0007: How to get your company ranked without getting slapped by Google with SEO Expert & President of The Watters Group Lee Watters

EA Interviews Episode seven Inspiration, Transformation, Success.

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What Shaken Expert Authority Nation have you ever thought about how the Internet really works? You know, how do searches work? What happens when you actually type something in? Have you ever wondered, how do I get my business on the first page of Google? I have, and I'm excited because on today's episode I have none other than Lee Waters, SEO expert, inbound marketing consultant, innovative thought leader and president of the Waters Group. He is responsible for helping professionals and companies position themselves as experts in their marketplace. And for over 22 years, he has been working in the digital marketing industry, creating content and improving the online visibility of his clients. With a background in audio and video production, he helps his clients showcase their brand and uniqueness. One of his superpowers is to help his clients create their own unique selling proposition, or usp, that separates them from for the competition. He works with many local nonprofits such as Wish Education Foundation, Circle of Hope, and is a board member of the Boys and Girls Club of Santa Clarita. Helping is a very big part of his life. As a Santa Clarita resident for 23 years. He lives with his wife Cindy and his two stepchildren, Sabrina and Spencer. I'm going to bring them up right after we thank our sponsor.

First there was Siri. Then you started talking to Alexa. But have you met Crystal because she knows all about you, understand anyone's personality on LinkedIn with this simple Chrome extension you can get from eainterviews.com Crystal Once again, eainterviews.com Crystal Hey Lee, how's it going?

Great to have you here.

Doing great, doing great. Mario, how are you?

I'm feeling awesome. I'm excited to have you here. I've been excited about our episode for a while. So you know, I know you're an SEO expert and you're going to share that with the audience and we can get into the details, but the first thing I like to start everything off with is what's your inspiration for starting your company? Why did you choose to do this when there's so many different options out there for what you could do with your time in your life?

Well, it all started, I think back as I was doing production in Hollywood between records and film and television. And as that industry started to change and come to a close for me anyways, I started looking at other things and the Internet kind of was breaking at the time. 94, 95 that type of thing. And the less I like spending on soundstage, I started figuring, you know, what's going to happen here with the Internet? Everything's going to come down this line. So I'm going to go figure this out. And kind of bailed on everything else. And I started a streaming company and we started streaming audio and video back in the early days. But the problem was homes didn't have high speed Internet, so it didn't work out too well. So I kind of got into other things and then I got interested in search and I sat back and was like thinking, well, how the heck do you find anything on this? How do local businesses get found on this thing? And, and at the time, all we had was AltaVista and Yahoo. And I just kind of fell in love with search from there and kind of went down that road.

Yeah, I remember the early days of the Internet myself. And I mean, we have instant messaging and video messaging and all kinds of stuff you can do now. And I remember around Christmas one year, I had Prodigy Internet CD and you were allowed like 30 emails a month. And my friend and I were texting before texting was even out. But we were sending emails. I'm like, do you see it snowing outside? He's like, yeah, that's awesome. We should go ice skating. And it was just the novelty of being able to send messagings in the early days. I mean, within five minutes it was like, you've hit your monthly limit. I'm like, oh, okay, we should just walk outside or call each other. But it's amazing to see where it's all started from. So you grew into you, you found, fell in love with the search and just the thought process of what it takes to search something.

Right?

Yeah.

So for someone wanting to be found out there, what would you say is like.

What'S the best way to get found out there nowadays? Because I know a lot's changed over the years.

Well, it's. Yeah, a lot has changed and a lot's changed even just in the last six months to a year. I mean, some of the things we were doing a year ago, now we're not doing anymore to get you to the first page of Google or up higher in Google anyways. And some things will even get you banned from Google. But mostly, I mean, mostly what we're focused on right now is called user intent marketing. It's really focused on the user's intent, your client, who your client would be, what they're searching for for answers. And so it's really figuring out who your ideal client is, understanding what their problem is, what their want or problem is, and then what frustrations go along with that problem and what are they experiencing and creating content around those frustrations and around those, those answers that they're actually searching for. You know, people search now for, you know, she always have really, but it's more prominent now is searching for answers to problems and questions that they have. So that's the thing that you really have to do is you have to make sure you fill that information that people are actually looking for. You have to be the most valuable, trusted source of information out there in your marketplace in order to be found. The more you're found and the more people stick around and, you know, engage with your content, the higher Google will rank you. It's, it's, there's a lot of the games that we used to play years ago to get to the top of Google are not valid anymore. Google's changed the algorithms and has really shut a lot of stuff down. So today you really have to create great content. And if you create the good content and get people to stick around and start spend more time on your site and share it and everything, you'll get rewarded for it.

What would you say are some ways to create great content for people to put out there to get found?

Well, it's really focused around what you offer, the kind of services or products that you offer.

Think about what your client or customer is actually looking for. What problems do they have? How are they? We take our clients through a thing called the Buyer's Journey. And there's different versions of the Buyer's journey out there. There's some real short ones. There's three steps and whatever. I use a five stage buyer's Journey. Steps, stages. There's five stages to it. And it's. The first one is thinking what's your prospect and your customer thinking about? Before they ever talk to anybody else, they're thinking about their problem. And sometimes even before they even talk to their wife or their kids or family or anybody else. This is pretty known and pretty common with like divorce lawyers or, or one client that we work with. Type of client that we work with is audiologists. And a lot of times people don't want to admit that they have a hearing problem, but they keep it to themselves. So they're thinking about it. So they go to Google and they start typing in questions about how do you lose your hearing or, you know, getting a divorce. What you know, most of the time it's how to cover my Butt in a divorce situation. But so they're really looking at this preliminary information before they ever talk to anybody or before they're even serious about doing anything about it. It's a conversation they're having in their head. So you have to become part of that conversation they're already having in their head with themselves. So then you have to go into stage two, which is acceptance, where your prospect, your customer, actually accepts the problem. All right, I guess I do have a hearing problem. Because you've presented enough evidence in front up there in that first stage to get them to realize, yeah, I do have a problem. And then they accept it. And then from there, they go into stage number three, which is, what are my options to get rid of this? How do I fix this problem? So as long as you're creating content for each one of those stages, you're doing good. So the next stage from there is, what is the best option for me for my situation? So they go from, you know, what are the. What are the options out there? To what's the best option for me for my situation? And then they go into who's the best supplier for this best option. And that's stage five. And that's where most everybody markets themselves to, is that last stage. And that's why you're just another choice. You're not the choice. And if you create the right content, build the right system for answering the questions and all that, you will become the trusted advisor. And Google will reward you for that. Because as people search the answers to their questions and you provide them with the answers, you're really killing two birds with one stone. One, your client is, or your potential client is actually trusting you and realizing they're getting the information from you, building trust. And then Google also sees that more people are spending time on your site, enjoying what you. What you offer and sharing it, or, you know, going deeper into your website. So Google will reward you for that and rank you higher.

So what it sounds to me is even though Google is a giant algorithm and a company and all these different things, it sounds to me like Google is doing the exact same thing that we as humans do when we meet someone at an event, see someone speaks, find them online, or wherever we find them. It sounds very similar. Would you say that's the case?

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, Google's. You got to understand that Google's trying to reward, you know, provide the very best information to their user, their customer. So the person who comes to Google types in a question looking for an answer for something Google wants to provide them with the very best information because it makes them come back to Google. If Google doesn't provide the best the answers they're looking for, they'll go off to some other search engine. And that's one of the reasons why Google is the top search engine out there, is because it always provides the very best information to their users.

Just for the last couple of years, huh?

Yeah.

So that I appreciate you sharing that because I knew a little bit about SEO and it was more on the video marketing side, how to rank videos, but I had no clue that there was a point. I gotta be honest, there was a point when you're saying all this, I was like, he's still talking about SEO. Because it really sounds like the same process that people are going through as far as, hey, do you know about so and so? Do you know about so and so? And people ask me, should I trust him or not? I'm like, yeah, he's a good guy, she's a good girl, you know, whatever the case is. But it's the same thing. We're all looking for that answer. And it sounds like you got it nailed down as far as the process goes. So I appreciate you sharing how you help people and who you help and how you help them. You were saying the local businesses, but I want to know a little bit more about the specific results. So when someone comes to you and they're saying, I want you to help me with my search rankings, I want to help help me with my business and everything, what can they expect? If they're at negative 10 right now, how do you get them to 20? And what's that time frame look like?

Well, it's interesting. And clients come to us in all different stages and we, and we work with a certain type of client. We don't just take anybody. Startups are really hard to work with. It's really hard to get startups results because they have no track record. We want somebody who's at least been in business five years, has a little bit of a track record, has a great or at least a very good rating in Yelp and stuff like reviews, good reviews and stuff. So we're not starting with a complete negative. Some people come to us with very bad reviews and a horrible rating and try to get us to help and fix, fix it. And it's like, dude, you're too far gone. You got other problems you got to deal with before you think about this. Fix these problems before you come trying to, you know, shine on. Trying to get everybody to find you. But it's interesting how it all fits together. I mean, it's really nothing different than from the very beginning how search really started. It's just that since how the algorithms have changed with Google and stuff is that they've just gotten rid of a lot of the garbage and a lot of the games that where you were able to game the system and put yourself in.

You tell me I can't keyword stuff, 200 keywords on a web page anymore.

No, you can. That'll get you banned from Google for sure. They'll get you blacklisted. So it used to work. There's a few things that used to.

Work really well, but now, even when you could do it, it was so obvious. It's like clearly you're not trying.

Yes, no. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, in order for Google to be valuable, they have to get rid of that stuff. So that's understandable. But realistically, if you're a good quality business, you know, a doctor, some type of physician, somebody who produces, you know, performs a very great, good service and everything, that's really who kind of we're looking for. And if you can really build in depth content, not about you, but about the solution to the problem that the customer is looking for. You know, one thing that I always see, and you probably experience this too, working with people, is like you look at somebody's website for the first time. The whole first page is all about them. It's like, move all that stuff to the about us page. Focus on your client, focus on the problem that they're experiencing and how you can help them solve those problems. And then, you know, make sure you put a lot of content in a lot of words and not just gibberish, but really good, useful content to make sure you're feeding the Google monster. And then, you know, with links into more videos and other stuff deeper into your website to get your person to stick around, your user to stick around more. That's really the focus of the whole thing and to really make it work really well. And if somebody's at usually if somebody's like on the second or third page, it's not too hard to get them to the first page. It's usually just a few tweaks of their content, maybe increasing their content, the quality of it, things like that. And there's, you know, there's really only five things that really keep you off the first page of Google. There's over 200 things that Google looks at that ranks you but the real serious ones, there's really five of them that really will keep you off the first page, even if you're doing everything else right. If you don't have these five things correct, you will not show up on the first page. One is there's no keywords on your homepage, on the page that you're trying to rank. No keywords at all. I see that a lot where somebody's looking for a certain type of product or service and the company's calling it something else, you know, industry terms or whatever, and not what the customer is trying to search for. So there's no keywords there, so they don't show up. So that's.

You're talking about the industry jargon.

Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, there's. And that's the thing you have to think about what's your user calling your product or service and then what's the industry calling it? If there's two different things, then, you know, and you're trying to be, well, I'm a professional and I'm going to call it this because this is the right term. It's like, you know, if your users calling it something completely different, Google's not going to rank you because they're not searching for that. So that's something you got to think about there. The other thing is thin and weak content. A lot of people think, you know, God, I don't want to put a ton of words on there. I want to make it very easy for somebody to read this and everything. Well, that's very thin and weak. If it's, if it just talks about you, it's weak content, not really focused on the problem and the solution to the problem. So that. And then time on site. This is, this is the thing. Your time on site is too low. If your users are not spending a lot of time on your website, if they're there for five seconds or so, 10 seconds and leaving, that's not good either. That's.

That's one way they can track that. I know that's an important thing. And I can't tell you how many people come to us going, you know, we need to do this and that. I go, you don't even know your numbers. Google, they're just guessing.

Yeah, Google Analytics. You got to plug Google Analytics into your website.

Which cost how much?

What's that?

Which cost how much free.

It doesn't cost you time. So it's like you're an idiot if you're not using it. So, but that information that's the base information that you need to know. You need to know exactly what your website's doing and Google Analytics is the best way to do it. And it's completely free. The fourth thing is your bounce rate. You got to keep your bounce rate very, very low. Bounce rate is when somebody comes into your website, spends less than 30 seconds or so on it and hits the back button on the browser and leaves to go back to the search results. That tells Google, well, they didn't find what they were looking for, so they went back to the search results. So it must not be very valuable what they went to. So we're going to drop it in value. And then the last one is.

Very low slow loading pages. If your page is load really slow, Google will ding you for that. And those are really the top five things that will keep you off the first page of Google. Even if you're doing everything else right, which is all the technical stuff, getting backlinks and which are really not that important anymore. I rank a lot of sites on the first page of Google without any backlinks at all and HTTPs now you know, they want everything secure. That's, you know, not that big of a deal. As long as you've got good quality content, people are sticking around and clicking around in your website and spending time on it. Google will rank you very high even if you have a lot of the real technical problems not quite dialed in. But that's a lot of what we do. We'll dial in that stuff, but we dial in the main content first to make sure that we're providing their users with the right content. That's very valuable to get their user to stick around longer and then provide them with a sales system, marketing system, funnel system or whatever that's going to be. You know, create a client out of that to get it to convert.

So I was going to make a joke about. So what you're saying is load 200 HD videos on the main page of everything you've ever done. So that way it loads nice and quickly.

But joking around about that, I am. The next question is how has video marketing helped your business? But I want to do one caveat real quick. You're talking about the load times, joking about the video. For anyone watching this, I am completely joking. Just do not add 200. I've seen people do it. It's hilarious when they ask me what could I do to improve it. Take all that crap off and make it simple with a fast loading time. Like he's saying, right, what's Your thoughts on having a CDN or content delivery network? Do you ever utilize that to speed up load times or distribute the loading?

Well, yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, however you can, you can create, get stuff to load faster. You know, if you can off, off, you know, offload stuff, that's, you know, whatever works. That's the thing. A lot of it is just making sure you have good content. I mean that's really the main thing. Even if your load times aren't the best, you know, even if you got great content, if people stick around, you.

Can still optimize the images and video. I is another thing I notice with people too, they have 6,000 resolution images for the website. That's a headshot and that's, that's one.

Of the main things that we see a lot is the images that they use are high resolution images, 300dpi and plus. Yeah, and your screen can only reproduce 72dpi. So you got to shrink those videos or the images down, get them small enough where they load quick. And there's plugins for that. If you're using like a WordPress site or something like that, there's plugins that'll help you compress those images and stuff. But those are the things that you really have to sit back and look at, you know, and then some of the tricks to really get people to stick around longer on your website is definitely putting a video or two on the homepage, you know, getting. Because if you put a minute and a half, two minute video, well, and people watch it, they're going to stick around for a while. So that's going to help you there. And then other videos on other pages, on your internal pages that helps people stick around longer and that just feeds Google the information that they want, you know, of making a quality content.

So you're suggesting to your clients and anyone watching this and hearing it, use video for your own business. And so obviously you're doing it for yours and speak a little bit more about what you've done to utilize video, to give people ideas. I've seen some of your episodes you've done and you do great on video as well. One of the reasons I invited you on the show, but I do want to know more about how are you utilizing it.

Yeah, video is a great source. I mean it's a great way. People don't want to read anymore. So that's the other problem. People sit back and think, well, people don't want to read, so I'll just put a video on the page. Well, Google can't understand what you're talking about in the video. So you still have to have the content there. So your best bet is to shoot a great video about your content, about the situation, the problem, the solution to their problem, whatever it is that you're trying to do, and then transcribe that, put that as the words on the page and then have that plus the video. That'll help you rank higher too. But with myself, I've used video as video ads on YouTube, Facebook, and drop them into a sales funnel or back over to the website for information. And then I put a lot of video on my site. There's just about everything. And with even all of our clients, we try to produce a lot of video with them because we know video ranks really well. And.

You know, YouTube is owned by Google and it's the second largest search engine, sometimes the first, depending what you're trying to search for, what people are looking for. But so it's very valuable to have those links between Google and YouTube and have those. So Google knows.

Have you ever done any SEO on YouTube as far as the video separately from the site and also using them on the site?

Oh, yeah, we totally. We optimize all the videos, we SEO all of our videos that we put out there because we know people are searching even on YouTube for, for videos and we want to make sure they show up at the top of those search results. Plus, it's not so, it's not so common anymore. We've seen a decline in this, but it's still, you can still do it if you do it right and it's the right type of search terms and stuff. But it's, you can get even Google term to bring up videos in the search results in Google. So you know, a lot of times, depending on the search term and how you optimize the video for search, you know, it'll show up in a Google search result, usually one or two positions. And that works great too.

Yeah, that's a great suggestion. We used to offer that as service to clients back in the day and I was testing it out even recently, and it's awesome what you can do with video. So appreciate the insight on that. We, we're gonna go to the sponsor, thank them, and when we come back, we're gonna have the rapid fire round. So stay tuned for that.

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Expert Authority Nation, we're back and we're here for the rapid fire round. So I've got Lee Waters, SEO expert and president of the Waters Group here, and we're going to go into rapid fire. 60 seconds, Lee. What is the biggest problem you see your prospects make and the fastest way they can fix it?

Quit talking about themselves. The biggest problem I see is they basically on the homepage of their website, they spew all about themselves and nobody cares about what you can do for them until nobody cares about you, until they know what you can do for them. So that's probably the biggest thing.

All right, great answer and very accurate. Shortest path to the cash. What's the one thing your prospects could and should do to increase their profits the fastest?

Basically prove to their prospects how they can help them. It's if they can demonstrate how they can help them and solve their problem, they'll become, you know, they'll get a conversion out of that.

Very good. All right, this is my favorite one. When people come to me for coaching and training and, you know, they think it's all this Facebook, LinkedIn, blah, blah, all these videos, all this crap. And that's all well and good, but my favorite thing is a pen, pencil and calculator. And that's why I keep right nearby. So customer lifetime value. Have some vision, people. It's your business. You're going to be around for five or ten years. Customer lifetime value. What's one way your prospects could maximize their customer lifetime value?

Oh, one thing I can do is just make sure they take care of their customers and don't screw up.

Keep them happy and keep, you know.

Be a real person in business.

Be human. You Know, introduce new solutions to them, solve their problems, really show them how you can help them. And it's not all about you, you know, you're, you're just, you're just showing them how to help, how to get the solutions that they're looking for.

All right, very good. Yeah. Again, I think so many people focus on the hit haw and hoot nanny and the shiny object and all this crap. It's like, have you reached out to them, called them, emailed them? It's just be real. So touch points, is there anything else I should know that you want to share that's vitally important to the audience right now?

Well, yeah, content. I mean, if somebody's looking to create more content, they're trying to figure out what do I do? Because you hear this word content, content is king. And you hear this, you know, content all the time. Well, how do you produce content? Well, we've broken it down to three basic questions that if you can answer these and create enough content out of it, you'll do very well. One is, what's your customer want to know? So focus content around what your customer wants to know. Answer those questions, you know, provide them with the information they're actually looking for. Then the next question is, what do they need to know?

Put all the content out there that your customer needs to know about a problem or a solution that they probably don't know to ask or wouldn't know to ask, and something that could probably get them into more trouble than they're already in, depending what the, what type of industry you're in. But you know that. And then basically how you can help them, you know, put that last, don't put how you can help them first. Because that's the other thing I see a lot of people do is, is again, they come in and it's like, here's what we can do. We can do this, we can do this, we can do this, we can do this. And it's like, wait a minute, I don't even know my problems yet. You know, it's like, I've got this one problem. I don't know about those other problems. Let me just deal with this one problem. And the other thing I can tell you to do to if you really want your website to convert better and, and increase your on your on page time, get rid of the pop ups, those pop ups that pop up when you first get there and they come up and you ask for this or sign up for that.

Your clients, they're just getting there. It's like, man, I just got here. I don't even know what to click on yet. It's like, and you're already asking me for my email address and all this. It's like I'm going somewhere else. They hook the back button and that will increase, you know, that's why your bounce rate's probably a lot higher than it should be.

Well, I appreciate the insight. And I was actually about to joke about that earlier. When you're saying the page load times, I was like, I was gonna make a comment about. So you suggest having pop ups right when someone gets there and.

20 or 30 of them on there. That'll work.

I was also laughing because I'm was split testing some stuff and even one of my own, I was like, yeah, I gotta kill this.

It's.

Yeah.

They just. A lot of people think, they think, oh, we'll get this. We'll get them to sign up for our, for our newsletter. It's like, I don't even know if you can help me yet. Why would I want to sign up for your newsletter? Find out if you are human, if you even are in my neighborhood, if you're even somebody I like. Let me look at a picture of you. Maybe I don't even like the way you look. So that's gonna.

Hi, nice to meet you. Want to get married?

Exactly. You know, so you gotta romance them a little bit, you know, take them on a couple dates, you know.

All right. Well, Lee, it's been an absolute pleasure as always. How can people find you?

They can find me@thewatersgroup.com and that's with two T's and waters W, A T, T, E R s. So it's the watersgroup.com. all my stuff is there. Email, phone numbers. Any way you want to get in touch with me, I'm there and be more than happy to sit down and talk with you. We don't just take clients on automatically. You got to go through a process with us. So to make sure we're right, fit, but more than happy to have that conversation with you.

Very good. Well, thank you, Lee. And we're going to thank the last sponsor and it was great having you.

Thanks, Mario. Take care.

You're already successful. You've worked hard to get where you are. We both know it wasn't overnight and hasn't always been easy.

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