to get more leads or get more sales, which means they don’t get the return on the investment, which means they go around saying well the SEO didn’t really work. Is that something you’ve seen yourself?
Logan: I think there’s two sides to that experience. On the one side, you have the the client who says ‘oh I’m getting lots of traffic but nobody’s converting’ and on the other side there are companies who are getting all their business coming from organic and they don’t even know where their leads are coming from. If you’re in that situation where you know a client doesn’t see the value in it, the value may come down the road, especially if we’re creating a lot of top and funnel content or middle final content.
…on why SEO ‘doesn’t work’ for businesses…
Darren: We see a lot of instances where genuinely people have used someone for SEO and they have done a terrible job. Why do you think our industry has such a problem with either agencies or freelancers not doing a good job? Or potentially clients not understanding that, in fact, they have done a good job they just don’t appreciate it?
Logan: I think there’s a simple answer and then there’s a whole Pandora’s box of other reasons. The simple reason is because in our industry, there are a lot of people who get sold on SEO, whether they were seeking it themselves or it was like an SEO company that reached out to them, and they were promised the world, but these people aren’t always able to deliver. I think SEO is kind of like a cake; you need all the ingredients for SEO to work and if one of them is missing, people don’t get their money’s worth.
…on the differences between working in-house and freelance…
Darren: One question I wanted to ask is the difference between working in-house and working as an agency or freelancer. How do you keep on top of developments and updates within what is a let’s face it probably the fastest moving industry in the world with Google changing things every few seconds?
Logan: There are things that are more difficult in-house, but I’ve had good and bad experiences working in-house. I’ve joined teams that just were not ready and when I joined them, in hindsight I didn’t do a good job of making sure they were ready. If you join a company that doesn’t have the right ingredients you’re not going to be getting results.
…on the biggest changes in SEO in recent years…
Darren: What do you think in your opinion has been the biggest change in the industry say over the past 10 years?
Logan: Easily ChatGPT. I know everybody’s talking about it, but I can’t think of anything else. It’s so tiring hearing about it over and over again but, at the same time, it’s like how can you not? Everybody compares it to when the internet came out and I think that’s a good analogy. It is going to change not just our industry, but our world. How it will change it, I’m not here to speculate, but I do think it’s like the biggest change that has happened in the last 10 years, for sure.
If anybody would like to chat to Logan about SEO testing or anything to do with SEO, you can head over to website loganbryant.com, his Twitter or on LinkedIn and reach him pretty easily.
I feel like I’ve learned a lot speaking to Logan, so huge thanks to him for coming on the show.
Remember to subscribe to the Engaging Marketeer to ensure you never miss another episode of our podcast.
