← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
How Fitness & Endurance Sports Can Enhance SEO Efforts
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
Hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Lane Ellis, who is the CEO and founder of RL Systems. RL Systems specializes in providing innovative software solutions for businesses looking to streamline their operations and improve efficiency.
- [01:01]
Podcast Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO, health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over a hundred technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.com AWT that's a h r e f s.com.
- [02:18]
Jordan Cooney
AWT Today, Lane and I are going to discuss how fitness and endurance sports can enhance SEO efforts. Okay, here's my conversation with Lane Ellis, the CEO and founder of RL Systems. Lane, welcome to the Voices of Search podcast.
- [02:35]
Lane Ellis
Hey, thanks, Jordan. Wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me on the Voices of Search podcast.
- [02:40]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, absolutely. I'm pumped to have you on for a lot of different reasons, but I think most importantly, you know, you're someone who has a lot of history with endurance sports. Remarkably, I think you own the world record for the longest distance cross country ski. Correct me if I'm wrong on that.
- [03:00]
Lane Ellis
Well, it's the longest cross country ski streak, which is kind of similar, but a little different. And we'll get into that. Okay, yeah. And I want to talk about some of the ways that fitness and endurance sports can enhance search and SEO efforts. You might think, hey, how the heck can endurance sports help SEO? But we'll get into some ways that I think it can help.
- [03:29]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. I mean, first and foremost, I think for our listeners, it's great to know that there's an endurance sport athlete on this conversation. So you'll definitely give us some background on that. And for this topic, I think it's really interesting to to see the connection of what typically is our professional world and how fitness and sports can really help from either a personal perspective or even from a health perspective in what we do within SEO. I know that physical health has so much to do with your mental health, and it all really connects together. So, Lainey, maybe give us a little bit of background on your journey through kind of endurance in sports and how you've used that throughout your life.
- [04:19]
Lane Ellis
Yeah, you bet. Jordan. One thing I'll say too, is that as I've gotten older, this is my 41st year working in online communications. I started out when I was a mere child of 16. And things like endurance sports and other areas of our lives have become more important as I've gotten older. And they seep into professional work and offer just wonderful gifts that we can bring into our professional lives when we kind of let down some of those walls and start to learn from other areas of our lives, whether it's endurance sports or different hobbies, different passions we have outside of work. So let me tell you a little bit about where I started. I started back in 1984 when I was 16 years old, running a computer bulletin board system on my Commodore 64 computer. And that was kind of my beginning of search. Back in those days, we used to optimize our directory structures of how we had our files set up on the servers to make them as friendly for search as possible. It wasn't the web back then. It was just logging in one person at a time to a bbs. But still, when you have thousands of files like I used to on my BBS programs that people could download public domain programs, you need to break them down into, you know, back then it was kind of rudimentary structures of directories and that kind of was like the beginnings of how I started to think of search and also in FTP when we used to FTP into websites all around the world, or Internet sites, not websites, this is pre web. Those two had way more files than a single BBS like mine, and those had to be organized in ways that were helpful for search. And we'll get into that a little bit in our second topic today when we're going to look back at some of the. Some of the things we can learn from Roots. But to continue on here, I just want to mention from my BBs, I went into the computer world working for a company called Computer Discount. I sold Commodore Amiga computers. And then I, in 1988 worked for a company called Progressive Peripherals and Software, which was one of the biggest Amiga hardware and software companies at the time. And I have a lot of good memories from those days. There was an assembly line of computer parts being built in the back and I could smell soldering irons going. And my friend Jay Tompkins, who was the head engineer there, taught me how to solder and taught me all kinds of electrical engineering things that were quite foreign to me. I was more on the computer programming and marketing side of things. And those are really fond memories that I look back on. Then in 1990, I shut down my BBS. I kind of burned out on pre Web social media. I was posting hundreds and hundreds of comments and posts every day on my own BBS and other BBS's and kind of took over my life. I would work, you know, a long day at the office at Progressive Peripherals and Software, then come home and run the BBS through the night. And those were the days when I started to dream about computers. And computers weren't so popular, of course, as they are now. So in 1990 I shut down my BBS. Then after a brief pause, I got back into the computer world. And from the 90s up until the early 2000s, I worked at an ISP here in Duluth, Minnesota, and I met my wife Julie in the early 2000s. I became a professional genealogist for a couple years, kind of a career shift there, which is one of my passions, genealogy and family history. And then tech pulled me back in. In 2007-2017, I worked at Pubcon as the lead editor for the famous search firm Search Conference company run by my pal Brett Tabke, who used to call my bbs. And I wrote over a thousand articles for Search Engine World at pubcon and got to meet a lot of incredible keynote speakers like you over the years. Then from 2018 until last year, I worked at a company called Top Rank Marketing, covering marketing, search, writing about the tech industry, influencer marketing, mainly for B2B. And those are my, that's my history. And from there, during that time, I GUESS it was 1998 when I started running marathons.
- [09:35]
Jordan Cooney
So Lane, before, before we jump into the endurance and the sports side of that world, just looking at your, you know, let's call it, for lack of better terminology, your professional career or your corporate career, looking at that whole span and seeing, going from kind of the infancy of where tech and technology, from both the hardware as well as to where we are today, from kind of a software now and AI kind of revolution, seeing these episodes where technology has evolved and transcended. Looking back on that, what are some of the key learnings or key takeaways that you have for our listeners? A lot of our listeners aren't going to remember those early days in the 80s and 90s pre Internet world. But to a huge extent I fundamentally believe that there's a tremendous value in building community through these channels and communication communities. And I'm wondering just what your takeaways are from that 30 year history, 40 year history that you've gone through in all those experiences and relationships you've built throughout those years.
- [10:51]
Lane Ellis
Well, you use the word relationship and that's key. I think as we go through our careers, we build up our network of associates and friends and I think it all comes down to communication. That's why I like to say I have 41 years in online communications rather than purely marketing or purely search or SEO. One of the takeaways I have from it all is just the enduring power of the written word initially and then as bandwidth got greater, audio and then video. But it all is about communication and AI is an interesting element. I have a funny little AI story, if I may tell it.
- [11:39]
Jordan Cooney
Please. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [11:41]
Lane Ellis
So back on my Commodore 64, all the way back in like 1987, you may be familiar with a program called Eliza. It was one of the very first AI programs and the source code I believe was free. And the Commodore 64 had a version of it, which I had and I, it took the form of just chatting like, like we do today with, with our AI programs. But it was much, much, many magnitudes of order simpler. So I tried it out back then and I chatted with it a little bit about things in my life. Like at that time I think I was playing basketball a lot and I chatted with it about some music that I was listening to. And then I stopped using the program. I just was basically tried it out. I kept my disks for my Commodore 64, I still have them. I kept them protected throughout the decades and maybe around 2010 or so I dug them out. I set up a Commodore 64 and a Commodore 1541 disk drive and I transferred my disks to emulator files that could run on an emulator. And I was very worried, you know, are these old disks going to read? They're so ancient. They've traveled with me from state to state. I grew up in Colorado and now they're in Minnesota. Luckily they all pretty much transferred over, including this AI program, Eliza. And I was curious, you know, with AI, what's with AI advances throughout the years, I, I booted it up and it said, hi Lane, welcome back, how was your basketball session? And this is like 30 some years later.
- [13:36]
Jordan Cooney
That's crazy.
- [13:37]
Lane Ellis
And I, I said it was good. And then it like was talking, writing to me about some music that I used to listen to way back then and which I'd forgotten. And so it's interesting when you look at the roots of AI like that and some of the code that is, it was in Eliza, I think is fundamental to AI. It's certainly a small part of what we have today. But I guess that was a funny little story about AI.
- [14:07]
Jordan Cooney
Isn't that the interesting piece to all this? Right. All of this technology is really part of the enduring abilities that we have today with AI. Without these advancements, without the Internet, without the ability to fundamentally build strong forums and community based experiences, we wouldn't have what we have today in AI. Your forum based approach has evolved into what we now consider our wikis, whether they be investment ones like Investorpedia, healthcare ones like WebMD, or even just knowledge ones like what we traditionally think of in Wikipedia. All of these are a foundation back on how we built forums and community online 40 years ago. And now today the backbone of how AI is being leveraged is training off of all of these documents and all of these repositories. So fundamentally there's this enduring legacy of how the Internet and essentially online community or a tech based community has evolved over 40 years to have what we have today in AI, which is incredibly powerful to think about from just the pure technology advancements. I'm curious, Lane, how that connects though, to your story about endurance and sports. Where does this connection of what technology is built connect to that whole part of your personal aspect?
- [15:42]
Lane Ellis
Right, well, let's dig into that. So in 1998, I started running marathons and I didn't take a traditional approach. Usually you start off running a short distance, like a 5K, and work your way up to the marathon. I don't know if it's just the way my brain is wired or if it just happened to be that. There is a world class marathon here in Duluth, Minnesota, with the funny name of Grandma's Marathon. They have an old kind of a fake grandma who comes out and greets all the finishers.
- [16:16]
Jordan Cooney
No way.
- [16:17]
Lane Ellis
It's named after a restaurant here in Duluth. It's been going on over 25 years and started by my friend Scott Keenan. Anyway, it was 98 and I ran my first marathon. And since then I've run 11 marathons and ultramarathons. And I started wanting to challenge myself a bit more. One of the things I did, which is actually kind of apropos because today is a super cold day here in Duluth. It is about 17 degrees right now. It's warmed up. It was 25 degrees below zero overnight, which I love. I just love the cold. Jordan. And so one of the things I started to want to push myself into in endurance is to see how cold could I go out and run a 5K in. So in the 90s, it hit 27 degrees below zero in Duluth 1 day. I bundled up and went out and ran a 5K. It didn't feel much different than running at 20 below, which I'd done before. But I wrote it in my record book. And the next time a cold streak came around was quite a few years later before it got colder than 27 below here. But eventually there was a day where I was scoping out the coldest places in Minnesota to try to find a place where I could break my record. And it got down to 40 below. And this is without wind chill. This is actual air temperature. And I drove up, got up at like three in the morning so I could be at this spot in northern Minnesota at the absolute coldest time. I was by myself. I probably should have brought somebody with me. I didn't even have a backup battery in the car in case the car wouldn't start. And anyway, I ran at 40 below. And then from there it took probably another 10 years before it got colder than that. And in 2018, a magical day happened. It was New Year's Day. I again searched out the coldest spot and it was a 50 below spot. 50, 50 below zero.
- [18:39]
Jordan Cooney
Oh my goodness.
- [18:41]
Lane Ellis
And I ran 5k on a frozen lake up at Lake Kabetogama, pretty close to Canada. And that is my standing record. My dream is to someday run when Minnesota sets breaks its all time cold record which is 60 below. Oh my goodness from 1996. It was a couple years before I I started running. I do remember that day in 96 though. I, I slept outside in a snow Quincy which is like a big snow fort and yeah, it was about 30 below in Duluth then, but 60, 60 below up a little north of here. So that's a little bit about my one of how I kind of started to push myself and these efforts seeped into my, my professional life. I found that like a lot of people, the fitter I got and the more into endurance I got, the happier I was and the more energy I had for, for my professional life. And it's just like proceeded from there and it kind of ties into playing the long game in search where winning a single search battle is a long way from winning an SEO war. SEO is a marathon, it's not a sprint. And kind of to take that to the next level you can move it into the realm of the ultramarathon. And I think maybe we could talk about that a little bit.
- [20:12]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You could pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you could work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategyless project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information, go to Previsible IO. That's Pre Visible. P R E V I S I B L E I.
- [21:40]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, I mean there's a couple Things I have, I have a million questions, to be honest with you, Lane. I mean, a million questions. I mean, but one of them that I have to ask because I do think that it relates to our professional lives. There's a huge difference between training for a marathon and spending the grueling months to get your physical self in a place and your mental self in a place to complete a marathon. Right? Like, that's a process that millions upon millions of people have taken on. Whether it's through personal ambitions or other ambition to complete a marathon. Many people have gone through the stages of preparation to get ready for a marathon. But in your situation, this is really unique because the preparation has to always be present. You are literally identifying the coldest days out of the year or the coldest periods of time, full stop. And then saying, I'm going to go and I'm going to run a marathon in some of the most frigid conditions known to man. And so the preparation always has to be there. You can't just wake up and then say, oh, I'm going to go run a marathon now. You have to have spent the time before that January 1st or that, you know, sub 40 degrees temperature day.
- [23:03]
Lane Ellis
Right.
- [23:04]
Jordan Cooney
How did you do that? How did you encapsulate the ability to be ready at all time? Because there's no, there's no knowing when that day will come that you're going to get out and step. Step out and run, run that marathon.
- [23:19]
Lane Ellis
Right. When I have been heavily into running, I always kind of was able to look at my training. I put in the miles and I knew I could run a marathon pretty much any day. I would much more regularly run 20 miles or less. But just knowing that you put in the miles and trained for it is a pretty darn good feeling. I mean, injuries happen.
- [23:43]
Jordan Cooney
Sure.
- [23:44]
Lane Ellis
You have to know how to overcome injuries and when to rest and when to push on. And to be clear, my super cold runs are 5Ks, not marathons.
- [23:54]
Jordan Cooney
Okay.
- [23:55]
Lane Ellis
Okay.
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Jordan Cooney
Still, nonetheless, that's still amazing. I mean, I was just going to. My next question is, how do, how do you do that? Because isn't it harder to run in that kind of cold temperature? Like, that's just got to be ten times harder.
- [24:06]
Lane Ellis
Oh, yeah, it is. Honestly, with the way it feels to me, and this might just be me, but anything below 20 below feels about the same. And part of it, I think is just knowing how to dress. I always tell people starting out running in the winter, if, if you're not a little cold during the first five to 10 minutes of your run, you're overdressed. But these super cold runs are a little bit different because you're, I mean, you're. I'm putting on everything I have gloves upon gloves over gloves, running in big height, big high top hiking boots and goggles to protect the eyes. Because when you get to those temperatures, the eyelids have a tendency to freeze shut.
- [24:54]
Jordan Cooney
Oh, my goodness.
- [24:56]
Lane Ellis
Yeah.
- [24:57]
Jordan Cooney
That's unreal.
- [24:58]
Lane Ellis
There are some other similarities I wanted to touch on. Like to get into the nitty gritty of how it can affect search.
- [25:05]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, please.
- [25:06]
Lane Ellis
So we have our competition in search businesses. And knowing your competition and precisely when is the right time to push hard and differentiate yourself from your competition is an important lesson that I've personally learned from my years as a marathon runner and as a cross country skier, which we'll get into a little bit. But knowing your competition is a key element, whether it's in racing, who's in my age group. Also knowing your race course, knowing your particular niche market is kind of like knowing a particular race course, which can be crucial in deciding when and where to make your next big search moves. Just like in a race, when you want to start pushing on that particular hill up there.
- [25:58]
Jordan Cooney
Knowing when to push harder in business, it's tricky and it's always challenging. One of the things that I'm curious to get your perspective on considering your endurance sports and this connection of endurance sports and in your particular story is sometimes we overanalyze that in business, we spend so much time trying to crunch the numbers of when the time is right, how to push really hard, doing more research, identifying more topics to write about. We spend so much time trying to answer the problem through data. But candidly, sometimes it's just like there's kind of, I hate to say it this way, but this gut knowledge or gut knowing.
- [26:42]
Lane Ellis
Yeah.
- [26:42]
Jordan Cooney
And how does that connect to endurance sports and in the business world in terms of knowing when to push harder?
- [26:49]
Lane Ellis
Well, in marathon running, boy, there's a lot of similarities in overanalyzing your training and overanalyzing marketing or search. You do have to trust your gut at certain times. Like you say, a lot of it just comes from experience, from putting in the miles and putting in the races, knowing your competition also, you're going to hit tough patches and you have to know the difference between safely running through difficulties and also to know when not to run through pain and instead to take some downtime to rest, recover and heal. You know, whether it's in marketing or search or in a race, one Other thing is that I learned from endurance sports is the power of starting a streak. I learned this in running. Now, a streak can be like, the very best way to overcome some challenges and obstacles. If you know you're going to be out running or doing SEO every single day and you're going to face severe weather or big industry challenges will come up, you're bound to embrace them. When you're on a streak, you have to do it every day, and then you see them in context as necessary parts of the big picture. And I just find streaks beautiful, which is kind of what I went into next. After, you know, tackling my cold run endurance thing, I started looking at a streak. And I'd like to share a little bit about this crazy thing I did a few years back that turned out to be one of the highlights of my life. If I could, please.
- [28:33]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, no, dive into that. Tell us about this streak. Tell us about what this personal achievement is, and share with our listeners how this connects back to SEO and business.
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Lane Ellis
Right. Well, Jordan, it began as I tried to start pushing myself harder and harder into more extreme cross country skiing adventures. As I've gotten older, I've shifted more from running, which I still do and love, but to cross country skate skiing, where I get to use my arms. And here in Duluth, we have very long ski seasons. They are getting shorter due to climate change. But one thing that I started off with when I switched to cross country skiing was I wanted to see if I could join this kind of rare club of people who've skied 100 kilometers, which is 62 miles in one outing. And I was able to do that. It was over nine hours from sunrise to sundown of straight skiing. And that was a big accomplishment for me. And then I kind of had a period of, oh, gosh, what do I do now? And after that, this is when I started doing this crazy thing. I went out in, I think it was 2019, and I. I cross country skied like five days in a row, and I thought, I wonder if I could do two more days, maybe make a whole week straight of cross country skiing. So I did. And then I just kept going. And I kept going that season until the snow ran out, which was like in May or something. And I ended up hitting 100 days in a row and had a little celebration with my friends. When that happened, I never thought I'd hit 100 days in a row. And when that happened, I thought, I wonder what the longest streak in the world is? So I started doing some research on it. I started a Reddit thread and got input from people around the world and tried to research in newspapers and anywhere I could. Any noted streaks. And I noted a fellow in Norway named Tom Stensecker had skied 200 days in a row. Wow. Out of 365 day year in Norway, he skied 200 days in a row.
- [31:02]
Jordan Cooney
Unreal.
- [31:02]
Lane Ellis
And so that was a goal. I kept skiing that year and I skied. Ended up 142 days in a row. And then the snow ran out. Now in Duluth, we're lucky. We have a lot of great natural snow. But then we also have a downhill ski area, two of them actually, with, oh three, there's three downhill areas that have man made snow. So once the natural snow is melted, I moved over to that snow and even that Snow ended at 142 days. But that brings us to my record, which was on November 13, 2021. I started skiing with the very first snow we had just a little dusting, just enough to glide on the grass. And I documented it with photos and I think I did a live stream and hoping to be able to see how far I could get on the streak. Long story short is I ended up skiing 202 days in a row and breaking the record, setting a new world record, which went until June 2, 2022. And it changed my life. During that process, I did a bunch of live streams and it was a life changing event. I still feed off of that energy that I got from that in my daily work life and in my home life. It's something I'm just going to treasure. And I think we can all, even if we don't ski, you know, crazy amounts of distance or run marathons, whatever we're doing outside of our professional lives, we can bring it in and learn from it, the things that we really love and it's bound to enhance our professional lives.
- [32:58]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. And that's an amazing place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices Search podcast. A huge thank you to Lane Ellis from RL Systems for joining us in part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow. Lane and I are going to discuss building a better SEO future by learning its roots. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Lane, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or you can contact him on Bluesky, where his handle is anerls.
- [33:27]
Podcast Announcer
Okay, thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which will answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschab B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.