Podcast SEO Management: Find Out Why Your Show Is Not Ranking On Google's First Page

Get off the marketing roller coaster and get on the automated fast track to digitally market your brand everywhere. Now join podcast producer Tom Hazard and Inc. Columnist Tracy Hazard as they share easy content building formulas and smart cut secrets proven to fuel hundreds of blogs, podcasts and brands with bingeable original content. Join the conversation on how to get your message out to the world. Be original, be heard, promote with power and purpose. Feed your brand.

Hey, this is Tracy and Tom on the Feed your Brand podcast and we are here with a kind of controversial episode from what's going on in our business right now. Because we've had a lot of discussions with some organizations about this recently and I've had occasion to talk with a lot of digital marketing agencies and digital marketing companies in general in the last month and we're going to talk about SEO management.

Yeah, you know, I'm going to call this a public service announcement for our clients and for any of you who are listening to this podcast and most of our episodes for feed you'd brand I would classify as evergreen in that the subjects we talk about are still going to be valid six months from now, a year from now, two years from now. I think for the most part that is SEO is something that has changed in the last 10 years, but I think it's also gotten to a point where even this episode we will still be valid a long time from now.

Yeah, typically if we were going to talk about SEO, we talk about like search engine optimization. Let's define that here. So you're really careful for those of you who don't know what that means, SEO, search engine optimization. And we're talking about the management of that. So in the past, all these companies, you get emails about them because everyone in all over the world and all over the places is like mining you. So the minute you order a URL.

At either Network Solutions or GoDaddy GoDaddy.

Or wherever it is they're trolling you and they find your email address for what's registered in there. And even if it's pretty sneaky, even if you've private registered, there's like 24 hours before a private registration gets wind of it. And they have people scrubbing that every 12 hours so that there's high likelihood you could get trolled even if you private registered your URL. So you should know that and be aware of it. That's why you're getting those junk emails.

Can I tell you, I am so sick of getting all of those unsolicited emails and I still get them. I mean it's ridiculous. I don't actually deal personally firsthand with the SEO for our websites and we have several websites and I still get peppered with these emails and there's like no end to them. It's almost as bad as robocalls on your cell phone.

Right. It's horrible. And the reality is this is the public service announcement side of it is that it's absolutely unnecessary in the world of digital marketing, in the world of your website today, it is not necessary for you to have an SEO manager who's helping you get search engine optimization on a daily basis and getting you ranked in all the top keywords. This is what they'll say to you. And the reality is, is that you have three things that you need to do in terms of search engine optimization. Number one, you need a website that's not so outdated and so old that it's not on WordPress or something like that. Right. If you have one of these really hard coded old websites, get a new one. It's time. Because you're not ranking and you never will rank.

Well, I agree with that, Tracy, and I'd like to add to that is that with your website itself, there was a time when really all that mattered on the Internet was how your website itself ranks in terms of SEO in the headers and in its configuration and having some keywords buried places so it would come up. But still it was mostly ranking for its own name.

It was ranking for its own name or one or two keywords of like what you were about. Right? Whatever. We're industrial designers. It would have been in for industrial design. Right. So would have been variations of that word. But that's not an issue today. Like sites are capable. When you have a new site, it's on WordPress, it's got all the good things that it needs to be involved in. It needs to be capable and set up properly. I will not argue with that. Absolutely. Get yourself a web developer who knows what they're doing there. That's why we love our friends@.com global media. There is no question in my mind that they understand the power of setting it up properly so that it works for you later. That's what you need. But setting it up properly is not enough.

And I also just want to throw in there setting it up properly is like a 3 to $500 cost to do one time in the life of the site. This is not like it goes and gets broken year after year.

Although I would say I would recommend that you get it updated once a year. I think you should have it looked at once a year because a lot changes on the digital side of plugins and other things that happen on your website, you should have it and make sure nothing's broken and it's still working. But that's like a $100 audit at once a year to me.

That's general website maintenance.

Exactly.

You need to be doing any website, specifically SEO. That was really nice.

But you got to make sure nothing's broken because when something breaks down that SEO doesn't work anymore, you're in trouble.

Right, I agree. You have to maintain your website. You cannot just assume that the fact that it's really good today means that your site is going to be healthy six months from now. No, definitely. Things happen. Plugins get updated, themes fall by the.

Wayside and don't get updated by the companies who originally developed them. And in those things, search engine optimization can get broken in the process. So you got to watch out for that. It does happen.

I'm kind of shaking my head.

No, I think, I think it's critically important and I think I see it goes too wrong with it where people don't take their website seriously. Right. Your website is your store. It's your storefront. You got to wash your windows, you've got to sweep your porch or your sidewalk. Right. You have to do those things for people to be able to find you, see you and take you seriously that you are still in business. And that is the one and only requirement of having a website is that shows that you are in digital business. Right. You are digitally exist today.

Yeah. And that's very, very important. It is a baseline requirement for being in business. But still.

And if I Google you and you don't show up for your own name because something got broken in that process, then you didn't do a good job of maintaining your site.

All right, I agree with that, Tracy, but still, that's old school SEO.

It is old school SEO, but it still. So number one, we want you to sell, set your site up, get a new site if you need it, but get it set up properly and keep it maintained.

Okay?

Get someone who can maintain it, or at least once a year do a good audit and check of the system and update for you. Okay? That's the number one thing in terms of proper SEO management procedures and how you develop it.

But nobody is going to get rich on pay per click or start ranking on anything really valuable or grow a big audience by doing that old school SEO. So thinking that one of these emails provide somebody who solicited you to do SEO on your site? That, that's something that. Oh my gosh, that's like the thing I've been missing. That's going to help me make more money. No, that's just going to allow you to be legitimate. Your website is never going to rise above the crowd just by doing that.

Right. And it's really hard with 1.3 billion websites on Google for you to be heard today. And if you're falling among the websites who are dead essentially, but they just still exist because nobody took them, then that's just ridiculous. You're in business today, you should exist in business and you have to keep it. So the second part of that is, is that you have to do something every single day or every single week that makes sure that people know you are still in business. That's where content comes in.

Yeah, content. This is really the key thing, folks. This is like if you're not paying attention and you're driving on the freeway and you're a little distracted, now's the time to really listen up. Because this is key.

Right? SEO management today, search engine optimization is all about content.

And why is it all about content, Tracy?

It's all about content because Google only cares and Google controls the majority of how people find you.

Yeah, it's not even worth considering anybody else.

It's just not worth it. There's just not enough return on investment in your time to figure out Bing and every other place out there. It'll work the same way. So if you figured it out for Google, it works the same way for everyone else. You don't have to optimize separately. And the reality is, at the end of the day, no one is going to find you if they don't type in something that has a direct link to you. Right.

So a company would have to know your name to type it into a search engine to find you, you, your company name or your name, which means.

You had to spend money advertising. You had to spend money multiple times advertising. So you get their name impressed in front of them enough for them to do that. So it's a high cost way to go about it if you don't use content as a basis for getting yourself found.

So wouldn't you rather people find you because of things that they type into Google search bar that are just needs that they have problems that they have or things in general that they're looking for? And then when they do that, your business name, your product name, your website name is going to come up because it's associated with those terms, Google's database.

Right. So let's say you're in the business of being a chiropractor and it's one thing for someone to type in the name of your practice. We have our friends at Precision Chiropractic in Rancho Santa Margarita. Right. People could type that in. They could type in the name of the doctor. They're going to get the practice, they're going to find them. No matter what, they will find them. Somewhere there's a directory listing them. Right. They're going to find them. But what if I am suffering from migraines and I want to know if chiropractic will help? Might I type in chiropractic migraines? Migraine help, Chiropractic. Right.

Or how can I get relief from migraines? It might not even mention chiropractic.

Right. So there might be all kinds of things that people type in and you want them. These are someone seeking pain relief. Right. What does a chiropractor do? Relieve pain. So wouldn't they want to be found? So if you're not found in all the possible areas, number one, you can't cram that into your website on your homepage, all the different things that you can do for people. It just sounds too broad and too much stuff. Right. And people who sell something complex, complex software, we sell very complex design services. Right. In our core business. So we sell lots of different things that are complex. And when you're selling something complex, you think that you want to cram all that into the homepage of your website and it just hurts sales.

Boy, do I hate that. Yeah. When I see a webpage like that, it's like, oh my God, Gosh, I'm not going to read through all this. I mean, I think simple, clean messages are much more effective in terms of direct, straight selling on your website. But I would argue selling on your website should be done through valuable content that provides value and serves others who will then come.

It doesn't mean you don't have a services page that lists your services, how you charge and who you are, you know, what you do, that's totally fine. But if you're going to talk about all the benefits, all of the issues that you can solve, do them one at a time via content. And so these are ways that we look at that and we say people come in and look for things at 3 o' clock in the morning when they're up because they can't sleep because they've had a migraine for three Days straight. Right. These are where people start seeking help for you. And it would be an absolute shame if they couldn't find a great chiropractor, if they couldn't find you offering your great services because you were only listed under your name.

Couldn't agree more, Tracy.

Right.

Yep.

So we think about these things and does this work in a local business? That's a big question that a lot of people ask, especially professionals, doctor's offices. We have a lot of clients that are doctor's offices and professionals that have only a local business. Really, they're only serving a geographic region. And that doesn't matter because at the end of the day, actually Google has an algorithm that will serve up local results first. So what happens is just because I happen to be in the Orange County, California area, typing in chiropractic and migraine, it's actually going to serve up results from anyone that is in the Orange County, California area first. So you're not actually competing with anyone worldwide on that particular subject or that particular pain. Pain topic, right?

Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Tracy, and probably is a deeper subject to dive into in another episode. But the reality is, if you are a doctor and think, well, there's lots of doctors all across the country and they all are writing content on these different subjects, how is that going to help me? Because there's a lot of competition and I'll never outrank them. Well, nationally it may be a little more competitive, but you're right, Tracy, when it comes down to locally, you will rise to the top.

Right? Exactly. These are the things that we really want to get across to you is that when you're looking at that SEO, being content driven. Right. It's a great way for you to dive into all the things that you can do and why you're so brilliant in whatever it is that you offer to the world. Right. I mean, there are reasons your clients or your patients or your consumers, your customers, why they love you. There are also the things that they ask you all the time that you could be self serving to them when they're forgetting to ask you. Right. They're helping themselves along the way and in the process they're getting to know you better. And this is where you cannot buy this content. So that's sort of number one. Number three. Thing number one was get good SEO capabilities, build that into your site, make sure it's the basic stuff, get the basics down. Number two is here is get your content and build content because it's going to help you and you don't have to do this in an extreme way. Once a week for most businesses is plenty to keep you up to date. We prefer to if you can do it. And there are lots of other ways and we talk about that from strategies to grow a business business, but just to maintain your business and keep that visibility high. On SEO side of things, on the, on the search engine optimization side of things and showing up on Google once a week is plenty. The next part of that is don't buy help here. Do not buy 400 word blog posts.

Oh my goodness.

And they're out there. You can buy them in any subject matter. Oh, you want to, you want to write about social media. Oh, they'll write you 400 word blog posts in keywords just so that you can supposedly rank. But the reality is is they do nothing for your site in terms of really ranking you or getting you more clients. They are a waste of money.

Yeah, you need to have at least 1500 word blog posts in reality up to even 2,500.

Yeah, we're seeing really, they have to be well over 2,000 right now.

It keeps going up.

It keeps going up, right. It's not getting shorter, they're going up higher. And this is the thing, you don't have to be a great writer. You don't have to write these into blog posts. That's what we use here. This is our whole brand casting system is you can speak them. Right. Tom and I will speak this episode. And this episode might be 3,000 words or more.

Might be more, Might be more north of 4.

Right, exactly. So very typically our blog posts are between 3,000 and 6,500, maybe 7,500. Even if we do some our longer interview episodes. Right, so you're talking about you can speak intelligently about it and you can have someone, if you would like to have someone just brush it up and clean it up and make it a little bit more well written would be.

The way, I would say a little more easy to read.

Easy to read, right, Exactly. But they can also do what we do. We add this one extra layer of it, we add keywords in there. Because what we do is we screen what we're talking about here. So I'm going to just like you.

Can pull back the curtain.

Pull back the curtain.

So you understand.

So we chose the title here is SEO Management Debt. Right. Our key word that we want to rank here is we want to associate feed your brand and the brandcasting you website with the term SEO management, which is a really broad term. Right. But we want those two to be connected because there's many, many times in other episodes where we mention the words SEO. So Google will start to see a pattern of language that's going around that. But I want one at the top level. I want one at what is the keyword level. So that's why we chose one of these high value ones. And then what we do here is that we're going to make sure that we mention all sorts of varieties of it. We say search engine optimization management. I just worked in another variation of that phrase of that word here.

And another pro tip is we actually go and search on the Google AdWord Keyword Planner and that's where we find some of these high value keyword phrases like SEO management. And then we'll look at the next 100 keyword phrases that the same people in the last month typed in who also typed in SEO management.

Like did they type in SEO Manager or did they type in search engine optimization phrases? Keywords.

But here's my favorite one is you'll see how many searches were made by people who misspelled SEO management. Now they probably got the SEO part right because that's pretty easy. And it's just.

No, I think it would be wrong actually. Pretty often you'll find soe, SEO E.

Management, but more likely management. So spelled wrong actually. And you may not realize it, but that is a valuable keyword to rank on because people who are typing these things into Google often type them in incorrectly and you can rank on a misspelled keyword. That's not a bad thing. It's actually a good thing.

So one of my favorites is like, you can look at this up if you want, but is ubs, which is like a financial management company. Well, it is one of the most often hit and impressed words keywords because people type in USB all the time, but they type it in wrong.

Yeah, no, I agree. That was actually pretty clever because very clever.

They don't think they did it on purpose.

That's sort of a different thing. That's not really a strategy. I recommend too much. Unless you have a name or an acronym for your company that happens to be just one letter transposed from something that is a very high search volume thing because maybe a very, very small fraction of the people who are trying to type in USB and type UBS would actually be interested in anything that company offers. Right?

Well, we actually do that all the time in our regular businesses because we've always typed in hazard and hazards and we specifically do occasional episodes about the hazards of product launching, for instance, or the hazards of launching a podcast. Right. And we'll use the single Z combined with double Z's. Right. And so it'll be the hazards rules. Right. Or something like podcast launch hazards. Right. And we'll use the name interchangeably. We'll spell them differently because we want to make sure somebody typed our name in wrong, that we should still show up.

So I know that there's a lot of really prolific writers and authors out there who are probably listening to this podcast that are probably shaking their heads and even cringing the idea of I would never let a blog post on my website be there that has a misspelled word in it. Okay, I respect your opinion. I'm just telling you now, whether you're listening to this now or you're listening to this six months after we published it, I understand that line of thinking and I respect it.

However, I just worked it in. If you missed it, I'm going to reveal that again. So if you missed it, I was talking about how often SEO is misspelled. So instead of SEO management, you have SO E management. There you go.

Guess what?

I worked it into a sentence.

And if you go to our blog post on our website for this episode@brandcastingyou.com, you are going to see how that is in the blog post spelled incorrectly just the way Tracy said it. And guess what? We're now going to be ranking on that search term in Google Search Bar. So I would personally rather win at marketing my business and reaching more people. This is where we talk about casting a wider net on the Internet for people that are already searching for things you provide.

Right. These people are already out there looking for help. You're not trapping them, you're attracting them. Right. Because you're there when they need you.

And you're attracting them in spite of themselves. They spelled it wrong and they're still going to find you. That's actually a good thing.

Right? So that's how we look at it. These are not black hat tricks, if you've ever heard that term before. This is absolutely above board. The proper way to do this, you either write it or you speak it and then write it, which you work in a keyword term, a phrase, and variations on that word that might be used, and you work that into it. And thinking about this as if you were a writer of a book. And for those of you who are authors out there, this is actually a technique that you use as well, especially if you're writing a book that is a how to helping people, Right? You're writing a book about that. You will focus each chapter or subchapter on one single topic. That is exactly what you're doing here. But you're just breaking them up into posts, podcasts, single episodes, single posts, written documents, whatever you want to think about it as you're working that out in the same format and you're spreading it out so that it is consistently posted each week on time. Because that's another thing that Google rewards.

And not only post it as a podcast out there, syndicate that way, publish as a post on your website or published as a social media post as a headline in the keywords. And those headlines make a difference, but they're attracting people back to your website to read your post.

Right? Exactly. And so this is the thing, as I've been out there giving a lot of speeches over the last couple months, and I've talked to a lot of digital marketing agents, and here's what they're all struggling with. They're all struggling with how to create enough content, how to create original content. And so what they're providing for their clients is a lot of unoriginal things, right? It's a lot of reshuffling of words. I say the same thing for this dentist that I say for that dentist.

But I shuffle some of it around, I rewrite it, the same stuff. So it's technically not the same post. It's an original post, but really it's a spin.

It's a spin article. That's what they call it, right? It's a spin post. And while that's perfectly okay, that isn't actually going to help you grow your business, because it's not your voice, it's not your message, it's not the way you would write it yourself. It's not the way you would say it yourself to your clients. And if you really want them to connect with you and you want them to show up, then you need to participate in the creation of content, which means that you will be persistent, participating in the SEO management of your own website. You will be participating in the content creation.

And obviously, we are proponents of recording that content, because who out of us, who are running a business or at a very high level in our company, have the time to sit down and spend three, four hours writing a blog post, which is what it takes the majority of us to do, right?

And so this is hard. This is hard for us. I mean, we're recording this on a Sunday afternoon. We've got a niece's soccer game in 20 minutes, so you got to be done with and ready for. But we're recording this ahead of time before it's needed, because we know this is valuable and important to our business. And I've been doing a lot of traveling, and we haven't had time to sit down and do it like in our normal process. It's gotten circumvented by a heavy travel schedule, but we are making time to do it. And it's taken 20 minutes out of our day to record this. It's not that long, right? How much?

Well, actually, almost 27 now.

Almost 27. Almost 30 minutes. Right. So it's taken 30 minutes out of our day on a weekend. But. But what we know is that the value of this to our business goes beyond the value of that 30 minutes for us.

And the other thing I'd like to mention here is we're not just being selfish in this. I mean, yes, we're doing this for our business, but we're also providing this information, this content to you for free, as a listener, as a site visitor. And it has value for you and your business, whether you were a client of ours or not. And you can do the same thing in your business. You gave the example of a chiropractor, Tracy. A chiropractor who records content, podcasts, videos, whatever, converts them into written content for their site are providing value to people out there who are trying to search for ways to relieve their pain, among other things. So you're serving the community, helping them find solutions. At the same time, you're serving your own business by attracting them and showing them, hey, you are a provider of solutions to help them.

That's right. And if you think that doesn't come back to you, it does. Because they know people, right? So they may not need you right at this moment, but they know people who do need you. And when it comes up, they'll be like, oh, I read this great blog post, or I heard this amazing podcast about this, and you should listen to it. And the next thing you know, you do have a client. That is how it has worked for us time and time again. And that's how it works for a lot of our clients. But at the end of the day, what we are at least comfortable and minimally comfortable with is the fact that we know the marketing effort and time and money that we put into our business is of the utmost attractive value for Google and for the right type of clients or consumers, whichever way you're looking at it to come to us and find us in the keywords, in their pain, in their need, in the problems that they need solving, that they're coming to us at the right time and we're there for you.

And that's why this process and all the things that we talk about and share with you on this feed you'd brand podcast and on our website@brandcastingyou.com is all about really true organic marketing at the most primal level. This is the type of thing that if you are out just marketing on Facebook with ads and trying to target certain people, putting certain kinds of content out there, you've got a chance that Facebook's algorithms change, how the targeting people change. You're going to have varying degrees of success and failure doing that. But the long game that is going to be the most valuable to you is putting out this kind of original content.

Being you out there is the most viable way to highly convert your efforts, your money, your time spent marketing. That is the most value you can receive from digital marketing today. And that's what we want to do, is we want to make that simple and easy. And that's our goal in all the information that we provide you on this show. That's our goal for our services that we provide to our clients. And brandcasting you. That is exactly what it is, is we want to make sure that you're not wasting money and time doing other things that aren't working, like old school SEO management. Stop doing it. That's what the point of this episode is.

Yeah, I still think the title of the episode is SEO Management Dead. Well, I would say old school SEO management personally is dead. I mean, yeah, okay, you need to still do it to a certain basic level, but it's so minor that if you do the rest of this that we're talking about and produce the original content on a consistent basis, it really won't matter at the end of the day if that some of that older stuff isn't there. If you don't rank actually by googling your own company name because guess what, your company name is going to come up. So, so much cross reference with so many other things people will enter, they're going to find you anyway. So yeah, we still do it. And yes, we're recommending you do too. But I do personally when people ask me, I'm like, it's dead in the sense that it's really unimportant in the big picture.

Well, and the reality is we've been doing this business in various formations and we have never paid for SEO ranking, SEO management in any way, shape or form that didn't come from content in the last 10 years.

The other thing I want to mention, if that isn't already clear to those of you that listen to this podcast regularly, Tracy and I practice what we preach. We're not just telling you to do this for any self serving purpose, hoping you're gonna come buy something from us directly related to this. We actually use this to market our own business now. Yes, it's used to market this business, brandcasters Inc. But we use it to market our other business. We have three different revenue streams, we have three different podcasts and content generation machines for websites doing exactly this in totally different ways.

Each one does it in a totally different way. But it all comes down to the same core pieces of information, core pieces of core principles of what we're doing here. That surround web social influencers, which you should go back and listen to that episode because that has a totally different value in SEO, right? Because that's called backlinks. That would be the old school way of talking about that.

A complimentary value.

A complimentary value. Those three things have to be in order. Your web, your social and your influencer or your partnerships. Right? All of those things have to be in order. Those are basics to doing business today. When you've got those basics in order, the two things that you can provide, that you can give your site and your business fuel is through content and promotion. And we don't like to spend a lot of money on promotion when promotion converts so badly. But content is better. That's how we do it. That's how we've seen it grow. That's where we have not spent money to market our business, but we have grown our business year over year, month over month because we generate a lot of content that is valuable and that's all we're telling you here. It doesn't have to be a lot, it just has to be valuable and.

Consistent, regular paced as well. You can't just do one this month and three next month and expect that you're gonna see significant results. You've got to do it consistently. We recommend minimum of one a week, but if you can do two a week, so much the better. Very important have people find you don't make it. So you have to spend a ton of money going out to find them anyway.

So we would love to hear your thoughts. You can go edyourbrand on Facebook. You can also find us@brandcastingyou.com and we would love to hear your comments and hear your thoughts and hear. I would love to know if there's any of you out there who are still paying SEO management fees to companies. Love to hear how much you're paying. So let us know. We'd love to have some numbers behind that. We don't really know anyone who pays for that anymore, so I'd love to hear if there's some companies out there paying for that.

Hopefully not too many, but. And you know what? If you don't want to share that information publicly, there's a way you can submit an email or send us a private message over Facebook and be anonymous. But if you're willing to share with everybody, I'm sure that everyone, all the listeners and viewers of the website would appreciate that. So, hey, I hope you found this episode of Value. Traci and I will be back next time for another great episode.

Yeah. And please tell your friends about Freed, your brand because we're always trying to grow our own listenership. So please tell your friends we'd appreciate that. And you can also download the app @freedyourbrand.co.

All right, well, so thank you so much, everybody. This has been Tom and Tracy on.

The feed you'd brand podcast.

Sam.

Sa.