Dale Bertrand: Organic Marketing And The Future Of Online Commerce

The future is never certain. But plenty of individual factors can always paint a clearer picture of what is to come and initiate fundamental change. When it comes to commerce, the online space seems like the perfect picture of where it will ultimately reside. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has certainly proven and even helped accelerate what will hopefully be a much more efficient future for businesses to operate and thrive in as this new model gains larger and more significant adoption within a digital framework.

It's no longer a new phenomenon to say that the Covid-19 pandemic changed the business model the world was operating on. If anything, it merely sped up something that was already growing within the framework of a multitude of business infrastructures. In the case of advertising and SEO, it certainly rewrote how to look over the concept in a much more open-minded manner. This is only more important given the rising cost of online advertising through the use of platforms like Google and Facebook. Now, although these platforms can be useful in the short term, Dale Bertrand learned from what he considers to be a more organic approach to SEO as opposed to the more limiting technical side that prevents businesses from being marketed in a more efficient and cost-effective manner in the long term of their operational capacity.

Who Is Dale Bertrand?

When it comes to business owners, both experienced and beginner, one common approach they've always taken is the adoption of having to spend money in order to make money. It's certainly not an easy endeavor for anyone to get a business set up, because it will cost money. But because this approach is taken with such an objective rather than flexible view, then it initially results in business owners burning more capital than they intended before seeing a reasonable rate of return. But if anyone could be honored for killing the notion that you have to spend money to make money, then Dale Bertrand would certainly fit the bill.

Dale Bertrand is the founder and president of Fire&Spark, a SEO agency that helps eCommerce and B2B brands compete against established competitors. Fire&Spark enables the clients to help centralize their brand by narrowing its focus on SEO, content marketing, and analytics. The quantifiable results Fire&Spark delivers help these very brands sustain continuous growth in organic sales. This type of growth is something still happening as more people and companies shift to an online approach that is more than just a temporary shift as opposed to Dale's more futuristic predictions. 

Organic Marketing: Before And After Pandemic

When asked about the effects the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic posed, Dale illustrated how at the height of the pandemic, many advertisers "suspended their spend" as he put it. It was certainly not the option they were intending, but for Dale Bertrand, it was a golden opportunity to take marketing towards a more organic and cost-effective approach. As mentioned before, the old saying "You have to spend money to make money" has been a bit of a selling point for business owners or beginning business owners into believing that there is a golden rule to operating a business. However, that was pre-covid logic. Once companies entered the post-covid-era, business logic didn't exactly go out the window, so much as reveal just how flexible it must be when a global event exposes weaknesses that were already present and subject to change.

Dale spoke on how when the pandemic arrived, the gradual shift of people moving or spending more time online was so massive that it increased the rates of advertising. Because Dale prefers a more organic approach in terms of SEO, having many companies that had to weigh in the major increase in advertising rates allowed for them to come to Fire&Spark, which then built SEO campaigns to help their brands.

Dale's organic approach isn't simply about providing brands with a cheaper solution when the central focus is on making the brand more effective, which is something Covid taught many businesses. In addition to an increase in advertising rates, the amount of advertising that increased in relation to the number of people targeted also became less effective. As to whether this was a natural element of the advertising, or simply the result of an overload concerning the increase of online consumers, it's difficult to determine. What can be determined with a greater level of certitude, is that the demand for more effective content became a necessity, and that necessity was what Dale calls "authority first SEO".

What Is Authority First SEO?

In describing authority first SEO, Dale had already elaborated in his interview how his company's SEO campaigns had become less focused on the technical side of SEO, such as the HTML tags or the sitemaps, and more about the engagement the campaigns provided. This engagement involved a focus on content that is both backlink and keyword-focused in scope.

By adopting an authority-first SEO approach, Fire&Spark had been able to double down and develop a better notion of what type of authority-first SEO campaigns they were trying to build for the future. Dale Bertrand and his company accomplished this by looking at factors that affected their link-building campaign. Several of these factors included looking at the bounce rate, the clickthrough rate in the search results, and the content. 

By making these factors the foundation of their link-building campaign, Dale and his company were able to create efficient content pieces that took analytics into account while reducing the focus on the technical side of SEO, which Dale pointed out was more focused on fixing things that were broken.

What Can Be Learned From Dale Bertrand's Organic Approach?

If one key piece of advice could be taken from the mind of a man who clearly recognizes the productive future commerce has online, then it's Dale's suggestion of businesses focusing more on their customers rather than their competitors, certainly takes the spot. It even manages to stay true to the organic approach his Authority first SEO centers around. Instead of being distracted by competition, it puts significant focus on the future as opposed to the more outdated and highly distracting technical side of SEO.