How to Grow Huge Websites Like Apartments.com Through Innovative SEO Tactics

I was able to sit down with Alex Membrillo, CEO of Cardinal, on his Ignite Digital Marketing podcast and share some tips on how I was able to help Apartments.com grow. Thank you Alex for spending some time with me.

Listen on Sticher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ignite-digital-marketing-podcast/e/54896347

Transcript

[00:00:01] Intro: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, where we help marketers and CEOs learn the latest tips and tricks to help ignite growth in their business. This isn’t your typical marketing Podcast, we push beyond platitudes to deliver you real world stories from the trenches. Are you ready to learn? Are you ready to grow? Are you ready to have fun? Well then, buckle up because you are about to enter the Ignite Podcast.

[00:00:32] Alex Membrillo: All right everybody, I’m super excited to have you listening today. I’ve got an old friend on the line with us today. This guy has been running incredible marketing campaigns both for the agency side and the dark side, the client side. Most recently which he will tell us is actually is more of like being back on the agency side than you think.

We’ve got Jordan Silton on the line with us today. He is Director of SEO and generalized marketing.

He’s going to only say it’s SEO but this guy is doing a whole lot more than that with a CoStar group which runs a ton websites that you will soon know more about but you have already most likely already used. I’d like everybody, let’s welcome Jordan to the stage here. We’re going to have a really fun talk, so everybody out there that loves SEO, you’re going to really enjoy today’s conversation. Jordan knows more about SEO than most of us have forgotten. This is going to be really great. I hope to get an education as well. Jordan, welcome to Ignite. How you doing?

[00:01:25] Jordan Silton: I’m doing great. Thanks Alex. Great to be here, I appreciate you having me on.

[00:01:29] Alex: Yes, absolutely. I look forward to learning. I want to dive right in. You have worked your way up. A lot of people are coming out of college and they are saying, “Hey, I’m ready for the big time gig.” We see Gary Vaynerchuk, we see Neil Patel, we see all of these guys and it looks like instant success. It’s not. All of us started as an interns or janitors or whatever it may be. How did you get your start? How did you work up to being a director? Tell us the story.

[00:01:52] Jordan: Well, I think it all goes back to getting out of college and what do you do next. I spent a lot of my time in college doing theater work, being the technical director for a student theater group over at Emory University in Atlanta and working on that side of things. I was in the business school. I was interested in marketing and I really thought that I would go work for a professional theater company and run their marketing. That was my first internship back in 2008, 2009 for the Alliance Theater. Great theater, professional theater in Atlanta, regional theater of the Southeast.

Then, what I realized is that I had to make a transition. I could go into the theater world or I could do something else. In 2009, it was right after the recession in 2008 and was fortunate enough to join the Emory Alumni Board, which just came in through a fluke email to undergrad students and was connected to a lot of great people in the Atlanta community. One of them told me to never underestimate the value of your personal network. That ends up ringing through to a lot of what I did and how I’ve been able to grow in my career.

That first touch point, not for that person, but for someone else on that board, gave me an internship, his name was Benjamin. He gave me a great chance to go into paid search marketing at the right time and really got my start there an intern for Search Discovery in the Atlanta area when there were only eight or nine people that have now grown to over 100 people. Fantastic growth for that company. I was fortunate enough to start as an intern, worked my way up there and stayed with them for over four years and still keep in touch regularly here at CoStar.

[00:03:29] Alex: Very cool. You started in paid search, but how did we get over to SEO?

[00:03:33] Jordan: Paid search was the thing I started with. My first job was to– in my dorm room on Sunday mornings or Sunday afternoons after NASCAR races, I was the person who plugged in the new ad copy and changed out for whatever driver was [unintelligible 00:03:48].

[00:03:48] Alex: Very cool.

[00:03:49] Jordan: That was really cool, really rewarding was like how are they letting me do this for a national scale advertising. I’m just some college student with access to the internet. That was fantastic. Luckily, I didn’t make any mistakes on that. But I had worked my way through paid search and took on a bunch of clients. Eventually, the paid search, it didn’t become boring or dull or anything like that. There’s tons of innovation going on in paid but I wanted to figure out what else was out there. We had a pretty strong SEO team with some really knowledgeable people.

I started to taking on some projects or helping out behind the scenes on client work, on the SEO side and the analytics side. Then eventually, due to some business changes and the way clients have shifted, there was a very urgent need for me to take on more SEO work and really found a home doing that. It’s been quite challenging and really been a great place for my career and I love it.

[00:04:44] Alex: Something tells me you love the puzzle of SEO. You just love the never ending enigma that we work in, don’t you?

[00:04:51] Jordan: It’s entirely about uncertainty. You’re- I guess the hockey analogy is just getting towards the puck, to where the puck will be, or we’re trying to predict where the search industry is going, where user experience is going. Google has headed one direction, if you’re trying to chase behind them, you’re never going to be in front. Trying to figure out where they’re headed and where their search engines are going.

[00:05:12] Alex: Yes, we’re going to talk a lot about where you see SEO going. It’s so funny, even when Google tells us something, something is going one way, you can’t believe all of it, you have to wait and test like meta descriptions were supposed to be doubled. I went and did that. Now we’re back, 250 characters. [chuckles] We’re going to get into all that fun innovation around the SEO in a minute.

We worked in the agency where we’re at Search Discovery, they went through some incredible growth, you still have the benefit of working with them, that’s great. Tell us about CoStar, what do you working with agencies on? First, tell us what are the websites you’re managing and what goes into those?

[00:05:49] Jordan: My work at Search Discovery, one of our clients at the time, and this is going back even when to I started in 2009, we’ve been client for a long, long time was Apartment Finder. After I left Search Discovery to go work again with someone from my personal network and lead SEO and analytics and paid for a digital agency in Atlanta, I got asked a couple years later by that same team I worked with at Apartment Finder to come join some new company and I never heard it before called CoStar.

Of course, I knew the brands and their portfolio. They owned apartments.com, Apartment Finder, Apartment Home Living and now own several more for a total of nine sites in the apartment industry. Really through connections in my past and through my network was able to get that opportunity and go work for Chris [unintelligible 00:06:33]

[00:06:34] Alex: Got you.

[00:06:34] Jordan: Now on the client side I like working with agencies and we still have a relationship with Search Discovery that goes all the way back and we work with them with analytics and Google analytics premium and all that kind of stuff.

[00:06:46] Alex: That’s great. Tell us about the work at apartments.com. I want everyone listening to hear what goes into managing mega sites like apartments.com. You also have a bunch, After55, ForRentUniversity.com, Apartment Finder, Apartment Home Living, aparttomentose.com, WestsideRentals.com, forrent.com. You’re managing a ton here. How do you do it, what are the main things you focus on?

[00:07:10] Jordan: You mentioned earlier that trying to transition from agency side to client side, you’ve called it the dark side, it’s not the dark side-

[00:07:17] Alex: Maybe agency side.

[00:07:18] Jordan: [laughs] Yes, on the client side, on your, “Dark side,” it’s more like the agency side than you would think or especially at CoStar because we have so many different sites. I think there are nine of them on the apartments network and of course, we have more on the commercial real estate side, businesses and land and other parts of our business is even fun to work with some of our colleagues on the other side, Belbex in Spain, work on some international SEO and that kind of stuff.

It’s more like the agency side than you would think because you’re always seeking buy-in. On the agency side you have a client and that client usually has a supervisor or a boss or executive that they’re trying to make look good. On the client side you also have people that you’re seeking by-in for, whether it’s colleagues or executives or just people on your own team that you’re trying to figure out how to get projects done and get things implemented on the site.

On my side working at Search Discovery, working at Relevance Advisors, agency side in the past, I never really thought my job was to come propose great ideas. It was to propose the ideas and figure out how to get them done, really focusing on the second part of getting them done, that’s where we focus on, Apartments.com and to other network.

[00:08:34] Alex: Talk to us about some of those ideas, what are the big initiatives? We’ve got mega sites, you’ve got thousands and thousands of pages, can’t focus on all of them. What are the main focus is, is it onsite technical, sites [unintelligible 00:08:44] app, is it link building, give us the rundown.

[00:08:47] Jordan: My background and experience comes from the technical side of SEO, that’s the people that I learned from, we’re great at that and what I’ve been able to do successfully. Now we do both at CoStar. CoStar really value SEO, they’ve had success in the past with LoopNet on the commercial real estate side. Really when they bought Apartments.com, dedicated a specific percentage of developments sprints to SEO work for Apartments.com in our network. I’ve been fortunate enough that like, “Hey, there’s no challenge of getting development work, of course, there’s some trading to get what you want in any given spread.”

We had this fixed allocation of like, “Hey, you can actually do things on the website, you don’t have to fight for everything tooth and nail.” That’s been a blessing and able to help us. Specifically, on Apartments.com, we’ll use data-driven technical SEO to expand a website, capture every topic and pass it and go souped in that. Anything a renter could need, we want to tackle on our site and of course, all that technical refining and tuning things for search engines and getting things going.

On the other hand we have sites on our network like For Rent have been really focused on content and link building, counter marketing and infographics and they’ve had a ton of success. We just welcomed them to the team in February. They won the best user content marketing at the US Search Awards and best in-house team, even recently PR news had like won an infographic for their Netflix infographic– sorry, they won an award for their Netflix infographic.

They had a ton of success on the link building side, my background is more on the technical side, trying to merge those together and get the most we can out of kind of an overarching collaborative SEO strategy.

[00:10:25] Alex: You guys are getting to both learn from each other, right? ForRent’s got this incredible content link building side and you’re bringing the technical expertise over to them. This is really interesting. I don’t want anyone to miss a point you’ve made there, you’re able to get a lot of momentum because you have executive buy in, and it’s not hard for you to get these dev’ sprints accomplished, because your company believes in SEO.

I wish it were the same across all major corporations, this is having huge transformative output for you guys, a lot of it is due to SEO, that’s huge to have executive buy in. I bet that makes you feel really rewarded going in everyday understanding that your executive team believes in what you’re doing.

[00:11:05] Jordan: Yes, absolutely. It’s great to have the buy in, it’s great to know that if something has like the SEO tag on it, that people think positively. Part of that is things that we got kind of coming in the aid. When I arrived here, they were already in place, but also making sure that you continue to work with all the different parts the organization and keep them updated on not just what we accomplished, but what were the results from it.

I have a monthly or it’s supposed to be a monthly, maybe once a quarter or sometimes more often internal newsletter, which I call SEO Insider, where I talk about either something that worked well or something that was a total flop, you have accountability to the products you work on and developers and other people throughout the organization can understand whether the work they’re doing went to good use.

[00:11:52] Alex: You send that out to the whole company? It’s an update on the initiatives that you’ve had, the goals and whether the objectives have been achieved, and you’re getting everyone updated on that.

[00:12:02] Jordan: Not the whole company. CoStar is quite a big company. I wonder- [crosstalk]

[00:12:06] Alex: Yes, I guess not every- [crosstalk] [chuckles]

[00:12:09] Jordan: I don’t know, there may be 40–50 people on the distribution list that touch all different parts of our products. Whether it’s marketing for franchises, development, technology, product, analytics and then a couple of key stakeholders in other parts of business.

[00:12:23] Alex: You’re selling all the time, you’re going and making sure every stakeholder’s on board with what you’re doing, they’re seeing the fruit, the results of the investment that they’re putting in, and that’s really smart. That’s really smart for you to be doing that and sending out that, what do you call it, SEO Insider?

[00:12:38] Jordan: Correct.

[00:12:39] Alex: Yes, brilliant.

[00:12:40] Jordan: I kind of learned that in my time at Relevance Advisors, where I started the SEO side of things, when I was actually selling, I learned that the need that clients had wasn’t always SEO. I might have come in trying to try to pitch SEO, but as I asked questions of the clients, they said, ”Well, I really need help on paid over here, I really need help analytics on this side, we needed to change up our Facebook marketing.”

Really figuring out what other people are interested in and making sure that you can do work that supports them was valuable, and to flipping out on us. On the CoStars sides too. What does everyone want to get out of SEO success? How do you communicate that to them and show the benefit of what they’re working on? That way it’s not this black box which you always think of SEO as, like, “we’re going to do some link stuff for SEO and traffic is going to go up“. It’s not that mysterious, especially, if you can track what you’re doing.

[00:13:34] Alex: Yes, then you show the results. What are your main KPIs? You’ve got click throughs that are obvious. Are you tracking organic calls and leads directly to these properties? What are the main KPIs you are reporting back on every month?

[00:13:46] Jordan: Yes, I mean, we’re tracking all of those things, whether it’s visits, impressions, if you call them that for advertisers on our side. The amount of times their profile page or a placard appears in search results, we into whether it be phone or email is those are all KPIs for our advertiser network. But for SEO, I care about traffic, pile over traffic and then meaningful traffic.

How likely is it that an advertiser is going to receive a lead or that renters going to find what they need? We’re actually working on a very early stages, I’m starting to work on a propensity model for what types of entry pages would be more likely to lead to a high value conversion and trying to tie back to.

[00:14:30] Alex: I would think that diving right into the neighborhoods is the most likely to drive conversion.

[00:14:34] Jordan: Yes, maybe, maybe not. [chuckles] Neighborhoods are pretty important for us. If you’re ever looking for an apartment being in the right neighborhood is key.

[00:14:41] Alex: Yes, The closer the more long tail and the closer to where they want to live, I think that would be that would have the highest propensity to convert. I want to get into the nitty gritty. We’ve been floating over some of the things that you’re responsible for and high level you’ve got a lot of initiatives going on. Walk us through an example campaign that worked out really well.

[00:14:59] Jordan: Yes, so you mentioned neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are something that I’ve been working on since day one. Arriving at CoStar, we have a proprietary data set for a neighborhood definition. That’s the name of the neighborhood. It’s the shape file or polygon. It’s a relationship between that data in our system, came in, looked at our traffic, and I was like, “Wait, we’re not getting a whole lot of traffic from neighborhood pages.” I wanted to figure out how to improve that.

Over the past, I guess a little bit of over two years, I’ve worked with across pretty much every team of the company whether it be on our research side to technology, to mapping and geography, even content to help promote neighborhood pages. Get the definitions right, make sure the name is correct, make sure the polygon is accurate, make sure the results included are helpful. We’ll go content for their guides. That became a real key traffic driver for us.

The neighborhood’s are probably the fastest growing segment of our traffic to organic search, for traffic from organic search to our search results pages on our sites.

[00:16:01] Alex: Well, that’s good. That sounds like it was a huge hit, time to submit that for an award, right?

[00:16:06] Jordan: I haven’t submitted that one yet. It took quite a bit of work. It seems to be rewarding.

[00:16:12] Alex: Yes, working across content dev team to rolling out something that big, that’s something that worked. You’ve been able to track it. That’s huge. Huge kudos to you. That is not easy to do, especially, at the scale you’re doing it at, so great job there. Now, tell us about something that was a complete flop and what we learned about it?

[00:16:31] Jordan: Yes, I had one of these early on. I mentioned the SEO Insider. I actually published this out on SEO Insider. I made sure that everyone knew that it was a flop and that not everything we do is rose-tinted and great for SEO. Within the first couple of months, we just licensed some really cool data for Parks and Recreation pages. We’ve all these different points of interest on our site like apartments near this transit stop on if you’re in DC or the metro or New York City on the subway or in Boston on the [unintelligible 00:16:57].

We have airport pages and colleges/universities and all sorts of other points interest. I wanted to add parks and recreation. I thought this was a great opportunity for parks and recreation. We successfully integrated into our product. We have the landing pages now for every local park, or zoo, or national landmark. If you want to have an apartment near Central Park in New York, we have page four at Piedmont Park in Atlanta. We have a page for it.

What we found out is it worked. We got some traffic. You had a nice hockey stick style curve. The problem is the top-end value of the curve was just insignificant compared to overall site traffic. Working in tens of millions, if you’re maybe ten thousand, really doesn’t do the trick. It worked, we got traffic but it wasn’t worthwhile for the amount of dev effort that we put into it. Wanted to make sure that was known, and that we’re tracking it, and we’re going to work on more important project moving forward.

[00:17:56] Alex: You were transparent about it. You put it in the SEO Insider. You let the executive team know and every stakeholder know that not everything is rainbows and butterflies. I love that, totally transparent about it. I bet everyone listening’s wondering if they could see an SEO Insider. I guess we can’t. Is there any redacted version of an SEO Insider we could post on this blog when we get it transcribed?

[00:18:16] Jordan: Yes, I could post it together for you.

[00:18:18] Alex: I think it’d be so neat. I bet everybody would love to see. I would love for everybody that’s in a director of SEO or marketing position to be able to report back to their executive team on what’s going on. I think the Black Box gives us a bad name. It doesn’t need to be that way. We have quantitative results that we provide. I love that. Okay, we talked about some hits and flops there. Where’s SEO going? What do we need to know about?

Google’s hitting us with 15 different things. We’re going to conferences, hearing a lot about mobile and voice. What actually matters, Jordan? What should we be aware of?

[00:18:47] Jordan: It’s everything you just said. It’s what everyone’s talking about all the time. It’s not really different. I guess the only value we provide is the lens at which you’re approaching it. There are a couple of trends that are happening in society. I think even mentoring Gary Vaynerchuk earlier. He’s talking about this topic too. Everyone is using mobile devices more often. Everyone is trying to look for things to save time. Like what was the value of Uber, it saved time, what was the value of other things.

Really, and again, you time back in your life. I think the SEO charters and things Google was talking about that they want SEO to focus on, help you on the go and help you save time. That’s mobile-friendly pages. It’s working towards Google’s mobile first index. It’s improving the site speed. Patch all webpages, [unintelligible 00:19:31] is a better experience, saves you time. Then like AMP which is the combination both of those. Mobile friendly plus fast speed.

Then the one that people are talking about right now but haven’t really figured out how to approach and we’re still coming up with a few ideas and trying to figure out how to solve it. Here it is voice. That could be potentially a huge time saver. Even Podcast like this, they give you time back because you can drive in the car and listen to a Podcast and do two things at once. Voice could be potentially helpful. Tricky for the apartment industry. We’ll see what we can do there.

[00:20:04] Alex: I hope people who are listening to us in their cars right now, not falling asleep at the wheel. This is so exciting for them. Very cool. We’re hearing about voice. I just don’t know. I feel I saw a study by Wil Reynolds here interactive super smart CEO of a great agency. He said like, “If they were coming through data, it’s like 0.2% of every search is Ok Google or something like that.”

We have Gary V who’s a great prognosticator and who’s talking nonstop about it. It gets in all of our heads. I’m saying, “All right, we have to prepare for voice search.” It’s one of those things that I think is like five years away from being actionable. I think Amazon advertising is much more here and now for e-com clients and maybe even not e-com clients soon. I love the AMP stuff. We have implemented that on the Cardinal site.

I think for some sites is tough. Are you guys AMP friendly on all of your sites now?

[00:20:55] Jordan: Yes, it depends. Like ForRent.com is AMP friendly. Both on their main site for property profile pages and for their blog. AMP enabled too, not just yet [unintelligible 00:21:05].

[00:21:05] Alex: Okay, got it.

[00:21:06] Jordan: We’re working toward some interesting things with a couple of our brands. As I mentioned to skate where the puck is going, to figure out where Google’s going towards the end of this year. Will AMP be the standard that everyone needs to use or will they give other sites and they’ve mentioned this. Even going back to last October, November, will they give other sites that have AMP like experiences the same presentation in search results.

Seeing if we can get to that level of achievement without maybe using the AMP standards. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket. We’re testing different things in different sites and seeing what we come up with and using those organs to help us.

[00:21:44] Alex: You’re definitely a data guy. You are running all kinds of tests and not going full in on anything and then evaluating data. That makes you such a good technical SEO. I have no doubt. Okay, very interesting. We implemented AMP on Cardinal but I don’t care about things like lead forms and a lot of those things that it cuts out on our homepage because we don’t get a lot of mobile traffic.

I was doing it more for the rankings. I wanted us to be showing up higher in desktop search. In order to do that with Google’s mobile first index, I felt like it would work. It seems to have worked. Then I guess you’re right, we’ll see if that becomes the standard or if there’s a way to achieve what Google’s looking to see without becoming completely AMP reliant.

[00:22:21] Jordan: You saw a direct impact on rankings? You think it’s like a secondary or tertiary impact?

[00:22:27] Alex: No, within two weeks. I didn’t do any link building or content updates for two weeks. I saw the rankings go up across the board like 10, 15%. That was from Oz and then I went into search console and our impressions have gone up about 30% and click throughs. They’re not the keywords that I care most about. It’s mostly our blog content and we’re showing up and a lot more searches for that.

It doesn’t convert that well. For our main keywords, I don’t know that it helped that much. If you want your blog content and things like that to rank, AMP definitely helped us tremendously.

[00:23:00] Jordan: As a user going through search results, trying to click on articles even if it’s not like news or other topics, I find myself just avoiding articles they don’t enough [crosstalk] it just take long while.

[00:23:11] Alex: Yes, it takes too long and too many images and ads and all that stuff. You’re accomplishing a ton of things. I got a couple great questions I want to- Well, a couple questions, I don’t know if they’re going to be great, we’ll see, left. Talk to us about your team. How big is a team that accomplishes nine websites’ SEO?

[00:23:27] Jordan: I think a pretty modest team. It was just me when I started. We’ve grown to a team of 11. We have three focuses or so. All that growth has been because of success of SEO initiatives. We did really well with content for neighborhood pages. We have a content team. We’ve done really well on the technical SEO side. We have one or two people working on the technical side. Then the data-driven side of our business is really critical.

We have a data analysis team that’s working on some cool things like mentioned data propensity model for weed likelihood.

[00:24:03] Alex: All right. Let’s get to the last question here guys. I’ve got two questions left here and I want everyone to know. Jordan is now got a team of 10 people working with them. A lot of people I’m sure are itching to get a chance to work with Jordan and learn from the best. What does it take to become a marketer on your team? What do you look for?

[00:24:21] Jordan: I look for a number of different things. I think going back to my past and got a learning about paid search, analytics and SEO together, I really value that the principle of like the T-shaped marketer. I don’t know if Rand Fishkin coined it or someone else that they shared it. The idea of you have to be really good at a lot of things but super knowledgeable about one thing. That broad range of knowledge and experience I think is pretty important.

The other side and I’m probably more qualified to talk about SEO itself than marketing overall. They put marketing in my title but I’m not sure that was intentional.

It’s really for marketing I think it’s customer focus. On the SEO side, we care a lot about the renter and how Google or other search engines are trying to qualify results that they think are more likely to be helpful to renters or what site is more likely to help renters and others. That’s a unique or distinct lens that I think SEO brings to digital marketing.

I try to make sure that everyone in our team has that high level renter focus and figure out what renters are all looking for, how to solve their problems, if they do that I think they’ll have success whether it’s the analytics side or writing content or coming up with technical problems, because you’re solving a real user need and so everyone is at a point of getting one when will be the end of the SEO, when will SEO be dead. I feel that principle will stay alive and if nothing else, hopefully, SEO is going to help share that renter or customer focus throughout the organization and make sure that principle thrives.

[00:25:59] Alex: Absolutely, so you’re looking for people that put the customer first and in your case it’s the renter. Do you guys ever have focus groups? Do you bring renters in to talk about how they came to find their apartment or anything like that? I assume you’re doing heat map testing and all that fun stuff.

[00:26:12] Jordan: Yes, I haven’t done any heat map recently, although, maybe some of our sites or different brands [unintelligible 00:26:17] are doing it but, yes, we do focus groups and other user testing and stuff like that.

[00:26:24] Alex: That would be so fun. Great. Now everybody knows what it would take to make it on your team. Everybody applying to work for Jordan, make sure to put the customer first and look more into the T-shaped marketer and know a lot about a little bit be an expert in one thing. I’ve actually never heard that before, I’m going to look that [unintelligible 00:26:39] out. Actually, I think that’s really quite intriguing.

[00:26:41] Jordan: I was actually applying to a role maybe, I don’t know, four or five years ago something like that. That was one of the requirements on the job application. I had to explain how is the T-shaped marketer [unintelligible 00:26:53] didn’t get the role but that was a try.

[00:26:56] Alex: [laughs] From then you’re like, “I have to know this is, so I could get any gig that I asked it.” Very interesting, okay, very cool. One final question. You’re obviously a very learned guy, how are you staying up to date on all what’s going on in marketing as well as anything else that invigorates you, tell us what you’re listening to or reading?

[00:27:14] Jordan: I like to read or listen– I still have like a old school RSS feed or [unintelligible 00:27:18] on my phone, and have a process, a kind of very type A personality. I have a process of reviewing my RSS feed, save important articles to come back to later and then also having some Podcasts or books in the background. Like all the top SEO Blogs of course are in that.

Other things I think will be valuable for marketers or anyone overall, probably three main things. You mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk, so I’m currently reading Crushing It, probably a little bit behind on that one. It’s a quick read but I am a slow reader. I listen to this Podcast, reading that book. I think he has a [unintelligible 00:27:56] perspective and some valuable insight there.

A lot of it’s talking about small businesses but you can really pull those larger themes at anything you’re doing. Another one I’d say is The Undoing Product by Michael Lewis. So you may be familiar with him from Moneyball or The Big Short. They’ve taken some of his books and turned into movies. Undoing Project is kind of looking back at Moneyball and trying to figure out the psychological principles behind it.

It’s about a couple of Israeli psychologists, Kahneman and Tversky, talking about the human psyche and how people think and make decisions and really how people fail at decisions and what influences their bias. I think that kind of pulls into their renter insight and understanding how people think and behave. Finally, I think 99% Invisible by Roman Mars, not a book just a Podcast.

He has a great Podcast voice, maybe one of the best voices in Podcast. [chuckles] It really has interesting look into thought behind unnoticed architecture and design and how design shapes the world we live in. I like it particularly because it has like a deep dive into history and look at some of unknown things in history and why they were the way they were. Also, I think Micheal [unintelligible 00:29:18] is doing that pretty well in his current Podcast, but this one from Roman Mars 99% Invisible is pretty cool. It helps me shape the way I think a little bit on the creative side of things, in coming up with-[crosstalk]

[00:29:30] Alex: You’re such an analytical guy, you really are putting in work and thinking creatively.

[00:29:34] Jordan: Yes. I don’t know, a lot of the free time I have goes back into professional or personal development and I can kind of try to psychoanalyze myself out of it.

[00:29:46] Alex: [laughs] I love it. You’re constantly learning and that’s the big takeaway here whether it’s Gary V or Invisible by Roman Mars, I mean, you’re constantly learning, you’re picking up new things and you’re not just working on business, you’re trying to balance yourself out and learn about things that are personal interests of you. Podcasts and books, that’s what Jordan is doing. Jordan, this has been huge. Where can everybody listening is going to have some questions for SEO, if they don’t think I’m smart enough, they may not come to me, they definitely going to want to come to you, where should they find you?

[00:30:15] Jordan: It would be @jsilton pretty much on any platform in Facebook, or Twitter or LinkedIn can reach out to me there, happy to be able to connect.

[00:30:24] Alex: All right, you can find him @jsilton guys. Jordan is as knowledgeable as anybody else here in Atlanta on SEO. If you need to find him @jsilton. He’s gone to Emory, he’s working at CoStar and running a huge team there of 10 people. If you need to find him, you have any SEO questions, please do not hesitate to reach out and if you can’t find him, please come through me, submit an enquiry on the Cardinal site and I will connect you directly to him.

This guy is as good as it gets. Jordan, thank you for spending time with us on Ignite.

[00:30:52] Jordan: Thank you also, [unintelligible 00:30:53].

[music]

Outro: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite, if you like what you heard, please leave us a rating and review. Before you go please remember to subscribe to this Podcast so you don’t miss the next episode. For more digital marketing tips make sure you visit cardinaldigitalmarketing.com. Have a great rest of the day and don’t forget that the most important part of your job is to Ignite

[00:31:19] [END OF AUDIO]

SEO Insider Template

From: Your Name To: SEO Insider Subject: TITLE_OF_THE_ISSUE (SEO Insider, Issue XX)

Hello ________ Team,

Welcome to Issue #XX of SEO Insider. This month, we’ll recap the SEO performance from MONTH, review some insights from RECENT_CONFERENCE_NAME, take look at some key SEO projects we recently released and a few more we are working on this month.

Contents (1) MONTH Performance (2) Insights from RECENT_CONFERENCE_NAME (3) Recent Project Wins (4) Upcoming Projects for MONTH

– — — — — –

(1) MONTH Performance

Our initial goal for YYYY was to increase network traffic XX% YoY. However, based on our strong performance throughout the first quarter, we have revised our SEO goals for the year. Last year, the we earned XXX million organic visits. Our new stretch goal is to hit XXX million organic visits in YYY. This ambitious number would be an overall traffic increase of approximately XX%, and we’ll see what we can do to make it a reality.

In MONTH, each site in our network increased traffic MoM, and SITE_NAME closed its YoY traffic gap. Over the past week, organic traffic to SITE_NAME has been positive YoY, which is a huge step in the right direction. Network traffic also continues to break all-time records each month this year.

INSERT_CHART_DEMONSTRATING_PERFORMANCE

– — — — — –

(2) Insights from RECENT_CONFERENCE_NAME

Last week, ATTENDEE_NAME attended RECENT_CONFERENCE_NAME, an conference focused on TOPIC. The conference was small enough for us to have meaningful conversations, we learned a lot from the speakers, we connected with VENDOR_NAME and VENDOR_NAME on their product roadmaps. Below are a few points that were echoed throughout the conference.

KEY_TAKEAWAY_1 — INSERT_PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_KEY_TAKAWAY_1

KEY_TAKEAWAY_2 — INSERT_PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_KEY_TAKAWAY_2

KEY_TAKEAWAY_3 — INSERT_PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_KEY_TAKAWAY_3

– — — — — –

(3) Recent Project Wins

Our latest product release went live on DAY, MONTH DD, YYYY. We launched a few significant new features and squished some bugs too.

KEY_PROJECT_1 — INSERT_PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_KEY_PROJECT_1

KEY_PROJECT_2 — INSERT_PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_KEY_PROJECT_2

KEY_PROJECT_3 — INSERT_PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_KEY_PROJECT_3

– — — — — –

(4) Upcoming Projects for MONTH

We have some ambitions project goals for MONTH, which impact almost every team across our organization. Within that broad range of projects, we’re particularly excited about three big initiatives.

UPCOMING_INITITATIVE_1 — INSERT_PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_UPCOMING_INITIATIVE_1

UPCOMING_INITITATIVE_2 — INSERT_PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_UPCOMING_INITIATIVE_2

UPCOMING_INITITATIVE_3 — INSERT_PARAGRAPH_ABOUT_UPCOMING_INITIATIVE_3

– — — — — –

Thank you for reading SEO Insider, and I hope you continue to find value in this email newsletter.

Please reply directly to me with any feedback, questions, or ideas. I look forward to hearing from you!

Best, YOUR NAME