Content Writing For SEO and Search Engines – Adam Chronister Interview – 174

Jesse Dolan: Again, creative writing with SEO in mind, right? A little bit different, Adam, than like we talked. What did you say? Writing for writing's sake, right? Not to steal maybe a catchphrase you're going to drop here in a second, but definitely different when you do this with SEO in mind.

Adam Chronister: I don't really consider myself an amazing writer, but I'm in the space, so I have to understand how to teach writers how to write for the web. Of course, a lot of that comes or starts with keyword research and then molds out from there.

Jesse Dolan: All right, everyone. On today's episode, we're going to be interviewing Adam Chronister. Adam is the founder of Enleaf, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses grow their online visibility through data driven marketing strategies. We're going to touch on some of that here in the interview. Adam is definitely somebody who knows what he is talking about in SEO. We met about a year and a half ago, but for over a decade, Adam has been at the forefront of SEO and digital marketing. He's published a lot of research for technical SEO. He's been a speaker in front of multiple audiences ranging on topics from cryptocurrency, online privacy, and of course search engine optimization. He's developed tools, tactics, techniques, some of which you can find on his website as he mentions coming up, and we link to in the show notes here.

He's great, and I think you're going to enjoy the things that we're going to talk about and some of the tactics and the techniques about how to write content for SEO, right? We all know we need to put content on our website. This is how to kind of look at that through the lens of SEO and do it the right way with intent for getting ranked. Hope you guys enjoy. Here's the interview with Adam coming up. Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks you found online. I'm your host, Jesse Dolan. Here today with Adam Chronister. How you doing, Adam?

Adam Chronister: Doing good. How are you doing, Jesse?

Jesse Dolan: Doing good. We're going to get into some SEO, talk about some creative writing with a lens through SEO. But before we get into that, why don't you tell people a little bit about who you are, self ratify yourself a little bit, right? Being an expert, you know what you're talking about in this topic. You've done this for a little bit. Why don't you give us the nickel tour in your own words real quick?

Adam Chronister: Yeah, yeah. So my name's Adam Chronister. I run kind of a boutique digital marketing agency. We're based in Spokane, Washington, but really we're, I guess we call ourselves a virtual agency. So we got basically employees across the US and abroad. I've been doing digital marketing since 2009. My background's originally in computer science, but I pivoted a couple years out of college and really kind of fell in love with data science, digital marketing, and so I've been doing that ever since.

Jesse Dolan: That's awesome. Yeah, nobody really kind of goes to school. I guess nowadays you can go to school for SEO, right? But we all fall into this one way, shape or fashion, but it usually involves some kind of background, like you said, some kind of science or digital or marketing or graphics at least. So you and I got to know each other through a mastermind we went to about a year and a half ago in Las Vegas, which was amazing, and we kind of connected. I think you're smart, bright, and had a lot of good things to share. I know you're speaking at the next one coming up, or presenting, I should say, in Nashville on some similar topics we're going to talk about here, maybe a little bit if we talk some reporting stuff.

But Adam's got a wealth of knowledge. Thought it'd be great to jump on the show to talk a little bit here with everybody about, again, creative writing with SEO in mind, right? A little bit different, Adam, than we talked. What did you say? Writing for writing's sake, right? Not to steal maybe a catchphrase you're going to drop here in a second, but definitely different when you do this with SEO in mind.

Adam Chronister: Yeah, we briefly talked the other day, and I was kind of mentioning that. So as you can imagine in this space throughout the years, I've had a lot of opportunities and situations where I've had to really kind of reprogram how people think about content, especially when it relates to the web. And I'm talking about different verticals. I mean, it seems like in the world of digital marketing, content creation, small business, all of that, there's a lot of misnomers about content and how to approach it from a web perspective. And I've been on multiple verticals of that, and some of it's come out of my own deficits. I don't really consider myself an amazing writer, but I'm in the space, so I have to understand how to teach writers how to write for the web. So I've taken traditional writers who had very kind of traditional writing styles and built training and programs to teach them how exactly to write for the web.

Of course, a lot of that comes or starts with keyword research and then molds out from there. And then on the flip side, we work with plenty of business owners, directors of marketing, marketing managers, and we also have to teach them what it means to write for the search engines. And it's not the same methodology that you would use, for instance, if you're writing for a print article. And so, yeah, there's a lot of misnomers that we've had to dispel throughout the years. One of those phrases that I use a lot is don't get stuck in the trap of writing for writing's sake. What I mean by that is I think most business owners understand that, hey, I should be creating content. I should be writing a blog or describing my products or my services. But that's typically about the extent of their knowledge. They know what they should be doing, but they don't know the how's or the why's.

And so a lot of times I have to dispel myths like, hey, I know you think you need to be writing every week or every two weeks or every month. But let's back up a little bit and let's really dissect the strategy. A lot of times I'll explain to people like, hey, instead of us writing once a week and just not really having any data, why don't you write once a month, but take that same amount of content and consolidate it, make it the most authoritative piece of content on your subject matter. And that typically takes a little bit of acclimation from the client perspective. Usually they're like, wait a minute, so I don't need to be writing as much or as frequently, but I need to be writing more subsident content. So we do a lot of that. It kind of goes back to a methodology I think termed by Brian Dean years ago called the Skyscraper Method, and there's still a lot of rationale for that. So I'm sure you're probably familiar with the skyscraper method or no?

Jesse Dolan: Absolutely. If you want to give everybody the quick explain it like they're five method, just make sure everybody's listening is looped in.

Adam Chronister: Yeah. So basically for a while now, there's been this idea, this concept in digital marketing called the skyscraper method. The reason that this content methodology is called the skyscraper method is essentially it replicates the idea of mid-century skyscrapers where somebody would outdo the next guy slightly so that their tower was X amount bigger than their competitors. Well, you can do very much the same thing with content. So if you cling onto a particular vertical, one of the ways to get ahead and to get visibility is to take what's already working in the search results and then approve upon it. So early on, this would look like, let's say the top ranking article was five best vacation spots in Washington state. Well, you might write an article that says 10 best vacation spots in Washington state. Now, in some respects, that methodology, and its, I guess, basic form is a little bit overplayed, but still the concept is the same.

The idea is how do you improve upon what's already working and also learn and glean from what's already working? At the end of the day, whether you're talking about content, technical SEO, link building, whatever it is, the biggest variable that we have as a specialist is to look at what's working and backwards engineer it. And so we do that very same thing with content. And really, yes, you can pull out all of these digital marketing tools and do a lot of deep analysis. And granted, when it comes to keyword research, that is important. But outside of that, a lot of the stuff is stuff that you can do yourself just by going to the search engines, doing a search as if you were your own customer, and seeing what's there. And nine times out of 10, most business owners don't even do that. So that's the best place to start is understand what's working and start to build a model to replicate that.

Jesse Dolan: That reminds me, we had Kyle Roof on episode 70 here, if people want to check it out, talking about that exact same thing, right? Google, how it hides it in plain sight, what it likes. Now you definitely have to reverse engineer it, then make sure you're studying things and whatever. But like you're saying, do some keyword research, sorry, do some searches yourself to see what you're seeing, and then digest the stuff here that Adam's talking about. I'd like to circle back if we can. You've mentioned this a few times, keyword research. And I agree 100%. Having that on the front side is paramount to understanding maybe not what you're thinking this thing, this widget digital service is called, but what are the people that are doing the searches actually calling it? And sometimes your terminology may not be the same. Even if it is the same, knowing what they're typing and searching is important. What do you mean by that? Why are you putting so much importance out on the front side of this process?

Adam Chronister: Well, keyword research is one of the things that, it's the forefront of any good search engine optimization strategy. And again, this also is the basis for understanding where you're going. A lot of times, people and business owners are kind of using the spaghetti method. They're just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. But we have tried to instill into our clients like, no, you need to let the data dictate your decisions, otherwise you're not doing yourself any favors. And so one of the very first things that you want to look at is your keyword research. And what that means is that can be as simple as, again, going to the search engines, typing in a part of a keyword and seeing what the auto suggest feature replicates. At the bottom of Google, there's options that show also searched for. But then there's things like everything from free plugins to tools, SCM Rush. I think Uber Suggest is a free tool.

If you're starting out or on a budget, A Res. You can go wild, but if you're just getting started, you don't need to go wild. There's plenty of free keyword research tools out there. And even if you don't want to get deep into that, you can have it done quite easily. I mean, whether you hire an agency like ours that can do really in depth competitor analysis and keyword research, down to, I wouldn't always suggest fiber, but you could at least get started without too much effort or cost. And that's really the emphasis of where you want to start with any digital marketing strategy.

Jesse Dolan: I like what you said too about, even if, yeah, there's a ton of resources to do it for you to help you do it, whatever, but just doing a search in Google, scroll to the bottom. What are other people searching for? What kinds of things you're seeing on the page if you're listening, watching business owner, marketing manager. Doing these things yourself to really understand that ecosystem of the search engine. And like you're saying, I just love the phrase, instead of just writing for writing's sake, if this is going to be found, what things, what are the buildings, what are the skyscrapers are you next to? What's the landscape look like?

And then, what's your standing out? Is that more authoritative? So if we just keep in order, we've done some keyword research right? Now we're going to write some content. I don't know, Adam, where you're going to go with this, but modifying an existing piece, maybe creating a new piece, a product or service page, maybe a blog post. Help us understand if we have some keywords in mind. How are we going to write a page, an article, a post for the search engines and not for human being? Because you had said earlier, it's different than a print article, right, and I think you're 100% correct. Share your thoughts on that.

Adam Chronister: Yeah, so this is kind of where the division between traditional content and web-based content comes into play. I think maybe the best place to start is to think about your voice search, your Amazon Alexa, your Google Voice, Siri, all that stuff. This is a great way to start to understand how search engines work. Because basically a lot of those voice activated search systems, you'll notice they're question and answer based. You ask it a question and it spits out an answer. Well, at the end of the day, if you really think about it, you ask yourself, what is a search engine? And you can come up with all kinds of answers. But the way that I like to answer that is, a search engine is a question and answer machine, meaning that you ask it a question and you want to have the best answer to that question.

So this is why a lot of times, particularly like with blog posts, but even service or product based content, we want to orient that content around answering a particular question or becoming the best solution to a problem. So it all starts with putting yourself into the position of your particular customer. You want to reverse engineer their scenario. So let's say for instance you are a plumber and you run a plumbing business. Well, start asking yourself, what is it that my potential clientele are looking for? A plumber near me, plumber issues. And you can start coming up with those keyword ideations yourself, and then you start to validate them with a lot of these other tools that will provide you exact data that will validate those ideas.

So again, the thing that we also preach a lot is what question are you answering? What solution are you describing? That is the correct way. Whereas comparing that to an article, you're not necessarily trying to intercept a query, you're just trying to entertain or educate. And don't get me wrong, there's plenty of that that goes into good content as well. You don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you also want to understand that most people when they go to the search engines, they're looking for a solution.

Jesse Dolan: Well, because that's number one thing we're trying to accomplish here is showing up. Somebody reading the article or reading your SEO based post on your website, that's almost like step two. First thing, we're creating this article to get found in search. That's why you're writing it for SEO, right? So it's not that it's one or the other, but just what's your priority? What's your main thing you're doing here? What's the intent? Okay, so we've got that approach, we've got keywords in mind that we're utilizing on the page. What other tips or tricks or best practices do you have for people to write for SEO's sake? Again, on this mock page we're going through?

Adam Chronister: Yeah, let me circle back on that. I do want to also dispel another myth. And so earlier I talked about the skyscraper method, and traditionally the basic understanding of this is you just want to write more than the competitors. And I've even noticed that with a lot of our clients, they just say, oh, I just need to write more content. And unfortunately it's not as simple as that because the way that search engines understand and parse content is less on word count. The only reason more word count is at all beneficial is because it can, by its very nature, build a larger semantic map. Meaning the search engines understand how synonyms work and how correlation of words work. So it's not always writing more words, but it's building a better semantic map so that when those search crawlers go and they crawl hundreds and millions of pages online, that they can understand and parse your piece of content and fetch that back based off a search query.

Jesse Dolan: So if you're going to double or triple size your pages, sorry to interrupt Adam, if you're going to double or triple size your page, you better make sure you're not regurgitating the same stuff. Don't have 3,000 words of the same thing as 1,000. Have more in depth on certain nuggets or a certain aspect of it to be more informative and authoritative on that topic, right? Just dive deeper.

Adam Chronister: And sometimes you can do just as much without more content. A lot of times it's just a matter of making sure that you understand what the targets are. Now there are a lot of great tools. You mentioned Kyle Roof. So Kyle Roof has built a, I think him and his team has built Page Optimizer Pro. That is one example of a tool that will start to give you data sets engineered towards this type of semantic analysis. Another one is Surfer, Formulary Surfer SEO. And there's a plethora of other tools that will do a lot of this analysis for you. So again, depending how deep you want to go, there are tools that will do this. In fact, I think Surfer SEO just started to roll out a free account. I don't know how many reports it gives you, but that's a place you can start with literally no money, a really great tool set that's going to help you understand this stuff without having to do it manually like we used to in the old days.

Jesse Dolan: Right? And I think all this, there's this undertone of you're doing this just with intent and strategy. Again, you're not just writing, you're not sitting down. Well, I better write some stuff for the website today if that's the mindset, stop, right? Rewind this, start over, listen what Adam is saying and start getting some things that are intentional for what you're going to sit down for.

Adam Chronister: So there's another thing too, another myth that we have to dispel. And again, a lot of this is, there's a lot of things that have floated to the surface that people have heard about digital marketing, about SEO that used to be true that are less true now. And the other thing that we're continually having to educate our clients around is keywords. So we still very much focus on a central keyword anchor per piece of content, but what I always tell people is a single piece of content can rank for one or many terms. And the reason this is important is we want to focus less on a particular keyword, although we do want that as our anchor. And we really want to look at a piece of content as what is the theme of this piece of content? And that helps people understand, okay, I don't want to be so attached to a single keyword, but what is the theme of this piece of content?

And so we also try to instill in our clients, what is the theme that you want for this piece of content? And inside of that theme, you may have a primary keyword, but you may have 10, 20 different interrelated synonyms that you want to include into that piece of content. And again, that's really how the search engines have evolved. They've evolved to understand keyword correlations, much like humans understand, I understand that words like dog and canine are similar themes. So that's the other thing that we are constantly instilling into our clients. Okay, what is the theme of this piece of content? And every piece of content should have a particular theme in mind in order to perform to its best capabilities.

Jesse Dolan:

Hey everyone, just want a quick interrupt on the show here to talk about Bright Local. If you haven't checked it out yet, go on out to localSEOtactics.com/brightlocal or you can go to our resources page. Scroll through that which has a bunch of different resources that we recommend and use ourselves and look for the mentions about Bright Local. There's a lot of things Bright Local does. We use it in house, it's one of our favorite tools. We mainly use it for their rank tracking for your website. You can kind of monitor your keyword progress, tracking the ranks, fluctuations, things like that over time for specific keywords that you enter in. We also love their local search grid tool for your Google My Business or Google Business Profile Listing. And what that's going to do is show you over your metro area, whatever you select for the size of the grid, seven by seven points, nine by nine.

Basically you define a certain area and it's going to tell you if you were standing on those spots, how does your GMB rank for the specified keywords? So that's great as well. We also use it for citation building, citation management for all your properties and mentions out there, whether it be Yelp, Facebook, local city pages, BBB, things like that. It's a great tool to help build and manage your citations to make sure your name, address, phone number is consistent and all those other things to really get your digital footprint identified by Google. They also have reputation management where you can aggregate all the reviews that you're getting across all these different portals, see how many reviews you're getting, what your score is, things like that. And also other tools. Check it out. They've got a free 14 day trial. If you go through localSEOtactics.com/brightlocal, or again, go to the link off of our resources page. You're going to be able to take advantage of that 14 day trial.

It is an affiliate link. We'll get a few bucks if you do that. Doesn't increase the price for you at all. Just kind of makes the tide rise for everybody. So if you're interested in any of those applications, like I said, they've got a whole suite of tools that's going to help you out, whether you're an agency or if you're doing SEO for yourself. I should mention, if you are an agency or trying to start an agency, they also have some great white label options, so you can leverage their tools and their products for your clients to showcase the analytics, the data, and give a real professional spin on your reporting, which is something we use as well.

So check it out, localSEOtactics.com/brightlocal and take advantage of their 14 day trial. Is there a way we can unpack that a little bit with an example? Are you saying, tell me if I'm right or wrong here. If we're talking electrical installation, whatever a theme would be, this is commercial focused versus residential focused and kind of massage the page like that? Are you talking even further within a specific type of electrical installation, right? Do you have something tangible we can walk through?

Adam Chronister: Yeah. I can unpack that. One of the things that we do a lot is we'll build service pages for our clients. So if you are, for instance, in the electrical business, you're probably going to offer a number of different services. And instead of throwing all of those service descriptions on one page, as I see a lot of people do, it would be more advantageous to create a separate page for each service that you offer. So let's see here. Let's take plumbing for instance. So as a plumber, you might do, I guess, I don't know, toilet repair. So that might be a service. You might do, like unclogging pipes, that might be a service. And so for every one of those services, you want that service moniker, that description, to be very much the theme of that topic. You wouldn't want to go too far out into other services. So that's kind of one example I could provide.

Jesse Dolan: Nice. Keep it straightforward. Don't confuse on your toilet repair page. Don't start talking about installing sinks, right? Keep it on that. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

Adam Chronister: And this is where there's other strategies. There's a couple names for this, but spoken model or what is this?

Jesse Dolan: Spoken hub?

Adam Chronister: Spoken hub model where, yeah, spoken hub where basically you have a hub of a piece of content and then you have subsets of that. And this is where you get a little bit more involved in that strategy. But you can take a central service and describe that really well. And then you could start creating content in a new page that's a subset of that service. So let's take SEO for instance, just because that's a business that we offer. We might have a page that talks purely about SEO and then we might create a piece of content that talks about local SEO, and then we might do one about e-commerce SEO. And you can see that each one of these can be a standalone piece of content that we can write about so that no matter what someone's searching for, they're searching for those long tail terms, SEO plus other descriptor. Their potentiality of getting the content that we provide is much higher. So that's the way to think about content as well, is you want to start out broad but focused and then work your way down.

Jesse Dolan: You're talking about the spoken hub, different ways to kind of link things together that comes to mind. What are some other things on the page? Again, sitting down, business owner, marketing manager, not a SEO wizard and guru like you are.

Adam Chronister: Sure.

Jesse Dolan: What are some of the other basic framework things that we should be looking at when we're making this page? Do we have to have images on there? Do you need some kind of piece of multimedia or you're talking about a main keyword or theme using that within headlines. Are there any other particular things you want to call out to make people aware of so they're just not mashing paragraphs and paragraphs of text together?

Adam Chronister: Yeah. So it's a good question. There's kind of two parts of the funnel. Search engine optimization typically leans heavy on the acquisition of traffic. But once you receive that traffic, now the challenge is maintaining it, keeping it, converting it. And so this is why we don't recommend just creating a wall of text. There's a lot of things you can do with the structure and supplemental content elements of your written content that are going to help its engagement. So for instance, once you've converted somebody to your website, you want to keep them there typically as long as possible. There's a terminology, most people in the digital marketing space understand this, a lot of clients don't, but it's called bounce, a bounce rate. Bounce rate is essentially when somebody does a search, they land on your website, for some reason, they leave very quickly without going deeper into the page.

Essentially you want to have a low bounce rate, meaning you want people to stick on that site. Google does look at engagement, so they look at how people engage with your website and they factor this into a lot of their ranking algorithms. And so, going back to the question, what other elements are beneficial to a blog post, a service page, all of that? Multimedia can be a good thing. It has pros and cons. Sometimes an embedded YouTube video can be great because it will allow people to engage longer. You do want to be careful with load time and that's kind of maybe a topic for another day. But multimedia is great where it's going to impact or improve upon the experience overall. So videos, good layout and spacing of your content is also very important. You want it to be very readable. The other thing I tell people too is people don't read, they skim.

And so I forget what the exact stats are, but essentially people are, I think, read roughly only like 20% or less of any given piece of content. So don't anticipate that people are going to sit there and read a 3,000 word article. It's very rare that people are going to do that. But a lot of people, again, going back to solving a problem, answering a question, they're looking for a solution inside of that piece of copy. So they might skim and find the paragraph, oh, that's what I'm looking for. So spacing is important. One of the things that we've been doing a lot is embedding audio of the article. And you'll see this sometimes with big publications. And this allows people to engage with your content in multiple ways. They can read it, they can play the audio version. Sometimes we'll take a blog post and we'll have one of our team members or one of our vendors turn that into a YouTube video summary. All of those are great tactics to improve your content and to improve your overall engagement.

Jesse Dolan: Nice. And I think all that, not all that, a lot of those things we talked there with multimedia that you're bringing up are probably after you write that content and article, go back in and add these things or get that audio like you're saying. Still, first things first is sitting down and doing this creative writing process. We teased a little bit, I teased a little bit on the front side. You've got some skills in reporting, you've got some knowledge in the reporting area there. You and I were discussing that a few days ago. Not to dive into that, because that's also another topic for another day to get you back on. But with regard to reporting, do you have any little tips you can share with us quick on how to maybe look at a certain thing or two for your report from your reporting to help maybe inspire you or lead you to where you should create some content?

You're sharing some great information on how to write that content. I'm trying to get here, what should we write? Outside of keywords, right? Presume we've done that keyword research, we know some popular keywords. What are some easy analytics or some other things we can peek at that say, Adam, you should write a couple blog posts about that topic. People are already coming to your website or whatnot.

Adam Chronister: Yeah. Well as mentioned, I could go really deep into reporting and probably won't go in as deep as we could just for the sake of your audience.

Jesse Dolan: We will. We'll come back later and do that for everybody on another episode.

Adam Chronister: We'll do a section on that for sure. But as it relates to reporting, one of the best things that I would recommend is competitive analysis. And this is similar in scope to keyword research. In fact, our team, we typically provide a level of competitive analysis as well as forecasting for anyone that wants it, assuming that they're interested at least in hearing about our services. So the reason that we like to build a report around competitive analysis, not only does it help clients understand where they reside in their more direct market, it also gives them a good indication of what slice of the pie they have. And it gives them a vision for how they can encroach more into that.

And then the second piece, one of the things that we do that is, I think, pretty unique specifically for SEO, is we've built some custom forecasting processes where we can take somebody in a particular market and give them at least a general indication of what SEO could do from not only a traffic perspective, but from a financial perspective, assuming that we can wrap our head around what the value of a lead is. And we have a series of questions to really boil that down. So again, that kind of goes back to what I mentioned earlier is whenever you're building a digital marketing strategy, you want to understand where it is that you want to go. You know what I mean? A lot of people just start and they just go through the motions because they know they should, but they don't stop and do the baseline work and say, okay, where is it that we want to be in six to 12 months?

Or what is our goals? Is our goal more sales? Or is it market domination? What are those KPIs? So I think before you ever get into deep dive reporting, I think you as a business owner need to understand what are the KPIs that are important to me? Because they're not the same for everybody. And until you can determine that, you don't know if the strategy that you implement is going to work until you have that. So that would be my suggestion around getting started with marketing. Understand where you want to focus from a KPI perspective as a business owner.

Jesse Dolan: And then that guides you. Again, the theme, there's that intent and direction and purpose. I like what you had said the other day, you can tell a piece of content some of your clients or your writers write when they're just sitting down and just banging it out because you can look at it and like, okay, there's no theme, there's no keywords, there's no hook on this for people that we're trying to get in front of. And if again, you're listening, you're finding yourself that that's the mode you're in or the mode you've been in when you're doing this, all you have to do is a few things on the front side.

Again, so there's some paid services, agencies, or tools that you can use to dive deeper on this, but if nothing else, doing some searching yourself. What are your competitors doing? What is Google liking? How does that reflect back on your own brand and site? And you should have some things you write down or notes that you take on where you need to create some content for bolstered existing. If nothing else, that's some intent. It gets you on the right path, doing it on purpose, and you can always fine tune it later too. So do you have any other nuggets or things to add on, Adam?

Adam Chronister: Just a funny anecdote. The one thing that I find interesting with keyword research, this doesn't happen always, but it's happened a couple of times enough to make it worth noting, is there's been occasions where we've created keyword research and it's not only impacted the client's marketing strategy and approach, but sometimes even down to the product level. And you'd be amazed by the number of business owners that have not considered what their market's looking for as it relates to what the data is telling us. And so, there's been occasions where we've created keyword research around a client's product and they're like, wow, we have this product that's not been our focus that has a lot more interest than what we even knew.

And so there's been even cases where keyword research has caused businesses to rethink what products or services they prioritize. So not only can that level of research help your marketing strategy, sometimes it can even help your whole business model or your product development. Again, we are very data driven, so we always like to let data tell the story. It's nice to have feelings and say, well, we feel that our audience likes this or we believe, but it's like, okay, that's great to have those opinions, but let's validate it with data. And that's, I think, where we excel and doing that across the board.

Jesse Dolan: So I think that speaks to you and us generally as an industry, digital marketing, and the power that's there as a form of marketing. Can you put an ad in the local newspaper or a billboard up or TV radio commercials and get exposure and have it work for your business? Yeah, if you're at that level, that's a great investment and that can work real good. But there are those questions you have. Did that work? What was the intent? How do people feel? Digital marketing, if you're doing it the right way and you got the reporting and the KPI set up, like you said, a lot of this, you can either track it back directly or you can glean enough information from two or three spots to maybe corroborate certain things and you can know what is working, what isn't working, what you should do more of.

And like you were saying, we use the term go where the fight isn't in some cases. What are some products and services that you're selling that are good margins that you're just not getting exposure for that are also not very competitive maybe for your niche or your geographic area? And yeah, it's fun helping businesses reinvent certain areas or breathe life into things. And for me, I'll close on saying that underscores that marketing, digital marketing here, is an investment, not an expense, right? You're doing it to get those clients and that stuff coming back, whether it's your time or your money that you're investing as a business owner or a manager. This isn't just to paint the house and make it look better. This is to attract and to multiply back that ROI for you. So anything else you want to add, Adam?

Adam Chronister: No, I think I'm good. But yeah, unless you have anything else, I think we covered most of the basics. I mean, a lot of the things that we typically try to instill, and so hopefully some of those insights will be of value to your audience.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, no, I think everybody listening, they should pull a few items out of here. You had some great tips and are spot on in a lot of ways. And we're going to have you on some future episodes too, everybody can look forward to more of Adam in the future, dropping knowledge in different areas. If people want to reach out to you, find you, contact you, why don't you go ahead and share, whether it be social, your website, things like that if they want get in touch.

Adam Chronister: Sure. They can find me at adam at enleaf.com. That's E-N-L-E-A-F.com. Same website, enleaf.com. I'll also mention we have a number of free tools there. One of the things that we didn't get into is headlines, but if you want to brush up on your content, take advantage of those tools. We have a free headline analyzer, a free website grader, a Serp preview tool, and a couple other things. So feel free to take advantage of those. They're all 100% free tools. Plenty of also insights on our blog, so those are free for your disposal.

Jesse Dolan: Awesome. Yeah, check that out everybody. We'll link to all that too in the show notes, in the blog post for this episode. If you didn't write that down, don't worry. Go out to localSEOtactics.com and we'll loop you in with all of that. Adam, thanks for jumping on, man. This was awesome and congratulations. It was some good value, so appreciate it. All right everybody, hope you enjoyed that episode. Thanks to Adam for coming on for that interview. Hopefully the first of many that we're going to have Adam on talking about various SEO topics. If you enjoyed this, hopefully you can spread the word, give us a follow, subscribe to it, and even leave a review if you're so inclined going out to localSEOtactics.com, scroll down to the bottom, click on the button for reviews, and drop us a review on Apple podcast, Google podcast, wherever you get your podcast, Facebook, Google My Business, whatever. We appreciate that and we hope you take the time out to let us know if we're doing a good job, if you're finding value in this show. Until next episode, take care.