Episode 512: 12 Reasons Why Your Business Absolutely Needs SEO by Sam Hollingsworth Part 2 #512

yes unknown secrets of internet marketing my name is chris boris one of the owners of eweb ewr or eweb result formerly eweb result uh i would say it's ewr now did yeah ewr digital no i why i was kind of coming on going and is we put a we put a little lead time into the video right to to to to kind of go with uh when we hit the live button because there's a delay and we missed it by a little bit so um i think that double changes uh or delay the play or delay either one uh changes from time to time just depending on like internet connection and how quickly facebook interacts and all of those things so well we're we're trying some new things we're going to run a commercial in the middle it's a little yeah like so this is a new thing and like you know we're building up kind of new products um you know we're also going to be probably offering some advertisements so we're testing all this out we want your feedback yes uh to know if this is something um the video we have is a little long okay it is a little long it wasn't intended for this but we want to test it out right so we want to and guys also what i'll tell you is it's actually something you should use okay like legitimately we're using it with all our clients or encouraging all our clients to use it basically when covid hit okay uh our videography uh team stopped okay and and so we worked on uh a way to capture testimonials that um you didn't need to physically be there because people are a little hesitant of that um but i mean this is awesome because it brings the cost down um to get video testimonials and you need to get those on your site because we know how powerful they are but we'll get into that in a minute i know we're we're doing the second part of

12 reasons why your business absolutely needs seo right chris yes yeah that is the article we're covering and this will not surprise you we have a review before we get started this one is from patrick lopez uh he's he's written a couple of times he's been a long time listener uh so put it to you patrick he says i am forever grateful to dewr digital they aren't there aren't enough stars to give this talented company uh from a person several years ago listening to their podcast and learning tidbits on their strategies i can't thank them enough highly recommend this seo company yeah good tip to you man appreciate it yeah thanks patrick all right so let's just jump into the right so 12 reasons why your business absolutely needs seo before we get started on number seven because we finished with number six i just wanted to rehash number six uh for one reason and by the way matt i'm gonna have i'm gonna spring a question on oh no uh on number eight um but uh so number six it says seo best practices are always being updated and that begs the question like how do i stay on top of the seo you know think changes things that are happening in seo uh uh well here's one question i wasn't planning on this one matt how can they stay up on the latest seo changes uh well um twitter uh following uh the google webmasters on twitter uh because basically they're announcing uh what's going on there's there's certain forums you could certainly uh listen to this podcast or you could you could you could hire us i mean there's been there's a big core update on mainly it was like speed like customer experience uh this month which is affecting a lot of people uh gmb a lot of things are changing there um you know eat was a big thing uh kind of end of the year going in the beginning of the year so like we're constantly having to um

see how google's responding and and uh somewhere do what did they find an article by you somewhere yeah there no there's a lot of yeah um what i would say is for eat specifically um we should have it on the website by the time you're listening to this podcast uh we just we just finished it we turned it into an ebook uh we do have some articles on our blog uh about it but we turn it into an ebook an easy to read ebook uh if you're following the best practice and here's the thing all the stuff that google's telling you to do is stuff you should be doing right like because they know from the the data and the customer experience that you need that so i'll give you an example um when you publish a blog you need to have a bio of who wrote the blog and some kind of data to support what they're saying right like like because they're like who's saying this right and so it's kind of bringing back authorship um when you look at a company like the about us page right like a lot of people don't have a picture of where they're located or their team or like people want to know that this is a real company so again these are things that you should be doing and now google's kind of like forcing you to say you really really really need to be done so um but yeah i mean seo is a moving target um you know the great thing is uh we're really following all the webmaster guidelines um and have been ahead of a lot of these changes right so our our our clients have not been affected um and we're continuously trying to find new ways uh to improve just delivering overall value but yes absolutely uh the fundamentals of seo are the same but you know the tactics and what google's looking for they readjust those dials uh and you have to stand on top of it i

mean one of the big changes i saw is like location pages uh or service pages used to rank now they're putting a lot more weighting on the home page now um kind of moving back to that um and so they're testing some stuff out right so we'll see what they do yeah so that's six they're always being updated make sure you stay up to date on them number seven is understanding seo helps you understand the environment of the web right so if you look at the amount of search traffic that is excuse me the amount of web traffic that is driven by search it's the majority of web traffic so if you're spending time understanding search search engine optimization then you're spending time understanding what's happening on the web right in the majority of web traffic uh and and that's a really important thing to understand well i mean the term seo continues to expand right there's youtube seo um you know conversion rate optimization can be considered seo it's basically a blend of like marketing right like what i actually see happening is because you have all these different mediums and these different tools marketing is actually going to fold under digital marketing because actually digital marketing analytics and and how we're doing things are actually more important than traditional marketing in my opinion uh and a lot more powerful and a lot more data driven and understanding where your money's going and like there's just so many different advantages so basically marketing is becoming digital marketing which is just good marketing right right yeah marketing marketing marketing marketing no and i understand that from a search perspective google's always focused on the user and so if you're following the guidelines of what google's interested in delivering for the user then you're going to do what like it improves your business because google isn't going to say things like oh the website should be slow no it needs to be fast is that good for your user is that good for your business yes

people need to be able to find stuff easily when they get on your website and not come back to the search engine to try a different website or the search result page to try a different website so all of those things if you understand all of those things you're going to be constantly improving your business i mean a lot of old school point would be like ss you know the ssl certificate right like like should your website be secure it wasn't secure now google's like saying it really should be secure is that a bad thing like and google gives you a nice bump if it is because you know it doesn't want its users getting you know hacked or whatever right like virus um so uh again the things that google's doing are the right things um based on the data to create a better customer experience so people continue to use google and find what they're looking for so yeah all right number eight is seo is relatively cheap and here's my trick question or just question matt is seo cheap well uh define cheap um i think that uh seo um is once you get seo moving right it's kind of like getting in a jet stream um uh for where your keyword placement is but if you want to move uh real estate wise uh you're going to have to do things to move it now once you're in that place you kind of glide there kind of ride the jet stream a little bit um but everybody else is trying to maybe compete with you right and so uh we've seen in all digital campaigns seo is the majority of the search trap the majority of how people come to the website the majority of uh roi you're going to get from um you know seo because it's not a dollar for dollar kind of trade-off right you're not spending a dollar to get a dollar 20 or dollar 50 or whatever it is right so uh now cheap seo uh

is quite dangerous okay and ultimately expensive yeah and and if it tanks your website ultimately very uh expensive and a lot of websites come to us where um you just can't take shortcuts okay like now you you need to find a company that really understands what they're doing i did uh just publish an article in forbes about how to find a enterprise seo company um so go check it out type my name and enterprise seo but anyways um what i can tell you is um if you're doing it right like like let's talk about this and sorry not to mean to go off on a tangent but basically um when you do something right like if you're building an ikea table okay and you follow the directions right you read the directions you follow the directions and you do it is that faster than trying to do it on your own putting things in the wrong spot and then having to like rebuild the table which i have done okay like as a personal example and hopefully there's some other people out there that that uh you know can relate what was faster right and so uh if you understand the framework and you understand what you're doing and you do it um you don't want to cut corners and you only have to do it like right like once right now there's some ongoing stuff with seo you do and that's why people are confused you know one time like technical or some certain on-page stuff or whatever like that but then there's ongoing seo too and there's off pages you know so there's a lot of different moving parts here um and like you think you can allocate like a couple hundred bucks to get it all done now it depends what industry you're in it depends how competitive it is it depends what your goals are right um you know there's uh operating online there's certain fundamental thing things that you have to do and be aware of and you know being

online and having a website's one of them but also if you're looking to generate business online there's certain standards that you have to meet and so uh doing those kind of web maintenance things have have an expense to them having an up-to-date website has an expense and once those things are in place now you can start doing the seo you can't do seo on a bad site uh if it's slow it'll pop up and it'll drop and or you can get people to it and it's a bad site and people will leave and based on uh how people are interacting with the site google will go uh no we don't like this and it'll drop you so again like depends where you're at on on how expensive it is for you um but uh cheap seo i would be super careful of and you need to know what they're doing if you don't understand what they're doing they're doing some stuff that could get you in trouble with google and i would honestly stay away from it i think the main thing is not cheap but transparent okay don't work for cheap look for a transparent company to explain it to you and understand what you do and that's you know that's really kind of how we um view things and and how we kind of view the world and and again that's why we do this podcast is to try to provide that transparency so yeah absolutely uh you may have at some point implied that a couple hundred bucks might work in some industries depending on competitiveness i just want to throw in no a couple hundred bucks no matter the industry it may take some of your time and therefore no actual dollars out but if you value your time you're going to be spending more than a couple hundred dollars worth of your time yeah yeah i'm and you can i mean it's not competitive industry like look like i mean look this is my frame of reference seo online marketing

it's investment now you know take dollar ad spend out there but getting everything set up and all that like you should be thinking if you're a small business a micro business i'm telling you you like 20k 25k is like actually what you really need to get started yeah you know and really like the ability to do things uh changes with money and the plan changes with money but yeah like if you're not spending enough or it doesn't equate to enough time of uh an expert working on your site um it's not even worth it okay because unless you get on the first page of google like midway up the page it doesn't even matter so if you're moving from page 10 to page 5 like you're just throwing money away right it might be better to move that money to remarketing or or something like that but you know like adwords you used to be able to get a long way on a couple cents but now clicks are multiple dollars you know hundreds of dollars sometimes um you know really where we're seeing a lot of opportunities in streaming um uh streaming videos uh and of course seo again seo and and putting those all together you get this multiplier effect so you're right it's not it's not cheap it it's you said it you said it the right way right if if you look at it as an expense you can have less expensive marketing but yeah marketing is not an expense and it's one of the challenges that a lot of business owners struggle with is like oh i gotta cut expenses let me stop marketing no marketing is an investment and should have an roi and i think if you think i think what people really want to understand is seo cheap yes it actually is relative to the roi you're not going to get a better roi from another marketing strategy uh that's just not going to happen but but you may have to spend a lot of money on

it but it's cheap because it's a it's it's the best investment well one of the things i think are key right and depending what your kpis are if it's getting people in the store if it's getting people to buy your product you're trying to figure out what your customer acquisition cost is right and then testing that out on different channels and going where where should i be putting my marketing dollars and what is that customer acquisition cost and how do we get that number down and does that number work with my business model that's really what you should be doing you should never be looking at it as an expense okay you should be looking at it like like if you're wanting to grow or whatever it is like what what does it take to spend to get a client like and then how do we improve that number and that's all you should be thinking about honestly and that's how you should look at it and go okay well if i spend this i get a client you know like and if i spend this and get a client if that's the right number then you figure out how to do it over and over again i was thinking about like a stock portfolio right let's think about your marketing in terms of a of an investment like a stock portfolio how about crypto right and if everything what how about crypto your crypto portfolio in general stock portfolio let's just say you invested in some traditional marketing which really doesn't have the traceability uh that digital marketing has and you see your account going up but you don't know if it's the radio ad or the tv ad or you don't know if it's the radio ad on this station or that station and so now you're in a situation where like well i don't know whatever to shift my investment dollars because i don't have this ability to track it now you look at digital marketing strategies even seo is a little

harder than track you can i think that's coming up up here pretty soon um uh so i won't go into it very much but but you can track it and then you can say oh well now i know i should shift the money here because that's where i get the biggest bang for the buck and that's you know that's where we get into digital and ultimately the biggest bang for your buck in the s in the digital marketing world is seo and chris i'm gonna have to stop you there we have a sponsor okay we have a sponsor which is us um um but it's it's a it's a product that we launch a sas model product we launch um it's working quite well uh and people are very happy and it's we're seeing a lot of reoccurring buys it's great i opened my email and you know all these people are signing up so we wanted to offer it out to you so so again you know if you're looking to build trust and increase conversions on your website with the current amount of traffic you have because that's a good use of your dollars too is maybe i don't need more people i just need to improve my funnel um pro testimonial.com pro testimonial should check it out so just listen um you know tell us what you think uh but we will do shorter ads but but i think actually this really lays out a story good so here we go pro testimonial your one-stop shop video marketing tool that captures and creates video testimonials in simple quick and cost-effective way did you know that 90 of consumers say their buying decisions are influenced by online reviews and that 79 of shoppers say they trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family that's what makes video testimonials so powerful you might be launching a new business or have an established one that needs some visibility or you have a new restaurant that needs community endorsement maybe you're a real

estate agent looking to connect with people buying or selling a home or you're just looking to capture video testimonials for your organization whatever the case pro testimonial does it all video testimonials are more important than ever in today's competitive marketplace so how do you quickly and easily capture those reviews and have a produced video ready to share that's where pro testimonial comes in so how does pro testimonial work well it's really as easy as one two and three one identify and reach out to your client or customer who will be happy to provide you with a video testimonial two send your client a request through your pro testimonial account then all they do is simply click on the link in their email and record their video testimonial in 50 seconds or less with a smartphone tablet or computer three pro testimonial makes magic by adding your logo inspiring music and your call to action at the end and that's it so sign up today and receive a 14 day trial to see how pro testimonial can work for you boom boom that's a commercial i'm going to tell you one important piece for anybody who just watched that is it is so easy for the customer to use also right so the focus of that commercial was like hey one two three for the the the business but when that customer gets it they don't have to download an app they just do it right there on their phone or right there on their computer laptop easy because it's got it definitely has a camera built in that's pretty awesome i also got to say i love the pizza logo like that was good just add your logo so we do commercials okay we're doing commercials we're doing modeling shoots we're doing a lot of different types of videos we're winning awards we just won the award last night you know boom and this is for product packaging for my vital c crews so and you're using pro testimonials yep so we're doing all kinds

of fun stuff over here and uh you know reach out to us maybe we can help you grow your business if you're a big business and you're spending a lot of money you're not seeing our eye and needing help give us a shout all right let's get back into this number nine seo and this is 12 reasons why your business absolutely needs seo uh number nine it's a long-term strategy seo can have a noticeable noticeable impact within the first year of action being taken seo time effort and budget uh that is committed to it it makes it your website lasts longer it makes it stand the test of time and a market worthy contender um talk about like you we've got a couple examples we've mentioned before about long-term impact of seo and maybe a client who's no longer with us because they have too much business in and where they're doing well a lot of a lot of how we do seo um is is really it sticks like it it really uh sets in place there's a lot of different shortcuts again uh that people can do that that won't uh stay everything we do is is really um uh like i don't know i don't know uh i don't know for i don't know what the right word is but like we'll stand the test of time but bottom line is what i think oh that's cool what i think that the answer is here with a long-term strategy is you need to have a strategy because if you have the wrong strategy the kind of keywords you're going to get you need to get the site to rank are not the the uh commercial intent keywords you need and um you know you've wasted a bunch of time to rank for a keyword that actually is not going to help you and so i think really what i'm taking out of this is you need a strategy right and you know seo takes uh some time to work depending on where

you're at it's very um you know variable but if you have the wrong strategy it will not work yeah it will not work so you need to have a strategy you need to understand where you're going you need to understand what you're doing and then again um what you're talking about is the long-term impacts of it where you get these huge roi numbers you know i mean we have clients and case studies of like 30x you know return on investment i mean so so again seo is an investment it takes a little bit to ramp up but if your business model is built around generating clients online um or driving people into the stores or or whatever it is uh and you want to utilize digital marketing seo should be that foundational piece and you've got to have the right strategy i mean strategy is so important so one of the things i did before we hopped on this podcast was did a search for bankruptcy tempe uh and our client who we got there two years ago is still position three so that's still that still has an roi the roi you can't complete i mean yeah i mean it's like coming in i mean it's bitcoin roi there you know so yeah all right so next uh 12 reasons why your business absolutely needs seo it's quantifiable um so seo doesn't offer the easy and we talked about this the easy to calculate roi like that of paid search right it's a little bit different but brands want to know and understand uh where they were where they are where they're going and you do have the you do have that visibility with seo at a minimum you have that with your search rank like where you're ranked for the phrases you're targeting well so so we had a client and and i'm working on this we haven't put together as a case study yet but but essentially a client that we weren't managing their site um got hacked they came to us

okay they were in first position okay they dropped down how do we get it back and this client was freaking out because you could actually he could actually see in his numbers what first position versus fifth position versus ninth position worth 11 position was worth to him right so we know how much traffic it gets we know roughly what the conversion rate would be we can see the conversion analytics of your site uh we can quantify what the value of that customer is to you so you can actually add a quantifiable number uh within a range of what you can get and if you're in a certain margin of error it's really like a no-brainer okay it's just really a no-brainer um you know and and that's uh i think that kind of step that customers need is they need to be able to see that they need to be able to understand that impact and and yeah you've got to think about it a little differently but it's so powerful so i think when you're talking about no-brainer it's kind of like hey matt would you like to be in the first position for your carpet business uh no-brainer yes but there's a difference between having that no-brainer understanding of yes there's value in that position and then the no-brainer understanding of like you just described i understand the revenue impact of position one versus five nine and second page like that is that takes your intuition to a level of understanding which is like okay what does it cost to get me to that first yeah i mean when you when you understand that and you see it that way um it's like why haven't i started doing that sooner right and i can't tell you how many clients um i'm seeing like if you want to stretch your marketing dollars okay and you have a decent sized budget like and you're spending money and you're like man i'm spending a dollar and you know i'm getting a dollar ten and i really

need a dollar twenty i need a dollar thirty i need actually i need like two or three bucks for that one dollar or whatever the number is and and you can optimize ads to to a certain point and we're certainly good at that we just hired somebody out of google to do that um or to to join the team that we were already doing that but like i mean like really good okay and so anyways um like you can only stretch it so much right um you you need to change the paradigm shift like you need to change how you're thinking about it and how you're thinking about uh marketing is that's when you bring seo into the conversation so yeah really from the beginning um all right number 11 seo brings new opportunities to light so this is interesting like okay let me read this let me understand what what he's saying here offering quality seo to brands means submersing an seo team in everything that is the brand the better a brand is understood the more opportunities will arise and help it thrive uh and and that's true like with our team when we're going in to understand your business to understand what we need to do from an seo perspective that's when we understand stand your brand and the better we understand your brand the more we're able to present and and and have that brand to be expressed through the not just the website but the marketing the paid ads just everything across the board yeah i mean i could go off on this topic for a really long time but i know we're um you know because it has brand and your first book was built your brand well my second book rise the person right now but so um no i think that seo is helping uncover searches that better match it with the pages right and and also it's a lot about how you're telling your story and getting your message out there so where are you at

in the customer journey for what searches are you producing a piece of content that you want to rank to to to have that touch point on the customer journey right and so um seo oh i'll give you an example one of our clients um uh basically the company's broken up into two and there's one that goes after the retail market one goes after the commercial like b2b market right so we've started to do seo on the site and they're like what changed because we're getting all kinds of inbound now that is commercial which we've never like gotten before right and so we unlocked some keywords based on uh some of the offerings they had that well one wasn't in that wasn't being indexed in google um or wasn't relevant enough google felt to to show it in the serps um and so now they're showing up for keywords and they're getting calls and so it's unlocking those new opportunities you know so seo good all right and number 12 of the 12 reasons why your business absolutely needs seo by the way this article is by sam hollingsworth if you're not on page one you're not winning the click right this feels like it goes without saying but a recent study shows that the first three organic search ranking positions result in nearly 40 of all click throughs while up to 30 of the rest on page one two don't get clicked at all if you're not on page one you need to be this goes like we were just talking about that i don't you probably don't even need to add any more to that right yeah i mean it's just interesting you can cut the data a lot of different ways so the top three positions get 40 of all traffic while 30 of all results page one and two don't get clicked at all yeah i mean basically he's giving you the inverse of it and he's giving you like the bottom of the first page and the second page like don't

even matter like again middle of the page and up is where you need to be so yeah yeah all right in conclusion and implementing strong quality seo on a brand's website and digital properties is always going to be beneficial to that brand and its marketing efforts like yeah we we couldn't agree with that more yeah i agree i feel like i'm in my hardest college exam uh ever and when i would read the problems the way my brain worked and it was like solve this and my brain was like yeah that's right like it's obviously right like why would anybody waste time solving it and that was my job in that class so um you have anything else no i don't got anything no yeah yeah i think that was enough i think we delivered i think we offered a lot of value in the podcast and if we did please uh leave us a review leave a review please what's the link matt i don't i think uh ewrdigital.com forward slash review will get you there review or reviews one or both of those will work um hey this is the end of our podcast we want to thank you guys for listening uh make sure you you know subscribe make sure you follow if you're on youtube smash that subscribe button smash that notification button we really appreciate you you guys have made us one of the most popular internet marketing podcasts and the most popular seo podcast in the known universe uh we appreciate you until the next time my name is chris burris my name is matt bertram you you you you you you you you you you you you you