Chris Burress 0:10 Hi and welcome to the SEO Podcast Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is

Chris Burress, one of the owners here at a web results

Matt Bertram 0:16 My name is

Matt Bertram your leads ninja

Chris Burress 0:18 leads ninja. Welcome back to another fun filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 479. I could be wrong about that. I’m just I that’s the number that was given to me. So it’s 479 We are broadcasting live here from Houston, Texas. We are safe from the corona virus. We want to share that with you

Matt Bertram 0:39 right now.

Chris Burress 0:40 Right now we are saying yes, and we hope you guys are safe as well. Please remember Matt and I, we are your results rebels. Um, you know, I’ve got a couple of things that we’re going to talk about an article 13 ways businesses can use SEO and marketing to come Bad Corona virus impact. I think that’s very timely. Yeah. And we’re gonna jump into that we’re actually gonna break it into two podcasts because there’s a lot, there’s a lot of good content. So we will jump into that. here shortly, we would ask that if you’re in a position to and given the current situation, you probably are in a position to shake us

Matt Bertram 1:23 share like or fall

Chris Burress 1:25 because you’re probably next to a digital blinds with easy access. And you probably have another digital appliances next to you. And you might be watching another digital appliance here

Matt Bertram 1:34 if you think it’s valuable.

Chris Burress 1:35 Yeah, right, Langley, if only everything is clear, we’re not asking you to do something you’re uncomfortable with. We’re just asking you to share it. If it makes sense for you. Like that. We appreciate that. Um, and after that, I’m just gonna jump right into this. This article. This article is by Miranda Miller. So pontiff to Miranda Miller, what’s one fascinating thing about this, we pulled this off hot off the press. And we printed it because this was the article that we wanted to talk about. And then by the time we printed it, I actually needed to look up the author because when you print it sometimes the author doesn’t come through. So we want to know the author. And the name of the article had already changed.

Matt Bertram 2:15 Yeah. optimization,

Chris Burress 2:16 optimizing on the fly. So this is from Search Engine Journal, again, random Miller, to you. And again, 13 ways businesses can use SEO and marketing to combat Corona virus impact you should at this point, so there’s everyone out there at this point, should be taking the safety precautions recommended by the World Health Organization who, who Yes, that’s the acronym for the World Health Organization. It was no joke. It was very little or no jokes when it comes to the World Health Organization. In so these are some pretty amazing things that are happening in Italy one of the hardest hitting areas to date, the government negotiated with the banks to sustain mortgage payments. So there’s a lot of things that are gonna happen. Like we’re kind of sitting in this isolated world, wondering what’s going to happen, universal income, and a lot of things are gonna happen,but

Matt Bertram 3:11 they’re gonna wipe away student debt

Chris Burress 3:13 total all student debts gone universal income,

Matt Bertram 3:16 right? You just just you know,

Chris Burress 3:19 the data is pretty clear universal income. I mean, let’s just add

Matt Bertram 3:22 another trillion dollars to the top the detrimental

Chris Burress 3:25 everything that happens in a motivated society in Canada. This is actually where Miranda lives. The waiting period for unemployment benefits has been eliminated. Obviously, a lot of people are going to get laid off at this time for self employed individuals and small business owners, it’s going to be harder to find this kind of help. So how can you survive the economic impact of Kovac 19. In the social addition, is social distancing required,

Matt Bertram 3:54 calm andoptimize,

Chris Burress 3:55 keep calm and optimize on it? I mean, this resonated with us because we’re an SEO So optimizing is really important. And we think of that in terms of optimizing for positions. But even when we’re running PPC campaigns, we’re on ongoing optimization is occurring and optimize your company. It’s just optimize your optimize everything optimize, optimize, it’s kind of like real estate, right? location, location, location, optimize, optimize, optimize. I’m seeing some alarming accounts from marketing and SEO friends of clients pulling their contracts and shutting down marketing operations until further notice. And this is in bold. This is a knee jerk reaction and it’s setting your business up for long term up uphill struggle to recover from you’re gonna

Matt Bertram 4:40 unwind all the stuff that you did, yeah, like, like, like, you can’t. Google does not like that.

Chris Burress 4:46 Yeah, like if we’re talking about the people who stay the course are going to end up on top.

Matt Bertram 4:51 It’s just like if you just stayed in the stock market from oh nine right? Yeah,

Chris Burress 4:55 yeah. Just like that. Just like that. But what is certain is that we will recover? Like we know this is going to happen and and then where are you going to be when we recover? Right? That’s what this kind of article is about. Shut

Matt Bertram 5:11 down. You should stop. If If you don’t, you can’t make it.

Chris Burress 5:14 Yeah, if you’re not gonna make it actually shut down yesterday. Yeah, right, like just shut it down and figure out what Plan B is. But if you’re planning on making it, then you know you got it,

Matt Bertram 5:26 you got to pivot, you got to reposition yourself for sure.

Chris Burress 5:29 It’s very much a living, breathing competitive space. And if you’re not actively moving ahead, then you are going to be falling behind. We’ve talked about budgeting, maybe budgeting should shift and maybe it shifts naturally. Right. So one of the numbers that’s kind of mentioned here. Yeah, you guys want to talk about Yeah,

Matt Bertram 5:48 go ahead. Bring it up. Skip this. Yeah. When we’re talking about SEO, organic searches, a zero sum game, your gains or losses are exactly balanced by the gains or losses of others in the SERPs. Yep. We understand that paid search or social or live auction but tend to not think of organic this way. It is very much a living, breathing competitive space. And if you’re not actually moving ahead, you’re falling away.Like I felt like

Chris Burress 6:12 that whole piece reinforced it. Yeah. You know, it’s good like the shoe knows how to write. Yeah, that’s good. I this next piece I love to Yeah, so if budgeting and marketing, if you’re doing anywhere between five one to 5 million in sales per year, you should be spending seven to 8% of gross revenue on advertising and marketing. This is according to the US Small Business Administration. And she talks about I’ve worked with high growth companies budgeting 10 to 12%. But for maintenance 7% is a bare minimum. I’m going to tell you it’s interesting. That’s high growth. There’s a gallery furniture gallery fringy incredibly famous individual in the city of Houston so let’s be speaking on the same stage with him in June. Oh, I don’t know. I got may or may not happen in June. Yeah. He goes by the moniker mattress Mac and he sells furniture any sell a ton of furniture. I think back in the in early 2000 it was $23 million of furniture a year out of one location. Right. It’s an incredibly good marketer and drives a really good business. He spends 15% of his gross on marketing.

Matt Bertram 7:22 I mean, that’s that’s the number I think. Yeah, right. That’s the number I always think of like reinvest 15% of gross Yeah, right. But But you know, small business maybe I don’t even think business is like very few businesses even spend that

Chris Burress 7:36 Yeah, I think so. They should be spending at least the the

Matt Bertram 7:39 marketing is your your your growth driver to new business, right. Yep. So,

Chris Burress 7:44 yeah. So, this means that for so if the targets the 7% for about every thousand 100,000 in gross revenue that you have, you should be spending about $7,000 of marketing. It is and this is also higher, highlighted. It is critical that you maintain at least this level of marketing investment throughout the CRO coronavirus pandemic. And like, that’s what we will be doing. Both of my companies will actually be doing that same track. So if it makes sense to cut back on some paid advertisements for the time being, maybe that makes sense. I’m going to be honest, I think that because there’s going to be a reduction because people are going to be pulling out that you might not actually have to make adjustments. There’ll be natural adjustments. It’s an auction environment, if people are pulling out of the auction, then the auction pricing is going to go down, you might find the right number actually happens organically. So

Matt Bertram 8:39 yeah, like there’s a quote out there that’s buy like the stock market buy when there’s, you know, in the streets, right. Okay. And basically, you know, that that’s pretty, pretty, pretty rough terminology. Yeah, but I think you do want to press the advantage, okay. Like I think that there’s an opportunity, if you’re positioned well to press the advantage and have really come out strong. Now if you can’t service the business right now, right, right. It doesn’t necessarily make sense to ramp up your marketing. But

Chris Burress 9:10 yeah, right, that makes sense.

Matt Bertram 9:12 You know, you might want to trim it back, you want to move it to other areas, you want to stay top of mind. But really, you want a business that can operate in this environment, because this could be prolonged. So you need to be thinking about business strategy on how to pivot to do that. And then if you come up with a new strategy, how are you going to let people know about Yeah, marketing? Yeah, right. So marketing is incredibly important to anything that we’re going to do. And,

Chris Burress 9:37 and SEO Marketing is a long game. Yeah, that’s that’s really the long game and it and so it goes back to if you plan on being here on the other side of it, then SEO is something that like

Matt Bertram 9:47 I said, in the past, like right now is the time to redo your digital presence. Like I think right now is a perfect time to rebuild your website if you don’t have a lot of time. Like in normal circumstances. Yep. You There’s a links back and forth template with whoever you’re having build your site.

Chris Burress 10:04 And if you’re working from home, you might have a lot more of that quiet time to actually get the thing. Yeah. And that’s what this podcast in this article is about is like, Okay, so let’s kind of regroup and say what can we do? Because we know you can you really only have a big successful business when you’re doing marketing properly. If you’ve got quiet time, the thing to do is focus on marketing. That’s, that’s, that’s it. So strategy. Yeah. So number one, interview employees and customers. So you can use zoom and Google Hangout. So you may think, Oh, I’m not going to be in touch with my customers. We’ll take this opportunity because a lot of your customers are going to be at home also take this opportunity to have phone calls with them take this opportunity to have zoom calls. We always

Matt Bertram 10:44 recommend their interaction. You want to see the body language you want to connect with them. You know, we do that with our customers currently.

Chris Burress 10:52 Yeah. And a lot of our employees are working remotely. We’re a digital marketing agency. So we’ve got that capability and Since we have the capability ever, almost everybody’s working from home, you know, we’ve braved the streets to come here and present a podcast to you. That’s just how we are. But get in contact with your employees, like do zoom conferences with your employees to understand how they’re feeling and what’s going on in their life. So reconnect with them. Number two, do a mini audit of your content assets. Right, so maybe very getting very specific. Let’s talk Did I miss something?

Matt Bertram 11:28 No, I got cut off the 201230. That’s weird. Yeah.

Chris Burress 11:33 So yeah, maybe create, like, again, let’s get specific about things that you could do that are actually really valuable for, from an SEO perspective, create a new Google Sheet or Excel sheet and keep track of all the content that you have the web pages, the emails that you’re got going out, blog posts, white papers, ebooks, by the way, send out an email that talks about the corona virus and its impact or lack of impact that it’s going to have on your business and your ability to service your customers like do that?

Matt Bertram 12:03 Well, all these things you’re talking about are something I like to call digital assets. Yeah, right. And there’s a lot of businesses right now that are slowly moving online. Yes, they should probably be quickly moving online that have no digital assets. So we have to start from a fundamental content on that level, and figure out what do they need in the customer journey? What do they currently have, and then start building these components. But these just like brick and mortar assets, these are these are digital assets that you’re going to use. And you know, your website is like your digital house or your digital office buildings are your digital showroom. And so you should be investing in these things. They do take maintenance to keep up but but you should be thinking about what to do like and you should have a list of all those right I mean, websites are actually based on their traffic, worth some money. Yep, you know,

Chris Burress 12:53 maybe a list of also your ebooks your presentation. Yeah, highlighted videos, right. So maybe now’s the time to to kind of sit down and create some time in your own office space, home office space and create some videos that are of immense value for your business, infographics and articles you publish, like, put all those assets together, I promise you just making a list of those assets are going to make you think of ideas of how you could interplay those assets together or utilize those assets better, just by putting a list together. If you get really ambitious, you can track articles others have published about your business too, right? So you’re kind of tracking what’s online about your business and those are assets

Matt Bertram 13:33 we track roundup posts. Yeah, right. Right. So those are those are pretty good.

Chris Burress 13:37 These may all be opportunities for you. So updating with fresh content, optimizing with new CTAs and keywords, adding internal links to new products or services and re promoting when business picks up again, right so that’s the focus is where you’re going to land when things pick up again. Next, and you might not be doing this as actually plan webinars. So want to answer frequent Asked Questions about small engine repair, introduce new team members or products to your customer base inspire seasonal bookings for later in this year, like those are ideas, think about what kind of webinar Could you put out there that would be of value to your customers, or the people who hang out with your customers. Right. So so that that you can have some connection into those particular market. I

Matt Bertram 14:23 mean, you should be doing webinars anyway. They’re great. We’ve started to get into doing them. In this current climate, you should be absolutely moving in that direction pretty quickly. There’s a lot of people with questions out there. Yep. And they’re, they’re looking to you, if they’re a customer or prospective concert to answer them for you. And this could be a really great, great opportunity to connect with them.

Chris Burress 14:44 Yep, absolutely. It’s interesting. He’s got a screen here of a webinar. That that was that he was moderated by Lauren Baker. Remember we had Lauren Baker on our podcast, so cool to see him getting out there still. Of course, he is. You know, the Founder of Search Engine Journal so he’s way out there. Number four, again, this is 13 ways businesses can use SEO and marketing to combat Corona virus impact. Number four is clean up your administrative mess. Like we all have an administrative mess.

Matt Bertram 15:18 Oh, look at this webinars 91% of professionals say webinars webinars are their favorite content format for learning.

Chris Burress 15:25 Because you can interact with

Matt Bertram 15:26 them. Yeah, I love data.

Chris Burress 15:28 Yeah, clean up your administrative messes, right. So when I first saw this, I was like, Yeah, I don’t know how that’s SEO. But, you know, write some posts that you’ve been meaning to get to. Right like that’s, that’s important. Get those webinars started, get that podcast started or get that new podcast posted or again in books, like get some books.

Matt Bertram 15:49 We had a book called it

Chris Burress 15:50 Yeah, we had a book call today. So get that administrative stuff. That’s stuff that’s just been kind of lingering. Now you’ve got some time in that home office. Let’s get that stuff done. Yeah.

Matt Bertram 15:59 Now’s the time to focus on that if you have additional time. Yep. Where you didn’t normally

Chris Burress 16:06 Next take aim at different types of searches. Right. So I really so this is SERPs search engine result pages. Now that you may have a bit of time and space to dig deeper. You can plot your domination I love this of zero of position. 00 Yeah, what’s position zero, that’s a video carousel, paragraph snippets and more Oh, and they’ve got a good reference to an article that you can like 10 ways to get organic page one listings. And then number six, this will be the last one for this podcast. We’ll do the rest of them in the next podcast. Get recording videos videos are great SEO fodder. Videos are great have we been saying videos? Sir are great. Sir videos are great. Like you ma’am. videos are great when you’re making these videos, these videos also think of the same things that you’re going to do when you’re thinking about publishing a blog post. Like go target longtail keywords, trigger featured snippets appear in relevant YouTube searches. Those are the things like as you’re creating planning the content

Matt Bertram 17:21 have coronavirus q&a.

Chris Burress 17:22 Yeah. On

Matt Bertram 17:24 in video format explain questions that people have. Yeah, I mean, the biggest question that I was hearing that I was having is like, on e commerce, like, does the coronavirus stay on pack on packages? Yeah, like and they said, Well, we don’t really know maybe like an hour or two. If you feel comfortable wiping it down.

Chris Burress 17:43 Don’t use Amazon one hour. Which, which wasn’t even a thing like four months ago or something.

Matt Bertram 17:52 I am incredibly impressed with Amazon. I feel like I should buy stock in them with everything that’s going on. But like I order stuff and that’s They’re the next morning. Magic like it like don’t even forget that I ordered it. Yes. Like, already there. I was like, I just listened this every day. Yeah, it’s really nice.

Chris Burress 18:08 It’s great. It’s crazy when you’re like doing stuff on a Sunday or something. Yeah. And it shows up that Monday you’re like, how does?

Matt Bertram 18:14 Yeah, like how is that on my portal? So yeah,

Chris Burress 18:18 and I can tell you it’s impacted. So my other business my vital See, we actually ship products to people. And it’s totally jaded their experience. We will literally like somebody will place an order at 730 on Friday, and if it’s not there at 9am on Monday, they’re like, Hey, what’s wrong with you guys? You gotta get your act together. Like we’re not Amazon like we don’t work over the weekend. Oh, I

Matt Bertram 18:40 I do know that I used to when I was buying I was like, if it’s not amazon prime or not buying now buy it like right and like, yes, when we were shipping our T shirts. I don’t we don’t have any other t shirts on. Oh my god. They took two weeks. We’re like, we’re like

Chris Burress 18:53 we’ve gotten we ordered them for the wrong reason.

Matt Bertram 18:58 This microwave society We live in Yeah, everybody needs it now microwave I can’t clap or hurt people’s ear

Chris Burress 19:04 delivery. embed the video and blog post. So when you make this video, include the transcript, take screenshots and use them in images for your social media true. Take five to 10 quotes from the video, transcribe them, put them alongside in your Instagram account. That’s one of the things we’re doing Yeah, reuse the quotes and media releases and upcoming blog posts. There’s lots of really valuable thing that you can do while you’ve got this extra time, and again, this is about combating the corona viruses impact to your business. So this is going to wrap up this this particular podcast. And you know, we just want to kind of wrap it up as we usually do and say, if you’re looking to grow your business with the largest simplest marketing tool on the planet, the internet call a web results for increased revenue in your business 713-592-6724 if you have a referral, that’s somebody who’s interested in digital marketing And we’re doing a lot of consultations right now. We’ve actually offered to all of our clients a free one hour consultation to talk about how to pivot your business to best take advantage to to turn this kind of bad dire dark cloud into a silver lining. So if you’re interested in that kind of strategy session, do go to our website he word results calm and and reach out to

Matt Bertram 20:23 so so one of the things that that we’ve done as well is on best SEO podcast calm. We were doing 30 minute consultations. Yeah, that volume has actually been increasing. There’s a lot of requests right now. And with people working from home, yeah, we’ve decided to do a video on it. Yeah. Okay. So just the demands coming in for consultation and requests. You know, if you put your questions in there, we can highlight and answer those. Yeah, we are now moving kinda to a video audit format and then you know, paid one on one base based on really demands like but you know,

Chris Burress 21:05 you’ll get a lot of value. So real estate

Matt Bertram 21:07 data, you’ll still get a ton of value. It’s just it’s just we can’t, we took volumes do like the volume is too high, we’ve had to limit it with three different employees to, you know, scaled back their time to work on existing accounts. And so I just want to let everybody know that that change to video audits, but we will have option for the paid consulting, it’s, again, just a supply and demand thing, but but just send us your questions. And we’ll make sure to get those covered in the video out for you. Yeah,

Chris Burress 21:38 yeah. And I’ll ask you to leave a review if you can. It’s nice and simple. A web results.com slash g plus g in the plus sign with Facebook. They can go to facebook.com slash e web results that’ll also take you and you can leave a review on how do you

Matt Bertram 21:53 feel about Yelp?

Chris Burress 21:54 Yelp is all right.

Matt Bertram 21:57 Yeah. trustpilot you Other versus others some clutch way

Chris Burress 22:03 when you make those reviews please make those reviews. You can even leave comments on our YouTube video so all of our podcasts are posted up on YouTube we’re

Matt Bertram 22:12 Yeah, we’re cycling we’re cycling through that we’ve been using that as kind of a repository I can really like this might be some of the time to do some YouTube SEO I clean some stuff up.

Chris Burress 22:22 Yeah, yeah, um, please remember we were filmed live here from 13 105 Northwest freeway, Houston, Texas. Oh, sweet 500 Houston to 500 dash

Matt Bertram 22:33 515 five, it’s 515 has

Chris Burress 22:36 changed in itself,

Matt Bertram 22:37 but we also have to herkie like glass doors. So that beautiful

Chris Burress 22:42 Yeah, just come by to see the doors.

Matt Bertram 22:44 Yeah, I mean, we’re, there’s very few people here might haven’t locked but yeah,

Chris Burress 22:47 you can see the doors and through them. Because they’re made of glass. Um, yeah. So visit us arrange an appointment with us. Just make sure it’s less than 10 people and we’re filmed here in Houston, Texas. You guys have made us the most popular SEO podcasts on iTunes. Thank you. We really appreciate you please like us and share us and follow us and all that good stuff. Until the next podcast. My name is Chris burns.

Matt Bertram 23:12 My name is

Matt Bertram.

Chris Burress 23:13 Bye bye for now. Good. We’re gonna repeat the first part again this time here. We’re recording. We’re actually

Matt Bertram 23:27 recording.

Chris Burress 23:29 Everything’s on everything. After we have the thumbs up. We have the phone Oh,

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