The "Top Secret" Formula Behind Digital Marketing

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Greetings everyone. Welcome to July. It is the July 2nd, 2014 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Greetings everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc., and one of the areas that we're focusing on these days is helping our community bank clients with both compliance and contract management in the vendor management areas. You can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting, Inc. online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Vendor management, that sounds exciting.

Vendor management, isn't it lovely when you're in a business that regulations cause you to spend more time doing everything than you really wish you had to?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can tell you as a vendor of services to banks, and other businesses, certainly in the banking sector, we're pretty familiar with going through the vendor management process. And when I was a banker, we did vendor management, but it wasn't nearly to the extent that it's required these days. So I've gone through several vendor management processes and answered several questions and provided numerous certifications and all sorts of documentation. And I can totally get why a bank would want to have some sort of a formal process to keep that organized, because there is so much paperwork a bank has to collect these days in that vendor management process to make sure who they're working with is, uh, is qualified and, uh, approved and vetted. Um, so hopefully, uh, hopefully that's keeping you pretty busy.

Um, and, uh, yeah, we were actually very fortunate to, uh, established a business partnership recently that allows us to offer an outsourced vendor management service that I can honestly say we can deliver the outsourced vendor management service less expensive than banks can do the service in-house on their own.

Yeah, very cool.

So I'm really excited about that.

Sweet, sweet. A little banker tangent there, but definitely for any of the bankers that are on the line, certainly get a hold of Jeff. You know, today we're going to talk— Baltij Gill, who is on the line with us now and has been one of our favorite speakers on Free Webinar Wednesdays. If you haven't had the honor of hearing Baltij talk, I will warn you, he talks fast. You better write just as fast. And there's probably a good chance we'll go a little bit over because there's always a ton of good stuff when we get good questions. But we're really excited to have him back and I guess before I set the stage, I'll cover my housekeeping items first. First and foremost, Free Webinar Wednesdays is recorded and it is archived and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So if you do miss something that Baltich says or want to go back and listen to it or share it with some colleagues in the office, you'll certainly be able to do that at freewebinarwednesdays.com once the archive is ready. And we do like to get questions and interaction from the audience. So if you haven't found it yet, there's a chat feature in the right-hand side of your screen in the control panel. Feel free to go ahead and type your questions in there, and Jeff and I will monitor those during today's session, and we'll ask them when there is an opportunity for Baltej to take a breath. How's that?

So, Eric?

Yes.

I actually see a couple folks are dialed in on the telephone today. Just a reminder, the number that shows up by default is a number in Canada, so if you do not have a calling plan that allows you to call Canada for free, You may want to either use the voice over IP or click on the dropdown in the audio area and look up the phone number for the area that you're calling from.

That's a good point. As an individual that does not have international dialing on their cell phone, who was surprised by a rather large and lengthy phone bill, you can certainly attest that if you're here in the States and are dialing from a mobile device and want to make sure that you dial the US number, it's probably a good idea to do that.

So good catch, Mr.

It only cost me about $22, but we had someone whose error cost them $80-some bucks. So yeah, we like to mention that now.

Yep, I see there's a couple people that are, uh, disconnecting and redialing, so good on you. So, uh, with that, I guess to set the stage, and I promise, Baltij, I'll let you talk here in just a little bit, um, you know, it's, it's no secret, and we said in my intro, we did WSI digital marketing There have been a lot of questions that have come back to me, and I know Baltich just spent some time in Hawaii actually with Google talking about this, that people are wondering really, what do I need to do from a digital marketing strategy? And we've talked about content, we've talked about SEO, we've talked about social media, we've touched a little bit on advertising in the past. And so what Baltich had done is put together this great session that just looks at all the various elements of a digital marketing strategy. It's not intended to be a sales pitch, although certainly if you need assistance, we'd love to help you with that. But it's more as an educational session to really reveal some of the things that you should be thinking of. And as we approach the second half of 2014— I can't believe the, the year is half over already— these are things that might want to get on your to-do list if you're not thinking about them already. And Baltich and our team I think do a really good job of keeping up with the trends, the shifts, the changes that are going on in the digital landscape. And so it's a good refresher, I think, for everybody, whether it's our banker friends or some of our small business friends or entrepreneur friends, on all the different things that are going on in the web and digital. So hopefully that introduction does you a little good justice there, Baltij. But Now I'm going to officially say, Baltij, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for joining us.

Hey, thanks for having me again.

Sounds good. So I just sent the presentation over to you if you want to go ahead and share your screen up. And I just had the opportunity to sit through a trial version of this, and there's a ton of good information. And even though I consider myself a digital marketing expert, kind of because that's the industry that I'm in, I love sitting with Baltij because there's always something new that I learn or a refresher that I need to pay more attention too. And I don't think anybody in this industry ever really totally gets everything because it changes so quickly. So I know you've got a lot of slides, so I'm gonna go ahead and shut up and I'm gonna let you do your work. And we look forward to being wowed by you, my friend. So let's get rolling.

Okay, great.

So yeah, again, like I said, thanks for having me, and thanks for having the Canadian number as default. I personally like that since I'm based out of Toronto here. So So, all right, so anyways, let's, let's get right into this because as Eric mentioned, this is a jam-packed webinar. What we do want to talk about today is there's a lot of moving parts when it comes to digital marketing. There's a lot of different things that you could actually invest in when you want to build traffic to your website. So there's things like paid search marketing and display and retargeting, and there's SEO, search engine optimization, there's email marketing, there's things you can do on social media, and then there's all this stuff on mobile now. But it doesn't matter which bucket of stuff that you choose, or maybe it's multiple stuff that you're currently doing or plan on doing. They're all designed to essentially drive traffic. And we say traffic like targeted traffic back to your website or web properties, meaning it could be your blog page or Facebook page or your e-commerce store, whatever the real goal of your website is. Our objective for today's webinar is really to educate you guys on all these different sections that apply in the digital marketing space and some key takeaways of each element. So having that said, kind of look at where we are today in the world. I mean, if you look at 50 years ago when we were watching television, I mean, we didn't have to go this far back, but I mean, still, you know, this was kind of like the scene at the family room where people would just get hovered together over one television, Television. So I just got a note that you guys have lost sound. Eric, could you guys still hear me okay, or is that just—

Nope, we're good. Yep, I love it. Yeah, yep, we got it.

Okay, great. So this was 50 years ago, kind of what it looked like when you're watching television. And we look at today's world, I mean, we could probably relate a lot to this. You know, you'll probably have the iPad out or your smartphone out, and you're pretty much consuming media, but you're consuming it through multiple channels. This is kind of how our world looks like, and this is really why there are so many TV shows now that are using things like hashtags, or they are building apps for your smartphones where you can actually interact with a lot of your favorite television shows. Like, one of my favorite shows is The Walking Dead, and they've got this great app where you could actually, while the show is going on, you could guess Who is going to get the most kills? What type of weapons are they going to be using? And all sorts of fun neat stuff where at the end you get a score, then you can share it. I mean, it's just things like that that these companies or these shows are thinking about when they are producing their media. So the same thing applies in your world, in the digital space. We need to look at where are your customers hanging out, and what devices are they using? I mean, really looking at Google and the size of Google, I don't think this is going to really impress anyone here. We all know how big Google is, and it's kind of scary actually. But there are 2.4 billion internet users worldwide, and there are about 2 billion searches done in Google every single day. So think about the opportunity of people searching for your product or your service, and if they are not able to actually find you. So this is not the web. It's not looking at your desktop anymore or your computer monitor. I mean, this is more the web where we have multiple devices, multiple channels, different screen sizes of where we have access to the Internet virtually everywhere and anywhere we go. And what will be the web? I mean, there's going to be Internet in your vehicles. There's going to be Internet in your appliances. They already have smartwatches out there where now you could actually measure your heart behavior, your sleep patterns, and your exercise. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's happening now in the digital space where again, why is this important and relevant to you? You really need to understand the technology of how people are accessing and consuming media because you want to make sure that you're there when they're looking for your product or your service. So this brings us to to the first section of what we call having great user experience on your website. So most people right now, if you open up your website on, for example, a tablet or maybe on your smartphone, are you currently happy with your website? Is it giving the people the best information that they want in an easy-to-use manner? Google actually came out and predicted that by the end of this year, there's going to be more searches done on Google mobile than there will be on desktop and laptop. And right now they are estimating about 35% of all internet traffic to a website is typically coming from a mobile device. So having all this said, you need to understand, if someone is coming to my website on a mobile device, is it really accessible? I'm a big Seinfeld fan, so I love using this example of Jerry Seinfeld when he was with a girl and he called her— she had man hands because I can relate to this because I've got something called fat fingers as well. I don't have piano fingers, so when I'm navigating on my phone and I try to click the Contact Us page or the menu page or whatever I'm trying to navigate, if I have to zoom and pinch and it just really makes it hard for me to navigate, that's frustrating for me as a user. And Google also understands if your website is frustrating people when they're trying to interact with it, the probability of you not ranking for those phrases on mobile searches it's going to be less likely for those people to have taken the time and built them something called a mobile website or responsive website. We are going to talk about those 2 in a moment and show you the differences. But there are multiple ways. It's not just me telling you about what Google is saying and how much people are using mobile devices. I mean, even your analytics which we will talk about as well if you are not familiar with this. But if you are measuring who is coming to your website, how they are getting there, and all that good stuff, Your analytics will tell you a lot of this data. And you can see on this specific example, if I kind of zoom in there, you can see that this client had about 60— sorry, 29.4% of their traffic in the last 30 days coming through a mobile device. So if people are coming through mobile sites to your website, but it's not user-friendly, again, it's hurting their user experience. You could even get so granular where you can figure out, well, what device are they using? In this screenshot you are seeing that Most people are coming from the iPhone, and the iPad, and the Samsung, and so forth. The list will go on and on. We were kind of joking around with this client at the time where out of all the devices people are using, unfortunately BlackBerry didn't make it to the top 30. There are more searches coming through a PlayStation than there was on that phone. But again, not to say that maybe all this information is going to be relevant to you. You might not need to know the device type. This will be useful if you are planning on building like a mobile application or something to that nature where you would want to know what are most people actually using, so then you can know what to work on first in terms of development priority. But other than that, you just want to know are people coming through a mobile device or not. So having that said, really as a business owner you have 2 options when it comes to— well, 2 main options when it comes to how do you fix this. There is something called responsive design, and there is something called mobile websites. Essentially what a responsive design is, it's actually revamping your entire website. So it's like rebuilding it and reskinning it and designing it in a way that it doesn't matter which platform or what screen size someone uses, the website will automatically conform to that size of the screen. So for example, if I went to your website on a desktop versus a laptop versus a tablet versus a mobile device, it will all load up differently just depending on the screen size of the actual user coming to your website. So that's what responsive design is. It involves revamping your entire website. Where a standalone mobile website, that's like a separate part of your main website. It's like a stripped-down version of your main website. It's just for quick, fast information. So essentially, they can work the same, but it's a standalone version of your main site. So if you want to look at kind of the difference of both of these options, the big pro thing about responsive design is the fact that from a user experience and maintenance and so forth, and even from an SEO perspective, this is kind of what Google has always recommended. But at the end of the day, you're only dealing with one content management system, meaning if I were to add 5 products to my website today, or maybe I was going to add in some news articles, maybe I did a blog post, or whatever it may be, I'm only dealing with one backend system or one CMS where I make the change once and it would automatically go across all the different platforms of however someone is accessing my web. So that's the big benefit of responsive design is the fact that you make changes once and it fixes it everywhere. I guess the cons of this is the upfront cost to get started. So even though your maintenance costs Down the road will be much lower and cheaper because you are not spending extra time doing things over and over versus a standalone mobile website. But you have to rebuild your entire website and redesign it and so forth. So the upfront cost is like getting a brand-new website, but it's kind of like getting 3 websites, like a mobile website, a tablet website, and a desktop tablet all merged into one. Where a mobile website The great thing about mobile websites, I mean, if you are building it standalone separate from your main website, these are very quick to build. So it doesn't take like weeks and weeks. You can deploy them pretty fast. The upfront cost, again, it's not that expensive because it's just a dummy or stripped-down version of your main website with just some clear icons and buttons and so forth. But the big con for having this for most standalone mobile websites is now you've got 2 content management systems. So if I'm updating my Contact Us page, I've now got to log into my main website, and I also have to log into my mobile website and make the changes twice. So here is a general rule of thumb as to which one to pick when you are looking at a responsive versus a mobile website. We would say that if, number one, if you are not happy with your existing website, whether it is from a design perspective, from a functionality perspective, or maybe it is just outdated, it's been a year or 2 years, It does not happen. You want to give it a fresh look and feel. You might as well go with a responsive design because you are killing two birds with one stone. You can get all the changes that you want on your main website and have it conform to all mobile and other devices as well. If you just recently invested and built a brand-new website and you are happy with it, hopefully, like I said, hopefully whoever designed and built it, especially if it was recent, they took into consideration mobile. But we ran into cases where that's not the case. So this is where you'd probably want to only invest, especially for budget reasons, into a standalone mobile website since you've already invested into a full website. So those are the 2 main differences in terms of helping to choose between a standalone versus a full-out responsive design. So just again, when we're talking about some of the different stuff that I'm going to be talking about today, anytime we mention the word keyword phrase, we're referring to what's someone types into Google. Anytime we're talking about paid search marketing, we're referring to the ads that come up on the right-hand side or the ads that sometimes appear on top of what we call the organic listings, which is the area shaded in green over there. The big difference is on the paid search marketing side, you're pretty much paying Google to be there. So I mean, it's instant, it's fast, it's quick. So that's the big benefit that you can tell Google, hey, if anyone types in this keyword phrase and in this geographic region, I want you to show my website. So it's a quick way for you to get visibility, traffic, visitors, all sorts of good stuff. But on the downside, every single time someone clicks there, you're paying money to Google, and that cost would depend on a whole bunch of variables like how many people are bidding in your website. So the cost could range. So it could be really, really cheap, or it could be really, really expensive. Where most businesses want to be is on this organic side where You typically, like I said, so you can get 1 visitor, 100 visitors, 10,000 visitors a day, but you're not paying for every single time someone clicks there and goes to your website. But you are most likely going to be paying an agency or maybe someone in-house or a consultant to make sure that your website is actually found, and this is more of a long-term strategy. So if you are doing paid search marketing, the biggest, most common mistake that most people make when they set up their paid search marketing ads is they send traffic to the homepage. In fact, 44% of clicks from B2B companies, according to Marketing Sherpa, are directed to the business's homepage, which is the number one mistake. They should be directed to something called a landing page, which— a landing page is essentially the first page the visitor sees when they come to your website. So, I mean, essentially any page of your website could be a landing page, but we're talking about a landing page that actually converts, that speaks to the customer that you're trying to talk about. So just some more facts. Research shows that companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7 times more leads than those with fewer than 10. So I mean, I wouldn't be too worried about the numbers and the percentages. General rule of thumb is the more landing pages that you build effectively that cater towards the product or the services that people are looking for, the higher the probability that you're actually going to get better leads and better customers and more conversions. And when we are speaking about conversions, a conversion is just basically anyone taking a predetermined action that you want to track and measure. So for example, if I was an ecommerce website, I might want to track and measure, are people adding items to the shopping cart, and how many people are actually checking out and buying? I'm not an ecommerce website, but I want to collect names and email addresses. So we look at Free Webinar Wednesdays where one of Eric's goals would be to grow his attendee list of his webinars. And usually you offer some type of incentive like, here is a free eBook, or a white paper, or listen to our past webinars, whatever it may be, but to collect names and email addresses. That might be the goal of your website. Or maybe the goal of your website is for people to actually spend some time on your website and read your content, read your information, share it with their friends on Facebook, and Twitter, and LinkedIn. So regardless of what your website does, There is obviously a goal that you want people to take, so you want to make sure that whatever the goal is, we can track and measure this inside our analytics which we will talk about in a moment. So let's put all this stuff into a real-life example of why it is so effective to build your landing pages correctly. I went into Google and I typed in 42-inch Vizio LED television. This is something what we call a long-term keyword phrase, meaning I'm not just typing in things like television or best television. I'm not at the research stage. I am actually in the buying stage. I know exactly what I want. In fact, I know the screen size. I know the model. I know the type of television. So I'm a very educated customer at this point, knowing exactly what I want. And my buying decision might be based on price or shipping or speed of delivery, but I pretty much know what I want to get. Now having that said, take a look at the 3 ads that I saw when I typed in this keyword phrase. One's coming from Walmart, one's coming from Amazon, and one's coming from Dell. So let's take a look at 2 out of these 3 ads to kind of show you what these landing pages actually look like. And keep in mind, I typed in the term 42-inch Vizio LED television. The last one first, which is Dell. So if I click on their landing page, This was the page that I was brought to. Now very quickly I can see that there are televisions here. That's great, but I don't see anything here that mentions 42-inch or LED or even Vizio. In fact, I see the first button here says 4K Ultra HD TVs, which are not the TVs I was looking for. There are smart TVs, and this one says Samsung, which is not what I was looking for. And yes, this one says LED TV, but it's not showing me my Vizio or my 42-inch. So it's not— I mean, this is the page that I'm first seeing when I type in that specific keyword phrase. In fact, if I scroll all the way to the bottom of this page, nowhere does it mention anything with a Vizio except all the way at the bottom here. It says Vizio, but this is a 70-inch LED smart television. So again, it's the wrong size, wrong information. I'm most likely— so Dell is paying money for me to click as a customer to come to this page, but essentially I am not going to convert because they're not showing me what I want. Now on the other hand, let's take a look at Walmart's landing page. If you take a look at Walmart, clearly on this page you can quickly see that the word Vizio is everywhere, the televisions are everywhere, the term 42 inches are everywhere, they're even bold, and it says LED. So this is exactly the information I was looking for. So this landing page will have a much higher probability of converting and doing better than the Dell one, just because of the way they, they're displaying the information to me as a user. Just a quick tip for anybody that does have an e-commerce store and so forth, 2 quick things. Number one is if you put your pricing in red, you will have a higher conversion ratio most likely, just because of 2 reasons. One, red is the fastest color that travels to the human pupil, meaning that if we were to glance at the page, the first color that we get drawn to or see right away is the color red. And secondly, this is more to do with human behavior and psychology. Red usually indicates a hot sale, a discount. So I mean, typically doing this would get more people likelihood for them to actually maybe add that product to the shopping cart. The second thing as well is the number one reason why shopping carts get abandoned is because of shipping rates. People typically add the product, go through all the information, they get to the point where they put in their zip code or their postal code or Whatever region you're in, you put in your local code just to calculate what would be the shipping cost. So if you were able to upfront put in your shipping cost without someone going through that entire process, this will help abandon people from entering your shopping cart and not checking all the way through and messing up all your analytics and you're trying to figure out, well, why are they not continuing to buy from me? Here's a quick little landing page optimization test that you can do on your webpage. So number 1, does it pass the blink test? Which is kind of what it sounds like. If someone looks at your landing page within 3 to 5 seconds, do they know what the offer is, why you're offering it, and why it's valuable? I mean, we all look at and navigate our own websites, so we could probably do it blindly if someone told us to go to our page and take a certain action because we're there multiple times a day. But you might be surprised if you ask one of your colleagues or your friends or your family Hey, look, if you were to do this on my website, could you show me how you would do it? And just watch them. You might be amazed to find out how they are navigating, how they are moving around, how they are clicking around trying to find the information that you want. So there are also other things like, do you have an attention-grabbing headline? Do you have good images? Is your copy clear and compelling? Have you minimized distractions on your page? We are going to talk about that one in a moment, so I will leave that for now. Do you have an optimized form? So typically speaking, you only want to collect the information that you need right away. So generally, the longer the form, the less likelihood it's going to get completed. But at the same time, the longer the form and someone does complete it, the more qualified the lead may also be because they've taken the time to do that. But I mean, at the time, if all you need is just a name and an email address at that time, great. Don't ask for every single thing else up front. Or at least don't make it required to answer all those things if really all you need at this point is a name and an email address and whatever other fields that you might have to use. So I think the number one challenge that people make when they are designing their landing pages and so forth is they offer too many choices and too many options. And us as human people, I mean, if we are given more than 3 options, it takes us so much longer and Harder to make a quicker decision. So the best example I could think of is, you know, when you're on an airplane and they give you all these movies and TV shows to pick from, which by the way I love. I mean, I wouldn't want just to have 3 options, but here's the reality. They've given me so many options, I've spent a good time just trying to go through all the movies, looking at trailers, going through all the TV shows before ultimately making the decision. of what I want to watch. Now, if I use the same scenario and I was only given 3 movies to pick from, again, not to say that would be the ideal situation, but just looking at it from a theoretical perspective, if I was only given 3 options, right away I know that A, do I want to watch any of these movies? And B, if I did, which movie am I going to pick? My decision time is going to be much quicker and faster with 3 choices than it is with 4, or 7, or 12, or 30. And it just keeps going higher from there. So that's why generally when we build landing pages, you can see here is the one that we did for Wonder Bread Canada. We typically have 3 different calls to action where people could actually— we call them funnels of how are we getting them to the goal of what we want them to do. So in this case, we are running a contest. They could win a home theater system. We did a product launch. This is more informational. That's the second goal. And the last call was give us your name and email address so we could give you all this and more information. So this is pretty standard. Here is another example of a landing page. Again, having the 3 calls to action on the right-hand side. And sometimes we have them at the bottom footer, but it all follows the same type of pattern where we typically have 3 different funnels. This is the one we did for NapoleonGrills.com. We just actually launched this website about 2 weeks ago, I would say 2 or 3 weeks ago now. Actually, this is probably a great website to look at if you have a chance, if you want to look at some of the different types of designs that are out there right now. If you look at napoleongirls.com, you are going to notice this website is one of those websites where you have to scroll down a lot. There is actually a lot of content on that homepage. It's kind of like having 4 or 5 homepages stacked on top of each other, which back in the days we would say, no, that's like the biggest mistake you could do. You want to make sure all your content is above the fold. People hate scrolling, which is also true and very valid. But you also have to keep in mind, how are people accessing and digesting your information now? We found with this company a lot of people were searching for them on their tablets and even on their mobile devices because they might be at the store physically and they're trying to figure out do they want a Weber grill, a Napoleon grill, or a Broil King grill or whatever, and they're doing some research. And it's easier for them to flick, like just imagine an iPad when you're scrolling, Like you are just flicking your finger and you are seeing all the information. You would rather do that than click because iPads, or I shouldn't say iPads, I should say tablets, they are still not as powerful as desktops and laptops especially in terms of the Internet connection. So when you are rendering images and text and so forth on your tablet, it will still take, generally it will still take longer than your desktop and laptop. I'm not considering if your desktop and laptop is loaded with all types of software and is just slow. I'm just talking about general browsing habits where the connection on desktop and laptops is still faster, meaning that people on tablets would prefer to scroll down versus clicking around. But also follow the same examples. I mean, this website we worked with back in 2009, a very, very, very old website, but still The same type of thought process. Take a look at the 3 funnels: new to cruising, cruise before, or book your cruise online. I mean, the end goal of the website is the same. We want people to book the cruise and give us their credit card information. But how are we getting them there? So the first funnel is new to cruising. These are people like me. I've never been on a cruise before. I got no idea what it entails. So I would probably click on this link. It would give me like beginner guide information and what to pack and Some safety tips and what to keep in mind. That's how the verbiage would be. And at the end would be, hey, and if you're, you know, we'd love for you to speak to one of our consultants and we could pick the right package for you. We could walk you through the process. That's what this new to cruising link would do. If I click on cruised before, these are people that have gone on cruises before, so they don't need all that baby or beginner information. And maybe now it's more talking to them that here's what our cruise offers, and, and here are the big features and benefits, and blah blah blah blah. So that way you could compare that, hey, you know what, I went on a cruise before, I like the fact that they have onboard Wi-Fi, or they've got this or that, or whatever, whatever the cruise actually has. So that's how the lingo would be there, and the call to action would still be pick up the phone and call us or book your cruise online. But you're just speaking to your customers differently depending on what stage they're in or what's their research or knowledge level or And last but not least, these are people who just booked a cruise online. They already know what they want. You don't have to sell them. They've got their credit card in their hand and they're ready to do the actual booking. So again, looking at your own website, you have to understand, is your website designed right now to help people solve problems or common questions that you get asked or things like that? Or how could you segment your customers to make sure that they are getting the right information? to them in the appropriate manner. So if you're an ecommerce website, here's just a good example of some before and afters. So I mean, if you could list your products this way, we talked about putting your font color in red, how much money have you saved, having a nice Add to Cart button. Customers that have bought this product have bought this product, cross-sell them. So probably one of the best examples I could probably think of, of the people that are experts at this, is no other than Amazon. I mean, Amazon spends millions of dollars testing conversions and testing to see, hey, if we make the add to cart button yellow with a black shadow, does that work more effectively than putting a 3D bevel? Or like all these little, little nitpicky things that we don't typically think of, but they test all this type of stuff to see what is getting people to shop online more. So if they're spending all this money on testing and so forth, It's not costing you as a business owner to replicate the same type of strategy, like to change a font color from black to— it's not going to cost you money, but now you know that this stuff works and it gets you higher conversions. So when we talk about the distractions, here's how Amazon is doing such an effective job. If anyone has actually shopped on Amazon, you probably don't even realize they did this to you until I've probably blatantly pointed it out to you. So here's a good example of what I did when I went to Amazon.com. I typed in the word Harry Potter and I saw the images. I saw the book, flipped it back, looked inside. So they have great product shots. They've got the information there. They've got customer reviews there. They've got star ratings there. They've got all sorts of good stuff. And they're telling me it's free shipping. It's in stock. They have the price in red and all that good stuff that we just talked about. And they've got a big Add to Cart button which is clear on the screen. So let's just say I go ahead and click on Add to Cart. This is what I end up seeing. On the top left-hand corner it says 1 item added to the cart. I also see my cart in the nav menu which just shows item 1. One of my biggest pet peeves is when you look at websites and you add an item to the shopping cart, you don't even know if the page refreshed. You can't really tell, did that item even add? And then you add it in again, or maybe again, and then next thing you know your shopping cart has like 4 or 5 of the same item, but you just don't know as a customer. So you want to make it clear to the person that, hey, the item was actually added. The second biggest mistake I see is when you add an item to the shopping cart and it kicks you out right to the checkout page. I mean, that's like going into a store to pick up a bag of milk and they're rushing you out to the cashier. Like, what if you still wanted bread and cereal and chocolates and all other stuff that you want to add? So don't kick customers out. They still may be wanting to do some more shopping. And this is where cross-selling is so important. So you can see right now, I added the item to the shopping cart. It's telling me it's been added. It's very clear. It's here. It's there. It's up there. There's a big icon that says, Proceed to Checkout. It's cross-selling me. And there's still all these links. There's still all these offers, Father's Day. There's menus. There's all sorts of stuff I can still navigate because I'm still in this store. Take a look at what happens now when I hit Proceed to Checkout. Once I actually click on this link, what's going to happen is this is what we call— Amazon does such an effective job of removing all distractions. This page is now so clean. Like, in fact, there are no links. The only links are like, forgot your password and sign in, like this stuff over here. But even the logo at the top left is not a clickable link anymore. They removed that link for a good reason. They don't want you to go back and maybe change your mind or anything. At this point, they just want you to focus on give us your money or become a new user and give us your money. So there is nowhere else to navigate to. There are no distractions. They have stripped away their navigation. They stripped away everything. It's just very clean. You are so focused on only doing one thing now where you cannot get distracted. In fact, they even have like step 1 of 4, so you know you are going to sign in, you are going to do your shipping and payment, you are going to get gift options, and place order. Even telling people what the next step is kind of like this has a better ability of people now converting. And it's just due to human nature. People like to know what's happening next, and how many steps are involved, and so forth. So the more easier you can make the checkout process for ecommerce, and the more cleaner you can make your navigation, in fact, if you could strip it out completely, even better. Then you could do some more advanced things like what we call multivariate testing. So for example, if you had a landing page that you built, but you want to test different headers, or maybe you've got different images that you want to use for your product shots, or maybe you've got different descriptions, or maybe you have different calls to action. One says buy now. One says order now. One says Get your bike now, or whatever it may be. And you want to test which effectively are most people going to like. Well, there are ways or there are platforms in which we could essentially test this. So for example, let's just say 100 people came to this landing page. It would be kind of randomized where all 100 of them would see a different heading, a different product shot, a different description, and a different call to action which it would measure over time Really, over time, it's hard to say whether it should be run for a day, a week, a month. It all depends on how much traffic is coming to these pages for you to make a good judgment call as to which heading or what image or what description, which call to action is essentially working better in getting more people to actually buy the product. So this is what we call multivariate testing. Another thing that you also want to track and measure, so we've talked about this a little bit, is something called Google Analytics. Most businesses out there, I mean, it's free to use and they are using Google Analytics, which is great. But I think the biggest concern that businesses have, they're like, yeah, we get these nice little Google Analytics reports with a nice dashboard with pie charts and these graphs and so forth, but what does all this data really mean? Like, what do we do with all this stuff? And this is why it's so important to work with an agency or a consultant that can actually help dissect this information that your analytics is providing and give you some real business information and intel as to what recommendations and changes to make to your website, or your landing pages, or your product to help increase your conversions, whatever your goal of your website may be. So if you are looking at your Google Analytics, here are what I would say are some of the top things I would look at. Number 1 would be your traffic sources. How are people finding your website? Are they coming direct? Meaning, do they know your web address? Like, are they typing www.yourdomainname.com and pushing enter? I mean, especially if I was doing offline marketing like a TV ad or a radio ad where I'm sending traffic to my website, that's the call to action. I want to see, did my direct traffic go up? Because that's going to have a direct influence over my offline marketing campaigns. If I'm paying an agency to do, or my consultant, or doing it in-house to do, SEO work where I want to be found in Google, Yahoo, and Bing and the different search engines. Is my search engine traffic going up? Is my visibility higher? Maybe it's referrals. Referrals just basically mean, are there other websites on the World Wide Web that are sending me traffic and I'm getting conversions out of them? So for example, let's just say, for example, this one right here where Eric posted my photo on his website for Free Webinar Wednesday. I'm like, hey Eric, you know what? You get a lot of traffic on your website. It might be nice if I, you know, maybe I put up banner ad and, you know, you could charge me for it and blah blah blah blah blah. And I could then measure to see how much traffic that I get out of Free Webinar Wednesday. They came to my website and bought my product. So let's just say Eric charges me $10,000 to have an ad on his website for a month, and I generate 100,000 visitors, and I get 4 people to buy my product. Now depending on the cost of the product and so forth, I will quickly know, was that an ROI or did I just waste my money? So all this stuff will allow you to track and essentially make business decisions as to what's working and what's not working. Entry page, this is also so critical for you to look at because you want to look at what's the most common page or the first page that people typically see when they go to your website. So if I'm getting all sorts of traffic but I'm not getting people to pick up the phone and call me, or they're not filling out my form, or they're not adding a product to the shopping cart, I want to take a look at what from that first page to that second page, which is step 2, why aren't they going there? Where are they going next? So your entry page and even your visitor path will allow you to measure that. We can see the general flow of how people are behaving when they are coming to your website. So again, if 100 people came to my products page, 50 people added the product to the shopping cart, 25 people put their shipping information in, And 10 people actually bought the product, which is great. But I would want to know from the 10 to the 25 people, how come those 15 people never continued to check out once they put their shipping information in? Or how about from the 25 people to the 50 people that initially added the items to the shopping cart, where did those 25 go? Why didn't they continue and put in their billing information? And so forth and so forth. So this will allow you to measure, to check to see where are people going, and then importantly, where are people leaving? Eventually, people are going to leave your website. So are they leaving on your thank you page and congratulations and thank you for buying my product page, or are they leaving on your pay-per-click landing page that you just built? So these are things you need to look, track, and measure to see effectively, is your website or landing pages working to your benefit or whatever your ROI goals might be? Just on top of Google Analytics, there are some other advanced heat map tracking that we also do as well for a lot of businesses. So I know it's going to kind of look funny on this page, but this is kind of a landing page that we built for All About Gluten, and it kind of looks like there's all these red, yellow, green, purple, orange dots on the actual page. Well, what those actually represent is actually people clicking on different areas of the landing page. We're able to track and measure to see where people are clicking, or if you're using a tablet or mobile where people are actually pointing with their finger and pushing the screen on. So all those colors in this case are representing where are people actually coming from. So for example, if I just did a television ad and I told people to come to my website, I could essentially segment that out and only look at the people that saw my television ad. How are they behaving on my website? Where are they going? Which products are they looking at? I mean, this is some great information that you could gather Not just in terms of what people are looking at, but you will quickly be able to determine what product are people looking at more than others. So it helps you maybe organize your content better, or organize your images better for your products, or maybe even put your featured item as the most popular item that people are now looking at. So it gives you a lot of great data and intel. So again, if you are actually interested, there is a lot of— we actually get a lot of feedback in terms of when we do this of how to get that done. At the end, you guys can all contact Eric Cook. He's well familiar with all the stuff that I'm talking about today, and he can tell you a little bit more about how he can put that on your website and have that tracking done for you. But just moving forward in terms of another section, it's called display ads and retargeting. I mean, a lot of people don't know what's called display ads and retargeting, and there's a strong probability everybody that's on this webinar right now, this has already happened to you, but you just probably never realized it, and you probably will realize it once I've explained it. So this is how display and retargeting essentially works. Let's just say you go and you visit a website. So I'll give you the example of Audi. Let's just say I was checking out an Audi R8, which is like one of my favorite cars in the world, and I was checking the Audi R8 and I was playing around with the features, the colors, all the options and so forth. But let's just say I didn't end up buying the Audi R8. I just played around on the website, but I left. I never left as a customer. Well, what Audi R8 could essentially do is they would drop something called a cookie on my machine, on my device that I use, which will tell the World Wide Web that I have visited not just Audi's website, but I was looking at a specific product like a white Audi R8 Roadster. Or actually, they call it the Spyder, which is the convertible version of their car. So anyways, that just basically means that once I leave the website and I'm actually traveling around the web, maybe I'm checking my Gmail, maybe I'm looking at Facebook stuff, maybe I'm looking at YouTube videos, but now Adi will start showing ads to me virtually everywhere I go, and they're showing the same part that I looked at trying to get me re-engaged and retargeted to capture my interest where it could go back to the website, and hopefully being a loyal customer, I will actually convert. Now, keep in mind there's an art and a science of doing this, because one thing you don't want to do is frustrate people. Because usually when we explain this to people, they're like, oh yeah, actually, you know what, that makes sense. I've noticed when I go to websites, and then all of a sudden when I'm traveling on Facebook, or Instagram, or wherever I'm going, I kind of see those ads following me. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but there's something called overkill where you don't want to be intrusive. Or what we like to say, stalking your potential customers. Sometimes there are too much where if they're not clicking on your ads after you retarget them, you should probably turn that feature off or tone it down where it's not popping up everywhere and anywhere. Because that again could actually backfire on you and make your brand seem very intrusive. So here's a good practical example of of how this works into place. This is a company, Marisa de Quebeco. We just met with them a few weeks ago. They launched a brand new product which they invented. This is actually a chocolate milkshake beverage. It's all organic. There's no— it's dairy-free, it's gluten-free. So it's like super duper, super duper healthy. So the concern was, we've got this great product. We know there's demand because of people's lifestyle and so forth. We know there's a niche. They're not trying to convince people to go healthy. They're trying to reach out to people who have already made the active choice. They want to live a better lifestyle and be active, and they care about what goes into their body. But how do they get in front of those people? So we showed them an example of how we can use retargeting. So when someone goes to their website and so forth, and let's just say after someone's on the Food Network and they're checking out different recipes, imagine if their ads start showing up on these networks. So you can essentially have your brand, and this is what we told them. This is the slide that we used for them saying your brand now could appear on the Food Network, the Food Channel, Allrecipes.com, Rachael Ray, and so forth. So again, depending on your business, whether you're B2B or B2C, or depending on your target audience, whether you want to target people that are in this case health, or some people want to target people with sports, some people want to target people with Some people want to target by gender or by geography. Depending on what's your persona of your demographics of the people that come to your website, there are websites out there that probably fit that market or that niche market in which if they generate a lot of traffic and having your ads show up on their website could not only be great for brand awareness, but it's also great for them to coming back and potentially becoming a customer of yours. Okay, so the last section over here, what you want to talk about is search engine optimization, which is always the big, big section. So just very quickly before we get into the meat of the SEO part of the presentation, for those people that are using WordPress, you might want to double-check. The most common plugins for WordPress in the SEO world is something called Yoast and All-in-One SEO Pack. If you are using the All-in-One SEO Pack, earlier in the month of June, there's a big security flaw in that plugin which makes your site vulnerable to hackers where they could do all sorts of crazy stuff and impact your website. It could hurt your Google rankings. It could do— just put it this way, there's a big security hole and All-in-One, they quickly released a plugin to fix this, their latest version of their actual plugin. Number one, if you are using this plugin, you can log into your WordPress admin console, go to the plugin section, and hit update to make sure you've got the latest version, which will plug this security flaw. If you're unsure of how to do that, again, you could probably speak to your local webmaster or whoever your consultant is. Or if you don't have one, this is where you can speak to Eric in, in figuring out how to get that done. Or even if you're not even sure sure if you even have this on your website, he could help with that as well. So I guess the big question that we get asked when we're doing any type of optimization from companies is, hey, I want to be ranked number 1 in Google. And we're like, that's nice, but here's our question to you. Do you actually deserve to be number 1 in Google? Like, do you generally have the best information, the best content that talks about that keyword subject or topic? Again, if I was a dentist in Toronto, for example, and someone goes and types in teeth whitening or dentist, family dentist, or dentist for kids, and they're in the Toronto area and you want to make sure that you come up, well, I would tell that dentist, well, first of all, do you have information that A, talks about how you're a local dentist in Toronto, and number 2, do you have great content on teeth whitening and your services and not just Have before and after photos, have testimonials, do you have reviews, do you have videos, do you have all sorts of genuine content that talks about 3 tips to make your teeth brighter naturally or 5 things to avoid before you visit the dentist and just great content like that that's just overall building the theme of your website so Google understands that this is generally A person that deserves to be ranking on page 1 of Google for that keyword phrase. And this is why your website now is so much more important than just content. You know, even though content is important, Google measures and checks to see, are people spending time on your website? That's a big, big factor now. So for example, let's just say myself and Eric were both dentists, and I was ranking number 1 in Google and he was ranking number 2 in Google, and we're both in the same region, and someone typed in dentist. And they came to my website because I'm ranking number 1, but if on average, if all the people that came to my website spent less than 5 seconds there and hit the back button for whatever reason, maybe my website took too long to load, maybe I used crappy images or who knows what, but then they went to Eric's website and they spent a couple minutes there, they looked at a couple pages, that's telling Google something so important that I, Voltage Guild, I do not deserve to be ranking number 1 in Google for the term Dentist, and Eric on the other hand does because people are staying on his website. So this is why now SEO is not just about dumping all sorts of content on your website, it's do you have a clean design look and feel? How's the user experience? And when you have that content, are people sharing it on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Google+ and all sorts of stuff? Because that will tell the search engines your content is genuine and people Let me just quickly pause there because I know, Eric, we are reaching the top. Do you want me to just keep continuing on, or how do you want to kind of handle it? Hey, Eric, are you still there?

I think he's muted, Baltidge.

Yep, sorry about that.

For a second I got worried. I thought this would be the worst if I The whole time and no one heard a word I was saying.

No, I'm— I, uh, I was muted. Sorry, I, I'm here.

Okay, so just— I know for a time check, um, I've probably got another 15 minutes, which will kind of take us over the typical standard time.

Um, did you want me to just keep continuing for those people that could stay, they stick around, or Why don't you continue, and then of course we've got this recorded, so folks that are unable to stick around can certainly hop on and catch the rest of the information once it's posted up to the Free Webinar Wednesday site. But I know the SEO is an area that a lot of people are interested in, so I hate to see you cut it short. Okay.

Okay, so yeah, let's just keep going through them. So, I think just having this slide on the screen, it's so critical and important that if you are a business and you're right now exploring different SEO vendors or companies that you might want to work with, one of the things you have to understand, like, I mean, we've moved away from the term called link building. That was a common SEO term that most brands used, and because it used to work back in the days. Right now, what we're relabeling it as link earning. We're genuinely building real links that drive you traffic to your website because you have to be so careful now when you get these links because of all these updates that happen in Google. So if you are familiar in the SEO space, like the Panda and the Penguin that you're seeing on the screen right now, it's going to be very familiar to you. And if you're not, these are basically algorithm updates that Google has made over the past couple years which they started targeting websites in which they felt were getting fake links or non-genuine links or links from poor websites that can now ultimately damage and hurt your credibility in the search engines. So there's tons of these updates. And here's just a quick snapshot of some of the major, major updates that just happened. So you can see one of the biggest ones that happened lately was back on May 21st, which was the Panda 4.0 update, which is really Google— again, this is the 4th version of this update, which they were scanning websites in which they felt that the content wasn't good enough, like whether it was not informative, whether it was maybe too much beneath the fold, whether it was just not strong content, not a lot of content, maybe just like a couple sentences. They just basically went out and penalized all these websites that they felt they don't deserve to be ranking there anymore because they got away with it in the past, maybe using other techniques. So again, if you are a brand watching this, You don't need to know about these penguins and these pandas and all these specific dates. I mean, you obviously have a business to run. This is why it's so important that your SEO agency or your consultant, whoever you're working with, they know this information and they know the dates. The dates are so critical because what we do is we actually check and track and measure how your website is performing on a daily basis. Not to say that you need to know every single day how your keywords are performing. You might only want to get a monthly update. update in a monthly report, which makes sense, but your agency should be tracking it on a daily basis, and here's the reason why. For example, let's just say on May 21st that update happened. If you were my client, I would check your website on May 21st and May 22nd to see, did your rankings fall on that day? And rankings, if you're not in the top 3 positions of Google, like if you're number 1 in Google, it's pretty much going to be flat. It's not normal for it to go up and down, but if you're anything else besides number 1, number 2, and number 3, your rankings are going to fluctuate daily. So you're going to go from like number 4 to number 6, then back to number 5, then number 4, then number 7, then 6, and 4. I mean, it's going to go up and down and up and down, but that's generally how most websites are. And you can see the pattern that we're seeing over here with this client, how they're kind of going up and down and up and down, which is normal. What is not normal, or which is not good, is if all of a sudden on that date, that all of a sudden your rankings fell for most of your keyword phrases. This is why it's so critical that the agency that you decide to go with, they have the ability to track this stuff daily, because if not, how could they effectively tell you that your rankings fell on this specific date and then correlate that back to an update that happened in Google and not knowing what that update is, giving you some real recommendations? as to what needs to be changed or fixed on your website. So an example is if on May 21st, if your website fell, I would then say, look, this is the update that Google did. They targeted websites which they thought had poor or little content. For us to recuperate your website because it did fall on that day or the next day, it's not a guessing game no more. This is most likely the cause. We need to start generating better quality content and having it published on your website ASAP. Very critical that your agency does this stuff. Another major update was the Google Hummingbird update, which again, in layman's terms— hang on, my screen just went black there. In layman's terms, if you guys are familiar with Ask Jeeves, which is the old search engine, it's the butler guy. I actually used to like that search engine. Or if you look at Siri, which is like your iPhone where you can actually basically say, hey Siri, what is the closest pizza shop to me? This is what the whole Hummingbird update for Google was about. It was really about them updating their engine so they have a better understanding what people are asking or typing in when they're asking Google a question in their search engine. So the best example I could think of, because this is one I could relate to, I always crack my iPhone so many times in a year, and I have bad luck that if I buy a nice case, I end up losing my iPhone. I don't crack it, but then someone else gets a nice little iPhone that's all in mint condition. So anyways, if I crack my iPhone, a common search for me would be to go to Google and type in broken iPhone, or crack my iPhone, or iPhone repair shop, or something along those lines. Now I just mentioned 3 different terms there, and Google right now will still give me 3 different results because I'm typing in 3 different keyword phrases. But essentially I'm asking the same thing. That's like me asking Eric, hey, I broke my iPhone, where can I get it fixed? Or I dropped my iPhone, where can I get it fixed? I've cracked my iPhone screen. Do you know a repair shop? Eric's answer to me should not change. He should say, yeah, Bob's Shop down on 47th Avenue, great service, great price, and blah, blah, blah, blah. This answer is going to be the exact same because the question is essentially the same. So Google is now having a better understanding of really what is your website talking about and what is it doing. So over time, we've always kind of focused on having your pages optimized, one keyword phrase per page and things like that. Google realized that kind of backfired because how many times have you now read a page of iPhone repair shop and iPhone broken screen fix shop and cracked iPhone shop? You know what I mean? How much time could you regurgitate the same type of content and make it compelling and unique and all that stuff and make it relevant? So they realized businesses, they kind of forced businesses to try to target every single keyword phrase possible and write content on it, which is not what Google wants. They'd rather you focus your energy and time on writing real good genuine content and they will have the ability to understand for all these keyword phrases that talk about that topic or that theme, if you deserve to rank there, you will rank there and that's how you need to build authority and trust in the search engines to actually get that to rank there. Another very common thing we get asked is for local optimization. So this is where you see those map listings like A, B, C, D, E, stuff show up right in the search and result page. So as a business owner, the first and very most important thing you could do to make sure that you're found on those map listings is to make sure that your business is listed in things like CitySearch and Insider Pages and Super Pages and Yelp and Google Local and Yahoo Places and Bing Places and blah blah blah. I mean, these are all the types of areas you want to make sure that your business is number one submitted and submitted accurately. I mean, for example, if you're listed on CitySearch but your phone number there is different than it is on the insider page on your website, Google is going to think they're all different businesses. Or even your website address or your physical address, if they're all listed but you wrote them differently, sometimes even the company name, if you're incorporated sometimes and other times you left that part out, even though we as humans will know it's the same company, Google will treat it as different. So you want to make sure that your information is actually consistent across all these different profiles. And last but not least, you want to make sure that your profile is complete, meaning if you have a Google+ page, Google asks you questions like, hey, do you have a photo of your business? Do you have videos? Could you tell us your hours of operation? Could you tell us your method of payments? Not to say all this stuff will apply to every single business, but the more information you can tell Google about your business, the more you complete your profile, the higher likely probability that you are going to be ranking in those map listings. I mean, this is one factor of many factors, but it's an important factor that Google considers. And I'm not just talking about Google Local or Google Places. I'm talking about City Search and Insider Pages, all these different profiles. So it's so important that, again, working with your local consultant or your in-house team or your SEO agency to make sure that they actually do this activity correctly. The next section is what we commonly get asked is, how do we outrank our competition? So we hear this all the time. We're like, we're better than our competitors. We're bigger. We have better service. We have better pricing, but online they're just destroying us. Well, the first thing you have to understand is how is your website currently performing? You need to have that benchmark. So here's a good example of a company in the UK. They came to us saying they want to be ranked for tennis rackets and so forth. So we showed them, okay, in Google UK, If you type in the term tennis rackets, you're in position 23 currently, meaning on page 1 there's 10 listings, on page 2 there's another 10, so you're actually sitting at the top of page 3 of Google. And then for other types of phrases like Babolat tennis rackets, you're number 28. For tennis racket, the single term, you're in position number 30. For all the other phrases you see on the left-hand side, they're pretty much on the top 5 pages of Google. In fact, actually the real thing is It doesn't matter if you're ranking number 23, 28, 500, 5,000, it's all the same thing. 91% of traffic does not go past page 1 of Google. So if you're not on that top 10 positions, especially in the top 5, you're losing the majority of that search engine traffic and visibility, because people would most likely refine their search if they don't find anything on page 1 than to go on to page 2 of Google. So first of all, you need to measure and track to see how your website is currently performing. Secondly, you need to know who is ranking on page 1 of Google for your keyword phrases. So we have a platform, our technology allows us to measure and track and look at the top 10 listings of every single keyword phrase and then compile together data that shows us who are your real competitors. So in this case, we found out that for all the keyword phrases, pro-drugs tennis, but even more importantly, tennisnuts.com, these guys dominated Google for every single keyword phrase that had to do anything to do with tennis rackets. It means they've done such an excellent job of convincing Google that they deserve to be ranking on page 1 of Google for anything related to tennis rackets. So this is where it gets interesting because our platform has the ability to do something called reverse SEO engineering where we could take a look at that competitor and find out where are they getting all their content from, how many times are they submitting, where are they submitting it to, which directories, which sources are they using, and then we could scrape all this data and not just them, but all the common websites on page 1 of Google for all the keyword phrases. So what ends up happening, to show you kind of in theory how this would work, is if I notice that, look, on page 1 of Google for my main keyword phrase, every single brand that Google is ranking, they all have a listing on, let's just say, SuperPages.com, but your website is not on SuperPages.com. Well, it's almost a no-brainer that you need to make sure that your business is now submitted there Because that's probably a factor that Google looks at to see, hey, are we going to rank anyone for this keyword phrase? Because clearly they are taking that into consideration because it just so happens that every single person on page 1 of Google has a listing on that site and you do not. So this is kind of what we call a reverse SEO engineering process which our team does to help figure out where to do your submissions, where to do your citations, and where to build your— earn your links and so forth. So again, we would never expect as a business owner that you would do this yourself. It's very time-consuming and tedious and takes a lot of analysis and data mining and so forth. This is something that obviously your SEO agency or your consultant would be responsible for. And then we look at other factors too, which is things like your social influence, like how many Facebook fans you have, your Twitter followers, your YouTube views, and so forth and so forth. I mean, right now it doesn't have a direct influence on your ranking, but we are going to be doing another webinar that talks about how your social influence could actually impact your SEO in the future. But here are just some quick little tools that you could use right now. If you want to find out what your competitors are doing and which keywords are they optimizing for, bidding for, and paying Google for, and what do their ad copies look like, you should probably note these 2 down, KeywordSpy.com and SpyFu.com. So I'll give you a couple seconds to write those down. But essentially, those 2 tools are free websites which you could go ahead and plug in your competitor's URL And it will actually show you which keyword phrases they're bidding for and what their ad copies look like. And one of the reasons why it's so important to look at that data, especially if you're doing paid search marketing, is well, before you write your ads for your paid search marketing to get clicks, you need to know what your competitors are doing. Like, how could you possibly write better ads because you want to get the clicks if you don't know what your competitors are doing? So a good example is— I like using this example. This is in the UK. It's an old example, but I still think it's pretty great. This is, congratulations, Congratulations to Audi for winning South Africa Car of the Year 2006 from the winner of World Car of the Year 2006. So this is like BMW taking a little jab at Audi. So again, this is not to do with paid search marketing ads. This is just to do with marketing of how brands are kind of battling each other and writing better stuff with their competitors. So you can see what Audi did. They're like, okay, congratulations BMW for winning World Car of the Year 2006 from the winner of 6 consecutive Le Mans 24-hour races. So it's kind of funny how now Audi came back at BMW and kind of are now boasting their chest as to how they are better than their competitor. In fact, Audi actually went all out where they would actually go ahead and even on their new A4 when they launched it, you know, because everybody knew about the rivalry in the UK, all it said was, your move, BMW. Like imagine now on your billboard, your ad space, you're actually putting another company's name, right? I mean, that's pretty gut-wrenching. And again, let me just clarify this as well. Depending on which part of the world you are in, sometimes you cannot mention your competitors. You can't do this and so forth. The point I'm just trying to make over here, how this all relates back to digital, is you want to make sure that you know what your competitors are writing, and you want to write something better. Because take a look at how genius this is. So imagine seeing this billboard on the street. You are going to move BMW. And then right across the street you see this. You see that BMW got their billboard up. And all it says is the word checkmate. So I mean, like, how powerful and cool is that? So again, when you're writing your ad copies, you can use those 2 tools to figure out what your competitors' ad copies are saying. If they're saying things like free shipping or money back and things like that, you want to make sure you consider all those things because you want to get higher click-throughs. How else could you outrank your competition? Well, another way is to make sure that your ad copies are compelling. So what you're seeing on the screen over here is something called Google Authorship. You guys might have seen this before where you type in something into Google and you see someone's face there and has a nice little copy there. This has been proven to have a higher click-through rate. So if you have a blog on your website, or if you have someone blogging on your website, it's so, so critical that you do set up something called Google Authorship, which will allow Google to understand who the author is and identify them and so forth. Now, just to give you a quick update, Google just recently moved away from displaying the actual photo and the actual person's— how many people they have in their circles. But the rest, I mean, you can still set up authorship. It's still important. It still gives you that boost in Google in terms of ranking and how quick you can do it. They've just gone ahead and removed some of the photos and so forth. I mean, it's just speculated the reason why. I mean, it's because Based on the reading that I have been doing on this, it's basically Google saying that if this stuff is getting more click-throughs, which they've been proven to be getting, and this is why we've been preaching brands to do it, that means there's other areas on this page that are not getting click-throughs, which includes ad copy. So if Google is losing now paid search revenue because images obviously stand out, even their ads, you can't put in images yet unless you have like a Google Shopping commerce site. And sometimes you see product-related searches, but apart from that, it's giving the organic the highest visibility because people are naturally drawn to images. Anyway, that's a whole different story. The point is you can still set up Google authorship. You can still identify to Google that somebody is writing your content. But take a look at the titles and descriptions of these posts. I think they are very well done. And this is what we call your title tag and your description tag of your pages. So the first one is the 100 Best iPhone Apps. People love looking at numbers. So when you are doing your titles and your descriptions, it doesn't just make sense to put in your keyword phrases and throw it in there. Write it in a way that is going to be compelling for someone to click on. The next one is 20 Best iPhone and iPod Apps This Week. In fact, this was posted 20 hours ago. So if I want to know the latest and the greatest and the newest information, I'm obviously going to be clicking on this person over here. Or take a look at the 3rd one here, 15 Best iPhone Apps You're Not Using. Now this is implying that hey, this is stuff that you probably don't even know exists out there that are just so phenomenal. So now it's building my curiosity and my interest, and I might click on that one. So you can see that these people are now catering towards 3 different types of audiences. Some of it is built on curiosity. Some of it is built on recency. And some of it is just built on a massive list of things that you want to look at. But at the end of the day, very, very effective of how they're writing their meta tags. How else can you dominate Google? Well, I think the number one mistake people don't leverage is their social profiles when it comes to organic listings in Google. And I understand as a business owner, a lot of them say, look, I've got a tough time just managing my website. I've got a business to run, but now you're telling me I've got to be on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, you know, MySpace, all sorts of Who's got time for all that stuff? Well, I mean, there are— not to say it doesn't take time, but at the same time, there are a lot of ways you can actually automate this process. So if you are writing content and you're writing stuff on your blog, you could set it up so it automatically posts to your Facebook page and your Twitter page, and you could still post it to your LinkedIn company page and so forth to help build your social signals and increase your SEO rankings. I think one of the most overlooked social engines is Google+. I think it's foolish for brands not to use this, especially if you want to be found in Google. I mean, this is Google's platform. So just to kind of give you a real example of how this works in theory, this is when I was actually in Hawaii. And I'll zoom in over here. I wrote on my Google+ page, hey, I'm at a digital marketing convention in Hawaii. And then I kind of wrote who the presenters were at that time. So this is all I wrote on, and I did this for a specific reason. But I just wrote this on my wall, you could say, of my Google+ page. And then I got someone I knew that was connected to me via Google+, which was Ryan from our team who is in Waterloo, Canada. I said, hey Ryan, could you do me a quick favor? I just want to do a quick test here for the group. Can you go into Google right now and just do a search for digital marketing convention in Hawaii, and just take a screenshot of what you see on your end, and could you just send that to my email? So he did that. And this is what I got from Ryan. So let me just zoom in over here. You'll see the number 2 listing that you see over there. It says, if you search for digital marketing convention Hawaii, take a look at that. My listing is posted there. In fact, take a look at the time. It says 1 minute ago. This is how quick and fast Google will digest information on Google+. They will get it much faster than having it just on your website because this is their platform, their engine. Now again, I'm not trying to sell anyone some magic beans and saying, look, you can instantly be found in Google for these terms. Keep in mind that Ryan is my friend on Google+, so he is part of my network. This is why it is so important if you are a brand or an individual, you start getting people to follow you on Google+ or follow you on your personal account. That way when you post stuff and they are signed into their Google account, and I don't know how many people are typically signed in, but I mean if you have Gmail, if you are looking at YouTube stuff, Typically, you've got to be signed in to use any of that stuff. So that way, if those people are signed in and someone is typing in a keyword phrase in which you've just posted an article or content about, you've got a strong probability of getting that first page of real estate and hijacking some real traffic instantly. So some people might say, digital marketing convention Hawaii, that's such a long-term keyword phrase. It is, but how about the term digital marketing convention which has 52 million results? Or the term digital marketing which has 781 million results. Or how about the term just marketing which has over 521 million results in Google if you type that in. For any of those keyword phrases when Ryan typed that in, my listing was on page 1 of Google every single time. And then just recently again, I was doing a live convention in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. So I did the same thing for this group. I'm like, hey, if you're looking for a hotel in Coeur d'Alene, If you have to check out the Coeur d'Alene Resort, just check in at the conference center. Again, I told Ryan to do the exact same thing, so if he typed in hotel in Coeur d'Alene, take a look at what he saw. This was done 5 minutes ago by me, but it's so quick and fast of getting your information on page 1 of Google, and the way to do this is leveraging Google+. Google+ will index your information so much quicker, so much faster if you publish to their profile. So other than that, what's better than being ranked number 1 in Google? Well, let's just say your website is ranking number 1, your Facebook page is ranking number 2, your YouTube video is ranking number 3, your Twitter page is ranking number 4. All of a sudden, you start to dominate Google. So it doesn't matter if someone is clicking 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, you own that real estate, you own that space, and every single time you get another listing in Google, you're actually knocking one of your competitors off that first page of real estate. For those people that are doing videos out there, I mean, videos are always great. Generally speaking, depending on the keywords and so forth, but on average, we typically get a business with their video ranking on Google within 5 to 7 days. The reason why is on the web, it's much longer because it's so much more competitive, but videos, there are not that many people that take the time to write video content about your keyword phrases and your topics. So if you are taking the time to write keywords, creating videos about your keyword phrases and what people might be searching for, and uploading it to YouTube and so forth. Again, speak to your digital marketing agency, whoever you're working with. And if you're not, you can speak to Eric Cook. He could talk to you about how you could actually maximize your efforts in terms of that. So that kind of brings us to the conclusion of this webinar. And I always like summarizing or concluding with this slide, which is basically at the end of the day, there's a lot of stuff that you could do with digital marketing. You don't have to do it all to be successful. We always like using the term crawl before you walk before you run, which is basically proof of concept. You can start seeing results, see what works and doesn't work, and then you can expand, expand, expand from there. And you can always use your analytics to measure results. So I know I kind of sped through that. You guys probably wanted me to crawl with my speech speed. I knew I was going over for time, so I just wanted to make sure I got all the information across to you guys. So with that, I'll wrap things up and I'll pass the controls over back to you, Eric.

There you go. Well, I warned everybody that you would talk fast and probably go over, and you didn't disappoint. So thanks for not making me a liar. Thanks to everybody that stuck on. I see we still have quite a few people that were able to hang on for the extra 20 minutes, so we really appreciate your time, and hopefully you got some good information out of it. Certainly check the archive. We'll get that up online here shortly as well. But don't really want to delay anybody anymore since I know we're over. So, Baltich, just again, thanks for joining us. Great information. And we'll look forward to seeing everyone back again next week here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. If you have questions on anything that Baltich talked about, reach out to me or Baltich. You can find us all on social media, and you know we'll be happy to help. And always love talking about this stuff. So until then, have a great Fourth of July to those of us here in the States. A belated Happy Canada Day to Baltage and all of our Canadian friends who celebrated on the first. And be safe out there, and we'll see you next Wednesday. Bye bye.