MBA988 Must Read: SEO 2018 (No-BS) Strategy by Casey Henry

Hey O welcome to the $100 RBA show, the business podcast that always delivers with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net Today's episode is a Must Read Episode on our Must Read Episodes, I share with you a book that has greatly influenced me, helped me, helped our business in some way. I share with you its insights and its takeaways. Today's must read is SEO 2018 no BS strategy. This book is by Casey Henry and this is not a wildly popular book or a New York Times best seller, but I stumbled upon it when searching on Amazon and this book is a short book that gives you a holistic strategy on how to crush it with search Engine optimization. We'll get into what SEO exactly is as well as how this book helps you improve your SEO on your website to get you more leads, more traffic, and eventually, of course, sales. If you actually search for a book on SEO, it's very hard to find something that's tactical and to the point. Most SEO books are overly detailed and give you a lot of information. You really don't need to know a lot of technical jargon and often by the time you get to the point where you actually get information you need or you can use, you've gotten tired and probably have closed the book. Not with this book. SEO 2018 no BS strategy gives you great insights within the first 10 minutes of reading this book. I want to share with you some of those in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Do you have your eyes on something? Maybe you see new business possibilities or you're close to retiring? It could be a new job. While you're looking, you may not see other things coming. Don't worry. These are the things that AIG sees. AIG has insurance for growing businesses and families and careers where you can reinvent an industry. You see opportunity. AIG sees you're ready for it. Learn more about AIG Insurance Solutions and Careers@aig.com podcast. So today's must read SEO 2018 no BS Strategy by Casey Henry Again is a straight to the point no BS like the title says. Search Engine Optimization Guide. Now if you have a website, which you should whether you have a physical business or you have an online business, you need to really get your SEO in order. Your search engine optimization order. Because otherwise you're making it very difficult for people to find you via a search, a Google search, a Bing search, with any search engine. And in a nutshell, SEO is basically optimizing your website so search engines can find you easily. Sites with great SEO rank on the first page of their target keywords for that actual website or their niche. So if my website's all about Persian cat grooming, so if I have good SEO, I should show up on page one on how to groom your Persian cat. You get the point. Now, the thing that a lot of people don't talk about is that there's a lot of things that factor in into your SEO. A lot of these things are not easily found out unless you do a lot of research. Why? Because Google doesn't want you to game the system, right? They don't want to just tell you how it works because then everybody's just going to do that and really just game the system, right? So somebody like Casey Henry breaks down, what are the things you need to really focus on? What are some of the things that really are going to make the most difference? Based on his own experience. Now, big companies know that SEO is so important and they invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in their SEO. But the good news is that you and I can learn what the experts know fairly pretty quickly. And 80% of the things that are going to make a difference can be implemented on your website with no expert hired. I know this for a fact because I've done it myself now, even though I've been doing this online business thing for a while, and I've been working on our SEO for our websites for quite while a quite some time. Things change. Search engines and their algorithms change year after year. That's why it's good to read a new book to stay up to date. So I want to share with you some of the biggest takeaways from this book and then I'm going to leave the rest for you to read. So Casey Henry starts with six very important things you need to understand or need to kind of commit to before you start working on SEO. It's kind of the first steps. One is outsourcing. It's funny how he starts with outsourcing, but he recognizes the fact that you can't be an expert at everything that you're going to need to do to have great SEO. You got to be willing to outsource it to freelancers out there. And he recommends sites like Upwork that you can hire a freelancer to do the things you need to do, whether that's modifying your blog articles or installing some WordPress plugins or whatever it is. But he says that you need to just resign to the fact you can't do everything. You, you need to hire, you need to outsource and need the help of others. Now the good news is it's not super expensive. You're not going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are freelancers out there that will help you with your SEO for $20 an hour. So pretty reasonable. The second thing he talks about is domains and hosting. So we talked about domains in the past, how your keyword or your business name in your domain really makes a big difference when you're doing your SEO or actually ranking for the those keywords. So for example, our webinar software, Webinar Ninja has the word webinar in it, right? And people are searching for webinar software. So that gives us an advantage that the word webinar is in our domain name. Now, hosting is where your actual site lives. Where do you actually store your site in the cloud? Now there's a lot of hosting companies out there, but you gotta choose a good one because he mentioned site speed. How fast your site loads has a lot to do with your ranking. So if you have a bad host or a site that's hosted on a bad hosting provider, their servers might be slow and your speed might be slow, therefore affecting your SEO, right? So you got to make sure that you're using top notch hosting. And he recommends different hosts and things like that. In the book he also talks about WordPress using WordPress if you go with a WordPress site and the plugins you should install if you're going to go through WordPress talks about privacy policies in terms of services, that these are actually quite important. Google looks for them in your site index to see if you're at a legitimate business, a legitimate website, so that they can give you preferential treatment versus some spammy blog. So make sure you have those on your site. He also talks about social media profiles, grabbing the social media profiles with your business name. This is going to help you have backlinks, help you just have a better brand awareness. Also just some general social capital. So again, if you have a business called Persian Cat Grooming, then you're gonna want to grab those handles for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn. You get the point. Now lastly, the thing that he mentions you really need to focus on when you're getting started is your Google search console. Now with any kind of Gmail account, you can open A Google search console. And you can track your website, your domains, and how well they're doing with Google Analytics, as well as you have the keyword tool there, and it goes into detail of how to use this search console. But this is really going to help you track and be aware if there's any kind of issues with your website, if you've been hacked or anything like that. So actually, these six things he mentions at the top of the book, we're talking about the first maybe ten pages or so. These are just gold right away. He gives you so much value because a lot of people neglect the basics. And the basics really matter in SEO. After he covers the basics in part one of this book, he goes really deep in keyword research. How to rank for the right keywords. Now, when you're ranking for keywords, meaning that you want to show up on the first page or the first few listings for your keywords, you got to know which keywords to go after. Some keywords are super competitive and are going to be really hard for you to actually rank for them. And some of them are not that competitive, but have a high search count, meaning that a lot of people are using these keywords for searching. They're searching this keyword and you should go after these keywords. And he shows you how because they're not that competitive, it's easier to rank for them. In part two of the book, he talks about your content strategy, the actual content that's on your website. He talks about how to create high quality content. So Google loves it. Also how to analyze your content for SEO performance and how to restructure that content to do even better. And then part three, he talks about how to double rank on Google using YouTube. Not a lot of people know this, But Google owns YouTube. So Google's going to show YouTube results for keywords in the search. So if I search, you know how to groom Persian cat. If there's anything on YouTube about that topic, they're going to show those YouTube videos in the search. So if you cover your bases with keywords where you have video content as well as, you know, blog content on your website, you're going to show up twice, giving you twice the chance to actually get clicked on and get a visitor on your website or a visitor to your video, which is going to lead to your website, because you can put that in the description of the video. The point is that you're getting more exposure. So this means you can get a whole bunch of traffic for free by double tapping on the Google search. Text search as well as YouTube. And then lastly in part four he talks about how to share your great content on your website or on YouTube, how to get other people involved and how to get them to share as well. So as you can see, this book is really well structured and it covers really what's most important. I would say what he covers is about 80% of what's really important when it comes to SEO. The thing I love about it is about 150 pages. You can get through this book in one sitting and you'll have a plan of action to improve your SEO immediately. You can't say that about a lot of SEO books. I would say most SEO books out there. This is why I really love this book and had to make it a must read. Guys, I got more on today's must read episode. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Support for today's show comes from Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams is your hub for teamwork in Office365. Here at the $100 MBA we run a remote team so we have teammates all across the world. And sometimes communicating can be quite hectic. Organizing everything from chats and emails and files. It can get chaotic. With so much to look after, it would be great just to have everything in one place. And that's what Microsoft Teams does. Teams is a single workplace where you can work, share and connect with the people in your work life. Teams brings together chat, meetings, files and apps all in one place. Take Teamwork, where you work with apps for mobile and desktop. So whether you're sprinting towards a deadline or sharing your next big idea, Teams can help you and your team achieve more. I recently used Teams and I found the user experience to be so simple and clean. I found it like stress reducing. So I tip my hat to Microsoft Teams for building such an easy to use app. Microsoft Teams in Office365 visit office.com teams to learn more to wrap up if you want more traffic to your website, if you want more recognition, if you want to spend less on ads and get more organic traffic via SEO, then you gotta pick up this book. SEO 2018 no BS Strategy by Casey Henry Such an easy read, so straightforward and uses personal examples along the way to show you how these things are applicable. Well, there you have it. That's today's Episode. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, let us know in an iTunes rating and review. We love hearing from you. I read every single review and it lets us know what you love about the show, so we can keep doing that. That's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. When it comes to how to books, a well written how to book is worth its weight in gold. Why? Because a biography you can listen to and you can enjoy the stories, but with a how to, if it's not well written, you're not going to get through the book and you're not going to get through the strategies and you're not going to implement. So I like short, well written how to books and this is one of them. So whenever you see one like that, you gotta pick it up and you gotta consume. Alright guys, sometimes in business you just gotta take a break. You need some time off away from the business so you can recharge. But before you go on break, you gotta plan for it. You gotta make sure your business is ready for it and your team's ready for it. If you have a team, you've gone ahead so you can be worry free on this break. But how do you do that? That's what I'll be discussing in tomorrow's episode. How to get ready for some time off. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. And until then, take care.