Eric Enge

Eric is a search engine optimization expert, a published author, the founder and CEO of Stone Temple Consulting and a public speaker at search industry conferences at Stone Temple Consulting and he’s been doing this for over 15 years.

He was named the US Search Personality of the Year by the US Search Awards, and also named Search Marketer of the Year by Search Engine Land Awards. He runs a digital marketing agency with over 70 employees, 60 contractors and more than a dozen Fortune 500 clients.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Eric’s success

Leveraging market making quality content

Result if you follow the steps in Eric’s session

Increase and drive traffic, brand visibility, and reputation

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

We do a lot of SEO with people and also help clients with content marketing. And when you look at the kinds of things that Google cares about, you inevitably get into, especially if you look at older papers, people talking about links to your site, and stuff like that. And, and it’s definitely incredibly important.

But also, you’ll see a lot of chatter in the past few years of Google and machine learning and how it’s going to change everything. SEO as we know it was going to be blown up and thrown away and start all over again. And it’s all wrong.

Of course, what’s in fact going to happen is already happening. Google is getting much better at assessing what the relevance is of your content to a particular user search query, the quality of your content, and how much people appear to like it.

And when you delve into content marketing, and you look at, you know, potentially doing that both on and off site, you’re actually really digging into sending out the right kinds of signals in all those areas. So that’s what we hope to talk about today, is really draw out for the listeners. You know, just how they can do that successfully.

Fantastic. All right. Well, just there you mentioned about on site and off site, content marketing and its power today. Why? Why does it have that role in search right now?

Well, it is worth actually, you know, I already mentioned it, you know, stepping back to the links being a big part of the algorithm for Google.

And they are still a big part of the algorithm. But you’ll see a lot of stories out there telling you that links don’t matter anymore. They’re getting less and less important. What people tend to ignore is a fundamental aspect of what it is that makes links important.

So, I’m going to give you a way to internalize it or get some intuition as to why they might be so important. So, let’s say I come to you. And let’s say I’m interviewing you, Liam.

And my question for you is, so Liam, tell me what budget your boss gave you for implementing things on your site that would cause people to leave it and go to someone else’s site? What’s the budget? Tell me.

1000.

Of course, nobody has a budget for that. Right?

Because you don’t want that kind of thing happening.

When you put a link on your site that isn’t part of an ad or something like that, you’re literally inviting people to leave your site. And by the way, some people do click on it.

And presumably, if you’ve cited it, because it’s a good resource, then that will have some benefit back to you. And the goodwill you build with that audience. There is no other signal like this on the web period. None. Social media doesn’t count. It’s not your site.

Right. So that’s what the fundamental underlying reason. Why just makes sense for links to remain a powerful part of the Google algorithm.

So, when you talk about content marketing, one of the things you’re trying to do in the process is attract attention to your business partner, which will be links and other signals, but we’ll talk about that when we get further into the conversation.