SEO Mastery | Bear Newman

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcasts for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Bear Newman, president and co-founder of Bear Fox Marketing. Bear is an accomplished digital marketer and author with over 15 years of experience in the industry and throughout his career, Bear has worked with numerous businesses ranging from startups to large corporations with revenues exceeding $400 million. As a co-founder of the digital marketing company, Bear Fox, Bear played a pivotal role in its growth and success. Within just two years, he led the company to reach seven-figure revenues, managing millions of dollars in advertising spend across various platforms. Bear, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Bear Newman: Thanks, David. Appreciate it. Happy to be here. David McBee: So in doing my research on you before today's interview, your expertise became very clear very quickly. You are an SEO guy, which, obviously, if you're an SEO guy, that should be apparent on the internet. I'm hoping that you can help me make this the definitive SEO episode of Simpli.fi TV. Does that sound good to you? Bear Newman: Absolutely. Sounds great. David McBee: All right. So imagine that you are talking to a room of 100 or 200 or 1,00 SEO professionals. They're already very good at what they do. They're not easily impressed. You've got five minutes to teach them something of value that they don't already know. What do you say to them? Bear Newman: That's a great question. The first thing that comes to my mind would be stepping back and asking the question more often, what if? I feel like in SEO, there's so much data, there's so many things going around. Google's algorithm, it's estimated there's 220 plus variables. So getting lost in the weeds is very, very easy. Being an SEO professional, one way to stand out is really just ask the question, what if, and start looking at SEO from a little different frame or a different perspective and say, "What if this is the norm in the SEO world? What if I could accomplish this? What if we could do this in this particular scenario, and what impact could that be? How could we separate ourselves? How could we really help our competitors or not competitors, our clients be that much better with these variables we're working with?" and really just setting a different pace, challenging yourself in new ways, understanding ... I feel like SEO professionals have a unique perspective in that they understand what Google's trying to accomplish. If they can step back and say, "What if in this particular scenario these are the results we've been getting, what could we do to really change that?" and then challenge the deliverables you're giving, whether that be keyword rankings, whether that be actual traffic, whatever it is, but just start asking more, what if? David McBee: Do you, by chance, have an example of what that looks like with one of your clients, maybe? Bear Newman: Absolutely. So one situation I walked into, client had been doing SEO for a while and they had been getting okay results, spending decent budget, and they were increasing their traffic about 10% per year on average. Wasn't great. I think their brand was doing about 6,000 unique visitors per month in their SEO. Looking at that scenario, went in and said, "Well, you've been doing SEO for a while, it's just not very focused." Then I looked at it and said, "Okay, what are you trying to accomplish?" The one thing to keep in mind is when asking what if is also keep in mind what the client really wants. Most of the time, clients don't want keyword rankings, they don't want traffic, they want the results that those things bring. So really, those two metrics are a means to an end. As a professional, if you can come in and say, "These are what we use to get here, but working backwards from what we want to be at, where can we improve that?" So in this situation, I went in, looked at it and said, "Well, you've got a lot of low-hanging fruit, you've got a lot of opportunity here that hasn't been capitalized on. You just need a little more focus," and I said, "I think I can increase the results dramatically within probably six months," and gave them some expectations, really, I don't know if that even is possible. In the next six months, we took their traffic from about 6,000 people per month to about 28,000 people per month. It was really just one of those stepping back and saying, "This is what we've been given. This is the pages, this is the opportunity that we have. How can we really maximize where we're at and focus and get better content on the page, get the authority of that page up and really understand who we're competing against and why?" So really put the time and effort into the strategy and then execute on it, and they were thrilled. They'd never seen results like that, and it allowed me to lock down a client as they grew. They grew from that point in time 250 million to about 400 million in size in the next, I think, year and a half. David McBee: That last sentence is the part I was waiting for. You basically said they don't really want traffic, and then you said, "I quadrupled their traffic." So I was waiting for what did that really mean for them. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to business owners who say, "My SEO guy brings me this report and he sews me all this traffic, but I don't know if that results in anything." I think that's a huge gap that SEOs constantly forget about. Bear Newman: Absolutely, and that is the biggest concern or complaint that I hear when I'm talking to clients is, and I actually beat them to the punch. I'll say, "Most SEO professionals will talk about keyword rankings and talk about traffic," and I said, "That's great, but I focus on ROI and what that ROI means. Doesn't mean a form field, doesn't mean a phone call," and then going through the analytics and putting the strategy in place to generate that. Really, you can see it on their face like, "That's exactly what they told me. It was all about rankings and traffic and the ROI was all on me." As a business owner, this isn't their world. They don't live in this. They don't understand how to convert traffic and rankings to actual ROI. So if you can come in as an SEO professional and say, "No, you know what? I know that's your concern. That's my concern as well. We speak the same language. Let me help you get there and this is how we're going to do it." David McBee: Then you've got to be accountable for it. That's the kicker. All right. So SEO is always changing. I was doing SEO almost 20 years ago and I could get somebody to rank by simply changing their title tag and throwing a few extra keywords on their page, but the algorithms today are so much more sophisticated. Can you share your strategies for staying ahead of the curve and adapting to that change? Bear Newman: Fantastic question. My philosophy is really to embrace the change, and that is one of those AI is a great opportunity. So one of those, and when I say embrace the change, go with it. You can bring your expertise to that change. So we'll just stick with the AI example. That came out, big game changer in the industry as overall. Everyone's in a race. I saw in a matter of months SEO companies firing their content team saying, "Hey, wait, you know what? I can replace you with AI." To a degree, you can do that. However, AI, when it first came out and still today, it's not great. It can help create a lot of content, it can create it quickly. However, if you're relying on an AI just to create a lot of content, as an SEO professional you Google is going to hate that. Google's entire algorithm is based around protecting the certs, those top 10 results, and making sure they make Google look good. So if they're delivering bad results, bad AI content, that's going to blow up in their face. So they have to combat that. So if you can anticipate that and say, "This AI content is good, it's not great, and it could actually be bad in some cases, so we can use it, but we have to use it to augment and improve the content we're making." If your competitors are like, "Hey, you know what, let's just fire everybody and let's just use AI. We can create better margins and create a lot of content. Let's do that," all of a sudden you have a massive opportunity because when Google updates that algorithm to punish them for creating bad content with AI, you are in a perfect position to take the loss that they just took. David McBee: I'm so glad you brought up AI, and that is such a good point of view on it because Google's going to push back on it hard. They're all about human-created content and authority. That's the trust factor. Do you have examples of how you help your clients build trust with SEO? Bear Newman: Again, great question. So to your point, I think, correct me if I'm wrong in my dates, it was November 28th of 2022, that ChatGPT launched. Google responded, I believe, December 5th with an algorithm update to combat low quality content. Since then, they've released a barrage of updates to make sure the content is on par. So to your point, that update focus not just on an individual page, but on your entire website. So when talking about authority, if you have 100 pages of content, 20 of them are good and they have good traffic, the other 80 are not great, they're just on the site. Google will see that and actually penalize your entire website, including the 20 that we're getting traffic because, really, you don't have good content across your site. So to make your website authoritative, you want to make sure you can go through remove that content, improve the content, whatever you have to do, but make sure your content as a whole is authoritative and every piece of content on there is serving a purpose. If Google scans, and they can see the updates, they can see the quality there. They've got their own readability scores with how they view your content versus your competition, and if you are buttoned up, dialed in, your natural language protocol, all the semantics, all those kinds of factors on the site between title tag, H1 tags, body text, length of text, all the factors that go into making good onsite content are there and are dialed in, your site's going to be authoritative. Then you add on a good backlinking structure, linking partners, however you want to call it, but ultimately, you have the foundation in place. That's what makes your website authoritative. David McBee: Bear, I think you did it. I think you stood up in front of the thousand SEOs and impressed them. So thank you very much. This was great. Bear Newman: Oh, good. Glad I could help. David McBee: Before I let you go, I'd like to ask all my guests if they have a favorite podcast or a book that they feel was instrumental in their success. Bear Newman: Absolutely. Essentialism by Greg McKeown. David McBee: Why Essentialism? What's so great about that book? Bear Newman: It's keeping the main thing the main thing. A lot of people talk about the word priorities. He said that's a word that was invented in the 1900s, I believe. It used to always be priority. So if you have a lot of priorities, you have none. David McBee: Oh, that's good. I like that. Okay. Great. What is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Bear Newman: Bearfoxmarketing.com, we've got a lot of content on there, some of my videos. We've got a YouTube channel, but bearfoxmarketing.com, you'll find everything you want to learn about us. David McBee: Terrific. Thank you so much, Bear, for being my guest today on Simpli.fi TV. Bear Newman: Thank you so much for having me. I loved it. David McBee: Thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading, media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.