IAM1797 – Founder Produces SEO-focused Content

Why it was selected for “CBNation Architects”:

In this episode, host Gresham Harkless Jr. interviews Joey Randazzo, the founder and CEO of Portland SEO Growth by Becoming Media. Joey shares his journey in entrepreneurship, including his experience working in the military and as a marketing director for a software company.

He also discusses the importance of producing high-quality SEO-focused content for businesses, including the benefits of organic search traffic and the role of content in building trust and authority with customers.

Additionally, Joey shares insights and tips for entrepreneurs looking to improve their SEO efforts, including the importance of understanding the target audience and creating content that meets their needs and interests.

Transcription:

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Joey Randazzo Teaser 00:00

Do something now. Stop waiting. I've thankfully been blessed to be pretty good about this throughout my life. I'm an action-oriented person. I'm a quick start. If you've ever done some of these types of kind of your personality and who you are as a person, I'm a quick start.

And so I'll get an idea and I will not sit on it. I'll just start doing it.

Intro 00:20

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business, from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:48

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. And I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit over 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we are repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call a CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focused on the visibility game, a.k.a. Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Sales. I would just say the name of the game is being found in these tools will help you to do that. We have heard the philosophical question. If the tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? If there's a really, really great product or service and no one knows about it, how great is it? Really? What impact does it ultimately make? This is where we will go into this month looking at visibility, branding, marketing, public relations, sales, being the lifeblood of businesses, building media companies, and so much more.

This is probably one of the most exciting and probably the most excruciating topics, but we hope this month to demystify, maybe even vanquish the fear and help and arm you with the tools to be able to increase your visibility. So buckle up and sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Joey Randazzo of Portland SEO Growth. Joey, it's great to have you on the show.

Joey Randazzo 02:18

Gresh, thanks for having me. Yeah, looking forward to it.

Gresham Harkless 02:20

Definitely looking forward to having you on the show too. Before we jumped into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Joey so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

Joey is the founder and CEO of Portland SEO Growth by Becoming Media. He has a team of 19 women, mostly military spouses that produce over 2 million words of SEO-focused content each year. They've worked with enterprise-level clients like Autodesk, WebMD, and NexEra.

Joey, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Joey Randazzo 02:46

Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it.

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Gresham Harkless 02:48

Let's make it happen then. So to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit, and hear more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

Joey Randazzo 02:56

Yeah. So, I love writing. I graduated from college, wanted to be a writer, I knew nothing about digital marketing. I knew nothing about SEO. I got connected with a gentleman that was doing his own SEO agency at Denver and he needed some content written for his clients. And I was like, sure, let's do it. That agency grew very, very quickly. So I took on a larger role with a Kind of content strategy internally. I became the CMO. It was a 15, 20-person agency. So pretty small, but basically I had to learn everything that I could about SEO and content marketing.

I had zero formal training. I just watched probably thousands of hours worth of YouTube tutorials, and read every single article I could get my hands on. That agency wasn't the best fit for me and I really love the content side of things. They were focused on some different aspects of digital marketing. I said I love this content thing, I think that we could do this really well. So I left and I started my own business that does SEO, but that really focuses on the content side of SEO.

As Google has said over and over again, your website needs comprehensive, valuable content that your readers care about. That's where I started. I started about two years ago, actually just over two years ago.

Gresham Harkless 04:05

Nice. Definitely happy for two years. I love hearing about that journey and that growth and how for one, I feel like you found a lane and opportunity where you were working with and for before they didn't necessarily want to go that way, but you saw that. I feel like to me like you alluded to, it sounds like SEO and content are like hand in hand anyway.

So when you do have that strong content strategy, that's going to just help you out tremendously with your rankings.

Joey Randazzo 04:30

Yeah, absolutely. They were focused on hyper-local SEO and really just hammered in the GMB, the Google my business strategy. But there's way more than that I believe, that could go into that and their clients get cool results. I was like, we could probably pour some gas on this and kind of layer in the content on top of it. So that's what we've done and I just want to also share that step is scary, right?

Like I hovered around doing it for months and I was like, man, do I do it? Do I not do it? Am I capable? Should I just go to another job doing contact strategy for another company that, maybe has a larger kind of lane that they want to build for content? It took me a long time to make that decision and even when I made that decision, it was still two, three months, probably more than that of that voice in the back of my head saying, why in the world did you do that?

So make it clear that it's not this grandiose, beautiful like I'm just gonna do my own thing and it's amazing right away. It was a challenge and it takes time.

Gresham Harkless 05:26

Yeah, I appreciate you so much in sharing that because I think so many times people that might be listening to this or people maybe even recalling when they made their decision or their leap or their step or whatever that looked like thinks that it just happens. Then next thing you know, you have a movie written about you, you're in New York, I could change and all those things happen, but it's a process.

A lot of times we have that imposter syndrome, we have those fears, all of those things that kind of are in the back of our heads, but sometimes we have to lean into that. And, we all go through that same kind of journey. So I appreciate you so much for talking about that.

Joey Randazzo 05:56

Absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 05:57

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I know we touched a little bit upon, Portland SEO growth and how you work. Could you drill down a little bit more? Tell us a little bit more on what that process looks like and how you're serving the client you work with.

Joey Randazzo 06:07

Yeah. So what we do is we work with all different types of businesses, local businesses, and then more content-focused brands. So what I mean by local businesses is either single or multi-location. Brick and mortar. So it could be a physical therapist, it could be a cannabis dispensary, it could be anything that people are searching for locally, the best chiropractor near me anything like that. Then the other side of it is just more content-driven business. So for example, we work with a national travel nurse staffing agency. So they help travel nurses get put into positions around the country. Naturally, people are searching more nationally for these keywords such as How do travel nurse stipends work? Where's the best area for your travel nursing?

So we lock in, we've got tons and tons of data on both sides of this, the local brands and the national brands about what is your target audience search? What are the high volume, low competition keywords that maybe your competitors haven't thought about that we can write content to drive high-intent traffic to your site? How we do that is we actually interview our clients. We're not the subject matter experts. We don't know, is cracking your neck bad for you? Like the chiropractor is going to know that best.

So we interview the chiropractor and we hear from their words, their beliefs, their Ideologies of what that means to them. We record that interview, and then our writers can actually write SEO-friendly content, getting all that data, getting all that keyword research, but that aligns with our clients and their beliefs and their ideas. So that's what we do at scale. So most of our clients get a couple of pieces of content a month. Some get up to 10 a week. Those are all about 2000 words, long-form content. So we produce, as you mentioned earlier this year, I'd be close to 4 million words of content.

Gresham Harkless 07:49

I feel like one of the things that and I don't know if you would consider this to be your secret sauce, but I love that strategy piece. I don't know if we've said that word, but it seems like that is something strong in what it is that you do and how you work with clients.

Do you feel like you are able to not just see those data points that just know how to do this, but bring it all together? Do you feel like that's part of your secret sauce?

Joey Randazzo 08:08

Absolutely. Yeah. There are so many components that go into SEO, right? There's Google has said there are over 200 ranking factors from how you title your images to all these different things on your site. There are a million things that you can focus on and that's where a lot of folks get confused and bogged down as they say, we need to do SEO. Do I need to go get out and go get backlinks? Do I need to create content? Do I need to Optimize all my meta descriptions? Is it what do I do? And there are 500 things that you could be doing.

That's where we step in as we say, let's take a look at your current digital footprint. Where are you at? What is your goal? So it's not let's drive more traffic. Who cares about traffic? It's what's your goal? Is your goal to double phone calls locally? Okay, then we should probably heavily focus on local SEO. Are you trying to build and increase your domain authority? We probably should do content at scale content that people would love to link to and share because it's just so valuable and interesting.

So it really depends. That strategy is huge when every brand is different. I think that's another component that needs to be thought about before people say, let's just go out and do SEO. What does that mean? What's the end goal? What is SEO trying to do for you? Then you can build backward from there. You say the end goal is let's get 50 phone calls a month. Right now we're getting 20. Okay. Where are those phone calls going to come from? How can we do the lowest-hanging food opportunities to get you those 50 phone calls as quickly as possible?

Gresham Harkless 09:31

So, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Joey Randazzo 09:41

Oh, that's a good question. One thing that I used to do more regularly, and I need to get back into it is Wim Hof method. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Wim Hof reading. So Wim Hof is a gentleman out of the Netherlands and he's got this certain breathing technique and cold exposure, ice baths, and breathing technique that he does and that he teaches people how to do.

I usually start my mornings with 10 minutes, a 10-minute YouTube video of Wim Hof breathing and that usually is a great start to my day. So, as I said, I used to do it every day. I probably did it every day for three, four months straight without missing a day. Now I do it maybe three, four days a week. But it's, you wake up and you've got everything going through your mind of like a checklist, checklist, checklist, what I got to do, what I got to do. By starting with that, just having that similar start to the day for me has been pretty valuable.

Gresham Harkless 10:30

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget, and you probably might have already touched on this a little bit, but this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice.

It could be around SEO, or it could be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business.

Joey Randazzo 10:42

Do something now. Stop waiting. I've thankfully been blessed to be pretty good about this throughout my life I'm an action-oriented person. I'm a quick start. If you've ever done some of these types of kind of your personality and who you are as a person, I'm a quick start. So I'll get an idea and I will not sit on it. I'll just start doing it. It bit me in the butt. It's bit me in the butt. I've done things wrong because I've put stuff out there too fast, or if I've thought of something and haven't thought through every single detail.

But it's allowed me to move really quickly and figure out what works and what doesn't. So instead of hypothesizing for three months, this strategy might work. Let's do it today and let's get 70% of the way there today. Sure, if I waited six months from now, I can build it out a hundred percent, but if I get it 70% of the way there, 80% of the way there, and push it out today or next week, I'm going to have enough data to know that it works or not.

So that's a huge nugget that I would share with people is, just do. Stop thinking sometimes and just start taking action because the more you talk, the longer you talk, it's likely just not going to happen.

Gresham Harkless 11:46

Yeah, I think that's huge. I think it  brings up, a lot around quote and quote failure and thinking when things don't go according to plan. I think Robert Kiyosaki, if I'm quoting right has this quote where he says, I started, I found out 9 out of 10 businesses fail. So I decided to start 10 businesses because you know that you learn so much from those processes.

I think that if you have that kind of quick start mentality where you're like, okay, I'm going to start this thing and that didn't work out, so I'm going to try this. Then you start to realize that you still get farther along in maybe six months than what somebody gets in six years, just because you have that mentality.

Joey Randazzo 12:21

Yeah. It's the idea of I'm trying to look up the quote real quick. It's like in the tech world, it's just kind of ship first, right? Ship the product first and then figure it out later. It's almost building the plane as you're flying it. That's how I operate my business at times and you can fly a plane. That's 80%. Maybe not, but that's how I do it let's get this thing off the ground, and let's start making those tweaks to the left wing, to the rudders, as we're going.

Because with this plane sitting on the ground, we don't know how it's going to fly. We're making assumptions about how it's going to fly. But we really don't know until it gets off the ground.

Gresham Harkless 12:54

Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite books, and I talk about it a lot of times and from a marketing perspective as well, too, is the lean startup. It speaks directly to what you're talking about. The MVP creates the minimum viable product that can get you out the door to get market feedback so that you can iterate from there. I think so many times when people spend years and years and years, and of course, If you're building planes, you might want to take a little bit extra time.

But if you're trying to figure out the next widget, that's going to make peanut butter and jelly better, maybe you can do that and get that out the door, get that market feedback, and then just iterate from there.

Joey Randazzo 13:25

100%.

Gresham Harkless 13:26

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on that show.

So Joey, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Joey Randazzo 13:38

A CEO. That's good, I told you not to give me the questions ahead of time so I can make this be really raw. The first thing that comes to mind is building something to help people with a group of people. So, as a CEO, it's my mission to help our clients and to do that with my team. So as a CEO, I think you got to be a leader and you got to add value to people. You got to do those two things simultaneously. You're adding value to some external group, person, thing, organization, or business, and you're doing that with a team and you're building that together.

So that's what a CEO means to me, building something really valuable, that's going to change people's world, going to change their business in this instance with SEO, it's going to transform their business and do that with my team, they're the foundation of it all. As a CEO, I'm just the orchestrator. That's what I think it means.

Gresham Harkless 14:25

I love that definition and you didn't say this word, but I was actually thinking it when you defined it. It is like a bridge because you said help one group of people with another group, help one group to help another.

I almost see that being a bridge where a lot of times you're maybe creating that business, that service, that product, whatever it is to be that bridge so that you can make a huge impact in so many different lives by doing what you do.

Joey Randazzo 14:47

Yep. Absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 14:49

Awesome. Joey, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time as well. What I wanted to do was just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best they can get ahold of you to find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

Joey Randazzo 15:03

Yeah. I think the big thing here is again, just take action. So if you've been sitting around thinking, man, I got to create content, I got to create content, try that strategy, pull out your phone. It could be just an audio recording on your phone. Think of the top 10 questions that your target audience is asking right now and just answer those 60 seconds, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, whatever it takes.

Go to a tool like Rev and for 20 seconds a minute, you can get that transcribed. So, a lot of people think that they need to have it perfect, you don't. Just get started today. I think that's really, really valuable when it comes to content and just SEO in general.

In terms of us, you can find us at portlandseogrowth.com. That's gonna be the best place to find us. We've got content on our site SEO Tips and all that good stuff. That's gonna be the best place.

Gresham Harkless 15:50

Awesome. We'll definitely have those links and information on the show notes as well too. And you also work with people in Portland, but beyond as well too?

Joey Randazzo 15:56

Beyond, yeah. Yes. So portlandseogrowth.com is the website. We have clients all over the country and even some internationally. So, folks that are looking for that support, of course, my phone's ringing right now it's over there. That's going to be the place to go.

Gresham Harkless 16:08

Yeah, absolutely. We will definitely have the links and information in the show notes. I love everything you're doing all the great actual things that you give, even that homework of creating that list of 10 questions, your ideal clients might be asking you as well, too. It's absolutely huge and gold.

So appreciate you, my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 16:23

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at blue16media.com. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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