International SEO in Canada and other Niche Markets with Geoff Campbell Ep. 595

Howdy, welcome back to another episode of the Unknown Secrets of Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram and I have a guest with me here today. This is Jeff Campbell. Jeff, how are you doing today? Doing great. Thanks, Matt. Well, Jeff is one of our enterprise paid ads and SEO managers here. So he manages a lot of enterprise accounts for us. I guess I'll let you tell the story, Jeff, of kind of how you came to be where you're at. Sure. So I've been with EWR Digital just over two years now. And if I go back about 12 years, I'm sitting in my cubicle in the corporate world, doing graphics work, and I'm listening to podcasts about SEO. And this is one of the podcasts I was listening to. So just adding to knowledge, you know, continuous learner going in that in that mode, just keep keep adding to my knowledge. And this is one of the best, well, the best source for SEO knowledge that I found. So I learned a lot over the years. And they kept offering a free consultation. So, you know, fast forward, probably five years from then. And I was doing SEO for a different company. I had kind of switched jobs to a few different scenarios. I was working in kind of an industrial B2B setting. And they were, you know, these guys were always offering free consultation, free website analysis, come and get your website checked out. So I thought, hey, why not? Let's get, they seem to know what they're talking about when it comes to SEO. Let me do their free website analysis. And I had a talk with one of the owners, Chris Burris at the time. And we kind of went through the website, got some great advice. And then a little later on, I think we got one of the consulting packages. We did an hour. It was actually, I think, a two hour consulting session, got a ton of value out of it. And then we had been working, you know, doing

it in-house SEO in this company. It was a multinational B2B company. And so we're trying to rank in different languages around the world. And when it came time to switch agencies, I thought, let's give these guys a try because they were a little bit smaller. We've been working with some bigger SEO agencies. And, you know, it was like they put more energy into their sales team than they did into anything else because the sales pitch was amazing. But the delivery wasn't everything that we had hoped it would be. And we'd also tried the offshore thing where there's, you know, lots of activity happening, but maybe the quality is not as good. So I thought, let's try, you know, a North American company that's based out of Houston because we were working a lot with oil and gas, marketing to oil and gas companies. And these guys were in Houston. They've worked in the oil and gas sector. So I thought, what a great fit for us. Let's give them a shot. They're smaller, but they know their stuff. I know that from listening to the podcast. And that worked out really well. So we worked together where I was a client for a couple of years and then getting to know Matt and the team here, really like these guys, really like their entrepreneurial spirit, what they're up to and kind of talked my way into a job and hopped over the fence and came over to the agency side of things. And the good news is we were able to keep my old employer as a client. So now I still work with my old manager and we still have that business relationship. So, but just working on the agency side now, which is definitely faster paced, a little crazier, but you'll learn a ton here. So I love it here. What can I say? Well, awesome. We'll just use that as our kind of testimonial, I guess. We typically read testimonials. We can get a lot of great testimonials, not just on the

GMB, but on all the Web 2.0s. Reputation management is super important, but that's not the goal of this podcast. The goal of this podcast is to really dive deep with international SEO. I think Canada is a great kind of sub market to look at because there's multiple languages. You know, you're you told me earlier about the size of California. So it's a pretty, pretty good size area. It's a great trading partner. It's on the border of the United States. So I think, you know, also I, you know, you're in Canada, so we're, we're a remote team since COVID. We've, we've really embraced that and have brought you into the fold as, as one of the team, right? Like we are based here in Houston. We do work with a lot of B2B industrial oil and gas companies, but that has certainly expanded. And certainly the podcast has been one of the ways that we've reached different markets on multi continents. So I think it would be cool to go into some of the nuances for maybe people that are looking to expand their market into maybe Canada. Also companies in Canada, I know there's a lot of companies that try to reach the U.S. market, right? And so we could talk a little bit about that. And then, you know, there's a lot of different things to consider from, you know, multi-language site, multi-domain site, you know, multi-local having, you know, country managers, right? So you're kind of, uh, as we move into the Canadian market, uh, country manager, I've done a number of, uh, blogs, uh, talking about, uh, international SEO, um, large-language tags, and, uh, or search engine journal, uh, done. I've done a number of articles about this too, because not a lot of people, uh, understand the complexities of just enterprise SEO is certainly different. There's a lot of legacy technology. There's a lot of, uh, with, uh, IT departments and sales departments, not just a small business, uh, owner, um, and vice versa. So I, I want to kind of

toss it over to you, Jeff, and, uh, you've worked, uh, in this space with, with Canadian companies, U.S. companies, and everything in between. So what are some of the things that, that you've seen as some of the differences maybe? Sure. Uh, so just to give a little context, I'm sure. Uh, some of the Canadian listeners who I know we have many will be wondering where, where I'm based. I'm in Hamilton, Ontario, which for, uh, anyone who's not familiar with, uh, Canadian geography, uh, that's kind of halfway between Toronto and Niagara Falls. So right in the Great Lakes region of Canada, very close to the border, about an hour away from, uh, from Buffalo to New York. So, um, yeah, the Canadian opportunity for American companies, I think is, you know, we're sort of up here. You're our biggest trading partner, uh, lots of, you know, cross-border business is happening. There's a lot of companies that have a footprint on both sides of the border. Um, but there's, you know, real opportunity here, uh, in terms of culturally, there are some differences, but there's a lot of similarities as well. There's a lot that we inherently get. We grew up on the same culture, watching the same TV shows, same networks, um, and a lot of culture has flowed, I think, in both directions. So there's, there's really, um, some distinct differences, but there's a really shared culture, uh, in many grounds when it comes to popular culture and certainly around business culture as well between the two countries. I think, uh, one of the things that people always say is that Canada has a little bit more of a conservative approach to business, a little bit more risk adverse. We like to, we like to know that things are going to work out. Whereas in, uh, the U S I think there's a, a higher tolerance for risk that that's generalized kind of statement. Of course, you're going to find people up here who are willing to take risks and do some interesting things as

well. Um, but as far as talking about the oil and gas market, uh, as a whole, right, everybody's so concerned because if you, you change something that's been working for a number of years, you know, people might die. Right. And certainly even in, in the industrial space, there, there's some real concerns about changing something that's always worked. And, and there's kind of this slow moving progress we've seen, um, you know, it be expedited through the digital transformation. Actually COVID has driven, um, a lot of that with businesses. And, and, and I think that there, there's a lot of value that we've been able to add to, um, you know, industrial across the board. I mean, everybody needs online presence, right? Like, so, um, and, and people are using, uh, different tools in the toolkit to, to, to reach those different kinds of people. I mean, is there anything else from a foundational standpoint that is important, uh, between the, uh, people maybe trying to reach, uh, the Canadian market, if they're looking to expand like we are, um, or vice versa, reaching the U S that you, that kind of nuggets that you've learned that, that may be different beyond risk on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that was kind of a general thing. And I think your, your point is great, you know, well made about the oil and gas market in particular, and the, you know, in a lot of ways, the slowness to change is a good thing because you know, when it comes to safety standards, when it comes to engineering standards, um, those things evolve slowly for a reason. Because if you just start shooting from the hip in that world, yeah, people can be injured seriously or die. And, and I know that, um, in the B2B company that I was worried, the industrial company I was working for previously, safety was a huge factor. So, you know, when it comes to like tech businesses and stuff, yeah, there's a lot of experimentation. You can shoot from the hip

and just try things out. But, uh, you know, in that world of oil and gas marketing, there's, there's, uh, kind of, uh, a bit of an old school approach, but it's very relationship based. Uh, but the technical tools and the digital tools that are available are huge. Sorry, I'm not really answering your question. Um, you know, something that's super interesting that, that just came to the top of my head based on what you're saying is, you know, we've been really, uh, starting to work on some deeper projects with clients. Where maybe it's mechanical, maybe it's, it's human focused, uh, like on the inspection side of pipelines or something like that. If you can help digitize that business, if there's any private equity people out there that are listening, um, they know if you, if you can move that to kind of a SAS model or a tech model, you increase the multiple of the value of the company tremendously. And so really investigating digital, um, there's, there, there's so much opportunity. It transforms the way businesses generate leads. I mean, that's the biggest thing. If we're focused on the marketing and sales side of things, when you, you've told me, you've told me that since coming here, you've gotten leads that are inbound for us because we're basically a content marketing machine inbound, uh, driven leads. And you've talked to people and seen people come through, through our lead count that your company, your old company would be salivating to connect with somebody there. And they're actually calling us. Yeah, absolutely. I'm seeing if not the exact companies that I was targeting before for a different, it was for equipment rentals. Now I'm seeing them come to us for, uh, marketing services. And I think, uh, the oil and gas industry is certainly primed for, you know, disruption and digital transformation. I think it's, it's happening. Uh, people know that digital has a lot of power to find and identify and bring in new customers. But I think it's, it's really, uh, you know, it's

gonna, it's not going to happen all at once. It's going to happen in conjunction with the way that the industry already is very relationship based, very expertise based. And, uh, you know, digital can just amplify that message and that expertise and that, you know, the innovation that's happening. I, I, I a hundred percent agree with you. I, I think that, you know, certainly the relationship based, um, aspect of it, uh, is, uh, changing a little bit as the new guard kind of comes in and there's kind of a committees forming on the oil and gas side. So it's not that just that one relationship, uh, anymore. Okay. But like, think about what we were just talking about though, that CROs out there, um, sales directors out there, you're putting a lot of effort into sales efforts. And maybe there's a marketing function or there's a, um, account based selling model or a B2B strategy that you could implement in addition to your sales force. Because you just said it, we're getting calls that your sales people were trying to go get. And if you look at the cost of acquiring a new customer, um, when you start measuring this stuff, it's, it transforms again, the way you do business. Right. Um, and so let's, let's kind of go more into SEO, uh, international SEO. I think that was kind of the title of this. Um, and, um, let's, let's kind of talk about, well, um, you know, in the U S multi-language is not that big a deal. Okay. Cause you know, basically now web accessibility is not the, the goal of this, um, podcast either, but, but hearing impaired, visually impaired people make up about of, of the market space. And, and also there's some new laws that, that you really, uh, need to be actively trying to pursue web accessibility, web, web access for all. Um, but reaching different languages, uh, in Texas, we've actually, um, really started to expand for businesses that have Spanish speaking people to go after the Spanish market.

Right. And that's been quite successful. I'm hearing a little bit of background noise on your end, just FYI. Um, and then, uh, and then, you know, I know in Canada, there's like, there's multi-language, there's French, right? There's some, some other languages. I mean, can you speak to, to, to maybe that, that diversity and how important that is? And then maybe even, um, you know, multi-domains, um, how, how you view that? Yeah. So, you know, in Canada, of course we've got two official languages, English and French and, uh, you know, Quebec is a really, it's got its own unique culture. There's a lot of stuff going on. There's a whole industry of TV shows and movies. Um, it's like another country. They call their parliament, they call it their national assembly. Like they really, um, act like a different country in many ways. And they've got certainly, if you go to Montreal, everybody's going to speak English. No problem. If you go to Quebec city, it's going to be like French only in a lot of cases. So there are lots of regions of, of Quebec where you only get, uh, French language as an option. Montreal is a little different because it's very cosmopolitan, but, um, you know, a lot of people will build businesses in other parts of Canada and never really consider the French language thing. You're going to do anything related to government. You're going to need French language because it's, you know, it's a part of the official, uh, language, but they also have a strong business culture there and lots of really interesting stuff happening. But again, it's just, you know, population wise, they've got a huge chunk of the population of Canada. Uh, so if you're going to come into Canada, you know, French language is a consideration. Um, but the French they speak in Quebec is there some subtle differences compared to the French that they might speak in France or in other parts of the world. Sure. Sure. Like Spain and Spanish and in, in Mexico. Yeah.

Similar to that. Yeah. I would just tell you, I, I don't, I don't know if it was Montreal, but I know that like, uh, blockchain is pretty big up there. Tech's pretty big up there. Uh, ether, uh, for those of you, uh, crypto enthusiasts, uh, I believe it started, uh, up there. So, um, yeah, I would just tell you, uh, Canada is not a market you want to maybe sleep on. If you, like we said earlier, it's the size of California. Um, you can reach a lot of people, but let's kind of dig into SEO. Um, we have, we have some time left here about, um, multi location. Okay. Multi country, multi language SEO. Okay. Yes. Yes. So content creation for the company that I was working at was really challenging because it was, it had to be expert level content. So you can't just write a blog when the technical expertise is the differentiator of the company that you're representing. So finding expert content creators was the challenge and then finding, you know, expert content creators who also were proficient in, you know, German or Dutch or French, uh, you know, so that we can get those blog articles translated and make sure that they're speaking in the way that people would speak in that industry, in that country. And then kind of back checking it, cross-referencing against different industrial sites from, from France and so on. It's a very, uh, you know, it takes a lot of effort to do international multi language SEO properly. And, uh, to get it, not just the language, you know, technically correct, but linguistically correct. And then you get situations like dealing with the Netherlands that we could never get the experts internally to agree on which version of the translation was right, because they have kind of linguistic differences from region to region within their country. And they would all, you know, one guy would say, this is correct. And then you'd send it to the other guy and they say, this is not correct. Um,

you know, the Netherlands was very difficult. Uh, the Dutch speakers there just with the nuances of that. I would tell you automation and technology are so powerful. Um, certainly now there there's options, even like Google translate that you can add to the site and people can, um, toggle between different languages. If they like to be able to add that functionality of sites, not very difficult. I will tell you though, the search engines, um, will only rank you in the language that that content's actually in. So sometimes you have to build, uh, like a mirror image of the site in a different language. Um, which is, is quite helpful. And then, uh, you need to make sure that, uh, the, the, the domain, uh, ties to, uh, the geographic area. Tell me a little bit about that. Cause everything in the United States is like.com. Dot com. I don't, I'm not a huge fan of.net. Some people are starting to use, you know, the.co, but that's actually another, that's actually another country. Right. Yeah. Um, I mean, are URLs a big thing in Canada? Well, .ca is kind of standard up here, but it's, if you have a .ca, it's almost like you're saying I'm only ever going to do business in Canada, which people can do. You can run a great successful business and never go outside our own borders. There's enough, uh, market here for sure. But I always feel like if you, if you have any notion that you might ever go international, you better figure out some, you know, a.com to build on or something, you know, a.co, whatever else it might be. Cause I feel like it's a totally acceptable standard here, but it's limiting. Um, when it comes to international, um, I like it best. I feel like it works best when you have one.com for the entire globe, but you can work it in different ways, uh, for different countries. But you got to have your hreflang tags in place. You got to have, you know, validated, correct translations.

And, you know, even when you're using something like WordPress multi-site, which will easily spit out for you, you know, different versions and you can use automatic plugins for translation and things like that. But again, it's got to be validated by humans and you've got to do things like getting your URLs, uh, translated as well, because if the page is in French, but the URLs in English, I mean, it'll still rank, but it's suboptimal, right? You always want to have like everything. So it's a very specific thing that you can't just rely on automation to do it. You've got to give it that extra degree of attention. I would say. No, absolutely. I would agree. If you're looking to do business there and you just, um, you know, and some of those toggles will only do a specific page or they'll even do just like the body of the content. So then your header and footer. So, so there's definitely some testing and okay. So we, we've talked about multi-language. We've talked about kind of different industries. Uh, certainly we're, we're focused on industrial oil and gas type companies. While we have worked with like finance technology, healthcare, all that sort of thing. Um, we talked, you talked a little bit about the impact of the Canadian culture. Um, you know, I think what you're talking about now too, is, um, like the usability of the site and maybe even maybe talk a little bit about mobile SEO. Like our Canadian, uh, users, uh, you know, using a different, I mean, in the U S it's like high mobile rates. It used to be like 50 50 kept climbing. I mean, almost now everything has to be mobile friendly. The Google spiders are mobile first. Um, they don't even look at really desktop. And so, you know, you have to design everything for mobile. I mean, is there anything that you see on how people are using technology differently or even maybe talk about seasonal trends? Like I, I, that's an area for me, like certain,

like when, when you came on board, um, uh, you know, Canadian new years, right? Like there's, there's different kinds of holidays. Um, uh, Canadian Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. Yeah. Our new users are the same Chinese new year is different. Uh, which means they have a lot of people out there like me and I, and I'm going to show, show my, my, my lack of knowledge. And that's why we have an expert, a country manager, like you on the team, um, educate people on, um, some of those nuances. Why, why they might need to look at that. And if there's any ways that people use, um, technology different, and then I'll dig into a little bit more technical stuff on the SEO side, uh, after that. Yeah. I think, I think the pattern of technology use is probably really similar. I don't think there are huge differences. Everybody's on mobile here. Um, certainly, uh, that, that pattern of use is just going to be pretty similar to what we have in the US. Uh, a lot of our holidays match up with yours. If you're marketing the Canadian market, you know, Thanksgiving is different. It comes in, you know, like a month earlier, typically than, than what you guys have in the US. So there are, there are some differences. I think it's always good. If you have a foreign market that you're trying to sell it to, to have some, you know, boots on the ground. There's somebody that you can talk to. That's going to know to how to validate things. Cause there's, there's even just a local slang. Like we have, uh, when you guys have Memorial day, we're having Victoria day, which is kind of like. That goes back to queen Victoria, but, but you know, locally we call it like may two, four weekend, which sort of connects to like two, four is what we call a case of beer. You know? So it's like always going to get a two, four for the two, four weekend. And I've seen beer ads running

that speak in that language. And I thought that's great. Great localization. When you're trying to sell into a market to understand how that market speaks about a particular product. This is the first time I've ever heard that. But one of the things that I know is a big issue, uh, especially for us companies that have expanded to North America or ship to, to different areas on the e-commerce side is when you put in your zip code. Right. Have you put in, uh, when you're buying something, can you speak to that a little bit? Oh yeah. That's, that's a pain point that I'm, I'm really glad that I get a chance to, uh, to bang the drum about here because many times as a Canadian, I've had the experience where I go to a website and I'm filling out my information and I'm trying to buy something or I'm trying to get registered for something. And then I get to the part where it says zip code, which we actually officially, we don't even call it zip code. We call it postal code up here. And ours is like the same as the British. It's like, you know, uh, H seven W, you know, uh, nine I five or something like that. It's like letter, number, letter, number, letter, number. So it's a different format. And a lot of times I get to a website and it's only formatted for us and zip code and it'll just reject it. And then I can't finish the transaction. So yeah. Cause you can't put e-commerce. Yeah. E-commerce sellers. If you want to sell into Canada, it's like our shipping address is going to look a little bit different from what the U S is. A lot of platforms like we've got Shopify, which is great, you know, Canadian platform, uh, that's really taking the world by storm. They do a great job of internationalization. They've got lots of options for that. And they, you know, probably because they're Canadian and they've had that pain point themselves, they'll accommodate

for a specific market. They're selling into it to understand just a little technical thing that can hold you up from doing business. If it's, if you didn't catch that detail. Yeah, no, fantastic. So I'm going to, we have about five more minutes left. I'm going to kind of, uh, jump into a few things on the SEO side that I want to highlight. And if there's anything that I mentioned, uh, please jump in. Right. Um, first, first and foremost, I think that, um, your website represents your brand. Um, one, I think that, you know, every kind of three to five years, new technology comes out. Um, and, and for bigger companies that might be harder to, but you need to be refreshing your website. Okay. You need to, it need, you need to have, uh, the most current case studies or testimonials or, um, you know, blog dates, like things that were written in 2017 might not be applicable. Um, so really looking at your brand, that's how people are engaging with you first. Um, what is it? 90, no, 85% of the customer journey happens before they pick up the phone and call you. Right. So if you're starting to go through digital transformation, your website is your main asset to do that. And so you should really look at, um, updating that to, um, get it, get it, get it ready for the future. Right. I, I, and I, I would tell you that once you have the website ready, then you've got to get the analytics set up. And so once you start getting these analytics set up, you can start seeing how your campaigns are working. Also, you can tie these into CRMs. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about on the paid ad side, uh, on the enterprise side, how, um, how important it is to, if you're driving leads to, to sync it in with your CRM to get that full feedback loop. If you're doing something like lead scoring. Yeah, this is, uh, this is really important

and something that I've found a lot of companies are not doing well. Um, first of all, you gotta, if you're, if you're a sales driven organization, you have to have a CRM customer relationship management tool where you track what's coming in and you've got to figure out how to get your people using it. It, it, because a lot of people view CRM as accountability and there's kind of that, that old school mentality of like, let me look at the activity that you've been doing. Have you been busy enough? Let me, you know, as a sales manager, let me apply pressure for you as a marketing person. That's not at all how we view CRMs. And I don't think that's a great way to use a CRM. The way that it's really powerful to use is to give feedback to the ad platform. Your marketing team should be, you know, as part of your sales enablement, sending in leads, filling the funnel, and they need to get feedback from sales. Like, are we giving you good leads, but not just the marketing team, the algorithms, especially for the paid platforms need to get feedback of, you know, it'll bring Google ads will bring you a ton of leads or Facebook will bring you a ton of leads. But if you give the, the feedback, you know, close that feedback loop and send the data back to Google to say, this lead was bad. This lead was good. This one got qualified. This one didn't. Then they can optimize for more of what you want. Of course, the best case scenario for that being e-commerce where you get that full closed loop. All the data is coming back. We spent this amount of money in marketing. We got this much revenue from e-commerce. Not everybody's doing e-commerce, but we need to know the value of the leads and get that information back. Well, I would tell you email automation and triggers and tags when leads come in to basically categorize them and have different drip emails that

you can just tag to create those touch points. Because what you're trying to do as a salesperson is you're trying to replicate the perfect sales experience for every person in mass. Right. And so the only way you can do that is if you if you can delegate something and you have some kind of inbound salesperson or assistant or something like that or automation. And that's when you start tying these things together becomes exceedingly powerful. Well, the biggest thing that I think is undervalued by a lot of companies is the power to in Google when people are searching for things. Right. They're looking for things. You're not disruption running an ad trying to get them to click on something. And that is great to grab someone's information. And certainly like we found like LinkedIn for B2B is absolutely fantastic. You charge target job trials. There's a lot you can really do even on the organic side. Only about five percent of people are content creators on that. There's newsletters. There's a lot of things you can go live that you can do. But SEO search engine optimization. Think about it. Anybody that's searching for a different kind of word, you can rank for that word. OK, SEO is like a mirror. You put it up. You've got to be the top in the top 100, in the top 10, in the top five, in the top three to really get the leads. Right. It's like horseshoes and hand grenades is a analogy that we use. You've got to be close in horseshoes and hand grenades. Yeah. In SEO, you have to be like top three, top five max. Like that's why SEO doesn't work for a lot of all the clicks. Yeah. All the clicks live there. And the quality of the traffic. I have yet to see a business where the best traffic was not the organic traffic. It's always the case. Organic traffic, which comes from SEO, converts at a higher rate, stays on the site longer, is more engaged. It's really the best

thing you can do for your business. But it's, you know, it's like going to the gym. You don't get results in the first week. Right. You build results over time. That's why they call it organic. Right. It grows naturally if you're investing in it. For my money, you know, if I was running a business, SEO should just be an ongoing program that's that's always running at some level. And usually in the beginning, there's a ton of low hanging fruit. I know we've seen lots of clients, you know, once we get that basic overhaul on their site, just really shoot up within the first couple of months because there was so much low hanging fruit available for them that they hadn't taken advantage of yet. You see that many times. Well, it comes in the site architecture. Right. When you're when you're building on the site, how you're organizing information, this this is an AI that you're basically training to try to learn all the information in the world. And I mean, but think about that. If it knows what you want and you send the right signals, it gives you exactly what you want. And if you're not getting what you want, you need that feedback loop to continue to change that on on a little bit of a side note on the paid ad side. I'm paid ads. You know, you always got to have an offer. Right. You typically run them to a squeeze page or something like that. I've seen a lot of people just run into their home page and they're like, oh, their ads don't work. Right. My ads don't work. Well, how you're going about doing it, it's a tool in the tool belt of how you do it. But also ads are like typically people that want to deal or people that need some kind of emergency that are not doing that deep research. Right. Right. Like my heaters busted. Right. Or something like that. My pipes busted. Like I need I need a plumber like immediately. That

sort of thing on the service based side is what people are clicking ads on. Certainly, if the keyword search volume is very, very difficult to rank for, it's going to take a long time. SEO does take some time. There's not a lot of volume. Hey, spend the money, skip the line, run that, you know, grab some of that traffic. But if there's good search volume, it's a developed market. SEO is going to drive you the quality business when people are doing the research. And your website needs to be able to, again, have the person understand that experience. Long form sales, short form sales, you know, middle of the funnel. SEO can check the box everywhere, but it depends on that strategy and building that strategy right now. The thing I get with enterprise companies as well, you know, good luck dealing with my IT team. Right. Or good luck dealing with my legal team. And there's there's definitely some some workarounds that you have to do. And you typically have to have a champion internally to push that stuff forward unless you get, you know, the MSA contract where you you cover it all. So so there absolutely are challenges. But there's there's workarounds. And then, you know, when you talk about multi location business and then you're talking about, you know, twenty five hundred locations. You know, there there are that that's different type of SEO than the local mom and pop small business. Right. You need a different kind of understanding, different kind of experience, different kind of tools, different kind of analytics to know what's working. Right. And so I don't know, I would just tell you, we've had a lot of great experiences helping take oil and gas companies from I mean, one of our clients earlier. Well, last year was what was it? What is AdWords? Right. So there's definitely people on that end of the spectrum that don't don't don't haven't run paid ads yet. Don't believe in them. And then there's a lot of people that have tried

stuff out or gotten burned. You really need an expert because, again, if you're not in like, in my opinion, the top three. And if you look at most analytical tools, they separate kind of top three, top ten and then kind of top 100 because you've got to you've got to be. All of it lives at the top. I'm talking 60 percent something of all the traffic's in the top three search results. So it might even be higher than that today. Yeah. So question question for you on that. I think I know the answer, but I want to hear you kind of go into a little bit. A lot of the specialized B2B type of clients that we get have things that are so highly specialized that there's really not a ton of search volume for it might be a little bit, but it's very highly specialized. And it's like a one in ten thousand audience are going to get this special part for their, you know, something about their oil rig or something about, you know, extraction or transportation of fuel. That's a really specialized piece of equipment that literally one in ten thousand people is going to be the market for it. Well, how do you think about that kind of challenge when it comes to to connecting with new customers when the when the customers are very specific and very niche like that? Well, you know how Google looks at things something called eat expertise, authorities and trust. They've added a level a layer of that experience now. But there's probably if it's so niche, there's probably a parent topic or there's a parent topic of that parent topic. Right. And so becoming a topical authority and building content in that area that that reaches those different areas is is quite important. Like, for example, if you're working with a welder, for example, you know, you need to build content. Around like the history of welding and what you know what different people look at welding for and even if it's not your

target market, how people how handheld welders are different than industrial welders and the different types of welding and and and building this this content base. It's kind of like a content cluster, but certainly you have to be a topical authority about that thing. So you've got to write really I can tell you if you also look like I think you get the point. Right. So you need to build content in this area. But domain expertise, you've got to. But the other thing that I think is super important is long tail key phrases. OK, so if you qualify for that core keyword or that top line parent topic, then Google will start showing you for all kinds of other search terms. So I think it's like even today, seventy five percent or maybe it's even higher. I got to look at some of this day, but seventy five percent. All the searches are still new in Google. People are using search engines differently. They're trying to figure out that specific thing. They keep kind of tweaking it. They keep adding words to it. You know, you can use a Boolean function to to try to get to that answer because the same companies keep showing up for the same things. Right. And you're you're looking for something deeper. So you're sometimes digging down past those those top searches to find that thing. But guess what? If you answer that question perfectly and specifically and there's a handful of people and the value of that customer, the lifetime value of that customer, that direct value of that sale is X, Y, Z. And and you answer that perfect per per question perfectly. Sorry. And and you show up first and you have good description and title. Right. They see that. That's the answer to my question. They click on it. They go to the website. They see what they're looking for. They take action and they buy from you and they don't go past the first search result. Right. So you've got to determine again on strategy

what keywords you want to go after. But we have even on our website, you go to EWR digital dot com. We have some great graphs on on showing the distribution curve and the volume of those long tail key phrases. And you can typically if you rank for that core key term and then you build that content on your customer journey on the right thing, you will start showing up for hundreds of keywords. Well, yeah, I see. I remember we had a situation with this one client where it was there was there was one very long tail keyword about a specific piece of equipment that for whatever reason, the market loved that piece of equipment. And it brought in like 20 percent of the traffic in that category. It was crazy just for one piece. The other thing that used to happen that was really nice was that we would carry rental equipment. And when the manufacturer stopped, you know, making that and they made their, you know, the new upgraded version of that piece of equipment. Well, the market doesn't forget about the old piece right away. And they kept Googling that thing and we were in top spot. So like even as the manufacturer keywords change for pieces of equipment, opportunities can open up. They're not trying to rank for their old thing anymore, but you can still rank for it if you have that equivalent stock. Like interesting things can happen with long tail that can become big wins for you. You know, we're always looking for that magic bullet of like what's going to move the needle hugely. And a lot of times you don't find it, but you if you try little things that you pay attention to the details once in a while, you can discover something like that. That'll just really tip the balance and bring in a ton of traffic. Well, yeah, there's got to be something said for test testing, having a theory testing it out and seeing what happens that that's the beauty of digital. And

this is probably something good to end on is when you do traditional marketing, when you're running a print ad or radio ad or TV. I mean, and also these marketing channels have been plummeting. Like if you look at the data, why digital is so powerful and why analytics is so powerful is you can see where your spend is going, what's happening and make like informed decisions about it. Certainly leveraging some of these bigger platforms and the AI and there's different kind of strategies associated with that. It's unbeatable if you do it right. Like the smallest company with the right strategy can go against the bigger players because they're typically so big that they're not focused and they're not laser focused on the one thing you are. Right. And they're moving slower a lot of times, too, as well. If you're a smaller company, you can move fast, you can execute, you can get these benefits. And there's red tape, right? Yeah, you can vault yourself right up there with the big boys just by being smart with, you know, even a small budget, small to medium budget. You can get a lot done as you know if you know what to go after. Well, awesome. Well, well, Jim, I think we're going to kind of end it there. Thank you so much for being on. I thought it would be good to to highlight you to. Well, the Canadian market as we we move into it, you've been doing a great job for clients down here. You've been doing a great job for industrial B2B oil and gas clients that we're working with. We really view you as part of the team. We're we're excited at the future here in 2024. And hopefully this was valuable to people looking at going into the Canadian market, coming from the Canadian market. And just in general, looking at international SEO, I want to do some more topics on this. I'm actually working with a lot of hospitality companies that are marketing to to U.S. people to come

to their island or come on their cruise or stuff like that, which would be fun to go into a little bit further. But hopefully everybody enjoyed this discussion. You know, if you like this discussion, please like it, follow us, share it, connect us with people. If you're in the Canadian market, please connect us with other people. If you think that this content is valuable, we would and we would love to connect with you. So I do have office hours. We have great opportunities in Houston with with oil and gas, as well as I know you guys have tons of medical research facilities down there, which we also have up here in in Toronto and London. We've got some great things going on. So if there's opportunities that you'd like to help us facilitate or like us to help facilitate rather to get you connected either with oil and gas or with medical or any of the other great things that are happening in Houston. Matt's well connected. He could have that conversation with you. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. And if you want to grow your mark, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful, most, I don't know, amazing tool that's ever been created on the entire planet, utilize the Internet, the Internet for new marketing business. And you can get on our calendar by going to EWR digital dot com and scheduling a consultation. And maybe you'll talk to Jeff or myself while we're on a round robin. So who knows? But thank you again. Bye bye for now. Bye bye.