Ashley: Welcome to the show, Brent. Appreciate your time.Brent: Thanks, Ashley. It’s great to be here. I’m really excited to be part of a podcast. This is my first.Ashley: First podcast version. It’s always fun being on the first one.

Brent: Yes, yes, quite excited about it.

Ashley: I’ll be nice. I’ve got you on the show today to talk about SEO, but I guess before we get started, just a quick rundown of your story.

Brent: Well, I’ve been now running – I own Echelon SEO and have been doing that for about 4 years now. Prior to that, I was a school teacher and basketball coach, and decided at some point that my next career was going to be in financial planning.

So I went back to school to become a financial advisor, and while I was there, I got involved in a website, just a little retail hobby site, and the guy that built it for me came back and said, “I don’t do any marketing, I don’t do any SEO. You’re going to have to do some reading.”

So I started reading, and I just absolutely loved it. I became very interested in social media, very interested in SEO. I like the changing environment and the challenge of keeping updated on what’s going on, and so I went back to my program and told them “I’m going to go into marketing.”

I do a lot of marketing for financial advisors, but I do for other businesses as well. I was fortunate; my university was just going through the process of hiring an SEO company, and so I was able to be part of that, kind of as a non-credited study. Worked alongside with them on the university’s SEO and that got me started.

And then my web developer got me my first client, and I worked for another year as a teacher, and then I’ve been on my own since.

Ashley: Wow. It reminds me a little bit of Ileane Smith’s story of accidentally – I mean, a little bit different – but accidentally starting blogging by thinking she was signing up to her daughter’s website, and all of a sudden she had a blog. It’s like, “Oh, I went into financial analysis and I came out as an SEO expert.”

Brent: That’s great. I think of that term “accidental,” I think most small business owners are accidental marketers. It’s a part of everyday business now that you are probably taking on some of your own marketing or outsourcing it. It’s been an interesting adventure.

Ashley: It’s a funny world we live in. I was speaking to a potential client a few weeks ago, and they have a website and they’re not getting any hits on Google at all, and yet they’re one of the biggest of their kind in terms of what they’re doing in Zurich.

They asked me “Why is that?” and I said, “It’s because you don’t have any content, you don’t have any SEO.” All of this stuff that’s been creeping in for I don’t know how many years, they don’t know anything about.

And of course, neither did I a couple of years ago either. You could get up to speed relatively quick, but most people are walking around ignorant until we need to know, right? Until we start our businesses up.

Brent: Absolutely, and that’s what I find here as well. I live near Boise, Idaho and work with a lot of businesses over there, and I was in talking to one, presenting to a group of businesses, and I realized that they didn’t even know what questions to ask.

As business owners, you know you need a website, so you get one up, but you’re so busy working on your business that you don’t always have time or an interest in the marketing side of things. So I think a lot of businesses go through that cycle of setting up a website and then realizing they’re not getting any visitors.

“How do I get traffic?” And then after they get traffic, they have to go into the “How do I capture leads form that traffic?” It’s kind of an evolution over time.

Ashley: Yeah, hopefully eventually they’ll learn, but I think it’s something that’ll obviously never happen. Everyone’s behind all the time.

In one other podcast that I listen to, the guy said in Australia he had a meeting with Google and – it was a few years ago or last year – 50% of Australian businesses don’t have a website. Whatever that actually means, I don’t know, because it could be one-man shows that don’t need a website or whatever. But anyway, it’s still a big statistic.

Brent: Right. I see stuff like that. I find it shocking when you hear stuff like that, because you and I, we’re immersed in it every day, and we forget that that’s not where everybody else is all the time.

Ashley: Exactly. We’re in the sort of 5% and these people are living in reality. It’s funny, because is I talk to any of my friends or family, nobody really has a clue what I do.

Brent: No, I go through the same thing.

Ashley: Anyway, let’s move on to our topic of the day, which is SEO, and specifically I wanted to talk about something on a post you wrote recently, which was the debate and the interesting question and answer that you had on the post about relevance of social signals in SEO at the moment.

Something that I’ve heard a lot about, a lot of people are saying “Yeah, you’ve got to get on Google+. The pluses are going to give you better ranking,” and other people are saying “No, it’s totally irrelevant. Get off Facebook, and who cares?”

So let’s jump into it. What did you basically go through and find out from your explorations in that post?

Brent: You’re right, it has been a hot topic within the SEO world, and really, you talked to different people and you get a different answer. I was asked at the beginning of the year what’s coming up for 2014, and myself, I, like many other SEOs, wrote social signals are going to become an increasingly important factor.

And I still believe that that’s true at some point. I don’t think 2014 maybe is the time for it, but at the time I switched some of my clients away from more traditional back-link building