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How can challenger brands compete and rise in competitive markets? Josh Piepmeier, CEO of Meriwether, explores SEO strategies for brands ranked 3rd or lower, focusing on profitable product lines, long-tail keywords, and balancing short- and long-term goals for sustainable growth.
SEO Strategies for Challenger Brands Summary
Key Takeaways
- Focus on Your Niche: Challenger brands should narrow their focus to their most profitable product lines for better SEO performance.
- Content Ecosystem Matters: Building an ecosystem of supporting content, including long-tail keywords, can boost rankings for your main pages.
- Balance Short vs. Long-Term SEO: Start by setting the framework for high-difficulty keywords, then work on ranking long-tail, low-competition terms to build momentum.
- Internal Linking Strategy: Use a mix of exact-match and contextual anchor text for internal links to provide clarity and relevance to Google.
- Brand Search and SEO: Even for challenger brands, building brand awareness through content and paid search can enhance your overall SEO visibility.
SEO Strategies for Challenger Brands: How to Compete with the Big Dogs
As a challenger brand, you might feel like you’re constantly playing catch-up in the SEO game. But here’s the thin g: with the right strategies, you can absolutely compete with—and even outrank—the big players in your industry. Let’s dive into some powerful tactics that can help you punch above your weight in the world of search engine optimization.
Focus on Your Most Profitable Products First
When it comes to SEO for challenger brands, it’s all about being strategic with your resources. Start by identifying your most profitable product lines and focus your SEO efforts there. This approach allows you to make the biggest impact where it matters most to your bottom line.
Create Content Around Purchase-Intent Keywords
One of the most effective ways for challenger brands to gain traction in SEO is by creating content that addresses specific questions potential customers are asking right before they make a purchase. Think about questions related to:
- Price and cost
- Where to buy
- Product comparisons
- Technical details
By targeting these long-tail keywords, you’re not just driving traffic—you’re attracting visitors who are closer to making a purchase decision.
Balancing Short-Tail and Long-Tail Keywords
While it’s tempting to go after those high-difficulty, short-tail keywords, as a challenger brand, you need to be smart about your approach. Set up the basics for ranking on those competitive terms, but don’t obsess over them. Instead, focus on creating a content ecosystem around related long-tail keywords. Over time, this strategy will help boost your authority for the more competitive terms.
Internal Linking Strategies
When it comes to internal linking, mix it up. Use a combination of exact match anchor text and more natural, contextual links. This approach not only helps with SEO but also provides more context to search engines about what your pages are about.
Content Creation Frequency
For challenger brands in competitive industries, more content is generally better. Aim for 6-8 pieces of new content per month. If you’re in a less competitive space, 4 pieces per month is a good starting point. Remember, consistency is key.
Don’t Forget to Update Existing Content
Creating new content is important, but don’t neglect your existing posts. Set aside time each month to update 3-4 older pieces of content. This keeps your site fresh and relevant in the eyes of search engines.
Building Brand Authority
While established brands have a leg up when it comes to brand recognition, challenger brands can offset this advantage by building topical authority. By creating a robust content ecosystem around your key products or services, you can demonstrate expertise in your niche and improve your overall SEO performance.
The Power of Focus for Challenger Brands
As a challenger brand, your superpower is focus. While the big players in your industry might have to spread their attention across multiple product lines or services, you can drill down into specific niches. Use this to your advantage by becoming the go-to resource for information in your particular area of expertise.
Remember, SEO success for challenger brands doesn’t happen overnight. It’s about consistently applying these strategies, measuring your results, and adjusting as needed. By focusing on creating valuable content around long-tail keywords, optimizing for your most profitable products, and building a strong internal linking structure, you can steadily improve your search engine rankings and compete with even the biggest names in your industry.
So, challenger brands, are you ready to take on the SEO giants? With these strategies in your toolkit, you’re well-equipped for the battle. Now get out there and start climbing those rankings!
SEO Strategies for Challenger Brands Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today is the founder and CEO of Meriwether, the e-commerce SEO agency that drives revenue, not just traffic. After starting his career training under a top direct response copywriter, he transitioned to the SEO industry where he now applies direct response principles to drive profitable SEO campaigns.
With multiple seven figure campaigns under his belt in tough industries like CBD, vaping, and health and wellness, today’s guest is the person to call when rankings and revenue are not optional. Today we’re going to look at what you need to do when there’s an 800-pound gorilla in your vertical and you’re a challenger brand with Josh Piepmeier. Josh, welcome to the podcast.
Josh: Thanks so much for having me on, Rich. Really looking forward to the conversation.
Rich: All right, so I mentioned challenger brand when I was introducing you. How do you define a challenger brand?
Josh: I’d say a challenger brand, it’s really about the mentality of the owner, but I’ll add some criteria myself. It’s anybody who’s the second or third brand in a space. If you think about there’s this concept of being the leader, and there’s maybe room for one or two brands in any space, and then anything below them is a challenger, right?
So if you think of Cola, it’s Coca Cola, it’s Pepsi is number two, and then it’s just everybody else. If you think about athletic apparel, this has opened up a little bit, but it’s still Nike is number one, Adidas is maybe number two, and then everybody else is after them. And if you’re talking about yoga, it’s a Lululemon. So anybody who is number probably three in the consideration set for any industry, I would consider a challenger brand.
And then you can add some SEO stuff on top of that. Do you have a strong website or not? But I think that core concept of if you’re not necessarily the number one or number two, I consider you a challenger brand.
Rich: And obviously, when you mentioned those brands, those are all brands we’re really familiar with. I actually did hear the other day that now Dr. Pepper is outselling Pepsi for the first time in U.S. history, but whatever, I get your point.
So when you’re thinking about it though from a small to medium size business that might just be known either in your industry or in your geography or both, how might that change the way that you think about a challenger brand? Or is it still the same thing, you’re just playing in a smaller sandbox?
Josh: I think for the most part it’s the same thing, but you’re playing in a smaller sandbox. I guess this is where I would start to layer the SEO metrics on top of this. Do you have one person that’s ranking for all of the keywords in your space?
For example, in CBD like we mentioned in the intro, I’ve done some work there. It can be break down CBG space, which is a subset of CBD, there’s one brand that has consistent rankings across all the keywords. And so this requires a little bit more research or an intuitive understanding of the space. But usually when I talk to brand owners, they know who those people are. They’re like, this doggone number one, they just have all these rankings and we don’t know why. We just want to take them out. We want to take them down.
And usually people have an intuitive understanding of who it is. You can break it down by product line. You can break it down by location if you’re a local business. But you normally have a sense of who are the one to two websites in your space that have rankings across all of the keywords you’re looking at.
Rich: Absolutely. And I’m just thinking about locally, the plumbers or the roofers who everybody knows their name because either they’ve been advertising forever, or they’ve been in the community forever, and those might be the number one brands, the big gorillas. And then we find ourselves in that challenger role.
So if we realize, if we’re self-aware enough to realize that we are in that challenger role, what can we do as a challenger brand? Or what do I need to do as a challenger brand that might be different from the vertical leader?
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a couple of distinctions we could make here, but the most important is more focus, right? If you think about, the comparison I like to make is between sort of a news anchor versus a barista at a local coffee shop. So if a news anchor gets on the air and they recommend a specific brand or type of coffee, probably a bunch of people are going to buy that kind of coffee just because this news anchor mentioned it. Maybe this news anchor has interviewed a couple of cool people and knows something about coffee, but not really that much.
The other option is you’re going to go down the street and you’re going to go to your neighborhood sort of mom and pop shop. It’s the barista who also owns the coffee shop and all he does is like, breathe, eat coffee. And so coffee nerd knows all the flavors, the tasting notes. What do you like? What do you don’t like? And then he’ll give you a recommendation. The difference between those two people is really the focus, right? The barista, all they’re doing is coffee. In the news anchor, they’re obviously interviewing people for a bunch of different segments.
So if you just have one area of focus and you get really focused both with your content, with your links, with your entire strategy, you can start to outrank some of these bigger players and then you can just dominate one area, move on to the next, and be very methodical. And that can really play out well over the long-term.
Rich: That makes a lot of sense. And I’m thinking of a client that I had years ago who was a small player here in Maine and big player in terms of what they did. They sold conveyor belts, but what they were selling was also sold by basically the equivalent of Amazon, which was Grainger. And it was the idea of how can we possibly compete against Grainger? Grainger does everything, you do this one thing. So let’s narrowly focus on just that. So that to your point, that’s the perspective that we need to come to the table with perhaps.
Josh: Yeah, exactly. And it’s funny, I actually have a mechanical engineering degree, so I know about Grainger, they have like thousands and thousands of products.
So if all you’re doing is talking about conveyor belts, you have the ability to market to people with very specific niche use cases. And this just sort of mirrors the play that business is going to take. It’s all custom. It’s all built for you. We are more flexible. We’re going to work with you when we come in and install it. You’re going to be able to pick up the phone and call us.
So now, because they’re just so focused on the one area, they can afford to write content or approach SEO keywords for things like conveyor belts for a 2000 square foot shop with X and Y equipment, right? So it’s very long tail.
Maybe you only get a few customers a month, but those few customers are really crucial for you. Whereas for Grainger, they’re like, that doesn’t make a difference. Three customers doesn’t make a difference for us. So absolutely. That’s actually a really good example.
Rich: Awesome. So I’m curious about this. When you’re talking to these challenger brands, how much of a therapist do you need to be with some of your clients? I have clients who wanted a website and they’re like, I want a website like Amazon. Great, do you have a hundred million dollars every year that you can spend on a website? Or they wonder why they’re not ranking first for a product that’s also provided by some ginormous company that has money to throw behind it.
How do you manage expectations and timelines when there’s a Goliath in the vertical with your clients?
Josh: I think the number one thing is absolutely I act as a little bit of a therapist. I hear the troubles and I say, look, I empathize with you. And here are some examples of some other clients that have been in your same shoes.
I think the number two thing, the second aspect here is we just bring it all back to money. And so if you can bring it back to money and here’s what you can get, here’s what we can’t get, here’s some forecasting for what kind of return on investment you can expect. If you can bring it back to the data, you can switch out of that mindset of, hey, I want this thing that XYZ has.
Because I think founders sort of have both of those. Founders that I talked to, they really love to rank for a keyword that they can show off to their friends. “Hey, we ranked number one for diamond drinks, this is super cool.” But if you say, hey, actually the most profitable thing to do instead of trying to rank for that huge keyword, is going to be to rank for these five longer tail keywords that are a little lower difficulty. And here’s the result that you’re going to get from that, here’s the money that you’re going to make because of that on a much quicker timeline. Then it all falls into place, and everybody gets on board pretty quickly, is what I find.
Rich: Nice. So once you’ve convinced me to check my ego and that I am a challenger brand here, what are some of the first things that a challenger brand should consider when it comes to their SEO? What do those first few steps look like?
Josh: Yeah, so first thing I’m going to do is dig into the products that this person is selling. What are your most profitable lines of business? And that can give us some clues as to where we should focus.
For example, if you sell conveyor belts and you also sell… well, maybe conveyor belts isn’t the best example, because I don’t even know what somebody who sells conveyor belts would also sell.
Let’s say you sell diamond rings and diamond necklaces, but diamond rings are by far your best seller, and they are higher gross margin, and everything is just better about that product line. In the second case, let’s focus on that area first. And from there, we start to build out the SEO strategy around that. And we can get very technical. We can get very deeper or not deep into that. But really, it’s about analyzing the catalog and seeing, okay, first of all, I’ll ask a series of questions, which one has the best profit margins, which one leads to repeat purchases, which one leads to your best customers who come back again and again, where are you most differentiated? And then you pick one product line, and then you build the SEO strategy around it.
Rich: So just to make sure I’m understanding this, it sounds like it makes a lot of sense. Rather than trying to fix everything all at once, what we should be doing is figuring out where our best profit margin is, or where our best opportunity is, and basically tackle SEO one vertical at a time rather than trying to do a half-assed job of everything.
Josh: Exactly. Yep. You got it 100%.
Rich: All right. So let’s say that we decide we’ve got the subcategory that we want to focus our SEO intentions on. How do you, when you’re working with your clients, find the right keywords or the content gaps and all those other elements to keep the ball rolling forward?
Josh: Yeah, so we have a whole sort of system that we use for this. It’s really interesting. One thing that we have found over the last couple of years is that the types of keywords that you use on one page, don’t just influence that page, they influence others as well.
So a really interesting example is, I’m not going to give away the exact industry, but we had a client who was ranking for something in the luxury space, let’s say. Let’s just say diamond rings again, to use that example. They had a sort of shopping page that they wanted to rank for the term ‘diamond rings’. And they were having some trouble. They couldn’t quite get it to rank. And so we just said, I guess we’re just not going to rank this right now.
They brought us in to help with some other stuff, some other content, and we said, great, this is just not on the table right now. However, we wrote two blog posts on the site that were about how much do diamond rings cost? And then, where do you buy diamond rings? A breakdown of mom-and-pop shop versus Amazon versus Costco, whatever. And when we wrote those two pieces of content, all of a sudden their collections page, their shopping page started ranking better for the target term.
So what we’re finding now is that there is this ecosystem effect where if you start to rank for all of these relevant questions that are relevant to the purchase journey, that all of your very short tail, very competitive keywords will start to rank better as well.
So my guidance would be to rank for sort of bottom of the funnel terms. What are the questions that people are asking you right before they buy something? There’s patterns. How much do things cost? Where do you buy them? What should I expect to spend? What brands are the best? You can write about the different brands in your space. If there’s a technical aspect to it, like for diamond rings, it’s the four C’s. For conveyor belts, I’m sure there’s other power things.
So if you write about those sort of five areas, price cost, how much do things cost, where do you buy them, what types of products are the best, the brands, and then technical – so I should say four things, technical details of them – that’s a really good starting point. And then we’ve just built on that over time.
So like we have dozens of clients, and we see what works for them. And we test out these different theories and see what works. And I actually have a full list that I’m happy to give to your listeners at the end that gives our top 15 highest performing pieces of content that you should write on your site. And that’s just all battle tested. It’s just iterations. We tested again and again, and seeing what works over time.
Rich: Yeah, we can include a link to that for sure. And I’ll try and remember to ask you about it as we get to the end.
And by the way, when it comes to conveyor belts, there are a lot of things. It’s do you want the products to stay on a flat level? Is there an incline? Does this need to be food quality level? Do there need to be little chevrons that hold things in place? And what’s the temperature going to be like? Is it going to be indoor, outdoor? I learn a lot, as I’m sure you do, when you take on a client in a new industry.
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Rich: So we’ve talked about some of these nichier terms, these long-term keywords. What is your thought about a high difficulty word? Is it even worth pursuing, or is that something we just ignore completely?
Josh: Yeah. So I love this. And now we’re talking, we’re getting into the nuances, how do you balance long term with short term?
And so I’ll actually talk about another client that we worked with. We took them from zero to they were ranking for the target term in their space, the short tail term. And then they had a bunch of other ones that were ranking for as well, the longer tail ones that we talked about.
What we do is we set up the framework to rank for the big, difficult keyword in the beginning. And then we just build around it over time. So we don’t have it super well optimized. It doesn’t have to be perfect. We just set up the basics.
So in this case, if you’re selling, I don’t know, hiking boots, and you want to rank for the term ‘hiking boots’, you got to just go at Google hiking boots and see what kinds of pages generally are coming up and then make sure you have the kind of page on your site.
In this case, it’s very likely going to be something like what people call a PLP or a collections page or a category page, where it’s just a list of all your products. So you’ve got to make sure that you have that page live on your site somewhere. You’re going to have it generally optimized for hiking boots in the meta title, meta description, all that nerdy SEO stuff. You have a little bit of content at the bottom of the page, but you don’t have to worry about making it perfect.
And then over time, you’re going to start to create this helpful content around it. And essentially the rising tide will lift all boats. So then that page over time will start to rank better for those shorter tail terms, as you’re creating this content that’s ranking for the longer tail terms around it. And then eventually you’re going to hit a point of momentum where Google sees your site as an authority in this space.
And usually what we find is that it is feels like a slog, feels like a slog, feels like a slog, and there’s a breakthrough. And then all of a sudden that collections page is really ranking very well for that high intent term. So you just set up the basics, and then you go focus on other things, let that marinate, and then over time, you’ll reinforce your position and start to do really well.
Rich: And Josh, as you’re building out all these blog posts, articles, resources, what is your official internal linking policy? Are you taking it that the first time that you mentioned hiking boots on this article about how to choose the right hiking boot for a beginner trailblazer, whatever it is, are you linking that over to that collections page?
Josh: Yeah. So that’s a really good question and something that we’ve actually changed a lot over the last year. Previously, we used to use a lot of 50/50 exact match anchor text. So exact match anchor text for the listeners is if you’re trying to rank for hiking boots, you use the words ‘hiking boots’ exactly for the internal link. In the last year, we’ve toned that down a lot and we start to use less exact match. And so we just try and figure out, okay, does this link add context to the target page?
Because what we found is that these internal links work as votes of authority within your site to say, hey, this page is really important, please rank it higher. But it also adds context. So if you use the word ‘best hiking boots in the rain’, and you link back to this page, that’s telling Google that this page is also about the rain.
So basically what you want to do is keep it natural. If you have a very high importance page, for example, that collections page that we were talking about. In every article that you write, I would link back to it in every relevant article. If they’re on the topic of hiking boots, if you write something else about sandals or something, don’t link back to that one, because you want to maintain the consistency of the topic, but link to it in the first third. But just use some anchor text that sort of feels natural and is relevant to the previous page. Because we find that added context over time helps Google better understand what that original page is, and that leads to better rankings. Especially now with AI and machine learning and all that kind of stuff.
Rich: When you’ve done this keyword research, and it sounds like your first thing might be to optimize blog posts as a category. How do you find the balance between the blog posts, between the category pages, and then even the individual product pages when it comes to using this? Is there a set thing, or is it more just by feel on how much you want to optimize those three given categories of pages?
Josh: Yeah. So we’re pretty page type agnostic. What we do is we pick a set of keywords that we know are going to have some purchase intent, and then we optimize around those whatever pages are required.
So we’ll say, okay, we have a conversation with the founder. We had a conversation, and we say, okay, the term that you want to rank for is ‘nicotine-free vapes’. Cool. What kind of page is ranking for nicotine-free vapes? It’s a collection. Great. Here are some other terms that are around that, that are really important, that are high intent. Okay, what kind of pages are ranking for those terms? How much do they cost? That’s a blog post. What are the ingredients? What are the harmful ingredients? That’s another blog post. Somebody looking for a specific size, a 200 puff, no nicotine vape. That’s important as well. That’s a longer tail variation. Oh, that’s actually a product page. And then we assign that to a product page.
So it’s really about mapping the most important, most valuable keywords first, and then creating whatever page we need to, to sort of support that strategy.
Rich: That makes sense. It seems to me like there’s been a lot of articles lately and blog posts and podcasts about the importance of brand when it comes to SEO. Do you feel that brand is important to the idea of the challenger brands when it comes to SEO, or is that something we should just de-emphasize as we’re on this journey?
Josh: So that’s a loaded question, because brand is very important.
Rich: You’re welcome.
Josh: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Brand is critical. And so one of the things that we’ve seen, especially over the last year, is that brand search correlates with your overall SEO profile. And so how do we make that less SEO nerdy talk, right?
Basically, if a bunch of people are Googling your brand every month, Google is more likely to show you in search results because they know that people already want you, want your stuff, and they like you. So for example, if people are searching for Lululemon yoga pants, Google’s going to rank Lululemon for yoga pants without their brand name attached to it a lot more easily because they know that people like those yoga pants.
So as a challenger brand, one of the drawbacks is you come into an industry, sometimes you don’t actually have as much of that brand equity built up. And so there’s a couple of things you can do. One, we find pretty strong correlations between running paid advertising and brand searches. So if you want to increase your paid advertising, that actually can help your SEO quite a bit.
The other thing is you just have to build the topical authority again. So we’re talking about that content. You build that content ecosystem, that actually helps offset some of the power of that brand building. So yes, brand is important. Typically, if you’re a challenger brand, that’s not going to be your strength though, and so we’re going to focus on other areas, like the content ecosystem. That’s why I talk about content so much is because it’s sort of your trump card. If you can do better at content than anybody else in one vertical, you can overcome a lot of these other challenges.
Rich: And when do you find, is there a tipping point where you’re like, we have saturated vertical one, it’s now time to start going after vertical two. Do you have some sort of rubric that helps you talk to your clients about let’s go after walking shoes and not just hiking boots anymore?
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of it is just rankings-based, revenue based, right? If we have one existing vertical and it’s doing very well and we’re ranking for most of the top terms in the space, I would say once we get to a majority where we say here’s a list of the top hundred keywords in this space, and we’re ranking in the top, I don’t know, say top five for.50 to 60 percent of those keywords. We say, okay, now let’s have a conversation about expanding into another area. Because you’re always going to be maintaining, you’re always going to be working on the existing sort of ecosystems that you’ve built. And so if you’re putting some resources into that ecosystem, it’s going to keep slowly growing over time, and maybe it’s not worth it to invest the same amount and those resources would be better used by going after something completely different.
So instead of increasing by two or three times a month, or 2 or 3 percent per month, you can say, hey, we’re going to attack an entirely new angle and we’re going to increase our revenue by 20% percent or 30%. And so it’s just a matter of balancing that out. And those are conversations we have often, but usually the tipping point comes when I’d say 50 to 60 percent of those keywords that you’re targeting, you’re ranking pretty well and you see, oh, we’re authorities in this space.
Rich: All right. How much content do you feel that we should be creating as a challenger brand, and/or how frequently should we be updating or adding content to our website?
Josh: Absolutely. So great question. I would say for competitive verticals, CBD, any vaping, anything like that, similar verticals, I’d say the outdoor space is pretty competitive to lawyers, anything like that, I’d say more is better. I’d say between six and eight pieces of content a month is a really good starting point.
If you’re a smaller brand, I still recommend trying to get at least once per week, publish something new once a week. So something like four pieces a month is a really good starting point. So my base that I recommend to clients is four per month. If you’re in any sort of competitive environment, I’d say bump that up to six. And if you’re like, no, we definitely know we’re in that really competitive space, definitely a little bit on the higher end.
Rich: That does seem very high to me. And I often think of there being a critical mass. So if a new website or a website that never really had a lot of content on it, I think you should be writing pretty regularly. If you can get four quality blog posts out a month, God bless you and take care of that.
Do you ever feel like there becomes, okay, we’ve got a critical mass at this point? Or is that again a question of, take a look at the metrics, take a look at your traffic, take a look at your conversions, and your analytics will tell you when it’s time that you can maybe take your foot off the gas or focus on another part of your business?
Josh: Yeah. I’d say the analytics will tell you. And again, we come back to the rankings, right? If you’re ranking for a lot of that stuff that you’d like to rank for, then you can probably take your foot off the gas a little bit. I would say usually the resources that are required to maintain an ecosystem are about half, maybe a little bit less of the resources that were required to build it.
So let’s say that you want to post eight pieces a month because you’re in a really competitive space. You do that for maybe a year. You’re going to meet a pretty solid spot. You’re still going to want to have maybe three to four articles a month set aside for updating those existing pieces, right?
Eight pieces a month for 12 months is, what is that? 96 pieces of content. A small percentage of those, 4 percent of those are going to be out of date or need updating at any point in time. At some point you’d be able to take your foot off the gas, but not completely.
And so does that answer your question? I feel like there was a couple of different…
Rich: Yeah, I think it’s just, yeah, when can you take your foot off the gas or when do you want to shift? And I definitely think you’ve answered that. I feel like there’s even more that we could have talked about, because I know that you and I in a previous conversation also talked about the role of video and also got more into link building.
For people who want to learn more from you, where can we send them online?
Josh: Absolutely. The place where I’ll give away some of the free resources as trafficlighttracking.com. I give away, there’s a whole series around attribution, SEO attribution. And we get into that. I’ll also give you that keyword list that I talked about if you enter your email there.
At trafficlighttracking.com is a great place to go. Otherwise I’m on LinkedIn. I’ve been engaging with people on LinkedIn, so I’d say just look me up on LinkedIn. We can include a link to that in the show notes, I hope. And so those are probably the two best places to go.
Rich: Perfect. Josh, this has been fantastic. Very eye-opening and just thanks for coming by and sharing your expertise.
Josh: Thanks, Rich, appreciate it.
Show Notes:
Josh Piepmeier helps challenger brands outrank their biggest competitors high volume, big profit keywords. Grab some of the “freebies” he mentioned in this episode, and be sure to connect with him on LinkedIn.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.