Why Your Podcast Will Never Be Heard By Millions (Unless You Do This First)

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 everyone, this is Tracy and Tom on the Feed your brand podcast and we are going to talk about Google power content. It's all about Google, you know, it.

Really is all about Google. And I'm sure though, that many of you listening when you either saw this title or heard that opening, you may be rolling your eyes like, oh my gosh, if one more person tells me they can do SEO on my website and make me rank higher on Google, I am going to scream or I'm going to punch the wall or something. And I understand that conditioning that you may have gotten into from just how you've been bombarded for years with emails from these SEO specialists that say they can get your site to rank that.

Can'T spell stuff in their own emails, by the way, that drives me absolutely insane. But there's so much junk out there. There's so much of this Google SEO crap out there that it's hard to know what to believe. But the reality is that the statistics and the numbers show and I'm just as frustrated and get just as annoyed with somebody who tells me that they can help me on Facebook. I am just as annoyed with that. In fact, I'm more annoyed with that because there's less value at the end of the day. So here are the statistics that are from Buzzfeed and Mashable and all of those TechCrunch. This is where these numbers come from and they are, as far as I'm concerned, are pretty credible and pretty up to date. So there's an average of 1.3% conversions on Facebook. You mean like Facebook ads, LinkedIn, Twitter ads in general on social media? So if you place ads, if you're boosting posts, those count as ads. If you're straight out placing ads, you have a 1.3% conversion rate. That's really low for the amount of money you're spending. Yes. So from a lot of people, I hear probably about 7 to $10 is an average lead cost. That's all kind of high. Okay. When you think about like the cost of people who you also get a lot of emails about, about, oh, buy our list Right.

Right.

By your list is probably somewhere around a buck fifty. It's generally around a buck fifty. A lead you'll end up doing in that. Now, are they any good? There's like a whole lot of questions there. Right.

Well, it's a lead. That doesn't mean the lead's going to close.

That's right.

Talking about response to the ad. Right?

That's right, yeah. So clicks, clicks, views. If you're putting up a video, whatever that might be, these are actual conversions of something happening, not just how many people viewed it. There's a. That's a big difference. We don't even look at that number because that's a useless number. And if you're doing it on views, you're wasting your money. So impressions are gone. That nobody does that anymore. So if you're only getting 1.3% conversion on social in general, then where are we with Google? And that's where we look at the number. And you're getting a 13% conversion on Google. And that is not just ads, but when your post is ranking on the first page. So it's both things. So some of the things are unpaid and you're still getting a boost and benefit from Google. So that's a really high. So this is why you still are seeing all these emails, because that's 10x power.

Yeah. I'll tell you, Google, in reality, whether you like it or not, Google really does hold the keys to the castle of marketing on the Internet today. All the pay per click values are assigned by them and they are the place that you actually buy and pay for ads. Now, I'm excluding social media here, but this ads that the conversion Tracy was talking about here of over 13%, it's all done through Google. And at the end of the day, the key to ranking on Google and being able to make money through your content, your which is your podcast and your blog content in particular. I mean this. At the end of the day, it really comes down to the written content. Where it's generated from can be your podcast or your video.

Right. It's also video content because Google owns YouTube. Like, you have to think about those things together. You want to rank on YouTube, you better be ranking on Google to begin with.

Sure. But today I'm not talking about actual monetizing of videos on YouTube.

That's not a totally different game, different.

Animal, and a subject for another podcast in the future. Today we're talking about the power of Google in terms of your written content. Because let's face it, the entire World is going to Google to their search bar and typing in search words criteria that they want to get an answer on in Google Search bar. That's where people go first.

That's right. And there are 1.2 billion websites on Google. So that's a really big, big, big pond.

This is a mind blowing statistic if you've never heard it before. But fully one quarter of all of the search terms entered into Google's search bar every single day Google has never seen before, I'm sure. Don't drive off the road now when you hear that, okay?

Because Seriously, I know 25% of stuff people type in Google has never heard it before, never read it before, never seen it before, never indexed it before, never done any of those things. That's astounding. Now keep in mind, I'm sure there's a significant percentage in this. There's probably a lot of misspellings in the process of that. That does happen, but that's still too many to count for all of that.

Yeah, and no, you're absolutely right, Tracy. It does include misspelled words. Misspelled words get indexed by Google just as well as correctly spelled words do. And there's also phrases, really poor grammatically worded search terms. Keep in mind, when we talk about keyword ranking on Google, we're not just talking about single words, okay? We're talking about combinations of words, phrases of words. And the reason that 25% it's never seen before is because, well, a lot of times there are things happening in the world that is new news or new words that get made up by people, new expressions. And so there's always new things, but they also get mixed with existing things. And when you do that, every time you type a different combination of words into Google, there's a new keyword phrase.

So, Tom, this has happened to us specifically in our 3D printing podcast, and I want to use the example of it. So we found out that Google was sending us traffic from cloud CAD computing, that term, which is associative. Right. Because a lot of 3D software is cloud based.

Right.

But it's not something that you would automatically consider belongs to a 3D print website. Right. Or to a 3D print podcast in this case. So we were receiving the association of that word and then we did a post specifically for it which became what they call a power post. Right. It drew in a lot of traffic.

We created a new piece of content that poured a lot of fuel on that keyword phrase. And associated with a bunch of other things because yeah, you're right, you can go on to. There's a number of search tools that are available out there on the Internet. One of them is through Google themselves. Another one is something like Ahrefs and there's Buzzsumo. There's a bunch of good tools in order to really data mine what's going on there in search on the Internet and figure out where the high value pay per click words are. And sometimes we find words that we're ranking on that are paying $25 click and that's huge when the average pay per click amount paid is less than a dollar.

Right. So what we're finding is those new words are highly valuable and that's really the association that can happen when you already have a site with Google authority, a site that already has Google value. And I want to talk to you a little bit about Tom, because you've been doing a lot of this. You've been doing a lot of, I would call them platform reviews and explain a little bit about what a platform review is because not everybody understands that. But then talk about really when you dive into people's websites, what you're seeing.

Sure. So I actually call it a five point platform evaluation really. And when we get usually it's lead generation from a webinar we've done or somebody is interested in perhaps starting a podcast or just wanted to expand their platform reach overall the Internet. And we will evaluate that for them and look at their website. It's five things. It's their web, their social media presence.

It's their influencer network, I guess you would call it.

Yeah, yeah. Their influence is another one. It's their. Then their content is another. And while some of these things cross over certainly, but we evaluate them separately, their content and then their promotion, how are they being promoted on the Internet, promoting themselves and or others are associated with. So we really go in and look at each one of those and usually between the web and the content is where you run up against these issues of Google and learning how it really is all about Google.

Right. And you can have sites that have been around a long time and have zero Google ranking.

Well, or here's an even trickier one, and this just happened to me the day before we recorded this podcast. I was evaluating someone's platform and they have. First of all, they had too many websites in my opinion. And I think there's a school of thought that oh, you should have all these different domains and cover all this different stuff. But there's value in having everything come Back really to one website and having that be where all of your author equity and keyword equity is on the Internet is into one site.

Right. Just on a side note, we'll probably cover that in a future podcast. I made a note of that. That's this old school niche backlinking website strategy. It's a little bit old school and it doesn't always work now in today's SEO and Google ranking system.

Right. So I had this prospect who I did this evaluation on and they had several very, very good domains in terms of website addresses, URLs. And they were ranking very high in terms of not Google, but just in general rank on the Internet. There's. I mentioned that tool before, Ahrefs, that's one of these. And their websites, one of them was ranking 800,000 out of the 1.2 billion websites out there.

That's incredible.

Incredibly high rank. However, they had absolutely zero organic keywords that they ranked on in Google's search. So on one measurement, they had a very, a very popular website or very high ranking website. And it's because the websites were very old. One of these domains was started in 1998 or 1997 in definitely 1.0 version of the World Wide Web here. And they were noted so many times. There were a lot of backlinks from other sites going to their site. They had a very high backlink profile of like over 5000 good backlinks from other sites are going to theirs. That's the entire way they were generating traffic. And while that's a very good thing to have, and we all want to have those backlinks, it's not the only thing you want to have.

Right. Because how many people are typing in your web address?

Very, very few.

Right. And so, I mean, yeah, it's good to have name recognition and they're typing in your web address and that's great. But if they can't remember who they are, they're going to be like a digital marketing service provider, you know, or digital, you know, whatever it might be that they're typing in, or coach for health and wellness. Like, you know, you don't know what they're going to type in.

And I got to tell you, this was an odd experience for me because very rarely do I come across a website evaluating someone's platform that has absolutely zero organic keywords they rank on.

Usually they have a few.

They'll have a few. They'll be ranking on something. They'll be ranking on their own name of the website, at least as an as a keyword on Google, but they are absolutely zero. So to further contrast that you had a website that ranked very high in terms of websites in general. All the criteria, the cross section of criteria that websites rank on and then still had zero organic keywords. It really blew me away. I'm like, what is wrong with this situation? It surprised me.

Right. And this is that old school SEO practice that is now getting outdated by Google's algorithm. That is that rewards content over rank.

Right.

And over backlinks and over all of that.

Think of it this way. Here's to illustrate the point. Think of it where you're going in and I'm going to use a completely different subject because I don't want to out the company that did this. Okay. But let's say you're searching on a subject having something to do with the tax code or your tax law, or it's time to do your taxes, that time of year. You're going to type in some search terms on taxes and you're going to in Google. And on Google is going to come up first. You'll have a couple of companies that are advertising to people that are specific.

You're going to have intuit keywords.

Yeah.

You're going to have TurboTax. Yeah.

You'll see whatever, you'll have ads for them. And then below that are the actual real websites that are coming up or the content, the articles usually that are coming up that are ranking up that highest position on the first page of Google. And you are going to look at some of those and click on some and go to some of them that are most relevant to why it is or what it is you're searching for. So you're, I want you to realize that you're going to go to content, you're going to go directly to blogs, articles, things that are written on that subject and have been posted on the Internet.

So, and it's highly likely there though that you're going to have sites like, you're going to have sites like CNN Finance or CNN Money rather. And you're going to have other ones where there are sites that are writing about taxes, writing about finance, that are going to outrank the general blogs, unless your organic keywords are matching better and are being given Google value.

Yeah. Actually here's the great thing about Google. Google doesn't discriminate. Google doesn't care if you're the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or you are John Smith with a little tax blog. They really don't care. It's all about the content, the keywords, the consistency and the frequency with which you're putting out content. But you can absolutely, as a little guy compete and start ranking and get on that first page of Google and compete with the big guys. Let me return now to this tax example. So when you don't rank on any keyword terms on your website, then you will not come up in Google search. The only way people are going to find you is if you go to somebody else's website, someone else's content, and on that website there happens to be a backlink to the one that had no organic keywords they rank on. But their web domain is linked to and out there in a lot of different places.

And that's a lot of it. That old school way of doing it where you got backlinks on other people's sites, where you got enlisted in many, many directories. And so because this site was around for a really long time, that's how they ended up in those listings, right? That's how they have all of that, but don't have the content to support it because they haven't put in place. And today it's a content driven power. That's where Google power is coming from. Content.

Today it is all content driven. It is a content world we live in. And if you are not creating content, you will simply not be found when people are searching on the Internet for these things. And you absolutely can be. So we have another, a current client of Brandcasters Inc. Who we produce their podcast and their blog posts and on a Wednesday we put up, they actually do a post every weekday of the week. But on a Wednesday they had a post that went up that referenced and mentioned another company. And they're in the financial sort of business, the financial world involved in real estate. And there just happened to be mentioned this company. And by Saturday Google had indexed the site for a bunch of keywords, including the name of this other company which really was just mentioned, mentioned once in the content, once in the article. But that company had such a low Google ranking for even their own company name. While they did come up on the first page of Google, if you googled their name, what came up right after them was the blog post that our client for our client on their website. So their company now was associated enough with this other company's name. When you typed in just that company's name, nothing about the podcast, nothing about the website name of the client that this post was on, just that company name. Their post came up on the first page of Google search just underneath that company. So they were getting lots of exposure.

Right. And this is where that connection to bigger websites, other things where you can get boosted up in the rankings and really help yourselves be seen next to and as powerful as bigger name brands.

Now, one other thing I do want to mention about the company that was not ranking on any keyword terms. They actually did have blogs on their website. Website, but it's an older website, wasn't WordPress and not that it has to be WordPress, but there was something wrong about how their posts and or their site was configured so that they weren't ranking on any keyword terms.

Right. This is where I know you guys feel really, you're like in love with your old websites or you just think it's too much trouble to switch them out and change them. But it's like so easy for you to go in and have an analysis made and have it fixed. I mean, these are things where you're not, you don't have to change everything about your content. But sometimes even just switching themes because a theme is not supported on WordPress anymore can make all the difference between you getting no ranking and you getting ranking again.

And I think there's some other potential factors as well. I think a lot of times if you've had a website that you've had on the Internet since the mid to late 90s, and probably not many of us listening to this podcast do, but if you had one that old, you probably are with the same host you've been with since the late 90s hosting that website. It can also be a hosting issue or it can be just whatever program or tool you're using to create the blogs and put them on your site. If it's not WordPress, so much has changed on the Internet, you really do need, if you are not a technical person, and I really don't expect many people listening to this podcast are, because you're business people, you're entrepreneurs and you have a primary business you're doing. You don't have time to be an IT expert or an Internet expert as well. So if you're not on top of those, you need to make sure somebody working for you is on top of those things. Because Google changes their algorithms, the rules change. And I think what's happened is this website's been out there so long, they get a little complacent. Hey, I'm not going to fix what isn't broken. Problem is they don't even know that it's broken.

That's the thing is that you really have to have a professional evaluation, kind of an independent evaluation. We have really some resource that we use all the time that we feel very confident in. One of the things that we want to do when we evaluate whether or not we're going to bring on a client, is their site capable of ranking? Are all the things that we're going to do for them going to work for them? Or is their site too old? And it's one of the criteria we have because if their site is too old, instead of letting them do pay us money and do services with them, we would rather turn them away and go have them get that fixed. And so in this case we refer them to someone to have them fixed because it makes the most sense because then we can add a lot more value.

Yeah. And it doesn't just have to be an old website issue. You could have a fairly new website that just is not properly set up or configured in order to rank properly on Google. So yeah, it is, we feel a very important thing and it's really not very expensive to get your website evaluated and to either know, yep, it's in good shape, or you know what, it's not bad, but there's a couple improvements that need to be made. Or you know what, it has some significant issues that have to be changed before you even consider growing the site or doing more with it.

Right. And it's part of why we started offering our five point evaluation actually is we started offering it because we wanted to, we needed to do the screen check to make sure we weren't taking on a client that couldn't benefit and.

That if they really do need the adjustment to their website that we can provide them a inexpensive and quick way to get it done. And that's what we've done. Like you said, we have partners. It's not the primary thing we do inside the four walls of our office of our business, but we absolutely do provide those services to our clients as they need them. A lot of times an absolute, trusted and proven partner.

Right. And a lot of times we don't even charge. It's like a part of those sort of services we do because if that's working, then we aren't going to crash their site, then we aren't going to have issues. And so we really want to make sure that you know all those things, it's just a part of the process.

But when people are always asking, how can I market my business? How can I get actually get exposure and start making more money in this modern world of the Internet, it really all does begin with Google, right.

It's a 10x proposition. Right? You can place ads on Facebook and spend tons of money and only get a 1.3% conversion rate, or you can have a 13% opportunity with Google. And so we see it as 13% with spending money, but we see it even bigger without.

Now, I think there are absolute appropriate situations. There's a time and a place to go bigger and to advertise and a real push marketing campaign on social media and other places. Absolutely. But this stuff with your own website and content marketing and being on Google, this is foundational, Right.

If this isn't right, then you're going to waste even more money because it's not going to add all the extra residual value that it has for you.

Well, you're not going to be able to take advantage really of all the opportunities that come your way by doing paid marketing and advertising. So this is how you cast the widest net possible on the lowest budget that you can on the Internet today is to be spending the least amount of time by recording content, either audio or video, and then converting that into written content for your website that gets indexed by Google. And then anyone in the world can find you who enters keyword terms that are things that are in your posts, in your written posts. And there, if you do this right consistently, on a regular basis and constantly, you will end up ranking on thousands and thousands of keyword terms and eventually tens of thousands of keyword terms. It's just the way it works, right?

And so of all those SEO things that you're receiving in your inbox and all over the place where you're always getting push notifications to them or you're getting them in your LinkedIn profile, I get them there all the time. They're junk. They're absolute garbage. Unless they're really talking to you about this power of mixing SEO and good foundational practices on SEO with content marketing. If you're not combining the two things, don't even bother to read them.

Yeah, you can't just get your website to magically rank on Google by doing some configuration tricks on the back end of your website.

These, what are a couple hundred bucks?

And traditional SEO it is content. Google cares about original content consistently and constantly provided and making that content available to the world. That's all they can. They want original content. There are other facets of this we'll talk about in other episodes, but you don't put the same piece of original content on more than one website or else Google penalizes both websites. Just a little pro tip there. That one's yeah, you've got to have original content. And Google knows the difference between content that came from thinking and writing versus speaking. And believe it or not, since 2009, Google has valued the content that comes from speaking higher than written content because it knows by the word order, the incorrect grammar that people speak versus what they write and think and type. They know it's original. And originality is the key. Your content gets boosted higher when it knows it's original and from speech it knows that. So that's why really we've built this whole system and process that we do around speaking your way to content, either through video or audio. And it's a lot of fun. And it's also so much fun when these things happen. When you have the client whose post just went out there and someone searched on on some term they would never expect to come up for and boom, they're on the very first page of Google within a week. That gets me excited. Exactly.

Yeah, absolutely. So if you found this valuable, please share it on social media edyourbrand and also come to the website feedyourbrand Co, download the app and have it directly posted into your phone, which is just so much easier because you can go and share on Facebook straight from there. Also, you can go to brandcastingyou.com and read the blog posts.

We hope you enjoyed this everyone. We'll be back next time with another great subject. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed.

You'd brand.

Sam.