9 Surefire Ways to Get Fired in SEO by Ron Dod #362

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast on the Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. I am Charles Lewis, your client results strategist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 362. As always, we do have a tip from our previous podcast, and we'll make sure that we've got our video ready. We do. The tip from our previous podcast is use Google Analytics Pages Report to determine which web pages have the best engagement. Yeah, look at the Pages Report so you can see which pages have the most visits, the most time on site, the most activity going on, so you can see which pages rank the best so that way you'll know which pages you want to change, alter, merge, or get rid of. If you don't have that data, then you can't make the right choices. Boom. Boom. All right. Please remember, we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas, and we are your, Charles and I, us two up here in front of you, potentially if you're watching, or one of us in your left ear, one of us in your right ear. We are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, and our mantra is do not be a douche. Do not be a douche. It is not a good look. So we've got an article today. We've got a great article, man. Punch in the face to Ron Don, Ronald Dodd, actually, and the good folks over at Search Engine Journal posted this article. Nine surefire ways to get fired in SEO. So this is an article talking to agencies and SEO people who actually do SEO. There's nine ways you can get fired. And so a great article. We'll dive into it in a minute. Excellent. If you are in a position and you have some sort of electronic device and you can, we would have, Chuck, what should they tweet? Tweet us. Tweet us at bestSEOPodcasts at eWebResults. Be sure to use the hashtag SEOpodcasts. This is number 362.

And like I said, tag us so that way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking. 362 podcasts. Yeah. If I could do the math quickly, that would be a lot. Yeah, we almost add one for every day of the year. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yeah, man. Well, are you counting 130? I'm counting 130 and 280. All right, so if you've listened to this podcast, if you've never listened to this podcast before, howdy, welcome to the podcast. You're going to have a good time while you're here and you're going to get informed. If you've listened to this podcast before, then you know the section that we are not going to skip today. I do not have a tear tattoo, so we did get a review, but we did not get 10 Shikos on Shiko. What is a Shiko, by the way? A Shiko is an eWebResults branded term for social engagement. It stands for shares, likes, and follows. Shiko. The rules of this quote-unquote game are if we get a review and 10 Shikos on any one of our social platforms, social profiles, then we will skip the process of telling you how to write a review. We did get a review, but we did not get 10 Shikos. Yeah, it was close. I think I followed back like eight people. Yeah, it was, I think, though, that was maybe from the week before, probably. Yeah. By the way, I'm glad to be back. I missed the last podcast. I did tune in. I think Daniel did a great job. You and Chuck, punch in the face to Daniel. Daniel Dugasleeve, our content writer. DG. Good stuff. All right, let's see. So, what we will do now is... And that was an original article we did that I wrote, personally. Check out Podcast 361. Boom. All right, so, if you want to leave us a review, and we're going to ask you very kindly, please leave us a review. Here's how you can leave us a review. One of the ways

has three steps. You go onto iTunes, you create an account, you write a review. Hopefully, you'll make that review fast. And if you want to, if you choose to, send us an email at podcast at eweberresults.com. And let us know that you wrote that review, especially if you're in another country, because it is actually harder to find your reviews if you're in other countries. It's kind of a pain the way iTunes has set it up. Next, you could leave us a review on Stitcher. Yep. The best way to find us on Stitcher is to go to eweberresults.com and then click into any page. Go to the podcast page, and then from the podcast page, you'll see the Stitcher logo. Click the Stitcher logo. Once you get to the Stitcher page, the upper right corner of that page, there's a button that says write a review. Take advantage. Excellent. Next, on our Google My Business page, by the way, you guys don't even know this. I made it easier on our Google My Business page because we were using a link. We were forwarding what we're about to tell you to a particular search result page, and you had to click the review. Now, it actually has the pop-up, and it works in mobile. So, boom to me. Yay. All right. So, we've made it really easy because there's numbers and pluses and all sorts of crazy stuff. If you go directly to Google, all you have to do is go to... Well, not just that. Not only is it the numbers and stuff, the way Google has changed Google Local and Google My Business and Google Plus, that the regular Google Plus page is extremely difficult to find. And so, we created this path here to just bypass that entirely. So, all you have to do is go to ewebresults.com slash... Google Plus. Or slash... Google Plus. Or slash... G Plus. Or slash... G Plus. And all of those will take you to, in fact, a pop-up that says... Write a review. Write a review

and leave it. Make it sure it is... Five stars. And then, where else can they write a review? I'm drawing a blank. So, we... Facebook. Facebook. Go to facebook.com slash... Ewebresults. It was a dramatic pause. That was not a forgetful pause. It was a totally forgetful pause. There was nothing dramatic about it. Just, yeah, my turn. Ewebresults. Yeah. It's amazing what silence will trigger, right? Go there, and then you click the review. You know how to do it. And please make sure that's... Five stars. All right. So, that's all the ways that you can leave us a review. We probably left that one. It's been so long. So, thanks to you for making it so long. Because that just means you guys are out there shicoing us and leaving us reviews. So, really appreciate that. We will just tell you how you can follow us on our different profiles on different platforms. Things like facebook.com slash... Ewebresults. Twitter.com slash... Ewebresults. YouTube.com slash... Ewebresults. Instagram.com slash... Ewebresults. And linkedin.com slash company slash... Ewebresults. By the way, I haven't tested that since LinkedIn totally changed their kind of look and feel. So, it's possible that that doesn't work. But hopefully it does. If you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we are probably looking for you. Go ahead and call us and leave an audio resume. I'm a 713-510-7846. If you're interested in a free, comprehensive website profit analysis, please go to our website, ewebresults.com, and click the green button that you cannot miss. If you think you might be able to miss it, go ahead and try. It is now time for the favorite segment of the program, the Algorithm Cataclysm. Oh, yeah. That was good. You really do need to check out the YouTube video for that special effect. It's pretty phenomenal. Yeah. Facebook probably didn't get that effect. I think it got a little... Marcus, did you get a little trimmer over there from the Algorithm Cataclysm? Wait, I... There you go. Yeah. Now you're in. Awesome. So today's Algorithm Catman, it almost

was not Algorithm Cataclysm, but I decided to do it because it affects two things. One, it affects how your reviews are presented. Right. And two, it directly affects the search engine results page. Okay, yeah. So I brought it to the Algorithm Cataclysm. So dig this, and it's interesting because we were working, we got a plugin and some other stuff we've created to kind of help show stars, right? Right, right. So now Google has changed. Matter of fact, they've reduced the star rating threshold. I was like, man, what is the star rating threshold? Well, the threshold that Google had in place to determine when they show stars and what those stars actually are. Well, they reduced the amount for that rating. They said Google is now awarding stars for as little as one review. Wow. Now, I noticed that the other, like, maybe even two weeks ago, I didn't, like, take a note of it, like, write it down and share it with you, but I did notice it. Yeah, and so this has changed from their past policy, which required businesses to have at least five reviews before a star rating would be shown. The reason this is Algorithm Cat is because we harp on reviews. We got a whole segment in part of this podcast that helps us pursue reviews. Right. And the reason why is for reasons like this. Now, with this threshold being changed, the amount of reviews you get and how those stars are shown will likely change dynamically based off of each review you get. So, as long as they're four and five stars, then your four and five stars should show. But as soon as you get one that's lower, instead of Google allowing, you know... It to accumulate. Accumulate and then make the adjustment. No, they're going to make the adjustment immediately. Yeah. Good news and bad news. And so, as long as you're providing a fairly decent service and getting positive reviews, you should be A-okay. The highlight here is if you haven't been pursuing reviews, if

you haven't put something in place to follow with clients that then encouraged them to leave your review, you should start. Start now. Definitely. Start now. That's true. I hadn't even thought about that. You can get a lot, you know, one bad... We all know that people are more likely to leave a bad review than a good review. Yeah. So, a whole lot of people who had one bad review out there and were kind of happy it wasn't showing? Now you've got two stars or one star or half a star and nothing but negative reviews showing. Yeah. And so, the good news is all it takes is, you know, it works off averages. Yeah. You get, you know, one bad review and you get four good ones, then your average becomes a 3.5. Yeah. And so, it's not that difficult to get your star right. We finally have our stitcher up to 4.5. And that took forever. Right, because we had like three or five back-to-back where people were complaining about the fact that it wasn't getting published as opposed to the quality of the podcast. And so, we're finally back up there. So, thanks everybody who left a five-star review. I'm sorry. Five-star review. That's how I will get, man. Excellent. So, I had a little bit of news. This is actually from last week because I took the news down. This was interesting. Facebook is adjusting its mission, right? The mission, the previous mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. And then, they kind of realized with all this fake news that you can get them connected. But then, what do you do? Do you have a role after they're connected? And so, they're really trying to address the role that they play after they make a connection. Clearly, they're good at connecting people. I'll tell you what Facebook is really doing. I believe they are just, they already are technically a media company. Right. But they are sitting the groundwork to be a

media company. A media company. And your vision needs to be aligned with that. Absolutely. Next, Cloudbleed. I don't know if you've heard of Cloudbleed. So, you've heard of Cloudflare. It's a site that will actually cache your website and then feed it. And so, it's faster servers. They say that they may even have more servers than Amazon, that they're a lot bigger than people realize. I doubt it. Who knows? They might be, but I still doubt it. Maybe they're using Amazon servers. Yeah, they're using AWS. I don't think no, like... There was some bug... The space I give my daughter when they be like, yeah. I'm not convinced what you're telling me is the truth. There was some bug. Apparently, it had been in the code for a very long time, but only manifested itself after they switched some core server level processing. And then, it gave an overflow error. And they said, 1 in 3,300,000 website views through Cloudflare would have actually revealed information. And what happened is it actually got indexed. Oh. Yeah. So, they found it. Their number one, it took them a little while to announce it. I liked their approach was interesting. They got staff overseas and here, right? So, they were working on it 24 hours a day. They would just do a handoff and continue working on it. They had it fixed within like 20 hours. And then, before they released it, they wanted to clear out the index. Yeah. We got to make sure, look, we've already identified this problem and solved it and resolved it. Yeah. And we just telling y'all about it. Yep. And so, that way you can't go back and find it. Yeah. That was exactly... Because that's what would have happened. Yes. Oh, there's a leak? Let's go see what kind of data we can get. Exactly. So, anyway, I think they... And by the way, this is yet another time that we will tell you, you should change your password. Mm-hmm. Um, Facebook is adding job ads to their search feature. That's

interesting. And then, Yahoo had issued another, uh, hack warning that's kind of disappointing, uh, because it's just another one. You know what? I'm still... My boy Kelsey said this the other day. He posted it on Facebook. And I liked it and felt it had the exact same sentiments. His comment said, with all of the trouble Yahoo's been having, he's surprised every time he gets an email from somebody who's still using Yahoo. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, me too. When somebody emails me from Yahoo, I'll be like, okay, I'm still using it. Yeah. So... Are you nervous about your... Everything. ...Yahoo source going away and having been hacked? Yeah. Absolutely. You got a little bit of news? Yeah, I got quite a bit of news here. Let's talk YouTube, right? What do you hate about YouTube? Ads. Ads. Dig this. So, YouTube is killing off an ad format that everybody hates. According to YouTube, they said, we're committed to providing a better ad experience for users online. It's part of that we decided to stop supporting the 30-second unskippable ads as of 2018 and focus instead on formats that work well for both users and advertisers. That statement came from a YouTube spokesperson. Punching the face to you, YouTube, for not forcing us to watch these lame 30-second ads. And kicking the shins for waiting until 2018. Yeah, like... What's up with that? Like, 10 more months, you know what I'm saying? They're like, man, that's 10 more months of ad dollars. We'll be telling our grandkids, remember that 10 more months that we had to wait for 30. We knew they were going away, but we still couldn't click through them. Yeah, so I'm just glad y'all are realizing that people hate these ads, and that level of hatred for these ads probably does not help ad revenue go up because they don't... They're not getting clicked. They're not getting... Frankly, the YouTube view is probably going down because you're forcing me to watch 30-second of these ads. There are other video places on

the web. I guarantee this video is available on Facebook also. Yeah. Ad-free. Yep. Just saying. So let's talk some more Google news. This is almost algo cat. This is official news from Google. Have you noticed the new ads, how they look? So over the last year, we've covered Google-sponsored ads changing the color probably three different times. Right, right. When we went to black, it went to yellow. There was a green. Then they had the green. It's green right now. Okay. Now the new one that they're rolling out is white with the green outline. Okay. Okay. I saw it once, and then I've been seeing the regular green, but apparently Google's green outline ad label is replacing the solid green version. According to Google, they said, we routinely test potential improvements to the looking field of our search results page. After experimenting with a new search ad label with the green outline, we decided to roll it out. This new ad label is more legible and continues to make our results page easier to read for our users with clear indication of our ad labeling. Yeah. This is an ad, and we just need you to really know it's an ad. So I have a feeling that they're probably on to this, which is we zone it out, and after we zone it out, their pay-per-click click-through rate goes down. So they change. And when they change the color, they're going back up. Yeah. And so this is going. Yeah. So in June, it'll be red outline. Red with a yellow outline. And then it's going to be like. It'll be back to the solid green state again. But I get it, and I know it's just to make a noticeable change to drive up ad dollars. I thought the same thing. With as many searches they have, I mean, a tenth of a tenth of a percent of increased click-through rate. It's a lot. It's a ton of money. Yeah, exactly. It's worth having a team of designers, team, working on that little ad. Working

on that to say, you know what? Let's just give it that green outline. Give it a smiley. I'm going to salary. Did you guys pay for that decision? Dig this. More news from Google. Talking about Google My Business. Now, this here is interesting. Some businesses, hold on. It says, yeah, new Google My Business guidelines state that virtual offices are not allowed for service area businesses. Service area businesses are businesses that serve customers at their locations. They should have one page for the central office or location and then designate a service area from that point. Service area businesses cannot list a virtual office unless that office is staffed during business hours. And we know how they verify that. Yeah. Yeah. They verify. They will get on the phone and call. They will discuss all kinds of ways. They verify a video, do a video. Yeah. They want to do a video hangout like with somebody at the office so they can check and see if this is legit or not. I get it. Google, they're trying to crack down on all these fake offices and bad Google Maps addresses and locations and things like that. I totally get it. Consider this. Right. Let's say somebody has all these virtual offices everywhere and you don't know that they're virtual but you need that service. Right. And so, yeah, if you do the Google search and say this person hasn't checked that box. It's around the corner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Then you're going to pull up like, okay, what's going on here? And so I totally get Google trying to remove that kind of stuff. Search for your SEOs out there. Let's include it. Right. We have some accounts where they may have, it may not be a virtual office per se. They have a warehouse storage. They got a warehouse storage, exactly some plant where they just don't see customers at. But they do have people working there and so we used that address which was at the time part of the good. But now since they

don't really see people over there, we're going to either have to make some changes or get my client to add a lobby. You know what I'm saying? You need a lobby, though. And a body. Yeah. And somebody or at least a phone that y'all can answer. Yeah. Last piece of news here. Oh, no. This is the continuation of that. They said some businesses like pizzerias that have both a restaurant seating to deliver and deliver a piece to the customers are hybrid service businesses and that's okay. They can show their storefront and designate a service area. But if you serve customers at your address and you want to set a service area, your business location should be staffed by your team and able to receive customers during the stated hours. Google will determine how best to display your business address based on your information information as well as information from other sources. That's what I hate right there, Google. That information from other sources part because it'd be... I wouldn't hate it as much if it wasn't hard to change. Right. Right? You try to get into your Google My Business account. You see all your stuff here. You need to change this menu link because the link isn't active or it's not right and the site that that menu came from is outdated and we can't update it. But you won't allow us to update the link because you pulled it from a third-party source. That is kind of douchey. Kicking the shin. Yeah. And so hopefully y'all address that with these other changes. And that's all my news. All right. So we do have one review. This is from Daniel Barbour. And it is, of course, five stars. These guys have a really great podcast and it's evident they know their stuff. They pull out all the stops and put their expertise on display. I've appreciated learning about SEO from the experts at eWebResults. These guys are top shelf. That's delicious. Yeah, top shelf. We're having a team event today and we're going to

have to have some top shelf from that event. I can dig it. Yeah, absolutely. All right. We've got some more punches in the face real quick. One patiffs and two questions real quick. Both of these, all three of these came from Twitter. The patiff goes to Kelly Karpinski. Yeah, Kelly Karpinski. She says, a friend referred to me at eWebResults podcast. Listened to three episodes today alone. Must check it out. Punching the face to you, Kelly. Thank you for tuning in. Hopefully we helped you out. I dig these two questions. These questions came in via Twitter also. First one says, at eWebResults, I love your podcast. I have been a listener for over a year. Question for you. Thoughts on live streaming and the value of Facebook versus Instagram versus YouTube? Could YouTube streaming help grow subscribers if we are struggling on YouTube? Let me answer this in the reverse. Yes, obviously. If you were broadcasting live on YouTube as we are right now, then it could help grow your subscribers. If you push that. If you notice, we don't push go subscribe to us on YouTube. Go subscribe to us on YouTube because that's not where most of our content is engaged at. Our video content actually gets way more engagement on Facebook, which is why we push the Facebook live. Now, to answer your question, in regards to the value, I think it really depends on what you're broadcasting and when you're streaming. This is an evening stream and you don't need it recorded. You just want to put it out there, Instagram live, all day. You'll get the best results. You'll get a lot more engagement. You'll get people liking and commenting. You'll get a lot of activity there. However, if you're streaming something that you may want to watch at another time, you may want to save so other people can go back and do it, then I'm going to suggest that you use Facebook. That way, you can tag people. Those same people can share. Those same people can comment. It'll

become a post in your timeline where you can share it and refer to it later. Now, if you want people, you're trying to drive traffic to your website, then I'm going to suggest YouTube because YouTube is a Google product. You can embed that. You can embed the Facebook also, a little wonky, but you can embed that YouTube video. Definitely take advantage of the fact that it's on YouTube and the SEO value associated with that. Then, if you're in a situation where you're trying to monetize it, where you got exclusive content, then YouTube is definitely the direction you want to go for that. Right now, we're broadcasting live from Facebook on Chris's phone and YouTube from our desktop, our business account. That's both. We can have a copy that goes on our website that gets optimized that we can use for that and then place the same content socially so we can engage with people. We can see comments. I would say it really depends on what you're broadcasting and when and who your target is to determine which live stream is going to have the most value. Great question, though. Yes. Last question. It comes from Smith Social. Probably go check out Dane. We had Dane on the podcast. Yeah, check out Dane. Dane. Golden. Golden. Golden. I think it's Golden. I know it's Golden. Gold something. Goldman. I think it's Golden, actually. Yeah. Dane Golden. Check out Dane. Yeah, he's with hey.com. Yeah, H-E-Y.com. Because he didn't like it when I said hey.com. Look, that's not H-E-Y. That's like H-E-E-Y-Y-Y. Oh, yeah. Y-Y-Y-Y. But yeah, go check him out. He's, in fact, we need to get him back on, right? Yeah. Because he sent us a really good article about how to increase views and people to view the entire video by a huge amount. Yeah, well, he's probably loving the fact that YouTube is cutting off that ad format. All right. Next question. This one comes from Smith Social, a social media company. They're at Smith Social WA. Guess they're in Washington. He

says, at E-Rib Results, hours of trawling. Can't figure out why some Google searchers have no AdWords on top. Help. Is it a budget thing? Hashtag Best SEO Podcast. Well, Smith Social, thank you for tuning in. Appreciate the question. And most likely it is a budget thing, right? If you're just not bidding enough, for example, to be on the first page, you're not going to show on the first page. Easiest way to check is log on to your AdWords and look at the campaign. And it will tell you, bid not high enough to be shown on the first page. So that's kind of the easy answer and obviously what the likely culprit is. Now, it could be the fact that maybe the term that you're bidding on or that you're searching for has been flagged by Google. It could be trademarked by Google. Right. And so they're just not showing it. Or worse, it probably was being showed at some point in time, but people began to spam it or the results weren't all that relevant. Or maybe there's a low search volume. And so Google says, you know what? We're just not going to show any ads for this term. And you might find them at the bottom of the page, first page, potentially on the second page in those types of situations. In those situations. Exactly. That's what I was going to say. Search it. And if you don't see it, click the page two or page three and see if you start seeing ads. Then that'll just let you know that whoever's bidding on it is really low bidding or it's a really low quality ad. Or frankly, the results that show up from that type of search aren't that relevant. And either way, that's why Google's probably not showing that ad. So social, hope that answers your question. Hope that helps. Appreciate your tweet. Punch in the face to you for listening, checking in with us. That's it. Those are the questions. All right. I believe that is the potatoes of the

podcast. It is now time to get into the meat. We have a little bit of instruction for you before we get into the meat. Remember, we asked you to tweet us. We're actually going to ask you to tweet one more time. What we want to do is make sure the author of this article knows we're talking about it. So what should, let's tweet him and say, hey, hashtag SEO podcast is using your article. Today's author is Ron Dodd, good folks over at Search Engine Journal. You can find him on Twitter at visitor underscore search. So he's at V-I-S-I-T-U-R-E underscore search. Tweet him. Tell him. Hashtag SEO podcast 362. Talking about your article. Exactly. And thank you for that. Appreciate it. And I'm actually doing it right now. That's what I'm distracted by in doing that. Learning about getting, how to get fired. Yeah, yeah. How to get fired. Exactly. So he posted, Ron posted this article on Search Engine Journal. Nine sure ways to get fired in SEO. Caught my attention immediately because we do SEO. Unfortunately, you know, we haven't retained every client we've had. And so we've been fired before. And it just happens. It's kind of a part of the game. And so I wanted to see exactly what these nine ways were. He starts off by saying whether you are an in-house SEO extraordinaire, a freelancer, or an agency owner, there are many pitfalls that can expedite your termination. He's right. It's all kind of reasons you can fail. Right? Even if you're providing an awesome service, an amazing service, you're getting results. If your client just doesn't get it, maybe, or they're failing to close the deal, they're failing to sell, then you will get the blame for that. And you could likely be terminated. This is what it is. But he has nine sure ways. Number one. Number one. He says, you are bad at reporting. So this is the first way to sure, the first surefire way to get fired doing SEO. He says, you're bad at reporting.

He goes on to say, you could be really great at your job or you could be really bad. But without good SEO reporting, the client won't know which you are. And he's absolutely right, man. Absolutely. I hear Chris on the phone all the time talking to different clients and leads about the value of reporting. And then I spend bulk of my time, at least 40 to 50 hours out of my work week in analytics, just going through reporting, listening to calls, looking at data, understanding the numbers. Because those numbers are extremely important. We're not bad at reporting. We're actually really good at reporting. Because we understand that reporting is part of the game. It drives the ship. It drives the decision makings. It drives the choices you make from a marketing perspective. It drives the choices you make in regards to your SEO and your site changes. You must understand. Matter of fact, I wrote down reporting is so important, which is why we dedicate time to it every single month. Not only dedicated time, but then scheduled time with the client. Like, it's important that these clients understand what these numbers are. And I also wrote down, just make sure that those you report to understand what the numbers are. Right. I think a lot of problems is, and you may have talked to people who've gotten reports. Yeah. And I've got a good story once you finish. So here's the story. I'm talking with a prospect today. And this is probably my fourth conversation with him. And I ran a report. Showed that the SEO is not that good. I actually met him up in Dallas. Really nice guy. Had a good meal with him. And then he was like, okay, I want to go over that report a little bit more. And in the interim, he sent me a couple things, including reports from the other SEO company, the current SEO company. And I just glanced at it. I was on my phone. I didn't have time. But I clicked through their

SEO optimization report. And their SEO optimization report had flags of stuff that they hadn't done. They didn't have a description tag. Their title tag was super long. Right? You know what that means, right? Yeah, that they didn't do SEO on that page. Or they certainly didn't do the right SEO on that page. And it turned out, actually, that the title would have made a decent description. Could have been better. But they got the title all wrong. So they're sending him these reports. He literally, he's in a fog. It's like 18 pages. And you and I look at the 18. Oh, good. That's interesting. Wow, that's good. That shouldn't be like that. And somebody who's an owner is like, that's an 18-page report. I'm not looking at that. That, one of the things I wanted to, what you were talking about, you get prepped. You look at the data. You don't just look at the data. You look at the data. Study this data. With the intent of explaining it to the customer. Because it's so easy. You know, Google Analytics, we could automate a report to our clients every 15 minutes. And they send it to you every week, every 15 minutes, every month if you like it. But it would serve no value if you got the report and didn't understand what it meant. And more importantly, if you couldn't take the data from that report and learn how to use it, how to act on it. And so, that's why I spend two, three hours just looking at the numbers before meeting with the client. That's so you can know, you know, what your traffic is doing, how that traffic is performing. Is it mobile? Is it desktop? How are they converting, right? Most of our time reporting is all about the results, right? I'm looking at sources and how are they turning the leads and which one turns into a lead and why did it turn into a lead and what pages did they need to take at and look at in

order for them to finally convert. So, then I can talk to you, client, and tell you this is the path that people are usually taking to convert on your site. How can we improve this? And then I'll give you some recommendations. You get some feedback. And that's how we continue to grow your business. The point is, if you're an SEO company, an agency like us, or an independent guy, freelancer, whoever it is, maybe you're in-house doing SEO, the first way, surefire way to get fired is if you're bad at reporting. You have to understand the numbers. Understanding the data is extremely important. And understand the numbers and explain it to the person in charge. Exactly. Number two. Number two. Second reason you can get fired in SEO, he says, giving unrealistic goals or expectations. Man, we hear this all the time. Look, he goes on to say, one reason that so many companies claim to be burned by so-called bad SEO companies has more to do with a lack of realistic goals or expectations. I've seen it time and time again where an SEO company is overzealous on promising certain results in a short window. Yeah, it happens. People get anxious for the sale and they maybe haven't done the right research. It couldn't even be malicious. They just have a process that works and so they haven't done the research for your specific industry and they assume that that process is going to work for you. And it may, it just may not happen in the time frame that they thought, right? And so that's why we got to take that time to do the research and figure out what search volume looks like. Yeah. How many people are typically searching around this time of the month? How many of your pages actually rank in a place where you can benefit from that search traffic? And that alone can begin to help you diagnose what type of traffic you're going to get and the likelihood of them actually converting. But if you haven't done

that research and you just got a hot client on the phone, they got a big budget and you want to close the deal, yeah, you can. We can deliver whatever you want in two months. And you may even do a good job, but if you don't deliver what you promised, then you're going to get fired. No, in that time period, you're going to get fired. Even if it takes you four months because you just underestimated it, yeah, you need to know that up front. And so, yeah, I totally understand this one. And we try not to do that. Frankly, I try to over-expect that. I'd rather over-bid it and then deliver faster. Yeah, it's going to take nine months. It's going to take six to eight months. Yeah. It's going to take six to eight months, and I'm really trying to kill it in three or four. Right. And just know that I'm telling you six to eight because I need to manage your expectations. I'd rather over-deliver and under-promise. Yep. And so, yeah, number two, giving unrealistic goals and expectations. Number three. Number three, third reason, third surefire way to get fired doing SEO is tanking the rankings. Right? You get a new client and their rankings drop. It sucks. He says, this one is less prevalent, but if you make a company client drop in rankings, this will usually equal your swift termination. Yep. He's right, man. It just happens. And the thing is, you got to plan for it, right? Like, this can be okay, for example, if they rank for the wrong terms. Right. Like, maybe you took on a new account and they came to you because they weren't getting business and you realize they're ranking, but they're just ranking for really the wrong terms. Right. Then it's okay to go ahead and revisit this content and make your adjustments because, frankly, you don't need them ranking for those terms anyway. Right. However, client is ranking maybe for some pretty good terms and they're already getting a good amount of

traffic and they brought you on to help them get more leads or get more traffic from different sources or something. Yeah. You don't lose that ranking because that's a surefire way to lose that job, to lose that client. You want to make sure that you're not making those type of changes. He even listed out a list and I'll give you two of the seven he said. One of them was, and I like this one because I've seen this mistake, giving bad advice on consolidating pages which are already ranking for good keywords. Right. So, let's say an example I just gave, site is ranking. Right. And these are target terms and they get high traffic and they're converting from this page, but you realize that maybe there's a better term you could be going after and it's relevant to that page. And so, since that page is already ranking, you want to re-optimize them for the new term. Man, and that new adjustment included like a title change or a URL change or a description change or a change. H1 change. Enough to move you from page position 2 to position 10 or position 2 to page 2. Ouch. Ouchie. That's a surefire way to get fired. To get fired. But the last one he said, well, number seven was changing the navigational bar categories without looking to see if those pages are getting a lot of traffic. So, understand that organic traffic is built a lot off links and so maybe you come in and you want to give them a more user-friendly menu, easy to use, which is the right thing to do. But, look, if you were moving the page out of the menu, out of the main menu and that page was ranking really, really well, the page is going to drop. It's going to drop in ranking and you just need to know that, which is why I said sometimes ranking dropping is okay as long as you know it's going to happen and you're prepared for it. You got a

plan in place to deal with that. Don't let it be a surprise to you because then that's when the problem really is. Number four. Number four. Being afraid to fail. This is a good one. He says this might be somewhat hypocritical after the above point, but what I really mean is don't be so conservative that you never push the envelope. SEO is constantly changing. If you're not evolving or pushing the envelope every now and then, you will see your competitors overtake you, which can get you canned. He's right. Look, look, you must try new things. Never get stagnant with SEO. And this is experience speaking. We've had a client where they came on. We did a good job. They got a good ranking. They were at number one for like 12 different phrases. Business was good. They didn't want to make changes because they were scared. We were like, okay. And so it just, it hung. Mistake, yeah. It hung. And then before you know it, it dropped. It didn't hang. It's like, what happened? Well, we didn't push the envelope. We didn't go make changes. We didn't go keep up with what was going on. And partially our fault for not pushing back against the client. Like, hey, we really need to make these changes. They were in more of a, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of situation. And we knew that even though it's not broke, it's breaking. Yeah. It's constantly breaking. It's constantly breaking if you're not constantly fixing it. Yeah. And so, you know, that's unlearned. Now we've pushed changes regardless. And then we just talked to the clients and helped them understand why we made those changes. But don't be afraid to fail. Like, SEO changes so much. We got everything from AMP pages to new ads looking a certain way to Google, you know, prefacing SSLs and even Chrome demanding that it be in SSL. Like, all of these changes happen all the time. And so, don't be afraid to fail. Like, you have

to go and make these changes. Don't be afraid to switch to SSL because you're not sure. Right. Make it happen. You just got to get it done. Don't be scared. Number five. Five. Listening to bad advice. We try to give good advice. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. But listening to bad advice is a sure way to get fired. He goes on to say, I've seen a lot of people in the SEO industry review rock solid advice and then decide not to use it. Either it's too hard or too time consuming or some other lame excuse. He's right. At the end of the day, if you have the knowledge. By the way, it is time consuming. It's very time consuming. Very time consuming. That's why we got a whole team of people doing different things. Somebody for off page. Somebody for content. Somebody for code. Because it's time consuming. And if you had one person doing all of that, they just wouldn't have enough time. And so, you need to be able to divvy it up. And I'll say this. Not only listen to us on Secrets of Internet Marketing, hashtag Best SEO Podcast. Check out Search Engine Journal, one of my favorite publications. Check out Search Engine Land. Another good publication. Check out Mars. Mars blog is awesome. Great information there. Those are my three kind of top sources. You may want to go to Search Engine Watch and some other places like that to get more data. Marketing Land. It's kind of a spinoff of Search Engine Land. The key is find good data, read it, research it, absorb it, and then try it. You have to be able to make those kind of changes and keep learning and not taking bad advice. What you don't want to do is go talk to some company who's giving you the wrong advice. Pushing you down the path to do something. Black cat. Somebody encouraging you to go buy a whole bunch of fake links. Fiber links. Which we're going to talk about later

in point number seven. The key is don't listen to the bad advice. Find your good advice and then take heed to it. Knowledge without action. Kind of what you're saying. Knowledge without action is just knowledge. It's just knowledge. Exactly. It's useless. Number six. Six. No testing or learning. Look, it's always a learning. One of the reasons we do this podcast is we've got to keep learning. Yeah, exactly. We're going to teach you guys. Yeah, people don't understand that the podcast helps us to learn because I have to read. I've got to research. I've got to try it. And luckily, we've got a client base big enough where we can try stuff and see stuff, right? But he goes on to say, look, you will no doubt fail if you become complacent with SEO. Google is the ultimate rat race. Those who get slow and don't conform usually die. He said the reason for this is if you're gaining rankings, it means someone has to drop in the rankings. It's a very cutthroat practice and people tend to forget that. If you get complacent and stop trying to perfect your skill or craft, you will eventually get left in the dust by your competitors. He's right. The reason I tell people that this is the reason our service comes with a monthly fee even is because every month we're fighting. Tooth to nail. Somebody else, yeah. Writing content, building links, making changes, adjusting the site, writing content, building links, making changes, adjusting the site, writing content, building links, making changes, then writing content, building links, making changes, then adjusting the site. It has to happen month to month to month because it's a cutthroat business. the day you stop adding content, the day you stop adjusting the site, the day you stop building links, guess what? Your competitors start breaking. You start breaking and you start dropping and your ranking begins to tank. And so it's a constant service. You have to keep testing. You must constantly improve and it's just part of the game. It's

just part of the game. There isn't a set it and forget it type situation. We're getting people who come to us for a redesign. Well, maybe blue one-armed widgets. Maybe. That's probably a set it and forget it. I haven't looked at it in a while. Three years now? Yeah, it's been a while. But something that is so obscure and has no search volume and nobody's interested in getting position for it, probably you can set it and forget it. But anything else, you talked about the competition. There's also the algorithm changes. I mean, we have a segment called the algorithm cataclysm because those algorithm changes affect your placement. And so if you're not constantly making adjustments, not following us and those algorithm cataclysms, then you can get left in the dust. Not even because your competitors are doing something intentional, but because Google made some algorithm change that favored your competitors over you. Your competitor went with SSL and you didn't. Yep. It's enough to switch your position. Yep. It can happen. Number seven. Seven. Buying links, right? We're talking about nine surefire ways to get fired doing SEO. Number seven is buying links. He says buying links is something that Google is actively trying to eradicate and companies and clients generally do not look at this favorably. He goes on to say, I know of companies who have purchased links and then were caught red handed down the road when an SEO consultant came in or the client found out via other means. It's just not a good situation to be in. Look, buying links just kind of sucks, right? It's just one of those kind of black hat practices that don't really work. But link building, however, is necessary Yes. for SEO, right? And so you're getting this link building is is the probably hardest most tedious time consuming most frustrating part of SEO, right? But you have to get it done. And that's why people who sell links make a lot of money because people think that they can just buy those links.

It just doesn't work. It's in the wrong location. It just don't work. You need to if you're an agency or you're an SEO or you're an in-house guy whatever work on a strategy work on a strategy right now that'll help you just build links. I won't just give you hours right now but what I will say is work with your clients right? Like leverage your clients leverage the resources they have the networks of individuals they have because to be told your client likely has other business owner clients or friends or contacts who have websites maybe even a similar industry but then their network will arise easy link building opportunities. I will give you this though if you're a client or even yourself within a service kind of provider business like an AC repair or something like that definitely build links from your manufacturers yes right so if you sell start there right if you sell Goodman ACs make sure you're listed on the Goodman site as a distributor or retailer whatever category you fall in with the corresponding link and do that for every manufacturer you carry that's one of the easiest ways to start building links in a way that actually is going to be shown favor by Google it's a relevant brand name high power domain name linked to you right versus buying a whole bunch of random links number eight number eight and this is the non-surefire ways to get fired in SEO number eight is sending bad outreach emails those suck you get those emails like hey we want to link to you and we know that you've got blogs on your site and we write articles similar to that matter of fact here a link to some check them out worst email to get in the world always spam matter of fact he says it should be he could have titled this one do not hire shady outreach specialists he's right look if that's part of the strategy for the company you're dealing with or if you're an agency and

that's your strategy it's time to change up they'll say the emails just don't work you need to work on a different link building strategy again so let me give you a pro tip because outreach is important it is important to reach out to people it is important to create those relationships if your business is doing events let's say like you got an event program or you're doing some local events and things like that that person is the best person for you to give the task of building outbound links because they've already have those relationships in place they're already in the habit of reaching out to people and scheduling events and showcasing your company and highlighting your information and so you give the same person the task of whoever they're talking to go ahead and link to us also right take advantage of your personnel the problem is we tend to find a script like this that you get from some site that worked once and send that to everyone in your contact list and everyone now flags you as spam right I believe that's called being a douche you don't want to do that and so instead like take the time to put somebody in place over that who has the time to send out a personalized email you know not some canned message that's just insert name here but a really personalized email with some meaning and truth behind it with some messaging behind it with the face behind it and a relationship behind it and only then will your chances slightly go up that they even link to you but if you don't do all of those things then they're definitely not going to link at all stop sending bad outreach emails it's just not a good look and very douchey don't be a douche and last one number eight number nine that was number eight number nine is you're just not getting results right it's kind of the reason we switched from e-web style to e-web results because our focus became on

the actual results nobody wants to pay an arm and a leg for SEO and marketing services and not getting a return on that investment and so the ninth surefire way to get fired in SEO is to not get results matter of fact he goes on to say this last one should be a no-brainer SEO is a results driven business no one wants to do SEO they just want SEO to get them results however if you're not getting results don't fret just yet he also says that if you're not getting results do not put all the blame on yourself do not give into the client or employer pressure and do not look for shortcuts to get results do the best job he can using best SEO practices and the rest will take care of itself that's why we test and measure you know what I'm saying that's why we test and we measure that's why we brought in you know degreed content writers that's why we brought in degreed project managers that's why you know I have 15 years experience in analytics and look at analytics all day it's why we had these things in places because you have to get results yeah we have to generate phone calls we have to generate form submissions or downloads or subscriptions or whatever your goal is if the SEO you know that you're paying us for if the PPC you're paying us for if the email marketing and the social media marketing that you're paying for isn't generating results then you're likely going to stop paying and you're going to fire us or you're going to fire whoever you're dealing with exactly you must generate the results at the end of the day that's why we meet every month so we can confirm what results you're getting and then continue to improve on those results so you'll get better results it's one thing to send you a report that said you got 50 form submissions and 50 phone calls but if those 50 phone calls were all not

relevant and the 50 form submissions were low end low budget not qualified then we really sent you 100 garbage leads which is okay from the perspective of that's why we meet every month so you can tell me man those phone calls sucked and the leads were garbage because of this and that and then we can go make adjustments plan of action for how to fix it and then make adjustments and rinse and repeat and we do it again the next month and every month we make those changes so you end up getting the best results possible we provide the best service possible and everyone wins man punch in the face to you Ron Dodd and the good folks over at yeah that's him thank you yeah he's already checking us out so punch in the face to you man for the article man nine surefire ways to get fired in SEO because all of these are ways that you could get fired and if you've been fired then hopefully you fixed it yeah you fix it for your next client exactly getting fired sucks that's true I mean we've we've been fired and haven't come back I'll tell you that that's pretty that's pretty exciting especially when you get fired because they didn't know yeah right when you try to tell them like look this is what's happening so that's probably the one thing that's not on here right because he talked about the thing well he did kind of mention half about educate making sure the client knew so the reason in this particular client that I'm thinking of that we got fired was just communication we weren't as responsive as we are now and that's not on the list from the context like they knew their results I don't think they understood how good their results were clearly they didn't they were only gone three months but they didn't just for them to leave to realize oh oh they're good they're good yeah yeah so so communication make sure you're communicating with the

client yeah that could have been number ten bad communication with the client is a surefire way to get you fired I've got a prospect good results but the communication wasn't great I've got a prospect right now I look at his results and I'm like so why are you talking to us you like got pretty good results already and goes yeah well a good result that I would like is that he returned my phone call I'm like alright I get it we can help you because we in fact return phone calls alright any any what news no no what news alright so if you like this podcast in fact we mentioned a tweet earlier go ahead and go back and do that tweet and so apparently Ron already knows that we're talking about his article so that's pretty exciting but but go ahead and share this with three of your friends just just three of them if you're on Facebook go ahead and share tag them in it like I say preferably business owners because we really want people who this content we're putting out can actually help yeah right so tag three business owners and hey check this podcast out great information cool thank you so much if you are actually looking to grow your business with the largest largest simplest marketing tool on the planet internet call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business our phone number is 713-592-6724 we have a program we've just created it created it called instant leads lead lead lead lead guaranteed teed teed teed both of those putting together instant and leads and guaranteed basically it's focused on pay per click an optimized a highly over we would even say overly optimized we've built into the system enough time so we can continue to tweak and adjust and do A-B testing on these landing pages you know a lot of the approach of people who are doing PPC is oh 15% of spend but if you're spending a thousand dollars a hundred and fifty bucks is not enough

money to make adjustments to your landing page it's not enough money really to make a lot of adjustments to your pay per click campaign and so because you're paying so little your campaign is actually suffering so this is a campaign again where we're focused on that landing page putting that together in the first 30 days putting together the PPC campaign in the first 30 days on day 31 you're getting leads we call it instant leads leads leads guaranteed if you're interested in that go ahead and let us know let's see if you're in Houston and you're doing network I'm just going to keep this really short you will now go to upsocialnetwork.com get to the next event please it's pretty powerful upsocialnetwork.com go check it out yeah please remember we were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street Suite 106 Houston Texas 77092 you can get a transcript and video and audio of this podcast at our website ewebresults.com until the next pod hey you guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes I don't even know he's like I don't think I'm at the end right now we really appreciate you I mean we got what two Twitter questions we got a review I gotta say we're a little lacking on the shikos can you step your game up just a little bit no really we appreciate you guys making us the most popular podcast on iTunes our goal is to double our listenership this year and some of that's going to be with interviews and some of it's going to be frankly a lot of it's going to be with you guys sharing our podcast with other people so thank you so much until the next podcast my name is Chris Barrett I'm Charles Lewis bye bye for now balance check balance check 362 SEO podcast 362 talk about marketing is what we finna do so listen close cause we got new tips for you Chris and Chuck back again and we getting loose yeah SEO podcast 362

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