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What You’ll Learn
SkyLine/SkyBest doesn’t let the fact that they are a member-owned telephone cooperative in the North Carolina mountains stop them from fighting hard against big competitors in the search rankings. Edward Hinson shares examples of what they’ve done to move up in the rankings and why it’s worth it.
Guest Speaker
Edward HinsonShow Notes
Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.
Andy Johns: Is search engine optimization dead, or is it alive and well? That’s what we’ll be talking about on this episode of StoryConnect: The Podcast. My name is Andy Johns, your host with Pioneer, and I’m joined on this episode by Edward Hinson, who is the chief marketing and sales officer at SkyLine/SkyBest in West Jefferson, North Carolina. Edward, thank you for joining me.
Edward Hinson: Thank you Andy, I appreciate the invite and looking forward to our conversation today.
Andy Johns: Sure. And we’ve had a couple before. I went back and looked through the archives. So Edward was on episode number 14 back in May of 2016, and then was on, we were talking about a video exchange service. And then on episode 99 in May of 2018, we talked about the retail space that they were opening at SkyLine/SkyBest. And then sorry, we missed May. Apparently May is when we record, but now we’re here again. This is going to be episode number, I think right around 320. So it’s been a little while since we talked, and glad to have you back on.
Edward Hinson: Yeah. Glad to be here. I can’t believe that it’s been 2016. We will have to do a ten year anniversary in a year and a half.
Andy Johns: Of that podcast. Yep. I think that’s when we came by and visited West Jefferson. One of the prettiest areas of the whole country right there where y’all are. Just a gorgeous spot. I think I say that every time we’re on.
Edward Hinson: But it’s still true and always will be. It’s a beautiful, beautiful area for sure. The mountains are just amazing.
Andy Johns: Yep. Well, Edward and I – I heard Edward present and another pretty place, very different. But that was out in Phoenix for the NTCA Sales and Marketing Conference. Edward was speaking with somebody from our Powerful web team about websites. And full disclosure, the SkyLine/SkyBest website is not one built by Pioneer, but I really liked a lot of what Edward had to say about SEO and, you know, the search engine optimization of the content on the site. But I guess we need to start, Edward, because every, I don’t know, every couple of months I see an article coming out by smart people that says SEO is dead. And then I’ll see another article two months later by another group of smart people saying SEO is alive and well. So when we talk about SEO, is it dead? Is it alive and well? And how has it kind of changed here in recent years over what it used to be?
Edward Hinson: Well, I see the same thing, Andy. And it’s certainly alive. I think the taglines are things to catch your attention. Like, “Oh no, we’ve been spending so much time we’ve made the investment in SEO. What’s going on?” There’s the lure of that, as there’s media.
Andy Johns: A little clickbait.
Edward Hinson: Yeah, a little bit of clickbait there. Now the nuances of SEO continually change. So if you were looking more granularly at like, “Hey, this part of SEO no longer works,” then that’s a true statement, so with shades of gray. You know, GA4, the Google Analytics 4, keeps changing things. As you know, we’ve been on the search, an SEO journey for a number of years. And we’ve had, you know, we’ve had a lot of success with it honestly. It’s made a big difference on our bottom line, engaging with our customers, finding customers that we wouldn’t normally be able to get a hold of or connect with. And, you know, our area, the the mountains, Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina and the mountain region as a whole is beautiful. There’s a lot of tourists. So a lot of people have come to our area, especially since Covid, we’re getting out of the more crowded, bigger urban areas, and discovered what a quality of life it is here. And, of course, we provide fiber optic network here gives gigabit speed in very rural areas. So it’s very attractive. And I’ve said all that to say a lot more people are moving here. People who had second or third homes here are moving to them full time because of the internet connection. But some people are moving from a more urban area, have never heard of SkyLine/SkyBest.
Edward Hinson: And what they do know is their incumbent provider. Maybe that’s AT&T or Charter or CenturyLink, or you know, what have you. And so by default, a lot of times they transfer their service, or that’s who they look for. So our task and goal with SEO is to find – part of it anyway – is to find those customers that may not be looking for us organically. They’ve never heard of SkyLine/SkyBest because they’re just not from the area. Now, if you’re from the area, you know us. We’re the cooperative that, you know, brings service to the most rural parts of the territory that we are in. But, so SEO has played a big role in that. You know, and it is changing for sure. When AI certainly is changing everything, but when AI started really rolling out, and we were doing, you know, test runs and beta of different platforms, we were starting to see where if you used for content creation and some different spins, if you will on verbiage, you know, take, you know, this statement or this phrase or this conversation and revamp it for me. We were starting to see if you were using AI, you’re ranking would go down. And I think that was just a toe in the water from Google. And this is only – this part is speculation on my part. But we do have an analytics tool that I’m going to talk about in a little bit where we measure it. We can see actually, you know, how our rankings are on on Google and page one and what our competitors are doing and how they’re doing it.
Andy Johns: Let’s jump in. Let’s jump in real quick to that organic, the organic piece that you were talking about there. Because I think, like you said, you definitely if they’re going to search SkyLine/SkyBest, I mean, you’re going to come up. But like you said, there’s so many folks moving to the area, new to the area. And we’re seeing that kind of across the board that the rural areas are seeing a lot of folks moving in now that remote jobs are more open. So do you guys get hung up in or what have you seen in terms of what people are searching for? I know that we’ve talked to some folks and they get real hung up over. Well, do they say broadband? Do they say gigabit speed? Do they say gig? Do they say Wi-Fi? Do you guys, I guess you kind of have to be ready when you’re planning out your search engine strategies. You got to kind of be ready for whatever they’re going to say. But have you seen some of the terms, you know, high speed internet? What are folks searching when they’re trying to find service in the area?
Edward Hinson: Well, interesting you should say that because it is important. We’re looking at it every day. If not every day, every other day, we’re in looking for searches. And that’s part of – we use a service called BrightEdge. Um, I’ll give you just a quick how we got connected with BrightEdge. I attended a conference in San Diego, I’m sorry, in San Francisco about eight years ago. Seven, eight years ago. And they were talking about SEO and what have you, but it was a conference. There were no telecom companies like ours, not cooperative type companies. No one that’s an NTCA member or anything like that. There were no one that was part of the audience were there. It was a British company that was doing this, but there were a lot of major players there. And what attracted me was the opportunity to engage with the bigger players because my goal was, okay, I want to see what these guys are doing who have massive budgets. I mean, we know AT&T has a $65 million a year marketing budget. Spectrum has a $60 million.
Andy Johns: Yours is not quite that big?
Edward Hinson: It’s not quite that big. (laughs)
Andy Johns: Fair enough.
Edward Hinson: And so we’re competing against those things. But I had the opportunity in a breakout session for, I think it is either 6 or 8 of us at a table. And at my table, I sat beside intentionally, the chief marketing officer for Facebook at the time and the vice president of sales for Hewlett Packard. And in their conversations, we got off topic of what our roundtable was supposed to be, and they just started talking about, you know, what each other uses. And now Facebook uses something totally different that they’ve created themselves. But, you know, through the Meta stuff. And, but at the time, they were using, they were both talking about BrightEdge. Like, “Well, that’s what we use.” So I’m like, okay, I need to understand more about this. So I dug in and found out at the time nine out of the top ten tech companies were using it. Scalability was a thing. They didn’t really do business with companies the size of ours, but they really have adopted us and done a fantastic job there. But what it enables us to do is to see what our rankings are and what our competitors, how they’re ranking. And all of it goes back to what you, the question you asked me is, what are the key words? What are people looking for in your market and how they find you? For example, if you use – this is an example I’ve used in one of the presentations – if you’re searching for women’s running shoes, Nike, you know how you sometimes just randomly put in words, or you think of last word and and you think, how do I get to this? Well, women’s running shoes Nike gives you different search results than Nike running shoes for women.
Edward Hinson: And so that order is important, but also the keywords that are in there. So for us, you know, it’s broadband, and it’s internet. It’s fiber. And because we are in the community that we’re in, it’s kind of transient coming from larger cities and some smaller and rural. And we have Appalachian State University there. We have to really have a dynamic range of search words because culturally it’s referred to as different things in different areas. It’s broadband in one area. It’s internet over here. It’s fiber over here. So we look at those keywords and how they rank and we’re constantly moving them around. Part of the BrightEdge suite is we can see what our competitors are doing. We can see the coding. And we’ve for the past four years, right at four years now, we’ve ranked number one on page one in organic searches on all relevant keywords for our markets over Charter, Spectrum, CenturyLink, and now BrightSpeed. We’re killing them. And we’ve never gone down below. They’ve never beaten us, even those multi-million dollar budgets. And we’re doing that by, you know, just really paying attention. So much so that CenturyLink has started using Sky plus Best in their coding to try to attract our customers looking for our service. They’re trying to snag our organic searches.
Andy Johns: You got their attention.
Edward Hinson: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we have a very, very small marketing team with some very powerful players on that team. But, the keywords that, you know, that we were using in there do vary. And then the phrases that we do. How our website is set up, GA4 has changed some of those formats. We’re still looking at the tags and creating new content behind it. I mentioned earlier about AI. Now we’re seeing it’s more helpful. I’ve, you know, 90% of all internet searches are on Google. So they’re not going to let you continue to do as much stuff for free without trying to push those words or put up some walls to say, “Hey, buy these words from us.” You know, our AdWords spend is not very high. We try not to spend any money there if we can, but there’s a certain –
Andy Johns: I was going to ask you about that. Yeah.
Edward Hinson: And, you know, of course their console or, you know, looking at their performance metrics, the, you know, Google does a good job, no question about that.
Andy Johns: Yeah. And that’s interesting. I was looking at your site while you were talking about that. I googled of course, I’m in Chattanooga, so I’m sure the geo filters or whatever is a little different, but I googled, I think it was “fiber broadband service West Jefferson, North Carolina.” And there’s, you know, skybest.com. It pulls up a page with a picture of your West Jefferson office, and it says “Looking for the best internet provider in West Jefferson, NC? Look no further than SkyLineSkyBest.” I did the search terms, I think I did the same “fiber broadband Boone, North Carolina.” There’s SkyBest up at the top. And then I click a link, and it takes me to a page with a picture of downtown Boone with a different page of your website. It says, “Looking for the best internet provider in Boone, North Carolina? Look no further than SkyLine/SkyBest.” So you guys are, you have different pages on your website where you’re sending folks based on the search, based on their geography. That was part of the strategy, too, it sounds like.
Edward Hinson: It was, Andy. And that’s important because if you just have a basic website with basic information, maybe some stuff behind some images or what have you, Google’s going to go, uh-uh, that’s not, you’re not spending time here like you’re supposed to be. And you’re also going to miss more opportunities with different customers who think differently. Their vernacular is different and all those sorts of things. So you have to really be dynamic in that approach. We’re under right now, we’re under a totally new website revamp that will launch later this year, but still the same behind the scenes kind of stuff that we’re doing because it’s working. But we do have to constantly look at it and make changes. And we’re writing in, you know, using video and every little nuance that we can to, you know, to check the benchmarks for GA4.
Andy Johns: I want to go back to what you said a second ago and feel free to say it’s none of my business or not share to whatever level you’d like. But let’s talk about money a little bit, because frequently when those articles come out that say SEO is dead, some of what they’ll say is, you know, Google is clamping down and wanting you to pay for, you know, the AdWords and search engine marketing. But it sounds like from what you’re saying, and go into as much detail as you feel comfortable on that spin. Because I know this, you know, this will go out on the internet. You never know if a competitor is going to hear it. But, talk to us a little bit about how you decide where and how to spend on some of those AdWords. I know you said you don’t do it a ton, but it sounds like there’s at least a little bit.
Edward Hinson: Yeah, there’s a little bit. And I tell you, it’s kind of like a filtering process. So I’ll share a few things with you that anyone can use, your podcast listeners can use that are free. And then what’s left, some things you have to be in the mix. So you got to spend a little bit. But, you know, Google’s SEO starter guide, that’s a good place to start. And it’s a written guide on, you know, ranking factors and optimization tips for Google’s reporting. And that changes. I mean, it’s updated all the time. So if you looked at it today and look at it next week, it’s probably different. But some of the free tools, additional free tools, Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool, this is pretty cool. It crawls 500 URLs for free, and it audits them for common SEO issues that Google’s going to recognize. So Screaming Frog is fantastic. The, you know, of course, the Google Search Console. That’s where BrightEdge edge pulls some of our, you know, data directly from that. And that shows your top search queries in your area, the pages and devices that are there. Another one that’s really good to use is tools.pingdom.com. And that runs speed tests for different pages on your website because different pages load differently, and it checks for those issues. That can be pretty alarming when you feel like you’ve got something there, but you know, you have someone that’s certainly – if you have some load issues or some coding.
Edward Hinson: People get impatient when they’re searching. If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you’re digging for that piece of gold. You know exactly where it is. But if you get lost in translation somewhere, like, let me just click on something else. Because there’s plenty of other opportunities to click on something else.
Andy Johns: Right.
Edward Hinson: And then another one, a final one is SEJ, Search Engine Journal. And that’s good for keeping you up to date on current trends. I like it. It’s kind of like a PR Net for some of your users will be familiar with. Like, common topics like, “Hey, I found this works,” or “Hey, I tried this. It was a pitfall. Don’t do this.” So there’s some great information in there, Search Engine Journal. So we go through those regularly as part of our process. And then from there, that kind of filters some things out and helps us not have to spend so much. And you can do those for free. And I highly encourage folks to look at it. There’s others out there. These are just some of the ones that we use that are reputable. And yeah, there’s going to be ad pitches in there. You know, it’s not, nothing is really free-free. But that’s okay. There’s an opportunity to, you know, to look at what the other services that are out there.
Andy Johns: I know I’m jumping around a little bit all over the place, but I was taking notes and trying to absorb what you were saying earlier. You mentioned that the different communities, the search terms are different. And I know you’ve been doing this a little while now, have you? Is there any rhyme or reason why, you know, the college town up near Boone is using, you know, fiber service versus another community using broadband or high speed internet? Have you made any sense of that? Or are those search terms changing over the years that you’ve been doing it? Is there any rhyme or reason there? Does it just seem to be kind of random? I know you guys have been monitoring that very closely for quite a while.
Edward Hinson: Yeah, it’s changed more. I mean, it’s still different everywhere, and we have to look at it. But it seems like there was more volatility actually during Covid. And I think it was probably just people have more time on their hands to get on the internet and to search and look for things. And for our area, as I mentioned, it’s a tourist area. So folks said, “Oh, let’s get out of the crowded city areas where COVID is or what have you, and let’s get out in some fresh mountain air. We’ve got a house up here. Let’s go rent a place.” So we’ve just had an influx of variety and diversity of people moving here and spending time here and again bringing their cultural vernacular here for, you know, a different areas. Broadband is probably, you kind of have to have that still in the mix. You know, whenever they were talking about funding and ARPA funding and different programs, you started hearing more of the broadband term. We have always tried to use, especially in our legislative conversations. We talk about fiber because obviously we believe that’s the best deployable method for broadband. You know, you’ve got –
Andy Johns: The differentiator for you too as well, I’m sure.
Edward Hinson: Yeah, it is symmetrical service, you know, gigabit right out of the, you know, right off the top. It’s reliable, you know, all the other things that go along with it. So, we, our speak, or our daily conversations might be a little bit different from what our coding is on our website just because we are trying to appeal to the masses.
Andy Johns: You touched on it earlier, and as we’re wrapping the conversation. Just a couple of more questions, but let’s get out of the crystal ball a little bit. One of the things that we’ve seen in the last, I don’t know, couple of months, I guess it really launched in April is search engines turning into more of answer engines, I think is the way that the Zapier CMO phrased it. But you know, where you get those AI summaries at the top, you’re going to search for something, and then it’s you get a paragraph of text that’s generated by AI kind of answering your search. How do you think that, you know, is that something that’s here to stay? Let’s get out the crystal ball, and it may be an impossible question, but where do you see it going in terms of the way that AI is going to impact search in the future? And then how are you guys doing anything at this point to try to get into some of that summary, the answer engine aspect of a search engine, or is that just something too early to tell right now?
Edward Hinson: Well, great question. Thank you for giving me a loaded one like that.
Andy Johns: Yeah, right. Just the future. That’s all I’m asking about.
Edward Hinson: That’s all. Luckily, I have this crystal ball right here, so I’ve got this ready for you. Let me share. No, we’re looking at that right now. We’re investigating that. And ultimately the back of my mind in my cynical mind is like, okay, there’s a couple of ways to look at. There’s probably more than a couple, but I’ll share my opinion on a couple. I think it’s helpful. I think it’s, you know, there’s education that’s in there, but what’s, how, where is this being derived from? Is it derived from a collective point of view that AI is supposed to do and pick up all of our conversations and the culmination of those things to give you the information that you’re looking for or the best possible answer? Or is it pulling these things together to say, okay, this is the best possible answer, and it’s maybe skewed a little bit in this direction because we want this particular provider of that product or service who’s paying us this money, we want them to be seen first through the lens of that search, if that makes sense. So therefore they have a marketable piece. I mean, Google is an advertising agency. They’re there to make money. So I think that probably weighs in there. And I mean, we’d like to be think, you know, altruistically is it. You know, I’m just looking for good information. I’m just looking for this. But, you know, it’s a business. And although it is, you know, I think extremely valuable. There’s a reason why 90% of the searches are there. They stay very relevant, help you find what you want, but they help you find what is being paid to be put in front of you as well.
Andy Johns: Yeah. Outstanding. I think that’s a pretty good answer to a pretty tough question. So I appreciate that. The last thing that I want to ask, let’s say there’s somebody out there who’s listening to this podcast, and they’re not doing much in the way of SEO right now. They’re not optimizing. They’re not working. And looking at the search, you know, where they’re falling, but they’re on the dreaded page two, where they’re below some of their competitors. They’re looking at the $60 million, you know, or the gigantic marketing budgets that some of the competitors have. What’s some advice that you would give them to get started? Or what’s some of the, you know, you’re obviously much farther along the journey than a lot of folks, but what’s some advice that you would give some of your peers in the independent broadband space to try to get started on optimizing and helping themselves out in those search results?
Edward Hinson: Well, good question. I think one of the things to, you know, you have to pay attention to it. It’s how customers are connecting. You don’t even realize the customers that you’re missing when they don’t find you. You know, and even local folks, I mean, that may not be really searching for the right things because they don’t know any better. I mean, our goal is to connect as marketers is to connect with our community and services, or community to provide our products and services. I think it’s incredibly important because so much of what people are doing, and it’s rapidly growing for searches, it’s off a mobile device. It’s, you know, so you have to make sure that your website, you know, is mobile friendly. It’s frustrating when you pull something up and you find what you’re looking for, and then the screen is so wide and you’re sliding sideways and getting lost on it. People get frustrated and go somewhere else. So that’s an important piece of it. You have to make that investment. And that’s the key word. It is an investment. And there’s an ROI to the investment. And if you’re doing it right, you’re going to get those customers coming in. And then, you know, as customers call in, I think it’s important to understand, to establish some metrics. Have your customer care folks, how did you hear about us? And that was, that’s a whole another study that we’ve done for years how people are finding us.
Edward Hinson: And I have, I could talk about that for a while. But it’s interesting when you really ask the questions, how they’re finding us and where they came from and what they’re looking for. So we record that and that helps us also with our SEO. But I would say, you know, make sure you’re mobile. I think it’s mobile-enabled or different terminology that’s out there, but it’s got to be friendly for that. I would use these tools that I mentioned earlier. Go for the free ones and learn about it and self-educate. And AI can help you with that too. Again, you know, verify the AI stuff, but it can be very useful for you. It can be very helpful. And then start to look at it, talk to your, you know, folks. Go to our conferences and link up, not just during the sessions, but after the sessions on the break at the, you know, hospitality hour or what have you, there’s were some real conversations can start. And my experience has been our industry. We’re very helpful to help each other. And, you know, one size doesn’t fit all, but there are some commonalities and things that we can share and, you know, learn from other folks to help us all move towards, you know, providing service to the rural areas, which is predominantly our focus.
Andy Johns: Absolutely. I think that if we had more time, I would love to dive in. Maybe we’ll get you on for a fourth episode at some point. We won’t wait 5 or 6 years before we do it again, but we could do a whole episode on that “how did you find us?” question. I think that’s a good one to have you back on down the road. I appreciate you bringing that up. We’ll have to come back to that one.
Edward Hinson: Hey, always a pleasure. Thanks for all you guys do. You’re at our conferences. You’re taking pictures and giving people professional head [shots]. You’re just doing all kinds of things to help support our industry and make things easier for us and have a professional presence. So I wanted to thank you for all that you do. Thank you for the invitation to be on the podcast. It was an honor. And I’m happy to be back on here anytime that you’ll have me.
Andy Johns: I appreciate it. So many folks are doing such really good work in their own service areas, and it’s awesome to be able to share those ideas, share those techniques with other folks to bring us all up to speed on stuff. Because especially when it comes to something like this, it’s just changing all the time. So thank you, Edward, for sharing those thoughts with us today.
Edward Hinson: Absolutely. Thanks, Andy.
Andy Johns: He is Edward Hinson, the chief marketing and sales officer at SkyLine/SkyBest in West Jefferson, North Carolina. I’m your host Andy Johns with Pioneer. And until we talk again, keep telling your story.
Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story. StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.