Achieving Digital Visibility Through Strategic Link-Building | Interview with Farzad Rashidi, Lead Innovator at Respona

Ryan Purvis 00:54:40
Hello and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took. They'll help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings.

Heather Bicknell 00:55:10
Today, we're delighted to have Farzad Rashidi, co founder of Respona to tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Farzad Rashidi 00:55:17
Sure, I think well, first of all, thank you so much for having me Heather as a pleasure. Well, my name is far as it as you mentioned, I know it's a little hard to pronounce. And the lead innovator at Respona just totally made up position. Which means I do what a lot of people don't want to do, and Respona as a as a platform that allows other businesses to build relationships with other relevant authoritative publications in their space to build backlinks and increase our organic traffic from Google.

Heather Bicknell 00:55:48
Awesome. And we have a standard question, we like to ask every guest because we find the answer varies a little bit each time. And as you know, some of the changes we're seeing in the workplace happened. So when it comes to the digital workspace, what does that term mean to you?

Farzad Rashidi 00:56:06
So, you know, I've been working remote since the beginning of my career way before it was cool. And, you know, our entire business is run online. And we do have an office here in Bachman, Maryland, which is 20 minute drive north of DC. And it's just me and my co founder pay mana comes in every once in a while, we do have team members in area, but we have over 100 plus team members over between our two companies. And everyone who's been working remote for years since before COVID. So COVID literally changed nothing for us as far as the way we do business. So I would say something that it's the only way I know how to do business. So I don't know how else to do business other than the digital environment. So that that's what I'm gonna put it that

Heather Bicknell 00:56:52
I'd say you're in the minority there for having done it for so long. What was it? Like before some of the advancements? And you know, more of the collaboration apps have come out? Have you seen it? And, you know, is it easier over time to work remotely? Or have you not noticed that much of a difference?

Farzad Rashidi 00:57:10
Well, I mean, definitely what I'm not that old. So slack was around when I started. So definitely had some tools, obviously, to to help us get there. I know, using zoom and slack way before it was mainstream. So they've been around since for a while now. And so yeah, definitely been utilising those for quite some time. But as far as collaboration goes, we sort of built the org in a way that wouldn't require, you know, constant meetings or face to face interactions. Everybody sort of has their own set of goals and responsibilities. And so they take ownership and sort of how can I put this, they don't bother anyone, unless they have a question or talk somewhere, people normally tend to figure things out and sort of, you know, take a holistic approach to their tasks. And that's sort of a general, I would say, startup culture in the tech space where people need to wear different hats, and it's not as structured or I'd say as segmented as a lot of large organisations. So you started, you sort of have to learn on the job and play along as it goes. So that that's sort of it.

Heather Bicknell 00:58:24
Yeah, no, I can. I can relate to that. So you mentioned link building, our audience might not be super familiar with that term could just break it down for me. You know, maybe you'd like like you'd explain it to someone's grandmother.

Farzad Rashidi 00:58:43
Sure. So, you know, to understand it, I kind of have to give a little bit of context in terms of sort of SEO and content as an acquisition strategy. And we can definitely dive deep into link building, or however deep you would like to take it. Obviously, we only have 30 minutes today. But But when I started my career, I started at our parent company called Visby. Have you heard of visit me before? Heather?

Heather Bicknell 00:59:08
I have I it's not ringing your strong bell. But I know I've seen I've seen it around? Yeah, probably got some LinkedIn ads, maybe.

Farzad Rashidi 00:59:17
No worries. We do actually spend very little on on paid ads. So you've probably seen that organically but as far as Have you heard of tools like Canva they're more mainstream are absolutely perfect. You're in it probably every day. So we're a little bit different the way that we're predominantly catering to businesses versus normal consumers so we predominant cater to SME and enterprise but where we sort of came about. So we're one of the first tools that was created, we, we were found around the same time as some of the other tools like that you've heard of has come out like President Campbell and whatnot. And at the time, it was the first marketing hire. So I was hired to basically build the customer acquisition strategy, you got a few different options, any business, one, go door to door sales, selling, build outbound, basically, team, hire a bunch of STRS, and AES, and do outreach. And that makes sense. If you're a consultant or sell some sort of expensive enterprise grade product, we were charging $15 a month, we're a subscription based business. You know, just like any other software you guys use on a day to day, so it just doesn't make financial sense to hire a US base salespeople to go sell $15 A month product. So that was ruled out pretty quickly to is paid ads. Were a bootstrap company. Obviously, cash is all the short, but main reason why paid ads wasn't really scalable for us was because there's diminishing returns. So you start running ads, it works great. You're like, okay, great, let's double the budget. You do, it doesn't double double comergence. So normally, we hit sort of a plateau. And you must say finally, we must not be very good at it. But we've tried over the last decade, pretty much every channel every sort of strategy, every sort agency you could think of and it just never been a moneymaker. For us. It's more so been. It's certain retargeting campaigns, types that have a positive ROI restaurant sort of plateau very quickly. So we're like, oh, I want to build a large business. How do we actually get ourselves out there without us having to chase after single chase after every customer? We're like, Okay, well, let's put ourselves in the shoes of a potential customer. So we'll say, Heather, you want to create a presentation tomorrow? And say you're looking for a solution to make it? What's the first thing you do when it comes to your research process? Let's say you didn't already have a solution for it. What was the process?

Heather Bicknell 01:01:40
Google, Of course you search for exactly.

Farzad Rashidi 01:01:42
So we knew that from our from day one, one, our customers are aware of the problem we were solving. And two, they're looking for it through Google. Like alright, what if we start showing up in places where people who are looking for a solution will come in organically find us some much more affordable way to to acquisition than me having to keep bombarding you with ads and emails and come knock on your door? Right. So like, that's great. So let's do some keyword research. Let's write some blog content and build some landing pages and put it on our website. And guess what happened?

Heather Bicknell 01:02:16
You didn't get the traffic you were hoping to see I would exactly.

Farzad Rashidi 01:02:19
It was absolutely crickets. Sierra was reason why is because we're in a very competitive industry. So you know, for our any of our terms you can think of can you actually do me a favour? Can you open the little incognito tab in your browser? And just open and just type in one of our keywords of example, I went through presentation software, can you can you type that for me, please?

Heather Bicknell 01:02:43
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. This is now an interactive,

Farzad Rashidi 01:02:46
right? I'm interviewing you now. Heather. The tables have turned

Heather Bicknell 01:02:50
feels like it's like a magic trick. I know. Okay, I'm gonna search for link building software.

Farzad Rashidi 01:02:56
Right? And think of your favourite card as you're doing. I'm just kidding.

Heather Bicknell 01:03:02
Okay, I'm there.

Farzad Rashidi 01:03:03
So presentation software. So you see how right below the search box where you type your keyword? It says how many page results like found x many results in like point one second? How many zeros etc. How many pages contain that that keyword presentation is?

Heather Bicknell 01:03:20
About 867 million. So

Farzad Rashidi 01:03:25
great. And then scroll down. What do you see like the first things I'm assuming ads, three or four to ads at the top?

Heather Bicknell 01:03:31
I get one ad. Okay. Sort of featured snippet. And then this means the first organic result.

Farzad Rashidi 01:03:39
Okay, perfect. So in the customer, I would say so it gets better. All I'm trying to say in this story is like all talking doom and gloom. But basically, it's a matter of figuring out what we were doing wrong at the time, which was basically doing what everybody else was. So hey, do some keyword research, write a piece of content, put on your website, move on to the next piece. Right. And we quickly realised, okay, if there are 800 million search results for our keywords, let's say you're in the top 1% however way you want to define quality, right? So the site loads fast is mobile friendly, that content is great. Yeah, pretty graphics. Yada, yada, yada. Okay, so does the top 1% When there's 800 million search results was top 1% 800 million. You're still in the hundreds of 1000s Right? So how do you go from hundreds of 1000s to top 10 which get majority of that traffic right 99% of the traffic? Well, we'll like, alright, let's figure out how to search in his work. And the way Google Beat other search engines. Again, I can dig into this for hours. But the short story is the way Google became the number one search engine. Back in the late 90s. I was a kid, just to reiterate on the fact that I'm not that old.

Heather Bicknell 01:05:00
I didn't mean to imply that you were

Farzad Rashidi 01:05:02
about it. I was not doing business at the time. But so the way Google basically beat all other search engines was based based on this algorithm that I put together called PageRank, which basically doesn't just look at what you have on your website, it looks at what other websites in your space are talking about you and whether or not they're they're mentioning it. And the way they track it is through just hyperlinks is backlinks. So if they're talking about you, they're most likely linking back to you. And that in either of these algorithms, is it a vote of popularity, because if I'm talking about Heather, and I'm linking to her website, I miss him. She's someone of importance that that I'm talking to. So if I'm, if I carry any level of authority, that also gets passed on to you. So they put more weight on websites that are popular, I guess, interesting now, because isn't it? Because now you can't cheat the system? Because, yes, you can stuff keywords on your, on your website, you can do whatever tricks marketers use, but you can't convince other authority sources to talk about you easily, right. So that's what caused that quality of the search results improve radically. That's why Google is the number one search engine. Now that's going to change, it's going to now be informed with a chatbot that questions are going to get answered for you quickly versus you having to sort of, for most information on keywords, instead of you having to dig through the site, which is great, which also reiterates the fact where do you where are these answers getting curated from from other websites? Right. So multiple other websites are read and then condense, and then Google pops out the answer. So it, it becomes, I would say, imperative for you to now start getting yourself mentioned on these pages, right? Now, let's try to show up in places where other websites in our space have written content already. That to get mentioned. So that process turned out to be a lot easier said than done. So I'm gonna pause here really quick, because I've been talking for a while. So let me give you a chance to say

Heather Bicknell 01:07:06
I don't know if someone's grandmother could could follow this explanation. But I do want, who listens to podcasts about the digital workspace is probably so with us. So no, I think you did a really good job of setting up, you know, some of the different factors that go in for the non marketers out there that people who don't, you know, aren't trying to get a website up their search rankings and, you know, improve their organic traffic can kind of get a hold on where we're going next, which I would think about, I imagine is going to be conversation about doing this at scale, right to build enough links to increase your you know, your authority.

Farzad Rashidi 01:07:42
Yeah, exactly. So what happens is marketers ruin everything. So when Yeah, we found out the links are great. And we're like, Okay, let's go now, build a bunch of websites that are just built to give links to other sites. So the creation of private blog networks, so let's go comment on other people's blogs, or posts on social media about our content and have links in there. All of those gotten nullified over the years, it's been around for 20 years. And so the only way that is sustainably helping you actually get up into socials, and not only just that, but now getting these chatbots these AI start talking about you actually recommend you to whoever is asking questions, is getting mentioned on authoritative publications here space. So that's the whole concept of Link building is, is basically to me sounds like promotion is just how do you get ourselves out there and, and that process was done quite manually at the time for us through a variety of different strategies. And we put it together under one roof and sort of an internal software. For us, it was a secret sauce, and we were like, This is amazing. So we put it together as a standalone product. So that's kind of the backstory of the creation or Respona and how it became a link building software to help other businesses also do sort of achieve similar levels of success. And so that's kind of the backstory there for you. We wanted you to dig that deep, but now

Heather Bicknell 01:09:10
it's all good. Yeah, no, it's interesting, you know, to me, I you know, I work in Marketing, not as much on the SEO side anymore, have worked with a number of agencies so sort of familiar with more of the tactics and not necessarily having to do them myself, but I do you know, on occasion receive sort of the the other side of it right, I get reached out to from someone who wants us to put a link on our site, and something I find That is always fun. I think it's like any, you know, outreach strategy sort of best practices, but asks that are totally missing the what's in it for you components. So I actually I saw the demo of your software, I went to your site, and I noticed in your sort of, you know, templated response, you had like a, you know, do you want an exchange, we'll give you a 30 day free trial of our tool. And we can link somewhere for you, or how do you think about like, I guess that side of things in terms of making the outreach, actually, you know, you can get to the point where you're reaching out to a company to get a link on their site as well. But I feel like where it kind of falls down, and that's the execution of it is just totally missing, why they give you the time.

Farzad Rashidi 01:10:29
Exactly. That's a great point. And he actually comes up every single time I talk about being a podcast, and I have a cheeky answer for you, and what are you gonna like it or not? But here's the answer. I'm getting a link from your website. Right now. What I'm doing here is a link building strategy. So there you go, there you have an answer. So nobody's spammed anyone, right. And we're both getting value from this collaboration. So first of all, I come meet smart people like yourself, right? Building relationships with that our folks in that industry, which is awesome, that's my number one go to, we're getting free advertising to the shot. So whoever's listening to this podcast, and three, or wherever you host this episode, you normally are going to probably mention Respona and guess what you're going to link back to our website, which is great. But at the same time, we're also helping you put together an episode, right and helping you create this piece of content for your audience. So everybody's winning in this partnership. And so now, it's a matter of scaling this, which you don't need 1000 of these partnerships happening at the same time, it's, you know, a lot of people may go overwhelmed, but But what I'm trying to say is that one of the, for example, the simplest, like link building strategies is, is to share your expertise, your story with other podcasters that will looking for guests to go on as a show. So one of the things for example, the Respona helps with is figuring out okay, who in your industry has been a guest on other people's podcasts, let's reach out to those hosts, and show them that you've done your research and actually found them and you can provide value and help them put together episodes together. Now, this is one out of a gazillion different number of strategies that you can do, and we do to make it work. And, and it's just a really good example, because we're in the process of it right now as we speak. And so nobody's being taken advantage. So but I get a number of emails are supporting gets dozens of it every single day of people. Hi, I would like to publish a guest post on your website, right? And we ignore all of them. We actually have a system that blocks them, even though we're in the business ourselves. And the reason why I think is the case is because this new, just like anything we marketers haven't quite figured it out yet. That reminds me of sales outreach, like cold outbound average back in early 2000. I would say 2010 ish. When Google started, I don't know. Sure. Actually. That was one time. But yeah, I think it's been around 10 years or so since they released the app API that helps basically, automate sending the emails. And so a lot of these tools like sales off and outreach and whatnot came out a lot of sales before like, this is awesome. Let me start spamming 2000 people a day to come and buy our products.

Heather Bicknell 01:13:31
Why is my response rate zero? Exactly.

Farzad Rashidi 01:13:34
And it works at the beginning, right? But when it's over done, obviously, over the course of a few weeks out saying if not months, and it gets it gets replayed. And so that's sort of where at the beginning stages of marketers figuring out okay, maybe spamming doesn't work. Let's figure out what works and work on it. And that's why you get sales emails, I'm sure you do every day, from account executives who know your dog's name, and

Heather Bicknell 01:14:02
A little invasive some times, dial personalization back a few clicks.

Farzad Rashidi 01:14:06
There you go. Exactly. So what I'm trying to say is that we're figuring it out, and marketers are figuring it out. And so that's why I think that negative connotation around link building being associated with spam, it's going to go away over time because it's just simply not working. So at some point marketers like, oh, maybe I'm wasting my time. Maybe I should stop spamming everybody.

Heather Bicknell 01:14:28
Yeah, no, I love I you know, I don't know why I've never thought about podcasting. More from like the as as part of a link building strategy, like certainly a brand promotional strategy, a content strategy. but hadn't really considered that other benefit as well. So you've opened my mind a bit there. And, you know, you sort of mentioned you're doing this yourself, right. I think you said you've been on like 60 podcasts recently. What what is that experience then been, like,

Farzad Rashidi 01:14:57
been amazing. As I said, I mean, there's a myriad of benefits to basically going as a podcast as a guest. Side from link building. That to me sounds like a shallow and simplistic for me number one ways. Now we're connected on LinkedIn, right? We see each other's posts, we comment on it, we're getting to see each other's products. And we help each other out. Right. So how building that relationship with another senior marketer in my space is of utmost importance. That to me is why spend an hour of my time talking about it, right? While we are having this conversation, we probably gained two or three links from other websites that our team does regular average for so but I, I prioritise it once a week, one episode every week, to meet folks in our industry and, you know, other other side effects that come with it. Side effect probably is not the right word, but you know what I mean? So that offence maybe, exactly, so that's why I continue to prioritise it and spend a lot of time on it is just as I said, there's we're shooting multiple arrows. Mall? How do you say, multiple birds with one arrow? There we go words.

Heather Bicknell 01:16:11
Yeah, for sure. Um, one topic I did want to pick your brain on as well, and you've referenced it a few times is just what generative AI means for this space and for the future of search. So, you know, we've seen a lot of news and hype around being AI, Google Bard, you know, a lot of like, positive and negative experiences with the technology. Yeah, I mean, you sort of already alluded to it, but how do you think it will change the the nature of search, and, you know, the tactics that we as marketers might use?

Farzad Rashidi 01:16:44
You know, either I'm gonna sound like a total tech road right now. So I apologise in advance, but

Heather Bicknell 01:16:49
we're talking about generative AI. Sorry, gives you licenced, to be a little brown. Yeah. Yeah.

Farzad Rashidi 01:16:55
I mean, that I can't help it. I have to chime in here. But I think it's it's kind of like the invention of the internet. Really, we're at a very beginning stages a bit, the way I look at it, it's still at its very premature, sort of stages. That to me, it's just very, it's just indicative of what's to come. And I think the way a search is going to change, it's going to be completely different the next couple of years, then it's been over the course of the past decade, in a way that a lot of informational content that a lot of companies put out, you know, if I want to know, for example, what are some of the ways to increase employee engagement, I'm most likely won't read as much, you know, copy paste the content from a lot of companies, it curates a lot of those answers and gives me the only things that I would normally like to hunt for are most likely going to be tools, when I'm looking for services, and I get normally directed from there, to a website, it's not so much at blogs have always been a sort of a gateway to get people in in the door. And I think that's sort of going to take a different approach where now you're optimise your content pieces. So that a lot of these basically, generative AI search engines, or AI that basically is put on the search engine would pick those up and actually include them as part of the answers. what humans are going to read like ours, things is gonna get a little bit more personal. So we start following people in our industry, who create content, say, that probably is going to happen a lot on social media, it's going to happen a lot of sub stack, right? Where we know and trust the sources that it's coming from. And a lot of cookie cutter answer to questions is probably going to get sort of done through that chat platform. And people do refer to decide that actually interested in what you're selling, they want to learn more, not so much to get answers to basic questions. So I think that's step one. And a whole, I would say, a guy spacing, what's going to change because the barrier to creating content has dropped to the ground. So anybody can just put in a keyword and create a piece of content within a matter of a second. So what that means is that it just loses its value as a as a marketing tactic or as a marketing strategy. You know, back in the day, when, when Rand Fishkin of Moz was sort of advocating for content marketing, that was sort of a new thing at the time where, you know, nobody had a blog on their business site and And now, we've come a long way. So I think that sort of has put a new minimum on the efforts that companies have to make, you know, to stand out.

Heather Bicknell 01:19:49
Yeah, I guess that's one of my concerns with, you know, the use of generative AI is just a content explosion of like, you know, I feel like if you're not really inputting some solid things into the prompt engine, you get a really generic. I mean, a lot of like, I guess, SEO content for SEO sake, because already sort of unlike this, but just like very generic, not like no new insights, not that useful content, potentially filling up, blogs everywhere at a rapid pace. So yeah, that's

Farzad Rashidi 01:20:26
again, my work short term, right. So the way that the search engines are, look right now, is still makes a lot of sense. Yes, pick a lot of longer tail variations of the keyword let's lesson competition and just start letting AI to pump out content and start occupying those results. But the thing is, few months from now that the page went when people go to search for something, it's going to look very different than what you see now. So a lot of those content pieces that you put out, even though they might get rankings, it still doesn't bring in any traffic, because a lot of people get answers to these questions. A lot simpler, a lot faster, through the search engine, kind of think of it as like this feature snippets on steroids. So a lot of those informational pieces that sort of got to go away.

Heather Bicknell 01:21:15
Yeah, I'll be interested to see some of the hallucinations there, the AI inaccuracies. And I think if you're a marketer, or business owner out there, and you're not already experimenting with some of these things, just to see what they say about your own business and your space, and are you showing up, like, definitely encourage folks to, you know, even maybe your own, I haven't done it with myself yet. That's a little scary, but like, play around with it and see what's accurate, where you're showing up and where you're not because it's a good thing to get ahead of before it is more widely adopted, I think.

Farzad Rashidi 01:21:47
But one thing I'd like to also say in addition to that is, don't look at it on chat. GPT. Because Changi Metis, the technology's not a search engine. It's kind of like a word predictor on steroids. It knows it comprehends content, and can spit out content, but a lot of information it gives it's 100. Accurate, I don't think people should put any way on it, because it just simply is not designed for that is the backend technology. What's going to be the main searching is Bing and Google, using that attack to generate a response based on whatever is already under dataset. So basically, now or current events, right, so you're looking for, hey, what's happening right now in Ukraine. So it will generate the response on the fly based on the latest news articles that have just been published on the topic. That's our index. Right. So. So I wouldn't necessarily take what change if it is says with a grain of salt, because that that that base foundation, technology is not the search engine. And what you probably should look at is bank chat and bar does coming soon. And sort of look there.

Heather Bicknell 01:23:04
Yeah, look at get on some of those previews. I totally agree with you. I do think we're in a weird period of history where, even though you know, GPT, 3.5, isn't connected to the internet. So it's not current, you might have customers and prospects using it anyway, and trying to do some of that. So it might not be bad to be aware. But yeah, I totally agree. It's definitely not where it's going. In terms of the Yeah, and the features,

Farzad Rashidi 01:23:31
nothing, you can do better, because the training is already ended, right. And the training is done to not only be knowledgeable, but know how to put out sentences. That makes sense. But the information itself may not necessarily be accurate. So that's a very important distinction between what open AI has done, which is creating a more sophisticated natural language processing algorithm versus a search engine, which is looking at the web, and basically indexing websites and informing different opinions based on what's already out there. Right. So that's the that's very important distinction, because even less a Chad GPT doesn't know about your business. That training ended years ago. You can't do anything about it. But Google, you can do something about it.

Heather Bicknell 01:24:20
Absolutely agree. Well, it's been so fun chatting with you. Is there anything upcoming that you'd like to give a shout out or let our audience know where they can find you?

Farzad Rashidi 01:24:31
Sure, well out there. My name is Farzad Rashidi aren't a whole lot of us out there. So I stick out like a sore thumb on LinkedIn. So feel free to stop by and send me a connection request love to have to hear from folks. And also I've recently put out my sub stack finally, I put out two content pieces trying to get better at actually, you know, forming concrete pieces that are short sweet but actually educational stuff from my experience so far so address ed.com myself stack haven't plugged in podcasts I think once or twice before, so it's very new. So excuse my blab rings. But yeah, that's where you can get more.

Heather Bicknell 01:25:08
Okay. Very cool. Well, congrats on launching that it's been great. Getting to chat with you for

Farzad Rashidi 01:25:13
that. Same here though. Thanks for having me on the show.

Ryan Purvis 01:25:18
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Hey, the big news app producer editor. Thank you, Heather. For your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW W podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website https://www.digitalworkspace.works/. Please also visit our website https://www.digitalworkspace.works/ and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.