Podcast With Michal Suski

Dominating Google: Surfer SEO’s Game-Changing Features with Michal Suski Head of Innovation, Surfer

Show Notes

In this episode of the Agency Insider Podcast, I am thrilled to be joined by Michal Suski, co-founder of Surfer SEO, a game-changing content optimization tool that's revolutionizing the way SEO professionals approach content creation and search engine optimization. Michal shares his unique journey from a background in forestry to becoming a leading figure in the digital marketing world, and how he and his team built Surfer SEO from the ground up.

We dive deep into the origins of Surfer SEO, the challenges of scaling a digital marketing agency in a small village in Poland, and the innovative strategies that led to the creation of one of the most powerful SEO tools available today. Michal also reveals some exciting new features coming to Surfer SEO, discusses how to adapt to Google's constantly changing algorithms, and shares valuable insights on what it takes to create truly successful content in the age of AI.

Whether you're an SEO professional, a digital marketer, or an entrepreneur looking to scale your business, this episode is packed with actionable advice and insider knowledge. Tune in to learn how Surfer SEO can help you optimize your content, improve your search rankings, and stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:50 - Co-founding Surfer SEO

06:05 - Launch of Surfer SEO

11:05 - Evolution of Surfer SEO

18:13 - Adapting to Google's Algorithms

22:57 - Exciting Features of Surfer SEO

25:17 - Topical Map Feature Overview

29:45 - AI Tools and Content Quality

33:28 - Common SEO Mistakes

36:00 - High-Quality Content Differentiation

37:49 - SEO Advice for Small Businesses

39:34 - Challenges in Growing Surfer SEO

40:52 - Fostering Team Innovation

42:30 - Entrepreneurial Advice

44:42 - Personal Insights and Experiences

46:11 - Recommended Books

47:11 - Staying Updated on SEO

49:54 - Learning More About Surfer SEO

Transcript

Intro

0:00 welcome to the agency Insider podcast where we dive deep into the world of SEO and digital marketing today I have a

0:06 special guest Michael Sosi co-founder of surfer Su Surfer Su is a powerful content optimization tool that has

0:14 revolutionized how experts approach content creation and SEO

0:21 [Applause]

0:26 [Music] Michael it is a pleasure to have you

0:33 with us today thank you for having me and great introduction for the product

0:38 we've built thank you so much yeah I'm I would I think I'll be one of your early

0:43 user as well appreciate that a lot yeah so uh

Co-founding Surfer SEO

0:50 can you tell us about your background and what led you to co-found

0:56 suru uh yeah so uh I have a master's degree in forestry so I was not supposed

1:05 uh to join either digital marketing or it uh but uh during the

1:13 studies I started to to work as a quality assurance uh so I was testing

1:20 software basically so that uh opened the first door for me to join uh the tech uh

1:28 industry and uh after some time there I joined the digital marketing agency uh

1:36 that was founded in Little Village in the southeast part of Poland uh and we

1:42 were doing SEO I was a pbn copywriter at the beginning obviously like probably

1:48 most of us start uh as an intern in the agency so the worst tasks you receive at

1:54 the beginning to learn and uh it turned out that as you saw

2:00 Dynamic uh Niche that you don't need 10 years experience to be on top uh and I

2:08 thought like maybe when I when I keep on learning uh when I start to to listen to

2:15 to to to the top uh people in the industry I can uh basically be

2:22 successful in SEO and it turned out that yes uh so I was a promoter to the head

2:28 of AO of the agency we've been doing SEO for clients so uh local SEO

2:36 e-commerce uh foras for for bigger bigger year H this was in which

2:45 year oh that was in 2016 okay okay that was quite quite long

2:52 time ago that was 2016 and when we were when when I was working in the agency we're like hm

3:00 how can we scale up the agency uh probably we need to hire more people uh to cover clients uh but where

3:10 can we find more people when we have the agency in a little village with no City

3:17 around and like who's going to join us that's one thing the other thing how can

3:24 we find anybody who know what SEO is uh in in in this area that was not possible

3:32 so we leaned towards uh improving our processes to be more efficient to take

3:38 on more client instead of uh scaling up the team and uh in that time that was

3:45 2017 uh on page started to get more and more traction so instead of building

3:51 tons of backlinks we figured out that uh we can optimize some headings paragraphs

3:57 add keywords here and there and boom magically Pages started to rank better so uh we started with analyzing HTML of

4:06 the pages so basically go to Google check the search results uh check the HTML okay how does uh this competitor

4:14 use keyword in H2 H3 where else maybe image out maybe somewhere else maybe they baled maybe not you know all these

4:22 statistics and based on these analysis done in Google Sheets we found out that

4:28 okay uh this is is the plan for this page to be optimized according to

4:33 competition and it worked but well it was uh time consuming at least uh our

4:41 time was relatively cheap so we could uh keep the margin uh so it was worth it

4:46 but we we we we realized that we can automate this process so a product the

4:54 tool can actually perform a search in Google uh visit the page PES extract the

5:00 information we needed for the optimization and then we will just look at the data and say okay I see that

5:07 everyone in the top 10 used uh keywords in the ag2s so we didn't okay that's the

5:16 number one thing to fix and that's how we build Surfer that

5:21 was internal tool for the agency first and we battle tested it in the agency it

5:27 started to uh like work really well well for us and uh you know we were like um can

5:35 we quit client SEO and so we did so we did and here we

5:42 are uh here we are building a product for for other agencies building a

5:48 product for in-house teams for Freelancers affiliate marketers and basically anyone who uh is looking to

5:57 increase their organic traffic from Google gole so that's the story that's uh

Launch of Surfer SEO

6:05 interesting so so the surfer SEO was launched by you formally or officially

6:10 in which year uh 2017 uh November uh there was the first

6:20 uh beta product release on one of the Polish uh SEO conferences and you know

6:26 we had this uh uh our our CEO uh had a speech in there showing these on page

6:33 tactics and at the very end he said like and you know what you don't have to do it manually you can automate it and

6:41 we've built a tool that you can try for free right now and we had the email notifications on the new signups and

6:47 when he said that and posted the link it was like binging you know the email notifications

6:53 were like people uh were signing up like like crazy so that was uh that was the

6:59 LUN that was lunch really nice uh experience yeah uh and uh so uh before

7:08 Sur for SEO you worked as also as a full stack developer sometime no no no I I

7:14 was testing software so uh I worked with a team of developers and designers they

7:19 built uh a feature and I was looking whether it works uh according to the scope uh or it has some issues and then

7:27 we were uh commun communicating to to to fix these issu but I never coded and

7:33 this application server uh I didn't write a single line of code uh we had a technical co-founder my brother uh who

7:40 wrote the first version uh of the product okay okay so uh so can you share

7:49 some of I mean of course there would be lots of success stories with Surfer SEO but can you share some of your

7:56 favorites uh the most recent one I guess uh is is one of my favorite uh when uh

8:04 we wanted to launch a new product uh around humanizing AI

8:10 content uh we started to first we started to build topical Authority uh

8:16 around that uh particular uh area which is AI detection

8:23 humanization uh AI content uh editing writing paraphrasing and so on so we

8:30 published uh uh 20 30 articles on that topic created a silo uh of all of these

8:39 uh relevant articles uh and when we launched uh a landing page that featured

8:47 the free humanizer tool it took off like crazy bringing uh 10,000 organic

8:54 visitors a day uh it was like huge Spike even though we were building this

8:59 website for 7 years this landing page became number one traffic page exceeding

9:06 even the homepage traffic uh so uh that was a that was a great uh great success

9:13 story of ours uh when we used our own tool to build the topical authority to

9:19 to to secure this new land of humanizing

9:25 a content and it turned out that when you have this domain and you publish uh content that

9:34 is specifically around your Silo uh which is what we did you gain trust in

9:43 this uh particular um well

9:49 information and you can take over the serup so that was that was really uh a

9:55 nice use of uh of uh well our own tool

10:00 to like prove that these things are are are possible uh so that that's that's

10:07 one but I will share really quickly uh the other one from today because I woke

10:12 up and saw a mention uh from a friend uh who is using Surfer for all of these

10:19 years he was uh a first person I interviewed as a user uh

10:26 and he just posted that he used one of uh one of our features which is auto

10:32 optimize so AI is reading your content checking entities that you are missing

10:38 and automatically inject these entities in the places where they belong so he did that and after reindexing the page

10:46 it took off on the ahfs you got the spike in ranked keywords uh really

10:53 really nice nicely looking so yeah another another one like from today

10:58 which is nice right so uh we'll talk a little bit more about Surfer SE of course so Surfer

Evolution of Surfer SEO

11:06 SEO of course as go has become a go-to tools for many SEO professionals can you

11:11 tell us how Surfer SEO evolved from when it was launched first and how it works

11:16 today okay uh the general idea is the same because the general idea is to base

11:25 your decisions on data real time information so we started with you

11:31 provide a keyword we check the ser and then in the Ser we find some elements

11:37 that uh uh are characteristics uh for good ranking

11:43 pages and we tell you what are they so you can improve your page uh but uh at

11:48 the beginning we just showed it on the charts that was quite complex

11:54 correlation tool with couple hundreds of ranking factors for you to review but

11:59 but it turned out that people uh well

12:05 want to automate uh some stuff they don't want to like review 500 ranking factors they would like to take these 10

12:12 20 30 most important or where you are lagging behind uh so they can get like

12:19 uh you know automated audit so that was the first thing we changed we added uh

12:25 automated audit that takes all of these factors least the most important ones and tells you that here you should add

12:33 uh two more headings here there's a keyword missing and here's a list of entities that you don't have but the

12:40 other guys do have so you better breach that Gap uh but again that was not

12:46 enough and uh people were leaning towards automation one more time uh and

12:53 when we had these entities and suggestions about the length and structure uh they were Stu

13:00 so what you could do you could click like publish the changes click the refresh button on the audit and it will

13:06 reflect the changes but it was a little bit painful to to to move between the

13:12 CMS and the audit publish refresh CMS audit publish refresh you know that's quite a process so uh then we built a

13:20 Content editor tool which is giving you feedback real time but still the same

13:26 principle keyword uh ranked pages and their characteristics but um with this

13:33 product you could just type or optimize the page and it will tell you in real

13:40 time that okay you hit the mark with the length you just use this keyword good

13:45 enough amount of times we started to score these pages with uh a Content score metric that uh allowed people to

13:53 evaluate whether they are good enough to rank or not really ready yet to be

13:58 published uh but then people wanted ideas for new

14:04 articles because they were using the content editor and the guidelines to brief their writers but they didn't have

14:10 ideas uh for more articles so we build a keyword clustering tool with the rear uh

14:16 so they could find more and more ideas Who start building topical Authority that was 2019 2020 long time ago and

14:24 they were already doing some keyword clustering uh in in in Surfer but again

14:30 with the same principle so you provide a keyword we check who is ranking we check

14:35 what they are ranking also for and then with that information we were able to

14:41 figure out like okay here are your competitors they rank for these uh 100

14:46 topics that are common among them so to bridge the gap between you and them you should uh cover these articles as well

14:53 but then AI came obviously so uh first people didn't want to write the Articles

15:00 themselves so we built a surfer AI that is I would say the most comprehensive uh

15:08 uh product for creating AI articles that are well not only like a chart GPT

15:14 single prompt but a huge huge chain of uh keyword extraction entity analysis

15:21 and promptings uh for the outline then to generate to get the tone right and so

15:26 on and so forth so uh well that was another addition to the product and then

15:35 people wanted another automation well you tell me about these 20 entities that

15:41 are missing but why can't you add these entities for me using AI so we build the

15:47 auto optimized feature uh that takes these missing entities and put them uh

15:52 into the article so as you can see the principle of the product was always the

15:57 same always get the data from the serup and tell you what Google wants and when

16:04 we know what Google wants we can help you uh introduce these changes or uh do

16:11 it for you but again that wasn't enough

16:16 and the most recent child of surfer uh is the content audit that is taking your

16:24 Google search console and the whole website and grades all the pages you have they the top ranking Pages uh they

16:31 receive their content score and from that point you can assess like okay my

16:38 client has 20 Pages out of 100 that

16:44 bring not enough traffic because they are like on the second page of Google

16:50 and not really well optimized so Google appreciate these Pages already giving

16:55 them second page but they are not well open optimized and with that product you

17:01 can spot these Pages auto optimize them so they can jump into the top 10 and

17:08 start uh generating traffic for yourself or for your clients which is the best

17:14 way actually if I were still working in the agency that would be my number one thing

17:21 after onboarding a new client just to create a Content audit see how well their website is optimized to see where

17:29 if if I have some tasks to do in own page or Pure backlinks or pure technical

17:34 SEO but when I see these best opportunities Pages ranking second page

17:41 of Google and uh with a poor content score not optimized with uh weak

17:47 headings weak entities coverage when I see them I know that when I fix this I

17:53 will instantly rank up so uh yeah that that will be my go-to tool and that's

17:59 the uh the youngest child of of surfer same principles Google characteristics

18:06 but at scale for the whole domain so yeah quite a quite a monologue from my side but there is a

18:12 lot right so so how does Surfer Su adopts to the constant changing

Adapting to Google's Algorithms

18:17 constantly changing algorithms especially after the Hsu and uh the Google AI update how do you guys adopt

18:25 yeah so uh we try to convince people to to uh turn

18:32 towards continuous optimization process instead of doing it one time and go uh

18:39 because uh well the search results are volatile and when we have like let's say

18:44 four updates a year there will be always a shuffle in the search results so let's

18:50 say uh it's January and we are doing the optimization and we got a certain set of

18:55 pages ranking the top we extract their entities their topics optimize the page

19:02 and we rank up great but then uh the algorithm changes and

19:09 promotes some other factors uh so we have a different set of the pages in the

19:15 top 10 okay so we need to adjust our

19:22 optimization sorry I lost for a bit so I I I think there was connection so so you

19:28 were telling me so there are four updates a year so how do you guys adopt yeah so uh we tell people to do

19:37 continuous optimization because the results are volatile and every time the algorithm changes there is a different

19:44 set of pages in the top 10 as benchmarks quite often not always but quite often

19:50 it changes so uh you have a let's say a new article publishing calendar where

19:57 you publish every week you publish one piece of content that's simplest calendar uh so you should have a similar

20:05 calendar and book time to optimize to optimize pages that are the most

20:11 important to your business so you are not waiting for the algorithm to change

20:16 you are not waiting for a crash you are continuously adjusting if

20:24 necessary to current circumstances in the top 10 let's say uh new iPhone

20:30 showed up and uh your competitors use that entity iPhone 15 uh in their

20:37 content you didn't you don't want to wait until Google demotes you for not

20:43 having this entity you want to review it every month or every two months to see

20:49 if there is something that you might be missing compared to the competitor so this is how you can adopt that the best

20:56 strategy you can have to adopt and and how does your tool adapt to for

21:02 example they were Google leaks so did you guys change something in surferio after that or you said see we already

21:09 were using it uh so it well on one hand

21:14 uh it reassured us that what we are doing is is

21:20 okay however uh all of these elements from the leak are not like uh we don't know

21:29 whether they are in use right now maybe they were used in the past maybe they will be used in the future so it can

21:36 only give us a general idea of what is it about uh compared to uh specific set

21:44 of rules that should be applied so uh even like we assessed the

21:50 information however we didn't rash changes because uh you cannot be 100%

21:58 sure what which factor is actually in play

22:03 right now and what's its weight because that's important even though something will be listed in there uh and you can

22:10 think oh let's go for it let's do an audit that you know takes care of that

22:16 particular Factor but uh it may be weighted by

22:23 0.01 uh% of the weight so what's the point of uh really incorporating that

22:30 and when you don't know the weights uh and the usage uh it's really hard I mean

22:37 it's a guessing game and we don't want guessing we want uh people to rely on a

22:43 real time information and if we cannot provide that uh to back up

22:49 ourselves uh we don't want to gamble our clients

22:54 websites okay so can you tell me any particular Sur for SEO feature which you

Exciting Features of Surfer SEO

23:00 are very excited about right now yes so uh for the very first time in the

23:07 history I've seen really uh working brand voice for the AI content uh that's

23:15 a that's a breakthrough because like everybody is claiming that well you can

23:21 select funny voice or like professional voice scientific that but that's a

23:26 like it it doesn't really work and it like you know sounding

23:31 professional means something else to everyone uh so it's it's it's it's not

23:37 the right way but with the new uh large language models uh showing up uh we uh

23:43 recently found out how to do it properly and it will work on a different

23:49 principle so instead of like selecting any of those predefined Styles you will

23:54 basic Pro basically provide a sample of your copy like this is my last article

24:01 this is my last couple of paragraphs I wrote and I'm proud of and it sound like me

24:07 so can you use that sample to rewrite my CH GPT article to actually be like me

24:16 and it turns out that yes uh so uh I'm really excited about uh this particular

24:23 feature uh and this is yet to come I mean I got it in the works I saw it working but it's not on the front end

24:30 yet um but but when it comes to to to to products that already exist I would say

24:37 that it's definitely the the content audit tool so the one that uh connects Google search console with server and

24:45 extract the pages then grades their score and shows you like where to start

24:51 with this optimization it it it it uh shows you

24:56 uh the the pages to optimize that will give you the biggest outcome with the

25:04 least work uh to be done so that's like 8020 rule applied a bit so this feature

25:12 is right now available yes yes is available to everybody okay okay now I

Topical Map Feature Overview

25:18 I understand that the Surfer SEO is going to introduce a topical map feature or is that correct?

25:24 Yes, it's already there for quite some time also.

25:29 Realize—yeah, go ahead.

25:36 So I didn't realize that actually. So how does the map feature work? I mean, we talk about it because right now everybody keeps on talking about topical authority, topical maps, topical clustering—you name it, anything with topical. They might launch topical coffee Ms very soon, so that's why I thought—yes, you explain those.

25:49 Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So at the very first day of class studying for that, which was like 4 years ago, we introduced a simple clustering method that was analyzing top ranking websites on a given query and assessing all the keywords they rank for and grouping them. That was very simple, but we wanted more.

26:26 We wanted to create a whole map of everything, all the keywords that you have that are clustered upfront so you can land on the map in any given place and navigate this way, that way, other way, like left to the right and see how these topics change. So you can navigate from SEO to SEO audit to technical audit to robots.txt file, like you know, like that could be a funnel to finding out about the robots.txt.

27:01 So what we did, we took the whole database of keywords—250 million keywords just for the United States—and we clustered them all at once. So on Surfer, you are not browsing keywords; you are browsing clusters.

27:21 Every keyword belongs to a cluster because there is no page that ranks for a single keyword; you always rank for some keywords. And when you connect that with Google Search Console information, where we know what you rank for right now and what clusters these keywords that you rank for are in, and we cross these two, we know that, okay, these are the clusters you rank for already, but they have neighbors, and these neighbors also have neighbors.

28:01 So you can play by yourself on that map with the keywords you currently have and understand what's the closest topic you can grow.

28:08 So you are growing sustainably in a way—you’re not jumping on topics like television ads, PPC, SEO email, whatever. When you tackle email, you will receive all about the email, and when you decide to move to SEO, you will receive everything you need to cover first off-page SEO, on-page SEO, technical SEO, any aspect of SEO.

28:41 So that's the topical mapping we do with the huge database of clusters, not keywords, but clusters. And your Google Search Console information, you create a visual map that tells you, like, okay, that's the territory, that's the closest to your center of gravity.

29:00 So what is this website about? It's mostly about television ads, so if that's the case, you will be growing your website in all aspects of television ads—from buying to producing to whatever, like finding the best prime times and so on.

29:24 This is how it works, and we specifically used that tool to assess the topics for the humanizer, to build the topical authority in the area, and that's why it took off so well.

29:36 So yes, these tools are available as well already.

29:43 Now, after the recent Google March update, lots of SEO professionals are now...

AI Tools and Content Quality

29:49 skeptical about AI tools featuring they might lead to cookie clutter content so how does Surfer Su address this this

29:56 concern well we use AI quite extensively on our

30:02 website and it's not tanking uh and but but seriously it's uh

30:09 all about uh the quality of that plus uh

30:16 these uh problems with AI are often associated with affiliate websites Niche

30:22 websites that were just uh removed from the Ser uh in the last update and well

30:31 it's easy to to correlate that oh I used Ai and my page is gone so it's because

30:37 of AI though it's not because of AI it's because of how this update worked

30:43 because there were also a lot of pages using Ai and not removed from the Ser uh

30:51 and uh the case here is that Google wants more money and and uh affiliate

31:00 marketers are middleman uh for Google because they would love to have people going directly

31:07 to the merchant center to the to the e-commerce uh role uh in Google yes so

31:15 uh you are not uh going through the uh you are not finding out the products

31:22 through someone recommending it but through Google recommending it because

31:28 when people uh find uh the product in

31:33 their ads uh then well Google is paid and they are happy but when they find it

31:41 through the Amazon affiliate website the guy is paid not Google so I

31:50 I would say that that was a problem with the business model uh not with the uh with the AI

31:57 content because well affiliate Pages without AI content also were wasted uh

32:03 so that that will be the case unfortunately because there's a lot there was a lot of business they stole a

32:09 lot of money uh from from the people and that's kind of

32:14 unfair and that that's really bad behavior and I'm not a fan of what

32:20 happened uh really so I'm really so feel sorry for all of

32:26 the affiliate marketers who lost their traffic and income source that that really suck

32:33 and unfortunately uh when we have business that relies on the third party we also

32:40 do because Surfer is also built built for optimizing in the search engines uh

32:45 so uh when the search engines are gone we are gone um so um I I I kind

32:54 of can relate to to to the people who who suffered from the from the recent

32:59 update and hopefully uh hopefully it will uh turn around uh yeah with the new

33:06 Google Update let's hope so it's they say it's just around the corner right because we we still don't have any

33:12 recovery success story right uh I was I was browsing the internet and I can

33:18 still see the comments that hey like nobody recovered from the hcu uh yet so

33:24 we'll see fingers crossed for that right now uh so of course you deal with so

Common SEO Mistakes

33:30 much content Surfer SEO is uh all about uh content uh what are some of the

33:36 common mistakes you see uh content creators uh making when it comes to

33:42 SEO I know one would be easy content writing I mean just copy pasting Ai and

33:47 using it but what other common mistakes you see yeah so the common mistakes I see uh

33:55 is definitely writing a piece of content than leaving it on the website for a

34:00 year or two because you spend couple of hours or

34:07 $100 and you published and the page is slowly declining in traffic and instead of uh

34:16 spending couple minutes and revive it because it's not relevant anymore uh

34:22 people are obsessed with publishing more and more and more instead of capitalizing on the assets that they

34:27 already have so uh that will be that will be the thing

34:32 and uh quite common mistake for the e-commerce websites is that they focus

34:39 solely on uh product pages and category pages instead of building blogs they

34:46 should be building blogs especially after uh the hcu where the affiliate

34:51 websites are gone there's a lot of room between redit and qu and Forbes

34:58 uh for ecommercesport

35:27 you can get them on the remarketing list and Target later uh it's it's obviously

35:33 a great source of internal links that will boost SEO of your category pages and the product pages uh and I can oh

35:42 wow my camera is gone uh I cannot really see

35:48 disadvantages of uh having a Blog on the e-commerce website so that this will be

35:54 my top of my head two mistakes people do right right so uh uh in this age of AI

High-Quality Content Differentiation

36:01 what differentiate truly highly content that ranks well in search

36:06 results according to you unfortunately the biggest differentiator

36:12 is the the domain that they are posted on so you're right domain is what right

36:20 just like parasite as right I I don't want to like uh uh tell people things

36:28 that they want to hear but rather tell people things that are true uh and at

36:35 this point we are in a situation where you can have quite okay content published on a

36:43 great domain that will take over really well optimized content and engaging

36:52 and groundbreaking results whatever uh on a weak domain so it turns out that um

37:01 the bigger players uh are on a on a cheat mode

37:07 right now and the smaller players have even more uh Gap to bridge but uh I

37:15 would say that um being uh

37:21 consequent uh and Publishing uh and optimizing uh uh during that hard period

37:31 will pay off uh sooner than later because gaining enough authority to

37:37 actually start ranking uh is not that far away so just started to take a

37:43 little bit longer for fresh websites that's that's it

37:48 okay now for a small business or solo entrepreneurs just starting with SEO

SEO Advice for Small Businesses

37:54 what would be your top piece of advice uh to check whether SEO is a good

38:01 channel to start that will be the first one uh and when you decide that

38:11 yes uh dedicating enough time and money

38:16 to it because it's an investment and I can see people getting

38:23 uh frustrated with no results but these

38:28 the lack of results come from either targeting keywords that your um

38:35 potential customers are not searching so generally like search volume high so I

38:42 go for it and forget about the intent uh so that's one one source of frustration

38:48 the other source of frustration uh is uh obviously lack of results that come

38:54 quickly so um uh to the point uh mixing SEO efforts

39:02 with PPC at the beginning can be really a good idea to get some results from

39:09 having a website and and making up the losses on the investment in SEO before

39:16 it brings you traffic uh so you can um you can like

39:23 uh you can grow your business with with with digital marketing basically so that

39:28 will be that would be the piece of advice right so uh I mean as a

Challenges in Growing Surfer SEO

39:35 co-founder what have been some of your biggest challenges in growing

39:44 suru I think scaling up the team uh that was uh that was a huge

39:51 challenge because when we were like team of five team of 10 team of 20 that was

39:57 really atively easy because everyone was involved in everything but when we started to grow and become mattered

40:06 company with some you know policies and like because when you have a business

40:12 that is big enough to get someone's attention uh

40:18 Administration and like whatever you need to to to to to to build it in a way

40:24 that is uh in line with with uh every every procedure and so on so uh that was

40:31 really challenging uh to me personally to um get

40:38 adjusted to the way of working uh in a in a in a bigger company that was the

40:44 biggest challenge actually not building features right kind of weird Okay so H how do you Foster

Fostering Team Innovation

40:53 Innovation with within your team at surprise you um

40:59 I guess it's uh all about being

41:04 opportunistic to what uh Market shows to

41:10 what Google changes to what our people are capable

41:16 of uh so I try to to um Empower uh data scientists that

41:24 work at Surfer uh with having some Bolder ideas like hey can we do this

41:30 maybe can we do that and when I ask some of these questions they come up with

41:36 their own ideas based on my questions uh because my questions weren't precise

41:41 because I'm not coding I don't know how things work under the hood like really

41:46 technically and uh because they do know and when they are navigated with my

41:53 questions they start thinking like hey I could do it this way and that way hey

41:59 miow does it make sense and I say God Damn I I wouldn't think about it because I didn't know it's possible thank you so

42:07 uh I would say this is the most uh fun and effective way to Foster The

42:13 Innovation the team to ask questions these questions uh push people into

42:19 ideas that uh comes uh out because they have knowledge that I don't have

42:27 so that's that's the that's the way right so what advice would you give to

Entrepreneurial Advice

42:32 the aspiring entrepreneurs in the tech in

42:39 space to n down to be specialist I mean seriously

42:46 uh the market is big and uh becoming General SEO service provider is hard but

42:55 becoming that dental service SE your provider is so much easier and there are

43:02 enough dentists in Chicago uh to take care of their SEO when you

43:08 are specialist in Dental SEO so you build a custom charge GPT for uh for

43:15 dental uh you know all the categories that they can offer you got the content plans prepared because they are more or

43:22 less uh the same uh for dental service for the roofers for like any for lawyers

43:28 lawyers that's that's a good one uh because I don't know how how is in the rest of the world but in Poland lawyers

43:36 cannot use PPC uh so if they cannot use PPC they only rely on SEO uh so there's

43:43 a lot of budget because there is no budget for PPC so all the budget goes to the to the SEO so well it's just a

43:50 really nice uh really nice place to to to to be uh so uh any different

43:57 differentiator that you can think of as the entrepreneur uh explore this area

44:04 and see if you if you want to go for it like like we did actually we could be all-in-one SEO tools with providing you

44:11 backlinks technical SEO audit crawler uh robot txt file Checker whatever but we

44:18 focused on retrieving information from Google search results and telling you

44:23 what's your content missing and we mastered it uh so we didn't dilute our

44:29 uh attention to all different areas of SEO but we focused on something specific

44:35 and uh you should think the same way right right so so let's talk some about

Personal Insights and Experiences

44:43 personal Insight so outside of work what are some of your personal interest or

44:49 Hobbies oh uh I I ski a

44:54 lot uh and and I buil my own skis uh so

45:00 I have a shop uh where we have a ski press and we pour some resin over the

45:07 fiberglass and the carbon fiber some wood and no you we we we put the skis

45:13 together and then we ski them in the mountains well that's that's the thing

45:19 that turns me on after work so are there any books you

45:24 recommended to entrepreneurs or are you into reading yes uh I I I I was reading

45:31 qu I mean recently I'm reading like one book a month I would say but there was a

45:38 time uh when I felt like I'm lagging behind a lot and there are like so many

45:45 uh positions uh that I should should check uh but if I were to recommend one

45:54 book that will be rework right yeah that that's that's the the

46:01 book that is the most influential uh and should be the most influential because

46:07 the outcome is really good so uh rework Jason Fred I guess yes the BAM found

Recommended Books

46:13 right yes yeah I read

46:18 right so I I read it three times uh and uh you

46:24 know the every time you read it uh some new ideas pop up like or even

46:32 you know refreshing yourself with the rework is is really nice because let's

46:37 say last time I read rework was two years ago am I still

46:43 aligned am I still aligned and when you read it you realize that I am not I mean

46:50 here and there it's fine but somewhere somewhere uh I'm totally off uh

46:57 of their thinking and you can even like straighten yourself back again uh to to

47:04 to to be aligned with whatever they say so uh definitely rework that's number one okay that's one of my favorite book

Staying Updated on SEO

47:11 as well so do you do you follow any for SEO updates what do you how do you keep yourself updated on SEO or do you follow

47:18 any one as such in particular not specifically uh I built uh uh my uh my

47:28 Facebook feed the way that like I've got

47:34 all of the seos in my friends list and I'm in a couple of groups like SEO

47:39 signals lab the best one I guess uh and it turns out that they post stuff there

47:46 and whenever it's something that I that I'm supposed to be checking it will be there within 15 minutes so I'm not

47:54 really trying to focus on uh let's let say to the list get up to date with SEO

48:00 this month no I'm just scrolling and 90% of the stuff I've got there is SEO

48:06 related and when there is something that uh really uh pops up in the in the

48:12 industry that I should know about I I will I will get it uh so that that's

48:17 that's how I oriented my uh information sources and how does the how does the

48:23 you are head of innovation so how does innovation idea comes when it comes to server Su to

48:30 you most frequently not uh in front of the desk it's like you know random

48:38 random because well if you build a company and it's your company uh you are

48:46 never leaving the office the office is like all time in your head and you are

48:52 processing uh things like you eat the and like should I do this way or maybe

49:00 that way and you know like always always unfortunately and I don't like it

49:06 however it's an advantage because these ideas show up uh quite often in there

49:12 from the bed I need to wake up to write something down or memorize it memorize

49:18 it memorize it right uh so um yeah this these uh these ideas uh show up in in

49:27 various moments uh but I'm not uh not saying it they do not appear on a on a

49:33 brainstorming calls with the team definitely as well but other than that

49:39 anywhere anywhere they can they can attack you anywhere okay yeah I guess it's it's uh

49:46 same for all the entrepreneurs out there ideas usually don't come when you when you're off the work yes I agree

Learning More About Surfer SEO

49:55 yes okay Michael thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today uh where can our listeners learn more about

50:02 you and surf for SE that will be our YouTube channel uh

50:07 we recently started posting a lot a lot useful videos about SEO in general and

50:14 I'm hosting a webinar live sessions every two weeks uh in there so that's

50:19 the best way to to get connected I think and SEO Surfers group on Facebook that's

50:25 the that's the second uh so that group is free to join or do somebody yeah no

50:30 no no just ju just find it SEO Surfers and uh there is obviously uh accepting

50:38 mechanism so we accept people like every day so why spam right

50:44 yes all right so that wraps up our interview with Michael Suki co-founder

50:49 of surfer suu thank you all for listening and we'll see you in the next episode thank you thank you Mike