17 Ways to Improve Your SEO in 2019 by Brian Dean Part 1 #461

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burse. I'm one of the owners of E-Web Results. My name is Matt Bertram. I'm a Brian Dean fan. A Brian Dean fan? Brian Dean fan. Oh, Brian Dean fan. Yes. We're a punch in the face of Brian Dean. We are all Brian Dean fans today. Please remember, we're broadcasting live from Houston, Texas. Matt and I, we are your results rebels. And I want to jump into this review. This is from Chris Westergaard. Punch in the face to Chris. It says, a great team of men and women who are invested into helping all of their customers, both big and small. I recently moved our hosting over to them to improve website speed, and there was a lot of issues cosmetically with the move. They helped me out through the whole process and never once seemed unprofessional. I'm sure it took lots of free hours on their part to get things right. Definitely a kind and caring group of people who are looking after your best interests. Punch in the face to you, Chris Westergaard. That is 100% true. Yeah, we are really out here to help you. That's why we do this podcast. Yep. You know, we're talking about, you know, some SEO optimized hosting options. We do do hosting. We've done it for a long time. We're looking at like a membership program where you get some free consulting and hosting as part of a membership program. But yeah, we do have a hosting business. We do have an IT business out there. We don't talk about it a lot, but we help a lot of local businesses and national businesses out with their infrastructure, hosting, and internet marketing. Yeah, because speed and the technical stuff behind the scenes from an SEO perspective are really, it turns out, really important. If this is the first time you're listening to the podcast, howdy and welcome to the podcast. We're glad you're here. If you've listened to this podcast before, you

might be looking for tips and tricks. That's why you're watching the podcast. No tricks, just tips. We can give you some tips. Ninja tricks. Yep, we can give you some tips. All you need to do is go to ewebresults.com slash tips, and that will take you to our tips page. Or you can talk to an internet marketing consultant for free. For free. And give you specified, specific actions that you can take on your website to improve your internet. Yeah, if it's not just like general tips that you want, if you want some tips for your website specifically, fill out our website analysis, free website analysis on our website, and you can get in contact with one of our internet marketing consultants to have those tips provided to you. Yeah. Real time. Real time. Real time. Like Facebook Live. Punch in the face to Brian Dean. What we're going to talk today, and actually it's going to be a three-part podcast series, 17 ways to improve your SEO in 2019. By the way, our SEO team is already diving into one of these techniques and applying it to our customers, and so we're excited. Like, it's one of the reasons we do this podcast. Yes. In order to deliver value to you, we have to be absorbing the information and implementing those processes in our processes, in our... We're constant learners here. Yeah. I can't even talk now to learners. Learners. No, but, you know, really, we are constantly reading. We're constantly learning the, you know, there's been, since the last podcast, there's been one to two updates, actually. There's been one update since our last broadcast, but since our last live broadcast, there's been two. And the internet's constantly changing. There's a lot going on. And so you've got to be reading. You've got to be looking at what's going on online and figuring out how to provide the visitor the best customer experience. And you need to be ready to do that, and you've got to be listening to these tips. I mean, this

is a big part of everyone's business. Chris, one of the things that I've been talking about a lot is how we're kind of digital builders. Right. Okay? We're building your digital infrastructure. Right. We're building the digital components of your business to help you grow. Yeah. I like that. Like, is that like Lego? Yeah. Legos? Yeah. Like, think about how long the internet's been around, and think about, like, how many skyscrapers there are in virtual reality, you know, there's a lot of, like, kind of, like, mud huts, you know, and there's some one-story buildings and stuff like that, and we are helping people build those massive skyscrapers. Big businesses. All right. So I'm just, I don't even know what we're, hey, if, we'd like you to do something for us. We do. We'd like you to do all kinds of things. We would like you to do something. Thanks for listening. We'd like you to shakow, shiko us. Share, like, and follow Bing. Bing, when you share, like, or follow us, it's not Bing that you hear, it's shakow. It's like Bing, but Bing's the period on the word, like, if the word was Google, the period would just be Bing. That's actually pretty good. And my mom did work for Microsoft for 25 years, so. And if you'll notice, one of us has worn the required garb for our podcast. This is a t-shirt that you can get from our podcast, not from our podcast, actually from our website. If you go to ewearresults.com slash swag, you can order one of these t-shirts. We've got a lot of t-shirts to select from. It's pretty awesome. What does the back say? Can you turn? Oh, yeah. I can turn around. The back says. Make marketing great again. So all you people listening, guess what the front of the shirt might have on it. Yeah. See this little swish right here? There you go. That little swish is. There's a blonde swish. It's a, you know. Anyways. You guys can figure it out. Yeah. You're marketing geniuses.

All right. Let's jump into this article. Again, punch in the face to Brian Dean. Yes. 17 ways to improve your SEO in 2019. And let's see. He said he used these seven techniques, 17 techniques, and got 21.3% increase in organic traffic in three months. How would you like to increase your traffic by 21.3%? That's pretty solid, especially when he gets so much traffic. To begin with. Yeah. It's a non-trivial. So, I mean, we have data points of like 1,000% increases and 200% increases. And it really depends where your starting point is and how much you're going to grow. If you're getting like five visitors a month and you add 20%, it's really not even the margin of error. So, like, and there's actually not 17. He gives us two bonuses. Nice. We're going to cover this in three different podcasts. And let's jump right in. So, number one is get more organic traffic with snippet bait. Oh, yeah. Snippet. You know what snippet bait is? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Said like somebody who doesn't. All right. So, he goes, in the last few weeks, I've gotten his site to rank in 41 different featured snippets. So, have you ever done a search, right? And there's a section of text that's pulled directly out of a website. That section of text is a snippet, is like in the infograph. And that, how valuable do you think? Well, I mean, that is something, Chris, we've started to do for clients. Once we get them in the top, say, five positions on Google, that's the next kind of step that we target. And then, you know, we use a lot of SEMrush, but we're using a lot of other tools. We're using Keyword Finder. We're using Ubersuggest. So, punch in the face to Neil Patel. Yeah. You know, so the thing is, you've got to kind of triangulate these. But in SEMrush, it'll tell you if a snippet's available and then kind of how to target that. So, we've been using kind of the suggested targeting in SEMrush,

which is a great tool. Yeah. He said he got this featured snippet for rich snippets, the phrase, and channel keywords. He said 41 different other ones. He calls it, and he says, my secret, a new strategy called snippet bait. First, find a keyword that you already rank for. Why is that important? You have to be on the first page. You have to be on the first page. Ahref says 99.54% of featured snippets come from first page results. So, if you're on the second page, you are probably not going to get a featured snippet, right? So, that's just not going to happen. Identify the type of featured snippet you're looking for. A definition snippet, a list snippet, a table snippet. And finally, add a snippet of content to your page that's designed to fit inside the featured snippet box. That's something that I haven't done. Yeah. I will say that. That's something that I haven't done is, like, make sure that the characters are matched up. So, if you think about it, when you're reading an article in a magazine, there's usually, like, this piece that's pulled out of the article that's highlighted. And we do that with most of our blogs. Yeah. But to have one that you're designed specifically to fit into that snippet, that's definitely something. I hadn't done that. So, I really like that. Yeah. And it's got to fit perfect. And he gives a good example. What are nofollow links? And it's a rich snippet. And so, it looks pretty good. So, that's, I don't know. That's good. Yeah. Snippet bait. That's worth the whole article. Punch in the face to you. That's a new technique, looking at how many characters there are and writing it just so Google can easily grab it. It's kind of like, you know, a snippet for, you know, PR, right? So, the, you know, the presidential candidate. Soundbite? Yeah, the soundbite. Soundbite, yeah. It's basically like a soundbite, the perfect size to kind of fit right in there. I knew what you were saying because

this is the universal symbol for soundbite. Yeah, it is, totally. Number two, improve dwell time with this simple step, right? So, is dwell time a Google ranking factor? Yes. Yes. For sure. And then he goes on to talk about how he adds video and really is comparing the bounce rate instead of dwell time. And I think both, I think it's important to discuss both of those, not just, okay, let's talk about dwell time and then let's say dwell time is important and then talk about bounce rate because you can have, you can have a bounce with a long dwell time, which is better than a bounce with a short dwell time. Okay. Or you can just not have a bounce. That's even better. Yeah, you want them to take action. I mean, I will say that that's one of the things that we're really, really seeing that we've gotten a lot of clients into the first position, we run up there, we ring the bell and then it doesn't stick. Yeah. Okay. And what's happening is a combination of the dwell time, some other on-page factors, you know, bounce rate and really, you know, things like breadcrumbs are something you want to implement because you don't want them to hit the back button. You want them to click the logo or understand where they're on the page, but better you want them to move through the site and click on something. Something else. Right. And stick around on the page, read it, watch videos. So these are important, important ranking factors because Google's looking at what you're doing for the user. I think it's starting to become even more and more important. So testament to Brian Dean here, right? Because one of the samples that he provides, like, hey, here's a sample video that I've done and the video is discover untapped keywords in Reddit. So this is like skyscraper content. It's linking to other content of his that has done really well, that's placed really well and proving it. By the way, I had

to watch the video, right? Because even though that's not one of his, you know, 17 ways to improve your SEO, it's something that I wanted to figure out, discover untapped keywords in Reddit. We actually did a survey in our office. About 50% of the people use Reddit on a daily basis. Now, that can always run the risk of, okay, you got a bunch of SEO geeks. Of course they use Reddit. And I actually asked, so do you use it for work or do you use it for stuff, like other stuff? Personal, yeah. The 50%, it was personal. So about 50% of our office does use Reddit because he actually says, you've probably already visited the front page of the internet, also known as Reddit. And I was like, I've been on Reddit, but I don't frequent Reddit. So that's why I asked the company. Well, some people say that Facebook's the front page of Google too. Of the internet. Of the internet, yeah. Yeah. Or not of Facebook. It is of Facebook. Well, and I think the reason that that might not apply is because most people use Facebook on their phone. Like they use the app. Yeah. How many people do, I'm sure a lot of people do use, you know, out of all the billion users. That's fair. That's fair. And most use it on the app. But I would say that, yeah, and I agree with that. So, so it is not technically accurate, but I would say where are most people spending their time when they're on the internet? So I think that depends on the generation. Sure. Right. We probably had a couple of people in this room. We were like, no, I don't use Facebook. I use Snapchat or... Instagram. Fish Snap. Well, people post... Fish Kiss. I don't know. Fish Kiss? What is Fish Kiss? I haven't heard of that one. That sounds good. Is that a swipe right or swipe left? Which one is that? Oh, I got it. So he gives the example in Reddit that

you can go in... Sorry. That you can go in and he gives the example of headphones. Like if you're looking for keywords for headphones, you go into Reddit, you look for headphones, you're looking for things where they're answering questions, there's a lot of interaction going on. And then he gives the example, he found a very specific model of headphones, which had a really high keyword density. And I'll talk a little bit later about actually going after phrases that may be brand specific. Like FishKiss.com? Like FishKiss, yeah. Like FishKiss. You know something's on FishKiss and something is interesting there. That's just how it is. Anyway, so really that's about dwell time. Have a video that increases. And he has a stat. So it wasn't just that it increased dwell time. He actually had a better click-through rate, so lower bounce rate with video, right? So it's not just that people stayed longer. It's that when they got to see a video, they chose to visit other pages. And look, we've been preaching this to our clients for a long time. And that is why we have a video production. Team. Team. Yeah. Unit. Business unit. So we really are seeing the power of video. Also by next year, 80% of all searches should be video searches. Or that's kind of what it was projected to be a couple years ago. And so video is absolutely critical to what you're doing online. And one of the things that video does for us, like as a company overall, we have customers who come to us like, I know content is king. I know I need to be generating content, but I don't have time to generate content. For us to have a video team go out and shoot an interview of you and talk about the questions that people are asking in your industry. Now we've got the ability. We've got the content we need to deliver SEO results for you. Yeah, no, it helps. And I think really the big buzzword right now that everyone's using is

storytelling. So really, it's so important to tell your story. And how do you do that? You do it one-on-one. Typically, you're searching the web or surfing it one-on-one. So you can tell your story. People want to click a button. They want to hear you. They want to see you. Like how many different cues, you know, when you talk are like nonverbal, right? So video is super important to connect with someone and tell your story. And, you know, we can just... Sound clip. That was nonverbal. Ironically. All right. Number three, find low competition keywords with ghost posts. I do not know what that is. You do not? Hey, look. I do not know what a ghost post is. I like the honesty. So really, it goes most keyword competition scores are way off, right? So I know that you... That's true. Right? Like, so, hey, SEM Rush is telling you this is the keyword difficulty. It depends, right? And you start doing some of your own research. And vice versa. So some easy keywords are actually pretty difficult and difficult keywords are pretty easy. He makes the point that those keyword competition tools are 100% focused on backlinks. But that's just one piece of the puzzle, right? Yeah. You got organic click-through rate. You've got search intent. You got page speed. You got mobile friendliness. You got 250 other things that impact the search. So those things are important in identifying the keyword difficulty. Most of them just talk about the keyword difficulty being inbound links. A lot of them, so Mangalow tools and also Ubersuggest are starting to look at social shares. Okay. So that's starting to become a big indicator, as well as the backlinks. You know, they're looking at trust flow. I mean, so there's other things there that are happening. It just depends on the tools. Yep. So for a few months back, he wanted to rank for the keyword free SEO tools. So what he did is he threw together an article, 25 amazing free SEO tools, and he just posted

it like on the second page on his own website. That's why he calls it a ghost post, because he didn't promote it out to social networks. He didn't really do anything. He just threw it out there and see what happens. See if it sticks, right? And he said he started placing for a long tail phrase right away, and then he decided to promote it. As it turns out, this super hard keyword was ridiculously easy to rank for. Well, I'm wondering, did he SEO the page? No, he did. Yeah, he SEO the page. Okay. But it's, so his point is, is that you may look at some of these tools, and they may say that these keywords are really difficult, move on. And he's like, well, just throw together a little article, which for Brian is not a little article, and stick it somewhere. Don't waste any energy, and then find out if it's really hard. Well, I mean, you know, Google's indexing his site quite a bit. It's a pretty big authority site. He's got, I mean, so there's- Yeah, he's got a couple legs up. Yeah, there's some advantages there, you know, that he might have. Well, and I think, you know, the counter argument to that is, that's true in the world he plays in, and for other people who might be generating content, the world they play in, it may feel like a different phrase in the world they play in, and it might not be, throw up a ghost post. Well, because I've seen a lot of sites that aren't SEO'd, and the categories and tags are not done, and Google just doesn't know what's going on. You just throw out a post there. It might get indexed, but it'll be words that you don't want to rank for, you know? And so, unless you kind of give Google some leading indicators of what you're looking for, it might not pick up what you're wanting. And so, I don't know- It does have to be SEO. Yeah, I don't know the

definition of ghost post of how ghost it is. Like, if you just throw out a piece of content and publish it. Can you really call it a ghost post if it's on Backlinko? That's true. How many visitors does he get among you? That's a debate we can have. He does point out, Ryan says, I'm not bashing Ahrefs' keyword difficulty score. I'm just showing you another way to figure out keyword difficulty on your own. No, but I like that he does tests. Okay, I really like that you do tests, and he tries to keep the variables simple. So, you know what's having an impact and what's not. It's not, well, you know, this article in itself, he's stacking a ton of SEO strategies. In the article, it's not just a skyscraper post, but I like that he's doing other things, and he's constantly testing, because that's really what we do as SEOs, is constantly test. Reverse engineer. Yeah, reverse engineer, figure out what's going on, how Google's updating the algorithm to figure out, you know, what's the framework we need to work in. Yeah, absolutely. Number four, use site links to boost your organic CTR. Last year, I decided to make organic CTR a top priority. How do you do this? How do you improve this? Because really, you can change the title, you can change the meta description, right? And those can have a significant impact on your click-through rate. So move your target keywords to the front. Well, most importantly, is you've got to make sure that that description is enticing enough for people to click through. Yes. Right? It's like, oh, I do a search for whatever, keyword titles, and then it says keyword titles, and only keyword titles. Like, no, the keyword titles that will make your website pop to the first page of Google in 10 seconds or less. Boom, that was good. That's actually going to get people. Are you a copywriter? You don't want me to be a copywriter. So what his suggestion is, okay, great, you've got a

good title tag. You're reasonably confident in it. You've got a good meta description. Now go after site links. And the way you get site links is a table of contents. I didn't know that. Yeah. He says, Ryan, I'm a fan. I'm a fan. Yeah. I'm a fan. It makes total sense. Don't know why I didn't think of it, but having the jump links is. This is the one that our team has already. Yeah, because I don't, I just in my head, didn't ever make that connection. Right. You know, what I had always kind of heard. Like, sometimes, I mean, and it's one of the reasons we do this podcast. Yeah, for sure. Because, again, if we're going to deliver value to you, we've got to be, like, digging into it and understanding what's going on next. And then we're like, okay, now we have a whole set of tools that our company is using and staying abreast of things. Well, I just thought when you, like, kind of fully optimized the site, they just started to pop in. Google kind of rewarded you. But I didn't know what the trigger was. And he's just, like, point blank telling you, which makes perfect sense. He says, in fact, once his page cracked the top five, Google hooked him up with site links. So, I just thought they did that. I didn't, but I didn't, I didn't think, I didn't make the connection to the table of contents. I like, I mean. And his page is a 14.9. That's why I have a pen out for this podcast. Like, I don't typically. Yeah. I'm learning stuff. Number five. Want more links? Be the source. Is that true? Yes, that's always true. It's always true. Well, so, I'll give you kind of a pro tip here. Like, I don't know. Brian probably knows this. I don't know. But, anyways, like, what we're finding on, like, product pages when we're doing e-commerce stuff, a lot of people are using, if they're a vendor, they're using a manufacturer. Images. Images.

Images. Yeah. Well, the manufacturers probably already posted those images. So, when you put them on your site, it's dupe image content. It's not going to hurt you, per se. Right. But you want to create a site map of original content. And so, get some original pictures on there. And when you're the source of new content, Google rewards that authorship for the first person that posts it on Google. Yep. That's why it's so important not to have duplicate content. Yeah. To make that original content. So, he wrote this guide, the definitive guide, Google Search Console. He's not afraid to say that it qualifies for great content. It had a bunch of actionable tips. Tips. Tints. Yeah. There's, like, dark and then lighter. There you go. Despite being a very solid piece of content, it only got 159 referring domain links. And he's like, well, why not? Only 159. Yep. The par that we used to measure. On the other hand, he wrote an article, we analyzed 10,000 Google Home results. Here's what we learned about voice search SEO. Ooh, interesting. Most people would also call this good, great content. Yeah. But it actually had, what did he say? It had a huge amount of links, 764 referring domains. And the reason is, like, what person is going to link to the definitive guide of Search Engine Console versus data? And he's like, the answer is really, like, journalist. So, well, my Google Search Console guide isn't that easy for someone to link to. On the other hand, my voice search study guide gives bloggers and journalists data that they can easily reference. So, really good stuff. And then number six. Any questions? Are we good? I'm adjusting my mic over here. Target keywords with big commercial intent. Right? So, let's see. When I first got started with keyword research, I would focus 100% on search volume. He doesn't do that anymore. Oh. Search volume and commercial intent. I've seen you in discussions with clients. Commercial intent's important. Yeah. Like, if it's got 100,000 views, but it's

not going to convert anything, that's not, I mean, searches. That's not what you're going to go after, right? Well, yeah. I usually look commercial intent first. Yeah. And then see, okay, is there enough volume to move the needle? And then competitive. Yeah. But also, you know, if there's 50 searches a month and you're in a local market and the, you know, the ticket price or whatever that item is, is enough and it's a long tail phrase that's easy to hit. It could work. It could work. Yeah. You know, and also one of the other things to do is I look and see, okay, is the keyword difficulty really hard? And is anybody bidding on the word or not? So if it's hard and no one's bidding on it, go bid a cent, go get that word, you know, but so you're, you're looking for the arbitrage is really what you're, you're looking for when you're doing keyword research. So what we have a thing that makes sense. He says, so target keywords with big commercial intent. For example, I recently started targeting keywords like link building services. He found one that was a, the keyword search volume on many searches. There was 300 searches, 350 searches, but the CPC was $25. So we know that, that, that, although there's less volume for that phrase, there's a lot more legit. Well, yeah. Well, yeah. So that's, that's what I look for too, especially when we're working in industries that I don't, don't have any idea. And then I go ask the client, I said, Hey, is this word important? Because like other, because other people are bidding on it and it's premature market now, AdWords. So, so you can kind of get an idea of, you know, how valuable that keyword is when you stack it and it gives you a little more insight. So he, he said, fun fact, I published this page as a ghost post. As it turns out, link building services is much less competitive than most tools complaint, uh, claim. So

that was just interesting. His article, seven link building services that actually work was, uh, you know, placed really well. All right. So that is, uh, our podcast that we've only covered the first six. We're going to jump into another podcast here really quickly. Punch in the face to Brian Dean. We're going to cover the rest of the 17, really 19 ways to improve your SEO in 2019. So, um, if you like this podcast, we're going to ask you to do something about it. Tweet Brian Dean. Tweet Brian Dean, let them know we talked about this podcast. Yeah. Remember we don't get paid for this podcast. We get paid in reviews. So do us a favor. If you think there's any value in it, go ahead and leave us a review. You can leave us a review at our Google plus page. It's just not Google plus anymore. Google my business page, which is ewebresults.com slash G plus, or just get onto Yelp. Yeah. And, and hopefully you'll, and hopefully they won't hide them. So, so, so everybody's into the rule of if you're not leaving a good review that adds value and you're just like, great job. Uh, Google tends to hide those reviews. So make sure there's a little bit of meat or potatoes and, and the post appreciate it. We will ask that you make that review five stars. Hey, if you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, the internet call you have results for increased revenue in your business. Call us at 713-592-6724. If you have a referral, we have a referral program. You just reach out to us. You refer the business to us. We close them. They pay their bill. And we will do marketing on your site. Fall free for a extended period of time. Yeah. A certain period of time. A certain period of time. A relevant period of time. A relevant period of time. Yes. And if you do want to call us and just ask us to put,

put you on hold, you can listen to some of our new music. Oh yeah. What do you got? Some of our new ad copy. Moving on up. Yeah. To the, hey, we were filmed live here at 13501 Northwest Freeway, Suite 500-34. Five. 35. But I think we have 34 too. Also, probably. But 35 is the main unit. Houston, Texas, 77040. If you would like an audio, video, or a transcript of the podcast, usually sometimes you may do. We're launching. Well, Gene, we're actually, we're actually, we finally have the site finished. We're actually working on our new website as well. Yep. We've started on that, but we finished bestseopodcast.com. And that is where we're going to house this podcast. We'll have a link to it, of course, from our website, but we're going to have that so you can stay up to date with all the things that we're doing related to the podcast and media. But bestseopodcast.com, and we will have that available soon. We're just migrating everything, and we're working on that right now. Very cool. Yeah. Until the next podcast, my name is Christopher Harris. Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.