Jeremy Easterbrook Talks About SEO, CRO and CMS Platform ALYA!

Hello, guys. Hello, marketers. How are you guys?

Yeah, well, for sure. Well, as a child, I was probably a little bit I didn’t like the tourney. I wasn’t the best kid at school. I was smart but never liked to have teachers and bosses and such. When I was playing high level sports, I was a very competitive guy myself. Then finally, when I was in university, I took a job. I was studying communications. Finally, I joined a communications agency at the time. They were doing some web stuff a little bit. Finally, at one point, I decided after I talked to my boss that it was 2010, a little bit before 2010, and then I came to see the boss and I told her, we’re going to need mobile campaigns, mobile apps, we’re going to need mobile advertising. And she says, well, I don’t think that the mobile thing is going to become big. So obviously, maybe it would have been picked up. I was very convinced. So I said, well, here’s the plan. I gave her the plan. And finally she said, all right, I’m going to check it out. And three months later, nothing had happened. I felt we’re going to miss the boat on all the great stuff that was happening in 2010.
Social media was popping. The mobile trend was growing. There was so much happening. I said, well, I’ll launch my own company. I launched Index in 2010. Since then, we’ve been growing. We went from being a smaller company, smaller agency to really being an important player in Canada in the digital marketing space. And we went from being an agency to now a solution provider. So, not just selling all the services that you guys know, SEO, PPC, etc, but also building our own AI platform to help marketers reduce their ad waste and also grow their digital marketing. So, the name is ALYA and we’re really trying to reinvent a lot of what we know exists using cutting edge AI. That’s my passion, guys.

Yeah, well, it’s a good question. At the time, well, where I’m from in Canada, I was very lucky to have very good parents. They helped me a lot. I was in a position where I had no kids, I had no depth. I was just coming out fresh from university. I was already, I think, very good because I was working on websites myself as a passion on the site. I was working on some site projects, and I also had access to a lot of some really smart guys at the time. If you think about, for example, Perry Marshall or Dan Kennedy, some people that were very good in digital marketing and had access to some of their content. Because of that, I decided, well, I can do this and I can do it better. In Canada, I think we’re a little bit behind what’s being done in the US. I said, well, if I’m reading stuff that is right now in the US, then I can put it in place in Canada and we’re going to be on the cutting edge. That’s why I said, Let’s do it. At worst, I’m going to be a few thousands in depth, but then I can get a job.

Yeah. Well, definitely the agency model has evolved a lot, especially in the last five years, I think. It’s changing really fast. One thing that is really important for agency owners and people who want to start their agency is that it’s not as easy as it was before. A lot of companies are bringing back internally the services and everything in the house. So, now if you want to become or if you want to start an agency, but also if you’re even running an agency, you really need to be smart, be very specialized. I think there’s two main models that emerge, an agency that does everything. But that’s very hard because you need to have a big team and it’s really hard to lift off a big team. Or you need to be very specialized and be very good at one or two things. That’s why when we started, we were very good at SEO and PBC. That’s it. No social media, no design, no graphic design, really focused on one thing. That’s how we succeeded eventually by also hiring people and working super hard. I was working at one point easily 120 hours a week. It was crazy.
It was very tough at the beginning.

Well, at the size we’re at, we’re 20 people here at the end of it. I’d say we’re becoming a decent size far from some agencies out there that are like 200, 500 people. But still, we’re in this situation now on bigger, larger accounts where often there’s going to be more than one vendor agency and there’s going to be consultants and we need to make it work with everybody. But also sometimes we’re just going to be working with one customer and that’s going to be doing one thing. But you’re right, everything is becoming omnichannel. It’s becoming harder and harder to just say we’re going to do one thing. You need to think about everything today. You need to think about omnichannel because you say, Well, I’m not seeing conversions from Facebook. I’m only seeing conversions from organic, so, I’m not going to do social. But now, no, you need to do everything nowadays. Everything is contributing.

Yeah, I’d say we do 95 % in house, so it’s very different as well. I know a lot of things I talked about earlier about different business models. There’s this third business model of an agency where there’s like two or three people in the company and then they delegate to contractors and such. I see that. I think it can work, but it’s very different, difficult after to focus on the quality.

Very difficult. I’d say if you do this, you’re not spending time working on the account as much as maybe you’re just doing the project management. After that, then you’re spending so much time, time, time trying to find and running after the providers that you’re hiring. Then they’re like, Oh, well, my dog was sick. Oh, my… Crazy stories. My electricity was down. Then the customers might be mad after it. Then they don’t do the job and then the customer says, I don’t want to pay. Now you’re stuck, you got to pay. You got to pay both sides. Sometimes it’s painful. That’s the risk of hiring third parties. You can also specialize in one specific vertical. I think that’s the key to success in anything, whether you’re building SaaS, whether you’re building an agency.
If you focus really on one segment, you’re going to do better. When we started, we didn’t focus on anything, and I think that was a mistake. We all the time we do this mistake. It’s better to really think about one persona, one customer profile, and you just focus on that person and you ignore the rest. I think that’s really the key to success. Here at Index, what we do is we specialize a lot in real estate developers, education, and e-commerce. That’s really one of the things we do. At the same time, there’s everything. You can go after chiropractors, you can go after lawyers, you can go after cars. The industry is so large that you’re going to find something fit for you, especially if you have a passion for that industry.

I’d say it’s mixed, but when you get to a certain scale, it’s really hard to run a lot of small customers. It takes a lot of work. We don’t have a set up to do that. We prefer to focus a little bit on larger customers. Customers that typically will pay $5,000 Canadian dollars to maybe sometimes up to $100,000 per month in advertising. That’s our preferred niche. But obviously, some agencies can pull it off by running thousands of small customers, but that’s not us. We focus a little bit on larger ones.

Yeah. Well, we built our own platform for onboarding customers at the beginning. We have all our deliverables in our system. We built an intranet for our agency. That’s really sweet. I wish we could commercialize it, but I guess every agency is different. But it’s really cool and it allows us really to make sure that at the beginning, other salespeople in the company sell what the production can do. It’s important not to sell something you’re not able to do. But even before that is to make sure as well that the process is smooth, they can open the proposal. When they open the proposal, they can sign it easily and then they can get into the system. Then when it’s signed, we do the kick off with the customer. Once the kickoff is rolling, we start quickly building the campaigns and working on the SEO thereafter. That’s, I’ll just say, our high level process, but we’re really efficient at it. You get good at it when it’s been 10 years that you’ve been doing it.

We called it… it’s built on a WordPress stack, but it’s really sweet what we did. Spend a lot of R&D. We’re lucky in Canada to be able to do R&D. We call it ARPANET, which is the first intranet that’s built by the US Army. We call it the ARPANET. It’s a cool little software that maybe I’m going to show you after if you want.

At the beginning, we did build one. Then after that, we realized the other platforms were getting so good. We use Zira for a while. We use the other one, Trello. But now, right now, we’re in ClickUp. I think they do a good job. The guys are spending a lot of good time on building their platform. It’s not too expensive. For now, we use ClickUp, but we might change in the future. I think the advantage with ClickUp is that the marketing people use it, which is already a good success. A lot of marketing people, they’re not organized. I don’t know why it’s just the way it is. Software developers are super organized and they love to use software like Zira. I think it’s just the right middle between both. That’s why we use ClickUp right now. Not our own system, we stopped using it. It was too expensive to maintain the cool features that you have today.

Yeah. Well, ALYA is really for e-commerce. How it works is you install it on your website, so you have a tag and you can also connect to Google ads. It’s very similar to Google Analytics tags and you connect. The way we do it, however, is that we access all the raw data from there. We extract it in a very specific way that we have the granular data that we can do machine learning on top of it. We have data scientists in the house and we always try to find new insights and new ways to show the data to our customers after. From there we build some really cool features for them. One of them is to show insights on what actions they should do in their marketing campaigns. That’s our main product is marketing intelligence. Our other product inside ALYA that I think is really cool for marketers, and I don’t think any people are doing it in this way, is we have a custom intent model that’s running and we give a score to each user who arrives on the website from zero to 100. This score, what we do from there is we try to assign it to a… we say, well, this user is very interested to buy your product, even though they might not convert. And then from there, especially if you have a lot of traffic, we can build retargeting campaigns and we can build lookalike audiences from that smaller segment of interested people on your site. And we’ve been seeing a lot of success with those. Instead of sending your whole traffic, we send just that to Facebook ads and we’ve been seeing amazing results and basically wasting less amount of money for our customers.

Well, that’s the beauty of AI. We can use the modern AI that was created in the last years. Canada is one of the forefront. We have one of the best AI researchers in the world called Joshua Bengio. We’ve been using that AI, and really the beauty of AI is that we can look at billions of parameters and we can do this better than a human would ever do. Our AI, we use only anonymous data. We’re not using anything that’s going to circumvent the GDPR or all the laws, the California law, etc. Our AI looks at time of day. We look at what device attributes you have without identifying you really individually. We even use the Google Analytics cookie not to create the new cookie. By using all of this, what we can do is we can look at hundreds of different combinations that then the AI is going to say, well, here’s your score from zero to 100. We pass that along, we send it to Google Analytics, we send it to Facebook ads, they’re big. From there they can improve significantly the campaigns.

Well, definitely who’s our target audience is marketers for e-commerce. If you’re doing marketing and e-commerce, you should definitely try ALYA. ALYA the AI. What it does really, the software is, it’s easy to create campaigns nowadays on Facebook and Google, but what’s hard is to scale and to grow the campaigns. But also sometimes you hit a limit and you hit some walls and you say, well, I don’t know what to do, but how I can optimize more in my campaign. There’s a limit, sometimes you’re blocked and if you’re not in a team, sometimes you’re not sure what to do more. That’s why we give insights on how you can improve your marketing campaigns and we improve the quality of data that we’re feeding to the pixels. Just by doing that, it can help you get to the next level and continuously get in there. What’s great about AI is that it constantly improves all the time. We are always getting new techniques, new ways of improving your accounts in the system.

Well, we talk with our users for sure. And at the same time, if you ask a marketer, marketer A, marketer B, you say, Hey, what would you do with this campaign? One would say, stop the campaign. The other would say, increase the budget. You know, it’s really hard. Marketers, you can talk to 10 marketers and they’re going to have 10 different opinions. What we try to do is we try to replicate the way you optimize your own account, but better. That’s what we try to do and we have a very good success rate that I’ll improve the account.

Yeah, for sure. Well, I’m in a unique position where I’m really an expert in AI nowadays because I’ve been spending so much time on it. I haven’t been following social media as much or some other things, but definitely I’m still actively researching every day about new techniques and such in this. What I’m seeing, obviously, is there’s new channels that are coming out. The devices keep increasing. There’s more and more omnichannel we need to do. It’s becoming harder and harder to run campaigns, for sure. More on top of that is that the ad platforms, they’re more and more using AI themselves. We have less control as a marketer. Even in SEO, we used to be able to control our title tags and our description tags. Now Google is just deciding, well, let me handle this for you. We’re having less and less control, so we need to take back this control. I think that’s a big trend. We need to monitor AI nowadays. We’re almost like teachers, so we need to teach their AI systems how to do it because sometimes they just go crazy and they’re spending all your money. If you look at the AI recommendations they do sometimes, they’re just ridiculous.
Google does absolutely ridiculous recommendations inside of your Google ads account. You just go dismiss, dismiss, dismiss, dismiss, dismiss. That’s the new trend.

Yeah. Well, really, one thing that’s really changing fast in AI, if you haven’t been paying attention, is the content generation. Right now in SEO, it’s very front of the pot. But even in ad copy, we’ve been seeing a lot more tools that I won’t name them, but there’s a million of them nowadays. Most of them use GPT3, which is the open AI, the company that’s owned by Elon Musk. The way he’s been building is he’s been open sourcing that API. Now Facebook has come in with their own, which is called OpenT. Google just released another one that’s even bigger. By looking at all of those, how can we use those language models to our advantage? That can help us. Maybe write our meta description, write our meta titles. But the problem is it doesn’t feel natural, but it’s going to get more and more impressive. But even eventually, I think our AI can even do not only the ad copy, but the image generation as well. They can even draw for us and find pictures that are going to convert.
As a marketer, I don’t have time to look at 500 or 2,000 pictures, test them all in our system.

The important thing is to keep the user experience in mind. If you’re doing it just to save time, it’s all good. But you need to think, is that going to harm your brand, the user experience. That’s really important to think about the people after your customers. If they feel you lost touch, then… But we’re really close to having some really impressive ad copy. I think we’re at a point where we’re close to this breakpoint where AI is going to be as good as a human but not feel as a robot.

Yeah. So the common issues, I think the biggest one is… That’s the biggest one marketers, I think, don’t do correctly is to not pass the conversions to your system. I see so many of them, they open an account, they start advertising, but then they are not trackable correctly inside of their platform. So if you don’t do that, you’re just wasting money because, again, everything is AI nowadays, especially the big players, Facebook, Google, Microsoft Bing. They’re all using AI to improve the system. What they’re looking at the end is to repeat success. They’re learning. They try to find similar customers to the one you generate it and they try to find them. If you’re not doing that, you’re completely wasting money.

Well, definitely the attribution is a really tough nut to crack because there’s a change happening inside of any platform nowadays and you think you know it and then it’s changing even faster. Obviously, the third party cookie, that’s okay, we can live with that. But it’s becoming even more complicated where Chrome is blocking more and more stuff. Then you have Safari which is also blocking everything inside of the platform. You have Edge now that’s starting to block everything. It’s looking at how this cookie was created? Was it created by JavaScript? Okay, then I’m blocking it instead of it. Soon, soon, soon, soon, we’re going to be struggling to track everything as marketers. I think more and more what we’re going to do as marketers is do like TV. How people were measuring TV at the time and still today is that, okay, we’re going to put $100,000 specifically in June. How much our sales are improving because we spent a little bit more. So, you look at this and I think we’re going to start doing this more and more with digital marketing is not just looking at direct sales, but more looking at micro conversions and then thinking about, Okay, what’s the end result?
Because at one point we’re not going to be able to measure anything anymore. IOS and all the stories that we’re hearing about.

Make sure you do your Google Analytics 4 set up. You gotta start doing this by the end of the month. If you haven’t done that, just do it now because you’re going to start the last month before you get year and year of data, so just do it.

I think you need to do a strategic plan before you start working. You need to think about what’s the opportunity and what makes sense for this customer. And for some customers, it makes sense to do some SEO. Some others, it doesn’t make sense to do SEO. So you need to think about that. Same thing with ads and then even PPC. Nowadays, maybe Google ads are full, so you need to think about the emerging platforms as well. So I always try to be on the lookout for competition. You need to use the tools and you need to do some market research before you start building it. You need to see, well, can I rank? Because it’s becoming harder and harder to rank in SEO. That’s right. Google is getting smarter in that sense. We were mentioning earlier about generated content, and Google is cracking down on generated content as well, so you cannot do that anymore. You need to see also about your resources. Do I have a big team to do the SEO? It takes a lot of juice to write content and produce a lot of content. That’s quality. Maybe sometimes it’s easier to do that.
I think that’s why also there’s more and more money in advertising and less to SEO, which is sad because I think it’s the best traffic source is organic traffic. True.

People don’t do it. You’d be surprised how many people start advertising or don’t have a 12 month plan.

You have a business plan, your business plan is 12 months. You have your goals and projections, and then you don’t have it for digital marketing. You need to. People are improvising all the time. So, I think that’s one of the benefits of working with an agency or people that know their stuff is that you’re not doing two months, one month, three months. No, you’re looking long term. Your business is going to change. In the meanwhile, you might get more customers. You might invest more and decrease your investments. But at least you need to have the path that’s laid out that you can see in the long run where your business is going to go.

Well, definitely we use a lot of the great tools out there. We use all the SEO tools to scrape, to look at the positions, to do the competitive research, keyword research, Google Keyword tool. One thing we’ve been using more and more nowadays is this Google Search Console. I think they’ve improved a lot, the Google Search Console. That’s great. Use the Google Search Console for your initial research, but also for your monitoring after. They’ve added new features. They’ve added the video indexation, which looks good. They do a lot more now on the snippets, the rich snippets, the Semantics SEO. That I think is going to be one of the biggest players. Most important thing you need to think about when you’re doing SEO in the future is to label your data in a smarter way to get more information. The companies will do it well. If you look at, for example, TripleAdvisor and Xpedia, they’re in their travel. Google likes the snippets a lot in the travel field and hotels, etc. You look at what they’re doing, they have all the extra markup in their sites and they do it server side, but they also do it in JavaScript.
They inject JSON in the page and it’s really impressive what they do and they get all the traffic because of that. That’s the future of any industry, whether you’re doctors, e-commerce. Now you see the reviews, the stars inside of the search results. For products, why is that? Well, because they use the JSON Market. Shopify is a great platform. It’s Gideon company. They don’t even inject stars inside of the… That’s like SEO 101. They don’t do that. In terms of processes, to use the great tools and have a great team that you have a process that’s laid out and you optimize content and you optimize it in a UI way. Not to make too much. I think automating the research is important. But after that is to do the job. You need to do the job, that’s it.

Well, we built our own tool to insert JSON inside of the page. It’s really impressive the way we do it. That’s one thing we use because we couldn’t do it after that manually, for sure. I saw some cool articles that people try to do it automatically as well to understand the context, the HTML, the page with Python and stuff like that. I think that’s interesting. But yeah, we use great tools out there. We look at the positions, for example, with the same rush. We wouldn’t be able to do that manually to look at the positions every day. It’s important customers do look at a lot. The other thing we do a lot with the automation is reporting. We don’t have time to send reports to our customers with manually pulling out data. It just makes no sense. The thing we do is we use a lot of Google Data Studio with other tools to connect to different data sources. I know there’s new and there’s other cool tools out there, but Data Studio does most of the job that we do. They do a lot of the heavy lifting. We like it and it saves us a lot of time because then we can just send thousands of reports or hundreds of reports every month to the customer and they like it because they can look at their data.
But if we had to manually pull the data, it would make no sense.

One thing is you should try ALYA for sure. It’s a cool platform and it’s going to help you increase your conversion rate because we’re going to be sending more quality traffic to your site. On the marketing side, it’s really helping you identify some ads that are not working and then you can stop those. Because of that, you get, again, more quality traffic, and we do it in a very smart way. Most of the advice I give you, and you don’t have to follow all of it, it’s going to increase your results. On the other side, since we do a lot of SEO and a lot of PPC, we don’t do too much web development for customers, but everything that’s related to pop ups, to call to actions, you need to think about that. We’re looking at also product recommendation. You need to be smart about your product recommendations and your cart. All those things for e-commerce. It’s really important. We do advice on our service side of the business, we do advise our customers on how to get that. But at the end of the day, it’s really to try to find new audiences and target those audiences all the time to bring quality traffic to your site and looking at your landing pages, your top landing pages and try to optimize those.
See how can I change the balance rate, how can I change the exit rates? So the pages where people exit and cleaning up your funnel. Try to make sure you don’t receive too much direct traffic as well. The direct traffic is something that then you cannot measure. A lot of that time, the direct traffic is coming from redirection inside of your platform across the main on your platform. You fix those and suddenly you understand your traffic way better.
Those are quick tips, but get in touch with me and we can discuss about more techniques. That’s okay.

Yeah. Well, I have hundreds.

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, we’ve had a lot of success in different industries and different customers of all sizes. I am proud of really large customers, but it makes you really proud also when there’s smaller customers that call you and say, Jeremy, please turn off my ads. Why is that? Well, I’m getting too many phone calls. I cannot answer everybody. I had to shut down their ads because they were getting too much cost. Since then, this customer has been with us for almost nine years. They joined us in 2012. So it’s amazing when you get those feedback from customers. Specifically for ALYA, one thing I want to say is that we saw some customers who were using ALYA and they were losing money with their ads. They were spending $100,000 per month and they were losing money. So their cost per acquisition, they were spending $100,000 to get maybe $80,000. Because of A lia, we managed to make their ads profitable and they can now spend $200,000 but they’re making way more money. They increased their return on investment to 300 %. Not all because of A lia, but because of the processes and also understanding that there’s actions you can do inside of your ad platforms that you can leverage.
One other that we helped, a company that had their customer acquisition at A9, they needed to bring it to $70 per purchase. We dropped their CPA to 64, which was really good for them because they didn’t know what to do anymore to bring their CPA down. Our target with ALYA is really to bring your customer acquisition down, reduce the ad waste. A lot of companies are wasting so much money in advertising. It’s crazy how much money they’re wasting.

Yeah, exactly. For the amount of time we spent on it, I’d say it’s a market. But yeah, building a SaaS is hard and there’s a lot of great tools out there. So I understand at the same time you don’t have the time to test every tool out there. But really, the way we’re doing it is we want to reinvent digital marketing in a way that’s never been done before. I’ve tried all the tools. I’ve tried everything. And one thing is for sure here at Index and ALYA, we’re really passionate about doing things in a different way that’s different from the other agencies out there, different from the other SaaS tools out there.

Again, I could go on for hours, but starting an agency is hard, building a team is hard, and managing people is hard as well. A lot of people think about the business side, but you need to think a lot about the human side. It’s important to be in the business for the good reason, which is helping customers out and having really this intention of helping the people out and not just trying to sell a system or something. It’s really to understand their business goals and try to work on the business, not just on the cool techniques and such.

I’m ready. Let’s go.

Yeah, definitely. I’d love to see the cool days when the internet was starting. It must have been really cool to hack and be a hacker. I’d probably be a developer if it wasn’t for that.

Definitely texting. If I can text, save time by talking. I’m an introvert guy, I’ll do it.

I have a cat, so the cat needs food. After that, really, it’s about changing and working on the marketing every day. It’s one of the best jobs in the world, marketing.

Yeah, all the time, trying to grow, trying to do acquisitions, trying to grow the company. We’re going to keep building it at ALYA. Some of the big players already are interested in buying ALYA, but for now, we’re just trying to focus, build the best platform out there. For now, no other plans, but you need to be open all the time.

Best business advice I can give you is to work hard. There’s no replacement to that. You need to work hard. You cannot expect to work two hours a day and compete with people that are working 10, 15, 20 hours a day. It’s impossible. That’s the best advice I can give you. No matter where you’re in the world, if you specialize and you’re passionate, you’re going to do good.

All right, well, thanks.