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Roman Prokopchuk is the Founder of Nova Zora Digital.
Nova Zora Digital experts use their experience to tailor the most productive campaigns to help you grow your business.
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0:00
Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. I'm Josh Elledge, Founder and CEO of UpMyInfluence.com. We turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority, and help them build partnerships with top influencers. We believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world. stick around to the end of the show, where I'll reveal how you can be our next guest on one of the fastest growing daily inspiration podcasts on the planet in 15 to 20 minutes. Let's go.
All right with us right now we've got Roman Prokopchuk and Roman, you are the founder of No, it's NovaZoraDigital.com. And first off, you were just telling me,
0:45
what is Nova Zora mean? Nova Zora literally the translation in Ukrainian means new star so kind of new star digital clients to get kind of a fresh start become who they're destined to be through digital market. K means
1:01
and you're an agency in New Jersey, is that correct?
1:04
Correct. New Jersey but a US basically based majority of the clients are the United States, regardless of the campaigns that we're running.
1:13
And I know you guys have built up to a pretty healthy level as an agency, you've done a lot of great work and and you serve a lot of clients in it was it? What are the industries that you primarily serve?
1:26
legal financial services, pharma, Life Sciences, so a lot of the boring regulated industries, yeah, fitness and consumer goods, but we have expertise and others, but those are kind of the core foundations.
1:42
It's good to be in a boring industry. Would you agree?
1:45
Yeah. It's hard to reinvent the wheel sometimes because of regulations, but it is fun delivering value to clients in those industries.
1:56
Okay, so a lot of your services revolve around Seo paid search content, online reputation. So give me a, I guess your unique
2:11
your kind of your USP that you would offer to clients in your industry what makes you unique compared to other agencies, mom one delivering and giving the services that the client actually needs. There's a lot of agencies and consultants that will give, you know, cookie cutter solutions and up charge them for for things that they don't necessarily need. But starting off with a baseline usually doing an audit, free of charge, at least to a certain extent a more in depth audit, when the campaign is taken over and basically baselining things, but understanding where that client stands and then what has to be done to move them along to where they want to be in terms of goals and some of the things that need to be fixed from prior agencies or in house? teams that have been done over the years? Talk to me about the audit
3:09
that you offer. And because that sounds like you're giving away value to someone that may or may not become a client.
3:17
Yeah, well, I mean, it's bad black and white. So if the current agency or you know, in house team that you have, isn't delivering or they're doing the wrong things, I think it's the, my my responsibility to basically tell the person or the company and they can go any route they want, but at least they have this this honest kind of evaluation. Usually, it's more so than evaluating the search engine optimization efforts, which is built out into onsite content involves the content, internal linking, other things like that in terms of titles, descriptions, technical Paid speed, how its coded. If the website may be a little heavy in terms of the code, how to improve that in an off site of backlink profile as their agency or in house been building spammy links, it's not necessarily kind of link building, but link acquisition and relationship building nowadays. We're on a podcast that's actually an excellent source of backlinks that I recommend to clients or anyone that asked me and then other things. So what have you done in social? Do you have a social presence? What are you doing with that? How are you branding on social channels? What have you done in terms of paid search, these are the ads you've ran, this is the, you know, estimated results and spend you've had because there's a lot of agencies out there that also manipulate the spend. So they'll say you know, you're getting X amount of money going to paid but they take a large portion, that's not the industry standard. So basically being as honest and transparent in that and giving as many facts and recommendations and at the end of the day, I think I think a lot of prospects like that honesty and kind of integrity because I'm not trying to pull a fast one on them just simply educate what what's going on and where they can actually be if they were doing the right things.
5:13
So when you're reaching out and and I guess part of the question is, what does a nova xaro do to attract new business?
5:24
A lot of it is referral base. I've been in the digital space for about 11 years. Yeah, about like 600 campaigns I've worked on. I've built relationship with former clients at other agencies have held three director roles as well and manage teams and and each of those agencies I've networked, and some of the people then went on to build their own agencies and go freelance and be contractors. So having a good relationship and a good kind of a character and being a stand up person and doing the right thing as much as possible and every city really goes a long way. But also outreach on social generating leads through my podcast itself, some of the interviews, I go on, and doing some of the efforts that we do for clients on our own behalf.
6:15
Yeah. And so, you know, in terms of like hard costs of doing an audit, I mean, there's definitely some investment there. And so, some would argue that there's a little bit of well there is there's risk involved.
6:28
There is I like I said the initial kind of audit before you know, with a proposal or where you stand before anything is kind of like a a junior or compressed version of the actual thing that when you get brought on then everything gets you know, that it so there are still a few hours that go into it. Obviously, certain things, you populate a URL or you put a brand name and you can, you know, spit out some information then you can use in that report, but other things like you said, are, you know, manual and require an expertise or an expert to look at it. So there is that. But I think the risk outweighs the reward in terms of getting your name out also, because even if they're not a client, or they may not have the funds to do so, if somebody asked them moving forward, they can be like, Listen, this person provided me all this detailed information for free of you know, no, cause we didn't necessarily retain their services. So, you know, I recommend them for you to even have a conversation and kind of it's a good thing to get your foot in the door in that sense as well.
7:34
Yeah. So obviously, having worked in SEO, and in particular, for the past 11 years, you've seen a lot of evolutions like what worked 1011 years ago, doesn't work too well, today. And so if we're looking at the year 2020. Now, what works today, that if I'm a smart business owner, I probably really want spend my time doing?
8:01
No great content is I mean, the key are differentiating your business in terms of on site. So if you don't differentiate or, you know, demonstrate why you're better than your competitors, and industries, oftentimes where, you know you're selling the same identical product or variation of it, and you have to really add your value proposition or what you stand for to connect to a user. But other than that things like structured data. So I think the statistic is about 40 something percent of people now go to a search result for informational searches. And through structured data, they get basically a answer. And they don't even click on anything, they get their answer within the actual search engine results page. So you can do things like adding structured data and schema to mark up information for you to basically show up in that basically knowledge snippet where somebody reads it, they know it's coming from you, and then they may leave. But then remember that it actually did come from you. And other things like voice. Obviously, in terms of indexation, there's a mobile first index now, because primarily mobile overtook desktop searches, so then they they moved over to a mobile first index. So having your mobile site fast and optimized for mobile, and the mobile experience is really important that you know, a lot of companies still don't necessarily do that well. And then I also believe in terms of voice search in general, and then voice operated kind of assistance, so Google Home. So in that sense, when you ask a question or for a company, the voice assistant gives one result, it's not like a search engine results page. So currently, you can do stuff to mark up your data for you to better show up if somebody has for a particular product or service. So I think structured data and schema are big from the technical sense and Voice keeps on growing over time.
10:02
What should we be doing? Is there a plugin that we should be using? If we're using on a, you know, running our website on WordPress that we can be using structured data and schema better, I guess when you're talking to me about that? Like, I'm familiar with what I find when I do a Google search, but I guess I've just really never considered that there's something special I need to be doing to make sure that I'm showing up in those Google search results with that answer.
10:30
Yes, I mean, certain plugins, certain SEO plugins, add a certain variation of that, like, all in one and Yoast, for WordPress, but they don't necessarily go to the advanced level. So you still have to understand how to mark up your data to the best of your abilities. Obviously, if you have someone in house, like an IT person or a technical person doing that, that's great. If you're doing yourselves Google offers tools like data highlighter through search console that you You can specify what kind of information it is or what kind of content it is. And then you basically highlight that within the text and it spits out the actual, you know, structured, coded, basically highlight for you, and then you can implement it on your website.
11:16
Wow. So I guess, you know, one of the first things would be to think about, well, what is it? You know, what questions can I answer simply using structured data schema and schemas? I don't know what the what what things play well for taking advantage of that?
11:37
Well, anything from the informational search perspective, because searches have are based on intent. So basically, you have informational, transactional and navigational Excuse me. informational, obviously is is direct questions don't necessarily lead to a sale for a lead, but it does get the user used to, or at least in knowledge of your brand. So a lot of searches are, you know, what, who, you know, stuff like that or different things that are related to what you do. So if you can think of the most common questions, obviously, there's tools out there to do keyword research and understands, understand trends over time for a specific content theme or specific phrase. So understanding that understanding seasonality, and really focusing on things like that from informational perspective, and having your content as in depth as possible, obviously, for a landing page, if you do something, you may not obviously have, let's say, 10,000 words, but have some kind of piece of content, like a knowledge graph, a QA section where you can really go in depth, and the users really expect that content to be in depth. Because obviously, if you have a product page, any kind of let's say for lawyers that area of practice page, you may not be able to put you know 10,000 characters 50 10,000 characters for pages like that, you want to get to a point how you help people what you do, and then have somebody with the amount of seconds they have to for you to hold their attention. Basically, you get to the point and they figure out, you know, this is the first step, let me learn more. But with that informational content, the content type, like I said, could be QA could be a knowledge graph or a knowledge base itself, where you have like a data dump of information and frequently asked questions, and then just structure it in terms of what what that content is, like I said, and they'll give you a better ability to, to show up within that basically, snippet.
13:41
What is Google's current or just I guess what you've seen in terms of trend of if someone may have been all about off site link building in the past, what are best practices today for getting attention from from other sources
14:00
Yeah, I mean, link building is for me or for recommendation by me. Link Building isn't just simply like for the SEO value, and then the types of links you have no follow or follow, follow links pass that kind of SEO juice or value and nofollow. You know, it's it's a link, but it doesn't necessarily add that direct SEO value, but I do still recommend them for referral traffic. A lot of bigger sites, if you get, you know, an article on Forbes or entrepreneur, they'll give a nofollow link because they don't necessarily want to pass that juice away from from the website itself. But you have the value of referral traffic. So like I mentioned before, a lot of people are going into in terms of demonstrating their expertise and branding, doing podcast interviews, relevant podcasts related to what they do and what they have to offer in terms of information that each podcast usually links back to a website or whatever you choose to link back to and then it gets syndicated to the major you know, podcast platforms that Those links can or may or may not appear there too. But I recommend that as a also referral source and the source for SEO. And then, like I said, building brand on social platforms like LinkedIn for b2b, have a really good organic reach compared to organic reach being kept on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Yeah. And testing. So I've been testing Tick tock, and the community there, everybody says, you know, they're all kids, they're really not all kids. There's a lot of, let's say, I would say 20 to 4550 year olds that are coming on slower and slower, and I see a lot of content from them. And a lot of creative content, the contents a little different than a 15 year old is putting out so you still have an audience, I would recommend testing at least testing if you're not going to do anything in terms of you know, how paid develops on the platform, or putting out organic content I would least test it. I mean, I think the third video I put on got like two 25,000 users and like 4000 likes. So it's it's like a wild west. So I would recommend being an early adopter to anything or any platform because it's simply moving away from attention to attention and where your target audience spends most of their attention online.
16:18
That's awesome. Roman just in terms of like, also like online reputation, I would imagine attorney so let's say an attorney. We had we had one client, and they had, unfortunately been lumped into a negative article. And it's really kind of a bummer situation, because they did nothing wrong, but they just kind of got lumped in with a big news story. When that happens, what's the best thing to do if you're like, if I do a Google search on somebody, and there's just noise or garbage or something that we really don't want to see in that first or second page of Google search results? What do you
17:01
Well, ideally, push it down as far as possible, then, you know, the further it is down the the least likely people are going to, you know, keep going in terms of clicks moving for moving down from the first base to second to third. But obviously, like you said, if it's, let's say, The New York Times or something like that, that's a strong domain authority that you have to push down. So my thing is, how are you handling and in terms of PR, so regardless of what your stance on it, take a stance and put out a public, you know, either response, or some kind of, you know, information about what happened that addresses it so you have that out there, but figuring out also how strong that piece of content is, is it syndicated because then you're gonna have a problem of moving other things down as well. Things like figuring out like you said, if it's warranted or not some some are, you know, smear campaigns. That is not viable, but other things. People actually did it or the attorney was unethical. And now he wants to move it down, which usually I don't necessarily take that because it doesn't align with my kind of, you know, pillar of integrity of for clients. But figuring that out, if you can put things out if you have a strong domain, if you can put content related to that, to combat that as well. And then figuring out PR effort, so if you do PR internally, or if you have contacts at you know, news, publications, different things online, blogs related to it, that want to hear kind of spinning your side of the story and what the story actually is getting as many of those as possible and we're on a podcast, possibly doing podcast appearances because a lot of the podcasts I do have websites have strong websites that they've built over time and doing your best to push that down over time. There's other like accounts Things like that you can make for that person for their name. But if you look at their name and a variation of what happened most likely you're going to have to structure content around those specific searches. So figuring out what that article and variations of what it actually rank ranks for, in order to understand what content you need to push it down.
19:20
Yeah. Awesome. Well, Roman Prokopchuk, you are the Founder of Nova Zora Digital and you're on the web at Nova Zora and that's N O V A Z O R A digital dot com. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, and and the name of your podcast you shoot if you're listening to his podcast. Well, guess what? You can listen to Roman's podcast Roman, what's the name of your podcast? It's called the Digital Savage Experience. So just search whatever podcast player you're in right now. So just search for Digital Savage Experience. Is that right? Correct. And you'll find it right there. Roman, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks. My pleasure.
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