Chris:
Will websites still be relevant in the near future? What happens when all the data out there in the digital landscape dries up and disappears? What strategies can we use still as a business to drive traffic and convert? We talk about that today. Join us.
Chris:
Welcome back to Get Overit podcast. I am your host, Dr. Christopher Fasano. Before we begin today’s episode, I just want to remind everybody, the best way to receive new episodes on the Get Overit podcast is to subscribe on your favorite pod player, whether that’s Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify. If you prefer to watch the podcast on a visual medium, you can subscribe right there on YouTube. Tell your friends about the show. If you’re really enjoying it, please leave us a review, a five star review right there on Apple Podcast. That’ll really help the show to continue to grow.
Chris:
And so now let’s get onto our episode today. Our guest today is Joe Hall. Joe is the SEO consultant, principal analyst at Hall Analysis, a company that he founded. Joe obviously is an SEO. We call them SEO in the biz. He’s a web developer, a writer, a marketer, and worked on both the national and local levels around a variety of topics. We’ll talk a little bit about his journey today. Most of his work though is focused on developing tools needed for small businesses and non-profits to become empowered on the in internet, be found on the internet. So we’re going to talk to Joe today. Joe, welcome to the Get Overit podcast.
Joe:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
Chris:
So Joe came very highly recommended. I was telling him before from a colleague that we work with here at Overit, Lisa Barone. Lisa said to me, you have to have Joe on the show. And so I’m thankful for Lisa for setting this up for us, Joe. So I always start the show with our guests. Tell the audience about yourself, what it is that you do currently, and then we’ll go back and talk about your journey to how you got there.
Joe:
Yeah. So I am SEO consultant and web developer. I guess, because of that, the type of SEO I do is mostly technical focused SEO and web development. And that’s basically it. I was thinking about this the other day. I do a lot of different things in relation to both those two things, but that’s the best way to sum it up, I think.
Chris:
So for someone out there that has no idea what an SEO is, tell us a little bit about what an SEO is, because it’s funny, SEO is not a person, but people that do SEO referred to an as an SEO.
Joe:
Yeah. Actually, I never even thought of that before. That’s interesting. I’ve been doing SEO for 13 years [inaudible 00:02:54] my mind. So SEO stands for search engine optimization and actually the term itself is stupid, because we’re not actually optimizing search engines, we’re optimizing websites for better performance within search engines. And it’s not the same as buying advertising, you can buy ads in search engines as well to get placement and visibility as well in search engines. But this is not that. This is actually showing up in the results of the search. And so I tell my clients, it’s a lot of technical work. It’s a lot of content and marketing work and a lot of link building or public relations kind of work. So it’s a hodgepodge of different disciplines that come together to help a website perform better within the search engine results.
Joe:
And my main focus is that technical aspect of it. So Google and other search engines, they have these massive volumes of documentation for how they want the technical specifications of a website to essentially operate and work for it to perform well within search results. And my job is to come in and make sure that a website’s technical infrastructure adheres to those standards basically. And then usually pass off the work to [inaudible 00:04:38] agencies like Overit for example, that does phenomenal marketing and with content and brand strategies and stuff like that can take it to the next level after they’ve got the best practices squared away.
Chris:
So, what we’re talking about is what I call like on page SEO, which is a lot of content and technical is really in the web, in that sort of back component there. And they all matter and they all come together, like you said to really drive. What I love about search and finding sites, is that for me, from a neuro scientific perspective, you have to really think about how someone is going to find your site.
Chris:
So, yes, it’s got to load fast, which is a lot of things you probably deal with, the content’s got to load and the images and all these things matter. And what also really matters is if I’m going to go look for the latest coffee flavor or brand, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to type things in. And what I type in is going to be directly related to what’s going to show up on the search results. So on the website content, and then the website has to anticipate all of that so that they can greater capture that traffic. So it’s very strategic and more strategic than I think people actually think.
Joe:
Yeah, definitely. And what you’re discussing is you’re talking about the nexus between what I call user experience, user journey and query intent. And so the user experience for SEO begins at the search box. A lot of people that think about user experience for SEO, they oftentimes think about just the general ease of the website, but really it starts off at the actual beginning of the search when the user puts in the query. And so when you talk about being strategic with that, the whole experience of the website or the content usage needs to be built around that user that typed in whatever term they’re searching for. And that comes into play with not only what we would normally think about a user experience, like page load speeds, and layout and design and stuff like that.
Joe:
But also that comes into content strategy and developing the right types of content that the user is actually looking for. And so a real, very detailed and advanced understanding of your target audience is required in order to get that type of SEO done correctly. And because of all that, good SEO requires a team of really dedicated professionals that really understand the target audience that they’re trying to attract. They need to be strategic with content and have everything else in place to work correctly like you said.
Chris:
What’s fascinating is that every conversation I have in areas of marketing and or sales, I feel like it always comes back to content in some regard. So, if people are going to find your website, yes, they have to use certain keywords and those have to be there, but in order to make continued gains and rank and to continue to be relevant, whether it’s automation strategies or you’re trying to get more people to find you on search, you have to have strong content. I feel like all the roads always point back to it in some way. You can’t do it without content.
Joe:
Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, you’re right. All roads go back to Rome and with content, it’s definitely true because you mentioned the difference between off page and on page SEO. Off page SEO usually refers to links that point to the website and other authoritative signals that point to the website from other websites. Those types of things do not happen naturally or organically if you have bad content. So that’s just one aspect of how content can have a massive impact on SEO is if you have the right content that attracts good high quality links from other websites, it’s going to help out with your SEO, but also the content has to speak to the user. It has to speak to your target audience and it has to drive a business objective.
Joe:
So it can’t just be content and traffic for the sake of content and traffic. It all goes back to the bottom line. And so the content has to not only attract good off page external links and whatnot, it also has to convert the user once they land on the page and it has to communicate effectively as well. So I think that content really is of the crux of it. But I like to tell clients that usually with SEO, it’s always sort of an odds game. And you have better chance of doing better if everything is taken care of, if all things are at best practices, then you’re going to more likely do better. So content is an integral part of that, but also technical and links as well.
Joe:
But yeah, and you don’t even know… Honestly, this is what’s so complicated about it. You really don’t even know when to stop with any three of those until you focused on all of them, in other words. So for example, I do a lot of work with page load optimization, making this faster for the user. And really that’s a never ending story. We can spend years on that trying to make the site faster. Every site can be faster, but there is a stopping point.
Joe:
You have to decide, when are we comfortable with stopping on this? And we don’t know. We wouldn’t know when to stop if we hadn’t done all the other components of SEO first, because if there’s not really great content on the site, then we might have perfect speed scores, but the content’s still not ranking. And, and then it’s like, well, do we need to double down on speed more? Or do we need to focus on content next? So, really, before you can make real hard strategic decisions over what’s needed, you have to make a best effort with all three areas, so you know what the real deficiency is.
Chris:
Yeah. So it’s interesting, like you said, do we need more content once you get the speed right? But then you put more content on, but is that content then optimized for speed? And then is that going to slow it down? And so you have this triangle that… Triangle saying on page technical, but I never really fully grasped the SEO world until I really got into more and more marketing marketing and realized the complexities of it.
Chris:
Also, I realized that it’s a longer game, a lot of SEO. You’re not going to make some SEO adjustments and then boost your traffic by 50% in one, two weeks in a month. It doesn’t work that way. And it has to be. And I think because of that reason, it could be avoided and or by companies that are having budgets and they’re trying to meet growth goals, they might just say, let’s just buy the traffic, because it’s quicker. I’m going to get more leads that way, but what I always try to tell everybody is you don’t want to pay for those leads forever. It’s one thing to do it in the short term, but you need a long term strategy to get those same keywords organically, so you’re not paying for it forever.
Joe:
So I think most experienced digital marketers would say that the long term ROI of SEO is unparalleled to any other channel. You can look at things like your paid advertising, your paid social, paid search and that kind of thing. And all those might have higher conversions. I think a lot of those things have a little bit higher conversion in the aggregate, but for the long term return on investment, SEO is always the number one performer. And I’ll admit that some of these channels are catching up to SEO, but overall SEO always been the highest performing ROI for most companies.
Chris:
We see that all the time Joe, we really do. And it’s just another reason why you should always want to develop that strategy early so you can get those fruits as soon as you can. I want to ask you how somebody gets into technical SEO, but before I do that, since we’re on this topic, I’ve been thinking about this. You’d be a great person to ask. With Google’s monopoly on search and on everything and their effort into trying to make you not leave Google’s home page, so there’s a lot of Google trying to give you snippets of content right there.
Chris:
You could book flights right there. If you’re a local business, I could book an appointment or give you a phone call right from the Google search page. So my question is, if maybe you see where I’m going with this, are websites going to be as relevant down the road as they are now, because will people even need to go to your site to get access to the services that you’re looking for, if you know what I mean? So just curious to get your take on that.
Joe:
Yeah. So I think that the answer to what you’re saying is yes, they will be relevant. And the reason I know this is because we’ve been asking that same question for the last 10 years. What you’re talking about, the changes to the result pages and all the new features and rich snippets, that’s all relatively recent, like in the last four or five years, but really, we have been talking about how viable will SEO be ever since I’ve been in it. It seems like every year there’s a new, well thought out article that says that SEO is dead or SEO is going to die soon. And back in like 2008-9 when I first really got into SEO, social media was really hot.
Joe:
And social media marketing was really hot and people were talking then about, well, do we need websites anymore? All we needed the Facebook page and now it’s clear that yes, you still need a website. The same thing with SEO. Every time that Google updates its search engine result pages to include all these different features, like you were talking about, this question comes up and the discussion comes up, is will SEO be viable in the future? Yesterday Google released, I think it was yesterday or the day before, they released a metric that said that 15% of all searches are for keys and search terms that have never been searched before. And so if you consider that, that means that there is still, even though it’s 15%, there’s still a substantial market share within search that Google cannot anticipate and all of the features that you mentioned before about the different things that show up in the results pages, those are all things that appear for queries that have high search volume.
Joe:
So there is still a lot of money on the table for companies that can execute a content strategy that leverages long tail keywords and long tail terms that they can rank well for, because there isn’t a lot of interference within the result pages for those terms. And then even if you want to rank for those high volume terms, and you want to go after those high volume terms that have featured snippets and all these other things in there, you can still get traffic. Now, the traffic from those queries are substantially lower than it used to be. And the clickthrough rates on a lot of those top rankings had dropped considerably ever since the knowledge graph and all these other features within the results, but it’s still viable. And if you’re in a market where your return on the investment still makes sense, you should still do it because maybe ranking number one for this keyword no longer gets that much traffic.
Joe:
But if your return on each close is high enough to make sense to do it, then you should do it. So I think that Google will always be in this position where they are trying to balance it. They are trying to balance the desire to keep their users on their pages so that they can sell more advertising, they can get more clicks to their ad market, but also make it so that their product is usable and still desirable because really the searchers, they’re there buying websites. They’re not really there to stay on Google, even if Google gives them what they’re looking for.
Chris:
Right. I agree.
Joe:
Their intention is to go to another website. So I think that they’re going to constantly balance that. And hopefully we’ll never get to a point where there are no more websites in Google search. It’s just Google. Hopefully we’ll never get to that. But will always be room for us to be creative and to get traffic in some way out of that experience.
Chris:
I think also Joe, the industry matters that you’re in more or not. So for example, we deal with a lot of home service clients or things that are very call based or we do a lot of pest control marketing. And pest control marketing via the mouse in my basement, all I might need to do is call and ask them to come out. So in that regard, if I just Google past control near me and I see something and there’s a number, I might just need to call, I might not need to go to the site unless I’m really trying to vet it out and be thorough. But I think whereas with if it’s a company that I’m looking that’s a more rich service that is maybe more of a higher price ticket, I might want to spend more time perusing their services. So I think it obviously matters on the business and the industry or the vertical that you’re in.
Joe:
I think it matters a lot and I think that’s the big catch there is, for example, let’s say that you’re an airline company. If you go to Google and you search for flights from Albany to San Jose, you’re going to get a Google snippet that will show you that information and actually help you reserve a flight within Google. so if you’re like Delta or American Airlines, that screwed you over but I think that’s where you have to think about marketing and digital marketing.
Chris:
Right, like another value. What more value can you provide?
Joe:
Well, yeah. And then also you have to be more holistic about it too, because Delta, for example, I’ve noticed that they are really big about what customer retention, they want to keep people coming back to them. And so I think that their kind of approach has always been let’s get people to reserve a flight no matter what, however they do it. And then once they’re there, and once we got them on the plane, let’s give them an experience that has them coming back so that they’re not even going to Google anymore, they’re coming straight to Delta.
Joe:
So I think that’s a thing. And I think that’s the approach that a lot of sites like that are going to be taking from now on is, okay, they cancel this out basically out of 80 to 95% of our most valuable terms. So let’s just get the user here anyway possible. And then razzle dazzle them after they get here and make them a committed long term-
Chris:
A customer for life-
Joe:
… customer-
Chris:
… for long term value. Right. So not worry about how they come into the funnel and into the ecosystem, but once they become part of our world, we make that world so great that the next time they want to book a trip, they’re not going to type into Google, they’re going to go right to Delta. They’re going to go into the app, however that works, and then they’re going to have them. So the acquisition doesn’t really matter at that point.
Joe:
Yeah. And I think that’s the way that your extermination clients should consider it as well. It may not show up in Google analytics, for example, that they’re getting a huge bump in traffic or whatever, but if you’re doing call tracking and you can see based on your call tracking that you’re getting closed deals from the phone numbers, then that’s where it needs to be. And then you just retain those customers as much as possible. I think that’s the approach that businesses should take when they’re faced with that kind of thing.
Chris:
Yeah. It’s funny. You have this conversation with some of our clients, had it that where it says, listen, if we’re doing our job correctly on digital, your traffic will dip a bit because that means we’ve made your digital face on the search engine so visible and so available that people aren’t really even going there. But, it’s probably a temporary effect, but it’s not cause of panic as long as the phones are ringing and we can still demonstrate that there’s a return, but again, they’re still going to the search engine. They’re still typing in terms. It’s just that we’re making things available to them there. But again, it’s industry specific. I wouldn’t recommend a strategy like that for other places, for colleges, for different places. People need to peruse the site. So they’re going to have to go.
Joe:
Yeah, you can’t have a strategy like that, where say an e-commerce website. They need people to visit the site and buy things. So, it just depends on the business and it depends on the approach with… Like we talked about earlier, the strategy with content and query intent and all that stuff. It all depends on all those things coming together to make sense of what your strategy should be with each individual issue and term and everything.
Chris:
So Joe, tell me this, how does one become a technical SEO? So I think about it did you just geek out on websites for a long time? Was it a web love first?
Joe:
So how does one become a technical SEO? Completely on accident.
Chris:
Okay.
Joe:
So this is-
Chris:
This is like most things in life I feel like.
Joe:
Yeah, exactly. So this is what happened, actually. It’s a long story, but I’ll try to make it quick. When I was in high school, back in the nineties, I was writing HTML, I was writing JavaScript just for fun. This is like 1996 and ’97. And I was just experimenting with building these things called websites that anybody could go to. And I had a lot of fun with that, but I have a physical disability and I use a wheelchair. And when I was in high school, I was really good with computers. And when it was time to go to college, someone said to me along my lines of you should go study computer science because you’re in a wheelchair. And that’s the worst thing you should say-
Chris:
What does that even mean?
Joe:
… To someone. Well, I think the thought was computers-
Chris:
What, because you can sit at a computer? Is that what the implication?
Joe:
You can sit at a computer all day. And so therefore you won’t need to get up and go around and do things. And I understand what they meant by that. But that’s the worst thing to say to someone, a young person, especially in a wheelchair. You need to do this because you’re in a wheelchair. That’s not a good idea to say that to a young person in a wheelchair. And so I, being not very happy with that, I went instead studied political science and that was stupid because I thought I was going to get involved in politics or whatever, but that was a dumb idea. But when I was-
Chris:
Aren’t you glad you didn’t go into politics?
Joe:
Yeah, I am. I am glad. Yeah. But I’m still very, very interested in it. But while I was studying political science, I was building a lot of websites for these nonprofits that I was working with. So I was working with a bunch of nonprofits as a volunteer, just because-
Chris:
In the political realm?
Joe:
Yeah. In the political realm. And doing stuff like that, mostly activism kind of things. And then when I got out of college, I tried to get a job in politics and couldn’t do that. But I was still in hot demand to build these websites, these websites for these nonprofits, because nonprofits talk to each other. And so I said I’ll start a business doing this. And I started building websites as a business shortly after I got out of school. And then I was like, God, man, these nonprofits don’t have any money. I should start doing this for businesses.
Chris:
Please people that have money.
Joe:
Yeah, exactly. And so I started doing it for businesses and then I did that for a while. And then during that same time period, I started working in house as an IT manager for a real estate company. And when I was working at that real estate company, it’s when I first got into SEO. I built their website and then the broker in charge and the agents just all complained that it wasn’t showing up on Google after it was built. And I was like-
Chris:
So you’re like, I got to figure out why. I got to understand.
Joe:
Yeah. But even then I knew that that was a ridiculous notion that would show up like the next day after, after it went live. But at the same time I thought, well, they’re right. It does need to show up in Google. It does need to show up for terms and stuff. So I got working on that and I learned about SEO in the real estate space. And if you’ve ever doing SEO in the real estate space, you know that it’s very competitive. It’s very competitive, especially local SEO is very competitive for real estate.
Joe:
And so I learned about SEO that way, but I didn’t want to actually go off and do it professionally, mostly because the real estate industry left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. So after I left that job, I knew I wanted to do something with SEO, but I wanted to continue doing some like web development work. So I started writing code for SEOs. So I started marketing myself as a technical developer that could help you implement your SEO audit or whatever, and that is around the same time that I met your colleague Lisa.
Chris:
This was when Joe, when was this around?
Joe:
Well, I think I met Lisa in 2009.
Chris:
Okay.
Joe:
And I was going to these conferences, these SEO conferences, not as an SEO, but as a web developer, trying to market myself to other SEOs.
Chris:
As you have tools and the ability to help them in their job.
Joe:
Yeah. Knowing that SEO is becoming more technical and that they would oftentimes do an audit or something that had a bunch of technical things in it that they needed to have implemented. And so I would take those audits and implement them or I would do whatever technical things needed to be done. So I did that for a while. And then I realized that these SEOs that I was writing code for were making a heck of a lot more money than I was and I also realized at the time, and I think still to this day, a lot of people that can write code, and this is not talked about enough, that needs to be talked about more, a lot of folks that can write code are, especially freelance people, are in constant competition with outsourced labor overseas. And a lot of the SEOs that I was actually writing code for were going to conferences and bragging about how they hired a developer in India for like 80 cents an hour. And I was like, God, I can’t-
Chris:
How are you going to compete?
Joe:
I can’t compete with that. And the only thing I had going for me was that I was in the United States and spoke perfect English. But really after you start working with a developer overseas for a while, that kind of isn’t a problem anymore. You develop a good vibe with someone like that. So anyways, I started seeing that the SEOs were also making a ton of money from, in my mind, not really doing a whole lot of work, because all they were doing was just making recommendations and strategy. And so I decided to become an SEO at that point and kept doing web development work, but offering SEO services and it slowly turned into an SEO company. And then in 2012, I quit web development completely. And I said, I’m not going to do this anymore.
Joe:
I can make so much more money as an SEO. And I’ve been doing that since then. But couple years ago in 2019 or ’20, I started web development again as a job for people that needed it. I got to a point where I felt super comfortable as an SEO and I still do, but I’m not super concerned about getting new clients or anything like that because I’ve done a lot of work to market myself and whatnot. So I started thinking, what do I do want to do? What do I just enjoy? What do I actually want to feel good about doing? A.
Joe:
Nd so I started this new company a couple years ago called Cloud 22 and we’re a web hosting company that is WordPress web hosting. But our primary focus is nonprofits because back in the day when I first got started with this whole thing, I actually really enjoyed working with these nonprofits and being they’re web guy. And so Cloud 22, it’s a WordPress hosting company, but we do everything under the sun regarding WordPress, but we’re primarily focused on nonprofits and we’ve been doing some great work so far with three really amazing nonprofits, one of which is doing some phenomenal work with the COVID-19 response. And so it just feels really good to get back into writing JavaScript for organizations that do good work.
Chris:
So you actually ended up in the world of computers, computer science just because you’re good at it and you had a passion for it. That’s the reason. That’s where you ended.
Joe:
No, no. Yeah. I ended up getting into computer science and everything just because I enjoyed it. And when you’re a young person, 19 or 20, you don’t really think about any of that stuff. Your influence and your motivation is mostly about external things that happen, like what people say to you and what people might think of you and stuff like that. If I would’ve had the focus back then to just look inside myself and realize that, hey, I actually just really like writing code, I probably would have gone on studying computer science, no matter what anyone had said to me at the time.
Chris:
I don’t know exactly how old you are, Joe, but you sounded like you said you grew up in high school in the 90s when the internet was becoming a thing and websites were becoming a thing. For people, the younger people that might be listening, there was a time where the internet wasn’t around and there was no websites at all. And I grew up in that time where there was no internet really, you couldn’t really get on and see anything. So I want to ask you know, are you wowed at where it’s gone to from where it’s been? And then the second follow up question to that is what are some challenges that you see in the world of digital marketing in terms of SEO or anything that businesses need to get over or push through nowadays?
Joe:
So am I wowed by this? I think if I really sat back and thought about it, I would probably be wowed. The problem with folks like you and I is that this internet stuff, this is the soup we swim in. And it’s been the soup we swim in for the last 25 years. And so looking about what’s going on right now and what used to happen, I feel like the changes that have occurred, I read about it as soon as at soon happens. I experience it as soon as it happens that I feel like it’s just so incremental that I’m not shocked by it. But I do think that what I’m really wowed about is things that I never thought would come to fruition because really when you think about it, the fundamental core tenets of the internet, technologically speaking, work the same way they did in the 90s. What I am still kind of wow about is handheld devices and mobile applications.
Joe:
I know that nowadays, that’s still not really a big deal. Okay, yeah, smartphones have been around for a while now, but if you think about in the 90s, if you could tell me that one day in the not so distant future, we would have a device that we could carry around in our pocket that would be just as powerful as the computers that sit on our desk that we work off of, and that you could get rich media experiences on these little handheld devices, I would’ve thought that was nuts. I remember one time in high school, I was in biology class, actually, and I don’t know why this happened in biology class, because this really shouldn’t have happened in biology class, but we had a computer and it was connected to the internet.
Joe:
And I remember on the front page of Yahoo, there was 45 second clip of a basketball game that happened the night before. It was probably the Lakers and [inaudible 00:39:20] or something like that. And I remember watching that 45 second clip and thinking to myself, holy crap, this is the future. I’m looking at the future. This is a game happened last night and I just watched the highlight clip, the highlight reel right here in my biology class. Now mind you, I don’t know why we were watching basketball in a biology class, but back then I was just blown away with when I saw that. And now that would be nothing now.
Chris:
No, in fact, it’s funny, Joe, last night I was listening to the New York Rangers game because I couldn’t get it on my streaming, I couldn’t get it. So I’m listening to it and they scored a goal and I went to nhl.com and I went and I wanted to watch the replay of the goal immediately after I heard it on the live stream and I couldn’t find it and I was angry and I was like, wait a minute, where is it? But it literally happened like 10 seconds ago. And the expectation is I can watch it somewhere that fast. It’s crazy.
Joe:
It is crazy. It is crazy. And I think that I’m shocked about stuff like that. Mobile devices are shocking to me. I am actually not super impressed with crypto or anything like that. They talked about the new web three or whatever. I’m not really that impressed with that. I don’t know, a lot of folks that are younger, I think are impressed with that. But the newer stuff that’s coming out right now just doesn’t really impress me. And in fact the Metaverse and everything, parts of the Metaverse I think are really interesting, especially the parts that revolve around augmented reality, but currently what we see with Metaverse, it’s stupid. It’s dumb.
Chris:
Yeah. Don’t even get me started on the Metaverse I find it to be so… We can’t even get anything right in the regular universe. And we’re already going to start pulling humans into a world so they don’t interact with each other anymore. It’s like that whole thing is I-
Joe:
Well, and it’s not even a real thing yet either. I like the idea of augmented reality for practical applications, like being able to, I don’t know, do different types of analysis on something in real time like that. That’s cool, but I just think that so much of what it’s being talked about is just nothing. It’s just garbage.
Chris:
And McDonald’s just announced they filed patents for the Metaverse. So I can go with a buddy into the Metaverse and sit down at a McDonald’s cafe and hang out, but I could do that at a real McDonald’s down the street, but instead I’m going to do it in virtual reality where it’s not real. So that concept to me is a little far, but we only have a few minutes left, Joe and before we go, because you’re an expert I want to ask, in the next few minutes, what do you see as challenges right now in the world, in the landscape of digital and traffic on getting to sites and these things, that companies are really going to have to pay attention to now? Is there anything that’s overrepresented, any issues that you see or any problems that you think people are really going to have to get over and start to push through?
Joe:
Yeah. So actually, I’m giving a talk this summer about this. So I’m prepared to talk about this already. Soon, very soon, I believe that we are going to approach a dark period as it relates to data and data collection. So there are lots of new privacy policies in Europe that have kind of shut down some of the data collection that companies do. The iPhone updates three recently blocked out Facebook’s ability to collect a lot of data.
Joe:
I think that there’s going to be this new trend within technology providers, especially device companies like Apple and Samsung, and maybe even service providers as well to clamp down on data collection. And as a result companies and marketers, we are going to start experiencing lots of our data that we currently rely on is going to start to disappear and that’s happening. We see that more and more right now, if you’ve ever tried Google’s new version of analytics, GA4, there’s substantially less stuff in there.
Chris:
Yes there is.
Joe:
Most of what used to be analytics is not going to be there anymore. So I think that we are quickly approaching this period of a data black hole as it relates to marketing and actually doing business online. And so I think what we’re going to need to start doing is thinking of new ways to make the same decisions that we make now that we make based on data. So if you’re saying there making decisions now based on a certain data set, I think it would be smart, can you start considering how you would make those same decisions without that data anymore?
Joe:
And I would encourage people not to think of in the context of, well, what’s a replacement for this data? Can we find a placement for it? Because you could, there are other ways to get that same type of information, but I think that it would be more beneficial and worthwhile if while you’re having that thought process of the replacement, if you also think about what else do we need to consider to make the same decision without data?
Joe:
Because I think that we are quickly approaching a period where we will have a lot, lot less data to work with and it’s going to make our jobs as digital marketers much, much more difficult, but it also might make it more easy too because I think it’s going to be more difficult for businesses than it will be for people that supply marketing services, because folks that supply marketing services, if they have less data to analyze, it should be in theory, less work. Less work that we have to do.
Chris:
Less noise too.
Joe:
Yeah. Less noise and less analysis work that we need to do to give a recommendation. Downside to that though, is that for business owners, they’re going to get less information to make these decisions. And so we needed to focus more on, I think, non data sources of reliable information that can help us make decisions going forward. I think that’s the biggest hurdle right now that we’re quickly approaching. And I’m thinking by the end of the year, we’ll see significant impacts in that area. Next year, we’ll definitely see more and more data just going away.
Chris:
It’s funny, as we close here, we could bring this back to content again, because what we always tell people is, people ask us about Facebook and the ability to not track anymore. You always say, you know what, you’re always renting when you’re using these places. So the best thing you can do is own and build your own content because you’ll always have that. You can always put that out there and you can always get some data back on that. Even if Facebook blocks your ability to track people around the internet, you can still receive data and make action off of content you create. So, one of the pivots in this time of dark data or inability to track is to double down on your own content production efforts to keep that going.
Joe:
Absolutely. And you know, Overit, you guys are a great example of that because you guys are doing things like you got this podcast, you have an excellent newsletter going, you’ve got this multifaceted approach to content, and like I said, I mentioned this before we started recording, you guys really do pay attention to fine tuning and polishing your content products.
Joe:
And I think that that is all about product design and product development. When you think about product design in the forms of content, that’s what you guys are doing. You’re doing such good work with building out these content pieces that I think that that’s the approach that you have to do, like you mentioned. Instead of renting space on somebody else’s site, you’re building up a content inventory and an arsenal of things that people keep coming back to. I think that’s really smart.
Chris:
So Joe, if people are interested in learning more about you and your services and what you do, where can they go to find out any information?
Joe:
So you can go to hallanalysis.com and that’s my main consulting website, or cloud22.com or if you-
Chris:
And you’re pretty active on social, right, Joe?
Joe:
Yeah. I was getting ready to say, if you are courageous and you enjoy rants about hot dogs, then please visit my Twitter account, which is @JoeHall.
Chris:
Cool. Joe, I want to thank Joe Hall for taking time to talk about [inaudible 00:49:25] on the Get Overit podcast. The links that Joe just mentioned, we’ll put in the show notes. So for anyone that missed it or forgot it, they can go right to this when this comes out, when you’re listening to this, go to the show notes, you can click on the links there. I also just want to quickly thank Adam Clairmont who produces the show. Here’s behind the boards over there from Overit Studios. Overitstudios.com if you want to look for any information about anything production wise like this. And I want to thank all the audience for listening in. Again, remind them to subscribe to the show and leave a review. Joe, thank you so much for taking the time, man. I really appreciate it. Great talking with you.