292 How to stay ahead in the local SEO game | Podcast with Michel Leconte - SeoSamba

Hello everyone, my name is Christian, welcome back to TechPoint. Today our guest is Michel, the CEO and founder at SEO Samba. Hello. Good morning to you.

Good morning to you. Happy to have you on the podcast. First of all, please tell us and the audience, what is SEO Samba? Sure, well, SEO Samba is a marketing automation platform.

And, you know, you could consider it as an all-in-one marketing automation platform. It includes lots of different tools, including not only SEO rankings, but SEO execution framework. So something that lets you execute search engine optimization, including URLs, meta descriptions, and also copy on web pages from the central locations across any number of websites. so that's really the core tool but there are many other tools that are found in the platform a review management tool a listing management tool, a social marketing tool voice over IP system so yes, the idea is to consolidate essentially all those multiple tools under one roof yeah, all in one, nice great to hear that.

I'm curious now from your perspective what do you say is the biggest problem that SEO Samba solves for its customers? Yes, I think one of the main challenges that we solve for is complexity. Digital marketing is highly fragmented. There are lots of ins and outs.

It's difficult to move data from one silo to the next. and SEO Samba facilitates this. So to give you an example, if you use a centralized blogging platform from a blog post, you can easily create a newsletter. At the same time that you publish your blog post, you can publish it to press release channels, if that's appropriate, and the social marketing channels that the platform connects to as well.

If you get a positive review on, say, Facebook for your business, you can easily share that through the social calendar on a LinkedIn profile and page or your Google profile. So that you can move things around. I mean, you create a newsletter on the email marketing tool and this becomes a blog. Right.

So, and the system also helps alleviate lots of, you know, challenges that are happening in the background that people are not necessarily aware of initially, right? Right. But as professionals, essentially, we have integrated all those solutions, you know, and decked them into the execution side of the platform. right who needs SEO Samba what is the ideal customer for you well the so we we serve multiple types of customers really so first of all the the the framework because it is a framework so there are really two systems when you talk about SEO Samba the marketing operating system is what that started to describe.

But there is also a very capable front-end that includes a content management system, an e-commerce platform, and a customer relationship management system all in one system as well. And that entire framework, right, those two separate systems, right, they can work jointly, right, or they can work separately. but they can both be private label by agencies by marketing agencies and business solution providers and so that makes it for a very powerful solution set that can be brought to any kind of segment or vertical that those agencies or business solution providers work with.

So one of the first segments that we serve is basically agency fellow professional marketers that are part of agencies or solution groups. And so they can market SEO somebody under their own colors, under their own domains, and so forth. So that's one type of customer. The other type of customer is the typical small business outfit.

They can be e-commerce-enabled. They might not be e-commerce-enabled. They might be service-based. We serve essentially, you know, any kind of across many, many industries, right, those customers that are looking for basically, you know, a cost-effective simplified version of a, you know, system that might be actually, you know, more popular with enterprise customers, right and enterprise companies And then the last tier of customers for us have to do with the multi businesses So multi-location businesses, they can be retail networks, they can be distributors, manufacturers with distributors, they can be franchise type of businesses as well.

And that is due to the flexibility that is offered by having on one side a cloud marketing hub and and on the other side a front-end that can be deployed across any or any type of on-site or or cloud type of hosting right and so and you can you know this is this is hybrid this is very flexible you can you can manage from the marketing or operating system you can manage or you know that that specific front-end that we've actually sponsored and open source, right? The name of it is SEO Duster, so you can check it out.

I encourage you to do that because you can download and install it anywhere you want or it's available and you want to click install as well. And it's a great open source product and it connects to the marketing OS and gets enhanced features essentially through the marketing OS. You can just use the CRM as well in there. That's also a possibility.

But even if you are using other platforms and other content management systems, such as WordPress or for that matter of not even having a website, you can still open up an account on SEO Samba and the marketing OS and then either connect your WordPress website or basically use the social marketing tools, the listing management tools, and on and on and on. Essentially, if you need a call tracking solution, for instance, you can use SEO Samba for that purpose. Right. Right.

I love to know the story of the company. So basically how you started. Did you see a problem that you faced or what is the background of SEO Samba? Yeah, so the background is, well, you actually have to, you know, go back a little bit in history.

Actually, I've set up an initial IT business back in the Bay Area many years ago. And at the time, we had some success. We started to have some success in the Bay Area. And then we started to expand in other parts of California and then beyond, right?

Going to Chicago and New York. And one of the things that we realized is that it was really hard to actually mirror the kind of success that we had with a small search engine at the time that was starting up that was called Google in other markets. And so I had some engineers on the bench, and I said, well, let's try to build a solution to do that, right, and to replicate that success for other, you know, offices. and that was really the first situation of SEO Samba.

So that company was sold and then move forward to 2008, I was looking for my next venture and occupation and I looked into it and that opportunity was still available because nobody had actually addressed the execution side of that problem. And so that's how we funded basically SEO Samba to solve that initial SEO challenge. And then from there, we expanded essentially to include more digital marketing tools. Right.

I'm curious to know about the most successful go-to-market strategy for today. So is it SEO? What's that? The most successful strategy for acquiring new customers.

Oh, well, so it depends who you are, right, really. But generally speaking, it's, as I was mentioning earlier on, it's a highly fragmented market, right? So there are lots of digital marketing channels that are available to any marketers these days. You've got to pick wherever your audience is most likely to hang out, right?

in, but having an email list, having if not an acquisition paid campaign, but maybe a remarketing or retargeting paid campaign might be a good fit for many businesses out there. And then building on the organic presence and building, generally speaking, the brand is usually a good investment, right? Because I mean, The default, it seems, is very much to actually work with Google Ads and going through acquisition there. But that particular channel is quite saturated for many, many industries.

So the lead acquisition tends to be very expensive. So even if it's a good channel, it's intent-driven, so it's quality stuff that you can get, But, you know, they also benefit essentially from any kind of brand activity that you have elsewhere, right, because there is a cannibalization that happens, you know through keywords through branded keywords essentially and sending back traffic to website and claiming essentially that attribution coming from the Google ad campaigns when in fact you know many of those leads are actually coming to, you know, the good work that is being done by other team members and, you know, other budgets essentially being spent all over the place.

so you know I'm from the you know school of thoughts that you should not have all your eggs in the same basket and so you know being able to play across all those multiple channels and you know adjust your budget based on what you are saying seems like a decent idea to me what is the vision for the future of SEO Samba because we have so many products so many verticals and you can help customers in such a unique way right all-in-one to offer so many suites of products but I'm curious to know what you see now with the age of AI and a lot of changes right oh yeah so uh exciting times you know with the AI I mean okay every every year SEO has announced as being dead right yeah you know And so that's what's interesting, because it always reinvent itself.

And now it's reinventing itself with basically the AI integration into the Google search results. And obviously the AI tools in and by themselves essentially being used as a search tool increasingly. But it's still a small portion of the searchers out there. It's growing, definitely.

And so that's definitely a factor on the organic side that you need to take into account. and then AI is also being used on the content generation side of things and those are tools that we have integrated into the platform so right now on the marketing operating system you can use our AI tool to create blogs at scale in fact so you can connect if you have 20 different websites you can connect them all to the platform and generate from a single effort 20 variants of a content piece across those domains So that's a possibility.

The social marketing tool is actually using AI heavily and having the ability to scout the web for you and find relevant content and craft it and provide an angle for your brand. Same goes with the image search and so forth. Same goes for the repetition management with the ability to our tool to come up with different answers and replies when reviews are left on your profiles. So AI is definitely here to stay and that is something that we are very keen on integrating further.

We had studied actually many years ago working with AI, you know, with like the anti-spam filtering and that is running on the platform and that's quite effective as well. We're using it for product descriptions, for instance, on the e-commerce side of things as well, where automatically from an image, the AI is able to build the product description for a specific product based on that image. So there are quite a number of efficiencies, essentially, that you can derive as a marketer from using this and using this in the SEO Samba's provided tools.

Now, you're right that we are a little bit of a Swiss knife, if you will, when it comes to marketing software. And so as such, we are a very proper solution for many types of businesses out there. And so our challenge is to understand where we are the best at and what are the type of customers that we best serve, right? And that's really the challenge on our side.

So, you know, the three segments I was mentioning to you, you know, small business, generally speaking, the agency solution providers, and the multi-location brands are really three areas where we shine. And so we definitely want to expand and do more of the same, especially that we have some great additional tools as well coming up. So we're quite enthusiastic about building technology. Happy to hear that.

From your experience, what did you say are the most loved features of SEO Samba? What companies use the most? Well, so the social marketing tool is definitely a highlight of the platform. Okay.

Lots of people that are using the social marketing tool. On the CRM side, which is something that we haven't talked much about, the CRM is very capable and very powerful, especially with the voice integration. since we provide the VIP integration, you can easily create leads, contacts into the CRM from an inbound phone call for instance We have the integration with texting as well So those are features that are very much liked by customers The ability to track automatically the lead source origin down to keyword level is something that is also very much appreciated by our customers.

the ability to parse essentially text you know text messages or conversations as well since we are the OAI once again is transcribing conversations automatically in a CRM so you have the ability to parse essentially those conversations as well whenever whenever you need you know to come up with an analysis if you will of the activity that is ready to customer service or sales right looking for specific keywords, for instance, or type of conversations. So, yeah, I think, you know, some of the CRM features, you know, the visual pipeline, the ability to have the digital signature integrated as well on the platform is something that is highly appreciated with the payment system that is integrated in there, receiving deposit payments on quotes that are sent privately to prospect through the CRM.

And by the way, one of the differentiators of SEO Samba when it comes to a CRM product is that all of this is really integrated within the platform, within the CRM, without any extra charge, which is a major differentiator compared to the top-of-the-line competitors where every time that you try to unlock something, you're going to be charged here and there and here and there and here and there, which gets to be quite frustrating. Or that you need to actually rely on a third party to handle the digital signature, handle the payment, blah, blah, blah, and so on and so on and so on.

So I think software-wise, that basically runs it up. But to cap it off, I think the most appreciated overall feature from SEO Samba is the amount of support and the hand-holding that our customers get from our team. And, you know, that's what we hear time and again, is that the support is second to none. Yes, yes, 100%.

And talking about costs, we'd love to break down the pricing structure of SDS Samba, if we can talk about it. So I'm really curious how you monetize. Is it only per suite? So you pay for all the features or how does it work?

so we we have a subscription based system for the marketing OS so it's actually going to evolve but we have a subscription based system for the marketing OS that will give you access to the on-site optimization access to centralized blog system and the various tools on the platform but some of the tools are also available as point solutions and some of them are metered, right? So, for instance, if you want to send over more than 2,000 emails a month, then there would be an additional charge for emails if you want to send 5,000 emails, for instance, or 10,000 emails or a million emails, right?

Yes. Same goes for the call tracking and the UIP solution. If you need some additional phone numbers, you can get some additional phone numbers for $5 a month, essentially, on the platform. when it comes to CRM we price per contact that are stored in CRM and that's really the only pricing element when it comes to CRM so you have access to all the features that is the call integration the drip emails the texting, the digital signature payment integration, the QuickBooks integration, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All of this is actually all in there and available to you. And actually, it's free of charge, up to 250 contacts in the Sierra. So to get you started, essentially, if you have a micro or personal business, 250 contacts might be just enough for you. And in which case, you can download the system and install it on your web host and just use it as such.

Or you can use cloud services and cloud you know, hosted version, right? And for minimum fees, essentially get the CRM, you know, that way working. Now, if you need a paid version, you know, a 500 contacts, I think is something like $39 or something of the nature. So it's very affordable.

I get it. I get it. Okay. Those are my main questions in the podcast today.

But if you want to add something else now at the end, we'd love to do that. So, yeah. yeah well I think that that was great to be on the podcast today and that if anybody sees this by all means feel free to get in touch with us and we'll be happy to go the extra mile as we do most often essentially to help you resolve your digital challenges yes awesome thank you so much Michel thank you Thank you, Grishan.