What You Need To Know About SEO: I Love Marketing LIVE with Dean Jackson Featuring Stephan Spencer - I Love Marketing Episode #392

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.

If you're looking for some helpful advice about search engine optimization, this is the episode for you. Whether you're just starting and looking into building your company's website for the very first time, or to make sure your business shows up in the top search results on Google and stays there, Steffen shares tips and tricks that are going to be extremely helpful to get more traffic to your company's website with SEO. He elaborates on ranking at the top of search engines and staying there, using a combination of paid advertising as well as organic search. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com 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. 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 science.

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, you know, people see as how can I get to be number one on, on Google? Or how can I get, how can I use it? So is that really the most important outcome of it? That is it traffic is the thing, or are there other more important things.

In doing SEO on a deeper level? I would say the outcome is to change the world. And you're just using Google as a vehicle. 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, right? 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 in 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'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 de. Optimized anti SEO, then you don't get to get your outcome and change the world. So that, 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 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 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. 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. I want to dig into the effort and the knowledge and the actual help or work that it takes to get free traffic. And in the comparison, both in terms of 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 I'd love to hear your take on how you find its position 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, 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. 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 offering your product, 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?

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 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 your trust float is a four out of a hundred, 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. A lot of people 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. Focus on the things that are the highest and best opportunities, the biggest needle movers. If that's getting link equity, link authority, because you, you're in the basement in terms of your trust flow score, your citation flow score or both. That's, 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. So that's, that's, 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 so since last year. And the Page Experience algorithm is going to come live very soon. It's due to launch in May, and when it does, if you don't pass core web vitals, you will get demoted.

How stable is what you're doing in SEO? I haven't really paid attention to it as a thing to move forward on. So I'm glad that you're here so that I can kind of forget my own situation, look at it and say, is this is the juice worth the squeeze?

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. It's. It's not a game you can win if you are going to try and cheat 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. It's a company with a profit motive. And if they want to set a rule that you think is unfair, 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 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 find.

Hey, you link to me, I link to you, everybody, right?

I never bought into that. I always thought that that is unethical and it's just, it's bad business. It's bad business karma. 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 best sweet spot for outcomes with SEO, is it an advantage for big corporate companies with huge teams of budgets and footprints versus a small business or a 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 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, 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, 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 that it's. 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 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, just a few positions lower on a Yelp page for your business, 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 your um, talking about the long growth of, of that like what the, the value is to get a hundred eyeballs a week on something is.

Yeah but here's the, here's the problem. I guess the opportunity is how I would refrain 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. Okay, that turns into people going to opt in which is basically free for you traffic that you were talking about. So you know, that's awesome.

And just to point one thing I did consciously here, 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 can conversion optimize the page. Now you're talking 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 or a million plus businesses. And they may be in lots of different, 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 always joke that, you know, I.

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. Actually have this hiring blueprint that. And it includes a BS detector 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. 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 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 alsoasked.com.

Okay.

Also ask.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 the bottom, click on 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 in 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, yeah, juice worth the squeeze, right?

Yeah. And if you think about. Let's go laterally a bit broader and think, right, 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, et cetera. 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, when he or she arrives. And it 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 they, he's the only party rental company that had identified people early on in the, in the, 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 beat a 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 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, he cut some corners. But back in the day when Digg was a thing, you know, before Reddit was the king Reddit dig, and he had all of 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. He, 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. It's 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.

Oh my goodness.

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, overnight prints dot 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 Shoemaker's new business card if you remember. Schumoney. 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 and 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 it 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. But 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 Journal's 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. Yes, 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, you know, a factor in your decision to put all that time into it.

Do you have any, like, I consider 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 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. 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 tension relieved. Buzzfeed is fantastic at this with their headlines, right?

Yeah, they are.

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 two out of three I'll be happy with as well. So 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, 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 with 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 if I none of these, all of those words that you've just said, I have no understanding of as a. The technical terms of those and 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. How would you budget in terms of 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.

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 scams or malware infected sites or whatever. They're linking to you now and they weren't before. And it's because of the bad SEO firm that you inadvertently hired. So you got to be very, very careful. If you don't have 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 five or ten thousand dollars and you just buy a one off SEO audit. 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 for $20,000?

I think that's an important thing though. But I often say to people to look at not thinking about it as an expense, but thinking about as a capital investment. 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 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 for ever and ever and ever. And that's kind of a, I get it that that's a better way to think about it Now.

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 link spam, 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 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.

That's awesome.

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. Yeah. 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. 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. Can we have people if they have some questions about this? We've got a real. I. 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. 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. Mepanspencer.com Mephenspencer.com so that's how to email me. And my website is stefanspencer.com and yeah, there's a ton of resources just sent.

Me into a loop here. Me that feel like I'm, it feels like I'm emailing me at Stefan Spencer. My mind just went into this loop. That. That's you. Okay. You shouldn't email you.

Me at Stefan Spencer mephenspencer.com okay.

Perfect.

That's funny. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and that's where StefanSpencer.com is the website where you'd find the SEO BS detector with.

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. Well, I think Stefan is 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 to share it. It's eye opening. I feel like we've just kind of scratched the surface of what's, 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.

I love MarketingZoom.com to register and join us here live on Zoom. 11:30am Pacific, 2:30pm Eastern.

Perfect.

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