Chris: Hi and welcome to the SEO Podcast: Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burres, owner of eWebResults and this is…
Matt: Matt Bertram, PPC Specialist.
Chris: Hey, have you guys figured out that there’s something different going on? Both the look if you’re watching, and the voice if you’re listening, is a little bit different. Matt, could you– yeah. Oh yeah. Charles as you know, last podcast was his. We found this here at the company. It is his mug, we are holding it ransom hoping that he will come back at some point and say hello. Maybe he’ll even drop in on the podcast or something at some point. And standing next to me is Matt Bertram. So Matt, why don’t you introduce yourself to the crowd and let them know who you are.
Matt: Okay. Well, so this goes out to Charles in much respect. I know he’s out there watching, so I just wanna say hello there and let’s hang out soon. So, myself? I guess– I think the reason they brought me in is because I am a Google partner, and I’m certified in Google Analytics, and Google AdWords. I’m a serial entrepreneur. To talk a little bit about some of my wins and losses I have definitely lost over $100,000 of my own money in online ventures and —
Chris: Ooooh, that is not why we wanted him to join us by the way. It’s a good lesson.
Matt: But I also had some really big wins. One business I built to $850,000 and made about $670,000 of profit in 11 months.
Chris: That is kind of one of the reasons we’re interested in him joining the team, yes.
Matt: So I’ve had some wins and losses, I’ve built some info companies and some other businesses and really the power of online media and what you can do with it is pretty amazing and to help businesses is what we’re here for. So that’s a little bit about my background, hopefully that gives everybody an idea of who I am and what I’ve been able to do. I’m trying to 10x all these campaigns that we’re working on here and we’ve got some really good stuff going on.
Chris: Excellent, I can tell you one of the things, Matt’s been with us for about a month and half, almost two months now and we are so in tune in terms of delivering value to our costumers and really excited about working with businesses and understanding those businesses, ‘cause really all of the stuff that we’ve always done has been a collaboration of: what’s your business about and what do you know about your business? What’s internet marketing about? And all that we know about internet marketing and how do we mesh the two, and it really becomes really powerful when you’ve got a serious interest, like a serial entrepreneur interest in business. So I’m excited. That’s a nice little brief intro, you’ll get to know Matt over time.
Matt: I feel your pain, but we can make it winning.
Chris: Absolutely.
Matt: So we’ve really been able to turn around some campaigns, definitely could get some testimonials out here of some of the stuff that we’ve already been able to do in such a short amount of time.
Chris: Absolutely.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: Well, this is podcast number 383 as we mentioned already. As always, we do have a tip from the previous podcast.
Matt: Okay, our tip is, “Focus on relevant high-quality links not on quantity.”
Chris: Yes. It used to be true that there was a kind of equal value between the quality of links and the quantity of links, so it was much easy to kind of outsource to India a massive quantity of link-building. It turns out that’s no longer of any value, quantity does matter, just make sure that they are all quality, and that is the tip from our podcast. Make sure you subscribe and follow.
Chris & Matt: Boom!
Matt: Skyscraping still works.
Chris: Actually I talk about skyscraping in the article today. Speaking of that article– well just one second. We were filmed live here in Houston, Texas and Matt and I, we’re now your friendly local neighborhood Top Position Snatchers! And our mantra is, “Don’t be a douche,” and frankly it’ll always be, “Don’t be a douche,” ‘cause being a douche is not good.
Matt: Don’t be a douche. Don’t be a douche.
Chris: Yeah, don’t be a douche. Hey I do have a quick review, this is cool. The title of the review is, “SEO help for sure,” and this review is of course 5 stars!
Matt: Whooo! I don’t know.
Chris: That works! It was by Kingbeeks from the US, it says, “Leaving y’all reviews all over the place, so a big punch in the face to me, lol. (laugh out loud) Keep up the great work.” Punch in the face to you man, Kingbeeks, that is awesome. So we’ve got a really good article for you today, but before we get to the article, we missed a little bit. If you have an electronic device or you have some sort of– you’re in front of a computer or something and you could tweet, here’s what we would like you to tweet: go ahead and tweet– make sure you do @BestSEOPodcast @eWebResults, this is– use #SEOPodcast and go ahead and use @AB80 ‘cause we’re gonna covering an article by Alek Barysevich, Aleh Barysevich, and as we cover that article you can tweet about it. So go ahead and do that, we really appreciate it.
Lets see, next we have… Hey! If this is the first time you’ve listened to the podcast: howdy, and welcome to the podcast. You’re gonna get two things today, you’re gonna get the potatoes of the podcast, that’s what’s happening right now.
Matt: Potatoes.
Chris: And then we’re gonna get into the meat.
Matt: How are they cooked?
Chris: So they’re cooked the most delicious way possible, yeah?
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: So that depends on your taste, how do you want them cooked? We got people tuned in with on Facebook Live, let us know how you like your potatoes cooked. We like them– apparently there’s a number of listeners who like them cooked quickly so that we can get to the meat of the podcast really quickly. Alright, so I’ve got a little bit of news, Rand Fishkin is stepping away from the day-to-day operations. Yeah, he’s been there a long time. He’s still gonna stay at the company, he’s just not gonna be CEO. He likes to do the stuff that he does and not the manage the people stuff. So punch in the face to you, that’s a great step.
Matt: Yeah, I get it.
Chris: When you get to focus on what you wanna focus on. And then next, so Google Search Console may have a bug, if you’ve got a big drop in your average position metric as of July 13th. There’s a whole lot of buzz, people are looking at it trying to figure out what’s going on and you know.
Matt: So also Google AdWords just changed today, at least on me.
Chris: Yeah, I heard. You were like, “Ah a different platform, how to get back.”
Matt: So I haven’t tested it out but changed today, and we’ll see where it goes.
Chris: So yeah, what I read is there’s at least seven things on the new platform that the old platform didn’t have, and so maybe we’ll cover that article next time because you’ll have had time to kinda mess around with it.
Matt: Yeah no, I watched a role out of it of what was gonna happen, but it actually hit me and I was like, “Ah!”
Chris: Not ready to actually use it yet. If you’re a PHP genius– I’ve kinda sidestepped some of our stuff here. If you’re a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we’re probably looking for you. Go ahead and leave an audio résumé at 713-510-7846. If you’re interested in a free comprehensive website profit analysis you can get that at our website eWebResults.com. Alright, so I think you got some PITFs right?
Matt: No I got some PITFs but I wanted to ask a question.
Chris: Yeah, okay.
Matt: One of the interesting things that you shared with me, it was on the audio résumés: what is the percentage of people that actually do it?
Chris: Oh. Okay, so interesting. There’s clearly a difference between us mentioning it in the podcast, right? And that going out to thousands, you know we have million of downloads. We use an audio résumé process in our hiring process and interesting stat. So basically we put out an ad, we do not consider anyone who will not follow the process and leave an audio résumé. The statistics are somewhere between 10-15% of the people will leave an résumé. So what that means is, yeah 85-90% of the people have auto selected themselves out of the process. Thank you for making my life easier.
Matt: It makes it so much easier, it’s been great. We’re actually interviewing after this and you know quality of people? So much better that will submit those audio résumés so that 85% of people that auto select out. Thank you, appreciate it, save time.
Chris: It really helps and by the way Matt is a recruiting expert, like one of his previous companies – the successful one that he mentioned – was a recruiting company. So you know, it’s kinda cool that the recruiter and they’re like, “Here, look how we do it,” and I was like, “If I were doing recruiting I would do that that way now. So that’s pretty cool.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: Alright, I think we’ve got some PITFs for those people who have checked in with us.
Matt: Okay, our first one is from Jim McDermit
Chris: And this is on Twitter.
Matt: Punch in the face?
Chris: Yeah punch in the face to Jim McDermit. Give him an uppercut, like straight in go for it, yeah.
Matt: Alright, so here’s the deal. Really long, I’m gonna kinda summarize what you said, but I actually did this myself after you sent in this comment and you’re absolutely right. Stitcher, very hard to submit a review. It is kind of hilarious, it does go on and off, but we figured out a solution.
Chris: Yeah, there is a solution. So what his note says is: when he’s on Stitcher trying to leave a review, if he hits a spacebar, it doesn’t actually put a spacebar in the review section.
Matt: The music goes on.
Chris: Yeah, it turns on the podcast, and then you hit the spacebar again and it turns off the podcast. So you’re not able to type anything. Well, you could compress all the words. The solution– so Jim hit me back, I sent him a note on Twitter and said, “Hey, have you had a chance to get the review submitted?” and he was like, “No.” Jim, here’s how you do it: you type up the title in a Word document or some sort of other text-based document and you copy and paste it in there, and then you type up the review and you copy and paste it, and there is one final step. Even after you press submit, and hopefully you’ll make that review 5 stars!
Matt: Whooo!
Chris: I like it. So after you press submit, then you go down to the footer and you click help and you find the support team and you let them know how hard it was to do.
Matt: That was my suggestion. So I’m gonna take credit for that.
Chris: Yeah, you deserve credit for that. I think that’s good.
Matt: It was pretty impossible. It was pretty impossible and having to work around with technology, with technology-based companies.
Chris: It’s very frustrating, yeah. Very, very frustrating. Alright, what else? What do we got?
Matt: Well, we got Jamie at–
Chris: Punch in the Face to Jamie
Matt: “BestSEOPodcast, love you guys keep it up.”
Chris: Yes.
Matt: Comics & SEO at–
Chris: That’s the title?
Matt: Oh yeah, @SoupHerMan. SoupHerMan.
Chris: SoupHerMan. Soup, delicious SoupHerMan.
Matt: Soup S-O-U-P, “Sweet, love PPC stuff too. Haven’t seen much content on YouTube optimization and love to talk about that, cheers from Dallas.” Okay, yes. We are actually working on a campaign right now where we’re gonna be doing some video ads on YouTube, so stay tuned, it’s coming soon.
Chris: We’ll have some insights, and got back and look for– ‘cause we did interview Dan or I think it’s Dane Golden. He’s like a YouTube aficionado, so kinda search for that and you’ll find it. So if you search like, “YouTube Dan Golden SEO podcast,” you’ll find it and go ahead and check that out.
Matt: We got two more real quick and we’ll jump into the meat pretty quick.
Chris: Pretty soon yes.
Matt: Yeah, so–
Chris: This guy is Olof Maximilian Pape.
Matt: 5 stars!
Chris: Yeah, 5 stars! Yeah, he included the 5 star icon in his tweet.
Matt: Thank you.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: And he does have a question.
Matt: He does have a question, “What do you do with content driving lots of traffic which unfortunately mostly is irrelevant.”
Chris: So we have a situation like this, back in the day we were doing a lot more IT, we still do some IT, and when I came across a problem that took me a while to solve I would actually put out a post on how to solve that problem. So we actually get significant amount of traffic for: how to get emails to go out of AT&T, right? So that’s the exact kind of situation. It’s irrelevant for our business – certainly our business in the direction that we’re going now – so what do you with that traffic? That’s a good question, what I would suggest that you– you got an idea?
Matt: I know what I would do. I wanna hear what you would do and I’ll tell you what I’ll do, or do you wanna hear what I’d do?
Chris: Well, okay. Yeah, let’s hear what you would do.
Matt: Well me personally, if I knew where that traffic was coming from and why I was getting that, I’d build an infoproduct around that and sell them some information on what to do with it or redirect as an affiliate marketer.
Chris: He’s actually a serial entrepreneur. His first thought is there’s a way to monetize that.
Matt: There’s a way to monetize all traffic, I can tell you that.
Chris: By the way, that is the logic you want working for your campaign. So there’s really kind of two things you can do. So one of the things with a lot of RankBrain and what’s going on with Google in terms of context is: you might wanna get rid of those pages. Now I know that could be painful because there’s traffic there, but if you’re looking at your overall SEO, it actually could be damaging because you have irrelevant content, right? So I’m making that assumption. The other is to figure out how to blend that content in another direction.
Matt: Yes.
Chris: Right? So how do I tie AT&T email content about eWebResults? I certainly could, you know, hosting is part of what we do for our customers, and so if we wanted to go pursue email customers then we could blend this in like, “If you’re having this problem, you really should be asking your hosting company and we would answer that for you.”
Matt: Well I mean the think the biggest thing is, why are you getting that traffic? Like there’s a reason you’re getting it, so identifying the source and then figuring out what to do with it or to tweak it or to model it and use that idea or that concept in a way that can benefit you. So you only gotta understand why you’re getting that irrelevant traffic and figure out what the source of it is, because all traffic is valuable, it just depends how you look at it.
Chris: And you mentioned an affiliate, that would be just as quick and easy if it has some sort of product-based thing that you can create an affiliate account with Amazon, right? And then just send them in that direction for Amazon, like monetize it as if it were a blog. My guess is, is that it’s kinda like us, where you’re getting this AT&T email traffic and it’s not really relevant to your business and I don’t really know how to– it’s not like obvious how to monetize it. So punch in the face to you. That was Olof.
Matt: Olof, peace.
Chris: Not the one from Frozen, I’m sure. Alright, so that’s our PITFs, that is the potatoes of the podcast, it’ is now time to get in the meat. So we’ve got this article, it’s the, “4 most important ranking factors according to SEO industry studies,” and this is by Aleh Barysevich. So we’ve covered articles by Aleh before, he does some great work. He’s actually compiled and kind put some really fundamental information together about these top 4 ranking factors. Now, where did they come from? They come from studies by SearchMetrics, Backlinko, and SEO PowerSuite. So those are really powerful, I’ve looked at SearchMetrics before. I know what SearchMetrics– what I’ve seen– I didn’t actually go back and kinda confirm this on these particular articles when I know I’ve seen and what I’m guessing when into this is, they actually just did searches for relevant keyphrases and then compiled statistics about the first, second and third place, all the way through I think it was the 20th position and compiled this information.
Matt: So Backlinko, I’ve read their articles. I love what they do over there, I think they’re great.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: So I just wanna give a punch in the face to them.
Chris: Alright, so number 1 is, “Content.” So content is obviously one of the most important– we talk about content as king, actually have been talking about content as king since the dawn of SEO basically. As soon as they kinda figured out that link-stuffing and that there are all these nefarious tactics that SEOers were gonna use, like, “Okay now we gotta get focused on content.”
Matt: Shhh.
Chris: So it’s even more important than it used to be, and what’s actually more important is relevant content written in natural language. We always say on this podcast: as long as you’re providing a good experience to the Google user, Google’s gonna look favorably upon you. And what has just come to light with RankBrain and as you look at these results and as these reports indicate, it’s more thorough content that completely covers the subject matter, the better. And so that’s what this really goes into. This is some interesting stats they found. “That only 53% of the top 20 queries have keywords,” and these are the people with the top 20 placements, alright? “Have keywords in their title tag, less than 40% of the landing pages have keywords in their H1 tags.” And that number’s been dropping.
Matt: I know why that is.
Chris: So it’s often said that your title tag should have your keywords in it, and even despite this, it really should. Your H1 tag should have your keyword in it, and despite what this indicates, you really should. But what is more importantly saying is, that the content is more important than those kind of SEO checkboxes. So you can no longer be just an SEO checkbox person, you’ve gotta be a comprehensive content creator. Yup.
Matt: So Google’s looking at user experience, so they’re looking at: is this information helpful? 80-90% of the searches were kind question-based or inquiry-based searches, and so are you answering the question of your reader or what they’re looking for? And that’s why the length of the articles is getting longer, the more depth is getting better, the 500-word articles for SEO are as effective I think in this article – I’m jumping around – but 35-word articles converting really well. I even could say 5,000 word articles or even longer could convert even better. If it’s high-quality content, Google’s gonna push you up to the top of the pop.
Chris: So if you think about kind of long-tail phrases and how people might ask question into OK Google right? Hopefully I didn’t turn that on for anyone. And how it might actually impact– how that’s gonna impact the variations that you really need to cover in that kinda main keyword topic. So you identify the main keyword and write great content. Let’s see, what else do we have? Oh, this was pretty interesting, so the article– there’s one article they did a search about Golden Retrievers and the one that was second place under Wikipedia– and this about Golden Retrievers, right? Like pretty dog, I like them, you feed them. You know, you can see that it’s pretty short content, it’s 3,500 words, that’s how they ended up under Wikipedia. I think that’s good, and that’s the one that you I think mentioned.
Matt: Yeah, so one of the things I’m actually seeing in this article that I think you could maybe speak to – and we were discussing this earlier this week – was infographics. Infographics impact and how important they are. So they’re listing this right here and so I thought maybe you could speak to that.
Chris: Well, so yeah. If you’re looking at putting together a 3,500-word article about Golden Retrievers, you kinda need to come up with stuff to put in there, to stuff in there, right? It needs to be good content, it needs to answer all the questions somebody might have about a Golden Retriever, and an infographic serves a couple of purposes. One: it’s that additional content in another form of media, in this case the media is images, right? Even though it’s an infographic, infographics are easily shareable, right? The things that you use on Pinterest you can use on Instagram, and they’re really engaging. Who doesn’t like a good infographic? I’m sure there’s one of you out there and you actually read every word of the 3,500-word article, so everybody wins, right? But yeah, infographics are really important. Now in each of these– we’re going through these four points, Aleh actually put–
Matt: 5 stars.
Chris: 5 stars. Aleh actually put together– oh I got– now I’m getting rated on the answers? Okay, I like that. It’s a new dynamic. He says recommendations on you know, what to do. So how to optimize based on this content. It says first, “Find and fix thin content.” Go on to your website, figure out where the thin content is. If you happen to be at WordPress, there’s plugins that’ll tell you how many words are in a particular page. Look for those pages with low quantity of words. We use SEOquake, it’s a plugin that goes into Chrome. When you right-click and open up SEOquake, it’ll tell you how many words are on that page. It also gives you a whole slew of very valuable SEO-related information.
Matt: Keyword density.
Chris: Keyword densities of single keywords, dual keyword, keyphrase with threes, and then also we’ll kinda talk about H1 tags, those other things they say are not important but I would argue are still very valuable. Next, “Explore fewer topics in greater detail.” So one of the things that we’ve done for clients who have joined us and they’ve got this kind of relatively thin content, if it’s related then we’re starting to put that content and consolidate those consolidate those into pages. So that actually does two things, it shows Google now content ‘cause you’ve kinda shifted it around. It’s not dupe content even though you copied it over because you were taking that other page down and 301 redirecting it, it’s just a new format of a page, it’s longer content, greater improvement.
Matt: We were talking about that earlier this week as well.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: You know? Like if you have supporting content and you have main, like how does that look?
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Right?
Chris: Yeah, yeah. So some of our products are– you know, what are the additional articles that we might put to support a particular keyphrase, and you’ve got on-page SEO. You gotta be cognizant of what those articles should look like, and should you not be writing those articles or blog posts, if you will, should you just be augmenting your content?
Matt: So speak to that because I think I’m muddy in the water here a little bit. So we have on-page SEO and then you’re doing articles and blog content, in addition to that the debate was should you have on-page SEO and support articles or when do you take the blogs and maybe combine them into the on-page SEO not a separate support article?
Chris: So you can’t do this in a vacuum, right? So that’s the problem, you cannot do this in a vacuum. You wanna have good content, it depends on where you’re placing. So are you writing these articles so that you have something to push out to social media? Which this talks about, something that you should do. Or are you just writing this content to kind of go after a longer tail keyphrase? And you’re gonna have to make a judgment call. It’s gonna be a judgment call on whether I should add it here or put it over there. If you think you can put together a good 600-keyword article that doesn’t necessarily infringe or expands on this content, then you very well may wanna put that blog article. But the other thing is blog articles are really good for promoting whether it’s social media, whether it’s a paid campaign, whether it’s through your email campaigns. You know, there’s value in those that is separate from the SEO. So in general, if you’re not ranking well, you probably wanna be further flushing out your target page.
Matt: 5 stars!
Chris: Another 5 stars! Alright! So his number 2 was, “Back links,” and we actually covered this in the tip from our previous podcast, where getting inbound links it’s no longer– it used to be that the quantity didn’t really matter what quality they were, but a large quantity had a big impact. And so that’s not that hard for Google to figure out, that it’s easy to hire people in India and get them to create lots of backlinks and they’re all crap, and so that’s done. You want quantity, but you want all of the quantity to be quality. I don’t know if you’ve got one of the keys I saw here was, “Create content that people crave.” Yeah.
Matt: Well, to speak to backlinks just really quick. I think it might behoove us to maybe do a special little whiteboard presentation on kinda how backlinks work, and that is kinda my thought there. Like authority links, authority domains. If you’re buying old domains to try to get some SEO juice, EDUs are really big. We’re gonna go into some of that detail but I think move the audience to–
Chris: That’s worth a whole podcast.
Matt: Yeah, there’s a lot there, but yeah basically high-quality links are better. So if you get them from EDU sites as well, you’re gonna have more authority so you can get a lot less backlinks as opposed to quantity. Also if you’re buying this backlinks, be very careful because Google can see it. When you look at some of this analytical data of a site that’s kinda going like this and then goes like this. It’s real easy to see it’s not organic.
Chris: By the way for those of you listening, he did a flat line and then jumped way up.
Matt: But we can talk– backlinks is kind of I think a whole podcast in itself.
Chris: Or a month of podcasts potentially, yeah.
Matt: Yeah, but social signals.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: Okay. Social signals are starting to be a lot bigger, so engagement in you content, doing social media content, those 500 little kind of blurs are really good there. I think blog’s moving towards 2000+ I think’s good, but the world’s changing and you just gotta kinda change with it and what Google’s looking for again is relevant content and relevant links. So I mean if you focus on that, you’re never gonna steer yourself wrong.
Chris: Absolutely, and so his recommendation on how to optimize for this was: “Use software to audit your link profiles.” You wanna monitor how many links are coming back to you and what the quality of those links are, and you wanna reach out to high-quality partners for backlinks. Here’s a Pro Tip: you should also run an audit on the link profile of your competitor and look at what they have that would be very easy for you to get, ‘cause they probably have stuff that would be of reasonable value which would be pretty easy to get.
Matt: Yeah, I mean my thoughts on that is: any time you’re building a new campaign I think everybody sometimes builds in a vacuum, they think about keywords or things that they’re going after and they don’t look at what’s already working with their competitors and how to take that and then take it to the next level, you know?
Chris: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so obviously competitive research is really good. I thought I had– alright so next, this is number 3, “Mobile-first user experience.” So Google is index is first mobile, if you didn’t know that, you know that now. Right, so the concept of responsive versus having a separate version of your mobile website, you can do whichever you want, there’s value to having responsive because the SEO effort you put into your desktop version of your website, once you make it responsive, providing your not like dropping tons of content when you make it mobile ‘cause that’s one of the things that tends to happen. It’s like, “Oh this image doesn’t work on a mobile platform so I’m gonna pull this out.” So you don’t wanna pull out all images, obviously you don’t wanna pull out text, you can but you don’t wanna do that. So Google’s actually looking at your mobile first, so, “85% of the websites now–” and this was on the internet, “Meet Google’s criteria for being mobile-friendly.” So if you don’t know if your website’s mobile friendly, go google the phrase, “Google Mobile-Friendly,” you’ll come up with a tool where you can enter your website.
Matt: Or you can just pull it up on your phone, and you can look and if you have to open it up like this, not mobile-friendly.
Chris: Yeah yeah, and that’s one of the criteria Google looks at is: are the points where the objects that you can click through, are they correctly sized?
Matt: And I don’t know if this is the best time, but I’m gonna insert this now. So when you’re looking at mobile, what’s really important is research the concept above the line and below the line, or above the fold and below fold, and basically you need your CTAs, your benefits, and your call– well your call-to-action and your benefits above the line when they land on it because people who hit the site, if it takes a second to load and you don’t have that, they’re gonna jump.
Chris: Yeah.
Matt: So if you’re looking at conversions there’s definitely a lot you can do and that’s where I see the biggest problems is on mobile sites not everything is above the fold.
Chris: And it’s not– and they’re just not designing with intent, right? They’re not creating the mobile with intent.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: Now here’s a warning that they gave: if you are building a separate mobile application, right? And if that mobile application– not really application, a mobile version of your website, and if it’s not ready, do not launch it prematurely because because they’re indexing the mobile version first, it can negatively impact your actual regular version. So how do you optimize looking at mobile-fist user experience? Google Search Console, it’ll tell you if you’ve got a mobile version of your website. It’s got a Structured Data Test, so like if you’ve got schema and you put it on your desktop version, it’s not on your mobile version then it’ll let you know, and then in Google Search Console there is a txt testing tool that will help you as well, and finally Page Insights can give you that.
And finally number 4. This is, “Other technical factors,” right? So this is, “4 most important ranking factors, according the SEO Industry Studies.” And so if we kinda go through these, number 1 was, “Content,” number 2 was, “Backlinks,” number 3, “Mobile-first user experience,” and finally, “Other technical factors.” We can blow through these. “Encryption,” it’s important. There’s a strong correlation between being encrypted and being placed well on a Google ranking. You could argue that that’s because those people who are focused on Google ranking are doing the smart thing and switching over to HTTPS or you could just say, “It’s something I need to do,” and stop putting it off and get it done. It’s actually not that hard, we could actually help you with that.
“H1 and H2 headings,” so despite the fact that the keywords weren’t necessarily in them, there’s a strong correlation that H1s and H2s exist in those pages that place well in Google. “Anchor text,” so you wanna makes sure you do not risk a Penguin penalty, you don’t wanna get the Penguin smackdown, those little flippers can hurt your website. Exactly, painful. But you wanna be aware of your anchor text and make sure you’ve got a good distribution of things that are linking to you. Like in our case for SEO Houston, we just don’t want every link to us to be SEO Houston, we need like “Click here,” and “eWeb,” and “Internet marketing company,” all of those things.
Interstitials, so those are when you have a pop-up on your website. Google has said, “No, don’t do that,” especially on mobile versions. So be really careful about what you’re doing with those.
Matt: So with that I’ve had a lot of debates with people in the industry as far as user experience.
Chris: Yes.
Matt: Like if it’s an annoyance, you know? And how well does it convert and how does it represent your brand? So there’s a big debate out there on pop-ups and lightboxes as you’re leaving the site whether it’s a good thing or not.
Chris: Right.
Matt: And I’ve seen data both ways, but that’s up in the air and I think it’s on a situational basis to simultaneously–
Chris: In industry situation where you sit in the industry, all sorts of things.
Matt: Yeah.
Chris: Absolutely.
Matt: And one other kinda tip that I had, just when we were talking about kind of pro tips especially on mobile and that sort of thing is: a lot of people wanna get stuff going really quickly and they don’t have their site complete and they wanna run ads and spend money to a site that’s not gonna convert. There’s two pieces of every pie, okay? Or two pieces of the pie, and if you are not making sure that that landing page is converting, you are wasting money and that’s one of the biggest challenges that I see with most campaigns. So just quick tip out there to all you home gamers.
Chris: Just so you know our approach, if you’re website is not ready for us to send traffic to it, we’ll make a landing page. Right, and you’ll get a separate landing focused page, landing/sales page, interesting. So how to optimize the other technical factors? One: turn on your SSL certificate. Come on, get over it, it’s not that big of deal.
“Make use of H2 tags,” right? Let’s see, “Diverse and semantically relevant anchor text.” So like make sure the anchor text in your site– ‘cause you absolute control over that, and whenever you’re kind of doing link-building efforts, kinda driving people to you, make sure that happens. And then “Remove Interstitials.” By the way these are– like I said, when I looked at the search metrics report – this was a long time ago, probably about a year ago – it was just phenomenally interesting the details that are in it. So I definitely recommend going and checking out search metrics reports. They are an intelligent company, you will have give your email address in order to get to that report, which I think isn’t actually a good thing.
Alright, so that is the meat of the potatoes? No. That is the meat of the podcast.
Matt: That was the meat.
Chris: Let’s see what we need to do to wrap up here. So let’s just say this: if you liked this podcast, and we hope you do, please go ahead and connect with us on the profiles we mentioned earlier, and also go ahead and share this podcast with three people that you know. And you can do that right now, we would really appreciate that.
Matt: I would appreciate it, first time in front of an audience here, so yeah.
Chris: Let us know how Matt did.
Matt: Yes.
Chris: If it was positive. Let’s use Mom’s rule.
Matt: No, I wanna know! I wanna know! Give it to me, tell me if it’s horrible. Tell me what you wanna hear about.
Chris: Yeah, I think it went really good so I’m excited. Let’s see. If you’re interested in growing your business with the largest simplest marketing tool on the planet, which is the internet.
Matt: Oh yes, the internet. That’s that thing.
Chris: Call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business, our phone number is 713-592-6724. If you’re interested– and that just went to sleep. If you’re interested– so when I talk about using the internet to grow your business, we have a program and that program is called Instant Leads Guaranteed. And what that is, is we were talking about– the screen behind–
Matt: I got it. Don’t Chris, I got it. I got it. I got it. Right here.
Chris: Look at that, he’s useful!
Matt: I got it, I got it.
Chris: It might not be showing whatshow it to the Facebook audience.
Matt: Don’t worry, don’t worry. Branding’s happening, don’t worry.
Chris: So Instant Leads Guaranteed is really kind of part of what Matt was talking about when you’re sending traffic somewhere it needs to go to a page that’s gonna convert and it’s all about pay-per-click. We can get traffic to your website quickly and we can make it convert by sending it to a landing page that is designed to convert. If you have a referral for us, so if that’s somebody who’s interested in a website or social media marketing or they don’t understand their Analytics or they would just like some sort of report on Search Engine Optimization or their pay-per-click audit. Go ahead and send them to us, when they pay us, we pay you. So we have that referral program in place.
Matt: I like that, I like that.
Chris: If you’re in Houston and you’re networking your business, first: if you’re not, I don’t know what you’re doing. Second: you should be networking your business and you need to go to UPSocialNetwork.com and join us at an event near you.
Matt: That’s great. That’s the next wave of networking.
Chris: Networking.
Matt: It really is very impressive, very impressive.
Chris: So we’re shifting all of our clients who would kinda go with us, and I see Nolen says, “Boom!” which all of those clients will go with. You get content. What networking group you do you go to that you get content? I think it’s called UPSocialNetwork, that’s the one that gives you content. So UPSocialNetwork.com.
Matt: I mean for me what I saw is, you’re networking with 5,200 people in a room and then it’s being broadcasted out and you’re broadcasting your message out to–
Chris: Thousands.
Matt: 8,000-10,000 people when I was there. So I mean like what kinda way to better way to use your time? I mean really coming from a sales background and a marketing background, that’s what it’s all about, it’s impacting more people for–
Chris: Every minute. For every minute.
Matt: Yeah, exactly.
Chris: Absolutely, so UPSocialNetwork.com. Alright so this wraps up our podcast. Great job Matt, I’m excited. You’re gonna be seeing and learning more about Matt as we keep going. We were filmed live here at 5999, West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas. If you would like a transcript, a video or audio of this podcast you can find that at eWebResults.com. You guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes, we appreciate all of you, we look for your feedback and until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burres.
Matt: Matt Bertram.
Chris: Bye bye for now.
Matt: See ya!