EP077: SEO Tips and Strategies with Stephan Spencer

Welcome to the Perfect Practice podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts, and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel, is a functional medicine and success coach, international speaker, and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Perfect Practice. Another great interview coming up for you today. Today we've got a very special guest. Stefan Spencer is a friend of mine. We've met at Genius Network, probably almost two years ago now, right, Stefan?

Something like that? Yeah, maybe a year and a half.

So we've known each other for quite some time and we've admired each other's work. And I'm so excited to share what he's doing in the world of SEO so that we as practitioners can reach, impact and influence more people. That needs to happen now more than ever. And you know, Stefan's got a very unique perspective because not only does he have a podcast for marketing and SEO and messaging, but he also has a podcast on health optimization. So I love that you're bringing both. You're kind of the holy grail, so to speak, in terms of having knowledge on both sides of this coin. So thank you for being here today. I really appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule.

Of course. I'm so happy to be here. It's such an honor. And anytime I get to help health practitioners, I'm all in because I had such a powerful transformation myself. If you go to the get yourself optimized website and you see the about page, the before and after, people don't even recognize me from my before photo. It's pretty cool.

That's awesome. So you've worked with clients like Zappos and Chanel, like Quicksilver, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Volvo, Sony, like some really, really big brands, what do they bring you in for? Like, why do they hire someone like yourself?

Well, you don't know what you don't know. And if somebody is myopically working on their own website and they're not seeing the bigger picture of trends that are happening or algorithm updates or things that could be applied from one type of industry or one type of business model to their website. So if I'm working with a client who's heavily into the e commerce space, but they don't think in terms of how to leverage the community in the ways of some of these large community sites or social networks. Then I can bring in my expertise and my experience working with those sorts of clients to their specific situation and they're finding out all sorts of opportunities they didn't realize even existed.

Yeah, you know, SEO is ever evolving, like most things, and it's certainly as practitioners we get, we don't get any training, any formal training in this category. And a lot of times at least my exposure to SEO has been when I buy a URL, somebody calls me up and tries to sell me an SEO package or I'll get random emails from people and that's my exposure. That was my initial understanding of SEO. So take us back all the way to the beginning. What is SEO? What does that stand for? I mean, I want you to break this down for the absolute newbie.

Yeah, well, SEO is a huge opportunity in terms of kind of setting the groundwork and providing a first impression that your visitor, or even before they become your website visitor, the person who types in your name, your brand, or even just the industry or type of practitioner you are into Google, what they see in that page of search results is their first impression. So if someone Googles you, Sachin, they put in Sachin Patel and then they see that maybe you have a knowledge panel, maybe you don't, maybe you have your LinkedIn is number one instead of your practice website. Right. They make a split second judgment about you and how big you are, how reputable you are. That's their first impression. So SEO is the opportunity to craft or shape that first impression that people have when they Google you. And yes, you could buy ads and they will look at the ads, but there isn't that implied endorsement that happens when somebody assumes that you are at the top of Google because Google thinks that you are all that there's something special about that versus oh well, they just paid for that ad slot. You know, it doesn't mean that they're the best.

So it's a, it plays a huge role in the psychology of the buyer. Right, that initial online impression that you make.

Yeah. People make split second decisions and judgments about people, about companies, about brands, and you can either kind of rage against the machine about that. Like, that's so unfair. I'm so reputable, I've invested all this time and money and energy. But then if it doesn't get conveyed through your web presence and through SEO, then people are like yeah, I'm not sure I'm even going to go to their website. And you didn't get a chance to offer them life changing healing or, or treatment. Yeah. So SEO is the gateway to providing meaningful, life changing service to somebody before they even get to the website because you have to convince them to come to your website. And what's the most efficient, fastest path from A to B from somebody thinking about, oh, I need functional medicine, I need cranial sacral therapy, I need whatever. And then getting to your practice, it's a Google search. That's the fastest, most efficient path. So if they're going to type in something into Google, you want to be there with a strong presence and multiple social proof points. You want to be able to convey not only that you have your website but, but that you've been written up on all these impressive websites, that you have feature stories about you, that you've been on tv. If they don't see any of that, they just see that, oh, you have a LinkedIn and you have a Facebook and an Instagram and you have a website. You missed an opportunity to provide that social proof in that very first moment, that critical first impression.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense when you put it from that perspective. So for people who don't understand, so now we understand what it is, how does it actually work? Like what, what do practitioners need to do to get closer towards the top or at the top?

Really? Yeah. So we need to first of all break this down into two types of searches. One is the more navigational search or the brand search. Somebody already knows about you, they were referred to you, so they know either your name Sachin, or they know your practice or they know your name of your podcast or you know something that's a brand of yours, so they're googling that or they're doing a more generic non brand search and that could be competitive. Instead of navigational, it's just informational or perhaps even transactional. Transactional being like they're looking for something to buy, but usually it's informational. I want to learn about gut health, I want to learn about how to get my microbiome tested, I want to learn how to get my atlas adjusted right. So they're going to Google for that. And either you're in the consideration set or you're not. If you're not in the consideration set, it's because they didn't see you and they didn't think to like nobody was referring you. So you're not in the consideration set or you are, because you're in the search results. And then they can make some decisions about whether you remain in the consideration set or not based on things like social proof points and irresistible offers and all that sort of stuff once they land on your website. But you got to get them to your website first.

Okay, got that. And one of the tools that you shared with us was called Answer the Public. I absolutely love that tool. And maybe we can either talk about it now or come back to it because it gives people the exact phrases or messages to convey to people based on what the average person would be searching related to that topic. So that was a really neat tool that you showed us because when, when I typed up functional medicine, I knew exactly what people were searching for and then I could create content around that topic. So is that, I mean, that's one tool. But what are some ways that people can identify what people are searching for and what strings of words to use to get the most eyeballs to their content?

Yeah, so first off, a lot of the search queries that people type into Google are brand new, have never been searched on before. It's like 15 or 20%. I forget the exact stat, but it's a huge number. Like 20% of searches per day are brand new, never been seen before by Google. Wow, that's pretty crazy. So what we're looking are that 80% that have been searched more than once ever. And that is revealing some sort of intention, some desire that the buyer intent or visitor intent is broadcasting that, hey, I'm looking for a service provider. I'm looking for a solution to this particular problem. So what you described as this tool, answer the Public, gives you one view into that world. AnswerThePublic.com is a tool where you can put in a keyword like functional medicine and get who, what, where, when, why, how, sorts of question based keywords that include that keyword that you put in functional medicine in your case, as well as implied questions like with prepositions and so forth. So doesn't necessarily have to have a who, what, where, when sort of keyword in the phrase in order for it to be an implied question. So it comes back with all these great questions, but they might have low search volume. So good keyword that you would target to rank highly for would be one that has three attributes, three qualities to it. One, it's popular with searchers. We were just kind of talking about that if people are searching for that keyword more than once ever, then that might be a good keyword to target. But the more the merrier. If there are more people searching for it, that's better than fewer. So it's popular with searchers. Secondly, it's attainable. We actually have a shot at ranking on page one if you're not on page one. If you're on page two or three, forget about it. There's this running joke in the SEO community that best place to hide a dead body is page two in the Google search results. Hate that joke, but the idea behind it that you're invisible if you're on page two, because 95 plus percent of the time, people don't go on to page two. That's really important to grok. So if you're on page one, you have a shot. If you're not, you need to get on page one. So is it attainable that I can even be on page one? So that's attribute number two. And the third attribute for a good keyword is that it is relevant to your business. Now, I should qualify that by saying relevant, at least to your target audience. And let me give you a specific example of this. Let's say that you sell, I don't know, baby furniture, bassinets and cribs, and your target market are expectant parents, right? If you were to target beyond the obvious keywords of baby crib and bassinet and so forth. But if you were to target the keyword baby names, some of your competition would laugh at you, thinking, well, that's crazy. How are they going to monetize that they're going to be selling baby names? No, but the point here is that they're going after the target audience of people who are expectant parents, because that's the only people who are searching for baby names. And it's earlier on in the buyer journey before that expectant parent is even thought through. Like, what kind of crib do I want to get? Or do I get a bassinet first and how do I outfit the baby's room? They're not even thinking nesting yet. They're thinking, what's the baby's name? I just got back from the ultrasound and found out it's a boy or it's a girl. And so now we're trying to figure out the name. So if you can influence the buying criteria of that expectant parent, that early on in the buyer journey, you have a leg up on all the competition. So if you can find those keywords that are relevant, maybe not directly to your business, but indirectly because it brings in your target audience, that's also a Prime Opportunity. So keywords that are relevant, they're attainable, and they're popular. Okay, so let's say that we're using multiple tools to find these opportunities. These keywords that have all three attributes and answer the public is one of them. But it's not giving us the numbers of which keywords are more popular than others. It's just for brainstorming. You might get a whole huge long keyword back that has 10 words in it. It's formulated as a question, but then There are only 10 searches a month for that keyword if you look it up on, say, Moz Keyword Explorer. So you're using multiple tools to figure out what the sweet spot keywords that are occupying, like all three attributes Answer the public is a great free tool. I highly recommend it. But it's not the only tool that you're going to need to use to find these great keywords.

Okay, yes.

Should I give you a few other keyword tools that might be useful?

Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it.

Okay. And by the way, I'm happy to pull up some of these tools on my web browser and share my screen so that folks who are watching this instead of just listening can see this in action. And for those of you who are listening and not able to view the video or the live stream, no problem. You can just kind of listen in and I'll make sure to explain what's happening too. Okay, sounds like a good idea. All right, cool.

That's perfect. Yes.

So let's do it. So first I'm going to go to answer the public just to show you how easy it is to use this tool. And we'll use Functional Medicine. And as an example, now, if you pay the little bit of money that it costs to have a premium account, which is maybe 10 bucks a month or something, it's very affordable. If you do that, then you'll be able to select the country. Otherwise it just defaults to Great Britain. So I'm going to log in with my paid account, switch to the United States. So I'm getting US Data, and I'm going to put in Functional Medicine. What this is doing is it's scraping from Google all the suggestions. You know, if you start typing autocomplete, you know, get these autocomplete suggestions from Google. As you're doing a Google search, you start typing the F, U, N, C, T and it starts filling in with these 10 different suggestions. That's Google Suggest. The problem with Google Suggest is, well, several problems with it if trying to do keyword research with it is one, it starts with those keystrokes. Well, what if it doesn't start? What if I formulate a question that begins with a what or a how instead of the letters F, U, N, C, T? Right. And secondly, where are the numbers? Like, how can I compare these numbers to each other? So it's helpful to have tools that give you more insight than that than just from using the Google Search auto suggestion. So this is the tool here with results that are in nice, pretty display and in kind of a circular format. You have to cock your head a bit to be able to read some of these. So I like switching to Data View so that I can see everything in these nice boxes and I don't have to tilt my head at all. And by the way, all of this is exportable. There's a little download CSV button, so I can pull that into Excel or Google Sheets and start creating pivot tables or whatever sorts of cool things within my favorite spread spreadsheet application. But you can see there's some questions here, like what's functional medicine? That might bring in somebody who is. This is an informational query and they're probably not buyer ready. They don't have their wallet out ready to book an appointment. Whereas somebody who's asking more of a question around, let's say where to find functional medicine doctors, or how much does a functional medicine doctor cost or practitioner cost? Those sorts of questions show more buyer intent.

Right.

So again though, we need to check with another tool like Moz Keyword Explorer. So I'll pull that up. And this is a paid tool. It's part of the Moz toolset, moz.com and what this tool allows me to do is put in the keyword, like functional medicine, get keyword suggestions back, and these keyword suggestions have numbers associated with them. So I can say, well, let's put in functional medicine into this tool and then I'm going to get keyword suggestions back that might number in the hundreds. And I'll get specifically for the phrase that I typed in monthly search volume. So that's how many people, how many searches happen, not how many people. Let's say it's got 30 searches per month for a keyword that could be 30 people searching once a month, or it could be one person searching every day, just checking on their rankings. So bear that in mind. But these keyword suggestions are where you're going to see things like who, what, where, when, why, sorts of keywords that you saw with the answer the public Tool. And you're going to see other types of keyword suggestions, like synonyms. Or here you can see where it says display keyword suggestions that include a mix of sources. I can specify that I only want to see questions. So it basically emulates answer the public, but giving me numbers, monthly search volume numbers, as well as difficulty scores and some other attributes as well that are pretty cool for each of these keywords. Or I could say, just show me broad topics and kind of broad ideas, or give me specifically synonyms to my keyword that I typed in. So you can just say include all of it. That's the default. Or you could say, I just want one particular type. And then you start digging through these keyword suggestions. Like, for example, for functional medicine, we have functional medicine practitioner, Functional medicine doctors, Functional medicine near me, Functional medicine doctor. And some of this stuff is so counterintuitive. For example, Functional Medicine Doctor has 7,391 searches per month in the U.S. functional Medicine Doctors, plural, 252. That is a huge difference. And you might think, well, intuitively I would say people should be searching for functional medicine doctors because they don't have one yet. And they're. They're looking for recommendations and they want to, like, choose from a bunch of them, but that's not how they search. So you get us kind of check your assumptions at the door and use the tools to see what is really happening. Sometimes the singular is more popular than the plural. In this case, sometimes the plural is more popular than the singular. And you just don't know until you use the tools. So this kind of tool, very affordable. I think it's $70 a month for the whole suite of tools from Mozzarella. And then there are tools like Semrush that give you competitive intelligence. This is another paid tool, semrush.com so now you can put in. Sure. You can put in a keyword like functional medicine. Or if you have a competitor that you know is just crushing it, you could put in that domain name and see all the keywords that they're ranking for. Well, not every single keyword, but a huge set of those. Do you have a favorite competitor that you like to spy on and see what they're up to?

Huh? Let's try Mark Hyman. I'd be curious. He's a leader in our industry, so I'd be curious what he's ranked for.

Yeah. Okay, so mark hyman is Dr. Hyman.com. i had to check that. Drhyman.com so we're going to put that into this tool, Semrush, and we're going to. We're going to specify that we want to do a domain overview. And then I choose the organic research section of this dashboard. So you can see that there are already. Before I even click on View Details, I can see that there are 59,000 organic keywords. So keywords that Dr. Hyman is not paying for on Google Ads, but they're organic, 59,000, almost 60,000 that bring in traffic to his website. So if I view details, then I can see what those 60,000 keywords are, and I can sort them in different ways. By search volume, by estimated percentage of traffic that they're bringing in, by cost per click. If he were to advertise with Google Ads and pay money for those keywords, I could sort by his position for each of these keywords and put the ones that he's ranking number one for at the top of the list. I could sort by keyword difficulty. It's pretty cool. And I can export all of this just by hitting that export button into a Google sheet, into Excel. I can also do something called a keyword gap analysis. So I would use the keyword gap tool, and then I would put in my website. In this case, which website is your main one? Living.

The Living Proof Institute or Living Proof Institute.

So Living Proof Institute, I would put that into this keyword gap tool. In the interest of time, I'm not going to go through that process of putting that in. But you can imagine if I were to say, this is me, Living Proof Institute, and my competitor is Dr.hyman.com. show me the gap where he's ranking on page one in Google and I'm nowhere. I'm not even on page 10. And you can see that that would give us a lot of insight into different types of problems and solutions and topics and things that I'm just not thinking about. Right. There's this acronym that I learned from. Gosh, who did I learn that from? Because I have my Marketing Speak podcast. I interview a lot of people. Let me just Google this real quick. But the acronym is called Upside upsyd. And by the way, what I just did right here was I put into Google upside, you know that, that acronym and then site marketingspeak.com I'm kind of good with Google searching. So this little trick is so valuable. You should definitely make a note of this one. Whenever you're trying to find something on somebody's website, like on marketingspeak.com in this case, you can put in Your keyword that you're looking for and then site colon, then the domain, no space after the colon. So S I, T E colon, and then whatever that domain is, and that will search within that website for the keyword that you just put in. So that is super valuable. Let's say that you're looking for something specifically on webmd.com or on my Mayo Clinic's website or wherever. Right. You can specify that exact site and then put the keyword in an addition and it will just search that one site. So as you can see, I figured out it's Keith Krantz. He's the one who came up with the upside acronym and that stands for unaware. Problem aware, Solution aware, your solution aware. And then decision. And I love this. And of course I wanted to give Keith credit for it because it's so valuable and it's his ip. So if you're unaware, you don't even know what functional medicine is. Right. You're clueless about that. You don't know that you need it. Everybody needs it. Right. But you don't know that you need it. Whereas if you're problem aware, you've got an issue where functional medicine could be the solution. But whether it's, it's a gut health issue or whatever, they just know that they're getting constipated or that they are getting diarrhea a lot, or they're just their stomach is upset or whatever. Right. So they have a problem and they need a solution, but they don't have any clue what that solution might be. Solution aware is they know that there's a microbiome test, they just don't know which one. Should they use biome? Should they use ubiome or whatever the competitor is? I think it's you, Biome.

Yep.

So that's a solution aware. But if they're your solution aware, the letter Y in the upside, then they know, oh, I need to go to Viome to get my gut biome tested, because that's the place to go. Everybody tells me that that's a really great company to work with and then decision is there already. Through the rest of that, they knew that they needed your solution. They're ready to make a decision, they're ready to make a buying purchase or they're ready book an appointment. So that's really valuable to think in that terms because if you are just looking at keywords and you're not thinking about where people are in the buyer journey, not every keyword is created equal. So if you are targeting a Keyword that I don't know. Let's go back to this functional medicine list from Moz, Keyword Explorer. If you were to put on the same playing field because the volumes are the same, let's say functional medicine certification and functional medicine training, they're completely different. Now, even if you're offering a course, an online course for functional medicine for people who want to go into that space, both seem relevant, but one is going to get a higher quality candidate, a prospect for you, because they're more serious about it, they want to get certified, they're willing to perhaps pay a lot more money for that certification, where somebody looking for training, they might just be looking for, you know, $50 online course. And they don't want to get certified because that's way too expensive. So you got to think about that whole upside funnel when you're targeting keywords. And I know that we could go a lot deeper down this rabbit hole around keyword selection. And there's so many tools out there, free ones included, like Google Trends, that's another great tool. Doesn't give you the numbers, just gives you percentages. So it isn't kind of a high level tool that I don't use that so much. But if you're looking for a free tool to get started and you're curious, let's say that you want to compare functional medicine to let's say functional, let's say a functional medicine doctor to functional medicine practitioner. Functional medicine doctor comma, functional medicine practitioner. So we put just whatever number of keywords separated by commas and then it will compare all those again just with percentages. And you can see that functional medicine doctor is way more popular of a keyword compared to functional medicine practitioner. And you might be using that terminology like, hey, I'm a functional medicine practitioner. And that's the wrong terminology because nobody is speaking in that terminology except for people inside the industry. And if you're trying to reach outside consumers, what are, what's their vocabulary, what's their vernacular? You need to understand that.

That'S actually really powerful.

Yeah. Oh, and there's one more thing too that I love about this tool, this free Google Trends tool. And that is this option here where it says web search. You click on that and you choose YouTube search. And then you can see how people search on YouTube because people's search behavior is different on YouTube than it is on Google. YouTube is the number two search engine. So if you do not have a presence on YouTube, if you don't have a channel and, and you don't upload videos to that channel. You're invisible. In the number two search engine, you might say, well, people are. They're YouTube searching me and I don't have a channel, and I don't really do anything on YouTube, but I know they watch some of my videos because they're on other people's channels. It's like saying, well, I don't really need the clients or the revenue. Someone else can have that. I just want my message to get out there in the world. I'm just happy for that to happen. Well, that's very altruistic of you, but not very business savvy. So you need to have a channel. You need to have your videos on that channel, and you need them coming to your channel to watch those videos and not on somebody else's channel to watch your content and consume your intellectual property, because then you're missing out on a huge opportunity. But remember, because people search differently, they're more into kind of a how to mode, or they're looking for tutorials or trainings or to be entertained. They're not searching for those transactional keywords on YouTube like they are on Google. So you need to think, you need to shift your thinking when you're targeting people who are searching on YouTube. But it is the number two search engine, so definitely it should be on your radar.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense now for people who are even just having a hard time creating content, Right? That's one thing. Like, you've got to create the content, and sometimes that can be challenging for practitioners. But then once you do get practitioners creating the content, if it doesn't get seen, then it's kind of like the tree, right? If nobody. If nobody's in the forest, they hear the tree fall. Did it actually make a noise? Right. Did it make a sound?

And do you know what the right answer is for that, by the way? No.

I'd love to hear it.

The answer is no, it did not make a sound because there was not an ear to hear it to convert that vibration into a sound. So the tree made a vibration. It only made a sound if somebody's ear was in the vicinity to hear it.

That's true. Absolutely love that.

Thank you.

So many of us are, you know, are dropping these gems of knowledge, but nobody's there to hear them, Right. And so they're not making the sound or the splash that we want them to. And I feel like that's where a lot of practitioners can give up because they're like, wow, nobody's Watching this, nobody cares. But they might not be using these tools to be able to figure out, okay, what word. You just kind of blew my mind. I didn't want to interrupt your flow. But when you show the difference between practitioner and doctor in terms of search, most people call themselves a functional medicine practitioner. So even the coaching and all that stuff, the title that I use is I'm a functional medicine Practitioner Success Coach. So now it's got me thinking, like, hey, maybe that's the wrong nomenclature, wrong word to be using. And that can make all the difference in the world.

Yeah. So the power is in the distinctions. And if you are just saying, well, this is all too hard. I'm not technical. I just. I don't want to do this because of that decision, because of that. And I dare, dare I say it, Laziness. People are dying. Now, I didn't come up with this concept. I actually heard this from Anil Gupta, who was coaching my wife, Ryan, who's a love and life coach. And he told her, people are dying because you are not showing up more powerfully because you are not getting on live streams and doing regular videos and da, da, da, da, da. You are not doing any of this stuff right at that. At that point in time when he was giving her this coaching, people are dying. And that really struck a chord with her. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, wow, people's lives are on the line because of that. What I'm sharing with the world is so important and so valuable, impactful for their quality of life and their longevity. They need to hear this. Well, by not showing up powerfully, conversely, people are dying. That should motivate you to work in this area, even though it might not feel comfortable, because all growth happens outside your comfort zone. If this were easy, then you wouldn't be revealing all that amazing light. So the. The way, that, you know, light bulb works with the filament is that because of the resistance, it reveals light. Yeah, a bit of heat, too, but it's mostly light. And if there's no resistance, if it's just straight through, you know, the electricity goes from one end of the filament to the other without any resistance. There's no light revealed. So, yeah, it's got to be hard because that's where all the light is revealed, and you got to reveal all your light into the universe, change all these people's lives.

I love that. That's such a great perspective and visual for people. So as you're. As you're Doing this, I'm like. I'm like, man, I feel super inadequate. And I feel like this is. It can be overwhelming initially, right? Especially as practitioners. Like, we were already overwhelmed enough with the idea that we've got to become entrepreneurs. We were practitioners. We trained. We went through this grueling, exhausting training program and then decided to switch gears as functional medicine practitioners upgrade our training. So that's a constant source of new information and data that we have to process. But then times are changing. Uh, we're trying to create a. What? You know, practitioners are trying to create a website. They're trying to get their content out there, put their vision and mission out into the world. And if it's falling on deaf ears, certainly that can become very frustrating and expensive. Right. And if people get discouraged because they're not gaining traction with their content, then they might stop doing what they're doing.

They might, and I hope they don't. Because you have to fail a lot before you succeed. If you didn't have to fail, if it was just easy, then where's the resistance? Where's the filament lighting up and spreading its light into the room? So if we can focus on just tapping into our desire and making a difference for people and failing and failing and failing until we succeed, you know, just fail fast, fail fast, keep failing, keep iterating, and you'll get it. And it's. A lot of times I learned this from Strategic Coach is it's not a how problem, it's a who problem. Who do I get to help me to fix this issue? Whether it's with YouTube or with Google or with Google Ads or with Pinterest or Instagram or Facebook or whatever, it's okay that you don't understand it all. You don't have to do it all. This isn't a must do list. This is a get to do list. I get to do these things. I get to spread my message, my light in the world. I get to change people's lives, save their lives, heal them, make a difference for people. I get to. I don't have to. Not necessarily. I don't want to. I don't want to learn some other additional social media platform and try to figure that out. So people tell themselves, well, I want to do that. They're lying to themselves unless they really do want to. But if they get to. If they change that from a to do list to a get to do list, that has. For me, it has been transformational. It's been really powerful. Then the overwhelm Just disappears.

I love that. It's a great perspective. You know, just switching that framework in your head can make all the difference in the world. Not just in doing it, but then the type of content that you create because you're creating it from a sense and source of gratitude versus, you know, an attitude where, oh, my God, I got. I got to do this. I don't want to do this, and I just got to cross it off my list versus taking that attitude of, hey, I get to do this, and I'm going to pour my heart and soul into it.

Yeah. People energetically will pick up on. If you are in a place of I have to do this or this is on the to do list. This is a tick the box sort of thing. Your heart's not in it. You aren't there because you love them and you love revealing light and you want to make a difference. But because you feel like this is, you know, I got to do this LinkedIn thing. I've got to do a native video on LinkedIn because this is part of my strategy. Then your heart's not in it, and that'll show. People will pick up on that energetically.

Yeah. And I think if you're sensitive enough, you will too. Right. You feel like you'll drag it out. You won't put your best foot forward. Forward.

Yeah.

So, you know, kind of you led me into my next question for you in terms of, you know, so we have. We have a problem now. Right. So anyone who's listening to this might realize, hey, that my SEO can certainly be improved. My visibility online can be improved. And if somebody's willing to do the work, willing to do, you know, willing to take on the attitude that I get to do the video, I get to share this content, I get to save people's lives, what's a reasonable step for them to take? Because there is that unconscious incompetency. Right. So I learned a lot of new things today. So I was unconsciously incompetent to a lot of what you share today. So it's that we don't know what we don't know, you know, bucket that a lot of us are stuck in. So what are some things that practitioners can do or who can they reach out to? I know that certainly I would love for them to connect with your team. If that's what you feel is the appropriate step or if there's something else that they should do, please let us know.

Yeah. Well, I would love for folks who are interested in working with me to contact me of Course. And you don't have to, you can just do, you know, check through the marketplace and see who is a fit. But if you have a set of kind of trick questions in your back pocket that you can insert into the interview process, that alone makes a huge difference. Because if you're interviewing somebody who is supposedly hopefully an expert in SEO, and you're not, there's this information asymmetry and you don't know what the right questions are to ask, and you don't certainly know even if you knew the right questions to ask what the right answers would be, because you're not an SEO expert. So they could snow you, they could give you a whole bunch of BS and you would never know. So that's why I would highly recommend they go to my website, to stefanspencer.com I have a learning center on there and inside of that learning center is the SEO BS detector. And you're welcome to include a link directly to this. It is a PDF.

Do you want to pull it up on your screen? Yeah, why don't you do that? Walk us through that.

So this is a, it's a set of trick questions, essentially. So what you do is you would casually insert these questions into the interview process. Don't tip your hand, don't, you know, make it obvious that you're trying to trick them or anything. You're not trying to trick them, you're just trying to identify the posers and the charlatans. So this is the learning center on my site. It's under learn there. And the section with the PDF documents, the guides, you'll see there's one called the SEO BS Detector. Then there's a handful of questions in there. You don't have to use all of them, but let me give you an example of one. It seems very innocent to just ask in the middle of the interview. So what's your process for optimizing my meta keywords? This is a trick question because the right answer is what meta keywords? Are you serious? Those never counted in Google, ever? Not even on day one? Not even when Google wasn't even called Google. You know, Google was called, by the way, when it wasn't Google at the very beginning, what their first name was. It's terrible name. Thank goodness they changed it. Back rub. Can you imagine saying to your buddy, yeah, you should totally just back rub that? Oh my goodness. No, I just back rubbed myself and look at the results. Oh my God, terrible. Yeah, so thank goodness it's Google. But the idea that this knowledge that Google Never counted. Meta keywords is, I think, fundamental knowledge that every SEO should, should know. And if they don't, if they say something like, well, yeah, meta keywords aren't as important as they used to be in Google. So you know, we don't really have a process for that. Or they just provide some answer like, oh yeah, this is how we do it. You know, to kick them to the curb.

I love that. Yeah, that's brilliant.

That is part of my seven step SEO hiring process. That trick question in the interview sort of idea. But there are other things that you can do to insert into the hiring process as well. Whether you're hiring an agency or consultant or contractor or an employee doesn't matter. This seven step process still works. So that's that SEO hiring blueprint that you'll see next to the BS detector. So you probably should grab that as well. And so I have a few different tricks up my sleeve to make sure that people don't get snookered by the SEO charlatan. Because there are a lot of them out there, unfortunately.

I love that. And I love that you've been featured in so many, you know, reputable. You know, there's so many articles like an Ad Week, Harvard Business Review, cnet. I mean, it's clear that you're definitely an authority on this topic. So it kind of begs the question for me, why would somebody not hire you? What would be the reason?

They might think I'm too expensive, but it's more expensive to not hire me and try to fumble your way through it than it is to hire me. And why not work with the best, with the guy who co wrote the book on the topic. Like literally, if you are watching on video, you can see I'm holding up one of my three books is the Art of SEO. This is a thousand pages. This is in its third edition. And yeah, when I hand this to somebody and they say, oh my goodness, you know, I'm never going to read this, can I just hire you? That's music to my ears. Because of course the answer is yes, you can.

It's not Lorem Ipsum, right? It's just like this thick book you hand to somebody. Like I'm not going to read that. They never even open the book. Could you imagine that it is the.

Opposite of Lorem Ipsum coffee. I mean it is really dense. It's actually used as a textbook in many universities. Wow.

So you wrote the book on it. I love it, man.

Yeah, well, co wrote it. I mean it did have some help, but the Idea that if you want to work with the best, if you want the best results, work with the best and hire the best. Yeah, I think that's a really good model. So that would be why you would want to hire me and why you wouldn't want to hire me. As you don't see the value. But then you'd be not seeing the bigger picture that you don't hire people based on their hourly rate or their project fee or whatever. You hire them based on the value. Yeah.

So what's like a cautionary tale? Like somebody who hired the wrong person and they come to you like, tell me about that.

Oh yeah, many, many times. So they hired the wrong person, the wrong agency, and that agency or person built low quality links. They took some shortcuts, violated some Google guidelines and got them penalized. Got them an algorithmic. It's not technically a penalty if it's an algorithm, but essentially it's an algorithmic penalty or a manual one. And then we have to dig them out of that hole. It's a lot harder to clean up toxic link mess and try and get those websites to remove the toxic links pointing to your website and those who don't to disavow them, submit a disavow file and then wait and hope that things correct. It's a lot harder to clean up that mess than it is to just never have gotten into that mess in the first place. So don't do low quality link building. The thing is, is a lot of these folks didn't realize that the vendor was doing that. They just said we're working on stuff for you. Well just, we'll handle it.

Right.

They don't know that some of the stuff is against Google's guidelines. Is all kind of a black box. Not good.

Okay, so how long would it take for somebody to start seeing, you know, traction?

Yeah.

Would that be immediately? Would that take time?

It needs. It takes time. It takes time. And Google's kind of official position on this is that you should allow the SEO practitioner at least 4 to 12 months for the impact to be felt. So this was Maile Ohye, engineer, Google, saying this on one of the Google Webmaster Central videos. And then the whole SEO community is like, yes, finally some a Google official position on this. Because it does take time and people come in with unrealistic expectations. In fact, I have wrote an entire Search Engine Land article about this about what is a realistic expectation for SEO for the results, for the turnaround time, all that. So you might want to include a link to that article in the show notes as well. It's really important that you're on the same page not just with the service provider, the SEO, but also with reality. Because if your expectations are unrealistic, then you've not only set your provider up to fail, but you're going to be a serial, like lack of success story.

Yeah.

And then people hire. Yeah.

They just keep switching vendors thinking it's that when it could be the timeline.

Right.

And I think a lot of that could be stated for functional medicine patients.

Right.

They come to us and if, if the timeline they have in their mind versus the timeline of what's realistic for their case is off, then they might not even give you a fair chance to get them well again because they had an unclear expectation or expectations weren't managed properly. So I appreciate that because we're always trying to build the long game for practitioners and sometimes people give up way too early in the process. So it's good to know that there's, you know, there's. It takes some time and that's important to know so that people can manage their expectations.

Yeah. In fact, I was just doing a sales conversation earlier today and we had this very discussion about like, how long does this take and what's realistic and so forth. And he needed to have some results pretty quickly because of budgetary concerns. So I'm like, well, what we could do is start with some conversion leaks, fix those leaks, and you take the existing traffic that's already coming to your website and you start getting higher performance, higher conversion rate on those existing leads or existing suspects that become prospects because they hadn't even been filling in the inquiry forms or the pop up was not compelling. Fix that stuff first you get an immediate roi. And then we also work on some SEO issues as well. And that will of course take longer, but you'll be able to afford that because of the improved conversion rate that we started fixing and getting immediate ROI on.

Yeah. Okay, amazing. So if somebody already has existing content, do you suggest that they go back and optimize that or is it better for them to create new content?

It depends on the content. I would say probably the answer, generically speaking, is both. Because when somebody is creating content for the target audience and they're not thinking about SEO, they probably haven't even created the right kind of content, let alone use the right words and so forth. So let's say, for example, that you're creating content around how to choose the right functional medicine practitioner, so you're not using the right terminology. But also that's terminology for people who are already solution aware, right? Remember the upside acronym. But what about the folks who have no interest in hiring you or working with your practice? But they would share this, they would link to it if it were the right piece of content. A great example of this just to show you how outrageous this could get if you were to create content that isn't just for your target market, but it's for the linkerati, those who have a lot of authority in the eyes of Google. So that's the linkerati. So if you were to create something solely for the linkerati and just disregard your target audience, and I'll give you a specific example that's pretty extreme, but it's kind of a quirky example that illustrates my point pretty well. So this company called lifeinsure.com, really small company, fewer than a dozen employees, they created a piece of content or their SEO person did. I know the guy that they hired and he Created this article 19 Things yous Probably Didn't Know About Death. Now, as a life insurance brokerage, it's probably not a great piece of content to present to somebody who is considering working with you, hiring your brokerage to select the right insurance policy for you. Right? We're not that keen on thinking about our own mortality and we certainly don't want to hear trivia like for example, the first item on that list of 19 was after being decapitated, you're conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds. Okay, fabulous. Where do I sign? Which now is it whole life or like what? So they didn't even link to that from their own website. But the SEO guy, he at the time had a very powerful account on Digg, which was back then a very powerful popular website to get in front of a lot of influencers. It's like the Reddit of today. So when he got it onto the front page of Digg with his power powerful account, they got a ton of traffic and more importantly, they got a lot of links. And those links were from some of the linkarati from those very high authority websites because they're like, wow, that is really quirky, weird, bizarre content. I totally got a link to it. But people coming in to that page would not buy life insurance. But that wasn't the point. That was to increase the link authority of the lifeinsure.com website. And it worked like a charm. They ended up on page one in Google, Bing and Yahoo for life insurance. And it wasn't that article, it was the homepage so they were right up there with Geico, MetLife, State Farm. And it was this tiny little company. It was from the power of all those great links pointing to that one article, that was the rising tide that lifted all boats. Every page of their site, the Universal Life quotes page, the whole Life quotes page, the homepage, et cetera, all benefited, all rows and rankings because of that one article. Because it just got so much traction with bloggers and journalists and webmasters and so forth linking to that page. So that's an extreme example. I'm not saying get really super edgy and totally outside your comfort zone and off brand and all that, but the more you're willing to get outside your comfort zone, the more growth you'll get. So if you're willing to do something a little more outrageous or controversial or humorous or whatever, the more remarkable the content will be in the more worthy of remark that content will be with the influencers that Google considers to be influencers, the linkerati. So that is a key lesson. If you started creating content with the linkerati in mind, you would create totally different content than what you've been creating. I'm pretty sure of that.

I love this. This is a great conversation, man. I can see how it could be valuable to any business, including my own. So what does that process look like? So what would the next step be? If somebody decides, hey, I really need to get on a call with Stefan and his team and I want to, you know, engage with them or at least find out what that process looks like. What would that step look like?

Yeah, just go to stefanspencer.com and book a call. Yeah, okay. It's pretty simple. But the thing that you want to do ahead of time as far as your thinking process, is really think hard about what kind of outcome you're after. Is it just simply to double your traffic or your organic traffic, or. Or is there something more meaningful that you want to go after? Right. So the more intentional you are, the better the outcome. If you just, I don't know, go to a family reunion and you just show up every year, that's pretty unintentional. I mean, it's nice. Certainly it's better than not going. But if you were to go with a powerful intention, like, I don't know, maybe there's somebody in the family that you just have this weird thing with and they don't say I love you to you, and vice versa. And it's like, you know, maybe it's like a very close relative, like, I'll never say I love you to my father, because I don't think I've ever heard him say that to anybody. And it's just weird. Get over it and get over yourself and just do it. And if you come with that kind of powerful intention, like, there's this person in the family that I've never said I love you to, and they're getting older, and I want to do that. I want them to know, feel, receive that love. That's what I'm going to do this year at the family reunion. Oh, my goodness, what an incredible. Again, back to revealing light and lighting up the room with that powerful light bulb. If you can do that with your intention for being online and not just, well, I need more traffic to my website. We're not getting enough leads. But no, you know what? Like, for me, I want to change people's lives through my podcast, and I want to have a book on the topic of life improvement optimization and taking your health and just your mindset and everything to a whole new level. That is one of my goals. And if somebody taps into that and not just, oh, I want to get double the traffic, then there's so much juice in that, right? There's drive, there's desire. And the desire is the fuel. Like, I'm getting very Kabbalistic here. I study Kabbalah. I love it. So if you have that engine of the desire, anything's possible. So tap into that before we have our call and let me know what that is. And not just, I want to double my traffic or I want to rank for this and that keyword. I mean, that's great. That's very tactical, but let's get strategic and even kind of metaphysical about it.

No, I love that. I love that perspective. And a lot of what you're saying really resonates with me from that spiritual side of things, too, because I believe that for many of us, our business is our dharma, and there's more to it than the numbers, right? It's the impact that it can have. And frankly, if the same amount of effort that I'm putting in right now is going to generate more impact, then I have an obligation to find out exactly how to do that. And, you know, again, as practitioners, we don't get any of this training, and many of us think that, oh, I've got my website and our job is done, and they can put together a beautiful website. We're actually going through that process of redesigning it. But at the same time, if nobody sees it, does it really matter what it looks like, yeah. And you know, it's kind of like winking in the dark, so.

Well, even if somebody sees it, if they don't engage with it, a website is something that people do, not something they view. So if they're passively looking at your website and saying, oh, okay, that's good to know. But then they don't take powerful action and they don't hire you or they don't sign up for your offering, they don't change their lives. And you didn't, like, you didn't reveal that light. So you gotta have a much more powerful intention with your website than just, I wanna put this out there, get it in front of people more, have a more powerful intention is just, I think, a good mantra for everything.

I love it. I love it. I've taken up more time than we had scheduled for. So thank you for being extremely generous with this amazing information. You know, we'll definitely put a link to the resources that you shared, especially our website. It's just an amazing wealth of information there and I'm excited. We've got another podcast with you and I coming up. We're going to be talking about all things health, which will be really exciting.

Yes.

And I'm so stoked to deepen this relationship and connect you with our tribe. And I truly believe that functional medicine is one of the best kept secrets. And I know you've witnessed the power of it in your own healing journey. And I'd love to have more practitioners be seen and be heard and, and if you're capable of helping us do that, I mean, the entire profession owes a debt of gratitude to you and I know that you can. So I'm thrilled to see what comes of this emerging, you know, and continue relationship that we have.

Thank you, Sachin. It was such a pleasure and you are a bright light in the world.

Thank you, my friend. Have an amazing rest of your day and say hi to your beautiful family for me.