Search Engine Strategies for your Small Business – Small Business Show 162

The Small business show, episode 162 for Wednesday PI Day, March 14, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show here at businessshow Co. The show by, for and yes, about small business owners. Sponsors for this episode include smiles. Textexpander we're@textexpander.com podcast. You can get 20% off your first year here, at least as far as you know. In Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Lafayette, California, I'm really here. This is Shannon Jean. How are you, man?

I'm good. I'm here while we're recording this, but we are, you know, as we often do here, we wind up recording shows in advance when we have to travel. And so I'm gonna. Hopefully the plan is I will be in Austin when the show comes out. But there you go, hanging out with.

A beer in your hand, listening to some good music and making some good connections as you cruise around south by Southwest.

Yeah, a little bit of south by Southwest. Yeah, that's a. I really limit my alcohol intake during south by Southwest. It's actually really funny. I, you know, there's. There's two. There's really three parts of the. I guess they call it the south by Southwest conference and festival, but there's three parts. There's the interactive part, which only happens at the beginning. There's the music part, which happens at the end. And then sort of spanning the whole thing because it takes a lot of time, is the film part. Then there's also an educational and a game thing, too, that they've kind of tacked on to either end as well. But I have reason to be engaged both in the interactive part and the music part. So I wind up being there for a while. And the parties that happen during the interactive, it's really interesting. I go to those and I see, like, some people really overdo it, you know, in terms of that. And then the music part happens and you think, oh, this is when it gets really crazy. No, that's when it just. It becomes normal. But no one, I mean, some people overdo it, but it's not the same frequency because people that live in the entertainment business like that at any level. And, I mean, I sort of learned this just being a drummer in rock bands. You're gonna be around that stuff all the. So you kind of have to figure out your own path and then just stick with it 100% of the time. Otherwise, you know, every night becomes party night and you get a real problem. But.

Oh, forget it.

But the People that are just away, you know, you know, once or twice a year, they cut loose a little bit more during interactive.

Yeah.

So it's always interesting.

It's a good point because we talk about conferences, trade shows, and the real value in attending those kinds of things. There's always these parties and stuff going on. And not only, I mean, can you develop a problem, obviously, but it can kill your productivity.

Right.

If you're out late, partying up, and then, you know, you want to be back on the show floor at, you know, or back at meetings at, at, you know, 8:30 or 9:00am it can be problematic.

It can be problematic. Yep. Yeah.

And. And I think we all this. It's an interesting topic. And, you know, I, I can remember going to, you know, CES and being guests of people that, that, you know, want to go out and party and want to treat you to everything and keep buying you drinks and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, it can be challenging, especially as I got older and it seemed like, you know, the reps from all these companies got younger, but it.

Was not happening that way.

Yeah, they stayed. They just changed. And I'm, you know, and they say, and they were, let's go to this club. Let's go here, let's go there. Okay, great. You know, but I found myself developing, you know, certain tactics of, okay, how am I not going to, you know.

Yeah.

Do shots and power, you know, through beers and whatever it is all night long with these guys that are breaking loose or that are in their 20s, and I'm in my, you know, 40s, and I'm not going to process this alcohol.

It's not going to work the same way.

It's not going to work. So I, I became very good at emptying my shot glass in other spots other than my mouth.

Fascinating. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, you. I would drop it down to your, to your waist and disc goes on the, on the car and boom. Or, you know, over your shoulder or you set it down. I mean, there's lots of ways to do it where you still are because it's valuable or I found it valuable to, to be in the moment with, with these people and develop rapport. I always say, I have this saying that I use, you know, people occasionally, you know, where drunk words are sober thoughts. And when you're, you know, keeping in. In check, so to speak, and enjoying yourself doesn't mean you can't have a drink.

Sure.

But when you're around. Yeah, when you're around vendors, suppliers or competitors on A social level, and people are getting liquored up. You can really glean some excellent information.

Or you can reveal excellent information if you're not careful.

Yeah. That's why you, you know, dump your shot glass on the carpet and just keep walking through the club, you know, whatever they're on the floor, or go set it. Keep that beer in your hand for quite a while. And every time they drag you to the bar to, you know, pony up, set it down somewhere, and then it's gone. Or if you go to the restroom, set down your drink. It doesn't matter how full it is, they're going to buy you drinks all night anyway.

It doesn't matter. Right?

It doesn't matter. Or fill your. You know, I used to go, you know, I'm a vodka guy, typically. And, you know, I, you know, when you go use a restroom, just dump out your vodka and fill it with water and come back.

Well, you can also, if you can get the bartender's ear. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just tell them, say, look, you know, I'm gonna order vodka tonics all night or whatever. Something clear.

Tonic tonics.

Yeah. What I want is just a tonic tonic. Yeah, exactly. And you know what? Take the money and put it in the tip jar or whatever you want, you know, like, whatever the Delta is, it's yours. I just can't be doing this all night long, you know, and if I really want to drink, I will make it clear to you that, you know, this one, make it the way I'm asking. Otherwise, if we don't, you know, and you can't always do that, but that can be a handy way, especially if you're with some people that are really big drinkers, you know, and. And it.

Well, especially. Yeah. And if you're doing international business, you know, some folks from other countries, you know, really like to put away the alcohol, in my experience. And. And they can kind of take offense if you're not matching them drink for drink or whatever. So you really do need to think about your tactics and not jump in both feet with them. I had one guy. I'll tell this quick story, then we'll move on to actually what we were going to do the show about. We were out the same kind of thing, party, party, party, trying to get everybody going all night. And we left in a relatively decent hour. And the next day I went up to their booth on the show floor to thank this guy for dinner and for taking us out. And he just reeked of smoke. And I. What? You okay? What happened? He's like, oh, you know, I. I went home and I. They had stayed in some condos right off the strip there in Vegas. And he's like, yeah, I put a frozen pizza in the oven, sat on the couch and immediately passed out. And I got woken up by the security cards breaking down the door because the whole place was full of smoke. And it was a great lesson. I was like, wow, that's. I bet you'll never do that again, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean. Right. You know, I will say, though, that there is value in, like, you know, there's these people that you're doing business with and there's money exchanging hands. And sometimes those conversations, even if they don't get tense, it's. It's all business, right? It's. It's brat, it's black and white. It's brass tax, you know, and I'm gonna push on you a little bit for your pricing or you're gonna push on me for my pricing, and that's normal and it's okay. And we can still go have a beer afterwards. But that moment of having a beer or dinner or whatever it is can. You know, we talked about it last week with the irs. Humanizing that relationship. That can all. I mean, you can. You can cement a business relationship for life, especially, you know, in a scenario like this where, you know, you're both out, you both had a couple of drinks. This guy went back, something not so great happened to him. You know about it. He's told you. Now there's this trust between you.

Oh, and we laugh about every time we see him. And. And you're right, it does build a bond. That's different than just they're going think of you differently than somebody that just makes a phone call that they've never met.

Absolutely.

Again, the power of being at conferences, trade shows, events like this, where you get to meet these folks or just visiting and stopping by to. I mean, there's been a number of times I've flown across the country and, you know, had a lunch and then, you know, headed back out to the airport and come home. So it's valuable. So. But, hey, we're not talking about this today, are we?

Well, we weren't planning on it.

That's right. That's it. But that's good. It's valuable label stuff. I love it. And, you know, we're going to talk. We did a show a couple weeks ago about near me searches, and I thought it was a good show. There's lots of good information about you. Know, bundling your company name or keywords or products in with that near me phrase that people use so much when they're searching for stuff around.

Yeah.

And after the show, we sat and talked about the search engine optimization and search and things. And I kind of made a confession to you. I said, you know, one of the things that really makes me feel stupid is this search engine optimization and keyword advertising. It's so frustrating, or has been frustrating for me in the past, that it was one of the things that really always just. I've struggled with, and I think I used the phrase, it's like playing a game that you don't know the rules. And then along the way, there's all kinds of people that are pretending to know the rules, but they don't really know the rules. And those people are glad to take your money to try to do some stuff that might work. And it wasn't until I started.

It's like the opposite of taxes, right? Where with taxes, it's complex, don't get me wrong. But there is a rule book, right?

Yes, there is.

And. And there's. So you can all go look at that and then you can really know, like, who's the. Who is actually helping you, who's feeding you a line of BS with SEO stuff. Man, it's snake oil sometimes, right? Yeah, sometimes.

So I thought it'd be worth. Yeah, sometimes. So I thought it'd be worth talking about today, you know, and one of the things that I realized a number of years ago is that a search engine is just another marketplace like ebay and Amazon. And when I realized that, it really helped me to get my head around a strategy. You know, on a marketplace, you know, you're selling a product or a service, and the marketplace controller, let's say you use ebay and Amazon. Or it could be any of this stuff, could be Fiverr or any of these freelance sites, TaskRabbit. I mean, these marketplaces are you, your. Your company, your product. In. In the case, Dave, we were talking about you. You know, your content is being sold, if you will, by the search engine, and they move your ranking up and down based on all kinds of data, but usually they won't share that data with you. So not.

Not a lot of it. They will share some.

Some of it.

Yeah, But. But they definitely don't share their algorithms with you. Right. And. And that's because they don't want people gaming it in a. In a perfect world. And I think the world is close to perfect in this sense. It's just frustrating. Their goal is not to make you more successful, of course, as the content provider. If, you know, looking at it that way.

Right.

Their goal is to make them more successful by making their audience happy to, and to do that they want to feed them the most valuable results that they can.

Yeah, the most relevant.

The most relevant. Right. Well that's valuable. Right. Presumably now, but I use the word valuable because some places like Google, you know, they show you the relevant results, but above those, they show you the results that they have been paid to show. Again, the most valuable. Right.

And they do build relevance into that ad thing. I mean it's really important. Like you cannot get to the top top just by paying more. It's all based on a number of people that are clicking on your ad, all this kind of stuff. So, so that I, I think is, is it is value because they know, oh, if we just put garbage up here, nobody's gonna click on it.

Well, that's it. Well, you would think that I have a story to tell that might refute that, that premise, but I, I, I agree that that's, that is the stated goal. And, and the obvious goal is to make those results as relevant and as valuable as possible. And if that means that you can be at the top or near the top, great. But that's, they don't really care about you.

No, no. Oh yeah. And it'll, it'll drive you crazy. And, and you know, I want to hear your, your story about content management and everything, but maybe we should talk about our, our sponsor real quick.

I would love to do that before.

We jump into that.

Yeah, sounds good. Yeah. Yeah. So our first sponsor for this episode is textexpander from smile@smilesoftware.com. actually, you'll go to textexpander.com podcast. That's where you're going to go, as I said at the beginning, to get 20% off of your first year of this utility that I know Shannon and I both use immensely.

Yeah, life changing.

It really is. It's one of those things if I didn't have it when it's not running on my Mac, on any Mac, I notice almost immediately. Because what textexpander lets you do is define all kinds of different big blocks of text. Well, they don't have to be big, but blocks of text that you can trigger with a much shorter shortcut. Right. So they call these things snippets. And your snippet. Like for me, I have small snippets like my phone number. You know, if I Want to put my cell phone number somewhere? I, I, when I'm going to tell someone my cell phone number, I use text expander so often that I don't actually think or envision my number. I envision C603, which is cell 603, which is my, my area code here, or my office number, I think 0603, because that's how often I use these things. And then, of course, I know my phone number, but this prevents me from fat fingering it and screwing it up. I know my email address. This prevents me from fat fingering it. I know my home address or my shipping address. This prevents me from fat fingering it. You know, it just lets me do this. I type the name of my company, especially Mac observer, the Mac observer, comma, Inc. All the time. And so I have. What I'll type is comma, tmoi, and boom, it puts out the Mac observer, comma, Inc. With everything capitalized the right way and all the punctuation where I want it. And it's way more efficient on your fingers to do that kind of thing than it is to have to type this clunky thing with mixed case and all of that stuff. And then you can use it. You can share those snippets, right? So you can have things where. I think you use this, Shannon, where you've got your customer service emails. Well, everybody gets to share the same customer service email, and that way everybody's on the same page, your company's sending out consistent messaging, and everybody's super happy. So you got to check this out. Go to textexpander.com podcast sign up there. They will ask you which podcast. Of course, we hope you'll put this one in because, you know, that's how it works. That's how they know that this is working. And. And we really thank you, Smile and textexpander, for all their support and for sponsoring this episode.

Yeah, I love having them on here, man. It's so great.

Same.

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So, you know, we've got all this stuff, this SEO, you know, we're. I mean, I can remember being really frustrated and trying to hire people, and so the thing I want to share today is a few tips that helped me get through that frustration to get some help and really start to promise.

Them a story, though.

Oh, I'm sorry I missed your story. Tell us your story. Dang it. Jump right in. Story of my life. That's the story of my life.

Right there's the story. That's right.

Go Ahead.

Yeah. Well, you know, for us at the Mac observer especially, SEO is king. And it's really frustrating for us because our company has been in business longer than Google, right. And not longer than search engines Lycos and altavista and I think even Yahoo right were outlast us. But Google as an entity is younger than. Than we are, which is sort of frustrating that we now have to play their game, but we do have to play their game. And things are actually pretty good with us with Google. But things are where I noticed that things were not so Good with DuckDuckGo, which is one of the four search engines that you can choose to use on your Apple devices by default. So.

And DuckDuckGo is, hey, we don't track. You know, this kind of. That's their mantra, right?

That's their mantra. They don't. They don't track you. They don't tailor results to a profile that they build of you because they don't build a profile of you. They just try and give you the best results based on the one query that you just gave them and nothing else. And it's pretty good, right? So I started using it and occasionally I need to go. Actually, more than occasionally, I need to go look for like, oh, where was. You know, I need to find the link for MacGeek, Gab582 or whatever. And so I'll just search Google or now DuckDuckGo for it and it wouldn't come up. I was like, oh, this is frustrating. I was like, okay, all right, now I need to figure out. So I started looking. Every one of these search engines will have a webmaster tools that you can go in and log in and sort of authenticate yourself as the owner of your site.

Oh, sure.

And then you can see how things rank. And if, you know, if they have your site maps and all of this stuff and it's really, I mean, totally worthwhile to do that. Like, oh, you know, I never really have done this for DuckDuckGo. I. I guess I should. So I started looking. They're like, we have no webmaster tools. We aggregate results from lots of search engines. Like, okay, fine, well, I guess I gotta go find those search engines. So I started doing some digging and there's no real, like, there's no one definitive list. But it became pretty obvious with all the research that I did that DuckDuckGo feeds mostly from Bing, which is Microsoft search engine, which is also the same search engine now as Yahoo. They say it's Bing. Bing and Yahoo. They list them separately when you go look, but it's. I mean, it's literally the same thing. So Bing. And then also this Russian engine called Yandex Y A N D X. It's like, okay, I'll go, I'll look. And so I. We already had a webmaster account with. With Bing, so I headed down the Yandex account path and signed up with them. And it's really weird because they're. It's like half in Russian on the website and you got to keep switching it to English. But I finally got things up and I was like, okay, you know, they're indexing us. Cool. Still not, you know, months going by, still not really appearing here. All right, let me look. And I'd search Yandex for us, and I'd be able to find us. Like, well, is the problem with Bing? I mean, we've had a webmaster account with them for a long time. I start searching Bing. Aha. Same results in Bing that I see in DuckDuckGo. Okay, so this is where it's going. And I dug and I dug and I can't, like, I can't find our stuff. In fact, I'll find these so frustrating, man, that. Take our RSS feed and publish it as an article, like each entry. And then.

So what's a scrap? Let me interrupt you. What's a scraper? Yeah, give me that.

Yep. So we publish articles every day, and you can find them by going to our website, or you can find them by subscribing to our RSS feed. And what these scrapers do is they subscribe automatically, I presume, to our RSS feed. And they take the content that's in there, which for a lot of our articles is just sort of a lead in paragraph. And. And then, of course, a link to the article and the title of the article. And they will take those three pieces of information and publish their own article about, you know, and that's it. And then it links to us, but it's the same title and just that lead in paragraph. And those things were getting ranked or getting would return. Like, I would search for, you know, the name, the title, the exact title of one of our articles, followed by the word Mac Observer. And I would see them and never us. Like, okay, something's wrong.

It's gotta be crazy.

Yeah, yeah, this sucks. So I dug and I found a support path. So I emailed Bing support, or I, you know, submitted a support ticket, and lo and behold, I got a response, which I really didn't expect. And it was like, I asked a couple of questions because, you know, I figured, well, you know, I have a couple of questions. If I'm gonna ask, I should. You. I should get them all in. And so, you know, I got answers to all of my questions, and it was like, oh, no, you're doing this right, or this one thing. You should change. And okay, it's cool. And then about, you know, the. The overall rankings. The. The guy said that when he wrote me back. He said, oh, yeah, your. Your site has a block on it. And it's like, what? He says, so I've submitted it, I've asked our. I can't tell why the block is there, he says. But he's like, I've. I've asked our review team to, you know, review it. And I thought, okay, fine, you know, and so a couple days later, he writes me back. He's like, okay, I heard back from the review team. Good news. They've decided to remove the block. It's like, well, okay.

Well, it's okay. Cool.

Good news. But, yeah, it'll take a few weeks for things to settle in and your stuff to start appearing. Like, okay, why was it blocked? Like, what? You never told us there was a block. Like, anytime I had a problem with Google or whatever, they're like, look, this content, you can't have this way. Danger, danger, danger. You get all kinds of emails and you get seven days to fix it or, you know, you're out kind of thing. It's like, oh, yeah, you get right on that and you fix it. This never happened. I haven't gotten an answer about that. This is two months ago.

Wow.

Yeah. And I keep asking you. It's maddening. And so things have started to appear, but these scrapers still, like, what'll happen? It's driving me crazy. What'll happen is we'll publish an article, and the day of the article, I can search Bing and find the article with, you know, with our name and all that stuff, and it's our link and. Great. And then starting the next day, these freaking scrapers will appear and we're gone.

So they're gaming the system.

Totally gaming the system. And so I pointed this out to the folks at Bingham, like, because assuming that they want to deliver valuable results for their audience, when I'm searching for this, this is not valuable, right? This is, in fact, way less. This is not what I'm looking for. I would think they wouldn't want this, and yet they seem to allow it. So I keep going through, and it's even more maddening. They have a way where you can issue like a takedown request. And so I do all of our articles week and I go through and I put them in and I put in the ones that the scrapers come up with and they delist them. And then it's cool, but it's like, guys, it's the same four sites every single time. Maybe you want to, like, take a look at your decision to never list them again. Like, maybe they should have a block.

They should have a block on it, Right?

Yeah.

That's crazy.

Maddening.

It's very frustrating and it is tough because those, those scrapers, you know, they're probably automated and just, you know, constantly, you know, doing this stuff over and over and over and you have to manually then go, you know, put a request in, do all that kind of stuff. It is. It's crazy. Yeah, it's nuts. So I. Back to where, you know, we were talking about SEO and getting some help.

Yeah.

I think the most, you know, critical piece of information that I can share with you is that you really need to sit down and look at your priorities. You know, what do you really want to achieve? If you go into it with this vague notion of, oh, we want our search results to be higher and I've done this, you'll spend a lot of money and a lot of time and you'll be extremely frustrated. Much better to say, look, what do we want to achieve? Do we want more page views for this article that we wrote? Do we want to sell this particular product, you know, more, or get that ranking for that thing? I mean, you really have to be specific. And it may be that you. Well, it certainly will be that those goals will change over time and as you develop them. But if you just, you can't have this broad thing or you're just going to continue to beat your head against the wall.

It's totally true. Yeah. And even with this, with this Bing thing, I mean, don't get me wrong, Bing is an important search engine, but it's not like Google. Right. It's maybe 80% from Google and 7% from Bing. Right. So, I mean, that's not insignificant. But it's also not like if I fix this thing with Bing, I don't expect it to magically open some floodgates and just have, you know, millions of new page views show up for us. It might happen. It might. And it does need to be fixed. Like, it's not something. It's big enough that I shouldn't ignore it. But it's also not the thing that I should like, clear my schedule for a month.

Correct. Not priority one, right?

It's not priority one. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that's a good question to ask yourself about your business. Is SEO and search engine optimization? Is that the best method for you to connect with your customer? You know, there's only so many spots on page one. Right. And I don't know what the statistic is, but it's gotta be, you know, through the roof on people that just don't go past, you know, page one on our search results.

I assume it's, it's got to be in the 90%. Yeah.

Oh, it's gotta be. Right? Yeah. And so it can be very expensive and very time consuming to, to rank up there on that page one. Are there better methods for you to use your time and your money to connect with your customers? You gotta ask yourself that. And, and you know, if I read a really good article on a, on a, an SEO company blog that I, that I, I liked a, it was a while back, I don't recall which one it was, but they were making some suggestions that I like and I thought they were pretty authentic. One was that if you decide that SEO is priority number one, their suggestion was you should have somebody on staff doing it for you. Not hiring an outside company because they're not going to get involved enough in so deep or as a small business, you may not be able to afford that, but having that in house, person that can really, you know, stew in all the stuff that's going on with your business and what you're trying to achieve is, could be more powerful. And then if you can't, if you can't afford a real quality SEO company, but maybe you can afford to pay them for a consultation. Yeah, not free. Don't do a free audit. No, no, I think you get what you pay for there.

You know, I think if you can't get a referral to somebody that's good for SEO for your type of business, and I can't stress that, like somebody that's good for Shannon's business might have no relevance for mine. It might, I mean, they might, right? They might understand both, but it's two very different things. So if you can't get a referral that you know is going to be helpful for your business, then maybe letting those people do those free audits is a way, I mean, it is their way of selling their services to you. So treating it like that and getting for people to do free audits you know, you'll, you'll be, you'll see the differences between them and you'll say, oh, this person is identifying some things that, that look like this might be real. Don't go, don't necessarily jump for the one that promises you the moon, because there's no way to promise anything other than we're going to do our best for you. Right?

Yeah. And when you're, when you're getting that consult consultation and working with them or you're just talking with them, you know, ask lots of questions, see how they communicate back with you. Send an email with five or six questions and see if they only answer the first two.

Yeah.

Do you like their follow through and what they tell you? Talk about the process because the process could be more important than anything else. Because if you're constantly frustrated with the company and how they're doing it and what kind of results they're coming back with or communicating, it's going to make it even worse. And then I would ask them what happens if it doesn't work and see how they respond. Because they should come tell you there are no guarantees this is what we're going to do. If they use words like, well, we have a secret method or we know this secret thing about Google or whatever, run away as fast as you can. Because there is no secret method. There is no secret sauce.

If they do, there are secret methods. Right. Because if somebody can figure out or learn one way or another what Google's algorithm is for a specific type of thing, then you can game toward that. Which is why Google doesn't tell you what their algorithm is, because everybody.

And also, yeah, it's a good way to get yourself blacklisted too. Right.

That's the problem. They call that black hat SEO where you're, you know, really gaming the system, not just tailoring your results for, you know, how best they should appear and cleaning things up. Like if you're truly gaming the system, they call that black hat SEO. And if Google catches, if any search engine catches you from doing that, then you get, your site gets a block on it. Like, like mine did, except I didn't game them.

Right. Somebody else did.

That's the. Well, yeah, somebody else did. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And I mean, and it's not just small companies, big company, you know, BMW got blocked a few years ago because they were doing some stuff like this as well.

Of course. Yeah, it's very tempting, right? It is, it is. There is a, I mean, it's a slippery slope, but there's a Fine line between doing all the right things aggressively and staying on top of that. It's like your taxes and just right. And then just doing that one thing that's like, oh, well, okay, you know what? It's cool. Like we do all this right stuff, we can do that one thing. And then suddenly it's like, well, this was. That worked really well. Of course it worked really well. You know, you're doing something they've told you not to do for a specific reason. That's right. Yep. Then suddenly.

And I think the, the key takeaway that you mentioned earlier is getting a referral from a trusted source, someone that's used, oh, I've used these folks. They've been able to help me here. They've, they've done it. And, and it's also, I think fits with a more global strategy on marketing on your social media, your reviews. You know, it's not, it's just not like it used to be where, oh, we just focus on, on ranking and keywords. And in that search engine it's, well, we're using social, we're using YouTube and video, we're using our reviews and all those things really should help get your rankings. And it's more authentic because you're really. We talked about this earlier. You want to be a resource for your customers or potential customers that is going to get your ranking up higher. It takes a while. And one of the last things I.

Want to that point, I just want to note and I've had this conversation with Matt Cutts at Google who is like the head of search there, or at least he was and I think he still is. The search engine's goal is to find things that, to automate a way of finding things that make sense to humans. So like the it. You don't want to write content for robots, even though it's robots that are finding your content and sending humans there. They also look at how long do people spend on this site after they go there is this content that we are directing them to valuable. So make your write your content for humans, but follow SEO best practices so that the content that you've written for humans and tailored for humans is visible to these search engines in the right way like that. But it has to be human first. And other than this stupid thing with Bing that has served us very well is, you know, work the right system. But remember that the system is actually built to be tailored toward humans from, you know, from search engines standpoint. Yeah.

And I would say that one of the things that really helped Me too. And took away a lot of the frustration is when I started ignoring my competitors and their rankings on search, everything got better. It's really easy to get in a battle over keywords that can cause you to spend tremendous amounts of money. A lot of time, a lot of frustration, and it's okay to be second or even third up in those results. And I would argue that it's better to spend time on your overall business value. Those reviews, your social being a resource for your customers, your blog. And over time, your results are gonna percolate higher than that competitor that you may have that really knows how to kind of tweak his SEO and always be number one for a set of keywords or whatever. It takes more time. It can be frustrating, but over time, your customer's gonna click into that guy, that's maybe number one and go look and go, eh, okay, great. And they' going to come back and click into number two, number three, maybe number four. You know, over time and all this other peripheral stuff, your kind of global value that you're adding or offering to your customers is going to move you up on that first page, which is so important.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true.

So we'd love to hear your stories, you know, feedbackusinessshow, co and or come talk, you know, share your tips. Business show co Facebook, in the small business support group. You know, we all have to help each other and it's sharing these stories and these little tips that, that really make a big difference. So we appreciate it.

Yeah, it's fun stuff. We really, we enjoy doing this stuff and, and we appreciate when you, you tell us how much you like what we're doing. So thanks to textexpander.com podcast for sponsoring keep living that charmed life. We'll see you next week.

Take care, everybody.

Yep.