Jon Henshaw, the brilliant founder of Coywolf, is a driving force in the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape. With a wealth of experience and expertise, Jon has left an indelible mark on the industry.
As the Co-Founder and CMO of Raven Internet Marketing Tools, Jon has played a pivotal role in revolutionizing SEO, social media, and paid search strategies. His innovative thinking and strategic insights have propelled Raven Internet Marketing to new heights.
Prior to his success at Raven, Jon served as an Internet Strategist and Partner at Sitening, a renowned performance-based Internet marketing firm in Nashville, TN. During his time there, he honed his skills and deepened his understanding of the digital marketing landscape.
Before joining Sitening, Jon made significant contributions as an Interaction Designer at Visa in Denver, CO. His expertise in developing user-friendly web applications for Visa’s consumer and corporate customers showcased his exceptional talent and commitment to delivering top-notch digital experiences.
What truly drives Jon is the constant evolution of his industry. He thrives on the challenges and opportunities that arise as digital marketing continues to evolve. With each new development, Jon remains at the forefront, exploring innovative strategies and leveraging cutting-edge technologies to stay ahead of the curve.
Recent Shows with Jon Henshaw
Digital Marketing News Roundup with Jon HenshawNewsEvery time EDGE host Erin Sparks (Site Strategics CEO) and Creative Studio Producer Jacob Mann produce a new episode of the EDGE of the Web podcast, they also put together a bonus news segment about trending digital marketing headlines. The latest features special guest Jon Henshaw, founder of Coywolf, a site that publishes webmaster resources and digital marketing insights about SEO, social, content, productivity, and entrepreneurship. Here’s the news roundup from Episode 349 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast:
00:00:34
Yelp lays off 1,000 employees and furloughs 1,100 more
From Romain Dillet on TechCrunch we learn that Yelp lays off 1,000 employees and furloughs 1,100 more. Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman announced in an internal email that the company is going through difficult times. Yelp has to cut expenses, which means a large round of layoffs and some additional measures — 1,000 employees have been laid off. In addition to layoffs, another 1,100 employees are now on furlough. Those employees are considered on unpaid leave until further notice (with some exceptions) — they will receive two weeks of additional pay and retain their benefits.
Erin Sparks: That’s a workforce reduction of 17%, which feels like par for the course in this current crisis.
Jon Henshaw: This is a kind of domino effect I’m seeing not just with local businesses like restaurants, but also businesses related to events. A friend of mine in Nashville who is a senior-level software engineer at Eventbrite was just laid off because all event have been canceled, so there’s just no revenue coming in. This is especially surprising because you have to hang on to your developers to keep things running!
Erin Sparks: Right, and for Yelp, which is all about recommendations for local businesses, fewer eyeballs means shrinking ad revenue, so it makes sense. People just aren’t going out so they aren’t using Yelp’s service. But that’s kind of hopeful in a way because it’s a local reaction to local shutdown, not a failure of the whole financial system like in 2008.
Jon Henshaw: Yes, and the impacts on businesses vary widely by industry. Take Zoom, for example, which has obviously seen an incredibly huge growth in usage, but the local business scene is drowning. Google had announced its big changes to the Google Partner program and just said they’d put off implementation now until 2021. After all, you have to figure a lot of businesses think they can’t even afford paid ads right now. I’m surprised we haven’t storied about the impact of the crisis on Google’s revenues. It must be down a lot. At the core, Google is an ad company.
Erin Sparks: Plus they were getting so much backlash from people unhappy about those changes. That probably made it even easier to push back implementation.
00:07:14
SEO will be a primary focus for marketers during the downturn, says survey
According to Greg Sterling on Search Engine Land, SEO will be a primary focus for marketers during the downturn, says survey. Respondents said SEO was their top performing channel last year and is more likely to be maintained going forward. A new survey validates the importance of maintaining your SEO efforts through the coming downturn. The survey, by Conductor, had 317 respondents drawn from Conductor’s extended network across a range of industries, including B2B (24%), Retail (12%), Healthcare (11%), Media (10%) and others (travel and hospitality, consumer technology, financial services, insurance, automotive, e-commerce and manufacturing).
Erin Sparks: I was surprised to see how many respondents said their budgets were staying the same or only decreasing slightly and that only 20% said budgets were being decreased greatly, but 317 respondents is a pretty small pool of data too.
Jon Henshaw: If the data holds, then it really just illustrates the ongoing unfolding realization that investing in SEO works and has value. So many companies natural gravitate towards paid ads because they understand it more and see the immediate impact and track results. SEO is less visible in those ways.
Erin Sparks: Yes, SEO isn’t the shiniest piece of digital marketing execution, but it’s that constant support that raises the tide. The data reflect the permanence of SEO and the value of focusing on producing rich, authoritative content.
00:13:26
Google Launches a Series of Blog Posts Highlighting the Value of SEO
On Search Engine Journal, Matt Southern reports Google Launches a Series of Blog Posts Highlighting the Value of SEO. Google has published the first in what will be a series of blog posts dedicated to SEO case studies. The aim of this series is to share success stories that demonstrate the value of SEO. Google says the intended audience for these case studies are people who may need some extra convincing that SEO is a good investment.
Erin Sparks: Case studies that show the value of SEO. Great news for SEOs, right?
Jon Henshaw: This is the most bizarre thing. You’ve got an ad company (Google) who must be taking a hit from people not buying as many ads during the pandemic, and who has recently made ads look as much like organic results as possible, layered onto the ongoing antagonistic symbiotic “frenemy” relationship between SEOs who constantly find ways to game the system and Google that then has to find ways to improve its algorithms to thwart those tactics, and now a series of blog articles from Google singing the praises of SEO within the context of antagonism between Google and SEO. It’s just bizarre. And then it gets even murkier when you think about who is being featured in the case studies and what SEO services where purchased/used. How were they selected? Is this some kind of tacit approval or suggestion in the SEO marketplace? Is that even fair? It seems very problematic in that way.
Erin Sparks: Yes, it does seem bizarre when you look at it from those angles. These are strange times indeed.
Jon Henshaw: And one other angle to consider is that in part, if SEO is about creating good content, then that’s good for Google maintaining and growing its user base because there’s more good content for Google to search and index. That’s the more positive take on the symbiotic relationship between Google and SEO and why they would want to promote good SEO.
Connect with Jon Henshaw and Coywolf
Twitter: @henshaw (https://twitter.com/henshaw)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonhenshaw
Mastodon: @Jon (https://henshaw.social/@jon)
Website: https://coywolf.pro
Coywolf blog: https://coywolf.blog
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April 10, 2020- EP 349: Stop Marketing in a Crisis? with Jon HenshawpodcastNearly 17 million have filed for unemployment in the past three weeks. The economy has come to an abrupt hard stop. What should digital marketing professionals focus on during an unprecedented crisis like the one we’re now experiencing? This week’s featured guest Jon Henshaw, Founder of Coywolf, has been in the SEO space for a long time now! He joins the show to share his knowledge of what digital marketers should be doing to help their clients during this time.
A few questions we get answered by Jon:
Should I continue advertising during a crisis?
Statistics with social media during COVID19
eCommerce sites statistics
What tactics should I be focusing on during this time?
During an economic downturn, you will find you have less competition
Consumer behavior trends during a crisis? [...]
April 10, 2020
- How to Improve WordPress Site Speed with Jon HenshawInterviewIf you love all those plugins you can use to beef up your WordPress website, you run the risk of slowing your site down enough to have serious negative impacts, not only in terms of visitors who quickly leave your site out of frustration, but also in terms of your SEO results. EDGE hosts Erin Sparks (Site Strategics CEO) and Tom Brodbeck (Site Strategics Digital Media Director) talked to Jon Henshaw, founder of Coywolf, in EDGE of the Web Episode 297 to find out how to improve WordPress site speed.
Tips, Tricks and Strategies on How To Improve WordPress Site Speed
In the digital world of the twenty-first century, you site needs to load in a matter of a few seconds or you’ll be losing visitors. Keeping in mind that Jon has done a phenomenal amount of research, experimentation and testing of a huge variety of factors that can affect site speed as it relates to SEO, here’s his advice to WordPress users:
: Google has done a great thing with this tool. It’s available as an extension in Chrome and is a great place to start for finding out what you’re up against. Run Lighthouse against your site and it will give you a very comprehensive view of everything from performance to accessibility to SEO. It’s an instant roadmap of what you should start worrying about and consider changing on your site.
: Just say “no” to off-the-shelf themes. People hate to hear this because they love these themes and the cool things they do, but they kill whatever SEO advantage you could get from Google for having a fast site. Right out of the gate, most of those themes require a bunch of plugins. They’re using a large JavaScript library or they’re going to be using jQuery and other things you don’t really need to create those eye-candy features that are completely unnecessary. Then, if you can’t resist a bunch of other plugins for things you want in terms of this or that calendar or security feature or whatever, this is how you end up with 20-40 plugins that totally negate the site speed SEO advantages you need.
Get Help: If you do the wise thing and avoid an off-the-shelf theme but don’t know how to code a site yourself, then you’ve got to find someone who not only understands how to code, but who also understands this critical connection between site speed and SEO results. And you’d be surprised how few and far between those people are. In other words, don’t get someone to code your site who ends up still falling prey to all those bells and whistles that slow it down.
: But the good news is that there are bare-bones themes out there you can use that get the job done without killing your SEO right out of the gates with a bunch of unnecessary plugins. Because here’s the thing about those plugins: even if they’re only used on certain pages, all their libraries and such are probably on every one of your pages, including your home page, and so all those libraries for all those plugins have to load on every page even though the plugin might not be used on any given page.
: Focus on what many call the “above-the-fold” area or “first meaningful paint” – the first part of your site that visitors are going to see – the top of the home page. That absolutely has to load with lightning speed, so you have to look for anything that might qualify as “render-blocking code” that slows that loading down. Then you can get smart and find some things that can be pushed below the fold so they load after the fact without getting in the way of what you need to load first and fast.
: After you’ve trimmed out as much as you can, if you find you still have quite a few plugins slowing down you site, then you should make sure that what you have is delivered as efficiently and effectively as possible. This involves three things: 1) Make sure you have an excellent hosting provider with a great caching system, like WP Engine (just ping your domain to see how many milliseconds it takes for it to come back, which can tell you right there if you have a crap hosting provider); 2) Use the WP Rocket caching system. It’s not free but it’s worth every penny in terms of an easy-to-use way to get instant speed improvements for your site; 3) Use a good content delivery system like Cloudflare, which is really good at compressing and optimizing your content for rapid delivery to end users. Image optimization is a big one that affects site speed, and Cloudflare will actually optimize each image for each end-user’s device to deliver it as quickly as possible.
As you make choices about these various items, you also have to be aware of whether or not they will play well with other elements. For example, when choosing a web hosting provider, you want to make sure it can handle using things like WP Rocket or Cloudflare if you want to use those tools (and you really should be using those kinds of tools), because not every provider is going to work well with those tools.
Connect with Jon Henshaw at Coywolf
A coywolf is an actual animal, a coyote-wolf hybrid that is the epitome of adapting to an ever-changing environment, and nowhere is that needed more than in digital marketing. Coywolf is about providing information and place to discuss it that is related to digital marketing. It’s a platform where you can have much higher-quality conversations about these topics than you would have in the larger forums and social media platforms. And be sure to check out the Coywolf Digital Marketing Podcast.
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January 29, 2019
- EP 297: How to Improve Site Speed on WordPress w/Jon HenshawpodcastWordPress has become one of the most popular content management systems as it is running over 28% of the web. And to their credit, it is easy to use has lots of great tools you can add that make your website even powerful.
But a lot of companies and developers can add so much code to your website that it is slowing down your website and frustrating your users and hurting your SEO.
Jon Henshaw, the founder of Coywolf and the Senior SEO Analyst with CBS Interactive, is a big proponent of WordPress and improving your speed on your website.
Join our conversation with Jon as we deep dive into plugins, code, and WordPress!
All this and more, today on the EDGE!
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January 15, 2019
