2021
2021
#525 Enterprise SEO Level Keyword Research Tips by Brand Smith Part 2
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Best SEO Podcast | EWR Digital
Video Transcript
speakerChris Burres·00:17

Hi and welcome to the podcast, internet marketing. My name is Chris Burres. One of the owners at EWR digital, 

speakerMatt Bertram·00:24

And my name is Matt Bertram. I’m the lead strategist here at EWR digital. 

speakerChris Burres·00:28

Welcome back to another fun filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 525. I think we spoke about last time that why do we always celebrate things in even numbers? Like fives or tens or whatever? I know that’s not Right. If it’s just, it feels good. Like, cause you know why? Because we have this many fingers on our hands. We have five fingers. That’s why You get to move to the next. 

speakerMatt Bertram·00:58

One, sir. 

speakerChris Burres·01:01

I can hear, I could hear you, but I cannot hear you now. 

speakerMatt Bertram·01:04

No, you’re back off full disclosure. I don’t know why. All of a sudden Chris said let’s do the podcast. And my internet said, I’m not sure. Maybe, maybe we’re. 

speakerChris Burres·01:21

This is, this is past the scheduled time. I’m no longer available. 

speakerMatt Bertram·01:25

Yeah. I mean, it’s been working really hard for me lately. I’ve been really busy. So. 

speakerChris Burres·01:31

Yeah. So a great, this is episode 525. We’re excited to bring it to you. And actually we want to, you know, I think I may have misrepresented what has actually happened in terms of getting a sponsor. We never looked for a sponsor for 523 episodes, and then we had people contacting us and we’re like, yeah, let’s figure this out. And then boom. Now we have Ahrefs as a sponsor. I think it’s a pretty cool deal. And so let me kind of get the commercial going for you and you have frozen, but now you’re back. I’m going to, I’m going to keep, are you like pretending to freeze? And then I can’t tell if your friends, All right. So last time we spoke about H refs, right? And a WT, which is H refs webmaster tools. 

speakerChris Burres·02:20

What can a WT make for your website, scan your website for a hundred plus common SEO issues that might be hurting its performance in search engines, kind of value browse your websites, backlink data and get actionable insights from your inbound and outbound link profiles, obviously valuable learn what keywords your website ranks for and compare how you stack up against your competitors in the SERPs. Again, that search engine result pages really like everything that you need an SEO piece of software to do. Right? And in fact, they’ve got a quote from search engine journal, who we kind of review those on a regular basis. They said search engine journal said, it’s hard to believe that something as useful as this is free, H refs webmaster tools is a killer service. And if you want to get free, get your free access. 

speakerChris Burres·03:14

You should just go to H refs. That’s obviously the letter a, the letter H and then refs, R E F s.com and then forward slash a w T for H refs webmaster tools. Glad that they are a sponsor, excited to be doing the podcast with a sponsor. You know, we finally just got around. 

speakerMatt Bertram·03:37

So Chris, you know, that I’ve been writing a number of articles for search engine journal. So we’re going to now have to do a, one of my articles next. You know, I wrote one recently on speed on some issues that were going on. I thought it would be good to expound upon that. And then one of the, really the next article that I have coming out that I’m really excited about is, you know, I’m writing about things that clients like ask, right? And so the client asks like, how many times can you optimize one page, right on page optimization. And like, you know, talking about like different elements mixing together, how Google looks at that. So, so I go into that, but a trust, okay. So I want to talk about this. Certainly this is a tool that we use. 

speakerMatt Bertram·04:22

This is a tool that I use on a daily basis. Not exactly sure on the free versus the paid version, but certainly worth its money for the paid version worth its weight in gold. Like that term, what I can tell you is. 

speakerChris Burres·04:38

Now worth its weight in Bitcoin. 

speakerMatt Bertram·04:40

That, that I actually, as I was saying, that came to my head. And what I can tell you is I used to use this tool a lot for off link back analysis, like link building, competitor link building, looking at the backlink profile, looking at the anchor texts, looking at the type of links that you might get. And it was really a great tool in that regard. I have recently started to use it a lot more for like keyword rankings, just quickly see how they’re ranking versus last month. I believe they update the data quite regularly. I like I’m able to go there really quickly and getting a quick snapshot. You know, sometimes you have to do manual searches for certain keywords and a trust is really good job updating their data. 

speakerMatt Bertram·05:36

And I have also recently started to use their auditing tool, which I’m really liking. So there’s a full portfolio of suites that Ahrefs is offering. And, you know, I, I can highly recommend them. I, I use them. I like them. I’m excited that they’re a sponsor. Ahrefs
Check it out. So. 

speakerChris Burres·05:58

Very cool. Yeah. Go to Ahrefs.com forward slash AWT to get signed up for that free version and the free access. All right. Let’s well, let’s jump into the article. Did you find any reviews? Do we have any reviews for today? 

speakerMatt Bertram·06:13

Honestly, I haven’t checked. I’ve been dealing like I I’ve had actually a lot of referrals and I’ve been doing consulting sessions most of today and yesterday for people that are, you know, people typically come to us for the most difficult problems, right? Like, so like they’ve worked with their local agency. They may be tried out their brother’s cousin. Right. Maybe they’ve tried to use somebody overseas and they’re just like, Hey, I need someone to help me with this problem. And time is money kind of thing. And, and so I’ve been booked up with consulting sessions and we’ve been getting a lot of referrals. It’s just kind of that time of the year. And that’s what I’ve been doing. So I have no idea. 

speakerChris Burres·06:57

Aye. Aye, aye. Aye. Aye. I always know, like we share with prospects, Hey, the thing that’s going to be most expensive to you. Isn’t, isn’t actually our fee. And especially as an RFE versus, you know, somebody’s cousin or versus somebody overseas, right. 

speakerMatt Bertram·07:13

You’re saying our retainer fee or whatever we’re offering. Yeah. 

speakerChris Burres·07:17

I see the real expenses and the missed opportunity. Right? If you were in position one quickly, right. In say two months like that, the, the loss of time versus another company that doesn’t get the job done as quickly is way more expensive than anything that you would ever pay. Right. It’s more expensive to your business, not to have those sales. 

speakerMatt Bertram·07:40

No. The last opportunity cost is real. I have clients telling me that they’re generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in lead volume. Right? Not all of them closed. And also we’ve had a number of clients hit some really big clients that like half a million dollar like changed their whole book of business because they’re ranked well and they’re positioned well for that right. Opportunity. And you don’t know that you missed it. I didn’t, I didn’t know where you were going with that, Chris. I actually kind of what I was thinking is like really the strategy, right? I mean, the right strategy in my mind is the absolute, most important thing. Because if you approach anything with the wrong strategy, you’re going to end up at the wrong place. 

speakerMatt Bertram·08:25

And so to know that this is what we need to do, this is where we need to go and feel confident in that. However you get there. I find to be like the most valuable, right. And someone that’s been there before, and that can give you advice. I mean, like learn on somebody else’s like dime, right? Like we’ve done it. We’ve worked with tons of clients. We’ve done hundreds. If not thousands of campaigns, like I have a lot of data with all these Google updates I can see across, you know, 80 clients what’s happening. Not only that, like talking to other colleagues in the space, you know, a lot’s happening, you might not be able to see that on your specific website. Right. So I think it’s a really good idea to leverage experts. Certainly it’s something that we continue to do. 

speakerMatt Bertram·09:18

And we promote at the company is continue to grow, continue to learn, continue to read. I think that’s really why you started doing this podcast, right. Is to keep up with the trend of everything that’s constantly changing in digital marketing. Yeah. 

speakerChris Burres·09:32

Yeah. This is, this is not an industry where you can sit back and go, oh right. As of today, I know it all. And that’s going to last even three months. Like that’s not even. 

speakerMatt Bertram·09:44

The logging in, on my gosh, logging into some of these platforms. They continue to try to optimize it for user friendliness. But if you know where things are and they keep moving stuff around and screw these platforms. Yeah. It’s constantly changing. And I can’t wait for it to start changing into web three marketing and we will be right on the forefront of that. 

speakerChris Burres·10:07

On the forefront. All right. So, so let’s talk about the article and this is part two. So in podcast number 200, excuse me, 524. We covered the first five of 10 timeless keyword research tips. This is again from Brad Smith to you, Brad Smith. He’s the CEO at workable just real quick. The first keyword tip was funnel stage. So, you know, if that piques your interest, you need to go back and listen to 5 24. Number two was a PPC performance. PPC is always a great workplace to do keyword research. Number three is existing page topics. Number four was seasonality. Number five is trending topics. And now let’s do six through 10. 

speakerMatt Bertram·10:56

All right, 

speakerChris Burres·10:57

Let’s get it done. All right. Number six is on-site search. So sometimes the answers are literally staring you in the face, right? You know, those times when you hear something so effective and obvious yet you realize you aren’t doing it yet. Right? So a lot of websites and what we’re talking about here. And, and he actually admits that the first time somebody mentioned this to them, he was like, duh, he pulled a, you know, a, a Homer Simpson dope should have had it from the beginning. If you have a search on your site. And it’s probably a good idea. If you’ve got any volume of content on your site, you can go look at what people are searching for. And you can enable site search inside Google analytics, and then go into behavior. 

speakerChris Burres·11:41

And you’ll be able to see the variety of searches that people are searching. Does it make sense to use keywords that your customers are already searching for on your site? 

speakerMatt Bertram·11:53

Yes. 

speakerChris Burres·11:56

And with that, should I go to number seven? 

speakerMatt Bertram·11:58

Well, I, I think that this is certainly important when you’re collecting data. I mean, as we talk about Google continues to change things, or they moved a lot of the search metrics that you could find into the ad-words portion, so you have to pay for it. And they put everything in GA under undefined, which is really not very helpful. So being able to track how people are interacting with your site, how they’re searching falls into maybe the category of CRO, and you can start a heat mapping and tracking sessions. And it’s certainly a great tool in the tool belt to understand what kind of content is popular on your site, what you maybe should write more of what people are searching for, how they’re searching for it, what words they’re using, that sort of thing. So, yeah, 

speakerChris Burres·12:45

Absolutely. All right. Number seven is branded key phrases. So we’re familiar with branded names like the product name or company’s names, but branded terms can extend to industry terms. You invent a there’s no better example than inbound marketing. I remember a time when inbound marketing was not a thing. And now it’s a thing associated with. 

speakerMatt Bertram·13:10

HubSpot. What about modern marketing, Chris? That, that was digital marketing used to be called modern marketing, right? 

speakerChris Burres·13:19

Yeah. Modern marketing. And so the concept here is if you’ve got a platform to share things out there, share the share things that you have ownership of. Right. So when somebody goes and searches, inbound marketing, I don’t know how it is today, but certainly in the beginning, the only thing that came up with HubSpot, cause they were the only ones talking about inbound marketing and they were talking about it everywhere, you know, in all the publications and any kind of any ads on YouTube, just everywhere. And so they created a phrase that really is associated with them. 

speakerMatt Bertram·13:53

I mean, they made a conference. I think Chris, you know, you pick articles that always lead back to you talking about . Why don’t you, why don’t you talk about like drinking your own Kool-Aid and believing in this concept of what you do for your farm nutraceutical business? 

speakerChris Burres·14:16

Yeah. So in, so, so the, the, all of our products currently we’re working on some different products, but all of our products currently are based on carbon 60 and what we came to understand. There’s really two things that we did, but from purely the marketing side, there’s scientific reasons behind this as well, and really safety for the consumer reasons. But w what we came to understand is if we’re out there talking about this thing that nobody’s ever heard of, what that does, is it throws people into a bucket of other vendors who have this product. And frankly, we checked the quality of those products and those products. Weren’t very good. And so we’re like, well, how do we go out and share this molecule, right? This carbon 60 molecule with people, but make sure they don’t get thrown into this. 

speakerChris Burres·15:05

I don’t know, questionable industry. And so what we came up with is ESS 60. So you can go look up ESS 60, and it’s a branded phrase, and it’s our own branded phrase. And what that does is if I go on a podcast, or if I write an article, what we’re talking about is ESS 60 in that podcast and in that article. So when consumers who are now recently exposed to this, go and search the internet, they’re going to find a reputable source of a high quality product. And we don’t have to worry about them going down a bad path, bad mouthing it, because they have a bad experience with a company that may not even be in maybe selling their product as having C 60 in it and not even having see 60 in it. And that has occurred. 

speakerChris Burres·15:51

So that’s kind of the reasons behind it and it’s proven valuable. 

speakerMatt Bertram·15:56

So, I mean, I think to summarize, if you’re going to spend a lot of time and energy generating demand for a specific product or service, you should want to reap the benefits of all that demand generation and work that you’ve done. And if you do that on your own phrase, you’re more than likely going to get the lion’s share of the search results for that. 

speakerChris Burres·16:24

Yeah. Th the lion’s share of the search result for what you create, what you plan. You often use that kind of plant and cultivate and harvest analogy. And you’re chopping a little bit. So I’m going to pretend that we’re still going, I’m seeing a timer. So this was interesting. It was a piece that he added in that I didn’t know how well it fit. This is Brad added in related to branded key phrases, but I thought it was interesting. So you can go find some of the data directly inside of Google analytics. If you go to audience inside of Google analytics, and then scroll down to interest underneath, you’ll find the affinity categories option. This is just like, this is nitty-gritty good stuff. You can analyze their onset. 

speakerChris Burres·17:09

So now you can see how people, what their infinity categories are. And you can also look at their behavior. Ultimately, did they download that white paper? Did they make a purchase? Did they schedule a, that free analysis? And then you can use that to understand and decide, okay. People with this affinity actually tend to close. Let’s spend time addressing people with that affinity. I think it’s really a smart decision. 

speakerMatt Bertram·17:36

I mean, segmentation, like I, and I’ll try to be brief. So we don’t lose internet search here, but creating affinity audiences, target personas, testing, different ads to those audiences, creating lookalike audiences, figuring out, you know, what messaging and what people respond best to that kind of fish, where the fish are. Scenario is certainly valuable. And that’s something in traditional marketing. You can’t always take advantage of, right? Maybe you can say, Hey, in this magazine, typically these people read it, but you can’t easily and quickly and efficiently test to see how people respond to that messaging and iterate on that to get to the purpose. Griffin messaging, certainly like ads or using Twitter to put stuff out there to find out what works before you invest in a SEO campaign. If you don’t have enough data is a great way to go. 

speakerChris Burres·18:40

Abs. Absolutely. All right. Number eight, location and widgets. Again, this is 10 timeless keyword research tips, location, plus widgets. Doesn’t sound obvious. What it’s really talking about. And this is w w his point is the widget is like pizza or internet marketing services or the generic version of whatever it is. You might be interested in purchasing or learning more about it’s the sh those end up being short tail phrases that are a lot harder to pursue. And his point is, Hey, go after the location. I think there certainly was a time when you actually had to do this on purpose. Like it was the only way I remember a day. And some of you we’ve had this podcast on air long enough are going to go, like, that’s not true. Chris is, Chris is lying. That was, that was never the case. 

speakerChris Burres·19:28

There was a time when you could just go to the internet and you could type, I don’t know, a cosmetic dentist, and you would get the most pause, met cause most popular cosmetic dentist at all. And actually it was the best content at that time. It wasn’t even a popularity contest yet Google wasn’t around and you would actually, they might be in LA. If you’re in Houston, now we know that doesn’t happen anymore. Google has done an amazing job of understanding where you are. And so if you’re looking for cosmetic dentist, it does understand that you don’t want one in California. Probably in fact, if you do want one in California, you gotta type in Cal, you know, dentist in California, cosmetic dentist in California. 

speakerChris Burres·20:12

So, Matt, I know you were giving me an example as were prepping for the show about how local plus widget is important to take into consideration specifically at the keyword search Fe phrase phase. 

speakerMatt Bertram·20:27

Yeah. So I, I lost you for a bit of that. So there might be some cut, cut outs. You know, when, when we post this, sorry guys, but yeah, I mean, when you’re doing keyword research, it’s really important to maybe use that target keyword or that target phrase, plus the location. Also, I think really going after long tail key phrases, I know he doesn’t talk about this, but going after a long tail key phrases, first maybe easier. Most of the searches that Google sees are also news searches. People are using search engines differently. They’re using longer phrases, but typically the keyword press location is a good way to go. And it’s a good way to measure data. 

speakerMatt Bertram·21:09

That’s something you can use a trust for is you can go there and you can search for this keyword plus this location, and then kind of compare those out versus other areas. And, and what you really want to make sure of is, you know, really you’re going to get to the first page to see anything with SEO. Not only that you need to see like really middle top first page to really see anything. And you’re getting a ratio of how many searches, how many searches there are for that term. And kind of the max amount of searches typically you would get is about 33% of all those searches. So if there’s a hundred searches, you get 33 of them. Well, you know, if there’s only 10 people searching, you’re only getting three people to your website. 

speakerMatt Bertram·21:50

How many people do you need to get your website to convert? So there’s some mathematical formulas that you really need to take into consideration when you’re going after keywords. So you can certainly rank for a great keyword, but if there’s not a lot of volume, you really need to look at the value of that lead to make sure it makes sense before you invest time in that area. Right? So there’s different, again, going back to the strategy, decide, maybe you want to just pay to target that, but you know, they’re there, you know, is not a great way. There’s a couple of tools out there, but there’s not a great way to go in this geographic area with this location, right? 

speakerMatt Bertram·22:29

How many people search for it if they’re not using that location term, and one of the easier ways to do you see it without really looking at some like enterprise level data is to just add that location to it. And it gives you a good idea. And I, and I’m sure that there’s like a formula of like, here’s how many people are in the United States. Here’s how many people are searching for that term. Here’s how many people are in your geographic area. So you’re getting a percentage of that national search of people that are looking for that term and to adding that location to it. So there’s certainly different ways to cut it, but adding that location to the product or service in that area gives you an idea of how much demand is there. 

speakerMatt Bertram·23:13

And if you’re finding something with very low demand in that area, you might want to go the demand generation route and go, you know, maybe Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads, or, you know, depending on what you’re offering, but you need to, Google is a demand harvesting tool now, you know, okay, so you got display ads, which could be different. You’ve got YouTube, which could be different, but typically you’re looking at existing search volume. And how do you capture that? You know, utilize those people, searching for that. And, and sometimes, you know, you might need to search around for the right keyword phrase. 

speakerMatt Bertram·23:52

You know, analogy I’ve used in the past is we had someone come to us for an AdWords audit and we realized that all they needed to do was rank for one keyword on the SEO side and it would solve their problem. And, you know, that was determined after like a two and a half hour strategy session. And the internal SEO was pushing back on it. And then the owner, I think I told this story, right? The owner was like, well, what is it going to cost to get there? And then basically I took our rate and multiplied by three, and then, you know, and I said, you know, there’s no timeframe on it, but he goes, how long can you do it? I said, I can do it 45 days or less. Now with that being said, they were already on the first page. 

speakerMatt Bertram·24:32

So all I had to do was re go up to the top and ring the bell. And that was done quite easily because I mean like we’ve talked about, I have access to a lot of different data. We’ve run along pains. I have a pretty good sense of how Google responds once I see how it starts to interacting with your website and I can measure some things. So after two and a half hours as insight, I pretty much knew what they needed to do. And, you know, I can understand the business owner standpoint of, Hey, I want to guarantee that this happens. And based on the data you’re showing me, this should be a big deal. And with that being said, it was for a plumbing company. And since then they bought in a air conditioning company because they’ve grown so much. 

speakerSpeaker 4·25:24

Well done. 

speakerChris Burres·25:26

I’m trying to go. 

speakerMatt Bertram·25:26

Fast because I’m afraid the, you know, the service is going to get cut out. So, 

speakerChris Burres·25:32

Yeah. All right. So, so number nine and again, 10 timeless keyword research tips is keyword difficulty. So keyword research re you want to research the relevance, the keyword phrase, excuse me, the key phrase needs to be at least tangentially related to what you do or offer, right? And you want to look at the volume of that. So these are two great things to look at, right? That’s the relevance and the volume, but they are not complete until you balance those attributes with the comp, with competition specifically, the other people already going after those words, right, Chris. So he gave the example, 

speakerMatt Bertram·26:12

You see my face, 

speakerChris Burres·26:13

I see that. 

speakerMatt Bertram·26:15

It’s like, I have war pain on. 

speakerChris Burres·26:19

The commercials. I forget what, oh, it’s, I think it’s for like, ATNT high-speed internet or something where they’re like you share sharing the zoom meeting and it’s all dysfunctional and whatever. There’s a, there’s a heritage. 

speakerMatt Bertram·26:34

Actually. I got the sun it’s I think the sun hitting it a certain way, but. 

speakerChris Burres·26:39

So he gave some examples. I tweaked them a little bit. You might guess where a, of like Houston digital marketing, some example, he gave us like Houston digital agency is a little better. The volume is a tiny bit higher. And not that competitive Houston web design is somewhere in the middle volume looks good, but it’s a little more difficult than the last one. So which one would you choose? Well, got to do more research first. Let’s dive into the SERP analysis and see what websites are ranking. So then he pulls up that SERP analysis and looks at it and says the domain of four authority of the first three sites looks decent, but then the next few drop off. So while the average score might seem daunting, initially, you still got a great shot at competing for this term. So there’s that really? 

speakerChris Burres·27:22

This is about having a comprehensive, I think you should have called this, you know, have a comprehensive approach to your keyword research, look at the data comprehensively. What is that volume? How relevant do you believe it is and who is placing well for those particular phrases that you’re considering? 

speakerMatt Bertram·27:39

Yeah. I mean, this could be certainly a whole podcast or a whole article on how to do the keyword research effectively. I think that’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll do that, but essentially like, look, you want to look at the bid auction, right? How many people are currently bidding on it? It’s a pretty mature market. I’m not saying everybody that’s in the bid auction knows what they’re doing. Actually. I’ve found that a lot of people, you know, don’t have the parameter set up. Absolutely correct. I would say that keyword difficulty score is somewhat misleading. So I, I agree with you. 

speakerMatt Bertram·28:15

It’s something to consider as a variable, but you want to look at how the other sites are doing, you know, maybe how many social shares those pages have, how many links those pages have, how strong those links are, what that keyword difficulty is, gives you an idea of how long it’s going to take to rank for that keyword. Right. And so maybe out of the gate, you might want to not go for something that’s a keyword difficulty of like 80 and the hard category. If there’s options that you think would convert at like the one to 10 or one to 20, right? 

speakerMatt Bertram·28:52

Like it’s kind of like go after the low-hanging fruit first, if it makes sense in an, a lot of times, if you do, and you dig down and do the research, well, you’ll find those golden nuggets that nobody’s bidding on. Right. And so that’s why you shouldn’t just use a Google keyword planner. You should use something like a trust to find that data, to know what approach is best. Again, it goes back to your strategy. If you have the right strategy, you’re going to win, right. And it’s not always keyword or like what you were saying, widget plus location. Like, that’s what everybody’s going after. 

speakerMatt Bertram·29:32

You might want to talk about something or specialize like inbound marketing or ESS 60 in a different area, maybe a longer tail key phrase, you know, look at the roadmap of like what you’re trying to do. A lot of times when we go after like a specific location, let’s say, Houston, like you were talking about, you might want to rank in the satellite areas or the sub sabar first interlink, those pages point those up to the Houston page, kind of build some authority in some of these other areas. And then Google understands that those are all associated with each other. And then boom, you’re really powerfully ranking for the Houston term. 

speakerMatt Bertram·30:13

So, I mean, again, there’s a lot of different ways to slice it, but again, one of the things I think is most important is keywords research and looking at it from a very strategic perspective of how you’re going to tackle those keywords and which ones you’re going to rank for first, what pages you want to rank, et cetera. So, 

speakerChris Burres·30:34

Yep. The wrong strategy will get you exactly where it’s going to take you. So make sure you don’t have the wrong strategy. All right. Number 10 and timeless keyword research tips, competitive analysis, a little competitive analysis can illuminate some overlooked areas, check out the link profile. This tells us where they’re getting links from of a competitor, right? This tells us where they’re getting links from. So you can reverse engineer the same tactic, but it can give you other information too. And the example he used was hard rock hotel, and they do a lot of ads for like black Friday or cyber Monday. So if you’re another smaller hotel or hotel, you might want to consider running black Friday, you know, placing for black Friday or placing for cyber Monday. 

speakerChris Burres·31:27

One of the things that’s really good about this competitive research is using AWC, right? Like, as we said at the beginning, learn what keywords your website ranks for and compare how you stack up against your competitors in the SERPs. 

speakerMatt Bertram·31:40

So this is like digital keeping up with the Joneses basically. Right. But yeah, I think that when your ability a backlink profile, you want to make your backlink profile look very similar to the people that are ranking in the positions you want to rank for. Right? And so the best form of flattery is I guess, imitation, right? And one of the strategies that we have when we’re link-building is okay, our competitors have these high quality, high da backlinks that are producing referral traffic is something really good to look at of what type of people are being referred from what websites to maybe your website or a competitor website. That gives you a lot idea to dig down in the keyword research more. But basically you want to look like the people that rank where you want to be. Right. 

speakerMatt Bertram·32:38

And so if that’s what you focus on, you’re going to get somewhere results. Hopefully right now it’s always best to figure out what they’re doing. And then kind of like one of them, right. Is, is certainly I think the approach that you want to take, but looking at a competitor’s backlinks, you can see their strategies. You can say, oh, this guy, you know, like if we’re talking about digital marketing to go back to that, okay, they’re commenting in the MAs forum, right? These guys are over here, these guys, right? For like us, like we write for hours, you write for searches in journal and in a few others, you know, oh, these guys are in the news a lot. Or these guys focus with this charity or, you know what I mean? 

speakerMatt Bertram·33:26

Like you can see a footprint in the back links of what people are doing and how they’re getting to, where they get to. And a lot of times I have, I’ve had a number of people come to me and go, I’m spending a hundred thousand dollars or whatever, or more of digital marketing. And I look at their website and they’re on pages, bad. Their website’s slow. So their technical’s not there. They haven’t done any content. Okay. Any content at all, they’re using a bunch of stock photography. And then I look at their backlink profile and I don’t really see anything. And I’m like, okay, I understand what you, you said you spent, but where did that money go? Do you have an understanding of that? Like most of the time they don’t, and that’s why they were getting hosed. 

speakerMatt Bertram·34:15

Like, and so that’s, what’s really important to understand, you know, what you’re getting, having that transparency, having those deliverables, having those milestones that you’re going after, that’s why we run three month campaigns. That’s why, if you’re a new client, it’s gotta be six months. The first three months are authority building, but we line out what you’re going to get. We’re fully transparent about what we do, but man, most of the time people come to us after they’ve been burned. Right. And like, if that money that lost opportunity costs you were talking about was spent in the right way, the first time, how much further would you be along? Right. And I just had. 

speakerChris Burres·34:56

Maybe buying a new business and air conditioning business. 

speakerMatt Bertram·35:00

Well, the one, well, the one I remember there was a cigar company out in Florida. I won’t say which one. And I can’t. Oh, I think I remember. But, but essentially he has like five locations. He’d spent a ton of money on his website. It wasn’t even done. Right. Wasn’t ranking wasn’t anything. I mean, he was deep in this. It was maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars and he comes back to us and he’s like, all right, I got eight K left. Like what can we do? Like, and so, you know, you want, you know, you want to make sure your dry powder and your marketing budget goes to something that’s going to produce ROI. That’s proven. Yeah. I mean, that was, I guess, man, I’m doing like self promotion. Your, I apologize. 

speakerMatt Bertram·35:47

But there’s a great article that I wrote forbes, for enterprise SEO of what to look for in an enterprise SEO agency. And if you’re kind of in the market for that, I would really encourage you. Go read that article before you start pursuing. And before you start spending a lot of money on something, if you don’t fully understand what you’re going to get that’s would be my biggest tip or biggest recommendation to somebody. So. 

speakerChris Burres·36:16

Makes a lot, it makes a lot of sense. All right. Let’s let’s wrap this up again. Tim. 10 timeless keyword research tips. This is from Brad Smith CEO over at workable conclusion keyword research. Isn’t a box to tick off mindlessly before hitting publish. It’s not even just a box that you tick off intelligently before you hit publish. Instead, it should be a more comprehensive, consistent activity that guides your next great marketing idea. Put TIF to you, Brad, because that’s absolutely right. That’s how it needs to be approached. Are you still there? 

speakerMatt Bertram·36:55

Okay. Out a great conclusion, grace. 

speakerChris Burres·37:00

And what we’ll do is, cause we didn’t say at the beginning, Hey, I know you didn’t get a chance to search for reviews. If you’re enjoying this podcast, if you’re getting any value of out of the podcast, one, make sure you go check out H ref our sponsor, and then also make sure you leave us a review. You can do [email protected] forward slash review, or you can go on Facebook and you can go search for best SEO podcast. You’ll find us there and leave a review there too, please. And, and that’s kind of it. Anything else? 

speakerMatt Bertram·37:33

No, I love it. 

speakerChris Burres·37:35

My name is Chris Burris. 

speakerMatt Bertram·37:37

My name is Matt Bertram. 

speakerChris Burres·37:38

Bye-bye for now. Yeah, 

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