Episode 17: Interview with Eric Enge

Todays guest: Eric Enge – Since 1997 he has been president of Stone Temple Consulting. In this capacity he is also well known for his Stone Temple Interviews where he is talking to social media- and search engine industry leaders such as Matt Cutts for example. In addition, Eric is also a columnist for Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land and, along with Rand Fishkin among others, published the book The Art of SEO.

Andre Alpar: Hi Eric, can you please introduce yourself?

Eric Enge: Sure. I am Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting a twenty-five-plus person SEO, social media and content marketing consulting firm.

Andre Alpar: Okay, are you specialized in certain fields when it comes to like, are you more working strategically or do you have clients in specific niches that you focus on, like e-commerce or travel? Or are you broadly there for everybody who needs help in the fields that you work in?

Eric Enge: Actually, we do offer pretty broad coverage. There’s certainly room for agencies that focus on one vertical market, but then you have to be really purist about that, in my experience. Because if I have say, one client in a hotel industry and I have a lot of other clients. So then I get a second client in the hotel industry, they get upset, whereas if I do nothing but hotels then I can actually be vertical. But given that we don’t do that, it makes sense for us to actually be horizontal in our approach.

Andre Alpar: Do clients want you to guarantee them that you will not take a different client that is a competitor, like a second client that is a direct competitor and how do you deal with that?

Eric Enge: It happens, we usually don’t like to sign that in our contract language, but the reality is that even if it isn’t in the contract, we are pretty reluctant to take someone in the same space. We actually had a situation just mid last year where we had a very large client in a particular industry come to us and we were working with a second, a solid second tier player but we actually couldn’t take him because it just didn’t feel right.

Andre Alpar: Alright. Okay. So what are the kinds of the issues that people come to you with and why do they choose you? I mean, the States is a huge market and there are obviously gazillions SEO agencies there. Is it they come to you because they know you because you have always been there? Or what do you say, what differentiates you from other SEO agencies?

Eric Enge: Yeah, I think if you would have talked about what our brand is about. Our brand is about…gosh, it is such a mundane phrase. People talk about White Hat SEO, and it really doesn’t do it justice because a lot of people say they do that, so let me actually explain it the following way:
I wrote a blog post which I published on SEOmoz in 2008, called “I don’t buy links,” and at the time the community was telling me that I was bringing a knife to a gun fight. But we have always tried to be well ahead of the curve and focus our activities on excelling at the things that Google wants you to do, rather than trying to figure out how to trick Google. And whether you call yourself white hat or not, a lot of SEOs who say they are white hat, are actually still trying to find the latest little tactic…

Andre Alpar: Tactic as in shortcut? Because otherwise tactic can be ok. Tactic can like a white hat tactic…

Eric Enge: Shortcut is the right word, that’s a great word for it…

Andre Alpar: Or trick as you mentioned before, it’s the same thing.

Eric Enge: So, they are looking for that. So they might not be violating some overt guidelines, so they think of themselves as white hat. We actually focus on excelling at what Google wants you to do. And if I can take another moment, I’d like to illustrate a couple of things there:
So, in January of 2011, I published on “Search Engine Land” an article called “The Rise and Fall of Content Farms.” That was three weeks before “Panda.”
Okay, two different times? And later in 2011, I wrote articles which basically predicted the onset of “Penguin”…

Andre Alpar: So what did those articles focus on? Exact match anchor texts or what was the focus of the articles in general?

Eric Enge: The focus of the articles in general was basically saying that the next big thing Google is going to do, the next Panda-like release, was going to be a link-based release. Now I did make some predictions about specifics. But because of the way we focus on, the way we studied the industry, and also the interviews I regularly do with people who work at the search engines – I’ve done many with Matt Cutts, for example -and we focused all of that energy on how they think and where they want to go, so that we can actually lead our clients down a path where they have long-term liability with our SEO strategy. So, that’s how we differentiate ourselves, I think, is for that focus.

Andre Alpar: Does make sense. So, when you prepare for an interview with Matt Cutts, how do you decide which questions to ask and which not to ask? Because my experience with Google people is that the willingness of answering depends really on what and how the questions are asked.

Eric Enge: It does, and the first and most crucial step is to have their trust. Alright, we actually use a process when we do the interview. They are allowed to view the final transcript before it is published, and that gives them comfort that if there’s a mistake made, or our transcription is wrong or whatever, that gets them to relax. But also because they are familiar with how we work with our clients, they tend to approach that conversation a little bit more relaxed and then you have to ask the questions the right way.
I do that naturally because it comes from that perspective of always trying to help publishers figure out how to put together a strategy that will give them long, secure, steady growth for a long period of time to grow their business. That’s actually what I’m trying to get at. Which is kind of what the Googler wants me to be getting at, so that kind of works really well.

Andre Alpar: Alright, your team of 25 people, what are the different tasks that they have? How are they separated into different topics?

Eric Enge: Link-building/content marketing is a very big part of what we do and I think this is a little bit of how I view how SEO is evolving. It has always been a little bit this way but you’re going to have this function which is called SEO promotion.

Andre Alpar: A little bit like PR, right?

Eric Enge: Yes, it’s going to feel more and more PRish. What will distinguish it from PR, is that there is always going to be room for the new digital marketing tactic that the PR department, the traditional PR department, is too slow to pick up on.
So content marketing, integration of social media and publishing great content and getting links, that is an example of something that the PR department is ready to handle. So that’s the realm of the modern-age SEO marketer. But then there is still the other part of SEO and that is another major function in the company which is dealing with the nuts and bolts of the website.

Andre Alpar: Like the technical SEO aspect..?

Eric Enge: Right, people still..they are too quick to believe that because you publish a website that the search engine is going to understand it. And even people who accepted that five years ago think “oh, it must be different now.” Well, it isn’t. The problems are the same. Duplicate content is still a huge problem in the industry. But even as new things emerge like doing rich snippets and rel-author tagging -I mean, these are all by the way cries for help from the search engines. “We need help, we need help!” right?

Andre Alpar: There was this hope that they would understand everything and be semantically advanced, but now basically they are pushing this semantically understanding of the content to the publishers themselves, so kind of outsourcing the work to us.

Eric Enge: Right, mark it up and tell us! Fine, you should do that. It‘s actually good for them, it’s good for the publisher.

Andre Alpar: Do you think it is always good for the publisher? For example, I always think of this recipe rich snippets as a bad example for integrating the rich snippets because in the end – I mean if you had a recipe website – you would have had a lot of traffic on aggregating terms. I don’t know, like tomato soup recipes, not one specific recipe but a group of recipes. And on those aggregating pages you would have huge amounts of traffic.
These days, you have marked down your recipes and Google takes the filtering traffic and the traffic on aggregating terms and then just sends you the customer when they are on one single recipe. And recipe websites -they’re typically publishers, so they earn off advertising dollars and now there are less paid impressions.

Eric Enge: Yeah, it’s a great question. It really is a great question and this is a place where you need to start again. As I’ve talked about this and sort of getting to the head of Google and what they want publishers to be doing. It’s incredibly important in today’s web and internet marketing environment and for SEO, to focus a lot of energy on building a brand.

Andre Alpar: So you have navigational traffic, not informational, not transactional, but navigational traffic.

Eric Enge: Yes, so you get navigational traffic, that’s true but also, even though you lose some traffic to that rich snippet stuff in the scenario that you outlined, there are other scenarios that will get you more traffic.

Andre Alpar: No doubt, no doubt.
If they haven’t figured out how to get traffic on the aggregating pages, they will always be only getting traffic on the single recipe. Then of course they will get more, because…

Eric Enge: Right, so there are sort of trade-offs.
But you’re going to have to look at the rich snippets experience in the situation, the category, the aggregating page situation you talked about, as an opportunity to get their brand in front of the consumer and assume/hope that the benefit will – when they want a specific recipe or something else – that a new query of “oh, I remember that, they actually gave me the information” and they’ll get to your page.

Andre Alpar: But wouldn’t you have to go for the brand and even without the rich snippets? It just makes more pressure on you having to become a brand. That was a strategy you should have also chosen before.

Eric Enge: That’s right. A very important thing for people to realize is that there is all this discussion from time to time about how Google loves and favors brands. There’s actually really fundamental and simple reason for that: Because a brand is a proxy for… the user trusts that. So the search engine wants to show things that the user trusts and is more likely to click on. It’s that simple, right? So, the need to work on a brand is always there. This puts a lot of pressure on pure affiliate marketers and people like that who were flinging up sites and working the magic to get traffic.

Andre Alpar: What do you think is their future and how do you think their life, whatever they were doing, how that developed since last year?
Do you think the market is like half the size now because Panda and Penguin basically crushed exactly those? I think the regular brands were hardly ever influenced by Penguin and Panda.
It was more these affiliates that you just mentioned that always did their magic and arbitraged traffic, getting it from SEO, pushing it to ad-sense or to affiliate, right?

Eric Enge: So, there are still a lot of affiliates that are doing quite well, some of which deserve to and some of which don’t.
But I can tell you, I have been doing affiliate publishing as a second business aside from my consulting business for eleven years and I have built and sold three affiliate companies. So I have a lot of experience in this. But we always focused on building a brand with what we were doing. The things don’t have to be separate.

Andre Alpar: Can you give an example so one can understand better what you were talking about or is it no-public, the topics?

Eric Enge: No, I mean there is a site called citytowninfo.com that we built and published that has still information on 20,000+ cities and towns in the United States and various vertically-oriented product information directories on it that did quite well. We sold that in 2010 and the site I think is still doing well today from what I understand.

Andre Alpar: Do you know whether it was hit by Penguin or Panda, just out of curiosity?

Eric Enge: Actually, we…I don’t know, but I do know that even when you try to be as clean as possible you can get hit by those algorithms.
So, we had another site which I can’t name that as a matter of fact was hit by Panda. We recovered it, we went through the hard work of getting it back out from under that and the reason why it was hit by Panda was kind of ironic, it is actually a good example of a Panda-situation. We had five thousand pages covering some very specific businesses. We went through great pains to make those pages of much higher quality than the ones on the market. But, and that was just a portion of the site. We ended up finding out that even though we thought those were much better than the other pages. Google didn’t and we got out of the penalty when we no-indexed those pages. It gets down to in the Panda-situation: How does Google recognize and decide whether it’s good or bad? Thin content, crappy spelling, those things are easy. But they are clearly making decisions on more matrix than that.

Andre Alpar: So that would be something like bounce rate, time on site…?

Eric Enge: That’s my belief, that it’s user-engagement matrix.

Andre Alpar: Do you really think that it sounded a little bit like enriched local information that you had on those pages?

Eric Enge: Yes, and we actually did…

Andre Alpar: Like a yellow pages thing, but specific for a niche?

Eric Enge: Well, what I can tell you, it was information on all the colleges and universities in the US. And there are about seven thousand of them.

Andre Alpar: Okay, and even though your information was richer than the average in the SERPs, you still think it wasn’t equally…

Eric Enge: Yes, we had hand-written, hand-researched, hand-written articles on about five thousand of those pages. And even for the other two thousand we did a lot of analysis, to do things like give ratings for your percentage of male vs. female compared to other colleges of similar size and difficulty of getting in. We had a ton of things that were worked out, that you can’t get unless you do a lot of work.
But the problem was, it wasn’t perceivable, the user engagement, I guess wasn’t good enough – it wasn’t user perceivable quickly enough. They have a couple of seconds for the user to make their decision, right? And we probably needed to do a lot of…

Andre Alpar: Like a re-design to make it more fancy so that people would stay there, click around, look a little bit more into it?

Eric Enge: Yeah, exactly! We needed to do that kind of stuff but where we were on the business at that time. Once we came to that conclusion we tried no-indexing it, it fixed it, we never actually went back and tried to do the rest of that work.

Andre Alpar: Right, right. Great stuff.
Alright, what do you think, the content market is kind of like the über-topic when I look around here, whenever it comes to off-page topics. Are there classical approaches, I mean info graphics, at least me, I am bored by them, I don’t want to hear about it anymore, and I don’t think it’s content marketing at all. What’s your view on content marketing? What is it actually, and what is it not?

Eric Enge: I think, let’s talk about the gold standard for content marketing.

Andre Alpar: Yeah, like what your dream client should do.

Eric Enge: So, what we try to get people to do is a multi-level approach. So, I’ll just itemize a few things. First of all, have high-quality content on their site of course. That may come in the form of a blog which is often a good way to do it. You have to have a subject matter expert behind that. As I like to say, have a subject matter expert or experts or go home.

Andre Alpar: Yeah, like a teacher and preacher.

Eric Enge: Yeah, somebody or some group of people needs to fit that role or don’t play because you will lose in the end. And you do that on site but you want to do more than that. You also want to do what I call very high-end guest posting which is, you do publish… well, an example: New York Times has taken over ten thousand guest posts. We know Tech Crunch has taken many thousands, Mashable has taken many thousands.

Andre Alpar: But it can also be the other way around. How about having a trusted author doing a guest post on your company’s blog?

Eric Enge: Yes, you could do that, too. And you actually want to do all these things. You want to be, now that you have your own good content put on your site, you also want to outreach to other people because that gains you exposure in front of their audiences, including their social media audiences and then you want to invite prominent people to guest-blog with you.
You can, not everybody has to do that but it’s a good idea because if you get Seth Godin to write an article and put it on your site, he’s probably going to tweet it and share it. That’s phenomenal, right?
And then there is a cousin of that, which is, you can interview prominent people, which has the same dynamic, and now they don’t have to go through the trouble of writing the article. And you can probably get even more prominent people to participate in that because it is flattering to be asked to be interviewed.

Andre Alpar: You are not referring to this interview, are you?

Eric Enge: Not at all.

Andre Alpar: Thanks, otherwise I was like *pppffff!* Just a weird feeling…

Eric Enge: It sort of dawned on me “he might start to interpret it that way”, but anyway.

Andre Alpar: Don’t worry.

Eric Enge: And, of course, have your subject matter expert give interviews. So, all these things really help gain exposure. And then you want to combine that with a very solid social media strategy. I have been on the record many times and I still believe that social media signals don’t act the same way links do. But that doesn’t matter. We don’t have to have that argument right now. The point is, from a content marketing perspective, if you are constantly putting good content on social media and you share your great content, whether it would be a guest post somewhere else, an interview you gave someone or an article or an interview you put on your own site, you now have a beautiful holistic thing happening which is the fact that you share this great content on your social media feed helps with your followers or fans because they see great content and you get more followers and fans. That’s a good thing, it sounds like, and then they share it on the social media feed that gets traffic and links and subscribers back to your blog. That sounds like a good thing. And now you have this wonderful virtuous circle taking place. This is what you need to belt.

Andre Alpar: You look with your clients, in those cases, are you more on an operative level where you help them? “Okay, this is how your articles, topics for your articles could be” or do you just do it on the meta-level, suggest to them “okay, this is the process,” and then you fill in the blanks yourself? Or how does it mostly work?

Eric Enge: We help them with both. You have to get the strategic part right or else they won’t do the other parts right. So it is really important to go through that and as I suggested before, we are talking about activities that a traditional PR firm doesn’t understand. Well, the traditional marketing person doesn’t understand it, too. And don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of really cutting-edge marketing people who get it that are in companies. But a lot of times in these companies, you have to go through a lot of education.

Andre Alpar: I totally share your views that content marketing is bringing marketing, PR and SEO together.

Eric Enge: So. That’s a big part of it but they also don’t have the people lying around that know how to execute the mechanics of it. So, we offer that, too. So we do both together and it has worked really well. We have had some great successes with it.

Andre Alpar: Great stuff, thanks so much for your time, Eric!

Eric Enge: I appreciate it, thank you!