SEO and Content Promotion with Alan Silvestri - Data Beats Opinion

Keith Perhac: Hello and welcome to Data Beats Opinion. I am Keith Perhac. And I'm here together with Alan Silvestri. He is the founder and director of strategy at Growth Gorilla. And in your own words, Growth Gorilla is a no BS content promotion and distribution agency for B2B SaaS companies. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Alan Silvestri: Hi Keith. It's great to be here. And so yeah, the no BS part, I actually took it out of the name and I was listening to one of your older episodes where you were talking about and making fun of people that have the no BS part in the name, so it's appropriate as well. We don't have that anymore now.

Keith Perhac: It's hilarious. It's so funny how quickly that whole... The view of those things changes. Eight years ago, nine years ago, that was like, okay this is something that's brand new. People are BSing us all over the place. Putting that in, it's like, "Yes, this is a straight shooter." And then as soon as something gets popular like that everyone's like, "Wait a minute. We're all no BS." And it becomes noise at that point. And then you have to find the next one to go onto.

Alan Silvestri: Yes, exactly. That's the main reason we didn't want to. We had that for a while. I think we were in the batch of people that were in the first ones to do that, but then it becomes trendy and so yeah, we said just let's leave it.

Keith Perhac: Yeah, before that it was, you remember when everything was named Sumo for some odd reason.

Alan Silvestri: Oh yeah.

Keith Perhac: And then after that it was Sherpa and it was like content Sherpa and all this stuff. And I found out later that Sherpa is a people, in English we always thought, it's a guide, but it's like saying, “Content Indians” or “Content Polish”. It's a group of people. And I was like, "Oh, that doesn't work as well anymore."

Alan Silvestri: Yeah. That's one of those SaaS trends, like having the name that finishes with LY.

Keith Perhac: LY yep. Yep.

Alan Silvestri: Like Calendly basically. Everybody started doing the same thing, yeah.

Keith Perhac: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I want to talk today a lot about content promotion and that strategy. I mean, most of us follow the, “Build it and they will come” from Field of Dream strategy and you've worked with a number of people like Podia and UpLead and a bunch of others. And just wanted to talk about how people generally go around content promotion, how they generally think about it and then why they're all wrong - and what you would recommend in those cases.

Alan Silvestri: Yeah. So I wouldn't say that everybody is wrong. The main thing that we notice with SaaS companies is that they're very good. Well, for the most part, they're very good at content strategy, content production. So they're really good at knowing the types of keywords that they need to rank for. They are good at knowing the different types of pages that they need to publish. So feature pages, the alternative two kinds of pages. But the problem is that, basically once the content is published, they don't really know what to do with it for the most part. So some of them, what they do is they just do a little bit of social media, reposting content into maybe Infographics or articles or podcasts or stuff like that, which is what I would say is the more classic “content distribution”.

Alan Silvestri: So, the way that we see content promotion is a proactive way of taking the content and putting it in front of the right people. And for us, what we do is more content promotion with the main focus of ranking pages higher in Google for the target keywords. So it's content promotion/link building essentially. But yeah, the way that we see it is link building done the right way. So for the main purpose of increasing rankings for your main target pages, that can be the pages that