DIY PPC, Google Places Reviews - #seopodcast 140

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Got it right there, Tom. I did. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. As hopefully you know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Otherwise, I have no idea how you found this podcast or why you subscribed. I guess internet marketing would have worked. Yeah, because we cover more than SEO. We cover PPC, we cover social, we cover local, we cover internet marketing in the whole. Everything. I've thought about, you know, we typically, when somebody asks us what we do, we say we make great websites, we put them on the first page of Google, and then we iterate with the traffic from Google to make sure that that traffic converts into business. I'm thinking about changing that to, we use all the tools on the web to help businesses grow their business. Yeah. Yeah. As always, we have a little bit of news, and we have a tip from our previous podcast. This is podcast number 140. So, in Podcast 139, our tip was, hire an expert or let an agency run your PPC campaign. The small investment will ultimately save you money, and most importantly, save you time. Definitely. Definitely want to save time. What you don't want to do is waste time and money. And so, whatever results you happen to generate by managing the PPC campaign yourself, you probably broke even or even lost when you consider your time as an owner sitting in front of a computer pointing and clicking. We were talking to a very successful business owner this week. He was using a service that didn't allow him to have access to all the details you can get in Google or in Bing, pay-per-click campaigns. He took it over himself. He actually did a good job. He improved it. Yeah. Significantly better than the company that he was utilizing. And, you know, we get on the phone with him. We're like,

so how much time are you spending? 30 minutes a day. Well, first off, here's what I would do different on your campaign so I can actually improve it. You haven't done those things. And 30 minutes a day for a business owner, you know, shouldn't you be, you know, making sure your employees have what they need to succeed the most? Shouldn't you be schmoozing with that client who sends you a ton of business instead of, you know, preoccupying yourself with a paper-click campaign? Yeah, it's two to three hours a week. And if you're 30 minutes a day, it probably means an hour. Yeah, let's be ready. So that's a whole work day total, you know, that business owners could be doing something a little bit more time-friendly. Productive. Yeah, productive. Hey, hey, remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. Yes, sir. And we have a mantra. What is that? Don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. Have a good look. If you are in front of some sort of electronic mobile device, go ahead right now and tweet. And you are going to tweet or hashtag SEOpodcast140. Just let us know you're watching us. Tag us at eWebStyle. That way we'll know you got it. Matter of fact, this portion of the program is sponsored by Google Nexus. And so, you know, use your phone, man. Tweet us. Let us know you're watching. And by sponsored, we mean we're proud to have one. Yeah. We're proud to have paid full price for one. Hey, Nexus, you know, just hook us up. It's not a big... I still can't believe Matt Cutts hasn't called us. I don't just... I don't... I don't get it. You know, here we are. Most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Hey, I wanted to talk about this. I met an incredibly dynamic CEO and very young, actually, CEO of a not-for-profit organization. So, guys, go check out the website. It's thirstproject.org. Basically, they put in wells in remote areas in Africa. The stories are, you know, of course,

any sort of kind of charitable story you get out of Africa is not going to be pretty. And it wasn't. What I thought was interesting is for $10,000, you can significantly change a community. So, that's what they do. They raise money to $10,000 goes towards putting in the well. And, you know, kids and women are walking, you know, three hours to go get water. And because they're doing that each way, by the way, they can't get an education. So, it really does totally... To go get water that's, frankly, bad water. He makes the point, this is water we wouldn't step in. And they're collecting it so that they can drink it. You know, and there's a ton of health problems. I just thought it was really interesting that, you know, if you could just put in a well, put it conveniently located, now kids can get an education. And that's kind of cool. So, I'm not going to push that. Just go check it out. Thirstproject.org. And Seth Maxwell. He's a pretty cool cat. 24-year-old kid. He was living the... Punch in the face. Yeah, punch in the face for Seth. He was living the L.A. me lifestyle. And, you know, saw some photos and had some experiences that changed him. And now he's the CEO. You know, he's... At their events, they've got actually some of the cast of Glee are involved in his project. Apparently, I actually know some of them personally, which is kind of cool. So, go check that out. Thirstproject.org. In terms of news, I mean, is there any greater news this week than the... Well, is it the iPad 3? Or is it iPad 3rd generation? Or is it the new iPad that... I don't even know what it's called. They call it the new iPad. It's technically not that... Anyway. And one of the points they made, I thought this was interesting. They being news people. I thought this was interesting. Media. They didn't want to call it iPad 3 because, statistically, this will be the first iPad

for a whole lot of people. And so, you don't want to go out and have the first one be the iPad 3. I got the new iPad. So, interesting marketing thing. What's different... It's iPad 3. Yeah, it's iPad 3. Around here, it'll be known as the iPad 3. Yeah. And we may not see one for a while. You know what's different on it? Well, I was surprised that... Well, I found out most of the rumors that they had going on weren't true. Like, it does have a home button. Yeah. You know, and they were saying that it wasn't... They was... I heard something along the lines of... The screen was supposed to be kind of beveled so you could, you know, feel certain stuff. And that's not accurate either. So... Yeah. 3.1 million pixels. Wow. Yeah. Stupid clarity. Yeah. They pulled up... This is on TV news, not, you know, internet news. They pulled up an HD TV and then showed how many more pixels are in this tiny iPad than your big HD TV. It's pretty crazy. It's also got 5 megapixel camera. I love their term, resolutionary. By the way, we have a new term to our vocabulary today. We'll be getting to that soon. And then I also thought this was interesting. TI, Texas Instruments, their profits are down. They're selling less Kindle fires than they had anticipated. Of course. You know, South by Southwest, and so it's not surprising that they chose now to release the 3. Remember last year, they had the whole pop-up Apple store out there. I'm surprised they didn't do that this year. I mean, with the 3 coming out. They probably will. Oh, yeah. Yeah, maybe an undercover thing. Next week, it'll be crazy out there. iPad. Although, are they coming out? They may not be coming out for two more weeks or something. Yeah, I think the release date was the 15th. So, that's next week. They probably missed. Next Saturday. Yeah, next weekend or something. Maybe they'll have one day at South... How long

is South by Southwest? It's running through next week. We're going to try and go. Oh, we're actually trying to put things together. You can stalk us. Facebook.com slash... E-Webstyle. Twitter.com slash... E-Webstyle. YouTube.com slash... E-Webstyle. E-Webstyle. Podcast at... E-Webstyle.com. I can't even do it after you get it started. Those are the ways you can stalk us. If you go to our Facebook page, there's a really good question. And, frankly, we don't know the answer to it. Basically, there's a gentleman, and I didn't include his moniker, so I don't know exactly who it is. I think I did speak with him. I think it's Philippi. And I think we may be interviewing with him later today. Yeah, we got contacted by two Phillippis, but... Yeah, two last name of Phillippi in the same week is crazy. He posted... He's got a virtual assistant working with him, and he wants to use a whole collection of tools. And he's actually listed all the tools on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash... E-Webstyle. And we don't use those. So, we're thinking that probably some of you out there use them. And if you guys do use them, get on our Facebook page and let us know your results. Go to that post, and in the comments, let us know which tool you used, and how did it work for you. Would you recommend it? Would you disapprove it? You know, let us know. Yeah. And no tear. You see, no tear. I was looking at that this morning. Okay. No tattoo. Didn't have to go through that. We're going to start with an international one. Good Info and Entertaining. This is by Matt Edwards. Hey, guys. Matt here from the Empty Head Designs in Melbourne, Australia. Emptyhead.com.au. Love the podcast. That's phenomenal. Empty Head? Yeah. Just dump all of our stuff on your site. Love the podcast. It's full of great info and presented in a way that I can deal with. Brain dope. What can sometimes be an incredibly dry subject is made to be reasonably entertaining. We'll take

it. Keep up the great work, Matt. And then we've got our new word. This is awesome. This is from Mark. This is from the other Philippi. Okay. And it's punch-u-tational SEO. No, I think you said that wrong. Punch-u-cational. Oh, punch-u-cational. Yeah. I did say that wrong. Yeah. Punch-u-cational. Eventually, I'll get a punch-u-cation and be able to say punch-u-cation-o. This is from Mark. These guys make learning SEO fun. This is a little long to bear with me. My brother turned me onto the podcast a little over a month ago to help me promote my blog and future business. Since then, I have gone back to the first podcast. I've been nearly completed, completely caught up with all of the podcasts. He's been on it. Yeah. Today is 140. Yeah. Yeah. Back to number one. At the end of each podcast, I feel like I have been schooled on SEO while being punched in the face. Boom. It feels great. It is now time to pass this information to my homeschooled 15-year-old son. By the way, that's a compliment. Yeah. I appreciate it. The fact that you're going to take our podcast and homeschool your kid with our podcast. Thank you. He loves computers, and I am creating a computer class for him, which will include, in part, the SEO podcast of Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. And he got the title right. Well, I don't think we have it up there. Yes, he got it perfect. I know that because of the way Chris and Chuck present this information. He will be enjoying, he will enjoy being punch-ucated on SEO. Punch-ucational and punch-ucated. Mark, punch in the face to you, that's like a left, a right, an uppercut, and then a jab. Yeah, punch-ucated is the art of being educated while being punched in the face. It's a verb. Not always related to SEO. Usually there is some sort of education going on when somebody is getting punched in the face, some form or other. All right, so you guys who tune in, last time we

did a podcast and we kind of just broke it out and we said, look, this section is going to be a video that gets put on our website. We're going to do the exact same thing today. So our regular listeners, thank you for tuning in. This is going to be behind the scenes. This is going to be the video snippet that we're actually going to put on our SEO page. Yeah, so last week we did a short, you know, 5, 10-minute segment that's going to go on our PPC page. So this snippet will go on our SEO page. So prepare to hear some basics. You may have heard some of this stuff before. But, you know, thank you for tuning in and appreciate your support. Hi, and welcome to our SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization Page. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, your Internet Marketing Specialist. What we're going to do for you right now is we're going to go over a number of subjects. We're first going to talk about what is SEO. Again, that stands for Search Engine Optimization. We're going to explain to you why do you want SEO. We're going to talk about how we approach, because we approach SEO differently with each client. And then we're going to show some of the details that we go through in order to implement Search Engine Optimization or SEO. So here we go. What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting your website onto the first page of Google or Bing in an organic method. And what we mean by that is in a typical search, you've actually got pay-per-click searches results that are across the top and right of your webpage. Those are pay-per-click. Those are sponsored. Those are sponsored ads. Usually colored. They're shaded. Sometimes yellow. And on the right side, usually white. In that middle section is what we focus on when we're doing Search Engine Optimization. And that's how do we get your website on that particular section. Why

do you want it? Well, Google makes billions of dollars off of their pay-per-click. Bing makes probably millions of hundreds of millions of dollars off of their pay-per-click or sponsored ads. A couple thousand. And each and both companies admit, readily admit, that 75% of clicks happen in what's called that organic section. So that's not the pay-per-click or the sponsored ads. It's the remaining part. Even part of that section is the local search results. So you've all done a search and you've seen little pins and those pins are related to the map. And those are called the Google six-pack, isn't it? Yeah. And that Google six-pack is also part of Search Engine Optimization. So the reason you want to do Search Engine Optimization is because 75% of clicks happen there. One could argue that if you spend $1,000 on pay-per-click, you should actually be spending $3,000 on SEO because it has that much more value. Next, we're going to talk a little bit about our approach and how we approach Search Engine Optimization for each of our clients. The first thing that we want to do is bring in a client and understand their business. We want to make sure that we can apply our skill sets to your particular business in a way that is most valuable. Definitely. We need to make sure that we understand what that business offers, how SEO is going to help them. Because most people, frankly, business owners may not be sure on the approach they need to do. Are they trying to maybe sell a service or a product? Or are they trying to promote the company and gain some brand awareness? So we need to meet and first determine what the goal is. You can imagine that focusing on branding as opposed to focusing on immediate sales has a totally different process. An absolutely totally different process. You may, in terms of branding in traditional marketing, you may be doing things that don't lead to immediate sales and, again, lead to good branding. So we want to understand that.

Often people come to us and they want sales. So when you talk about sales, one of the, well, two of the questions that we like to ask are, what do you sell the most as a business? What makes you the most money? And what makes you the most money? Because often they're not the same. And frankly, a lot of business owners don't really know or, you know, it's not on the tip of their tongue. And we give them a few minutes to mull it over and then they have an answer. And that gives us an idea of what to focus on. Because sometimes you want to focus on growing your existing customer base even though it may not be that valuable because you know it's easier to get. And there's some percentage of them translate to more valuable customers. And sometimes you may want to say, you know what, I sell thousands of these. And every one of these other widgets that I sell, I actually make twice or ten times as much. So I really want to focus on that particular item. And so that's what we do is really understand the business and then come up with a marketing plan to cover both of those. One important thing, because Charles is about to get into some details of search engine optimization, one important thing to note is that internet marketing in general really all supports search engine optimization. So as we grow a campaign, as a campaign becomes more effective, we tend to add more services to that campaign to make sure that that campaign actually thrives. So you should be doing some social, you should be doing some pay-per-click, and you certainly should be doing SEO. As soon as we identify what we want to focus on, we have to identify keywords. Yeah, keywords, keywords, keywords. And he says it three times for a particular reason. We all know in real estate, everyone will say, what's the most important factor in real estate? Location, location, location. Location, location, location. In search engine

optimization and, frankly, in internet marketing in general, the most important thing is keywords, keywords, keywords. And Charles, take it away with some details about search engine optimization. Well, the reason, you know, the target is keywords, keywords, keywords is because at the end of the day, we're talking about searching. And you search with keywords. And so, you know, you use sorts of content and other things like that to promote those particular keywords. But we have to make sure we have the perfect foundation. And that foundation is the keywords. So, here at eWebStyle, what we tend to do after we've consulted with the client, after we've determined the path they want to take, are they selling a product? Are they promoting the business? You know, are they trying to put their name out there to create more brand awareness? Or are they providing a service that they want to do? Once we've determined all of that and we've done our keyword research, then we dive, you know, head first into SEO. And with that dive, what I mean is first things first, we cover the basics. Usually, what Chris didn't mention is not only do we recommend, you know, the pay-per-click and the social stuff to go with the whole gamut of internet marketing, part of that is also the web design. And so, usually, we have built and managed that website in-house. And so, that allows us to go in and attack the basics. When we manage that site, when I say SEO basics, I mean, you know, your titles, your meta information, link sculpting, making sure your navigation is right, making sure you have the right amount of pages on there, content generation. To be frank, most business owners don't have good content when they come in. And either some is written in first person, some is written in third person, maybe the keyword density isn't correct. And so, we will take a whole other step in rewriting and generating the right content that makes your company look good, that the users can understand and

relate to, and that the search engines like. And so, we make sure we get that content together. And when we have that content, then we go through a series of cross-linking, making sure that all these pages are connected in a way that the Google bot can index and find, and that users who are reading that content can click and make their way through, using the right anchor text, using the right tags and link titles and things like that. All these are basics, and there are hundreds of other basic things that we would also do, and this is just the starting point. We make sure we cover all these basics using the right keywords. And this is all on-page stuff. Off-page stuff, we start going into some link building, submitting to directories, maybe some guest blog posts and articles and things like that that you need to do off-page to build links to the site in order to, again, approach and try to get that ranking. Right. That we want to get. Chris mentioned it earlier that, you know, on that center page of the Searching the Results page, it's really broken down into two sections. One is your natural listings, and above that is your local listings, the six-pack, A through G. And so we, most companies won't do this, but we actually manage your Google local places page, and not just Google, but Bing as well, as part of our SEO campaign. And so if we are managing your SEO, then you can expect us to also manage your local listing. Right. And part of that entails, you know, making sure your places page is right, making sure it has all of the details Google wants. Part of our off-page link building stuff is done to assist in your places page, submitting to other directories, CitySearch, Angie's List, things like that, that help generate the buzz that Google wants to see to help your places page improve. Everybody knows that places pages need reviews. And so one of the things we do is operate

with integrity. We won't do any fake reviews or anything like that, like, you know, some people do. And so part of our job is to consult with our business owners about how they can generate reviews. How they can change their internal processes so that they drive their existing customers to reviews. Yeah, definitely. I mean, an example would be, you know, if you're selling, let's say we've built you an e-commerce store and your product, part of your checkout process would be, you know, thank you for your purchase with the link, you know, to your Google Places page. Please give us a review about your process or about the product itself. And so that way, as we tend to drive traffic and that traffic converts to sales, it can also convert into reviews. Which helps more traffic when the cycle continues. And so that's just part of it. Lastly, reporting. You have to know how it's working, right? Which keywords are working best for you? Which keywords, frankly, aren't working? Which pages are being viewed the most? Which referral source is working? And so our campaigns always include natural listings. They include places listings. And whether it's SEO or paid search or social, you will also get reporting. I need to let you know, excuse me, where your traffic is coming from. How many pages views did you get? What's your bounce rate? You know, things like this help us determine what's working, what's not working, what we should change. And we'll do more than just, you know, send you the reports and tell you have a good day. No, you'll get the reports and then we need to talk. Because what looks good on black and white may not necessarily be what's happening at the office. I could see you're getting a thousand clicks and you could say, no, my purchases haven't gone up. Well, then we need to fix that and we need to address that. One of the benefits of having us do everything is that we can immediately address it. And everything meaning

the website and the internet marketing. So the website and driving traffic to that. Like I said, the third thing that we do well is iterate with the traffic from Google and your website to make sure that it actually converts into business. Definitely. And so, I mean, with our SEO, that's what you can expect. You can expect that your basics will get taken care of. You can expect us to go in and handle the advanced stuff, especially for an industry that's a little bit more competitive, a little bit more complicated to kind of crack that first page ranking. We know what to do to get you there. You can expect to get reports to understand what's happening and why it's happening. And you can also expect some consultation to help you work on your end so we can all achieve that same goal. Absolutely. You probably wonder how good are we at what we do. If you Google internet marketing Houston, online marketing Houston, PPC Houston, pay-per-click Houston, website marketing Houston, we're the only company that's on the first page for all of those terms. So that's us going against our people in our- Houston is the big market. Yeah. Fourth largest city in the country. There's a lot of SEO people focusing on that particular term in this city. And we're the only company that's on the first page for all of those terms. You know, that is constantly changing, so I will put the caveat, that is as of 2012, because maybe somebody else is listening to our podcast and maybe adjusting their efforts to catch up to us. The reality is, is all they would be doing is catching up to us. They wouldn't be passing us. That has been a good explanation of search engine optimization. We told you what it is. We told you why you specifically want it. We kind of showed you a little bit about how our approach is different on a per-customer basis. And Charles went into some good detail about how we actually implement it and

things that are important about it. One thing that I'd like to say is, do a search for a term that you would like when people search that term for them to find you. And at the very top, right under the search bar, you'll see how many results there are for that search. And what I'd like to see is, how many times would you like people to be driven to your website? Yeah. And if that number is bigger than what it currently is, give us a call. Definitely. Give us a call. Let's talk about it. If we can't help you, which I doubt would happen, I'm pretty sure we can, but we'd like to talk about it and maybe we can help you get to that number. Excellent. Again, my name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. Charles Lewishield, internet marketing specialist. Thank you. Boom. That was good. All right. Our SEO podcast listeners. Thank you. We're getting applause. That's awesome. Our SEO podcast listeners, that was a great behind-the-scenes thing. Do we have any blank stare news? I do got blank stare. Oh, we got blank. We have blank. All right, man. We got blank stare news. I didn't warm up last night. I think I can still do it, though. Yeah, that was void. Ooh, with the smirk. Blank stare with the smirk. Look at that. Oh. Blank stare with the smirk. Because we were talking about iPad 3 earlier. So, this blank stare is at Sprint. Uh-oh. Poor Sprint. And that's my carrier. Yeah, mine too. Poor Sprint. Sprint was mad because they didn't get invited to the iPad 3 launch party. Not realizing it's called the iPad 3 LTE. Right. They don't provide that for GLTE service. So, why would you be invited? Yeah, so, come on, Sprint. Get your game right. They did release a statement saying that hopefully by this summer they'll have a network and everything in place. And so, you know, we'll see. I know a few iPhone users on the Sprint network. And I've been hearing negative

stuff. And so, let's go Sprint. Get it together. Have you, it's been bad with the iPhone on? Yeah, I gotta, I know three people who have iPhones with Sprint. And they, you know. Yeah, but iPhone had problems on AT&T. I mean, I hope it literally had no problem from day one. It is not the best phone out there from a phone standpoint. It is one of the best phones out there from a multi-user device. Handheld smart phone device. Yeah. Without a doubt. Excellent. That's true. Yeah, they did have problems. The only one they seem to succeed on was Verizon did pretty well with them. Yeah. Well, you know, and somebody made the point, and I know I've mentioned it on the podcast, that even with AT&T, other phones never had the problem. Right? So, iPhone users would blame AT&T, and, you know, there are other phones that didn't have that kind of problem. And then, of course, the iPhone 4, when it came out and had the, you can't hold it improperly, issue, you know, that kind of shed a little light, maybe, on the design of the actual phone components on the iPhone. So, I think it'd be great to get the iPhone, I mean, the iPad on Sprint. I was actually just in Sprint the other day. Apparently, they're dropping the, isn't it Sprint, Sprint Verizon is together? Who's together? Sprint, anyway, there's apparently a whole new spectrum that's going to be opening up and available to Sprint, so they're going to try and take advantage of it, you know, low spectrum, some spectrum, I don't know. Anyway, you have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes, that is because of you, you over in Africa, you over in Europe, you over in Asia, and you in Central and South America. We actually do have listeners on every continent that has population. Thank you very much. If you could do us a favor, there's two ways that you could help us. One is you could go to iTunes, you could

create an account, you could write a review, and then send us an email, podcast at e-withstyle.com. And when you send us that email, let us know, in fact, the one we read today with Punch-U-Cational. See, I already got my Punch-U-Cation. With Punch-U-Cational. He's going to Punch-U-Cation. Past, present, and future. That one was actually submitted on iTunes, and then he sent us an email, so we were both actually sharing it with our significant others. That was really cool, you know. He's sharing it with his son, and he's coming up with this great terminology. And then the next thing that you could do for us is go to our podcast page, e-webstyle.com slash SEO podcast. SEO podcast, and on that, if you go down right above where my biography and Charles' biography starts, there's a link to our Google Places page, you know, Google Plus page, Google Places page, our Google Places page. Go there and submit a review there if you could. Yeah, we'd love that Google review. And wait, we don't want you to do that unless you enjoy and get good information from our podcast. Yeah, yeah. All right, here's a punch in the face to all of you guys. My name is Chris Burris, owner of e-webstyle. Charles Lewis, internet marketing specialist. Bye-bye for now.