There are also many facets to SEO as well. And it’s important to know what those facets are. We have keyword, research, metadata and a Variety of other things Today we’re going to be focusing strictly On metadata, But I wanted to include keyword research because It’S extremely important not to start filling out your metadata before you’ve executed a Really well thought-out and well-researched keyword, research campaign And we can talk all about that at The Net.
Impact, We know a lot about keyword, research and we Can definitely help you with that as well, But today, let’s dive into metadata Metadata consists of keywords that you list On your page, your page’s description headings, alt text for images and title tags for your Page Now, it’s important to know that all this Metadata is behind the scenes. If you’re looking at a web page, you will Not see any of this metadata actually rendered on the page that the consumer, or that your Web visitor sees It’s all in the background and it’s all for The search engines, So, first of all keywords, Keywords are very important to metadata.
You want to make sure that after you do your Keyword, research you’re applying the best keywords that are focused to your page, not Too broad not too overly specific, and you wan na make sure that you use a lot of those To attract visitors to your page, So two things to remember about keywords: Are that they areโฆyou have an unlimited number of space, but don’t abuse it and you Want them to be focused to your content.
Next is the description. The description is, what will actually show Up in your Search Results Snippet as Google calls it. So the description is your search result. You got the search right here and you’ve got The listing one-two-three listing This is your snippet. Now it used to be that the descriptions would Show up exactly as you had entered them into the snippet, but now Google will pull from A lot of different areas to create that snippet.
So if you have a really well-written description, A lot of that description should show up in the snippet Headings, You’ll see headings in your source code, One of the things that a lot of people do For search engine, optimization is they’ll check, source code And all you have to do to check source code. Is CTRL+click or right click on the page and you have the option to view source code And you can see all of the code.
That’S behind! Your website, which includes the metadata So headings, will be listed in your source. Code as H1 H2 H3 – And these are all really important because They basically tell Google what the hierarchy of your content is. An H1 is more important than an H2 is more Important than an H3 – And you know a lot of times – they’re headings – They’Re bolded, so they show how your content is organized on your website.
We also have alt text for images. This one is…, There’s a little debate about how to do. Alt. Text I know even among the team here we might Have a little disagreement about what exactly alt text should be, But let’s say you’ve got a picture right here. And we’re going to you knowโฆ, Don’t judge my art skills, but we have a tree. With a sun rise in the background, Well, typically, alt text is supposed to describe Exactly what that image is, So it’s basically describing the image it’s Not giving any additional information about it, So you have.
.., The alt text would be. You know Tree at Sunrise Now, a lot of times there’s a deeper meaning. To that image than just what it shows in the physical sense, And so there’s also another metadata field, That you can add to an image, it’s the long description field And in the long description field you can Provide more info about that picture, So maybe this is a tree at sunrise, right, Before a rainbow appeared over the Grand Canyon, That would be where you can add content that Would maybe connect that image specifically to the content on your page Title tags? This is a big one.
A lot of the search engines will use different Lengths of title tags, but you wan na keep your title between 60 to 70 characters And you might wan na do a little research on These There’s a lot of speculation that title tags: Are changing that Google is changing, how they create title tags for pages? Typically, title tags were given a lot of Weight in search engine rankings and they were used to basically determine the content.
Of the page, But now there’s evidence that Google was Possibly creating title tags with additional information from H1s and descriptions And they may be updating title tags or adding Title tags where there were no title tags before So there’s a lot of discussion going on in The SEO community about that right now And you know some companies will create Title tags for their pages and they’ll render exactly as they listed them, and other companies Will create title tags and they’ll show up slightly different than how they have them.
On the page or even completely different, So that’s sort of a controversial item. Right now, but just keep your eyes open to see how that discussion progresses. What else is there? We have basically, all of your main metadata Listed out right here, but what else can influence your SEO? Well because of how Google is now creating New snippets, it’s increasingly important to make sure that you have good content on Your page and make sure that you have a great website information architecture.
So basically, what that means is when someone Visits your page make sure that it’s really easy to find the content that they’re looking For your navigation is very intuitive, And a lot of that comes through a wire-framing Process – and we do a lot of that work here at The Net Impact. Other things you might look at are ADA compliance. For those with disabilities, who might be looking at your website, I think part of that is having your alt tags.
Filled out, but there’s also a lot more that goes into ADA compliance as well. You wan na make sure that you are minimizing Your validation errors as well. So if you have a 404 error page not found You wan na make sure that you’re going through and checking your website and that all of Your links lead to a good page and that everything is well connected on your website. Finally, your URL, That’s probably one of the hardest things To change because you have to register a new domain But make sure that when you’re starting a Webpage or if you’re redoing a website and you can potentially change the URL, make sure That your URL still fits exactly what you want for your content and that your URL In and of itself will be intuitive to people who wan na know exactly what to expect to find On your website, That’s about it for our discussion of search Engine optimization, If you need any additional assistance with Search engine optimization or search engine marketing, please contact The Net Impact, We’ll be happy to help.
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Just take a look at it from your perspective. What do you do when you want to find something on the Internet? You search for it right and then you click on one of the links on the first page of the search results. In fact, more than 90 % visitors will behave exactly the same way ever wonder how those web pages at the top of your search results got there it’s, because they were search engine optimized, exactly how search engines.
Work is a closely guarded secret, but the main principles are known: they’re based on two main factors: keywords and links. Let’S focus on keywords: first, your chances for a better ranking grow when your website contains the same words that are being searched. Keywords are especially effective when they’re found in a website title address or headings, but careful quality over quantity should be your rule of thumb.
Some so-called SEO experts try to fool the search engines with some ridiculous keyword occurrence, instead of focusing on quality content first and how about the links websites that link to yours basically tell search engines that you have some good stuff there, but again quality over quantity links From irrelevant sites won’t help you get a better rank. What we’ve just talked about provides a basic introduction to SEO.
In reality, it’s not a simple task and you’ll definitely need someone to help you with it. Someone like us will develop a custom SEO strategy specifically for your business, identify the right keywords, right, friendly site code and figure out the best linking tactics but, most importantly, we’ll help. You find ways to provide high quality content for your visitors and search engines as well. So do not hesitate and contact us today.
You
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I get annoyed quite easily at bad data visualizations. I think it’s incredibly important to get it right to make sure using the right chart to make sure you format it correctly. You focus the attention right away. You remove all clutter so a lot of things going to building a good, visual and there’s a lot of things to consider.
What is the question that your audience might ask? Quad is the main message that you want the audience to take away when looking at your chart. So there’s a lot of things to to consider in order to make sure you build a good, visual and there’s already a ton of resources online. They talk about how important is the use of color the choice of the way you present your dashboard, the orientation of the dashboard, so a lot of a lot of things come come into play to build a good visual.
So I wanted to do a series of articles to kind of share my experience and give some ideas of how I like to address. Visualization and I am using real, live web performance website performance data and something that comes quite often in my line of work and something that I work with on a daily basis. So one of the things what you see in here is attend for website traffic. So really basic piece of data that actually can tell a lot about how the website is performing.
This is something that I do all the time. Usually I do looking at a period of 13 months or looking kind of year-over-year stacking of this role so for this example, I’m looking at a very simple wine chart that visualizes sessions through a website for a period of 13 months. So we can look at the beginning at the end of the of the line chart to compare year over year results, so this is built in Excel a fairly basic these days tool for data visualizations visualization, considering all the fancy tools that are available now.
I still think it’s great for building beautiful charts. So when you select data, this is, and you insert the line chart this is here. This example is how Excel is going to insert it. So this is the default, and this on the right is how I’ve worked around it. To make sure that I tell the story I want to tell with this and while this first example still shows a good upward trend for website traffic, there’s a lot of things that are cluttered so first, I always try to make sure I don’t make the audience Tilt their head so kind of aligning the horizontal axis so that it really aligns well – and it’s not tilted.
I’Ve included data labels on each data point which in this case is each month and when I include date, the labels. I always delete the vertical axis because I think it becomes really cluttered when we have two points of the same data I remove gridlines. I think they do add clutter in certain cases. They might be useful in this case. However, I think they would just add additional things to look at in this trap.
I always try to include a take away title and I’ve put a few annotations, so this is the one thing I really like about wine charts is that you can include annotations point to certain data points that are important and that you want the audience to look At immediately when they look at the chart, so this is really basic example of a line chart showing overall traffic to website. Another example that I see often is a line chart built for multiple categories.
If you want to look over time – as in this example right here, so I’m going to remove this to see the table with the data we’re looking again and website traffic by social media, and we want to compare how the traffic is, how these metrics are performing. Against each other, one thing I’ll be really careful is to not include more than three categories with the wine charts over the you know, chart that has more than three lines would become really cluttered tangled, and it would really be very hard to process.
So that’s why I’ve chosen an example with only three metrics in my second article next week. I will talk more about how you can handle data, where you have a lot more categories that you want to look at over time with the line chart. So this example here is what Excel inserts by default, and this is something that I’ve tried to rework. So I haven’t added a title here. This is something that you can consider depending again on what you want to tell with this data.
I have decided to use the axis rather than data labels, because with a few lines between each other, it will be hard to be certain numbers. So I have chosen to clean that and use an access and in terms of legend, I have put all this. The names of each social network, social media network at the end, so it’s very easy when someone’s looking at it to see the performance and not kind of look at the line, then look at the legend to make sure they’re looking at the right color.
So in this way it just makes it easier to follow the trend for each of the categories that you’re comparing. You can obviously be a little bit more careful with color and choose different colors. You might want to point a specific one with color, so what I think the takeaway here is from what I’m seeing is Facebook performing really well going up for the past 13 months, while the other social networks have experienced the dip.
So, in this case, you might want to analyze, what’s happened and what has changed in terms of compete are getting on those two social media networks. The other chart that I use a lot – and it comes very often handy and it’s probably my favorite chart – is bar charts and column charts. So here in this example, I have a single category bar chart. I’M going to move a little bit this, so I have two sets of data here that I want to talk about a little bit so in this first one we’re looking at users to the website for each day of the week summarized for the month, and in This case, I would rather have the data sorted by the way the category flows so the way the week goes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on, rather than sort by the number of users.
So there are a few use cases like that. You might want to look at hour of day again sorted by the progression of the hours or maybe age group again, this may go in a progression, so be careful what your data and how its structured and how you want to sort it. So in this example, I’m sorting by the category the way the days of the week flow in the second example, which is this chart right here – we’re looking at users to the website by social network and since social networks don’t go in a certain order.
I’Ve sorted this data by the number of users April to the website, so this is what Excel inserts by default when you click to insert column chart, rather in this case vertical bars – and this is what I’ve done with it. Using some formatting I’ve included a take away title I’ve chosen to highlight the day. That’S brought the most users to the website. You might not necessarily want to do that, but depending again on what you want to see with the chart, this could be a good idea to choose a highlighting color for the best performing or the worst performing category.
So the second example we looking at users by social media, so this here is what Excel inserts by default. When you choose a horizontal bar turn slightly first, the metrics – I haven’t highlighted them in this case, just because they are sorted already by the doc performing social media network again, depending on what you doing, and what do you want your report ones to focus on? You? Might want to choose to highlight the top one and I’ve included a takeaway title, so I’ve used a few that I’ve removed this axis so really trying to clean the charts to make sure it.
It looks good and is kind of right to the point. So other circumstances using a bar chart is, if you have multiple categories so like in these examples here and again I have by week and by marketing blog. The data by we looking at the day of the week is sorted by the way. The days go for marketing blogs, we’re looking at the top performing one altogether, so we are looking at blog subscriptions and use like the subscriptions on the website, and with this with the blog ones, I’ve included a total column where I’ve summed all the both of these Metrics so that I can sort by the one that performs best overall, not by a particular conversion type.
So let’s look at this day of the week. This is how Excel inserts it by default. This is what I have tried to do with with this chart. So I’ve chosen a color. There is software, for you know, kind of is the same color, it’s just different intensity. Just so it’s kind of I I think it looks better. I don’t want, otherwise it becomes really distracting when it’s bar charts and you kept to come. Look at two bar charts at a time for the same category and I’ve decided to keep the ledge and there’s a few things you can do depending on how long the names of those metrics are.
You might include them here at the beginning and get rid of get rid of the legend so that it’s again removing an export, an extra clutter, so here it in the bottom example, where we’re looking at those same conversions by blog. This is how Excel will inserted by default. Again, I have put their categories in the first order, and I decided to use a stacked bar chart and I think, with horizontal charts, horizontal bar charts, gaghe bars can actually look really good, especially if you only have two categories.
If you have more than two, it can become a little too colorful. Depending on how you keep you know, there’s ways you can look at formatting of those colors and choosing columns wisely. I have a article about that also coming up, so I’m going to talk more about how you can visualize with stacked bars, so in this again kind of the same concept and what I forgot to do here, I’m going to do it right now is to point Which color is what conversion so I’m going to use a text box I’m going to choose, although it’s sitting on top of it, I will still try and use the same color as the bar.
The color of the bar yes, and I’m going to can choose the colour of the border and hold it in this case. You can go all the way down and include these on top of each one kind of again, depending really on how you want to build your visual. I think I’m going to leave it like that. I think that’s pretty straightforward and easy to understand what we’re talking about for the rest of the chart, so I’m going to leave those right here and only appearing at the top.
So I hope this was useful and gave you some good ideas on how to approach data visualization for this. These two basic chart types that I find myself using very very often, and they come really handy when you load in a digital marketing, company, dashboard or website performance dashboard. I have a few articles coming up that I’m going to talk about more about the stag bar charts and how you can approach this.
If you have multiple categories more than two, how you can visualize how you know how you can avoid? Rather, a line chart that uses more than three categories so that you can avoid the tangling in the clutter of so many chart, charts and lines. Sorry whines. Well, I hope this was useful and thank you for reading and also join me. The next few weeks as I’ll, be publishing more articles on how you can tell a story with data using Excel.
Optimization some SEO seems like black magic. Having worked with Google search for over a decade, what I’ve learned is that, first, it’s not black magic and second, if you want long-term success, there aren’t any quick magical tricks that an SEO will provide so that your site ranks number one.
It’S important to note that an SEO potential is only as high as the quality of your business or website so successful SEO helps your website put your best foot forward so that it ranks appropriately in the spot, where an unbiased potential customer would expect your site to Be seen a successful SEO also looks to improve the entire searcher experience from search results to clicking on your website and potentially converting a good SEO will recommend best practices for a search friendly site from basic things like descriptive, page titles for a blog or small business.
To more complex things like language markup for a multilingual global site SEO is ensure that you’re serving your online customers a good experience, especially those coming from a search engine, and that your site is helpful, whether they’re using a desktop computer or mobile phone. In most cases, the SEO will need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit.
My strongest advice when working with an SEO is to request if they corroborate their recommendation with a documented statement from Google, either in a Help Center article, article or Google, a response in a forum that supports both one the SEO description of the issue. That needs to be improved to help with ranking and to the approach they prescribed to accomplishing this tasks. Requesting these two bits of information will help prevent hiring a poor SEO who might otherwise convince you to do useless things like add more words to the keyword, meta tag or by links, because if you search for google advice on this topic, you’d see blog posts and Articles from us that clearly explain that adding keywords to the meta tag wouldn’t help.
Furthermore, while google uses links for page rank, our documentation highlights that we strongly advise against the approach of buying links for the purpose of increasing page rank. One basic rule is that, in a majority of cases, doing what’s good for SEO is also doing what’s good for your online customers. Things like having a mobile-friendly website, good navigation and building a great brand. Additionally, if you’re a more established brand with complicated legacy systems, then good search, friendly best practices likely involved, paying off some of your site’s technical debt, such as updating your infrastructure, so that your website is agile and able to implement features faster in the long term.
If you own a small local business, you can probably do the initial work yourself check out our 30-minute article series on how to build an online presence for your local business. Now, if you still believe you want to hire an SEO, here’s a general process, one conduct a two way interview with your potential SEO check that they seem generally interested in you and your business to check their references.
Three act: four and you’ll probably have to pay for a technical and search audit 4. Decide if you want to hire, let’s break this down and start with step 1 conduct. A two-way interview in the interview here are some things: to look for. A good SEO. Doesn’T focus only on search engine ranking, but how they can help your business, so they should ask questions like what makes your business content and/or service, unique and therefore valuable to customers.
They want to know this information to make sure it’s highlighted on your website. For your current and potential new audience, what does your common customer look like and how do they currently find your website 3? How does your business make money and how can search help for what other blogs are you using offline advertising social networks 5? Who are your competitors? What do they do well online and potentially offline if the SEO doesn’t seem interested in learning about your business from a holistic standpoint, look elsewhere, it’s difficult to do good SEO without knowing about a business’s goals, their customers and other existing marketing efforts.
Seo should complement your existing work. The second step in hiring an SEO is to check references if your potential SEO provides prior clients be sure to check their references. You want to hear from past clients that the SEO was able to provide useful guidance and worked effectively with their developers, designers, UX researchers and our marketers. A good SEO should feel like someone you can work with learn from experiment with and who generally cares about you and your business, not just getting your site the highest rank as ultimately those techniques rarely last long if they work at all, they’ll want to educate you And your staff on how search engines work so that SEO becomes part of your general business operations.
Step 3 is to request a technical and search audit. If you trust your SEO, candidate, give them restricted view, not full or right access to your Google search console data, and even your analytics data before they actually modify anything on your website have them conduct a technical and search audit. To give you a prioritized list of what they think should be improved for SEO, if you’re a larger business, you can hire multiple SEO to run audits and prioritize improvements, see what each has to say and then determine who you could work with the best in the Audit the SEO should prioritize improvements with a structure like one the issue to the suggested improvement 3: an estimate on the overall investment, in other words the time energy or money.
It would take for your developers to implement the improvement and for Google search as well as searchers and customers to recognize the improvement. The SEO will need to talk with your developers to better understand what technical constraints may exist for the estimated positive business impact. The impact might be a ranking improvement that will lead to more visitors and conversions, or perhaps the positive impact comes from a back-end change that cleans up your site and helps your brand be more agile in the future.
Five, a plan of how to iterate and improve on the implementation, or perhaps how to experiment and fail fast, should the results not meet expectations that covers the structure of the technical and search audit. Now, let’s talk about each of these audits individually in the technical audit, your SEO should be able to review your site for issues related to internal, linking crawl ability, URL parameters, server connectivity and response codes, to name some if they mention that your site has duplicate content Problems that need to be corrected make sure they show you the specific URLs that are competing for the same query or that they explained it should be cleaned up for long term site health, not initial growth.
I mention this because lots of duplicate content exists on web sites and often it’s not a pressing problem in this search audit. Your potential SEO will likely break down your search. Queries into categories like branded and unbranded terms. Branded terms are those with your business or website‘s. Name like a search for Gmail is a branded term, while the search for email is an unbranded or general keyword.
An SEO should make sure that for branded queries such as Gmail, your website is providing a great experience that allows customers who know your brand or website to easily find exactly what they need and potentially convert. They might recommend improvements that help the entire searcher experience from what the searcher sees in search results to when they click on a result and use your website for unbranded queries.
An SEO can help you better make sense of the online competitive landscape. They can tell you things like here are the types of queries. It would make sense for your business to rank, but here’s what your competition is done and why I think they rank where they do. For instance, perhaps your competition has great reviews, really shareable content, or they run a highly reputable site. An SEO will provide recommendations for how to improve rankings for these queries and the entire searcher experience.
They’Ll introduce ideas like update, obsolete content. They might say your site is suffering because some of your well ranking content is obsolete. Has poor navigation a useless page title or isn’t mobile-friendly, let’s improve these pages and see if more website visitors convert and purchase or if they can micro convert, meaning that perhaps they subscribe or share content improve internal linking your SEO might say your site is suffering because Some of your best articles are too far from the homepage, and users would have a hard time finding it.
We can better internally link to your content to feature it more prominently, generate buzz. The SEO might say you have great content, but not enough people know we can try to get more user interaction and generate buzz, perhaps through social media or business relationships. This will help us attract more potential customers and perhaps garner natural links to your site. Learn from the competition your SEO might explain here’s what your competitors do well.
Can you reach parity with this and potentially surpass them in utilities? Or can you better show customers your business’s, unique value again, a good SEO will try to prioritize what ideas can bring your business, the most improvement for the least investment and what improvements may take more time, but help growth in the long term. Once they talk with you and other members of your team, such as developers or marketers, they’ll help your business forge a path ahead.
The last thing I want to mention is that when I talk with SEO s, one of the biggest holdups to improving away site, isn’t there recommendation, but it’s the business making time to implement their ideas if you’re not ready to commit to making SEO improvements. While getting an SEO, audit may be helpful, make sure that your entire organization is on board else. Your SEO improvements may be non-existent, regardless of who you hire so that wraps it up thanks for reading and best of luck to you and your business
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It’S a search engine, optimization service and you’ll, be explaining what that’s all about thanks for joining us Chris. You bet thanks for having me on today. Well, for the sake of brevity here. Let’S go ahead and refer to search engine optimization by its industry, shorthand initials SEO that stands for search engine optimization Chris.
Just what is SEO and why is it important to online marketing? Well, SEO is a track of skills that helps a website be found and what’s happened is the internet is put the power into people’s hands the consumers hands. While traditional media marketing has always pushed the messaging at people, the internet really asked people to pull it from them. So most online sessions include querying a search engine and that event is the marketers opportunity to be present on the search result without applying SEO to a site.
It won’t be present for the search results. So it’s a very important aspect of having a website today. In kind of a new twist on the old saying that, if you build it, they they will come, but really if they can’t find you that they’re not going to come at all. Are they exactly so you better build it right? Well, who needs SEO and what sorts of companies are you working with? Are they large companies small companies? Well, we deal with all sizes’um state associations, visitor centers for States and things like that, and then we have a lot of mom pop businesses for sure.
A lot of our business has sprung out of my past life, which was marketing in the hospitality industry, and so that kind of gave us an ability to leverage ourselves into the search engine, optimization business. But basically, unless a website is designed just to be shown when someone – and it is asked about it – in other words, if if a business owner was asked, do you have a website and he gave somebody in a dress that would send somebody to that website.
But if that’s all, you ever do with your websites and that’s all you ever have to do, but as we know what we’re really trying to do with websites to get our message out to new people, people who’ve never heard of us. So in that aspect everybody needs SEO, because really, if you don’t optimize your site for search engines, how is anybody going to find you out there? It’S really quite a revolution in the marketing model? Isn’T it we’re now just for the cost of getting a host, which quite often is free and putting up some creative content and getting yourself well placed in a search engine? The small guy is on equal footing with the big guys.
Aren’T they to some degree? Absolutely. I mean for a hundred years, marketing and advertising was about shouting about who we were and hoping that people would take notice of us, and now we basically sit in a library waiting for someone to find us so very, very different methods. So you can succeed simply by being clever these days very much so then there still is room for four people with great ideas and not a pocket full of cash for sure.
Well, what are some of the general principles of SEO? Where does it all start? Well, in one word Steven, it’s definitely relevant. All items on your page have to be congruent with each other, and this is a lot of what people miss, because it’s so simple and what I try to have people understand is a search. Engine is just a computer application. If you will all it seizes pluses and minuses, and so it has to be able to add something up from all of that and come up with an answer, so you have to give them the answers.
Who are you? What do you do? Why do you do it? When do you do it, and where do you do it? If you don’t answer those age-old questions of marketing, then there’s no way for the search engines really to be able to compile that information and index you correctly into their collection of literally hundreds of millions of websites well and they’re, pretty clever at that, aren’t they. I know they have certain algorithms, that these search engines use, and quite often their top secret, that Google algorithm, and sometimes it seems that people are focusing on trying to chase the algorithm rather than simply starting with the fundamentals that you talk about is who are you Targeting and and what value, what content are you going to provide? Well you’ve got that right if you’re, an expert on safe flying pigs, but your site talks about the birds and the bees.
You’Ll fall short of your goals. To be sure, I want to quickly do a Google search on flying pigs. I imagine there’s probably a website specializing in yet how about some of the specific fundamental steps that you take when you’re, providing your your search, optimization service, one or three or four fundamental steps that you offer well given the opportunity to get involved with the client early On in their process of either creating or redesigning a website, there’s a lot of things we can do before.
Even one piece of code has been written, it’s so important, especially these days that a site be built. What we called search engine friendly and what I mean when I say search engine friendly, is that a computer application such as a search engine is able to do some things, but it’s not able to do other things. So if you build a website that makes it hard for the search engine to traverse across all of your pages and your navigation and your links, then it’s not going to find all of your information.
So we get in right at the beginning with the web designers and make sure that the site is being built search. Engine friendly, for example, fret using frames, might not necessarily be a friendly thing to do absolutely frames. Overuse of flash there’s there’s a number of pitfalls to be sure, there’s literally dozens of types of code that will display a web page, but not all of them will will allow a search engine to read it.
So all these great bells and whistles might be good for holding somebody once they get there, but isn’t necessarily going to work to attract them in the first place. Exactly I mean if we’re not on the first page of Google, for what it is, we’re we’re offering our chances of being found, at least through search or slim, to none yeah. I’Ve heard quite often in studies, you may get millions of returns, but if you’re not in the top 10 or the top 20, you might as well not even be there or what? If you optimize yourself for something, you think would bring you a lot of traffic, but it’s completely irrelevant.
You find yourself getting a thousand visitors a day who have no interest in what it issue offer. People do that at more and then you would believe. After after we have a search engine friendly site design, the most important thing that can be done on the page on each page of the website is make sure that correct titles and meta descriptions are used that match the content of the site. It has to be targeted at specific search phrases that have been proven through research that you’ve done to be the way that people actually search for what it is you offer we can’t just assume.
We know how people search we have to go out and do the research as to how they actually perform the searches that they do that bring up the web sites that they’re. Looking for now. My toe tags may sound like a fairly complicated concept to people who aren’t used to actually web design web development, but it seems to me it’s one of the simplest things to do for most effective return on your efforts ago with search engines.
It’S very simple, very obvious: there are a few rules and most people completely forget about it by the time they get to that part of their web design. They’Ve spent so much time and effort coming up with good graphics and writing whatever their their information is the simplest things get missed and that’s where the opportunity lies for people who are paying attention for sure, which is all for naught if it’s not optimized, for the Searches well – and you know finally, an interesting thing about websites.
Is there never finished? So you know the final of three fundamentals that that I list for people is that always be considering that you have never-ending improvement in growth of what was originally unique content that you wrote, in other words, don’t go and steal a bunch of content from someone else And expect to do very well for the search, especially if you never go on to go back to that page and work it over even more.
So you want to think of yourself as being a contributor to the web and not just adding more noise to all of that. That’S out there it’s a never-ending process, that’s for sure, as the internet itself, and can you think of any industry that you have ever seen that it has revolutionized the marketplace so quickly is the Internet to look at? What’S happened in just the last decade? Absolutely – and you know, I would bet that people from the 30s would say that direct mail certainly change things and it did back.
Then this is nothing more and nothing less than that. It just has the ability to reach people is like nothing ever before. What is a job like for a SEO specialist? Does it give you flexible time with your online work? Does it give you free time for some of the other projects that you might be working on? Oh absolutely, but I caution people that if you don’t enjoy the work that you do, this will be drudgery like nothing else, so very specialized research and I like competing, and so those two things are what I spend the majority of my time.
Doing the writing of titles and descriptions and tweaking people’s content, so it’s congruent with that. It’S the easy part! When I worked in television and radio, we were always checking. How is our ratings, comparing with the competition from quarter-to-quarter even from day to day? Imagine you probably do the same thing with search engine optimization. Absolutely you know one of the one of part of our process with the client is that we report back to them on a regular basis, exactly how well they are competing in the marketplace.
So I’m constantly looking at that and to to an obsessive extent. I guess: do you focus on a range of search engines or do you target primarily the big one or how do you? How do you go about selecting your strategy? Well, isn’t that interesting come you know, we’ve seen the rise of Google come at the turn of the century and when they when they, when they change the way people searched at at that time, we were probably querying upwards of 20 to 30 search engines for a Client there were that many, and you can probably remember things like Lycos and hotbot all received millions of visitors a day that we’re searching on it and what we’ve seen, certainly in the last three to five years, is a closing down of that too.
At first there were, there were four majors that would be Google msn yahoo and you could say, ayo l, even though that was really just a portal for somebody else, but it had a lot of a lot of traffic at it at that time. A lot of members, it was not forget to ask jeeves write. A speech has always been a second fiddle to everybody, whether it ever will rise. You know above a percent or so of market share remains to be seen.
However, I’m a true believer that if someone can build Google in the year 2000, someone will beat Google in the year 2010. So we have got our eyes and ears out all the time. Looking at literally hundreds of beta tests of different ways of searching that are going on in the marketplace today and just in the last year or so, we’ve seen a huge explosion of what’s called social media and tagging things that have nothing to do with search engines.
But have an awful lot to do with optimizing: the information that you’re delivering the people much like we optimized for search engines and Chris Tucker. I know you’ve been doing this since 1996, that true, that’s quite a bit of evolution. You’Ve seen happening within search engines within the Internet itself and I’m sure you’re keeping a sharp eye on future trends as they come out as fast and furious.
We’Re fortunate that Chris is going to be sharing with us. A few leaks that we can take a look at of some of his optimized sites and see how their ranking in the search engines and what little tricks Chris may have been applying. Chris, it’s been a pleasure having you with us today we’re here some contact information for credits. His website is email if you’d like to discuss some of the topics of today or to get more information on its services, and thank you for joining us Chris.
Thank you for having me Steve.
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The wrong way, you know, they’re doing automation, tools they’re like no. You know that’s easy. I can just schedule the stuff out you’ll.
Basically we forget about it, but you know the three C’s of being. You know content consistency. Community community is the most important, even though it’s a third one, because without it for a brick and mortar business, you know you’re in person. If you don’t have a community around your business like it can be transactional, it can be like okay, I sell here got ill there, but after a while people going to be like well, what makes you guys different from the big chain, not much weight.
You know. So it’s the same thing with online communities is like you’re not connecting with the people, and I feel like a lot of businesses they think of it as being more. They think of social media like it’s just a online connection, thanks yeah now yeah, I’m an extension of TV radio, although traditional marketing out there, but it’s like it’s – definitely not that you can have a two-way conversation with their customer, even clients, and they want that yeah.
They want that because, like even for me as a consumer like when I reach out to you especially a local business – and you don’t respond to my call – okay well they’re all about talking about, though you know they’re about community and all that stuff guys, they don’t Fall through with that to where it’s like, okay, I get so excited with my favorite brands. All share my like we’ll retweet, nothing like.
If I take a picture of my food, you know and they retweeted I’m like. Oh my god, they did. Are you going to fail yeah under you, especially when they do that you’re? Like oh right, I’ve had some really fun conversations with like there’s. This bee bee vomit honey company? Okay, like what’s going on yeah – and I remember having this funny conversation with somebody where we shared an article about how honey is bee vomit, oh and they started in our conversation they joined in the conversation they were like.
It really is see ya. Well, I mean what right there is this build credibility, their business to to wear like you know, you’re, not just making up stuff and they’re, not just standing behind being silent, be like yeah sure just wait, you know, can I think they’re like yeah they’re participating in It as a person but, like you know, that’s the entity itself to where it’s like. You have a voice yeah the business online.
You know you do have a voice to where it’s like. You got ta talk with people, but you also got to make sure that you know when they ask you questions you respond so much about oh, hey, next special here and next special dare and oh come to our event kind. I think it’s like it’s not so much about the broadcasting so yeah, that’s part of it. It’S just that. You need to make sure that you’re having the conversation to told you’re, thriving online community and then in the end, it’s like yeah.
You might have 500 followers, but they’re 500 in games Paul, you know versus a million followers who don’t even know who that you exist. They’Re like based in other countries, they’re never going to buy from here, they’re just like Auto liking. Everything autocon think this is great. You know it’s like muffin, so it’s all about authenticity, yeah. I can appreciate that I feel like the online world is it’s very different than any other type of advertising and I feel like you, can’t really look at it as advertising.
If you want to be successful with it yeah, you have to really view it as something different as more of a relationship. You know customer relationship, management or customer relationship building platform versus looking at it like an advertising platform. Yeah, it’s all about the storytelling. I mean it’s just about just being real, like people are trying to flip that front up being like I’m like this or you know the business there being like.
I’M like this, but if they’re just they’re not telling a compelling story, people don’t know they’re. Just like. Okay, I’m going to go on to the next coffee shop or the next, whatever you know yeah, so what’s your favorite tip for businesses, small or large, and I want to start really cultivating a community for their business on social media. Well, I mean I guess especially for Twitter, but you can do it on Instagram and other networks as well.
Is that you know just think of what you want to listen for other business um? So you know twitter and instagram has the hash, hash tags and stuff. So you know, listen for or you know, put up search terms for people, for you know terms that basically would search 404, your business so, for example, pizza company. Yes, people are like I’m hungry or they use the pizza emoji. You know you could you’ll see what they’re talking about with their friends through that or you can just even pop in and be like.
Hey. You want pizza, we’re down the street from you I mean that’s that gets a little borderline CLD. You are so cute. It’S also you’re being a little more active in that way to where you’re not waiting for them to come to you right, so our people start doing that. Is it just like going to Twitter and searching or you can go through Twitter and search. You can also use tweetdeck, which is owned by Twitter.
Okay, of course, you know that’s more than what we can talk about this yep. I you know people want to reach out out to us and talk about it, and just have me do a tutorial. I can do that. Okay, awesome yeah. I know you do lots of workshops and things like that yeah well, thank you so much Helene for those amazing tips and helping people to understand the importance of building communities on social.
I wanted to do a article on search engine optimization. I want to do a little bit deeper of a dive. I’Ve done several SEO articles in the past. I had a good conversation last night with a genius SEO guy that I highly respect in the in the space, and we were kind of talking through some things, just kind of being marketing, guys discussing the ins and outs of what I’ve learned.
What they’ve learned and the one thing that I found was that everybody kind of has their own different flavor, but I will tell you that search engine optimization has changed vastly over the last five or six years. I mean what I want to do is kind of give you an overview to make sure that you kind of know what search engine opposition it optimization is how to actually go after those keywords that you want organically and then really just kind of build towards.
You know getting an organic ranking on Google to try and get that traffic that you don’t the pay for per click or pay for by lean with social etc. So the first thing I want to do is just kind of break down what I would call like. A Content first, what a lot of us say is content first SEO strategy. Now what I mean by that is is I believe that your website content is the chassis at which your search engine optimization is built upon, meaning I don’t care how great you’re out you know your external links are your reviews? Are your conversions that you’re getting through Adwords or whatever you’re getting that does have a factor in your domain Authority? If you don’t have a lot of educational, unique content pages on your website, you’re not going to ever be able to be ahead of someone.
That does and also has those things. So the first thing I want you understand is that content website content is highly important. Now, what is website content well website content would be the individual pages that are on your website, so I’ve done articles on the on the past on this on the past, talking about foundational content versus supplemental etc. But one of the things I want you to understand is that you really need a to be working towards a large website from a Content perspective from a page number perspective.
So one of the first things that we do whenever we go into analysis of a competitor and try and figure out what they’re doing to get you know so many dating quotes a day. I’Ve got a Medicare prospect right now. It’S getting 200 quotes a day from their organic SEO. Now they’ve been doing this for years, but that’s a huge number. I think I think they tell me 2000 policies a years what they’re getting from their organic.
You know website just passively. That’S those numbers are bonkers. Like right, so obviously, if we can understand and crack that code, then it’s a big big part of it. So content is: is the chassis of your SEO now there’s other things that are going to matter, but the main thing with content is that it’s unique in that it’s structured, the correct way with Google search console and that your pages are structured.
The correct way you got all your page titles set up all your meta descriptions set up h1 set up, your keyword, integrations, etc. There’S lots of ways to manage that, but you know just make sure. That’S that’s key, so every page in your website needs to be structured correctly from the meta data perspective and then once you get, you know a content strategy where you’re creating content, there’s other things that that we’re all noticing as SEO is out there that are really Affecting the overall organic listings, absolutely one of those things is just articles.
Okay, one of the things that I am seeing more and more and more and more is that those websites that have highly integrated articles, along with either transcripts below the article or actual, like blog posts, with the article embedded that matters to Google. If you, if you’ve noticed, Google has actually pushed organic listings, sometimes below the recommended articles, why do you think they do that? Well, let’s think about it.
For a second, if you’re googling a keyword on Google – and there is a article that explains that keyword better than a website, would then would Google rather give you the article or someone randoms website? Well, of course, they’re going to try and give you the article, because it’s makes sense for the user, but it also gives Google paid think about it. Every eyeball that goes to YouTube to look at articles on their actual platform is a potential eyeball to advertise to for their impressions.
So what Google is doing is actively moving up different queries, search queries based the note that, based on the nature of the search query, if it’s very informational – and there are articles that are tied to that, there give me those recommended articles above even the organic listings, Which is crazy, like that’s something I didn’t even see coming two years ago, so you know I’ve done millions and millions of dollars of search engine optimization across different industries and now that I’m in one specific industry, which is the insurance industry, I’m seeing that article is Making a big difference, it really is so that’s one of the things I want to talk through.
The next thing that I want to talk through is inbound links. Now this is a interesting conundrum. Okay, because Google has stated that they don’t want you to buy links. I don’t want you to engage in link building services, but there’s two main things that you got to pay attention to when it comes to link building one, the domain Authority and the content of the website. That’S linking to your website matters a ton getting a doggie daycare website to link to your life.
Insurance page is not going to help you in any way getting a Medicare gov link to your website will matter. I mean that’s huge okay, the thing that I don’t love about working link building into into SEO strategies is one. Unless it’s a major SEO strategy, then you want to do that, but for basic SEO strategies linking isn’t controllable or sustainable, meaning. I can’t guarantee myself X amount of Link’s for X amount of budget, so it’s difficult for me to really put resources towards it, because I’ve had clients and projects where we’ve tried to build links and we’ve done like hours and hours and hours and hours and hours Of work – and we only got one or two links done and it’s hard to quantify that as a return on investment, so snippet, it’s typically been something.
I’Ve tried to stay away from, not to say that inbound links aren’t like important, but it’s something. That’S it’s difficult to manage, but if you can get inbound links, of course, they help your domain authority, especially if that inbound link is a relevant website to the content that you’re trying to drive right. That’S that’s the key, so inbound links still work now. I will tell you that six, seven years ago the link wheel and link pyramids and all that stuff.
That was how you did SEO it didn’t really matter about your website as long as other web sites were linking to you as an authority, Google would give you that domain. That’S not the case anymore and just think about it. Would you rather go to a website that has a bunch of links tied to it on the backside or we really go to website it’s educational, informational answers, the questions that you’re looking for for that particular you know viewing session on the internet.
You know the answer to that. So does Google so they’re optimizing the backend smoke and mirrors away from search engine optimization? That’S why I still believe content first strategies are highly important. The second thing that I’m noticing that’s working out for SEO big-time is reviews. I had a client bring this up to me yesterday and reviews believe it or not do provide a somewhat of a link, but but there’s systems out there, where you can actually get reviews and reviews.
Well, let me try and explain this whenever you’re looking at search engine, optimization, you’re, typically doing things that are helping the search engine, robots, crawl, your website and rank where you deserve to be ranked, based on content based on domain Authority based on all the metrics that Are involved on getting on the top of the list, but you also have to tailor to your users your actual people that are looking at your website to get information and potentially opting in in the form of a lead.
So one of the things that reviews does is it really heightens the engagement of the user because it adds social proof to your overall. You know domain Authority, but also the individual. That’S looking through that, if they see that 14 people in the last you know 22 days have given you positive reviews, 5 out of 5 stars, then that’s absolutely going to be a factor for the user to determine if they’re going to opt in or not so.
But what is interesting is is that we’re finding also, and that reviews actually helped on the organic SEO site, as well as the user experience as well. I had always really kind of been under the impression that reviews were mostly user experience and less search. Engine optimization and the algorithm I’m seeing and based on what colleagues are telling me is that they’re actually merging the two you know together so, but what really ends up being the truth of search engine optimization is really just building a resource for people to educate themselves.
On whether it’s review content articles other websites that are linking to it as an authority as well, that is how you win the game in 20. You know 20, 19, almost 20, 20. So with a good search engine, optimization plan, I you shouldn’t like never ever ever. Do those $ 1.99 SEO bullcrap deals? All they’re doing is they’re taking 200 bucks a month for five months. Until you realize it’s not working, then you cut it, but you’ve paid them a thousand dollars and you just cut your losses.
Do not do that to do SEO the right way, and you know these in 2019, you have to have unique custom content written by human beings. You can’t even really spend content. You can’t figure out a way to bring in a bunch of content. That’S already written not going to work, it’s got to be custom and unique. You’Ve got to try and shoot and work towards articles, and you got to try to get to the point where you’re actually soliciting reviews, whether that’s through an email sort of acquisition.
After the customer, you know signs up with you hey. How did we do? Would you mind filling out this review platform, whatever you’ve been going into some sort of paid service? That would help your reviews would be something that you could think about to help your overall organic SEO. So those are the three things that I feel like have been supplementing the content first, but I really believe that your website content is the chassis that your SEO was built on.
As long as you can focus on those three things, you don’t have to do all these three also by the way. This is something that you have to do usually internally, it’s difficult to have an external company produce articles articles for you, because it’s usually your content. That needs to be on that article, but typically, this is where the SEO company can thrive. That’S what we focus on a lot is unique custom content and then coach on the reviews, coaching, the inbound links coach on the articles and just kind of provide some insight on what that looks like.
So we obviously do SEO for insurance. Only the interesting part about SEO is if it’s content first, that means you need to know what the heck you’re talking about about Medicare. We spend all day long talking, Medicare final expense, life, insurance, health insurance, long-term care, disability, all these insurance, because all we do so our copywriters only write for insurance, so we kind of know what infographics to produce what content to write etc.
So if anybody hires and unspecialized marketing agency anymore you’re silly because you need to be starting to find just like lawyers are doing, you don’t go, find a general attorney if you’re a criminal case, you go find a criminal lawyer. Well, I’m starting to actually refer other industries to my colleagues and they’re, starting to refer insurance people to me, because digital marketing is becoming such a huge part of people’s marketing budget and I used to own a jack-of-all-trades marketing agency.
And if I was competing with myself. Ten months ago, I today would just I laugh at how I would approach an insurance prospect, because it’s so different than how the general world operates from a digital marketing perspective. Please please please, even if you don’t hire secure agent marketing, if your insurance hire someone that specializes in insurance marketing, because it’s a big difference between how the general you know the general world markets, that’s that’s the truth, so I hope you guys found some value out Of this content, I try to kind of have to have these articles, be very educational, focused my goal.
I’Ve always said this. If you guys follow our content, I want to help you guys understand what is north there’s so much garbage information out there. That is just like people chasing rabbit trails that this don’t even make sense people that aren’t experts in anything trying to give advice, just it’s just bonkers. So what I hope this article can do is give you understanding of how SEO works in 2019.
And you know what guys this is going to change in six months. Also, it’s going to work more differently. Every six months, Google updates, the you know every more than six months. Google is updating how they are. You know, tracking websites etc. So I would HIGHLY encourage you guys to you know: take this model run with it and really don’t listen to any of the bye links and buy this or blah blah blah that just doesn’t really work anymore.
It’S got to be content. First, you need content and in order to even get to that point, you got ta have a website which we also can build as well. So hope you guys found value in this today and we’ll see you again on the next time.
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In letting more clients find your photography business, I’m Jamie from jamiedelainewatson.Com and Let’S get into basic search engine, optimization for wedding photographers right now, The first step to getting started with search Engine optimization on your blog is installing the Yoast SEO Plug-in I’m using a WordPress blog, which I highly Recommend for the functionality and availability of all their plug-ins.
If you don’t see this on the recommended page When you go to your WordPress settings and their plug-ins we’re just going to search From keyword here, Yoast SEO and you’re going to hit install now, I already have it. So that’s why mine says: Active so you’re going to hit install now, Once that’s done when you go to one of your Blog posts you’ll see it underneath your main blog post content At the end of your blog post content, you’ll See the Yoast SEO plug-in right here.
This is a really handy plug-in that allows You to set the focus keyword right here and also helps you to edit the snippet that’ll Be shown on Google when somebody searches, so this is how it will appear in Google. You Can edit that there Then they’ll also tell you an analysis of How your SEO’s doing so any problems they’ve found improvements. You can make and good Results Then the plug-in will give you either a red Light a yellow light or a green light for good, okay or bad.
You can this specific blog post, because I Haven’T worked on it yet says: “ SEO Okay” The second step to achieving a good SEO rating For your blog is to create titles that your ideal client is searching for For this wedding that took place at this specific Venue you can see that I’ve named it with the venue’s name, followed by wedding. This is a huge improvement versus naming the Blog post, Sarah and Brandon Wedding, because nobody is Googling for Sarah and Brandon’s Wedding Instead, I want to attract brides who are searching.
In Google, the name of the venue followed by wedding assumably, because they’re getting Married there and want to see examples: Let’s try this out. I’Ve opened up a new Chrome Window in incognito mode, What this means is that it’s not taking into Account any of my past history or personal preferences, and it’s not personalizing, my Google results at all, it’s all exactly as another client or another person would see.
I’Ve searched Robert H, Lee Alumni Wedding. Because that’s the title of the post – and you can see here – fourth, fifth, sixth, my Post comes up number seven based on that search result. This is an amazing way for me to market to Brides who are getting married at this venue and actually number eight, is also me from A wedding two years ago After you have your search friendly title. You’Re going to want to make sure that you have the same title right here in the permalink Because this also will help Google know that this is relevant information.
So not only is The title there it’s also here Another great title – I could add photos to The end of this, because that may be an exact search term that somebody would be using Either one You definitely don’t want just the venue name: You want to add wedding, if not wedding photos SEO tip number three is to name all of your Images in the specific blog post with the search term as well. All of these images that I’ve put into this Blog post that you can see here, they’re not called SarahandBrandon.
Jpg instead they’re Listed as RobertHLeeAlumniCentreWeddingPhotos01.Jpg You can see here, if you look into the HTML You can see all of these different images tags here. This is how I’ve named them. It’S quite easy to rename using a program. Like Photo Mechanic or Lightroom, and you can rename these really quickly and I have them All named under the venue name or the search term, The reason we name our images with the specific Venues name is: it provides another opportunity for Google to show off our photos to a client Who may be searching for the specific venue Instead of typing into the regular Google Search results.
I tested this out by clicking images and under images I’m going to search Through these are all images that Google has deemed relevant to this search term. Now I don’t see… Well. This is actually My image right here you can see Jamie Delaine Blog written there, so the third image is one Of mine and as we go down I’ll see a few more of mine here, this is also one of mine. It’S Even pulled in other weddings that aren’t at this venue because it’s been from my blog That had this wedding on it Here we start to see Sarah and Brandon’s The blog post – I was showing you so these are popping up here.
This is also one of there’s Now this is only going to increase in weeks. To come, this is a pretty new blog post. Maybe a bride would be searching for wedding. Photos on Google images, she’d click this and then she’d want to go see where this post Is and the next thing we know she arrives on my blog post here and hopefully contacts Me to book her wedding SEO tip number four is to include the name: Of the keyword you’re focusing on throughout the blog post, It’s not enough to just have it in the title: And in the permalink and in the images we can go one step further and include links.
Throughout You can see that I’ve done that here by saying “, I’d love the chance to photograph weddings at Robert H, Lee Alumni Centre,”, while linking To the venue site, I’ve also listed it here under Ceremony and Reception Venue there. You always want to make sure that this flows Naturally, you definitely don’t want to just copy and paste that link a million times. That kind of used to be the old SEO rules 10 years ago.
What you’re going to want to do is try to Fit this in naturally with what you’re saying I could have probably done even a better job. At this, a good example would be. I could go down to where there’s a reception image like Here, for example, this is the ceremony and I could say something like I love photographing. In this beautiful space at the Robert H Lee Alumni Centre and then I could link to that As well – and that would be another way of introducing my keyword into the blog post SEO tip number five – is you want to include Quality links throughout your post A really easy way to do this when we are wedding, Photographers is to link to all of the vendors involved in the day I’ve gone through here, and I have every single Vendor and a link to their website, this is showing Google that my website is quality.
And it’s also focused on directing traffic to other quality websites, and so I’ve linked All of these here These are called outbound links, you’ll also Want some inbound links, which means bouncing people around to other blog posts? You have That they may find relevant Something I maybe should have done with this Post is, I could say, “ P.S. If you want to see another wedding photographed at the UBC Alumni.
Centre,”, it’s another name for it: “ You can visit Jamie and Jason’s wedding, blog post Right here,,” and then I would link this to another wedding that I did at the Alumni Centre. And that provides another quality link to Google to show that my website is worth indexing. And bumping up in the search results, The sixth and final SEO tip is going to be Using alt tags in your images, Essentially alt tags are something that describe The image to Google, because Google doesn’t know what they’re actually looking at it’s Relying on all of this data we put in our blog post and in our images to provide quality Search results for people who are searching In WordPress if you click the edit button.
Here on the image you’ll see the alt text under alternate text written here. I’M going to write Robert H, Lee Alumni Centre. Wedding Photos: this is telling Google that this is what this image is about. Let me click update. What this means is that When I go to this image here and say you have a pin it Pinterest button, I can click, save And my alt text will automatically be imported here so anytime.
This image is shared you’ll Have that text embedded in the image through the alt text, Of course, adding alt text to 80 images? One By one, by using this, edit tool would take a long long time, so instead, what I do is I use the HTML version of this post If you’re new to HTML we’re going to click Over here to text and then I’m going to copy all of this text by going command C. But I’m Going to open up my text editor Once I have my text, editor open, I’m going To go format, make plain text so there’s no formatting and then we’re going to paste.
This This looks like a confusing amount of code. But what we’re going to look for here is alt equals two quotes, We’re going to use the find and replace and We’Re going to have alt two quotes go here, so this is what we’re finding and then what We want to replace it with What we want to replace it with. Is your keyword? Search term Anytime, you see this in the document. It’S Going to replace it with that, so we’re going to replace all and then we’re going to copy This text again and drop it back into the text editor and cover everything there Then you’re going to want to make sure that Nothing else changed in your post, which it didn’t and then you’re going to hit update.
And that’s a really quick way to update all of your alt text. I hope you enjoyed this article if you want More tips on how to find your ideal client and how to bring more work into your photography. Business you’re going to want to head to jamiedelainewatson.Com/50ideas five zero ideas and there’s over 50 ideas. For how to market your photography business and bring more clients to your awesome work, If you like this article, please give it a thumbs.
Up subscribe and comment below, and I would love to hear from you in the comments and Interact with you there. Thank you so much for reading
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We see it so vividly in our minds and we almost see it so vividly as it has already happened, and I was running fast to make that happen. All right guys welcome back another episode of a mere proved now. Today’S guests is good friend of mine, dev Bassett. Now before we begin, today’s show a little bit housecleaning notes for everyone out there. Now, if you haven’t already make sure to subscribe to my youtube blog because every single week, I’m picking two lucky people to earn twenty dollars in bitcoins so make sure to subscribe, and if you’re listening to this on iTunes, if you leave a review, I will also Be looking for one to two lucky people, so I can get them 20 bucks in Bitcoin now without further ado, our special guest.
Today our guest is dev Basu. He is a founder of power, bi search, a performance media and digital marketing agency that helps b2b software technology companies, such as click funnels and Shutterstock in 2018, powered by search work has driven over 2.4 billion in annual sales directly from the intent engine mythology apply successfully To SEO and direct response paid search, let’s impress her brother.
Well, you like it’s all, it’s all downhill from here Goodman. I have to have you on the show man thanks for having me yeah man, so the reason I want to have you on the show is like, first of all, kudos our round of applause for a building powered by search. Thank you. It’S impressive and you know you and I know each other for a while, and I would love to know the ins and the outs, the ups and the downs of smiles and frowns, of what it took to build power, buy search.
And maybe, if you can kind of rewind and tell us a little bit history of the process and what it actually took to create this amazing business that you built yeah for sure man, it’s a what a trip we’re celebrating our 10th anniversary this October. So I can take you down memory lane to do it. So 2009 is when I started the business and recall: wasn’t the best time to start a business after the crash right after the crash to start working in technology and marketing.
But honesty was a boon, because what I realized is money flows from less effective blogs, the more effective blogs. So one of the things the wind that was at our back back then was a fact that businesses that we used to work with and we didn’t work with software businesses when we started it was, you know, small businesses, local businesses, they were pulling money out of This thing, I don’t, if you even remember it’s called the Yellow Pages yeah.
What is that thing good for a door stopper these days yeah, so they were pulling money out of there and they needed somewhere. To put it so most of the time, advertising and marketing goes down in a recession, but the part that remains what actually ends up happening for growth businesses as they go. We need to cut, but we’re not going to cut everywhere. Let’S cut down the blogs that are the worst performers now that we have some savings, there’s no point just putting it under a pillow there, a business you want to grow.
You realize that a recession is actually a really good time to grow your business, to be able to get more market sure, so you got ta put it somewhere and the thing that most of our clients wanted was they wanted to figure out how to get Google To love on them how to get Google to love their websites? How to get you know, visibility had to get clicks. How to get. You know phone calls and leads, and that was kind of the Wild West back then, and so that’s what we helped them do and it started off real small, so the business it started when I was when I was, I was probably 21 yeah 21.
At that point you know starting to finish up my university career. I did an undergrad at: U of T the BBA program to live in Scarborough, which is on the east end of Toronto. Small 50s good fifty sort of square foot condo solarium, is where I started this business and the way it came around actually was. I was working at a job. You know it was interesting. I was a director of marketing at an agency that was affiliated with the Yellow Pages, so I actually got to see the inside track on how the Yellow Pages was sold.
What kind of businesses used it how they tracked and measured success, and I was also able to see what was going to happen to it next, and you know, I think it panned out in a way which wasn’t exactly a curative or ry+ for for them over The last decade and and that’s why there are door stoppers right, so I looked at that. There’S a point where my boss, at that time she calls me to Maya into her office and sits me down and says: have you know you’re you’re graduating soon? What do you want to do? They said I don’t know you know I’m having a fun time working over here.
I’M learning Lots. I would just want to contribute and continue working in this field, and she says you know. I think you should never start your own business, really yeah Wow. I said what. Why would why do you say that, and she said I think, you’d be a terrible manager. I’M going now I’m curious right, I’m not I’m not even mad. I’M curious, I’m like what what makes you say that she said well, even a split that aside, you know, for you know just a minute, a hot minute.
Do you know how expensive fax machines are? I know fax machines. It’S 2009. I haven’t used a fax machine since 2007. That was still you know, because the company Hughes fax machines. At that point she said you know how many found much phone lines cost. I’M like I’m. I use Skype so 2009 right and I think just the that nature of the argument I think reflecting on it. You know hindsight’s always 20/20.
She was worried that I’d go on my own and she predicted that correctly, but that was also the tipping point for me. I, despite like oh yeah yeah, I was ever this person is yeah. I thank her. Thank you so much right, so that was like. On a Friday I was in Montreal. I flew back to Toronto. I went and registered an incorporation. I was like you know. Just basically playing around with names like what can I call this company and the genesis behind the name powered by search actually comes from me being a nerd, remember, vbulletin, before I’m sorry, yeah, so at the bottom of every vbulletin forum was powered by people didn’t and So I kind of I did some soul-searching over that weekend and it’s odd.
What do I call this company? What’S my what’s on my DNA, and it was just as fact that I had learned so much about how Google and other search engines worked over the last. You know five years what I started in 2005 and I said it’s got ta be powered by search. That’S what we’re powered by. If I, if there were no search engines, I wouldn’t know what to do in this business. There’D be nothing to optimize there’d, be no! You know advertising to run, and so it’s going to be powered by search.
That’S that’s! That weekend was magical because I went from incorporating the company online, not knowing anything, about how to incorporate a company at all to starting to put down the site map and then just updating my LinkedIn profile on that Monday and just saying hey, you know what I’ve Gone out of my own, I’m an independent consultant at this point in time, and that was it. It was interesting that there was just an outpour of people who are my network reaching out and saying hey? Can you help me and would you have a look at my website and then before I knew it that first I think two months it was already at 30 to 50 km RR and then just kept growing from over there, and it was too much work to Handle – and you know how it goes well, there’s too much work to handle and you’re a technician.
You hire another technician and that kept snowballing into this. This agency, that and this consultancy that we’ve built now ten years later, and so you mentioned 20k 50km RR yeah – was that just through word of mouth completely who word-of-mouth, okay yeah it just came in, and you know I one of the things that I really learned About pricing in the early days was never to charge by the hour. I made that mistake, mm, probably eight I’d, say I’ll.
Tell you the story. Actually I uh I designed a website. It was for a florist in 2008 and I didn’t know a lick of HTML or coding, and I thought this is a really get good way to get. You know to get paid to learn. So let me take this on, and this is back like I was using notepad mm-hmm notepad to design these websites, and the guy gives me an Excel spreadsheet with you know all the different types of flowers and whatnot he has and got some images.
He just gives me a USB key, no Dropbox at that point, not not that I can recall at least it says, design me a website, it’s a simple directory style site and you just keep clicking clicking clicking until you get to a point where you find a Flower, you like and there’s a phone number. You can call super simple, so it was a hundred, maybe pages that I needed to design I charged him 500 dollars for this website and then a hundred hours later.
Well, I calculated my per $ 1 per hour. Yeah yeah, my effective, I really rate, and I was like oh boy. This was an expensive lesson, yeah yeah, and so I think what helped in those early days was just using value pricing understanding what expensive problem I was being hired to solve and then really helping the business of the owners I was working with and as a simple Right now, it’s like what two people three people in the company yeah.
I was two people. Okay, it was two people at that point in time, and then it grew to three by the end of the first year it was four and and then it just kept growing more over there. So you were hiring people like developers, designers, yeah, yeah and in the beginning they were like. You know Swiss Army knives right, so people who were generally complete generalists – and you know they could talk to clients, so they could build decks and they could write copy and they could build ad campaigns.
They knew how to do outreach things like that and then, as we started honing I learned about you know what t-shaped talent basically looks like where you can go deep in one area and and that’s how we started: building or functional practice areas. And so when did you when you exhausted your word of mouth, then referrals? What was your next strategy to take growth to the next level? We decided to practice what we preach, so that meant publishing speaking.
You know getting beats by our own SEO, our own AdWords. So one thing that you might see is: like digital agencies: don’t advertise, you know the good ones, don’t and it’s all referral, referral referral and, frankly, I think it’s a little lazy, because you should be getting better at your own craft, not just getting better at it. Based off your clients time, and so, if you aren’t walking the walk, then your believability goes down mm-hmm, and so, as a result of that, we really practice that, and you know whatever our focus was over the years.
We got really good at it and then we just started sharing freely. So the idea was that you know our best. Thinking was either going to be really expensive or it was going to be free and it’s ping-ponged over the years as to what that is, and currently our best thinking is free. You know, but we know that it’s going to be one of those situations where no one’s going to come in, lift it and just do it on their own.
So what was it the? So? I really want to dissect this. So you don’t 2250 K. You know people can kind of understand that right, yeah get a couple of leads in yeah, a retainer. You know, okay, you know tema, for what between like? What would you say? The Jim was a gradual jump, or did he go from 50k? Tens like 300k a month like how did that process look like doubling every year, doubling every year, doubling every year so first year, I think our revenue was 480 okay.
Then it was like 960. Okay. If I recall correctly, we went to 1.7 the then it was 2.5 it was. There was what year we were three and it just kept growing, basically over over there until this is all paid like majority of the normal SEO and paid yeah SEO and paid. You know that’s 90 % of it, and then 10 % was other things that clients needed, whether that was you got into some really cool projects. By the way, you know building voice of customer research or analytics and attribution projects, but largely, I think, the the big thing that businesses wanted to work with us and hire s for was getting traffic and converting it.
Okay and so the two ways you do that, are you know you can you can pay for it? You can earn it or we can collaborate with somebody else to get it, and so we didn’t do referrals or influence or type programs. We just did you know you can pay for it PPC and you can earn it and that was SEO yeah, so you’re putting in the money in the vending machine. So if people wondering like how would that campaign look like? So if we were winding back a couple of years, you know you had a couple of million dollar revenue, say: 1.
9 million. What did that funnel? Look like so you’re bidding on what kind of keywords rebidding on like for other agency owners or other people who might be in similar situations, is that it was the strategy back then, oh just for like getting leads yeah I mean sir. You start at the bottom of the funnel right, so if somebody, if you’re trying to get local clients, what we would do is look at all the variations of Toronto Plus digital agency web design, agency marketing agency SEO agency and so on, then you want coverage over There and then you build up and you go okay.
So that’s like somebody who takes a small percentage of market who are already looking for an agency there’s, so many more people who are in the market looking for help. They just don’t know that they want an agency ad. So then you start looking at all the different use cases. So an example of you know: huge growth periods for us was when Google would come in and penalize a bunch of different websites and so they’d drop in their rankings.
They’D reach out, because what we had optimized for was Google penalty recovery, ok or AdWords suspension recovery, and I seen are. This – is like early early days like so. If you end up seeing that, like you know, an advertising program is feeding someone’s business. Let’S it’s an e-commerce business and they get banned or suspended. They want to come out and go. How do I quickly get back up and running, and so we bid for those terms.
We would you know, optimize and have landing pages for those terms. So it’s really scrappy really really scrappy stuff and so yeah. We don’t want to go 50,000 foot high level talking about a lot of ideas, but not doing CPC landing page fill out the form getting a call, easy, peasy right and then one thing that we did, that was kind of interesting, was sequential remarketing. So one of the big problems we saw early when remarketing came out, which is just you know the ads that follow you around.
If you don’t do the thing that the website and what you do they just retargeting the problem with those ads is that most marketers think of the audience the person they do. Humanize the person say this is a lead as a lead as a lead, and so, if you’re, a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and so you just keep seeing the same ad again and again and again and eventually get sick of the brand right.
Like you hit like that ad fatigue, ad fatigue and you might hit like don’t show this to me again. You know I’ve done that on Facebook and other networks, where you see ads, hitting you again and again again, so what we did was we wanted to be sequential. So if somebody came to a page where we wanted him to fill out a form and they didn’t do it well, what are some possible reasons why they didn’t do it? Maybe they weren’t ready? Maybe they needed to see more proof? Maybe they wanted to see some case studies.
Maybe they wanted to understand what the process was right. Maybe they didn’t know that if they could afford it, and so each one of those deserves a different message. So we’d start with the most probable one and then, if that didn’t work, and not three to five date, have appeared, we’d switch it up. We’D show them a different at that point in time, and so that just kind of like we saw that everybody’s got a different track in their customer journey.
But you got ta meet the customer where they are yes, not where you want them to be, and so at this point, are you still the only person who’s trying to close the deals like all these deals are coming in the top yeah yeah yeah yeah, all Coming in through, we had a very structured sales process, for you know, engaging and enrolling and basically getting started with clients, and I mean I recommend this there’s a specific process for almost any type of consulting, which is you start off without trying to prescribe the solution To your your prospect, because that’s what the number one rookie mistake is you tell me what your problem is and I already am going to say: I’ve got a solution for that, so instead, what you do is you diagnose before you prescribe right? Just like a doctor, you think about all the experts that you trust in implicitly trust.
You trust your your doctors, your lawyers or surgeon. You don’t have a question any of the recommendations, but each one of them will ask you a few questions and then give you a course of you know a way to go basically with digital. The problem is that every everybody thinks they can do it. Everybody thinks they can write copy. Everybody thinks that they’ve got an opinion and design, and so, instead of just coming out of the end saying we can take you on it’s going to cost X and you know work with us the better ways to say hey.
I don’t know if we can help you or not, but if we did a discovery where we diagnose what the gaps are, we have an idea where you want to go where you are and let’s figure out, what’s the blocker, you know the the things that are Roadblocks in the middle, then we come up with the right strategy and roadmap and then from there we help you execute it. Does that make sense and for most people who are rational, logical layer like that makes complete sense.
I wish somebody would actually spend the time to articulate what the problem actually is, rather than guessing or feeling their way through a problem wasting a bunch of time and then saying oh yeah, I didn’t work six months later, except now I’ve been paid, and you know The clients pissed off, which is the majority of incoming clients, that we we’re seeing had that frustration being loved another agency.
They left another agency. We were very rarely where we, the first agency, that anybody worked with. They had done a different budget for things. They’D work with individuals, consultants or freelancers they’d hire other agencies and then the beginning. I don’t blame them, it’s not their fault because they just simply know one thing, which is what it costs. What the you know, the monetary funding basically is required.
They don’t know how to tell good from bad, and so they go through a couple of experiences which lead them. You know, leave them underwhelmed and then they go. I think I need someone better, because that tier of investment didn’t get me a bespoke or tailored solution. I got a cheap solution instead and so that’s kind of like this philosophy of you. You know you either are very you’re a premium or you give away your best ideas for free, but nothing in the middle.
Basically, so would you say the the pain point started happening in the company, we’re like like now what oh yeah so cuz right now, like you’re growing you’re, doubling here by a year? So that’s you know, compound growth when, in that process like what year was like yeah like things are going to I’m going to say falling apart, but things are kind of hectic they’re hectic yeah. I think that came around year three for sure.
I realized that we were having a hub-and-spoke model where we didn’t have any systems we didn’t document anything we were flying by the seat of our pants yeah. Of course man. I know it’s, it’s really just getting a bunch of smart people together and hoping and praying that big things just work sure. So we didn’t have. We had no one-on-ones, we didn’t have a weekly stand-up structure, we didn’t have properly track goals, we didn’t have objectives and key results.
It was literally just do what you feel is best for the client in their best interest, and so that was a dart core kind of thing was, you know we have a fiduciary duty to win, for our clients do what it takes to make that happen right, But when you start scaling your company and you get to the point where you’re anywhere above 10 people things start to fall apart, and it’s just a there’s, a simple equation for the nodes of communication.
Uh-Huh developers would know this very easily. It’S actually one of the first things in the early days, LinkedIn used to test engineers. With this question saying you know, LinkedIn’s got this one-to-one and then in a second degree, third degree, fourth degree and it starts becoming geometric right. The number of nodes of connection, so can you calculate what the most efficient way to get to people who are not connected with each other and three degrees apart to talk to each other? So I saw that, and I said okay.
This is where it falls apart. People don’t talk to other people and information gets lost in the ether and they assume that communication has happened and as a result of it, they are operating in silos, and that can happen in a company as little as ten people. So that was her third year, where I reckon that you know we couldn’t have a a command and control type of structure. We couldn’t operate without having meetings and we needed some structure in place and the funny thing I think is you know when you start a company, you most people have worked with other companies and they hate way to hate structure.
They want freedom right and then you start your own company, and you realize that oh man, like people say they don’t structure, they don’t want structure, but they actually crave it mm-hmm, because it gives you gives you lines to color with them. The other thing as well as and I think in the beginning, you start hiring people who are like you, it’s just a common human condition. No one tells you that you should hire compliments of yourself.
You know the things that you’re not the greatest at you hire for that, rather than people who are likeable and are easy to hang out with and exactly thinking the same way you are, which I did you know so I hired for four skills over sort of Fact did the DNA, the drive, nature and acumen of what these people would bring to the company, and that was a mistake. You know, obviously in hindsight and so around year.
Three is when we really started sort of playing with what would it mean to put some structure and and creating SOPs and looking at what were what things we were doing. That was repeated as well and that’s when we started putting in kind of the the codification of who we were what we stood for, how we worked, we created something called the playbook, and the playbook was the first thing that an onboarding hire would see.
In fact, we started showing little bits of it, even in the interview process as a means to actually show them that look. We’Ve thought this stuff through we’ve spent the time, and I think that was a big game-changer, because one of the things that I I discovered was different about. The way that we built the company was all of the smartest people and the best people from a culture fit that we hired had one thing in common.
They were typically a lone wolf wherever they worked before they were. The experts expert everybody used to come to them and say what do you think we should do, but as a result of that, they didn’t have a feedback loop. They didn’t have people to talk to and bounce ideas off of, and they crave that, and so when they came to us, they found that they were like okay. These are you know. A group of people are really passionate about what they do interesting.
There pause for a second, you said something that struck me: lone Wolf’s worked by themselves. Yes, rock star self motive, motivated how the were you attracting these people. It was a couple of different things, so you do the basics right like if you think about a massive pyramid of hierarchy of you know you, you have to realize that the best people are not looking for jobs. Of course, they’re not getting headhunted they’re getting headhunted.
So we wanted to build community around what these people were not only involved in, but the next level up as well, so supple, a couple of things that we did that were offbeat and seemingly you know somebody would look at us at that point in our journey And said that this was a waste of time, you should be going out and building a sales team or you know doing something of that nature or maybe hiring a headhunter.
So, instead, what we did was we created a meet-up series and then in Toronto is called you know, inbound tรญo, which grew quite large and every month what we would do is to supposed to free Meetup, different digital marketing topics. How the guest speaker come out. We would speak as well and the idea wasn’t to get a single client out of it. The idea was to assemble people and give them to be the connector really in the room.
I would say you know what we’re going to take we’re going to put this investment in of time and money and effort. It would always be after hours, by the way that was it was never during work. Hours would be like between 7:00 to 9:00 p.M. Or 6 to 8, and you know different people’s offices when we didn’t have the space. We worked with friends who had bigger offices and could loan us a room and whatnot.
This is like the early years right and that thing grew and grew and grew, and then we created a conference called endowed con, which grew – and you know it started. You know fairly small, a hundred people and then it’s a tight. It was like 450 people coming up to a conference we took over the CBC. You know their whole hall, basically over there and production costs of 300 thousand dollars for for that conference right and so just by being this hub, I think it really helped with that.
Very hard to track word-of-mouth, which then attracted these people to us became the epicenter yeah yeah hard to connect the dots kind of as you do it, and you just have a good feeling about it. But it’s easy to look back at and go okay, I see how that all figured itself out, and so how do you know now? We have thanks for sharing it’s really good strategy. You know creating community right building the tribe.
You know letting people know that you know like they you, I just respect them, but this is more than just business. This is about making friendships. You know building a local community mm-hm funny thing like you know, for Toronto, being such a big city, always gay! You probably get this question a lot too. I mean you know any growth, hackers, I’m like, oh yeah, for a big city. We don’t have that many like, I feel disconnected at times.
You know yeah for sure, um, just fascinating um. So with the with the new introductions of okrs, kpi’s and systems. How did that transition look like to adopt these new systems? Rough yeah? I bet yeah. You know what I didn’t realize I think was. I was running a mile, a minute of surrender and then I think the the key thing that entrepreneurs do differently and maybe we’re configured a bit differently than than other people.
Is we see a reality? That’S not here. Today we see it so vividly in our minds and we almost see it so vividly as if it’s already happening – and I was running fast to make that happen and some mentors basically said hey it’s a bit like you’re the bus driver. You’Ve got everybody on the bus, you start taking a 90-degree turn on this bus and you’re going 60. You know kilometers an hour everybody’s going to fall out of the bus yep and that’s you know that it was the risks that we really ran when all of this happened.
So I really have to teach myself to go slow enough to have one major change at a time and that’s still a work in progress. You know 10 years later and having this business, where I want to continue pushing my nature is driving its impatient. It’S. Why can’t this happen any sooner? What do we need to do to cut through the noise? Did you have any employees or team members that could not accept the adoption of these new systems yeah for sure, and they left? Oh yeah yeah? I think that – and I think that’s good for both them and for us right so, and there’s no judgement in that as well as I think this is just always about fit, and I always thought about this as a like fit should exist between your team members And it should also exist in the client agency relationship as well, and so, if you have great fit like you’ve, been there Amir like where you work with people and some people are such a joy to work with and others.
You want to pull your teeth yeah. So just you know when you find the right person when you find the right who yeah life is such a joy, they can almost they can pick up exactly where you’re leaving it things off, and then they can run with it. They’Re yeah they’re alert they’re the resource folder, you know very easy to work with, and so when we and we realize that that that, like you know, you want to take a mirror earth and look at yourself as well, so there was every year you know.
I would do that as a year came to a close and says say what who do we need to become? Who do? I need to become personally to attract that kind of person into my life, whether that was a key higher key client that I wanted and even a reputation I’d like who do you need to go? What contribution do you need to make for that to be true, and so how did that process look like? Was it just you booking off three hours of time, just thinking that pen and paper or yeah, I just basically go I’ve got.
I follow right now. What I do is I follow a process called your compass, okay and every year. It’S this download this questionnaire essentially, and it helps you reflect you slow down, you’re just going to go. What worked well, what didn’t work so well? What goals that I said that I hit that I need to say for this. Your compass, that’s about your compass time, cos you’re like why you know your your your compass, your compass, yeah, and it’s made by some guys in Europe, and it’s really nice that they just kind of did this as a service to the world where don’t charge anything For it, you can print it out.
We can do gatherings or parties with people where you everybody does it together. As a group, I do it, I do its introspective kinda on my own, and so that was one of the key processes that I used. You know there’s a there’s that and and then just asking questions about, like you know how, like how might I type questions, how might I improve our client service? How am I did? How might I be of higher service to my team? How am I push my team in kind of a gentle ways right and just like doing that and also getting feedback as well, so we we put in a feedback loop at first, we use it a system called tiny pulse, tiny policy, yeah and then – and now We use something called office vibe and the idea is fairly simple.
It’S like you know, work happens on a day-to-day basis. You can typically look back and a on a week on a Friday and go. How do I feel about my week? What we’re highlights, where were the lowlights, and you should capture that and do it in a way where psychological safety is really important in teams like, if team’s trust, each other Trust is the basis upon which everything else happens. You know performance doesn’t come without rest and so yeah we put this in and we started measuring how happy and how engaged our teams are and that one had to tap in every every week right.
It would just ask you different questions about engagement and, and then we were on custom poles as well. So just ask like okay, how are we doing about topic X or how am I doing as a CEO? What else should I be doing if you were a CEO? What would you do instead? I love that question and it’s great, like you just start, seeing all these different things that people see from their own lens that they were in the SEO department.
They would say something different than if they were in design or if they were working with clients, they would say ABC things and would just like create ideas for where to go next, and so at this point year, three growing yeah employment systems. Some people leave some people like it. It’S part of the process. Are you hiring more sales reps now because it can’t just be you closing the deals all right.
So, what’s that next stage like what was that next pivotal stage to build your company, maybe to 3x from there on it, yeah yeah? So what we found was here’s a characteristic, we’re solving a complex problem, we’re going up and to the right in terms of the clients we worked with so higher ticket in terms of what they would invest annually with us more complexity in terms of SEO and PPC. We moved beyond local businesses moved to national it, businesses franchises ecommerce businesses and then technology businesses where we really found our stride.
You know software and technology businesses and what what I found with that was. They wanted a an agency that had a codified way of thinking. So not just smart people, but a smart, smart people with a way of doing things that would get them to the result that they wanted. The second thing was they: they wanted transparency as well know something that really locked in this. This industry, where you know agencies, would do this thing where they’re cobbling together a deck five minutes before the Commission walks in the door and they’re like hey, look over here, yeah, okay, yeah and then they would just make stuff up, and so that we saw all Of that, and as we were rolling it out, the key thing that we wanted to really emphasize on was that we will be in it too.
It both for ourselves and for our clients is one of our win situation. Just isn’t one for us exactly and then you’re aligned right, I think you’re you’d figure. That would be like basic business practice yeah. I think it’s ingrained. You start seeing it and in interesting ways. You know I’ll give you an example of where I found that incentives mean everything. So the way people behave is heart highly predicated on what their incentives are.
Always men right, so features of habits right, so you can create good incentives. You get good behaviors, basically that right so to I’ll get to your point about like whether we hired salespeople are not in a second. What we found is with clients who were bigger and we started working with. You know national global brands like a FedEx, PMO, Remax, etc. Their procurement departments would start getting involved or the buying department now procurement departments.
You know I love them, you know, god bless them, but they start thinking of every single thing that they buy as a blue widget. So, if you’re trying to buy expertise, if you treat that the same way as you’re buying computers doesn’t quite work mm-hmm, you know it doesn’t give you the end result, but the incentive is always we need all of our terms to get accepted on our you know Terms that protect us against risk making sure that we get the best possible price and we need to negotiate down the price as hot as low as possible.
Essentially, and so we started looking at that going. Oh, this is really interesting that their incentives are set up. This way, how might we, you know, win in that situation, and it was not to battle procurement? It was the best way to win in that situation was to have an internal champion to whom the cost of not hiring us was larger than the cost of doing so, and so we recently did this with a large brand, and you know procurement was giving us A hard time and just saying hey, you know what look we can’t do this and that you got ta accept our terms, we’ll pay you in 180 days, Natalie.
No, that’s not going to happen! 80 days 90 days, and so we just got simple conversation with our internal champion or stakeholder and just said: hey, look before you. If you want to buy the expertise, we’re really not for you. If you’re trying to essentially get a six-month loan for 0 % interest – and she said yeah – I totally understand – let me take this back – you should not be dealing with this, which was a very refreshing change, 10 years into the business compared to what would it look Like in year 3, so to answer your question, we didn’t hire salespeople.
What we did instead was we got our operations team involved as part of the sale. Ok, so how? How does that look like? So what I found is that on, in my experience, working with salespeople and being someone who sells you know day to day me myself, you have to qualify, you need to make sure that it’s good fit. Then you need to figure out what you need to work on together. You need to write up a proposal or a discussion document.
Then you get across the line. This is like the standard consent, simple stuff right, the part where I think most salespeople, if you’re, not in the delivery of the result where they miss it, because they’re not part of that process, is they make promises that the delivery team can’t keep, of course, because They’Re just trying to sell it. Yes, exactly thinking it’s a its affirmation base, whatever you know, and it’s that’s where the incentives start falling they’re very different right salespeople are incentivized to sell into closed operations.
Teams are incentivized to retain right and to grow and to delight I said this doesn’t make any sense. We’Re a small company like what we should be doing, that the client should have a joint, unified experience from the get-go, and so what we would do is I’d. Come in vet the deal and say hey: is there something for us to work on over here and then I’d have strategically people from my team come on board number one problem that agency owners often face in their early years is they are the face of the Company, and so everybody just wants to work with them as they’re already grows thanks men yeah, there’s like we want to work with you, we don’t know your team yeah, and so what we did instead was we’re like.
How do we change this so that they’re seeing the team from the get-go not when they closed the deal, and that this, the simple answer was only to people who are fits from a values, thinking budget goals, perspective and then introduce them to the team as soon As you know that to be true get the team involved so that you can shape the deliverable together, so would that mean every time a new potential client came through this team would be a combination of people from your whole company, like you, wouldn’t be the same Team from different people interesting different people.
So if we identified that a the you think about a triangle, you’ve got like acquisition up top got engagement on one side and conversion which one hurts the most, which one are they weakest at if it was converging, we’d pull in designers and developers, UX people right, Because that’s what they needed, help with sure and those people being in the day-to-day would know about what to do to fix or diagnose that situation way better than anyone in sales could in their limited capacity of dealing with the client.
And if it was somebody in you know they didn’t have any traffic, this makes sense, pulling an SEO or PPC consultant and they’d be able to go. Let me have a look at your problem and that it was. It was a dual sided thing. It wasn’t just it made sales easier it. You know boosted retention, but it also didn’t make the delivery team grown. When a new client comes on board, cuz they’re, a part of the process was like the IKEA effect, they’re co-creating.
What to work on together? Now you were, though, one of the keys here and that’s a brilliant strategist. First time I actually heard that the IKEA strategy, no, no, this got into great sales processes yeah, because everything is kind of saddled before them. So the the the beginning, part, though, is you, are still triaging or yes heading at the beginning, right so you’re doing the filtration to kind of weed out the potential bad fit at the beginning, yeah.
Well, so just two things like so even in operations. We think about it as when you’re starting to work with collaborating. So if you’re a senior consultant – and you want to work with your team to deliver you’re not involved in a day-to-day delivery, it’s like the AES are at ten. Eighty ten rule you set, you shape the project and the temp of first ten percent of it. The team carries at 80 percent of the way, and you polish, at the other ten percent right as you’re influencing the work on both ends of it, but the largest part of it is the expectations or the outcomes or set.
He knows exactly what they need to do and then you help you bring in people to help you with that ten percent as well to help them grow. So, let’s fast-forward, like let’s say, contract comes in it’s a hundred k contract yeah, whatever your takes eight months, cause a lot faster than Oh Nance contract right yeah, who, how do you have the system set up for at the end of the line to kind of Continue this relationship with that company, yeah, great okay, so I’ll, give you a more recent example, so went on honeymoon recently, Portugal, anyway, congratulations! Thank you.
Thank you and we actually had a deal worth a hundred and fifty K close without any of my involvement whatsoever. Didn’T even open the deal right, and so all I knew in terms of updates was deal came in. I had a director of strategy come in and vet the deal. He created a project task team to come in and say what would the you know the diagnostic stage, a discovery stage, look like the road mapping, the execution stage.
Now that that’s closed. What we also have is we, you know, unlike a lot of agencies, have like account managers or account directors, and we tried that for a couple of years, didn’t work for us at all, and I think the the key thing over here is that this whole idea Of the division of labor, like that, goes back to the Industrial Revolution where you know, let’s make this look like an assembly line where each person does a different kind of work in what we do.
It just doesn’t work and not in our experience at least, and so the best consultants are the ones who can understand the client understand their business needs. Translate those business needs into what the what needs to be done in terms of the work. They don’t necessarily need to do all of the work, but they can work with a team of people who do the work and then once you’ve got the data. You need to be able to tell a story with it.
So turning a data into insights, and so they so the entire team is actually maintaining a relationship with the client we’re very upfront with our clients in saying. Look if you, if you’re, hiring us, because you know you have the desire only working with one person or probably not the right fit for you, because you’re primarily trying to hire someone to manage a relationship and a relationship essentially implies that you are you’re buying a Commodity think about it.
This way you have an Account Manager for a commodity, like maybe your bank right, so you might have somebody who manages your mortgage. For example, all mortgages are essentially the same right: different interest rates and whatnot, essentially the same product underlying. So you don’t buy a mortgage because of its expertise. It’S a commodity to come out. It yeah, so you’re buying the relationship and that’s what most people stay with their bank is they have a relationship now that’s going away by the way.
Right, like that’s, really go. Some cost bias is leaving yeah, that’s that’s leaving, but most people they’ll continue working with whatever the professional is in their life because of the relationship and relationships are a really good reason to stay, but not a really good reason to attract a client and there’s a Very key distinction between that what you should do to attract the client is to have demonstrable meaningfully different, exacta, Bertie’s right and so now that the clients got a relationship with everybody on the team.
We have structured intentional interactions and so, if you’re on the senior leadership team once a quarter, we’re dropping in and just saying, hey how’s it going so we’ve got the standard. You know Net Promoter Score every month, asking them a scale of 1 to 10. How likely would you two be to refer powered by search to a colleague of similar caliber? We’Ve got the quarterly drop in that happens with the senior leadership team.
We’Ve got people who are directors of paid and of SEO, looking at quarterly Business Review reports that make sure that the QA and that’s done properly, the where you know, there’s high throughput in terms of what we’re, what we’re delivering to a client. But there’s no one person that owns that client relationship, which is also kind of different. It’S contrarian a little bit because intuitively it makes sense that you would want a high.
You know a person who’s got high relationship bias like they’re just good at connecting with people and building. That’S interesting strategy, though it’s like point of failure is kind of the biggest point of failure is for anybody with relationships that and leaves and takes those relationships. A hundred percent yeah yeah, so it’s strategic yeah right, because the idea is you get everybody to shine where they’re meant to shine.
So, instead of this having this old school to, you know thinking that, like if you’re running, if I was running a web development agency, what I’ve heard in the industry is, you want to have your front facing kind of sales relationship, people who don’t know anything about The code mm-hmm and then you’ve got people in the back room coding and that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
So why would you do that with marketing? You want the in the copywriter, the designer the PPC consultant right there in the room. All three of them working with the client and we asked for the client to not just be having one person but having their product people their sales people. So we can ask questions that are more dynamic. It’S not just about getting the lead or the marketing qualified lead hey.
How did that demo go? What questions are you asking on the demo? Where are you finding friction and then it’s just beautiful, like um there’s a book that came out recently, it’s called trillion dollar coach I’ve been meaning to read it, it’s really great, but I actually download inaudible. It’S still sitting there, it’s a great book. So one of the the the quotes in this book is from that. The specific coach is work, the team, then the problem don’t work, the the problem first and then the team.
So the idea is, if you just pair up people and you point them in the set in the right direction and say, go figure this out. I don’t care how you figure it out, but work together to figure it out. Don’T just say: okay got the problem and you go off in your own silos and we do that on our team. But we also do it with a client and we say: look, let’s start from the same side of the table and approach this problem together and we’re it’s going to be a better together, approach, wonderful and so that’s around year, three or four yeah, and that that’s Ideology has existed all the way here thing yeah.
When would he say Dannette next hurdle or roadblock, and I came in after, like here three or four yeah, so you’re four. I wasn’t in place in the hub-and-spoke model going. I don’t have enough time to spend with our team of 14 or 15 at that point in time that with to spend with each and every one of these people developing, you know they’re they’re, you know competencies, capabilities or growth maps all of this type of stuff And I thought I couldn’t hire at that point.
It was naive enough to think that I couldn’t hire anyone to help me with that. So what I did was, I said. Okay, you know the only way to go about this is potentially to find someone to partner with give away equity in my company and get a few partners on board, and maybe we could delight in conquer, and so I went and found a few people were running Their own agencies ended up partnering with them and then stayed partnered with them for the next four years, and that process was very interesting interesting.
You know going through the process of merging together and I was Arsuf working together. Oh that’s, I’m actually interested. I was more interested in the fact that you were able to sell them the story, because you had your company doing or you know, two million dollars plus yeah. You have these two other individuals, yeah, I’m assuming they’re, doing okay, yeah, right and so to meet up with two other parties yeah and then sell the dream and story to come together.
That’S a that’s fascinating! Well! It was kind of interesting, because what I figured was that pretty much everybody at that size was having the same growth challenges: okay, right, the lack of systems, a lack of focus in the specific area of the business, whether there was operations or new business marketing finance Right and running a really tight ship over there and I didn’t go into it with a plan of like hey, I’m going to sell these people on the dream mm-hm I went in and hey what are you doing? What are you finding? Are you have running the same problems I’m running into and we just got to talking and they’re like yeah we’re running into the same problems, and I think we sold ourselves on the fact that if we put our heads together, we would be able to focus and Have our own lanes essentially, so everybody brought in something friend, yeah yeah, at least on the surface level.
It felt that way and that we would be focusing in different areas and it’d be a better together approach. You know three heads are better than one hmm. How did that merger look like? Well, it was yeah, it took probably six months to put it all together and figure out the logistics of it, and I think the biggest thing was in the first year of that merger. It’S a little bit like when two families like you’ve got a stepmom stepdad, basically come together and you’re, bringing in kids into the picture and that’s exactly what it was like, and so you guys all want to like same building like same same same they were remote.
You know I had an office and they came together and we were 60 people overnight Wow. So you went from like 15 to 60. Oh yeah, huge growth, you’d started that new team then or the new merger that they start adopting the system you built before yeah and and part of it was also the chief operating officer that we took on at that point that my partner’s at that. That point had his own systems that he you know he was heavy into automation and process, optimization and my talents always being and visualizing and architecting, but I followed through his crap mm-hm.
So you know I’ve always been the ideas guy and I needed somebody to work. The system again and again – and that was what I wanted this partnership to look like so the bottom line is yeah. They came in with their own systems and we had a mishmash essentially until we found our footing. It took like a whole year to be able to get to that point: yeah yeah Wow, that’s crazy man, yeah, okay, so the merger happens, 60 people overnight same office, different systems all trying to kind of find equilibrium among each other.
What, then, the hardest part of about any kind of partnership is understanding who’s, taking lead in a specific area and not succumbing to decision by committee and I’m the type of guy who is very open-minded. I want to listen to everybody else’s ideas and I started really seeing okay they’ve had their own success that got them up to here. Let’S start this better together, three heads, you know put together type of approach when I realized was that we ended up.
Actually, you know Neapolitan ice cream dan sullivan says this all the time where it’s like strawberry you’ve got your chocolate and vanilla, and there are nice. You know there’s three very distinct ones, but if you put them in a bowl and it’s out in the sun, you end up getting mush yeah. So in hindsight, that’s that’s kind of what happened like we were watering down each other’s ideas as opposed to reinforcing them.
We had growth, you know I, we had a couple years of solid, getting new clients on board new team members on board, but if I were to look at hindsight of core values and mission and why we were doing what we were doing, each party bought a Different vision to it, and that’s that was both a source of growth, but also a source of healthy conflict, sometimes unhealthy conflict as well in the business.
At this point, when you, sir, like things have to change them, yeah, it’s I’ve always just been a proponent of you know. If I’m feeling a certain way are other people feeling that way, let me start polling mm-hmm and I started pulling. You know incoming team members. You know their first two weeks, they’re still fresh. What are they seeing that’s different about how we’re doing things versus wherever they came from and I over-index on exiting team members as well and the exit interview like hey? What are you seeing? Why do you know? Why didn’t this work out for you and the thing that camp kept coming up is well and without you know, trying to code it in any sort of fancy paint it was.
You know one partner says one thing: the other partner says something else that where there’s some level of conflict we don’t know what to do hmm, and so I think that created confusion. And to me I looked at that. I said: okay, what needs to change over here is there’s no judgment or good or bad. It’S simply. There are many different ways of running a company and what a team needs is clarity on what is the one way that we’re going to run this company and that’s the clarity I think the team deserved.
So I looked at that and I really want hmm. I think we need to change the way that we’re approaching this and the way that the business is being run and that led to a conversation and in 2018, where we decided that well, one of us is going to kick by it by out the others and That process culminated it. You know last year in June, where I bought them out of their shares and that’s a whole circle. Isn’T it from 2014 going from running a business as a sole founder? How did that conversation go like originally was like random, like hey guys, you know.
I think that the key thing I found about it is that people don’t like being surprised, and so what I really focused on was how do I deliver a firm but kind message as well? I don’t think they were surprised by it. Nothing any of us were surprised by the conversation. It was the right thing to do and then, as is probably true for anyone going through an acquisition or through an M & A type of process, it kicks off all sorts of dirt into here right and it’s a whole thing.
Oh yeah, it’s a whole thing. Oh yeah, yeah Zeke side is trying to figure out how I get back bigger piece of the pie. I brought this and uh well, it just goes back to incentives. You know you have opposing incentives at that point in time, and so it’s hard work. It is, it is very hard how long did the negotiation or process take to siglos yeah? Well, I mean I’m exceptionally fortunate that it closed in three months.
Really yeah 90 days need everything bring up talking yeah. I thought about this. For a long time, though, I was thinking about it towards the end of 2018, talking to some mentors trying to figure out what the right cuz I wanted to really like. When I’m said in a direction, I really go for it. Mm-Hmm I take I’m a high fact-finder on the Colby. So just means that I’m gathering a lot of data, I’m playing it through all the angles, and then I commit right, and so I knew what different directions it could go down and I had lots of great people and my you know – support network helping me both As a great ear to kind of listen to what was going on to mentor me through the process as well, and so that’s one of the reasons why it was most, you know it went as a sort of efficiently as it did it kind of like.
You know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs were, like my friends are entrepreneurs, so I there’s someone else who I know and in our community who closed their deal recently and that deal took a a year and eight months, which is a long time a long time About the opportunity cost right, hmm, the negotiate it ever bring up the day, maybe wanted to buy you. Oh oh yeah, yeah that that was like that there’s a dance that happens right, so the dances about it’s like playing poker.
You don’t want to show all your cards, you don’t see everyone else’s cards, and so it’s a it’s a back and forth where you have to strategically kind of think about like what’s right for the company. What do you want personally? What does the other side want? Hmm and I learned a lot of a negotiation last year – master class man – Oh, is I felt like I could talk about that for hours. Looking back in hindsight, anything that you would have done differently with the negotiation.
I know I mean we. I think it went well. I think that every did we never resorted to. Never any sort of yelling shouting matches that kind of thing. It was just cool and collected and unpatient. Like that’s one thing like, I have a name page, and I heard this from navall and it kind of summarizes me well very impatient with actions definition with results. So I thought thing you’ve gone on for another two months: Odeon fine with it, and so where are you at right now with powered by search so the buyout went through that was last year? Luckily, I went quick and easy mm-hmm, you know um.
What’S the major focus now, what’s the because now you’re in charge, you know it’s one single-minded or you can cook the kitchen yep, what’s happening with paradise search we started at the ground level, which is any consulting business, is ultimately a people business. You can have all the greatest systems and thinking of everything else, but I’ve, no, sir people to execute on that it’s difficult to scale.
So we went back looked at every one of our people. We looked at. What do we need to do to support them and their growth? What’S their growth, not basically look like what’s the last time that there’s chaos, it happens when you have this type of partnership turmoil where you start ball, dropping some balls like you know. When was the last time we did a quarterly bonus. Oh oh crap! Now that didn’t happen, so, let’s start going back and keeping every single promise that wasn’t kept and make good on it like.
That was just super important to me. So we did right by our people. First recognize people who were high performers coached the ones that needed some more help offered. You know a path up, so you know coach up or coach out mm-hmm, so we had to do that. The next thing we did was brought in a VP of Operations, because I knew exactly where I wasn’t going to excel in the company needed somebody with high systems follow-through and looked at.
You know, through my network and talked to people and found this person and hired hired her and then went to clients and said hey. Well, you know what could we be doing differently for you than we’re doing today? Had honest great conversations got there, Net Promoter scores worked on stuff, it’s been like a huge amount of growth along that path, and then we were very flexible throughout the the journey.
Like a couple of things, I don’t know if you know, but we offer five weeks of paid time off to everybody at powered by search doesn’t matter whether senior already is the agency. Business is one where people work long hours. They burn the midnight oil from both ends, you know of the candle and we didn’t want. I never wanted a company that was unsustainable, like that said, if you don’t have time to enjoy life like what’s the point of like saving up for this retirement thing, so five weeks of vacation, it works out to roughly about 10 % of pay.
If you look at it for the entire year, and so we give that, then we were offering people two days of work from home as well, so 40 % of your work week. If you really wanted to, you could work from home and there were people who loved it and are heavy. You know great contributors and other people who kind of bent the rules a little bit. I know they. They took advantage of that privilege. They saw it as a right yeah, and so we looked at that and said: hey look.
You got this great office in downtown Toronto. You’Ve been there, we’ve done a nice office. Yes, it’s good office, but there’s a conversation we have with a mutual friend of ours. Jason Gaynor and Jason, I mean we’re having lunch and after lunch he said hey. What are you thinking of doing with the office and the team and everything and I’m like you know, I want to grow it so putting in all the right Lego blocks to be able to do that, and he goes yeah.
You realize that you could be buying a Toyota Corolla every single month, with what you pay in rent. I don’t know that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and I’d been kind of toying with the idea of what would it look like to work with the best in the world, and you know, would I be thinking it was my head Up I’d screw it on the right way to think that the best people in the world are going to be an hour’s commute from this office, and I realized the answer was no, because I looked at all the people that I admired and they were all around.
The world they were and they were in Australia in the UK in the US you know in South America – I’m playing. How do i? How do I tap that? How do I make sure that I can get these people to to connect and become part of powered by search, and that’s when this idea of going fully distributed? Remote first came up. I guess in hindsight, like I’ve, always been thinking about like how do I do it differently than it’s done today, and that’s one thing that you don’t see with too many agencies, especially Akamai.
That’S probably interesting kind of transition, oh yeah, again it was well planned. We did surveys, we asked everybody and her team. What do you think about this? What do you think our clients will think about it? How will it impact you and then we quantified it and said? Look most of you are spending two weeks of your entire life commuting every single day. Yes, two weeks, what would it look like to have two weeks back and then we actually got.
You know type form survey responses of? Oh. What would you do and said? I would walk my dog. I spend more time with my parents, you know I’d go to I play with my little brother and things like that right play with my kid. Like that’s priceless right there. You cannot put a price tag on uh-huh, and so that was also a very motivational push towards going remote, and so we made that change and man. It’S been a world of difference, that’s amazing, yeah, but the system’s have to be there.
Oh yeah, the processes. Okay, ours, KPI or boards for tracking reviews, yeah everything. So how frequently do you guys physically meet up for some type of generally speaking like once a month? Okay is when we meet up, and that’s still because a large portion of the team is in Toronto. Yeah, we’re still figuring it out in terms of what we do. We hired our first full-time guy in Cape Town, South Africa, oh cool earlier this year, he’s working out fantastic, he’s fantastic at what he does, and so the next step is really to go to an annual retreat that where we fly everybody down and use the budget That we would have used for on-premise, you know in office and that’s just a great way of like incentivizing people towards an end of year, like here’s, where we’re going to go uh-huh.
It’S amazing man, yeah! Well, thanks for sharing the story. Yeah. Thank you. Like wow nice file, virtual man, that’s crazy, yeah yeah, especially the offer everybody. No, no, especially for that team, I’m totally in favor virtual. If you can do it, yeah um, you know overhead cost. You save save time, especially throttle net traffic. I think I’ve become especially sensitive now to getting stuck in traffic yeah, because I just look at any go.
There’S all the other ways. I could be spending this time like yeah like yeah. The funny thing is that remote doesn’t mean you’re working at home um, not stepping out like. I am very happy to jump on a flight to go, see a client mm-hmm, that’s quality, in-person time. You know what I mean like. The difference, I think, is when you are putting in that time in the commute, but it’s low-quality, that’s right! That’S a waste yeah and I think remote work is the future cool man.
Well, Deb thanks for sharing good if the people want to get in touch with you, learn more about power, bi search or what you’re doing on the side. What’S the best resources hit me up on LinkedIn, just search, dev Vasu, and then our site powered by search calm when we publish we’re on a publishing role actually right now something publishing methodology around how to grow: software’s and service businesses and b2b technology business as well Cool guys go check out, dev and I’ll see you guys next week, peace
We appreciate you guys joining us again. I really really am excited about search engine optimization for a couple reasons. I know that there’s a shift coming in the market right now, digital marketing is taking a lot of market share from traditional media in general in the insurance industry.
I know this because we spend a million dollars a month on digital marketing, whether it be Google YouTube. Facebook Instagram: well, you know what landing pages whatever just in the insurance space alone, and so I am seeing a shift go massively towards social media. Well, what’s happening is because this massive shift is going towards social media there’s actually a opportunity, because everybody’s focus of digital marketing is now social which is driving up cost its diluting the lead quality.
There’S some issues going on with that. So, on the flip side, what we try to do is try to kind of go in a different direction as the crowd and we’ve kind of figured. That figure that out a little bit, it’s a little bit of a waltz, not to say that social media is where we’re going, not to say that we’re not doing that like the rest of us, but there’s an opportunity that is other places as well. Besides social media – and that is, in my opinion, search engine optimization what is search engine optimization? Obviously, it’s getting your website found on Google to get an organic ranking to get passive lead flow into your business, so we don’t have to pay per lead, but you’re getting passively flows throughout the month.
Also, what’s happening is: is the industry is shifting to less face-to-face? Less walking into the insurance office and more telephone sales doing the multi-state getting your license in multi states. So what happens is you’re kind of fighting the? What’S you if you’re face to face with somebody, you have an opportunity to impress them. You have an opportunity to show up sharp to, basically, you know, show up in a nice car, whatever that is and then, but with digital and with phone sales.
You kind of have to like really exude that that presence as much as possible and a lot of people what’s happening is they’re googling, the company that you’re with they’re googling the carrier talking about they’re googling, you as a person and if you don’t have that brand Figured out and if they Google, you know John Jacobs, Springfield, Missouri and you’re, not on the list. With a website, it’s going to hurt you you’re, going to get less you’re, not going to really realize it, but less people are going to do business with you, because of that I promise.
So what I want to do today is spend a little bit of time. One I’m going to go through about 10 to 15 things that is search engine optimization. All of these things. You could probably google and find mountains of information just as a quick plug. I’M going to be doing a master class December 4th. There’S a link in the description below for you to be able to check out that master class where I’m going to teach this stuff.
For two hours I’m going to go through the tools, I’m going to get everything where I’m going to teach you how to do this, as opposed just talking about it right now, but there’s a lot of you guys that are interested in kind of hearing. Some of this stuff, and probably a lot of you guys that are doing some of it, but not all of it. So I just I don’t want to walk through those specific points. So the first thing that I want to talk about with search engine optimization, that is an important factor – is what I would call premium hosting or like your hosting environment, your site, speed.
You got to make sure that you’re, you know, Google will ding you for having slow site, speed, slow mobile site speeds and the way that you set up your premium hosting is actually important. If you just go for like the cheapest, you know website that you pay $ 49.99 a month or whatever, and they stand up a website. I guarantee you that hosting package that you’re on is poop and you’re going to. Google is going to basically ding you for not having a good hosting environment overall, so you know: we’ve set up our stuff in WP engine and some other hosting environments that are, you know, top tier.
We don’t do the cheapest hosting environment possible right and that’s something that does matter to Google, because they’re, the ones that are sending traffic to your website and one of the first things they check is who’s is hosted with what are the credentials and that leads into The next thing, which is SSL certification, so there used to be sort of a myth that only SSL certification mattered for e-commerce.
Specifically, so it’s not necessarily true anymore, you need it. What will happen is on the Left bar of the of the search, the where the URL is it’ll say not secure. That’S just like I mean just think about the perception that that brings that if you’re going to the website and says not secure, you know you’re going to have this perception that oh, this is guy. Who is this guy he’s not secure? You know what’s going on and a lot of our clients are older people and if they see not secure it kind of, has a tendency to kind of freak some people out, even though they don’t know what that even means, and they for sure don’t want to Put their credit card in, but if they’re putting their email address and trying to go through our lead forms through gated content or reach out to us directly by calling the number on the deal and they see not secure, that’s going to hurt.
You. Google knows that. So they count that against you as well, so with any good SEO strategy. The next thing that you want to make sure that you do is anybody, can you know, shoot an arrow at the wall, walk up to where the arrow landed and draw a bull’s-eye around it right? That’S not what we’re trying to do a search engine organization, we’re trying to do keyword, research to make sure that we know the target that we’re trying to shoot at.
You may think keywords um, just kind of come to you and what you would Google yourself. You need to really do some keyword, research to figure out where the actual search volume is on Google. So there’s lots of tools out there. I’M going to go through some tools on my master class that we use that are free to do all the keyword research. So you want to make sure that you first understand which keywords you’re going after on a search engine, optimization strategy, because if you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know what you know create content about.
You don’t know how to structure your website. It’S not! It’S! Not the ideal situation for sure, so you know that’s an important thing. Is that key research? So the next thing you got to make sure you do is you know Google ranks websites, predominantly I wouldn’t say predominantly, but well yeah. I would say predominantly based on the amount of content, so I don’t care how good your SEO is on a five-page website.
A 20-page website on the same topic is that structured correctly with SEO is always going to outrank the five-page website, just think about it. If you’re, a user, Google wants to send their users to good educational websites. If Google identifies this website as having five pages of content on a particular keyword and this website of having twenty pages of content on a particular keyword, which one has more domain Authority, you think obviously the one that has more content.
You need a good content strategy. A lot of people, don’t really understand like how to structure that, though, a lot of people think that that means just building a website and then putting a blog feed and just creating all these blog content. That’S not how you do it either, there’s all kinds of ways to screw this thing up. So that’s that’s! The main thing is to have some sort of a content strategy.
Then you got to make sure that you’re doing something all the work that you’re doing you got to have a way to track it. So you want to have an independent source that tracks leads clicks balance rates, content captures which blog posts are your popular ones. So you can create more content around that different markets. Different areas have different hotspots for different keywords. So if you are able to create a big library of blog posts, you can actually see which of your blog posts are getting more traffic, more attention and driving.
Those leads into your overall website that way, so in order to track that, you have to Google Analytics set up, ok, Google Analytics is free to set up it’s not rocket science. What is a little more difficult, though, is setting up the goal. Conversions in the lead, form captures and all that stuff, but just getting analytics on your site is not that hard and it’s free. You just have to have a login set it up.
It’S not it’s not rocket science. So the next thing, while you’re doing analytics, is a tool called Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is basically the interface that Google gives us as owners of a website, to look at how Google is seeing our website. That’S where errors come up. That’S where Google gives you your sort of information to say this is what’s wrong. This is what’s right. This is what you’re doing good.
This is what you’re doing bad. Also that’s where you submit your sitemap and you basically are able to with Google Webmaster Tools. That’S the interface that we have to tell Google how to crawl our website. If you don’t use Google Webmaster Tools, you’re just waiting for the search engine, robots to crawl, your site and just kind of do a lot of guesswork, which is not how you want to approach in this digital age.
You want to make sure that you have a good foundation set so that I already touched on the sitemap as well. Now. The next thing you got to do is, if you have your content structure, figured out. You’Ve got to make sure that your on-page SEO is. Is fixed what that means is. Is you got to have your page titles, your main descriptions or h1s your copy? You got to look at your keyword, research. You got to make sure all of your meta data is set up correctly in the existing pages and all these blog posts that you’re creating you got to make sure that you’re adding the right keywords and structuring that correctly with a sitemap that was talked about, etc.
But you know, the main thing is: is your page title is if you were able to go up to the tab on Chrome and hover your mouse over the tab, that you’re on a little rectangle will drop down and will give you the key words that you’re Focused on, if you don’t put those into Google specifically, then Google will guess for you. I can’t tell you how many times I go to a website and the page title is home and we’re an insurance agent.
You know why would we want home as our number one keyword that we’re going for on our homepage? That’S silly right! The reason is because no one went in and set it up, so you’re never going to get ranked ever no matter what you do. If you don’t have their correct, correct metadata built out, the next thing that you got to do is go through and make sure that you have all these directory listings sorted out.
So every mention of you or your business on the internet needs to align with the phone number description, address, etc. If there starts to be a bunch of different versions of your address, a bunch of different versions of your name, a bunch of different versions of all these different, you know mentions of your business that are saying it’s here know it’s there and once here’s the phone Number there’s the phone number they do this.
Nobody do that. Google sees that as inconsistent and they actually ding that against you on the flip side, if you have it all set up correctly, not only does that bring you inbound links, it also gives you authority with Google as well, because it’s all consistent and it’s more trusted. Basically so that brings me into a sort of link. Building link building is still a thing with with search engine optimization, it’s not near as important as it once was, link building used to be the actual SEO strategy that we all use, which was called the link wheel.
So he had your you know your main website and had your different websites that you would link to, and Google would look at all the links to a website then give domain authority based on that final site. That was being linked to because well, a lot of people are linking to it. Then that site must be. You know the most authoritative on this particular keyword. Well, Google realized that people started the game that system, and so they they links are still important.
But it’s not as important as it used to be, but you still want to try and get some organic links. If you can, whether it be through PR releases, there’s plenty of press release, you know systems, you can submit a press release with your link and they’ll. Give you a link and there’s social links you can do, but the directory listing also will get you those links as well. The only thing I don’t love about link building is it’s hard to like the Google is getting more and more, they don’t want you to buy links in any way, and so, if you have any system, that’s sort of selling links to you, you can actually get In trouble by buying links big-time, I’ve had to have clients.
You know. Google has like a naughty corner that if they catch you doing things, it’s called blackhat SEO. They’Ll put you in the naughty corner and it’ll. Take you off their search engine altogether. So the last thing I want to kind of go through is some sort of ongoing review system. Google does look at reviews and a star rating of those reviews embedded in your website as a indication of performance.
It’S weird how they do it. It didn’t used to be a thing, but Google realizes that consumers use review star ratings and reviews and amount of reviews as a point of authority as a point of basically a website that has 50 reviews on. It means that it had 50 customers come in and and pay attention enough to leave the review. So Google actually does look at that stuff. You’Ve got to set it up correctly, but it is.
It is important to look at and then you’re really just at the end of day, if it’s it may seem overwhelming, but it’s all a project that you can kind of work on and move towards. So there’s always a next level to get to a search engine. Optimization, there’s always the next level to actually arrive and what you’ll find it with a good social search engine optimization strategy is that over time you will get increased traffic you’ll start to get lead flows.
I can’t tell you how many customer customers I’ve helped where they’ve had paid ads and search engine optimization, so they got your paid ads, driving the leads and then you’ve got your search engine optimization. Finally, they catch up and then cut the paid altogether. That’S happened. I mean more times than I can count done. Millions of dollars of search engine optimization over my seven years of digital marketing and that’s like our biggest win, is when we can basically say you know what we just have to pay 10 bucks, a click just to get.
You know X amount of clicks. It would cost us X amount of dollars now we’re getting that amount of clicks organically. Let’S cut the paid altogether focus on sort of Lee developing over here, but not usually use Google paid tools any any further, but on the flip side, by the way, Google does use AdWords data conversion rates etc. To give you a thought in your website as well, so one way to get a bump on your search engine or optimisation rankings is to have an AdWords campaign with decent conversion rates driving traffic to your site.
Because Google does look at that information as well, because they’ll, say wow, you know here they’re paying $ 10 per click. You know they have a ten percent conversion rate on this particular landing page. They must be an authority on this particular keyword and they do bump up your domain authority by doing that so guys. I would love to kind of teach you more about this with actionable steps of how to execute this yourself.
Um, it’s not rocket science. I can get you you can even do this with your own wicks and Squarespace site. You don’t even need a wordpress site to do some of this stuff. So what I would love to do is invite you guys to our masterclass. That’S going to be happening December. 4Th and you will see the link in the description below and we would love to see you guys there I’m going to teach you all this stuff, it’s going to be two-hour, I’m going to record it if you sign up for it, I’m going to give you The recording and everything is going to be sort of laid out a little bit more simply in steps we’re going to take more time to unpack each of these things and walk through all of them together.
So thank you so much for your time. It’S really not as mystifying as people think it’s really just a matter of work ethic and executing and creating content strategies in a bit, but but most importantly, making sure it’s structured the right way so that you’re building authority towards the keywords that matter. That’S that’s! What SEO is basically so thanks for joining us, I look forward to seeing on the Masterclass.
Also you can reach out with the link below start here. If you want me to a site audit and look at your actual search engine, optimization of your site, if you’re interested in working with an insurance professional to help you with your search engine, optimization think about this guys if content, marketing and content, that means writing custom Content, you want an insurance, professional and insurance only person that is only insurance marketing to be writing the content for your insurance website.
Trust me it’s. It will help so anyways. Thank you guys for joining us. We will talk to you next time.
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