I Love Marketing Meet Up Group - SEO Expert, Stephan Spencer

Stefan and Jim and Matt and others. This kind of feels like a Genius Network meeting. We were just together last week and I love what Dan Sullivan said about Genius Network. He says, I never want to be the smartest person in the room. I always want to be in a room where everybody's getting smarter. And that's what I find in Genius Network. I love that question quote from Dan Sullivan. So we're going to see a little bit of that on display today. Of course, Dean Jackson has been ingenious.

Timothy, you got muted.

Oh, Tim got muted.

All of a sudden he's still over there dancing and singing.

There we go.

Somebody on your end did that. Anyway, what I was saying was we've got really, really smart people in Genius Network. And so if you can imagine being with Stephen Spencer and Dean Jackson and Rick and Matthew and Jim and these others, it's just a remarkable, remarkable experience. So before I start the official announcement or introduction, anyone interested in Genius Network, by the way, it's really difficult to remember this URL geniusnetwork.com Hey there. Go check it out. Then you can hang out with these guys all the time. Okay, let me go ahead and make an official introduction here and then we'll get started. I just want to welcome you. Joe Polish is on sabbatical. Of course we miss him, but he's having a great time, from what I understand. And we'll see Joe in about 10 more months. But Dean just does a brilliant job with these. We're delighted to be with everyone. So welcome everyone, and we're going to get started in four seconds. Stefan Spencer is an SEO expert, founder of interactive agency Net Concepts and best selling author. He has three books published by O'Reilly. They are the Art of SEO, Social E Commerce, and Google Power Search. He's optimized the websites of some of the biggest brands in the world, including Chanel, Volvo, Sony and Zappos. Stefan hosts two popular podcast shows, Get Yourself Optimized and Marketing Speak. Stefan is also a Genius network member since 2018. So I introduce to you, of course, Dean Jackson and Stefan Spencer.

Wow.

I can't wait to hear what he has to say now. This is going to be very exciting. Stefan, I'm excited that you're here. This is always a topic that people have a lot of mystery around. There's a lot of mystery around how these search engines work and SEO this magic witchcraft that you perform. So I'd love to maybe have in your words talk about what the importance of this is or why you've kind of dedicated yourself to this pursuit and what can come of it.

Yeah. So it's, it's really fun to break apart and put back together something like an algorithm or think of it kind of like an engine that you tear apart and you rebuild. And I love figuring things out like poking and prodding at the black box that is Google. And I just, I am so excited to get breakthrough and then share it with others. And yeah, that just lights me up. And I like demystifying how search engines work and how Google works because it puts the power back into our hands instead of seeing this as, like you said, black magic or witchcraft or voodoo. It's, it's science. I know it's ironic given that I have a book titled the Art of SEO, but it is for one second.

Don't slide past that. Hold this. This is your calling card, which I think has been one of the greatest ever. Just from a marketing standpoint, that book, it's like, it's simple. You could do it on your own. Here's everything you need to do.

Yeah, it's just a few things. It really is only 994 pages of stuff and you're going to be golden.

Yes.

And the best part about it, it's got a hummingbird on the COVID Yeah, that's easy.

That means it's simple. That's funny. So I love that cracking the code element of it too because I look at. That's what direct response is. And human behavior. If you can find the right words to put on a postcard that get people to go to a landing page and get them to leave their name and their email address and the right words to say. It's all very. What I call, what I crack do is algorithms, marketing algorithms. You know, we figure out what's the right way to say things and the right things to do. But your outcome of the SEO is traffic. That's really the thing that people see as how can I get to be number one on Google or how can I use it? So is that really the most important outcome of it? Is it traffic is the thing or are there other more important things with. In doing SEO or. I'm interested because I'm.

What a great question.

Yeah.

I look at it honestly, really important to know what.

Yeah, I'll just. Where I'm coming from as a marketer, I come from that. It's the I can predictably buy traffic and I got know what I'm working with kind of thing. And to, to me, if you don't mind me playing the role of, of an advocate for business owners who may not know how it all works kind of thing. Is SEO the way to is the most important thing that you get traffic. Is that what we're. The outcome that we're comparing it to?

I guess so. But on a deeper level, I would say the outcome is to change the world and you're just using Google as a vehicle. Okay, so if I want my I'm in abundance. 360 Many, many of James network members are. There's a. This thing called the mtp. The massively transformational purpose and mine is to elevate the consciousness of all humanity. It's not to help my clients rank number one in Google for all the keywords they possibly care about. I mean that's, that's a step in that direction, I suppose. But I have a much higher purpose. My sole purpose is more aligned with elevating human consciousness and getting us to be kinder and more loving and more conscious. So I see this as a vehicle. And Google is like the operating system of the Internet. It's the quickest, most efficient, most direct path between points A and B. Somebody is googling you, your business, your services, products, your competitors. You need to show up because otherwise you're not in their consideration set. You're not and remember the days of the white pages and the yellow pages. So you might be in the white pages, but you're not in the yellow pages in the area that they're looking for in the topic space and the niche or industry. And thus you're invisible. And if that is what's holding you back from reaching your outcome of changing the world, changing how people think about your topic, your niche, your industry, helping them to, I don't know, reach greater heights, amplify their message. And it's not happening because you, you've made a mistake or your team or your webmaster has made a mistake in configuring your web server so that it's not optimized for search. It's kind of deoptimized anti SEO. Then you don't get to get your outcome and change the world. So that's sad and we got to fix that. So that's how I see SEO fitting into the bigger picture. Yes, you want to delegate tasks and get things, things done, but you're much better off focusing on the end game, right? So begin with the end in mind. And if you delegate, for example, an outcome instead of a task, you're going to get a better outcome for yourself, your business, your family, your community. Than if you just say, here's this task, here's this task, here's this task. Or, here's this traffic source, here's this traffic source, here's this traffic source. Let's plug them all in and create some funnels and so forth. That's. I don't know. That misses the bigger picture for me.

So when you say that, like, looking at the bigger purpose of enlightening the world or getting people access to information, you're saying that if people have knowledge or information that they want to get out there and they're not properly doing the right things so that that information can get out there, they're missing out on their opportunity to make whatever impact it is that their purpose is.

Yeah, I remember Anil Gupta. I don't know if you know him, the author of Immediate Happiness. Great guy. He once told my wife, because you're not getting your message out there. At the time, I don't know if she was podcasting yet. She's got a great podcast that's been going for like, five years now. Stellar Life, it's the name of it. But at the time, I don't think she was doing that yet. And he said, because you're not stepping up and doing the thing that's going to get your message out there. People are dying. And that really struck a chord with her. And she got some stuff in order pretty quickly after that. And I always remembered that, because you're not stepping up. And I'm not talking about her, I'm talking about all of us. People are dying. People are lost, they're depressed, they're sad, they're unfulfilled, they're not getting their sole purpose fulfilled.

Yes.

So, yeah, we need to step up.

Wow. I get it. That's amazing. And it's true, when you really think about it, that if you do have information that can change somebody's life, if it's not in front of them at the right time, it's not doing them any good. That's true. So the way I look at it, if that's the outcome that I'm interested to hear the parallels of buying. Because you can buy the top positions in Google for any keywords that you want kind of instantly and have that predictability.

On the paid side of the traffic.

Yeah, on the paid side. And so I want to compare in your mind, like the case for doing the effort, because everybody kind of talks about, well, you get free traffic from Google, but if we take the. I want to dig into the effort and the knowledge and the actual help or work that it takes to get that free traffic. And in the comparison, both in terms of, you know, if we take, if we have a standing start and start right now, you could have paid traffic literally today for the keywords that matter to you. So let's, I'd love to hear your take on what, how you compare it to, or, you know, find its position for, for SEO.

So I will say, first of all that paid search is great if you need to turn the spigot on immediately, there's not a lot of opportunity with SEO to do that, because SEO does take time. In fact, Google engineer Maile Ohye, former Google engineer Maile Ohye famously said it takes four months to a year. Give the SEO practitioner four months to a year for the results to start to come in from their work. And I think that is accurate. But the old adage, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. So if you're not doing SEO, start today and not tomorrow, not next month, not two years from now. Because otherwise you're missing out on an asset that paid search is not. Paid search is a traffic source and it is an income stream if you do it well, but it is not an asset in the same way that SEO is. SEO can put money in your pocket month after month, year after year, because you have some equity, some authority and trust that you have built up with Google by building links, by getting yourself out there and sharing your knowledge, being remarkable, and I use that term remarkable very deliberately. I'm using that term because Seth Godin and the Purple Cow defined it as being worthy of remark.

Right?

You have content that's worthy of remark, that can get you a lot of links and a lot of social shares, a lot of buzz, and of course, create a lot of light out in there in the world. So if you think of it as I'm building an asset by doing SEO and I'm also diversifying my traffic sources by also doing paid search, I think that's a nice way to frame it and gives you a lot of flexibility.

Would it be a way, would it be fair to say, if I own a lemonade stand and I need lemons to make my lemonade to sell to my people, and paid search would be the equivalent of going, and I can buy lemons and just take the lemons and process them and take, make it into the lemonade that I'm going to sell. And maybe what you're saying, but I'd have to buy the lemons at retail or at wholesale or whatever to get them, but I'm buying them individually. And maybe what you're saying is the equivalent of planting my own lemon grove, where I can nurture lemon seeds and then have an unlimited supply of the lemons that I need down the road. Yeah, that make does that.

Yeah, I like that. I also like the analogy of you're buying a franchise and a lot of kids are offering lemonade. Lemonade stands that you get a piece of every single day.

Right. Because they're making way more lemons. Yeah, I'll have more lemons than I need so I can have them for other things. Okay.

Yeah.

So that's about the.

And to take that analogy just one little step further, if you think of every page of your website as a virtual salesperson, if you have 500 pages of content, that's great. That's like 500 virtual salespeople who are peddling your, your wares, like offering your products and services on Google for hundreds or thousands or tens of thousand different of keywords. But then if you go to, let's say 5,000 pages, now you've got 5,000 virtual salespeople and that's way better. So the more pages of quality content that non duplicate, not thin, just good quality and hopefully some of it remarkable content, those are so many more opportunities to rank. And it is that leveraging effect of that asset spread across many thousands of pages.

So what does it actually take then to rank highly in Google? And where do we start with that? If we're thinking, okay, we do want to build this asset that's going to yield ongoing traffic for us, where do we start?

I would suggest framing it with the three pillars framework where you have content architecture and links and then everything goes into one of those three buckets. Let's say you have to do keyword research that goes in the content bucket or pillar. Let's say that you need to change some settings in the Yoast plugin for SEO for your WordPress site that would go in the architecture bucket. Let's say that you need to do some digital PR public relations and hit up some journalists and make some pitches and see if you can get featured in some, some articles that would go into the links bucket. So these different activities, again with a bigger outcome in mind of changing the world or whatever it is that your MTP is, all these different activities will get you there to varying degrees speeds. Your Achilles heel is that you have very little authority as far as Google sees it, because you pulled up a tool like majestic. Majestic.com and you put in your domain name and it tells you that you're trustful. Flow is a 4 out of 100, then you know that that's what you need to fix. And all the other stuff can just sit by the wayside for now. In terms of SEO, this is the thing to focus on. This is your Achilles heel. And this is something that a lot of people kind of miss out on. They think that they have to do everything because it's a best practice. Well, I need to go through every single one of my meta descriptions and rewrite it so that it's better. And I have 5,000 pages. That's going to take many, many hours. Well, meta descriptions don't increase your rankings. They only help with the click through rate for wherever your position is already. If you're number 10 and you have a better snippet at number 10 because you've optimized the meta description that really didn't move the needle much. Number 10 is almost page two and how often do you scroll all the way down to the bottom of page one? So focus on the things that are the highest and best opportunities, the biggest needle movers. And if that's getting link equity, link authority, because you're in the basement in terms of your trust flow score, your citation flow score or both, that's where you start. And it's as simple as that. And you don't need to be an SEO expert to see that. You just pull up with majestic.com for free. Your trust flow and citation flow score, that's where I would start. I'd also look at things like your page speed. There are plenty of free tools that will give you some read on different issues that are in those three pillars. So PageSpeed would be in the architecture pillar. If you pull up PageSpeed Insights, you just Google for that. You don't even have to know the URL of it. PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google. You put your website URL for your homepage in there and it will tell you out of 100 what your score is. If it's a 20 and it's in the red and it says you don't pass Core Web Vitals. Oops, that's a big problem. That is something that you need to address as well. And Google is going to start demoting sites that have slow loading pages that don't pass Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals is this new metric or three metrics that Google's been talking about since last year. And the page experience Algorithm is going to come live very soon. It's, it's due to launch in, in May and when it does, if you don't pass core web vitals, you will get demoted. So that is something that, that's kind.

Of the thing that I was worried about or think about in this whole equation is the unpredictability of the, you know, the algorithm that everybody talks about, you know, all marketers kind of fig. It feels like since it started that it used to be in the very beginning, the just keyword jamming onto your page and doing it in microtext at the bottom. And then there was, then it was linking. But they would always figure out that everybody's gaming the system and then they would completely change it. So you'd have to start, start over again. How, how, how stable is what you're doing in SEO, you know, in these, in these things. And you have to forgive my, like, I don't know anything about SEO. I haven't really paid attention to it as a, as a thing to move forward on. So I'm glad that you're here so that I can kind of, for my own situation, look at it and say, is this is the juice worth the squeeze in, in, in doing it?

Yeah, yeah, I think it absolutely is worth the squeeze and it is stable as long as you're not trying to game the system.

Right.

I have been pearly white hat from the very beginning.

Yeah.

And it's just, it's, it's not a game you can win if you are going to try and cheat the rules or ignore the rules. Google has guidelines and whether or not we think they're fair or not, they can call the shots because it's, it's their ball game.

Yeah.

They can say this is something that we are not going to allow in our engine. Like let's say that you're not allowed to talk negatively about vaccines. We will remove you from Google. And you think, wow, censorship, that's free speech. And like that's, that is. That should be illegal. Well, since when is Google the government?

Right.

It's a company with a profit motive and if they want to set a rule that you think is unfair, okay, well, it's unfair. But it's their search engine and you're getting a lot of free traffic.

Free.

I put in quotes, air quotes here because you do have to put time and energy and staff and budget towards SEO. It's not really free. But like I said, you're getting an asset, but you're getting this traffic without spending money with Google, and it comes with some rules and restrictions, and you got to play by those rules and restrictions. And so if you're trying to figure out how to outsmart Google with regards to fake links, you know, PBNs, private blog networks that you're trying to.

You link to me, I link to.

You don't link.

Right.

Well, let's say that you bought an expired domain that used to have a lot of links to it, and you're trying to fool Google into thinking that this is still a legitimate website, even though it got expired and you snapped it up and you're pretending to be the old site owner and now link to your site as if it were a link earned by merit. And you're hoping Google is fooled by this. Like, that's a thing, that's, that's a thing that people still try to pull off. And I never bought into that. I always thought that that is unethical and it's just, it's bad business. It's. It's bad like business karma. I just would never do it. So, yeah, that's why it's stable for me and for my clients, because we don't try and play those, those games.

What size of business has the, the best sort of sweet spot for outcomes with, with SEO? Is it an advantage to, you know, for big, you know, corporate companies with huge teams and budgets and footprints versus a, a small business or an entrepreneur?

In some ways, yes, it is. In some ways, no. Like, if you were a big business, that your hands were tied in various ways. Like, for example, I remember working with Chanel and there were so many pages of the chanel.com site that we were not allowed to put any content on. It could only be images. There's no text. Like, how are you supposed to rank for keywords with pages that have no text on them? And so it felt like trying to do SEO with your hands tied behind your back. And yet they had massive amounts of authority. And so if they wanted to and they were willing to put text on the page, they could own a lot of keywords. So in that way they were not nimble and at a disadvantage to the small player, to the, to the entrepreneur who's nimble, who, who is a quick start and just get stuff done. But on the other hand, if you are a small startup with no authority, your trust flow is a 4 out of 100. It's going to be really hard to rank for anything but your brand. Maybe even then you can't rank number one for. It depends on what the brand name is. But regardless of what your, your business is, whether you're getting, let's say, 100% of your business right now from referrals, if it's the case, you still would benefit greatly with SEO. And it's not because you'd add another referral source. It's because maybe you would. But it's because where do people do their due diligence? Right? Google.

You want them to be able to.

Find you, so they're on Google, not just find you, but to see all the good stuff about you and nothing bad.

Right.

You're curating those brand search results. So it's all of your best stuff. The game is stacked in your favor, like everything. The shelf space is full of all your best pr, press mentions and blog posts and podcast interviews and social accounts and so forth and so on. So that happens. Then they think, okay, this, this guy or this gal is legit. I'm just going to work with them. And all those people that you never heard from because they were referral that stopped when they saw that your LinkedIn was ranked number one instead of your actual website or when they saw there were some negative reviews just a few positions lower on a Yelp page for your business. Yes. You lost it and you had no idea that it even happened.

Yeah, that's really interesting. You know, one of the evidence, I wrote an article on Medium, you know, few years ago now about the nine word email. And so that email on medium, I get the Medium Digest or whatever and it shows you that, you know, and I'm constantly getting 100 to 150 reads of that article, you know, every week for it's been years now. And I imagine it's because in Google if people search out nine word email, one of the top things that comes up is the, that Medium article. And that's the kind of thing, I guess what you're talking about, the long growth of that, like what the value is to get 100 eyeballs a week on something is.

Yeah, but here's the problem, I guess the opportunity is how I would reframe that for you is how many of those 150 are reaching out to you and saying, hey, I want to book a call. I want to.

Yeah, quite a few. Because at the bottom of the article, in the article I offer my email mastery book that they can get at Mastery that turns into people going to opt in, which is basically free for you traffic that you were talking about. So that's awesome.

And just to point one thing, it.

Wasn'T Anything I did consciously.

Well, here's where it could even be on steroids is if, if it were your own website that ranked with that same article instead of Medium. Medium does have a lot of authority, but imagine that your website had enough authority that it outranked the Medium article. And then you could put an exit pop, you could offer some sort of additional irresistible offer over on the right hand side and further conversion. Optimize the page.

Now you're talking.

You would get so much more lead flow. Yeah, well, there you go. It's like James Schramko, who's a friend of both of ours, believes in owning the racetrack. And if you are playing on some driving the car on somebody else's racetrack, they can change the rules on you, they can kick you off the racetrack. It is not a stable platform for you. And that's what's happening because you don't own that platform. You've built a house on rented land and at any point in time they could mix metaphors, pull the rug of it from.

Right, exactly. Yeah. So would it be helpful to talk about where somebody could start? Let's say like I think if we think about who's here with us, you know, we've got a few hundred people that are probably running as entrepreneurs, six and seven figure businesses. There's probably some people with 10 or more million dollar business, but the majority of I would guess are going to be mostly six figure on the way to a million A or a million plus businesses. And they may be in lots of different things. Some local businesses, some that serve, you know, national or international audience. So what would be a good like jumping off point for people? What are some of the. Is there an 8020 to this? That these, if you just going to do these things that if that would be the biggest impact. Yeah.

So I love the 8020 rule, the Pareto principle, but I actually learned this also from James schramko that the 8020 rule is fractal. So there's actually another layer where there's an 8020 of the 80 20. Yes. And 8020 of that and so forth. So 4% of the activities that you could possibly do or that are on your to do list that are going to generate 64% of your outcome. So let's find that 4% because that's going to get you most of the way there. And think about SEO as some kind of technical wizardry which many of our listeners and, and folks here are probably not in that boat, not in that position to go in and tweak settings and check the XML site and wouldn't.

Know where to start. Like, that's. I was joked that, you know, so.

Give up on that front of the screen.

Yeah, who, not how. That's what we need.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's what. You took the words right out of my mouth. So you get the right. Who. Who can do that technical wizardry for you, and you just know to ask the right questions. I actually have this hiring blueprint that. And it includes a BS detector which you can use when you're interviewing the technical person, the SEO practitioner specialist, and ask them these questions. If they get them wrong, there's only one right answer. And you don't have to be an SEO expert to know that they got the answer wrong. So, for example, you could ask them about, what's your process for optimizing my meta keywords? That's a trick question because meta keywords never counted in Google ever. Not on day one.

Okay.

So if they say something like, well, those don't count as much as they used to. But, you know, here's what we do. That's as wrong of an answer as, oh, we love meta keywords. Like, it's all wrong. Unless they said meta key, meta keywords never counted because that's the right answer. So if you know what the right answer is and you have the cheat sheet of all these questions to ask, and you just kind of fold a few into the interview, then you know you're hiring the right person, somebody who's skilled, even if you're, you're. You're not skilled in SEO yourself. And so that handles the technical side of it, but what about the creative kind of content side of it? And there's not a lot of wizardry involved here. That's the beauty of it. Like, for example, let's say that you wanted to come up with an editorial calendar for not just social media, but for blogging and for videos and just for all the content that you're going to produce for your content marketing. Well, you could use a tool called also asked dot com.

Okay.

Also ask dot com. And what that does is you put in a keyword. I don't know, let's say it's podcasting and it will come back with all of these different questions that people are asking Google. Then you can take those questions and create an FAQ page, or you could create a bunch of blog posts around that and you can schedule those out. And that's your editorial calendar. You can do this for a number of different keywords, and this tool is based on the people also asked box. That's why it's called also asked dot com. When you are searching on Google and you see a bunch of questions related to your search query in addition to all the regular results.

Oh yeah, down at the bottom.

Click on the bottom.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or just, you know, shortly lower down the page, you start clicking on these questions and it will not only expand to show the answer, but it will keep adding more and more questions. It's kind of like a bottomless pit, right? You can go very deep down that rabbit hole. Imagine having a free tool that in a great kind of tree structure, sort of visual shows you a bunch of these questions and then at any point you can click on one question and then it recenters that as the beginning of the tree and then does another query for you and comes up with all of these additional questions. And you can save this to an Excel spreadsheet. You can save it as a PNG file, like as an image and like I said, you can use that as fodder for determining what your editorial calendar is or what should go on your FAQs page or what you're going to shoot videos about.

It's.

It's really.

So would it be fair to say then this is what would fall into. This is what would be called keyword research is that what you're looking at is essentially seeing what. Because beginning with the end in mind, you would guess to think about what is it that we want to be the answer to when people are, are going to Google and would it be fair to say, or is it true that you would be looking for the most traffic or the ones where you've maybe got the best chance of making an impact? Like if we take.

It's kind of a combination. There are three criteria that I would recommend evaluating a good keyword by. One, is, is it attainable that I can rank on page one for that? Because if you're in page two, you're no, no man's land. Can I also. So can I attain that ranking? Can I attract my target audience with that? Is that relevant to my business or to my audience? And then is it popular? Are there actually enough searches for that keyword that it warrants my time?

So those are great too. Worth the squeeze, right?

Yeah. And if you think about. Let's go laterally a bit broader and think, let's say that I'm selling something that doesn't have a huge keyword search volume for it. I don't know. Let's say that Baby bassinet is like, let's say you make bassinets and you sell them online. Maybe the search volume isn't that high for bassinet and baby bassinet and baby bassinets, etc. But if you think about who your audience is, it's expectant parents, right? So what are expectant parents searching for? So you go to where the fish are and do your fishing there. And in the case of expectant parents, they are searching for baby names in droves. Like that is a massive keyword and it's only expectant parents. How many people are searching for baby names that don't have a new baby on the way? Probably nobody. So that's your target audience, that's who you're going after. And sure, you're not selling baby names, but you're reaching your audience and you're going to add value. You're going to do content marketing. You're going to maybe provide some remarkable content around baby name meanings or new trends or maybe like spiritual baby names or conscious baby names or whatever and it resonates with your exact audience. And then you can have that soft sell of the essential nesting checklist, those 31 things that you're going to need for your new baby when he or she arrives and includes.

Okay, I just had a light bulb come on for me for. Because now we're saying something in a world that, that I understand now I see something that came clear. One of the things that I was talk about with our reaching people is that sometimes it doesn't have to be exactly the thing that you do. You said baby bassinets that a lot of people aren't searching on that. Years ago I did some work with a party rental company in Toronto in Canada. And I asked them, I said, what's like, what would be the dream come true client for you? Like, what's the home run the best client that you could get? And they said an outdoor wedding would be a home run because you get the tents and generators and linens and tables they need everything, right? And. But party rental companies are like way down on the list of sexy things that a new bride and groom or potential bride and groom are searching for, right? Or looking or even on their mind. But what's high on their mind as soon as they get engaged is, is where are we going to have the wedding and when. That's the first two items on the list, right? So we put together a directory of 101 Great Places to have an outdoor wedding in Toronto and started advertising this Directory, which was getting amazing response because that's the thing that people were interested in and excited about. And now he had that audience to himself because he's the only party rental company that had identified people early on in the process. So now I get what you're saying about as a content strategy is what would be the content that your market is searching for that maybe it's not directly related to, you know, buy a baby bassinet. It's not somebody looking to buy something, but it's somebody who's in the world that's going to require at some point a bassinet that's, that's smart and that's. So you're saying those are the kind of things that would have the longest reaching impact, not just the competing on baby bassinet prices or for sale or anything like that. Right.

So we're looking for that 4% that generates the 64%. Yeah. And here's another. It's about time.

Yeah.

So if you think about how do I get links in droves as well.

Yeah.

You got to have something super remarkable there that is so worthy of remark that causes everybody to just proactively, without prompting, link to you. I mean, it's going to help, of course, if you outreach to folks and let them know about your content. But imagine if it's so buzzworthy and link worthy that folks just want to be the path to your door. They want us to link to you from their blogs, from their resource lists and their homepages and everywhere else. So if you think about what could be an incredibly valuable piece of content that is so link worthy and shareable that it's just going to have a life of its own. Let me give you an example or two. So, okay, this was, this is an old one and it's not even mine. It's. It's from another SEO who will remain nameless because he, he cut some corners. But back in the day when Digg was a thing, you know, before Reddit was the king, Reddit was really Digg D I G G and he had all these accounts that were on that were like in the top 100. He had had some top 10 ones as well. So anyways, he utilized that and he also liked to cut corners in terms of the content creation. So he found this article for his client. The client was lifeinsure.com and it was a small life insurance brokerage, probably had a dozen or fewer employees. And what was the magic here is he found this article online. 20 things you didn't know about death. And he just lopped off one of the Items, made it 19 things you probably don't know about death. And he put it on this life insurance website and he hid it so that it was only available if you found it through Digg. And he submitted it to Digg, of course, and it made the front page of Digg. Imagine if you could make the front page of Reddit the front page of the Internet. It's a big deal. And he got tons and tons of links for his clients. It was a disturbing article too. Nobody's going to buy insurance after reading that. You're still conscious for 15 to 20 seconds after getting decapitated. So that's the sort of stuff that was in that article. And he just kind of quickly paraphrased it. It was another article he found online, but it did incredibly well, not just on Digg, but as I said, with getting links. And these were not people who were looking for life insurance. This is like 13 year old Alpha geeks who think, oh, that's cool, I'm going to link to that or I'm going to drop that in my blog. Right. And so all of those links propped up the entire lifeinsure.com website, the homepage, all the landing pages, term life quotes, whole life quotes, universal life quotes, et cetera, they all started to rank much higher in. It actually got to the point where, just from that one article, the term life insurance returned the homepage for lifeinsure.com like I think it was at number three or four. And it stayed on page one for years. It was right up there with State Farm and MetLife and Geico. This is tiny little insurance brokerage. So this is how you punch above your weight. Not by cutting corners, not that extreme, but by thinking outside of the box and creating something that's so remarkable it's a foregone, it's a foregone conclusion that you're going to link to it when you see it.

That's amazing. So do you have some examples of that, like how. Because I'd be interested to see what your approach would be. I would ask people if, if people would just get out of the way and let you do what you could do for them. What's the kind of dream come true scenario that you can create through SEO?

Oh, so many. So many. So this is a pretty recent one from last year. We took over the Pinterest account of Everypedia, which is a competitor to Wikipedia. It's built on the blockchain and we got their Pinterest account from 31 monthly viewers to over a million.

Wow.

One million monthly viewers in an eight month time period. So they just gave us the keys and said, knock yourselves out because we can't figure out this Pinterest thing and if you can, that'll be amazing. And we did. We just crushed it for them. And another example, this is an old one, but Many years ago, Overnightprints.com they print business cards and all that overnight. They weren't ranking very well or not at all for the term business cards. They were just buried for that. And I came up with a contest idea of Win free business cards for life. It was the Free Business Cards for life contest.

I like that.

And you could design Jeremy Schumacher's new business card if you remember Shoe Money.

Yes.

He didn't like his business card. I knew that. And he loved his logo though. He had his logo like the Superman S logo thing on the bottom of his pool and everything. So I knew he liked that. But he just, he didn't like his business card. So I approached him, I said, hey, how about we do this contest and we'll get all these great entries and you'll end up with an amazing business card. And he did. He loved the winner. It was like a super cool chip looking credit card business card that won. And the winner got free business cards for life, which in the small print was 20 years worth of 1000 business cards per year, which is pocket change. And so that put them on the map to the point where not only were they ranking for business cards on page one, they got all the way up to number two. And they didn't do any on page stuff because all the stuff that we wanted to do on their site we just kept getting roadblocks and more roadblocks. And so we didn't, we weren't able to achieve anything in terms of on page SEO. It was purely from that one contest.

Would you say? I mean, that's exciting too, when you start to think about all the possibilities there. Would you say that being a local business or having a smaller geographic area where you're trying to impact one community is easier or more difficult than is that for businesses that might be local businesses?

Yeah, it's easier in the sense that it's less competitive. I mean, there is competition in the form of Yelp and these other national or international sites that rank for a lot of different geographies. But you're competing with smaller businesses. Like if you're in the restaurant space, you're competing with local restaurants. And many of Them don't know SEO from anything. And so you have a competitive edge if you know a little bit about SEO. And one thing about local SEO that's good to not only know but execute on is that local links are important and make a really good difference. So if you're chasing after links from the local chamber and convention and visitors bureau and local chapters of nonprofits like.

The is that where things like writing articles on the local newspaper would be a useful thing to have articles on their site potentially.

Let me preface that by saying you got to do a little bit of homework first to see if it is going to be worthwhile or it's going to be a waste of your time. Like meta descriptions are not a total waste of your time, but they won't move you up the ranking. So it's very much a second order activity. If I would go to the local, let's say business journals website and see that they never link out in their articles or when they do, there are no followed links, meaning that they strip any link equity from flowing out.

I got you. Right?

Right. So I'm checking, I'm doing my due diligence first before I say, hey, I will write for free for you. I'll be an unpaid journalist for you. That sounds great for them, but not so great for you if you don't get any juice out of it. So you got to see if the juice is worth the. Squeeze yourself before you just say, oh well, Stefan said you should write for a local business journal. Your mileage will vary. It depends on the scenario. So if it's a local nonprofit and you're, let's say, on the board of that local nonprofit, like it's the American Marketing Association, Madison Wisconsin Chapter or something like that, and you are putting a lot of time into, I don't know, an event that you guys are doing or the newsletter or maybe there's a resource site or something that you guys are launching. I'm not saying don't do it because you're not going to get the link equity, but at least know ahead of time if you're going to get any SEO value from all those activities. Because maybe that's going to be a consideration, a factor in your decision to put all that time into it.

Do you have any, like, I consider the, the nine word email like a magic trick that I can. We could share that with somebody. They could do it today and get some result. Is there anything that would be something that everybody listening should be able to at least do this or this or you Know, maybe a couple of things. If there's something that they could do to, to dip their toe in the water here or to get some kind of outcome.

Yeah, yeah. So start with your homepage. That is the most important page of your site as far as Google is concerned in almost all cases. And start with the most important element of that page as far as Google's concerned. That's your title tag. It's the first thing, the most prominent thing that appears in your search list thing. And if there are no good keywords in there, that's a big missed opportunity. And then you think, well, what are good keywords? If you use a tool like Google Trends, which is a free tool, then you'll get a sense for which keywords are popular versus other keywords. You have to compare them with each other because the tool only provides percentages, it doesn't provide actual numbers. But if you put in, let's say laptop comma, laptops comma MacBooks comma MacBook Pro or MacBook Pro, you know, try and compare the singular and plural. You could put a little string of keywords there separated by commas, and you can see which one's the most popular. And then you could say, all right, laptop, or whatever the keyword is, is the most popular. I'm not using any keywords right now. It's just the name of my company. And then it says dash homepage. That's a big oops. Let's fix that and let's put our most important keyword that we're trying to rank for. We'll put it in the title tag. And don't make a like spammy keyword list for your title tag. Just make it read well and be value focused and maybe even have a, like, I don't know, a little bit of intrigue in there or kind of a curiosity gap. If they, if you're building up tension in the reader and the visitor, the Google searcher's mind, and then they have to click in order to have that, that tension relieved. Buzzfeed is fantastic at this with their headlines, right?

Yeah, they are.

If you, if you have some curiosity gap that you create with your title, that would be the best of all possible worlds. Keyword and value proposition and curiosity gap. But, you know, two out of three I'll be happy with as well. So, you know, just make it better than what you have now. And that's an easy, easy win. The homepage will get re crawled by googlebot very quickly. Probably it will get re indexed in the Google Search Index. Pretty quickly as well. And then hopefully you'll see some improvement. You'll maybe check the rankings beforehand, see, oh, I'm number eight now for whatever my keyword is. Let's see if I can move the needle a bit. And oh, wow, a week later, I'm at number seven. Yay. That's a win.

Right?

Another thing that you can do is to, is to get your Google Search Console account claimed if you haven't already. And then you can see not only what your position is for you as a searcher individually, but you can see the average across all of the searchers who are typing in that keyword. And that shows up in your Google Search Console performance report. And that's a free tool as well. So if you don't have access to Google Search Console, just Google it and follow the instructions to add your site and for free. Now you're going to start getting data on how many clicks you're getting for which keywords, how many impressions, how many impressions don't lead to clicks, and then your ctr, of course, taking into account both of those numbers, the clicks and impressions. And you can start making tweaks and seeing how you move the needle. Because as Peter Drucker famously said, what gets measured gets managed. And if you're tracking your rankings and the traffic coming and so forth, you don't know if you're winning or losing.

So none of these, all of those words that you've just said, I have no understanding as the technical terms of those, but I'm happy that I know that what these things are, what that they exist, that there are who's. Who can help with this kind of, with this kind of stuff. I'm curious about, is there how would you budget in terms of the cost and the time of moving forward with an SEO plan and what timeline of when you might expect to see some results from that or what those results might be.

Yeah, so the prices run the gamut and here's where you have to be very careful. Right? Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. Because if you spend $500 a month on SEO, you're probably in much worse position than if you spent nothing at all. Because the people who are willing to take $500 a month for SEO are not only not good at SEO, probably, they are probably atrocious at it and in getting you bad results or no results and potentially lying to you in the process so that you keep paying them while you're still not getting the results. So the danger is you could end up with A sullied link profile where it's just toxic. People have linked to you that are spammy and are not legitimate websites or have they, they have bad juju. You know, it's like porn sites or, or scams or malware infected sites or whatever. They're linking to you now and they weren't before. And it's because of the, this bad SEO firm that you inadvertently hired. So you got to be very, very careful. If you don't have, let's say, more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then you probably better off not hiring an SEO firm until you save up, let's say 5 or $10,000 and you just buy a one off SEO audit and just stop there. If you hire somebody for even like 1500amonth, probably they're not going to be very good. It's rare that you could hire somebody good. It's like trying to find a house that is $20,000. Like what are you going to get? $20,000?

Yeah.

So I would.

I think that's an important thing though to make, you know. But I often say to people to look at not thinking about it as an expense, but thinking about as a capital investment that because what you're doing with SEO, it's not an expense that you're. I spent 500 on SEO this month and I didn't get anything. It's not that, it's that you invested $2,000 a month or whatever it was for a period of time to build this, you know, this SEO footprint or whatever you, I don't know what the word would be, but all of these assets that you're creating that are going to bring you traffic forever and ever and ever. And that's kind of a, I get it that that's a better way to think about it.

Now if you have, let's say five to $10,000 a month, then you could also, in addition to maybe doing some auditing of your website and finding all the issues and missed opportunities, might be able to do some link building as well. Now, PR firms are not inexpensive, but this is a specialized form of PR that normally you either end up hiring a really bad firm that builds low quality links and those end up getting you in trouble. Like I described the, the link spam, that these are toxic links. The alternative is to hire a really good firm and that firm charges kind of like a monthly retainer. And like most PR firms, they would charge that retainer and keep that retainer regardless of whether they get you the results or not. And that can be really frustrating. It's like the PR firm coming back to you saying, you know what, we couldn't get any results this month because coronavirus just took over the entire news cycle and nobody like none of the journalists would return our calls. And they all.

But we sure worked hard.

Yeah, we sure did. And I'm like, that's, that's, that's not good consolation for me. I don't, I don't feel any better about that. So I want to get a pay for performance arrangement if I'm in the position of the client. So that's what we offer is pay for performance link building. So let's say that Your budget is $5,000 a month for that. So that's the monthly retainer that you would pay at the beginning of the month. And then the links that we build would be costed out based on the authority scores of the linking websites like the trust flow and the domain rating Dr. Is metric in Ahrefs, another great SEO tool. And we just have a formula. Calculate what the price is going to be for that particular link and it adds up all those different links to the month's budget retainer and then we move on to the next month. And if a link got stripped out of or you know, the opportunity fell through or whatever, okay, well that's not going to cost the client. That's on us. We got to replace that link and then we go and we replace that link and just have to backfill it from that previous month. So that's how we work on a pay for performance basis. And that's how I recommend finding a service provider that does this is if they're willing to put skin in the game and get paid for performance, then you've got the right firm working for you.

That's amazing. So where are you able. Can we have people if they have some questions about this? We've got a real. No doubt that you are working from your wisdom bookshelf. I say it, you're right. You're in field reports. Not, not book reports. You're not book smart about this. You're actually in the field smart about it. So we've got someone who can really answer questions there. But before I open it up, where can people reach out to you if they want to. They want you to be their who for this. Because I think it's one of those things where you could. It's a very costly to try and figure it out on your own. I guess that's. Yeah.

So yeah. So me@stefan Spencer.com me@stefan Spencer.com. so that's how to email me. And my website is Stefan Spencer.com and yeah, there's a ton of resources.

Just sent me into a loop here. Me. It feels like I'm emailing me Tefenspencer. My mind just went into this loop. That. That's you. Okay yout shouldn't I email you me tefenspencer mephenspencer.com okay. Perfect.

That's funny.

Yeah.

Yeah. And that's where stefanspencer.com is the website where you'd find the SEO BS detector with the tools.

Okay. I love that. That's great.

So you go to the, to the learning center and it's. It's on that page and the resources.

I'm sure that people. There may be some BS detector stories that people might have about some SEO experience too.

Oh my goodness. I have some too. I like. I really funny that. So one of my clients asked me to second interview a potential in house SEO guy.

Yeah.

And I asked him what his favorite SEO tool was and he said it was Majestic SEO.

Oh.

And I knew my spidey sense was already tingling because Majestic had rebranded from Majestic SEO several years earlier. And I thought, okay, he's using the old name, so let's dig a little deeper. So I said what's that metric in Majestic that. That really important metric? And he's like, oh yeah, yeah, it's AC Rank. And I went, I gotcha. I didn't say that, but I knew it in my mind because AC Rank was deprecated three years earlier, replaced with Trust Flow and Citation Flow. And this was his favorite SEO tool. So he was out and he didn't even know it yet. I quickly wrapped up the interview and thank you very much.

Amazing. All right, well that's. I want to hear what people have to do. Have any questions or any stories, Eunice or Tarna.

I've got a couple questions that have come in from the chat if you'd like me.

Okay, great.

There we go. Yeah, perfect. That's a good idea.

Awesome. So Serge said something that I think sums up this whole session very well. He said page, page search and SEO is like hiring kids to run around knocking on doors selling your lemonade. So that one came in a little bit earlier, but I thought that was a good one. All right, Stefan, so if you were to approach the demoting of sites in regard of load speed, what would be your first three steps?

So I believe in hiring the right who. And one of the 10 minute talks from this month, Genius network meeting was Dan Wilkinson, pagespeedoptimize.com and he is a wizard at this. Okay, there he is. Hey, Dan. So I highly recommend him. I've sent a bunch of clients his way and he's. Yeah, he's amazing.

That's awesome.

Awesome. Okay. And then dawn asked, great perspective, Stefan. Where does schema fit into the three pillars? What important ways does local SEO differ from national versus global?

Okay, so those are two different questions. Let's start with the schema question. So schema.org is a markup of like it's the ability to add structured data behind the scenes in the HTML code that the search engines can use for whatever different purposes, perhaps to create rich snippets in the search results. You know how you see sometimes a search listing that has a star rating or it has a price or a stock availability or lists an event. These are rich snippets, they're expanded listings. And that's powered a lot by schema.org markup. And that means you got to do the work of spoon feeding that content to the search engine, saying, here is the price of the product, here is the stock availability, here's the product name, et cetera. Here are the number of ratings, here are the number of reviews, here's the average rating, et cetera. All that needs to be marked up. And a lot of that can be done kind of automatically. Again, this is something that you'd want to hire the right who for and have them markup that in the templates or use. Let's say if you're on WordPress, let's say you have an e commerce site on WordPress with WooCommerce. Get the right plugin, if it's not already built into the theme that you're using, that handles all this for you so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. And again, the right who will know which plugin and they will recommend that and they'll maybe install it and test it, make sure it's all working appropriately. Yeah, so that's schema. And one of the easiest, most valuable pieces of schema markup that we can all benefit from is schema organization markup or schema person markup. It depends on what type of site it is. If you have a personal website, then it's person markup. So StefanSpencer.com would be schema person markup. And if it's a company, like a company brand, then it would be organization markup. And one aspect of this that is really valuable is, let's say it's, it's an organization's company and you have added the organization markup or your who has then the same as attribute that can be added provides a list of perhaps five or six social profiles like your Facebook, your Twitter, your LinkedIn, your Pinterest, your YouTube. Right. And if you're in Wikipedia, put your Wikipedia there too. If you have a listing in crunchbase, listing on bloomberg.com etc. ANGEL CO. LIST all those as well in your same as list in your schema markup. And then when you see these right hand, they're called knowledge panels over on the right hand side of the search results. If you're searching for your name, like search for me for example Stefan Spencer and you'll find a panel over on the right. It's called a knowledge panel. It lists my books, it lists, it has a little description of me from my Wikipedia article. It has photos of me, it has all my social chiclets and those social chicklets. If you click on them and it leads to my YouTube or my Facebook or what have you. Well, that comes from the schema markup. If you don't do it, then you make it harder for Google to find your social accounts and to list all of those social chicklets in your knowledge panel. It also makes it harder for you to even have a knowledge panel if you don't have the organization markup with all the same as attributes.

Wonderful. I think that actually just answered Dean's question in the chat. Also, what if you're a solo biz with a small team and have a limited budget? Having the knowledge panel set up for anybody is important, right?

Yes. And you don't have to have any budget. You could use the free version of the Yoast SEO plugin which supports adding schema organization or schema person markup. And you can just read the help page on yoast.com about how to add, you know, fill in those fields and hopefully that will maybe even trigger a knowledge panel to get created. If you already have one, it'll certainly help with filling all of those social slots there with, with your social profiles.

Awesome. Okay, two more simple questions I think. One, Mario Ficcini was asking, is there an ideal length when it comes to the title tag?

You know, it's not about the number of characters. In fact, you can have a long title tag that exceeds this certain width. And it's not a character width, it's actually a pixel width. It's 512 pixels. Yes, I'm a geek who memorizes all this stuff. So if it's a smaller character like the letter I, it takes up less width in pixels. If it's the letter M or W, it'll take up more. So whatever that 512 pixels equals in characters will depend on what those characters are. But let's just say for a rough gauge rule of thumb, it might be 50 to 60 characters. Right. So if it's longer than that, the characters that are lopped off in the search listing still count in the rankings algorithm. They're just not displayed. You'll see A in the search listing and the rest of it will be, you know, omitted from the search listing. Is that a bad thing? Well, maybe it's slightly bad, but in some cases actually benefit because then you might have a curiosity gap that you've created. Right. The best thing about SEO is and you're like, don't I want to know what that is? Click. Oh, it's links or whatever. You know, it's like whatever that thing was, you had to click and go to my website to read the list, the rest of it. So that's not a bad thing. And I don't think I answered the question. That was kind of the Part 2 of the schema question around local. So if we have time, we can circle back on that one too.

Awesome. And I think local, global and national. Local for sure, because that's been coming up quite a bit in the chat. One other question that came in earlier from Serge. Any good SEO AI tools that you suggest or are playing around with these days?

Yeah. So it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Let's say you want to write some copy. There are some AI based tools like Copy AI is one that comes to mind. There's another new one that just launched from Dave Rogenmoser. It's called Conversion AI. There's. If you want to create videos, there's lumen5.com which is AI based. It'll take a blog post or article and turn that into a video. It has a huge stock photo and stock video library, a bunch of background music, and it figures out what the bullet points are based on the content of the article and what transitions to use and what background music to use and everything. And it'll create a draft video for you that you can easily edit. That's really cool because from an SEO perspective, you've got a great, like social sharing video that can help your blog post. That's the further expansion of that topic or that, that that video get more links Right. So that's something that you want to drive people to. The blog post from that video and for the, for the, the full information, all of the additional resources and so forth and a more full service AI based SEO tool market Muse. So that's very heavy on AI. I heard this at Abundance360 from Peter Diamandis and I'm paraphrasing this quote, but it's something like this. There are going to be two kinds of businesses by the end of the decade. The businesses that use AI at their core and businesses that are out of business. So take that one to heart. And if you aren't at least playing around with AI, at least know about GPT3. If you've never heard of it, Google it. Go to OpenAI.com and play with some of the demos and look at what they're up to. Because if you know that Google is just killing it with AI, hopefully not killing us Boston Dynamics robots and all that in the future. But if you think about all of the AI algorithms that are powering Google, how do you outsmart an AI? Any ideas?

Yeah.

There's really only one way to outsmart an AI.

Is that with another AI?

Exactly. Thank you, Tarna. You nailed it. Yeah. So if you are not at least playing with AIs, you're going to miss the boat and that's not going to be good for you.

Wonderful. There's a couple other questions that have come in. Dean, you want me to keep going with? There's two others.

Oh, you're on mute.

I see you talking, but I'm not hearing you.

Sorry about that. Yeah, let's go to the two more and. And then we can wrap up. Boy, this is like. It's fascinating, but we're coming up to 4 o'. Clock.

It's crazy, it happens so fast. There's been so much that has happened here today and if there's one thing you do do the title tag.

Yeah.

Get that done before the end of the day. Okay. So Stefano asked, do you have any suggestions on page structure for professional services firms? That firm that wants to rank in various cities. I suspect it's not advisable to have all the city keywords on the homepage.

That is correct. I would create a little directory of the different locations, a page for each location. And the content needs to be unique. You can't just have the same description copy on each of the pages with the city name changed. Let's say that you have 10 locations and each location has a different staff. They have different subject matter experts and different clients and different success stories and testimonials and so forth. You can populate each of those location pages with unique content that helps sell the location and the value that you offer from that location and differentiate that locations page from the other locations that you have.

Yeah, that's good. That's an interesting. That apply to franchises too, I guess, right? Yeah, yep.

That's a pro tip there. That's a big one for a lot of law firms and a lot of service providers and. Okay, so I think that's a wonderful segue into. The last question I have here. Dean for us is circling back to the what important ways does SEO differ from national global? But I think we should talk about local too because I know we've got a lot of people that run local businesses.

Yeah, I think so too.

That's great. Yeah. So local SEO is a little bit of a different beast because you do have factors that go into the equation that are unique that are not really applicable to national. So for example, distance from the city, Centroid, if you are way out in the boonies and your competitor is in downtown, they have a leg up in the algorithm because who wants to drive 30 minutes to get to the dry cleaner when they can go two blocks? So that, that's a factor that comes into play with local. And as I said earlier, local search takes into account local links. So if you're not getting links from your local area, focus on that because that's, that's, that's a miss. If, and this also applies to global and other national locations. If you are outside of the US and you're, let's say in Canada or the UK, well then you're trying to rank in google.ca or google.co.uk and if you don't again have local links for that market, if you don't have Canadian links, if you don't have UK links, it's all from the US that doesn't look like you're the most relevant business in your niche in that market. So local links, if you're trying to rank in a other country search engine, Google engine, like Again, let's use google.co.uk and your, let's say the, all these factors we went over page speed and schema.org markup and all that. If that's all in order and you've got one little setting wrong, like for example, inside of Google Search Console, that's that free tool that I told Dean and everybody to make sure you're signed up for. It's Free from Google. So make sure you have it inside of there. You can change or set your preferred geographic region. And if you had it wrong, let's say that it was set to us and you're in the UK. You just destroyed your chances of ranking in google.co.uk just with one little setting. So make sure that you get it right. Normally the right setting is to not set it at all and just let it be global. Yeah, there are lots of nuances. If you're talking about global across many languages and countries and regions, then you definitely need to take into account hreflang tags. But I don't want to make everybody's eyes glaze over who don't have multinational businesses. So it is one of those technical aspects. You just ask the right who make sure that we are set up right with our hreflang tags. And again, there are plenty of free tools out there that will give you insight into this stuff. You don't even need to rely on the WHO to tell you if it's working or not. You just go to, in this case, technicalseo.com and there's an hreflang checker that you could put in your website URL yourself and see, oh, is it working or is it messed up? And then you tell the right who. This is broken. Please fix it and take a screenshot showing that it's broken in that hreflang checker tool and you say, this is a problem. I don't know how to fix it, but I bet you do.

That's amazing. Well, I think, Stefan, so much wisdom here. I mean, definitely, you're. You definitely have a deep, deep well of knowledge about this. I appreciate you coming to share it. So, Stephan Spencer.com and email me@stefanspencer.com to reach out.

Oh, and subscribe to my podcasts too.

Because subscribe to your podcasts. There you go.

Marketing speak and get yourself optimized.

There we go. Perfect. It's eye opening. I appreciate you taking the time. I feel like we've just kind of scratched the surface of what's here. But I really appreciate you being, being here and I appreciate everybody joining in with us. Next month we do the same. We're back with another I love marketing meetup. Zoom. I love doing these zooms. It's great to connect and see everybody. And I believe that next month we have Robert Cialdini. Is that right, Tarna? Is that the close?

Robert's going to come in April.

He's coming in April. Okay.

Yep, yep, exactly. So let's Just talk about March and April while we're here.

Okay, There we go. April Cialdini. And then who do we have in March?

Michael Bruce.

Okay, Per. Oh, there you go. You can't lose.

You cannot.

Those are two great ones.

No, that one will be ready for everybody to get registered in just about an hour. So sign up for that one. You don't want to miss Michael Bruce. And I'm sure you can tell a little bit more about him if you want, but that'll be a great one.

What's the date of it?

Same date, since there's only 28 days in February, so it's March 17, St. Patty's okay. 11:30am Pacific. 2:30pm Eastern.

Perfect.

Ilovemarketing.com to register and join us here live on Zoom. And then also, we had so many people watching on YouTube today. Gina, go ahead and pop that in the chat again and share that, especially with your webmaster or with those on your team that speak some of those. This techno babble. And I just wanted to say thank you, Dean, for us stay on the ground because it's so easy to get so big with the. With SEO, but. What?

Oh, yeah, no, I'm not. I'm. I'm not ashamed to let you know I don't know any of that technical stuff. So I want to. I was doing it for me to get to the real language of stuff.

So.

Yeah. And Stefan, you're great. That's. It was awesome to, you know, come down to my understanding level. I appreciate that. All right.

I appreciate you, Dean. You are a gift to not just the marketing community, but to humanity. You are just full of so much love and generosity and kindness. Yeah. It's not just the nine word email that made you famous.

It's not just nine word emails.

That's.

It's like who you are as a soul. I just think you're a beautiful human and a beautiful soul. So thank you.

Awesome. Well, I think we can't. Let's. Let's end it on that. That's fantastic. If you were here with us live. Don't forget to save the chat. So many great resources in there. Lots of. Gina's been taking great notes all the way along, so you'll get all of those links and resources there that she had there. So don't forget to save that. And then we'll see you next month, same time, same channel. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you next time.

Thanks.

Okay. Bye, guys.

Mercedine. Mercedine. Bye, Mercy.

Stefan. I see Gina and genius team.