087: Mike Grehan (Acronym)

Mike Grehan on Innovation City

“Stop selling, starting helping. What is it that you could do right at the beginning to help me [the user]?” — Mike Grehan

Welcome to Innovation City—powered by Venture Cafe—where Tyler Kelley and Michael Johnson, Co-Founders of SLAM! Agency, interview innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency in cooperation with Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community. Venture Cafe is the largest combined gathering of entrepreneurs and innovators anywhere in the world. Events are held every Thursday in St. Louis, Miami, and other leading innovation cities around the globe.

Today’s guest is Mike Grehan, CMO & Managing Director at Acronym. Acronym – Search Agency of the Year – is the largest independent global search engine marketing firm. Mike sits down with the team today to discuss how he got started with search engine optimization, the most important SEO tools, AI’s increasing connection with SEO, understanding the buyer journey, creating useful content instead of just creating content for the sake of it, and more!

They discuss:

• Joined the internet-based industry back in 1995 when he started an internet marketing consulting company
• His background in advertising, radio, & television
• Setting up clients with their first email system
• How he got started with search engine optimization (SEO)
• The early days of SEO and how he was able to take advantage of the new marketing tool many people were not aware of yet
• The importance of linking to other websites
• The most important SEO tools:
  • Links
  • Keywords
  • GPS
• SEO is no longer about tricking the search engine to rank higher, but rather is about creating a good content experience to take customer’s through the buyer journey
• Search VS. Discovery
• The interconnection of content and SEO
• The cognitive process users take to get their info: Informational>Navigational>Transactional
• Understanding the buyer journey and developing content that carries users through it and not disrupting the journey just to sell something quick
• The main take away from his EQSTL talk: Stop selling, start helping
• AI’s increasing connection with SEO
• The difference between strong AI and weak AI
• Creating useful content instead of just creating content for the sake of it
• Stop thinking about websites and start thinking about web apps