THE THOUGHTFUL ENTREPRENEUR PODCAST
Enhancing Online Presence Through Comprehensive Website Content
In a recent episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show, host Josh Elledge sat down with Michael Chagala, the Founder and CEO of Rank Harvest Digital Marketing. The conversation delved into the intricacies of digital marketing, focusing on the evolving landscape of SEO, the role of AI in content creation, and the importance of quality content. This blog post will break down the key insights from their discussion, providing actionable advice for businesses looking to enhance their online presence.
Michael Chagala emphasized the importance of staying updated with Google's algorithm changes. These updates can significantly impact search rankings, making it crucial for businesses to adapt their SEO strategies accordingly. He highlighted that quality content is king, with Google's recent updates prioritizing high-quality, relevant content. Additionally, user experience factors such as page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and easy navigation are increasingly important for SEO. Businesses should conduct regular content audits, focus on E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), and leverage analytics tools to monitor performance and identify areas for improvement.
AI has revolutionized content creation, but Michael Chagala stressed the importance of humanizing AI-generated content to maintain authenticity and engagement. While AI can generate content quickly, it often lacks the nuance and emotional connection that human writers provide. Businesses should blend AI with a human touch, using AI for specific tasks like product descriptions while maintaining editorial oversight for more complex content. By identifying suitable tasks for AI, maintaining editorial oversight, and continuously experimenting and iterating, businesses can effectively leverage AI in content creation.
About Michael Chagala:
Michael Chagala is the founder and CEO of Rank Harvest, LLC. Rank Harvest offers premium search engine optimization services to local and national businesses in competitive markets, difficult niche ranking challenges, product launches and repairing damaged SEO.
Michael’s career began sweeping the server room floor as an unpaid intern at a software development company, later progressing from software engineer to digital marketing then leadership. Michael was an executive at one of the fastest growing companies in the United States helping bring a small energy company from $20 million annual revenue to nearly $70 as part of a small team of Directors.
About Rank Harvest Digital Marketing:
Rank Harvest is a premium search engine optimization agency specializing in driving traffic to corporate and enterprise-level brands. We use a modern distributed workforce model without a physical office allowing for low overhead and to hire the top talent around the world.
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Links Mentioned in this Episode:
Want to learn more? Rank Harvest Digital Marketing website at https://rankharvest.com/
Check out Rank Harvest Digital Marketing on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/rank-harvest/
Check out Michael Chagala on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelchagala/
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Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00:05) - Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence comm and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now. Michael Chagla Michael, you are the founder and CEO of Rank Harvest Digital Marketing. Your website is Rank harvest.com. Michael, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (00:01:17) - Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:01:19) - Well, listen, I'm grateful you are here because I don't think I've had an SEO expert in a little bit. And I have been seeing a lot of evolution taking place in Search World thanks to two letters a I it's I'm sure we'll be talking about that. But, Michael, if you could maybe just give us an overview of the work that you do with rank harvest.
Speaker 2 (00:01:41) - Well, at Rank Harvest we specialize really in just two things paid ads and SEO ways to drive traffic to people's websites. Those are our main two to, things we do here.
Speaker 1 (00:01:54) - And and so in that world, for folks that maybe have not been obsessing over that world, say, over the past year or so, can you kind of catch us up with what's been going on in both paid and organic search?
Speaker 2 (00:02:10) - Yeah. So there, especially around organic search, Google is always making changes to its algorithm, which changes how websites rank in search results. And we are consistently seeing situations where someone was holding, let's say, the number one position in Google for a long time.
Speaker 2 (00:02:30) - Suddenly they're they're down by a page and, you know, someone else is just as surprised to have that has that new number one spot. And there's been a lot of shuffling around like that recently.
Speaker 1 (00:02:44) - Yeah. Well, what would you say are. Well, can you talk? Let's just talk about Google. What is Google saying right now that folks should be paying very close attention to?
Speaker 2 (00:02:58) - Quality of content and by. When I say content, that means text. so with ChatGPT and other AI programs coming out that write content is good, as you or I would sit down and write content. Perfect grammar, perfect spelling. There are a lot of advantages to that. But at the same time, sometimes that content is a little bit dry and uninteresting to read compared to what a human would write. And it's not actually so much that Google cares who the author was, but Google pays attention to things like how long does the visitor, on average, stay on a given page on your website? If people come to your website, they land on a page, they hit the back button.
Speaker 2 (00:03:46) - Three seconds later, you're basically teaching Google that visitors don't find that content valuable, but if they stay and they read the entire page, well, then you're more likely to get moved up in search. And Google's paying a lot more attention to that quality of content recently.
Speaker 1 (00:04:04) - Yeah. and so what do you work with in particular industries or niches? I know you're based in San Diego.
Speaker 2 (00:04:12) - We work with just about anyone. In fact, we specifically didn't want to focus in any specific niche. mostly for our own reasons. We just kind of want to keep things interesting and not have to. For example, I came out of the solar industry doing digital marketing over there, you know, and after a few years, there's only so much you can write about a single industry or, you know, a new way to package the same product. So we really try to keep things interesting for our own purposes and keep our own creativity flowing and and not not not pin ourselves down.
Speaker 1 (00:04:50) - Yeah. well, Michael, to our friends that are listening right now, you know, you talk about, obviously, you know, quality of content.
Speaker 1 (00:04:58) - What what does that mean? Especially, I would say, when you also have leaders that are saying, well, look, if we're not using AI, I mean, that just seems dumb. We should be using AI. How do we any best practices for like what you'd recommend for kind of the best prescription to be, you know, to, to be efficient. Right. So we don't want to be overpaying for stuff that can technology can help us with the job. but then again, there's no point in doing it if we're just there's no benefit to it, which I could see that if you're just doing sloppy, crappy AI generated stuff, it's clearly AI. And we all know what that AI voice sounds like. We see it, you know, resplendent with a cornucopia of opportunities are at your doorstep. Come on. Please, nobody talks like that.
Speaker 2 (00:05:47) - Right? Yeah. So we do suggest that I should be part of any business owner or marketing manager's toolkit, but you just have to know how to use it.
Speaker 2 (00:05:59) - So if you are going to use AI to, let's say, write a long form, let's say a blog post, go back through it and humanize it a bit, kind of erase those kind of weird words that, you know, humans don't use. But then also, I. Really works well for things like a short product description. You know, let's say you're selling iPhone cases and these iPhone cases. You know, you've got 10,000 of them for sale and they're all just about the same thing. But for SEO purposes, you need a unique product product description for each one of those. Well, let AI loose on that. Say, hey, I need 10,000 product descriptions that are unique and the only thing that changes is what phone model it applies to. And maybe the color that will save you an enormous amount of time. So it definitely has it. AI has its place, it's here to stay, but it's always, I believe, going to have to be driven by it, by human to, pretty a large degree.
Speaker 2 (00:07:10) - Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:07:10) - Michael, looking at your LinkedIn feed, I see that you, are you you you are getting on a lot of lists. you're kind of getting awards. certainly. You're out out there sharing your thought leadership. So, you know, again, you're kind of sharing these placements. I suspect that that's kind of a part of your off site SEO strategy that that you recommend. Can you can you maybe just take us through a little mini Ted talk on on how to get a lot more of those attributions out in around the world.
Speaker 2 (00:07:47) - Yeah. Happy to talk about that. So I you recognize something that we are doing, which is you may call it sort of a PR angle to SEO. So as time goes on and more and more websites are applying SEO to their websites and Google is having a more difficult time, you know, it may find that it has 10,000 websites available for a certain search, and those websites are virtually identical. Google says, well, how am I supposed to sort these from position one on down? So one of the things that's starting to do is to look at maybe the company management who owns the company.
Speaker 2 (00:08:32) - it's almost like Google will do a parallel search and, and try to determine of those of these businesses who are really experts in this industry. So one of the things I do is I try to get myself out into, the digital world, into online conversations, position myself as an authority in my space, which I am. And that is a very advanced SEO strategy that that we that we are using. As you can imagine, being a digital marketing agency, there's no more competitive space to try to fight over rank than a bunch of other experts doing exactly what you're doing. Yeah. so we're trying to look ahead and kind of get into the PR space of this rather than just focus on, you know, technical SEO on our website.
Speaker 1 (00:09:28) - Talk about how you engage with your clients. Well. What does that typically look like? We.
Speaker 2 (00:09:35) - We try to do things a bit different in that we're a little bit old school when it comes to engaging with our clients, and that there's a lot of human interaction, a lot of conversations, a lot of FaceTime.
Speaker 2 (00:09:47) - we find that a lot of our customers come to us because they fired their previous SEO agency. And surprisingly, the number one reason for firing their agency wasn't lack of results. It was a lack of communication. You know, they're writing a check each month to this agency. They have no idea where their money is going. You know, they may pick up the phone and call customer support for this agency. You know, they get someone new each time that person has to get familiar with the account. We just don't do that. We have dedicated account managers that have a relationship with our customer, and our customers can pick up the phone and their account manager will answer. It's, you know, it seems like a lost art in this industry.
Speaker 1 (00:10:30) - Yeah. Well, for for me, I, you know, and at least, you know, kind of folks in our world, too, I don't know. I don't like being treated like a number. I like to feel like together, you know, we got humans kind of figuring out and solving big problems.
Speaker 1 (00:10:44) - And I think that's, badly. And desire as much as I think some service providers try to, you know, crank through more clients and, you know, kind of, I don't know, systematize, automate a bit, a bit too much. So, so, Michael, I'm certain that you've got resources and, you know, for someone that may be listening, you know, content that you'd recommend, maybe just something that you feel that, would be valuable. And by the way, I want to put this out there, and I didn't share this. you've worked with some pretty significant brands NFL, AIG, Sony, Huawei, I it's, if I said that correctly. so. Oh, wait, thank you so much. But yeah the Baltimore ravens.com. My goodness. Yeah. how did you you know, there might be like let's say another, B2B service provider that's listening to us and they're like, dang, how did Rank Harvest get them as clients?
Speaker 2 (00:11:48) - Well, I think part of it I mean, first of all, I've got a wonderful team here, but it's also because I've been doing this for so long.
Speaker 2 (00:11:57) - I, you know, I, I was in corporate digital marketing for, for 20 years before I started Rank Harvest. In fact, Rank Harvest was a side hustle that I, that I created in my, in my mid 40s. And it grew I grew it into a multi-million dollar business from there. But I before this I had this long career. and gosh, I've been doing SEO since 2005, 2006. So I've just built a lot of partnerships. A lot of people know about me and, you know, my strategies work. And again, I do have to say that a lot of it, most of it perhaps is my wonderful team here.
Speaker 1 (00:12:43) - Excellent. All right. So, Michael, your website, as I was sharing earlier, before I got distracted by your, your roster of clients, which is, pretty impressive. Rank harvest.com. but, you know, again, you know, are there any resources that you'd recommend to someone take a look at or, you know, maybe, again, just kind of education? I know you've got some some great blog posts here.
Speaker 2 (00:13:08) - The the best. Well, I'll put it. I'll put it to you in the in terms of advice, if you need, if you want to improve your SEO and maybe you don't want to engage with an agency or freelancer or whatever. The number one thing you can do is fill your website full of pages of information. Google consistently, larger websites consistently outrank smaller websites, and it's simply because Google wants the confidence to know if it's going to send a search visitor to your website, that that website has enough information, is satisfied with other whatever they're looking for. The easiest way to do that is fill your website full of information, not just promotional information, but even just information to to help visitors understand your industry and how to make decisions.
Speaker 1 (00:14:00) - Yeah, yeah. Truly. You know, writing for humans and truly being a good steward, truly trying to help, help help help help. Google knows what you're writing. Google knows what you're doing.
Speaker 2 (00:14:10) - And never underestimate Google's intelligence.
Speaker 1 (00:14:13) - Yeah, yeah. okay.
Speaker 1 (00:14:16) - So again, your website rank harvest.com when somebody goes there and let's say that they maybe they fired or you know, one maybe they've had some negative experiences, you know, with an SEO provider. And, they'd love to at least have a conversation and see what, you know, engagement might look like. What do you recommend for them?
Speaker 2 (00:14:39) - Just come to our website, fill out the contact form. in most cases, if if someone wants to get on a zoom with me, I will make time to do that. I'm very transparent. I give them honest advice, even if that advice is that we're not a good fit for them. I will help put them on a path towards whatever I think is best in their situation.
Speaker 1 (00:15:04) - Excellent. All right. Michael. Shigella. Did I say that correctly? You did. Michael Shigella again. Founder CEO of Rank Harvest Digital Marketing. Again your website rank harvest.com. Michael thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence.
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