Steve Marin runs Spark PPC, a marketing consulting firm based in New York City, he focuses on small to medium sized businesses. He has been doing SEM and SEO for over 8 years now. He said he loves both PPC and SEO, they are both children to him - he can’t pick one he loves more. He kind of fell into running his own company after helping a family member’s boss with SEO and PPC and that client has still been his main client for the past five years.
Content & SEO - A Perfect Match: Steve Marin explained that content is what business owners need to focus on, no longer is it just about link building. He said content helps you build rapport with your audience for free. He trains his clients on how to do the keyword research, how to write good content and how to rank for your relevant keywords.
What Clients Don’t Get About Content: He said clients need to worry about writing valuable content and less about ranking for that content. Do not worry too much on the meta data, keywords, etc. but rather focus on if the content is written well, is it enjoyable to read and answer the questions. He added that short content is not all that bad, but you need to answer the question the searcher is asking for. Some clients can be challenging and some clients are super busy so he believes in writing out workflows and templates to help manage that operation with businesses.
Ego Ranking: Steve explained he wanted to own a big keyword phrase and he went after it and got it after three months. He said he wanted to beat the best he knows in SEO at that keyword and he did it.
How To Rank Your Content: You first must create content, in the first place. But he says he loves to use SEMRush as a tool to get as much information to help with that content. But he said, creating really detailed and long pages, structured well, works super well for rankings in Google search. He isn’t doing much on the hub and spoke pages but he is testing those out now.
Backing Up PPC Assumptions With Data: He explained that “making assumptions that scream, not whisper” was a slogan he got from Mark Ford. He loves the quote because it covers what people in business often do, they focus on a single or a few changes but not the bigger picture. He said the business owner should focus on the incremental things and the business owner should focus the larger macro picture. So what he looks for is what will make a large change in your business. Will lowering your cost per click be a huge factor or will it be increasing your click through rate or something totally different. He tracks a lot of this mostly with the built in native tools from Google Ads, Facebook Ads and so on.
We then talked about how sometimes you think something will work and the data shows it does not work. He shared some examples of how he obsesses on landing pages and sometimes he feels one thing will work on that page and it doesn’t. The key is to test and test, and let the data decide which one to stick with for that specific case.
You can learn more about Steve Marin at SparkPPC.com.
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